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I actually agree, I find it a lot easier to learn here than I did at University. I think it's because I'm mixing with people that care about knowledge.
I support the original attitude that pervaded HN, that karma is about surfacing interesting information. It's not personal, nor should it be.
Personal relationships do develop here, but not as a direct function of karma (I'm sure karma plays some role, inevitably, due to visibility and so discovery.)
In short, what would the other person want to know? (That's "want", not "should", the latter being a slippery slope.) Keeping in mind the composition and goals of the community, this makes participating pretty straight forward.
1 Maybe I've been veering too far in this direction, lately.
Whenever I do, I seem to find myself caring too much about the responses. This leads me to returning again and again to a thread I've already learned from and replying to responses in an attempt to clarify my position. Before I know it, a half-hour has passed to no benefit.
Since arrows tend to be clicked to reflect a worldview which conforms to a reader's own and not to promote posts of substance, I find the result is more poking a hive-mind than learning through discussion. That agitates me far more than it should and, for myself, it's best by far to simply lurk.
I actually think that most comments add more noise than information, and therefore decrease the value of a thread as a whole. This get worse as commenting gets easier, because easier posting means more comments, but most people don't actually have something interesting to say/write. Information gets diluted and less accessible/visible.
In fact, this applies to the whole Internet and I sometimes wonder how much time it would have taken to learn the same things I learned while browsing through tech-related blogs by, for example, reading books (which are, often, denser in terms of information).
Chicago has an excellent reputation!
That perfectly describes my relationship with Hacker News.
As another first time commentor but long time lurker, I'd like to thank those of you who do comment. You've created a truly great resource.
Google cone of learning.
The right ideas will slowly come to you, but getting some perspective is essential and that's not going to come from sitting in your apartment staring at your laptop. The two things I suggest are:
* Exercise. Mens sana in corpore sano. Lift some weights. Run, cycle. Anything. Be yourself, only better (as seen on a t-shirt). You will not believe how much regular exercise will change your state of mind.
* Travel. Get out of town. Get out of your hole. Get some perspective. Even if you just go to stay with some relatives in another city for a few weeks. If you can afford the flights, go somewhere warm and cheap and bask in the sun like a lizard. Meet some strangers. Make friends. Talk to girls. Read, eat, drink.
I wish you the best of luck, and please let us know how you get on.
Edit: I also really, really recommend reading Siddhartha by Herman Hesse. It will definitely help shape your thoughts, and it's a very quick read.
I ended up at Esalen for almost 6 months in their work/study program
I worked in an organic garden overlooking the pacific picking/planting food that we ate the same day for 32 hours a week.
And had cheap access to incredible massage/yoga/healing programs, and the support of intelligent and conscious people who were also trying to find their center again.
Best thing I ever did, and I highly recommend it.
My advice: Give yourself time. I believe we are all fundamentally good and have the will and energy to work and express ourselves in the world. Sometimes, it's ok to rest and step back, and find our grounding again. Give yourself that permission.
I took time and founded a startup but it wasn't until a week ago (9 months from the start that I really found the right niche)
It sounds like your in Vancouver, I am as well let me know if you want to grab a coffee and have a more in depth discussion. Also, have you spoken to your doctor about SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder)? Around Feb/March of every year is when I want to make drastic changes to my life, I've sort of chalked it up to SAD and have made a point to get outside during the sunshine more often.
The ideas that you think are crazy are probably whats going to snap you out of your funk. Think of doing something crazy as making yourself available for new ideas, opportunity and inspiration. I can tell you that if you bike from Vancouver to Halifax you're probably going to meet some very cool people doing interesting things. Those interactions will probably drive your next idea. It will flood your head with experiences and environment that few other people have. I just wouldn't start any big new projects until you've given yourself a month to evaluate in a de-stressed environment.
The second one (8 months), I tried a startup but didn't get far. (I am not the type for a large solo project.) I spent two months in Turkey. I wrote a third of a novel (that I'm still working on.) I worked on learning Turkish.
Honestly, I'm not ashamed that I didn't do anything of major value. I found true love, that was enough for me. :)
- Drop all timelines for recovery.
You didn't go into burnout overnight, so you're not coming out of it overnight. I saw the warning signs of my "batteries" getting low in early 2009, but I kept pressing on at full speed because I wanted to get ahead of the workload, and kept hoping that relief would come.
The relief didn't come, the workload increased, and my mind essentially shut down. I felt like a zombie some days -- a zombie too down to even chase after brains.
- Change your scenery.
I tried to cheat by doing all the little things and hoping for immediate results.
There were days I'd spend 8-10 hours biking through Manhattan and Brooklyn. But my mind would wander back to work ("I'm only X blocks from work, I wonder if building security will let me bring my bike through the lobby, so I can work on this bit of code that'd improve operations... wait, what the hell am I saying?")
I moved from one apartment to another. Granted, certain things about my original apartment (and neighborhood) were annoying me, but not as much as I thought they were. The move helped put me closer to where I wanted to be mentally, but there was still a long way to go.
I resigned from my job in June 2010, even though we both wanted to make it work. I was just too far into the abyss. I considered a sabbatical, but I wasn't sure that I'd be willing to return at the end (plus there was word that someone else had did the same -- left and didn't return, so I told myself that my 1-year request would probably be denied).
I spent the next two months throwing parties, going to parties, catching music acts, traveling to visit friends and family, and doing new and old things (photography, skydiving, sailing, etc).
I didn't set a travel itinerary or any schedule whatsoever -- I would just randomly look at air/bus/rail fares and weather forecasts, say "that seems reasonable", and book my ticket.
- Don't work during your recovery.
During my traveling downtime, I'd do some consulting work for a few clients. I enjoyed working with most of them, but out of the latter bunch, there was one over-demanding client that threw all of it into chaos.
In my burned out state, I desperately tried to make it work with this client ("if I just try harder..."), but no, it just reversed any progress I had made at this point. And affected the other clients I really liked.
- Don't beat yourself up.
I had all the same fears you currently have, and the biggest one was not having a plan. I felt like crap that I let myself deteriorate to this state, and that it was affecting people around me.
Eventually I made one plan that I'd stick to no matter what: to get better.
- Keep at it.
In September 2010, I legitimately started feeling better and began at a new job, but I continued to travel (weekends, 3 day weekends, holidays). Kept doing the things that made me happy, and my recovery kept progressing.
With this new job, I made a rule of not working at home -- only in the office, except for emergencies, until I could find a better balance. Sometimes, I felt like I was coming close to max capacity, so I'd ease off the throttle. Just being aware of what your limits are is a big win.
For a while I was starting to hate tech, and consider my options as a farm or construction worker (a la "Office Space"). But I'm back to twiddling knobs and some hacking -- I've probably written more code in the last two months than I have in the last year.
Here I am in February 2011, and I'm in the tail end of this thing. To put a number on it, I'm probably at 95% and as long as I keep at it, I'll be better than ever.
* The most important thing out of this is you have to take the time out to recover. You cannot try to multi-task/juggle/whatever because you will fall right back into the rut you were climbing out of. *
Hopefully this helps you all shake off some rust, and better yet, avoid the dark road I went down for almost two years.
I've discussed my problem with a fellow procrastinator recently and we agreed that this feeling of "I won't finish what I start anyway" was a major contributing factor.
Granted, some things on your list sound easier than others. Namely the bicycle thing. I suppose you need some planning for such a big project. On the other hand, if you just jump into it, you'll probably figure out quickly what you need. If you have some money left, you can always just stop at some bicycle gear shop by the road and get what you need.
And even if you fail (take a flight home), it doesn't seem like such a catastrophe.
You could combine the bicycle thing with the grassroots protest by simply claiming that you are "cycling for cause X" (I never understood those, but lot's of people do that and it seems to work). Hm, maybe I could eat chocolate to help save the whales?
A startup could work, if you chose something else than Java. But it might be more beneficial to do something entirely different than your day job.
The reason you can't re-factor the pile java in front of you is because you don't really care about it. If its a startup and something you own, something you create then its likely to be easier to get yourself to work on it. And the code will be new and not carry all the horrible baggage that old java tends to.
You discount yourself too much, you clearly are smart, and you clearly are a hard worker(otherwise why would your boss let you go for a year) and you clearly know a thing or two about things you care about. Get out and do something, anything -you- care about.
1) Your problem will be there for a few days but will most likely be forgotten in weeks.
2) Bring a notebook, write your journeys in detail. The food you eat, the tea you drink.
3) Observe local culture.
4) Take a lot of pictures.
Basically, try to forget your day job.
If you travel, I'd suggest you to go to Asia (Japan, Korea, China, India, and SE. Asia countries such as Malaysia, Singapore, and Indonesia). Go to a place with rich culture. Spend a few weeks or even months there.
Those pictures and stories would hopefully make you feel better on your gloomy days.
I've been living in North America for almost 10 years (in particular Vancouver) and the cities get boring quickly. Lack of personality and culture. Asia is completely different; more vibrant.
More importantly: change your perspective on how to live life.
2. Meet a lot of new folks. Find meetups happening that have nothing to do with your field. Buy lunch to one new person everyday and have long conversations. Go on a road trip maybe to meet and connect with all your old college friends.
3. Read good fiction. Read magazines that have nothing to do with your interests.
4. Travel. But without fix leaving dates. Slow leisure travel.
5. Eat healthy. Exercise. Sleep well.
Inspiration for this post taken from the quote:
"There are four ways to know much:
live for many years;
travel through many lands;
read many good books;
and converse with wise friends."
- Baltasar Gracián
Do NOT do anything remotely close to your profession, there more to life than picking up a new programming language to learn.
