Indeed, and thank you. It's going to be a highly biographical novel at that. The story writes itself! Running unknown contraband (people? drugs? he truly didn't know, and that was how he got paid) across the border, getting tied up with the organized crime scene south of the border, drunken bar brawls, sex trafficking, falling as a patsy, time in a Mexican prison, and so much more. I have to imagine and dramatize things about the other actors in his life, but this is some rich material to mine.

The best part is I got to experience all this without being exposed to all the risk, and my future readers will get to have a taste of that experience for a mere $10 or something. If I can only manage to carve out enough time to write the damn thing, that is. One of these days.

I'm getting myself there, but slowly. My wife would actually be better off if my leaving motivated her to start exercising and eating better. She's gone from overweight to obese to bordering on morbidly so, and she's the future poster girl for diabetes. I'm sure any girl I rescue from having to crap in a hole in the ground will be better off. Everybody could come out a winner after the wounds have healed, but first I have to wield that scalpel and do some painful cutting. I'm a nice guy, not a sadist. Thus far, I lack the balls to take action.

The irony of my own atheism is that not believing I have a sky daddy on my side has left me inclined to turn the other cheek, to be kind to other people, and so on like that. I can't, in good conscience, just dump the fat 45 year old wife who bores me intellectually and sexually, and consumes ravenous quantities of my income in ways that are of no benefit to myself. I can't even put down this wretched old dog who will just stand there looking you in the eye while taking a shit in the living room, who has been limping along in poor health for years, but still has a happy enough life. The dog is 20 years old, the same as the marriage, and I've been waiting for both of them to die of natural causes for the longest time now. I can't bring myself to put either one out of my misery, even though the misery is considerable, and the only real consolation I have is that I'm doing the right thing in martyring myself this way. Somehow the idea of allowing my own happiness to be a priority is a concept that never made its way into my atheistic ethos.

In contrast, one of my best friends is a deeply religious true believer who can attest, with no irony at all, that "every word in the Bible is the literal truth." I've thrown the full weight of the Skeptic's Annotated Bible at him, and he has an answer, an explanation, a dodge, or an excuse for absolutely every last line item. I couldn't believe the things he does if I wanted to, but it certainly has led to a sharply contrasting life. I suppose I keep him around in order to live vicariously through him. When you have Sky Daddy on your side, you can do anything and call it moral. He used to own a brothel in Mexico, and he was involved in sex trafficking operations whereby rural farm girls were lured to the city under false pretenses, and forced to work off their debt in the brothel. He dumped his old fat wife for a fresh young third world farm girl who worships him like a king, and is genuinely happy to do so. That's the hell of it right there. I've talked to his wife plenty of times. I know quite a lot about misery and abuse, and I see none present in her. She's really happy, beautiful, and servile. The only time I've seen her unhappy was when my friend forgot to let her perform some minor service or other for him, and did it himself instead.

The contrast between our lives is amazing. We have the same job and work the same 70 hours a week. He gets worshiped as a king, and I get walked on by a fat woman and then come home to clean up dog shit every day. If I could just suspend my disbelief and embrace this goofy Sky Daddy stuff, then I could become a sociopath too, and as a sociopath, I could be happy to shoot the dog, divorce the wife, and get me one of those servile young slave women from abroad. What man wouldn't want to come home to dinner and a blowjob seven nights a week? Me, apparently. I'd rather let a fat woman walk all over me, spend all my money, and keep me on an eternal debt treadmill, because it's kind thing to do, and the kind thing is always the right thing. That's what my atheist mother taught me; a fat woman who did the same thing to my poor meek father.

Sigh.

Everybody told me, "You can't buy a red vehicle! Your insurance will skyrocket!"

Everybody told me, "You can't buy a large vehicle! Your insurance will skyrocket!"

I bought a large red vehicle. My insurance skyrocketed. By $3.86 a year.

Then I added a teenage driver to my policy... Ugh.

I pay Comcast over $200 a month, but they're reliable and fast. You couldn't pay me enough to deal with Verizon DSL again, and while OTA channel options have expanded considerably, OTA today is like cable was in 1980, and a big step back compared to cable in 2014. My wife has to have her 24/7 reality TV. It's actually a reasonably cheap price to pay to keep her from annoying me to death.

As someone else already pointed out, doc writers for FOSS projects tend to be technical-minded early adopters who are either developers themselves, or who spend a lot of time with developers. That's how I got my own start, and it has come with the dual problems that my writing is too technical for Joe User on the one hand, and on the other, when you start documenting new software, you find a LOT of bugs. If you have any coding skills at all, it's faster to go fix the bugs than wait for someone else to do it, and that's how doc writers morph into developers morph into project managers. I haven't updated my documentation in almost 10 years, because only so many hats fit on my head at one time.

As a project manager, the problem I've faced is that I have dozen of peoples who loves my project and woulds liking to help in some way to be part of the team. These generous peoples is wanting to help very muchly, but they isn't writing so good in English, because they isn't talking English as first language. Really interesting it is getting when collaborating are peoples from two very distinctive language background who makes error in strangely conflicting way too. Resulting is documentation need to be heavily edited, to the point of rewriting everything. Them peoples is nice, but they isn't no use writing nothing.

