Until last year when I went to my GP for a "general checkup". He looked surprised and suspicious, and asked "Why?". I told him I had been drinking too much. Since then I've had about four visits in one year as the effects of 20 years of alcohol, smoking, stress, obesity and asthma have all started to take a toll.

Agreed, it is possible to change career direction - particularly if you are strongly motivated for the new career, and have savings and/or other backup.

I really liked this observation! Indeed, when you are young and independent is the best time to take a risk with your career. While it is never easy to change direction, it is certainly easier now than it is once you are financially locked in. After that, it'll be twenty years - if you are lucky!

That seems to be the unanimous advice here.

When someone is taking their first job out of college I think that they should be given lots of advice from those with more real world experience. The first job often sets up the whole of your career. If you start in banking, you will probably stay in banking. Ditto for defence. Once you have two years experience in any industry it will be very hard to change to another industry. It's not impossible of course, but it may involve a period of unemployment and a pay cut. But, if you have dependants by then (which often happens in ones twenties) then you are locked in.

For the advice to be useful it should be based on fact, and the adviser should be careful of overemphasising their own emotions. It should also be open ended, eg. saying "The games industry often has some notorious sweatshops, but that is not universal", rather then "Don't work in the games industry!".

Perhaps the one bit of advice which must be emphasised to new graduates is that the first job is a very significant choice which they may not be able to easily change - so choose wisely.

Now, I am talking from personal experience here. When I was about to graduate someone gave me exactly this advice - the job I take now will probably be the one I have for the next twenty years. I rushed into it, and took an exciting looking job in the defence business. I quickly hated it, but I was already locked in, and had dependants. The defence business wasn't nearly as exciting as the it seemed, but it took me twenty years to get out of it, and a massive pay cut.

I live in South Australia, and it's winter here, too.

I would say it does, because using seasons as a unit of time is a distinctly Northern hemisphere convention. In my observation, American's and Canadians are the main users of it (more than the British).

I often get confused talking to an American when they talk about doing something "in the summer", and it's not so much that they have a different summer, but that I'm not used to measuring time like this. (We only use it for things that are specifically related to the weather, such as sports).

In Australia we wouldn't say "later this winter", we'd just say "around August/September".

Sonar, so that I can fly around in caves in the dark.

I looked up some of the alternatives too, and decided that halberd was my first preference, after a bit of thought.

When I graduated from uni 25 years ago Dijkstra was my hero and, under his influence, I tried to solve problems on paper, and prove my programs, etc. It took me years to understand that real software engineering is about sitting in front of a computer, typing out code, testing and debugging it. I wasn't much use to myself or anyone else until I discarded the Dijkstra influence.

I still remember him as a great writer and humorist, and his ideas are useful, just so long as the young programmer doesn't try to put them into practice.

It used to be 60% to 80% when I had more of a "life", and spent time doing housework, reading, going for walks, etc.

Now my only breaks are the gym a few times per week, and when I do the bare minimum of cooking and house chores, and a few regular social commitments, particularly church. Apart from that, I just put myself in front of the screen, and stay there.

No porn, btw, just internet news and forums, and work. In the last few years it's become more of the former, and less of the latter.

This is a timely reminder to change my ways.

Fair enough.

Still, the second prediction is worth quoting in full. The premise "Most people have nothing to say to each other..." is so near, and yet so far, from web 2.0 that it's just delicious. To be able to say something so wrong (in hindsight) is an achievement beyond most of us. It must rank with the all time great failed predictions.

The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in "Metcalfe's law"--which states that the number of potential connections in a network is proportional to the square of the number of participants--becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each other! By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet's impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine's.

As a web developer I use VS predominately, but also Expression Web to prototype tricky HTML/CSS features, because it's WYSIWIG and HTML/CSS is so good. However, the process was always slowed by switching between the two tools, so I also see this progress, ie. incorporating ExpWeb into VS.

Your paying $50 for that, and also for the guarentee that it will work first time, on this laptop.

If I could change one thing in my personal management, over 30 years in the business, it would be to advertise and promote myself, rather than to passively expect my achievements to be noticed. The passive approach usually worked when I was working with a team of other programmers, but it was spectacularly unsuccessful when I was the only programmer, or chief programmer, in a non-software business. The passive approach was also much more successful in my younger years, than in my fourties. People outside software expect programming to be easy, and, moreover, if the delivered product is good, and produced without visible project stress, they only see that as confirmation of the fact that it was easy. If there are visible problems, which happens on 99% of projects, then they see that as evidence of the incomptance of their programmers, and think that solution is to let the current team go (by no responding to wage requests) and get a better team, at the same price.

I think that "under promise, and over deliver" has to be part of the solution, in sharp contrast to the usual gung-ho, iron-man approach of programmers to estimating and promising.

An anecdote of how non-programmers view software is a discussion I had with my mother about web development. I mentioned to her that it is usually more difficult to build a complex site, than it is to build a pretty interface, and I mentioned google an example of a complex site. Her blank expression prompted me to suggest "You don't think that google is complex, do you?", and she just said, "Well, not really". Obviously, to her, a simple text box which searches the web is not complex! :)

Agreed. Most Australians are interested in the U.S election partly for this reason, but mainly just because it is a great show. In Australia, during our Wednesday when the votes roll in the U.S Tuesday evening there is blanket media coverage of the ongoing tallies and most people, whether at work or at home follow it.

Most of us follow it mainly out of curiosity, without expecting that the result will make any difference to life in Australia. It is predictable that whichever candidate wins they will put U.S. domestic interests first on matters such as trade and protectionism, and will expect allies to toe-the-line in foreign affairs, and that our government (from whichever side of politics) will largely follow along.

Good points! You reminded me of the console YaST. I use that often to do some admin on a server through ssh, without starting the GUI. It's a brilliant tool.

I didn't know about webyast. Thanks for the tip.

Also, has the Yast GUI been fixed to make some kind of sense?

It always made sense to me. It's one of the top 3 reasons I stick with openSuse. The "pattern" concept in recent YaSTs is a little confusing at first (only because it complicates the GUI) - but once you've used it you don't want to go back.

YaST seems to combine the best of Windows style configuration GUI's, with a better view of the underlying mechanisms, and it put's everything in one place in a way that I've not encountered elsewhere in Windows or Linux.