- I would move to absolutely close to work as possible, even if that means renting a closet from someone on craigslist.
- Consider the day job a sidejob (but of course, be professional). Always look for a better gig.
- Be frank, say you need a vacation right now/nearly immediately because you're unable to keep working at this pace. If they make up flimsy excuses, stay firm and say something like "I feel like I'm not performing at my top level because I'm headed in the direction of burning out. I would like you to help me be recharge my productivity and engagement by finding a way to get some time off very soon because this will save you from having to fire me and hire somebody else and me from having to quit because I really want your help to allow me to get back to firing on all cylinders so we can get X done."
- Build a paper clock
- Visit a massage/sauna/spa place
- Do some random hobby meetups or local community center activities
This is brilliant because the main cost of running gear is power draw (PDUs / electrical circuits). Having OEM/ODM blade ARM setup a-la sgi cloudrack/supermicro is the way to drive costs to the floor, in a Backblaze/Google way. Unfortunately, it's a "Dell/Walmart model" hypercommodity where such a business has to maintain massive customer subscriptions to stay cash positive and still just trickles in $.
It's an interesting space, but if I were launching a cloud IaaS/VPS, I would probably optimize for the other extreme of "Apple model" premium/full-service expensive hosting that has fantastic uptime, gear and sales/support for enterprise/startup and IT/web operations... There's some more money in that and less headaches. (The most money seems to be in the upper-middle pricepoint area.)
This is important because "silence gives consent" to hate and violence directed at unprotected minorities. Revoking business dealings is one of the main levers to encourage countries/groups/companies to play nice. Tyranny of the majority (or to a lesser-degree, minority beyond a sensible point) are incompatible with civility.
Top-down configuration (as opposed to discovery like UDDI) via something like zookeeper or dns solves this problem. And APIs shouldn't do WSDL either, the code and docs should document the API. It's possible to add so many over-engineered layers of YAGNI flexibility that almost no one can understand what the heck is going on or how to hack on it, e.g., Eclipse plugins.
If Snowden or IS uses this service, it's still possible for governments to take you to court Lavabit-style (minus SSL private key) (or Mega or PirateBay) and get a court order to shut you down unless you have colo/VPS hosting in Iceland, Sweden or similar jurisdiction and private DNS registration with a registrar independent from most corporate/diplomatic pressures (definitely not name.com, maybe what piratebay uses: https://www.binero.se or similar with less inflammatory/infamous clients).
Privacy as a service/app cannot be sustainably delivered without being distributed, like TahoeLAFS or i2p. Company-run, centralized service/apps are SPOFs because they're at massive risk of being shutdown or blocked by friendly/unfriendly governments, at their whims, by whomever happens to be in power. The instant email option is partly distributed but the bigger risk is being in the US means US courts, FBI, local police, etc. can grab your provider's servers. name.com is also subject to both Irish and American laws.
Unfortunately, most founders of privacy apps are business naïve and unable to manage their attack surface, making them easy prey to non-technical but more business-savvy folks. This resistance is further compounded by the sunk costs-bias, because what's done is seen as an immovable foundation which can never be torn down and, therefore, it must be worthwhile in the face of overwhelming contradictory evidence (e.g., 1950's lifestyle worship leads to cognitive dissonance with climate change). In reality, a venture should be a viewed as a never-ending collection experiments, where the assumptions may be turn out to be terrible to excellent (hopefully nearer to this) and trends/disruptions may move out from under it all.
Good luck and I hope it makes a lot of money before it gets shutdown by Hillary or the Great Firewall of China.
I had a long chat to a taxi driver medallioned in Chico, Sacramento and SF the other day.# It seems Uber is doing good to bring the fight to the pay-to-play bureaucracy, but it doesn't seem to be showing enough demonstrative acts that their drivers are making more/have better conditions than non-Uber drivers.
# This summer, it seemed there were only 1-2 Uber X drivers in Chico which didn't work weekends. If they did, I had a credit to use which would've meant a free ride. Also, the rules in Chico is that a Paradise (a nearby town) company can't pickup in Chico and vice-versa.
Many carriers already MITM port 80/tcp (blindly sending SYN ACKs). Symptom: try connecting to a random domain without a webserver (like http://cse.ucdavis.edu/ ) and it will seem to have a website but just hang.
I hope this is just a pretext for negotiating an unionization deal. Because short-term $ extraction by ambulance-chasing lawyers might provide a little relief for the past, but it can't quickly solve other sorts of working condition grievances in the future.
A million times yes. This is a common mistake of managers/older people assuming younger/inexperienced folks are dumb from their mistakes and lack of experience. The latter need patience and some guidance for the former to grow their "common sense" to become more capable/productive/successful.
The other antipattern is spoiling kids and helicopter parenting, which leads to sheltered/learned-helplessness kids. Letting kids struggle more to learn for themselves and earn things is important because the role of the parent to prepare people to become independent, survive and thrive. Also, expecting them to do more with much less improves their ingenuity out of necessity. People/startups that are broke can often attain what others cannot because they are able to make something awesome out of what other people call "junk" and waste less money.
USAID and DOD's DIA usually have cool IT/dev gigs.
The other thing is to become a military supplier for development, either like Booz Allen Hamilton contractor or independent shop can work. I worked on a couple of Rails apps for socom/specops. The money is grreat if you need consulting/ish work.
Working with NSA/CIA can become morally ambiguous.
Since I'm anon, I'll say that I did a few ivy league SharePoint implementations. Thankfully, their IT/IS shops had to inherit the content and provisioning responsibilities.
Btw, anyone needing Exchange or similar implementations should use http://www.coyotecrk.com/. They did Cisco's and Stanford's implementations. They'll charge arms/legs, but they'll deliver something production supportable for real shops.
Reminds me of a contract gig I passed on to support Microsoft's creaky inheritance of Danger's Hiptop/Sidekick stuck in cheapest maintenance mode. Everyone associated were trying to rotate out and it seemed like morale was less than zero.
Also never work for slave-driving shops like Taos (aka Tause Mountain) unless you really need the money because it will crush your soul. (eg master cool techs and be awesomely personable to get cooler gigs/referrals.)
- Consider the day job a sidejob (but of course, be professional). Always look for a better gig.
- Be frank, say you need a vacation right now/nearly immediately because you're unable to keep working at this pace. If they make up flimsy excuses, stay firm and say something like "I feel like I'm not performing at my top level because I'm headed in the direction of burning out. I would like you to help me be recharge my productivity and engagement by finding a way to get some time off very soon because this will save you from having to fire me and hire somebody else and me from having to quit because I really want your help to allow me to get back to firing on all cylinders so we can get X done."
- Build a paper clock
- Visit a massage/sauna/spa place
- Do some random hobby meetups or local community center activities
- Volunteer at church/nonprofit to help the needy
- Donate blood