Nice try, friend. But I am not swayed by your faulty analogy. Come to think of it, I am disgusted by it. Yes, I have seen offices screech to a halt because of a virus. But if you really think that having your computer - even your whole network - trashed by a virus would cause you the same physical harm, the same anguish, the same nightmarish fear of one's surroundings that being raped can cause, you really need to get out more.
If you just meant that the "being vulnerable is the same as asking for it" argument is false, the comparison is still a red herring.
How about something like, "Well your honor, I got separated from my group during a field trip to the local hospital, when I founnd myself alone in a room with someone who was dressed as a nurse. She took off her blouse and bra, and started grinding her breasts into my face."
"I had heard the rumors about the crazy hooker that liked to sneak into the hospital dressed as a doctor; the one who would offer to store valuables for patients going into surgery and then disappear with them - the one who would empty sharps bins and biohazard bags into her coat pockets. I heard she would screw and/or blow several guys at a time in the communicable disease ward - yelling all the time that she was clean, healthy and discrete; the perfect girl to take home to their moms."
"So I figured, 'what the hell?' I reached up to touch one of her boobs - and she grabbed my collar, slammed my face into the floor and started kicking me in the crotch...."
(And in case anyone needs to be told: the character of the crazy hooker represents my opinion of the Microsoft corporation, and the MS Windows operating system. Individual Windows users are represented by inocent people in the hospital who, fooled by her official looking garb may have unknowigly and trustingly interacted with her.)
So this kid can take a piece of code - the core of which was written by someone else and that trashes peoples' computers, modify it a bit and send it out to trash still more peoples' computers?
Sign him up on the WinXP sp3 team! Then put a tracker on him and make him live on the MS campus until his sentence is up: restitution and incarceration.
To distract Windows users from that fact that any virus damage was their own fault* future versions of MS Office can have an animation of Clippy buggering the kid in a Microsoft Virtual Pound Me in the Ass Jail.
*through poor system maintenance of an already and inherently insecure system
My problem is that I get distracted too easily. I'm hoping that changes with age.
(Any old people want to comment on that?)
It can change, but you'll have to work at it. If you're 22, you basically are who you are going to be from now on. Unless you make a deliberate and persistant effort to learn how to focus, and to stick to drawn-out tasks, it will never change. I only say this because I am on the far side of my 30s, and I used to think of myself as easily distracted. But now that I'm older, I.....
Cool! The Blender installer just finished downloading. I gotta run - good luck on your dissertation... or whatever it was.
but the line on the ECMA site, the repurposing of 3D CAD data for training and visualization, generally in non-engineering and non-design applications, killed it for me. I was hoping for an open universal format for CAD files. I know they're commonly used but.dwg and.dxf are overrated and proprietary. And IGES is supposedly the universal format, but every CAD program has its own unique approach to the IGES format. In my experience, exporting from one CAD systesm to another via IGES is, at best a gamble and at worst a tedious excercise in rebuilding what got mangled in the transfer.
So what's the point here? Will this enable me to model dancing hamsters and spinning thingies in Alias or Rhino and export them directly to Front Page and Power Point? Be still, my beating heart.
Maybe this HDD cannon is some lame idea that normally would not have shown up here. But maybe the guy behind the site annoyed timothy enough (d3wd, p0st m4 5it3 - it r0x0r5!!) that he decided to unleash a horde of geeks on the web server to teach the dork a lesson in humility.
Behold the power of bored people with 'net connections!
Right on! I think Dark Side of the Moon, (and Wish You Were Here, Animals, etc) are excpetions to the general rule. It seems that more album cuts are free-standing than tied into the flow of their album. Even songs that come from a flow of music often can be ripped out of the album and played in a random playlist.
A good example of that is Money, from DSotM. How many times have we heard that in radio playlists, and how many times (if ever) have we heard anything else from that album on the radio?
I really have to wonder what Kellaris is thinking when he calls the MTV generation brain-damaged because we can now present our own music to ourselves in a format that has been used for as long as Mr. Marconi's little toy has been used commercially.
I'm not going to ignore him because I have a short attention span, but because he has said nothing memorable.
The question is a strawman. The underlying (and false) assumption here is that security and usability are inversely proportional. The other questionable assumption - that Windows is, by definition, user-friendly - is such a tired subject here that I won't even touch it.
