If you've had customer face-time, and worked in a large company, or visited large companies and worked in them, your understanding of the corporate world is not to be underestimated.
Young clowns right out of school typically take years to understand how corporations work, how to navigate, how to handle the politics, how to communicate, hell, even how to dress. You probably want to focus on getting back in to corporate work, or perhaps consulting with corporations.
As another poster mentioned, you'll be hired at this age for experience - so parlay what you have, don't fret about age.
If you'd like to take on a modern language, Udacity's got a really good intro course on Python, six weeks long and free. Other courses on web application development, programming a robotic car, and more are there for the taking. Worth your time. Start with Python - its used there extensively, and is a modern interpreted language.
All excellent titles (and most of these are on my shelf). One I'd like to add is "Simple and Usable" by Giles Colborne ISBN: 978-0321703545
Simple and Usable is a short read, but does a great job at helping you understand what goes into simplifying a design. "Simplicity is not simple" - there's always an irreducible amount of complexity. This book helps you understand how to manage it.
It's a mindset book, not a cookbook - not really similar to "Design of Everyday Things" (DoET), but it serves a similar purpose: help you set your course through the field.
Love my ThinkTank Urban Disguise: http://www.thinktankphoto.com/search.aspx?find=Urban+Disguise. This is a briefcase-look bag, which you wouldn't think held camera gear. Can get a harness for backpack use.
Word to the wise: this is a LOT of gear to be hauling. My bag weighs a ton without ANY laptop, and my 15" MacBook Pro makes it a strain on a shoulder. Travel lighter than me, please.
Well, you could go to/dev/null for the functionality they've delivered for me so far.
Your question implies that similar functionality (in the sense of a product that's purchasable, not vapor and that will work as advertised) is actually available somewhere else.
I believe there's a British firm that markets the same hardware, that actually gives a crap about the customer, but unfortunately you're not going to get two working GBEN ports from them either - it's the same device.
Yeah, I'm still waiting on my "Early June" delivery of a GuruPlug+ from an order in May. It's spec'ed great. Too bad you can only use the Gigabit Ethernet at 10/100.
They think they're going to sell me a "professional upgrade kit" to make it meet the spec they advertized when they billed my card. Bullshit.
So let's say you want to do something you need to rely on: home music server, 24/7 monitoring applications, security. If you haven't laid in a spare, are you going to wait over 3 months for a replacement when it breaks. N.B.:WHEN it breaks.
Run far and fast from GlobalScale!
Why expend so much effort to piss a customer off at your company? Couldn't they have just put up an order page that said "Fsck You, Customer!"?
It's a great idea to get a tour from a dosant. Ours was ex-NSA, and the commentary is was fantastic. There's more than one Enigma there, and also the American version of the Cryptographic Bombe, which broke the 4-wheeled Enigma code. Brings a whole new meaning to "brute force computing".
Sad to say, I agree. Get a Sheevaplug (from someone other than the quite unresponsive Global Scale Technologies), a USB disk that spins down and do a file server that draws about 6 watts.
If you've got software to do productive work on it, you could donate it to World Computer Exchange or freecycle it locally for even less carbon debt - either of these options would give someone less fortunate a hand.
I thought it was very "fake geekery" at the time, Disnified bullshit, like everything else Disney puts out.
When the movie came out, I'd already been doing optical special effects for a while, and thought the "everything on black" opticals looked cheap and lame - not up to the high standard set by Doug Trumbull with 2001, Silent Running, etc. over a decade before. The work didn't even look as good as Star Wars.
There were maybe a half-dozen CGI scenes, which looked pretty cool to me, but that's about all I could say for the movie.
The plot insulted my intelligence, even then.
The first "all-CGI space footage" movie was, AFAIK, "The Last Starfighter", which featured another insulting plot, though the very cool Robert Preston appears in a key role.
So many of the films of the next 30 years would be weak exercises in filmmaking as excuses to get time on a supercomputer or grid. We shouldn't be celebrating this low-water-mark.
That said, I've got a colleague, ex-military, NOT a crank, who says the US Army implanted a glass-tube into his hand much like the one pictured - without his knowledge or consent. It was implanted while he was out during an unrelated surgery.
The implanted tube irritated him enough that he was regularly scratching it, and he eventually dug it out of his skin - and was surprised to see the foreign object.
The same guy has never spouted any nutty theories to me, never was paranoid about being tracked - just mentioned this experience.
For my part, I figured it was the Army experimenting with ways to inventory their humans, and maybe to posthumously ID them.
