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One thing I've noticed is the difference in the url structure of your amazon affiliate links compared to the ones that I have on a site that I've pretty much abandoned http://www.albumvsalbum.com

When I click one of your links and navigate to amazon, I get a url that looks like this:

www.amazon.com/Rio-Grande-Games-U00090-Power/dp/B0007YDBLE%3FSubscriptionId%3DAKIAINAGOCRZFLVCUJUA%26tag%3Dfindanewgame-20%26linkCode%3Dxm2%26camp%3D2025%26creative%3D165953%26creativeASIN%3DB0007YDBLE

This is in contrast to links from my site that look like:

www.amazon.com/Night-Of-The-Hunter/dp/B002XHWB3W?&camp=212361&creative=385533&linkCode=wag&tag=albumvsalbum-20

Note that your link at least visually is not formulating the ?, &, and = like mine is. Instead those characters are being url encoded. Now I don't know if this is causing difficulty on Amazons end or not but it's something I noticed.

EDIT: if this is the issue, please let me know.

I love lifting weights. Particularly the lack of thought and physicality that is required. It's a tremendous break from my norm.

Sounds to me like you've identified a potential opportunity! I recently went through a job search myself and while I didn't experience your exact pain points I definitely came away from the process thinking that there was room for improvement. I had an idea for a service that I wish I had during the process, I started hacking on it a bit but have yet to figure out a way to make it scale. I'm interested in chatting with you more about how the job search sucking might be remedied. Send me an email if you're interested (see profile).

The best thing I've come across django related is the "Django from the Ground Up" tutorials: http://showmedo.com/videotutorials/series?name=PPN7NA155

It might be useful to offer a text based chat, that could then progress into a video chat. My thought here is that the text based chat might lower the barrier for some users that are nervous of diving into video.

Didn't you also comment recently about doing an analysis that led to the reorganization of stocked products such that the most frequently lifted products were more accessible? That must have saved some indirect dollars (if not direct), through increased worker efficiency.

Seems like you have a real eye for this type of thing!

Though I didn't have control over all the variables, I started my math on when to start having kids by first deciding the age that I wanted to be when the kids were likely to leave home. A good number sounded like 50 to me. We wanted 2 to 3 kids (2 years apart), so when my wife and I were 28 we decided to start the baby train rather than wait any longer (i.e. a better financial situation). My son is almost 2 and I have another due in Feb., so that should put me at almost 50.

I do miss having some of the free time that I used to be overflowing with, but I wouldn't change a thing (well maybe family close by to babysit the kids every Sunday --> never discount the value of having family near by ... assuming of course you get along well).

Here is a link to the HN feed in the terminal that I was remembering:

http://www.catonmat.net/blog/follow-hacker-news-from-the-con...

I absolutely surf HN and other sites throughout the day. My brain needs a distraction every once in a while. As long as your work gets done, I don't see a problem with this. Intellectual pursuits and positions are not monotonous assembly lines, it is simply not possible to focus 100% of your attention 100% of the time. You need breaks.

While I don't see a problem with this, your boss quite clearly does. Not only that, he's handling his displeasure with you in a demeaning way. And as you say, it all seems to stem from the fact that he doesn't understand your work or what goes into you doing your work.

"I am really ashamed with how I am handling his rants and outbursts."

Have you tried sitting down with him (in private) and expressing your concerns about his expectations and the unhealthy working environment that he's creating for you?

I think that expressing your concerns in a very matter of fact manner is completely reasonable. I would start by focusing the discussion on the value that you bring to the team. Try to get your boss in the frame of mind that you are valuable, you do your work well and on-time. Then shift the conversation to the concerns you have. Use a lot of "I feel .." type sentences. Focus not on what he's doing wrong, but rather on the things that would help you to work better and feel happier. Try to frame it in a positive path. Also ask him what his concerns are. Don't be defensive (or rather try desperately hard not to be). Hear what he's saying to you and then try to say things along the lines of, "I hear what you're saying. I even understand how it might look like that. I can assure you that I'm a team player and I'm always looking to deliver the best that I can. From my perspective, sometimes I need to let the challenge at hand ruminate. That might mean that I need to look for a solution on the internet, or even take 5 mins and think about something else. Just to let it all process. At the end of the day I want to let you know that I enjoy the work here, and I think that I deliver real value to the company."

