That's what Moore's comments are. In front of the cameras all of the Washington crowd crows about democracy and rights and thinking of the children and the like, but they secretly despise all of those things and all of us who cherish them. They mock honesty because dissembling is the air they breathe. They hate action because the status quo fills their pockets. They hate freedom because it curbs their power. Think of the worst cartoonish super villain you can think of, then imagine an entire city filled with them, and you have the capitol of the United States. They're all psychopaths.
That's why we need to clear all of them out and do a serious reboot of the country. We know a lot of things now that we didn't know 200 years ago when the first iteration of the Constitution was written, and we've had 200 years to watch the outputs of the first system. We can engineer a system of government that does not select for the psychopaths we have now.
Really, why do you still do it? Live sports. OK. Um, why not go watch the sports live? Season tickets can't be that much different in price from all the cable fees and DVR fees and fees, fees, fees. Plus there are no commercial interruptions in the games. You even get to be surrounded by other fans who are just as excited and focused as you are (unless you're at a baseball game haha)
Cable TV has become a massive time, money, and energy suck without providing much entertainment, and less and less distraction. Go outside and throw the ball around with your kid. You'll save a lot of time and money and have a better time connecting with your family.
It's time the American people clean house from top to bottom. Absolutely everyone in government and big business need to go. Prison, exile, whatever. They all just need to GTFO. Enough.
Why not extend the system to carry all kinds of freight? It would be awesome to resupply stores, deliver packages, and the like the same way. It would dramatically cut the truck traffic in the city, with all the noise, pollution, and traffic they create. It's probably even safer, from a security standpoint, to have an expertly monitored system like that than a hundred thousand random vans, delivery trucks, and semis running around.
This is exactly why XFCE is refreshing. I have a 7-yr old convertible tablet that I love like one of my own children--it's an extension of my self and makes me vastly more productive than any other hardware I've ever encountered. I bought it from EmperorLinux (those guys are phenomenal, BTW) and it has run like a top all these years.
Except, when I upgraded Ubuntu to oneiric and they put Unity on, I wanted to chew my eyes and hands off to get away. And I gave it an honest-to-goodness 2 months to get used to in case I had simply turned into an old curmudgeon while I wasn't looking. Nah, it was crap. So I switched back to Gnome, but Gnome3 was only slightly less a disaster.
I happened upon XFCE by accident, and it is great. Back in business. And it occured to me that there are productivity gains, tangible, measurable productivity gains from not messing with user interfaces just for the heck of it. And being able to stretch old hardware well past the planned obsolescence of Windows, Apple, and now (dammit!) certain linux distros has many benefits, only half of which are financial.
But one of the benefits is intangible, and more philosophical--discovering XFCE and considering the larger hardware & software picture around it has reminded me that in our game parsimony is always a good idea. But more than that, it's a way of life that will always serve us in good stead. After all, hardware mostly tends to keep pace with demands, until new demands arrive that dwarf the capacity of old hardware; at such times hewing to a philosophy of parsimony will always triumph over those who squander cycles just because they think they can.
Palm led the way to the mobile revolution. They had connectivity with the Palm VII before there was any such thing with any other device. When BB started, I scoffed. When Apple re-started mobile after the failure of the Newton, I scoffed. But from there it was a long, downhill slide for Palm. Just idiocy after idiocy. The Handspring/Palm split made it tough for a developer to choose sides. Then they refused to follow the "touch the screen with your finger" trend. You had to have their stylus.
For me, the end, the utter end, was the CREEPY strawberry blond girl in their Pre ads. I ran from that.
They flew an airplane 515 miles using nothing but the sun. They flew. Not drove, not sailed, not floated. It's impressive. Dead impressive. It's a vision of the world that could be.
I consign those who pooh-pooh this to go back and try to do something equally impressive without fossil fuels or equal cheats.
The best thing to do for national security is to immediately de-fund and dissolve the Department of Homeland Security. WTF is a "Homeland" anyway? Is that like a "Fatherland" or "Motherland?" As an American, as one whose ancestors signed the Declaration of Independence and also who got here long, long before, I am deeply offended by and opposed to calling this country anything but "The Land of the Free, and the Home of the Brave."
