I tell you what, Issue Tracker felt like a nuissance for the first day or so, then I saw how I had gone thru 16 trouble tickets in less than four hours, each of the 16 issues were insignificant and I would have forgotten about them before the end of the day, which would have resulted in just putting 4 hours of generic IT work in the timesheet!
Now I am a believer. The extra effort to document all this work is well worth it.
I read about his experiment yesterday and I could not agree more. I got two very different extremes of his concern:
1. I am a Mac switcher. A little bit after I switched to Mac I noticed that, once the euphoria of the new computer wore off a little bit, and OS X stopped being a novelty to me, I was running out of things to do in the computer. I thought I was hallucinating, because as far as I could tell, and this includes many years messing with every flavor of Windows plus SuSe and freeBSD, I seemed to be spending at least one hour less per day in front of the computer. Then I figured it out: I was too used to spend about one hour a day just doing things to keep the PC running.
The Mac was pretty much maintenance free and updates don't come out every day, so unless you are a tweaker, there is not a lot of stuff to do to mess with the OS itself. Most apps I use check for an update on startup, and on my daily list of websites to visit is versiontracker, which will tell me any other of my apps that needs to be updated.
2. At work I wear many hats: I am the lead programmer, but at a moment's notice I have to switch gears and become the CIO/CTO/Director of Technology/Mac guy/Windows server Guy/Network Guy/Printer Guy, etc. I work for a 14-employee company, and I am the only technically-oriented person (everybody else is either a biologist or a statistician). I kept having trouble because even if I only spend about 50% of my week working on programming tasks, I was always working 60 hours weeks because of all the odd jobs that had to be done around the office. Worse, there was no way to track these, so my timesheets for a week would show 20-30 hours broken down between a few billable projects, then another 20-30 hours clumped as "IT."
I started using Issue Tracker (issue-tracker.sourceforge.net) and forced myself to write a trouble ticket for every stupid little request I was made. It did not matter if it was a 5-minute job: if it was not a "billable" task, it would go into the issue tracker. After a couple weeks, I got to the same conclusion as Marshall. All these little jobs suck in a hell of a lot of time. The 5-minute printer clearing job is actually a 15-minute job: 5 minutes for somebody to come to you to interrupt what you are doing, explaining the problem, then 5 minutes to fix and test and a final 5 minutes to explain the problem was fixed and to return to work.
The worst thing was that the boss acutally had the nerve to tell me that the reason I was working 12-hour days was because I was goofing off 8 hours at the office and then catching up from home. Now I can show him the issue tracker log and show him that no, even with 14 Macs at the office there is just too much crap that has to be dealt with thru the day.
The Macs at the office run fine, thank you. Even the ones still on OS 9 (*cough*cheapskate boss*cough*). Most problems we have with the Macs are due to programs we run in classic mode (have I hinted at how cheap my boss is?\): once these lock up there is no way to kill just one classic app without restarting the classic mode itself. The two Windows servers are cheap and sturdy but require constant TLC. Thanks God the mail server is freeBSD.
It is not $10/hour for everyone. Monthly unlimited is $30/month. I have had it for a year and it works much better than my own cable modem. I live in a very busy town (suburb in North Virginia) and I can drive to at least 5 Starbucks within 2-3 miles that have T-mobile Hot Spot installed. I never find more than one person online at a given time, and regardless of what they do, it never feels slow.
The logistics of doing this should not be complicated. You can land a T1 for less than $1000/month if you look around. The tip jar should be able to offset whatever the T1 costs. And make sure the antenna is set so it does not go beyond the outside tables at the coffee shop. Make people get close to the store in order to connect, the smell of coffee will do the rest. I would not even worry about bandwidth control.
I got a custom built Timbuk2 "El Ocho" and the sleeve that is fitted for the Titanium Powerbook form factor. Best laptop bag I have owned in my life!
