Of course, I ended up spending $100 or so at Powells the first them I went there, yesh!
The first time? Oh, then you found your way around, and started spending more the other times, right?:)
Seriously, when I lived there, I'd get Amazon recommendations, then search the Powell's website to get a better price for used books, call them to have the books all collected at one store, then went and bought them regularly, downtown, after making sure they were in good condition (they usually were). Amazon was probably delighted to see me move home to Texas.
I can remember struggling back up Burnside with a double-bagged sack of books, feeling worried that I was an easy target for the weirdos who hung out just around 405... I shouldn't have bothered. Can't spend books, and probably knew in a glance I was newly broke:)
You must work for them, or something. Real Portlanders don't have umbrellas.:)
I almost mentioned Sushi Town in my other threads, as it was down the road from where I lived off Sunset & 26, but really, Sushi Takahashi downtown has a bit more flavor, if you know what I mean, though the quality's not as good. Also, I was informed (quite seriously) by a friend who joined me at Sushi Town, "you know, they banned foam containers in Multnomah County?" This was remarked upon while he was fondling the cup his soybeans came in. So, points off for being less environmental. Just kidding.
I spent 4 very happy years in PDX, and I would move back there from Dallas in a heartbeat _IF_ the the right job came up.
Cool, another Dallasite yearning for the PacNW. I even miss those turkey-cranberry-cream cheese subs from Greatest American Hero, sometimes:)
For anyone going to Portland, I have a suggested dinner/evening out: go to the Crystal Ballroom McMennamins downtown, order a Captain Nemo burger and a Terminator Stout. Get your lovely lady the Spinach Calzone.(Assuming Vegetarian, dish still highly recommended anyway)
That's the one, a block from my old office, where we'd have office lunches. For me, fish&chips and RC Cola was good enough. (Now everyone from my old office knows for sure it's me). There's some Thai place way over on the east side of downtown, like on 4th or something, that's great. I can't remember the name, but it occupies two floors of a building. I have yet to find a Thai place here in Dallas that is comparable.
Fortunately, my employer is in the Bay Area and I telecommute from Portland so my employment is not at all dependant on the local economy.
Darn, I was about to ask you where you worked, and if they're hiring:) Actually, for the last year I worked as a router jockey, etc., it was all telecommuting, I just went to the office weekly to see if I had mail, make sure the mountain was still outside my window, and make use of the private garage spot the company paid for. That was a great perk, actually.:)
Yah, I knew my numbers were off, but still. It feels smaller. You can walk across the whole of downtown and much of the nearby suburbs easily, at least until you get accosted by homeless people... and I'd never known people who could bicycle to work before, and many of these people do.
If my words encourage someone to move a company up there, it'll be a good thing for the economy there - I only moved because I was laid off and couldn't get another router-jockey job there. (And yes, I'm pining to return, if anyone has a similar position to fill)
I never saw any bears, but did see deer, on top of the usual possums late at night in my apartment parking lot, an owl who lived in the tree just outside, no flying insects most of the year (too many spiders?), and so forth. And there was so much green stuff everywhere. I loved it. I even had funky orange mushrooms growing next to my parking spot, til the groundskeepers weed-whacked them. Don't forget, I'm from Texas, so anything growing is something cool.
It does have it's big city problems, however. Traffic can be pretty bad and I managed to get assaulted there once. Eugene has most of the big city amenities without the big city problems.
Traffic? Bad? I kinda see your point, but it's a relative issue. The roads aren't handling the population increase well at all, in fact Sunset was often severely crowded during rush hour (I lived in Beaverton, and worked downtown, so often commuted via Cornell Road, very pretty), but it was still only a 20 or 30 minute drive to get home at most if I took the highway.
As far as getting assaulted, was it by a homeless person? The homeless people hanging around on Morrison and Burnside did worry me a lot, but nobody really tried to hassle me. People in our office did see some of them having sex in the waist-high bushes in our parking lot once around lunchtime, though, and the police were called. I don't mean to pick on people without places to live, but if they're not mentally ill when they start out it seems a lot of them become that way out of necessity, and they do scare me.
I never really visited Eugene much, and I wish I had. I never got to visit Crater Lake, either. I did get to see Trojan, the old nuke plant, though... that was an anomalous but interesting event during a scenic road trip.:)
If you stop by Free Geek to donate spare parts or help, say hi and be nice to Laurel, the overworked geek goddess.
