midnightmonster

They're not expired accounts--they're active subscriptions with valid payment information where the expiration date on the card used to subscribe has passed. Such cards are often still 'good'.

Members can easily cancel the service any time, but they have to actually cancel. If we cancelled everyone with an old card we'd be hassling a lot more people than we'd be helping.

I'm a little surprised at the reaction here.

It's a service--like most other consumer subscription services--where if customers have to take action to keep their subscription going, you're more likely to lose those customers than if they only have to take action if they want to cancel.

My belief is that (1) when people's cards expire, many people don't bother to update their card information in every single place they have a subscription and (2) most people who want to cancel will actually cancel and not just count on their card's expiration date to do it for them. Since we've had just one complaint in more than a year (on the order of 0.1% of number of charges we've made on past-expiration cards), I think my beliefs are justified.

And charging for time spent writing email to or for a client and consulting on the phone sounds scummy to you?

I saved a client tens of thousands of dollars per year by not making a small change.

The client had just had a customer service issue where one of their customers discovered many months later that her card was still being charged for her subscription even though the card had expired. She didn't know that many cards continue to work after they expire, and had never bothered to cancel her account.

So the client wanted me to make sure that we don't charge expired cards in the future. As far as I knew, this was the first time the issue had come up in the more than a year since we switched payment gateways, so I generated some new reports, and it turns out they had charged almost $4,000 to expired cards just in the previous month. Some of those customers would correct their card data if we notified them, but the reality of subscription businesses is that there's a lot of inertia involved. It's safe to say that the client would simply lose a fair portion of those dollars every month if we stopped charging expired cards with active subscriptions. Much better to refund the one customer/year who complains that they thought an expired card meant they unsubscribed than to forgo all that revenue. Of course they agreed and we didn't make the change.

FTR, this is the same client that a few months ago was complaining that I was the only programmer they'd ever worked with who bills them for email and phone conversations. I'll be reminding them of this case if it ever comes up again.

I'm the rails newb on a small team. (Many years other programming experience.) I don't have any small projects to hand off, but I'd love another person or two to bug on gchat or aim when I'm trying to figure out what is the Rails Way of doing something.

Slightly off topic parenting discovery: if you're the dad in the USA, you can count on general approval or at least tolerance for just about anything you do with your kids in public so long as you're not hitting them or screaming at them. It's kind of insulting that the standards are so low, but most people still seem to expect dads to be clueless, and/or they treat taking the kids out in public by yourself as an extra credit activity for fathers.

Copy promises scalable vectors, then lists 4 raster formats as what you get.

What's the minimum you'd use for iPad development?

Maybe someday I'll be at the point where my fitness goals require regularly pushing through the pain, but right now I want to push through the resistance with mental work. As evidenced by the fact that I do eventually do most everything I'm supposed to be working on, I don't think any of my work is too hard absolutely--it only feels too hard or too long or too boring for how I'm feeling at the moment.

I'm a programmer doing almost all client work. Eventual goal is to build a different kind of business around building my own stuff.

One probable analog is knowing the course. That should mean it's easier to work well on tasks that I can see the end of, but it should also mean that it's easier to do something very much like something I've done before. The first may be helpful, the second is obvious and not helpful.

I have no direct competitors to keep in view or focus on beating. Maybe I can hack my brain to think about the work competitively somehow.

If there's an analog to focusing on the running, I'm not sure how it would work.

I had a macbook but found I preferred my Linux desktop. I ended up giving the macbook to my wife. I'm thinking about getting another mac for iPad development, but I still expect to do everything else on my Ubuntu machine.

It's good to be able to switch positions. You can get an (expensive) desk that easily adjusts height, or a drafting stool so you can sit at your standing desk, or two desks. I found that I did tire of standing, but getting one of those comfort mats for standing helped, and adding the treadmill so I can walk or stand helped more (and has made it much easier for me to lose weight, I believe).

You probably have too-small a screen or too small letters on your screen, though for what it's worth there really i no ergonomic way to use a laptop that doesn't involve at least one of an external keyboard or screen. Increase your font sizes, and you may not feel the need to lean in so much. (And/or see an eye doc.)

