There's a saying -- going freelance is trading the illusion of job security for the illusion of freedom.
In any case, what I really enjoy about freelancing is that it's very easy to take multiple clients and combine a lot of your overhead to reduce/write off costs.
Also, with multiple income streams, you can effectively eliminate the one client who is starting to become a nuisance without threatening your way of life too badly.
Summer's coming along? Drop down to one client and take it easy. Need extra cash? Work like a dog and see the results in your bottom line.
Pinch pennies for a year and you've got a comfortable cash cushion that'll smoothen out most unexpected employment mishaps.
Requires a strong can-do attitude and self-control.
It was a bit scary at first, but once I started believing in myself, getting the work became pretty easy and I'm generally a much happier person now that I made the step.
At this point, you'd have to kill me before I would agree to work a fixed 40 hour/week schedule.
I was at a client's office last night when the owner told me he had just pre-ordered one. He said "do it soon! they're selling like mad!" so I placed a pre-order as soon as I got home.
A Presidential Candidate's job is to figure out which set of lies will convince just enough people to vote for him in such a way that he is elected President.
Given that lying is part of the job, a PR campaign that paints you as a consistent, honest person who never lies is invaluable. Conversely, a PR campaign that paints your opponent as an inconsistent, lying, unprincipled louse is also effective.
In the current system, a Presidential Candidate must be a master sociopath if they want to win. Compared to you and me, Bush and Kerry are relatively identical. They're rich, well connected, master manipulators. From their point of view, they've been playing a globe-spanning cat and mouse game for most of their lives. They've learned to feign interest, smile at people they hate, and laugh on command. They grew up in similar worlds and probably crossed paths many times before in some way. Maybe at Skull and Bones Kerry gave Dubya a black and blue ass as part of the initiation rites.
The world that these high-powered politicians live in is nothing like ours. They're not like us. To them, we are tools to be manipulated for their ends.
Bush learned long ago that it's in his interest for the public to believe him to be a benevolent moron of the common man rather than an intelligent, blue-blooded failure.
Kerry's learned to attach his name to important movements of the last half century. Playing the contrarian who fights the tough fights has been very effective for his image, and would be knockout punches if they were the kind of thing you could explain in short sound bites.
The choice you have to make on November 2nd is: which master sociopath will have a more negative effect on your life if elected?
SCHIEFFER: Mr. President, I want to go back to something Senator Kerry said earlier tonight and ask a follow-up of my own. He said -- and this will be a new question to you -- he said that you had never said whether you would like to overturn Roe v. Wade. So I'd ask you directly, would you like to?
BUSH: What he's asking me is, will I have a litmus test for my judges? And the answer is, no, I will not have a litmus test. I will pick judges who will interpret the Constitution, but I'll have no litmus test.
(...)
KERRY: Thank you very much.
Well, again, the president didn't answer the question.
I'll answer it straight to America. I'm not going to appoint a judge to the Court who's going to undo a constitutional right, whether it's the First Amendment, or the Fifth Amendment, or some other right that's given under our courts today -- under the Constitution. And I believe that the right of choice is a constitutional right.
Waiting for grep is worth it. It's got full regex matching capabilities.;)
I dunno, I use grep relentlessly on a daily basis and it never seems to underperform for me. If I see someone use the Google Desktop Search and it makes me jealous I'll make a wrapper called igrep that searches an index that gets updated every 4 hours.;)
Being a Linux user, I was jealous for about 45 seconds.
Then I remembered that I store absolutely everything relavant to my life on a central server under my home directory and that I use grep, awk, and find to effortlessly do these search-things and more.
Packaging things that UNIX users have had for users and bringing it to the masses is such a tried and true business model.;)
Phones are easy. Pick them up, dial a number, you talk to the other person.
Email is easy. Type a person's address, your message, hit send.