I didn't mention FG in my thread because I was writing to a tourist, originally. Another organization people moving to the Portland area should know about is the Personal Telco Project. I have to warn everyone once again about the Fry's in Wilsonville, also; their customer service was pretty sad and the manager unresponsive when I lived in the area.
I miss Portland, terribly. In fact, last night a co-worker happened to ask me some questions in email about the area, because he's thinking about visiting. Here were my replies:
reply 1:
I know exactly what you mean. Chuck Palahniuk describes it as a town of fugitives and refugees. It's the kind of place where pedestrians and bicyclists have the right of way, regardless of what the street lights might read, and you don't turn into a street until after everyone has crossed (the opposite of Dallas, at least). It's also the kind of place where an office lunch is just as likely to be held in a bar as in the local sandwich shop. Speaking of bars, the area's known for its microbreweries as well. And there's Powell's Books, of course, the largest bookstore in the world, in case you get bored with walking around...
The city itself's only a couple hundred thousand people. You can see a couple mountains from downtown, depending on where you are and how hazy/misty the weather is. There's great scenery just minutes away in every direction. The west stretch of Highway 26 is also called Sunset Highway, for good reason - it runs out to the coast, which has some excellent beaches (look up Cannon Beach and Haystack Rock on Google images for pretty pictures). The weather is generally milder than Dallas; I didn't have air conditioning in my apartment, and only felt I needed it about 3 weeks out of the year, and I kept a kitchen window partly open almost all winter long. As for rain, when I moved up there the average rainfall was 31 inches, and Dallas' was 33 - it's just that Dallas has a few gully-washers yearly, whereas Portland enjoys mist or drizzle a couple times a week much of the year.
I do have to warn you though, it does (or did) have the highest suicide rate in the U.S, probably due in part to the fact that the sky is often overcast, there's less peak light (unless you mean on mountain peaks) at that lattitude, and so forth. However, I actually prefer those conditions to the ones down here, so I was happy during the winter months.
Powell's history page [comment regarding my relationship with them through my excellent former employer deleted] If that's not bookish enough, try Reed. "Reedy" is a fitting name for most of the students.
public gardens If you're at all interested in nice gardens to walk through, the International Rose Test Garden is a great place to walk around. If you have more time, the Japanese Garden is pretty must the only garden outside Japan considered to be "real" (the Mt. Fuji-stand-in doesn't hurt, either)
At some point, if you drink alcohol, or even just eat, you might end up visiting one of these. They've converted a lot of old schools, etc. into pubs along with the usual locations.
You probably won't want to go out there if you don't have much time on your trip, but see if you can recognize this hotel from the picture. [It's this one, Slashdotters]
I have a Motorola P280. It's actually the 12th or 13th replacement of the phone, though I swear I think they started shipping me back some of my first phones, again. T-Mobile for the most part was nice about replacing the phone, but they never seemed to care about the firmware issues that kept causing me to want replacements in the first place: calendar appointments set months in advance will randomly trigger an alarm, for example. (This last month, I had two alerts go off for my sister's birthday, which is in September, and for which I set a reminder one day ahead. This has happened for other appointments with various reminder lead times, in the past)
I don't see why they can't just accept the phone back and give me credit towards another phone, having swapped so many out already. They've already spent more than the cost of a new phone on swapping this one out. Of course, now it's out of warranty, so I can't do it again. And though I've been a customer since 2001, their "loyalty discount" is really no different from new customer offers, including the new contract obligation.
I considered switching providers since I was going to have to start all over, but my sister has Cingular, and they're even worse, overcharging her monthly on calls she didn't make, double-billing her, turning off her phone sometimes even after they've noted they have her payment in the system, etc. I guess I shouldn't complain?
(Note: yes, I tried complaining to Motorola about the issue I was having, and they said I had to go through T-Mobile. I hate these fingerpointing games, I just want a working phone)
That's precisely why I want it smaller. We already know that if we get one, we're going to have to get external drives, etc. Naturally, this makes me think of the great form factors Sun used in their early desktop models. Of course anything less chromey or bubbly would be cool.
Is it too early to start talking about a case redesign from Apple? I'd love to see a small box instead of a tower. Worked great for Sun's "pizza box" and "lunch box" server models, and those are even stackable.
If they really can't design something that size that would be heat efficient with the (expected) speed bump, they could still use that smaller board with slower speed CPUS that use the new die. Surely they've already figured the temperature issue out with their work on the XServes, though?
If Apple doesn't do it, I'll bet someone else will.