A wise friend once told me "If someone else can do it, you can totally do it."
Is it your own beliefs and attitudes about work? If so, changing jobs won't help. Are your work responsibilities so large that you don't have time or mental energy for other things in your life? If so, changing jobs would help. Is your diet messing with your brain chemistry? If so, changes in your diet would help. If the causes of your burnout are in the circumstances of your job, then the sabbatical will only help temporarily. Coming back to the job will reintroduce the causes and you'll see the effects of burnout again.
If you are able to diagnose the causes well, sometimes only small changes are needed to ameliorate the problem. If you don't diagnose well, you may end up making a large change without much positive effect.
For the past two years I've been in the habit of tracking my mood every half-day along with a short sentence or two of what was going on. This process has been great in getting me in touch with what tends to stress me out or make me happy. I'd recommend starting a habit like this.
I resort to physical work, it still requires me to keep my focus but it doesn't require me to think nearly as much, in fact I'll find myself zoning out completely. I hand wash dishes and it gets me into the same zone where I don't have to think for 30-minutes.
If you've got property and you'll have no work commitments I would suggest learning how to maintain your property, there's lots of physical work that will release your mind and keep you away from things (IE technology) that will keep your mind in that exhausted state.
Build a shed, you'd be surprised how difficult it is to actually get it to sit level. You'll have to work the ground, then frame it and then side the walls and shingle the roof. It can be especially daunting if you've never done this sort of work, but it may be worth it to learn because not only is there economic benefits (IE you can do the work yourself rather than pay the 6x mark up companies charge from the cost of materials for this work) but 5 years down the line when you start recognizing you're feeling a bit burnt out you could use the skills you've learnt to put up a fence or something.
Physical work also has the added benefit that it helps your diet and metabolism, both of which can contribute to that burnout feeling. I'm not saying your diet will improve, I'm saying you're likely to end up eating more protein and fat, which certainly helps me. I always get into that burn-out feeling when I start eating more carbs.
I have two things to suggest. I hope they help. If I'm being blunt, I apologise.
1. Simplify your thinking.
If you have a habit of overly abstract thought, you can make problems more complicated than they need to be. You could say it's a bit like spiritual java programming.
For instance, aims such as "become a virtuoso musician" don't mean anything. They lack concreteness. "become ascetic monk on mountain top". Also intangible.
You say you recognise them as daydreaming. But your whole way of thinking is daydreaming - "What I think ..", "What I fear ...", "doom", "failure". All abstract daydreaming. Do something about it. Stop daydreaming.
Make a promise to yourself: you will reject thoughts that don't have a tangible aspect you can act on immediately. They are tiring you. Let your brain rest awhile. And if you have to think about problems, think about other peoples' problems not your own.
That means real, tangible people. It could be anyone. This is not a moral injunction. It's practical - if you look to see how you can help other people it requires empathy and if you develop empathy you start to see other patterns of thought. It may help you see different ways of thinking and get you out of your rut.
Only think a few days in advance. Reject all thoughts of the future for a while.
2. Tone down the ambition.
You imagine a virtuouso musician or some epic bike journey, some massive startup. Therefore anything you actually you do seems crap in comparison - attempts noodling on the piano or going for a small bike ride around the neighbourhood seem silly. Trivial. Pointless. Why bother? Stop comparing yourself and your life to your daydreams (see point 1).
I write this because this is what helped me. Please ignore it if it doesn't feel right.
Best of luck, I wish you all the best.
The only caveat I'd say is that 'travel the world while you're free and single with no-one to tie you down might sound great, but.... In personality tests I tend to come out as an introvert but I'm fairly sure I'm actually an extrovert with poor social skills (and hey, self awareness is the first step to improvement...) - I know I need others around me and that that takes more time in a new environment than for some. For me, the 'travel the world, see the sights' advice would make me lonely and miserable in all these beautiful places I'd spent a fortune to see. Make the most of the opportunity to do things you wouldn't otherwise get a chance to, but be honest with yourself about what it takes to make you happy; don't press on regardless with the 'opportunity of a lifetime' if taking it will cause you greater pain elsewhere.
One thing that might help here is to understand that motivation generally follows action. If you wait until you feel motivated to do something you might end up waiting a long time, or until some external pressure forces you, or you will fall into the trap of only doing things that give you immediate pleasures. So once you've taken care of your immediate physical needs, make some kind of longer term goal - do that bike ride, do some charity work, start a small project, it can be anything but do something.
I still plan to leave but now am at a point where things are more manageable so I have time to plan what I'll change my career to. Whereas 1-2yrs ago, I was feeling very low, totally tired all the time, quite depressed etc.
Here are my 2 cents and what helped me:
• Try and find a girlfriend, online dating can be useful. Failing that a female travel partner. This is a big one and made a huge difference for me. The first girl I meet was really not right for me, I mean we had nothing in common but it didn't matter. It's all experience. I regret now not taking opportunities to meet girls earlier when I could have, just because I was scared.
• Travel is good, yes your problems will be with you but you will be seriously distracted, forced to look at new things, experience new things and gain new perspectives. I personally don't think it matters where you go. If it were me, I'd go to a few different places with a rough idea but try to avoid planning too much (like me, that probably goes against your nature!).
• Give the computer a break.
• Exercise is all good and necessary but not the key in itself. Though I can reccomend surfing - I started to learn and even though I totally suck, there is something about it. The message is: if you can find a form of exercise you really enjoy, so much the better,
• Don't be afraid to party sometimes, perhaps you don't have the sort of friends to do this with right now. But if you get the opportunity to go out, have a good time and get drunk do it (occasionally).
• Meditation: yep, mindfulness. Try getting some books on Zen, Adviata or by Krishnamurti.
I find a meditative activity to be of some help. I enjoy rifle marksmanship, gardening, and washing dishes.
They might look and feel different though.
Athletics - Pick something that is so far out of your reach that it doesn't make sense why you would do it. For example, I just signed up for a double-marathon without having ever done a marathon first.
For ideas (and possibly even inspiration) of what might be possible in a few sabbaticals:
I took a year in Denmark between high school and college, learned Danish, how to paint, and toured Germany with an orchestra playing the clarinet (which I had also just learned). I also developed a taste in music by going through an entire library's worth of records in alphabetical order among other adventures, including backpacking on my own for some months.
I took a year between my undergrad and my Master's, in which I worked for a software project I was passionate about, traveled the Middle East, taught programming in Jerusalem to Palestinian high school students, and studied Arabic and Topology at Harvard.
I took a year between my Master's and beginning my PhD, in which I worked as an astronomer in Switzerland, founded a startup in the bay area, and did a ridiculous amount of traveling stateside.
In addition I've taken a few month(s) here and there... moved to the Arctic to work for a startup, to Egypt to scuba dive and study Arabic, etc.
Think positive and big! Best of luck in your adventures! BTW I am not rich or independently wealthy, just was very creative out of necessity at finding external funding sources. All of the above were self-financed in this manner.
What I'd suggest is learning to surf the ocean. I don't do it personally, but a lot of my good friends are surfers from Victoria in Australia.
There is a good perspective amongst surfers. They may wonder who the fuck you are at first, but once you've wormed your way into their scene, they are most welcoming.
Good luck... you need to chill out, have some wild parties and come back refreshed.
How I've found that people (myself included) get into burnout is that they work their hardest on things with no positive emotional feedback. (such as completing a physics phd or dare I say programming for a startup pre-launch) Its not about toughness or anything here, that "some people just cant cut it." What is going is that the people that stay afloat have family, friends, hobbies and fun to keep them going.
What I would do is the following:
1. Identify the things emptying your gas tank (programming is extremely taxing after long periods of time)
2. Identify the things filling your gas tank (... as I said earlier ... friends, family, hobbies and fun with them)
3. Make sure you are working out, eating right and sleeping decent hours. (if your body's hormonal systems are going to be a help not a hurt they need to be taken care of)
4. Work on adjusting your balance much towards the fun stuff for a while and less from the draining stuff.
5. Slowly integrate some more draining stuff making sure the filling stuff isn't coming in faster on average.
I've burned out before, and this is how I got out of it. I wish you the best of luck here and hope to follow your way out.
- On day one I was a new person. I suddenly had 8 work hours of extra energy. No need to set aside time for relaxing (it'll quickly get boring).
- Work on a farm. Getting up early, and really sweating for your food is fantastic. There are general applications forms here: http://www.transitionsabroad.com/listings/work/shortterm/far...
- Travel. Everyone else has already said it, and they say it for a reason. I pretty sure your problems won't follow you. Personally, I prefer travelling with couchsurfing.com or airbnb.com. You meet great people there.
- I travelled to friends around the world. Some of the greatest moments were actually pair-programming with those who wanted to. It extremely fun and social. None of the projects were ever completed, and it doesn't matter. :)
If you ever travel to Norway, let me know, so I can show you around.
Otherwise, the suggestions to exercise are great. Travel is also a great idea, but I'd say go somewhere and stay there for a week or month, get a sense of natural rhythm and pace. Also, try and just hang out and talk with some people, without any goals.
Good luck.
And if you aren't, get some more sun, by your comments, your body is probably wanting a shift into earlier hours? Get up early and hear the birds chirping without having to rush into an office. I think the same thing happened to me from 28-ish to 31-ish. I went back to school and finally entered the game industry and focused on less, just being good at that. Is there a field you want to get into that you haven't really tried? Just do it, start now in small goals.
Also, set some lower goals for yourself in smaller tasks and get them done quickly. Sometimes you are tied to bigger projects that make the rush of accomplishment numbed from the pain of larger projects if they are longer and less driven by smaller accomplishments/releases. Control some of these on your own.
