Topeka's way out in the middle of nowhere.

"Kansas City" mostly means Kansas City Missouri, as well as the adjacent Kansas City Kansas and sprawl of suburbs. Sprint is in Overland Park, KS, a suburb about 10 miles west of downtown. Downtown KCMO is a pretty decent city - go visit the Plaza area or the university.

If he isn't understanding your code, maybe you need better comments in it. Have him write some!

Or maybe your code is complex because it's trying to implement a bunch of complex semi-contradictory requirements that evolved over time, rather than implementing one clear design specification that was available upfront. That also needs really good comments.

Firefox crashes way too often for my taste, but since about version 13 it's gotten a lot better on memory use. I haven't used Chrome in a while, just tried it and found that yeah, it's really really fast. It used to be a real memory hog, and I won't be able to tell if that's still true unless I load it up with a lot of tabs. (And unfortunately, since I'm stuck running 32-bit Win7, I can't just throw enough virtual or real memory onto the laptop to handle memory bloat, and modern browsers don't seem to like waiting for Win7 paging anyway.)

I used to use a yoga ball as my home office chair. It took a little while to get used to, but my muscles adapted quickly enough.

Then one day I backed up and scared my cat. He slashed at the ball, claws out, and I started sinking slowly to the floor as it deflated.

Tai Chi and QiGong have a lot of great stretching and stability exercises you can do in not much space, and they're slow moving enough that you're not going to work up a sweat.

Also, getting up from your desk periodically and doing things, like going and getting coffee.

I picked a gym near the train station, so during the years I was commuting by train it was convenient to go there when I got back from work, before doing other things for the evening. I've been going a lot less frequently since I changed offices.

Bad crypto can cause you no end of trouble. There are people out there who know what they're doing who've written PRNG systems in the general direction that you're talking about, but understand what to do and not do in the designs. Some of it's pretty subtle, like only bringing in new entropy in big chunks rather than trickling it in, and knowing what crypto algorithms work well for applications like this and what don't. And some of it's tuning.

Go read the "/dev/urandom" Wikipedia page. If you need Yarrow, use it.

The general speculation is that something in Android is using /dev/random when it would probably be ok with /dev/urandom, but nobody's sure quite what. Google Maps was mentioned; maybe it's using https to fetch map segments or something?

Ok, it only works if you've got a cybernetic dolphin who can use SQUIDs to read you brain, but you could still become a very technical boy...

Real programming jobs usually spend a lot more time in the requirements gathering and clarification and solution analysis phases than they do in actual coding. On the other hand, it does weed out the people who don't actually have a clue, at least if you provide enough time rather than trying to get speed. Shouldn't be necessary, but HR departments are usually run by people who understand contracts, not technology.

My department recently tried to hire a lab manager contractor to do router gruntwork and organize a lab move. We quickly found that after the candidate's contract shops and our HR department had both reformatted their resumes, we couldn't tell much except who they'd worked for (e.g. "working on CCIE" meant "didn't have CCIE", not "had CCNP, working on CCIE", and "worked on X" might mean "developed the X system from scratch" or "used the X system to enter data without understanding what it was"), and most of the people who really did know their stuff found better jobs so we didn't end up getting second interviews (good for them, we really needed somebody to do unexciting gruntwork.)

We ended up asking everybody the question "You've just typed "google.com" into your browser, tell me what happens on the wire in as much detail as you can." It should be elementary, but way too many applicants didn't understand the OSI stack enough to talk about Layer 1 vs. 2 vs. 3, much less about arp or broadcasts, or didn't get the concept that typing things into your browser makes stuff happen on a wire, and the technically competent people could talk their way through it pretty quickly.

My resume has lots of buzzwords on it so I can get past the HR department, but I also try to indicate what I'm actually good at. HR department people usually don't have complex engineering skills, and while it would be nice if they could actually identify people who do, it's tough.

And the fact that you wrote "CV" instead of "resume" implies you're not American - over here, calling the previous employer isn't going to get you anything more than a confirmation that they did work at the company, they usually won't say anything negative about work quality because they could get sued, and maybe they'll say something positive but you can't really trust it. Google might find you people with uncommon names who've done open-source work; it's much less likely to help for people with common names or people who've done their software work inside large companies.

and take malaria-prevention meds. You may need to start them a couple of weeks before your trip, depending on which meds they're using these days.

Also, anywhere that has malaria issues usually has other diseases that you'll need to get immunized for, so expect some fun shots.

Similarly to the "Your Tivo Thinks You're Gay" problem, Disney might decide that you like "It's a Small World", and have its pinkness follow you around on TV screens and its music playing on any nearby speakers. And imagine(er) that they sell that information to the Hello Kitty people so it also follows you around the mall next time you're there.

I'm much more bothered by the California Transportation department's FastTrack than by Disney's. I don't need them tracking me fast, and they already charge $1 more for paying cash, and they're going to start making Fastrack use mandatory on the Golden Gate Bridge (or take your license plate photo and send you a bill.) I use that bridge 2-3 times a year, so buying a surveillance appliance is annoying. On the other hand, Disney World FastTracks were somewhat useful, not that I plan to go back. (I saw "It's a Small World" at the 1964 New York World's Fair, and once was really enough :-)

Look at the original - the source data was ~/mail/contacts/* , which is potentially multiple files.

The original command line we're flaming about started with " cat ~/mail/contacts/* | grep [...] ", so assuming there's more than one file in that directory, you can't just use
Also, "cat ~/mail/contacts/* | grep [...] " produces different results than "grep [...] ~/mail/contacts/* " - either RTFM or try it. Pay attention to the filename: at the beginning of each line. Maybe you want it, maybe you don't.

At $DAYJOB, the IT department policy used to be "IE6 Only", which everybody ignored and installed Firefox. Eventually they finally decided to support IE7 (and now support IE8, at least on Win7), and they installed Firefox on our machines the middle of this year. Unfortunately, it's the FF10 ESR, which broke my working environment (FF13 really did do a much better job of memory management, and since IT only supports 32-bit Win7, I can't just fix the problem by installing more RAM.) So I'm hoping they'll get moving and let us upgrade to 17 ESR real soon. (And given the latest IE bugs, I'm hoping they'll let us upgrade to IE9 or IE10 soon?)

My lab machines are mostly running Linux, where this is of course not a problem. And the Linux virtual machines on my desktop run relatively current FF, but there's not really enough room for a big enough VM. One of my coworkers installed native Linux on his laptop with a VMware Windows machine on top that's running the IT department official versions, which let him max out the hardware RAM and lets him do most of his work from Linux, which was at least somewhat helpful.