doubleplus

Good catch.

It's true! When I'm with the ladies I can go on for hours about a random content generator I'm working on for fun, I can forward tons of /. links with explanations about what makes them interesting, I can call with a frequency and average message length just past the line of "creepy," I can be visibly nervous and embarrassingly insecure, and I can show up for teh love having skipped a shower and on 3 hours of sleep. But as long as I throw on a $75 hoodie, some prefaded jeans, and a pair of Pumas, my shit is tight!

The 20 Eye: http://www.zappos.com/images/725/7257495/5089-291353-d.jpg

Chutes & Ladders

eh... She dropped the ball in the last quarter of that, but I think he could have tossed a lifejacket instead of watching her drown.

Check out the DL section of that site... lots of radio mixes by Above & Beyond, Ferry Corsten, Paul van Dyk, Tiesto, et al.

Trance! http://s-torm.com/forum/dload.php?action=category&cat_id...

I got one of these right after they came out, too. Having had no experience with Linux before then, I've spent more than 15 minutes at a time figuring out how to get things to work. Right away, it was a couple nights on nvidia driver and wpa support. And since then, about once a month, I'll have to spend a whole night or two figuring something else out... last weekend it was something with generic vs rt kernels for ubuntustudio. Anyhoo, looking back, I wouldn't suggest it to any relative novices (like me) who really just want to use their computer to accomplish normal tasks, and who aren't into tinkering for the sake of it. Gnome/KDE in K/Ubuntu are really convenient and slick 29/30 days, but to be honest, I'm getting tired of fighting my computer and I'll likely pick up a Mac when I get a new desktop this summer.

Portland: Free Geek http://www.freegeek.org/ And random NE, SE, and NW cafes.

I love elephants. That's what made it hard for me to read this last week: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7262951.stm I'm going through a Frans de Waal-fueled chimp phase, too, and the news for them isn't much better. Same for dolphins. Damned naked apes.

I agree.

Beat me to it.

I grow old... I grow old... I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

I really miss poker too. I never played at the level you did, but I had a pretty healthy obsession going for a couple years. And the people I "met" were more on places like 2+2 and the play sites than live, but I see your point about a latent honesty and honor.

re: "...but not one where they ended up getting stiffed when the stakee went on to win..." one exception came to mind. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamie_Gold#Winnings_controversy Yeah, he's an exceptional douchebag, and he wasn't exactly staked from his rep, but still. (I just wanted to call him a douchebag again.)

You're sure it wasn't "there"...?

Another 200% of what? The "90%" already taken? If you work on something for 90 hours, then for another 180 hours, that 90 hours was actually "the first 33%," so I guess I don't understand why he doesn't just refer to it as such. But then we wouldn't have a blog post (with wonderful the grammar).

2nd on the weather. I'm living somewhere else for the first time (Portland) and I just experienced my first ever autumn and winter.

I understand to the OP these responses might seem a little dismal, but SD really does have a stagnant feel to it imho.

san diego really sucks anyway. and that's coming from a native. :)

I do find caffeine use to be effective, driving force. Instead of just sitting around at home doing nothing, I feel compelled to take my laptop and be unproductive at local cafes. It also enhances my attention/focus deficiencies, leading me to read many more books, magazines, and blogs than I normally would were I to remain enmeshed in whatever I'm working on.

Before I got to this, I was wondering if anyone was going to mention PHP. I'm at the exact same stage as the OP and I'm just going with PHP (and learning MySQL simultaneously). I do want to play with Python eventually, but my first goal is to actually be able to find a job doing this stuff by the end of the year. Plus, even though every virtual human I run across has been programming RoR since 1963, everyone I know in meatspace uses PHP... and those are the people I'll be bugging for help.

Go to your local craigslist web/info design job page and run a search for PHP and count how many ads come up. Then run searches for Python and Ruby. That's enough help for me when it comes to making a decision.

Thanks for reminding me about that. I just paid a visit and now I have 36 books on Ajax/CSS/JS, 11 books on Photoshop, 53 books on PHP/SQL/LAMP, 50 miscellaneous O'Reilly books, and 44 books on Neuro-Linguistic Programming. I should be set til summer!

it's so inspiring - & that it's good too that someone lacks grammatical knowledge can still be successful & is heard widely also.

"Top Stories:

Angelina Jolie's Remote Controlled Vibrating Panties (8 comments) 25"

I don't know... looks like it might have a wider appeal. :)

Personally, I like the mix. And there's not always a solid difference between the "news" items and the AskYC, anyway. If I'd be interested in clicking on some guy's post about Ruby vs. Python, I'd be just as interested in clicking on an AskYC post on the same topic.

Irony is truly dead.

A condensed version...

If you have a family to take care of and you just lost your job to outsourcing, you just need to follow a few simple steps:

* Don't be prejudiced.

* Beat out hundreds of other programmers for a management job or start your own business.

* Be eager about... something.

* Read an economics textbook.

* Dream about traveling the world without having to work much.

* Help someone do... something. The Wealthy Programmer says greed is bad.

Of course, this is coming from one of the most intelligent people to walk the Earth, someone who never had to deal first-hand with a lack of smarts. On a similar note, I just heard that attractive women with rich, good-looking, intelligent, humorous husbands all agree that the only thing important in a man is a sense of humor. As luck would have it, we all have a bit of that and a bit of creativity. I'm inspired.

21. Don't let people walk all over you. Chase down the bastard who took your car.

It looks like someone already wrote the inspirational post generator I was working on.

Seriously, though, he says at the end that he wouldn't want to be anywhere other than where he is today, and that he had to make all the above mistakes to arrive there. Which is true imho - I feel the same way. He also says his 18 year old self wouldn't listen. That's also true - this certainly isn't the first time I've seen someone say "don't drink to excess, don't watch too much TV, stay fit, and watch your personal finances." So his conversation with 18-yo-self would be wasted. I'd like to see a list of things he would say to an 18 year old that would actually lead to some change in behavior towards healthier living and a happier life. That would be something I haven't read yet.

BA Political Science, UC San Diego. Still learning programming. Stuck in insurance atm.