Also, play some Red Dead Redemption or your video game of choice. They can really help reduce stress and provide escapes to clear your head after a day of work or when you need to shift to relax.
> I'd ride my bike across the continent from Vancouver to Halifax (I don't own a bicycle and haven't ridden one in years)
I can recommend a long bike trip. I rode from Canada to Mexico between September and November 2010. I've been a 'cyclist' most of my life, but don't ride all that far nor often. Take it slowly and build up the miles gradually. I had never done more than a two day bike-camping trip, and met several people with zero bicycle touring and negligible general cycling experience.
I would buy a good selection of maps and, if it's feasible in the areas to be crossed, an Internet-connected device. Couch surfing would be ideal, since it keeps costs down and provides precious social interaction. Canadian camp sites are expensive.
Also, bring an iPod stocked with audio books, courses, or something else to engage your brain (I found a "This American Life" collection invaluable). Music is nice, but when you're grinding up the tenth hill of the day at 3mph, it's nice to let your legs do the work while your brain focuses on what you're listening to.
If you are genuinely interested in this and have no idea where to start, let me know. I think you could get all your touring needs together for $2,000 or less.
* Lost ~80 pounds starting in February a few years back. 200->120. Hovering at a healthier weight, or so the wife says.
* A few years back, I had a consistent contest on one of my projects (hostjury.com) where we'd give out ipods once a month. I hand-delivered one of them ~6,000+ miles away, by car.
* The next year, I got a motorcycle. February.
* The next year, I moved to Vanvouer. February.
* The next year, I put ~80,000+ miles on my car. February through June. Anywhom..
* Found a wife, the next. She's put me under some new limits but we're probably moving to San Diego or *.in.cali. soon. //February, again. Uhaul is cheap ;)
There isn't anything inherently wrong with having sudden desires or your mind screaming at both your body and soul that it's in a rut. I too would highly recommend getting some exercise.
Try doing the grouse grind a few times a week. I used to live right up at the top of the mountain and would make my way up there each morning. It's a beautiful way to start the day, and is a fantastic starter workout. My time was about ~35 minutes once I got into the habit, but initially it was 1.5 hours -- so keep that in mind.
Start small. And hey, changes of scenery don't hurt either. Take a trip, wield your vacation pay. Change your personal life, your work life will follow suit.
In the meantime, eat a bit healthier & get some more exercise. Oh, and get a bicycle. Steed cycle is on the North Shore & that's where I bought mine. Put ~40miles a day on it in Vancouver and loved every minute of it.
I'm convinced the only way to really "cure" burn-out is to change scenery and time. It sounds like you've got both, so go do something, or do nothing at all. It doesn't matter too much.
I know you have lots of things you're thinking about doing now, but start your sabbatical anyway. It only takes a couple of weeks of doing nothing until you're ready to plan -- anything -- to get out of the boredom.
Take the time, do nothing, and then decide.
I spent the next two months traveling through Spain, Italy, France, UK, and Ireland. I met some of the most amazing people in my life and I still keep in touch with them. I went running with a bull in Valencia, scuba diving for the first time in my life in Nice, had the most amazing pizza in the world in Naples, and got my geek on with Roman history.
At the same time, this cured my burn out. I didn't think it would, but when you start using other parts of your brain to communicate and live with people who don't speak your tongue your mind opens up.
I also wrote about every city I visited on my blog as a travel log of sorts and as a way to show my friends what I was up to. I started in Boston which you can read here: http://paydrotalks.com/posts/103-boston-clam-chowder-pigs-an....
I wish you the best of luck. Being burnt out is a horrible state to be in, but it's awesome that you're taking yourself out of work to treat yourself.
And thats where you're going wrong. There's nothing stopping you from doing a single thing on your list besides you. Sometimes being naive about what it will take to accomplish something is actually whats needed to do it.
Not to mention most of the things on your list, while amazing experiences, take little more than minimal finances to do so. Pack a backpack, fly to vancouver and buy a bike and just start riding. Plan as you go. You could be biking across Canada by Tuesday and $1500 later if you wanted to.
Just because you don't donate money or pick up litter doesn't mean you can't go volunteer. There's plenty of organizations online you can look up, most of them will plan your trip from start to finish, you just put up the cash. Go teach english somewhere, provide medical assistance, build a school.
Stop focusing on what you are(n't) doing now, and have(n't) in the past. It takes little more than an idea or goal and the drive/desire to do it to make it come true. Clearly you feel that who you _think_ you are right now limits you to who you can be. That's not true at all. Do what you have to do to be the person you want to be. You only live once, don't let anything hold you back from being the person you want to be, and experiencing the things you've always wanted to. Live your life with no regrets. Every day you spend thinking "if only..." is another day wasted.
The good thing about this is you realize where you're at now and you're actively taking steps to improve your situation. Be strong, follow your dreams and dont get intimidated. Try and take a small step forward every day and in a few months you'll feel like a totally different person and in a way better place.
Also, I was a homemaker for a long time. I didn't join the "9 to 5" club until relatively recently. Go do something with a different relationship to time. It can be very mentally and emotionally freeing. I think that is part of the theme of your "escapist fantasies": A completely different kind of schedule/lifestyle/relationship to time and the world. Those can very much be good things.
Good luck with this.
non-profits are always grateful for someone who wants to help, beyond the token one day of service
Starting wit traveling is a very good option. This is also what I did. Go to a totally different place. A different (non-western) culture. Not to help or work, just to be there. A lot of people go to South-East Asia. I did that too and loved it. My thinking and problems were reduced to what to eat, where to eat, where to sleep and what to see next.
You can do this for months. Then you may start to miss your work, you may start to have ideas again. You'll probably miss thinking and you will find out what to do during the rest of the leave.
There are also some changes to the diet that may help you (started with vitamins and eating some meat - helped to alleviate my symptons. May help with you, may not).
But that is just a first step. You must then strive to find the causes of your problem, only then it will disappear. Usually, heavy meditation does the trick. If you train martial arts, your teacher may know something about it. If you don't find anyone, there are lots of books on the subject.
Please note that whatever cure you're offered, you'd better not believe it at first. Test it, and if it works, stick with it.
I hope what I wrote helps you. Feel free to contact me.
after that week is over, maybe report back?
i would not make any life changing decisions just now.
Not sure how many people are in the world like me or us. I'd like to know how they cope.
I recommend reading Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel.
Traveling can be extremely enlightening. If for no other reason than it will give you plenty of time to think. If you find yourself thinking about different startup ideas (like I do when I travel) then you know you are probably in the right line of work.
You will also open your mind up to a million other things that you probably weren't aware of before.
But I think there is a bigger problem here. Even if he doesn't understand the technical stuff, he SHOULD be able to understand what it should do, how it should solve the problem, and ways he can make money. You don't need to know a lick of code or any technical stuff to know what you want out of your product. I think the problem is a bit different than just feeling out of element.
As long as he genuinely wants to solve a problem and is actually innovative and passionate about doing it, money or not as a primary motivator is not the issue. The issue is whether or not he can figure out all the things he need to figure out as the business guy.
Step 1: find a cofounder who is as excited about your ideas as you are with his, and whom you enjoy working with and vice-versa.
I am still new to the startup world, but am working well with my co-founder. Hiring someone to code every time your product has a problem is not the correct way to go about it. You have to be able to constantly work and change to keep pushing something forward.
Step 2: immerse yourself in technology
Really, I don't feel out of my element because I have surrounded myself in my life with technical people and technical things (went to MIT, have taken tech classes, worked at [stereotypical corporation] doing design and working closely with developers, and am learning how to dev in the process).
Step 3: learn your product and learn it well (including the technical parts)
You have to understand your product in and out in order to make sure you are able to speak to those who need the product. If someone asks about security: know it. If they ask about a specific API you don't want to have to "get back to them."
Step 4: find a good balance between what you're doing, what everyone else is doing, and what needs to be done.
I think the hacker/hustler combo is really valuable At some point the devs will be way too hosed in the development of the [product/site/whatever you're doing] to go out and find funding/sell the product. You need people who are confident to talk about what you're doing and will have fun doing it.
and Step 5: have fun.
Getting into the start-up world is hard. You really have to enjoy taking risks, moving around, getting out there, and meeting people.
I'm sure I'm missing steps in all of this, but the steps above really help.
Even if they were distinguishable from a voting ring, it still makes sense for their upvotes to be ignored (since they're artificial votes, and a poor measure of a submission's value).
There could very well be some other logic at work, too, like being more likely to ignore votes by people who visited the submission directly, or ignoring votes that happen too soon for the voter to really have read the article. It is fun to speculate.
Do your friends ever upvote other submissions? It would be useful to consider this.
If you and your friends participate regularly and upvote other stories as well then you're less likely to have a problem, but the exact algorithm isn't public, so I can't say with certainty.
I'd most likely install it on my android phone, if it were free/ad supported. Could see it being a very viral game, with people finding interesting ways to game the scoreboard.
This is what insurance is for, right?
Round #1 instructs you to place your phone on a hard surface, find a hammer of any kind, and hit your phone as hard as you can.
Rounds #2 and up instructs you to repeat Round #1.
A permanent blank screen indicates you have won and you may receive a prize (a brand new iPhone!!) if you can convince Apple your phone is malfunctioning because of something they did.
I was well aware of the "risk your phone" aspect, "iDare" was my working title...
Let me know :)
Something like:
"Want / Need a new phone see how far you can send yours flying for a shot at new hardware."
