I've almost never met a customer who actually knew what they wanted. At least, not consciously; but over the years you learn different ways to pry information out of them... sometimes it takes visual aids (in the form of an interface mockup to look at), or lengthy meetings, or in extreme cases a hammer and chisel, but I've never had a project where the actual coding was anywhere near the bulk of the work.
Unless you're part of a team working in a large organization, the job of programmer is less than half technical IMHO. As a freelancer, I feel my value to the customer lies more in my years of experience working with non-technical end users than it does in my understanding of a particular language or platform. Of course, that's tough to get across to someone you're trying to get work from...
The problem I'm having with my current main project - a customized time-tracking application - has more to do with requirements-creep. The customer (a state government agency) keeps coming up with strange and irrelevant types of information they want gathered along with the stuff that is actually necessary for the research. Fortunately, I'm just a subcontractor in this case; there's a layer between me and the client, and it's those people who are really suffering from their behavior since they'll have to figure out how to cope with this non-orthogonal information while compiling the report. All I have to do is keep adding more buttons and forms, periodically reminding them how much more complicated and intimidating the interface is becoming and how far past our original budget we are... it's actually nicer than a lot of other jobs I've had.
Another sideline I have is doing websites for friends in the entertainment industry. One site I've been trying to get started on for over a year now is for a comedian who, by his own report, is so bad at self-promotion that he freezes up when the emcee asks how he wants to be introduced! So this has been a long, hard slog to get anything out of him to put online...
Anyhow, enough rambling. The point is - helping the customer to figure out what they actually need is the unspoken part of the business that they don't teach you about at school. It's more than just leaving the jargon out of your conversation, and it's a skill too few of us have developed.
This pretty much says it all: http://www.netfunny.com/rhf/jokes/91q4/progh alf.ht ml
I'm in the planning stages of building a custom patient-info database for a small (2-3 docs) medical office. I haven't yet really dug into what HIPAA will mean, but I've been hoping that just keeping the database on a server isolated from the Internet (and not on a wireless network or anything) would be enough to solve MOST of the issues. That, and making sure that everyone who has physical access to keyboards is already authorized to look at the data (almost everyone in the office who's not a doctor is already entering the data into the current system anyway, at one time or another).
How much more is going to be necessary? We're hoping to keep this project simple - Access2k-based, custom GUI, little-to-no need for outside communication - as it's only being done because none of the off-the-shelf products my client has tried really fits his needs.
As for The Dish - it's a very nice movie if you can locate it. Patrick Warburton and Sam Neill star, and it's a fine example of rural Australian culture and personalities (as opposed to the rather Hollywood-ized films like "Crocodile Dundee", or the self-caricature of the Croc Hunter...)
I visited Parkes earlier this year and believe me, they don't let you forget for a SECOND that The Dish was filmed there! "As Seen in The Dish" signs abound for miles around the place. Of course, the filming was probably the biggest thing to happen in Parkes since the moon landing itself...
I'm a freelance contractor for many of my jobs, so for the most part I get to say what I like to the people I work with directly, and let THEM deal with the clueless PHB's. (I highly recommend this solution to everyone)
But in the past, the Dilbert-esque solution has worked for me in a few cases - just tell them it's a great idea and you'll get started on it right away, then ignore it. They go away happy, and nobody knows the difference.
Of course, that doesn't help when you're trying to explain why you need money for something - but as noted above, I'm generally not in that situation. *relaxed sigh* *smug look* *frown as bank balance is recalled...*
While I understand and agree with the Pure Dripping Evil of the overall proposal, I'm not sure why I should personally be worried. As someone who does not demand the finest digital quality in my viewing or listening, I'm not incredibly bothered by an inability to make digital copies. There'll have to be analog outputs (at least on the first few generations of equipment), right? And you can't really copy-protect analog video in any way that's genuinely difficult to bypass - a TBC alone nullifies most variants of Macrovision, for starters. So, with a little help, my All-In-Wonder (or whatever) should still do everything I need.
Or, am I missing something?
