artumi-richard

You've written a lot here, and I don't have much time. My apologies, I will be terse:

1) I prefer text too and ongoing communication requires lots of this. 2) You should be able to call people over simple things. 3) You should have a work environment where calls are OK. I've solved to many problems with a phone in 10 minutes that others have spent a week playing email ping-pong with. 4) An initial conversation does have lasting effects, "First impressions count" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_impression_(psychology) 5) It's not about making people like you, it's about reducing misunderstandings. If you've got open prejudice then this could help to address even that. 6) While you may not learn about someone from a call, especially if you struggle to understand the emotional content of a call, but that doesn't mean they don't understand something about you which eases future communications with that person. 7) Tone setting is really valuable for some people who struggle with focus.

Back in 2006 I read that people don't understand the intended tone in emails. I'm assuming it applies to most text based communication, and is one of the reasons I have devalued email and comments.

The key quote:

"According to recent research published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, I've only a 50-50 chance of ascertaining the tone of any e-mail message. The study also shows that people think they've correctly interpreted the tone of e-mails they receive 90 percent of the time."

I think this means we overlay what we think the intended tone was meant to be on top of the email, and usually it's more to do with us than the content of the email, and I suspect in Coraline's case it was uniformly negative due to unrecognised prejudice. I would suggest that in the corporate setting, if you've not got a relationship with the author of code you shouldn't be able to feedback initially as text, but instead either in person or on the phone. In that way you get the relationship between reporter and coder off to a good start, and follow up text communications will have a better chance of working.

I would actually go so far as to say no-one in a corporate setting should be communicating with each other as text without a phone call or a meeting to introduce each other.

Here's the article that's stuck with me so long:

https://www.wired.com/2006/02/the-secret-cause-of-flame-wars...

I would have thought a single multi-column index would have been more appropriate. Did you consider these? They have been in PostgreSQL since 9.2

https://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.2/static/indexes-multicolu...

That reference about DHL being German doesn't sit nicely with me. Germany is much more socialist than the USA.

To emphasise this point, he believes that consciousness is provided by a non-physical unmeasurable substance that has some kind of complex structure, in order to contain the complex consciousness. Could you build a human molecule by molecule to match another that was naturally born, then it wouldn't be conscious as you wouldn't have the means to build a consciousness to go with it.

Once I'd got this far with the book, I put it down.

There has to be a ceiling to how much demand can be induced.

There are 2 Aldi's near me here in the UK. One in a wealthier area and one in a poorer area. They do seem to alter the store somewhat to match what they sell. The Aldi in the wealthier area has a larger area for fresh foods and a large stock of those foods. I think the poorer one has more biscuits and soft drinks.

I think the two labels are "absolute poverty" and "relative poverty"

What fun:

I have recently been reading The Hobbit with my 6 year old son Benjamin stop he has become engrossed in the book somewhat and then just hearing about the Adventures of Bilbo Baggins and Gandalf as well of course as mine growing are a diary Norrie tilly tilly Bailey and wailing not forgetting the king Under the Mountain himself starring oakenshield Gollum Gollum

I just today listened to the BBC Bottom Line Special [1] on this, and their guests, one who used to run Jaguar, and an expert on VW, don't buy it. Their argument is that the engineers in VW could have done a proper job, but the technology would add another $500 to each vehicle, and VW must have been looking for a way not to spend the $500. And all the other VW engineers would ask "How did you do it?".

[1] http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06jt518 9mins 15 onward

One thing I've noticed since using an e-reader that I've not heard anyone else mention, is that I've become far less happy with the quality of print and the quality of the paper in the physical books I'm buying. I once read a book [1] that had unusually high quality paper which made it noticeably denser and the pages had more flex in them, which made one handed reading a doddle. It wasn't flawless, as the print would smudge if I rubbed my slightly moist fingers against it.

Still, every time I go to a book now I'm usually thinking "the type is too large" or "that font is awful" or "the paper is too thick".

I think it's time the industry had another look at how paperbacks in particular should look and feel, given the influence of the e-reader.

1: http://www.amazon.com/Unreliable-Sources-20th-Century-Report...

I used one in the Arts Tower of Sheffield University where I studied. It was fun, but felt slow. There were also 2 (3?) conventional elevators that seemed like the best bet when doing more than 5 floors.