You know I really don't understand how someone could enjoy a game which encourages people to throw a 600 dollar device onto a "soft" surface. You how this ends right? Kids want to play this and they will throw the from EVERYWHERE and BOOM you have to buy another 600 dollar phone.
You want to make money? Write something useful.
However I really like that you put the source code on GitHub.
1. I had just started at a startup (Mahalo), and I was excited about being 1/5th of a company's development team; being 1/1000th of a company's dev team felt less appealing.
2. They offered the same amount of money I was currently making, but I would have had to move from the affordable Twin Cities metro area to San Francisco.
3. I've telecommuted for every job I've had since college; I don't know how well I'd make the transition to commuting and wearing office-appropriate clothing every day.
At the time, #1 was the most powerful reason I had for declining, but now, it would be #2. They've called a few times since then to see if I've changed my mind, but with inertia being the powerful force that it is, I can't see myself moving out of Minnesota, away from my family and my wife's family. (I have told them that as soon as they open an office in Minneapolis, I'd be happy to talk to them again.) Although, with three feet of snow on the ground and sub-zero temperatures over the past few weeks, I'm reconsidering my four-season climate policy.
It's likely they'll say that it's something they don't normally do. This may be because they haven't decided yet, and the system isn't set it up to support it. So make it clear that you're on the fence and want to talk to the team you'll be joining, and you can wait while they figure it out.
In your situation, based on what you have shared I wouldn't take the job. It sounds like you took the interviews to acquire the personal validation a job offer would represent to you and now that you have it, there seems no real reason to up root your life.
I hope my interpretation of the situation helps and I wish you all the best no matter what decision you may make.
I lived in the same house from the age of 3 until adulthood. I graduated high school with some of the same folks I went to kindergarten with. I got married at a young age to a man who only wanted to join the army. He did and we moved around for a couple of decades until we divorced.
The transition at the first duty station was quite hard for me. My then husband had grown up as a military brat and hit the ground running. I had no clue how to do that and he was zero help to me with this major adjustment. For that and other reasons (like a pregnancy where I threw up for 8 months out of the 18 months we were there), I was really miserable at that first duty station and it took me years to realize it wasn't the fault of Texas and to "forgive" Texas. I irrationally hated Texas for quite some time.
I wanted out of my home town and I have no regrets, though I resented my then husband's lack of support at the time (and never did feel he did the right thing in that regard). I returned to my home town during the divorce and I have been here about 5 years or so. I intend to leave again someday (basically as soon as I can arrange it, logistically) and I don't think I could be making such plans had I not left to begin with. For me, it was very much a growth experience and I think my life is vastly better for all of it.
But if you do this, I would suggest you be prepared to help the spouse and kids adjust. Maybe they will be fine. Maybe your wife is more resourceful than I was at, oh, age 21. Maybe she will have no problem finding hobbies, friends, and whatever else floats her boat. Maybe your kids will also jump in with both feet, gleefully. But if they do not, odds are good that they will blame you for their misery. Being sensitive to that and willing to assist will most likely go over a lot better than my ex husband's choice to let me just sink or swim on my own.
Good luck with this decision.
As for the decision, well, I'm in a very different place in my life - 26, single, etc. I can't exactly give first hand experience. (I can say that living in cities is often cheaper than it seems, especially if you or your kids can take advantage of public transit - car insurance and gas adds up quick!) I think the important thing to remember is, all getting a job offer does is give you more options, not less. Whatever you decide, I'd take your offer as a vote of confidence that with or without working for Google, you'll do just fine.
Google might be hot, and can be an amazing place to work at, if you're the kind of person who prefers that.
Myself, I'm not. Perhaps I'm silly, but it would take tons of money to 'persuade' me to leave my current position, because I value my co-workers, my job and the general atmosphere here more than I value my income.
As long as I love my job, and can live a comfortable life, I'm satisfied. Throwing money my way is not a motivation for me in any shape or form, and that's the only thing Google could offer me.
Aside from yourself, it's obviously a big call for the wife and kids to begin new lives .. potential source of resentment. Especially if your wife is a homemaker - she'd be leaving behind her well established and important social and support networks for your opportunity, without the distraction of a new job to ease the loss.
On the other hand .. it's Google. An opportunity to play with some of the biggest systems on the planet! How secure is/are your current job(s)? Will you be harder to hire in 10 years if you didn't take the Google job?
Good luck with your choice. Good problem to have!
Although I am no expert, my wife and kids moved to Paris, France not more than 1 year ago and now we may be on the verge of moving back to the US. As you can imagine, it's no picnic moving with a family. (And the stay in Paris was/is aligned with my longer term goals.)
b) How does the rest of your family feel? Uprooting a family is never a particularly pleasant experience, but there are better and worse times/situations.
c) Why do you want to work there? Is it for the prestige? Is it because you'll get to work on something you really enjoy? Not saying theres any wrong/right answers, but at the least its a worthwhile thought exercise.
You: Boss, we need to talk.
Boss: Ok, let's talk.
You: I decided to leave ${CompanyName}.
Boss: Ok, is there anything we can do to make you stay?
You: No, I've made my decision. How long do you want me to stay to transfer my responsibilities?
Narrator's note: the standard is 2 weeks.
Other things: they might ask you why you're leaving. It's not the time to provide them with a list of complaints (especially if you haven't raised them in the past). You can be vague but truthful: the other opportunity looks like a better fit for you.
That is essentially the script I followed when leaving my past jobs. All my bosses were professional about it and understanding.
Good luck with this.
That being said, here's a few tips that I think could help you.
1. Remember that this is business. That doesn't mean forgetting about the people involved, just that the most important thing in this situation is your career.
2. Do as much as you can to help the transition. The new company that I went to work for wanted me to start asap, but I was willing to give my previous employer 2 full weeks of my time since I did value the relationship and wanted to leave on the best terms possible.
3. Just be honest. While they may not want you to go, they should understand that this is what you need to do.
Good luck! Hope it all goes well.
I am one of 2 developers at the 7 person company. The company is full of enjoyable people, for the most part. The job itself is one that I've wanted to quit for the past year and a half. Perhaps worse in my scenario is that when I leave, they're going to be pretty much left floating dead in the waters until they find another developer. And, even when they do find a replacement, it'll take a few months for that person to get up to speed. I've been there a year and a half and I'm not even 100% knowledgeable about everything there. So, I'm a little nervous about when I put in my 2 weeks notice.
To answer your questions, though - I'm just going to do it. I'm the kind of person that usually stresses out a ton, and would probably be closing to passing out due to stress within the moment prior to putting in my 2 weeks. It's all going to be fine, though. It's not up to my boss, it's up to me. It's my future. So, with that in mind, I'm just going to notify him as soon as possible and that'll be that. I'm going to be polite and thankful for the job, since it has been very accommodating. (they let me finish up school part time while working)
In your case, I'd just be extra friendly. If he's a family friend, then he will understand.
Good luck.
What does that mean? Pick an idea that is either inherently non-technical or requires significant non-technical work to launch. Your idea can't be stolen if it takes a massive amount of research and pre-programming work to launch. Most hackers (typically the people most capable of executing quickly) will try to solve a problem technically. So, don't solve the problem technically.
At first, like you, I was scared that anybody could copy it and do it themselves, but after revealing my idea to others, I realized they didn't "get it" like I did. Every idea has subtleties, even something like Groupon which has been copied to death.
I've spent hundreds of hours on improving my understanding of the problem I'm trying to solve. Now I have the confidence that anyone smart enough to help me execute will also see the value of working with me and not against me.
The key is to make sure everyone's interests are aligned, that's how you build a real team. It's not what you've done in the past that counts (idea), it's what you'll do in the future (execution).
In the end, it boils down to "an idea isn't much worth. It's the execution that matters." Just try to be quick.
One thing that we did was, we gave all the people who started our company a small share. With this, everyone involved in the early stages had a good reason to keep quiet about our prototype. Worked for us. May not be the best for every start-up though. Especially if you want to hire people abroad.
Very few of these companies manage to break out and go big - when the dotcom bubble burst, all of our former giants like Nortel and Corel imploded, leaving only RIM to pick up the pieces in the tech sector.
There are reams of tech companies in the $1MM-$300MM space, a few in the $300MM-1B space, and basically one (RIM) in the $10B+ space.
Getting capital to scale aggressively is a huge problem - it's just not as easy or as free-flowing as in the USA. However, foreign financiers are starting to notice that they can get better returns on Canadian companies because of a paucity of funding, so I'm hoping that will improve things over time.
Otherwise, Canada is a fucking awesome place to start companies. We just need more people with the balls, the drive, and the unwillingness to accept no for an answer when it comes to raising money.
In the US, angel investors and VCs are more apt to take risks and aim for the huge rewards. In Canada, it seems the investors are looking for singles, and even then, they expect you to already have market traction.
Check-out Basil Peters stuff to get an idea of what I'm referring to. Early Exits, not going for the home-runs.
At the same time, there is a large Canadian contingent in Silicon Valley doing great things. So I don't think its the entrepreneurs, it's the investment market.
Would Twitter have been funded here? Not likely. Freshbooks? Not likely. RIM? Possibly.
Before my infatuation with Clojure I spent a couple of years intermittently hacking at SBCL, writing other toy applications, flirting with CLSQL and UCW and struggling with the ASDF ecosystem. CL became a disappointment because of the library problem, and because I couldn't shake the feeling that the language was overburdened. How many operators for equal do you need, anyway?
(Joke, joke. Well, sorta.)
Frightfully smart people, worthy of your respect, say you should know Lisp.
