davesailer

Yeah, so all I can do is maybe throw more gas on the fire by offering some things I found.

Karl Voit did a dissertation on using tags, and developed some software to help...

How to Use Tags https://karl-voit.at/2022/01/29/How-to-Use-Tags/ (and there are several other posts on the subject)

Tagstore: https://karl-voit.at/tagstore/en/papers.shtml

Personally, me still be try to find system to work in own small head. Many head acheings yet.

I love you all. Wow. What a group, what a collection of perspectives.

I'm not top-tier, not in your league at all. Not dumb, but a bit late in getting organized.

I worked for a state government. For too long, trying to make it work. Then on July 7, 2005 I quit my job after deciding that I'd rather die than keep working there. Haven't worked since, as it turned out. Squeaked by somehow, since I always lived within my means and was good at saving money.

In 2011 I took early Social Security, and that thousand a month coming in was a huge relief. Way better than zero. My defined-benefit state pension kicked in during 2014, doubling my income, and now I live in Cuenca, Ecuador and am starting over at age 73, though not really worried about an income. Mostly it's about the learning, and developing skills I never got to before.

And I have learned more about life in the last 10 years than all the time before that, mostly via thinking things over. Of course, now that I'm smart, I'd do everything differently. Radically. If I had the chance.

A couple of days back I looked up a guy I used to work with. He was a young intranet webmaster at [state agency]. Since then he got into the Agile/Scrum world and made a really good living from it. Been all over state government as a contractor, and other places, like Microsoft, and even got to Australia, etc. Good for him. He decided to focus on a thing, own it, and run with it. I've always dithered. My loss.

A thought: If you haven't checked it out yet, take a look at "The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master". See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pragmatic_Programmer and https://pragprog.com/titles/tpp20/the-pragmatic-programmer-2... for info

From my experience...

* The real issue probably isn't finding the right job or company but finding the right people, including the right person within yourself. It always comes down to the people.

* If the Pointy Headed Boss doesn't understand it, then it can't be that important.

* Especially for a small/non-technical company, you are hired help, like a plumber or electrician -- maybe useful from time to time to do some obscure dirty thing but still just another manual laborer.

* From a non-technical boss to me, about a technical issue: I've dealt with people like you before -- you always see it as black and white, but we need more shades of gray.

* There is likely no general solution. What's right for you may not be right for anyone else.

* A well-run company is a well-run run company. That's the fundamental fundamental.

* No-code software is a tool to solve problems. To be of any use it has to be driven by someone who knows how to think, which is what a programmer is.

* The contractor who built one client-server system I worked on needed three more months to finish it. Nope -- had to meet the deadline. So three of us spent two years slapping patches on it. And all three of us left before it was working as promised.

* Words of wisdom from some of my (former) co-workers, none of whom were part of any solution, ever: (1) If it ain't broke, don't fix it. (2) We've never done it that way. (3) Wait.

Some choice thoughts from the comments here:

* "Very few passions survive contact with the industrialized version of their craft."

* "Programming is a tool. Computers are tools. You're not getting paid to program. You're getting paid to solve some problem for your employer by programming."

* "I realized that the problem is inside of my mind...It took me many years to finaly come to the deep realization that sitting down by yourself and brutaly examining my own problems that the mind generates is the only way forward."

* "What I hate about the industry is politics, short-term thinking, selfishness, dogmatism and other forms of irrationality."

* "There is next to nothing being produced today that I care about at all. I don't play games, I hardly ever use my smart phone..."

* "I try to bring a sense of craftsmanship to my work."

* "I thought I was the only one."

More at Goodreads: This I Know: Marketing Lessons from Under the Influence https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/30201128-this-i-know

Check out the video. "Clifford Stoll talk from 1999" at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HvqFo-EU9W0 "The man is certainly eccentric."

"This is a video of a presentation given by Clifford Stoll at a Sequent User's Group 'Enterprise Solutions Summit' in Portland, OR. I happen to find this program on a DVD as I was cleaning out some old boxes and figured it was probably the only surviving copy of this presentation in existence. Of all the programs, presentations and lectures I've attended over a long career in the IT field, this presentation has always stuck with me and I figured it would be a shame if this were lost to the world forever. I hope you enjoy the presentation as much now as I did then." -- William Danger Newman

"When Doug Lindsay was at college he got ill very suddenly. It was the same mystery illness his mother and aunt had suffered from for most of their lives. Doctors were baffled. Doug had to drop out of college and was bedridden for years. He decided to take matters into his own hands and work out what was wrong with him. In search of a cure, Doug eventually persuaded doctors to perform a surgery that had never been done on humans before. He spoke to Outlook's Jo Fidgen, in an interview first broadcast in December 2019."