(P.S. Sometimes I think most of the really worthwhile TV has already been made, anyhow... it's less and less important as a medium. The further I get into any area of interest - science-fiction, comedy, documentaries - the more I discover the best stuff never makes it to television in the first place. Let 'em have TV, if that's what it takes to keep them busy...)
OK, I'm only posting here 'cos, I was trying to moderate a post in this thread and it turns out I fingered someone as "Redundant" when I was trying for "Insightful", so the only way to erase that is to post in this thread.
I got nothing to add to this thread but the lesson here is, don't "moderate" when you're tired...
Pardon me for asking, but what's left on C-band to watch?? I mean, there's other things in life beyond TV; what makes it worthwhile is that it's easy to get at - just push a button. So, I have to wonder (given that I don't know the poster's circumstances) why someone so technically literate is trying to learn how to spend hours and hours just to see "midget wrestling from Peru" or "stock reports in Korean"...
On second thought, it IS an interesting question in principle... so, it's ideal for Slashdot, the haven for techies who have too much free time. (which reminds me, I got WORK to do here!)
Yeah, I do freelance at-home work. I've always been a bit of a generalist, so I dabble in several areas. I've also been lucky enough to generally scrape by on jobs which pretty much fall outta the sky at me - almost all my jobs have come from unsolicited offers by people who know I can do computer stuff. My primary customer is actually the company I used to work for 9-5 as an IT tech, 'til I quit 3 years ago when I noticed I was doing mostly database admin stuff (and not being paid for it). But - for several reasons - it's been a financial roller-coaster.
My main employer, despite its recession-resistant business, has been in their own fiscal slump unrelated to the tech market collapse. I had too many eggs in their basket and was, as a result, essentially unemployed for almost a year. During that time I tried to launch a consulting business with a website and cards and etc, but my (no-$$) marketing efforts resulted in no new business - all my clients have been people who already knew me beforehand. I also do small websites and video projects for half a dozen friends I know who are comedians. And I've got some database-related stuff on the side. But primarily, at the moment, I'm back making good $$ writing software (in Delphi) for my main employer. And that'll end in about 2-3 months tops, so I dunno what'll be next.
In general, I think there are a number of websites which are attempts to broker this sort of thing, but I don't know if any of them actually work. I'm about to find out 'cos I have a serious problem with ODBC drivers, trying to hook a proprietary app which uses Pervasive to an Access system, and I've decided to subcontract that little bit rather than waste my time trying to solve it. So, I'll soon find out here if the system works...
Callamon wrote: > but it's a really good and easy to make potato soup. > > 1 Can of campell's Cream of Potato soup (with 1 can of milk) > 1 Can Chunky Baked Potato w/bacon & chives > 1 Can Baxter's Potato and Leek soup
You can make potato soup out of nothing more than potato soup, potato soup and potato soup? Astonishing.
I heard about something very similar occuring last year in Los Angeles - could not find the original link, but this Usenet post (via Google) seems to cover a lot of ground: http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&threadm=2001 0908143917.09208.00000550%40mb-mp.aol.com
I just married an Australian last month, and we got her a green card fairly quickly, but it was only after months of research, paperwork, and headaches that the actual filing went so smoothly... We'll begin working on my Australian visa shortly, as we want to travel back and forth freely rather than settle in one country or the other, and we both have careers which can be done essentially anywhere (but it's a lot more profitable in the USA, especially if you're earning US dollars and spending them down under!).
