I'd rather have a set amount of PTO. In my experience, the companies who say "unlimited" really mean "you can, in theory, in the vague and distant future, have some unspecified amount of time off" and that future doesn't always come.
389 karma · joined February 19, 2011
Reach me at <my nickname>@binaryredneck.net
Best day ever (well two best days, it's happened twice): the first time someone whom I considered a much better coder than I came to me for a code review.
At my desk, I have a pretty extensive collection of papers, but my go-to for quick brainstorming or hashing things out is a couple of Arc notebooks (Staples' in-house brand). It's easy to move the pages around, and the paper is very fountain-pen-friendly.
The project's ML, issue queue, and IRC channel(s) are great places to lurk and learn the lay of the land.
When a man isn't making as much money as his peers, he's told to compete: improve his skills, negotiate harder, rack up some accomplishments. When a woman isn't making as much money as her peers, everyone starts talking about HR policies and the pay gap.
It makes women soft. Focusing on women as a class pressures us not to compete as individuals. Those of us who ignore the pay gap and "women in tech" and other distractions, instead choosing to improve ourselves, negotiate for what we want, and show off our abilities make money just fine.
Quit whining and start doing.
Once, I almost took a job with a military contractor for one of those things where I happen to be the only person with the odd assortment of skills to pull a particular product out of the fire. Despite them really needing me, they responded to any request that I have some form of work/life balance with more money (which is nice, but won't raise my child or keep me from burning out). I turned down the job in favor of an offer for less money that allowed me to work from home.
Another time, I was in the office of a place I'd had an offer from. At my request, they'd arranged for me to spend a day with the team I'd be working with. That place pushed the "brogrammer" image about a mile too far: one of my would-be coworkers was even drunk enough to vomit on my desk! I had nothing else lined up, but I knew I couldn't work in that place. I walked.
1) Choose a suitable pseudonym. Heinlein, Orson Scott Card, or Orwell references in the pseudonym get you extra cool points.
2) Generate a gpg key pair and publish the public key.
3) Write stuff. Sign said stuff with your private key.
4) Using Tor, free wifi four towns away, a small computer stashed in a coffee shop set to log in when you aren't there, or whatever methods make you feel safe, post the signed material to several dozen file sharing, pastebin, or other suitably public sites in several different countries.
5) If anybody cares about what you've written, it won't die there. It'll get passed on from person to person long after anybody gets it taken down from anywhere you originally posted.
Mixing business and romance is in itself very difficult to pull off without a massive explosion of drama that hurts everyone involved and spares shrapnel for those who just happen to be nearby. Add in the employer/employee dynamic, and we're talking at best a ton of work to try (and usually fail) to mitigate the power imbalance, and at worst a sexual harassment lawsuit.
You've described yourself as someone who finds it difficult to interact with others. You find yourself falling for someone in a situation where you couldn't help but interact with her. In other words, your hindbrain is screaming "take the easy way out!".
I get it... our society makes the location, selection, and courting of mates difficult and extremely high-risk for heterosexual males. It's dysfunctional, and it needs to stop. Women are trained almost from birth in a set of behaviors and expectations that hamstring you at every turn, and yet most feel powerless in a situation that can be just as frustrating for them.
Learn to be more effective in finding and wooing mates in a situation where you aren't mixing different relationship types, and do your best to step out of the expected patterns. When you aren't reacting to a self-imposed scarcity, passing attractions won't be such a big deal, they'll just pass.
--Susan
P.S. -- Yes, I know I just made all of that sound far easier that it is. It's not easy, but it does work if you go about it right. I know this because I tend to send my male friends and partners into the world far more capable at selecting and wooing interesting women than they were when I found them. It's just another skill to learn.
1. I started taking huge doses of vitamin B6.
2. I moved my work space around a bit to allow for better typing and writing posture.
3. I switched to a good buckling-spring (mechanical) keyboard, like the IBM Model M or one of its successors from Unicomp[1].
