2/3rds of gun deaths are suicides, and so any differential in the firearm suicide rate will tend to swamp differences in the firearm homicide rate.
[1] puts CA as 3.4 gun homicides per 100,000 people per year, and TX at 3.2. Top of the list is DC at 16.5 (and then LA at 7.7), bottom of the list is VT at 0.3.
I so want to get into mechnical keyboards but most of my work is done on a 2015 MacBook Pro and I'm so efficient with the large trackpad - I rest my palms on the laptop and can reach everything with just a pivot of the wrist. I tried the Magic Trackpad, but I kept having to move my forearm and it just slowed me down too much.
What kind of mouse or trackpad is everyone using with these $xxx - $xxxx keyboards?
I use a trackball next to my keyboard which barely cracks the $100 barrier right now. The trackball won't change when the keyboard does in a few months.
None of those look nearly as good as the GITs inspired, Masamune Shirow designed PS/2 serial mouse I own (only as a collector's item - I don't use it). Found it cheap on Ebay years ago. Today I don't even want to think of what it would cost (I'm sure it's become a collectors item of some sort).
If I need to clean a mouse that I've been using for less than a few years, I am going to reevaluate my personal hygiene. After that, it's going in the trash.
My wife and I (both 40 today) are a husband-and-wife entrepreneur team that started our software business right out of college at 21. We had our first child at 30 and second at 33. At the opposite end of the spectrum, some of my wife's high school classmates who didn't go on to college are already grandparents.
We used our 20's to finish undergraduate college and go on to get our graduate degrees, do some traveling, and build & grow a successful software company. We looked at our 20's as the chance to build a business with little opportunity cost and even less overhead, knowing we had the rest of our life to recover from any failures. We put in a lot of hard & long hours, dealt with financial ups-and-downs, and had to learn how to build a team.
Today our software company, now a SaaS and e-commerce business, is stable and has a solid team in place. Being established, along with our kids enrolled in online school, enables us to have a significant amount of flexibility for family. We spend just over half of our year in Texas and the rest in Colorado. Work still has to get done, but we can work around family now.
I couldn't imagine us trying to build a business from scratch, especially as a husband-and-wife team, while also trying to raise kids.
Recently I saw where the shipping increased based on the price of an item. I bought Fujitsu ScanSnap iX500 ($419) and the Prime next day price was $7.99. I guess they figure that if I'm spending $400+ on an item, a couple bucks more won't make-it-or-break-it for me.
We (my wife and I) hired my mom to run my e-commerce stores after she retired. She is paid an above-average hourly rate, can set her hours, and can work from home. Knowing that we would be giving someone access to a merchant account that has a significant amount of money run through it each month, we had to have someone we could trust to process refunds and occasionally charge additional amounts when orders were upgraded.
She spends 1-3 hours a day managing the stores while my dad works on his model trains. It's enough to keep her busy, have a sense of accomplishment similar to her old job, provide a little extra income - all while not cramping their retirement.
I was a little nervous at first - more about her feeling pressure to make us happy than us being satisfied with her work. However, her role is clearly defined (answer emails, return phone calls, and submitted/track orders to our supplier, etc). This reduces the chance of misunderstandings or let-downs than would be more likely to occur with a less defined role like strategy or marketing.
On our ranch, we have an automatic gate opener with keypad. While FedEx and UPS will use a key code if one is printed on the address label, USPS refuses to enter through an open gate. Maybe they were just afraid of the cattle (http://www.LonghornSteers.com).
Fortunately for us, UPS delivers virtually all of our Amazon orders (2-3 a week since it is easier to use Prime than drive into town). The day that Amazon uses USPS for us is the day we cancel Prime, too.
The only worse delivery company we have dealt with is DHL, who Microsoft uses. I think it stands for (D)ump the package (H)aul tail away, and (L)ie that no one was home. On numerous occasions, DHL has left thousands of dollars worth in software at our gate which is on a busy country road.
A tip that I have found with delivery drivers is to be nice and get to know them. Smile, ask them how they are doing, offer them a bottle of water on a hot day, etc. Many will go out of their way to help a friendly face.
My mom and sister live in a rural county with more dairy cows than humans, and its not just easier, but considerably cheaper. Not sure what its like where you live, but sometimes around here people assume 50 cents/mile total cost aka $1/mile round trip so a trip into town to a big box store isn't twenty miles away, its $20 away, round trip. Suddenly paying less to Amazon than the locals will charge AND getting it "free" in two days is looking like a great deal. When I visit I notice rural retail is rapidly dying other than convenience stores and bulk type stores.
Cheaper and easier? Your post came off as immediately combative, but when I read the rest I realized that it wasn't at all. I don't mean to chastise you, only to point out how it was perceived.
Hmm could be. I didn't think either option would be hard, so it must have been an innocent word selection error, and I have immediate family who go into repetitive detail how its cheaper, apparently along with everyone else, making rural retail go out of business...
I've seen combative, and its looks a lot different than suggesting a different word and giving some back story that's shared experience for two people from cow country of course, but the city slickers in the audience would need significant background to understand. Maybe an analogy for urban people, would be imagine if the subway suddenly changed price to $20 per ride. Or adjusted for inflation of incomes and expenses in urban areas, if the subway changed to $200 per ride. Sure, its easy driving, nice scenery, no legendary California traffic jams, but its still very expensive.
Long time reader of the site and nice to see your post on HN. Thanks for sharing everything and good luck with the sale.
Dropshipping can be a great compliment to an existing software business, offering a nice way of increasing customer lifetime value. My wife and I develop & market CattleMax, a web app for cattle ranchers to manage their herds.
A few years ago, we were approached by a manufacturer who asked if we would become a reseller for their animal identification tags. We thought we'd try it out for a few months so we setup a store so our customers could buy from us online. Several years later, business has grown beyond just our software customers and we have launched another dropship store with another manufacturer.
Appreciated, thank you. And congratulations with the success you've had pairing your web app and eCommerce - very original! Best of luck with it in the future.
I develop a Rails 3 web app and recently moved from MySQL to MariaDB. Well actually the guys at Rails Machine did the move for me. I don't know what all they did on their end, so can't speak much for the server admin side. We ended up making the switch since I was moving to a high availability setup with multiple DB servers.
On the web app side, I am using the mysql2 gem and made zero changes to my code. Also, I frequently import SQL dumps from MariaDB into my local MySQL development with no problems.
The only issue I had was related to some nasty SQL I had in a select in a finder (yeah I know bad practice). MySQL was returning a 0 while MariaDB returned NULL. Either way, it was my fault for messy code and when I fixed the select, everything was good.
There's one silly difference I noticed. Timestamps in mariadb dumps have their size appended. Mysql doesn't like that, so you need to filter them out. Otherwise pretty much a drop-in.