I don't consider myself a stupid person, but whenever I've had a phone in my office, I've had absolutely no idea how to use any of the conferencing, hold, transfer, or even voicemail features. They vary from phone to phone, and have non-obvious icons. It took me a few moments to realize that the icon that showed a receiver going down didn't mean hangup, but speaker-phone.
I agree that having this infrastructure will make new, better things possible, but a VoIP infrastructure isn't all that more disruptive than already having an IP infrastructure. Some novel applications came out of IP being pervasive, but I see VoIP as a byproduct of an earlier disruptive agent, not as the disruptive agent in itself.
AOL users are a significant chunk of internet users, and these internet users add to the Internet Explorer marketshare by choosing IE as their browser. In return for giving Microsoft this browser marketshare, they get their AOL icon on the Windows desktop.
If Microsoft takes it away, AOL can, literally overnight, make Netscape the dominant web browser.
The buzz around filesystems research nowadays is making the UNIX filesystem more database-ish. The buzz around database research nowadays is making the relational database more OOP-ish.
This research to me sounds like the original designers growing tired of the limitations of their "creations" now that they're commodities and going back to the drawing board to "do things right this time". I predict the reinvented versions will never catch on because they'll be too complex and inaccessible.
Of course, this second system syndrome isn't just limited to systems. It happens to bands, directors, probably in every creative art.
I think what we've got in the modern filesystem and RDBMS is about as good as it gets and we should move on. What do you think?
Recently on the Google Labs Aptitude Test there was a question: "What's broken with Unix? How would you fix it?"
The moment I saw that question I said it must be a trick. UNIX develops by evolution, not by dictation. Whenever an individual change is dictated it almost never survives on its merits.
UNIX is beyond the comprehension of any one. One can introduce a change, but it is up to NATURAL LAW to ultimately decide if the change lives or dies.
That said, pttys, fifos and ioctls do in fact blow.
Doctors told my parents never to give me soda since they thought it caused nervous ticks. One day I started having my own money and bought my own soda and, while it had no change on my ticks, I sure did become addicted.
Most people don't recognize the symptoms of caffeine addiction. Saturdays for me were characterized by splitting headaches because, after years of suffering, I realized that by noon on most mornings, I had had a large cup of coffee and a can or two of soda. Since I was sleeping in on Saturdays, by four or five o'clock my withdrawal symptoms would kick in and I'd be in agony.
I've broken my caffeine addiction on two occasions. Both times were unpleasant, I spent the first day tired with an agonizing headache, and had a mild headache that wouldn't go away for at least a week or so.
Caffeine is so prevalent in the American Lifestyle that it's hard for me to stay caffeine free for long. Once you've been a hard core caffeine junky, it's extremely easy to rekindle your dependency. I'd go months without caffeine, and even if I took one or two doses of it at a party, I'd redevelop withdrawal symptoms. Inevitably, caffeine would find itself back in my regular diet.
My caffeine intake always starts out modestly at one or two cups/cans a day, and gradually grows into a ridiculous 10 or 12 cups. At that point, even the slightest schedule changes are enough to trigger withdrawal symptoms. At this point I'd usually bite the bullet and quit it cold turkey.
Caffeine products definitely have their pleasant aspects, but make no doubt about it, it's a drug, has negative aspects (moreso for some people, I'm sure), and is pretty hard to avoid in the 21st century.
The Solaris philosophy is reliability, serviceability, observability, etc.
Yeah, that's fine. Except when you're a kernel developer saying that, what you're actually arguing for is selling high end proprietary hardware.
"What do we do if RAM goes bad?"
One company will say "our hardware has hot swappable RAM and the OS has support for it! (and it only costs 4x-8x as much and if something goes wrong we'll make you sign an NDA before we support you)". Hopefully you'll buy it before it occurs to you that it's cheaper to buy 5 PCs and load balance the task.
Continue ad infinitum.
Sun sells the hardware that follows the big refrigerator computer mentality and they charge you dearly for it. That computer needs an OS that drives all of its refrigerator sized gadgets.
Linux is not interested in selling you hardware.
