swalberg

"watch the kid" -- I think you spelled "be a parent" wrong.

I don't know where you are in your career, or what your expectation is of a career, but there are lots of companies out there where you can do interesting things, be well paid, and have time to balance your work and family life. You just need to look for it just like you were looking for a higher salary, more responsibility, or even use of a particular technology.

Asking about it at an interview may get you an answer, or rather, anything but an emphatic "yes" with some examples may be a strong negative sign. But I think the key thing is to decide what you want out of both a career and a family, and to find the job that puts you on that path.

Since you're planning far ahead for the exam, have a look at writing both Technician and General in the same session. I took (just) my Tech a few months ago and several people at the session did both. After studying for General I'm kicking myself for not doing it myself. There's a lot of overlap and a lot of it is pretty intuitive if you have a science background.

Linus also wrote a successful Scuba dive logging and planning tool called Subsurface (https://subsurface-divelog.org/) that has a cross platform desktop edition and mobile editions. Like git, he started it as a way to scratch his own itch, and now it's mostly supported by the community.

It has support for most dive computers and does full technical dive planning with mixed gasses.

Just to follow up on my own post, on slide 29 of http://peo.on.ca/index.php/ci_id/23480/la_id/1.htm there's mention that some of those types of engineers are covered by other provincial/federal regulations and are exempt as long as they're doing the type of work they're licensed to do.

In neighbouring Manitoba there's a carve out for locomotive engineers, power engineers, and certain types of electrical work, as long as they're certified by their respective bodies and not pretending to be a different kind of engineer. Didn't see anything in the Ontario act but I wouldn't be surprised if it were there somewhere.

edit: https://web2.gov.mb.ca/laws/statutes/ccsm/e120e.php#66 section J

No, sorry. Mostly it came down to "find out where your customers are". I had a payroll service for home help, so I reached out to the people who place the people and pitched the service as a way to help their customers. I had a site to check for security problems in popular blog frameworks so I made it so you could direct link to a site's results and then helped people out on forums, providing a link to the analysis. Stuff like that.

Advertising on FB/AdWords/etc can help, but there's no substitute for finding your customers yourself.

Focus less on your own problems and pay attention to the problems that other people have. Especially problems where they've come up with really hacky workarounds -- think Excel spreadsheets, weird approval/email chains, manual import/exporting from one system to another, etc. All good signs that there's something to be improved, and that it's enough of a problem to put effort into.

Couple of other thoughts -- your problems are likely not to be technical. They're going to be obtaining domain knowledge, marketing, and supporting your product.

I'll second the recommendation on "Start Small, Stay Small". Also Eric Reis' "Lean Startup" and 37 Signals "Getting Real". The latter two were really helpful in getting my most successful project out the door and making money.

Did you frame it in terms of the problems you solved rather than the game part? While the interviewer may have a bias against games, it could be spun as "I learned a complicated technology to build this game" or "in order to build this game I had to keep refreshes under XXms which required an innovative solution to state handling". Or perhaps "yes it is a game, but I use it to keep my skills sharp. I use the game to push my boundaries and practice good coding skills, and bring those improvements to my day job"

Leave your programming at work. Find a cause you believe in or a political candidate you think will do good, and volunteer for that. Knock on doors. Call people. Do research. Organize events and people. Donate money. Change other people's minds.

A lot of these social good things need people to get involved, not software to be written.

I started off in Canada as a Cub leader. I was very hesitant because I didn't see myself as "good" with kids that were not my own. Took me about a year but I grew into it, eventually being the Akela of the pack. Since then I moved to the troop level, and after moving to the US, I'm an ASM with a BSA troop.

It's very rewarding to help young people discover the outdoors and help them on their path to being young, responsible, adults.

Collectd with the statsd plugin is a really lightweight way of collecting the data. Collectd has several outputs, from rrds to grafana.

My understanding of the J1 is that it is a cultural exchange visa and that the intent is that it's very short term work and specifically not as an alternative to the H1B.

