what, like has already been done with enterprise integration?

Channels, Adapters, Routers, Filters, Transformers, Splitter/Aggregator, Delayer, Bridge?

Very original.

There's some things shell scripting can do well, and there many things it can't do well - writing large complex programs that make it easy to drop in new functionality without changing existing code is one of them.

A few negative people here may have said they wouldn't hire you for not having a degree, but the fact is plenty of people still will. I can vouch for that with plenty of historical evidence. Admittedly it going to be harder in these economic times but the sooner you go for it the better.

First you need to know if you have an aptitude for it, are you better than some people you work with? half the people? or 90% of the people you work with? You'll need to be good, there's no point pursuing this course if you're not any good.

Start low and work your way up, you'll find out soon how good you are. Start on a helpdesk, and don't spend too long there. Then move on to desktop support and/or sys admin work. From there the world is your oyster (networks/dev/management) - I've pursued this course and am now a developer after 7 years of this path. I'm not great with the math side of it, but I have a colleague we call 'rainman' who does all the deep math while I just stick to good architecture and design principles. Rainman can't communicate for crap, so that's where I come in, I'm the buffer between the genius and the rest of the world. You don't need a degree for that.

If you've got a good attitude and an aptitude for technology/programming/software/problems you'll go further and earn more than most of the negative 'genius' posters on this thread, why? Because you can still have a positive social attitude, and to a profitable forward thinking company that's worth 3 brilliant socially inept techies, all of whom who will need to be lead by someone with good social skills.

This confirms what I'd already been practising for a while now through personal experience and what I'd read/heard.

When it comes to doing martial arts classes and other exercises, I typically start with some deep breathing for 1-3 mins (preferably while walking to the class), then follow with a light 50-60% warm up. I have stretched cold before exercise in the past, but it kept causing injuries (I obviously stopped doing that). Then after I finish a class I'll cool down with some stretches while my muscles are warm - which I find I can stretch much further.

I'm over 30 now and have recently re-started capoeira (so pretty hard for work me), and these high effort classes are getting much harder since I've been out of training for a few years. Getting back in to it I've found (casual observation, no science here ;-) that after a combination of a deep breathing and a light warm up, my ability to train is increased substantially. I'm not exaggerating at all. We're talking the difference between having to stop constantly and feeling like passing out, and carrying on a class just at the edge of my comfort zone. Most of the article seems to back this experience up with some science, which I'm glad about :-)