I was in the army for 3 years as a medical laboratory specialist (92B-10) and went to my advanced training school in San Antonio, TX at the lovely Ft. Sam Houston.
I spent several months learning to manually perform all sorts of medical lab work only to arrive at my permanent duty station and be told to forget it all because I'd never need it. Everything in the hospital lab was fully automated with the exception of white blood cell differentials and those were only performed if the machine wasn't sure it had the right answer.
However, if the power had gone out (which it did my very first night working alone on night-shift) I was prepared. Thankfully when it went out it was August and over 100 degrees and that was too warm to perform the tests I knew how to do (as temperature affects reaction rates) and so my very first night being on my own I had to call the hospital commander in the middle of the night and let him know that until the power came back on we (the lab) would be unable to perform any lab work and that we wouldn't be opening the blood bank fridges for anything short of a life or death emergency.
They had to reroute all incoming emergencies to Walter Reed and other area hospitals until about 5:00 am.*
I know a lot of people make fun of the military, but everyone I knew while I was in was well trained and could cope when the expensive equipment wouldn't work.
* Yes, our hospital had emergency backup power. No, the air conditioning was not on emergency backup power in the wing where the lab was (formerly the psych ward) and so even though the instruments stayed on, the temperature quickly rose to the point where every single instrument started beeping and quickly went out of calibration. No, the blood bank fridges did not have backup power to keep them cool. No, I don't know what genius civilian contractor came up with that plan.
When Donkey collapses to the ground he says something like "I'm coming, 'Lizabeth!" which is a call-back to Sanford and Son, which is anything but recent.
I work in an R&D facility for a global leader in medical diagnostics.
My "What the *#*$ were you thinking?" stamp was purchased back when I was part of the management team that processes individual awards for superior performance. We used to get award applications stating things like "John Smith came to work *every* day this week and was *on time* every single day. I think he deserves a $1000 award for his stellar performance." That's really not much of an exageration, either. Now I use it when reviewing requirements documents and just stamp it anywhere that needs it before returning the document to the orginator.
The other rubber stamp was purchased when I was the project leader for a common cable that would link many of our various medical devices to a PC. We were suddenly hit with a patent lawsuit for a reagent chemistry that was similar to the one used in one of our devices and the lawyers started demanding every single sheet of paper that had the product name of the possibly infringing product on it (we won that battle, btw).
Since my cable project had ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with the chemistry formulation in question, but DID talk to the medical device that used the formulation in question, I was told by the attorneys that I would need to submit all documentation that contained that particular product's name anywhere in it.
That same day I got a copy of a catalog from NIC that specializes in selling badges and fake IDs (and I still don't know how I got on that particular mailing list) and they had these government surplus rubber stamps, including the one I bought.
I bought the rubber stamp, started stamping the cover page of all my documents and then scanned in the image of one page and e-mailed it to our attorneys and told them that all of my documents were thusly stamped and as such, no longer existed, so I would not bother to submit them.
I never heard back from the lawyers and never did have to submit my docs.
Oh, and have you seen my stapler?.... why, I oughta burn this place to the ground...
I have yet to see it held up in court, but any time I print a document I don't want to have to worry about, I smack it with the stamp and put it in a file drawer.
I keep it right next to my What the *#*$# were you thinking? rubber stamp that I had custom made. That one seems to be getting an awful lot of use recently...
Get you some of those old Epson dot-matrix line printers that people everywhere are throwing out, set them up with old '486 boxes to spool the print outs and start a hard copy archive of all your correspondence.
You can probably get as much free green-bar tractor-feed paper as you could ever use just by asking around.
You're adhering to the letter of the law, but there will be so much dead-tree-mass that noone will ever want to dig through it. I also recommend using a standard 8-pin Courier type font that will give anyone who tries to read it a headache after about the first 4 pages.
Actually, if you had checked you would have found that the auctions were both within hours of closing and that same vendor had multiples of each item so it was unlikely that the price would have gone much higher.
Darmok (TNG - Attempt to communicate with an alien race - probably my favorite episode of Trek ever made)
Shaaka - When the walls fell!
