Almost everything has a computer of some kind inside it. That's why my hobby/career changed from just electronics to computers and electronics. You can still get stuff that melds the two in the name of common goals.
When I got my first Intel 8255 I was in heaven. It was at that moment I could connect a computer to my breadboard in a meaningful fashion. Learning to screw around with a 6811 was even more of an eye opener. These days, it's a bit different.
Arduino Beagleboard Altera development board
Hell, the black boxes I work on for a living have six computers inside the box, all networked together over SPI, RS-232c and the system bus of the Coldfire chip at the heart of it all. And that's not counting all the crap that hooks into the box.
"How many kids today really watch their dad fixing things, or building anything from scratch?"
My daughter, for one. And she's only three years old. I hope she will grow up to be as bummed about Chinese "epoxy blob" Electronics as I was when I was a kid. I had to start dumpster diving for broken stereo receivers to get anything worth taking apart when toys turned out to be so pointless.
I'm saving a working Robosapien for her. Those are very hackable.
I've had to change a lot about the work I do in order to make it kid-safe. For instance, I can't have high voltage power supplies (backlight inverters) open with her around and switching entirely from Tin/Lead solder to Lead Free was a bitch. But it still means I can have her watching what I do and maybe even helping sooner in life than I.
I learned to solder when I was eight. She'll probably learn long before that.
She has been watching me build a render farm from trash computers over the past nine months and turn broken LCD and plasma TVs into working sets for over a year now. During the past six months, she has taken a genuine interest in the work. She will watch me work for far longer stretches than she'll watch Dora or Diego.
That makes me proud and gives me hope that our world isn't heading toward Idiocracy standards after all.
Even though it sounds like you're calling me worthless there, I'd agree with that sentiment if it weren't for the training I did pre-ITT and my lifelong passion for "fixing broken stuff". When an eight year old learns how to solder, it means something.
Having ITT on my resume opened few doors for me. It took years to get a proper job related to my field, but every experience from lowly solder monkey to SMT line operator to rework cell lead to full-on tech has been worth it since it helped me trace some nasty process issues that were costing some serious money.
Learned more in high school with my IE teacher mentoring me than I did at that triumph of marketing "college". When your class is full of forty-somethings who blew their backs out at the steel mill and need to be taught which end of a soldering iron to hold, as opposed to people who aren't there just because "I heard electronics pays well" that's a pretty big clue you've been had.
While I have been a lucid dreamer since age four, I never expected the depth I got out of it during my teen years.
I had a girl named Katie living inside my dreams. Generic cute-girl name aside, she was certainly unique, being rather unlike myself. My waking life was for working on my craft while my dream life was for play. And oh hell did we ever play.
The surprising thing was how authentic the simulation turned out to be.
Time dilation is a wonderful thing when you can make a half-hour REM cycle seem like a whole day, especially when able to manage more than one such event per waking life night. Go to sleep in a dream with Katie by my side, tag an NREM cycle and wake up in the next dream.
When I started gaming, we'd even fight in a DOOM type environment together. That was pure fun.
I look at it as a way I kept myself from succumbing to the same thing that nabbed a bunch of my peers who traded their dreams (in the ambition sense) for small desires, knocking girls up in the process and royally nuking their lives.
It also explains why I didn't lose my cherry until I was near 23.
Whether this "Katie" has any significance or not, that mind trick kept me from going mad during a really weird time in my life.
If she's the one waiting for me on the other side after this life, the real fun has yet to begin and it's entirely worth waiting for.
So how long do we have until the Loudmouthed Fundie Retard crap about teh Debbil assigning everyone a number comes along?
There are already mobs, with half a set of teeth split among them, who "don't take kahndly tuh havin a neegurr n duh whaht hayouse" and think Obama's "dee Antuhchrahst".
But then these are the oh-so-oppressed "master race" types who would be kept alive by the health care thing. Hoo boy for the inner conflict. Though they'd probably just claim they're putting one over on the "ZOG" or whatever by living to fight another day--against jew bankers or whatever the flavor of the week is.
While the quote is normally applied to lawyers, it fits the subspecies of teacher I spent my childhood and adolescence under.
Within my district, they didn't have an accelerated placement program outside of the college credit courses for liberal arts brown-nosers. It was either mainstream or Special Education. It taught me about money and the things people will do to get it. No money in an accelerated program for someone who is entirely incompatible with the cookie-cutter, look-up table, bombardment cramming approach that looks good on Standardized Tests, but won't put food on the student's plate in the future this schooling is supposed to be preparing them for. Plenty of money, however, in having another Retard who isn't retarded and doesn't require the added attention the money is there to pay for.