Also, (previously posted)...

"Doug Lindsay: The Man Who Invented a Surgery" at https://medium.com/swlh/doug-lindsay-the-man-who-cure-himsel...

"This college dropout was bedridden for 11 years. Then he invented a surgery and cured himself" at https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/27/health/doug-lindsay-invented-...

"Indigenous archaeologist argues humans may have arrived here 130,000 years ago" at https://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/indigenous-archaeologist-argu...

"We're supposed to believe that early hominids got to northern Asia 2.1 million years ago and then for some reason didn't go any farther north," Steeves explained. "A few thousand more kilometres, they would have been in North America. So it does not make any sense whatsoever."

There is also a link to a great podcast, and she has a book out too: "The Indigenous Paleolithic of the Western Hemisphere"

Right now I'm reading "PSP, A Self-Improvement Process for Software Engineers" by Watts Humphrey (2005): https://resources.sei.cmu.edu/library/asset-view.cfm?assetID...

PSP = "Personal Software Process", the step before TSP, "Team Software Process".

Personal software process (PSP): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_software_process

Team software process (TSP): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Team_software_process

It's there for anyone who is interested. Right now I'm skimming it to see what I can learn. Can be quite involved but can reduce errors and improve quality by orders of magnitude. (Proven.)

Given that, Humphrey repeatedly emphasizes that communication and understanding about what needs to be built are the most important parts, and that trying to test quality into larger systems can literally take years (of full-time work, by teams of dozens of developers).

Since I'm retired and reviewing all the ways that I wasted my life, then for me it's only an intellectual exercise, but this could help someone still in the thick of it. Lots of food for thought.

Good read...

"Dirt to Soil One Family's Journey into Regenerative Agriculture", by Gabe Brown, 2018

Gabe Brown didn't set out to change the world when he first started working alongside his father-in-law on the family farm in North Dakota. But as a series of weather-related crop disasters put Brown and his wife, Shelly, in desperate financial straits, they started making bold changes to their farm. Brown―in an effort to simply survive―began experimenting with new practices he'd learned about from reading and talking with innovative researchers and ranchers. As he and his family struggled to keep the farm viable, they found themselves on an amazing journey into a new type of farming: regenerative agriculture.

Brown dropped the use of most of the herbicides, insecticides, and synthetic fertilizers that are a standard part of conventional agriculture. He switched to no-till planting, started planting diverse cover crops mixes, and changed his grazing practices. In so doing Brown transformed a degraded farm ecosystem into one full of life―starting with the soil and working his way up, one plant and one animal at a time.

In Dirt to Soil Gabe Brown tells the story of that amazing journey and offers a wealth of innovative solutions to our most pressing and complex contemporary agricultural challenge―restoring the soil. The Brown's Ranch model, developed over twenty years of experimentation and refinement, focuses on regenerating resources by continuously enhancing the living biology in the soil. Using regenerative agricultural principles, Brown's Ranch has grown several inches of new topsoil in only twenty years! The 5,000-acre ranch profitably produces a wide variety of cash crops and cover crops as well as grass-finished beef and lamb, pastured laying hens, broilers, and pastured pork, all marketed directly to consumers.

The key is how we think, Brown says. In the industrial agricultural model, all thoughts are focused on killing things. But that mindset was also killing diversity, soil, and profit, Brown realized. Now he channels his creative thinking toward how he can get more life on the land―more plants, animals, and beneficial insects. "The greatest roadblock to solving a problem," Brown says, "is the human mind."

One source: https://u1lib.org/book/5283239/7bd9a9 38.14 MB

About the Author

Gabe Brown is a pioneer of the soil-health movement and has been named one of the twenty-five most influential agricultural leaders in the United States. Brown, his wife, Shelly, and son, Paul, own Brown’s Ranch, a holistic, diversified 5,000-acre farm and ranch near Bismarck, North Dakota. The Browns integrate their grazing and no-till cropping systems,

which include cash crops and multispecies cover crops along with all- natural, grass-finished beef and lamb, pastured pork, and laying hens. The

Brown family has received a Growing Green Award from the Natural Resources Defense Council, an Environmental Stewardship Award from the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, and the USA Zero-Till Farmer of the Year Award.

Fastmail supports ( https://www.fastmail.help/hc/en-us/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&que... ) the Sieve mail filtering language ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sieve_(mail_filtering_language )

GMail does not.