Another caveat is that the position could be designated as subject to the 2 year residency rule, and therefore your employee would not be allowed to work in the US for 2 years after their J1 expires.

Another thing to consider is if you're ever going to sell it.

In my case I had a small project that I just claimed on my personal tax returns. I sold it to another Canadian company, and if it was done as a share sale it qualified under the capital gains exemption.

It was a fairly costly matter to retroactively separate the project and IP into its own company. The bulk of my lawyer and accountant fees were on this.

My office did this on a vastly smaller scale. The people that do care about their keyboard either store it in their locker, or in the case of one of my coworkers, carry it with them (it's the smallest CODE keyboard so it packs up easily).

That clearly doesn't work for the monitor.

Not every pork belly is the same, and the fattier ones are sold as a cheaper brand. If you've ever bought the really cheap bacon, it shrivels up to nothing as it cooks. So the window does let you know what you're getting and let you make a price/value decision about how much fat you're willing to pay for.

I suspect that brand affinity may have something to do with people not using that window regularly. Once you find a bacon you like it's going to be relatively consistent. But without the window you can't really compare two brands.

I don't think the credit score itself is the problem, it's that it's the only thing banks use. There is no discretion for cases where the mode doesn't have enough information.

As one example that has affected me, I moved to the US a year ago. Go to buy a used car last month with bank statements showing a good salary and enough cash to buy the vehicle outright, a check for 1/3 of the car price, and phone numbers of my employer and landlord. All the banks the finance department contacted automatically denied me without looking at the stuff I brought.

I went to my local bank branch thinking a human might help. I got automatically denied, the manager tried to escalate given the information I provided, but I was still denied.

In the end my loan was through the car manufacturer at a fairly high rate.

I realize I am fortunate in that I can afford to take a crappy loan solely to build a credit history and play this silly game. But the way the model is used treats people who are new to obtaining US credit and people who have used credit terribly virtually identically.

The fraud I'm worried about isn't from a bona-fida customer, it's from a fraudulent customer.

BadGuy uses your service to sign up for BadGuyDojo, and attaches a stolen bank account. 10 "customers" sign up with stolen credit cards, process payment, and the money is gone along with them. A month or two later the credit card companies come looking to you for the money.

A company doesn't really "sponsor" a TN visa, they just have to be willing to write a job offer letter that satisfies the border officer. This means it specifies the job is temporary (try to get it to say 3 years, as that's the longest they'll give you the visa for), it has a salary, and it has a listing of job duties that aligns with the NAFTA job class you're going for.

With the TN visa, you just need the proper documentation and they issue it at the border. The company doesn't need lawyers or filings; it's all on you.

I'm sure a big company like Amazon has experience here. If you're job hunting and are talking to smaller companies, you might have to educate them about how the TN works because many don't know it exists and assume they'll have to pay a lot of money to hire a Canadian.

If you've never come in on a TN visa before it's worth the ~$400 in lawyer fees to get them to review the TN letter and coach you on the procedure.

I've written 3 technical books. I highly recommend talking to an agent. I used studiob.com. Not only will they negotiate money on your behalf, but they'll get crappy clauses taken out. Stuff you've never heard of like "cross accounting clauses". My last contract had a right of first refusal for my next book in their opening offer. The acquisitions editor even laughed when we asked about it because she didn't know it was there.

The agent will take 15% and believe me it's worth it.

Whatever deal you cut, pretend like it's not going to earn out its advance. Because it probably won't. As everyone says, you're not doing it for the money. You're doing it because you love the topic, love to write, and to be seen as an expert in the field. Writing the books themselves earned me very little money. Follow on work, like articles, and using it in salary negotiations, more than paid for itself.

I'd suggest you figure out the book you want to write then shop it around the publishers (again, agent helps). And be picky about the publisher, talk to other authors that used them. They're not all the same. When one publisher hires editors and pays their technical editors and another expects a lot of self-editing and offers a free book to the tech reviewers, the outcomes will be vastly different.

sprintf and friends will pad strings for you, no?

printf("%20s\n", "Hello");

Wireshark also comes with "tshark" which is a CLI tool that gives you access to display filters and some of the GUI features. In particular, it's great for scripting if you're trying to pull some stats while troubleshooting.

