1,233 karma · joined May 20, 2008
I think this is a great reason to take a nap in the middle of the day if your environment is conducive to it. It works for me as long as the code is the top thing on my mind when I fall asleep.
The fact is, the average person couldn't become a professional athlete no matter how hard they worked. That causes athletes' genetic gifts to overshadow their hard work.
Besides that, if you think the culture is bad now, it's likely that you'll find similar settings intolerable after 6 months of sabbatical.
That's kind of my point, really. There are already some options in the wild, and they're bound to get better, so that's definitely a plus for Android.
The most annoying thing to me is the lack of a really good equivalent to Interface Builder. Building UI's in XML is tedious and error-prone.
Along those lines, there seems to be a problem with doing the XML layouts in Eclipse. There have been reports suggesting that the layout tool is creating a memory leak which eventually leads to the 20-seconds-to-switch-tabs problem.
There are things I definitely prefer about Android versus iOS, like the Activity/Intent framework. I feel that it encourages a much more modular design.
The code signing and deployment process is also much easier on Android.
I also like XmlPullParser slightly better than NSXMLParser (though the performance might be worse), but that's just a personal preference. And if you really want a SAX parser, you have that in Android too.
IMO, on both platforms you'll be pulling a bit of hair out
[1] Mark Murphy's commonsware site has a 0.4 version of a book called Android Beyond Java with an incomplete chapter on writing apps in Scala. I've never tried writing an Android app in Scala, so caveat emptor. I am also aware of some efforts to get Clojure on Dalvik, but I understand that it is very slow out of the box due to reflection.
There are occasionally comments in the android-developers group about issues specific to particular phones. Seems like the Droid is often mentioned, and the thread I recall was with the camera.
I imagine it would be frustrating to get a crash report, not be able to duplicate it, and have your app work fine on the dev phone in your possession.
edit: here's the thread: http://groups.google.com/group/android-developers/browse_thr...
Early on, my wife (a pronounced extrovert) wanted adult contact and conversation more than anything. She wasn't all that happy when I was off in the land of ones and zeros when she was talking to me. It was a minor issue before the baby, but it really came into focus when their was a little person vying for our attention all the time. As your child gets older, this advice will apply doubly for the child.
This might sound a little crude, but, here goes: after the first three months, schedule opportunities for intimate time! Your time will be limited, and anything that is not a priority will go by the wayside. You can look up and find that it has been several months since you've been intimate. We didn't have a strict schedule like every Wednesday after she sorted the recycling[1], but we did agree in advance to "take a nap together" later that day or the next day. Spontaneity just didn't really work for us. The trick is keeping the pressure off - if one of you is tired and really just wants to take a nap together, that's got to be OK, otherwise it will drive you apart rather than bring you together.
Good luck. It's an awesome adventure!
This observation is hugely important because one of the biggest myths about low-carb diets is that eating all that fat will be bad for your heart when in reality study after study shows that such diets outperform low-fat calorie-resricted diets on the most important lipid indicators - HDL, VLDL, and triglycerides.
The scare-tactic logic runs something along the lines of "Sure, you might lose weight but think about what you'll be doing to your heart."
When hard numbers show that eating unrestricted amounts of fat and protein lead to similar weight loss as a low-fat, calorie-restricted diet, the lipid results are swept under the rug.
This matches my personal experience. I had similar weight loss result on both types of diets, but my blood panels were dramatically better on a low-carb diet. I'd also add that I never felt hungry on a low-carb diet, while I was constantly hungry on the low-fat, calorie-restricted diet.
I find the main difficulty with low-carb diets is that they are boring. Our society does not cater to them. Ordering at restaurants and eating lunch with your workgroup when meals are brought in ase challenging. There's also a lot of social pressure around dessert (parties) and alcohol.
Unfortunately - at least for me - cheating on a low-carb diet is a major setback because it can set up a cycle of hunger that take at least a few days to get out of. Low-fat diets aren't the same, mostly because you are often convincing yourself to be hungry all the time anyway.
But mostly I agree with you.
No difference?
"A low-carbohydrate diet, which consisted of limited carbohydrate intake (20 g/d for 3 months) in the form of low-glycemic index vegetables with unrestricted consumption of fat and protein." (emphasis mine)
"During the first 6 months, the low-carbohydrate diet group had greater reductions in diastolic blood pressure, triglyceride levels, and very-low-density lipoprotein cholesterol levels, lesser reductions in low-density lipoprotein cholesterol levels, and more adverse symptoms than did the low-fat diet group. The low-carbohydrate diet group had greater increases in high-density lipoprotein cholesterol levels at all time points, approximating a 23% increase at 2 years."
That's a pretty big difference if you ask me. The low-carb group was not calorie-restricted. The low-carb group had more positive changes in the most important heart disease indicators (VLDL and HDL). Notably, the HDL increase is very important.
