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On weddings and rings
I spent time with a couple of friends this weekend that will, within the next couple of years, likely be getting married and starting a family. They spent much of our time together talking about houses and children and wedding rings, which brought me to an interesting revelation. I care not one whit about wedding rings. Dresses, either, but the ring was a big topic of discussion. He’s planning on getting her a ring from Tiffany’s. It’s important that the diamond not be synthetic, because their love is real and the ring should be, too. Nor should the ring be less than about $1800, because their love is worth a…
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Daily tasteeness (2008-03-24)
Must Read: The Twenty Science Fiction Novels that Will Change Your Life I’m going to see if the liberry has any of these books for my perusal. It’s been a minute since I’ve read a novel. Surfer Girl Reviews Star Wars: In case you are not yet convinced. Interesting anecdotal evidence of Obama’s trustworthiness and character.
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Uncategorized
User-focused development
Examine, if you will, the core design, development, and support trio of a company’s flagship product. This trio considers the product’s users dumb and stupid and “fucking retarded”. They’ve been told 30 times that a date looks like 3/19/2008, not 3/19/08, and certainly not “next Thursday”. They’ve been given the manuals and a tour through the product. They must be retarded if they repeatedly break the software. Customer support is, of course, a supremely annoying job. The customers don’t know what they’re talking about, and almost everything is a training issue. But those users keep that company afloat and its employees able to eat. Their needs are simple, and many…
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Shameless plug: MS Walk
March 29, 2008. 07:30. Symphony Park. Charlotte, NC. I’ll be walking in the MS (Multiple Sclerosis) Walk with Dulin, Shelly, and several others. The walk is either a 2.5 mile or 5 mile walk, depending on how I feel that morning (and, likely, what others are doing). I’m crazy excited. It’s not a race, but I consider it a first step in my goal to engage in races in the near future. Plus, it’s the first fund-raising walk I’ve done since freshman year of college. To make the walk worthwhile as a fund raiser for MS, however, I need to, well, raise money. If you’re in Charlotte, you could also…
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Succeeding at life
I’m at an interesting, forward-moving period in my life. As you may have noticed by the abundance of links around here on the topics, I’ve been studying up (geeking, if you will) on productivity and personal finance. My personal finance skills have been shit all my life. My parents were horrible role models in finance — no savings to speak of, horrendous amounts of debt, and a nice stack of neglected debts (foreclosures and the like). What I learned from my parents was how to live paycheck to paycheck. It wasn’t that money slipped through the cracks, necessarily, but it was that they were fine living in the moment. Living…