I basically like my Droid, but it's not without numerable faults.
The touchscreen isn't great (even forgiving that it doesn't do multi-touch like iPod/iPhone). When you're browsing a regular web page (something the Droid is up to, with its nice screen and good browser), sometimes the links are just too close to resolve the difference between them. Lots of frustrating touch...back...touch...back action going on.
My wife and I toured the museum of stuff that blows up (Bradbury museum?) at Los Alamos on our honeymoon (the site does say "news for nerds", right?).
One of the displays said that special styrofoam-like stuff that holds reactive parts of some in-stockpile nuclear weapons in place has a service life of 10 years, but the weapons using it are 25 or more years old. Meanwhile, they've lost the recipe to make more foam.
I wonder if they're able to refurbish these nukes (and what happens as the foam ages if not).
A: I'm gonnna guess you don't have a two-year-old.
B: exactly who are you to question features I find important, presuming to speak on behalf of every user?
but Google made the OS it's running. The issues I'm bitching about are all OS things. The Moto hardware is superb: sounds great, much quicker to work than my iPod touch.
There's an exchange client that will lie for you for $10, but the interface - ugh...
Could start railing about "there's no task-list sync on Droid" or "ActiveSync doesn't sync notes", but only those who use both obsessively (as I do) will understand why these are huge gaps.
Am starting to realize that the REAL problem with a task-list is building a sane interface - have yet to see one better than Franklin-Covey, with Palm and Outlook coming in for a tie at second.
Honestly, autofocus on the just-so-so camera is the last of my worries:
Can't sync with Outlook (the phone doesn't have on-device encryption that would satisfy Exchange policies). Only calendar works, not contacts or email.
Can't hands-free voice dial (have to touch the phone to unlock it, touch to turn on voice dial, speak your choice, touch the choice from the menu of likely suspected contacts).
Locked phone's touch-screen comes on in pocket when answering with a headset, causing much mute/disconnect/speakerphone hilarity.
Turn-by-turn navigation is way off, literally by miles. Wrong 4 of 4 tries so far (in metro Atlanta and DC).
Immature bluetooth won't support HCI (portable bluetooth keyboards).
Rotating the phone after checking email checkboxes unchecks everything
Can't order contact list by last name (fixed in first name order)
Can't charge it with ANYTHING but the included AC adaptor (over-draws USB power from my old USB car and wall chargers)
Really, fix the camera sometime down the line. But make the phone dial hands-free. Make email work. Make the navigation something other than worthless. Make "lock the screen" really lock the screen.
Someone at Google should use one of their own phones for a while and see how (s)he likes it.
It's a wonderfully powerful platform, but clearly not as well-thought-out or fluid to work as iPhone/iPod Touch
Since it's a top-of-the-line smart phone, and VZW's new flagship smart-phone and "iPhone killer", I didn't think to ask "hey, this can do the same must-have Outlook sync through a cable thing that your freebie and $30 phones do, right?"
It's not quite a smart phone if it won't sync with Outlook. Stupid phone, more like it. (and before you snark at me, I'm a Mac owner, user, lover (though not a Macolyte). I just have to use Outlook at work, and that makes Outlook sync (not through GMail, sorry) a _necessary_ feature).
When a phone will voice-dial, and when it will take a Bluetooth headset, I don't automatically think to ask: "Wait...will this phone voice-dial through the Bluetooth headset? No? Why the fuck not?!??"
What the hell good is voice dialing if you have to swipe to unlock the phone, pick an app, talk to it, then confirm your choice by tapping the screen?
Maybe the general question I should've thought to ask was: "Hey, are there things about this phone that suck? What are they?" But knowing VZW salespeople as I do, I'd have no confidence in the answer.
These are a couple of the WTF items for Droid. Another is: if I need to use a static IP on one of my WiFi connections, the phone tries to use the same static IP for ALL my WiFi connections. The static IP is bound to the phone, not to the connection. #fail
Yet another: If I have the phone locked, and I take an incoming call from my BT headset, the touch screen comes on on my pocket and mutes, disconnects, puts me on speakerphone. Wait a minute, I thought I had the phone LOCKED!
It's a wonderful hardware platform, but there are a fair amount of problems yet. I hope the real-world feedback (particularly anger over Outlook and the lack of BT voice dialing) will snap their heads around.
I bought the phone expecting a certain amount of early-adopter pain. I wanted to go on the journey with this product. But the Outlook and voice-dialing things just make my head want to explode.
Slashdot Mirror
"The White Mountains" trilogy enthralled me as a kid. Great for a young reader.