I loved that episode, too, but I always wondered how a civilization with such a specific form of language (i.e., referencing past historical and mythical events) could have ever developed beyond the stone/bronze age?
How could you teach a course in warp propulsion dynamics, for example?
Same thing happened to me, except instead of towels they came out with some sort of spray bottle and sprayed the gasoline with some clear liquid which caused it to almost immediately gel up and then they washed it down a drain with a water hose.
I've always been curious as to what that clear liquid was...
I imagine when they review the forum postings and see "DIE YOU EVIL SPAMMING SCUM!" they just say "tsk, tsk, I don't want to see this crap in my forums... I wonder if there is software that can prevent people from sending me this crap? There should be a way to opt out of this! Why, this return e-mail is fake so I can't even complain! There should be a law!"...
with about 60 seconds of searching on eBay (check user BuyEssex) I was able to find a Sony Clie (monochrome) PDA for under $20 and a keyboard to go with for under $1.
"At least when I buy something in a store and it doesn't go my way I can confront the store owner directly [usually get exchange/refund at that point;-)]."
How many times have you been ripped off on ebay? Do you actually know anyone who has?
I've been using ebay since August of 1998 and in all that time I have been ripped off a grand total of ZERO times in over 150 transactions.
I have had a few incidents, such as: * A buyer who bid up an item and then disappeared before sending any money (I resold the item a few days later for almost as much).
* A seller who took my money, then sent an e-mail to let me know that they would not be able to ship the item as expected because the quality did not match their expectations (it was something they had ordered to resell) and they refunded my money promptly (via M.O., this was pre-PayPal).
* A seller who claimed to have shipped a product to me but it never showed up. They then claimed to have shipped it to the wrong address and were reshipping, after another week or so they gave up trying to make up new stories and refunded my money.
* A seller who sold me a high-end digital camcorder that showed up damaged. I notified him via e-mail and he shipped me another one without waiting for me to return the broken one first.
Other than the first one, I've encountered these same kinds of issues shopping in real brick & mortar stores and in dealing with various online companies.
Are there people who get ripped off on ebay? Sure, you betcha. Are there people who get ripped off in real brick & mortar stores? Yep. Online shopping? Yes. From a guy on a street corner? Sure.
If you're going to shop anywhere then you need to be aware of:
* Feedback, either through an obvious display like on ebay or by calling the BBB and asking before dealing with a new company
* Return Policy, especially on anything expensive. A lot of online sellers charge a "restocking fee" which can be as high 15%.
* READ BEFORE YOU BID. I've done business recently with an electronics liquidator on ebay (userID BuyEssex) and they have really high feedback (55,000+) and a lot of negative feedback. A quick review of the negative feedback shows quotes like "Didn't know item was broken, bad deal" yet when you read the auction description they're replying to you'll see things like "we plugged this in, it DOES NOT POWER ON, sold AS-IS" and then people complain because it doesn't work...
* And the number 1 rule, as mentioned by previous posters, if it seems too good to be true, it probably is.
I wish I could provide you with the link, but there is a site (maybe www.firmware.com ?) that has the hacked firmwares for the DVR-A04 which lets you burn any media at the speed of your choosing... and guess what... they all work!
I was VERY disappointed to find that Pioneer wanted to hold my hand and make sure I didn't burn any coasters by not allowing me to burn my choice of brands at my choice of speeds. If I buy a spindle of blanks and the first couple attempts at high speed fail, then I'm smart enough to drop back to a slower speed for the rest of that spindle... However, if the first few all burn flawlessly at high speed then I shouldn't have to wait for Pioneer to get around to releasing a new firmware that supports that brand so I can burn them at the speed I want to. Since upgrading I've only found one brand of DVD-Rs that didn't work well at 2x and had to be burned at 1x, but all of the others (and I've burned over 500 DVD-R discs in the past 2 years) have burned without problems.
You can find a program called Convert LIT (or CLIT for short) and use it to convert.LIT books back to.txt or.html files which you can then convert to the format of your choice.
If you have your heart set on.LIT compatability then you are almost stuck with a Windows based system.
