scottlilly

No. US -> Paraguay.

I'm still surprised how much happier I am in Paraguay, even though I'm a programmer who loves efficient systems, rules, and well-defined processes - and none of those describe my new home country.

I have a similar feeling regarding PvP games. Not so much for any simulated violence, but rather for reinforcing the zero-sum philosophy of, "For me to win, another human being has to lose." However, I don't feel the same about many non-RPG, zero-sum games, like chess or poker.

Maybe because it's easier to be detached from cards and plastic pieces, than from a character in an RPG - who has a name, 'friends', a pet, a history of achievements, etc.

You can call me a "care bear", but I personally don't feel that reinforcing such a limited world-view is how I want to use my time and energy. And it's not something I describe as fun.

It sounds like we need to start a club.

I moved to Paraguay a couple years ago and have been going through some of the same types of stresses and emotions. I spend my mornings working alone, in my apartment, on a personal project that will (hopefully) earn me some income. The afternoons, I do a bit of contract programming for a local company, but am the only person on the project, so I don't interact much with the other programmers. When I come home, it's back to my personal project.

I keep telling myself, once I earn enough semi-automated income to pays my bills, I'll get out more. But it often feels like my life is "on hold".

I also picked up IntelliJ this time around. Even though I mostly do .Net development, it's too good an offer to pass up. This gives me an excuse to translate some of my libraries to Java.

My doctor did something similar for me.

I have constant pain due to a small lesion in my CNS. The doctor tried some anti-depressants and even a couple of very old anti-psychotics. The idea was that, even though I would still mentally register the pain, it would become more like background noise.

It worked, to a certain degree. I'd still love to find an ultimate solution, and I still need to limit myself for some activities (long walks). But I'm able to get through a regular day without pain medication - which I've so far refused to take.

I'd be concerned about running an online casino with a .com domain. The US government has a track record of seizing domains.

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/feds-seize-foreign-...

My main goal for this month is to start applying lean manufacturing principles to my life. I'll be recording all my activities (on paper, since I'm probably the last programmer without an iPhone or Android device), the results of my efforts, and building value stream maps for the important processes.

This will be for all aspects of my life - work, social, health, etc.

They don't see the similarity because they are, in fact, different.

If my house catches on fire, and someone doesn't put it out, there is a reasonable chance it will spread to other houses. So it's a societal issue - at least at the local scale. As a societal issue, it makes sense for each member to be forced to pay for it.

If I break my leg, there is no increased chance that my neighbor will break his leg. So it's a personal issue. My neighbor receives no benefit from my leg being repaired, and is not harmed if isn't repaired. So why should he be forced to pay for it?

If you want to say that public health care should exist to provide vaccinations, in order to prevent the spread of disease to others in society, that would be a reasonable argument.

I once wrote a program that stored complex rules in a database (what was required for different types of legal documents, in thousands of different jurisdictions across the country). The table names I used made the relations obvious, but they were long.

A few years after I left that job, I briefly ended up back at that company on a contract assignment - for a different project, under a new development manager. At one point, I had to pull some data from the database, and had no problem finding the information I needed, or how to connect it together.

The dev manager joked about the long table names (not knowing I was the source of them). But when I asked him if any of his current developers had trouble finding the information they needed, or understanding the relations, he said, "No, they just get tired of typing them."

That's just one anecdote, but I'm going to stick with long, descriptive names.

SEEKING WORK - Remote (unless you happen to be located in Paraguay)

It may not be what the cool kids are working on, but if you need a reliable .Net back-end system that can handle large amounts of data, then we should talk.

Most of my work has been C# with MS SQL. My previous employers and clients have been large corporations in oil exploration, real estate, insurance, and pharmaceuticals.

I've been an agile coach and have used most agile practices - although I'm currently experimenting with lean-based ideas to go beyond 'Agile'.

To see my full resume and a couple desktop apps I'm working on, visit http://programsbyscottlilly.com/

US citizen, with US corporation (in case that helps for billing)

Contact: scott [at] programsbyscottlilly.com

Inspired by this post, I went to the website of a company I worked for back in 1999-2000. The login screen for the first "real" web app I ever wrote looks exactly like I left it.

The company was in a bind with some contractors who were developing a web app for them, and I had recently written my own personal HTML site. So, I bought "Teach Yourself ASP in 24 Hours", read it over the weekend, and put together a little prototype, to see if I could actually connect to the database and report the information they wanted. I ended up writing that website for them over the next two weeks. Once I deployed it (no IIS web admins at the company), I went back to my regular Clipper work.

I wouldn't be surprised if it hasn't been touched in years.

Part of me wants to be happy that it's lasted so long. But I'm also a bit disappointed that all the other 'cool' stuff I've worked on since then probably hasn't had one-tenth the use of that site.