Windows is not less secure because it is "more user friendly" and linux is not more secure because it can be obtuse and seem l33t-friendly. Windows is still locked into a one-box, one-app, one-user approach to things. And until they change that - and demand some basic network savvy from their average user - windows will never be more secure.
The unices were designed for a networked environment with lots of users with varying degrees of access. Security wasn't as afterthought - it was a prerequisite. As long as they are developed properly, adding some pretty icons, some control panels, even some (shudder) wizards will not make Linux less secure.
And since your pro-MS buddies are horrified by the thought of an open-source system,"open(ing) itself up" to "Joe User", I wonder why you're even taking the argument seriously. Burn them some liveCDs (I'd start with Knoppix, SuSE live-eval and FreeSBIE) and ask them to give those systems a good, hard look.
I can understand the appeal of The agate face. It has a cool sort of realism; kind of like a well made video game or CG movie. So maybe it is a success on its technical merits. But read the contest introduction. It is meant to be a contest of both technical and artistic merit.
I am not an art teacher but if I was (and did you read the blurb about the panel members?) I think I would say things like:
"The warm tones in the foreground and the blue background give The agate face a sense of space and a feeling that this is a glimpse of a place that continues on in all directions. But I wonder why I should look at it. What is supposed to be happening here? Was it meant to be a picture taken by a hiker who didn't pull out his camera fast enough when he saw a roadrunner? Is it a dying jawa's last glimpse of home? You have brought me to an interesting place but I have no idea why".
...and...
"There is a dramatic tension between the shadows in front of the sphere and the bright background. And the contrast between the sphere and its context is dynamic and mysterious. The sphere is a truly focused object: visually and physically it is symmetrical on all possible axes. That internal calm balances the external ambiguity in the scene and gives a sense of poise amidst chaos. There is no way to tell if the sphere is stationary, rolling slowly, or streaking by - or which way its going if it is moving. And whether it is in a small, brightly lit container or some vast, glowing space may never be known. But that does not matter; in fact it makes Simple all the more engaging. What does matter is that the compositional elements give a believable sense of physicality and of space while maintaining a visual unity through their contrasting qualities.
Yeah, I'd say something like that. But fortunately I am not an art teacher and don't have to.
However, I will say that I know how long it would take me to model Simple in Rhinoceros or Alias, and how long it would take me to tweak the surfaces and the lights before I could reproduce that scene. Visually, and to someone who can't grok it, the code for Simple is as unified and compelling as the image itself. I actually sat staring in wonder at the code for as long as I did at the image. Come to think of it, that's exactly why I consider it (and by at least one formal definition it is) art!
It can be a pain to install on middle-aged hardware too. I recently spent a weekend trying to put FreeBSD onto a homebrew box (an ABIT board w/ Athlon proc and pretty ordinary PCI cards). I tried installing from both CDs and the 'net but after every install - a kernel panic on rebooting.
The good news is that I am posting this from the same machine booted on the FreeBSIE disc. Maybe it would be worth trying to install FreeBSD 5.x
But seriously, I admire your efforts to adapt to the changes the new owners want to impose on you. I do hope you find a way to get your job done and that you can continue in your job without undue restrictions.
But think long and hard about this new company. Will your work with them help take your career in the direction you want, or will you forever be pigeon-holed in the company as "one of those lunix freaks from that company we bought a while ago"? What other changes will they bring to your workplace?
If you can't see yourself working happily for them in five or even two years, start looking now. Take the time to put together a nice, tight resume; maybe even read up on current job-related news, refresh your interviewing techniques, maybe even read a bit about management skills, and start making contacts - all the time keeping your poker face on at work.
It is much easier to find a job while you have a job. Its a stronger bargaining position for you and it is proof to the interviwer that you are employable.
You are right that there is nothing wrong with a little overtime now and then. And I agree that teamwork and being there for the team in a crunch is important. But that is only if the whole team's understanding of teamwork is more or less the same.
I know for a fact that there are places where the question at an interview, "You don't mind working a little overtime now and then, do you?" is their way of asking "You don't mind grabbing your ankles and letting us have our way with you, do you?"
My own job is a good example.(disclaimer: I was not there when it happened but enough credible people have told me the same story, and the politics I have observed here make me believe that this is true) About two years ago there was a big push on one project. The engineers (only three or four at the time) were told to do everything they could to "stay ahead of the trades". These guys put in twelve to eighteen hour days to get enough drawings out fast enough that no one would stand idle on the job. The whole time they were told to log their hours so they could take an equal number of comp hours off after the project was done.
