Watchmaker in training here - after 20 years in startups I am now in my first semester of watchmaking school. It is one of the hardest things I've done in my 47 years, and I am loving every minute of it. It is training my brain, hands, and eyes to see and do things I never thought possible.
Repairing a watch feels similar to dealing with code to me:
- observing to see how/why certain watch components/chunks of code work and interact with each other
- analyzing performance
- disassembling and cleaning parts/"cleaning" code
- troubleshooting why something isn't working
- repairing faults caused by the previous watchmaker/developer
I highly recommend it to anyone needing something physical to do after a day spent staring at a screen. Stare at a watch instead!
<disclaimer>I am an Automattic employee.</disclaimer>
We do serve ads equally to all browser types. :)
[edited to note that I am talking about ads that can potentially generate revenue, not any other ads we may have run in the past to convince people to upgrade their browsers]
WordPress.com serves ads to everyone unless you are logged in to a WordPress.com account or are running some kind of ad blocking plugin in your browser. This bit about not serving ads simply because you are running Firefox is simply untrue.
I've found the most effective way to work through a problem is to have to explain it to my wife (who has no programming background). It works wonderfully.
For those of you that don't want to drop the money on a roaster, you can buy an old popcorn popper and use it. Beware - once you start down the path of roasting your own coffee, you won't want coffee any other way.
I think you are mainly right. There are a small subset of us ex-Army folks with special skills that weren't signal or intel guys. That number is dwindling every year, partly because those highly skilled jobs (mine was calibration related) are being pushed to the DA civilian side. Also (as you correctly mention), you can do a short 4 or 5 year active tour, then get out into the civilian world and make literally 3 times the salary doing the same type of job.
I think the Army tries to pride itself on training people to get out ("Hey we pay for college, we help find you jobs when you are outprocessing!"), but the reality of the situation is that most of the Army isn't getting trained for their exit to the civilian world.
Heroku does support Rails 3 (3.0.0beta). I ended up porting my stuff from 2.3.5 -> 3 and was up and running in no time at all. See http://docs.heroku.com/rails3 for more info.
If by "affiliations" you mean "works for" or "is paid by" DuckDuckGo, it's highly unlikely. DDG is the product of solo founder Gabriel Weinberg (epi0Bauqu). Check out his awesome blog: http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/.
"Remember that all geeks are shy, just like you. Even the boisterous ones. Or especially. The word “shy” is so universally applicable among geeks that it means nothing: it’s no excuse for you or anybody else. What do you think beer is for? It’s not just a FIFO stack."
As a soldier, I would have loved this while I was deployed. This looks to be a great service - I'm spreading the word to all my Army buddies. Such a great idea!
Repairing a watch feels similar to dealing with code to me:
- observing to see how/why certain watch components/chunks of code work and interact with each other - analyzing performance - disassembling and cleaning parts/"cleaning" code - troubleshooting why something isn't working - repairing faults caused by the previous watchmaker/developer
I highly recommend it to anyone needing something physical to do after a day spent staring at a screen. Stare at a watch instead!