I had pizza in Italy, in different cities, purchased in different restaurants, and you know what? It just wasn't that good. Most of the time I ended up mopping up copious amounts of olive oil from the top.

To be brutally honest, the best pizza I've ever had was right here in the good old U.S. of A.

At my desk:
One computer two displays (for work)
Four computers, one display (through KVM switch, for me!)
One computer, no display
One laptop, one display

At my wife's desk (a few feet away from mine):
One computer, one display

In the living room:
One notebook
One netbook

I just measured my total book shelf space. After doing the math, I am totally blown away at how many "linear shelf feet" we have:

Four book cases, five shelves each, 27" of available space on each shelf = 540 inches.
Two book cases, six shelves each, 28" of available space on each shelf = 336 inches.
Once book case, four shelves, 22" of available space on each shelf = 88 inches.

Total linear inches of available shelf space = 964
Total linear feet of available shelf space = 80.33

The really bad news is some of these shelves have two rows of books on them :-(

The first four and last one book case are filled with novels, do-it-yourself books and other entertainment-type books. The middle two book cases are filled with computer books, top to bottom, sometimes two rows of books per shelf.

I was in the U.S. Navy for 15 years. I've been lots of places, mostly to Naples, Italy though :-(

at 72 F, but the wife over-rules me. She compromised at 76F.

I totally agree. I used to program for a living, now I'm a middle-ware systems engineer on Unix systems, for a large U.S. corporation. I get to work from home, play in Unix and Linux all day, make a pretty good living, and still code for myself.

Am I a billionaire? hardly. Do I enjoy my life a bit more then I did? Most assuredly.

Too bad ssh wasn't an option... I spend about 90% of my work day connected to remote computers via ssh, or executing remote commands via ssh and scp.

Next to ssh, I probably use the grep command most often. At work, I'd estimate I use grep almost 10x as much as find.

HaHa, that's funny!

I'm from Florida, we have four seasons as well:

Spring: March
Summer: April, May, June, July, August, September, October, November
Fall: December
Winter: January, February

My wife and I recently celebrated our 12th wedding anniversary (July 20th - anniversary of the first moon landing :-D ). She's a math and space geek and I'm a computer, ham radio and space geek. We did no special planning, read no manuals, just did it.

Sometimes you have to stop over-analyzing things and just do them!

One of my friends asked me to help his younger brother become acquainted with programming, so I downloaded several "free" language installers (all for Windows), their documentation (as available) and tutorials, burned them all onto a CD and gave it to him. I advised him to install all of them (Python, Perl, Ruby, Java), and play around for a while to see which one(s) interested him the most.

After a few weeks of playing around, reading the tutorials and such, he decided that Python was the language he felt the most comfortable with, and I then bought him the "Learning Python" O'Reilly book, to help him get more of the nuances of the language. I was also available to help him with any questions he might have had, during this learning phase.

Fast forward a couple of years. Said younger brother has now graduated from high school, is going to college part-time, working on a Computer Science degree, and has a full-time job with a software company in the area. He works mainly in Python and Objective-C (for iPhone and iPod Touch development), but is also learning Java, so he can work with the Android SDK.

Is Python the best language to learn programming with? I can't answer that, but I can say it worked wonders in this instance.

Where I live (Florida), basements are referred to as "indoor swimming pools".

I think you might be surprised (pleasantly, at that). I work for a fairly large U.S. corporation, and we have a butt-load of commercial hardware and software (Sun hardware + Solaris, IBM AIX, WebSphere, etc...), but are now making a very concerted push towards open source (Linux on X86/X86-64, JBoss, etc...). Even "old CIO" dogs can learn a new trick... when the IT budget starts shrinking.

If only I could convince them to move from Windows on the desktop, to Linux. Oh well, take the victories when and where you can.

I use my non-glass ceramic "Mug of vi" at work. Keeps the plebes on their toes!