The effect they wanted was for the chains that bound me to make me submit and fall in line. I was too strong for that and became stronger. What they got was a captive who entered an evolution loop requiring ever tighter chains to maintain the illusion of control--all on borrowed time. I got my diploma, the chains that bound me broke and my exhaust plume burnt the ever-loving shit out of my captors as they tried in vain to escape. Actually, it was more like a criticality incident and I was a new Demon Core being fooled with by trained monkeys.
I had my faith in humanity annihilated. This was dangerous. I viewed humans as organized Carbon and water to be ruined the moment they posed a threat to me. You reap what you sow. I turned their secrets against them and used them for fuel in return for their greed. For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. For every action against myself or those whom I hold dear, my hammer will strike with the combined fury of injustices remembered.
Here's hoping I left enough damage in my wake to evoke sharing of lessons learned from the elder Teacher's Lounge monkeys I shocked. If my child is treated with the same level of disrespect, the hammer will fall once again. I welcome it.
I will carry this grudge until the four years this cost me has been returned to me.
"Crusaders" are everywhere, even for this kind of trivial shit.
Much like Godwin's Law and monkeys with typewriters, the more people they piss off, the greater the chance they'll push the buttons of a psycho who has the ability to do some actual damage.
Give the wrong(right?) person nothing to live for, by wiping them out financially, for example, and you roll the dice on whether they'll take you down with them.
You can only push a fuse so far beyond rating before it opens. And only so far beyond that before it explodes famously, often with a domino effect.
Slashdot Mirror
Almost everything has a computer of some kind inside it. That's why my hobby/career changed from just electronics to computers and electronics. You can still get stuff that melds the two in the name of common goals.
When I got my first Intel 8255 I was in heaven. It was at that moment I could connect a computer to my breadboard in a meaningful fashion. Learning to screw around with a 6811 was even more of an eye opener. These days, it's a bit different.
Arduino
Beagleboard
Altera development board
Hell, the black boxes I work on for a living have six computers inside the box, all networked together over SPI, RS-232c and the system bus of the Coldfire chip at the heart of it all. And that's not counting all the crap that hooks into the box.
"How many kids today really watch their dad fixing things, or building anything from scratch?"
My daughter, for one. And she's only three years old. I hope she will grow up to be as bummed about Chinese "epoxy blob" Electronics as I was when I was a kid. I had to start dumpster diving for broken stereo receivers to get anything worth taking apart when toys turned out to be so pointless.
I'm saving a working Robosapien for her. Those are very hackable.
I've had to change a lot about the work I do in order to make it kid-safe. For instance, I can't have high voltage power supplies (backlight inverters) open with her around and switching entirely from Tin/Lead solder to Lead Free was a bitch. But it still means I can have her watching what I do and maybe even helping sooner in life than I.
I learned to solder when I was eight. She'll probably learn long before that.
She has been watching me build a render farm from trash computers over the past nine months and turn broken LCD and plasma TVs into working sets for over a year now. During the past six months, she has taken a genuine interest in the work. She will watch me work for far longer stretches than she'll watch Dora or Diego.
That makes me proud and gives me hope that our world isn't heading toward Idiocracy standards after all.
Some forms of communication are just not considered to be appropriate for some types of information.
Yeah... like in that one Seinfeld episode.
*nods again*
Even though it sounds like you're calling me worthless there, I'd agree with that sentiment if it weren't for the training I did pre-ITT and my lifelong passion for "fixing broken stuff". When an eight year old learns how to solder, it means something.
Having ITT on my resume opened few doors for me. It took years to get a proper job related to my field, but every experience from lowly solder monkey to SMT line operator to rework cell lead to full-on tech has been worth it since it helped me trace some nasty process issues that were costing some serious money.
*Nods*
Learned more in high school with my IE teacher mentoring me than I did at that triumph of marketing "college". When your class is full of forty-somethings who blew their backs out at the steel mill and need to be taught which end of a soldering iron to hold, as opposed to people who aren't there just because "I heard electronics pays well" that's a pretty big clue you've been had.
I feel dirty.
Nope. Scanner did.
I guess we know what that certificate certifies.
YEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAHHHHHH!
's okay! U feel betr soon. I maed u a cookey...
Sure you don't mean "MCSE"?
While I have been a lucid dreamer since age four, I never expected the depth I got out of it during my teen years.