You've already surmised that there's some groupthink here on HN. PG is one of Lisp's principal cheerleaders, he writes in lucid prose and has a couple of very nice textbooks to his credit. (On Lisp is probably the best macro treatment out there.) HN is itself written in PG's own Lisp variant, and there's lots of us here who have drunk the Kool-Aid.
So do invest some time in Lisp, but don't believe for a moment that you can do a few Euler problems and have a good feeling for the language. Your effort will take some time, however long it takes to learn to recognize design patterns in Lisp code. (This is where those autoindenting editors shine.)
And which Lisp? You'll get as many opinions as there are Lisps. Clojure's emphasis on FP attracts me, and its heavy emphasis on Java interop is immensely practical. You've got eight months to go before the next Conj; better get cracking, and good luck.
Not yet. I've only recently started making a concerted effort to learn Clojure; so I haven't written any "production" Lisp yet.
Do you aspire to or want to use Lisp/Clojure? Why? Learn something new? See if you experience some of that wonderfulness that everyone talks about?
Yes, and for all of the reasons you mention. I've been hearing about how incredible and productive Lisp is, so I want to find out first-hand if it really lives up to the hype or not. If it does, then maybe using Lisp (via Clojure) could actually represent a real competitive advantage.
Do you know others who are serious Lispers? Are you reading HN and assuming that there are lots of serious Lispers out there? (I am.)
I really don't know anybody personally who I would call a "serious Lisper." But I do know some other people who have gotten on the Clojure bandwagon and are learning Clojure.
Is Lisp really seeing the kind of interest and usage suggested by the submissions? Or is HN groupthinking about Lisp?
Who knows?
I do want to be using Lisp, mostly because it is giving me a chance to experience programming in a new way. The only really new thing I've learned is a sort of mental click on how programming functionally feels. However, I've also been exposed to a lot of new concepts. I don't think I've had any sort of enlightenment, but I do think I've improved.
The only other people I know who use Lisp are people I met after starting Clojure. It has some really awesome people lurking in its IRC channel.
As to whether or not the Lisp love is group think, I have no idea. I can tell you that most of my teachers in college don't even know Lisp exists and I'm the only student I know who is using it. Subjectively, my teachers don't seem very competent to me and my fellow students don't seem to program outside of the classroom.
I can tell you that Lisp doesn't seem as readable as python, but it is still fun to program in. I don't regret that I'm trying out Clojure.
Is Lisp/Scheme as tedious as I'm assuming? I'm not talking about readability -- surely one can get used to the parens and indenting and read (and write) it just fine -- I'm talking about tedium of everything having to be a procedure call.
I have questioned my being a software developer also in the past. I seriously thought about going back to university to become a teacher. I decided against it. Mostly because of the financial losses this would have caused and because I just try to find outlets for my desire to teach in my current job as well as spare time.
It's usually a shame if you basically throw away 4.5 years of working experience to do something completely different. Unless you really hate what you are doing, I'd recommend trying to slightly steer you career into the direction you want to explore. Drastic changes often come with high losses.
Unless you have enough money to just jump ship and go try whatever.
A few things:
1. I would move the 'About' tab over next to the 'Owed to You' tab. Stretching it across looks slightly off.
2. The last line of your copy could use a rewriting. Maybe "Try it out! Just use your own e-mail address."Or just take out the comma.
3. Is there a way to remove yourself from the e-mail list on the site? (not just in the e-mail.)
Just this past weekend, I taught myself enough Ruby (on Rails) to get the basic application down. My next steps involve designing a nice UI and to add more connection features.
I don't really have enough done to post anything here yet, but if there's something you'd really like to see in a web app like this, your advice is most welcome.
Some ideas would be to get small bands/musicians signed up and spread the word to their fans or listeners. If your app is any good, the word will spread on it's own. You are better off not getting a lot of publicity before your app is real slick
SecondMarket creates liquidity for investors, founders, and employees while allowing the company to still maintain some control of how many investors they have.
At NextGenConf a few weeks ago, Peter Thiel specifically said Clarium prefers to invest in companies that can be successful without any exit. [Can't find a ref here, taken from my notes.]
[1] http://ecorner.stanford.edu/authorMaterialInfo.html?mid=2311
As for why, it is because the work we're doing (a particular style of video game) is unproven in the market, and we need to be able to take substantial risks, again and again, where we stand to lose a lot of money. We can't afford to have any external interests guiding these decisions. We're doing this work for love of the work, so an exit would be ridiculous.
If I was a V.C., I would dismiss any founder that answered the "what is your exit strategy?" question with anything other than a middle finger. A good V.C. would see it as the V.C.'s job to convince the founder to sell at the right time.
If you don't want to go through that route, and your software can run in a private cloud, then I suggest you offer them a non-hosted version. Giving them your source code is a no no unless you are planning to open-source everything.
In addition, let them know that they'll have to pay for upgrades. Having said that, make sure you price it properly to make the extra hassle worth it.
You want to put your code in escrow, and have an agreement that if your company folds, the customer gets full access (not necessarily ownership) of the code, and has the right to the engineers' time necessary to get it and keep it working.
These sorts of things are standard in some industries. Get an hour of free consultancy with an appropriate lawyer, and it will work easily. Talk to your customer and say that you are sufficiently confident to give them full access to the code in the event that you can't deliver. They get the full blast of your confidence, as well as the assurance that it will all work.
I'm biased on this one, and it's a little outdated, but Mandia's book is pretty good too: http://www.amazon.com/Incident-Response-Computer-Forensics-S...
If you know which you are looking for, you can most likely find it on the github mirror: http://vim-scripts.org/
I think it's easy for people to poo poo on Detroit. Detroit needed to burn so something better could rise from the ashes. Change always happens when things hit its lowest point.
That being said, there are a lot of smart people in the midwest, and given the challenge of finding talent in the valley, there should be more startups in the midwest. Chicago and Pittsburgh seem to be getting there but you don't hear much from other places... Any place with good universities will have some startups, but Detroit hasn't gotten much out of U of M
I started my business in Detroit and there is no other place I would choose if I did it all over again.
Stop passing old stereotypes about Detroit around and come see the city for yourself.
HN. I joined the day after it opened for public use (it had been in beta for YC founders for about 6 months previous).
FictionAlley.org. I started lurking when they had a couple hundred members, and joined as user 1881. Joined the staff a couple months later, when we were at around 2500 registered users, and when I left the staff 3 years later, we had over 100,000.
Dropbox. Like you, I remember being super impressed by Drew's little demo on the HN forums. I actually had lunch with Drew, Arash, and Aston right after they got their Sequoia funding to discuss joining the company as employee #2. Had my own startup at the time and wouldn't leave my cofounder; I keep wondering if this'll be one of those decisions I'll regret forever, but OTOH the failure of my startup afterwards led me to Google, and that's been a pretty good experience too.
FaceBook. In September of 2004, a couple of my friends were all excited about this new social network that had just expanded to Amherst from the Ivy League. The founders had apparently just moved out to Silicon Valley, gotten some angel funding, and were shopping the company around to acquirers and VCs. I joined, found it kinda "meh", but friended all my friends (and a few people I met just once or twice at parties). At the time, they had profile photos, contact info, and the Wall, but nothing else. No private messaging, no chat, no photo-sharing, no apps, no events, no groups, etc.
Avici (remember them? They sold the massive routers that Enron Broadband and many of the major ISPs of the first dot-com boom used). Sometime in the summer of 1995 or 1996, we were sitting by the pool with the family of one of my friends from middle school, and talking computers. My friend's father said he and a bunch of his coworkers from BBN were founding a new company. They'd wanted to do these multi-terabit/second routers for years, and given how the Internet was exploding, it was now or never. They IPO'd at a market value of over a billion dollars in 2000, my friend's dad cashed out as soon as the lockup was over, and then the company promptly tanked.
Akamai. I was in a support group for gifted & talented kids with Reid Barton, the 4-time IMO gold medalist, when I was a teenager. Sometime around 1998, my dad was talking with his mom about what he was up to. He'd been working on the Cilk programming language at MIT, and one of the professors in the department was leaving to found this Akamai startup. Reid was going to join him as an intern. The irony is that I waited until the dot-com bust, after Danny Lewin was killed on 9/11, then picked up a whole bunch of Akamai shares on the open market at a price lower than the strike prices of virtually all the employees. That pretty much funded my first startup.
Posterous. Here the first thoughts were different and it didn't kick in among most of my friends. I used it for some time as an experiment and got to know it quite well, but somehow I didn't enjoy it too much, now I know I'll be using this platform for some projects soon.
Flickr. I wasn't much into photography back then, but my mates who were active photogs got crazy about it. At first I really didn't like it, partly because of the early UI/UX, partly because I wasn't really sure about the idea of hosting pics 'out there' and didn't like the ToS. After a few years, when I got into photography as a hobby, started using it right away (exploring and sharing) and I do it actively to this day.
Lots of local companies, which are probably irrelevant to most of the HN crowd, but I'll mention some anyway: gadu-gadu (from a simple sms gate app to being THE instant messenger in Poland completely killing ICQ here), grono.net (first leading social network), nasza-klasa (classmates social network), wykop.pl (digg clone).
Then there are some non-YC things, like Mibbit, Tarsnap, and BCC, which aren't actually "big," but have gotten enough coverage here, and seem to have gained some permanence.
I probably could have gotten a nice Twitter username if I had bothered. Oh well.
I used it a few days after it was launched public and thought it was just anther blogging platform. I hardly paid much attention. After an year or two the service started to gain traction when some famous bloggers moved to Posterous.
I still don't use it but it certainly has grown big.