About the only thing I liked about Yahoo mail was its built-in blocking feature, which apparently used Sieve without any tap dancing needed. All you had to do was pick an email address to block, block it, and that was it - you'd never get _anything_ from that sender again, and the sender wouldn't know that they'd been blocked, so they wouldn't be tempted to try another route.

But GMail? Duhhh, nope.

I started reading the following a couple of nights back. Might give you some help if you haven't already seen it:

The Passionate Programmer (2nd edition) Creating a Remarkable Career in Software Development by Chad Fowler https://pragprog.com/titles/cfcar2/the-passionate-programmer...

You can check it out before buying at either of the following:

https://www.pdfdrive.com/search?q=chad+fowler&pagecount=&pub... OR https://u1lib.org/s/chad%20fowler

"It could be that the purpose of your life is only to serve as a warning to others."

https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0535/6917/products/mistake...

https://despair.com/

Try government work. I was in state government for a long time, trying to make it work. It doesn't. Unless you're a contractor.

They get all the development work, and then regular staff have to try to actually get things working, and maintain it, not knowing how or why it was built that way, but by then the contractor is off doing something else.

During the last failed project I was in the middle of, in 2003 (mostly as an observer, because I actually worked there), I was making around $42k/yr, and the guy in the next cubicle was making $200k.

He knew different things than I did, but I also knew different things than he did, so the difference in pay was because he was a contractor, and therefore considered to be valuable.

Whenever I got a chance to actually do something, my stuff would slip into production and actually work, silently and forever, so I never got to be a hero by coming in on weekends to perform miracle rescues when everything blew up. Because it didn't. One reason that I was never considered to be an asset.

Anyhow, there's government all over. Exactly every town has it, every county, and every state, and there are lots of companies already set up to feed on it, and usually always looking for bodies to throw at it. You can find a niche.

Look at state, county, and municipal government. These are all soul-killers but generally come with livable pay and good benefits, and if you have any relevant skills at all, it's relatively easy to find an opening. There is also contract work for these entities, which can give you a chance to meet people, check out the landscape, and note which skills are in highest demand while you find a way to wiggle into the system.

Stay only as long as you need to or the environment will destroy you. Usually I'd say one year max, but you sound like you need more. Use your time to plan your future in detail.

Look and act happy. Defer to "authority" (i.e., the hopeless incompetent mutants who hire and fire). Smile a whole lot. Pretend that you like everyone even if you hate them all. Engage in friendly chitchat and help out with birthdays and potlucks when they come around. Fake it.

If people like you they'll give you a pass on everything as long as you don't set the place on fire or molest their children. If people don't like you then you're out of luck no matter how excellent you are, because it's government work, and government doesn't go broke, and if something doesn't get done today, or doesn't get done right, there is always tomorrow. And people just want to get through the day and go home and forget about it.

A more in depth version, originally in Spanish: "Freddie Figgers, the baby who was dumped and is now a tech millionaire", BBC Outlook, February 20, 2021, from BBC Mundo via Google Translate:

https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=es&tl=en&u=https:/...

And the podcast which I just found (haven't listened to it yet). "The broken computer that unlocked my fortune."

"Abandoned at birth, Freddie Figgers became a tech prodigy. When his beloved adoptive dad got Alzheimer’s, Freddie invented a shoe with GPS tracking that led to his fortune."

09 February 2021, 23 minutes

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p096h1fx

Similarly...

"Tina Chopp is God." All over Bellingham, WA in the early 1980s, then Seattle, usually scribbled in alleys and under bridges.

I have a copy of the "Book Of Tina Chopp" stored somewhere on a backup drive. No idea if it's still findable online. Mostly a slim link to the memories of my enjoyable days in Bellingham way back when, though I don't know if I'll actually ever read it.

Meanwhile, this gives you a taste of the old days: https://www.abebooks.com/book-search/title/tina-official-new...

Also, my uncle had a boat. Named "Little Schmo". Had a line drawing over the name, looking just like the drawing in the article. Early 1950s. (I'm that old.) Some things were better then.

podcast (mp3 file, runs 00:28:50) https://podcast-a.akamaihd.net/mp3/podcasts/undertheinfluenc...

More info.

Vilhjalmur Stefansson's book, "THE FAT OF THE LAND": https://web.archive.org/web/20180802084820/http://highsteaks...

Vilhjalmur Stefansson's coverage of the same topics from Harper's Monthly Magazine, November 1935:

- Part 1: https://web.archive.org/web/20180109155358/http://www.biblel...

- Part 2: https://web.archive.org/web/20180104021843/http://www.biblel...

