raphaelb

It depends on what your toilet supply lines are like and if you use a cold water only or a cold/hot water bidet, but a cold water only one (not nearly as uncomfortable as imagined before trying it) is very easy to install as long as your supply line has a shutoff valve and is relatively flexible.

It takes 15-20 minutes and it basically consists of unscrewing a few things and screwing them back together again.

I would second this. I read most of "No More Mr Nice Guy", and while I found it helpful in some ways it also was just not as "clean" in my opinion as "Boundaries" by Anne Katherine.

I have difficult times in relationships also, and your post sounds similar to things I've struggled with - general personality / demeanor acquiesce with uncertainty or internal disagreement, very flexible most of the time until very stubborn in certain ways, not feeling like I can recover my peace & internal clarity before another wave.

I recently read the book Boundaries by Anne Katherine (https://www.amazon.com/Boundaries-Where-Begin-Recognize-Heal...) and feel like it was exceptionally eye opening. I always felt like I had a normal-ish upbringing (but how do you ever really know, outside of egregious abuse?) but there was very little to no modeling of positive boundaries and individuation, and it has negatively impacted my relationships.

I've also read some of Henry Cloud's "Boundaries" book, but it was a little too Bible-oriented for me, but that may not bother you. His writing is very clear and he had many insightful gems sprinkled throughout the heavy reference to scripture.

It also may be worth talking to a therapist or counselor (and I would suggest doing it just for yourself first) before trying marriage / couples counseling. In my experience with marriage counselors (admittedly not a lot), the relationship itself is effectively the client. The one I went to wouldn't even discuss with us that our marriage may not be right for either of us whereas a personal therapist is there specifically for you.

Thanks for your detailed reply. These are all good points. I need constant reminders about perfectionism and I like that quote.

Thank you, I will check those out.

I have tried a few times to get on the anki/supermemo bandwagon but have always struggled a bit figuring out how to structure the cards. Maybe I just have some hangups with it but would love to see a good workflow or best practices for incorporating it into my study.

I think specifically I would second guess myself for the syntax of the cards I was creating - and if there was another better way to do it. I always wanted to find almost like a guided walkthrough that would take me through the whole process or something and help me build the skills associated with it.

I always wonder if this is a personality thing... I vastly prefer email (or slack/chat rooms) over phone / in person verbal, with some exceptions for certain types of brainstorming / planning.

I like to provide my thoughts on a topic in written form up front so people have a chance to think about it, and like the same in response.

Plus having a written record of decisions and even the thinking process is so helpful.

I haven't read the book and was going to ask about accurate vs precise but found this helpful article discussing it as it relates to software here if anyone else is curious about that distinction: http://itsadeliverything.com/accuracy-vs-precision-in-estima...

I mean that's fair enough, but do you have the same complaint about companies like NYTimes or other paywalled content? I only mentioned it because numerous people seemed to be very offended by it which seemed a bit odd to me considering you can just close it, but maybe that's just me.

There is a link on the email collection ad that says "Continue without an email address".

I use Green Arrow engine + studio, by the folks at drh.net, and it can do that very well. You can basically get a hook that will execute your arbitrary code for each contact - database lookup on a remote service, whatever. So you can build very complex newsletters that are totally customized to each recipient. And it is fast as can be (can pretty easily push 1M+ messages per hour if you have that much volume to send)

In order to take full advantage of it you need to be a developer though.

It's got great pricing too, esp. if you get their perpetual license and then run it on your own dedicated server (they set it up.)

It's not always prototypes necessarily but mostly it's about reaching out to people you already know and letting them know you are helping people on the side with software work.

I was very lucky in that I happened to be good friends with a super-connector type person who always has people asking him for help. If you know other people who are doing consulting work, you can talk to them, if they are good they won't be particularly protective because good people always have more work than they can do.

In general, it can take time to build this up but in my experience it's valuable to see how you can help / give to others around you, and it will come back to you at some point. You have to learn to avoid the time wasting clients and people who look for you to do spec work, but after you've learned to spot them it's not so hard.

I think the simplest is doing small consulting projects. There are often people looking to launch an app or build a prototype or whatever it is where you can work a couple hours a week on it and make a pretty good rate.

In my experience if you are a pretty good developer and good at communicating, you can find small bits of work without much effort. Now I'm doing a lot of consulting so charge more, but previously I would pick low stress / low mental fatigue projects, with people I enjoy working with (often pre funding prototypes), and charge between $65-$85/hr which could be another $500-600 / month at 2 hours per week.

I also never used any of the freelancing sites, and always found work through personal connections, since it dramatically lowered the risk of getting a bad fit for me.

Cool! I was just talking about something very similar - some kind of parent + kid project kit box, for busy parents who want to work with their kids on something but don't have the knack / time to figure it all out for themselves.

Thanks - I've just started watching cs50 and he is great.

