I have been using Top Shelf for at least 3 years. It's one of the first apps I ever installed on my 1st gen iPod Touch.

Screenshot of PG&E usage data they provide on the web.

http://ge.tt/5zhMaLm

Wow. PG&E in California starts at 11c/kwh at baseline which gives you only 579kwh per month. Then the tiers climb up to 40c/kwh. Accordingly, my bills are 3-4x higher. Ugh.

It would be interesting to know where you are. In Fresno, CA, power, electric and gas, is provided by PG&E. I have heard we have some of the highest rates in the nation, but I don't know if that's fact.

In a 2900sf home, where I also work, the A/C is set to 80 in the summer. That yields a bill of about $600+ in July and August, most of it being the electric consuming about 1800-2200 kwh per month.

The mild months, November, March - May, the total bill is in the high 200's.

In winter, when the central heat is running, it's about $500.

It's expensive.

I only use unlocked phones and prepaid plans, T-Mobile, PagePlus mostly. It can be done. There are plenty of unlocked phones available on NewEgg, Dell, Amazon, and Craigslist.

Yes, knowing that rent, people, and insurance aren't cheap, I think $1.50 is reasonable. I'm not sure what goes into your calculation that the coffee costs 20 cents. I don't even think straight coffee orders keeps Starbucks thriving. It's probably the specialty drinks and the food.

I can do it at home for less, but not $.20/cup cheap. The problem with coffee is it has a limited shelf life. A good brewer or brewing method takes money and time to prepare also. I don't like to compare to soda as I can buy it on sale and store it for weeks or months without degradation.

However, my frame of reference is what I pay for a decent cup of coffee dispensed on demand at a retail store. Those prices from Starbucks are reasonable. I pay more at local places like Coffee Society (Cupertino, CA) or Orchard Valley (Campbell, CA). Granted, it's slightly better coffee. Peet's is about the same in price and quality, IMO.

I've never understood the slam on Starbucks about their coffee being expensive. Where I live (California), the prices for coffee are:

• small/tall: $1.50
• med/grande: $1.85
• lg/venti: $2.00

What price should the coffee be? As a daily coffee drinker, I go back and forth whether it makes more sense for me to spend $2 a day at Starbucks or a similar place (all the prices are about the same), or spend $10-12 plus $1.50 for pint of cream and brew at home which lasts about a week.

I don't buy lattes or mochas that often, and that isn't coffee; it's a specialty drink. I think they run in the low to mid $3 range as it requires a paid employee to make it for me. Again, what should it cost?

I'm going through the stages of Twitter: it's stupid, it's funny, it's useful, it's too much information. This Slashdot page was loaded via a Twitter link. The thing is, I do get useful nuggets of information from Twitter: breaking news, tech links, sports scores. And while most of the time I don't care where you are are what you're doing, once in awhile I have hooked up with folks having a beer who posted on Twitter.

Until it gets easier to parse the feeds (sorry, lists just aren't working for me), I've had to get past that feeling that I'm missing out on something if I don't check the feed, or I go through a long history. So at this point I've learned to let missed items just go and move on with my life.

-- MV, a software engineer

The vasectomy fright is so overblown. I had it done 2 months ago. Go to a urologist who has experience (say 1000+ procedures) and does is regularly. The doctor I went to does them all day on Fridays. It's done in 15 minutes. Put an icepack on your nuts and watch some movies and sports for the weekend. Keep the kids away from your midsection. By the following weekend it's pretty much forgotten.

"Married people don't have sex" is such a tired cliche. If you're in that situation, sorry, that sucks, but it's not supposed to be that way. At age 40 with elementary school kids, I'm glad we made the decision. Plan ahead and put an extra $500 (or whatever your out-of-pocket expense might be) on your company Flex Plan to get it subsidized tax free.

That's how I was able to justify to my employer to issue me a Verizon MiFi. It pays for itself in lieu of charging hotel wifi plus has so many more uses.

There's a lot of anti-IDE rhetoric going on, but I rely heavily on mine, Eclipse (for Java programming). I also rely on Vim, TextPad, less, and so on depending on the task. But for this particular question and the point about dead weight, leverage your IDE to clean house. You can play with compiler and static analysis flags to remove things like unused: private methods, imports, variables or whatever is applicable to your language. If the formatting is inconsistent, run a formatter that pleases your eye (assuming there isn't a group standard for that ... another religious programmer's topic).

Other parts of Eclipse that I rely on especially when I'm in another team's code (we have about 2m real LOCs):
* Call hierarchy [ctl-alt-H]
* References [ctl-shift-G]
* Class hierarchy [f4]

Where I am, some of these conveniences are becoming more difficult to leverage as Spring and its XML configurations define object relationships.

And that's depressing, yet, I'll be checking the box next to her name. As is usually the case, I'm not voting "for" someone. I'm voting against Senator Boxer.

That's what babies do. Put some headphones on and deal with it.