I just bought a used iPAQ 3765 off of ebay (look for a vendor called BuyEssex for great liquidation prices!) for $114 and the screen on it is fantastic. I have yet to use it in a really dark area for a length of time, but in brightly lit rooms and outdoors it functions beautifully. 64 MB of RAM, 206 MHz Strong-ARM processor and Pocket PC 2002 means it runs most of the latest software (including decoding DivX files!).
I'm looking to add the PCMCIA sleeve and a Kingston DataPak 5GB hard drive to it so I can carry a LOT of.LIT books and movies.
The first time it happened to me they changed all of my job titles to "industry standard terms" and bulked up some of software experience. In the end, instead of being a Visual Basic Programmer / Project Manager I ended up being a System Analyst and IT Group Manager with Oracle (where the hell did that come from?) experience... simply because that's what the job they were sending me out to interview for wanted.
After that I sent them out only in PDF and would make any requested changes myself and re-send rather than let them monkey with them
Try sending out your resume to headhunters/recruiters in Word (or other document formats) and you'll be in for some rude surprises at the first interview you go to...
So, Mr Jones, I see on your resume here that you used to be President of the United States, you cured cancer and put an end to world hunger.
Uh, yeah, if that's what it says now, I guess I did...
After that I make sure to only send it out in.PDF format. I still get call backs asking if I can send them a Word version so they can "tweak it up a bit".
Slashdot Mirror
It's a lot more than that in any respectable theater in the Metro Detroit.
Wow, that's only the second time I've ever seen someone use the word "respectable" in the same sentence with the phrase "Metro Detroit".
Last time it was something like "Metro Detroit detectives report finding an un-identified victim with a respectable sized hole in his skull".
"I gave the monster a dollar"
"You gave that monster a dollar! No wonder he won't leave us alone!"
"and three-fifty"
It's supposed to be pronounced as 'tree-fitty' as in "and then the Loch Ness Monster said, 'I'm gonna need about tree-fitty'"
I was in the army for 3 years as a medical laboratory specialist (92B-10) and went to my advanced training school in San Antonio, TX at the lovely Ft. Sam Houston.
I spent several months learning to manually perform all sorts of medical lab work only to arrive at my permanent duty station and be told to forget it all because I'd never need it. Everything in the hospital lab was fully automated with the exception of white blood cell differentials and those were only performed if the machine wasn't sure it had the right answer.
However, if the power had gone out (which it did my very first night working alone on night-shift) I was prepared. Thankfully when it went out it was August and over 100 degrees and that was too warm to perform the tests I knew how to do (as temperature affects reaction rates) and so my very first night being on my own I had to call the hospital commander in the middle of the night and let him know that until the power came back on we (the lab) would be unable to perform any lab work and that we wouldn't be opening the blood bank fridges for anything short of a life or death emergency.
They had to reroute all incoming emergencies to Walter Reed and other area hospitals until about 5:00 am.*
I know a lot of people make fun of the military, but everyone I knew while I was in was well trained and could cope when the expensive equipment wouldn't work.
* Yes, our hospital had emergency backup power.
No, the air conditioning was not on emergency backup power in the wing where the lab was (formerly the psych ward) and so even though the instruments stayed on, the temperature quickly rose to the point where every single instrument started beeping and quickly went out of calibration.
No, the blood bank fridges did not have backup power to keep them cool.
No, I don't know what genius civilian contractor came up with that plan.
Not all of the parodies were all that recent.
When Donkey collapses to the ground he says something like "I'm coming, 'Lizabeth!" which is a call-back to Sanford and Son, which is anything but recent.
I work in an R&D facility for a global leader in medical diagnostics.
My "What the *#*$ were you thinking?" stamp was purchased back when I was part of the management team that processes individual awards for superior performance. We used to get award applications stating things like "John Smith came to work *every* day this week and was *on time* every single day. I think he deserves a $1000 award for his stellar performance." That's really not much of an exageration, either. Now I use it when reviewing requirements documents and just stamp it anywhere that needs it before returning the document to the orginator.
The other rubber stamp was purchased when I was the project leader for a common cable that would link many of our various medical devices to a PC. We were suddenly hit with a patent lawsuit for a reagent chemistry that was similar to the one used in one of our devices and the lawyers started demanding every single sheet of paper that had the product name of the possibly infringing product on it (we won that battle, btw).