Sun's problem is that it's figuring out that people are starting to solve big computing problems with clusters of commodity PCs instead of refrigerators. How do they fit into that market? Well, they can try to embrace Linux, or they can make a half-assed attempt by sprinkling magic open source pixie dust on Solaris and giving their kernel developers some airtime.
If your employer fired you, would they be polite about it? Give you two weeks pay? Wait for you to finish paying off your car? Wait until you found a new job? Still provide nice references? If they wouldn't do this for you, why on earth would you do this when you fired them?
Maybe you see the value in being the better party? I can respect that, but it's not a game that I can play. I consider myself extremely patient, tolerant, forgiving, and easy going. If someone has put me at the end of my rope, then they must be particularly deserving.
Don't turn down a chance to put an asshole in their place. It's a pleasure of life that is unique unto its own.
An EMT described essentially that, but I think he put it more eloquently:
"This is how they set up a triage. They make four areas. A green area, a yellow area, a red area, and a black area. In the green area goes people who are in need of treatment, but will basically survive if they aren't immediately tended to. In the yellow area they put people who are in need of treatment or they'll die. They put corpses in the black area."
Here's where we ask "So who goes in the red area?", obviously being set up.
"In the red area they put people who are badly injured but still alive. But they don't receive any treatment, because either they're untreatable, or the effort that they put into treating them could save several times as many people in the yellow area. People they put into the red area are abandoned to die."
I hope that (like me) you're saving your money. By the time you reach your early 50s, you'll effectively be unemployable, as employers look at you and laugh (bad health/insurance risk; too untrainable/independent; general nonconformist).
When you've lost interest in the rat race, the only thing that seems worth doing with money is saving it.:D
To be so cliche: money isn't everything. A material life can be pleasant, but it's ultimately a game. I thought for a long time that it was the way of increasing happiness, but I eventually figured out that the happiness came from playing, not from winning. Now that I've grown tired of the game, winning is exposed for what it really is, empty. I think I'm ready to relegate it to the area of minor unpleasant tasks that people need to do to survive and find new things that I enjoy (making good progress here).
It all hinges on one important discovery: having zero dollars to my name did as much for my happiness as having lots of dollars to my name--nothing! Maybe the trouble is that most people never end up on both ends of the spectrum. Seeing both sides is however crucial to realizing that the real things that make one happy are things that don't cost money.
The only time I was truly miserable was when I was in school. I still have nightmares about being back there. I don't know why I was so afraid to leave at the time, but if I had to do it all over again, I would've dropped out immediately.
Schools are not designed not to teach, kids are designed, or molded not to learn. Today was my first day of school as a junior.
Total bullshit. For a number of reasons:
Being "smart" does not require an interest in politics.
For a lot of people, school is a waste of time. Not everyone wants to be a doctor, lawyer, or accountant. Some just want to serve you fries, some just want to beg money from you, some just want to rob you, and some just want to found the company that markets an operating system to different thinkers just like you.
Smart doesn't mean happy. For some people it's a prerequisite, but it's no guarantee.
School is a twisted, bizarre system, and a horrible indicator of what the future will bring. There is no permanent record.
Slashdot Mirror
There's a saying -- going freelance is trading the illusion of job security for the illusion of freedom.
In any case, what I really enjoy about freelancing is that it's very easy to take multiple clients and combine a lot of your overhead to reduce/write off costs.
Also, with multiple income streams, you can effectively eliminate the one client who is starting to become a nuisance without threatening your way of life too badly.
Summer's coming along? Drop down to one client and take it easy. Need extra cash? Work like a dog and see the results in your bottom line.
Pinch pennies for a year and you've got a comfortable cash cushion that'll smoothen out most unexpected employment mishaps.
Requires a strong can-do attitude and self-control.
It was a bit scary at first, but once I started believing in myself, getting the work became pretty easy and I'm generally a much happier person now that I made the step.
At this point, you'd have to kill me before I would agree to work a fixed 40 hour/week schedule.
