I think it's quite telling when most of the color-cell-phone commercials on TV are pushing the gadgets based on non-work-related applications: "Got a few minutes to kill? Play 'Bowling' on your Nokia!"
As opposed to carrying around a paperback book and trying to improve yourself a little...
I have no sky, and I must scream
on
Meet The Leonids
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· Score: 1
Crappy Michigan weather. Completely overcast all night and into the dawn.
Java. The company to which I was contracted was making a big web-enabled push (right, people are going to buy washing machines over the web!). Many of us, even contractors, were taught the basics of Java. Almost none of it "stuck", because no manager wanted to be the first to use newbie programmers in a mission-critical effort. Today I can't write "hello, world" in Java. There are probably fewer job opportunities for Java programmers in the midwest than there are programmers, but it hardly matters since both numbers are nearly zero. Didn't miss out on much by skipping Java at the time.
NT. For a brief moment, it looked like Windows NT would be the "next big thing". But hardly anyone around here bit on it, at least for hosting home-grown systems. The adventurous went with IBM AIX; everyone else stayed mainframe. Didn't miss out on any paychecks by not learning NT.
Cobol. Okay, that's a lie. I didn't want to learn anything about Cobol, ever, and I very nearly succeeded (so far).
PHP. Very briefly I thought I needed PHP, but at the time I would have been learning PHP3. I've found that I can do any of that in Perl with a good page templating package. Had I learned PHP, my tiny company wouldn't have hired the web developer that we desperately needed, and I would be supporting 40% more code than I support today (and working correspondingly long hours).
No, you aren't. I'm the database engineer for a small firm, and we have tens of thousands of lines of Perl code, all developed within the last year or two. Over half of the running code came from open-source efforts, though.
People keep telling me Perl is dead, and my efforts to continue to learn and use it are wasted. However, nearly every time I need to add a big chunk of functionality, I reach for CPAN, and lo! there it is. Why in the hell would I want to learn a "better" language, if it meant that I had to write all my own library routines?
(English is a pretty bad language, too, but as long as 99.999% of the people I know speak it as their primary language, why would I want to learn Esperanto?)
What a marvelous idea. I hope your college will solicit students to do some of the work as a "giving back" to the community. They should also get in touch with local computer clubs, the Radio Shack/Best Buy/computer stores for spare parts contributions. Publicize the heck out of this as an effort to bring the entire community up to speed on computer skills. Think about what this does to the skill level of the local workforce!
Three cheers for your enlightened college. May I ask where you go to school?
Digital cable made inroads around me when they started offering free installation and 3 months at a reduced rate. (Of course, after three months in our house where the only show that got serious attention was "Farscape", we determined that even that wasn't worth the full price, and we disconnected.) So maybe DSL and cable providers should look at making the first few months the same cost as dial-up, just to get people to try it.
I found myself spending way too much time at the keyboard, so I've taken the pledge recently: Every night, off to bed 30-60 minutes earlier than "usual", with book in hand. And not just any books: have promised self to strictly rotate between three areas of interest (sci-fi/fantasy, technical/computer stuff, and religion, not that you care, but just to illustrate; YMMV).
Actually, I've been telling my (30- and 40-something) friends that this is the series we'd all have been reading if Harry Potter hadn't come out. I enjoyed it immensely, couldn't put it down.
Lots of comments here about changing contract law to "prevent" this from happening (again). But what do we do for this instance? If you aren't a Perl coder, you might not realize that dropping Carp and Exporter from the standard distributions will break about 99% of what's out there.
Perhaps the Perl community needs to take up a collection to buy the rights to these two modules from the corporate overlords. Oh, and once the deal is struck, a little note to their CIO letting them know that the corporate overlords' domain will be essentially blacklisted on Usenet comp.*...
I know I'd be amenable to adding that domain to my killfile, on general principles...
Driving in today, I heard how the neighboring Indiana National Guard has more than enough people trying to sign up. Many who have called asking about enlisting have been told they are not suitable for service (physically, I would assume). They are telling people to find some other organization and volunteer to help--something like the Red Cross.
It struck me that I have talents and abilities that might be of service to volunteer organizations: I write code, I can configure computers and set up websites. Others can convert old computers to run Linux, upgrade machines, set up networks, Internet sharing for small offices, etc.
Has anyone begun a job pool for Nerds Like Us? Something like, "Local Red Cross chapter needs mail server or CGI script"?
One weekend a month would be doable for many of us. Some of us could even get employers to spring for a day off, a'la Habitat for Humanity.
Slashdot Mirror
Recommended: Entering Space
Sheesh, this is old news:
http://www.speakeasy.org/~cgires/exec.html
As opposed to carrying around a paperback book and trying to improve yourself a little ...
Crappy Michigan weather. Completely overcast all night and into the dawn.
At last, more reliable superpower mutations for coders. We're the ones who deserve the proportional strength of a spider, not those stupid physicists!
No, you aren't. I'm the database engineer for a small firm, and we have tens of thousands of lines of Perl code, all developed within the last year or two. Over half of the running code came from open-source efforts, though.
People keep telling me Perl is dead, and my efforts to continue to learn and use it are wasted. However, nearly every time I need to add a big chunk of functionality, I reach for CPAN, and lo! there it is. Why in the hell would I want to learn a "better" language, if it meant that I had to write all my own library routines?
(English is a pretty bad language, too, but as long as 99.999% of the people I know speak it as their primary language, why would I want to learn Esperanto?)
No! Now you pay it all up front ($200 for the console, $50 for the game ... did anyone really drop $250 on this game in the arcades?)!
Just how much is this "free" gift going to cost us?
Three cheers for your enlightened college. May I ask where you go to school?
Digital cable made inroads around me when they started offering free installation and 3 months at a reduced rate. (Of course, after three months in our house where the only show that got serious attention was "Farscape", we determined that even that wasn't worth the full price, and we disconnected.) So maybe DSL and cable providers should look at making the first few months the same cost as dial-up, just to get people to try it.
Read all about it:
http://www.darkmaterials.com/faq1.htm#1-1
I found myself spending way too much time at the keyboard, so I've taken the pledge recently: Every night, off to bed 30-60 minutes earlier than "usual", with book in hand. And not just any books: have promised self to strictly rotate between three areas of interest (sci-fi/fantasy, technical/computer stuff, and religion, not that you care, but just to illustrate; YMMV).
Actually, I've been telling my (30- and 40-something) friends that this is the series we'd all have been reading if Harry Potter hadn't come out. I enjoyed it immensely, couldn't put it down.
Lots of comments here about changing contract law to "prevent" this from happening (again). But what do we do for this instance? If you aren't a Perl coder, you might not realize that dropping Carp and Exporter from the standard distributions will break about 99% of what's out there.
...
...
Perhaps the Perl community needs to take up a collection to buy the rights to these two modules from the corporate overlords. Oh, and once the deal is struck, a little note to their CIO letting them know that the corporate overlords' domain will be essentially blacklisted on Usenet comp.*
I know I'd be amenable to adding that domain to my killfile, on general principles
It struck me that I have talents and abilities that might be of service to volunteer organizations: I write code, I can configure computers and set up websites. Others can convert old computers to run Linux, upgrade machines, set up networks, Internet sharing for small offices, etc.
Has anyone begun a job pool for Nerds Like Us? Something like, "Local Red Cross chapter needs mail server or CGI script"? One weekend a month would be doable for many of us. Some of us could even get employers to spring for a day off, a'la Habitat for Humanity.