DHS, and their child agency, TSA, need to clear out their desks immediately and to not let the door hit them on the ass on the way out. They must be not only barred from ever working in government again, but to be stripped of their citizenship and exiled to North Korea, Cuba, or some other sufficiently totalitarian state more predisposed to their dysfunction.
Thank you for posting this. It's important for those who don't suffer from depression and low self-esteem to understand how debilitating it is, and how close to impossible it is to get rid of it. Paths out of depression exist but are damn narrow and easy to slip off of.
Personally, after suffering all my life, trying everything including anti-depressants, I finally found a way to climb most of the way out of the abyss. I recognized that it was neuro-chemical in origin, that there was nothing I could physically do about it; so I decided to try to recognize the depression for what it was when it happened, to take a deep breath and try to zero out the dark thoughts, list out the empirical facts of a situation, then consciously work to spin those facts in a positive light to myself. I can now mostly function, but the darkness haunts me like a specter and even now cripples my productivity and drive sometimes. For me that's a victory, but one that has come with an enormous cost of will and almost at the expense of my very life (you know what I mean).
I hope that others who haven't met this particular demon will read what you wrote and try to put themselves in their shoes before they judge, or make glib remarks.
That is absolutely what is missing from today's education: hands-on, fun, engaging application of principles to reality. Want to teach hydrodynamics? Build a miniature dam. Teach them the knowledge while you're doing something real with it.
But I'll go one farther than this guy: throw entrepreneurship into the mix. Teach kids how to start businesses and do things on their own, with no starting capital. Teach them how to scrounge and improvise and. solve. problems. Nobody, nowhere, now, teaches that. If you've ever been to a Maker's Faire, you know how much brilliance and creativity are out there in America still, and if we could spread that culture to our schools our economy and society would take a quantum leap in the next ten years.
the math & science behind these objects, the objects themselves, or the woman who created them. I'm so overwhelmed with their hotness my neurons are freezing up.
It's funny you mention Russian natural gas, because it was when Russia shut down the gas pipeline that runs through the Ukraine to Germany and the rest of Europe that the Germans decided they needed to get real about renewable energy in a hot hurry. Now, the Russians did it to mess with the Ukraine, not with Germany or anyone else, but the collateral damage to the latter was considerable. Wonder how good an idea the Russians think that monkey business was now, with the rest of Northern Europe coming to see their gas supplies as a strategic vulnerability?
Anyway Germans shutting down their nuclear plants started when the Greens became a significant player in the coalition government. They've been anti-nuclear for 30-40 years, so when they got power they got busy immediately realizing their heart's desire. Fukushima is quite a recent development, but far from the only thing driving Germans to go to green power.
I'm curious to see what shifting their economy to local solar, wind, and biomass power will do for their overall competitiveness. Will they lure back even more manufacturing when future oil/gas/fossil fuel shocks hit other major economies?
Why do all the cable TV networks, and producers, and actors, and writers and all the people associated with movies and such think that they deserve to be wealthy for what is essentially putting on a puppet show? Lives don't depend on what they do. Nations will not rise or fall on the next episode of Family Guy. Far less of far less importance rides on *any* form of entertainment than, say, the guy who keeps the local electrical substation in my part of Brooklyn running. So why the *F* does the schmuck producer in Hollywood think he gets to make many multiples more than the doctor who saves his kid's life?
It's high time that every last piece of work in the entertainment industry gets cut down to size. (Of course, the same must also be said of bankers and politicians, but that's a different conversation.) It would be super if we had governments that would cooperate on that score and end copyright, but since that's not gonna happen piracy will have to be the vehicle to get it done.
So pirate away, world! Pirate like the dickens. Take a pledge to pirate every blessed piece of music, film, TV show, and what have you for 5 years until the RIAA, MPAA, and all the rest of their ilk are gone for good.
I'm not Australian, but I'd vote for him if I were.
Why is it that this guy can be a serious candidate for the Australian Senate and the Pirate Party can win seats in European Parliaments, but we can't even get f-ing single payer health care in the United States?
The world really needs Democracy 2.0, badly. This autocracy/oligarchy/crony capitalism thinly disguised as democracy crap has got to go. We need a system were the sociopaths who currently comprise our "leaders" are expressly barred from any position, of any power, ever.