No, don't get the prequel (though I haven't read it).
If you've had customer face-time, and worked in a large company, or visited large companies and worked in them, your understanding of the corporate world is not to be underestimated.
Young clowns right out of school typically take years to understand how corporations work, how to navigate, how to handle the politics, how to communicate, hell, even how to dress. You probably want to focus on getting back in to corporate work, or perhaps consulting with corporations.
As another poster mentioned, you'll be hired at this age for experience - so parlay what you have, don't fret about age.
If you'd like to take on a modern language, Udacity's got a really good intro course on Python, six weeks long and free. Other courses on web application development, programming a robotic car, and more are there for the taking. Worth your time. Start with Python - its used there extensively, and is a modern interpreted language.
Excellent short story: A boy makes a "disapearer" and puts it to use. Quick, entertaining read, economical, vivid prose.
All excellent titles (and most of these are on my shelf). One I'd like to add is "Simple and Usable" by Giles Colborne ISBN: 978-0321703545
Simple and Usable is a short read, but does a great job at helping you understand what goes into simplifying a design. "Simplicity is not simple" - there's always an irreducible amount of complexity. This book helps you understand how to manage it.
It's a mindset book, not a cookbook - not really similar to "Design of Everyday Things" (DoET), but it serves a similar purpose: help you set your course through the field.
Must be quite a drag for kids in Cumming, Georgia (or for those poor youths from Butts county, GA).
Love my ThinkTank Urban Disguise: http://www.thinktankphoto.com/search.aspx?find=Urban+Disguise. This is a briefcase-look bag, which you wouldn't think held camera gear. Can get a harness for backpack use. Word to the wise: this is a LOT of gear to be hauling. My bag weighs a ton without ANY laptop, and my 15" MacBook Pro makes it a strain on a shoulder. Travel lighter than me, please.
Well, you could go to /dev/null for the functionality they've delivered for me so far.
Your question implies that similar functionality (in the sense of a product that's purchasable, not vapor and that will work as advertised) is actually available somewhere else.
I believe there's a British firm that markets the same hardware, that actually gives a crap about the customer, but unfortunately you're not going to get two working GBEN ports from them either - it's the same device.
No idea where to tell you to turn.
Yeah, I'm still waiting on my "Early June" delivery of a GuruPlug+ from an order in May. It's spec'ed great. Too bad you can only use the Gigabit Ethernet at 10/100.
They think they're going to sell me a "professional upgrade kit" to make it meet the spec they advertized when they billed my card. Bullshit.
So let's say you want to do something you need to rely on: home music server, 24/7 monitoring applications, security. If you haven't laid in a spare, are you going to wait over 3 months for a replacement when it breaks. N.B.:WHEN it breaks.
Run far and fast from GlobalScale!
Why expend so much effort to piss a customer off at your company? Couldn't they have just put up an order page that said "Fsck You, Customer!"?
It's a great idea to get a tour from a dosant. Ours was ex-NSA, and the commentary is was fantastic. There's more than one Enigma there, and also the American version of the Cryptographic Bombe, which broke the 4-wheeled Enigma code. Brings a whole new meaning to "brute force computing".
Sad to say, I agree. Get a Sheevaplug (from someone other than the quite unresponsive Global Scale Technologies), a USB disk that spins down and do a file server that draws about 6 watts.
If you've got software to do productive work on it, you could donate it to World Computer Exchange or freecycle it locally for even less carbon debt - either of these options would give someone less fortunate a hand.
If they could slice it up like one of those "all edge pieces" brownie pans, everyone would get beachfront property!!
Me too - I was just out of college at the time.
I thought it was very "fake geekery" at the time, Disnified bullshit, like everything else Disney puts out.
When the movie came out, I'd already been doing optical special effects for a while, and thought the "everything on black" opticals looked cheap and lame - not up to the high standard set by Doug Trumbull with 2001, Silent Running, etc. over a decade before. The work didn't even look as good as Star Wars.
There were maybe a half-dozen CGI scenes, which looked pretty cool to me, but that's about all I could say for the movie.
The plot insulted my intelligence, even then.
The first "all-CGI space footage" movie was, AFAIK, "The Last Starfighter", which featured another insulting plot, though the very cool Robert Preston appears in a key role.
So many of the films of the next 30 years would be weak exercises in filmmaking as excuses to get time on a supercomputer or grid. We shouldn't be celebrating this low-water-mark.
Puhleeze. I like Jonathan Demme probably more than the next guy, but at least go back to the wellspring of military weirdness...