- Part 3: https://web.archive.org/web/20171206075942/http://www.biblel...

The Harper's Magazine articles cover the same ground as the book but are better written in my opinion.

Also note: I am not associated with any web site.

See "The E-Myth Principle is Still Alive and Flourishing" at https://www.forbes.com/sites/martinzwilling/2013/04/25/the-e...

"The E-Myth ('Entrepreneurial Myth') is the mistaken belief that most businesses are started by people with tangible business skills, when in fact most are started by 'technicians' who know nothing about running a business. Hence most fail...Let me assure you that in my experience, ...I still see too many businesses started by technicians who haven’t acquired the basic skills or knowledge, or still assume that business acumen is a minor part of the new business equation."

OK, you revealed only far down this thread that you actually are a special case, not just some random local who got an interview. That does add complexity.

But (and I am no expert, and I have never come within a million miles of this level of employer), I decided decades ago that anyone who didn't have the brains to hire me was someone I didn't want to work with. No, really - what you see and what you think you want might not be what you need, and a different employer could be a better match.

I've found in my life that unexpected and unanticipated opportunities usually turn out better for me than ones I think I ought to pursue. Maybe that's only me, maybe not.

And finally, as others have said, interviewing gives you more practice at interviewing, which makes you better at interviewing, and more likely to make it through the inevitable random fluctuations that reject qualified candidates. Randomness is not your fault, but practice at recognizing it and dancing around it will help you.

Also, at Kickstarter, https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/jkapalka/the-mysterious...

Sorry - a bit off-topic but...

Try "The Truth About Money with Ric Edelman": http://www.edelmanfinancial.com/radio

Listen over time and you get an education. You can also check out his books, explore his web site, and end up with a good idea of how to run your financial life yourself.

This is especially good for those in their 20s - start now by putting away modest amounts and you'll be rich by the time you're my age.

Also the "Video DownloadHelper" extension for FireFox will let you download these podcasts and others like them that don't offer a direct download option, so you're not stuck sitting there in real time.

<quote>

With 75 years of climate data cross-referenced with reams of shopping research, marketers can now use the weather to predict sales.

Sears Automotive knows that 5-year old car batteries die after three consecutive days of sub-zero temperatures, so they advertise on day four.

The busiest day of the week at Harley-Davidson dealerships is exactly 22 degrees C and sunny.

When spring temperatures hit 21 degrees C, hair removal products surge 1400%, and BBQ sales jump 200%.

And did you know that when the temperature drops just one degree in the Fall - just one degree - mousetrap sales surge 25%? Marketers do.

</quote>

"Businessman Bill Browder knew a thing or two about how to make millions in Vladimir Putin's Russia. But even he didn't know just how brutal the price of business could be amongst the Kremlin's cronies. Bill Browder recounts the brutal tale of his own lawyer's torture and death and his quest to bring justice to bear on the new Russian bear.

"The 2013 trial of Sergei Magnitsky in Russia was such an example of the theatre of the absurd, that it's since been turned into theatre itself.

"Mr. Magnitsky, a lawyer who worked for a Western businessman, was imprisoned by Russian authorities - and was tortured to death. Only then - after his demise - was he put on trial.

"The co-defendant in that trial is still very much alive today. He's businessman Bill Browder, and Sergei Magnitsky was his lawyer.

"The story is all told in his new book, 'Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder and One Man's Fight for Justice.'"

"Jason Fried is a software entrepreneur and the founder & CEO of a company called Basecamp. He's spent a lot of time thinking about the workplace."

"Teresa Amabile has spent the past three decades looking deep into the hearts and minds of people at work. She's a psychologist and professor at Harvard Business School, and the author of several books on work."

My favorite (from a long time ago now): "Experienced in Lotus 1, 2, and 3."

Check Rails Hosting Info: http://www.railshostinginfo.com/

I found OCS Solutions through them, and am totally satisfied: http://www.ocssolutions.com/

I am a customer of OCS and do not benefit from their business in any way.

I had a really bad experience with another company whose name is like S*5.

Followup to Xinha/Xinha Here! (I forgot these...)

* 2007 Evaluation of WYSIWYG editors: http://www.standards-schmandards.com/2007/wysiwyg-editor-tes...

* List of WYSIWYG rich text web editors from Genii Software Ltd: http://www.geniisoft.com/showcase.nsf/WebEditors

"Xinha Here! is a wrapper for the Xinha HTML editor that enables WYSIWYG editing in any HTML textarea and text input elements."

As a Firefox plugin. Or use it the standard way.

https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/1449