I don't think it's money that draws you into IT in the first place; if it is, it's probably a bad incentive as money can only do so much to make you happy.

What drew me into IT was passion for the subject, and I do believe that the only way you can possibly do a job for a lifetime is if you're passionate about it.

So while a bigger paycheck *may* be effective in bringing brighter people into the field, they'll probably be as ruthless in their craving to maximize their income as they'd be in other lines of better-paid work (you mentioned security traders, for instance, I'm not sure I'd want those for colleagues ;-))

+1 for Django from my end, too. It can be a bit complex at times if you still know what CGI is and are used to code your web pages accordingly, but once you've got going with it it can be amazingly flexible and powerful.

Also, the built in "admin" will save you a ton of work down the road.

I'm not a full-time developer mind you, but the people I've heard good things about Django from are right up there with the best of them as far as development skills go in our company.

me too, I hate talking on the phone or having the damn thing ring when I'm in the middle of something else. I have my office phone set to the lowest possible ring tone volume (sadly it's not possible to have it just beep once like the old ones we used to have), and my mobile phone is usually muted, too except when I'm on call (for two nights about once a month).

For work, about 90% of my stuff is organized through email, and people complaining of too many useless emails probably haven't used a decent mail client like mutt or discovered procmail yet and are still stuck with outlook or some other gui-only atrocity.

+100 if I had mod points, well said Sir.

While I believe the climate is changing (look at Earth's history, glaciers, tropical rainforest alternating through the ages), I believe the current hype about "us having to do something about it!1!1!!eleventy" is just another scheme to keep people afraid of something and keep them in line. Ice age in the 70s, nuclear war in the 80s, terrorists in the 90s and beyond... I'm simply too tired to feel afraid of anything anymore.

I do my best to protect the environment, but that's basically all I can do... no need to panic about things that are beyond my capability to change.

Not all cultures on earth treat (or more importantly) have treated the earth as just another asset to exploit to the best of our abilities, but sadly as a result, our culture is in the large majority now which promotes the idea of "men above all else", and humans not being subject to or part of the ecosystem just like the birds and the bees. "Ishmael" by Dan Quinn (yeah I know, I keep mentioning that book) has an extremely valid explanation of "how things came to be this way", better than anything else I've read.

Read it, but be warned, it may change the way you view our culture *forever*.

All the best, Uwe

Dan Quinn has some very insteresting ideas you might want to check out:

http://www.ishmael.org/

Basically, it's all about food production. Once we freeze the yearly food production output at the current amount, population growth will stop. No extra famines or revolts (we're having those already, remember?).

His Book "The Story of B" contains a great analogy about the reproduction among mice.

Ascension in 2k moves? Incredible. I've been playing nethack since the late 80s / early nineties and haven't even managed to find the damn wizard (and if I found him, he'd probably kill me ;-)

Another vote for Linux Mint 11, maybe try pinguey which is supposed to be even easier.

Nothing special planned, just a nice bbq over at a friend's place with the family. I don' think any of us is going to ascend unexpectedly, but if someone does, we'll most likely wish him / her godspeed and raise our malts in their absence ;-)

Love the "dry ice shoes / helium dolls" idea though... I lol'ed ;-)

Uwe

That's my favourite (and most likely, I think) doomsday scenario, too. Just imagine what the sky must look like before it happens, spectacular sunrises and -sets... wow.

Hmm, nice mission acryonm, makes we wonder what they'll name the TItan Thermal Sensors on that probe ;-)

I'm also a recent convert to chrom(e|ium) and have been using it almost exclusively for six months or so, but I find its print functionality severely lacking on Linux (stable builds). I still have to revert to Firefox regularly in order to print a page or two, say in landscape format.

org-mode here, too (and emacs, of course)

I think those pictures he came up with first inspired an entire generation of would-be computer scientists, maths geeks, physicists and Scientific American readers. How such a simple iteration could render those fascinating patterns even on a 2d grid, remains to this day one of the big mysteries. R.I.P. Benoit, I hope you'll finally be able to make sense of the fractal nature of things from up / down there!

I thought most of those byproducts weren't wasted, but used to feed cattle? No more happy days for the cows, it seems, and Scottish milk is bound to deteriorate from now on (no more whisky flavour).

It's hard to believe that the nation that invented haggis to be able to use *all* parts of a slaughtered animal should simply toss away the byproducts of whisky-making.

A thousand times *this*. The Emperor hath no clothes....