I have a policy:
If something is asking for a username and password to ANYTHING for ANY reason, I walk away.
The one exception would be if the federal government was asking because I was applying for security clearance.
Passwords are highly privileged information. Anyone with them can pretend to be me. Not happening.
I was one of those lazy, complacent types. Until I actually talked to a rep from my local CU at an event-thing at my office.
After hearing "9.75% interest on credit cards" and promptly picking my jaw up off the floor I signed up. Repeat with "2.75% car loan..."
Went in, took care of the paperwork, no fees, no BS, and I got both usable paper and plastic for the checking account before I walked out the door.
Wells can suck it.
Several years ago I acquired a Laserjet 4si for $0. Bought a legal paper tray on Ebay for ~$20. My dad printed loan documents on the thing (roughly 200-400 pages a day, 5 days a week) for many months. it sat alongside a far newer LJ1200 that couldn't handle document sets over 50 pages, whereas the 4si could blow through an entire ream's worth and the output bin might be full... Page count when we got is was around 1.6 MILLION. Ended up giving it to a friend of mine (who ran the shop the printer was salvaged from) when a customer of his needed a replacement printer (it was their's back in the day to begin with) 1.9 million pages and still going... Damn thing made the lights dim when it spun up.
I used a 1988 IBM model M keyboard at work for nearly two years. The thing is responsible for me getting a solo office (no one could STAND being in the same office as me due to my typing speed and the noise). Ironically, I had to give it up... When I moved I had to swap my desktop_synergy'ed laptop for a laptop with no ps/2 ports and me minus an adaptor. Found the adaptor a few weeks ago, haven't bothered... yet. A friend of mine took his Model M to a LAN party and participated in a "keyboard toss" event (toss your keyboard at a target on the floor and you might win said target's contents ( a Z-board, iirc). 50 guys tossed their boards, 48 had to get replacements. 1 won the new board, my friend just snapped the keys back into place (and duct taped the shattered space bar together) and went right back to fragging.
When Steam first came out it was horribly broken. I avoided CS 1.6 because of it. then I bought Half-Life 2 and was forced to use Steam. In the beginning it sucked, then things got better. By the time The Orange Box came out, it was rock-solid and just too freaking easy. (Disclaimer, I'm in the US) I maintain a copy of SteamApps on my file server (currently ~80GB). I can reload my game rig with impunity and just copy the files back. Or just let steam sit open overnight and all day when I'm at work. By the time 5pm rolls around I have a slew of games installed without me having to juggle discs and keys.
I used to be a devout follower of Westwood (RIP) and Maxis (RIP) then they started to suck after EA bought them out and everything got DRM'ed to hell. I vote with my dollars these days. Steam may not be perfect, but is has the virtue of being GOOD ENOUGH. Hell, I could even reload HL 1 (ancient game that it is) and play that if I wanted.
I recently went about loading up my old standbys, Quake, DooM and Red Alert (1). Gameplay sucked from what I've become accustomed to. Yes, nostalgia is a wonderful thing, but for things like FPS and RTS games, progress is better.
What I really miss are the flight sims, mostly X-Wing, TIE Fighter and X-Wing Alliance. Those don't play well on Windows 7. I have the discs, just no way to really play em.
I work at a MSP, so we're a help desk for 30+ companies.
The uniform for technical folks is a logo'ed button-down shirt (dark green, either short or long-sleeved) and slacks (technically kakhi, navy or black, but the predominant color is kakhi) and 'dress' shoes (anything not sport shoes is fair game). Even for those stuck in the office all day and not in the field interacting with customers the policy applies (the logic being that if you have to run out to a site you're already dressed).
We have a strict "no help without a trouble ticket" policy and most of our customers are now smart enough to not harass the local greenshirt directly... mostly.
If we're talking about a megacorp helpdesk, it only makes sense if the rest of the company has required uniforms or anything beyond "business casual".
In an office without uniforms the breakdown seems to be this:
Boss + boss's cronies/assistants: Business formal or high-end business casual (suit and tie)
Non-customer-facing folks: business casual
customer-facing: business casual with a tighter dress code or a uniform.
If IT must have a uniform, make sure it is comfortable. Full-cotton is great, and darker color don't show dirt and sweat (though the usual gray computer-dust sticks out a bit). Also find a dry cleaner that will do pickup/delivery. Professionally cleaned and pressed uniforms do wonders for the image (bonus: the IT grunts only have to keep track of where the dirty bag and pile of clean shirts are, not the mechanics of washing.).
