Agile's biggest problem is that it is bloated. It tried (tokenly) to be this lean development methodology but it keeps getting burdened with more and more cruft. Same problem every time: some company nobody has ever heard of announces that by forcing all developers to speak only in haikus during scrums, they increased productivity by 12.86%. Now every company feels the need to adopt that. A year and several increasingly-bullshit announcements later, we all have to have scrums from 9:18-9:33am Eastern Martian time, speak in haikus, address each other only by our given pirate nicknames, and sing all four verses to "God Save the Queen" at the start of sprint planning meetings (even though none of us live in the UK).

If dorm life is anything to go by, you penny his door every night. And on weekends you rig up the Flour Wall to really fuck with him.

Hey, if you're gonna live like broke college students, may as well go whole hog.

Also known as, we've made it hard to get right. We're not talking about time in the abstract, we're talking about our implementation of it being hard to get right because we have complicated the hell out of it.

This is a large part of the problem. More often than not these issues stem from people trying to roll their own time handling code / int'l address code / i18n / etc rather than using one of the standard (and well-tested) libraries available in their language.

Time is hard to get right, addresses are hard to get right, i18n is hard to get right. Don't roll your own. There's a thousand edge cases you haven't accounted for.

It is kinda unclear at first glance if you don't look really closely. I made the same assumption at first, that the line ending represented the cost of that item.

Figured that had to be a calculation error on the TV thing. That helps the numbers quite a bit. Now you're up to about $500 month left over. That's a much more reasonable value with some added wiggle room if needed in some of the other lines.

I'm a bit surprised your mortgage is still so high. My mortgage was for $110K when I bought (selling it currently for $170K, hooray market recovery!) and even with Florida's silly insurance prices my monthly payment is 60% less than yours for only a ~25% lower mortgage. And your prop taxes are only about $300/yr higher than mine. Do you have a really high interest rate? Or are you also in area with crazy insurance costs?

He isn't, he's paying $2K. Look at the line again:
$42K (start) - insurance ($2K) = $40K (remaining)

How in the hell are you spending $433 a month on TV/Internet/Phone? Is that even possible? I could get the best plan for each in my town and not even be half that.

And 19.2K for your mortgage? My 1500 sq ft house in a mid-size city of 1 million is only 9K including prop tax and insurance (and that's in Florida where insurance is absurd). You have no money left over because you chose to settle in an overpriced city. In most of the country 70K is a very comfortable number for two people.

His numbers are annual, not monthly. 3K annually for car loan, 18K annually for mortgage, etc.

He take the final number (2.2K) and divides it by 12 to get the effective monthly leftover.

You aren't paying regular income tax. You are paying short-term capital gains tax which mirrors the standard income tax rates. They are not technically the same tax, however. And the period where you go from short-term to long-term is one year, not two.

So if I buy an investment property for $80K, put $20K and months of sweat into renovating, then sell it for $140K, I didn't "earn" that profit that is subject to capital gains tax?

Capital gains covers a hell of a lot more than sticking money in an index fund and leaving it there for 40 years.

Agreed. For small / inexperienced teams, we've always recommended VisualSVN. GUI to manage most of the project admin tasks, easy integration with AD for user/group auth, and a fairly simple workflow.

Git is has some really nice features, but I wouldn't push it onto a team with no VCS experience.

There's a gas station 1/4 mile from my home that I buy from 2-3x a month using the same credit card. Once or twice a year one of those purchases would get flagged by Citi and locked my card, even though there was a clear pattern of use.

On top of that, I had an absolutely infuriating experience using a Citi card on a decent-sized Newegg purchase (~$600). I've made about a dozen purchases from there over the past couple years. They declined the charge as potential fraud and sent me a fraud alert. I confirmed it was a legit purchase and re-ran the order about 15 minutes later. Citi declined it again as potential fraud and sent me a second fraud alert.

At that point I called them up and closed every account I had. Will never use Citi again.

I've had/have credit cards with pretty much every major issuer. Chase, Citi, Barclays, BoA, Amex. Chase has by far been the best about not screwing up fraud detection. Citi is the worst. The rest are decent.

How many ad-containing sites give you the OPTION to pay for the content? That's the real question. I'm perfectly happy to toss a few bucks to the site if I get value from their content, but damn few even give me the option. It is either fund them through dodgy third-party ads or don't support them at all. And when those are my choices, sorry, no funding.

Essentially the same as how I used to work. My problem is that having that much stuff open to begin with ends up being counterproductive. Context switching is what I try to avoid. I don't want to manage many different applications simultaneously, I want to only have the applications I'm using right now open. If I have so much stuff open that I can't fit it on two monitors, that's a problem to me.

Nowadays: IDE on left screen, browser on right. Skype for talking to colleagues minimized in the tray. Mail client usually closed (I only check mail periodically during the day, usually when I take quick work breaks). Music player minimized to tray, but I just let it run on shuffle anyway so I seldom need to touch it. If I need two browsers open (one for docs, one for testing), I just split them on the screen.