Hilarious. Pointing out petty condescension is condescending, I guess.

You did read the second part of his comment, right? Where he is clearly being ironic and is referring to corporations, not proper human beings? Good rant, though!

From what I understand the reason people get offended is that M$ implies there is something evil about making $$$.

I just get offended by people saying 'M$' because it paints the Linux community as a bunch of pimply-faced teenage dorks that think that calling Microsoft 'M$' is like the greatest insult in the world. I use Linux at work. It's a great developer platform. I use it t home for my server. Great at that, too. Just have a windows box for games. So you can call me a Linux geek... but I hate two things about the linux community:
Those that insult proprietary companies like a kid would
Those that insult others trying to learn Linux (if someone was to say "RTFM" to a newbie in real life, I'd kick him in the nards)

Really? 401k is a retirement, long-term investment. The market goes up and down, so unless you plan on cashing out your 401k TODAY or next year, I say now is the time to put MORE into the 401k. It's the stock market! When it's low, put in more money, when it's high sell off!

Never ever ever react to a sudden change in the stock market on a long term investment, unless it's something like enron...

I'm in the iPhone camp and have both of these apps on my iPhone.

The only reason I'd flip to android is that I can write java apps to the android... if you want to write an app to your iPhone, its objective-C, which I know you probably prefer, Barbie, but I'm a java guy ;)
Another advantage of iPhone is maturity. The androids are still level 1.0. I like to wait for the next gen (which is why I have an iPhone 3G, and never had the original iPhone).

LOL! Love the subject, johndiii :D

As with everyone, I'm surprised you lasted this long. A threat to pay is a last resort, company will fall out from under you if you leave, kind of threat, or a threat to someone you want to quit so you don't have to go through any company policy severance...

If you are looking for a job in the states, let me know. My company always appreciates a good developer, and we do placement jobs if you don't want consulting.

Yup... spiders kill the bugs that can carry disease and stuff. As long as they are like up in the ceiling or out of the way areas making webs, I let'm go...

I'm all for reform, but national vote count is a lot easier to corrupt than a bunch of district votes. Checks and balances are in place to prevent corruption. Why are we getting rid of them?

... now that messages are on the front page (or I just found them), I'm late to the party, but allow me to also say "I'm here if you need anything."

I'm a big believer in marriage, and I hope you've tried counseling with both of you before you (will or already have) hung it up.

Best of luck. This is a time thing... it'll take time to get through it all, and you never may get through it entirely, but know there are others out there to help you through it.

Apps worth having:

• TwitterFon: I've tried a variety of twitter apps, fon is free and the best
• Wikipanion: Free wikipedia app that makes it much easier to read wikipedia from the phone
• PNC Mobile: Or any other bank app... if you like to keep track of your banking on the fly
• iFitness: The only app I've purchased. If you work out and want to keep track, its the best out there.
• WebMD: If you do webMD, this has the symptom app already built in
• Dictionary.com: Great app (huuuge 35MB!), but its all offline with pronunciations.
• Shazam & Midomi: Want to know who sings that song with a link to iTunes?
• Stanza: Free online books (download and read on the phone)
• TWC: Local weather + weather channel forecast movies
• Lightsaber: Fun toy ;)
• Trace, CubeRunner, TapDefense are the games I've played and kept
• DirectTV: If you have direct tv, you can log in and set your machine to record shows and stuff

That's my list. I haven't found a decent free chess game (with AI... there are some free online ones, I believe), and there are too many pay ones for me to look at, but if you find a winner, let me know. Sudoku apps are a dime a dozen...

IntelliJ is definitely the cream of the crop when talking about it and eclipse and netbeans... the problem is the latter two are free, but IntelliJ is hundreds of dollars...

eclemma is probably what you are talking about witht he emma/junit.
I'm also a fan of 'findBugs' for statistical analysis and I use Q4E for Maven2 integration.
Also, 'extract method' is a great refactoring thing to know... and you can make it so saves automatically organize imports and format the code...

... I prefer eclipse. Netbeans has some nice wizards, but eclipse I feel is more polished and has far more plugins to help with the coding.

If you want to play a FPS with great story and playability, I'd suggest Metroid:Prime3. Of course, I'd say go get the first two gamecube games and play them so you are entirely into the story and everything in the game, but I'm a metroid fan since the original NES version, so I think its completely and entirely worth it...

Obviously, in the interest of runtime efficiency, I don't want to use the modulus operator, or a for loop, or a switch statement, or a bunch of ifs ...

Seems like mod + for loop would make for the quickest and easiest code. Why make something complex when there is no requirement to do such a thing? This could be a process that runs on its own machine in the middle of the night where those 'wasted' cpu cycles wouldn't matter...