Keep in mind that your boss (who seems to be woefully inexperienced or at least very poor at managing technical staff) might not appreciate it. But at the very least you come out knowing that you handled the situation in a professional manner (great story for the next interview).

Another option is to get a feed of HN to your terminal (I saw something like this once). It'll blend into your work flow more. Even RSS feeds to your email.

It would be very interesting if sanswork and KoZeN could throw up a quick blog, where each blog post contains: (1) the original CV; (2) the CVs formatted as each of them would recommend; (3) a few points from each highlighting why the changes were suggested. I'm sure a handful of representative CVs could be chosen and the proper permissions obtained. Might be too much work or simply not of interest. I'd like to see this though. Let me know if I can help in some way.

http://www.antiqueway.com - antique store listings with a dose of mapping.

The ultimate goal is to have pricing for improved listings (description, couple pics, link to website) and tiered pricing for the listing of antiques that the antique store has for sale. Example of a site doing the former is www.antiquesincanada.com and the latter www.sellingantiques.co.uk/

I think the main challenges here are SEO and pounding the pavement. If you have any thoughts or ideas for improvement, fire away!

I think this is the key: "They feel like they've done everything that was expected of them."

I understand this feeling but it is misguided. The reason is that their understanding of what's actually expected is not correct, because the expectation they follow has not been provided by the people who will ultimately hire them. The understanding of expectations is often provided by councillors or teachers/professors at high schools and universities (or parents). These people in general are horribly out of touch with the true expectations of an employer or requirements of entry level positions in the particular industry of interest. As a result students misguidedly follow these expectations and are suddenly struck with reality when they are done.

The reality is that universities do not train students for the work place. They are money making operations whose goal it is to provide an education as a service (note: that an education from a university does not equate to workplace readiness). This means that if they think that they can attract students with a new buzzwordy program, they'll create that program and tell the students about all of the great opportunities that exist in industry (e.g. nanoscience or nanotechnology), when in fact no such opportunities exist. Universities are completely out of touch with the needs and desires of industry (one counter would be some eng. disciplines) or at the least their primary focus is not on those students who exit the program but rather almost entirely those students entering the program (more fuel for the machine). The same goes for more traditional programs (e.g. physics or CS), I've spoken to many professors over the years about job opportunities and they always talk about academia (which they know well) and the nebulous industry.

My advice to students is to clarify what it actually takes to enter an industry early in the academic process. Perform market research and actually talk to people about their experiences (look at early resumes and CVs if you can). At the same time think about building up your CV with projects/initiatives/etc. that strengthen your softer skills (communication, leadership, project management, etc.). I didn't do the former very well but I did do the latter and it has helped me immensely (you must be able to distinguish yourself from the pack). Also work at building your network, this is key. Then once you get that job, look at the next rung up and "rinse, lather and repeat" the above process.

Even if you want to go the startup route I would still recommend the above unsolicited advice.

It definitely seems that there must be an opportunity here to compete against STATS and others. But if (like you) you wanted to compete where do you legally get the stats in the first place or in an ongoing manner. What is the original source of the data? Do you have to pay for game tapes, watch them and compile the stats yourself?

I don't know. I agree that the game scores, roster data, etc. are facts but at the same time work was performed at some point to compile that data so I assume there must be some legality around not simply copying it and reusing it. Of course I don't know for sure it's just a gut feeling. Wish I could find a definitive answer without having to pay legal consultation fees I can't afford.

Thought it was sweet there's a wikipedia page about the error message.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC_LOAD_LETTER

I'm very intrigued. This is definitely one of the skills I'd like to improve upon. But I'd like to play with a demo episode first before forking over the preorder cash.

I just started trying out Open Site Explorer (http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/) yesterday. So I'm interested to see how your tool compares. A feature I like for the aforementioned tool is the "Linking Root Domains". With regards to your tool I definitely like the sounds of email updates both for my own sites as well as competitors. But so as to not be inundated by emails, it might be nice to choose the option to only be updated when a new "Linking Root Domain" has been found.

This concept of "anonymous matching/crush matching" was the basis of eCRUSH. The founder did an interview on Mixergy http://mixergy.com/ecrush-ranker-clark-benson-interview/

Here are some additional links: http://www.startup-review.com/blog/ecrush-case-study-why-tim... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECRUSH

Maybe there are some lessons you can glean from the eCRUSH story that will help you out.

