BeyondPod has been my podcast app of choice. MyTracks is a hiking program that will generate files that google and apps like Lightroom can use. I use it to add GPS info to my photographs, or to tell me how far I hiked. Or both. I like Orbot with Firefox and Twitter. I don't really need to route everything over TOR, but it makes me feel warm and fuzzy when I do.
This. I rarely give coding tests when hiring - a quick check to see if you can at least comprehend the basics. I'd love to do more, but frankly our coding requirements aren't that high, and your ability to interact with your colleagues in a rational way is more important. A jerk is far more of a problem in the office than a mediocre coder.
The new guy will never be as good as you are. That's just how it is. He'll make mistakes, he won't take things seriously enough, etc. etc.
As the part-owner of the company, you're just going to care more. That's OK. It's your job to take the future of the business seriously. His job is to keep the servers up and running. He should be good at that, and take that seriously. It's not his job to be you.
If you don't turn it loose, they'll quit. Any self-respecting professional will. Micromanagement makes people stabby. Don't micromanage. Do set expectations - realistic ones, and do hold them to it. But don't do the job they were hired to do. Show them the ropes and turn them loose. As for the passwords etc., as someone else noted, if you're the only one who knows those, you need to work on your disaster plan, because that should never happen. You could blow a blood vessel in your brain reading these comments and then who is going to manage the servers?
The fact is that management isn't IT, and IT isn't management. You're changing jobs, and you need to let the old one go.
(Sorry - the subject is a joke brought on by people warning you not to read posts that tell you to do this)
Maybe the money is really bad. Maybe they're ripping you off. Maybe you have a family to feed. Maybe you have a car payment. Or a house payment. Maybe for some other reason you just really need the money. In that case stay exactly where you are.
Otherwise you should move - money is a pointless thing to hold out for. The average family of four makes 50k in the US today. I expect this pays fine compared to that. Be realistic, be cautious, but go where it's interesting. Wasting your life in a boring job is silly.
We have about 30 of these machines, and have noticed a higher than expected failure rate, specifically on the gpu. We've been waiting for an official announcement, but since we have AppleCare haven't been bothered. There is very little question in my mind there's an issue, and I'm finding it interesting and revealing to watch how this plays out.
I'm pretty sure if the law says 'must respond to all properly filed requests', then yes they are.
This type of counterargument may have a long and storied history, but it's still crap. If the law says X, then you are required to follow the law. Even if you don't like it.
And for God's sake - they're the ones who are supposed to enforce the law! What does it say about the NYPD when they think they can pick and choose which laws are appropriate, or which parts of the law they have to follow?
Recently a high ranking us gov. official plead the 5th during a particularly complex trial that was part fishing expedition.
Now that I have more experience working in government, I realized I had a new interpretation of her actions that were not immediately 'she did it, but doesn't want to admit it'.
Every day officials are asked to make an awful lot of decisions, based on limited information. Some of them are no doubt corrupt, but many are trying to do the job to the best of their ability. But they are human, with biases and foibles and sometimes just plain oops moments.
In the case of this trial, it was high profile, and it was slanted just enough (as I recall) that the people on the other side of the table would have been very happy to find any misconduct, of any kind.
More than likely, at some point in her career, she did something that was not, strictly speaking, completely legal. I don't think it's possible to avoid it, given the size of the bureaucracy and the rules governing it.
In this case, the 'MAY incriminate me' becomes just that - 'I know what I did, and I did the best that I could, but frankly, maybe something in there wasn't strictly in line with every one of the 10.8 bajillion rules.'
This could (I'm not saying does in every case, but could) prevent some rabbit hole/witch hunt situation that just doesn't benefit anyone.
I don't know your situation, so I can't comment on life choices, etc. What I can say is that the person who made the comment you responded to probably isn't making a value judgment, just stating a fact.
