I've tried using Evernote and Dropbox, but could never make it work the way I wanted hence the motivation to work out keeping note in an ordered way in my notebooks.
Check out the book 'The Investment Answer' (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0982894708). Its a great place to start when trying to learn about investing and long term money management. It also goes in depth on how to select someone to help manage your money.
I'm reading The Design of Everyday Things right now. It is an amazingly good book. The examples are awesome. It really is changing the way I look at everything.
While Twilio would be a surefire way to do it. You can also hack up a small script that will use sms gateways to send the email, but then you would have to know the person's carrier in advance. I find this way more interesting, but not nearly as robust. You can do some interesting things when you are sending text messages through gateways.
I'm a programmer/analyst at a startup. It is a fun job. I'm always jumping between tasks and have a million things going on all at once. For me, the job is ~70% programming, ~25% analysis, ~5% other. That will certainly very depending on the company and responsibilities, but thats probably a good model of the work from what I've seen. If thats your cup of tea (sure is mine) then I would say this would be a great way to go. There are downfalls though; if you go the startup route that is. More then likely you will be making less then corporate and the hours may be more erratic to, but that depends on corporate culture. I would say give it a shot if your curious.
I really like the idea, but part of your concept concerns me. Having pronounceable short urls is always a plus, but having them expire is sketchy to me. It means 1 of 2 things in my mind and maybe you can put my worries to rest. I will also preface the concerns with 'I did notice that the time is variable and user chosen'.
1 You are going to litter the web with non-active(broken) links and that sucks.
2 (more likely) As you reuse words in urls there will be links that will point to things that are in no way related to the context in which they were originally used.
Is that really true? Most of the companies I've talked to are looking for people with Ruby/Rails experience. I've seen some looking for Python Django experience, but far less. I currently do Python dev at work. I've looked a Django, but I wasn't super impressed, but again maybe I'm just not finding the right resources for learning to work with it. Any suggestions there?