Since my cable project had ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with the chemistry formulation in question, but DID talk to the medical device that used the formulation in question, I was told by the attorneys that I would need to submit all documentation that contained that particular product's name anywhere in it.
That same day I got a copy of a catalog from NIC that specializes in selling badges and fake IDs (and I still don't know how I got on that particular mailing list) and they had these government surplus rubber stamps, including the one I bought.
I bought the rubber stamp, started stamping the cover page of all my documents and then scanned in the image of one page and e-mailed it to our attorneys and told them that all of my documents were thusly stamped and as such, no longer existed, so I would not bother to submit them.
I never heard back from the lawyers and never did have to submit my docs.
Oh, and have you seen my stapler?.... why, I oughta burn this place to the ground...
I actually have a rubber stamp on my desk that stamps the phrase
THIS DOCUMENT OFFICIALLY
-------DOES NOT EXIST-------
See here for a scanned image of the impression.
I have yet to see it held up in court, but any time I print a document I don't want to have to worry about, I smack it with the stamp and put it in a file drawer.
I keep it right next to my What the *#*$# were you thinking? rubber stamp that I had custom made. That one seems to be getting an awful lot of use recently...
Two words for ya:
Hard Copy.
Get you some of those old Epson dot-matrix line printers that people everywhere are throwing out, set them up with old '486 boxes to spool the print outs and start a hard copy archive of all your correspondence.
You can probably get as much free green-bar tractor-feed paper as you could ever use just by asking around.
You're adhering to the letter of the law, but there will be so much dead-tree-mass that noone will ever want to dig through it. I also recommend using a standard 8-pin Courier type font that will give anyone who tries to read it a headache after about the first 4 pages.
Actually, if you had checked you would have found that the auctions were both within hours of closing and that same vendor had multiples of each item so it was unlikely that the price would have gone much higher.
How about "Goatse.cx - When the image formed!"
Could you move a wee bit faster for that?
Show off.
Darmok (TNG - Attempt to communicate with an alien race - probably my favorite episode of Trek ever made)
Shaaka - When the walls fell!
I loved that episode, too, but I always wondered how a civilization with such a specific form of language (i.e., referencing past historical and mythical events) could have ever developed beyond the stone/bronze age?
How could you teach a course in warp propulsion dynamics, for example?
Nah, they should be generous and offer them 10,000 shares of stock.
Then to be evil they should sell 1 Googol shares of stocks to make their measly 10K shares worthless.
Same thing happened to me, except instead of towels they came out with some sort of spray bottle and sprayed the gasoline with some clear liquid which caused it to almost immediately gel up and then they washed it down a drain with a water hose.
I've always been curious as to what that clear liquid was...
I imagine when they review the forum postings and see "DIE YOU EVIL SPAMMING SCUM!" they just say "tsk, tsk, I don't want to see this crap in my forums... I wonder if there is software that can prevent people from sending me this crap? There should be a way to opt out of this! Why, this return e-mail is fake so I can't even complain! There should be a law!"...
with about 60 seconds of searching on eBay (check user BuyEssex) I was able to find a Sony Clie (monochrome) PDA for under $20 and a keyboard to go with for under $1.
What? You don't have an M1A1 laser range finder laying around in the junk box of your electronics shop? What kind of hacker are you?
Consequently, I speculate that his vehicle must be an aircraft carrier...operating on land. My only question is, where the hell does he park it?
If it's still fully equipped and armed, then the correct answer is:
Wherever he wants to.
"At least when I buy something in a store and it doesn't go my way I can confront the store owner directly [usually get exchange/refund at that point ;-)]."
How many times have you been ripped off on ebay? Do you actually know anyone who has?
I've been using ebay since August of 1998 and in all that time I have been ripped off a grand total of ZERO times in over 150 transactions.
I have had a few incidents, such as:
* A buyer who bid up an item and then disappeared before sending any money (I resold the item a few days later for almost as much).
* A seller who took my money, then sent an e-mail to let me know that they would not be able to ship the item as expected because the quality did not match their expectations (it was something they had ordered to resell) and they refunded my money promptly (via M.O., this was pre-PayPal).
