However, I will have to say that I was initially excited about Clojure and each day become more disappointed because it really does carry with it all the baggage of Java. I had vowed to avoid CLASSPATH hell the rest of my programming days and Clojure often makes me feel like I'm lying to myself.

An ex girlfriend is a tech "journalist" for a new-world tech blog. What you've described is exactly how the new media outlets work.

Good luck.

  studio apartment, best deal in the city: $1000
  1 burrito per day (or equivalent)         $150
  1 coffee per day                           $45
  2 beers per week                           $30
  health insurance                          $250
  muni pass                                  $45
  cell phone                                 $70
  cable modem                                $50
  stuff like soap toilet paper, laundry      $30
  github                                     $7
  hosted slice                               $40
  subtotal                                 $1717

NYC will cost at least 30% more than this.

It's very easy to spend $2000 living a "cheap" lifestyle. I don't know what I'd cut out here. Aside from coffee and the beer, I don't really do anything a normal adult single male would do. That budget contains no dates, no movies, no restaurants, no books from the book store, etc. If I do any of those things a couple times a month I'm hitting $2K.

Moving to the east bay doesn't save much money unless you move far, far away. The nearby nice parts are not cheaper, the nearby bad parts are sketchy, and the far away parts require a car or else hours on the bus.

Also, craigslist is really the only way to do it.

airbnb.com has good places to crash.

maybe consider new jersey if cost is the biggest issue.

http://www.uic.edu/depts/oar/undergrad/tuition_undergrad.htm...

When I revisited UMN, it is $4200/semester... but that seems to be without fees.

http://onestop.umn.edu/finances/costs_and_tuition/tuition_an...

I first saw the UMN tuition on this site, which calculates it for the year:

http://www.getreadyforcollege.org/sPagesGR/TuitionChart.cfm?...

That's more time than I really wanted to spend on this topic, but I do find it interesting that even state schools can cost way more than I would have suspected.

But was he really doing what he loved, or was he partially an automaton doing what his parents engineered him to do, eventually becoming the only things he knew how to do? It seems like he almost had no choice in the matter, and all his eccentricities were his way of coping with destiny.

IT can be a crappy job and complaining from time to time is a good way to blow off steam. But consistently venting about the exact same thing for 6 years is pathological. It also set a pretty lame tone at the JoS forums. Certain people would show up in nearly every thread about anything to snipe it down and remind everyone that life sucks and then you die, that's just the way it is kiddo, you picked the wrong job and there ain't nothin' you can do about it now. We just don't get any respect! It was like a Rodney Dangerfield sketch on repeat, except it wasn't supposed to be funny.

One of my theories is that in addition to providing an alternative to sites like ExpertsExchange, Joel Spolsky joined up with Jeff Atwood to start Stack Overflow partially because his own forums got spoiled by a bunch of bad apples who wouldn't leave.

The other thing is that I've never heard of a woman trying polyphasic sleep or even being mildly interested in trying it. It seems to be one of those things that only guys with blogs care about.

I would rather not draw that crowd over here, or have their stories reposted, or even links to that forum. That sort of negativity is boring at best and poisonous at worst.

I have liver problems. It's not liver transplant liver problems but it's a problem nonetheless. Here is how I found out about it: I felt vaguely crappy for 6 months but just thought I was fatigued because I stay up late and don't have a very good diet. I finally went to the doctor for something else, they did some tests which initially signaled some problems that could be related to my liver or could be from something else. Then they do some more tests and I waited 3 weeks and they say "yeah it's your liver."

So Jobs loses weight through 2008, he goes to the doctor in January and they say "whoa initial tests show you are messed up, you need more tests." They make that announcement to the press. Then he gets more test results, he announces a week later that the problem is way worse than he thought, he needs a transplant, time for a leave of absence.

Of course if you're the kind of ghoul who plays death pool games it's more fun to imagine corporate conspiracy theories hiding his problem for months or years to keep the short sellers at bay. However, Occam's Razor would suggest that a typical male relationship pattern with the doctor's office is a more likely explanation.

Yeah, that is how it usually works...

However, I worked as a math tutor for 4 years in college. I tutored both college students and in an after school program for east african immigrants.

What I observed in that experience was that people with good trig backgrounds did very well with the mechanical formula manipulation stuff in Calc. They were mostly having issues with proof structure, etc.

The students who had a sketchy trig background had problems with proof structure and also had a lot of issues simply doing mechanical symbol manipulation problems.

I majored in math and focused on abstract algebra. I don't think rings, groups and fields are very useful to general programming or even computer science. I actually have the exact opposite opinion on the matter. Unless you're going into crypto algorithm research you don't need to know that stuff, you just use a pre-existing library. On the other hand, trig establishes a foundation for stuff like robotics, DSP, computer graphics, computational physics and so forth. Almost anything falling into the traditional "applied math" bin requires you to have gotten trig down cold at some point.

However, arguing this is sort of a moot point because I can't think of any elementary or secondary school math sequence where you just skip over trig and take group theory instead. Trig is usually required somewhere along the way and abstract algebra is usually not available in high school unless you're going to a specialized math and science school. Indeed, it's usually not even available in college unless you're a math major.

If you have a sketchy trig background and need more practice and inspiration, I recommend:

Trigonometric Delights by Eli Maor, for inspiration.

Trigonometry Refresher by A. Albert Klaf for practice problems

Advanced Trigonometry by C.V. Durell and A.Robson for examples of advanced applications

Statistics is very important and totally overlooked by most hackers and even math majors (including myself.) If you have the opportunity to take a good stats class in high school or university, do so. I do not have any good recommendations on self study, but it seems like books on things like Biostatistics often lay the basics out more clearly than general stats textbooks.