Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.

Can I write you a check?

Two years ago I quit my job and bought health insurance. Cost about $1200/mo for my family. When I was looking around what I saw most were people complaining about how expensive it was. Sure, it is, but the job I'd quit was paying about $2000/mo for me. And while it might be expensive, simply factor it into the cost of running your own business -- just like *ANYTHING* else. If it means you have to charge $10/hr more, then that's what it means.

Also, consider an HSA/catastrophic plan. We switched recently to that, and even with two young kids, we end up spending less than we did for just our premiums before -- and when you get down to the nitty gritty horrible accident scenerio the coverage is pretty much the same -- well, don't get pregnant... that isn't covered.

Not understanding the business reasons behind the decisions being made. The PHB's don't care what language you use or algorithm or any of that (usually). What they do care about is that it's on time, has the features they want, and gives them a high return on investment.

I've sat in meetings were a programmer will go on about why a certain feature can't/shouldn't be done for a variety of technical reasons and gets no where. And right after that another programmer will mention that the feature can't be done as it would cost $$$ and delay the project and not provide any ROI. And the feature is canceled.

And, no, I'm not suggesting programmers should pull the ROI trick out of the bag when they don't want to do something, but if you want to convince management, speak their language.

It doesn't bother me so much for job applicants -- It's less important than proper attire, etc.

But for politicians it is a definite black mark. Especially when they have a professional domain name, but a hotmail/yahoo/aol -- yes, even gmail email address. It tells me that they nor anyone on their staff is "with it" technically and to me that means they won't use technology appropriately during their term.

I don't want to have to remember to bring a charger when I visit the in-laws for the weekend or travel for a meeting. Unless I'm going somewhere for >4 days I can leave the charger at home.

That would be Python, not Ruby... and since I have to wait for Slashdot, the book is good. So is the Well Grounded Rubyist (also by Manning).

Try Copilot. It's not free, but they have a per-minute plan that's reasonable. It's VNC over SSH, but wrapped up nicely so easy to use.

This reminds me somewhat of the AI computer to look at sat photos and determine if there were tanks in the photo. They trained it. They tested it. It worked great. And then it failed horrifically. It turns out the training photos that had tanks were taking on sunny days, those that didn't were cloudy. The computer had learned to distinguish between sunny and cloudy days and wasn't looking for tanks at all.

Well, when the people vote against building football/baseball stadiums *three* times and then they go ahead and build them anyway it gives you a good idea of where the money goes.

I really don't think the fact that both of you are geeks has anything to do with it. As many others have pointed out you are simply replacing one set of potential issues with another (ie. watching football all sunday vs playing games all sunday -- the underlying problem is the same).

What I haven't seen anyone mention is that just because you are married doesn't mean you get to stop trying. You *MUST* continuously "date" your wife. Whatever it is that you did to get her to agree to marry you in the first place... keep on doing... if that means flowers and chocolate and nice dinners out, do it. If it means setting aside time to read books she likes, do it. If it means joint sessions of WoW, do it. Marriage doesn't give you a free pass to your relationship.

The other thing I would say is that you two can make a choice right now. Are you going to work through your issues (you *WILL* have them) and be open with each other? Or are you going to keep the divorce card in your pocket just in case. My advice... toss the divorce card out the window and be willing to work through your issues no matter what. And before everyone jumps on me, I do realize that divorce is sometimes necessary -- but getting a divorce because he plays too much WoW isn't one of them. The bigger problem there is that you won't have learned anything. Why did I play WoW so much? Why did I let him play WoW so much? What is the underlying issues? Co-dependence, passive agressive, depression? You've got to solve those or you'll be back in the same boat the next time around.

I read an article about a study that took unhappy couples. Some broke up. Some got counseling and worked through it. Five years later 75% of those that stayed together were "more happy". Only 25% that broke up were "more happy". (my numbers are off, but you get my point).

I've been married 12 years..

Does he float?

Wouldn't it be better to simply plant grass instead? Ignoring the problem of having to reinforce roofs that is...

Ugh. No. Maybe it's just me, but my browsing experience slows way down waiting for all the various ad server domains to resolve. For the record, there are a handful of sites that I have turned off Adblock for because I appreciate what they are doing and because they don't do it in an annoying way.

Don't librarian's (particularly those in the library science realm) deal with this sort of thing all the time?

If you're into this sort of thing and other scientific anomalies check out 13 Things That Don't Make Sense. Looks at a variety of scientific topics that scientists can't explain or are deeply divided on. Good book.

http://www.amazon.com/Things-That-Dont-Make-Sense/dp/0385520689