If you're interested in coding, you should think about it as a career. If you're interested in coding beautifully, maybe not.

Though it's true, I've met a bunch of not-all-there programmers, part of the issue with code quality is that they don't have the luxury of forever refactoring.

Once a feature is done, the lid has to get slammed on it and nailed shut. If there's a bug that shows up during a warranty period, it might get fixed, but that won't involve a refactoring.

If a bug that's not a critical issue shows up outside of warranty, it gets put on the QC backlog, to be fixed...never. (One bug not considered critical by a team I once worked on: the mobile site won't let anyone who shows up with a mobile device log in. Has lasted > 1 year and still broken).

The factors that push the "finish it quick and never touch it again if you can help it" behavior are mainly aggressive schedules, and a desire to get home a little after 5PM.

Some of the best programmers I know work the vampire shift, drive their wife and kids nuts with it. But they don't work next to me in an enterprise.

If you're young, you can burn through the night, as I'd have done before the wife and kids (and to be sure, all my coding is hobby stuff, and I'm picky and refactor forever). Now, married, mortgaged and spawned, I have to pull 15 minutes together at a time to immerse myself before someone needs snot wiped or the house fixed. That or baffle my in-laws by coding like a madman and doing _nothing_else_ throughout the Thanksgiving weekend.

That seems to be what most of the programmers around me have.

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...What about "Children of Star Wars"? What about "Star Wars Messiah"? Does Leia kill herself? Is Luke Atredies REALLY the Kwisatz Haderach?

I realize this is George Lucas' universe, that he "made up myself", but come on, aren't there another nine books of story to tell?

DIsagree.

I haven't seen the project in TFA, but I HAVE seen an interaction design project where GoPro cameras were put on the heads of first-graders in a lunchroom.

I have to say, the experience of seeing a first-person view through the eyes of someone 5 years old was amazing and eye-opening. Certainly, I don't have direct access to the first-graders' thoughts, but I DO have a certain access to their experience through these recordings, which I wouldn't have but for this unique instrumentation.

Try it out before you knock it. I'd say that Glass could potentially do the same thing with the homeless, if people didn't look like such rich, entitled dorks wearing Glass. There are other lower-profile life-logging cameras which could do a good job of this (I've seen one in use. The owner said people never ask her about it). Nothing about the GoPro is so special to the task.

FYI, I work in User Experience and Interaction Design, don't own a GoPro, nor do I work for them or own stock in their firm.

I _wish_ this would work, but App.net tried so very hard, and put together a nice service - everything you could want, and it's made very little headway.

The real issue is this: Twitter has your friends. You can walk away from a service, but switching services means you're walking away from your friends, and most won't do that.

Twitter is sucking more and more, and will probably lose me at some point. But realistically, not yet.

They must have to carefully calibrate the size of the missile with the syringe on the tip!

Srsly. Don't get all exercised about it. It'll pass.

I'm actually kinda surprised FB aren't blanketing the nation with CD-ROMs.

I think I might pay $15 an hour not to ever wear 'em.

Several people had Glass at a recent conference I attended. Every time I saw one (my first live-and-in-person sightings), I thought "Oh, yeah, of course: they really DO make you look like a dork."

Agree: my office XP laptop (with an i5) took 12 minutes to boot to where I could even crowbar Outlook open.

OTOH, my SSD-upgraded 2008 Mac Book Pro on Snow Leopard goes from cold metal to ready to work in 20 seconds.

Eye tracking in the usability world has been in the 4- and 5-figure range for a while. At least one cheap ($1200) option required that you wear heavyish headgear.

Tobii makes some of this usability eyetracking equipment, and it's my hope that this device will be adapted to work with the popular Morae usability recording software.

Eyetracking will be part of nearly everyone's usability toolkit, vs. an expensive luxury, if so.

It might hold possibilities for eyetracking studies on mobile software as well.

Sorry, I think Catcher in the Rye is worth the read. Not life-changing, but yeah, read it - worthwhile.

++On The Road - awesome book - might supplement it with some third-party history of the beats.

Recommend Dune in the Science Fiction realm. Take the series as far as you wanna - but at least Dune.

Don't Make Me Think by Steve Krug is essential for the web developer, and I think "Simple and Beautiful" by Giles Colburne a close second. Maybe top it with "The Design of Everyday Things" by Don Norman - you'll never look at a door handle the same way again.

Recommend for ANY coder Kernigan and Ritchie "The C Programming Language" - such a brief tome, and a comprehensive document on how to write in the language that rocked the world. Would be a good read for any tech writer, as well.

Whatever they say about Steven Ambrose (and they say a WHOLE lot...accusations of plagarism, f.e.), "Undaunted Courage" presents the Lewis and Clark expedition in Technicolor - if only they could teach with books of this quality.

If you're gonna read any Stephen King, gotta read The Stand, for the sweep of it.

"LED bulbs are out of this world at Home Depot" Those prices are for 4- and 6-packs. Read your own search result. At between $10 and $12 for a Cree LED bulb at Home Depot, the price is right, and I'm VERY happy with equivalent light output, color temperature and performance with my Z-wave dimmers. No CFL or LED bulb so far has matched them. I've had to return one Cree bulb so far because it shipped with the glass envelope loose. Been perfect otherwise (4 bulbs installed for trial, roughly 6 months in). Full disclosure: I hold 100 shares of CREE. And this is my actual experience using the bulbs in my house.

What with the usual tenor of Slashdot comments, wanted to say early: awesome that you're working, doing it, trying to live in the "normal" world, where the normals don't often understand. My heart and thoughts are with you.