His solution and syntax remind me of Ada's variant records. Despite Ada's focus on safety, it also resorts to runtime exceptions for incompatible fields in that case. That's probably a local maximum in the language design space.
I've run OpenBSD on my Thinkpad for two years, only plugging it in at night, and everything works (sleep, resume, good battery life). Which Thinkpad model do you have? When did you last try OpenBSD? Maybe I could help.
We prefer a simple lifestyle so we omit many expenses: no TV, rarely eat out, drive older cars, have no debt payments, eat only a little meat, buy high quality clothes which last through all 5 kids, high deductibles on all insurance, save as much money as possible.
I'd be glad to answer any specific questions in private. Shoot me an email at [email protected] if you want.
I think that our local schools are about as good as government education can get. My kids' classes range from 11 to 14 students so they get lots of 1-on-1 time with a teacher. The teachers provide extra challenges for exceptional students. The teachers and school administration are very responsive to feedback from parents. Students graduating from high school with good grades get a full scholarship to the University of Wyoming, if they want it.
Having said that, my wife and I place much more emphasis on independent learning and life experiences than on formal schooling. Because my wife and I have plenty of time, we are able to encourage their education in ways we couldn't if we lived in an expensive city. Our lower living expenses also allow us to take trips and have experiences that we feel are more valuable than book learning.
I'm married with 5 kids. We live in rural Wyoming (no income tax, bought a comfortable house for $86k). We've always lived well below our income so we have no debt and sufficient savings.
I mostly choose to work on "products". That helps me focus on problems that people actually care about without any of the startup pressures. Although, I've also written several open source libraries that I thought the community might like.
I started by telling my employer that I would only work 4 days each week. I spent Fridays working on a cool idea my brother and I had. That idea proved useful enough to pay the bills so I quit my job.
I'm much more relaxed now and spend better quality time with my kids. In hindsight, it would be worth almost any sacrifice to get to this point again.
Google should auction off customer support, like it does AdWords.
Hire as many support staff per product as Google deems profitable. When submitting a support request, I indicate how much I'm willing to pay to receive an answer. The highest bids get answers, the rest don't (or get slower answers depending on request volume and difficulty).