Hiring managers have very little information on which to base a very important decision. Hiring people is easy. Firing people isn't. And getting stuck with someone who is mediocre can screw your organization for years to come. So you extrapolate - a LOT. You generalize - a LOT. And then you cross your fingers and hope the person who shows up to the face-to-face interview is as good as their resume said they were. And then you cross your fingers again and hope the employee you hired is as good as the person at the interview said s/he was.
It is common to see hundreds of resumes come in for a good job. If you give someone a quick shorthand that lets them winnow that pile down quickly, they're going to take it.
Does that mean you weren't the best candidate? Nope. But it does mean you need to write one hell of a resume to overcome the default, because otherwise you're just not going to get past the first cut.
And to the OP: the math may or may not be related (it's always hard to say where life will take you after), but if you figure out how to motivate yourself to do things you don't want to do, and do them well, you'll have a leg up on an awful lot of people.
Holy cow - the best? Really? Despite a foreign policy indistinguishable from Bush? I voted for the man, gave money to his campaign,etc. and even I can recognize a mixed record. There have certainly been some successes - I expect Obamacare will become another strong safety net, for example - but 'best ever'? C'mon!
You may be right. On the other hand, a system that works on modest hardware, that has a solid interface (I have always thought WebOS was the best of the phone user interfaces, conceptually) and that is, like Android, open source, has the potential to fill a very useful niche.
If I recall correctly, in addition to commercial support, MoodleRooms also contributed back to the code base. I don't know the percentage of improvements that came from them, or from NetSpot, but I'd bet they were solid components if someone was willing to pay to have them written. And there's all the improvements related to running Moodle as an enterprise app, as opposed to on an old 486 in the back closet, which is often how many installations start out.
If Blackboard's plan is to harm Moodle, they could do worse than taking out some of the key development partners - over time, simply stop contributing. It's slow, but they can't kill the product all at once anyway. So they could collect revenue for a while, and at the same time take development resources away from the community. Eventually the customers decide to move, because the product no longer supports (shiny new thing), and look! they already have a relationship with Blackboard!
If you're lucky, you might be able to donate both globally and locally - the above post references Heifer Int'l, which is HQ'd 30 miles from my house. So I can simultaneously fight poverty far away, and ensure a local employer keeps being a local employer. YMMV, but it's worth thinking about.
I would point out that much of the recent craziness around mortgages has revolved around the fact that the banks misplaced, misaligned, or outright faked documents. Keeping a copy of the big stuff is important, because more than likely, if it's big, then someone has incentive to pretend it doesn't exist. If the only copy is the one being provided by folks who will lose money depending on what that document says, you may be in trouble.
Marriage and insurance docs fall in this same arena. Things get lost or destroyed sometimes. For example, my original marriage records exist on a small island nation. One solid tsunami, and they're gone. When I turn up 20 years later, noone's going to know or care who I am.
I always buy the lowest level refurb mac mini I can find (paying $300 for an extra 100GB of disk strikes me as insane), and they do a great job. Lower power use, remote control, etc. etc.
Gavron makes an excellent point - I recently got a Nexus One with T-Mobile, and on the map I had solid service at home and at work. When the phone arrived I found a very different reality - roaming everywhere. Don't trust the maps - ask users - when I mentioned T-Mobile to my colleagues at work (too late!) they all knew it didn't work in our area. I could have saved myself a lot of time just by asking a local.
>I'd wager that Blu-Ray is the last physical format for home video that we ever see.
Agreed - as people become more comfortable with the idea of having their 'library' as a digital object, the physical media will, I expect, go away.
> However, there will always be a small minority of people who want a physical copy and that's probably always going to be Blu-Ray.
This, on the other hand, I seriously doubt. Even if all the holographic storage doesn't pan out, something will be the next big thing. Unless 'always' is defined as 'for the next ten years or so'.
I had already discarded this idea, because of the lack of hardware, but it does open the question as to whether the US should direct future research into broadband into satellite internet. The two birds you could kill at once would be domestic access and, assuming you could get the hardware accepted into other countries, a tool for future operations of this nature.
