• On Life and Love

    Weekly Linkage: The Long Edition

    At some point in the last 2 weeks, I had 0 unread items in Google Reader. It was a short-lived, joyous experience, but this is the result of my web branching: HCG Diet Dangers: Is Fast Weight Loss Worth the Risk? – MSN Health & Fitness – Healthy Living – "But the so-called hCG diet is either a weight-loss miracle or a dangerous fraud, depending on who's talking. The plan combines drops or injections of hCG, a pregnancy hormone, with just 500 calories a day." I don't even have words for how stupid this sounds. And how unhealthy. "Yeah, I'm going to shoot up with a hormone and engage in…

  • On Life and Love

    Deployment Automation with Fabric: Bee’s Knees

    One immensely valuable thing I learned at Skookum was the value of automated deployments. I worked with a gent who took the time to work up Capistrano scripts for each staging and production environment of the whale of a project I worked with him on. I appreciated it during development, but I didn’t appreciate it until we were deploying single tweaks out to production on Amazon EC2 in rapid cycles. I haven’t worked with EC2 since then (second half of 2009), but let me tell you, deployments were for the birds. With his scripts though: run the script, enter your SSH or git password(s) a few times, and you have…

  • Uncategorized

    Like Too Human, Not Like Devil May Cry 4

    So… console systems aren’t so bad after all. But I need game suggestions. I spent some time this weekend getting more comfortable with our new XBox and PS3. I asked Greg to find me a Diablo-like (because I was driving), and he made me a short list of games to demo, warning me that I probably wasn’t going to find anything really like Diablo/Torchlight (which I have on PC). Their “click-click-click” gameplay style may not translate well to consoles. His list? Too Human Fable II or III Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light And maybe some others. A not-so-short list, really. I grabbed and fired up the Too Human…

  • On Life and Love

    Finally, Some Wedding Relaxation

    Within the last week, a few incredible things happened with regards to the wedding: My stress level dropped by about 50%. I got my wedding dress. RSVPs are coming in. We have a marriage license! Wedding planning is fun again! Actually, RSVPs starting coming in last week and are trickling off this week, but we now have People Attending Our Wedding. Which makes this stuff, like, official. So does the marriage license, which was pleasantly easy to get. Greg and I took a couple of hours and worked straight through our Checklist o’ Doom (thank you, Knot), making sure we knew where we stood on everything, clearing out irrelevant tasks,…

  • On Life and Love

    Weekly Linkage: All Over the Place

    There’s no particular theme to this week’s surfing, but there are some pretty pictures and good reads here. The problem with waste – Note that the list of not-recommended screenings include things like screening for prostate cancer in men older than 75 or colon cancer in folks above 85. I glanced through the USPSTF's procedure manual, and it looks like they're taking into account a variety of factors (age, gender, race, etc.), but their information is only as good as the studies they're pulling from. How worried should we be about researchers' biases (ageism being the first that comes to mind)? "So we’re confronted with a set of screening recommendations…