If you're lucky, you might be able to donate both globally and locally - the above post references Heifer Int'l, which is HQ'd 30 miles from my house. So I can simultaneously fight poverty far away, and ensure a local employer keeps being a local employer. YMMV, but it's worth thinking about.

Now talking like a pirate will involve phrases like 'tax relief'...

Though in some ways I suppose it always has....

I would point out that much of the recent craziness around mortgages has revolved around the fact that the banks misplaced, misaligned, or outright faked documents. Keeping a copy of the big stuff is important, because more than likely, if it's big, then someone has incentive to pretend it doesn't exist. If the only copy is the one being provided by folks who will lose money depending on what that document says, you may be in trouble.

Marriage and insurance docs fall in this same arena. Things get lost or destroyed sometimes. For example, my original marriage records exist on a small island nation. One solid tsunami, and they're gone. When I turn up 20 years later, noone's going to know or care who I am.

I always buy the lowest level refurb mac mini I can find (paying $300 for an extra 100GB of disk strikes me as insane), and they do a great job. Lower power use, remote control, etc. etc.

Gavron makes an excellent point - I recently got a Nexus One with T-Mobile, and on the map I had solid service at home and at work. When the phone arrived I found a very different reality - roaming everywhere. Don't trust the maps - ask users - when I mentioned T-Mobile to my colleagues at work (too late!) they all knew it didn't work in our area. I could have saved myself a lot of time just by asking a local.

>I'd wager that Blu-Ray is the last physical format for home video that we ever see.

Agreed - as people become more comfortable with the idea of having their 'library' as a digital object, the physical media will, I expect, go away.

> However, there will always be a small minority of people who want a physical copy and that's probably always going to be Blu-Ray.

This, on the other hand, I seriously doubt. Even if all the holographic storage doesn't pan out, something will be the next big thing. Unless 'always' is defined as 'for the next ten years or so'.

I had already discarded this idea, because of the lack of hardware, but it does open the question as to whether the US should direct future research into broadband into satellite internet. The two birds you could kill at once would be domestic access and, assuming you could get the hardware accepted into other countries, a tool for future operations of this nature.

Promote the hardware, perhaps at a discounted price, perhaps even in partnership with local resellers. It's the newest thing, a great option for getting internet to poor people, heck - you could even throw money at people to deploy it.

You wouldn't need very deep market penetration into a country, though obviously it would be better if the technology worked with mobile devices.

If you're a tinfoil hat type, I would keep my eyes peeled for something like this.

I had been thinking meetup (as in meetup.com), but certainly tweetups seem to be happening a lot.

I do not recommend the slashdot anniversary parties - awkward! (I'm looking at YOU, Ann Arbor-ites)(yes, I'm kidding. mostly)

Most of my geeky friends ended up with people who aren't quite as geeky as them - definitely look outside the geek stuff.

Classes are great if you're interested in something, but definitely go because you're interested, not just to meet people.

And ballroom dancing is way more fun than you expect - even if you are looking at your feet counting '1-2-3-4' the whole time...

This is only partially true.

Education will delay your earnings. However, given the current environment, your earnings may be delayed anyway.

More important, and I've had this conversation again and again with decision makers, is that the Master's degree is the new Bachelor's degree.

In the US, and in much of the English speaking world, university degrees are becoming more common. A Master's is a signal that you have put in extra effort, basically.

We recently hired a helpdesk position, and the HR drones were requiring a Master's. While this is an extreme example of HR going crazy, it doesn't change the fact that, before any calls, before any interviews, the non-Master's people were thrown out.

So to return to the post I am replying to, while you might benefit from earnings now, you might not, and in future, you will definitely want the second degree if you plan to earn anything.

For the first job, though, it probably isn't necessary, and taking a couple years off from school to see what the 'real world' is all about isn't a bad idea. It will also, if the degree means more to you than a sheet of paper, make the Master's program more useful to you, because you might have a better idea of why the stuff matters.