ronnieCA

When I get that feeling, I know it's about time for a week or so of vacation. I have to break the routine up as much as possible, and stay away from the computer, cell phone, tv, etc.. For me, getting out of town and going camping, kayaking, or skiing for a few days usually does the trick. Even if you're tight on cash and can't get out of town, just intentionally detoxing from technology can be incredible for recharging your batteries. You don't realize how exhausting it is being tied to your cell phone or laptop until you get away from it for a few days.

Best of luck getting out of the rut.

Yes, that is how I got my current job was through a couple rounds of video chat. I'm a Canadian citizen working at a US startup through an I-84 work visa.

For straight up development work, I actually prefer my dual 24" monitors which I have at my office. At home I have the dell Ultrasharp 27" (which is the exact same panel as the apple cinema 27"). I like the 27" for the versatility. It's really great for movies, games, etc... when I need some distraction. It is hands down the most beautiful screen I've ever owned.

It's kind of like saying, I've heard of this wonderful book on learning French, can I use it to learn Spanish? They're similar languages, but not the same. The grammer is close, but different. The vocabulary is close, but different.

That being said, Land of Lisp is a fantastic way to get your feet wet in functional programming. I would highly suggest giving it a whirl. Learning Common Lisp will definitely help in learning Clojure. But you really need to look at it as two distinct steps towards your goal of learning Clojure.

There is also a new Clojure book coming out at the end of the month called the Joy of Clojure, which I'm really excited about. Currently the only two books out are Stewart Halloway's Programming Clojure, which is excellent. and Stuart Sierra's Practical Clojure, which is also very, very good. They are both focussed on Clojure 1.0, however, so you'll miss out on some of the features brought by 1.1 and 1.2. I own both, and can't recommend one over the other, though I might lean towards Practical Clojure purely for personal preference.

Clojure, C# (or more generally the .Net Framework), and Python.

As for natural languages, hands down Mandarin. I spent the summer in Hong Kong, and while they spoke Cantonese there, it was still a fantastic introduction to Chinese culture.

While logical programming is powerful, it is only useful in certain situations. Due to the way Prolog backtracks to find a final solution, it can be increadibly slow, and it has to be able to 'undo' an operation.

While it is a much different language now, Erlang was originally based on Prolog, and has been adopted, modified and extended to be a much better "realworld" language.

I would whole heartedly suggest giving it a try! It may appear daunting, but if you take your time and go step by step, chances are, you'll be just fine. If you're really worried about screwing up your system, you can install it on a virtual machine first (virtual box is free and works well enough), as a trial run.

You're bound to learn a thing or two while you go through the install, so jump in and have fun!

I recently set up my personal web page at www.prgmr.com. For $8/month for 256mb/6gb, I have no problem paying that much. It's been a great experience, trying to get everything set up and running the way I want it. I couldn't be happier with it. I really enjoy running my own site, and getting to choose when and what gets upgraded.

You can always integrate external services as needed anyway. I use google apps for mail. I wanted to use Google App Engine for another project, but being restricted to Python 2.5 was a bit of a deal breaker for me, so for now I'm just testing it on a sub-directory on my personal site. When I'm ready to launch it on it's own domain, I will simply get another VPS and push the site over to it.

I don't know if this is outside of the scope of your plans, but threading issues are a big one that jump out for me. POSIX threads can cause all kinds of wonderful headaches, it would be nice to see some solid advice on the does and dont's.

These are exactly my most productive hours. I often feel like I should move to the west coast and try and telecommute in the UK.

I'm currently reading Coders at Work by Peter Seibel and psyching myself up to start working through Concrete Mathematics - Knuth, Graham, & Patashnik

Coming from a similar background, I second a lot of the links pointed out so far (w3schools and JQuery have been a huge help in particular). It's a great start. After that, just dive in. I started writing a chess game using canvas (part of HTML5) and javascript. It's just been a matter of figuring it out piece by piece from there. Writing lots of awful code, figuring out why it's awful, tearing it up and doing it again (Javascript: The Good Parts has been a great help).

I've managed to learn just enough html/css/javascript to be dangerous, now I'm moving on to server-side programming. What I like to do is this: Take an 11"x17" piece of paper, and write whatever it is I'm trying to learn in the centre and circle it. As I figure out what I don't know know about this technology, but need to, I draw a branch off the centre circle, for that piece of knowledge. And I continue to break it down as I go. This gives me a good visual of things I should start focussing on.

As a more concrete example, I'm using python as the backe end to my current side project. So in the centre of the page is a bubble for python. Off that I have different things I want to explore, so there is a bubble for Security, WSGI, templating engines, and SQLAlchemy. Off of security, there are bubbles for server hardening, XSS, etc..

Best of luck, there's lots of confussing technologies and non-sensical gotchas, but eventually it does start to make sense.

My first suggestion would be bloodwork. If you are deficient in certain minerals, it can really screw with your energy levels. As the adage goes, you can't improve what you can't measure. Start with a baseline, to make sure there isn't any particular deficiency you are fighting against.

After that, it's all about balance. I use the iPhone app 'Lose It', which tells me my percentage of calories from fat, protein, carbs and alcohol. It also provides a companion website which shows you graphs of your intake, weight, etc... I find having my dietary data available has been the single biggest improvement in my ability to manage my weight. Though in my case, I've been desperately trying to loose weight. I have lost, and kept off 35lbs over the past year. (No, I have no connection to Lose It, just a very satisfied user).

Employers are going to have a bias against you for not having a CS degree. That doesn't mean it's a deal breaker, however.

The biggest thing you can do is have a portfolio ready. Show potential employers that you are capable with a great website. Examples of projects you've done, and what you are capable of are going to be absolutely imparitive.

As far as minimal skill set, you are going to want be very confident/comfortable with HTML/CSS as well as cross browser quirks. Familiarity with Photoshop is a definite asset, as you will be required to chop graphics at a lot of shops. I would go to major job search sites, and look at the qualifications for front-end web developers. See what employers are really looking for right now and focus on that.

You should never eat wild white carrots or parsnips. They are difficult to distinguish from hemlock root, which is highly poisonus.