Tons of kits like this still exist now a days if you are into guitar playing. kits to build copies of long defunct pedals, or old school tube amps. a lot of fun to make your pedal board, and you can learn as much or as little as you want.
As a kit I cut my teeth on building a hero 1 robot from heathkit before I even learned to write cursive. I often tell people that just to up my geek cred. Luckily the drive to do nerdy things has never really left me.
of course with the exception of it altering you if you left it at home, however that is a bit creepy, and, well let's just say I won't be getting a coin for my wife anytime soon
I've spent the past year "working" within graphical programming, and I have to say it is a slow form of torture.
I have been "writing" IVR applications for a call center. The interface is far from intuitive, and it is jsut too easy to miss what is actually going on. The loops and if statements are all there, but you have to click through on the item to actually see what is going on.
Forget trying to find an easy way to locate where something is. at least in my case (VXML) I was forced to use grep to at least give me an idea of where to look, then spend 10x the amount of time it would take in plain ol code to find where to make the change.
It's funny, i so rarely browse reddit, but i somehow happened upon this story this week - i guess it came up in some kind of mega "what are you most ashamed of" thread or somesuch. Ultimately it was as GP described; a redditor researched one of 'gone wild' big 'stars', poured through her history ,ultimately found another reddit account of a selfie shot that had the same background as the 'gone wild' shot so concluded they were the same or friends, researched back that history and ultimately found her real identity.
just an FYI, you can (even if you don't have the email anymore) get old posts removed from google groups, you have to jump through a bunch of hoops, but it isn't too hard to do. Just read around. I had to cover for 18 year old me posting god knows what on usenets several years ago. I did this when google first bought deja news however, you can likely get them to remove it.
who knew people were saving stuff back in 94-95. hell anyway 18 year old me didn't care, but luckily I can cover for him.
My wife works for Agriculture Extension in our state, so she is a bit in the know here. She says Greek Yogurt is the only growth dairy has seen in over 20 years. Because of that, everyone is going to (or already has) start making it. As far as being New York centric, I would venture to guess it would be because a lot of the research this is based on, is coming out of Cornell, which is the Land Grant institution in New York (Land Grants run extension).
feel lucky you don't have a kid with medical problems.
I've had to drag out accepting an offer from a company so I could find out 100% if my child's doctor was covered by their insurance or not. In the end I had to turn it down because he wasn't in the network, and having to pay the 20k out of network deducible would have ate any net gain I would have gotten by taking that job, I had to turn it down.
I felt bad dragging out the process so long, but I really had to cover myself, and at least on their side they were 100% understanding.
This sucked, however we're still lucky. We had her (hopefully) last surgery last week. While staying in the Ronald McDonald house (her surgeon just moved further away from us) we got to hear tales of people having their house foreclosed on, due in part to their kid going through leukemia treatments (they were/are insured btw).
You shouldn't have to lose your house because of medical necessity
And I hope in the future you might have an opportunity to to sign on with that employer later -- it sounds like if they're understanding while you tried to sort out the insurance questions, then they'd probably be good people to work for.
I tried reaching out to them a few months after it all went down, and my wife could pick up insurance. The main contract they had was set to be cancelled (they also canceled contract with 15 other companies) so in the long run it worked out for me.
oh, and my Daughter is fast to recovery, just need to keep her from bouncing off the walls for another with week, which is impossible for any 5 year old.
http://pumpingstationone.org/2013/12/lock-picking-and-sem/
you can actually tell which ones were picked.