Screw it. It's too hot to go outside we'll stay inside and eat. I know that most older people that I know start going downhill quickly when they stop moving.

I was just thinking about 15 minutes ago that I had a very enjoyable day doing some real coding.

I was so guilty of that. Freaked out every time a single packet from anywhere would hit my home machine. Even had email alerts sent to my cell phone. That lasted about 48 hours when I decided I wanted to sleep. Wish I could send email back in time to myself. Eh, I probably wouldn't believe it anyways.

This or something like this will be huge. I remember arguing against linux. Why would anyone want to install that? It's crap written by some college kid. I was extremely wrong, but I learned quickly after Solaris kept getting crappier and crappier.

I wouldn't worry about that. We could give ponies to crippled children and that would somehow be used to recruit terrorists.

...considered posting a comment in this, then stopped and deleted it just in case *your* employer takes offense?

I don't think it's possible to block all the noise in a dorm unless you have designated quiet dorms.

I liked to tinker with configs and settings and libraries, but now I like my home computer to just work. They cost more, but are worth it. I still have a unix command line and most of the open source tools but have access to commercial software as well.

Yummy KoolAid.

As silly as it sounds, I find that I'm far more productive when I take a few minutes before I start working and make a list with paper and pen of the things I want to accomplish today. Cross them off when complete. Something about the list living in the real world versus a list in a text file keeps it more "real". Maybe it's the way my brain is wired since I grew up when computers were things you hooked up to your TV. I definitely understand the OP's situation. It's really hard to focus when you literally have the world at your fingertips.

I love the GQ and Men's Health articles that show the outfits that you're supposed to wear. Suit - $3000, Shoes $750, watch - $8000. Yeah, sure.

As silly as it sounds, "putty" made Windows bearable for most admin tasks as I rarely need X Windows. It's probably been 10 years since I had a true linux desktop. Now if I want to run linux on my laptop, it's done as a vm which makes driver issues much easier. And I can run Netflix on the host OSX. IMHO, the only reason to run linux on a desktop/laptop is to get some life out of old hardware.

The TI-994a Extended Basic manual and "Cosmos" when I was a kid.

No books really stick out from college, I'd say it was more of a cumulative effect from the individual books.

"UNIX in a Nutshell" in the early 90's - sure it's just a dump of man pages, but I think I memorized everything between the pages and it got me started in UNIX.

"Learning Perl" - perl has paid the bills and let me go home at a decent hour. Thanks Larry!

...or am I the only one picturing Mario jumping up, hitting a block and then collecting the coins that shower down?

I was in a similar situation and I bought my kid a netbook at Target for something like $230. He takes it to school and if he loses it, I won't kill him. Added NetNanny and that keeps him away from most of the nasty stuff on the 'Net. It's not fast, it's not open source, but it works reasonably well. He can surf, email, and make documents for homework and it fits in his little back pack. It's held up for two years so far. No complaints here.

Watch it!!! ;-)