Please stop with the FUD. Most people will charge their EV's overnight, when electricity demand is lowest (and so are the spot prices for electricity). That's hardly going to "stress" the grid. Also, as more people put solar panels on their roofs the load on the grid falls. See this article for the impact existing solar photovoltaic capacity has had on wholesale electricity prices in Germany to get an idea for what the solar panels mean to stress points (aka peak demand) on the grid.
There's another factor to consider as well, the growing efficiency of powered devices and of transmission technology. If you have been following the advances with graphene and carbon nanotubes at all you'd know we're on the threshold of a quantum leap on that score.
Will there be challenges with this conversion in our energy & transportation economies? Sure. But they pale next to the problems that fossil fuels are creating for us. So stop mindlessly (or purposely) spreading FUD about EV's.
I have been perfectly happy with Netflix alone the past three years since we cancelled DirectTV. No ads, you can watch entire seasons of shows you like without interruption, and you can pause, rewind, fast forward, and stop & resume later if you want. And I can watch episodes on my Android phone separately if my wife wants to watch something else on the TV; that also means I can watch something if I'm stuck waiting somewhere stupid like the DMV. That's so far ahead of the Cable companies that at this rate they're never going to catch up, and their end will be soon, messy, and abrupt.
This is exactly right. A few days ago this article came out that showed, quite dramatically, the effect existing Solar photovoltaics have had on wholesale electricity prices in Germany--it has essentially chopped off the top of the price curve.
Solar produces best at the peak of the day, which is exactly when spot prices for electricity peak, so your payback is even faster than average electricity prices would indicate. And the amazing thing is that even without taking that consideration into account a payback period of, say, 5 years is still pretty trivial when you're gonna own the house for 30 years.
If you had another LRAD and pointed it at the cops' LRAD and matched their wave function, wouldn't the result be a blissful silence? How about ten thousand people with iPhones/Androids running an app that did the same thing, pointed back at the cops' LRAD?
I am not an expert in acoustics, but I seem to recall something called "constructive/destructive interference" from physics, and am also aware of the existence of Bose noise-cancelling headphones.
My background parallels yours, except I'm American, so YMMV. In my case, the dot-bomb forced me out of programming because I was in New York and all those jobs were outsourced to India and China. The only jobs left were project management and account management, managing the work done by the programmers in India. As it turned out, the programming background gave me a very large competitive advantage in project management because I understood the technical development process intimately and could also identify when the outsourced developer teams were messing up and get things back on course.
But the part that might be helpful to you is to assert the skills for management that a degree would "certify" you have. Instead of gunning for lower- or same-level positions or losing time and money getting a degree, assert that you have the skills and experience for the job you're hoping the degree will help you get. Spin the experience on your resume to reflect those management qualities rather than the technical ones, per se. Talk about the time that your leadership on a team project rescued it from disaster and saved the day and BIG $. And if you've been around in tech as long as you say you have, you should be able to talk the talk, with confidence. That's all you need.
The dirty little secret is all the MBAs and the vast majority of IT managers are intimidated by real techs who really know what they're talking about, so all you have to do is use that. I don't mean rub their noses in it, but be sweet as pie while having that great tech resume behind you. They'll hire you and pay you lots of money.
That's what I did, and it's taken me to the top of IT here. Of course, top of IT even in New York isn't anywhere near what schmuck investment bankers make for producing nothing of any value to anyone, but that's a different conversation.
Good luck, and trust in yourself and your experience!
When I upgraded Ubuntu and encountered Unity, I too was shocked at how bad it was. Instant revulsion. I tried to stick with it for 6 weeks to see if it was just me, but it was bad. I got rid of it and reverted to Gnome, but it had grown so bloated that the responsiveness of the entire system had gone to hell. Thank god I discovered the light-weight windowing environments that have been out there for years, maintained by a small but loyal fan base. I switched to XFCE and hey presto my venerable 600mhz machine was as spry as a young'un. It made me wonder how long I could stretch this machine out, whether or not its physical components would give out before the progressively greater demands of the OS would drive me back to the good ol' CLI for everything...
I had not heard of ads before, nor experienced it myself when traveling the ubuntu upgrade path. Then again, it *is* linux; you can easily eliminate it from your system.