A few months later the production manager who told them over and over again that they would get those comp hours abruptly changed his story. Suddenly he had "no recollection" of ever promising comp time.
The moral: get it in writing.
This wasn't a matter of putting in the occasional forty-two to forty-eight hour week. This was some guys busting their asses for several months, with the promise of some reasonable compensation when they were done. When the comp time evaporated, it became a de facto pay cut.
They like to tell us that we are akin to managers, and must work until the job is done. But really we are just white collar tradesmen. We are expected to generate enough drawings, based on our boss' vague, directionless, self-contradictory instructions to keep every worker here busy. But somehow - maybe because we do it sitting in front of a computer all day, and it doesn't look like 'real work' - they get us for a flat rate. And they will squeeze as many hours out of us as we will give them.
It has been said above, but I am going to emphasize it. This is not a problem of cable storage; this is a problem of territory. You're the guy and she's the wife. In most cases that means it is her house and you are effectively a long term guest there.
You don't believe me? Look at the living room, the kitchen and your bedroom, for example. Are they arranged and decorated as they would be if you lived there alone, or as they would be if she lived there alone? I thought so.
But as you are a long term guest, and because of your various useful functions (getting things off high shelves, opening jars, killing icky things and changing fluids) you should be alloted some small parcels of guy space.
Traditionally, guy space is found in the garage, the basement, the attic or sometimes in a room in the house that the wife can find no other use for. They are filled with things; guy things; things that the wife will not tolerate anywhere else in the house but cannot outright ban. Your power tools, your games , your books , your semi-abandoned projects, your things that are too close to working again to throw away,
This is where your computers should be.
Once you establish that your computers are in your space - where everything is as it should be - let your cables be as they should be. The general condition of the guy space must constantly remind her that here, she is the guest A rat's nest of computer cables on the floor sends that message subtly but strongly.
I wonder what the local police would think if I put up web cams showing their station entrances or their parking lots. Or even better: multiple web cams on the impound lot where, according to recurring rumors, our men in blue go shopping for car stereos and accessories.
Heh, that's what I figured you meant - but it was too funny not to point out. I actually sat there for a minute or two trying to fathom the subtle and peculiar humor before it occured to me to try.com
I was just tired enough to think that I might be missing something!
The first one has an article that will tell me "how to use the feet [I] have". Maybe it'll show me how to overclock these ol' dogs so I can walk faster!
I hadn't heard about Clinton wanting to change the 22nd amendment either but after a google for "clinton 22nd amendment" I found that it is quite true. Give it a try!
For what its worth I would like to apologize. My comments were inappropriate and misdirected. I too am a generic consumer and the sort of disinterested professional I alluded too: part of my job is drafting and generating documents to go with the drawings, and to me this computer is just a cranky set of pens and a way of pissing away the lunch hour.
I gripe and complain along with my co-workers about crappy software (microstation V8 and MS Office mainly) and then shuffle back to my desk to keep using them. The main difference is that I know (by way of/. et al) that there is a better way. I want to scream when our IT guy says that yeah, he would upgrade our pathetic old fileserver but the company won't pay for the licensing (or something like that). And I know from setting up a Samba server on a junker box at home that our needs could be met affordably - but I can't get it through to the IT guy or the anyone else.
Just like you said, "luser" was the red cape to my bullheadedness, and I went off. Please do not let my short fuse affect your opinion of software developers: I am not one of them. My coding abilities extend not much beyond putting the paragraph separators and the occasional link in this text.
_If_ the software had a reasonable interface and some useful capability and _if_ the interface and capabilities needed improvement, these improvements should be intuitive and self-evident to frequent users of that software.
But most software "upgrades" I've encountered seem to have been done for one of two reasons. Either the software company wanted to sell more units so they wedged in a few more obscure gadgets and trinkets, slapped a "NEW AND IMPROVED" sticker on the box and rammed them the market's throat. Or the pasty code-gophers that write the software found some technically correct - but invisible to most users - way to improve the software.
In other words, the new version was made to sell more crap and make the buyers think they actually got something, or because the coders wanted to strut and flex for each other.
While I do not have time to propose better alternatives, I will point out two problems. Wizards? Wizards are crap. They are a lousy, time-wasting intimidating, patronizing quick fix. If the GUI was well designed and intuitive users would be able to find the settings without being led by the nose by sneering questions or inane cartoons.
