• On Life and Love

    Pleasant Mobile App: Guidebook

    I’m going to a conference this weekend, so I’ve been preplanning all my time slots (double- and triple-booked, of course, as I do). My last conference was DragonCon, and it used a DragonCon-branded mobile app that was built using Core-Apps’ EventLink and FollowMe platforms. It really struggled to keep up with the heft of DragonCon–every load of or task-switch to the app checked the servers for event info and friends’ statuses, I don’t think Twitter postings worked, and the app crashed pretty frequently on my iPhone 4, particularly when network conditions were bad. I really, really hope DragonCon switches to Guidebook this year. The conference this weekend is much smaller…

  • On Life and Love

    Flaky Friday (F)Links

    I’m now fully in the flaky phase of the tattoo process, and am losing large black/grey flakes at a pleasantly quick rate. It’s really, really hard not to encourage the process, though, especially when (squick alert!) attached flakes are catching on my shirt at work. Grody! Sleeping has been rough since Saturday. When it was all raw and fresh, it just (ha!) hurt badly. Once it dried out, it hurt to do anything that stretched the skin, like lie on my stomach. Or lie on my side. Or relax my shoulder. The winning solution for sleep so far is to use a small pillow under the front of my tattoo’d…

  • On Life and Love

    Wednesday Weekly Winkage

    Not, of course, limited to Wednesdays. Today just happens to be one. …Barely. I shall open with a video of Nayna, my belly dance instructor, from a couple of months ago: I’m somewhere off to the left, wishing I’d brought my own camera. This was after class, so I don’t feel bad about watching my instructor dance instead of dancing myself. Posie Gets Cozy: Well, Things Fell Apart – Sadness.”For six days, as we waited for the results of the DNA test, we loved her with our whole hearts…” 10 things the iPhone Siri will help you get instead of an abortion | The Raw Story – “Ask in New…

  • 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…

  • On Life and Love

    Weekly Linkage: Politics, Money, and Some Music

    The original posting of this was horribly borked. I may be switching link-posting plugins. Warm and Fuzzy Budgeting – "You have things that matter to you. Hopes, and goals, and dreams. This is going to sound cheesy, but I think it’s true: Your budget is simply your hopes, and goals, and dreams … on paper." Maybe those tax incentives for creating new jobs should be for hiring a currently unemployed person | Prometheus 6 – What? How are you only going to hire people who already have jobs? "Members of Congress had urged the commission to explore the issue, after reading press reports of numerous instances in which employers and…