Attorney fees, fines, insurance rate increases, etc

$5k lawyer, $6-7k to the damage to my car when I hit a curb (which happened before the DUI and I never got busted for), everything else.

Makes sense, I guess you could do that too! I'm in the maximize-debt camp like everyone else so it just seemed odd.

I figured I'd take the guaranteed 4%. Plus it's worth it to get out from under $150/month in mortgage insurance. My goal is to retire with two places owned free and clear, and I can rent out one of them.

Most of the SXSW attendees aren't from austin so I guess I'm not surprised that the job fair isn't focused on austin either.

So are you living/working in Austin? Do you mind if I ask who for? I am working for Underarmour Connected Fitness (formerly Mapmyfitness). I figure we probably don't know each other or you'd have mentioned it (this is my actual name)

Ever had any mention of this site irl since you use your real name?

Just once that I can think of, at a live poker game, when my name came up. I haven't met many people (that I know of) who even know what twoplustwo is.

I do live in Austin, right on 2nd and Lavaca, which is just a short walk from er... Trader Joe's, which is just below Underarmour, yeah?

I was working at Cycorp up until late last year... well-known and highly controversial in certain circles (sure clowntable knows about them).

If you ever attend open mics and see a guy playing left-handed guitar who doesn't sing, that's me. Yes, I manage to stick out like a sore thumb, even in Austin.

What really got me at the job fair was how every company was a tech company, but nary a person who I spoke to knew anything about the tech the company used, except for one.

Typical conversation:

Me: "Are you in Austin?"

-- yes.

"I'm a database engineer. Are you looking for database people?"

-- Yes! We use HTML, CSS, JavaScrip, and Anuglar! Isn't great?

"Uh... do you use maybe Python?"

-- We use a lot of JavaScript.

"Have you heard of PostgreSQL or Cassandra?"

-- I'm not sure about all that, I just know we use JavaScript.

...

Yep. So I guess you're in that AMLI complex there?

I've heard of the place but I don't know much about it.

Oddly, I play left-handed also (and also do not sing). But you won't find me playing in public often.

OK, I looked them up, I do know who Cycorp is. I had a recruiter call me but I declined to interview there.

Oh, and actually I take it back, you must be in the square building with the square hole in the middle. I think my last job had a few corporate pads in there for out of town guests. Nice location. I live in the sticks and bike in a lot, or ride my scooter. It has it's ups and downs.

Yep.

I'm still getting used to doing it, but I've gotten good feedback and I'm starting to enjoy it some, plus I'm hoping to find a singer, etc. The other musicians are really cool across the board and it is sort of a social circle for me now.

I don't regret working there. It may depend on the division you are in, but glassdoor reviews didn't reflect my experience. Definitely some super-intelligent people there. One of my coworkers was talking about how she felt insecure because she "only" had a masters. I'm like, lol me.

I was testing out this thing at SW Edu:

http://jamstik.com/

I complained about not having a lefty version and someone was standing next to me saying he played lefty as well. The sales guy told me about this place, in Houston. I plan to make the pilgrimage one day now:

https://www.southpawguitars.com/

Edit, I love the jamstik site for lefty's:
Because we use the same mold for left & right handed models, the d-pad will be situated on the underside of the jamstik+. It is a bit less accessible but is still useful once the positions are learned.

While we do support lefty in our jamTutor and jamstik+ apps, please understand that we have not had a chance to fully optimize the apps and the fretboard display will appear reversed

I hope southpaw has ONE right-handed guitar. A cheapo $100 guitar with old strings.

I have 2 guitars from Southpaw. It's a neat (little) store. One is a Joe Pass model of the epiphone hollow body, the other is a fender strat. Having a dedicated left hand guitar was one of the best things about becoming a grown up - before that I played self-modified right hand guitars and it was never quite right.

I have never had my hands on a jamstick but I don't understand why it couldn't be left handed just via programming?

I have a midi pickup on the fender, and an Axon midi processor for it. I've written a lot of software for it over the years. I fiddled with a left-to-right converter and it works to a point. I can hand someone my guitar and switch it from left to right and they can play it like that - but there's a mental disconnect most people have, like how it's hard to talk when you hear your own echo. They can dimly hear the strings directly and it doesn't sound right, so even though the "main" sound coming out of the amp sounds fine, they get tripped up.

I once considered going to an extreme and putting light guage strings in every string position. I think that could actually be pretty interesting but I never tried it. (You can tell the processor what the root note of each string is, so there's no need to have a specific set tuning to start)

Yeah, I was thinking the same thing about the midi as well.

I did the modded guitar thing for a while too. I used to be able to play upside down and backwards since I'd find myself playing right handed guitars all the time, but can't do it so much anymore. My own stuff is too complex to convert over anyways.

All that you are doing sounds really awesome. I'd probably hook all G-strings. Seems like a decent compromise between the weights of the strings. The thumb is bound to hit too hard otherwise, but I guess it depends on the guitarist. I know I manged to slice up my fingers pretty bad on the high E while playing upside down at times. Can you put something on the neck, like a loose strap capo, to mute down the string and use the amp for sound?

I don't think so. The roland pickup is really pretty much like a normal pickup, except that each string has it's own pickup instead of sharing a single one. So, it detects notes via the strings vibrations. It doesn't bother me to have the string noise be different than the amplified noise, I'm used to it.

there is a 2+2 er I have met that works basically on your team from the sounds of it in marketing, lol

That is a good path to follow. Many wouldn't do that. Well done.

Huh. I don't know many people in marketing. 2+2 membership is not something most people announce so I supposed you'd just never know.

We need like a secret hand shake or something.

"Are you a friend of sklansky?"

sup bro?

Man linux administration is irritating. npm doesn't have permissions to make folders?? 2 days in to working on this and I insta sudo -s and chmod -R 777 all the things. Who would voluntarily do this for work?? People think I'm crazy for learning 100 javascript things but look at what hoops you have to jump through just to get a website working on a real server.

I finally got my application deployed no thanks to azure being pretty terrible and like just total random stuff happens and websocket requests are 400-ing(???). Oh well its not even done anyways so yeah back to javascript.

There's a reason that SysAdmins are a surly bunch.

I think a lot of it depends on what OS you are using. I think CentOS was created specifically to keep SysAdmins employed, as I found it to be highly unstable, full of strange, unsolvable bugs, and default to pure bat****. When you can't even cd into ~/myfolder because you don't have permission, something is truly wrong.

Try Ubuntu or Fedora for your server. Not exactly a joy to use them, but far less irritating. If you don't use Linux as your own OS, then you probably shouldn't be trying to spin up a server. I think learning how to use a setup a server was the single most difficult thing I've ever learned, but what's fascinating about servers is that every single problem you run into resolves to the simplest answer you can think of, but the challenge is gearing your brain to think about KISS at all times. I love listening to SysAdmins give talks because they truly speak the language of elegance. JS frameworks, sadly, seem to live in the opposite pole, where every riddle is solved by adding more complexity to the problem.