My wife found a butt-ugly electric sit-stand desk on Craigslist, from which I salvaged the legs.

Bought a nice $40 birch veneer top from Ikea, with their cable tray, attached a full-length outlet strip to the back, an Ergotron arm for my monitor, and mounted all the geeky gear (GbEN switch, KVM, USB hub, etc.) sub-surface.

It's nirvana, and I can sit or stand, and even raise the desk to get under it when they drop the big one.

You can find electric legs in my major US city new for around $500 (more than what I paid for a used desk).

"The White Mountains" trilogy enthralled me as a kid. Great for a young reader.

No, don't get the prequel (though I haven't read it).

If you've had customer face-time, and worked in a large company, or visited large companies and worked in them, your understanding of the corporate world is not to be underestimated.

Young clowns right out of school typically take years to understand how corporations work, how to navigate, how to handle the politics, how to communicate, hell, even how to dress. You probably want to focus on getting back in to corporate work, or perhaps consulting with corporations.

As another poster mentioned, you'll be hired at this age for experience - so parlay what you have, don't fret about age.

If you'd like to take on a modern language, Udacity's got a really good intro course on Python, six weeks long and free. Other courses on web application development, programming a robotic car, and more are there for the taking. Worth your time. Start with Python - its used there extensively, and is a modern interpreted language.

Excellent short story: A boy makes a "disapearer" and puts it to use. Quick, entertaining read, economical, vivid prose.

All excellent titles (and most of these are on my shelf). One I'd like to add is "Simple and Usable" by Giles Colborne ISBN: 978-0321703545

Simple and Usable is a short read, but does a great job at helping you understand what goes into simplifying a design. "Simplicity is not simple" - there's always an irreducible amount of complexity. This book helps you understand how to manage it.

It's a mindset book, not a cookbook - not really similar to "Design of Everyday Things" (DoET), but it serves a similar purpose: help you set your course through the field.

Must be quite a drag for kids in Cumming, Georgia (or for those poor youths from Butts county, GA).

Love my ThinkTank Urban Disguise: http://www.thinktankphoto.com/search.aspx?find=Urban+Disguise. This is a briefcase-look bag, which you wouldn't think held camera gear. Can get a harness for backpack use. Word to the wise: this is a LOT of gear to be hauling. My bag weighs a ton without ANY laptop, and my 15" MacBook Pro makes it a strain on a shoulder. Travel lighter than me, please.

Well, you could go to /dev/null for the functionality they've delivered for me so far.

Your question implies that similar functionality (in the sense of a product that's purchasable, not vapor and that will work as advertised) is actually available somewhere else.

I believe there's a British firm that markets the same hardware, that actually gives a crap about the customer, but unfortunately you're not going to get two working GBEN ports from them either - it's the same device.

No idea where to tell you to turn.

Yeah, I'm still waiting on my "Early June" delivery of a GuruPlug+ from an order in May. It's spec'ed great. Too bad you can only use the Gigabit Ethernet at 10/100.

They think they're going to sell me a "professional upgrade kit" to make it meet the spec they advertized when they billed my card. Bullshit.

So let's say you want to do something you need to rely on: home music server, 24/7 monitoring applications, security. If you haven't laid in a spare, are you going to wait over 3 months for a replacement when it breaks. N.B.:WHEN it breaks.

Run far and fast from GlobalScale!

Why expend so much effort to piss a customer off at your company? Couldn't they have just put up an order page that said "Fsck You, Customer!"?

It's a great idea to get a tour from a dosant. Ours was ex-NSA, and the commentary is was fantastic. There's more than one Enigma there, and also the American version of the Cryptographic Bombe, which broke the 4-wheeled Enigma code. Brings a whole new meaning to "brute force computing".

Sad to say, I agree. Get a Sheevaplug (from someone other than the quite unresponsive Global Scale Technologies), a USB disk that spins down and do a file server that draws about 6 watts.

If you've got software to do productive work on it, you could donate it to World Computer Exchange or freecycle it locally for even less carbon debt - either of these options would give someone less fortunate a hand.

Definitely not trying to say I'm smarter.

When you look at human factors problems, typically "smart" doesn't enter into it in the sense that someone is "not smart enough to perform this task".

In fact, smarts can be a root cause: if everyone on the design team is blindingly smart, they may also be completely blind to the interpretation users make of their product in the marketplace.

This is typically solved with user research (not to be confused with marketing research) and design. Many companies study the out-of-box experience since that's when the user's initial impressions of a product are formed. Ever open an Apple product to find yourself delighted? That's a researched, designed experience.

What first impressions of Moto and Android did this OOB make on my wife? (We both already knew Verizon are asshats).

Hi Coward - goodonya for not signing your name to an ignorant comment. Says more about you than about me.

I work in human factors, so you're in my domain now.

It's really not stupid to pull a tab marked "PULL". It wouldn't have been difficult to mark the tab "PULL - battery" or not mark it "PULL" at all.

  - Smart people designed, built and operated radiation therapy machines that killed people that live in my state.
  - Smart people designed, built and blew up the Space Shuttle Challenger by launching when it was too cold.

These are human factors problems caused when innate human psychology meets poor design:

- Generalizing knowledge in a domain: Wife and I have both seen "pull" tabs in plenty of brand new products where you have to pull the tab out to get the product to begin to work. That's what we thought it was.

- Taking the only instructions at face value: the label "PULL" and "Don't Cut" is used here to mean both "PULL" and "DON'T PULL!". Am I stupid for not getting "DON'T PULL!" out of "PULL"?

Hope your day's going better than mine!

jddj