Both the Scavenger Hunt and Kuviasungnerk, the "awesome" winter festival, are constructs, complete fictions created by the University of Chicago marketing droids so they have something to put in prospectuses for applying students. During all my time there, six years for undergrad and master's, I neither knew nor heard of (remember, it's a small school with very few degrees of separation) even 1 human who participated in the Scavenger Hunt and only 1 human who did Kuviasungnerk. (Kuviasungnerk, btw, is where you get up at 5am in the depths of January to run to the shores of Lake Michigan and do calisthenics. I mean, who wouldn't be all over fun like that?)
There were only two events with even a soupcon of fun in them, and those were Sleepout and the Lascivious Ball. Sleepout was where people pitched tents on the main quad in order to be present when they announced registration for hard to get classes via the shoutout system. The Lascivious Ball was a dance where you went dressed in lingerie, skivvies, or basically as little as possible. The university killed Sleepout, claiming it was a fire hazard, and the Lascivious Ball after rumors leaked out of professors hooking up with students.
And that was why fun died at the University of Chicago.
The cord has already been cut in our household, four years ago. We have Netflix and stream content through our Nintendo. I don't care if the shows aren't the latest, greatest. Being able to watch entire seasons of a show in a row, without commercials, more than makes up for the "dated" material. It also more than makes up for the absence of the latest, greatest Hollywood blockbusters. Indeed, it's that absence that has led me to discover many great foreign movies and TV shows as well as American series that I would not have tried before, such as Breaking Bad and Sons of Anarchy.
We went on vacation a couple weeks ago and tried to turn on the TV. It was such dreck, intercut with endless commercials of other dreck, that you could not pause or browse through or fast forward/back through that we turned the set off after 30 seconds and never turned it on again.
All of you geeks should try a similar experiment: turn off the TV cold turkey for a couple months. Use DVDs or torrents instead (or go outside!). After that time, turn the TV back on and see if you can even tolerate it. Bet you won't.
Slashdot Mirror
That's my dream scenario. Who's working on this? Are they on Kickstarter?
That's what Moore's comments are. In front of the cameras all of the Washington crowd crows about democracy and rights and thinking of the children and the like, but they secretly despise all of those things and all of us who cherish them. They mock honesty because dissembling is the air they breathe. They hate action because the status quo fills their pockets. They hate freedom because it curbs their power. Think of the worst cartoonish super villain you can think of, then imagine an entire city filled with them, and you have the capitol of the United States. They're all psychopaths.
That's why we need to clear all of them out and do a serious reboot of the country. We know a lot of things now that we didn't know 200 years ago when the first iteration of the Constitution was written, and we've had 200 years to watch the outputs of the first system. We can engineer a system of government that does not select for the psychopaths we have now.
Really, why do you still do it? Live sports. OK. Um, why not go watch the sports live? Season tickets can't be that much different in price from all the cable fees and DVR fees and fees, fees, fees. Plus there are no commercial interruptions in the games. You even get to be surrounded by other fans who are just as excited and focused as you are (unless you're at a baseball game haha)
Cable TV has become a massive time, money, and energy suck without providing much entertainment, and less and less distraction. Go outside and throw the ball around with your kid. You'll save a lot of time and money and have a better time connecting with your family.
It's time the American people clean house from top to bottom. Absolutely everyone in government and big business need to go. Prison, exile, whatever. They all just need to GTFO. Enough.
Why not extend the system to carry all kinds of freight? It would be awesome to resupply stores, deliver packages, and the like the same way. It would dramatically cut the truck traffic in the city, with all the noise, pollution, and traffic they create. It's probably even safer, from a security standpoint, to have an expertly monitored system like that than a hundred thousand random vans, delivery trucks, and semis running around.
This is exactly why XFCE is refreshing. I have a 7-yr old convertible tablet that I love like one of my own children--it's an extension of my self and makes me vastly more productive than any other hardware I've ever encountered. I bought it from EmperorLinux (those guys are phenomenal, BTW) and it has run like a top all these years.