And lusers? if you're so 'leet why didn't you spell it |_u53rZ or something like it? That "luser" is probably a professional like a doctor, a legal assistant, an architect, whose job involves many skills and a lot of knowledge that has nothing to do with computers. To them, computers are just one of a wide selection of tools. On their behalf I say "fuck off, dork."
You can't set your own broken metacarpal? You can't cite precedent to defend yourself? You can't convince a client with a sketch on a bar napkin to up your project's budget by a million bucks? Well then fuck you, loser. And get a real job while you're at it.
Honestly now, who of you who write accounting software have actually spent a day with some accountants? Or CAD software guys, do you ever talk to engineers (ME or Civil, EEs don't count), architects, industrial designers and toolmakers? And whoever keeps writing the crap bundled with digital cameras, have you ever actually used anything besides maybe a Kodak disposable?
Come on people, programmers aren't writing programs only for other programmers any more. Meet the rest of us halfway, wouldya?
No, seriously. I have a flourescent table lamp that I made from a dead CD-ROM, an off-the-shelf 6" flourescent light and a seven inch tall stack of various CDs, many of which were AOL discs.
WIth a drill press and forstner bits I opened up the center hole to about 1-1/2", then epoxied the stack of CDs together. I put the lamp's ballast inside the CD-ROM case and mounted the light tube atop the case in a nicely machined piece of aluminum that I had pulled from a betamax machine.
So the flourescent tube sits vertically in a stack of CDs and its light refracts radially out of the CDs through the plastic and between the foil layers - a very cool effect.
I don't have a picture of the CD lamp online but there is a picture of a lamp made from a halogen bulb and four old sound cards here .
Just don't take anything said in the article seriously.
Slashdot Mirror
If you just meant that the "being vulnerable is the same as asking for it" argument is false, the comparison is still a red herring.
How about something like, "Well your honor, I got separated from my group during a field trip to the local hospital, when I founnd myself alone in a room with someone who was dressed as a nurse. She took off her blouse and bra, and started grinding her breasts into my face."
"I had heard the rumors about the crazy hooker that liked to sneak into the hospital dressed as a doctor; the one who would offer to store valuables for patients going into surgery and then disappear with them - the one who would empty sharps bins and biohazard bags into her coat pockets. I heard she would screw and/or blow several guys at a time in the communicable disease ward - yelling all the time that she was clean, healthy and discrete; the perfect girl to take home to their moms."
"So I figured, 'what the hell?' I reached up to touch one of her boobs - and she grabbed my collar, slammed my face into the floor and started kicking me in the crotch...."
(And in case anyone needs to be told: the character of the crazy hooker represents my opinion of the Microsoft corporation, and the MS Windows operating system. Individual Windows users are represented by inocent people in the hospital who, fooled by her official looking garb may have unknowigly and trustingly interacted with her.)
'zilla went to some random search page, IE went to /. but firefox went to microsoft.com
if that's what you mean, it wasn't just you
Sign him up on the WinXP sp3 team! Then put a tracker on him and make him live on the MS campus until his sentence is up: restitution and incarceration.
To distract Windows users from that fact that any virus damage was their own fault* future versions of MS Office can have an animation of Clippy buggering the kid in a Microsoft Virtual Pound Me in the Ass Jail.
*through poor system maintenance of an already and inherently insecure system
Canadians: Americans for the price of Mexicans
It can change, but you'll have to work at it. If you're 22, you basically are who you are going to be from now on. Unless you make a deliberate and persistant effort to learn how to focus, and to stick to drawn-out tasks, it will never change. I only say this because I am on the far side of my 30s, and I used to think of myself as easily distracted. But now that I'm older, I.....
Cool! The Blender installer just finished downloading. I gotta run - good luck on your dissertation... or whatever it was.
So what's the point here? Will this enable me to model dancing hamsters and spinning thingies in Alias or Rhino and export them directly to Front Page and Power Point? Be still, my beating heart.
Behold the power of bored people with 'net connections!
A good example of that is Money, from DSotM. How many times have we heard that in radio playlists, and how many times (if ever) have we heard anything else from that album on the radio?
I really have to wonder what Kellaris is thinking when he calls the MTV generation brain-damaged because we can now present our own music to ourselves in a format that has been used for as long as Mr. Marconi's little toy has been used commercially.
