If it could really park by itself, it would have to be able to do all of the following:
Roam the parking lot for 20 minutes looking for a spot, with windows rolled down, blaring bad techno at the surrounings.
Predatorily follow someone walking along the parking lot in the hopes that they will get in the car and pull out, and mouth them off in anger when realizing that they just wanted to pick up their wallet left in the car.
Know not to park next to the door-dinging Canyonero.
Mouth off at the "ass-clown in his fucking Porsche" who parked diagonally across two parking spaces.
Yell "WHAT THE FUCK! THAT WAS MINE!" at the soccer mom who just pulled into the available space that you have spotted while four rows across and have been navigating to it ever since.
Drop into neutral and rev up the engine behind the two old ladies who don't know any better to fucking get off the road.
Bitterly bitch at the handicapped people for wasting perfectly good parking spaces that are never taken anyway.
Say "that's it, I'm taking the goddamn bus next time!" at least once every two minutes while still circling the lot.
Finally find a parking space after 30 minutes of circling, parking with the front wheels over the "absolutely no parking" line.
Find that someone double-parked you upon your return, and be able to pull out over the curb, nearly leaving your exhaust pipe behind you.
Until then, don't talk to me about self-parking cars.
College is learning to wade through crap, and it will affect your future life in a very significant way, so don't take it lightly. Sure, everyone knows college is bullshit, including the people who will be going through resumes, but everyone appreciates what having a college degree really means; it means that you have proven that you can work in an environment that sets (often senseless) requirements and deadlines.
For most smart people college is a bore. In my 5 years of it (switched degrees and universities mid-way, from child psychology in Russia to special education in USA) I have learned very little that came directly from my courses. However, what I had failed to realize by the time I was in my fourth year, is how much having decent grades will affect your future life. I became so disenchanted with college by my final year that I failed 3 classes in my last semester (I needed them solely for qualifying for scholarships, and didn't need them to graduate). The classes were Kindergarten Education, Intermediate C Programming, and Art Education Methods. These should have been straight A push-overs, but I have failed all three of them by just not bothering to turn in my assignments, even though if you ask my teachers, they will probably tell you that I was one of the brighter students they have ever taught. That came around 5 years later to bite me in the ass when I realized that most graduate schools want a GPA of 3.0 in the last 2 years of college. Due to these three Fs mine is now 2.85. Stupid? Sure. But the stupidity is my own and I warn you not to make this mistake.
So whatever: everyone knows that college is a waste of time and money, and you will probably learn much more outside of it than while attending classes, but the important thing that matters to employers is the fact that you have enough focus and energy to wade through 4+ years of stupid crap, which tells them that you will probably not be a complete boob in their structured corporate environment.
Sure, you can just ignore college, but your venues will be limited. Unless you succeed in starting your own company, or decide to be an independent artist all your life (note, this usually == poor), a college degree will be a key to many doors that would otherwise remain shut.
Note, however, that unless you are just out of college, the actual degree you pick means absolutely dick. Hell, my degree is in Special Education, and I work as a sysadmin, and the guy I work with has his in Political Science. In fact, we have frequently reminisced that we would much rather hire someone with a liberal arts degree who learns IT skills on their own, than someone with an actual degree in the field, as this usually means that the person is able to be creative about their tasks, and not follow some rigid "this is how it's supposed to be, dammit" rules.
So, if you can pull it off, pick a degree that would be fun to do. Hell, I have no regrets whatsoever about majoring in Special Ed, if only because 95% of my classmates were actually attractive, vs the oddballs majoring in ECE/CS. Then, once you have your fun-though-largely-useless-in-real-life degree, go volunteer for some non-profits to build up your resume (if you can afford that, of course). If you have even a smidgen of content in the "previous working experience" that isn't being a pizza delivery boy, the employers will mostly disregard the "education" field as long as a "BS" or "BA" is featured there. IT is one of the fields where most stuff you learn in college is largely inapplicable just a few years after graduation anyway, so let's all cheer for that.
So, to summarize: go to college. Suck it up. Have fun. See real boobs (and I don't mean drunken frat-boys). Lose virginity. Graduate with good grades, and be content that you have just gotten yourself a powerful door-opener that will help you throughout your life.
