asktell

Nice. I like the occasional bird flying across the background. Would be nice to make the layout responsive with Twitter Bootstrap 2.

No.

Increase your rate. Let them know that 2012 is a new year and every year, at some point early in the year, you increase your rates to reflect the growing cost of living, but more importantly, the growing value of the skills you've acquired during the preceding year. There is no reason you can't double your rates if you have enough clients who are willing to pay at those rates. If they don't value your work at your proposed rate, they'll drop themselves.

tl;dr Write well.

Every language has its gotchas. Even assignment operators are kind of a gotcha.

If you're coming from a basic math background, and have no programming experience, then the expression "a = 15; a = a + 1;" would be confusing in any mutable language, because assigning a value to a variable is not equivalent to stating the equality (identity) of both sides.

This post highlights the difficulty in making data accessible in a "traditional" web app. One of the most intuitive interfaces for accessing and manipulating tubular data is the spreadsheet, but very few web apps look or behave like a spreadsheet.

I would argue that there is an inherent friction between usability and accessibility of information. Adding options to sort, filter, search, or selectively show or hide fields might make data more accessible but result in reduced usability overall. The exact point where the tradeoff happens isn't clear to me, but 37signals tends to err on the side of usability, at the expense of accessibility. Of course, one could argue that in a data-intensive app, accessibility _is_ usability, and vice versa.

f.lux is also great for short and dark winter days. I keep my day temperature around 4,400K and my night temperature around 3,400K in the winter (and substantially warmer during the summer).