For the non-riders, ATGATT means "All The Gear, All The Time". I wince whenever I see some young kid and his girlfriend riding with t-shirt, short pants, and sandals. Human erasers on donor cycles :(
The Dickey Amendment[0] frightened the CDC from doing just that. Lobbied for by the NRA and added to a spending bill by a Republican congressman. "Although the Dickey Amendment did not explicitly ban it, for about two decades the CDC avoided all research on gun violence for fear it would be financially penalized." The CDC had budgeted $2.6M to study the problem. This was stopped and, in addition (as "punishment" perhaps?), exactly $2.6M was diverted to something else. Willful ignorance. What can you do?
My method is super simple but does require a wee bit of self discipline. I "HALT!". I even have "HALT!" written on a post-it on my monitor. Whenever I notice that my (valuable) attention is wandering, I yell "HALT!" in my head or out loud (depending who is nearby). This makes me snap out of it, to break the pattern. Ideally, I return to what I should be doing but very often I can only do the minimum. The minimum being sitting there doing nothing, thinking of nothing (except the thing I should be doing), until I get bored and want to do something ... but only allowing myself to do what I should be doing otherwise I must continue to sit doing nothing (being halted). It's often too hard to halt AND switch do what I should be doing, so this method breaks it into two steps. Halting alone is much easier to force myself to do since doing nothing is easy. Once in halt-state, the only possible exit is to the proper do-state.
Made https://securemypw.appspot.com so I could securely share passwords with my wife (for bank, investment, biller accounts) in case something happened to me. URLs are saved in a Google doc we both have access to. Now I use it for most of my passwords.
Agreed! Framework == good doesn't mean any/all frameworks == good. Many of PHP's frameworks seem to have ignored PHP's unique run-time characteristics and adopted Java idioms (with Java, you pay once at compile time; with PHP, you pay with every single request). Ubiquity, near/at the top of the PHP benchmarks, seems to accept PHP's unique run-time characteristics (so performs well) and yet still provides all the benefits of a framework (consistency, etc). Ubiquity should see much more love than Laravel/Symfony/etc but doesn't :(
Read "Speaking of India" by Storti. It really helped me understand a lot of the strangeness I also observed working with India-born coworkers and contractors.