Absolutely not. As you gain domain knowledge you should feel exactly this way. I'd suggest that you be concerned if you didn't feel this way. When I finished highschool I thought I was pretty damn smart and had a lot of things figured out (clearly not the case). From an academic point of view as I worked towards my Ph.D. I was constantly reminded of how very little I did know. While I did learn new things day by day, my appreciation for how much I didn't know grew exponentially. In fact I think what I'm left with after the whole exercise is not a confidence in my knowledge but rather a confidence in my ability to learn, problem solve and ask questions.

Clickable links: http://www.loopt.com/ https://indinero.com/ http://www.nozbe.com/ http://www.peerindex.net/

I bought biosecurity.co and traceability.co.

Any updates on the number of visitors?

I've tried CamStudio for recording webinars but would like to hear your suggestion for Windows, thanks!

Little of what is on that site has to do with hating sports as pure games involving physical activity. Rather it seems the common theme (from my albeit brief inspection of the articles and forum) is the hate for the jock culture. And it seems the jock culture that many of these people have experienced is one of bullying. So instead of sportssuck.com, this site should really be renamed bullyingsucks.com.

> If you were 20 years old today, what would you be doing?

* exercise (gym, sports, whatever I enjoyed but got me moving)

* go into engineering, comp. sci., or statistics instead of physics --> main thing is choosing a discipline with solid job prospects in a variety of locales while also aiding me in my pursuit of bootstrapped projects

* go to hacker meetups, democamps, diy clubs

* work on more personal projects

* find like-minded people that have personal projects (see going to hacker meetups, democamps, diy clubs)

* have fun with friends

As an aside: my experience is that a good deal of students in B* programs feign being smarter than they actually are. It's usually not until towards the end of a B* program that students realize how little they actually know. If you're looking for partners in the second group look for people who are clever and genuinely curious (about life, people and how things work). (where * is A, Comp., Sc., Eng., etc)

I get it. Thanks for responding!

I noticed that proficiency in Java is required. Is there a technical reason or unique feature that makes Java the best choice for 80legs, as opposed to some other language?

Unfortunately I don't have a solid recommendation for you. But I feel similarly and would be interested to hear what you come up with. This past January I completed a Ph.D. in physics in an interfacial science/polymer physics/biophysics group. During my time I found that one of the aspects that I really enjoyed was performing data analysis. A large part of my work involved writing custom scripts in Matlab to model experiments or to analyze experimental data. As I'm not particularly interested in continuing on in academia, I'm really beginning to consider the idea that rebranding or retraining myself in areas of data mining and analysis may be the way to go. I'm not sure how best to accomplish this either. I let the thought of doing a quick Masters enter my mind but that's not ideal for me. I think I can quickly come up to speed on theoretical considerations I might be lacking so another option may be to just convince a company to give me a shot.

I guess in asking my original question, I'm curious about peoples thoughts on the morality and ethics of this type of behaviour. In particular I'm curious if anyone is strongly against this for some reason I haven't thought of?

EDIT: also if people do this alot and there is a strong morality issue or legal issue it may mean that there's a need for this type of service (tipjoy ver. 2 perhaps)

The following link has some good disscussion that is relevant to your scenario: http://www.marketingprofs.com/ea/qst_question.asp?qstID=2003...

Also I remember seeing a variety of "homemade" fare being pitched on Dragon's Den (Canadian version) in the past. You might consider trying to track down videos of these pitches as there may be relevant info regarding the marketing steps the entrepreneur has taken and what the Dragons suggest. For example there was an episode about "Ebesse Zozo Hot Sauce": http://www.cbc.ca/dragonsden/pitches/ebessezozo.html

I wasn't able in the short amount of time that I looked to track down a copy of that episode.

Interestingly (given comments below about a video) there's a video of a kid drinking Ebesse Zozo Hot Sauce .. not very entertaining mind you and only 435 views: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eg8wcn7xHA4

There's also info here about Denzel's Hotsauce: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Denzels-Hotsauce/37098955726

Reading through the wall posts should act as a great source of ideas for the various methods this person is using to market their hotsauce.