...say that television is the opiate of the masses.
There are stores offering them for play and sale in New York, on 14th street between 5th and 6th avenue.
Every morning I walk past and see someone playing Mario Bros. or Contra.
Once you finish ooh'ing and ahh'ing about strace, it's time to look at ltrace. For warriors only, please.
Windows has equivalent tools, but as you say, they're impossible to follow because of how complex the API is and how "featured" the applications are.
I hope that Vonage and company are smart enough to take the hint and contribute heavily to the Republicans before they get regulated to hell and back.
It's so interesting that everyone interprets this as an anti-Bush statement.
What it really means is now that the election is over, no one has to worry about making unpopular moves for at least a couple of years.
I was at a client's office last night when the owner told me he had just pre-ordered one. He said "do it soon! they're selling like mad!" so I placed a pre-order as soon as I got home.
One day later I read this.
Right place right time? Hooray!
is the link to the Draft-Dodging HOWTO.
Some people say exceptions. I say goto. Easy to understand, easy to implement, and very clean IMO:
/* reuse sin struct from accept() */
int addclient(int s,struct sockpair *sp)
{
struct sockaddr_in sin;
socklen_t sl;
int local,remote;
sl = sizeof (struct sockaddr_in);
if (-1 == (local = accept(s,(struct sockaddr *)&sin,&sl))) {
perror("accept()");
goto just_return;
}
fcntl(local,F_SETFL,O_NONBLOCK);
if (extent >= TCPFWD_NO) {
fprintf(stderr,"error: out of buckets! %u >= %u\n",extent,TCPFWD_NO);
goto close_local;
}
if (-1 == (remote = socket(PF_INET,SOCK_STREAM,0))) {
perror("socket()");
goto close_local;
}
memset(&sin,0,sizeof (struct sockaddr));
sin.sin_family = AF_INET;
sin.sin_port = htons(remote_port);
sin.sin_addr.s_addr = inet_addr(remote_addr);
if (INADDR_NONE == sin.sin_addr.s_addr) {
fprintf(stderr,"inet_addr('%s'): failed\n",remote_addr);
goto close_remote_local;
}
if (-1 == connect(remote,(struct sockaddr *)&sin,
sizeof (struct sockaddr_in))) {
perror("connect()");
goto close_remote_local;
}
fcntl(remote,F_SETFL,O_NONBLOCK);
sp[extent].allocated = 1;
sp[extent].a = local;
sp[extent].b = remote;
extent++;
return 0;
close_remote_local:
close(remote);
close_local:
close(local);
just_return:
return -1;
}
A Presidential Candidate's job is to figure out which set of lies will convince just enough people to vote for him in such a way that he is elected President.
Given that lying is part of the job, a PR campaign that paints you as a consistent, honest person who never lies is invaluable. Conversely, a PR campaign that paints your opponent as an inconsistent, lying, unprincipled louse is also effective.
In the current system, a Presidential Candidate must be a master sociopath if they want to win. Compared to you and me, Bush and Kerry are relatively identical. They're rich, well connected, master manipulators. From their point of view, they've been playing a globe-spanning cat and mouse game for most of their lives. They've learned to feign interest, smile at people they hate, and laugh on command. They grew up in similar worlds and probably crossed paths many times before in some way. Maybe at Skull and Bones Kerry gave Dubya a black and blue ass as part of the initiation rites.
The world that these high-powered politicians live in is nothing like ours. They're not like us. To them, we are tools to be manipulated for their ends.
Bush learned long ago that it's in his interest for the public to believe him to be a benevolent moron of the common man rather than an intelligent, blue-blooded failure.
Kerry's learned to attach his name to important movements of the last half century. Playing the contrarian who fights the tough fights has been very effective for his image, and would be knockout punches if they were the kind of thing you could explain in short sound bites.
The choice you have to make on November 2nd is: which master sociopath will have a more negative effect on your life if elected?
Anyone else watch those debates?
