I've recently been using Mylyn to give me a focussed view on the code I'm working on. I love the way it automatically adds things to the context as I click around.

Then of course there's the rather gorgeous "Run unit tests in context" to give me feedback on the things I've been tinkering with.

Some of us have already done this on our own.

Now that I don't live in London I've taken a hit on my salary and the types of work I can do. However, moving to the countryside has allowed me to spend that time with my kids instead. Today we went for a walk in the forest for a few hours and it was wonderful. We've been really lucky, we mandated a broadband connection as part of the move and the world has moved to make this a lifeline for banking, auctions, work, groceries, ... we rarely need to actually go anywhere to do things. That's quite a change from the trudge my parents had to do when I was a kid in the countryside.

I believe people have been doing this for centuries.[citation needed]

...it's not universally popular it appears

...maybe not even economic

...but they do a TV show on it

At the end of the day I feel fortunate that we can finance living in the country on a programmer's salary. Just like with having kids, I'd say my basic advice is to lower your expectations of what you'll have in life and you'll be fine.

I love that the remote turns on the PS3. Mine is two rooms away with a long HDMI cable - the kids can turn on the PS3 through the walls.

Seeing as we have a toddler, the PS3 is safely ensconced in the 19" rack and little grubby fingers and cheese sandwiches can't get to it.

Yep, this works well for me. I have a slew of 160GB drives and I use them for offsite backups at other family members' houses. I gave up with DVDs when I got to 40GB. Having so many obsolete drives made me able to have multiple offsite backups which is always nice.

However I did go to the dark side first and set up big RAID arrays with them that were very fast. The only snag was I had to do that in each machine else I got upset copying files around as I wasn't using the fast drives efficiently. Then of course you have to get GigE to keep things rolling. Then you realize your time could be better spent posting to /.