I had hoped to subcontract work on a big project this Spring, but after shopping a proposal around to several development firms, never found anyone capable who wanted to take on the work, and decided to do it myself. Since Rails seems to be what all the cool kids are using these days, it seems…
How we cut our phone bill by 80%
Phone service is quickly becoming a commodity of negligible value, like email. (How much did you pay to send your last email message? You could work out your cost in network access, electricity usage, etc., but the time lost in calculating would be more than a month of messages sent.) "Making a phone call" is…
Medicare: Pick a drug plan this week
[Executive summary: If you know anyone using a Medicare Prescription Drug Plan, point them to https://medicare.gov/find-a-plan/ this week.] Nelson Minar recently gave an example of government agencies beginning to catch up with the private sector with regard to web services. I'll offer another, not so fancy (though plenty of AJAX is on display), but very…
goodbye to an old friend
when we went to west virginia last winter, i set up call forwarding with verizon so calls to the house would be redirected to my cellphone. at some point while we were away, the house phones stopped working. our housesitter reported it to me and asked whether i wanted it fixed, but i said that…
grandfathering data
as i've moved my computing life from a style based around one computer to one driven by online services, i've been moving from my own homebrew solutions to reliance on "opa" -- other people's apps. there are several clear advantages: sites with a narrow specialty make material more discoverable, and thereby more useful to someone…
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