Waiting for grep is worth it. It's got full regex matching capabilities. ;)
I dunno, I use grep relentlessly on a daily basis and it never seems to underperform for me. If I see someone use the Google Desktop Search and it makes me jealous I'll make a wrapper called igrep that searches an index that gets updated every 4 hours. ;)
Being a Linux user, I was jealous for about 45 seconds.
Then I remembered that I store absolutely everything relavant to my life on a central server under my home directory and that I use grep, awk, and find to effortlessly do these search-things and more.
Packaging things that UNIX users have had for users and bringing it to the masses is such a tried and true business model. ;)
Phones are easy. Pick them up, dial a number, you talk to the other person.
Email is easy. Type a person's address, your message, hit send.
I don't consider myself a stupid person, but whenever I've had a phone in my office, I've had absolutely no idea how to use any of the conferencing, hold, transfer, or even voicemail features. They vary from phone to phone, and have non-obvious icons. It took me a few moments to realize that the icon that showed a receiver going down didn't mean hangup, but speaker-phone.
I agree that having this infrastructure will make new, better things possible, but a VoIP infrastructure isn't all that more disruptive than already having an IP infrastructure. Some novel applications came out of IP being pervasive, but I see VoIP as a byproduct of an earlier disruptive agent, not as the disruptive agent in itself.
AOL users are a significant chunk of internet users, and these internet users add to the Internet Explorer marketshare by choosing IE as their browser. In return for giving Microsoft this browser marketshare, they get their AOL icon on the Windows desktop.
If Microsoft takes it away, AOL can, literally overnight, make Netscape the dominant web browser.
The buzz around filesystems research nowadays is making the UNIX filesystem more database-ish. The buzz around database research nowadays is making the relational database more OOP-ish.
This research to me sounds like the original designers growing tired of the limitations of their "creations" now that they're commodities and going back to the drawing board to "do things right this time". I predict the reinvented versions will never catch on because they'll be too complex and inaccessible.
Of course, this second system syndrome isn't just limited to systems. It happens to bands, directors, probably in every creative art.
I think what we've got in the modern filesystem and RDBMS is about as good as it gets and we should move on. What do you think?
Recently on the Google Labs Aptitude Test there was a question: "What's broken with Unix? How would you fix it?"
The moment I saw that question I said it must be a trick. UNIX develops by evolution, not by dictation. Whenever an individual change is dictated it almost never survives on its merits.
UNIX is beyond the comprehension of any one. One can introduce a change, but it is up to NATURAL LAW to ultimately decide if the change lives or dies.
That said, pttys, fifos and ioctls do in fact blow.
Doctors told my parents never to give me soda since they thought it caused nervous ticks. One day I started having my own money and bought my own soda and, while it had no change on my ticks, I sure did become addicted.
Most people don't recognize the symptoms of caffeine addiction. Saturdays for me were characterized by splitting headaches because, after years of suffering, I realized that by noon on most mornings, I had had a large cup of coffee and a can or two of soda. Since I was sleeping in on Saturdays, by four or five o'clock my withdrawal symptoms would kick in and I'd be in agony.
I've broken my caffeine addiction on two occasions. Both times were unpleasant, I spent the first day tired with an agonizing headache, and had a mild headache that wouldn't go away for at least a week or so.
Caffeine is so prevalent in the American Lifestyle that it's hard for me to stay caffeine free for long. Once you've been a hard core caffeine junky, it's extremely easy to rekindle your dependency. I'd go months without caffeine, and even if I took one or two doses of it at a party, I'd redevelop withdrawal symptoms. Inevitably, caffeine would find itself back in my regular diet.
My caffeine intake always starts out modestly at one or two cups/cans a day, and gradually grows into a ridiculous 10 or 12 cups. At that point, even the slightest schedule changes are enough to trigger withdrawal symptoms. At this point I'd usually bite the bullet and quit it cold turkey.