Promote the hardware, perhaps at a discounted price, perhaps even in partnership with local resellers. It's the newest thing, a great option for getting internet to poor people, heck - you could even throw money at people to deploy it.
You wouldn't need very deep market penetration into a country, though obviously it would be better if the technology worked with mobile devices.
If you're a tinfoil hat type, I would keep my eyes peeled for something like this.
Education will delay your earnings. However, given the current environment, your earnings may be delayed anyway.
More important, and I've had this conversation again and again with decision makers, is that the Master's degree is the new Bachelor's degree.
In the US, and in much of the English speaking world, university degrees are becoming more common. A Master's is a signal that you have put in extra effort, basically.
We recently hired a helpdesk position, and the HR drones were requiring a Master's. While this is an extreme example of HR going crazy, it doesn't change the fact that, before any calls, before any interviews, the non-Master's people were thrown out.
So to return to the post I am replying to, while you might benefit from earnings now, you might not, and in future, you will definitely want the second degree if you plan to earn anything.
For the first job, though, it probably isn't necessary, and taking a couple years off from school to see what the 'real world' is all about isn't a bad idea. It will also, if the degree means more to you than a sheet of paper, make the Master's program more useful to you, because you might have a better idea of why the stuff matters.
It can't be emphasized often enough that once you have a plan, you need to stick to it, and therefore you need to have a very good plan.
Of course, you never -actually- stick to the plan, but emphasizing that every change means delays of X helps to stem the tide of changes people come up with.
Slashdot Mirror
BeyondPod has been my podcast app of choice.
MyTracks is a hiking program that will generate files that google and apps like Lightroom can use. I use it to add GPS info to my photographs, or to tell me how far I hiked. Or both.
I like Orbot with Firefox and Twitter. I don't really need to route everything over TOR, but it makes me feel warm and fuzzy when I do.
This. I rarely give coding tests when hiring - a quick check to see if you can at least comprehend the basics. I'd love to do more, but frankly our coding requirements aren't that high, and your ability to interact with your colleagues in a rational way is more important. A jerk is far more of a problem in the office than a mediocre coder.
The new guy will never be as good as you are. That's just how it is. He'll make mistakes, he won't take things seriously enough, etc. etc.
As the part-owner of the company, you're just going to care more. That's OK. It's your job to take the future of the business seriously. His job is to keep the servers up and running. He should be good at that, and take that seriously. It's not his job to be you.
If you don't turn it loose, they'll quit. Any self-respecting professional will. Micromanagement makes people stabby. Don't micromanage. Do set expectations - realistic ones, and do hold them to it. But don't do the job they were hired to do. Show them the ropes and turn them loose. As for the passwords etc., as someone else noted, if you're the only one who knows those, you need to work on your disaster plan, because that should never happen. You could blow a blood vessel in your brain reading these comments and then who is going to manage the servers?
The fact is that management isn't IT, and IT isn't management. You're changing jobs, and you need to let the old one go.
(Sorry - the subject is a joke brought on by people warning you not to read posts that tell you to do this)
Maybe the money is really bad. Maybe they're ripping you off. Maybe you have a family to feed. Maybe you have a car payment. Or a house payment. Maybe for some other reason you just really need the money. In that case stay exactly where you are.
Otherwise you should move - money is a pointless thing to hold out for. The average family of four makes 50k in the US today. I expect this pays fine compared to that. Be realistic, be cautious, but go where it's interesting. Wasting your life in a boring job is silly.
We have about 30 of these machines, and have noticed a higher than expected failure rate, specifically on the gpu. We've been waiting for an official announcement, but since we have AppleCare haven't been bothered. There is very little question in my mind there's an issue, and I'm finding it interesting and revealing to watch how this plays out.
Is there a reason we're not calling this a drone? The use of 'UAS' makes me feel like I'm reading propaganda.
"We all follow US politics. It's just so entertaining - like professional wrestling, but with slightly less violence."
Presumably excepting the guns and military interventions?