The above is a whole series of stories unto itself, but other issues we're facing include: - climate changes. Depending on where you live in the USA, you may not have appropriate clothing for the UK; certainly, my Aussie wife is not yet fully prepared for my Colorado winters... - medical care. Australia's socialized medical system is efficient and user-friendly; and my wife is an asthmatic. We'll either have to get medical insurance here, or be prepared to drive to Canada whenever she needs more medications - pets. She has a dog, and we could bring him over but then he'd face months of quarantine if we wanted to take him back down under, which is unacceptable. So he'll have to stay with family while we're in the USA, and she misses him quite a lot. The UK has similar anti-rabies regulations on pets. - financial. Are you going to close your American credit card and bank accounts? If not, will they pay overseas postage to send you bills and statements? Do you have investments here that might be expensive to simply liquidate? Are you prepared to learn about your options and obligations under U.K. investment law, or can you afford professional help for all this? - there's others but I've been typing all day already
It's a safe bet there's some online message group which can help you even more directly than/. - we found extremely helpful resources on Yahoo Groups, some of which seemed almost tailor-made for us. Don't accept an answer on anything really significant from just one person, as the information out there varies widely in quality... for example, we consulted lawyers and some friend-of-a-friend senior officials at the INS about immigration issues in this post-9/11 world, and learned a lot about the months and months of delays we were facing... then, during an online search, we discovered Direct Consular Filing - which nobody had told us about, for obvious reasons, 'cos it involves bypassing the INS entirely and simply filing your petition at the consulate. An expected 6-9 month wait turned into a 1-day process, but only after we'd gone through literally dozens of other "answers" to our overall question of "how can we do this quickly?"!
Sure, I'm guilty... I'll attach sound effects (and sometimes debugging-assistance functions) to the "doubleclick" event of field labels in my Windows apps, or leave jokes in Javascript comments of websites, etc. I've always worked alone as a programmer so these things rarely, if ever, serve as more than stress relief during late night programming sessions.
For my consulting business webpage, I put some background-color text at the bottom of one page (which you can see just by drag-selecting the text) explaining that if you use a certain code word when calling me, you get 25% off my hourly fee. Nobody ever noticed.
And for some reason I still can't stop myself from putting in "All your base are belong to us" in HTML comments of the sites I build...
How boring would it be to do a project without SOMEthing fun in it?
Well, if I sound smug then maybe I'm entitled, but my fiancee loves gadgetry. She's not a geek by any standards - she shops for shoes, clothes, kitchen-y things and real estate before even looking at an electronics store - but she says part of what attracted her to me is my gadgetry and techno-fluency... if I were to put a network link in the bathroom, I would probably get treated to an amazing dinner and a wild night in the spa-bath!
I could go on about our shared interests, but that'd be even MORE off-topic. One point I will make comes from my previous relationship, wherein the girl (as it turned out) *pretended* to be interested in gadgetry because she felt it would be a way to get closer to me... pardon me for being fooled, she works 2nd-level PC techsupport at a large insurance company!
But anyway - umm, what WAS my point? Oh yes - women are trouble! Mine isn't, but she's taken, so all the others ARE trouble! Avoid when possible. That's my advice.
The article says the craft "may repair itself", but that it could take up to six months. I've seen some slow reboots in my time, but even WindowsNT on a '486 only takes a couple of weeks... seriously, what could take that long, when it comes to an automatic function on a computer? Is it just a timeout put in for safety?
I've been essentially unemployed for the past year - until last week, to be exact - and I got by on a combination of odd jobs (websites mostly), selling stuff on eBay, and credit fraud... but one thing I happened onto was pizza delivery. Perhaps I found an unusual place, but they were - and are to this day - pretty good for me. Not only are they the first non-computer job to hire me since I first began working (yes, I too have been turned down by gas stations, grocery stores and limo-driving jobs), but they are extremely flexible when it comes to hours. Plus, during peak times my income averages around $15/hr... not consulting-bucks, but a living wage if you're at least near to fulltime.
Assuming you don't have a friendly pizza place hiring nearby, my other efforts - selling stuff on eBay, and networking your gluteus off to get website or consulting work (even if it's just upgrading an old P-120 for someone's Mom...) is a good way to bring in a few bucks while passing time in a quasi-productive way. You can also take time to learn new skills, from books or classes, that you never got around to while employed.
The most important lesson I've learned is to keep my income sources diverse. I still deliver pizza one or two evenings a week, I still scan eBay for poorly-advertised stuff I can buy and resell at a profit, and I still do websites and upgrades for people whenever I get a chance. No one person, company or even industry can determine whether or not I earn money.