If you do have a mandate for uniforms, make sure to keep a stash of cleaned and pressed uniform shirts in a closet or cabinet somewhere at the office, someone WILL need it someday.
I have an old HP LaserJet 1200 that I use for everyday printing. Cost me nothing (office castoff, IIRC) and i snagged a new cartridge for all of $30 (my dad had spares, too). I have about 5000 pages worth of print capacity for $30. My only regret is that is isn't networkable natively (haven't gotten a print server for it yet).
By title, I'm a "Systems Engineer" in reality, I'm an IT grunt. I'm a hardware guy, a printer repairman, a cabling guy, DBA, developer, Windows Server Administrator, Linux sysadmin, helpdesk monkey, VOIP guru etc etc.
I like my title, it beats the hell out of "consultant" I don't have to worry about dealing with stuck-up business types who gawk at a $200 repair bill for a $200 system. I don't have to worry about marketing, HR or any other business related schlock. I don't have to deal with retarded lusers who wonder why their system gets hosed after visiting questionable web sites and don't want to pay me $70/hr to fix it.
pfSense
Handles multiple WAN links handily (though your modems needs to have a sane failure mode (e.g. when the line is dead, drop everything) my cheapy DSL modem gets saturated by torrents and dies but still lets pings
and other little heartbeats through making the router think all is well, the results are very strange.
Has add-ons like BandwidthD: pretty traffic graphs and a graphical version of nTop: you may not know who's stealing your bandwidth, but you will once ntop is on the case.
I have mine running on an old Athlon64 (my eldest box, a P3 is busy with Asterisk), runs great, but I have a deployment on a PII-350 with 128MB of RAM elsewhere.
Oh yeah... you lucky sonofabitch!
For Computer Gear/Electronics: NewEgg, Fry's or BeastBuy if time beats money.
For Media and general homeware type stuff I don't need RIGHT NOW or isn't too heavy: Amazon et.al.
For local homewares: Target, & WallyWorld, specialty retailers for bulky things
If I need something RIGHT NOW and its 3am on a sunday: Wally World.
My roommate just got a job as a cashier at WallyWorld over the holidays. It may not be great work, but it's work.
In High school, I was 250+ that took up weight training. 2 years later i was ~ 225 and in the best shape of my life.
Two years after that I had balooned up to nearly 270. I wasn't working at the time.
At 270 I started on the Hacker's Diet. In 2 months I was down to 255. I started a job that kept me on my feet.
In another year I'd dropped back to 230.
Two years after that and I'm fighting the scales to stay at 250.
A little over 2 years ago I moved. my diet changed, my environment changed. I went from a strictish diet to eating whatever and whenever, the change exacerbated by the shift in environment.
I'm watching my weight again and trying my damdest to track calories. My new (relatively) job has my sitting at a desk 8 hours a day (Burger flipper is more active than helpdesk monkey).
I need to get back on the weightlifting bandwagon, and that means joining the local gym, a feat not financially feasable at present.
So I'm left with moderating calories trying to make my way down to 240.
I'm an IT monkey (Isn't most of/.?) I don't get the glory, I get a paycheck. It may not be a fat one, but it isn't thin either.
I'm just trying to survive this recession with my skin intact (and my house and car still in my possession). That means no glory, 45 hour work weeks and all sorts of bad stuff. The good thing is, I enjoy most of it.
Science has never been popular with Joe Sixpack and Jane Packaday for a variety of reasons, most of which have already been said.
The barrier to entry is the biggest one. Science takes a lot of background knowledge relative to other endeavors to get in to.
What matters is results.
Do the Sixpacks care HOW a car works? unless they're a mechanic by trade or by hobby the answer's probably no.
They care that it DOES, that is all.
Science is popular when its results are visible. internal combustion on self-contained mobile platforms made cheaply enough for the Sixpacks to afford transformed society. Telecommunications equipment running in to every home and business made the world smaller.
Integrated circuits made the world smarter. Mass-produced integrated circuits making computers affordable to the Sixpacks made the world smaller, faster and smarter all over again.
How do you make science popular? make it appeal to the average user. The problem however, is that science and averages don't mix. you don't innovate or learn when you stick within the boundaries set forth by the law of averages. Joe Sixpack, by definition doesn't think outside of the box. Science will always be the domain of the free thinking folk who ask "WHY?"
I only have full use of one hand (my left).
I'm in IT.
I have been typing one handed since the dawn of time. Yes it's advanced hunt and peck, but it works.
If I am writing off the cuff (e.g. a report, forum post, etc etc), then I've somewhere between 50 and 70 WPM. Transcription tops out at around 50.