* A seller who claimed to have shipped a product to me but it never showed up. They then claimed to have shipped it to the wrong address and were reshipping, after another week or so they gave up trying to make up new stories and refunded my money.
* A seller who sold me a high-end digital camcorder that showed up damaged. I notified him via e-mail and he shipped me another one without waiting for me to return the broken one first.
Other than the first one, I've encountered these same kinds of issues shopping in real brick & mortar stores and in dealing with various online companies.
Are there people who get ripped off on ebay? Sure, you betcha. Are there people who get ripped off in real brick & mortar stores? Yep. Online shopping? Yes. From a guy on a street corner? Sure.
If you're going to shop anywhere then you need to be aware of:
* Feedback, either through an obvious display like on ebay or by calling the BBB and asking before dealing with a new company
* Return Policy, especially on anything expensive. A lot of online sellers charge a "restocking fee" which can be as high 15%.
* READ BEFORE YOU BID. I've done business recently with an electronics liquidator on ebay (userID BuyEssex) and they have really high feedback (55,000+) and a lot of negative feedback. A quick review of the negative feedback shows quotes like "Didn't know item was broken, bad deal" yet when you read the auction description they're replying to you'll see things like "we plugged this in, it DOES NOT POWER ON, sold AS-IS" and then people complain because it doesn't work...
* And the number 1 rule, as mentioned by previous posters, if it seems too good to be true, it probably is.
I wish I could provide you with the link, but there is a site (maybe www.firmware.com ?) that has the hacked firmwares for the DVR-A04 which lets you burn any media at the speed of your choosing... and guess what... they all work!
I was VERY disappointed to find that Pioneer wanted to hold my hand and make sure I didn't burn any coasters by not allowing me to burn my choice of brands at my choice of speeds. If I buy a spindle of blanks and the first couple attempts at high speed fail, then I'm smart enough to drop back to a slower speed for the rest of that spindle... However, if the first few all burn flawlessly at high speed then I shouldn't have to wait for Pioneer to get around to releasing a new firmware that supports that brand so I can burn them at the speed I want to. Since upgrading I've only found one brand of DVD-Rs that didn't work well at 2x and had to be burned at 1x, but all of the others (and I've burned over 500 DVD-R discs in the past 2 years) have burned without problems.
As seen here
You can find a program called Convert LIT (or CLIT for short) and use it to convert .LIT books back to .txt or .html files which you can then convert to the format of your choice.
If you have your heart set on .LIT compatability then you are almost stuck with a Windows based system.
I just bought a used iPAQ 3765 off of ebay (look for a vendor called BuyEssex for great liquidation prices!) for $114 and the screen on it is fantastic. I have yet to use it in a really dark area for a length of time, but in brightly lit rooms and outdoors it functions beautifully. 64 MB of RAM, 206 MHz Strong-ARM processor and Pocket PC 2002 means it runs most of the latest software (including decoding DivX files!).
I'm looking to add the PCMCIA sleeve and a Kingston DataPak 5GB hard drive to it so I can carry a LOT of .LIT books and movies.
I wish I had enough money to be fined 800k.
Just go trade a few songs on Kazaa and you'll get a short letter from some nice people. They'll be more than happy to fine you at least that much...
The first time it happened to me they changed all of my job titles to "industry standard terms" and bulked up some of software experience. In the end, instead of being a Visual Basic Programmer / Project Manager I ended up being a System Analyst and IT Group Manager with Oracle (where the hell did that come from?) experience... simply because that's what the job they were sending me out to interview for wanted.
After that I sent them out only in PDF and would make any requested changes myself and re-send rather than let them monkey with them
Try sending out your resume to headhunters/recruiters in Word (or other document formats) and you'll be in for some rude surprises at the first interview you go to...
.PDF format. I still get call backs asking if I can send them a Word version so they can "tweak it up a bit".
So, Mr Jones, I see on your resume here that you used to be President of the United States, you cured cancer and put an end to world hunger.
Uh, yeah, if that's what it says now, I guess I did...
After that I make sure to only send it out in