That's all the planning an shit for gardening and different techniques. Alright, I concede you could talk about gardening, I was just bitter because I was essentially signed up for THE LABOR aspect of it and I don't want anything to do with that...
 
 
But yeah, I wouldn't ever suggest that more topics is the only way to attract new people but its one that almost everyone can probably accomplish with a little bit of effort.
 
Thing is, topics can act as seeds of activity, they don't always work but when they don't little is lost other than maybe some of the topic poster's ego.

Hey I wanna share something. So long story but, basically a few months ago an company here in town hired our programming company to provide 2 coders full time. So me and another guy (who's IMO the best we have in the company) have been working there, and it's a super nice place, brand new, GIANT like 10-foot cubicles, all kinds of awesome stuff. Anyway, we find out about a month ago that they are actually going to be buying our WHOLE COMPANY and all of us coders (we have like 12) are coming here full time. The reason for this is the part-owner of the company is the biggest douche-bag idiot that's capable of breathing oxygen, and has made the other owner's (who is our boss, who is a cool ass dude) life a living hell and has almost ruined the company several times. He's a giant asshole and nothing but a hamper to our company. This new company is like, they do 3d architectural modeling for like giant skyscrapers. They like model the building, they model (like create 3d models) all the appliances/pieces and connect them together to show things work. Basically they get like million-dollar contracts, profit millions every year, really nice place. And they have a lot of interesting/smart/GREAT ideas for applications/products for the industry to make managing content easier and give us an edge over other companies doing the same thing.
 
So, when me and this guy (Neil) first came over, they have a couple projects that their "in-house" programming team was working on, and it was total garbage. Just the worst shit you've ever seen. They use Drupal for EVERYTHING database-wise (not knocking Drupal per se, but it's a CMS and that's what it's for. You don't use Drupal to handle complex and complicated product licensing shit. It's not even like they had some custom addon they just stuffed what they want into this database. And the code is a mess, they are just an amateur shop who took on a client that needed something more "enterprisey" in a good way (professional I'd say) and have done their best. Unfortunately their "best" is abysmal and a maintenance nightmare. 
 
They had been working on this particular project for like...2 years. Tons of bugs in our bug tracker, they were claiming it was "done", it looked like ASS, and it was basically broken. It was a piece of shit they couldn't release it because it was garbage and they'd get laughed out of the industry. 2 years. So we come in, and not 3 weeks later Neil and I have not only cleaned up the code to make sense and be maintainable, we fixed all the bugs, added TONS of improvements, and rebuilt the entire UI (which is a Qt application that loads a webkit WebView to render "pages" that act as the application. No the worst thing ever, but quite annoying to work with, even though HTML/JS is my strongpoint essentially which saved a lot of time) which they had quoted as taking 4 weeks (4 weeks of 3-programmer full-time hours). So they could build a "theme engine." Just trying to milk money basically, and the guys at INVIEW can't call them on this bullshit because how do they even know? This is how my boss was brought in (and hired as their CTO), to assess what the fuck is going on. They have an "in-house" team who lives in North Carolina (we are in Vegas; they are far apart) and a couple programmers actually in the office. One was a terrible guy who was making six figures as a "senior architect" who literally couldn't write simple code or do anything useful. They had 2 newbie programmers who had been there basically a year and hadn't learned ANYTHING. We fired that guy, he was useless and was just coasting on the free money.
 
They even gave him 6 months severance, which is kinda dumb but, this shows that the people who run the company are fuckin serious about benefits and treating people right. The CEO guy has a crazy-good health insurance policy for the whole office, it's a PPO (which is a good version of healthcare, as opposed to an HMO which is cheaper to pay for but your co-pays are higher) and it's paid for by the company, you don't pay anything. So after this merger I'll have better health insurance which is sweet because my asthma is about to cost me a ton of money, but I'll get to that in a sec. So we're in the process of firing the north carolina team, because they are worthless but mostly they are just amateurs, and we can put out stuff that's better than them in a fraction of the time and it's ridiculous. 
 
So I had to explain all that so you have context for the next part.
 
I've been working so hard and consistent at work for the last like..4 or 5 months, it's been so GREAT. I think all programmers, especially in a consultant-type company where you build products for OTHER companies, you tend to go through periods of being burned out, where coding isn't fun and your project is boring and the client irritates you and the new feature requests are either stupid, hard to do, or something you suggested a long time ago that they didn't go with, and now you have to go back and re-implement everything the way you should have in the first place. But I always get that once or twice a year, just totally bummed and like I just want to work at mcdonalds and stand there and go home and sleep. 
 
But the last couple months have been so rewarding. One of their "junior" programmers and I share a cube, and she's like the "design"-type person (graphical abilities and design sense -wise) and I know how to do all the cool stuff in html/js and build really great apps, so we work together and it's really cool teaching someone. I've never taught anyone anything before, and she's starting to pick up on stuff (she's really new, doesn't really know much javascript aside from basic programming principles, and she's mostly just an html/css person at this point) and it's really neat. 
 
But yeah I just wanted to say basically I've been working like, ALL DAY, all these days, and it's fuckin great. Pretty stoked on things right now, I guess. 

isn't PPO like an account you put money in for health care? I think we have it and you can pick between a basic or extended coverage or a ppo and the ppo is a set amount of monetary income that you can like run out of but I might be thinkin about something else.
 
Thats cool you're likin your job and your boss is takin care of you thats the way it should be. I'm workin nights and its cool as hell I don't have to deal with anyones bullshit and its the summertime now in the gulf so it gets hot and humid as hell and I'm fortunately missing out on that. I'm hopin to go to mate school soon and finish off my classes if my employer pays for it. If not I'm gonna go work for a contracting company probably or maybe work on a drillship where I can make around 300$ a day because this around 180$ bustin my ass and carryin other peoples weight shit is gettin real old.

Yeah I think you're right, someone mentioned today that there's something like $2000 in it (maybe that was just for dental? that's what we were talking about) however I believe co-pays are cheaper too, so while I'll use up the 2000 in less than a year, the cheaper co-pays are just the bonus on top. I'm about to start immunotherapy for my asthma, and the shots will be something like 50-75 right now (they start weekly, then go bi-weekly, then monthly for something like 2-3 years). So that will be very nice.

If you've got enough money coming in and you actually need it then I'd just supplement that with whatever other coverage I needed and go out of pocket because if you actually use it and immunotherapy doesn't sound very cheap especially if you've gotta pay for doctor appointments and shit.

I get 60% disability, vision, dental, health, phamaceutical, I can get life insurance if I wanted and they added some group law crap which is like a legal coverage plan but its mostly for people with shipping licenses like mates and engineers who can get locked up if they fuck something up and I'm not at that point yet and don't really plan on getting arrested again anytime soon anyways.