The Empty Soda Can

For those that don’t know, my sister is permanently disabled. She has Reflex Sympathetic Dystrophy Syndrome , which basically means that untreated, she’d experience pain, 24/7, to the tune of 10% worse than natural childbirth. In fact, RSD patients—who are overwhelmingly female—often report that pregnancy decreases their pain level, so while most pregnant women are complaining that their back hurts, the RSD patients are rejoicing that their arms and legs don’t. Thankfully, my sister has been blessed with amazing health benefits. Until their retirement, a few months ago, my parents were both middle-school teachers in New Jersey, which basically means that their insurance is phenomenal compared to just about everyone else’s. (Case in point: growing up, my sister and I took prescription chewable vitamins because our $1 copay was cheaper than over-the-counter Flintstones vitamins. True story.) While many insurance companies won’t even admit that RSD exists , let alone cover it, I’m not a...

It was a couple of months ago that my wife, Anna, decided that we should start purchasing Dean’s ® brand milk over the store brand, because she heard somewhere that, unlike store brands, Dean’s contains no hormones. As luck would have it, about a week later, CVS started having sales on Dean’s milk, pretty much every week—sales so good that it’s now actually less expensive than the store brand—so we started taking advantage. This morning, I was sitting at the table, innocently eating my breakfast, when I noticed that Dean’s has actually begun advertising this rumored fact. You probably can’t read it in the photo, but that golden, rounded fourteen-point star contains the following words: Our Farmers Pledge Not to Use Artificial Growth Hormones* So I’m thinking, “Cool! Anna was right! There’s no artificial growth hormones! How consumer-conscious of them!” But then I notice the asterisk. “Hmmm…” I think, using those exact words. “What could that be for?” I look around the label—it re...

wuy So here are my thoughts: The most obvious option is what Eddie has already suggested: something that will last me another six years. Given the fact that desktops are, in my experience, more reliable than laptops, that would probably be a Mac Pro. It has all the power I could ever want (for the moment), but uses less electricity than my G5. It has room for four internal hard drives, which will make for easy RAID building; and plenty of room for expansion (Firewire 800, PCI Express 2.0, up to 32GB of RAM, etc.). The big down side is the price: a Mac Pro costs $2,499 or $3,299 with no upgrades, plus whatever else I’d like to spend on a new display (and no, my old display won’t work with its new-fangled ports, so I’ll need to upgrade that, too). It’s really not a bad deal, for what you’re getting, but do I really need that much? If I were constantly doing graphics or video, sure; but as a developer, I’d actually probably be better off with something simpler—if for no other reason...