Except, when I upgraded Ubuntu to oneiric and they put Unity on, I wanted to chew my eyes and hands off to get away. And I gave it an honest-to-goodness 2 months to get used to in case I had simply turned into an old curmudgeon while I wasn't looking. Nah, it was crap. So I switched back to Gnome, but Gnome3 was only slightly less a disaster.
I happened upon XFCE by accident, and it is great. Back in business. And it occured to me that there are productivity gains, tangible, measurable productivity gains from not messing with user interfaces just for the heck of it. And being able to stretch old hardware well past the planned obsolescence of Windows, Apple, and now (dammit!) certain linux distros has many benefits, only half of which are financial.
But one of the benefits is intangible, and more philosophical--discovering XFCE and considering the larger hardware & software picture around it has reminded me that in our game parsimony is always a good idea. But more than that, it's a way of life that will always serve us in good stead. After all, hardware mostly tends to keep pace with demands, until new demands arrive that dwarf the capacity of old hardware; at such times hewing to a philosophy of parsimony will always triumph over those who squander cycles just because they think they can.
Palm led the way to the mobile revolution. They had connectivity with the Palm VII before there was any such thing with any other device. When BB started, I scoffed. When Apple re-started mobile after the failure of the Newton, I scoffed. But from there it was a long, downhill slide for Palm. Just idiocy after idiocy. The Handspring/Palm split made it tough for a developer to choose sides. Then they refused to follow the "touch the screen with your finger" trend. You had to have their stylus.
For me, the end, the utter end, was the CREEPY strawberry blond girl in their Pre ads. I ran from that.
They flew an airplane 515 miles using nothing but the sun. They flew. Not drove, not sailed, not floated. It's impressive. Dead impressive. It's a vision of the world that could be.
I consign those who pooh-pooh this to go back and try to do something equally impressive without fossil fuels or equal cheats.
The best thing to do for national security is to immediately de-fund and dissolve the Department of Homeland Security. WTF is a "Homeland" anyway? Is that like a "Fatherland" or "Motherland?" As an American, as one whose ancestors signed the Declaration of Independence and also who got here long, long before, I am deeply offended by and opposed to calling this country anything but "The Land of the Free, and the Home of the Brave."
DHS, and their child agency, TSA, need to clear out their desks immediately and to not let the door hit them on the ass on the way out. They must be not only barred from ever working in government again, but to be stripped of their citizenship and exiled to North Korea, Cuba, or some other sufficiently totalitarian state more predisposed to their dysfunction.
Thank you for posting this. It's important for those who don't suffer from depression and low self-esteem to understand how debilitating it is, and how close to impossible it is to get rid of it. Paths out of depression exist but are damn narrow and easy to slip off of.
Personally, after suffering all my life, trying everything including anti-depressants, I finally found a way to climb most of the way out of the abyss. I recognized that it was neuro-chemical in origin, that there was nothing I could physically do about it; so I decided to try to recognize the depression for what it was when it happened, to take a deep breath and try to zero out the dark thoughts, list out the empirical facts of a situation, then consciously work to spin those facts in a positive light to myself. I can now mostly function, but the darkness haunts me like a specter and even now cripples my productivity and drive sometimes. For me that's a victory, but one that has come with an enormous cost of will and almost at the expense of my very life (you know what I mean).
I hope that others who haven't met this particular demon will read what you wrote and try to put themselves in their shoes before they judge, or make glib remarks.
I didn't know that. Now I don't know whether to shake your hand or smack you. :-)
That is absolutely what is missing from today's education: hands-on, fun, engaging application of principles to reality. Want to teach hydrodynamics? Build a miniature dam. Teach them the knowledge while you're doing something real with it.
But I'll go one farther than this guy: throw entrepreneurship into the mix. Teach kids how to start businesses and do things on their own, with no starting capital. Teach them how to scrounge and improvise and. solve. problems. Nobody, nowhere, now, teaches that. If you've ever been to a Maker's Faire, you know how much brilliance and creativity are out there in America still, and if we could spread that culture to our schools our economy and society would take a quantum leap in the next ten years.
the math & science behind these objects, the objects themselves, or the woman who created them. I'm so overwhelmed with their hotness my neurons are freezing up.