Flexible response would be the ideal: maybe you can avoid the problem with less collateral damage by, say, turning off ports than by installing new software on production machines.
I don't see why people can whine about not being able to patch productions, and them being vulnerable, when they don't bother to turn off unnecessary ports dedicated to unnecessary services, and especially don't turn off those unnecessary services. You can turn off services while a machine is running, and if they're not necessary, nothing bad should happen to the machine.
As far as the "new computer" question goes, duh, don't connect it to the internet until you turn off the services and ports, and then put it behind a firewall, if you have one. I can see how a newbie buying a machine from WalMart or Best Buy might not know this, but people here shouldn't resort to the same complaints. This goes for ANY operating system you install on any platform, of course, not just x86 MS Windows.
So have you or your friends in your online community (I peeked at your website) identified alternative methodologies that work better, so far? Because I'd really love to hear of something that can supplant this.
By the way... PBS had a dog training show on during their last pledge drive, and when I was thinking about training to work with that one boy today, I totally started thinking of that tell-them-no-and-pull-them-back action the tv show says is the proper way to train. Ugh.
Your comments verify what I suspected, that people probably end up a bit nuts because their conditioning suppresses venting or disobeying until it reaches a very high level. Hard wired mental responses probably also impinge upon the ability to be fully rational, anyway. But again... have you come up with some alternatives?
Instead of helping the autistic leverage our natural savant skills, ABA just spends years forcing us (in an extremely abusive manner) to do mindless tasks precisely as told on command, like dogs.
While I was in college, I signed up for an "early intervention training program" to work with one family's autistic son, who was about 2 years old, if I remember correctly. I kept thinking, while watching him, that he indeed looked like he was being programmed for a limited set of responses.
I don't think it's very enabling, as it seems more for the convenience of the parents in terms of managing the child, than in giving the child extra tools to deal with the world. The training very purposefully tries to extinguish any variance from the rote behavior, and certainly never gives room for questioning the training.
So a kid ends up programmed to say, "please read me a story, mommy," when he wants a story (or maybe just time sitting on the couch getting attention), and will say that exact phrase to his father or even guests in his home. If he needs new behaviors later, he's not only not got an easily modifiable and growing base of learned socially-acceptable behaviors that he could adapt, he actually has to work harder, fighting against the programming that says there are only certain ways to do things in the universe. Furthermore, since he's being conditioned, at least at an early age, to always allow himself to be on display, and unquestioningly accept directives from anyone around him even when he's doing things like using the toilet, he's possibly being set up for some real issues with being a target for manipulation or abuse later.
A "normal" kid is allowed to take initiative to ask why, and challenge authority in (limited) ways, and that's how he learns independent thinking. Admittedly, I didn't get to see whatever training changes occur when (if) an older kid makes it to school, but for the younger kid, at least, this type of behavior is quite against the program. This type of program may still be of substantial benefit to those who have limited potential for internal growth, but I have to think that for kids for whom there's hope of eventual integration into society, the range of outcomes of this training seriously need to be studied more.
Erring on the side of caution is a good place to start. Being more worried about safety or security than you normally would is erring, and every once in a while you find out the extra padding you created actually helped in extraordinary circumstances.
Here in Dallas, we're still trying to figure out how a gorilla got out of its habitat. So far it appears that all the expected levels of security and caution had been maintained. Perhaps someone being more cautious than he "should" have been would have averted this tragedy, though of course probably nobody would ever know.
I thought that if they were truly random, you could get all 505s... it would just be a huge coincidence, right?
If their random number generator precludes repetition, it's progressively less random, right? Because the randomness becomes infinity (or highest number) - n, n being the number of answers it's taking out of circulation.
I'm hardly going to buy an overpriced drive in order to play a game with an additional monthly fee, or worse, throw out the game entirely just because I want the drive. Especially with a Playstation 3 due out in just a couple of cycles that will likely (hopefully, as this is old tech) be incompatible. But I've been interested in adding a drive to my Playstation 2 that games might see (instead of the ones that comes with the incomplete and crippled Linux sets) ever since it was promised, when the console was released, years ago.
However, according to the article, the utility disc will allow you to format the drive and run diagnostics, etc. Has anyone had experience installing a standard hard drive with the network adapter (standard IDE and molex power in standard spacing, just begging for this) and using the disc to get the drive working?
