The state lines in the US might as well be national borders if you’re trying to change your health insurance. I recently moved from Massachusetts to Maine, a total distance of 100 miles. I am self-employed and was paying the usual insane amount for my own health insurance in Massachusetts, including coverage for my spouse…
Sometimes losing everything is an opportunity. Forty years ago, in late December, I broke up with my wife. After years of unhappiness, it had become clear that the we didn’t belong together. She requested that I leave the apartment the next morning. I had a small suitcase full of clothes and nothing else. I called…
Yesterday my wife and I bought a house in Portland, Maine. We’ll be moving there soon. I thought you might be interested in how we chose Portland, after 40 years of living near Boston. Why New England? I moved to New England — Cambridge, Massachusetts — in 1979 at age 20 and I’ve been here…
My wife and I are preparing the house we’re selling for buyers and an open house in a month or so. We fell in love with the house almost immediately. It’s on a beautiful piece of ground in a nice part of our town. It’s big but 100 years old, with personality. It has four…
Every once in a while I begin to wonder if I am crazy. Why bother blogging here every week day? Since this blog began in March of 2015, I have posted on it every weekday. In six-plus years, that has added up to 1,700 posts and 1.5 million total words. These posts have seen 3.5…
Fair warning: this post is all about decisions I made and why I made them. If you don’t want to hear about that, skip it. I just agreed to purchase the home of my wife’s and my dreams in Portland, Maine. And pretty soon we will move there and own it, free and clear. This…
Fastly runs a CDN — a content delivery network that makes delivery of Web pages faster globally. Due to a bug, major Fastly clients including Amazon, Reddit, Spotify, eBay, and Pinterest were unable to serve pages to customers for about an hour Tuesday. Fastly apologized — and its apology is a clinic in how to…
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I lost an easy chance to make three quarters of a million dollars. I’ll never forget that. But I don’t regret it. Early in my career, I was working for a software startup company. I was the first employee the two founders hired. I was young and inexperienced, but I poured my heart into the…