Go to your local Home Depot (or whatever) and get some plant ties. Work every bit as good as velcro "Cable Ties" (maybe because they're the same thing) but they're dirt cheap because they're marketed for plants rather than computers. 50 feet or so runs about $4.

If you want to use a mouse to scroll through documentation, access IDE options, open source files, quickly navigate through code etc, you need a mouse

Yes, if you want to use a mouse, you need a mouse.

However, those things (except perhaps the IDE options, if the IDE sucks and doesn't offer keyboard shortcuts) can be done with the keyboard, often more quickly than with the mouse.

Screw the mouse! Just about any programming task that might use a mouse can be done more quickly (and less irritatingly) with a keyboard once you learn how. My optimum setup is a Kinesis Advantage keyboard, paired with a Wacom tablet.

While pricy, I've found the Kinesis to be worth every penny. The plethora of thumb keys allows me to keep not only my hands at the keyboard, but also my fingers positioned at the home row. No big moves for backspace, delete, page up/down, home. Ctrl and Alt are also thumb keys, eliminating the little Cut/Copy/Paste dance. The keys are also closer together, ergonomically positioned, and have delightful response. My only complaint is that the ESC and the Function keys are tiny little rubber buttons on top. Still, compared to the standard, and even "natural" layouts, it's far, far superior imho.

But I digress. Next comes the usefulness of the Wacom tablet. While excellent for graphical apps, I've found it exceptionally poor for programming-type tasks. Which is why I use it. The sheer irritation of having to move my hand, pick up the pen (if I can locate it!), hover over the pad to find the pointer on screen, do my business, then set the pen down before returning the keyboard is motivation enough for me to learn, remember, and use keyboard shortcuts as often as possible. A bit painful for the first few days, but a huge time saver in the long run. Any minor task that I might otherwise use the mouse for, after using it once or twice I'll be giddy to find a keyboard replacement.

IIRC, the labels handle all the busywork for the artists on this. Lawyers and accountants call lawyers and accountants, hammer out agreements, establish a rapport over the years. Might even be some even-trades going on (you can use X of ours if we can use Y of yours). Works all right if you're signed with a label. Sucks majorly for indie artists who can't afford the fees demanded and/or don't have corresponding in-demand works to trade access for, assuming the labels will give them the time of day at all.

Yeah, I kinda lucked out in that regard, as I had a very clear exit strategy. Minors and second majors in college are good for that type of thing. If I was determined (or resigned) to stay in computing, I might try to find some joy in making the most beautiful, elegant drawing possible for everything I worked on. The drawing might become my purpose at work, with the actual code being some necessary by-product that I would hardly give a second thought to. Just thinking of that almost has me motivated to go write a nice program. Almost.

My colleagues read /. also, but they've already heard the story. :P

No, but plumbers don't have to invent a new kind of pipe every time they fix a sink or unclog a toilet. They are very different kinds of activities.

Get yourself an enormous piece of paper (butcher paper, or something from an art store), and make a big drawing, in pencil, of the entire project and how everything will fit together. Do it at an appropriate detail level to fill a good portion of the paper.

This has multiple benefits... it gets all your ideas written down, it gets the project organized (and helps identify potential problems before they're in code), it makes for nicely visible pieces of a larger puzzle, and, perhaps most importantly, it gets you away from the computer where you have coder's block.

The one best piece of code I've ever written, which had all sorts of interprocess communication and synchronization problems to overcome, etc., I started with a big drawing, which lent itself very nicely to a fully pseudocoded skeleton of the program (fully doxygened and line-by-line commented before any code went in), followed by the actual code, which practically wrote itself at that point. Not only did this keep the process going, but it also helped me eliminate and compensate for a whole bunch of technical and design issues, before I had even written the code that I would have had to fix. After addressing a few rogue syntax errors, the program ran correctly the first time.

Unfortunately, while effective, this process left me completely spent. Having written what was, by my standards, a perfect piece of code, I saw little further for me to accomplish in my career, and I was especially devastated when I saw that it was fairly likely that my contribution would not make it into the final product. A mere shell of a programmer remained, and I have steadily lost interest in programming since. I'm enrolling in graduate school for music in the fall.

I came to that realization about myself over the past few years, which is why I'm going through a career change right now. Couldn't be happier about leaving it behind.

I find that nothing gets me cleaning the apartment like having a project to do. And nothing gets me working on a project like having a clean apartment AND another more urgent, less appealing project to do.

Right now, if your apartment is messy, work on your current project. Of course, instead of working the project, you'll procrastinate it by cleaning your apartment. When your apartment is clean, get yourself an urgent, unappealing project. Soon you'll be using your original project as a means of procrastinating the new one!

On the first day of class, my college history teacher asked for a show of hands on how many had been in a high school history class taught by "Coach What's-His-Name". Almost all the hands went up. The situation is quite similar for high school math. I had one HS math teacher who wasn't a coach, and she was even worse than the ones that were.

Indeed. On any given day in high school math class, I'd snooze through the lecture and skip the lesson, and go straight to trying to solve the problems (usually during the lecture, once I was bored with doing origami). If I had problems, I'd go back to the chapter or listen in on the lecture to figure out how to do things.

The teachers were usually not amused. However, I was equally unamused by the crappy book with the frequent word problems about LaRonda's Kwanzaa party and the end-of-chapter reflection question that asked how I felt about using such and such equation to solve such and such problem.

I got put in my place in 3rd grade because my mom showed me a way to subtract quickly in my head without all the "cross out the 9, replace it with an 8, and put a 1 in front of the 5" nonsense they liked to call "borrowing" (you borrow, but you never give back!!??). My page of problems came back marked up for me to re-do because I didn't "show my work," as the entirety of my work consisted of occasional barely noticeable tick marks next to certain numbers.

I was floored in my college pre-calc class when we went through the steps to see where the quadratic formula came from, and when I learned that an imaginary number is more significant than "what QuadKill on the calculator spits out when there's no real answer".

Worse yet, the AP/Honors courses are not only at a higher level, but for some baffling reason most would assign an order of magnitude more work. While I could've handled the material, I simply didn't want the increased workload and so avoided AP classes like the plague. The threat alone of so much more homework was enough to make me avoid AP classes like the plague. Then, using the handy loophole, my non-AP-enrolled self took and passed 3 AP tests for the college credit.

It was a lost cause. Anyways, pursuing the matter much further would have delayed lunch.

Ugh, that reminds me of this leadership retreat I went to (in college, mind you).

We did one of those "rank the 40 things you would bring with you to a desert island" exercises, where you then compare your answers to an expert's. We did a list on our own, then we did one as a group.

We then got our group score, and did some seemingly unnecessary math to it, and voila! The group got a perfect score! "I don't know how it works, but it always does! When we work together, we always get a superior score! Teamwork is Awesome!" announced the retreat facilitator proudly.

I immediately recognized that, to get the group score out of 100, the math we had just done was...

score = a + (100 - a)

So... If 100 = 100, then Teamwork is Awesome!

Arguing until I was red in the face would not convince the lady that she had drawn a conclusion based on 1=1. Insistence on "I've been doing this for 15 years, and it's always worked!" led me to believe that I'm the first attendee of that retreat in 15 years who could do math. I about cried. I remain highly skeptical about the value of teamwork to this day.

There's no requirement for public school teachers to have masters' degrees. A Bachelor's degree and a credential are all that's required, at least in California.