I had a girl named Katie living inside my dreams. Generic cute-girl name aside, she was certainly unique, being rather unlike myself. My waking life was for working on my craft while my dream life was for play. And oh hell did we ever play.
The surprising thing was how authentic the simulation turned out to be.
Time dilation is a wonderful thing when you can make a half-hour REM cycle seem like a whole day, especially when able to manage more than one such event per waking life night. Go to sleep in a dream with Katie by my side, tag an NREM cycle and wake up in the next dream.
When I started gaming, we'd even fight in a DOOM type environment together. That was pure fun.
I look at it as a way I kept myself from succumbing to the same thing that nabbed a bunch of my peers who traded their dreams (in the ambition sense) for small desires, knocking girls up in the process and royally nuking their lives.
It also explains why I didn't lose my cherry until I was near 23.
Whether this "Katie" has any significance or not, that mind trick kept me from going mad during a really weird time in my life.
If she's the one waiting for me on the other side after this life, the real fun has yet to begin and it's entirely worth waiting for.
So how long do we have until the Loudmouthed Fundie Retard crap about teh Debbil assigning everyone a number comes along?
There are already mobs, with half a set of teeth split among them, who "don't take kahndly tuh havin a neegurr n duh whaht hayouse" and think Obama's "dee Antuhchrahst".
But then these are the oh-so-oppressed "master race" types who would be kept alive by the health care thing. Hoo boy for the inner conflict. Though they'd probably just claim they're putting one over on the "ZOG" or whatever by living to fight another day--against jew bankers or whatever the flavor of the week is.
"Whaht Paar", indeed... *facepalm*
It's easier to create a lot of noise than it is to completely drown it out.
Programming is a hobby for me, but I take it very seriously and hate distractions. The problem is I live directly under the approach for an airport.
My solution? Power up the fan tray of my renderfarm.
There's a programmer at work who prefers his workstation to be located amongst the server racks. I fully understand why.
Why not just go "Hey! Look over there!" and shoot them in the head? $1 for a bullet and they never know what hit them.
Look, kids! A real life working physicist. He's got a job that doesn't involve waiting for an internship to open up at a University.
"99% of teachers gove the other 1% a bad name"
While the quote is normally applied to lawyers, it fits the subspecies of teacher I spent my childhood and adolescence under.
Within my district, they didn't have an accelerated placement program outside of the college credit courses for liberal arts brown-nosers. It was either mainstream or Special Education. It taught me about money and the things people will do to get it. No money in an accelerated program for someone who is entirely incompatible with the cookie-cutter, look-up table, bombardment cramming approach that looks good on Standardized Tests, but won't put food on the student's plate in the future this schooling is supposed to be preparing them for. Plenty of money, however, in having another Retard who isn't retarded and doesn't require the added attention the money is there to pay for.
The effect they wanted was for the chains that bound me to make me submit and fall in line.
I was too strong for that and became stronger. What they got was a captive who entered an evolution loop requiring ever tighter chains to maintain the illusion of control--all on borrowed time.
I got my diploma, the chains that bound me broke and my exhaust plume burnt the ever-loving shit out of my captors as they tried in vain to escape.
Actually, it was more like a criticality incident and I was a new Demon Core being fooled with by trained monkeys.
I had my faith in humanity annihilated. This was dangerous. I viewed humans as organized Carbon and water to be ruined the moment they posed a threat to me. You reap what you sow. I turned their secrets against them and used them for fuel in return for their greed. For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. For every action against myself or those whom I hold dear, my hammer will strike with the combined fury of injustices remembered.
Here's hoping I left enough damage in my wake to evoke sharing of lessons learned from the elder Teacher's Lounge monkeys I shocked. If my child is treated with the same level of disrespect, the hammer will fall once again. I welcome it.
I will carry this grudge until the four years this cost me has been returned to me.
Looks like we have a good test target for one of those tungsten rod gravity projectile satellites.
I got the terms of yer settlement right here.
"Crusaders" are everywhere, even for this kind of trivial shit.
Much like Godwin's Law and monkeys with typewriters, the more people they piss off, the greater the chance they'll push the buttons of a psycho who has the ability to do some actual damage.
Give the wrong(right?) person nothing to live for, by wiping them out financially, for example, and you roll the dice on whether they'll take you down with them.
You can only push a fuse so far beyond rating before it opens. And only so far beyond that before it explodes famously, often with a domino effect.
Do people mourn dead lawyers?