I changed Caps Lock to Control, which is extremely helpful. Especially since on the Macbook keyboard, it's tough to reach down and hit the Control button without accidentally hitting Function instead.
I've been an early employee / only programmer in a startup in the past, in which the founder said the exact same thing -- once we get to "revenue neutral," you'll get "a big share of equity."
It won't happen. They only said that to keep a carrot in front of you for a little while longer. If the company ever gets to revenue neutral, their idea of a "big share" will suddenly change. After all, why give a programmer a significant chunk of equity once the company is making money? That equity is suddenly worth something!
If you don't already have equity, you're not likely to get any. And it sure sounds like you deserve a significant amount of equity given how early you are and the risks you're taking; if you wait to negotiate how much equity you get until after the risk has gone down, you'll get a lot less equity. And that's if you get any at all.
I paid mine off within about two years after graduating, but later learned that doing so wrecked my credit. (The credit score people want to see a long record of payments, not someone who quickly pays off debts in full.) I felt that it was better to pay them off NOW, rather than pay 10x as much over the course of decades.
I'm sure if you have a credit card or something, you wouldn't have to worry about that.
I ordered the original ZenPad, before learning that it was essentially a scam. After I placed the order (along with others, I'm sure), they delayed the shipment date by several weeks, putting it after the 45-day return limit for Paypal (they required payment via Paypal).
After discovering this, I complained to Paypal who promptly canceled my order and returned my money. Enso has repeatedly had problems with having their Paypal account restricted because Paypal considers them a scam.
Since then, Enso has sent out numerous emails whining about people accusing them of being a scam, citing such "evidence" as the fact that their Paypal accounts regularly get restricted, their website doesn't really work, nobody has ever seen any of their products in person, their alleged manufacturers claim never to have heard of them, etc. These complaint emails are invariably stuffed to the gills with misspellings and poor grammar, and each time they send one I received 22 copies of it.
So, while this hardware _looks_ kind of cool, I am not going to preorder it. And I won't buy anything from them until they actually manage to ship something.
OS X, 2 monitors. 8 Terminal windows, 2 fullscreen MacVim windows (with vim running the NERDTree and Buffer Explorer plugins).
I do all my Java/Flex/Ruby/Python development like that, and I think it works great. I've written code generators to give me Java or Flex classes as needed, without having to write much boilerplate.
Just do what feels most comfortable, and make small changes as needed to make it better.
I take Damage Control Master Formula from Primal Nutrition; in the last six months I've lost about 30 pounds, find myself considerably less hungry than I used to be, and have a lot more energy than I did before. (That all may also be related to the fact that I switched to a high-protein/low-carbs diet at the same time.)
Primal Nutrition also offers Omega 3 supplements, which I also take. I have not had the rancidity problem.
The same is true of most people who use email, but email still wouldn't have become as widespread as it is today if it weren't interoperable with other email servers.
No, I'm young and healthy, and don't care about health care. I wouldn't go to the hospital anyway.
Mainly, what's keeping me from doing it is that I'm doomed to obscurity and people tend to dislike me when they either see me, hear me talk, or read what I write.
If anyone has experience overcoming those problems, I'd love to hear it. But "health care" is right around "what color is the sky?" on the list of things I worry about.
It sucks. It produces almost no smoke, the cartridges that they claim "contain as much nicotine as a pack of cigarettes" last for 2 hours of intermittent puffs, the thing decides to start "cleaning" itself regularly after about a day, and the battery runs out way too fast.
It's a good idea, I think, whose time has not come yet.
* Disclaimer: I bought 2 different kinds. Smoking Everywhere and Smoke Free. Smoke Free was better in that it was actually the size of a cigarette and produced more "smoke" (vapor), but they both sucked so bad I was back to exclusively real cigarettes within 4 days.
If you happen to be starting at the place I work, the only way I can get a Mac is if new employees say they want a PC. Otherwise I'm stuck. I don't know if I'm next on the list, but even if not that'd get me one step closer to my Mac.