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0056218/
He said glass. He works in healthcare IT and would probably be able to tell the diff between a needle, a bone shard and an RFID implant of some kind.
This woman sounds pretty nuts.
That said, I've got a colleague, ex-military, NOT a crank, who says the US Army implanted a glass-tube into his hand much like the one pictured - without his knowledge or consent. It was implanted while he was out during an unrelated surgery.
The implanted tube irritated him enough that he was regularly scratching it, and he eventually dug it out of his skin - and was surprised to see the foreign object.
The same guy has never spouted any nutty theories to me, never was paranoid about being tracked - just mentioned this experience.
For my part, I figured it was the Army experimenting with ways to inventory their humans, and maybe to posthumously ID them.
is that "Pee on Viewer"? Sorry, I don't keep up with all the fetishes...
I basically like my Droid, but it's not without numerable faults.
The touchscreen isn't great (even forgiving that it doesn't do multi-touch like iPod/iPhone). When you're browsing a regular web page (something the Droid is up to, with its nice screen and good browser), sometimes the links are just too close to resolve the difference between them. Lots of frustrating touch...back...touch...back action going on.
That probably gave the figures a big bump. Using it right now.
My wife and I toured the museum of stuff that blows up (Bradbury museum?) at Los Alamos on our honeymoon (the site does say "news for nerds", right?).
One of the displays said that special styrofoam-like stuff that holds reactive parts of some in-stockpile nuclear weapons in place has a service life of 10 years, but the weapons using it are 25 or more years old. Meanwhile, they've lost the recipe to make more foam.
I wonder if they're able to refurbish these nukes (and what happens as the foam ages if not).
Will check this out ASAP. Thanks!
A: I'm gonnna guess you don't have a two-year-old. B: exactly who are you to question features I find important, presuming to speak on behalf of every user?
but Google made the OS it's running. The issues I'm bitching about are all OS things. The Moto hardware is superb: sounds great, much quicker to work than my iPod touch.
There's an exchange client that will lie for you for $10, but the interface - ugh...
Could start railing about "there's no task-list sync on Droid" or "ActiveSync doesn't sync notes", but only those who use both obsessively (as I do) will understand why these are huge gaps.
Am starting to realize that the REAL problem with a task-list is building a sane interface - have yet to see one better than Franklin-Covey, with Palm and Outlook coming in for a tie at second.
Honestly, autofocus on the just-so-so camera is the last of my worries:
Really, fix the camera sometime down the line. But make the phone dial hands-free. Make email work. Make the navigation something other than worthless. Make "lock the screen" really lock the screen.
Someone at Google should use one of their own phones for a while and see how (s)he likes it.
It's a wonderfully powerful platform, but clearly not as well-thought-out or fluid to work as iPhone/iPod Touch
Actually, no I didn't.
Since it's a top-of-the-line smart phone, and VZW's new flagship smart-phone and "iPhone killer", I didn't think to ask "hey, this can do the same must-have Outlook sync through a cable thing that your freebie and $30 phones do, right?"
It's not quite a smart phone if it won't sync with Outlook. Stupid phone, more like it. (and before you snark at me, I'm a Mac owner, user, lover (though not a Macolyte). I just have to use Outlook at work, and that makes Outlook sync (not through GMail, sorry) a _necessary_ feature).
When a phone will voice-dial, and when it will take a Bluetooth headset, I don't automatically think to ask: "Wait...will this phone voice-dial through the Bluetooth headset? No? Why the fuck not?!??"
What the hell good is voice dialing if you have to swipe to unlock the phone, pick an app, talk to it, then confirm your choice by tapping the screen?
Maybe the general question I should've thought to ask was: "Hey, are there things about this phone that suck? What are they?" But knowing VZW salespeople as I do, I'd have no confidence in the answer.
These are a couple of the WTF items for Droid. Another is: if I need to use a static IP on one of my WiFi connections, the phone tries to use the same static IP for ALL my WiFi connections. The static IP is bound to the phone, not to the connection. #fail
Yet another: If I have the phone locked, and I take an incoming call from my BT headset, the touch screen comes on on my pocket and mutes, disconnects, puts me on speakerphone. Wait a minute, I thought I had the phone LOCKED!
It's a wonderful hardware platform, but there are a fair amount of problems yet. I hope the real-world feedback (particularly anger over Outlook and the lack of BT voice dialing) will snap their heads around.
I bought the phone expecting a certain amount of early-adopter pain. I wanted to go on the journey with this product. But the Outlook and voice-dialing things just make my head want to explode.