It's still functional.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arts_Tower

I think you can generalise one more step up. Markets that look horribly inefficient may well not be.

Does anyone know of a conference that takes a wider view of the job of programming? It has always felt to me like the focus is all about our tools, because tools can look cool, but I'm interested in the process of starting with a messy list of requirements and getting to a completed project in the most successful way, which is often the real challenge in my work.

Open access science books

http://www.intechopen.com/books

Not just PHP. Here's an advert for a django junior developer in London for £25k.

http://www.indeed.co.uk/cmp/Titan-Merchandise/jobs/Junior-We...

I stopped with the statistics element of my math degree as soon as I could because of the disgust I had for the p-value decision thresholds.

My first reaction to this was "MySpace? - some kind of stargazing based website?" before moments later: "Wow! - I completely forgot what Myspace was!"

HMRC is not going to know if someone travelling from France to the UK was charged the wrong VAT rate, and if they did, they wouldn't start issuing fines. They are very kind to our sector, as the government wants to encourage our sector to grow in the UK.

Also, you can do like Digital Ocean, have premises in the EU, and customers in the EU, but claim to be only an American company and ignore the VAT question completely. Still, I'm not sure how long they will get away with that.

No. There is nothing you can do. There is nothing you can say. Choose a battle you can win.

I'm doing work with a drug testing company, that generates a lot of stuff you wouldn't want taken out of context. This kind of stuff: "How's the meth goin?" - "Oh great. We're getting loads this week" "And the Steroids" - " Ah, not so well. Bob's lab is running behind, they're really busy"

Could there be a browser plugin to like and share everything as you wander through the web? That would be an interesting way to demonstrate tracking technologies.

Stay in the job, focus on your family life for the next 12 months. At some point during that time you'll know exactly what you want to do, and you wont need to ask advice here.

Now this may be old, but it had something called "pods" which I think are servers. And you have to run one, or register with one. Once done it would store all the data. There didn't seem to be a way to have intra-pod communications. This didn't feel sufficiently decentralized for me. Basically it seems more like a tool to create your own facebook. I still have to trust the guy running the pod.

I was expecting a locally running app, with all my stuff available to it, one or more bitcoin style IDs and external servers acting as a napster style introductory service, which once complete would have nothing to do with the encrypted p2p communications that followed.

I think with a sufficiently scoped out messaging protocol and simple demo client software something new and important could be created.

Since everything would be encrypted for the end-recipient it may well be data intensive, if sharing videos amongst many people for example, but perhaps some shared secret/ one-time pad/ dropbox (old and new meanings) would be a good solution to this.

Encrypted p2p facebook.

Quitting because you are stressed and the pressure is high is one option. As you say above, taking a week off might be another option. Taking two might be better, if you can forget or put into perspective the problem at hand.

Prioritise your basics. Eat properly. Go to bed early. Do some exercise. See your friends. Watch a movie. Make it your goal to have done all this for a week. Without sufficient reserves of energy & social interaction your job of getting through this is much harder.

If you feel shame about things not going well, you shouldn't. Everyone you know has made up their mind about "who you are" and the outcome of your decision here will not influence that one way or the other.

I'm solely responsible for all sorts of stuff and have received a few ear bashings over time. I hang on to a few facts:

1) I am variable. I cannot predict how much work I will get done in a day. I am not a machine. 2) Estimating how long a non-trivial software project will take is hard, and I should expect nearly all estimates to be wrong, and there will be consequences to that. 3) People can be unreasonable. I will on occasion have to deal with them. 4) Not everything is about me. If someone is angry on the phone, they may well have all sorts of shit going on in their lives. Don't judge. Don't take it personally.

In short, shit happens, and the more I do, the more shit I have to deal with, and after a while, that's fine. You try to avoid it, but you can't. I do the best I can, sometimes that's great, and sometimes it's not so good.

This is one of those things no one could value before having done it. Relax. Going home early was always going to be more appealing. I'm sure it's nothing to do with you, your meeting or what you planned to do in it.

I have a more up-to date reference

http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/vat/start/register/when-to-register.h...

I do get them from pingdom, and AWS. I do not get them from Mailchimp or hostgator.

I try to do things now that I won't be able to do in the future. If you hope to have a family one day, that's going to tie you to one spot, because you'll want a support network, so you would be wise to travel now.