If you're part of a university, this project sounds tailor-made for a senior project by some EE whizkid. Just draft some geek and bribe him with promises of interships, and give him an unrealistically short deadline.
If you're in the private sector, it's a totally different story. You must summon the civic-minded core of your being and seize the opportunity to help the next generation. Give some deserving, hardworking American student the real-world experience that will provide them with an edge in the competitive job market of tomorrow. In return for the design and construction of your whole system, you will provide an invaluable internship opportunity that will give a real shot in the arm to their resume! And you'll hardly charge them anything.
Either way, you get your gadgetry, and everyone's happy.
Doesn't anyone else remember the Casio (?) touchscreen Calculator Watch from the 80's? I can't remember the model number, but it employed character recognition to let you 'draw' numbers on its glass face with your fingertip, along with +/-/x/[divide], then two horizontal strokes meant "equals?". It was only about $100, too, IIRC. I wanted one, but high schoolers didn't have that kind of money in those days...
As others have mentioned, the immune system is affected by lack of sleep, as are hormones such as melatonin (which has, IIRC, antioxidant properties so lack of it can be linked to cancer, in theory).
However, one thing I haven't seen mentioned in this discussion thread is the fact that testosterone is typically produced between hours 6 and 8 of a sleep cycle... so, this Provigil stuff might work without obvious side-effects, but I'd hate to wake up after a binge and have man-tits!
> awkward to use a mouse with your fingers raised.
Agreed, but I see two solutions there: you can keep them raised with springy leaf-type supports (which stop short of the fingertip), OR you can have software read the area of fingertip in contact with the "button" surface, and watch for a sudden increase as compared with the "average" - 'cos your fingertip squashes and flattens a bit when you apply pressure with it.
Or just don't use microswitches DESIGNED to make that little click, if you want a simpler answer.
Touchscreen mouse?
on
No-click Mouse?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Why not use the stuff they put on touchscreens? It works via the capacitance-change caused by contact with your skin, as I recall. Wouldn't click unless you failed to trim your fingernails...
Ah, just my thought when I saw this on CNN - if it's "about the size of Delaware", WHY does American media use "9 times the size of Singapore" as a comparison?
That's akin to saying a meter is "roughly the size of two Australian pizzas". Thanks, Media. I feel informed now.
Slashdot Mirror
I've almost never met a customer who actually knew what they wanted. At least, not consciously; but over the years you learn different ways to pry information out of them... sometimes it takes visual aids (in the form of an interface mockup to look at), or lengthy meetings, or in extreme cases a hammer and chisel, but I've never had a project where the actual coding was anywhere near the bulk of the work.
h alf.ht ml
Unless you're part of a team working in a large organization, the job of programmer is less than half technical IMHO. As a freelancer, I feel my value to the customer lies more in my years of experience working with non-technical end users than it does in my understanding of a particular language or platform. Of course, that's tough to get across to someone you're trying to get work from...
The problem I'm having with my current main project - a customized time-tracking application - has more to do with requirements-creep. The customer (a state government agency) keeps coming up with strange and irrelevant types of information they want gathered along with the stuff that is actually necessary for the research. Fortunately, I'm just a subcontractor in this case; there's a layer between me and the client, and it's those people who are really suffering from their behavior since they'll have to figure out how to cope with this non-orthogonal information while compiling the report. All I have to do is keep adding more buttons and forms, periodically reminding them how much more complicated and intimidating the interface is becoming and how far past our original budget we are... it's actually nicer than a lot of other jobs I've had.
Another sideline I have is doing websites for friends in the entertainment industry. One site I've been trying to get started on for over a year now is for a comedian who, by his own report, is so bad at self-promotion that he freezes up when the emcee asks how he wants to be introduced! So this has been a long, hard slog to get anything out of him to put online...
Anyhow, enough rambling. The point is - helping the customer to figure out what they actually need is the unspoken part of the business that they don't teach you about at school. It's more than just leaving the jargon out of your conversation, and it's a skill too few of us have developed.