You're confusing "lose their insurance" with "have their insurance changed to not screw them when they actually need their insurance"
FTFY
I'm pretty sure if the law says 'must respond to all properly filed requests', then yes they are.
This type of counterargument may have a long and storied history, but it's still crap. If the law says X, then you are required to follow the law. Even if you don't like it.
And for God's sake - they're the ones who are supposed to enforce the law! What does it say about the NYPD when they think they can pick and choose which laws are appropriate, or which parts of the law they have to follow?
Recently a high ranking us gov. official plead the 5th during a particularly complex trial that was part fishing expedition.
Now that I have more experience working in government, I realized I had a new interpretation of her actions that were not immediately 'she did it, but doesn't want to admit it'.
Every day officials are asked to make an awful lot of decisions, based on limited information. Some of them are no doubt corrupt, but many are trying to do the job to the best of their ability. But they are human, with biases and foibles and sometimes just plain oops moments.
In the case of this trial, it was high profile, and it was slanted just enough (as I recall) that the people on the other side of the table would have been very happy to find any misconduct, of any kind.
More than likely, at some point in her career, she did something that was not, strictly speaking, completely legal. I don't think it's possible to avoid it, given the size of the bureaucracy and the rules governing it.
In this case, the 'MAY incriminate me' becomes just that - 'I know what I did, and I did the best that I could, but frankly, maybe something in there wasn't strictly in line with every one of the 10.8 bajillion rules.'
This could (I'm not saying does in every case, but could) prevent some rabbit hole/witch hunt situation that just doesn't benefit anyone.
I don't know your situation, so I can't comment on life choices, etc. What I can say is that the person who made the comment you responded to probably isn't making a value judgment, just stating a fact.
Hiring managers have very little information on which to base a very important decision. Hiring people is easy. Firing people isn't. And getting stuck with someone who is mediocre can screw your organization for years to come. So you extrapolate - a LOT. You generalize - a LOT. And then you cross your fingers and hope the person who shows up to the face-to-face interview is as good as their resume said they were. And then you cross your fingers again and hope the employee you hired is as good as the person at the interview said s/he was.
It is common to see hundreds of resumes come in for a good job. If you give someone a quick shorthand that lets them winnow that pile down quickly, they're going to take it.
Does that mean you weren't the best candidate? Nope. But it does mean you need to write one hell of a resume to overcome the default, because otherwise you're just not going to get past the first cut.
And to the OP: the math may or may not be related (it's always hard to say where life will take you after), but if you figure out how to motivate yourself to do things you don't want to do, and do them well, you'll have a leg up on an awful lot of people.
Holy cow - the best? Really? Despite a foreign policy indistinguishable from Bush? I voted for the man, gave money to his campaign,etc. and even I can recognize a mixed record. There have certainly been some successes - I expect Obamacare will become another strong safety net, for example - but 'best ever'? C'mon!
You may be right. On the other hand, a system that works on modest hardware, that has a solid interface (I have always thought WebOS was the best of the phone user interfaces, conceptually) and that is, like Android, open source, has the potential to fill a very useful niche.
Sort of true, but not really.
If I recall correctly, in addition to commercial support, MoodleRooms also contributed back to the code base. I don't know the percentage of improvements that came from them, or from NetSpot, but I'd bet they were solid components if someone was willing to pay to have them written. And there's all the improvements related to running Moodle as an enterprise app, as opposed to on an old 486 in the back closet, which is often how many installations start out.
If Blackboard's plan is to harm Moodle, they could do worse than taking out some of the key development partners - over time, simply stop contributing. It's slow, but they can't kill the product all at once anyway. So they could collect revenue for a while, and at the same time take development resources away from the community. Eventually the customers decide to move, because the product no longer supports (shiny new thing), and look! they already have a relationship with Blackboard!
If you're lucky, you might be able to donate both globally and locally - the above post references Heifer Int'l, which is HQ'd 30 miles from my house. So I can simultaneously fight poverty far away, and ensure a local employer keeps being a local employer. YMMV, but it's worth thinking about.
