I think the best inhibitors of histronics are the long and subtle posts on the value of contemplation of underlying forces acting in society. Post away, ignore the peanut gallery.

DrupalCon can be expensive. If you can get there cheaply and perhaps share an AirBnB with someone or otherwise cut costs, it might be worth it.

However, you definitely need to continue freelancing or contracting so that you build a portfolio that you can point to.

In terms of self promotion, I would advise that one of the biggest bang-for-your-buck methods would be to present at Drupal Camps that you can attend cheaply. Make a 45 min presentation out of one of your projects as a "case study", those types of presentations are popular.

Eventually you will get a job offer if you keep that up.

In the longer term, you cannot neglect your education. This doesn't mean going back to school or taking formal classes necessarily, but you have to realize that you will have to be improving yourself for the rest of your career - either learning new technologies before your customers need them, deepening your theoretical background, learning a foreign language, something. Try to attend to that in a disciplined way.

The degree does not do much to help employers evaluate people; a potential employer may apply it as a filter, but for development jobs and other creative work, it is not a good filter. The ones that are actually using it to refuse interviews are managed by lazy, unimaginative types and you don't want to work there. It is more likely that the requirement of a degree is posted as a formalism, perhaps the company doesn't want to suggest publically that they have low standards in hiring, and that an appropriately qualified candidate will get an interview.

The fact that you have taught people who finished a degree late, and they thought it was worth it, is not really evidence. The reason why they were still persuing the degree is that they thought it would be worth it in the end; perhaps they attached more importance to the emotional aspects of degree as a societie's validation of themselves, and this might also lead them into the more bureaucratic and entrenched parts of the industry, which also attach importance to degrees.

Learning that concrete technologies are meaningless but the large ideas behind them are, will happen in the workforce, much faster than the 4 years of a degree.

Finally, you trot out the old "it doesn't mean anything but you need it for advancement" nonsense. That just isn't true. It may have been true when GE, GM, and IBM were large portions of the workforce and had their corporate ladders in place, but few organizations trust their own internal promotions anymore - they prefer the validation, not of a degree, but validation that another company hired you for a similar position already. You advance two ways: a growing company grows underneath you, or you leave for a higher position somewhere else, perhaps returning later. The growing company method is mostly luck, and lateral switching depends mostly on the job you are leaving, not on the degree you do or don't have.

Education is not a waste, you will have to do that your whole career. But educational insititutions are a waste, and don't have as much education in them as you would think.

I don't think the Federal Government is a good example of limiting secrets to save money.

Declassification is under funded, and mainly a fig leaf.

Classifying documents as secret is cheap, and has many bureaucratic benefits - making people and projects look import, shielding failures from review, etc. Thus the default is to classify everything.

I think this applies to other large institutions with secrecy programs as well, such as large corporations.

You say "To progress the site I need to set up version control, continuous integration, and staging" . . . in the near future, I think you will be able to buy all that with a few clicks in the cloud environment. A good example that is available right now is the Pantheon evironment, although it is targeted at only Drupal: https://getpantheon.com/platform

I know the founders of Pantheon and have worked with one of them. The demos they have been giving, and the experiments I did with it using the Beta trail codes they gave out, were very impressive. I would start any large multi-developer, scaling project on Pantheon right now.

Eventually there will be similar offerings for all platforms. You probably should not wait for that, however. I would avoid basing the project on Microsoft products if I were you, and I would set up servers on the Rackspace Cloud, keep the code in a private github, and set up a single real hardware server at the house or office that has enough a development environment on it be to fall back and have that machine also keep backups of everything.

I have fled Southwestern Bell several times, only to have them buy the company I went to (including leaving to go to AT&T only to have them buy that and masquerade under that name).

I may have to do it again. Maybe I can move my number to a VoIP provider such as Vitelity in order to keep it, and then just go without a cell phone for a while. Americans spend a lot more on communications than other first world nations, and not having a phone bill for a while would fatten my wallet.

Regardless of if it is a web site or traveling to Mars, if someone says something is to be funded by advertising, what they mean is they don't know how to get the money.

It is likely that the economy overspends on advertising by a large degree. Most of it is in untracked, and Google and others succeed with relatively limited tracking - just showing someone looked at something, not tracking it back to sales at all.

Given the unpaid externalities of advertising -- for example, not being able to find the site you are looking for in the first page of search results, and slow loading web pages crapped up with ads, etc -- we should not encourage this type of behavior, and when two equal options are available, choose the one less advertised.

The big box failed because methane is coming out as well as oil, and at that presure and temperature the methane makes an ice with the water, which clogs it up. The bigger a box or cone you make, the more of this will form, and the oil and ice will float and lift it off.

You need a smaller box, not a bigger one, and possibly to heat it. You probably can't insulate it and let the hot oil keep it ice-free, because at that presure anything with air pockets like insulation has, is crushed flat and doesn't insulate any more.

