I would really like a timer app that blocks social, distracting sites during the work sprint so I'm reminded if I start to stray and then unblocks them during the rest.
Yes, I think it marks a certain level of success/fame when someone takes the time to make a parody of you. Most Saturday Night Live skits for example or http://www.fakesteve.net/
I'm the author -- thanks. To keep things very clean, we created a :cron role for our deployment (which happens to be the same server as our :db). I imagine that many people are running on one server and so the :app role is fine. The point is that you can deploy different cron schedules to your various server types using roles.
Whenever simply generates your crontab file for you using a cleaner syntax. It hasn't reinvented anything or added any complexity. You are just using cron.
It will work FINE without Rails. The code you're pointing to simply finds the Rails root if it exists as a convenience. If one doesn't, you have to manually tell Whenever your path: set :path, "/path/to/my/app"