This pretty much says it all:
http://www.netfunny.com/rhf/jokes/91q4/prog
I'm in the planning stages of building a custom patient-info database for a small (2-3 docs) medical office. I haven't yet really dug into what HIPAA will mean, but I've been hoping that just keeping the database on a server isolated from the Internet (and not on a wireless network or anything) would be enough to solve MOST of the issues. That, and making sure that everyone who has physical access to keyboards is already authorized to look at the data (almost everyone in the office who's not a doctor is already entering the data into the current system anyway, at one time or another).
How much more is going to be necessary? We're hoping to keep this project simple - Access2k-based, custom GUI, little-to-no need for outside communication - as it's only being done because none of the off-the-shelf products my client has tried really fits his needs.
Parkes Observatory Homepage (does not mention SETI yet, at least not prominently)
As for The Dish - it's a very nice movie if you can locate it. Patrick Warburton and Sam Neill star, and it's a fine example of rural Australian culture and personalities (as opposed to the rather Hollywood-ized films like "Crocodile Dundee", or the self-caricature of the Croc Hunter...)
I visited Parkes earlier this year and believe me, they don't let you forget for a SECOND that The Dish was filmed there! "As Seen in The Dish" signs abound for miles around the place. Of course, the filming was probably the biggest thing to happen in Parkes since the moon landing itself...
I'm a freelance contractor for many of my jobs, so for the most part I get to say what I like to the people I work with directly, and let THEM deal with the clueless PHB's. (I highly recommend this solution to everyone)
But in the past, the Dilbert-esque solution has worked for me in a few cases - just tell them it's a great idea and you'll get started on it right away, then ignore it. They go away happy, and nobody knows the difference.
Of course, that doesn't help when you're trying to explain why you need money for something - but as noted above, I'm generally not in that situation.
*relaxed sigh*
*smug look*
*frown as bank balance is recalled...*
While I understand and agree with the Pure Dripping Evil of the overall proposal, I'm not sure why I should personally be worried. As someone who does not demand the finest digital quality in my viewing or listening, I'm not incredibly bothered by an inability to make digital copies. There'll have to be analog outputs (at least on the first few generations of equipment), right? And you can't really copy-protect analog video in any way that's genuinely difficult to bypass - a TBC alone nullifies most variants of Macrovision, for starters. So, with a little help, my All-In-Wonder (or whatever) should still do everything I need.
Or, am I missing something?
(P.S. Sometimes I think most of the really worthwhile TV has already been made, anyhow... it's less and less important as a medium. The further I get into any area of interest - science-fiction, comedy, documentaries - the more I discover the best stuff never makes it to television in the first place. Let 'em have TV, if that's what it takes to keep them busy...)
OK, I'm only posting here 'cos, I was trying to moderate a post in this thread and it turns out I fingered someone as "Redundant" when I was trying for "Insightful", so the only way to erase that is to post in this thread.
I got nothing to add to this thread but the lesson here is, don't "moderate" when you're tired...
Pardon me for asking, but what's left on C-band to watch?? I mean, there's other things in life beyond TV; what makes it worthwhile is that it's easy to get at - just push a button. So, I have to wonder (given that I don't know the poster's circumstances) why someone so technically literate is trying to learn how to spend hours and hours just to see "midget wrestling from Peru" or "stock reports in Korean"...
On second thought, it IS an interesting question in principle... so, it's ideal for Slashdot, the haven for techies who have too much free time. (which reminds me, I got WORK to do here!)
Yeah, I do freelance at-home work. I've always been a bit of a generalist, so I dabble in several areas. I've also been lucky enough to generally scrape by on jobs which pretty much fall outta the sky at me - almost all my jobs have come from unsolicited offers by people who know I can do computer stuff. My primary customer is actually the company I used to work for 9-5 as an IT tech, 'til I quit 3 years ago when I noticed I was doing mostly database admin stuff (and not being paid for it). But - for several reasons - it's been a financial roller-coaster.