Over the past few months:

* Printing tax forms (even if you do them electronically it is much easier to have a file folder of all your info should you get a query from the government) * Printing homework or practice questions for my kids * Printing registration forms for the many places that aren't computerized * Faxed identification for various purposes * Faxed contracts for real estate * Scanned documents and identification for people that accept them over email * Scanned expenses

And that's not including my wife's use of it, who is a student and will regularly print off stuff to mark up by hand.

I've written/cowritten 3 books and a whole lot of articles over the past ~15 years on a freelance basis. Most of the good work came through an agency, StudioB, though I had pitched magazines and other places from time to time on my own.

My experience is that a lot of the good sources of ad-hoc work have dried up. That's not to say there is nothing now, but it's not the shooting-fish-in-a-barrel it was a few years ago. The demand has gone up and down over the years so I'm sure it'll be back.

As you've seen it's a lot of fun. I always treated it as a way to get other people to pay for me to learn the stuff I would normally have done in my spare time anyway. The money was good for the time invested, but I make far more just working a day job.

If I wanted to make an income from it, I'd be finding a company or two to attach myself to rather than piecework.

I've found that the industry is very focused on your portfolio, so continue to build upon that.

Also, be very nice to the editors you work with. They provide a lot of feedback to the people making the decisions, and no one likes a prima donna.

If I'm reading this right, the registrar suspended the domain because the contact details weren't validated by the customer. It wasn't ICANN.

It seems to be up to the registrar -- other registrars I use send an email that requires no action if the details are correct. But one I used previously suspended a domain of ours because the guy that registered it ignored the email.

robots.txt only tells spiders not to request a certain path. The search engine can still infer the content of the page from the link or surrounding text, and show it. Google usually annotates these in the SERPs with something like "Google is not displaying the contents of the page because it's been blocked with robots.txt"

http://canada.usembassy.gov/visas/doing-business-in-america/... shows most categories require a degree.

Hm, I thought it was going to be talking about leaking information from your app, not browser cache.

Putting the database row ID in urls, which is the Rails default, basically lets a competitor plot your growth with a simple script.

I need an SSN so I can pay into social security and eventually make use of those benefits. Also pretty sure I couldn't have applied for it in advance because I didn't have any non-tax treaty income to report, which is what prevented me from getting one when I tried a few years ago.

I applied for a SSN when I got here but it took 4 weeks to process. I now have an SSN card with a statement on it saying that I'm only allowed to work with DHS authorization.

Part of the hassle is because I signed up for services with no SSN but web sites all assume you have an SSN. The other problem is that credit histories don't cross the border. Even with an SSN, I've got no public record or credit history.

What I find funny (or sad) is that when I call to update my records with my SSN (largely so I can build a credit history) people refuse to take the number over the phone, and will not take an email scan. They only want snail mail or fax.

I'm Canadian and just moved to the US. While utilities were pretty good about me not having a SSN (including Verizon), it's all the stuff that comes after that's causing me problems. So many web sites either rely on having an SSN on file, or by contracting to a 3rd party to do identity checks that fail when you don't have a US credit history.

I'm currently in Limbo with my healthcare provider because they won't let me pay my bills online (or set up appointments, see results, or email my doctor) until I validate my identity, I've had to do my auto registration through snail mail because the state's website won't recognize my SSN, and have also had to call other places to get set up on their websites because of having no SSN when I started.

You mentioned T-Mobile, who were pretty good in getting me set up without a credit check, but won't auto debit my credit card when I have a bill. I have to go online each month and pay, with that same credit card. And getting to that point took a couple of phone calls.

This is on top of a 46% marginal income tax rate and 12% sales tax.

I don't know what the BC plan is like, but in Manitoba if I didn't have any coverage through my employer I'd be paying for almost everything except visiting a doctor or ER. And you're still stuck in a line to see specialists. It's not unheard of to schedule an appointment with a specialist a year out.