Capslock is great to use for keyboard layout switching. E.g. if you have to constantly write in two different languages, there's nothing better, especially because you can just glance at your keyboard and see if you are in the primary on secondary layout.
Unless, of course, you're multi-lingual, then you have to come up with different solutions.
A poetic suggestion.
on
Spam as Poetry
·
· Score: 4, Funny
In search of rhyme I spam peruse, With stalling breath I moan in Bayes. I've heard of life. But of such ruse No proof I've seen in all my days.
I've got three systems currently running reiser on Gentoo, from my PowerPC/SCSI/NFS/Samba file/print server to the ancient Compaq laptop with a 4GB drive.
I believe that is the definition given for the word "dilettante" in most dictionaries.:)
Hehe... Well, it's even funnier that way.:) Thanks for kind word -- I don't really do that much on Squirrelmail these days, but I still follow the project closely.
Well, to re-calc back from Russian, which has had precisely this problem:
security hole: a hole in defenses (dyra v zaschite) patch: a clothes-patch (zaplata) bug: officially, "a problem in software," but unofficially "a hallucination" (gluk), or direct usage of English "bug"
Other fun translations: firewall: inter-network screen of defense (mezhsetevoi ekran zaschity), though "fayervoll" is used far more commonly hard drive: firm disk (zhestkii disk), though among techies the word "vint" is commonly used because of a very old popular brand of hard drives: Winchester. Macintosh: that other thing they use in the US
Overall, techie jargon tends to use words directly borrowed from English, though you won't find it in official language, because when Russian techies talk, it's completely incomprehensible (Ya emu fscknul partisheny, zapatchil parochku daemonov, sdefragmentnul hard, i posle reboota vse bylo okei).:)
This reminds me of a joke: an old Russian russophile professor was complaining that his students use a lot of foreign words in their works. "Why, why did you needlessly use this English word 'slide' during your presentation? There is a wonderful Russian word for that -- 'diapositiv.'" (which, of course, is German).
Maybe it's ugly, but "fayervoll" is far easier to understand than "inter-network screen of defense," which makes you think of something uttered on Star Trek.:)
Remembering a sequence of 52 cards is actually not that hard. Well, okay, it's hard, but it's doable. I used to be able to do it with relative success, but I haven't practised in over 3 years.
There are several techniques, and most of them use grouping and storylining. For example, this is the one I used:
Every card gets three possible meanings -- a subject, an object, and an action. Then you draw the cards in threes and make up a story on the spot. E.g. say you drew a two-hearts, jack-spades, and six-diamonds. In your designation chart, these cards have the following meanings:
two-hearts: subject: Madonna; action: seduce; object: boobies jack-spades: subject: drug dealer; action: wave above one's head menacingly; object: bling-bling six-diamonds: subject: bank attendant; action: pay; object: a wrapped packet of dollars.
So your combination becomes: Madonna menacingly waving a wad of dollars above her head. The key here is to visualize these things and make up a continuous story, as if describing what happened to you on the way to work. (Out of the door, I saw Madonna waving menacingly a wad of dollars above her head. I came to talk to her, and apparently she was angry because a drug dealer shot her car (jack-spades/three-spades/four-diamonds). I offered her a ride, and on the way to her house we saw from the windows of our car Saddam Hussein trying to hump a church building (king-spades/four-hearts/ten-crosses).). It's important to tie the previous action to the next (saw through the windows of our car), so you don't lose the sequence of events.
The cards are grouped by subjects -- all hearts have to do with sex, all diamonds have to do with money, all spades have to do with criminal element, and all crosses have to do with cults and religion. Usually just three possible meanings per card is not enough, because it can always be that you just CAN'T make something meaningful out of a combination ("Bank teller seducing an electric chair" takes... a lot of imagination to visualise, though if you manage, you'll never forget a six-diamonds/two-hearts/five-spades. Ever).
Sometimes you sure make up very amusing combinations. E.g. among the ones I recall is Saddam Hussein licking a cash register (king-spades/ace-hearts/ten-diamonds), Marylin Monroe wearing a punctured car tire on her neck (queen-hearts/queen-diamonds/three-spades), and Bill Gates seducing a bill fold (king-diamonds/two-hearts/two-diamonds), though this one could have actually happened for all I know.:)
The weirder you make your combination, and the more vividly it stands out in your imagination, the higher is the chance that you will remember it.