Alternatively, has anyone decoded the format and ripped the partition data from one drive to another? (Note to the gathering sharks: again, I'm not interested in copying the MMORPG, which would be understandably illegal. I just want my Playstation 2 to recognize hardware I install to work with games I have paid for.)
I haven't looked recently, but other than NeXTStep, the only OS I ever found that could run on my basic black slab was NetBSD, and even that had to be strapped from a bootserver, with no local disk support. I'm not sure whether it's more a testament to the wacky hardware or how tenacious the NetBSD teams have been that they were able to do this at all...
They're letting newbies train in our cubicles during a different shift, at my temp job. For some, it must be the equivalent of potty-training, with all the refuse and grime we arrive to, every day. Several of us have gone home or called in sick over the last week, probably not coincidentally.
Maybe there ougth to be a catchy name for the IBM deskstar experience, preferrably something that can follow their HD's reputation with them to Hitachi;)
I got on IRC right after bringing home my Hitachi Deskstar 180GB drive (I wrote it as 160 elsewhere, oops), to brag about Fry's price of $70 after rebate.
The response? "You bought a DeathStar?"
Needless to say, that didn't please me much. Nor did Fry's lying to me about how they'd handle the rebate when the store didn't have the forms on hand, but that's an issue with them...
Slashdot Mirror
The first time? Oh, then you found your way around, and started spending more the other times, right?
Seriously, when I lived there, I'd get Amazon recommendations, then search the Powell's website to get a better price for used books, call them to have the books all collected at one store, then went and bought them regularly, downtown, after making sure they were in good condition (they usually were). Amazon was probably delighted to see me move home to Texas.
I can remember struggling back up Burnside with a double-bagged sack of books, feeling worried that I was an easy target for the weirdos who hung out just around 405... I shouldn't have bothered. Can't spend books, and probably knew in a glance I was newly broke
You must work for them, or something. Real Portlanders don't have umbrellas.
I almost mentioned Sushi Town in my other threads, as it was down the road from where I lived off Sunset & 26, but really, Sushi Takahashi downtown has a bit more flavor, if you know what I mean, though the quality's not as good. Also, I was informed (quite seriously) by a friend who joined me at Sushi Town, "you know, they banned foam containers in Multnomah County?" This was remarked upon while he was fondling the cup his soybeans came in. So, points off for being less environmental. Just kidding.
Oh yah, the description's a lot better than the reality, of course, but thanks :)
I'd still go back there to live, though maybe a little further outside of town.
If I'm not mistaken, they're actually ball bearings.
Cool, another Dallasite yearning for the PacNW. I even miss those turkey-cranberry-cream cheese subs from Greatest American Hero, sometimes
That's the one, a block from my old office, where we'd have office lunches. For me, fish&chips and RC Cola was good enough. (Now everyone from my old office knows for sure it's me). There's some Thai place way over on the east side of downtown, like on 4th or something, that's great. I can't remember the name, but it occupies two floors of a building. I have yet to find a Thai place here in Dallas that is comparable.
Darn, I was about to ask you where you worked, and if they're hiring
Yah, I knew my numbers were off, but still. It feels smaller. You can walk across the whole of downtown and much of the nearby suburbs easily, at least until you get accosted by homeless people... and I'd never known people who could bicycle to work before, and many of these people do.
If my words encourage someone to move a company up there, it'll be a good thing for the economy there - I only moved because I was laid off and couldn't get another router-jockey job there. (And yes, I'm pining to return, if anyone has a similar position to fill)
I never saw any bears, but did see deer, on top of the usual possums late at night in my apartment parking lot, an owl who lived in the tree just outside, no flying insects most of the year (too many spiders?), and so forth. And there was so much green stuff everywhere. I loved it. I even had funky orange mushrooms growing next to my parking spot, til the groundskeepers weed-whacked them. Don't forget, I'm from Texas, so anything growing is something cool.
Traffic? Bad? I kinda see your point, but it's a relative issue. The roads aren't handling the population increase well at all, in fact Sunset was often severely crowded during rush hour (I lived in Beaverton, and worked downtown, so often commuted via Cornell Road, very pretty), but it was still only a 20 or 30 minute drive to get home at most if I took the highway.
As far as getting assaulted, was it by a homeless person? The homeless people hanging around on Morrison and Burnside did worry me a lot, but nobody really tried to hassle me. People in our office did see some of them having sex in the waist-high bushes in our parking lot once around lunchtime, though, and the police were called. I don't mean to pick on people without places to live, but if they're not mentally ill when they start out it seems a lot of them become that way out of necessity, and they do scare me.
