347.life

I completely agree. As a small business owner, health insurance is my #1 expense. It is so unfair how few benefits I receive. People are people and have the same needs, no matter the size of the employer. Why must there be such a huge difference in the amount of benefits for the same provider? It's health prohibiting.

Megnut: “For those of us that are self-employed, and for those that are unemployed, health insurance continues to be a big expense, and an even bigger pain in the neck.” Amen. [Scripting News] [dws.]

It's official! This message is being sent from my new, clean install of Jaguar (OS X v10.2)!!

It's awesome! I have a bit of feedback for Jobs & Co., but it's a great step forward.

The Radio migration was a piece of cake. I just copied the RadioUserland folder from the backup to the new drive and double-clicked. If you see this message, the migration was picture perfect.

SWEET!!

What kind of advertising is this for an online commerce package? One of the great values of an online store is 24/7 availability. If my store goes offline for a couple of hours, even in the wee hours of the morning, I could be losing valuable orders and prospective clients. This kind of routine could break the bank for some small business. Who are you going to trust with your online business?

Good writing is the basis for weblogging. Good books about how to write are “On writing well” and “Style: toward clarity and grace“. If you don't feel like reading books, this list might help as well:

• Avoid alliteration.
• Prepositions dangle awkwardly if you use them to end sentences with.
• Avoid clichés and colloquialisms like the plague, or you will seem old hat.
• Employ the vernacular, while eschewing arcane and obfuscatory verbiage.
• Avoid ampersands & abbreviations, etc.
• Take it easy with parenthetical remarks (however relevant), to avoid chopping up sentences (unnecessarily (we might add)).
• To ever, however artfully, split an infinitive, marks you as grammatically challenged.
• Skip the foreign words and phrases you know, n'est-ce pas?
• Never generalize.
• 'I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.' – Ralph Waldo Emerson
• Comparisons can clog up writing as badly as alliterations and cliches.
• Avoid redundancy and verbosity, or readers will think you are repeating yourself and using too many words as well besides.
• We really get @*&%$**)!! when you use vulgarities.
• Clear, specific writing beats vagueness, we suppose. Whatever.
• Overstatement totally destroys any credibility you ever had forever.
• Understatement can, at times, perhaps shade a point to the point of its fading away.
• One word sentences? Eliminate.
• Analogies work about as well as fur on a flounder.
• Don't just sits there. Pick verbs that do something.
• Even if a mixed metaphor sings, you should derail it.
• Who needs rhetorical questions?
• Its distrakting too punctuat, an spel rong.

Good writing is surprisingly hard. [Krzysztof Kowalczyk's Weblog] [dws.]

My wife and I have gotten caught up in the finals for American Idol. I remember when the show first appeared – I was appalled. Now that they have narrowed it down to the finals, it is actually very good. The final folks who are left are all amazing singers.My personal favorite? Kelly Clarkson

Radio Book: Something Unexpected: Scotts Radio

As the author of the O'Reilly Essential Blogging chapters on Radio, I clearly have a commercial interest in Radio.  You'd think that I'd want people to just buy the Essential Blogging book and NOT give content about Radio for free.  You'd think that but you'd be wrong.  I really want to see Radio do well along with great people like Jake and Lawrence.  And more documentation is pretty much always a frothy good thing for products. So… Inspiration struck me yesterday when I was digging through the 240 gigabytes of digital bile that I call a hard drive(s): O'Reilly cut a lot of my text on the Essential Blogging book.  (these are all labeled as “Missing”)  Why not aggregate that content along with my previous writings on Radio and release it as a free book under the GNU Free Documentation License?  This content still gets tons of hits from Google so it's clearly useful.  A quick demand (ok gentle request) to my partner, Gretchen, for “A really cool cover” and within about an hour, she IM'd me the graphic at left.  And I've been in hard core content massage since 3:37 am on this oh so soggy Boston day.  I won't tell you that this content is perfect — there are clearly some broken links and other editing style things that need to get done.  But there is a lot of content and it's useful.  It'll get improved more over time but following the Open Source mantra of “Release Early and Release Often”, I give you: Scott's Radio ==> Read Stories

[The FuzzyBlog!] [dws.]

Saving for College. Start saving early and often! [The Motley Fool]

Keith's Weblog (entry #2663).

Two verses not in the bible

Via Oliver Tseng, a quote from Richard Wurmbrand… he has no link, so I'm going to quote it here in full, because it's so worth it (I feel guilty getting to copy it in here, since Oliver had to type it. Thank you Oliver!):

One of the greatest beauties of the Bible is the fact that two
verses do not exist in it. First of all, there exists in the Bible
no verse in which Jesus asks anyone: “What sins did you commit? How
many? Under what circumstance? With whom? Tell me if your sins were
small offences, or huge crimes.” Rather the Bible tell us Jesus went
from person to person saying, “Be of good cheer son; be of good
cheer, daughter; your sins are forgiven” without inquiring what these
sins had been. Neither does He ask you about your past.

Second, there is not one instance in the Bible in which someone
apologized to Jesus or asked forgiveness. After the Last Supper, all
apostles except John had fled; Peter had denied Him. When they met
the resurrected Lord, it would have been nice if they had said, “We
are sorry.” They did not. This was because whoever looks into the
face of Jesus sees on it so much understanding and love he can be
sure beforehand that “he forgives everything.” Christ wishes to save
me much more than I wish to be saved. He wishes me to be in heaven
much more than I wish to go there. A man must run fast to run away
from God, who is after him with His blessings.

Rely on these two verses which are not in the Bible. Believe that
He does not hold your sins against you and that His utmost desire is
to forgive you. -Richard Wurmbrand

That sounds like it's just aimed at Roman Catholicism.

[Keith's Weblog] [dws.]