Mnemonics is quite amusing. It helped me make it through college without ever taking notes and learn three foreign languages. Definitely a very useful skill to learn and master.
Let's see: it's free, it's uniform across platforms, I'm not locked into proprietary hardware, and I don't have to support litigious bastards called Apple by constantly paying for upgrades and bugfixes.
(Slashdot has a bit of a blind eye when it comes to the last part, I fully realize.)
icon@fleur:[~]$ cat/proc/cpuinfo | grep motherboard motherboard : PowerBook3,2 MacRISC2 MacRISC Power Macintosh icon@fleur:[~]$ uname -a Linux fleur.hogwarts.jk 2.4.22-2d #2 Mon Oct 20 12:03:14 EDT 2003 ppc ppc ppc GNU/Linux
I used to have an OS X partition, but I deleted it during the last reinstall since I haven't used it in over a year.
Now, see? THIS would strike people as "It does all that for only $99?! COOL!"... However,
being able to -USE- all that without a doctorate is another matter for some folks.
I see you have clearly never worked in techsupport at a university.:)
Women aren't even allowed to drive in Saudi Arabia and they have religious police that murdered school girls by not allowing them out of a burning building because they where not 'dressed' correctly. When you make the decision that dress in more important than the lives of kids you are a majorly fucked up society.
Is this *more* or *fewer* dead kids than all school shooting victims in the US in the past year? I'm thinking there is more than one fucked up society here...
Well, groklaw is hosted at ibiblio, which in its turn is hosted on ncren. I believe all of slashdot is a tiny spike in their overall traffic, which includes students of many major universities sharing music from their dorms.:)
"Maia" is just approximation from Quenya (High Elvish) into common, so as long as it's phonetically pronounced the same, both spelling variants are just as correct.:p
Gandalf is not a man -- he is istari, an immortal Maya (sort of a "lesser god"). He came to Middle Earth a few thousand years before the action of LOTR takes place and he was already old back then, considering he's been around in one shape or the other since the creation of Arda.:)
It's amusing to see how early 20th century "Jew jokes" get a new life this way.:) Not that I mind, of course, but the whole Apple vs Microsoft spin feels just completely tacked on. If only because I would find much more humor in Apple/Microsoft employees travelling to a conference by train.:)
Slashdot Mirror
This reminds me:
Spellchecking for form fields!
If it could really park by itself, it would have to be able to do all of the following:
Until then, don't talk to me about self-parking cars.
Set up an RSS feed. Sheesh.
College is learning to wade through crap, and it will affect your future life in a very significant way, so don't take it lightly. Sure, everyone knows college is bullshit, including the people who will be going through resumes, but everyone appreciates what having a college degree really means; it means that you have proven that you can work in an environment that sets (often senseless) requirements and deadlines.
For most smart people college is a bore. In my 5 years of it (switched degrees and universities mid-way, from child psychology in Russia to special education in USA) I have learned very little that came directly from my courses. However, what I had failed to realize by the time I was in my fourth year, is how much having decent grades will affect your future life. I became so disenchanted with college by my final year that I failed 3 classes in my last semester (I needed them solely for qualifying for scholarships, and didn't need them to graduate). The classes were Kindergarten Education, Intermediate C Programming, and Art Education Methods. These should have been straight A push-overs, but I have failed all three of them by just not bothering to turn in my assignments, even though if you ask my teachers, they will probably tell you that I was one of the brighter students they have ever taught. That came around 5 years later to bite me in the ass when I realized that most graduate schools want a GPA of 3.0 in the last 2 years of college. Due to these three Fs mine is now 2.85. Stupid? Sure. But the stupidity is my own and I warn you not to make this mistake.
So whatever: everyone knows that college is a waste of time and money, and you will probably learn much more outside of it than while attending classes, but the important thing that matters to employers is the fact that you have enough focus and energy to wade through 4+ years of stupid crap, which tells them that you will probably not be a complete boob in their structured corporate environment.
Sure, you can just ignore college, but your venues will be limited. Unless you succeed in starting your own company, or decide to be an independent artist all your life (note, this usually == poor), a college degree will be a key to many doors that would otherwise remain shut.
Note, however, that unless you are just out of college, the actual degree you pick means absolutely dick. Hell, my degree is in Special Education, and I work as a sysadmin, and the guy I work with has his in Political Science. In fact, we have frequently reminisced that we would much rather hire someone with a liberal arts degree who learns IT skills on their own, than someone with an actual degree in the field, as this usually means that the person is able to be creative about their tasks, and not follow some rigid "this is how it's supposed to be, dammit" rules.
So, if you can pull it off, pick a degree that would be fun to do. Hell, I have no regrets whatsoever about majoring in Special Ed, if only because 95% of my classmates were actually attractive, vs the oddballs majoring in ECE/CS. Then, once you have your fun-though-largely-useless-in-real-life degree, go volunteer for some non-profits to build up your resume (if you can afford that, of course). If you have even a smidgen of content in the "previous working experience" that isn't being a pizza delivery boy, the employers will mostly disregard the "education" field as long as a "BS" or "BA" is featured there. IT is one of the fields where most stuff you learn in college is largely inapplicable just a few years after graduation anyway, so let's all cheer for that.
So, to summarize: go to college. Suck it up. Have fun. See real boobs (and I don't mean drunken frat-boys). Lose virginity. Graduate with good grades, and be content that you have just gotten yourself a powerful door-opener that will help you throughout your life.
Capslock is great to use for keyboard layout switching. E.g. if you have to constantly write in two different languages, there's nothing better, especially because you can just glance at your keyboard and see if you are in the primary on secondary layout.
Unless, of course, you're multi-lingual, then you have to come up with different solutions.
In search of rhyme I spam peruse,
With stalling breath I moan in Bayes.
I've heard of life. But of such ruse
No proof I've seen in all my days.
I believe that is the definition given for the word "dilettante" in most dictionaries. :)
Hehe... Well, it's even funnier that way. :) Thanks for kind word -- I don't really do that much on Squirrelmail these days, but I still follow the project closely.
Cheers,
--icon
I am, and it *was* a response. :)
If your name is in the blurb, and you can count more than 5 accusations of being a baby-raping faggot at -1, you know you have succeeded as a geek. :)
"Comet Thatcher shower on a cold day!"
"Comet Thatcher shower on a cold day!"
</Austin_Powers>
Well, to re-calc back from Russian, which has had precisely this problem:
security hole: a hole in defenses (dyra v zaschite)
patch: a clothes-patch (zaplata)
bug: officially, "a problem in software," but unofficially "a hallucination" (gluk), or direct usage of English "bug"
Other fun translations:
firewall: inter-network screen of defense (mezhsetevoi ekran zaschity), though "fayervoll" is used far more commonly
hard drive: firm disk (zhestkii disk), though among techies the word "vint" is commonly used because of a very old popular brand of hard drives: Winchester.
Macintosh: that other thing they use in the US
Overall, techie jargon tends to use words directly borrowed from English, though you won't find it in official language, because when Russian techies talk, it's completely incomprehensible (Ya emu fscknul partisheny, zapatchil parochku daemonov, sdefragmentnul hard, i posle reboota vse bylo okei). :)
This reminds me of a joke: an old Russian russophile professor was complaining that his students use a lot of foreign words in their works. "Why, why did you needlessly use this English word 'slide' during your presentation? There is a wonderful Russian word for that -- 'diapositiv.'" (which, of course, is German).
Maybe it's ugly, but "fayervoll" is far easier to understand than "inter-network screen of defense," which makes you think of something uttered on Star Trek. :)
for instance, they may contain a brown dwarf orbiting a star
This is what happens when you ask a ranger to toss you, silly dwarf.
alias renice='kill -9'
Remembering a sequence of 52 cards is actually not that hard. Well, okay, it's hard, but it's doable. I used to be able to do it with relative success, but I haven't practised in over 3 years.
:)
There are several techniques, and most of them use grouping and storylining. For example, this is the one I used:
Every card gets three possible meanings -- a subject, an object, and an action. Then you draw the cards in threes and make up a story on the spot. E.g. say you drew a two-hearts, jack-spades, and six-diamonds. In your designation chart, these cards have the following meanings:
two-hearts: subject: Madonna; action: seduce; object: boobies
jack-spades: subject: drug dealer; action: wave above one's head menacingly; object: bling-bling
six-diamonds: subject: bank attendant; action: pay; object: a wrapped packet of dollars.
