Well, I'm still 18 but I could have used a reminder or two about not eating shoddily prepared street food at the beginning of the year. Would have saved me a lot of heart- (and tummy-) ache.

Getting myself an entry-level diving cert.

I, Robot was my reading gateway drug. Count me in (I'll join in as soon as I get my internet set up.)

Erm, about food...We agreed to take turns cooking for each other. I live (or will live) in the slum parts of the city and the nearest source of fresh grub is the wet market a 5-minute walk from our future unit. I've never bought anything by myself in a wet market before. This'll be a challenging first few months for us, I expect.

I guess you really can't account for everything.

We actually had a sit-down on things we should watch out for, but I expect there's still a lot of surprises down the road for both of us. My only worry is if we didn't catch all of the big ones.

You mention reciprocity. I understand that people tend to discount the efforts of others when it comes to doing shared responsibilities like washing the dishes. How can I avoid this? I don't want to get into a fight just 'cause we refuse to recognise each other's efforts and I know thinking rationally becomes more and more difficult to do the more tired you get (whether from school or just life in general). From what I hear, tallying chores is one of the more common points of contention between couples and I still haven't found an acceptable solution to that problem.

Erm, about that last point...I'm two years into a five-year course and I've transferred dorms more times than I can count. It's just that this would be my first taste of more freedom and more leeway than what in-campus dorms usually allow.

An inevitability. I like that. Reminds me of Ted Chiang's short story, Story of Your Life. Basically, he espouses there are two ways of looking at perception: the sequential, cause-and-effect one and the Dr.-Manhattan-esque I-know-what-will-happen-but-I-can-only-watch-while-it-does one. What do you mean by "do what's fair" though? I don't really trust my judgment when it comes to these things because I am aware I have lived a rather sheltered life. I'm a suburb kid, unlike my SO, so I figured there's a lot of things that I was made oblivious to while growing up.

Anyway, the reason why I asked this question is that I have observed that whenever I go through big changes, I also change in a big way. I usually don't survive unscathed. I still haven't found a "core" personality I can anchor myself to and I'm kind of getting tired of dealing with new things and new unknowns and new life goals. So basically what I'm asking is, is there a way to ensure some measure of stability while going through these phases? I can foresee maybe four or five more big changes in my immediate future and I would really like to be prepared for them.

What kinds of games do you play? Usually the recommended route for gaming in Linux is to run your games under Wine, but in my current setup I just have Windows 7 on dual boot with Arch Linux (which is where I'm currently typing this) like you to avoid the hassle.

I have been hopping from distro to distro for about a year now and in my experience the distro you pick doesn't really matter that much if you aren't the type of guy who likes to tinker with stuff under the hood. But if you are, then I would recommend Arch Linux. Besides all the bells and whistles (or rather the lack thereof -- I am extremely bloat-allergic and so I have been known to do a complete reinstall of Windows every 6 months), it puts complete responsibility on you as a user to know what you're doing. Because of that, if you screw up then you know that it's all your fault.

Do you know how to use a terminal? One of the best things I ever did for myself was to sit down and attempt to crack open that esoteric bugabeast. If you don't, here's a nice tutorial. Once you go full Linux, that little black box blinking at you is going to be your best friend. If anything you should at least learn how to use it so that you'll have an idea of what to do when you accidentally bork your system. Also it's a good way to immerse yourself in the Unix Way so there's that.

I found a pretty substantial discussion of this on Hacker News: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6468448

How old are you? It seems Elon Musk is doing very, very well in reopening the development of space right now, so it might not be as long a wait as you think.

Could you give me a heads up on who the more interesting people to follow here are? The only person I knew before coming here is kleinbl00 and my familiarity with him is unreciprocated.

The problem I have with lists like this is that they tend not to stick in your mind precisely because they are presented as a list. In my opinion, lists are just about the worst way to learn things from especially if there's no prose to guide you from one item to the next. Now I know that the list you linked just functions as a reference of sorts so I'm going to ask you, is there a hyperlink version of that page or a book version even? It just irks me whenever someone shares these lists and I open them that I have to fight against the urge to close the tab because it's intimidating to go through the whole thing.

Ugh. Frak that. I refuse to adjust my lifestyle for future employers. xkcd puts it better than I can: http://xkcd.com/137/

I'm sorry for sounding like a bellend, but I just don't see the value in thinking that. If a potential employer doesn't like what you're doing with your life, why not just hop on to the next?

No, what I meant was I'm going to take a hiatus from pursuing a 9-5 desk job after graduating. Ya know, take a break from the rat race.