Took a "business ed" class in 8th grade. Typing was a primary component, but the typing classes were not first up. the teacher saw how fast and effivient i was with one hand, said something to the effects of "I'm not even going to try messing with that," gave me an A for the section and moved me on.
I did endure another typing course in 10th grade at tech school (try as I might I couldn't get out of it... passed that part with a B, feh).
In the Real World, I routinely smoke most other users 9"you can type faster with one hand than I can with two")
The problem: my endurance sucks (arm gets tired) as I have more or less forced myself to use a full QWERTY layout all my life (though an alternate setup may be "better" I have yet to find one that works.
I just bought a house and am in the process of Geeking it out.
There's phone wire (looks like 4-wire CAT3) in most of the rooms, either that or a RG6 CoAx plug. I'm going to run at least 1 CAT6 drop (or 6 depending on location) to each (retrofitting the RG plates with combos and removing/replacing the RJ11 jacks abandoning the wire in place). Going to run a new home run from the phone box to the new wiring closet (all of 30 feet through a crawlspace) and break it out such that any new CAT6 drop can be used for POTS (I have as Asterisk system that needs hardphones). my house is between cell towers for AT&T (I move from a faraday cage to a house between two cells, Kobayashi Maru)
I type this from my G15 at home.
At the office I have an old-enough-to-drink Model M. Annoys the crap out of my officemate, but then again, he's so hard of hearing he projects loud enough for his phone conversations to be picked up by my noise-cancelling headset and heard by people at the other end of my call.
*sigh*
Wouldn't trade the M in for anything else. It's in dire need of a cleaning though. I don't want to clean it and break something:(
Seconded...
Roommate/friend of mine took his Model-M to MML3 (for the unitiaiated, a bigass LAN party in Louisville, KY). One of the sponsors had an event where to win a ZZ-board, all you had to do is toss your existing keyboard through the air about 25 feet on to terazzo and knock a keyboard box down. 100 tried, probably 80 or 90 were broken beyond repair by the impact of keyboard meeting floor from ten feet up. The model-M... took ten minutes to scrounge up all the key covers but it still works today, 4 years later. (manufacture date of 1988, BTW)
I have a '96 and an '89 myself. Indestructable.
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I have a policy: If something is asking for a username and password to ANYTHING for ANY reason, I walk away. The one exception would be if the federal government was asking because I was applying for security clearance. Passwords are highly privileged information. Anyone with them can pretend to be me. Not happening.
I was one of those lazy, complacent types. Until I actually talked to a rep from my local CU at an event-thing at my office. After hearing "9.75% interest on credit cards" and promptly picking my jaw up off the floor I signed up. Repeat with "2.75% car loan..." Went in, took care of the paperwork, no fees, no BS, and I got both usable paper and plastic for the checking account before I walked out the door. Wells can suck it.
Several years ago I acquired a Laserjet 4si for $0. Bought a legal paper tray on Ebay for ~$20. My dad printed loan documents on the thing (roughly 200-400 pages a day, 5 days a week) for many months. it sat alongside a far newer LJ1200 that couldn't handle document sets over 50 pages, whereas the 4si could blow through an entire ream's worth and the output bin might be full...
Page count when we got is was around 1.6 MILLION. Ended up giving it to a friend of mine (who ran the shop the printer was salvaged from) when a customer of his needed a replacement printer (it was their's back in the day to begin with) 1.9 million pages and still going...
Damn thing made the lights dim when it spun up.
I used a 1988 IBM model M keyboard at work for nearly two years. The thing is responsible for me getting a solo office (no one could STAND being in the same office as me due to my typing speed and the noise). Ironically, I had to give it up... When I moved I had to swap my desktop_synergy'ed laptop for a laptop with no ps/2 ports and me minus an adaptor.
Found the adaptor a few weeks ago, haven't bothered... yet.
A friend of mine took his Model M to a LAN party and participated in a "keyboard toss" event (toss your keyboard at a target on the floor and you might win said target's contents ( a Z-board, iirc). 50 guys tossed their boards, 48 had to get replacements. 1 won the new board, my friend just snapped the keys back into place (and duct taped the shattered space bar together) and went right back to fragging.
When Steam first came out it was horribly broken.
I avoided CS 1.6 because of it.
then I bought Half-Life 2 and was forced to use Steam.
In the beginning it sucked, then things got better.