I never really visited Eugene much, and I wish I had. I never got to visit Crater Lake, either. I did get to see Trojan, the old nuke plant, though... that was an anomalous but interesting event during a scenic road trip.
If you stop by Free Geek to donate spare parts or help, say hi and be nice to Laurel, the overworked geek goddess.
I didn't mention FG in my thread because I was writing to a tourist, originally. Another organization people moving to the Portland area should know about is the Personal Telco Project. I have to warn everyone once again about the Fry's in Wilsonville, also; their customer service was pretty sad and the manager unresponsive when I lived in the area.
reply 1:
reply 2:
Nice travel-guide-related website: Lonely Planet
events calendar
Powell's history page [comment regarding my relationship with them through my excellent former employer deleted]
If that's not bookish enough, try Reed. "Reedy" is a fitting name for most of the students.
public gardens If you're at all interested in nice gardens to walk through, the International Rose Test Garden is a great place to walk around.
If you have more time, the Japanese Garden is pretty must the only garden outside Japan considered to be "real" (the Mt. Fuji-stand-in doesn't hurt, either)
At some point, if you drink alcohol, or even just eat, you might end up visiting one of these. They've converted a lot of old schools, etc. into pubs along with the usual locations.
You probably won't want to go out there if you don't have much time on your trip, but see if you can recognize this hotel from the picture. [It's this one, Slashdotters]
The Columbia River Highway runs east of Portland, and includes some nice scenery of Multnomah Falls and the Gorge area.
Out west is Cannon Beach and Haystack Rock.
Oh, tying almost everything in town is the MAX, the light rail service. Gues
I have a Motorola P280. It's actually the 12th or 13th replacement of the phone, though I swear I think they started shipping me back some of my first phones, again. T-Mobile for the most part was nice about replacing the phone, but they never seemed to care about the firmware issues that kept causing me to want replacements in the first place: calendar appointments set months in advance will randomly trigger an alarm, for example. (This last month, I had two alerts go off for my sister's birthday, which is in September, and for which I set a reminder one day ahead. This has happened for other appointments with various reminder lead times, in the past)
I don't see why they can't just accept the phone back and give me credit towards another phone, having swapped so many out already. They've already spent more than the cost of a new phone on swapping this one out. Of course, now it's out of warranty, so I can't do it again. And though I've been a customer since 2001, their "loyalty discount" is really no different from new customer offers, including the new contract obligation.
I considered switching providers since I was going to have to start all over, but my sister has Cingular, and they're even worse, overcharging her monthly on calls she didn't make, double-billing her, turning off her phone sometimes even after they've noted they have her payment in the system, etc. I guess I shouldn't complain?
(Note: yes, I tried complaining to Motorola about the issue I was having, and they said I had to go through T-Mobile. I hate these fingerpointing games, I just want a working phone)
That's precisely why I want it smaller.
We already know that if we get one, we're going to have to get external drives, etc. Naturally, this makes me think of the great form factors Sun used in their early desktop models. Of course anything less chromey or bubbly would be cool.
Is it too early to start talking about a case redesign from Apple?
I'd love to see a small box instead of a tower. Worked great for Sun's "pizza box" and "lunch box" server models, and those are even stackable.
If they really can't design something that size that would be heat efficient with the (expected) speed bump, they could still use that smaller board with slower speed CPUS that use the new die. Surely they've already figured the temperature issue out with their work on the XServes, though?
If Apple doesn't do it, I'll bet someone else will.
I don't see why people can whine about not being able to patch productions, and them being vulnerable, when they don't bother to turn off unnecessary ports dedicated to unnecessary services, and especially don't turn off those unnecessary services. You can turn off services while a machine is running, and if they're not necessary, nothing bad should happen to the machine.
As far as the "new computer" question goes, duh, don't connect it to the internet until you turn off the services and ports, and then put it behind a firewall, if you have one. I can see how a newbie buying a machine from WalMart or Best Buy might not know this, but people here shouldn't resort to the same complaints. This goes for ANY operating system you install on any platform, of course, not just x86 MS Windows.
So have you or your friends in your online community (I peeked at your website) identified alternative methodologies that work better, so far? Because I'd really love to hear of something that can supplant this.
By the way... PBS had a dog training show on during their last pledge drive, and when I was thinking about training to work with that one boy today, I totally started thinking of that tell-them-no-and-pull-them-back action the tv show says is the proper way to train. Ugh.