My main employer, despite its recession-resistant business, has been in their own fiscal slump unrelated to the tech market collapse. I had too many eggs in their basket and was, as a result, essentially unemployed for almost a year. During that time I tried to launch a consulting business with a website and cards and etc, but my (no-$$) marketing efforts resulted in no new business - all my clients have been people who already knew me beforehand. I also do small websites and video projects for half a dozen friends I know who are comedians. And I've got some database-related stuff on the side. But primarily, at the moment, I'm back making good $$ writing software (in Delphi) for my main employer. And that'll end in about 2-3 months tops, so I dunno what'll be next.
In general, I think there are a number of websites which are attempts to broker this sort of thing, but I don't know if any of them actually work. I'm about to find out 'cos I have a serious problem with ODBC drivers, trying to hook a proprietary app which uses Pervasive to an Access system, and I've decided to subcontract that little bit rather than waste my time trying to solve it. So, I'll soon find out here if the system works...
Callamon wrote:
> but it's a really good and easy to make potato soup.
>
> 1 Can of campell's Cream of Potato soup (with 1 can of milk)
> 1 Can Chunky Baked Potato w/bacon & chives
> 1 Can Baxter's Potato and Leek soup
You can make potato soup out of nothing more than potato soup, potato soup and potato soup? Astonishing.
I heard about something very similar occuring last year in Los Angeles - could not find the original link, but this Usenet post (via Google) seems to cover a lot of ground: http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&threadm=2001 0908143917.09208.00000550%40mb-mp.aol.com
I just married an Australian last month, and we got her a green card fairly quickly, but it was only after months of research, paperwork, and headaches that the actual filing went so smoothly... We'll begin working on my Australian visa shortly, as we want to travel back and forth freely rather than settle in one country or the other, and we both have careers which can be done essentially anywhere (but it's a lot more profitable in the USA, especially if you're earning US dollars and spending them down under!).
/. - we found extremely helpful resources on Yahoo Groups, some of which seemed almost tailor-made for us. Don't accept an answer on anything really significant from just one person, as the information out there varies widely in quality... for example, we consulted lawyers and some friend-of-a-friend senior officials at the INS about immigration issues in this post-9/11 world, and learned a lot about the months and months of delays we were facing... then, during an online search, we discovered Direct Consular Filing - which nobody had told us about, for obvious reasons, 'cos it involves bypassing the INS entirely and simply filing your petition at the consulate. An expected 6-9 month wait turned into a 1-day process, but only after we'd gone through literally dozens of other "answers" to our overall question of "how can we do this quickly?"!
The above is a whole series of stories unto itself, but other issues we're facing include:
- climate changes. Depending on where you live in the USA, you may not have appropriate clothing for the UK; certainly, my Aussie wife is not yet fully prepared for my Colorado winters...
- medical care. Australia's socialized medical system is efficient and user-friendly; and my wife is an asthmatic. We'll either have to get medical insurance here, or be prepared to drive to Canada whenever she needs more medications
- pets. She has a dog, and we could bring him over but then he'd face months of quarantine if we wanted to take him back down under, which is unacceptable. So he'll have to stay with family while we're in the USA, and she misses him quite a lot. The UK has similar anti-rabies regulations on pets.
- financial. Are you going to close your American credit card and bank accounts? If not, will they pay overseas postage to send you bills and statements? Do you have investments here that might be expensive to simply liquidate? Are you prepared to learn about your options and obligations under U.K. investment law, or can you afford professional help for all this?
- there's others but I've been typing all day already
It's a safe bet there's some online message group which can help you even more directly than
Sure, I'm guilty... I'll attach sound effects (and sometimes debugging-assistance functions) to the "doubleclick" event of field labels in my Windows apps, or leave jokes in Javascript comments of websites, etc. I've always worked alone as a programmer so these things rarely, if ever, serve as more than stress relief during late night programming sessions.
For my consulting business webpage, I put some background-color text at the bottom of one page (which you can see just by drag-selecting the text) explaining that if you use a certain code word when calling me, you get 25% off my hourly fee. Nobody ever noticed.
And for some reason I still can't stop myself from putting in "All your base are belong to us" in HTML comments of the sites I build...
How boring would it be to do a project without SOMEthing fun in it?