By the time The Orange Box came out, it was rock-solid and just too freaking easy. (Disclaimer, I'm in the US)
I maintain a copy of SteamApps on my file server (currently ~80GB). I can reload my game rig with impunity and just copy the files back. Or just let steam sit open overnight and all day when I'm at work. By the time 5pm rolls around I have a slew of games installed without me having to juggle discs and keys.
I used to be a devout follower of Westwood (RIP) and Maxis (RIP) then they started to suck after EA bought them out and everything got DRM'ed to hell.
I vote with my dollars these days. Steam may not be perfect, but is has the virtue of being GOOD ENOUGH.
Hell, I could even reload HL 1 (ancient game that it is) and play that if I wanted.
I recently went about loading up my old standbys, Quake, DooM and Red Alert (1). Gameplay sucked from what I've become accustomed to.
Yes, nostalgia is a wonderful thing, but for things like FPS and RTS games, progress is better.
What I really miss are the flight sims, mostly X-Wing, TIE Fighter and X-Wing Alliance. Those don't play well on Windows 7. I have the discs, just no way to really play em.
I work at a MSP, so we're a help desk for 30+ companies. The uniform for technical folks is a logo'ed button-down shirt (dark green, either short or long-sleeved) and slacks (technically kakhi, navy or black, but the predominant color is kakhi) and 'dress' shoes (anything not sport shoes is fair game). Even for those stuck in the office all day and not in the field interacting with customers the policy applies (the logic being that if you have to run out to a site you're already dressed). We have a strict "no help without a trouble ticket" policy and most of our customers are now smart enough to not harass the local greenshirt directly... mostly. If we're talking about a megacorp helpdesk, it only makes sense if the rest of the company has required uniforms or anything beyond "business casual". In an office without uniforms the breakdown seems to be this: Boss + boss's cronies/assistants: Business formal or high-end business casual (suit and tie) Non-customer-facing folks: business casual customer-facing: business casual with a tighter dress code or a uniform. If IT must have a uniform, make sure it is comfortable. Full-cotton is great, and darker color don't show dirt and sweat (though the usual gray computer-dust sticks out a bit). Also find a dry cleaner that will do pickup/delivery. Professionally cleaned and pressed uniforms do wonders for the image (bonus: the IT grunts only have to keep track of where the dirty bag and pile of clean shirts are, not the mechanics of washing.). If you do have a mandate for uniforms, make sure to keep a stash of cleaned and pressed uniform shirts in a closet or cabinet somewhere at the office, someone WILL need it someday.
I have an old HP LaserJet 1200 that I use for everyday printing.
Cost me nothing (office castoff, IIRC) and i snagged a new cartridge for all of $30 (my dad had spares, too). I have about 5000 pages worth of print capacity for $30. My only regret is that is isn't networkable natively (haven't gotten a print server for it yet).
I'm eyeing a Color Laser, but there's no hurry.
I gave up on Ink long, long ago.
By title, I'm a "Systems Engineer" in reality, I'm an IT grunt.
I'm a hardware guy, a printer repairman, a cabling guy, DBA, developer, Windows Server Administrator, Linux sysadmin, helpdesk monkey, VOIP guru etc etc.
I like my title, it beats the hell out of "consultant"
I don't have to worry about dealing with stuck-up business types who gawk at a $200 repair bill for a $200 system.
I don't have to worry about marketing, HR or any other business related schlock.
I don't have to deal with retarded lusers who wonder why their system gets hosed after visiting questionable web sites and don't want to pay me $70/hr to fix it.
I'll take it where I can get it.
pfSense Handles multiple WAN links handily (though your modems needs to have a sane failure mode (e.g. when the line is dead, drop everything) my cheapy DSL modem gets saturated by torrents and dies but still lets pings and other little heartbeats through making the router think all is well, the results are very strange. Has add-ons like BandwidthD: pretty traffic graphs and a graphical version of nTop: you may not know who's stealing your bandwidth, but you will once ntop is on the case. I have mine running on an old Athlon64 (my eldest box, a P3 is busy with Asterisk), runs great, but I have a deployment on a PII-350 with 128MB of RAM elsewhere. Oh yeah... you lucky sonofabitch!
For Computer Gear/Electronics: NewEgg, Fry's or BeastBuy if time beats money. For Media and general homeware type stuff I don't need RIGHT NOW or isn't too heavy: Amazon et.al. For local homewares: Target, & WallyWorld, specialty retailers for bulky things If I need something RIGHT NOW and its 3am on a sunday: Wally World. My roommate just got a job as a cashier at WallyWorld over the holidays. It may not be great work, but it's work.
