Funny you should ask: I just got back from a trip to London. Eight time zones worth of jet lag.

I find the first night there or back is no problem to get to sleep, because I'm so totally wasted I can't hold my eyes open anyway. It's the second night that's the killer. After that I'm fine. Getting up at the right time is a challenge on flights to the east coast, but is rarely an issue for Europe.

Unless you're making a phone call or having some other sort of live interaction, the time at home is irrelevant. Don't even think about it. The time where you are is the time that matters.

...laura

Example?

I always insist on a clean compile with the warning level turned up as high as it will go. If the compiler is cool with my code, I have a better chance it will do the right thing with it.

Once I have an application that works I see if it meets performance goals (if any). If it does, I'm done. If it doesn't, profile, find the hot spots, optimize as needed. Compiling an entire application with -O3 is idiotic, and misses the point.

...laura

I get in to the office nominally at 8, but usually get in a bit earlier, like 0740.

Since I'm on Pacific time and almost everybody I deal with is on Central and Eastern time, I consider it a courtesy to them to be in the office promptly. At one time I had a job that got me over to Paris and Brussels quite a bit, but the "engineering" folks were the sort who rarely showed up in the office before 1000. This is getting kinda late in western Europe when you need to work with somebody to solve a problem. Since I was in the office earliest I took most of the calls from Europe, and, oddly enough, was the one invited to fly over and help them figure things out.

...laura

It sounds like you are caught between a rock and a hard place to me!

Whoops! Sentences are hard! That invitiation must have been lost in the mail, that is.

Uh, I'm sorry, the invitation to the club meeting where we let "them" into "our ranks".

(hint: Collective accountability is a bullshit philosophy.)

The last thing i would want if i was dying would be people praying for me. "And patients who knew they were being prayed for had a higher rate of post-operative complications like abnormal heart rhythms, perhaps because of the expectations the prayers created, the researchers suggested." http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03... N

My boss and I routinely look at new tools and technology with an eye to solving our company's problems and build cool new stuff. Our goal is not to embrace flavour-of-the-month technology. It's to identify better solutions to old problems, or find good solutions to new problems. Tools have to work, or they serve no purpose. Everything else follows from there.

We do most of our development in C on Linux, but have incorporated virtualization and cloud computing, new technologies that provide better solutions to old problems. The jury is still out on other goodies. I like python, while my boss prefers perl. I like Django, while he prefers PHP. He's the boss, so I write lots of perl and PHP... :-}

...laura

It's on the wall, for all to see. Inscrutable display, mysterious controls, the works. When the weather changes it tends to lag a day. So the first warm day we cook with the heat on. The first cold day we freeze with the heat off.

I prefer opening the door out on to the balcony. Fresh air is so much nicer than anything the HVAC can do.

At home I leave my bedroom window open - even if only a crack - all year.

...laura

Great if your looking for something held together with glue and having limited expansion capability.

My fave is still the original Star Wars. It was fresh, it was new, yes, it was hokey, but it worked. Check your sophistication at the door and enjoy the ride!

I find the prequel movies unwatchable.

Some things never change: when The Empire Strikes Back was imminent, they re-released Star Wars in the theatres to get some buzz going. It was accompanied by a short, a trip to the Moon, assembled from NASA footage. Some younger members of the audience expressed loud displeasure at the "fake" movie. They didn't read the credits where it said "Filmed on location by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration".

...laura

I did my first year Computer Science in Algol W with punched cards.

The system required a blue "ticket card" to do anything other than list your card deck. We were issued a supply of ticket cards, and could (and did) buy more at the campus bookstore. We punched our cards ourselves. We were very careful to write everything out, to walk through our programs to make sure the program was syntactically correct and might have a chance of doing what it was supposed to do before spending a ticket card to find out what the compiler thought of it. We had immediate turnaround, which meant you could go through ticket cards that much faster.

I now program mainly in C on Linux boxes. The programs I create are orders of magnitude more complicated than what I created then. My interactive productivity is much higher too. I'm not sure I'd even attempt much of what I do now if I didn't have much more powerful computing and debugging facilities available.

...laura

I am reminded of a TOS episode where two warring planets had made their war so clean and clinical that they had no real reason to stop it. Until Captain Kirk came in and showed them what war really was, something horrifying, to be avoided. Even if it meant talking peace with your enemy.

Capital punishment is such an atrocity. Maybe if it was shown to be that atrocity, there would be less support for it. Public hanging, firing squad, maybe even dust off the electric chair. Show that it's gross and disgusting, and that civilized people have better ways to keep their societies working.

...laura

Well, we'll have to differ then. The free market is an ideal, but a self-executing free market is a rarity. No regulation (or no government) is a nice jingle but there will always be something. (Is anyone saying more regulation/govenrment for its own sake? No, but they can be nasty side effects.) It's the law itself. Even the criminal law is a form of regulation—especially unlikely to be banned—and yes amending, sometimes repealing, it can improve it. That said, I do sympathize with the libertarian perspective (versus dogma) and think the government can be seen as just another ... corporation. Which means, regulate with care, not never.

"Robber baron" just sounds cool. I don't think we have classic monopolies like oil and steel, but less the landscape is pretty messed up, and getting worse so with the repeal of Glass-Steagal and so on..... Just my 2 against $2 trillion.