admiraltbags

Oh man, now its time to dig through all my emails for tracking info. Thanks for that!

TLDR: It'll ultimately be a good experience, I can't fathom it being bad in the end.

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I disagree. I would say it's bad if it is your only course of action towards improving your situation without trying or considering other options than yes, not the best idea ever. For me though it's much different and a lot of consideration went in to my decision.

I'll try not to bore you with details but I want to numb a few social emotional responses I have as an introvert who wants to be more sociable and outgoing. As much as I try to keep a focus on doing that in day to day life it's challenging for me with all the distractions (mostly work). I see the PCT as a way of repeatedly forcing these interactions in a natural way. Everyone I've met as a backpacker/hiker were friendly and approachable and considering your current situation on the PCT you both have a big glaring thing in common that will make connecting that much easier. My problem tends to be finding common ground with your average person and I'm hoping to develop some strategy of doing so easier. What better way to get better at this than to force myself to do it repeatedly while simultaneously doing something I love (backpacking)?

I can't say the goal I have in mind is the correct one, can't say it will absolutely make me a happier/better person... but believe without any doubts that it will have a positive impact on me either through being in better shape or by improving my introspective views, sociability, or my tenacity for taking on challenges, etc.

This is interesting. I'd like to hear what HN's take is on this. I noticed that about 30% of the time products take 3 days, not the advertised 2 to get to me. I live in SF so they really have no excuse. Didn't bother me to much but never the less annoying when paying for the feature.

Another slightly off-topic gripe about prime I haven't seen much flak regarding is shipping things like a roll of duck tape in a 12x16" box full of packaging bags. I'm guessing they shipped from a different warehouse from the rest of my order but still wasteful, what can you do though?

As someone who just quit his job to walk 2650+ miles along the pacific crest trail I found his last statement very interesting as well.

I'm a pretty normal tech industry hacker who can sometimes be socially awkward and definitely a bit introverted. I'm hiking the PCT because it will force me through things I find uncomfortable like being alone, and meeting new people. As I see it, I'm forcing myself through a tumbler and hoping what comes out the other end is more in line with who I want to be. Very different reasons.

Funny thing about hangouts and SMS merge is that you can get away on a bill cycle or two of "texting" overdrafts by claiming stupidity to the whole merger things (which in itself is so damn stupid). What really annoys the shit out of though is that you can't text people from your contact list without taping all kinds of shit, it's really the worst UI of recent I've ever experienced and makes me hate google.

Most can but I've never seen one write good code.

Interviewed with their lead front-end engineer for a front-end engineering position. Everything was great then he asked me for my "story". I answered as best I could but I guess it wasn't what he wanted to hear so he re-iterated that he wanted to know if he would like working with me. I think that's great thing to determine but was put-off by the question-- I got the feeling I would be working with a bit of a tool.

He also put a ton of emphasis on it being a "start-up" and essentially said something along the lines of "in this type of culture its expected that you earn less". I can only guess they passed on me because of my salary requirements which are ~20k under the average. If that is the case which I can only guess it was, not exactly filled with respect or value for work/life balance. /2 cents

EDIT: and jeez they are pushing themselves hard on ycombinator lately.

Lurker turned member to post this.

Second web related job at an insurance company, I was 20 years old at the time. We were heavy into online advertising, mostly banners at the time (this was right around when adwords started to get big). The company just bought out all of the MSN finance section of their site for the day-- it was a pretty big campaign ($100,000). We drove all the traffic to a landing page I had created with a short form to "Get a quote".

IT had given me permissions to push things live for quick fixes and such, I made a last minute design tweak and, you guessed it, broke something. I was checking click traffic and inbound leads and realized traffic was through the roof but leads were non-existent. This was about 45 minutes after the campaign was turned on. I jumped on the page and tested it out and got an error on submit. FUCK. I literally started to perspiration INSTANTLY.

Jumped into my form and quickly found the bug, can't recall what it was but something small and stupid, then pushed it live without telling a soul. Tested, worked, re-tested, worked. Ran some quick numbers to get a ballpark estimate on the damage I caused... several thousand.

Stood up and walked over to the two IT guys, mentioned I borked things and that I had fixed it... what should I do? I can still see the look on their faces. Shock, then smiles. Walked back to my desk and about 10 minutes later my two bosses show up (I worked for both dev & marketing managers).

They said thanks for catching the problem, not to worry. I did good for finding it myself, fixing it, and pushing it live. I was still sweating and shaking. They walk off and later that day marketing manager informs me MSN will refund us for the 45 minutes of clicks.

It took about a month before I felt competent enough to touch our forms again.