In High school, I was 250+ that took up weight training. 2 years later i was ~ 225 and in the best shape of my life. Two years after that I had balooned up to nearly 270. I wasn't working at the time. At 270 I started on the Hacker's Diet. In 2 months I was down to 255. I started a job that kept me on my feet. In another year I'd dropped back to 230. Two years after that and I'm fighting the scales to stay at 250. A little over 2 years ago I moved. my diet changed, my environment changed. I went from a strictish diet to eating whatever and whenever, the change exacerbated by the shift in environment. I'm watching my weight again and trying my damdest to track calories. My new (relatively) job has my sitting at a desk 8 hours a day (Burger flipper is more active than helpdesk monkey). I need to get back on the weightlifting bandwagon, and that means joining the local gym, a feat not financially feasable at present. So I'm left with moderating calories trying to make my way down to 240.
I'm an IT monkey (Isn't most of /.?) I don't get the glory, I get a paycheck. It may not be a fat one, but it isn't thin either.
I'm just trying to survive this recession with my skin intact (and my house and car still in my possession). That means no glory, 45 hour work weeks and all sorts of bad stuff. The good thing is, I enjoy most of it.
Science has never been popular with Joe Sixpack and Jane Packaday for a variety of reasons, most of which have already been said. The barrier to entry is the biggest one. Science takes a lot of background knowledge relative to other endeavors to get in to. What matters is results. Do the Sixpacks care HOW a car works? unless they're a mechanic by trade or by hobby the answer's probably no. They care that it DOES, that is all. Science is popular when its results are visible. internal combustion on self-contained mobile platforms made cheaply enough for the Sixpacks to afford transformed society. Telecommunications equipment running in to every home and business made the world smaller. Integrated circuits made the world smarter. Mass-produced integrated circuits making computers affordable to the Sixpacks made the world smaller, faster and smarter all over again. How do you make science popular? make it appeal to the average user. The problem however, is that science and averages don't mix. you don't innovate or learn when you stick within the boundaries set forth by the law of averages. Joe Sixpack, by definition doesn't think outside of the box. Science will always be the domain of the free thinking folk who ask "WHY?"
I only have full use of one hand (my left). I'm in IT. I have been typing one handed since the dawn of time. Yes it's advanced hunt and peck, but it works. If I am writing off the cuff (e.g. a report, forum post, etc etc), then I've somewhere between 50 and 70 WPM. Transcription tops out at around 50. Took a "business ed" class in 8th grade. Typing was a primary component, but the typing classes were not first up. the teacher saw how fast and effivient i was with one hand, said something to the effects of "I'm not even going to try messing with that," gave me an A for the section and moved me on. I did endure another typing course in 10th grade at tech school (try as I might I couldn't get out of it... passed that part with a B, feh). In the Real World, I routinely smoke most other users 9"you can type faster with one hand than I can with two") The problem: my endurance sucks (arm gets tired) as I have more or less forced myself to use a full QWERTY layout all my life (though an alternate setup may be "better" I have yet to find one that works.
I just bought a house and am in the process of Geeking it out. There's phone wire (looks like 4-wire CAT3) in most of the rooms, either that or a RG6 CoAx plug. I'm going to run at least 1 CAT6 drop (or 6 depending on location) to each (retrofitting the RG plates with combos and removing/replacing the RJ11 jacks abandoning the wire in place). Going to run a new home run from the phone box to the new wiring closet (all of 30 feet through a crawlspace) and break it out such that any new CAT6 drop can be used for POTS (I have as Asterisk system that needs hardphones). my house is between cell towers for AT&T (I move from a faraday cage to a house between two cells, Kobayashi Maru)
I type this from my G15 at home. At the office I have an old-enough-to-drink Model M. Annoys the crap out of my officemate, but then again, he's so hard of hearing he projects loud enough for his phone conversations to be picked up by my noise-cancelling headset and heard by people at the other end of my call. *sigh* Wouldn't trade the M in for anything else. It's in dire need of a cleaning though. I don't want to clean it and break something :(
Seconded... Roommate/friend of mine took his Model-M to MML3 (for the unitiaiated, a bigass LAN party in Louisville, KY). One of the sponsors had an event where to win a ZZ-board, all you had to do is toss your existing keyboard through the air about 25 feet on to terazzo and knock a keyboard box down. 100 tried, probably 80 or 90 were broken beyond repair by the impact of keyboard meeting floor from ten feet up. The model-M... took ten minutes to scrounge up all the key covers but it still works today, 4 years later. (manufacture date of 1988, BTW) I have a '96 and an '89 myself. Indestructable.