antiform

Converting mockups from "the layout guy" into HTML/CSS was my first non-food-service job in high school, but this was about six years ago, at a small advertising firm that did more print work than web work.

I think the confusion comes from referring to the person who does the mockups as a "web designer." I have yet to meet a person with that title who does not know HTML or CSS. The people who don't get their hands dirty with the coding are usually referred to as just graphic designers.

The Man Who Knew Infinity, about Ramanujan, is a biography that I reread regularly, if only as an example of somebody who continued to do what he loved against all odds. Whenever I get overly frustrated with a math or programming problem that I can't seem to overcome, I go through some of my favorite passages in there, if only to remind myself how lucky I am to be able to what I love with the support of the people in my life.

Also, I can now safely say that reading The Autobiography of Malcolm X in high school was a key moment in my personal development.

In my opinion, it would be a lot more productive to learn one of the "standard text editors," namely vi(m) or emacs. The learning curve is higher, but it will allow to be very productive on almost any Unix-based operating system.

Textmate is a great product with a lot of useful features right out of the box, and it very Mac-like with its UI and Apple-style keyboard shortcuts. It also has a lot of macros, and you can access a lot of shell commands straight from the menus. However, by hiding all of these details, it makes it more difficult to use a computer that does not have Textmate on it.

Thus, if the "Macness" of a program is very important to you, and you don't mind being dependent on one machine and one proprietary program, then Textmate is certainly worth the cost. If not, then I recommend you save the money and build skills for the future by learning how to work with vim or emacs.

I actually think the two sentences that follow that quote reveal a lot more about Paul Erdos.

"You've showed me I'm not an addict. But I didn't get any work done. I'd get up in the morning and stare at a blank piece of paper. I'd have no ideas, just like an ordinary person. You've set mathematics back a month."

(http://www.untruth.org/~josh/papers/Paul%20Erd%F6s%20bio-rev...)

This is pretty spot-on. Find something you like to use or are interested in. If you want to get involved in coding, you should start with some minor bug fixes. For instance, Django has a separate list of "easy improvements" to encourage newbies to get involved (http://code.djangoproject.com/wiki/LittleEasyImprovements). You generally should not try and go for a major bug fix right off the bat, because if your code does not follow the convention for that project or the direction in which it is going, your patch will probably be rejected.

Coding aside, most open source projects are also hurting for things like proper documentation, testing on multiple platforms, plugins, and a good-looking accessible website, so you should just find the intersection of your skills and interests with what the project lacks and go on from there.

Having known graduates of both Daewon and KMLA at several elite colleges, I can say that their performance is comparable to most of the other students at their respective colleges. There are those who continue in their study habits and graduate at the top of the class, those that relax a little to explore their options and enjoy more of their college experience, and those that put more emphasis on socializing than studying. There's no real stereotype of a typical graduate from one of these schools, other than being smart, Korean, and communicating in fluent English. Most of them seem to be happy to be going to college in the U.S.

The craziest thing about most of this is that it takes just as much (if not more) effort for kids in high school to get to one of the top 3 Korean colleges (Seoul, Yonsei, Korea). In fact, both KMLA and Daewon also have a track for students who want to attend Korean universities that is just as intense.

It's hard to say whether this is the best way for a person to spend their high school years, but in places like Korea and Japan, this is the way that any college-bound student spends their youth. Everybody who wants to go to college either attends a college prep school or a private prep program from about middle school, because that's the way it has always been.

Harvard University (and to a slightly lesser extent, other Ivy League schools).

Their product is nothing if not world-class, and over the last century or so, it has become nearly synonymous with success, privilege, and prestige.

It can be disputed whether or not there was a significant conscious effort to manage its image through marketing or branding, but one cannot deny the effect it has in many places of the world that you are associated with that institution.

I think a small vignette from Clerks says it best:

Dante Hicks: "Theoretically, people see money on the counter, and no one around, they think they're being watched."

Veronica: "Honesty through paranoia."

I used to be a Camino guy, but Firefox 2 with the Vimperator plugin won me over.

If you're pretty comfortable with your programming chops, want to get up and running quickly, or are planning to do "real-world" programming with Lisp, Practical Common Lisp (http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/) is great.

Personally, I loved learning Scheme (a dialect of Lisp) from from Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/), and since it's used to teach CS courses, you can find lots of exercises and project ideas online. If you don't mind a slower, more concept-based learning method, you can supplement your programming projects with this book.

"A taste for the mysteries of numbers is excessively rare, but when a person of the sex which must encounter infinitely more difficulties than men to familiarize herself with these thorny researches, succeeds nevertheless in penetrating the most obscure parts of them, then without a doubt she must have the noblest courage, quite extraordinary talents and superior genius." - Gauss to Sophie Germain

I'm not a big fan of the O'Reilly books on Python, but if you prefer the style of Learning Python, you can't really go wrong. Most of the basic Python tutorials teach more or less the same material, so you won't miss too much by choosing one tutorial over the other.

I personally recommend How To Think Like A Computer Scientist (http://openbookproject.net/thinkCSpy/). It doesn't cover everything in 2.5, but I think most of the stuff in 2.5 you're better off just reading the release notes after you have a basic grasp on the pre-2.5 stuff. You're going to be reading a lot of code to master the nuances of Python, and most of it is pre-2.5 Python, so you should know it well.

If you want to use that book, there's also assignments and projects available from UC Berkeley's self-paced Python course, CS 9H, at http://www-inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~selfpace/cs9honline/ if you want more structure.