It has been a really frustrating ride over the years. We could do better on documentation if I took the time to sit down and go through it all, but if I had that much time, there are so many more critical things to deal with first. What it all amounts to over the span of almost 15 years is a slow process of attrition and collapse where more people leave than join, and more and more unfinished work piles up everywhere.

It is what it is. If you don't want to deal with all this, go spend $1,000 on some commercial stuff.

I've had similar experiences in life. Things that were boring in school are easily mastered once you have a real use for them. Knowledge is a tool. What good is a tool if you don't use it to accomplish work?

Give me a problem, and I will figure out what skills I need to get you a solution, and acquire just those skills. That's just how I get things done as an adult.

Wineberries (Rubus phoenicolasius) are considered an invasive, noxious species to be destroyed on sight. But why would you want to destroy something so very delicious and tasty? I have some growing on my property that drove all my fancy named cultivars to extinction, and good riddance. These berries are better tasting anyway, and the seeds were free from heaven above, or at least a bird's cloaca from above. Bird shit never tasted so good.

There's going to be hell to pay when the sharks get ahold of these things.

We just have to convince someone that water from Europa is a miracle tonic that grows hair and enlarges the penis. The funding will take care of itself.

I have a couple of bad micro SD cards. Put one into a card reader on a Linux machine, try to read some of the files, and presto magnifico, kernel panic every time. Windows handles this corruption a lot more elegantly, incidentally, but the hardware is toast either way.

Having learned that psychopaths are more attractive to women than guys who have good jobs and don't punch them in the face, I'd like to have a brain scan and see if I'm lucky enough to be a psychopath. If I am, maybe I can get laid!

Yes. I've provided estimates I felt were very fair. I bill based on what a competent person ought to be able to do with something, and don't charge for the extra time I have to spend due to not being competent with some particular language or toolkit or what have you. If the project is in Python, I don't know Python, so I'm not going to charge for the time I have to spend reading up on the language.

In this case, the $40,000 estimate is realistic for me, simply because that's what I would actually have to have in order to endeavor to complete this task. There is more work there than I can get done while working 80 hours at a day job and having a little bit left over for a life, so if I'm taking on a project of that magnitude, I have no choice but to interrupt my regular employment. There probably isn't enough work in IceWM or whatever we're talking about to justify paying one guy to work on it full time for a year, but my regular gig is an all or nothing proposition where I either eat all the food on my plate, or I get none at all. That's what it would take for me, but obviously anybody actually hiring me for this job under these circumstances is a moron, and to that extent my offer is not especially serious.

In principle, nothing. In practice, $x is always a figure that's off by at least one order of magnitude relative to the amount of work involved in accomplishing the desired goal.

It helps if you already know the code, the language, and the toolkit intimately. The more you know ahead of time, the easier it is to accomplish some goal for hire. In practice, the more intimately involved you are with a project, the less $x will be. I've had people offer to buy me a six-pack of beer in exchange for what amounts to 50 hours of work to someone familiar with the code and able to get off and running quickly. Another time, I got offered $50 for a similar amount of work, which is much better, but still laughable. Sure, I know the code, but it still takes time and work to implement and test something. I work on that particular code for free, but if I'm for hire, I'm going to get at least minimum wage. Otherwise, I'm simply not for hire.

No, I anticipate there being enough work that I can't get it done and work 70 hours at my day job too. Let's say it only takes me four months of highly concentrated effort to get everything up to date and humming along, after which future maintenance will be much easier to manage. All I have to do is take four months off from my day job, which means I give up my seniority, my vacation pay, my sick pay, my experience pay, my bonuses, my health insurance, and I start over from square one four months from now when they rehire me. If they rehire me.

I'd like to do this badly enough to make some huge personal sacrifices, but one full year paid up front is the least I'll take in order to gamble everything and trade away all the benefits of staying with my nose to the corporate grindstone.

Indeed, if I could pull together multiple projects, everybody could pay less. Too many projects, and I can't get the work done though. Financing for such things is extremely unpredictable too, and I might get paid this year and never get paid again, so I have to go off and hunt up some other project to work on.

Hunting work takes time too. All in all, I'll just keep my day job until somebody meets my price. This means I will be keeping my day job in perpetuity, unfortunately for me, and unfortunately for all the FOSS I could have worked on, had I but time. Oh well.

This is why it's impossible to pay somebody to work on your pet FOSS project, unless you have deep pockets, or a gigantic base of users with shallow pockets and the will to empty them. The best way to get FOSS done is to go do it yourself, and do it for free, out of love. If you can't code, and you can't pay, then you're just shit out of luck. Incidentally, while obviously somewhat over-valued, Ohloh.net lists IceWM as having an estimated commercial development cost of about $2,000,000 USD. $40,000 is jack shit. It's not even one real salary for a developer.

As long as you pay me $40,000 USD a year, I'll continue maintaining IceWM for you in perpetuity. That would be taking a big pay cut to do something boring that I have no interest in doing, but it would be worth it to get to work at home in my underwear.

I don't know how many times I've been approached by someone who wanted to "pay" me to do work like this. Yeah, $60 isn't going to get you anywhere, Bunky. Sorry bud. You want me to do something that's going to eat all my time, then I'm quitting my day job, and guess who has to make my house payment and crap? Right!