hurt

That's a wonderful if very sad blog post. I'm sorry for your loss Ed.

I've found #1 absolutely essential for my motivation on both a personal and professional level. When I don't understand where I'm going or what I'm trying to do I just procrastinate (and often get depressed). I've found it a really difficult lesson to learn, how to sit down and break tasks down into parts that I can actually accomplish.

I've noticed that when I speak Spanish (or Japanese) I become a much more outgoing person. I've suffered from fairly bad social anxiety most of my life, but when I switch to another language I don't run into the same mental walls that I do when I speak English.

I found that for me I can easily change the direction depending on which foot I focus on in my peripheral vision. I don't know if that'll help. The initial shift from clockwise to counter-clockwise gave me a headache/weird feeling inside my head.

Putting aside the claims about IQ, did anybody else have the picture start acting really funny as you shifted between viewing it clockwise versus counterclockwise?

I had something that looked like a conflict with the figure trying to go both ways at the same time and jumping between the two.

I found it a fun little exercise.

Assuming that your predecessor acted in a professional manner, then I would probably contact the individual after I'd had a chance to take a look at how everything had been laid out.

Non-profits may not have a lot of money for technology, and the recent economic disruptions have really hit them hard due to the drop in funds they get from corporate/other giving.

I would expect to run into a lot of older equipment all duct-taped together in a non-logical fashion. This isn't something that you should blame the predecessor for, sometimes we have to make non-optimal choices given the constraints we work under.

As an aside about working in the non-profit sector, I've been employed as the only IT person for a smaller nonprofit (~30 users or so) for almost 4 years. You may have heard the phrase "the smaller the stakes the more fierce the fight" from academia, it also holds true in the non-profit world. (and I suspect in any human organization, but my experience has been mostly in the academic/non-profit sector thus far.) Expect to run into budget issues, and nasty personalities.

Fortunately, on the budget front organizations exist for IT software/hardware giving that can really help out.

One that I've used: TechSoup.org

Many major software vendors offer discounts for non-profits if you look around.

Plus you can always use linux/freebsd/openbsd/etc on commodity hardware to help keep costs down. At the cost of time depending on your skill set.

I expect you may have already heard a lot or all of the above, so feel free to ignore it!

Oh, and if you get the job, Congratulations!

Thanks to you and ajross, this really helps.

Hey ajross, do you know any good sources for reading up on different I/O paradigms?

It's one of those things that I've read about different methods here and there, but I've never come across one good source that compared and contrasted the various techniques.

The short answer may very well be no, since it somewhat depends on the programming language one chooses to use. As you'd likely handle I/O differently in something like Haskell, versus python. Anyway, I'm just curious Thanks.

I've also never heard of difference tables before, what a cool little technique!

Awesome! A Pittsburgh Hacker News meetup, count me in.