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[Johuotar]

I'm sick. Breathing hurts.

[GlyphGryph]

Yeah, the part about the programming thread that really makes me feel miserable is that I actually WORK as a programmer. I have no excuses.

Bah. The only way to feel better is clearly to quit my job and get another career. I will totally kick ass at in the teaching methodologies thread. (please gods do not let this forum be full of dedicated and awesome teachers)

[Tellemurius]

Yeah, the part about the programming thread that really makes me feel miserable is that I actually WORK as a programmer. I have no excuses.

Bah. The only way to feel better is clearly to quit my job and get another career. I will totally kick ass at in the teaching methodologies thread. (please gods do not let this forum be full of dedicated and awesome teachers)

I said fuck it and went to Hardware, never looked back since, unless linux is being a bitch >_>

[Telgin]

Yeah, the part about the programming thread that really makes me feel miserable is that I actually WORK as a programmer.

Same here.  Sometimes I wonder if feeling inadequate is just part of being a programmer.  I frequently see people make seemingly wild accusations such as, "Constructors are evil" and I wonder what glaringly obvious thing have I missed.  I'm constantly paranoid that other programmers know too much more about everything than I do.

Programming's one of those things you have to keep doing to stay really good at. I gave up on c++ for like, 3 years, and when I came back to it I had to relearn a crapload of stuff.

I look back at some of my ancient code and well... it's a good thing I relearned some stuff. I had some wacky implementations back then.

There's a lot of merit to this statement.  I suspect everyone feels this way, but not all that long ago I went back and found my first programming attempts ever.  The unadulterated PG-13 horror.

[Levi]

Same here.  Sometimes I wonder if feeling inadequate is just part of being a programmer.  I frequently see people make seemingly wild accusations such as, "Constructors are evil" and I wonder what glaringly obvious thing have I missed.  I'm constantly paranoid that other programmers know too much more about everything than I do.

The thing is, if you are mostly programming for yourself then it doesn't really matter how your code looks.  I'm a terrible programmer in many many ways.  I don't comment well, my algorithms are usually just plastered on hacks and I have no real concept of software architecture.  My only real advantage is that I've been doing this for ~10 years and I've got a knack for picking up languages.

I don't care one bit if my code isn't up to other peoples standards because they will likely never see my code.  As long as it works the way I want it to work, I'm happy.

Whenever somebody tells you something is evil or recursion/inheritence is the holy land, take it with a grain of salt.  If its not been useful for you, and you've been managing just fine without it then you probably don't really need it.

[RedKing]

I used to be a programming ninja. Back on the Commodore. 

I've got the proper mindset, the ability to think procedurally, etc. (I think people who intuitively "get" programming also tend to be good at foreign language acquisition and vice versa). I've just never really had the opportunity or impetus to learn anything new in the last 25 years on that front (other than a C++ correspondence course I took).

There was an NPR piece this morning on the difficulties for manufacturing workers who have to skill up to stay employable in a automated manufacturing environment, and one of the people they interviewed summed it up beautifully:
"It's having to make a choice between paying your bills or having a future." (in that she didn't have the time, between work and being a single mother, to get the education she'd need to be up-to-date and employable).

I know this feeling way too well, because I'm on both sides of it. When I got laid off in 2006, I chose the "have a future" option by taking out a $30k student loan and getting my Master's Degree (while becoming a father). That gamble failed to pay off, and now we're paying for it in the form of tens of thousands of dollars of debt to pay off. Now part of me would really love to go back and get a Ph.D. and/or intensive Mandarin training, but with two kids, a mortgage, and that student loan to pay off -- it's just not feasible. We're creating a society where you need kind of a crazy amount of education to really be competitive in finding a good job, but making that education prohibitively expensive and increasing the other financial pressures on people to lessen the chance they can afford to get that education.

[TherosPherae]

So my grandfather had another stroke. I wish I could feel something significant about this, but right all there is in my head is a little kid crying in the corner because a great man he knew is now slowly disappearing. Not dying, being gone in an instant, but being slowly worn down by nature until he's nothing like the man he once was.

[Nadaka]

I don't know if my depression is causing me to stop cooking, or if me stopping cooking has contributed to my depression.

