• On Life and Love

    Know What’s Difficult?

    Crafting a business. Duh, right? I don’t mean writing software on the side while you have a full-time job and dreaming that someday you’ll be your own boss. I mean sitting down with a spreadsheet and some historical data, and projecting real-deal income and expense numbers. Figuring out how to create every penny you need to make something successful and sustainable. Okay, that’s not actually the business itself. Doing the work to make those numbers work is the business. Bookkeeping is the business. Putting fingers to keyboard and phone to ear, day in and day out, is the business. But those numbers are crucial, and your eyes must be open…

  • On Life and Love

    Sweet Deviled Eggs

    For many years, I was utterly confused when I ate other people’s deviled eggs. Why weren’t they sweet? What’s this weird paprika stuff? Then I learned the secret to my mother’s deviled eggs: Miracle Whip. Turn up your nose, cringe, flail at your love handles, whatever. The creepy creamy crack is the secret. People who would otherwise look at me like I’ve grown a second head have gobbled these things up. (That was before I knew of their loathing for Miracle Whip–I try not to serve people food that contains things they have moral objections to.) Now, my mother isn’t a measuring cook, per se (which is fine, because we…

  • On Life and Love

    The Contortions of a Spell List

    So I’ve been working on the next major release of the D20 Spell Lists app, and have found myself in a code and UI reorganization/refactoring jungle as I’ve refined my feature set and how I want to handle things. One of the common-enough cases that the current version doesn’t handle well that I think needs to be is multiple spellcaster classes. If I’m a Druid 5/Bard 6, I’m going to want to keep separate spell lists, and will have different DCs, spells known, and spells per day to contend with. With the current version, the best solution is probably to have two different character files, each with its own spell…

  • On Life and Love

    Compassion in the Workplace

    I’m dealing with some really shitty stuff right now. Can’t talk about it, but my week has been–despite some beautiful bright spots–pretty fucking lousy. ‘Sokay. We’re dealing. In struggling to remain open to my own emotions and those of people around me, I found myself indirectly barraged this morning. Breakfast with my coworkers led to one of them going into this diatribe about another colleague that wasn’t there. It wasn’t the usual, “Oh, guess what so-and-so said in a meeting?” It was a harsh, personal attack, full of diagnoses of immaturity/stupidity/ignorance, analyses of personal business that wasn’t for us to know, and a one-upping on pain. A “my pain’s worse…

  • On Life and Love

    Health Insurance Confounds Me

    Whycome pricing out independent health insurance is so confusing? Seriously. I have a spreadsheet, and for each plan I look at, I end up with some new column that I then need to backfill for the plans I’ve already looked at. Whycome some don’t cover birth control? Or maternity? Take a stance, companies. You’re already charging more for women in childbearing years. Whycome a plan can have a $3000-$5000/per person deductible, but not be considered a high-deductible plan (and thus eligible for an HSA), and there still be a coinsurance after the damn deductible? Whycome some of them have documentation that mentions using an HSA for certain things, but the…