Stack's note claims that his problems stem from $12,000 in unreported income that his wife had, and a piano that had been claimed as a business expense or asset that the IRS said was not. He also mentioned having his retirement reset to 0, but hey, that's about as common as having freckles or wearing glasses.

This caused him to destroy a house worth $250,000 and a plane that is probably worth $20,000 to $40,000. The unpaid tax on $12,000 might have been $4,000 at most, maybe doubled with penalties especially given his previous tax problems, and if he had written off a piano he should not have, at most that is another $5,000 in income - I'm presuming he didn't buy a Steinway Grand or something, if so I hope that also wasn't burned in the house.

His note also failed to mention that his ex-cultist wife had left him the day before. It is possible based on the manner in which the house burned that he had booby trapped in an attempt to kill her.

Now, this aspect of the tax code probably is screwed up. But it's a little like deciding to pass gun legislation in the heated atmosphere following a mass shooting; do we really want people in the mental condition of the last days of Joe Stack to be dictating our tax reform debate ?

If you cleared your mind of all the emotive pictures and chatter of the last week, and sat down and looked at the tax code and picked something that needed changing, would the treatment of technical contractors really be at the top of the list ? There's a lot of crap in there, from how deductions are counted for leasing versus purchase to whatever causes all those big corporations to pay no tax year after year.

Also, if you pick Joe Stack in his final days as your guide in tax law, note that he also complained bitterly about the tax exemptions of churches, particularly the Catholic church. I don't see the Joe Stack fans arguing for a change in that.

Why do you say Drupal requires a lot of file and configuration manipulation to go from 6.14 to 6.15 ? I have done this numerous times. What I did was, untar the new new php code on top of the old, run update.php, look through a list of things it was about to to do, click OK.

You are advised to put the site in "offline mode" (users can't log in to change data) while doing this, and back up your files and database before hand so you can revert, which I did. I did not have any problems though. I did it all from the browser without editting any files, for multiple fairly complecated sites.

Thanks for that link -- I think call recording is an essential feature of any phone.

Speaking of which, do you know of a call recorder app for Android that doesn't suck by attempting to record the incoming channel using the microphone or force you into speakerphone mode ?

But students and their parents are told the opposite. They are told that a college degree is the key to social and economic advancement, and that you can pay off any amount of debt if you can just make it through college. Discussions of higher education at the high school level consist mainly of "can I get in" and "how do I marshal the recources", parents and career counselor and college recruiters never discuss if it makes financial sense; it is taken for granted it is the smartest thing to do.

I think that is begining to change, articles calculating the payback from a college education are appearing more frequently.

It should be noted that in the case we are discussing, the girl is not suing because her degree fails to increase her employability. She is suing because the career office at the school (she claims) is not helping her as she was promised they would, apparently showing preference to placing the straight-A students in interviews, and ignoring her lower GPA.

However, everybody who reads or hears of this immediately begins discussing whether college educations are worth it. I think this means that society as a whole is deciding that college is too expensive for what you get.

I once did a large project in which I took a large, slow site in PHP (it was pretty complecated, it was a CRM with a lot of custom business logic) and rewrote all the core functionality from PHP to C / C++, and made it a "module" of PHP. The rewriting was mostly simple translation -- litterally removing all dollar signs, adding some types, and attempting to compile, and just fixing the compile errors until it would build. Then going back through it with a fine-tooth comb to track down all the memory leaks.

The speed increase from doing that is pretty surprising. Simple loops that do a bit of math or something speed up by 100 times, and a loop that creates and destroys an object within the loop will be 100,000 times faster. This is without actually trying to write fast C/C++ code, and not create and delete the same thing over and over in a loop -- just pure dumb translation of the code.

At that point, the web site guys can keep tweaking and changing the web page in PHP just like before; but they load that module in the php.ini and then they have a basic library of stuff, like login_user() or get_user_balance() and etc, that are really fast and do all the heavy lifting.

I would be surprised if Facebook has not already done this. How to do it is well documented in several books, and there are lots of PHP modules written in C/C++ to look at for examples.

I suspect that Facebook's VP is right that AMD and Intel exaggerate their claims, but is also generally true that most computer programs are more IO bound that you expect. This is not a reason to avoid something like I describe above; once you have the more complete control of programming in C, IO issues may be easier to find and address.

He also mentions that the servers offered by Dell and others aren't very power efficient or practicle for him, and he mentions Google designing their own servers. Nothing google did was really rocket science, from what we know, and Facebook probably doesn't have to go as far as they did to get a reasonable benefit. It's not that hard to set up motherboards to run without a case, booting off the network with no harddrive attached.

I maintain several mail servers for various clients. Dealing with spam takes up a lot of time and resources, but I have also spent a lot of time trying to get my legitimate fixed-IP business class IPs off of SORBS "dynamic IP" list. I think SORBS probably ended up being a net loss in the spam war, because admin resources that could have been spent fighting spam were instead spent trying to avoid friendly fire.