I have determined to solve this dilemma with bacon, though my blood pressure may not thank me.

[RedKing]

So my grandfather had another stroke. I wish I could feel something significant about this, but right all there is in my head is a little kid crying in the corner because a great man he knew is now slowly disappearing. Not dying, being gone in an instant, but being slowly worn down by nature until he's nothing like the man he once was.

You have my sincerest sympathies. I was kinda blessed that my grandfather died in his sleep without any prior illness or debilitation period. Came as a much bigger shock, but in a lot of ways it was easier to deal with as a shock than to deal with in a slow, inexorable way. 'Cause like yours, I kind of thought of my grandfather as a larger-than-life figure who was quietly one of the toughest, most determined people I've ever known. Dude had so much shit happen to him over his life that would have broken most people, and yet he was generally always in a good, friendly mood. When I think I have it bad, I just think of his life and it gives me much needed perspective.

[MAurelius]

There was an NPR piece this morning on the difficulties for manufacturing workers who have to skill up to stay employable in a automated manufacturing environment, and one of the people they interviewed summed it up beautifully:
"It's having to make a choice between paying your bills or having a future." (in that she didn't have the time, between work and being a single mother, to get the education she'd need to be up-to-date and employable).

I know this feeling way too well, because I'm on both sides of it. When I got laid off in 2006, I chose the "have a future" option by taking out a $30k student loan and getting my Master's Degree (while becoming a father). That gamble failed to pay off, and now we're paying for it in the form of tens of thousands of dollars of debt to pay off. Now part of me would really love to go back and get a Ph.D. and/or intensive Mandarin training, but with two kids, a mortgage, and that student loan to pay off -- it's just not feasible. We're creating a society where you need kind of a crazy amount of education to really be competitive in finding a good job, but making that education prohibitively expensive and increasing the other financial pressures on people to lessen the chance they can afford to get that education.

And yet interestingly roughly half the US population thinks that getting rid of gov't support for the unemployed and instead giving massive tax breaks to the wealthiest citizens is the solution to this problem.

I'd love some of whatever they are smoking.

[freeformschooler]

I don't know why we're still with AT&T.

1) AT&T creates U-Verse plan as an alternative for existing and new customers. We decide not to switch to it and stay with regular DSL.
2) AT&T abruptly suspends our Internet access until we call them about some unspecified thing related to U-Verse.
3) We spend an hour on the phone waiting for AT&T to talk to us. 10 more minutes confirming it's actually us. Then we have to describe and read to them from the page we'd see when we opened up a browser that told us to call them in the first place.
4) They tell us that they're splitting off U-Verse and making it their only broadband company, so you can't have broadband/DSL with just AT&T any more, you have to have it with the new U-Verse company. They tell us they'll send us some new equipment today (it was yesterday when we called) so that we can use our old plan after the U-Verse transition. Meanwhile, they turn our Internet back on temporarily.
5) We wait for today and our equipment never gets here. Internet goes out again, this time with no number to call.
6) We call AT&T to tell them our Internet's out again. They tell us our modem is probably broken after we spend an hour describing everything we've done and they've done to them, as well as confirming who we are. They tell us they will have to redirect us to actual tech support.
7) We spend 30 more minutes with AT&T's "tech support" until we mention that AT&T is going to be offloading their DSL services to the new company. Cue tech support guy on the other end flipping his shit as apparently they hadn't told him that at all and apparently the change would cost him his job. He tells us he'll send us a new modem for the old service in addition to whatever new "equipment" hasn't arrived yet.

Now we're without Internet again through no fault of our own. Currently in my school's library.

[MaximumZero]

My VB II class was dropped completely from the school. Fuck. That means I'll have to wait until next spring instead of next fall to actually graduate. Fuck.

[GlyphGryph]

Why is that, exactly? You could always ask for an exemption.

[Nadaka]

Holy crap.

I just found out the shit I have been working on needs to be done right now, and I have not been prepared for it. I don't know when, or even if I am getting out of work today.

[MaximumZero]

They still have the class available, but it's only available in spring and not at all this Spring. Also, I'm not sure that I'm doing well enough to get an exemption. I'll talk to a counselor about doing something else next fall or over the summer, maybe.