It's funny you mention Russian natural gas, because it was when Russia shut down the gas pipeline that runs through the Ukraine to Germany and the rest of Europe that the Germans decided they needed to get real about renewable energy in a hot hurry. Now, the Russians did it to mess with the Ukraine, not with Germany or anyone else, but the collateral damage to the latter was considerable. Wonder how good an idea the Russians think that monkey business was now, with the rest of Northern Europe coming to see their gas supplies as a strategic vulnerability?
Anyway Germans shutting down their nuclear plants started when the Greens became a significant player in the coalition government. They've been anti-nuclear for 30-40 years, so when they got power they got busy immediately realizing their heart's desire. Fukushima is quite a recent development, but far from the only thing driving Germans to go to green power.
I'm curious to see what shifting their economy to local solar, wind, and biomass power will do for their overall competitiveness. Will they lure back even more manufacturing when future oil/gas/fossil fuel shocks hit other major economies?
Why do all the cable TV networks, and producers, and actors, and writers and all the people associated with movies and such think that they deserve to be wealthy for what is essentially putting on a puppet show? Lives don't depend on what they do. Nations will not rise or fall on the next episode of Family Guy. Far less of far less importance rides on *any* form of entertainment than, say, the guy who keeps the local electrical substation in my part of Brooklyn running. So why the *F* does the schmuck producer in Hollywood think he gets to make many multiples more than the doctor who saves his kid's life?
It's high time that every last piece of work in the entertainment industry gets cut down to size. (Of course, the same must also be said of bankers and politicians, but that's a different conversation.) It would be super if we had governments that would cooperate on that score and end copyright, but since that's not gonna happen piracy will have to be the vehicle to get it done.
So pirate away, world! Pirate like the dickens. Take a pledge to pirate every blessed piece of music, film, TV show, and what have you for 5 years until the RIAA, MPAA, and all the rest of their ilk are gone for good.
I'm not Australian, but I'd vote for him if I were.
Why is it that this guy can be a serious candidate for the Australian Senate and the Pirate Party can win seats in European Parliaments, but we can't even get f-ing single payer health care in the United States?
The world really needs Democracy 2.0, badly. This autocracy/oligarchy/crony capitalism thinly disguised as democracy crap has got to go. We need a system were the sociopaths who currently comprise our "leaders" are expressly barred from any position, of any power, ever.
Please stop with the FUD. Most people will charge their EV's overnight, when electricity demand is lowest (and so are the spot prices for electricity). That's hardly going to "stress" the grid. Also, as more people put solar panels on their roofs the load on the grid falls. See this article for the impact existing solar photovoltaic capacity has had on wholesale electricity prices in Germany to get an idea for what the solar panels mean to stress points (aka peak demand) on the grid.
There's another factor to consider as well, the growing efficiency of powered devices and of transmission technology. If you have been following the advances with graphene and carbon nanotubes at all you'd know we're on the threshold of a quantum leap on that score.
Will there be challenges with this conversion in our energy & transportation economies? Sure. But they pale next to the problems that fossil fuels are creating for us. So stop mindlessly (or purposely) spreading FUD about EV's.
I have been perfectly happy with Netflix alone the past three years since we cancelled DirectTV. No ads, you can watch entire seasons of shows you like without interruption, and you can pause, rewind, fast forward, and stop & resume later if you want. And I can watch episodes on my Android phone separately if my wife wants to watch something else on the TV; that also means I can watch something if I'm stuck waiting somewhere stupid like the DMV. That's so far ahead of the Cable companies that at this rate they're never going to catch up, and their end will be soon, messy, and abrupt.
This is exactly right. A few days ago this article came out that showed, quite dramatically, the effect existing Solar photovoltaics have had on wholesale electricity prices in Germany--it has essentially chopped off the top of the price curve.
Solar produces best at the peak of the day, which is exactly when spot prices for electricity peak, so your payback is even faster than average electricity prices would indicate. And the amazing thing is that even without taking that consideration into account a payback period of, say, 5 years is still pretty trivial when you're gonna own the house for 30 years.
If you had another LRAD and pointed it at the cops' LRAD and matched their wave function, wouldn't the result be a blissful silence? How about ten thousand people with iPhones/Androids running an app that did the same thing, pointed back at the cops' LRAD?
