Let's see, I'm ...

1.) ... getting married in May.
2.) ... leaving the South and moving to Boulder in June.
3.) ... watching my fiancee start grad school in August (so she should stop talking about wedding minutiae and start talking about something more interesting)
4.) ... hopefully leaving J2EE behind for a field with fewer idiots soon after.

I have high hopes for 2010.

I can say that the worst pizza I ever had was at "Latin Camp" in high school (part of the state governors' school program). It was held at a college campus whose cafeteria must have had a massive surplus of potatoes because every meal involved them in some slightly unnatural way.

The pizza was potato pizza - it was a pizza crust topped with mashed potatoes instead of sauce, and then regular toppings (cheese, pepperoni, veggies, etc). Never have I felt so cheated as when I bit into that first slice.

I see this as a corollary to a phrase a Latin professor of mine used to use all the time: "Clarity of grammar is clarity of thought."

If you haven't taken the time to think through what you mean in order to translate it from concepts into words, then there's a high probability that you have missed something at the conceptual level and are hiding it in the noise and ambiguity of language. Misspelled words such as variable names or even misspellings in comments, ESPECIALLY when they're not consistently misspelled, strike me as the same sort of disregard for the rules of the system and throw up a big red flag that something may not be as it should. At best, it's an impediment to grep, but frequently I find that misspellings in and around code mean that there is more work to be done.

So... are your friends vegetables or are you taking the couch potato metaphor a little too seriously?

Did you mean to reply to the AC?

Anyway, I probably have a decade or so left in my career at most so it's really an issue for younger developers.

There are special cases like Red Hat, but I don't see much evidence that a FOSS-only industry is sustainable. It's one thing to fly the FOSS banner while complaining about your proprietary day job that pays your bills, it's quite another to decide to major in a difficult subject that doesn't pay well or has few jobs.

Pff. I could just as easily make up a nice chart of Fahrenheit temperatures by intervals of 10 degrees. Since 5 degrees C is 9 degrees F, your scale would only be the tiniest bit less granular.

Oh, and my scale would go down to 0F, which isn't unheard of in the winter here. Thankfully it's rarely below that.

Just out of curiosity, what light, agile, well-built car would you buy to transport 3 young kids given the rules about car seats?

Because I'd rather not by a 3-row SUV like the Traverse or Highlander, but I don't see any other good option, other than not having kids, and that's a pretty shitty one.

Different strokes. Quadaffi is playing his games in the middle of fucking nowhere. Libya is not in the middle of a global strategic hot spot. If we let Libya have nukes, then the only card he could have usefully played is to try to sell it to other folks, ala North Korea. That's one strategy, sure, but not one that holds a big interest in Iran.

They want to be a big, perhaps THE big, regional player. Capitulating to the Evil Americans is not the way to do it. Of course, time will tell if going head to head with the rest of the world is the right way, but it's worked so far. We'll see what happens when the Israelis get all bent out of shape and have one of their little air raid practices or if Russia decides to play nice with Obama for some reason or another.

If they keep it up, Israel may "donate" a lot of fissionable material to them, delivered via airmail.

Great that will make up for the 200billion we apparently lose to piracy! Seriously who could come up with/report such an obviously out of the world BS statistic while keeping a strait face.

Speaking of irony...

(I confess, it was me)

Great Post. I'd just add that many of us spent a lot of time, money, and sweat getting our engineering or CS degrees and we didn't do it because we wanted to be in the support business. Most of us don't have the people skills to be a great at support anyway.

What's that, 21 minutes?

I bought a PS2 with the intent of purchasing $20 games. If I can't find them (out of print or not sold here or whatever), I'll just download them. I intend to give them my money, but if they make it impossible to do that I won't do it.

Of course, that probably means I'll stop buying console stuff and move back to computers. I feel better about giving hardware mfrs my money anyway, even though PC gaming is a constant upgrade treadmill.

Ever higher game prices are only shooting yourself in the foot.