I'm finishing up deep integration of aMember, vBulletin and WordPress now and it is going very well. I'm very excited about launching.
aMember is built to manage recurring subscriptions first, but you can set products to "lifetime" and users will only have to make a single payment if needed.
Open source, healthy ecosystem, safe future. Around 60% of my friends with smartphones have Android devices. Don't worry about competition, there's plenty of demand. Just be good at it.
If open source isn't a requirement and you own a Mac then obviously iOS is a great choice too. For the time being I really wouldn't consider learning any platform apart from these two.
I'm an iOS developer, now doing a deep-dive into Android.
Pretty much, the consensus among my iOS developer circle is that to be considered a serious mobile player you need three platforms: iOS, Android, and mobile web.
To be more marketable as a developer, there is no single platform that you want to learn (the true answer is to strive to become a better designer than coder - the best coder I know personally is a better designer - and that is one of the reasons he's had top-10 App Store apps). Learning Android has less of a learning curve. Knowing both iOS and Android is hard - I'm trying to do that now - and I've given up - shelved all my iOS projects to focus on Android.
Android is going to win in the long-run. WebOS is going to be a footnote in the history of tablets (unfortunately Nokia didn't buy them 2 years ago). Windows Phone 7 is a wildcard. By mobile web, I don't mean rich HTML5 - I mean decent mobile optimized websites like http://shakeshack.com
If you are going to study iPhone, just dive right in. The analyzer will save you from the most egregious of memory leaks and retain cycles. You will realize that your code you are writing sucks three or four iterations or generations down the line. Don't fret about that. You will go back and forth between the benefits of IB vs writing code for UIs directly.
If you are going to study Android, the code from OpenIntents is some of the best written I've seen so far [1]. A lot of the Android examples don't cover non-trivial stuff (like how do you have a ContentProvider that can handle multiple tables, how do you skin). OpenIntents shows a way, maybe not the best way - but decent, how to do all of that.
[1] http://code.google.com/p/openintents/source/browse/trunk
If you're thinking about launching your own apps, the same logic applies. Go where the users are, then branch out if you're successful. There may be less apps on some of the other platforms, but now that there are successful smartphone companies, they're porting to most major platforms, so you're competing with the big boys for a share of a much smaller pie.
If you know at least basic C, Objective-C isn't hard to learn at all, but you need a Mac to do development on.
Android requires Java as far as I can tell, but maybe there are other options for that platform. Java is fairly close to C, but you'll probably still find it easier to learn if you've done C++.
It is also possible to create web apps that are essentially wrapped. Though I'd imagine you still need access to the platform (e.g. a Mac for iPhones) to produce even the wrapper.
Keep in mind that dynamic languages such as Objective-C and JavaScript will probably make it easier to debug, at least in my experience. If this is something brand new to you, a forgiving platform may be the best way to start.
Which segment you want to target depends on what types of apps you want to make.
If you're goal is to make money from the app itself (like a game or utility app), you should invest in iOS where the ROI is far greater. If you are developing an app for a web service, then you are probably looking for the greatest reach instead of trying to generate profit from the app itself. In this case, you can just partner up with an Android developer to cover both market segments.
On the other hand, if you're fine with making a mass market app that is monetized through ads instead of direct sales, then Android is good choice since it is in need of more consumer-friendly apps. Finally, if you want to make something cool just for the sake of hacking, then Android obviously gives you the greatest access to the underlying system to do whatever you want.
All of the other mobile OS's are too young to really predict where they'll go.
WebOS? Did you hear about any good software thing HP ever released? That company doesn't know the stuff and purchasing Palm doesn't change much.
I've played with many of these Frameworks, just to have a comprehensive unbiased opinion. I also used the pure Android/iOS SDKs too. My suggestion would be to use the pure Android & iOS SDKs to learn. Then use the Airplay SDK ($$), which covers all Smartphones. (<they offer free education licenses)
By the way: You can circumvent the slow Android emulator by using an Android Virtual Machine http://www.android-x86.org/ or the latest AVD Platform target, which supports "snapshots".
Best wishes
AARRR is a nice conceptual schema for organizing activities-- I don't really see it is as something that is "applied", as much as a reminder that: a) each of the five areas is important in its own right, b) each of the five areas has separate goals, and c) each of the five areas has separate metrics.
At least, that's the way I'm using it.
We actually had exactly this discussion internally when we created our landing. We even had at least one prototype of the more mysterious kind with little more than a signup form.
I think both can work well, but for our beta we felt it was quite important that our users had an idea about what they signed up for. We're not doing a consumer product, and it wouldn't help us much getting lots of emails from people who would be completely lost when given access to a tool for professional web designers.
I suspect that being more mysterious would work well for sites with more of a social networking or entertainment focus.
1) http://www.localmind.com and http://www.dayri.me
The Art of the Start - Guy Kawasaki http://www.amazon.com/Art-Start-Time-Tested-Battle-Hardened-...
Outside Innovation - Patricia Seybold http://www.amazon.com/Outside-Innovation-Customers-Co-Design...
Unleashing the Killer App - Larry Downes & Chunka Mui http://www.amazon.com/Unleashing-Killer-App-Strategies-Domin...
Wellsprings of Knowledge - Dorothy Leonard Barton http://www.amazon.com/Wellsprings-Knowledge-Building-Sustain...
The Innovators Dilemma - Clayton Christensen http://www.amazon.com/Innovators-Dilemma-Revolutionary-Busin...
Crossing the Chasm - Geoffrey A. Moore http://www.amazon.com/Crossing-Chasm-Geoffrey-Moore/dp/00605...
The Startup Game: Inside the Partnership between Venture Capitalists and Entrepreneurs - William H. Draper http://www.amazon.com/Startup-Game-Partnership-Capitalists-E...
Some of these aren't necessarily about startups, but I think they all have something valuable to offer. YMMV.
Not sure how helpful it will be, but it is definitely a source of inspiration, and also possibly examples of how things can work. Either way, once I picked it up, I couldn't put it down.
I assume from your post that you and your brother are cofounders and neither can code? If this is the case, your setup already hardly make any sense. Smart coders will know better. Chances are you hardly know much about the business side of things much less convince coders to build your dream, one that I'm sure hasn't been "truly" validated.
Of course I am assuming and I could be wrong and you did validate your idea correctly and have much more going, but I seriously doubt it (and I'm trying to say that nicely here).
You should in all sense, validate the idea with REAL potential users, not your friends. If that pans out and you have limited funds, outsource a prototype first. THEN and only then, should you consider moving to the valley after you've got some minor traction and a working demo. The valley is not cheap and unless you live somewhere like Manhattan, you're not helping your financial situation much more. You're making it worse.
Networking is important but working smart is also important. You can make online connections before coming here. You have your odds stacked against you if you don't have local coders for raising (whether you hire before or after). Majority of all investors won't invest unless you have in-house coders so the long term strategy of hiring overseas hopefully isn't something you were planning and is only in consideration for your prototype/demo.
Salaries here are crazy but that's how it goes. At this point in your startup, I would seriously consider finding a cofounder and define very specific roles between you and your brother. And hopefully you're bringing enough knowledge on the business side as you're expecting your coder to bring to the table on the technical side. After all, you don't want to bring on someone who can't code at all and expect them to learn, no one wants to team up with an inexperience business cofounder only to have them learn and certainly not TWO of them. Something to consider.
Ideas are great but alone they're not worth much. You need to make it worthwhile for whoever you're working with as well. If you can get a prototype and demo up, pitching to coders AFTERWARDS make things a bit easier. Something to consider.
Best of luck
1. start lean:
Only hire founders who will work for nothing. You can also hire new people and train, but that's /very slow/ and not really recommended if you are a "startup" rather than a lifestyle business.
2. get funded. take the money (and the publicity. 1% of a funded company is going to be perceived as more valuable by most people than 50% of the same company before it's funded) and hire good people.
For both 1 and 2, the valley is great. It's a great place to meet people who have the technical skills (and the financial acumen) to become a co-founder. It's also a great place to find people who might fund you, and it's a wonderful place to find people you'd want to hire if you had a lot of money.
The thing of it is, people get paid more around here, but standards are higher, too. A mediocre SysAdmin in silicon valley, if you move him to, say, the Sacramento area, will be like a minor god.
This isn't to say that you can't find good people outside of silicon valley, but the average here is higher. I'd say high enough higher to justify our inflated wages. If you are paying market rate for market skill, even though you are paying more here, I'd say you are at least getting as much skill per dollar as you would elsewhere, and maybe more.
Hang out at the hacker dojo, go to various meetups, meet people. It's pretty great. Personally, I think it's worth the extra cost just for the social life. I feels pretty great to be surrounded by all these smart people who are interested in the same sorts of things you are interested in.
But really, if you want to hire people on the cheap, this is not the place to do it. You would be better off almost anywhere else in the world. Hiring foreigners (or Midwesterners) and having them work remote is one way to do it. Moving to Texas is another popular option.
In general, you get what you pay for, only less. Code has to be maintained, and even if something is thrown together in "a couple months", you may regret that for anything except a prototype.
A single excellent programmer may very well handle your entire project, and ten horrible programmers may never get it done. If you're not experienced dealing with programmers, then set up some kind of deal where you pay only when it's finished and you see regular progress from the people you hire. Be prepared to set aside plenty of time to test what is given to you, and do both expected and unexpected things with it. You need to be in a position to reject their work if they say it's "done" and you can still see quirks and instability (because some programmers can be lazy or clueless).
The cost of living in the valley is very high, so anyone living there will need more money for that reason alone. It wouldn't surprise me if you paid nearly 50% extra. This might be worth it, especially if it means finding someone right away instead of 6 months from now, but keep it in mind.
