I'd recommend you take an intro to macroeconomics course. You'll learn about how monetary policy works (interest rates) and that will help you your whole life. Understanding economics helps you understand business trends, investing, and it gives you more perspective on current events.
At least Linode recently gave everyone a 42% RAM increase. Good point though, most of the hardware progress has been pure margin for the cloud vendors.
Hi I've done the same thing, http://www.craigdiddy.com and I also have a list of all the other sites that do this and why mine is the best. Besides email you can currently get free sms to find out even faster (via Twitter) and I plan on releasing the non-interface code on github.