And working at home (or in a startup you run, I guess) means you can do things to help your health and productivity even if they might seem ridiculous, like take naps and walk while you type. Yet another reason I don't see myself ever having a 'normal' job again. (And most people seem to think my treadmill desk is pretty cool, fwiw.)

"not have to move back into my parents place while I job hunt"

In your position, I would strongly consider moving back into my parents' place. I got married right out of college and my wife worked in resident life while she was a grad student so we could live on campus for free. But if I had been single and struggling to make a freelance career work (instead of married and...), I probably would have moved right back home. Saves a bunch of money (don't forget food savings), which gives you time to build the life you want.

FWIW, I did end up 'giving up my freedom' and took a full-time job in retail so we could get decent health insurance and have a baby. I did that for a year and a half, then split work and childcare with my wife for a couple years, and for the last 2.5 years I've been supporting my wife and three kids solely with my freelance work. So even if you have to give up freedom for a while, you can bank the experience and work your way back.

I do remember much of what I read. I also have (what I take to be) an unusual quirk in that I'm very risk averse in reading--often I would rather reread a book I know I enjoy (and have gotten insight from) than risk an unknown. At first I thought that my retention might come from the rereading, but I'm not sure that's the case, since I have plenty of examples of remembering things after reading them once. In fact I think the rereading is caused by the retention: if what you read sticks in your head, a negative experience or a waste of time is that much more costly.

My understanding is that the Xmonkeys are not nearly so amenable to embedding as node. There are some server implementations of older monkeys, though:

* whitebeam http://whitebeam.org/, which to my surprise appears to be not actually dead yet.

* jaxer http://jaxer.org/

* couchdb

But none of these seem to be low level enough to make a reasonable comparison.

Flusspferd http://flusspferd.org/ seems most like node, but using spidermonkey (circa Firefox 3.5, it seems, but actively maintained, so there's hope for future enhancements). Unfortunately, it doesn't yet seem to have all the handy web serving stuff that node has, so probably still not useful for a competitive benchmark.

In the absence of an epub, GoodReader on the ipad is very handy for reading PDFs as books. The type is a little small on this document, but I am able to read it without zooming and panning.

Obviously I'm not a controlled study, but I've found weight loss is easier since I made a habit of eating a large serving of vegetables at least once a day. And I don't worry about what I have to do to make them desirable--soy sauce, salad dressing, salt and butter--just so long as I'm mostly eating veggies at the time.

No kidding. Accidentally signed up for a 3-year contract once.

Would like to read a good explanation, even a lengthy one, but I'm not so interested in watching an hour-long lecture. Any links to text?

My reading is that they raised $105 million via convertible notes and promissory notes "in connection with the acquisition of substantially all of the assets of Id Software, Inc.". Traskjd has it right--this might mean they spent $105M on id, or it might mean they only needed to borrow $105M of whatever they spent.

Universal negative is hard to prove, but this has a ring of at least partial truth.

What I got from the previous article (admittedly as my own synthesis, not afaict from the original text as such) was, sure, the program to build a brain is only X Megabytes, but the computer that runs that program is the human body growing in the physical universe. If you want to be able to run that program, you're going to need to emulate at least the relevant instruction subset of the physical universe. It's hard to know how large is the relevant subset or if computers will ever plausibly get there. If the subset turns out to be quite large, you'd need a computer that could model its own subatomic physics.

Re: web confessional

I don't know what you mean by "RFQ" in this context, and I don't know whether you meant this seriously, but in the Catholic faith, confession is not (principally) counseling: it's a sacrament. Neither confession nor any other sacrament may be administered remotely. You may think that's silly (but unless you believe in the efficacy of the sacraments, it seems even sillier to argue about how they should be effective), but of course the question has come up at least since phones became commonplace, and the somewhat related practice of proxy baptisms on behalf of the dead has come up since the first century. In short, I wouldn't bet a business model on the Church changing her mind on this one.

I'm not saying you couldn't get traction calling something a web confessional--in the reality tv age I think the name implies exhibitionism more than confidentiality--but it would be disingenuous to pitch it to Catholics as at all related to the sacrament.

