I'll be honest, hopefully you'll appreciate it because you need honest advice.

I read your post and I can already hear the self-pity string quartet playing and a big screen in the background playing images your hard, hard life. Task #1 is to stop whining, not just to other people, mainly to yourself.

What do you mean you could not get any loans? What kind of whiny-ass thing is that? You could not get loans so you dropped off college? Unless you're Bill Gates or Sergey Brin, you did a huge mistake there. Get back into school at any cost. Anyone can get a college loan. There are federally-funded ones, there are guaranteed gov't loans, there are scholarships, in-school jobs, grants, emergency cash crises funds at schools, etc...

To me it sounds like you wanted out of college and you took the first good excuse to get out. You are screwed now because once you get out and get the $9/hour full-time job (oops, you already did), it is REALLY hard to get back into school. Now all you need is get a girlfriend, get her pregnant, and congratulations, you have locked yourself out of school. If you have financial obligations (credit cards), consider filing bankruptcy. Otherwise, you WILL be held prisoner to your monthly payments (been there, done that).

Here's my advice: Get back into college. If you have a car that's all yours, keep it, otherwise sell it and buy a bike. Once you are accepted: Get a job. Any job that is compatible with school hours. If you have potential as a programmer, then get a job/freelance as a programmer while you study. If not, flipping burgers to pay for school is a very dignified thing to do. (It's bailing out of college for whiny reasons that carries no dignity)

Stop whining. It does not get any easier if you whine. Problems do not get solved if you whine.

Consider your own question: "Is there some alternative that would allow me to go back to school?" WTF are you waiting for? For the problem to fix itself?? You are waiting for something to "allow" you to go back to school... I will tell you right now, it's not gonna happen. You have to make it happen. Put your ass back in school first, and THEN figure out how the rest of your life will adapt to school life and priorities.

You are not the first person to have to deal with this, there is a huge mechanism in place already to allow people to stay in school. It just carries a cost (sorry, the new car will probably have to wait till after graduation). All things say you do not want to pay that cost. Snap out of it.

Add a footer to the comments page.

Justification : When I page down and hit the end of a page of comments, there is no visual cue in the page telling me that I'm at the bottom. Since I think I've gone down a full page, I lose track of where I was reading; which is annoying.

Why non burn to DVD and drop in the mail box?

Donate where you feel inspired to donate; applaud those donating to good causes that don't inspire you. It's not an optimization problem.

Does anyone else find it a little disheartening that despite being hosted on a MySQL / SUN site, and despite this meaning that they're obviously not providing his family with health insurance, that they're not even offering to do any contribution matching? I'd hope for a little more from a small-ish company that just got bought for a billion dollars.

There's a photo in our office of a couple employees handing hard drives down a chain like a fire brigade. The caption: "The bandwidth is great. It's the latency that kills you."

It's quite silly that Apple still has the SDK under NDA. How do they expect developers to share tips and tricks to improve their applications?

I am always amazed how much it feels like we are in a world of guilds who are concerned their "secrets" will escape.

Aye, but minus the low level features of C and the high level features of Lisp. Like pointer and memory manipulation and macros.

Still, it can be a very nice language, I just wouldn't say it is "C + Lisp". Also I'm not sure what the article had to do with either Lisp or C, it seemed more like a discussion of haskell... Am I missing something?

Edit: I'm still confused. Anyone want to take a better shot at explaining what a monad is? Or, more precisely, what's so special about it that it deserves a special name?

How about linking to the actual source instead of a flamebait media piece? Good grief:

http://www.aps.org/units/fps/newsletters/200807/editor.cfm

I'm having a little trouble finding the "explosion" in that text. They're publishing one paper by a presumptive skeptic, and are (ZOMG!) open to debate. Yeah, that's blown the consensus thing wide open, it has...

Any and all nerds, geeks, and IT professionals:

Channel Intelligence, its directors, high ranking employees and investors are at this time placed on the Information Technology No Fly List. Please do not sell this company or these individuals any form of information technology service.

This includes web hosting, network support, system administration, and even PC repair.

I also urge taxi drivers to drive right by them in the rain and small children to make faces at them in public.

OP overlooks the real reason people have leaned toward the bigger house for the past 50 years (and it has nothing to do with bathrooms or Grandma). It was because it was generally accepted financial advice and because it worked.

The general rule was "Buy the biggest house you can afford, and then, when the time is right (5 years or so), take your equity or flip, and do it again. By retirement time, you should be sitting on a tidy next egg."

A lot of older baby boomers have earned more in their lifetime from this strategy that from all their jobs combined!

Then people forgot about the phrase "you can afford" and starting breaking the guidelines in a boom market. They also forgot about the busts, when this strategy goes on hold.

When you blindly follow "rules" you don't understand, you're just an accident waiting to happen.