Now talking like a pirate will involve phrases like 'tax relief'...
Though in some ways I suppose it always has....
I would point out that much of the recent craziness around mortgages has revolved around the fact that the banks misplaced, misaligned, or outright faked documents. Keeping a copy of the big stuff is important, because more than likely, if it's big, then someone has incentive to pretend it doesn't exist. If the only copy is the one being provided by folks who will lose money depending on what that document says, you may be in trouble.
Marriage and insurance docs fall in this same arena. Things get lost or destroyed sometimes. For example, my original marriage records exist on a small island nation. One solid tsunami, and they're gone. When I turn up 20 years later, noone's going to know or care who I am.
I always buy the lowest level refurb mac mini I can find (paying $300 for an extra 100GB of disk strikes me as insane), and they do a great job. Lower power use, remote control, etc. etc.
Gavron makes an excellent point - I recently got a Nexus One with T-Mobile, and on the map I had solid service at home and at work. When the phone arrived I found a very different reality - roaming everywhere. Don't trust the maps - ask users - when I mentioned T-Mobile to my colleagues at work (too late!) they all knew it didn't work in our area. I could have saved myself a lot of time just by asking a local.
>I'd wager that Blu-Ray is the last physical format for home video that we ever see.
Agreed - as people become more comfortable with the idea of having their 'library' as a digital object, the physical media will, I expect, go away.
> However, there will always be a small minority of people who want a physical copy and that's probably always going to be Blu-Ray.
This, on the other hand, I seriously doubt. Even if all the holographic storage doesn't pan out, something will be the next big thing. Unless 'always' is defined as 'for the next ten years or so'.
I had already discarded this idea, because of the lack of hardware, but it does open the question as to whether the US should direct future research into broadband into satellite internet. The two birds you could kill at once would be domestic access and, assuming you could get the hardware accepted into other countries, a tool for future operations of this nature.
Promote the hardware, perhaps at a discounted price, perhaps even in partnership with local resellers. It's the newest thing, a great option for getting internet to poor people, heck - you could even throw money at people to deploy it.
You wouldn't need very deep market penetration into a country, though obviously it would be better if the technology worked with mobile devices.
If you're a tinfoil hat type, I would keep my eyes peeled for something like this.
I had been thinking meetup (as in meetup.com), but certainly tweetups seem to be happening a lot.
I do not recommend the slashdot anniversary parties - awkward! (I'm looking at YOU, Ann Arbor-ites)(yes, I'm kidding. mostly)
Most of my geeky friends ended up with people who aren't quite as geeky as them - definitely look outside the geek stuff.
Classes are great if you're interested in something, but definitely go because you're interested, not just to meet people.
And ballroom dancing is way more fun than you expect - even if you are looking at your feet counting '1-2-3-4' the whole time...
This is only partially true.
Education will delay your earnings. However, given the current environment, your earnings may be delayed anyway.
More important, and I've had this conversation again and again with decision makers, is that the Master's degree is the new Bachelor's degree.
In the US, and in much of the English speaking world, university degrees are becoming more common. A Master's is a signal that you have put in extra effort, basically.
We recently hired a helpdesk position, and the HR drones were requiring a Master's. While this is an extreme example of HR going crazy, it doesn't change the fact that, before any calls, before any interviews, the non-Master's people were thrown out.
So to return to the post I am replying to, while you might benefit from earnings now, you might not, and in future, you will definitely want the second degree if you plan to earn anything.
For the first job, though, it probably isn't necessary, and taking a couple years off from school to see what the 'real world' is all about isn't a bad idea. It will also, if the degree means more to you than a sheet of paper, make the Master's program more useful to you, because you might have a better idea of why the stuff matters.
It can't be emphasized often enough that once you have a plan, you need to stick to it, and therefore you need to have a very good plan.
Of course, you never -actually- stick to the plan, but emphasizing that every change means delays of X helps to stem the tide of changes people come up with.
They did a phone survey?
This might be a bit more useful if they actually showed people.