Well, if I sound smug then maybe I'm entitled, but my fiancee loves gadgetry. She's not a geek by any standards - she shops for shoes, clothes, kitchen-y things and real estate before even looking at an electronics store - but she says part of what attracted her to me is my gadgetry and techno-fluency... if I were to put a network link in the bathroom, I would probably get treated to an amazing dinner and a wild night in the spa-bath!
I could go on about our shared interests, but that'd be even MORE off-topic. One point I will make comes from my previous relationship, wherein the girl (as it turned out) *pretended* to be interested in gadgetry because she felt it would be a way to get closer to me... pardon me for being fooled, she works 2nd-level PC techsupport at a large insurance company!
But anyway - umm, what WAS my point? Oh yes - women are trouble! Mine isn't, but she's taken, so all the others ARE trouble! Avoid when possible. That's my advice.
OK, what's Norwegian for "password"...?
The article says the craft "may repair itself", but that it could take up to six months. I've seen some slow reboots in my time, but even WindowsNT on a '486 only takes a couple of weeks... seriously, what could take that long, when it comes to an automatic function on a computer? Is it just a timeout put in for safety?
Vacuum tubes are still the way to go.
(And science has yet to improve on cylindrical wax records)
Assuming you don't have a friendly pizza place hiring nearby, my other efforts - selling stuff on eBay, and networking your gluteus off to get website or consulting work (even if it's just upgrading an old P-120 for someone's Mom...) is a good way to bring in a few bucks while passing time in a quasi-productive way. You can also take time to learn new skills, from books or classes, that you never got around to while employed.
The most important lesson I've learned is to keep my income sources diverse. I still deliver pizza one or two evenings a week, I still scan eBay for poorly-advertised stuff I can buy and resell at a profit, and I still do websites and upgrades for people whenever I get a chance. No one person, company or even industry can determine whether or not I earn money.
If you're part of a university, this project sounds tailor-made for a senior project by some EE whizkid. Just draft some geek and bribe him with promises of interships, and give him an unrealistically short deadline.
If you're in the private sector, it's a totally different story. You must summon the civic-minded core of your being and seize the opportunity to help the next generation. Give some deserving, hardworking American student the real-world experience that will provide them with an edge in the competitive job market of tomorrow. In return for the design and construction of your whole system, you will provide an invaluable internship opportunity that will give a real shot in the arm to their resume! And you'll hardly charge them anything.
Either way, you get your gadgetry, and everyone's happy.
Doesn't anyone else remember the Casio (?) touchscreen Calculator Watch from the 80's? I can't remember the model number, but it employed character recognition to let you 'draw' numbers on its glass face with your fingertip, along with +/-/x/[divide], then two horizontal strokes meant "equals?". It was only about $100, too, IIRC. I wanted one, but high schoolers didn't have that kind of money in those days...
As others have mentioned, the immune system is affected by lack of sleep, as are hormones such as melatonin (which has, IIRC, antioxidant properties so lack of it can be linked to cancer, in theory).
However, one thing I haven't seen mentioned in this discussion thread is the fact that testosterone is typically produced between hours 6 and 8 of a sleep cycle... so, this Provigil stuff might work without obvious side-effects, but I'd hate to wake up after a binge and have man-tits!
Agreed, but I see two solutions there: you can keep them raised with springy leaf-type supports (which stop short of the fingertip), OR you can have software read the area of fingertip in contact with the "button" surface, and watch for a sudden increase as compared with the "average" - 'cos your fingertip squashes and flattens a bit when you apply pressure with it.
Or just don't use microswitches DESIGNED to make that little click, if you want a simpler answer.
Why not use the stuff they put on touchscreens? It works via the capacitance-change caused by contact with your skin, as I recall. Wouldn't click unless you failed to trim your fingernails...
Ah, just my thought when I saw this on CNN - if it's "about the size of Delaware", WHY does American media use "9 times the size of Singapore" as a comparison?
That's akin to saying a meter is "roughly the size of two Australian pizzas". Thanks, Media. I feel informed now.