Another possibility is to drive a nondescript van down Castro Street on a weekday around lunch, pick out a scrappily dressed young male, and kidnap him. Make sure you're driving facing west (or is it north? I mean south) so that you don't get trapped by the railroad. You'll need guns, I hear you can get them in Reno.
This is not what I was asking for! Infact, we are both programmers. So I wasn't trying to offense anybody!
The thing is that if we get an early investment of 10K (we also want to ask for the less possible that we could need) we dont want to blow it off inmediately on one single guy...
What I was asking is how to invest it the better way possible to finish a prototype? (that is what I meant with cheap)
What I was looking for are things like:
1. Hire a prgrammer for a month for around 5K to help you with the core. You can find them in ...
2. At the same time hire 2 trainees for 2K each and...
Can someone give me an advice on that?
2. Many startups don't need that many programmers early on. I prototyped my latest project by myself in under two weeks.


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We are excited to announce KDE's recent appointment of Mylinda Jones, as our newest Board Member. Mylinda will be filling her mother's (Carol Jackson) vacant seat through December 31, 2018. Please make her welcome!
Regular meetings are typically held on the fourth Monday of each month at 5:15 p.m. with the Public School Corporation meeting held first in the Central Office gymnasium. Any changes in this regularly scheduled time or location will be made public by news media announcement and will be posted on the district calendar. Special meetings are called when necessary. Notification of any special meetings are also made to the public via news media announcements. All meetings are open to the public and the public is invited to attend. For more information, please contact Amy Wessel via e-mail: firstname.lastname@example.com, or via phone: (606)327-2726 or (606)327-2706.
The Ashland Independent Schools Board Policy Manual can be found on the Kentucky School Board Association website using the following link: AISD Board Policy Manual.

subset: commoncrawl


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Edward Robert Small
|Service No
|Date of Death
|The Buffs (East Kent Regiment) 7th Battalion.
|Thiepval Memorial, France. This memorial to the missing of the Somme, bears the names of more than 72,000 officers and men of the United Kingdom and South African forces who died in the Somme sector before 20 March 1918 and have no known grave. Over 90% of those commemorated died between July and November 1916.
Edward was born on 6th January 1877 and baptised at St Mary's, Bryanston Square, Westminster on 7th February 1877 with his brother Arthur Vivian (b.1875). Besides Edward and Arthur, his parents, James Edward and Edith Amelia Small, had five other children; Amy Edith (b.1873), Kate Evelyn (b.1881), Marguerite Esme (b. 1888) and twins, Percy Howard and Arnold Rowland (b.1893).
In the 1881 census, the family were listed as living at 14 Upper Baker Street, Marylebone, London and Edward's father worked as an umbrella manufacturer. By the time of the 1901 census the family were living at Stamford Villa, Long Lane, Finchley and Edward's father's is employed as a 'school attendance officer', while Amy is a post office clerk, Arthur a bank clerk and Edward an insurance office clerk. All the children are still living at home. The family appear regularly in the parish records of St Paul's, particularly in giving to the East End Window fund, which suggests that they were probably members of the church.
By the time of the census of 1911, Edward was residing with his mother at 471, Archway Road, Highgate. Edward worked as an insurance clerk, whilst Arthur was a bank clerk, Amy was a civil service clerk and Marguerite was a civil service telegraphist. The twins, Percy and Arnold, were a bank clerk and a mercantile clerk (in exports) respectively.
Edward married Margaret Mary Brown (d. 1960 in Finchley) and they had four children: Winifred Margaret (b. 1912), who was baptised on 8th June 1913 in St Luke's Finchley, Edward William (b. 1913), who was baptised in St Luke's on 30th August 1914, Douglas Percy Roy and Dorothy Edith Kate (1915-1996), who was baptised in St Luke's on 11th July 1915. The baptism registers indicate that Edward was employed as an assurance clerk and that they lived at 'Blackheath', Holmwood Gardens. Interestingly, Margaret and all four children are listed as living at 6, Holmwood Gardens in the 1938 Electoral Register.
Edward enlisted in the 5th Battalion of the Buffs and was transferred to the 7th Battalion of the Buffs (East Kent). The Battalion embarked from Folkestone on 27th July 1915. They deployed to the Somme, occupying trenches opposite the village of Fricourt. Here, on 1st September, they had their first real taste of action. This set the pattern for many months spent in the same region until 1st July when they took part in the Battle of the Somme, with the task of clearing craters from the mines exploded under the Germans at Carnoy. The battalion was fully engaged throughout the Somme struggles. The 7th then went into rest in the Abbeville area, before returning to the Somme for continuing fighting. Edward was killed in action while attending to the wounded on the Western Front.
The May 1917 monthly magazine of St Luke's Finchley says that Edward was 'killed while helping the wounded in France … Mr Small was one of the first to occupy a house in Holmwood Gardens, his first home after his marriage. He leaves a wife and four young children, the youngest about two months old. The wife is very seriously ill.'


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Last year I had the pleasure of shooting an aspiring model by the name of Alisha. It was her first photo shoot, so I had to provide a bit of coaching...but not much, she was a natural! The real challenge was keeping an overly helpful aunt from taking over the photo shoot! Thankfully all challenges were overcome, and Alisha's portraits turned out gorgeous!
Keep it up Alisha, great work.


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St Luke's Hospice's latest fundraising venture is in the form of the Accumulator Challenge. The charity have given business minds across the South West £50 as a start-up float to raise as much as they can! St Luke's has been encouraging people to walk, run, fundraise, support, auction, raffle, and bake their £50 into a larger sum so QuickStore Saltash has got involved on the action!
They'll be hosting 2 carwashes on the 9th and 23rd of October in which patrons are encouraged to make a suitable donation in order for the team to leave you with a gleaming motor! On Friday 2nd October they'll be asking you "how many lollipops are in the tub?" in their fiercely competitive lollipop challenge!
Friday 16th October is the rag-bag collection so people are being encouraged to bring in their old, possibly stained and even ripped, clothing so they can send it off for recycling!
There's also going to be a highly anticipated bake sale on Friday 30th October so make sure you get yourself down to QuickStore Saltash to get your hands on some tasty little weekend treats – all for a donation to the St Luke's Hospice cause of course!
Find out what you can do to aid St Luke's or contact the QuickStore Saltash team for further details!


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Full Streaming Anti-Social in High Definition FormatNow you can download full Anti-Social in top quality with duration 116 Min and has been launched in 2015-01-01 with MPAA rating is 2.
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- Countries of movie : United Kingdom,
- Language of movie : English,
- Durationof movie : 116 Min
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- Cast of movie :Gregg Sulkin (Dee), Meghan Markle (Kirsten), Josh Myers (Marcus), Christian Berkel (Philip), Christian Berkel (Dominic), James Devlin (Nicky), Andrew Shim (Jason), Sophie Colquhoun (Emma), Caroline Ford (Rochelle)
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Hello again. Today I am sharing my first make using this Tatty Twinkles stamp. This was a completely experimental piece for me as I never ever shade my card before or after stamping but I did this time.
I used she Tim Holtz Distress ink to colour my background before inking the stamp. I was in a red and black mode for some reason so I used some Hunkydory Adorable Scorable as my base and worked the colours from that. I cut out some images from the set to use as embellishments and I chose some red ribbon to highlight the sentiment. I literally winged it with the border and I'm thrilled with it. Sometimes winging it works, sometimes it doesn't but I've been lucky with this make. Even though I have been making cards for about 14 years I haven't had the confidence to experiment until the last 2 years.


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Developmental Psychology, University of Michigan
Cohort Seven Fellow
Academic Mentor
Christopher Monk, PhD
Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry, University of Michigan; Research Professor, Survey Research Center, Center for Human Growth and Development
Policy Mentor
Alison Miller
Associate Professor of Health Behavior and Health Education, University of Michigan School of Public Health; Research Associate Professor, Center for Human Growth and Development
Areas of Expertise
Mental Health and Well-Being, Youth Development, Longitudinal Data Analysis, Structural Equation Models, Adolescents and Young Adults, Low-Income Families and Individuals, Neuroimaging
Tyler Hein is a fourth-year Developmental Psychology doctoral student at the University of Michigan. Her research utilizes neuroimaging, social contextual, and longitudinal approaches to evaluate specific mechanisms linking qualitatively different early adversities to adolescent brain function and internalizing psychopathology. Ms. Hein seeks to conduct research that directly aids in the development of effective prevention and intervention strategies to improve mental health outcomes for children and families. Prior to beginning graduate school, Ms. Hein graduated with a bachelor's degree in Neuroscience and a minor in Chemistry from the University of Pittsburgh, where she researched neural mechanisms underlying the development of irritability in children.
Parsing the Effects of Child Maltreatment on Neurodevelopment and Mental Health
Understanding the specific mechanisms through which child maltreatment and protective factors impact brain development and adolescent mental health is essential to the creation of effective intervention efforts. The aim of this dissertation is to examine the unique effects of qualitatively different forms of child maltreatment and protective factors on affective brain function, as well as anxiety and depression, in a diverse adolescent sample. The first data chapter examines the relation between exposure to abuse, threat-related brain function, and anxiety symptoms. The second data chapter aims to elucidate the relation between exposure to neglect, reward-related brain function, and depression symptoms. The third data chapter investigates the potential buffering effects of protective factors on the relations between abuse and neglect, threat- and reward-related brain function, and anxiety and depression.


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Innovative and comprehensive design capabilities to help you achieve your vision.