I double majored in English and philosophy because that was what I wanted to study and the kind of school I wanted to go to. I didn't expect it to help me get a job, and sure enough it didn't. I ended up doing a mix of non-programming employment and moonlighting as a consultant for several years until I had enough skill, discipline, and network to become a full-time consultant a couple years ago--which was when life kicked my family off a cliff and called, "Hope you figured out that flying thing!"

Thankfully, I've been flying since then. So if you habitually choose your life based on what you think is best not easiest, and you have some reasonably well founded confidence that you can make it work out regardless, study whatever you want to study. Just don't expect anyone to give you credit for it until sometime after you don't need their regard.

I'm very close to people who were saved from really horrible situations by state intervention. But then for them, foster care was hardly any better until they were adopted.

The state taking my kids is actually my worst parental nightmare--even beyond all the accidental and criminal bad things that could happen. I'm a very good parent (you'll have to take my word, I guess), but I'm not conventional. And I know all it takes sometimes is a little misunderstanding.

I read this one a while back. Anyone know of a source for more recent data?

Do you mean 6 and 8 hrs per day, or 6 hours over the course of the week and 8 hrs over the course of the weekend? Because if you meant the first, (1) I am skeptical that you have 6 hours of good work in you in addition to your regular job, unless maybe your job isn't coding at all and you live alone and you don't actually like to see humans, and (2) that's 46 hours per week! I sure hope you could build something worth $1000/month after a year of that--and after 4 years of $1000/month you'll have earned $20/hr on your original work.

Coding while walking works fine for me. As far as the mechanics, it's not hard to walk and type at the same time. 2 mph isn't very fast. I can't draw with the mouse while walking, so the occasional graphics work has to be done standing.

Mentally, the consistent motion sometimes helps with flow, sometimes not. It's hard to tell, but switching between walking and standing seems to be enough for me to support the various required mental states. I've been doing this for about two months now, and while I have no hard data, I've done what I consider to be some of my best and most creative work ever in the last two weeks, so worst-case the walking isn't too great an obstacle to my coding.

And this is indeed a huge improvement for my back over both sitting and standing.

I often pace while thinking. An ongoing frustration for me has been having to sit down or otherwise stop to record what I'm thinking about. If you can't relate to that at all, then the treadmill desk might not be a good fit for you, or at least not for the same reasons it is for me.

My treadmill desk, built from a $400 walmart treadmill, pieces of my former Ikea 'Jerker' desk, and a $30 metal shelf from Costco.

http://letterblock.com/images/treadmill_desk.jpg

So obviously I can do walking at various speeds and inclines (usually 2 mph at 4 degrees) or standing. I have an ergo standing mat that I put on top of the treadmill if I'm going to be standing for a bit. Whenever I get the rest of this office cleaned up enough, I'll look for a small easy chair for occasional resting or iPad use. Off camera there's also a stand fan, which you may need if you walk for hours and your office window faces south in Florida. (My office has always been hot, and I find that moving actually makes it more bearable.)

I don't consider myself to have a lot of friends, but I'm 28 and virtually everyone I do spend time with is older than me. I got married and had kids young, so married and parenting peers are all older. I own my own web development/consulting business, so my clients and business peers are all older than me. My path works well if you started on it several years ago. If you need a short cut, find any adult fraternal organization to join. Religious and/or service-oriented will probably be most effective. For me it would be the Knights of Columbus or Rotarians, to give a couple examples. I don't know where you are or what exists there, but they can be a great way to meet older people in the parallel- or team-work for a larger cause context that gives people the opportunity to form friendships.

Also, among the reasons older people are useful besides connections is so that you can learn from their wisdom or lack of wisdom. (It can be useful to keep a list for yourself of traits you want to root out and avoid so you don't become that guy 20 years from now.) Usually you can do this learning by active observation on your part, but sometimes people will feel compelled to teach you explicitly. God knows I'm no expert at social graces, but most of the time you probably have to let that ride, and strongly consider the possibility that you deserved it. If you're sure you didn't, try to understand why they thought you did.