I worked this schedule several years ago as a night shift NOC monkey. I think I might go back if given the chance, despite the fact that I'd make about 1/4 the money I do now. Nothing like staffing a data center by yourself (or with one other person) in an empty building with nothing to do except write code, watch movies, play video games, order takeout, and wait for an alarm. Plus we had several OC-12s at a time when I was paying $150/mo for 768k SDSL.

You didn't get to see other people very often, but everything was just starting to open on your way home from work so running errands was a snap, your commute was the opposite way traffic was going, and shopping was easy because the grocery store was empty. I used to hit the health club downstairs, swim a couple miles, and be headed out to my car to go home just as the 9-5ers were rolling in.

Just thinking about it makes me dread riding the train into the city in a few hours. I need to go to sleep...

Don't know where you live, but I'm sure it falls into one of two categories:

1) Decent place with at least a few privacy invading and/or absurd security regulations that don't actually make anybody safer.

2) Hellhole.

As a US citizen, someone who's not easily scared by nebulous "TERRORISTS R COMING" proclamations from the White House Press Office, and someone who thinks the government in general should stay out of my hair, I'm not a fan of most of our regulations when it comes to travel and documentation.

On the other hand, I've been around enough to know that aside from the extra attention our laws get, they're not really any worse than anywhere else.

Common sense and practicality are in legendarily short supply when it comes to nations and their concepts of security. This is not a problem that's restricted to the USA by any means. We do get a lot more attention than most other individual nations, though.

Well, Common Lisp stole my bike.

I think my physique is proof positive that it takes pretty much zero energy to play WoW.

Thanks, citizens of Oregon! With your continued efforts to reduce, reuse, and recycle, you are helping to ensure that this planet of ours is around for generations to come. Kudos to you for cutting down on your driving, buying new, fuel efficient vehicles, and using alternative methods of transportation.

Unfortunately, we're gonna have to fuck you.

I didn't have anything except a cell phone when I signed up for FiOS. Granted, I signed up for FiOS TV + Internet, but I could have just as easily left the TV off and they would have connected it. My neighbor has that setup, and I've been thinking about dropping the TV myself.

As someone who has no particular love for Python, I'm not encouraging you to use it. Still, of the possible criticisms of the language, the whole "using indentation to delimit blocks" is probably the worst. It just works, people. I went into it skeptical too, but Python's parser is smart enough to handle just about any style of indentation you throw at it, so long as you're at least somewhat consistent in its usage.

If you want "Python without mandatory indentation", Ruby is probably about as close as you'll get, though they're significantly different. Still, if that's your gripe about Python, you owe it to yourself to at least give it a try before you write it off.

... with sexy results.

The trick to avoid going out of business because your code is good is to sell support for shitty code.

MySQL figured this out years ago.

Good point. This is why the ultimate cost saver is to switch from commercial software to pirated commercial software.

If you're not going to go get the degree, you have to compensate for it by being more competent than you otherwise would have to be to get the same job. When I walk into a job interview people look at my resume, and bang, strike one. I have to make up for that by being better than their other candidates by enough to overcome the bias. You say you're an enthusiast, but almost everybody trying to get an entry level position at any decent company in this industry is to some extent. The question becomes, are you better than most enthusiasts with degrees?

If I had it to do over again, I'd just get a degree. With the economy in the crapper, now's the perfect time to do it. If I didn't love my job and have a mortgage to pay I'd probably do it myself.

By the way, there's always the tech support route. It's real easy to get a tech support job without a degree. Sure, the work sucks, but you get your foot in the door somewhere. If you're good, you can move out of there into a "real" job. The flip side to that is that a resume with nothing but tech support on it might actually be worse than no resume at all. There have been "Ask Slashdots" about that before.

It would be so much more inconvenient if you'd had to stop every mile

I don't know if you've ever been to the northeastern US. I'm pretty sure I paid about $100 in tolls between Maryland and Long Island.

Give them an HD Content for a month and they'll quickly learn however.

Not bloody likely. My parents have a 50" LCD that does 1080p with FiOS and all the networks in regular and HD. They often watch the standard def versions. They couldn't really tell the difference between DVD and VHS, either. They're in their 50's, decent eyesight. It just doesn't make a difference to them.

They also have a nice 5.1 setup and had their receiver locked in mono for about 6 months. Couldn't tell.

Yes, non-compete agreements have been difficult to enforce in IT because it's hard, as an IT worker, to get another IT job that doesn't violate the non-compete in some way. They're not going to let the companies take your livelihood away based on a non-compete. That said, if you quit your job and go implement something which is pretty obviously the *same* product, they'll have no problem getting you for that.

Get a lawyer, since it's stupid to ask slashdot for legal advice, and maybe he'll tell you something different. Don't be surprised when he tells you to (*ahem*) not quit your day job, though.