How To Become A Hacker
http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html

Which also led me to this goldmine:
How to be a Programmer: A Short, Comprehensive, and Personal Summary
http://samizdat.mines.edu/howto/HowToBeAProgrammer.html

And this– which is immensely important for the work-life as we just began shifting our framework-of-choice to Python:
Why Python? by Eric Raymod
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/3882

The following I am not 100% sure about, as they involve some heavy-duty core changes to your OS X setup… and many of them I do not yet understand, so proceed with researched caution:

OSX For Hackers
https://gist.github.com/2260182
(which is apparently a fork of this: https://github.com/mathiasbynens/dotfiles/blob/master/.osx)

Lately I have been obsessed with reshaping my intellectual/emotional engagement with the world– which sounds quite heavy, and perhaps it is, but I have realized how many blockages and irrationalities have crept into my head from living a life (which I am sure is true of everyone) and now that I am in such a radically different work environment than I ever expected, planned for, or studied for, many of these issues are thrown into super-high relief. So it’s time to change them.

Mostly, thought, I need a new set of mental tools, and so I did some searching for “mental models” and came across a funny/interesting/insightful speech by Charles Munger (of Berkshire Hathaway fame) to the Harvard Business School. The first 1/2 of it, roughly, is what I am most interested in, where he lists (and extemporizes on) his favored “mental models” he uses regularly to apprehend his world and make decisions:

A Lesson on Elementary, Worldly Wisdom As It Relates To Investment Management & Business
http://www.readability.com/articles/zx7qstah

(I have this pumped over into the Readability service because the small fonts etc of YCombinator drive me batty, I am old now so I like my fonts robust and even serif-ed, when appropriate).

When I lump all these links together, I begin to see the shape of what I’ve been after… and though I am leaving some elements out (not for any particular reason beyond time/fatigue) which might flesh it out more, I think this is pretty sufficiently descriptive to be useful.

I must mention, even though we’re committed to Python (it makes the most immediate business/life/sanity sense) I am particularly crazed about learning LISP. I mean, all things considered, look at the compact elegance of the scheme solution to the Tower of Hanoi puzzle, especially compared to the other languages: http://programmingpraxis.com/2011/10/11/tower-of-hanoi/

So, after brewing up a mean cup of Vons© generic brand ‘european’ hot chocolate (which, embarrassingly enough, is the best damn hot chocolate I have encountered outside of the gourmet Max Brenner’s stuff Katya bought me for my birthday {but that is a milk/real-chocolate machine, whilst this is a water-based [and therefore, slightly more efficient] mix}) I got right into trying to rework some pages in the new site/project I had outsourced (to Moldova and Romania) in an effort to get some serious coding. It’s in CodeIgniter, and it is my{our} first foray into frameworks, something we {the dev team (see pic above of our workplace)} have eschewed up until now as a confusing overkill of code.

Anyway, this is me making a short story long. The resolution is, the transfer from the dev server to the live-mirror (penultimate home) server caused some wild train wreck with the rewrites. It took me about 4 hours to figure it all out– that is, just to get it working. I did not get a chance to actually change the pages necessary for delivery tomorrow. Now, I am riding another wave of burn-out and have no desire to work, so it’s off to bed to face the repercussions in the morning.