Have you thought about the litl?
posted to Ask MetaFilter by brainwane at 1:44 PM on February 3, 2010

You're not a bad person and you almost certainly haven't lost him.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by brainwane at 8:04 AM on February 2, 2010

I believe this is one reason people use the Miller Analogies Test.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by brainwane at 10:09 AM on January 20, 2010

I work on a Thinkpad X200, running Ubuntu with only one problem. Get the extra 9-cell battery.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by brainwane at 3:47 PM on January 18, 2010

Some short fiction that caught my eye in 2009: "True Names" by Stephanie Burgis (intense mindgame fantasy with a very strong woman narrator), "The Regime of Austerity" by Veronica Schanoes (vivid fable, short & sweet), "The Second Conquest of Earth" by L. J. Daly (epic-feeling in a short space, mindgame again), "Origin" by Ari Goelman (somehow a fresh take on superheroes, & emotional too), "Élan Vital" by K. Tempest Bradford... [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by brainwane at 11:05 PM on January 12, 2010

I think of the tech industry as an ecosystem with room for a lot of different roles, and good for you for exploring and finding a role that's more suited to you. Most of the roles do have more human interaction than straight-up software development.

Could you speak a little about why sales engineering caught your eye more than technical writing, business analysis, project or product management, testing/QA, interaction design/information architecture/usability, or... [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by brainwane at 9:49 AM on December 16, 2009

snowymorninblues: A laudable set of goals! You might want to think about "business analyst" as a position to consider. The business analyst translates from a customer's needs into a functional specification for the technology they need. As I see it, a sales engineer has a similar job but is focused on getting customers and on aftermarket support; I think the broader role of business analyst might suit you better.

Another way to expand your perspective is to... [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by brainwane at 4:47 PM on December 16, 2009

I've been blogging for eight or nine years and most of my posts get zero comments, or one comment, even the really thoughtful ones. Empirically, people don't post comments when they have nothing to say except "Good post" -- readers comment when they have a substantive or emotional response.

So you're not the only one.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by brainwane at 10:12 AM on December 12, 2009

Perform stand-up comedy at an open mic.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by brainwane at 12:25 PM on December 11, 2009 marked best answer

Structured mentorship arrangement with your favorite role model at the company.

Nthing vacations/flextime/sabbaticals/telecommuting.

Adding a new responsibility to your job *that you want*. Example: if you've been wanting to learn about social media and it's not currently part of your job, ask if you can present to the board about social media strategies in 6 months (and take the appropriate amount of time to research it between now and then).... [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by brainwane at 7:18 PM on December 3, 2009

The Partly Cloudy Patriot and other historical nonfiction/memoir by Sarah Vowell.

Close to the Machine is an autobiography by Ellen Ullman, engineer.

In Code: A Mathematical Journey by Sarah Flannery. A young Irish woman discovers math with the help of her dad, and makes international headlines with a discovery about cryptography.

Alison Bechdel's... [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by brainwane at 10:23 AM on December 1, 2009

I forgot to mention Fugitivus.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by brainwane at 7:29 AM on December 3, 2009

I've heard great things about CiviCRM (a free, open source software application for managing relationships with constituents/donors), and its CiviContribute component automatically generates receipts and tracks thank-you notes. The developers are quite responsive in case you have needs they don't cover.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by brainwane at 6:44 AM on November 26, 2009 marked best answer

My answer. Short version: I started with a bunch of entry-level jobs in the tech industry, and now I'm a geek/suit interface.

Community management, product management, and tech writing all sound like plausible options for you; cholstro's advice above is good. If you're interested in any of those, contributing to an open source project is a way to get pro-level experience and build your portfolio fast.... [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by brainwane at 5:51 PM on November 25, 2009

Hereville is the story of an Orthodox Jewish girl who fights a troll.

Nothing Better is about first-years at a Lutheran college.

If you can stand the interface, check out some of Amar Chitra Katha's online offerings (religions considered are mostly Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism).
posted to Ask MetaFilter by brainwane at 1:23 PM on November 3, 2009

You say you have zero technical skills, but as long as you're not afraid of breaking something by clicking on it, you have the skills to use and write about end-user open source applications and frameworks. You can report bugs, improve bug reports written by others, write and improve help documentation, write press releases & blog entries about new versions and functionality, reach out to schools and universities to increase the user base, and go to conferences to publicize your product.... [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by brainwane at 7:39 AM on October 29, 2009

Scrape 'N' Feed?

"Scrape 'N' Feed is a simple Python wrapper around the PyRSS2Gen module. It implements almost all of the code you need to create RSS feeds out of web pages. All you have to rite is the code that actually does the screen-scraping (and Beautiful Soup makes that easy). It stores feed state in a pickle file between invocations, freeing you from having to worry about most of the minor problems that get in the way of scraping RSS feeds.... [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by brainwane at 10:45 AM on October 28, 2009

Elliot Aronson's The Social Animal is a fine intro to social psychology -- fun to read, well-organized, and edifying. And its narrative descriptions of experiments and their later permutations give the reader the sense that science is an ongoing process.

Academic nonfiction I enjoyed includes American Taxation, American Slavery by Robin Einhorn. If institutional competence in government agencies interests you, you might like... [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by brainwane at 7:17 AM on October 22, 2009

Today's Papers wasn't the same after Scott Shuger passed away.

I find the summaries in The Morning News twice-daily headlines are usually enough that I only click through to 2 or 3 articles from each installment.

Related snarky roundup: InfoMania's weekly We've Got You Covered segment on the week in magazines.

2nding The Week.

Also, if you have a Nintendo Wii, have you checked out its news service?... [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by brainwane at 9:21 AM on October 21, 2009 marked best answer

Technology is an ecology. It's a bunch of moving parts that fit together -- sometimes well, sometimes badly. Neal Stephenson said that learning Unix is more like learning anatomy than like learning physics, and I find that true of technical learning in general.

To summarize/expand upon my own advice elsewhere: Skim first, really fast, for the headings/subheadings. Draw an anatomy, a diagram of all the parts and how they fit together. Imagine... [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by brainwane at 7:06 AM on October 21, 2009