rmobin

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This plan worked out fantastically well for me. I started eating this way around April of this year, saw results after a very short time, then started weight training 2-3 times a week. I'm down to about 145 lbs from 175, and as long as I stick to the good foods (meat, veggies, some fruit) I feel great. Being healthy has been a great help for hacking because of better focus, energy levels, and overall mood.

Gred Linden likes Introduction to Information Retrieval: http://www-csli.stanford.edu/~hinrich/information-retrieval-... (free online).

He's right about the importance of education and the poor state of it in the US, but I'm not convinced that the private sector can't handle it. Inside American Education (http://www.amazon.com/Inside-American-Education-Thomas-Sowel...) is a really interesting book on what our current system is like (although a bit dated, it's from 1992).

I picked up Beginning J2ME (http://www.amazon.com/Beginning-J2ME-Novice-Professional-Thi...) earlier this year when working on a mobile application for BB and it was pretty handy. You should know that RIM provides additional apis on top of J2ME that let you create more native-feeling BB applications (and it's worth learning imo) - for this I used tutorials online and RIM's api documentation.

The developer of BBSmart, Neil Sainsbury, used to have a really helpful blog at http://devberry.com, but I believe he took it down after his frustrations with RIM (it's like "shouting at a brick wall").

I definitely agree with the point that some drudgery (with benefits that aren't immediately obvious) is necessary in schools, but the state of public education in the US is pretty bad, and in many cases this cartoon is spot on.

From http://www.paulgraham.com/notnot.html :

"We have some evidence to support this. Several of the most successful startups we've funded told us later that they only decided to apply at the last moment. Some decided only hours before the deadline."