Also check out "The Way of the Warrior" classes on meditation for different methods. You don't always have to focus on the breath or try to empty your mind.
I completely agree. I do most of my running on my own, early in the morning and it is a great time to get ready for the day just noticing the world, your body, waking up, and accepting those things and moving on. I also try to do sitting meditation before (usually out of bed, meditate, warm up, run), but if I have to choose I run before meditate and call it even.
If you find this place, please, please let me know. I'd take a 20k pay cut to get out of my cube that opens on a fairly busy hallway, no natural light, uncomfortable imitation "mesh back chair" and mini-fridge with a k-cup machine for a 70 person work group.
While the US will tax you as long as you are a citizen, you can take a credit for any foreign taxes that you already paid on the same income, which should prevent double taxing unless you happen to be in a very low tax country. If you had some kind of business setup to collect the income in the foreign country you could probably keep a lot of profits in the business and not claim much income for yourself, but it is something you'd probably want to talk about with an accountant and is probably different in the UK (I love UK tax forms by the way, so simple compared to ours!)
As for actual experience, I had a great time in Buenos Aires. You get 90 days visitor visa with a US passport and there is a good size population of ex-pats that take a weekend trip to Uruguay when they get close to 90 days, turn around and get another 90. A bunch of them make some cash teaching English and keep it all under the table, which I don't really recommend (I mean they still get you on VAT, but you don't want to mess with any laws in a foreign country if you can help it), but it isn't a bad place to be.
I have a similar, but not the same idea. I found a cool clothing company when I was traveling and I think that their designs would sell here in the states. I've talked with them about importing, but it seems pretty expensive. The bulk discount they would give me on their sticker is only 50% (they sell shirts for about $20 so it would be about US$10 a shirt+shipping). I mean, the quality is good and it is all hand made, but I'm not sure what, if any profit I could make after taking into account shipping and storage (since it is all hand made I assume I'd have large inventory costs to make sure I could handle any unexpected volume). Do you think my idea of bringing the designs here are crazy?
I'm very interested in the start-up culture and definitely agree that I've done enough school for the moment and am ready to get to work. I think the thing to do is just get back to coding and getting into the community to see where it can take me.
I'm sorry for the late reply. Did you have to go back to school or were you able to be hired on the merrit of your web app? Do you think that not having a formal CS degree has been detrimental to your career?
I do plan to start programming again. My experience was mainly Perl with some VB and Java thrown in. I've heard good things about Python and am going to try it out.
