I hear you there. In high school I struggled so much with "How are ya?" As a depressed person living in my head with a huge amount of anxiety, the true answer to that question involved minutes of conversation. Knowing that nobody wanted those minutes still took me several seconds to blast over and discard, then trip and stumble through an answer before landing on something. It took a lot of work to just be able to say "good", even when that wasn't the true answer, or even an appropriate response to the question asked. They are just simply social barks of no meaning.

It was a long time coming before I realize what you said above, that most of the time people aren't in the mood to engage their brains and have a serious discussion right as soon as you meet up, that you have to work up to that kind of thing.

In terms of learning, I've always been of the mind that you have to keep the difficulty proportional to the skill. I game a lot so they are useful analogies for me, but when teaching someone, you can't throw them in against a professional player and expect growth, you have to first teach the person to be average level and familiar before time with excellent players is beneficial in the slightest.

Ironically, middle and high school is probably some of the most treacherous and brutal social situations we all have to go through, and at a time when we are all weakest at doing so. Interacting with most sane adults is generally the best practice before people get thrown to the lions, but that never seems to be the way it goes.

In some ways I wonder that its generally easier to interact with adults because we have all been mostly scarred at one point or another in high school, and thus learn empathy properly, but eh.

It's funny because when an advertisement does it's job right and I notice it, I file it away as explicitly to avoiding the brand when making an impulse buy in the store. I mean I get the point, when I look at the rack, I am familiar with the brand, and pick it over the competitor. Except your stupid advertisements have made me do the opposite, avoidance!

I think advertisements can be done well, subtle and non intrusive, fusing their product to a good image. I don't know about all their methods but say red bull's take on advertising is novel and actually creates things of interest that they plaster their logo on,

I'll never understand why people think the bullhorn and siren methods work... unless they do, maybe they do? If so, that is probably our fault.

Just sounds like you are getting old and seeing that is is fatiguing to learn the same thing over and over again... I mean it is, but that is computing in general. I grew up with DOS and norton commander, then we hit windows 3.1 to learn things, then windows 95x and upwards. Even between windows versions everything shuffled around and I had to relearn where it all was.

Back in college I finally got some unix/linux command line experience, had to learn some stuff there but nothing too deep. In the working world I was back to windows for a while, but a new job got me stuck on OSX and once again had to relearn everything, then back to ubuntu again (What asshole greenlit those scroll bars and 1px target to resize a window?!) and learning more and more.

Oh yeah, there is also the ipad, ipod, iphone, and android devices with their own OS's and quirks to learn too. Not to mention console dashboards and navigating around their social networking features.

I mean, it all keeps changing, and some new stuff sucks, but overall, I think its getting better. I find myself just as lost as I've always been, but the answer is usually auto completed for me when I start typing it into google, I don't even have to search through 30 pages of altavista to find a good webring to browse for good information.

I mean taking the editor, yeah some suck, but some are great, sublime text for example, it is pretty hipster like, but damn, it was really built for people like me. I like keyboard shortcuts but I like GUI's a lot as well and sublime seems to marry the two really well.

So yeah, software changes, more and more TYPES of people are building software for more types of people, there is a lot of crap out there, but filtered out, the gems are really great gems.

This right here. Nobody really is in love with the company in general, but it is the people you've worked with and for that actually might have made working there tolerable. The last thing I wanted to do leaving a long position I had was strand any one of them by being lackadaisical during my final two weeks.

Only way to get rid of that is to root your phone and delete the .apks from /system/app. Otherwise stuck with them, which does suck.

Agree here. Worked at a place where their policy involved treating people like criminals as they went out the door, didn't even get a moment to say goodbye to some people I was friendly with or had the security guy hovering over them like they were going to take a rifle out and start shooting any moment.

It's like others said, if they were going to do something crazy it would probably be before they put in 2 weeks. One guy they took him out for lunch for his birthday then fired him when we got back.

Obviously I got out of there as fast as I could.

We waited a while to introduce our oldest to peanut butter, my wife was pretty scared about it because she had a friend growing up with a peanut allergy. It just kinda got to the point where we didn't have peanut butter in the house anyway, it just wasn't a staple, not out of any real thought to specifically avoid it.

There is no history of food allergies in either family, though my side does have some heavy animal allergies. We finally gave him a spoonful of peanut butter and he broke out in hives and then threw up about 10 minutes later. We freaked out of course and had him in for some allergy testing, he had a pretty big blow up with the skin prick test and his blood levels came back very high.

This is where everything gets to be an approximation. We still don't know his allergy. A skin prick test just proves that the allergens on his skin react to it. The blood test proves he has the potential for a big reaction to peanut proteins in him. Apparently there are 8 proteins in peanuts, and some cause stronger reactions than others. It is possible your blood test comes back 'high' yet your body doesn't react to the proteins that will cause an anaphylaxis reaction.

Further, it depends how your body breaks down the protein in your digestive system, it could be possible to come back with high levels on the test yet your body breaks everything down into small enough quantities that the allergen never triggers even though you have the potential for an explosive reaction.

