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Travel Advice You Can’t Afford to Miss
Traveling in a foreign country can be filled with wonder and excitement. It can also turn into a nightmare without the right preparation. Travel Tips Bring currency (US / UK / Euro) in decent quantities in small bills ($500+). This is emergency money for towns without ATMs. Carry that currency distributed among various hiding places [...]
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Privilege Means Responsibility
Let’s redefine privilege Because it’s not working well for our society. Here’s what we have right now: Privilege : advantage, benefit; prerogative, entitlement, right; concession, freedom, liberty. Advantage, benefit, freedom, liberty: those are all accurate words for what I disproportionately enjoy with being a privileged member of society. In fact, I’ve got just about all [...]
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Hack Your Finances – Thoughts on Extreme Retirement Planning
Extreme Retirement Planning is a financial movement that I discovered a few weeks ago. At least, that’s when I heard of that terminology for being frugal. As it happens, I’ve been implementing some of those ideas for the past year or two. But these Extreme Retirement Planning (ERP) folks crank it up to 11 and [...]
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Goals and Giving Back: Creating Meaning in Life
I’ve been in serious discussions with a new friend regarding the refinement of the self. The discussions started at RubyMidwest but since I don’t yet have their permission, I’ll leave the individual as a shadowy anonymous figure. The evening of the discussion brought about a conversation regarding refactoring oneself through a constant process of testing [...]
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Stop, Drop, and Sleep
Exhaustion is in the air today. I fell asleep at 7pm and according to my Twitter feed, it’s not just me. So is: Passed out on the couch at 9. Been working so much lately :/ — ashe dryden (@ashedryden) April 24, 2013 And: to code or sleep? that is the question. — Derek Bender [...]
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Increasing Productivity with Shortcuts
I’m writing this to the incessant tick-tock of a digital Pomodoro, which seems fitting as this post will discuss productivity hacks. We won’t be talking about run of the mill ones. I won’t berate my readers to modify their ‘/etc/hosts’ file in order to route Reddit or Twitter to localhost. No, these are real habits [...]
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RubyMidwest 2013: Lessons and Reflections
I attended RubyMidwest and want to share both my impressions and resulting growth. But let’s backup, I had debated whether to drive or to fly out to Kansas City, MO for the conference. With only two weeks to spare, our primary long distance car began having some trouble. So, I looked into the costs of [...]
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Pricing a Product: Napkin Math
I’m facing the novel prospect of pricing a software product. This product is something that I created during evenings and weekends. It’s very specialized for my current industry, so I won’t go into the details of the product. But suffice to say that it sorts data in a time saving way. Product Benefits Saves 1 [...]
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Two Factor Authentication for All the Things
I recently went wild with two factor authentication due to reading about Chicago VPS getting hacked. I received the nicest email from LastPass warning me that my email address was among the SQL dump posted by the hacker. My Response First off, according to ChicagoVPS all the passwords were in the form of salted hashes. [...]
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A Week with ThinkingRock GTD
The Good My first week with ThinkingRock has gone REALLY well for adding tasks. I sit at the computer for much of the day and when a GTD task comes to mind I dump it via Cmd-Space GTD "description of task" . The Bad Having a very efficient system for adding tasks paired with a [...]
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Benchmarking GTD
I’ve been working with RescueTime for the past week and I’m VERY happy. First off, I don’t have to change a thing to make use of the system. It’s a great way to benchmark my own time spending habits on the computer. It’s well setup to allow individual configuration of what you believe is productive [...]
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Finite Keystrokes Before Death : Making the Most of Them
The idea that we possess a finite number of keystrokes to consume before death is an ominous consideration. That’s the concept mentioned in one of RubyFreelancer’s archived shows by Eric Davis (if I remember correctly). I believe he’s quoting another person in the episode when he talks about having a finite number of keystrokes remaining. [...]
