stoney

They've just introduced a similar scheme in the UK, with the price guaranteed for 25 years. It looks like around a 10 year payback period on the installation so a very attractive proposition if you've got the cash available and plan to stay in your current home for at least the next decade.

Widescreen movies on a 4:3 aspect TV always use black edges, but maybe that's just tradition or to do with contrast or something like that.

EDIT: Just noticed that HN has a grey content area with white around the edges, which I like, so maybe my preference is more to do with having different colour sides than dark sides - i.e. some kind of boundary to the content area.

Which is more likely to suffer an outage? Which is more likely to suffer a long outage? Which is more likely to suffer a fatal outage?

If you don't know where to start then just start anywhere - come up with one or two concrete objectives to work towards. The most important thing is to start. Pick something that looks achievable over 2-3 months and go for it. By the time you have achieved those objectives you will have built up some momentum and also learnt a bit more, so you'll be in a slightly better place to pick your next objectives. As you get better at this you can start picking bigger targets and doing it over longer time frames.

If you're really stuck then try picking an open source project at random and commiting yourself to contributing something to that project in the next two months. That could be programming, it could be documentation, it could be something else. If you're not physically active, then pick some kind of physical challenge too. Completing a 5 kilometre/3 mile run/walk is achievable for most people in that time frame.

The more you do, the more you'll know what to do (and the more you'll realise how much is still undone).

And on a more specific level - if you want to get into a top grad school you will most like have to do well academically. Depending on your course, exams are likely to be a major factor in your grades, so learn how to be good at exams - it is a skill and if you are staying in academia for a while it is one worth learning. What follows is old advice, but not many people seem to follow it. If you're studying a technical subject, then make sure your maths is up to speed. If you are bad at maths it will make any kind of numerical/equation type of exam much harder (and also many things in the real world). During the exam, do three passes through the paper - on the first pass just read it, look for easy questions. On the second just answer stuff that you know reasonably well, don't waste time on difficult stuff. On the third pass go back to the questions you couldn't do and do as much as you can. Even if you can't answer the question write down stuff that you think is relevant, you might pick up a mark or two here and there (but don't go overboard writing down irrelevant stuff, your marker won't thank you for that). And practice, practice, practice. Get hold of old exam papers and do them (timed). Get hold of the answers to the old exams if you can and study them. Often the questions are set by the same person each year and often they aren't very imaginative at coming up with new variations.

You could try looking into what this guy promotes: www.marksdailyapple.com - basically trying to eat and exercise in a way vaguely similar to our caveman ancestors (or at least his interpretation of our caveman ancestors).

And if you can go somewhere sunny for a few weeks that can't hurt either.

In fact this could be the start of his marketing campaign for next intake of students...

Getting from being obese to an average weight is much harder than maintaining an average weight. Once you get yourself into an obese condition you've got a difficult road back out.

Though I agree with your basic argument - if you eat less than you burn you will lose weight. The tricky part is that your body can vary what it burns to some degree (your metabolism can speed up and slow down), so it's not entirely obvious how much you are burning.

If a pedestrian is keeping as close to the side of the road as reasonably possible and is reasonably visible (e.g. not wearing all black on a pitch black section of road), then it doesn't seem unreasonable to expect a driver to avoid crashing into them - even on a highway. Especially if it's a reasonably straight road which most highways are.

Yes, low fat!=low calorie

(though in the case of milk, low fat milk does have a lot fewer calories).

In Brisbane much of the east of the city is taken up by port and airport, so not such a desirable area.

Maybe you could write a couple of articles about your system, how you might use it, why it's better than other systems and who it will work well for (or maybe an ebook would work). Then use the description of your overall time management system/apporach to lead people into your tool.

My enjoyment of games seemed to reach a peak. I used to be impatient for the next Grand Theft Auto, but after San Andreas I didn't enjoy the newer ones so much (still good, but not as good). The Total War series peaked with Medieval Total War. SimCity peaked around version 3. Elderscrolls 3 was better than 4.

Thinking of them makes me want to go and play...

Apple could grant everyone the right to redistribute any GPL'ed apps, but it wouldn't make any practical difference because who could I distribute the app to?

"Trust me, I'm a doctor!"

And dealing with unhelpful customer service:

"We're sorry Mr Smith but we can't do that..."

"Actually that's DOCTOR Smith"

It won't help you get what you want, but the amusement factor will make you feel better.

A friend of mine has Dr on all of his credit cards. He claims to have received free upgrades on rental cars from time to time as a result. Not sure if I believe that.

For me the biggest value from my PhD came from the writing up. It is really, really, really hard to get from having "done all of the work" to writing a coherent, well defended thesis on it. You will get very good at spotting holes in arguments (particularly yours, but also other peoples). You will get a very real understanding of how much work is involved in getting from 95% to 100% finished. It's not directly valued in industry but I know that I benefit personally from my writing up experience.

And you get to call yourself doctor. That's nice.

Also make sure you think about the long term. Sure, you're not trying to hire them away from the company now, but what if your side project is unexpectedly successful?

Despite the hype, I'm not sure how many people are really sold on them. In practice I use native apps 99% of the time. When I'm number crunching Excel, Matlab, Python are all native. When I'm programming (even developing webapps!) Emacs, Mercurial, etc are all native apps.

Web apps still have a long, long way to go before I will be ready to do my day to day work in them.

I would guess that a good number of players who sell their old games use the money to buy new games. This move will definitely push the price of EA's used games down, I would guess by close to $10 for games with significant online content. Which means that EA's primary customers (the people buying the new games) now have $10 less to invest in their new game for every old game that they sell. I can't see people increasing their spend on new games to compensate for this, so the net result could be that EA get more money from used sales, which is more or less balanced out by getting less money from new sales.

Apparently chemists encounter a similar thing when studying chemical bonds - every new academic year you are told that what you learned the previous year was such a gross simplification that it's basically wrong.

Probably all small costs on their own, but they add up.

Also the chance to make some contacts in the country before I arrived would have been good - making friends in a new city is hard.

I would have paid for that kind of service.