culley

It would be great to have this kind of historic information on all consumer electronics.

It's nice to buy a fridge on the cheap because it's last year's model.

Rob Cross has a nice book on Social Network Analysis.

Google Social Network Analysis to get a quick over view of the field and the relevant open questions.

Living in NM, the rural areas are really poor (Income ~25% less than urban), mostly agriculture (big trucks), and long distances to travel to get to gas stations. Combine that with all the young kids moving away (free lottery scholarships) and a higher than normal percentage of people on fixed income, and I'm only surprised the gas doesn't eat up more of their income.

wow. I wrote that same passage down, and this one: "There is an expiration date for blaming your parents for steering you in the wrong direction."

I use Wink for all my demos. Easy, Fast, Small Size final product, compatible with all browsers, and did we mention free?

Facebook is an older crowd of mostly college graduates. Thus higher income and more desirable to marketers. They do a good job of helping you find friends of a friend and reconnect with high school and college friends. Games like scrabolous give the bored office workers something to do.

I believe the word you are searching for is Clit Mouse. Only Lenovo (Think Pad) and Dell (D620?) have them.

Stop and Smell the Rosemary, Junior League of Houston Cook Book. As a cook, it is one of the few that I leave in my kitchen and regularly consult. Full of accurate great recipes that make you look fabulous.

PS - And the ex-wife (mother) asked for her own copy this year for Mother's day.

100k plus options. 10 yrs experience. NM. Nice House in city center $800 a month. 20 min commute. But no comparable companies to move to in town.

Consider attending a political event. You'll be surrounded by only the socially adept who will all be forced to at least talk to you momentarily. Watch as they work a room. A relatively cheap donation will get you invited. Consider it a training fee. You'll learn more about power and interpersonal relationships in a night than a month of sitting by yourself at the bar.

btw - I second that this is a skill that does not come from books. It requires real effort on your part.

For debugging it's amazingly effective. Even simple coding comes out amazingly bug free when you have a second set of eyes watching as you go. I second that it is intense. I accomplish much more than I would by myself, but I always feel very used up afterwards.

Really hot computers are a thing of the past. The new Intel chips run cool and low watt. Check out the Air for example. No more burned testicles!

You can recycle Al with electricity. A large portion of the Al in circulation is recycled.

So far so good. Nice Concept and implementation. Check out RadioFreeTexas.org for a direct competitor with other interesting point based ideas.

alright, I figured it out. Set up a gmail account for the barber. Set up a standard email request on his site. They click the button sending him the request. gmail is smart enough to recognize key words (like event) and tag them. Right click to add them to his calendar. gives him "approval" rights allows anyone to email a request for a specific time. shared calendar can limit everyone to free / busy to keep privacy clean.

good suggestion. I'm going to give it a go.

Getting closer to an answer http://www.google.com/support/calendar/bin/answer.py?answer=...

Looks like I can invite anyone, but still not sure if anyone can invite the google calendar.

Thanks for the quick summary and the link. These are too complex for the need. I could hack one down to the right size, but I'd rather not be in the barber support business.

thanks for the thoughts.

Does anyone know if Google Calendar supports invites from other systems? Outlook for instance.

Lots of lawyers with black berries as clients, but few tech savy ones.

I just spent 2 hours learning about whole empires that I had never heard of. Joys of a great american education.

In my experience, business users get frustrated trying to explain all the ways their business works to programmers.

Having to define the problem for programmers is the key.

If they can do it themselves, they don't have to make you understand what they want.

Will it be good software by programmer standards? probably not. But if it works. Does anyone care?

It boils down to is it easier for me to teach a business user enough IT to solve their own problems or for a business user to teach me all the details of their problem in a way I can solve it for them.

Very few problems are worth training a developer on the details of my business.

This is already occurring. I work at a large engineering company. The engineers, even those with no coding experience, are writing one off scripts to solve problems and then throwing them away. Some write 10-15 scripts a day. All of which used to be done by IT. Our IT department has shrunk to glorified data managers. Make sure the data is reliable and the engineers write all the logic themselves.

It's much nearer than you expect.

It may not be agile or maybe it's the extreme of agile.

Our finance guys started using the scripting language just 6 months ago.

The requests are drying up from them as well...

None of the script would pass even basic IT standards, but they work. And they only have to work once. Answer the immediate question. They don't care if it takes 1 min or 8 hours.

It's not pretty, but it is disposable code with no IT involvement.

Albuquerque is nice. Not Flat Decent city with interesting things to do. Fair community of hackers, coders and makers. Lots of movie money, lab money and spin offs. It's really booming around here lately Still possible to live walking distance to good food, bars, music, parks, and grocery stores for minimal green (especially compared to Bay Area).

Santa Fe is expensive and full of retirees who are snobs. It's close enough to drive up or train up (coming soon) if you'd like to visit, but no one should live there.

The only caution is NM is the land of entrapment. Stay for more than 2 years and you will never move away. (the spanish have been here for 500 years).

BS Material Science - Rice Took no comp sci in school, but I've been coding since I was 8 (Drawing Mr. T in VB) Currently work as a coder, never used the degree but.. co-workers who do my same job without a degree pull 20k less a year and are career limited (in that they can't advance anymore until they get a degree of some kind)