I'm not going to ignore him because I have a short attention span, but because he has said nothing memorable.
Windows is not less secure because it is "more user friendly" and linux is not more secure because it can be obtuse and seem l33t-friendly. Windows is still locked into a one-box, one-app, one-user approach to things. And until they change that - and demand some basic network savvy from their average user - windows will never be more secure.
The unices were designed for a networked environment with lots of users with varying degrees of access. Security wasn't as afterthought - it was a prerequisite. As long as they are developed properly, adding some pretty icons, some control panels, even some (shudder) wizards will not make Linux less secure.
And since your pro-MS buddies are horrified by the thought of an open-source system,"open(ing) itself up" to "Joe User", I wonder why you're even taking the argument seriously. Burn them some liveCDs (I'd start with Knoppix, SuSE live-eval and FreeSBIE) and ask them to give those systems a good, hard look.
It makes a lot more sense now.
I am not an art teacher but if I was (and did you read the blurb about the panel members?) I think I would say things like:
"The warm tones in the foreground and the blue background give The agate face a sense of space and a feeling that this is a glimpse of a place that continues on in all directions. But I wonder why I should look at it. What is supposed to be happening here? Was it meant to be a picture taken by a hiker who didn't pull out his camera fast enough when he saw a roadrunner? Is it a dying jawa's last glimpse of home? You have brought me to an interesting place but I have no idea why".
"There is a dramatic tension between the shadows in front of the sphere and the bright background. And the contrast between the sphere and its context is dynamic and mysterious. The sphere is a truly focused object: visually and physically it is symmetrical on all possible axes. That internal calm balances the external ambiguity in the scene and gives a sense of poise amidst chaos. There is no way to tell if the sphere is stationary, rolling slowly, or streaking by - or which way its going if it is moving. And whether it is in a small, brightly lit container or some vast, glowing space may never be known. But that does not matter; in fact it makes Simple all the more engaging. What does matter is that the compositional elements give a believable sense of physicality and of space while maintaining a visual unity through their contrasting qualities.
Yeah, I'd say something like that. But fortunately I am not an art teacher and don't have to.
However, I will say that I know how long it would take me to model Simple in Rhinoceros or Alias, and how long it would take me to tweak the surfaces and the lights before I could reproduce that scene. Visually, and to someone who can't grok it, the code for Simple is as unified and compelling as the image itself. I actually sat staring in wonder at the code for as long as I did at the image. Come to think of it, that's exactly why I consider it (and by at least one formal definition it is) art!
The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
The good news is that I am posting this from the same machine booted on the FreeBSIE disc. Maybe it would be worth trying to install FreeBSD 5.x
But seriously, I admire your efforts to adapt to the changes the new owners want to impose on you. I do hope you find a way to get your job done and that you can continue in your job without undue restrictions.
But think long and hard about this new company. Will your work with them help take your career in the direction you want, or will you forever be pigeon-holed in the company as "one of those lunix freaks from that company we bought a while ago"? What other changes will they bring to your workplace?
If you can't see yourself working happily for them in five or even two years, start looking now. Take the time to put together a nice, tight resume; maybe even read up on current job-related news, refresh your interviewing techniques, maybe even read a bit about management skills, and start making contacts - all the time keeping your poker face on at work.
It is much easier to find a job while you have a job. Its a stronger bargaining position for you and it is proof to the interviwer that you are employable.
I know for a fact that there are places where the question at an interview, "You don't mind working a little overtime now and then, do you?" is their way of asking "You don't mind grabbing your ankles and letting us have our way with you, do you?"
My own job is a good example.(disclaimer: I was not there when it happened but enough credible people have told me the same story, and the politics I have observed here make me believe that this is true) About two years ago there was a big push on one project. The engineers (only three or four at the time) were told to do everything they could to "stay ahead of the trades". These guys put in twelve to eighteen hour days to get enough drawings out fast enough that no one would stand idle on the job. The whole time they were told to log their hours so they could take an equal number of comp hours off after the project was done.
A few months later the production manager who told them over and over again that they would get those comp hours abruptly changed his story. Suddenly he had "no recollection" of ever promising comp time.
The moral: get it in writing.
This wasn't a matter of putting in the occasional forty-two to forty-eight hour week. This was some guys busting their asses for several months, with the promise of some reasonable compensation when they were done. When the comp time evaporated, it became a de facto pay cut.