4. I switched to the dvorak keyboard layout, which reduces the awkward twists/bends that qwerty forces on us.
5. I stopped writing with ballpoints, rollerballs, or any type of pen other than a fountain pen.
6. I purchased the book Write Now by Barbara Getty and Inga Dubay and learned their italic and cursive italic handwriting, which is much better for the hands than how most of us were taught to write in school.
7. I keep mousing (esp. use of "eraser mouse" or touchpad pointing devices on my laptop) to an absolute minimum.
...and that's it. I've been RSI-free for about a decade. The only caveat I have is that my RSI was in my wrists and the backs of my hands/third knuckles. It was not in my fingers at the second knuckle as your pictures show. I'm not sure that this makes a difference, but I'm not sure that it doesn't, either.
I still spend most of my typical day typing, and a lot of time writing longhand. I don't take any scheduled breaks from either (just the usual pause-to-think/snack/etc) or do exercises for it -- I tried both of those things and they did nothing for me.
Good luck, and feel free to contact me if you have any questions. RSI is not fun.
--Susan
Some things to note:
Modular packs add lots of weight, and you'll want to travel light. You don't know how much ground you'll have to cover, what the terrain will be like, or who you will be trying to help along. Stick with something simple.
For men, military packs offer a good balance of weight, durability, and low price. Women stay away from them. Military packs are designed for a male frame, and do not distribute weight optimally for a female frame. Proper weight distribution lets you carry a heavier load farther with less pain or fatigue.
Take the time to learn some basic survival skills. With more knowledge, you need less gear.
Don't rely on a rigid water bottle, period. They can be broken easily, wear out and leak, and are very low capacity compared to water bladders. Get a bladder (such as those by Camelbak or Platypus) and make sure your pack accommodates it so that you can drink while you move.
Don't carry prepackaged water -- the packaging takes up space and adds weight you don't need. Carry a good water purifier, and purification drops or tabs as back-up.
What kind of first aid gear you should carry depends a lot on your skill level, but whatever you buy MUST be in a waterproof, airtight container.
MREs are kind of bulky for what you get, but if you are a novice they are very easy to deal with. There are plenty of books on backpacking food with more palatable, nutritious, and portable suggestions if you are interested.
The advice on clothing is generally good, though an extra set of shoes, depending on what you wear, may be impractically bulky. Lots of extra socks are a must-have.
There are lots of shelter options out there -- what you will want depends a lot on whether you are bugging out with others, and your skill level. I'm partial to camping hammocks like the Hennessy, though my BoB also includes a tent because my son is usually with me. He has an emergency lightweight shelter in case we get separated. Everyone in the family must have what they need to survive independently if separated, period. Even the little ones.
As for other gear, choose carefully, get the most utility for the weight/cost/size possible. In addition to the "ten essentials" (navigation, shelter, nutrition, hydration, insulation, first aid, fire, light, repair kit, sun/bug protection), I make sure to have provisions for communication, self defense, stress relief, and trade.
To touch on stress relief in particular, books and games can be bulky and heavy. I carry two packs of cards, a journal and writing implement (practically useful, not just for an outlet), and dice. Add to that the kata in my head (prearranged forms from martial arts) or any similarly repeatable exercise you know, and for just a few ounces you can have stress relief and entertainment alone or with others. Small musical instruments such as a harmonica are great, too.
ugh. Sexism is an attitude, the rude introduction was the action. Who cares why it was rude? It shouldn't be more offensive because you can (correctly or not) ascribe a motive to it that you find distasteful.
Trying to decry this sort of thing and speak up in "defense of women" or any of that garbage infantilizes women and perpetuates a much more serious problem than men noticing how we look.
Kind of like the reverse of: http://xkcd.com/385
Looking for part-time work to supplement my income while I launch a project of my own.
Remote/anywhere or on-site/Indianapolis
I've got 8 years experience as a Drupal dev and Drupal trainer, and am a co-author of The Definitive Guide to Drupal 7.
Lately I've become interested in Python web development with Pyramid. My own project is being built this way, so I'm coming up to speed fast.
