Do sun salutations each morning and night (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surya_Namaskara), this relieved all my back pain and other aches. Aeron is the best way to go as far as chairs go, plus they have a killer warranty.
Check out the editor of XBL - for those not familiar, XBL is what XUL is built on top of as well as all the widgets you see in the mozilla platform (ff/tb etc), including all your html controls. I think if google went this route, they are definitely picking up where netscape left off and where moz foundation has limped along with, ie. building a platform around the browser.
Without getting off topic about what a good programmer is etc - One thing to point out that is relevant is the fact that there are a lot more beginner programmers than non-beginner programmers out there - all the content being generated around forums for performing specific tasks (code snippets and QA) created an insane feedback loop for the PHP community - I think that this is where PHP really beats out everyone else - There is much more google searchable support than any other language out there. Fast ROI of your time/instant gratification which fuels beginners to learn more/ask more questions generating more content and answering more questions.
Whats kinda crazy about approaching sound design, at least from a programmers point of view - is all the concepts you have to learn about sound and then learning how other programmers decided to implement these concepts and then sort of procuring all the universal approaches in a specific area. This was my major hold up along with there being really really bad documentation for supercollider. On top of that, most of the code is insane when you try to take it apart and learn from it. I actually thought of digging into the C++ and learning it that way, but that code is pretty bad too. What other stuff are you into right now?
Ive recently been contracting with a large media/design company that among other things incubates web businesses and other ideas. Besides thier own internal ideas they also bring in alot of VC backed companies that need development/design work. These are all web businesses that are essentially outsourcing thier entire product/service frontend/backend development to a third party. This seems flawed right off the bat to me because of the development loop being so large (client -> proj. manager -> my proj. manager -> me) but also it sort of makes sense that there are companies that can charge an arm & leg for work like that and people actually pay it - the clients do not understand the nature of software development and the need for a fast turn around on functionality. Anyways, just wanted to comment on this point of view.