Insulin has a very important role in weight control but is often ignored in favor of the calories in - calories out argument, an argument that ignores important factors in weight control (most notably the influence of diet on satiety and metabolic rate).
From what I understand about brain development from my child's pediatrician, dietary fat is important. I don't think the calorie argument is airtight. There's more to the story than is presented here.
Anyway, the author opens with information from one source who seemed to focus on meat and later includes information from another source focusing on cooking. An editor probably read two paragraphs and wrote the headline. Nothing to get bent about.
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If there are 10x as many users who joined in 2010 as there are those that joined in 2007, then this graph implies that more veteran users are more likely to post.
I didn't make the first step for a long time because of some faulty assumptions.
I started working part-time about 5 weeks ago, and it's become obvious that I was fooling myself for the sake of maintaining the status quo. Now that I see that it's relatively easy to find income outside of my day job and that my family can cut expenses if we are more deliberate about how we spend, I wonder why I have always imagined the worst.
The biggest factor is stuff. It's true that what you buy enslaves you. Houses to a mortgage, cars to a loan and expensive insurance, retail items to credit card debt. The more you can eliminate or reduce those expenses, the less of an excuse you'll have to keep working in a situation that isn't fulfilling.
They might appear to be logically equivalent[1], but one clearly has hope of gaining empathy from the public and the other does not, especially considering BP was already on the hot seat about their safety record.
[1]I don't think they are - Apple's design decisions are no where in the same league as BP's ongoing record of putting the health of their employees at risk. The only entity benefitting from BP's decision would have been BP, whereas the antenna design supposedly gives better reception when the signal is not being attenuated by the user's grip.
No one would have felt small-minded to focus on those details, especially as the total number of barrels climbs toward 5 million.
Bottom line, you need to be near the top of the hill to take the moral high ground, and by all accounts, BP was near the bottom.
The idea of combining closed loop model-based control for the easy-to-model portion of a process with open-loop control for the difficult-to-model portion of a process would have a lot of application in lots of places, but not many people would pay attention to using the technique for, say, controlling a distillation column.
I appreciate the nice link to a PDF I found on Mr. Kolter's website from the link at the end of the second video: http://ai.stanford.edu/~kolter/lib/exe/fetch.php?media=pubs:...
- Be a good communicator. This means speaking and writing well, giving timely updates, and being clear about the spec.
- Be honest. Buyers are expecting you to blow smoke. If you don't, they'll be shocked. This means sometimes saying, "I don't know how to do that, but I can learn."
- Follow through. I've had one client pay me to learn something just because he knows I will do what I say I will.
I'm sure there's more tips, and I do a lot wrong (like not say "No"). But doing the basics will put you above the crowd, even if your skills aren't top 10%.
My biggest concerns prior to initiating the negotiations were 1) affecting morale if someone else is forced to compensate for my reduced hours, 2) the fact that I occasionally do freelance mobile development on the side, and 3) possibly being let go as my company is going through a downsizing. So far, it hasn't been an issue, but it's early.
It turns out that my freelance work is a non-issue according to my employment contract and IP agreement. I didn't really reduce my hours to do freelance work. Instead, I was doing freelance work to insure some modest income should I be forced to resign, and I may reduce my efforts there since I can easily live just on the income from my part-time work. My boss and his boss were cool about the freelancing, but they told me to keep it to myself, and I wish that I had been more private about my side interests prior to asking to go part time.
In your case, I would check up on the IP situation. You don't really want to be in a position where there are questions about who owns your side project.
As far as negotiating tips, what worked for me - I don't know that this is great advice necessarily but I had to do it this way because it addressed the worst case scenario in terms of short-term income - was that I was resolved to resign, even though it wasn't really my first choice in improving my situation. However, I have about 1 year's living expenses saved up and I'm making close to $1K a week doing 20 hours of freelance mobile development and turning down projects just about every day. That gave me the confidence to start the conversation by saying, "I am considering resigning." Eventually, I suggested the work schedule that I was willing to consider. I had researched the company HR site to know what options were available to me. I also felt reasonably confident that they want me to stay and that it would be hard to replace me, at least in the short term.
One thing that is bad about bringing up resignation is that it will likely keep you from collecting unemployment if your employer plays hard ball. I never said "I resign," just that I was considering it, but I have been advised since then that it was probably a bad idea from that standpoint. It probably didn't matter in my case because I wouldn't be eligible anyway due to my freelance income.
Also, I have a very friendly relationship with my boss, so that helps a lot. It seemed that he really wanted to help me, and he played up the cost savings angle up the management ladder to help me get what I wanted.
The caveats are that I was prepared to resign, the agreement includes a stipulation that either side can rescind the arrangement with 30 days notice, and our HR department was already set up to handle such arrangements.
I wanted to do something like this for a long time, but I was too afraid to ask.