The only authoritative way to determine the allergy is an oral challenge, but due to our son's high levels and his previous reaction, would be really dangerous for him until he is a bit older. The only thing to do is keep testing and hoping the levels drop enough to try a challenge.

Right now hes in 'avoid cross contamination' mode and it really is a bit life changing. We have to take an epi pen around with us and be 'those people' that ruin it for everybody. My son has to ask if new food is safe, because we put peanuts in every god damn product. We had a sunblock we put on him that caused him to break out in a rash and we looked up the ingredients and one of them was derrived from peanuts. It is insane.

And nobody gets it, even here some of the comments are really insensitive because they love their peanut butter. For us that substance is a deadly poison that targets our son and it is everywhere, every, fucking, where. I've been on there other side where I've gotten on a plane and couldn't eat the snack I brought with me and complained, but I guess once I get on the other side of it, I realize how scary it can be.

We were playing at a rec center after a group class and he was making new friends playing at a pool table when I noticed a dad come over with a half eaten sandwich to give to his kid... whats on the sandwich... peanut butter! SHIT they've all been at the same table touching the stuff, that kid is little he'll be all over with that food, we have to GET OUT OF HERE NOW.

That is the bullshit you have to deal with with this thing, the world is suddenly full of boobytraps that'll put your kid in the hospital or kill him if you aren't fast enough to stick him with the epi pen. It SUCKS, way more than having to wait to eat my snack until after I got off the plane.

Eh.. I get what you are saying, but is eating honey really some sort of life necessity? Will a child really be not well adjusted in life because they didn't eat honey? I don't think its helicopter parenting to take some basic steps to avoid some risks, like waiting a touch to have honey or anchoring your large furniture to the walls.

This is sort of a turning point with the intenet age where we do have a lot of information at our finger tips, more so than ever before, so the number or perceived risks is overwhelming to parents, you can't really blame people for wanting to make sure their kids get old enough to have the chance to fuck things up on their own.

Yes sir. Waited for a friend to have an interview in my car when I was in highschool, listened to the radio for about 45 minutes. When he got back, went to turn the car on and, boop, no power... Had to get a jump from the guy my friend was interviewing with.

Pretty ignorant on my part but lesson learned. Could have used a 10 min shut off timer ;)

Right on. I live in NJ and see so many shit driving accidents on my way home, it'll be awesome when computers take over and do it right all the time.

For the people that still enjoy driving manually, I could easily see 'manual drive' roads cropping up once automation takes over, roads that are built only for fun and interesting driving rather than the functional roads that end up being fun by accident of on account of the terrain it was built on.

Isn't that how it is done? It is about 3 seconds on every light I stop at in NJ. When I started driving a manual transmission I had to really pay attention to when the lights at intersections were going to change so I could be prepped to go (was nervous to start/stop the car when learning).

After the other lane goes red, there is a 3 count of all red to clear the intersection and then you get green. Some of the 'all reds' are longer at different intersections depending on the gap where you might be stuck, there is an awkward one over a railroad track at a busy intersection that has a longer 'all red' for example.

I think it depends on the tools you need. I tired several times to make a run at VIM but wasn't seeing much of an advantage over the ultraedit/notepad++ speed I was used to for doing things... but then again I don't have to do any work where I'm stuck in a terminal. If it were the case I'd make a serious run at learning vi/emacs or whichever.

I recently found SublimeText and I have to say it is a real leg up over notepad++/uedit for a rich editor, it sort of marries keyboard navigation with the gui in a really cool way. Each has its strengths, and it is nice to see something realize that without feeling like it has to shun one or the other. I liked it so much that using it for just a few moments had me switch over to it everywhere I use a 'rich text editor'

I really don't think people think "Oh man, how do I appear smarter here, yes, yes, I will use BEGS the question, only the intellectual elite use this phrase, and I shall be one of them!!"

I think the phrase just makes no sense, I still can't understand how I'm actually supposed to use it. If I just looked at the words in the phrase, I would read it as something begging for a question, raising the need to ask a question. I didn't even know that phrase is somehow related to academia in anyway.

But I guess I know now that the word seems to activate elitism, a moment to declare superiority, which begs the question of why it is so prevalent for people who know the proper use of the phrase to assume its misuse is just an attempt for the person to be as educated as they are, and not a common misunderstanding.

I am hoping for the day we won't let people drive anymore. It is a task that when failed for just a moment can end lives, proven time and time again, every day. Automated cars with good sensors can do a better job, and I can't wait untill I can buy a car that doesn't even need to think about there being a steering wheel or pedals in it.

Push a button to go to my location, sleep, read a book, play a game, whatever, and get there faster (routed around traffic, faster and more efficient merge speeds etc) and safer than I do today. Travel times suddenly become free time, which would be great. I know I won't see this in my life time (even though we have the tech to build something like this today), but maybe for future generations.

Ideally there would be no need for lights.