My other strength is community geekery -- I've done some speaking on things like hacker culture, creating a thriving developer community, and motivating users. Until recently, I worked as a Community Manager over at Stack Exchange/Stack Overflow.
The problem--at least here in the US--is that we create too much friction in adoption, both legally and socially, resulting in people going to insane lengths to conceive children in risky situations, rather than taking in children who desperately need loving homes.
I know a few of my fellow hams who still maintain very old-school rigs that wouldn't be affected beyond hand repair by an EMP. The country would pretty much rely on us for communication.
Without a working car, my son and I would be left on foot to get to the family farm, unless we could trade for horses along the way. Once there, living off-grid isn't a problem. My grandparents never fully trusted modern technology, so my brother and I were schooled in preserving food without power, cooking, heating/cooling a home off-grid, and so on. If this happened in the middle of a harsh winter, we'd face a couple of hard months before scaling up our farm and food preservation efforts, but having confidence that it was temporary would do a lot to get us through.
Not only do all of these give us a way to survive, but they give me things to barter for what we don't have or can't produce.
Cities would have riots, starvation, dehydration, and disease. Suitably rural communities would get by okay, and possibly prosper, under such conditions. City life is just plain unsustainable -- there's nowhere to grow/raise adequate food, no one is taught life skills like growing/raising food (or they rely on commercial fertilizers, garden hoses, etc. to do so), preserving food without electric refrigeration, and so on. Even disposing of sewage and getting clean water depend on electronic-controlled infrastructure. Garbage would pile up like mad without trucks to come get it.
An acquaintance of mine once asked what he should do in such a doomsday scenario. I told him that there was really no way he'd survive, as he lacked any useful skills. He pointed out that he was an extremely good coder, and I asked him what he was going to program. He asked if he could come to the farm with me, and I explained that we can't afford to take on people who aren't prepared to lend anything to our survival.
It varies a lot by scale, the type of land, and what other resources are available, but as a rough estimate you need about 1 acre per person you wish to sustain at a bare minimum. On a smaller scale, with less-than-ideal land, or with inexperienced/incompetent farmers, you need much more than that. If you want someone with those resources to let you make a home on their property (we WILL shoot you if you try to trespass and take resources), you'd better have something to offer in return.
The best way to make your fringe belief not seem so fringe is to keep a steady trickle of attention on it, so people get used to hearing about it. It gives the illusion that the fringe belief has a bigger following than it does, and to people not educated in logic and rhetoric, the bandwagon approach can be pretty powerful.
Here's your oxymoron-of-the-week award.
I don't know where you are on the globe, but here in the US, the trades have increasing shortages. Even employers offering on-the-job training are failing to find enough qualified* applicants.
The problem is that the social status of these fields has fallen dramatically. The guy who pumps septic tanks in my hometown bills more per hour than the lawyer, yet nobody there hopes their kid will skip college and work on septic systems instead, nor would any out-of-work paper pusher I know consider taking the job (even if it meant making more money than he used to).
Our middle class is most hurt not by the changing nature of middle-class jobs, but the changing perception of them. As recently as the 70s or 80s, the guy who fixed your septic, installed your air conditioner, or fixed your car was considered an important part of society -- the very image of middle-class America. Now he's treated like a loser for not having a degree.
How many people who identify with the American middle class go seek new careers that they and their peers see as lower class, even for middle class wages? I don't know, but my gut and anecdotal observation say "not enough". Changing careers is really hard for some people -- how many will make it while their friends and neighbors look down on them for working a dirty job?
* In this context, "qualified" is roughly equivalent to "will show up on time, won't steal or destroy stuff, will behave decently toward coworkers and customers, can read, can follow directions and learn to turn a wrench". So, not looking for rocket scientists, just basically hard-working folks.
I'm in the process of migrating from Openfire to prosody because of issues with Openfire's stability and lack of forward motion (there are features that have been in the works for literally years that still aren't going anywhere -- such as vhosts -- that are standard in many other xmppds.
All else being equal (or just unknown), go with the one you'll get the most immediate real-world feedback on. At least that way you'll know quickly if it's viable, and if not, what made it not viable.
Learning++