I'm like you, I have a couple dozen actions I use in PS to help speed things up in post processing. They helped a lot when I had to retouch 500 images (by other photographers) over one weekend. Man, the wrist on my mouse holding hand was sore for a week afterwards.

I will say that Lightroom handles most of my simple editing needs and I only go to Photoshop when I need to use its more powerful tools. For most portraiture I start in Lightroom and then polish things up in (Google) Nik ColorEfx Pro.

I agree 100%.

I've tried Pixelmator, Acorn, GIMP, and countless others but the best bang for the buck goes to Photoshop Elements. Under $100.

Mint

Use Dropbox or similar. Super easy.

Dropbox has a 'Sync using LAN' checkbox you should make sure you keep checked. Helps save you on your ISP's monthly data cap.

Powerline Ethernet!

Be careful, 401k's aren't bullet proof.

Mortgage. Keep the rest someplace safe for emergencies. (invest maybe 10% of that in some solid stocks)

Life expectancy has dropped from that of the generation born in the 1920's and 30's and I'm guessing will continue to drop what with every generation getting fatter and fatter and exercising less.

Another thing to consider are all the articles on how machines and computers will probably take over nearly half of the current job market within 30-40 years.

Look at the timing of when she retired. I'm betting she made big cash in the Internet boom of the 90's.

Agreed!

I don't see how its factoring in inflation. I'm in my 60's and costs on some things, like food and gas, have skyrocketed. (and there's been a company wide wage freeze for the past 4 years where I work)

1978 - Apple II+, first gen (Rev 4 motherboard) with floating point processor. No lowercase, no hard drive, floppy drive was still months away.

Don't be sorry about 'ranting', I've done it myself because I also had my heart broken and, well it was a traumatic event in your life and one way to deal with it is to put it down on paper, or in this case on the site's comments.

I hope your new girlfriend can understand that you've been deeply hurt even though…

At night I place a box fan in an open window at the other end of the house, blowing warm inside air out. Then in any bedroom I want cooled down I open a window and let the negative air pressure the box fan creates draw cooler air in from outside.

If you have a window the same size of the box fan thats great. If not you…

You can also backup all your starred items in Google Reader by using Evernote. Open Google Reader, in the leftmost column click on 'Starred items', I scrolled down to the end just to make sure all the items showed on the page, then used the Evernote plugin to save the entire page. This will save all the links to pages…

Just go to Staples' site and type in their search box 'Whalen Astoria'. Or just search for 'Whalen Astoria' to see if there's other places that carry it. Might be one closer to you or at an even better price.