/sci/ - Science & Math

You have a chronic sinus or inner ear infection. The neck cracking is pretty indicative. See a doctor; get antibiotics. You may require sinus surgery if it's really bad.

Don't worry too much about the money... it's worth whatever it costs, even if you have to work the next 20 years to pay it off. Better to be poor and healthy. Trust me on this one. It will eventually spread to your eyes, and one of those infections will cause blindness. Or you could have an abcess that works its way into your CSF, or develop polyps that go cancerous.

If you've let it go this long, you might have a lot of scarring that you will never get rid of, and you'll never ride a rollercoaster again. Good luck.

One good way is to try out different programming languages. You're good at an OO language... fine. Try learning a functional or logical language. You'll be surprised at how it changes your way of thinking about what programs can do.

For example, while learning Prolog, I realized just how often I write loops that would be much simpler if I just had a generic backtracking algorithm. So I wrote in all the imperative/OO languages I know a similar sort of functionality, and I use it all the time.

Or, after learning Scheme (and later Ruby), I realized the value of having code that can create other code. Actually, I first really got the idea in Prolog, but first used it in a big project written in Scheme. Anyway, macros are friggin awesome, and my C++ code is now hardly even recognizable as such... but on the other hand, I can write half the code and have hardly any errors as I would were I writing vanilla C++ with no macros. (Templates are the first step to a proper macro system, but are a pretty poor substitute for many reasons.)

Ruby taught me the handiness of convention over configuration. I used to start all my Fortran programs with IMPLICIT NONE, but in retrospect, my hard-on for explicit typing doubled the amount of code I wrote for many years. So many wasted keystrokes, so much unnecessary debugging.