I am not an expert in acoustics, but I seem to recall something called "constructive/destructive interference" from physics, and am also aware of the existence of Bose noise-cancelling headphones.
My background parallels yours, except I'm American, so YMMV. In my case, the dot-bomb forced me out of programming because I was in New York and all those jobs were outsourced to India and China. The only jobs left were project management and account management, managing the work done by the programmers in India. As it turned out, the programming background gave me a very large competitive advantage in project management because I understood the technical development process intimately and could also identify when the outsourced developer teams were messing up and get things back on course.
But the part that might be helpful to you is to assert the skills for management that a degree would "certify" you have. Instead of gunning for lower- or same-level positions or losing time and money getting a degree, assert that you have the skills and experience for the job you're hoping the degree will help you get. Spin the experience on your resume to reflect those management qualities rather than the technical ones, per se. Talk about the time that your leadership on a team project rescued it from disaster and saved the day and BIG $. And if you've been around in tech as long as you say you have, you should be able to talk the talk, with confidence. That's all you need.
The dirty little secret is all the MBAs and the vast majority of IT managers are intimidated by real techs who really know what they're talking about, so all you have to do is use that. I don't mean rub their noses in it, but be sweet as pie while having that great tech resume behind you. They'll hire you and pay you lots of money.
That's what I did, and it's taken me to the top of IT here. Of course, top of IT even in New York isn't anywhere near what schmuck investment bankers make for producing nothing of any value to anyone, but that's a different conversation.
Good luck, and trust in yourself and your experience!
When I upgraded Ubuntu and encountered Unity, I too was shocked at how bad it was. Instant revulsion. I tried to stick with it for 6 weeks to see if it was just me, but it was bad. I got rid of it and reverted to Gnome, but it had grown so bloated that the responsiveness of the entire system had gone to hell. Thank god I discovered the light-weight windowing environments that have been out there for years, maintained by a small but loyal fan base. I switched to XFCE and hey presto my venerable 600mhz machine was as spry as a young'un. It made me wonder how long I could stretch this machine out, whether or not its physical components would give out before the progressively greater demands of the OS would drive me back to the good ol' CLI for everything...
I had not heard of ads before, nor experienced it myself when traveling the ubuntu upgrade path. Then again, it *is* linux; you can easily eliminate it from your system.
Both the Scavenger Hunt and Kuviasungnerk, the "awesome" winter festival, are constructs, complete fictions created by the University of Chicago marketing droids so they have something to put in prospectuses for applying students. During all my time there, six years for undergrad and master's, I neither knew nor heard of (remember, it's a small school with very few degrees of separation) even 1 human who participated in the Scavenger Hunt and only 1 human who did Kuviasungnerk. (Kuviasungnerk, btw, is where you get up at 5am in the depths of January to run to the shores of Lake Michigan and do calisthenics. I mean, who wouldn't be all over fun like that?)
There were only two events with even a soupcon of fun in them, and those were Sleepout and the Lascivious Ball. Sleepout was where people pitched tents on the main quad in order to be present when they announced registration for hard to get classes via the shoutout system. The Lascivious Ball was a dance where you went dressed in lingerie, skivvies, or basically as little as possible. The university killed Sleepout, claiming it was a fire hazard, and the Lascivious Ball after rumors leaked out of professors hooking up with students.
And that was why fun died at the University of Chicago.
The cord has already been cut in our household, four years ago. We have Netflix and stream content through our Nintendo. I don't care if the shows aren't the latest, greatest. Being able to watch entire seasons of a show in a row, without commercials, more than makes up for the "dated" material. It also more than makes up for the absence of the latest, greatest Hollywood blockbusters. Indeed, it's that absence that has led me to discover many great foreign movies and TV shows as well as American series that I would not have tried before, such as Breaking Bad and Sons of Anarchy.
We went on vacation a couple weeks ago and tried to turn on the TV. It was such dreck, intercut with endless commercials of other dreck, that you could not pause or browse through or fast forward/back through that we turned the set off after 30 seconds and never turned it on again.
All of you geeks should try a similar experiment: turn off the TV cold turkey for a couple months. Use DVDs or torrents instead (or go outside!). After that time, turn the TV back on and see if you can even tolerate it. Bet you won't.