exactly, Dr. Ink. the arcade version of Asteroids will be much more missed than Duck Hunt.
cheers -- aaron.

a general complaint that the UX stinks is not actionable. if you can collect information documenting the pain points - tech support had to spend a whole hour with a customer because of a misunderstanding about this button, end users are making 10 clicks to do a common action when it could be reduced to 6, and so on - those issues can and should be filed in a tracker where they can get attention and be prioritized alongside the company's other concerns.

the relevant quote is: "quality is a feature, too." (-caskey dickson)

you might want a tool storing claims in the form of RDF triples; these can be used as the basis for deductive reasoning. one standard in this area is the Web Ontology Language. several software reasoners are named in the wikipedia article. also, for existing knowledge bases, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Ontology_Language#Public_ontologies

go read "peopleware" by demarco and lister. this classic addresses what makes a productive workplace in creative technical work. indispensable.

i frequently have the same pulsation problem with the stock android, so perhaps it is a hardware failure.

one case in which reverse engineering will not succeed is if the program is obfuscated in order to conceal a newly developed algorithm.

... i pace in front of a whiteboard during work hours. not to mention all the walking across campus. in my case this required a master's degree.

as you work, collect lists of everything you think went wrong in your programs and programming practices (both practical and academic). you will then be prepared to sit down with your notes from the last quarter and identify broader themes. once you can frame issues in common terms - e.g. your web API mangles UTF-8 input, or you find that you are creating new bugs at an unpleasant rate, or your users aren't understanding your documentation well - you can look up how others have addressed these problems. then the action items will become apparent (eliminate operations that assume input is 8859-1, or adopt a unit testing framework, or work with a technical writer to clarify the text).

do consider placing the computer you choose farther away. in many cases, putting it in the next room or attic or a cabinet will resolve this problem.

calling aztec images "prehistoric" is racist. would a society without recorded history have one of the most advanced calendars of all time, still being reproduced on coffee mugs?

while working on my B.S. at johns hopkins, i spent the year 98-99 at the engineering college ("beaucheff") of the university of chile in santiago. this is the country's premier technical school. the curriculum was quite rigorous, and i studied with some very serious professors including the current head of yahoo! research in spain and the director of the chilean council on nuclear power. lectures and projects are in spanish, textbooks are in english. like anywhere, the bureaucracy was a challenge. it comes recommended because i had a hell of a year.