I was talking to my veterinarian friend about careers and she said something interesting. She and many of her vet school friends would often fantasize about becoming seriously ill or getting into bad car accidents.
“Why?” I asked.
“Because then we’d have an acceptable reason to be able to take a few days off.”
Apparently some of her [...]
Monthly Archives: January 2008
Momma don’t let your babies grow up to be doctors
January 31, 2008
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You’re going places kid
January 31, 2008
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The new getting discovered on the radio is getting discovered on an Apple ad.
My bulletproof computer backup strategy guide
January 30, 2008
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Someday your hard drive will die. You need a backup strategy that’s bulletproof and easy.
Please note that while I will be talking about Mac OS X backup methods, the overall strategy applies to other operating systems too.
Live your life on one laptop hard drive volume. When your iTunes library lives on one external hard drive, [...]
Five economic effects that often make good book titles
January 25, 2008
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The Black Swan (2007)
The Long Tail (2004)
The Tipping Point (2000)
Creative Destruction (1942)
The Invisible Hand (1776)
Quotes of the day
January 25, 2008
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Government cannot create genuine spending power; the most it can do is to transfer it from Smith to Jones. If the Treasury sends a stimulus check to Jones, the money comes from taxes, from borrowing, or is newly created.
The hardest problems to cope with are those you blame on other people.
Vonage: You never get a second chance to make a last impression
January 25, 2008
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I had Vonage VOIP phone service for over a year. I was really happy with it. The Vonage web interface was usable and offered great free features like the forwarding of voicemail MP3s to my email.
I only needed Vonage because I didn’t get cell reception at home, and now I’m moving. Fewer bills and fewer [...]
MacBookPro hard drive upgrade how-to
January 24, 2008
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I was running out of room on my hard drive, so it was time to upgrade with a Hitachi 250GB 5400RPM SATA drive from OWC ($150 at the time of this writing). I thought about going for a 200GB 7200RPM drive, but the higher data density of a 250GB drive means the performance difference of [...]
The marketing lesson from Dreamhost’s billing meltdown
January 24, 2008
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Yesterday I talked about the important personal finance lesson derived from Dreamhost’s accidental over billing of their customers. Today let’s look at the PR lesson.
Dreamhost addressed their colossal blunder with their usual tongue in cheek style, even though many of their customers were seriously hurt by the error. This wasn’t some simple downtime, large sums [...]
The one crucial lesson you can learn from Dreamhost’s billing meltdown
January 23, 2008
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Dreamhost, my web host incidentally, mistakenly billed their customers for a whole year of service in advance. Fortunately my credit card on file was expired so I was spared, but others were not so lucky. Some customers were billed thousands of dollars against their checking accounts which caused everything from overdraft fees to missed mortgage [...]
Wired magazine’s annoying subscription cards: now with 32% more irony!
January 23, 2008
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In the latest Wired (Feb. 2008) they talk about things that suck.
The page where they talk about annoying magazine subscription cards is where they jammed the bulk of their own subscription cards.
Har Har. You know what is also funny? Putting those blank subscription cards in the mail so Wired has to pay postage.
To be [...]
