HN user
Programmer. Lisper. Preferrer of 'web dot', to 'dub dub dub dot'. Not very good at talking about myself.
I've been pretty happy with shush[1], which is a similar script that helps with a lot of this--including randomdelays, locking to avoid overlapping runs, e-mailing only on errors (or other criteria as you see fit), and so forth.
Arguably a wee bit simpler than jffry's s3+cloudflare option, and with a similar pay-for-what-you-use pricing model, is NearlyFreeSpeech.net.
I'm a fan of web.foo.com, personally. Much easier to pronounce. ;)
I used Ubuntu for years, but the constant barrage of updates (every six months outside of an LTS release!) and the fact something /always/ broke when moving to a new release (usually video) eventually got annoying enough that I switched back to Debian. For me, Debian's slower release cycle is a plus in itself.
You may be interested to know Seibel gave a non-zero amount of thought to the issue of women in "Coders at Work": http://gigamonkeys.wordpress.com/2009/09/22/women-coders/