Design is much more than creating a new look. Design is about understanding parameters and constraints, and providing inventive and original solutions that successfully communicate your message, strengthen your brand, and give you the edge over your competition.
Our goal is to deliver unique design strategies that work for you. What can we design for you?
Our in-house design services include:
3D Renderings
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Exhibit Design
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Material Sourcing
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… and much more
Check out some of our recent projects on our Portfolio page, or schedule a visit to our Mahwah, NJ facility to see our talented exhibit design team in action.


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Always there was magic between my textbooks and sleep. As soon as I took a textbook in my hands immediately the goddess of sleep would lovingly embrace me. Till I finished my studies I had this disease ! So I took to outdoors for my night study to overcome this problem. Till late evenings, say, up to 9 o'clock in the night our school campus became my study place after I joined college. This campus became part of my life since appa worked there and I had my whole school life there. And not only that, we had the church, the big cathedral and I was a regular church goer in those days. Till I reached my middle forties I preferred to attend services there for festivals like Christmas and Easter. The campus had been an inseparable part of my life and this attachment made me have my first grandson's baptism there in that church.
The other place, which was my study-spot, was under the streetlights of our road. During nights, especially after 10 o'clock, a group of five or six of us, all from different schools but neighbors used to come together under the streetlights. The favorable spot for all of us was a corner building, which housed the local post office. There were two advantages. It had a brighter mercury light since it was a sort of road junction and the other one was a overhead shed which could protect us on cold wintry or rainy days. Studying under the streetlights had its own advantage. Since we were always in groups one cannot so easily sleep but we had so many things to share – secrets of teenagers. The hours we spent on roads to study were much less than what we spent to share our little secrets, adventures and escapades. Though our group had around six or seven fellows only two from the group came up to post-graduate level and the rest either just passed their higher secondary exam or flopped even in that. I would be so fresh when I was with this group and once I got into the terrace of our home to continue the studies, within no time the unconquerable goddess of sleep would embrace me.
My other study center was the St. Mary's School-Church campus. I was almost a campus-kid since all my childhood and adolescent days were revolving around the church and campus. In those days there used to be two services everyday, the first as early as five in the morning and the other at 6 o'clock. Appa and amma used to get up at 4.30 and they would go to the first service. They would wake me up before leaving to the service. Amma would come back from the church. I would be then going for the second service. For many years we used to get our daily milk from the farm in the campus and so immediately after the service I should get the milk and rush back home. The farm was closed after some years and so I was relieved from that duty. When I reached the last two years of my schooling I stayed back after the service in the campus. The excuse was that I could study for an hour or two before going home. The school provided a room to study in the evening for some day scholars who did not have good facilities at home. This facility was extended to me even after I joined the college as I was the son of a popular teacher. So some hours in the morning and evening became hours of freedom for me. The strict discipline maintained at home would be missing and I was the master to myself in these hours. These were the hours of total freedom for me. I enjoyed these hours to the hilt.


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Our prime country houses across the Murrumbidgee River were eagerly searched for through the cattle males of yesteryear. Nowadays, individuals flooded lush grazing houses from the high country support huge amounts of brown and rainbow trout.
Brown trout grow body fat around the abundant way to obtain yabbies the dammed river – Lake Tantangara – supports. Late Fall sees well-conditioned seafood transfer to Tantangara's streams to start the annual breeding event.
Spring time will find lengthy lean trout cruising the houses after losing condition over winter breeding and also the scarcity of feed obtainable in the river. The rainbow trout aren't a hostile yabby feeder and therefore will be the more compact of these two species within this lake.
Reviews of poor fishing within the all downhill areas this year didn't deter me and my fishing mate, Peter Hanrahan from creating a recent trip.
Pete, or "Bags" to his mates (Pete always appeared to trap bags of seafood or plastic box out whenever he went fishing) continues to be fishing these all downhill areas for many years and it has the understanding to understand where, when and just how to trap trout at different stages from the four seasons.
We showed up around Sunday lunchtime and met track of two buddies Wayne and Paula Burns who also provide been fishing el born area for several years. Lunch was a little of the problem once we always depend on fresh seafood for supper every single day but because we hadn't been fishing yet, lunch comprised of bread and jam and coffee. Fly gear was soon put together and also the boat released and also the mission begun.
Temperature of water was still being high at 19–20C that was not favorable to get affordable bank fishing throughout your day but was still being great for the mudeyes designed to use the hotter several weeks to depart water of the evening when they're protected from wild birds and climb onto a log, rose bush, rock or stems of grass and leave the nymph stage right into a dragon fly.
A miracle day within the high country.
Finding in which the cooler water was welling up after tepid to warm water was pressed over the dam through the prevalent wind, we found in which the biggest quantity of mudeye shucks were around the surrounding rose bush and rocks. This is in which the mudeyes would again come ashore, hopefully today.
We'd our evening fishing place sorted and merely had the capacity for a night meal of steak grilled within the coals having a lashing of veggies and boiled spuds.
Tugging the boat up 100m from the rocks and shrubbery covered in mudeye shucks, we began fishing all of the the sunshine using small black fur flies and Mrs Simpsons to complement the swimming mudeyes because they found shoreline.
I was striking seafood immediately and because the last vestige of sunshine vanished we switched to small muddler minnows and also the seafood fell of these inside a large way. I believe we'd connection with about 10 seafood between us whenever we made the decision to it a evening and roll into mattress ready to have an early start. Although there have been many signs warning of 1080 baits placed out for wild dogs there appeared to become a minimum of six individual dingos mournfully serenading us to rest.
Wayne Burns have been up early each morning and already were built with a beautiful conditioned brown trout of the touch over 5lbs arrived not not even close to our camping, caught on the Woolly Bugger fly.
Pete and that i headed right into a nice bay he understood may hold good quality seafood, going through previous years.
I had been now fishing a black beadhead fly to mimic a little yabby also it was most likely within the first six casts the road drawn up low on a fantastically conditioned brown trout of four.2lbs that was stored for supper.
This brownie fell to some black beadhead fly.
On washing the trout, its contents of the stomach demonstrated it absolutely was feeding solely on yabbies.
Because the sun woke up, the experience died lower so we attempted different techniques for example loch style fishing within the houses in which the sounder demonstrated public of seafood, however this demonstrated hard going.
Pete fishes fly only however i can give anything a try and instead of throw my arm off for nil result I made the decision to rig a little flick fishing rod having a curly tailed plastic grub.
Second cast using the grub also it was smashed around the drop but unsuccessful to connect, despite the fact that it had been hit again on a single retrieve. I transformed to some eco-friendly grub and shortly were built with a plucky rainbow towards the boat.
Rainbows were lots of fun on soft plastics and lightweight flick stays.
Moving to some prominent group of rocks around the leeward side where cooler water must have been welling up, we drifted past, showing flies near to the rocks.
Obtaining the flick stick in the end remained as close enough for any cast, I shot out a Berkley Large Eye edge and also got anchored in the boat with a nice brown.
Twenty metres along another brown required the edge and also the seafood, while not huge, seemed to be stored for supper.
Rain was now beginning to become a feature from the nights and therefore this shut lower the hatching of mudeyes – they require a dry warm evening to hatch so Muddler Minnows were ignored for large black Woolly Buggers.
Going to the Murrumbidgee arm from the river we passed numerous herds of untamed brumbies, legacy from the early cattlemen, these graze around the lush All downhill grasses and glisten under the sun.
Marine existence is rampant within the Murrumbidgee arm, platypus appear to become everywhere throughout the first evening. Caddies flies were thick in mid-air, and nearby wild brumby stallions placed and huffed to warn us off.
Wedgetail eagles squabbled on the floor near to the boat and also the ever present dingos began their mournful wail.
Seafood were rising. Time for you to seafood a dry fly. It is discovered the increases weren't surface increases but sub surface increases because the seafood had to have emerging nymphs.
Fishing from the bank the road stiffened on a pleasant seafood, the black Woolly Bugger had misled another brown, this time around certainly one of 3.8 pounds.
Pete was striking a couple of more compact seafood and becoming a couple of takes by a few bigger ones but stored missing them.
I rigged a really slow action fly fishing rod and tied on small stick caddis fly along with a small Mrs Simpson and caught the funnel above Pete. It had been difficult to separate platypus and trout increases.
Rapidly I'd put three seafood around the bank, one of these an acceptable brown.
Being mainly yabby bird feeders, Tantangara's browns are usually of the good size.
Fishing a more compact creek arm the platypus were changed by water rats, these cruised water and rose out to the rocks before diving in. One water rat cruised below my ft before emerging in the water. Walking across my coiled fly line lounging on the floor, he sniffed the boot of my waders before determining a body fat yabby are the best to consume and again joined water.
Through the finish from the week's fishing we'd caught a great number of seafood between us lunch every single day aside from the very first was fresh trout fried in a little oil with bread and butter. Fresh area mushrooms compounded what we eat too of the bucket filled with fresh boiled yabbies that have been caught of the evening using strong torch light.
While obtaining yabbies I additionally acquired a pocket filled with whitened gemstones, similar to whitened marbles split in 2, one for reds searching just like a mushroom in which the stalk have been. I requested Pete if he understood exactly what the strange gemstones were. "Yep, they are gastroliths," he stated. Gastroliths are calcium carbonate gemstones present in yabby stomachs – yabbies need calcium to develop their new shells after moulting.
Once we packed up camping to mind home following a week of enjoyable and challenging fishing, a whitened dingo searching a lot more like an Arctic wolf was high above our camping and gave us a goodbye wail.
Yeah old mate, help you early in the year.