I've been doing professional software development for 10 years but his explanations finally made some very basic things click like they haven't ever before.

Very cool... I've been using TabsOutliner which has been a joy for me, but I like some of the UI refinements it looks like you have.

I've always wanted to do this same thing but include other applications / files and be able to easily pop in or out of a session or project.

At this stage in your career is pick whichever one you are going to learn more from in terms of working with great people. By the way you worded it it sounds like the .net shop will have more people senior to you and therefore may be a better learning experience.

Perks and even salary at this point are far behind the benefits of working with an excellent team you can learn from, in my opinion.

I have practically no sample size but my own father shifted into more project management into his 60s and he's as in demand as ever running a team of 10-12 secs.

And I've personally hired a developer in his 60s for a startup. He was retired but just loves to keep programming and so took up some work with us. He seems to be in reasonably high demand as another company has been trying to hire him in the last month too.

For me, DWYL has always not meant "forget about whatever else is going on in the world and do your own thing", like their example of forgoing finance & law to study Norse mythology.

I always figured it was a perhaps incomplete counter to a previous time where there was an expectation you should not enjoy what you do. Many people talk about hating their work, etc. Perhaps it goes too far in the opposite direction and implies a selfish view, but in my opinion we needed a little bit of that move in this direction. Maybe we went too far and it needs to be adapted to something else, such as "Do what you love, that also has value to society" or something.

I definitely agree with the digs against off the clock "well you should love what you do, so keep doing it for free!" stuff though.

This is super cool! I've often thought about doing exactly this but never got off my ass to start building it!

The only other functionality I would like out of my own setup which I might play around with is having each of the projects have some keyword / context based on the project. So for example all of my 'blog' browser windows are in one browser window with multiple tabs and I could be in another project and move a tab to my blog project easily.

The other thing I would like about that is sometimes I end up with 25+ tabs, all over the place relating to one or two of my projects. If when I did the equivalent of virtualenvs "deactivate", it would save all of the tabs in the active projects browser window and they would open later when I deactivated the project. This also would be useful for to leave a project all alone, as close to how I left off as possible to focus on something else, but without losing that state.

Like screen for your entire work setup.

Thanks for sharing your setup!

I answered my own question. Bought it, looks great. From the book:

"This book should work well with the Django 1.4 series, less so with Django 1.3, and so on."

Is it only for 1.5? Will the best practices carry over for someone looking to understand more about structuring 1.4 projects?

I'm working on a 1.4 project right now and while 1.5 sounds great, I'm not sure we're quite ready to upgrade. But we've been looking for a best practices book more recent than the ones covering 1.0 on amazon.

To be fair you didn't link these studies you speak of either. Modes never seemed to bother me very much and I've been using vim for a while but I can understand the difficulties with it.

Also it occurs to me that I may do some of those things like mashing esc repeatedly just to be sure subconsciously.

"If given a complete lack of want, I'm convinced the majority of the world's population will choose to do nothing creative with it"

I don't know if I agree - I think if you move up Maslow's hierarchy of needs and they no longer 'want' the basics, they will allow themselves to advance into the 'higher stages' and then desire to fulfill those needs such as socializing, sex, etc. But presumably if those things all come easily as well, they will then move further up the line into creative expression, etc.

I know I've been most creative when I didn't need to be, and everything else in my life was more or less 'taken care of', and I suspect many people would have the same experience.

I certainly don't claim I'm a great programmer, but I can attribute a lot of my career success to focus on and learn to improve #5. I got the itch to improve it because the greatest programmer I know is a true master of rapidly debugging problems, and great at un-sticking projects when no one else can/will.

I was able to improve my own skill in the matter with the "Learn to Debug" section in the "How to be a Programmer Book": http://samizdat.mines.edu/howto/HowToBeAProgrammer.html

It seems as humans we jump on any chance to beat ourselves up for not doing, being, or having something.

Oh, I don't have a $1B company, I've got to beat myself up about it. Oh, I'm older than So and So 20 year old who sold his company for $15M. Oh, I'm too young to have the right experience to really tap into this niche. Oh, I spent too much on college and now have all this debt and need to get a real job instead of starting my business. Oh, I didn't go to college and everyone else my age has great connections from it.

Just stop playing A you lose, B you lose.

That feels a little heavy handed and like you are projecting of your own values onto the situation to me. The 170 customers are paying right?

If the site works and is providing those 170 people what they want then what exactly is wrong with that? If its not providing them what they want why are they still paying $99 per month for it?

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Very nice site. Right after he resigned I actually stopped and thought about how he had changed my life directly or indirectly. Truly amazing.

We created a FB event "Dress Up Like Steve Jobs Day": https://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=130179840411684 to honor Steve Jobs on Friday, September 9th.

I tried everyman with my wife and thought it was going great subjectively, until a friend of ours said "You guys look like shit" which made us promptly realize that hidden behind the delusion that we were doing fine we were much more dull.