Caffeine products definitely have their pleasant aspects, but make no doubt about it, it's a drug, has negative aspects (moreso for some people, I'm sure), and is pretty hard to avoid in the 21st century.
How is the quality of the VOIP services?
They're as good as POTS. In some cases the signal is louder.
Are there delays? Dropouts?
I don't notice any.
Access to local 911?
Nope. But a gun is faster way of handling most emergencies.
What happens when the power goes out in my house?
Celebrate! You have a great excuse for not picking up the phone when someone tries to call.
The Solaris philosophy is reliability, serviceability, observability, etc.
Yeah, that's fine. Except when you're a kernel developer saying that, what you're actually arguing for is selling high end proprietary hardware.
"What do we do if RAM goes bad?"
One company will say "our hardware has hot swappable RAM and the OS has support for it! (and it only costs 4x-8x as much and if something goes wrong we'll make you sign an NDA before we support you)". Hopefully you'll buy it before it occurs to you that it's cheaper to buy 5 PCs and load balance the task.
Continue ad infinitum.
Sun sells the hardware that follows the big refrigerator computer mentality and they charge you dearly for it. That computer needs an OS that drives all of its refrigerator sized gadgets.
Linux is not interested in selling you hardware.
Sun's problem is that it's figuring out that people are starting to solve big computing problems with clusters of commodity PCs instead of refrigerators. How do they fit into that market? Well, they can try to embrace Linux, or they can make a half-assed attempt by sprinkling magic open source pixie dust on Solaris and giving their kernel developers some airtime.
Ahh, that makes more sense now. Thanks.
If your employer fired you, would they be polite about it? Give you two weeks pay? Wait for you to finish paying off your car? Wait until you found a new job? Still provide nice references? If they wouldn't do this for you, why on earth would you do this when you fired them?
Maybe you see the value in being the better party? I can respect that, but it's not a game that I can play. I consider myself extremely patient, tolerant, forgiving, and easy going. If someone has put me at the end of my rope, then they must be particularly deserving.
Don't turn down a chance to put an asshole in their place. It's a pleasure of life that is unique unto its own.
An EMT described essentially that, but I think he put it more eloquently:
"This is how they set up a triage. They make four areas. A green area, a yellow area, a red area, and a black area. In the green area goes people who are in need of treatment, but will basically survive if they aren't immediately tended to. In the yellow area they put people who are in need of treatment or they'll die. They put corpses in the black area."
Here's where we ask "So who goes in the red area?", obviously being set up.
"In the red area they put people who are badly injured but still alive. But they don't receive any treatment, because either they're untreatable, or the effort that they put into treating them could save several times as many people in the yellow area. People they put into the red area are abandoned to die."
I hope that (like me) you're saving your money. By the time you reach your early 50s, you'll effectively be unemployable, as employers look at you and laugh (bad health/insurance risk; too untrainable/independent; general nonconformist).
When you've lost interest in the rat race, the only thing that seems worth doing with money is saving it. :D
To be so cliche: money isn't everything. A material life can be pleasant, but it's ultimately a game. I thought for a long time that it was the way of increasing happiness, but I eventually figured out that the happiness came from playing, not from winning. Now that I've grown tired of the game, winning is exposed for what it really is, empty. I think I'm ready to relegate it to the area of minor unpleasant tasks that people need to do to survive and find new things that I enjoy (making good progress here).
It all hinges on one important discovery: having zero dollars to my name did as much for my happiness as having lots of dollars to my name--nothing! Maybe the trouble is that most people never end up on both ends of the spectrum. Seeing both sides is however crucial to realizing that the real things that make one happy are things that don't cost money.
The only time I was truly miserable was when I was in school. I still have nightmares about being back there. I don't know why I was so afraid to leave at the time, but if I had to do it all over again, I would've dropped out immediately.
To reiterate, fuck school and choose life. :D
Schools are not designed not to teach, kids are designed, or molded not to learn. Today was my first day of school as a junior.
Total bullshit. For a number of reasons: