I agree. If I take a job then I'll stick with it unless there is something horribly wrong about the job. If I had other options I wanted to look into I wouldn't take that job to begin with. In a recession you take what you can get. Don't management types know this? Doh. Shit, some of the places I've lived recently the only job still making decent money is the pizza delivery guy. But no way they are willing to hire me for that. As if I lack the ability to pick something up and drop it off. Argh. I always wanted to work in a pizza place anyway.. I love pizza!:)
Then your left with a gaping hole in your resume. What have you been doing for the last 10 years since you stopped working at Chucky Cheese? I guess you could make up other crappy jobs but then if they call to confirm any of them your ass is fired.
Sure it's great for the global economy but for us folks that can't live off $150 a year it's something of a problem. How long until the economies of India and similar countries are such that the average worker there is paid what the average worker here has been making? Until things reach that equalization all us Americans are somewhat screwed. I'd be fine with living off $30k/yr but living off $6k/yr as I have the past couple years is really hard. Living off $150/yr is right out of the question. Low prices are great but if you can't even pay your rent they don't do any good.:)
Would but I don't really have the money and I'm possibly to anti-social to be a good bartender. I would be a pretty good bouncer. (Big, tall, strong, scary looking, mutters weird things.) I've yet to get an interview as a bouncer or security guard yet though. Not sure what other jobs would let me violate my fellow citizens right to party. I don't think I could be a cop, spook, or soldier.
The problem is that blue colar folks can take some night school classes and bump their skills up to white collar. What happens when there aren't enough white collar jobs? Then those blue collar folks are shit out of luck along with a lot of the white colalr folks because there is no place to go. You can't have every American as middle management. How do you make the leap from flipping burgers to managing 10,000 employees in India without anything available in the middle? The way things are going only the lowest shit jobs and the highest rolling in the dough jobs are going to be left in this country. You could raise the taxes for the wealthy to support the lower classes but then they'll just move their assets out of the country to. Then what happens to the US? Nothing good.
Remember all those sci fi books where machines, ultra-cheap foreign labor, and the affordablity of shipping stuff around turned the USA into a flat broke smoking hole in the ground? Welcome to the future. Maybe if I get some bitchin swords I can deliver pizza.
Obviously, you don't know many dot bomb coders. I've known several that have struggled to eat, pay rent, and other basics. Especially those that are fresh out of school and didn't get any of the riches from the boom. The fucking IT market was flooded by schools pushing through no talent, no interest folks that just wanted the big paychecks. Now it's a real bitch to prove you actually know what you're doing. Several years of job experience? Means nothing now. People with several years of job experience and a couple degrees are lucky to keep decent jobs. If you live outside major cities your doubly screwed. Nobody is paying to relocate fresh hires these days and most won't even give you an interview if you're out of area. A lot of coders are being forced to compete for jobs flipping burgers in order to stay fed themselves. Did you ever try to apply for a job at Burger King when the 18yo manager hiring you can't even pronounce the qualifications on your resume? Uhh huh. I'll teach those smart asses the meaning of overqualified!
So they would be watching the first time fliers while the calm, cool, collected hijackers relax and think about who they are going to kill first?
What makes them think that terrorists are jumpy? I'd think a guy who is on his flight to 1000 virgin wifes in Heaven would be nice and relaxed. Why don't you try looking for the guys buying viagra just before getting on the plane?
Planes are bad enough but when is the last time you went Greyhound? Damn sit in that cramped a space for 36 hours and you'll hurt for days afterwards. If you did it often I'd imagine you'd see longterm damage. I'd love to find an affordable method of travel where I had enough leg room and didn't bang my head constantly. I espeically hate when the fucker in front of me is sleeping and leans their seat back smashing my legs (even after being asked not to). For short people planes and buses might be okay but if you're very tall (I'm 6'6) you're better off driving or even walking if the distance isn't to great. Maybe if these companies treated their customers better they wouldn't be bankrupt all the damn time.
You had free time in school? I'm assuming you mean college and not like highschool. Jeez I worked a full time job, a part time job, and went to school full time. Any extra time I had was spent sleeping. Compared to school just being a working stiff is easy. NOW I have the time to play around with compiling things pointlessly. Especially since the dot bomb.. lots and lots of free time. School really pays off when the job market is dry by the time you get a degree.:)
I knoq. For the longest time I didn't bother getting an account because I though Slashdot was lame. It wasn't until 5 digits that I decided to become one with the lameness.;)
I figure I can count myself a low id person in general since I've been online long enough to remember when there was no web. Sure there are people who were online a lot longer than myself but few that are my age (and lived in the rural Midwest). *sigh* I miss those days where when you downloaded a file you had to manually check if there was room on the disk for it first.
I almost never send 'snail mail' anymore but I do send increasingly more packages. I'd like to see the USPS put more energy into improving that role but they do a pretty good job now.
I guess it depends how you go about your business. Most porn sites are nothing but con jobs. Take the same pics, slap an annoying tour and signup page on the front, add a few annoying ad banners.. and that's supposedly your site. I count that as spam. Brownie points if I have no spam mail advertising your site though.:)
If you have your own models and somewhat unique pics and no cheesy sign up and ads then I'll agree that you shouldn't be lumped in with spammers. The one site I can think of off the top of my head that I think is good would be suicidegirls.com (which I found because a/.'r mentioned it). They actually seem to have fairly decent content and a low annoyance level.. though not everyone will like their taste in women.:)
No doubt the spamming method is pretty good for cash flow but as a user it is annoying.
For really good USPS service get yourself a PO Box in a small town outside a big city. That way mail comes and goes pretty fast but doesn't get lost in the local system. My local post office currently (in rural Arkansas) isn't to fast but they have terrific service and the price for a PO Box is significantly less than in a big city. It's probably the nicest looking/functioning post office I've yet seen.
Miami I think has a lot of problem with the local system because it lost about half my mail and when I tried to come in to pick up packages they couldn't find them most of the time. I think things get to the locale but they didn't always make it into my hands from there. I also noticed it depended on my local carrier. For a while I had a guy who'd swipe my mail. It probably did not help that I tended to get rather racey pictures in the mail. A lot of those disappeared.
The worst place I've seen the USPS function was in Miami.. they lost LOTS of my mail and even certified packages. Everywhere else it's been anywhere from okay to great. I've dealt a lot with mail and shipping in other countries so I can appreciate what you saw about other countries mail systems.:)
These deals always strike me as lame. I can understand why poorer countries do this but I count the companies that cut the deals among the cheesier entities online.. right after spammers and porn sites. Do we really want to advertise for these clowns?
On behalf of all users with low user id's I reserve the right to be lame anytime we wish. Besides even those of us that are godlike in our geekness can't be 100% perfect. We're like Linux - only 99.99997% perfection.;)
My roommate once got a package addressed to her (misspelled) name at our city.. no address.. I was very impressed that it actually arrived and wasn't very much delayed. The USPS truely isn't that bad.. depending where you are. I have horror stories in some locales but a lot of places it does a great job.
I sort of figured the same thing which is why I was good at the more uncharted areas (like AI) when I was a teenager.
I'm still fairly good at such things largely because as you said I try things for myself. Obviously, if the experts have no luck then they aren't really experts. All really amazing things are invented by people regarded as crazy or foolish by the experts of their time.
If it doesn't work.. tweak.. then try again.. repeat forever. Even if you don't discover what you were looking for you'll often discover something just as good.:)
The hard part of real life is that there are way to many rules that most of us won't break. Online it's okay to kill, steal, lie, cheat, etc where in real life most of us are forbidden such behaviors by the morals we've been raised with. Even worse we tend to follow laws which exist largely to keep the poor from becoming middle class and the middle class from becoming rich. The risk of breaking our own code of conduct or being punished is enough to keep most people from getting ahead in real life.
Get your ass online and start meeting other people and answering questions. Despite what people may say I've found that submitting resumes and working through recruiters is pretty much useless unless you have at least a Masters degree and a few years of on the job experience. At least since the dot bomb.
Answering questions means you'll sharpen your skills, by forcing you to think through many types of problems, and you'll build a reputation up by which people will know you. Eventually people will come to you and ask if you want to work for them (or their employer) when they are needing help. Write something fun and/or useful and put the code on your website. Show off what you can do when you get the chance. Word of mouth is still the best way to get a job in my experience.
Also beware that many IT/programming jobs are short. You might be hired to write code for a friend's company and when you're done they won't have much left for you to do. On average I spend 6 months out of every year in between jobs. Learn to save enough money that during these low periods you don't starve. Of course the more experience and reputation you build up the easier it gets to find new jobs. Eventually the tech market will be growing again and then things should be considerably easier. It's hard to get work when thousands of fellow geeks are fighting for the same jobs.:)
Actually that sums up life for most people I know - myself included. All I can say to such people (myself included) is that now and then you have to say what the fuck and go out and do things that are a little crazy. Fly, drive, take a bus, or walk cross country seeing new places and meeting new people. Do stuff you never thought you could do. Make choices that aren't the safe thing to do. Sure you may have to go back to your shitty home and bad job eventually but at least you aren't trapped there because you can leave. Your cage is in your mind. You can let yourself out at any time.
I just wish their were dragons and villians to slay in real life. I'd really love tramping across the country chasing dangerous bad guys and getting paid to whack them. I'd probably get in trouble the first time I whacked a PHB though.. doubt there is a bounty out on them.. but there should be one!
I want to know how you become a programmer or editor for Slashdot. As much time as I spend on here (and other message forums) it seems I should be getting paid in some way.;)
Slashdot Mirror
I agree. If I take a job then I'll stick with it unless there is something horribly wrong about the job. If I had other options I wanted to look into I wouldn't take that job to begin with. In a recession you take what you can get. Don't management types know this? Doh. Shit, some of the places I've lived recently the only job still making decent money is the pizza delivery guy. But no way they are willing to hire me for that. As if I lack the ability to pick something up and drop it off. Argh. I always wanted to work in a pizza place anyway.. I love pizza! :)
Then your left with a gaping hole in your resume. What have you been doing for the last 10 years since you stopped working at Chucky Cheese? I guess you could make up other crappy jobs but then if they call to confirm any of them your ass is fired.
Sure it's great for the global economy but for us folks that can't live off $150 a year it's something of a problem. How long until the economies of India and similar countries are such that the average worker there is paid what the average worker here has been making? Until things reach that equalization all us Americans are somewhat screwed. I'd be fine with living off $30k/yr but living off $6k/yr as I have the past couple years is really hard. Living off $150/yr is right out of the question. Low prices are great but if you can't even pay your rent they don't do any good. :)
Would but I don't really have the money and I'm possibly to anti-social to be a good bartender. I would be a pretty good bouncer. (Big, tall, strong, scary looking, mutters weird things.) I've yet to get an interview as a bouncer or security guard yet though. Not sure what other jobs would let me violate my fellow citizens right to party. I don't think I could be a cop, spook, or soldier.
The problem is that blue colar folks can take some night school classes and bump their skills up to white collar. What happens when there aren't enough white collar jobs? Then those blue collar folks are shit out of luck along with a lot of the white colalr folks because there is no place to go. You can't have every American as middle management. How do you make the leap from flipping burgers to managing 10,000 employees in India without anything available in the middle? The way things are going only the lowest shit jobs and the highest rolling in the dough jobs are going to be left in this country. You could raise the taxes for the wealthy to support the lower classes but then they'll just move their assets out of the country to. Then what happens to the US? Nothing good.
Remember all those sci fi books where machines, ultra-cheap foreign labor, and the affordablity of shipping stuff around turned the USA into a flat broke smoking hole in the ground? Welcome to the future. Maybe if I get some bitchin swords I can deliver pizza.
Obviously, you don't know many dot bomb coders. I've known several that have struggled to eat, pay rent, and other basics. Especially those that are fresh out of school and didn't get any of the riches from the boom. The fucking IT market was flooded by schools pushing through no talent, no interest folks that just wanted the big paychecks. Now it's a real bitch to prove you actually know what you're doing. Several years of job experience? Means nothing now. People with several years of job experience and a couple degrees are lucky to keep decent jobs. If you live outside major cities your doubly screwed. Nobody is paying to relocate fresh hires these days and most won't even give you an interview if you're out of area. A lot of coders are being forced to compete for jobs flipping burgers in order to stay fed themselves. Did you ever try to apply for a job at Burger King when the 18yo manager hiring you can't even pronounce the qualifications on your resume? Uhh huh. I'll teach those smart asses the meaning of overqualified!
So they would be watching the first time fliers while the calm, cool, collected hijackers relax and think about who they are going to kill first?
What makes them think that terrorists are jumpy? I'd think a guy who is on his flight to 1000 virgin wifes in Heaven would be nice and relaxed. Why don't you try looking for the guys buying viagra just before getting on the plane?
Planes are bad enough but when is the last time you went Greyhound? Damn sit in that cramped a space for 36 hours and you'll hurt for days afterwards. If you did it often I'd imagine you'd see longterm damage. I'd love to find an affordable method of travel where I had enough leg room and didn't bang my head constantly. I espeically hate when the fucker in front of me is sleeping and leans their seat back smashing my legs (even after being asked not to). For short people planes and buses might be okay but if you're very tall (I'm 6'6) you're better off driving or even walking if the distance isn't to great. Maybe if these companies treated their customers better they wouldn't be bankrupt all the damn time.
You had free time in school? I'm assuming you mean college and not like highschool. Jeez I worked a full time job, a part time job, and went to school full time. Any extra time I had was spent sleeping. Compared to school just being a working stiff is easy. NOW I have the time to play around with compiling things pointlessly. Especially since the dot bomb.. lots and lots of free time. School really pays off when the job market is dry by the time you get a degree. :)
I knoq. For the longest time I didn't bother getting an account because I though Slashdot was lame. It wasn't until 5 digits that I decided to become one with the lameness. ;)
I figure I can count myself a low id person in general since I've been online long enough to remember when there was no web. Sure there are people who were online a lot longer than myself but few that are my age (and lived in the rural Midwest). *sigh* I miss those days where when you downloaded a file you had to manually check if there was room on the disk for it first.
I almost never send 'snail mail' anymore but I do send increasingly more packages. I'd like to see the USPS put more energy into improving that role but they do a pretty good job now.
I guess it depends how you go about your business. Most porn sites are nothing but con jobs. Take the same pics, slap an annoying tour and signup page on the front, add a few annoying ad banners.. and that's supposedly your site. I count that as spam. Brownie points if I have no spam mail advertising your site though. :)
/.'r mentioned it). They actually seem to have fairly decent content and a low annoyance level.. though not everyone will like their taste in women. :)
If you have your own models and somewhat unique pics and no cheesy sign up and ads then I'll agree that you shouldn't be lumped in with spammers. The one site I can think of off the top of my head that I think is good would be suicidegirls.com (which I found because a
No doubt the spamming method is pretty good for cash flow but as a user it is annoying.
For really good USPS service get yourself a PO Box in a small town outside a big city. That way mail comes and goes pretty fast but doesn't get lost in the local system. My local post office currently (in rural Arkansas) isn't to fast but they have terrific service and the price for a PO Box is significantly less than in a big city. It's probably the nicest looking/functioning post office I've yet seen.
Miami I think has a lot of problem with the local system because it lost about half my mail and when I tried to come in to pick up packages they couldn't find them most of the time. I think things get to the locale but they didn't always make it into my hands from there. I also noticed it depended on my local carrier. For a while I had a guy who'd swipe my mail. It probably did not help that I tended to get rather racey pictures in the mail. A lot of those disappeared.
Remind me to get crapo.la. The perfect name for the perfect TDL. :P
The worst place I've seen the USPS function was in Miami.. they lost LOTS of my mail and even certified packages. Everywhere else it's been anywhere from okay to great. I've dealt a lot with mail and shipping in other countries so I can appreciate what you saw about other countries mail systems. :)
These deals always strike me as lame. I can understand why poorer countries do this but I count the companies that cut the deals among the cheesier entities online.. right after spammers and porn sites. Do we really want to advertise for these clowns?
On behalf of all users with low user id's I reserve the right to be lame anytime we wish. Besides even those of us that are godlike in our geekness can't be 100% perfect. We're like Linux - only 99.99997% perfection. ;)
My roommate once got a package addressed to her (misspelled) name at our city.. no address.. I was very impressed that it actually arrived and wasn't very much delayed. The USPS truely isn't that bad.. depending where you are. I have horror stories in some locales but a lot of places it does a great job.
I sort of figured the same thing which is why I was good at the more uncharted areas (like AI) when I was a teenager.
:)
I'm still fairly good at such things largely because as you said I try things for myself. Obviously, if the experts have no luck then they aren't really experts. All really amazing things are invented by people regarded as crazy or foolish by the experts of their time.
If it doesn't work.. tweak.. then try again.. repeat forever. Even if you don't discover what you were looking for you'll often discover something just as good.
Feel free to modify this if you know Python - this is just the Linux version I use as part of a larger program..
import md5
def fingerdvd ( dvd = '/dev/dvd' ):
fd = file ( dvd, 'r' )
data = fd.read ( 1048576 )
fd.close ()
m = md5.new ( data )
return m.hexdigest ()
The hard part of real life is that there are way to many rules that most of us won't break. Online it's okay to kill, steal, lie, cheat, etc where in real life most of us are forbidden such behaviors by the morals we've been raised with. Even worse we tend to follow laws which exist largely to keep the poor from becoming middle class and the middle class from becoming rich. The risk of breaking our own code of conduct or being punished is enough to keep most people from getting ahead in real life.
Get your ass online and start meeting other people and answering questions. Despite what people may say I've found that submitting resumes and working through recruiters is pretty much useless unless you have at least a Masters degree and a few years of on the job experience. At least since the dot bomb.
:)
Answering questions means you'll sharpen your skills, by forcing you to think through many types of problems, and you'll build a reputation up by which people will know you. Eventually people will come to you and ask if you want to work for them (or their employer) when they are needing help. Write something fun and/or useful and put the code on your website. Show off what you can do when you get the chance. Word of mouth is still the best way to get a job in my experience.
Also beware that many IT/programming jobs are short. You might be hired to write code for a friend's company and when you're done they won't have much left for you to do. On average I spend 6 months out of every year in between jobs. Learn to save enough money that during these low periods you don't starve. Of course the more experience and reputation you build up the easier it gets to find new jobs. Eventually the tech market will be growing again and then things should be considerably easier. It's hard to get work when thousands of fellow geeks are fighting for the same jobs.
I'll do that when I find a decent University that will sell me my degree for $50 down and $30 a month subscription fee for my classes. :)
Actually that sums up life for most people I know - myself included. All I can say to such people (myself included) is that now and then you have to say what the fuck and go out and do things that are a little crazy. Fly, drive, take a bus, or walk cross country seeing new places and meeting new people. Do stuff you never thought you could do. Make choices that aren't the safe thing to do. Sure you may have to go back to your shitty home and bad job eventually but at least you aren't trapped there because you can leave. Your cage is in your mind. You can let yourself out at any time.
I just wish their were dragons and villians to slay in real life. I'd really love tramping across the country chasing dangerous bad guys and getting paid to whack them. I'd probably get in trouble the first time I whacked a PHB though.. doubt there is a bounty out on them.. but there should be one!
I want to know how you become a programmer or editor for Slashdot. As much time as I spend on here (and other message forums) it seems I should be getting paid in some way. ;)