Your comments verify what I suspected, that people probably end up a bit nuts because their conditioning suppresses venting or disobeying until it reaches a very high level. Hard wired mental responses probably also impinge upon the ability to be fully rational, anyway. But again... have you come up with some alternatives?
While I was in college, I signed up for an "early intervention training program" to work with one family's autistic son, who was about 2 years old, if I remember correctly. I kept thinking, while watching him, that he indeed looked like he was being programmed for a limited set of responses.
I don't think it's very enabling, as it seems more for the convenience of the parents in terms of managing the child, than in giving the child extra tools to deal with the world. The training very purposefully tries to extinguish any variance from the rote behavior, and certainly never gives room for questioning the training.
So a kid ends up programmed to say, "please read me a story, mommy," when he wants a story (or maybe just time sitting on the couch getting attention), and will say that exact phrase to his father or even guests in his home. If he needs new behaviors later, he's not only not got an easily modifiable and growing base of learned socially-acceptable behaviors that he could adapt, he actually has to work harder, fighting against the programming that says there are only certain ways to do things in the universe. Furthermore, since he's being conditioned, at least at an early age, to always allow himself to be on display, and unquestioningly accept directives from anyone around him even when he's doing things like using the toilet, he's possibly being set up for some real issues with being a target for manipulation or abuse later.
A "normal" kid is allowed to take initiative to ask why, and challenge authority in (limited) ways, and that's how he learns independent thinking. Admittedly, I didn't get to see whatever training changes occur when (if) an older kid makes it to school, but for the younger kid, at least, this type of behavior is quite against the program. This type of program may still be of substantial benefit to those who have limited potential for internal growth, but I have to think that for kids for whom there's hope of eventual integration into society, the range of outcomes of this training seriously need to be studied more.
Erring on the side of caution is a good place to start. Being more worried about safety or security than you normally would is erring, and every once in a while you find out the extra padding you created actually helped in extraordinary circumstances.
Here in Dallas, we're still trying to figure out how a gorilla got out of its habitat. So far it appears that all the expected levels of security and caution had been maintained. Perhaps someone being more cautious than he "should" have been would have averted this tragedy, though of course probably nobody would ever know.
I thought that if they were truly random, you could get all 505s... it would just be a huge coincidence, right?
If their random number generator precludes repetition, it's progressively less random, right? Because the randomness becomes infinity (or highest number) - n, n being the number of answers it's taking out of circulation.
Or am I just on crack?
even though Google pays websites a certain amount per click, doesn't it also charge the advertisers placing the adwords at least as much?
Doesn't that mean it's not Google that would be defrauded, but the affected advertisers?
I'm hardly going to buy an overpriced drive in order to play a game with an additional monthly fee, or worse, throw out the game entirely just because I want the drive. Especially with a Playstation 3 due out in just a couple of cycles that will likely (hopefully, as this is old tech) be incompatible. But I've been interested in adding a drive to my Playstation 2 that games might see (instead of the ones that comes with the incomplete and crippled Linux sets) ever since it was promised, when the console was released, years ago.
However, according to the article, the utility disc will allow you to format the drive and run diagnostics, etc. Has anyone had experience installing a standard hard drive with the network adapter (standard IDE and molex power in standard spacing, just begging for this) and using the disc to get the drive working?
Alternatively, has anyone decoded the format and ripped the partition data from one drive to another? (Note to the gathering sharks: again, I'm not interested in copying the MMORPG, which would be understandably illegal. I just want my Playstation 2 to recognize hardware I install to work with games I have paid for.)
I haven't looked recently, but other than NeXTStep, the only OS I ever found that could run on my basic black slab was NetBSD, and even that had to be strapped from a bootserver, with no local disk support. I'm not sure whether it's more a testament to the wacky hardware or how tenacious the NetBSD teams have been that they were able to do this at all...
They're letting newbies train in our cubicles during a different shift, at my temp job.
For some, it must be the equivalent of potty-training, with all the refuse and grime we arrive to, every day.
Several of us have gone home or called in sick over the last week, probably not coincidentally.
I got on IRC right after bringing home my Hitachi Deskstar 180GB drive (I wrote it as 160 elsewhere, oops), to brag about Fry's price of $70 after rebate.
The response? "You bought a DeathStar?"
Needless to say, that didn't please me much. Nor did Fry's lying to me about how they'd handle the rebate when the store didn't have the forms on hand, but that's an issue with them...