They like to tell us that we are akin to managers, and must work until the job is done. But really we are just white collar tradesmen. We are expected to generate enough drawings, based on our boss' vague, directionless, self-contradictory instructions to keep every worker here busy. But somehow - maybe because we do it sitting in front of a computer all day, and it doesn't look like 'real work' - they get us for a flat rate. And they will squeeze as many hours out of us as we will give them.
You don't believe me? Look at the living room, the kitchen and your bedroom, for example. Are they arranged and decorated as they would be if you lived there alone, or as they would be if she lived there alone? I thought so.
But as you are a long term guest, and because of your various useful functions (getting things off high shelves, opening jars, killing icky things and changing fluids) you should be alloted some small parcels of guy space.
Traditionally, guy space is found in the garage, the basement, the attic or sometimes in a room in the house that the wife can find no other use for. They are filled with things; guy things; things that the wife will not tolerate anywhere else in the house but cannot outright ban. Your power tools, your games , your books , your semi-abandoned projects, your things that are too close to working again to throw away,
This is where your computers should be.
Once you establish that your computers are in your space - where everything is as it should be - let your cables be as they should be. The general condition of the guy space must constantly remind her that here, she is the guest A rat's nest of computer cables on the floor sends that message subtly but strongly.
I was just tired enough to think that I might be missing something!
The first one has an article that will tell me "how to use the feet [I] have". Maybe it'll show me how to overclock these ol' dogs so I can walk faster!
Homer Simpson
I gripe and complain along with my co-workers about crappy software (microstation V8 and MS Office mainly) and then shuffle back to my desk to keep using them. The main difference is that I know (by way of /. et al) that there is a better way. I want to scream when our IT guy says that yeah, he would upgrade our pathetic old fileserver but the company won't pay for the licensing (or something like that). And I know from setting up a Samba server on a junker box at home that our needs could be met affordably - but I can't get it through to the IT guy or the anyone else.
Just like you said, "luser" was the red cape to my bullheadedness, and I went off. Please do not let my short fuse affect your opinion of software developers: I am not one of them. My coding abilities extend not much beyond putting the paragraph separators and the occasional link in this text.
sincerely yours, frAme57
But most software "upgrades" I've encountered seem to have been done for one of two reasons. Either the software company wanted to sell more units so they wedged in a few more obscure gadgets and trinkets, slapped a "NEW AND IMPROVED" sticker on the box and rammed them the market's throat. Or the pasty code-gophers that write the software found some technically correct - but invisible to most users - way to improve the software.
In other words, the new version was made to sell more crap and make the buyers think they actually got something, or because the coders wanted to strut and flex for each other.
While I do not have time to propose better alternatives, I will point out two problems. Wizards? Wizards are crap. They are a lousy, time-wasting intimidating, patronizing quick fix. If the GUI was well designed and intuitive users would be able to find the settings without being led by the nose by sneering questions or inane cartoons.
And lusers? if you're so 'leet why didn't you spell it |_u53rZ or something like it? That "luser" is probably a professional like a doctor, a legal assistant, an architect, whose job involves many skills and a lot of knowledge that has nothing to do with computers. To them, computers are just one of a wide selection of tools. On their behalf I say "fuck off, dork."
You can't set your own broken metacarpal? You can't cite precedent to defend yourself? You can't convince a client with a sketch on a bar napkin to up your project's budget by a million bucks? Well then fuck you, loser. And get a real job while you're at it.
Honestly now, who of you who write accounting software have actually spent a day with some accountants? Or CAD software guys, do you ever talk to engineers (ME or Civil, EEs don't count), architects, industrial designers and toolmakers? And whoever keeps writing the crap bundled with digital cameras, have you ever actually used anything besides maybe a Kodak disposable?
Come on people, programmers aren't writing programs only for other programmers any more. Meet the rest of us halfway, wouldya?
Crap. I can't believe I even responded.
WIth a drill press and forstner bits I opened up the center hole to about 1-1/2", then epoxied the stack of CDs together. I put the lamp's ballast inside the CD-ROM case and mounted the light tube atop the case in a nicely machined piece of aluminum that I had pulled from a betamax machine.
So the flourescent tube sits vertically in a stack of CDs and its light refracts radially out of the CDs through the plastic and between the foil layers - a very cool effect.
I don't have a picture of the CD lamp online but there is a picture of a lamp made from a halogen bulb and four old sound cards here . Just don't take anything said in the article seriously.