So your combination becomes: Madonna menacingly waving a wad of dollars above her head. The key here is to visualize these things and make up a continuous story, as if describing what happened to you on the way to work. (Out of the door, I saw Madonna waving menacingly a wad of dollars above her head. I came to talk to her, and apparently she was angry because a drug dealer shot her car (jack-spades/three-spades/four-diamonds). I offered her a ride, and on the way to her house we saw from the windows of our car Saddam Hussein trying to hump a church building (king-spades/four-hearts/ten-crosses).). It's important to tie the previous action to the next (saw through the windows of our car), so you don't lose the sequence of events.
The cards are grouped by subjects -- all hearts have to do with sex, all diamonds have to do with money, all spades have to do with criminal element, and all crosses have to do with cults and religion. Usually just three possible meanings per card is not enough, because it can always be that you just CAN'T make something meaningful out of a combination ("Bank teller seducing an electric chair" takes... a lot of imagination to visualise, though if you manage, you'll never forget a six-diamonds/two-hearts/five-spades. Ever).
Sometimes you sure make up very amusing combinations. E.g. among the ones I recall is Saddam Hussein licking a cash register (king-spades/ace-hearts/ten-diamonds), Marylin Monroe wearing a punctured car tire on her neck (queen-hearts/queen-diamonds/three-spades), and Bill Gates seducing a bill fold (king-diamonds/two-hearts/two-diamonds), though this one could have actually happened for all I know.
The weirder you make your combination, and the more vividly it stands out in your imagination, the higher is the chance that you will remember it.
Mnemonics is quite amusing. It helped me make it through college without ever taking notes and learn three foreign languages. Definitely a very useful skill to learn and master.
Let's see: it's free, it's uniform across platforms, I'm not locked into proprietary hardware, and I don't have to support litigious bastards called Apple by constantly paying for upgrades and bugfixes.
/proc/cpuinfo | grep motherboard
(Slashdot has a bit of a blind eye when it comes to the last part, I fully realize.)
icon@fleur:[~]$ cat
motherboard : PowerBook3,2 MacRISC2 MacRISC Power Macintosh
icon@fleur:[~]$ uname -a
Linux fleur.hogwarts.jk 2.4.22-2d #2 Mon Oct 20 12:03:14 EDT 2003 ppc ppc ppc GNU/Linux
I used to have an OS X partition, but I deleted it during the last reinstall since I haven't used it in over a year.
I see you have clearly never worked in techsupport at a university. :)
Oh, hey now. Ours landed, too!
Well... more likely than not... *cough*
A man enters an auto parts store and addresses the mechanic:
"I'd like a pair of windshield wipers for my Yugo."
The mechanic looks at him thoughtfully, then says:
"Sure, sounds like a fair trade..."
Women aren't even allowed to drive in Saudi Arabia and they have religious police that murdered school girls by not allowing them out of a burning building because they where not 'dressed' correctly. When you make the decision that dress in more important than the lives of kids you are a majorly fucked up society.
Is this *more* or *fewer* dead kids than all school shooting victims in the US in the past year? I'm thinking there is more than one fucked up society here...
Yeah, I see it now... Star Wars episode VI -- Attack of the Geriatric Ward.
Well, groklaw is hosted at ibiblio, which in its turn is hosted on ncren. I believe all of slashdot is a tiny spike in their overall traffic, which includes students of many major universities sharing music from their dorms. :)
Oh yeah? You wanna fight, geek boy? :)
"Maia" is just approximation from Quenya (High Elvish) into common, so as long as it's phonetically pronounced the same, both spelling variants are just as correct. :p
Oh, fine, fine, I concede, I misspelled it. :)
Gandalf is not a man -- he is istari, an immortal Maya (sort of a "lesser god"). He came to Middle Earth a few thousand years before the action of LOTR takes place and he was already old back then, considering he's been around in one shape or the other since the creation of Arda. :)
See more here: Encyclopedia of Arda
Damn... Did I just fail the geek outing test?
It's amusing to see how early 20th century "Jew jokes" get a new life this way. :) Not that I mind, of course, but the whole Apple vs Microsoft spin feels just completely tacked on. If only because I would find much more humor in Apple/Microsoft employees travelling to a conference by train. :)