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    Cell Phones: Going Prepaid?

    So, I have this iWone 3G. Greg has one, too. It’s something of a boat anchor these days, now that the novelty has worn off (it’s been about a year and a half). I’m not an iPhone gamer. I don’t really use social networking stuff (Hootsuite) on it except on rare occasions. Email is only for reference rather than composition. It is my primary camera at the moment, sadly, since my real one won’t hold a charge on fresh batteries. So what do I use it for? Contacts, calendar, phone calls, static music, and Pandora. The first two come from our good friend Uncle Google. The last two are definitely…

  • On Life and Love

    Weekly Linkage: The Personal Finance Edition

    The notables in this week’s internet cruising were mostly in personal finance. Surprise, surprise. I picked up a couple of books from the library yesterday: Generation Earn by Kimberly Palmer. I’m neck deep in this one already, and really liking her approach. Less conservative than Dave Ramsey, less passionate as well, but it’s not geared at those struggling and drowning, it’s geared at those of us able to look a little longer term. The Bogleheads’ Guide to Retirement Planning (by a ton of folks). I’ve read a fair amount of their stuff on their wiki, but want to get a feel for their approach in a more sequential fashion. The…

  • On Life and Love

    A Financial Advisor: What Am I Even Looking For?

    I spoke with a financial advisor last week. I really don’t trust other people with the future of my money. I especially don’t trust most people’s advice when they offer it broadly. Most big-name finance people seem to either hand out advice that’s uselessly bland for someone geeking on the topic (that’s me!), or so tailored to a particular world-view, product, or life situation that there’s barely even a gem worth digging out of the morass. Plenty of simple things don’t get accounted for in books and writings on the topic: What if I don’t have employer matching in my 401(k) and have lousy investing choices there? What if I’m…

  • On Life and Love

    Weekly Linkage: Google, Politics, and Bees’ Knees

    This week’s internet cruising: Coding Horror: Trouble In the House of Google – Jeff isn't the first to point out the problems with Google's search results lately (the content mills are clearly winning, and I swim through a lot of mess to get good results anymore), but he's done a lot of due diligence to try to improve Stack Exchange's rankings over the content scrapers, with mixed results. Excellent post. Sphinx – A better way to write your docs – This looks like an awesome doc writing/management system–I struggle with how much documentation to produce for the internals of a system (i.e. not a publicly exposed API), but I'd definitely…

  • On Life and Love

    Weekly linkage

    Down to six hundred sixteen unread Google Reader items! Here are some of the coolest of the nearly 200 I’ve read in the last couple of weeks (as well as random surfing, of course): How to Lower Your Heating Bills This Winter – I definitely need to try out lowering our thermostat. We keep it on 72 F in the winter, which we could probably stand to lower by 5-7 degrees if I bundled up more. 9 New High-Quality Free Fonts | Freebies – I really like the Spatha and My Fair Cody fonts on this list. I'm (back-burner) working on a design for charsheet.net, and the styles of those…