The thing is made with ballistic nylon, has plenty of pockets and has a double waterproof liner. I have been soaked in a downpour and the bag has stayed completely dry. The straps are very strong and confortable and the cross-strap makes it easy to move fast since the bag is not swinging around. I carry my iPod on a strap pouch which is quite handy.
The bag holds a lot of stuff. Mine carries:
1. A Titanium Powerbook G4 2. Power adapter for the Powerbook 3. Portable firewire drive 4. Digital camera 5. Small tools. 6. Extra keys (it has a detachable keyring) 7. CDs for all the software I have on the Powerbook, in case I need to do an emergency restore. 8. Cables for the digital camera, iPod and firewire drive (these I keep in a cheap plastic pouch) 9. Contact lenses, spare change, etc. 10. A starbucks thermos (the ones that are long but sort of thin) 11. My lunch. 12. At least one book, sometimes two or more.
All the stuff fits perfectly without the bag bulging in any way. This is handy when riding the Metro because people get pissed if you are carrying a back pack and it sticks too much to the back. Messenger bags are usually flatter than a backpack and hang lower, so there is less chance of you hitting a short person in the face when turning around in a crowded train.
It was expensive as hell but the bag takes a lot of abuse and so far it still looks new. BTW, stay away from the Timbuk2 "commuter" bags. These are NOT waterproof (a friend of mine got his camera manuals totally soaked in a Timbuk2 commuter) and are not in the same league as their traditional messenger bags. Also, you need the sleeve (they have one for every form factor Apple sells); it is about an inch of padding all around the laptop, and you can pull it out of the bag if you are just walking around the office with it or just for a very quick trip.
The "master" copy of the music resides in the mac. You can have more than one iPod sync to your iTunes. That means if your iPod dies and you get a new one you can just sync it like the old one. If it was the other way around, say the mac dies and the iPod is good, you cannot extract the music unless you use a third party app to pull the music (iPod Viewer is really good and it is free).
You are correct: since the main copy of the music resides in my mac, I did not lose anything. And yeah, I used to be kinder to it before I had an external firewire drive to do backups, so 1 GB out of the 4.5 GB space was reserved for backups.
I treated mine like shiiite for 10 months, then the drive crashed. I took it to the store and no questions asked: I was handed a refurbished iPod of the exact same series as mine and was only charged a $30 handling fee. I walked into that store expecting them to tell me that I had to pay for a new one since mine obviously broke due to misuse. The replacement iPod is already 6 months old and still gives me almost 11 hours of battery power.
Of course, mine was a first generation 5GB iPod. I have friends with newer units and nothing but problems, so who the hell knows? If any of you is interested in getting an iPod, go ahead and get it. It is an amazing gadget.
I believe the last Heinlein you should read is "I will fear no evil." I almost did not read "Stranger in a Strange Land" because I had the misfortune to read "I will fear no evil" first.
I wasn't seeing Number 6, I was drooling at her and pawing on the floor the whole time she was on screen. Her stills at scifi.com did not do her justice.
My actual remark should have been "... The other thing I did not like is you barely get to see the battledroid-type Cylons..."
I loved it but I got pissed off when I realized that Sci Fi realized they could take over some of the black bars for widescreen and use them for promos. It is visually distracting and borders on the annoying.
The other thing I did not like is you barely get to see the Cylons. As far as I can tell the frickin things only show up in two scenes.
Everything else just plain rocked. I hope they can secure a series or at least maybe put together another 2-4 hours.
The productivity gains I have thanks to BBEdit save us a ton of money per week. I work in a mac shop with Microsoft-based web apps (the horror!) and the workflow process is terrible and with little hope. What used to take hours of cutting and pasting to convert between totally dissimilar formats is now done 99% with just one click, thanks to the Perl filters and built-in features of BBEdit Pro. It is not just a speed advantage, it also saves us a ton on quality assurance, since with all this scripting we got rid of hundreds of places where errors could be added to the documents.
The one thing BBEdit cannot do is select a column from a HTML table unless there is a specific pattern I can regex for. That one task is done in Dreamweaver MX, everything else is done in BBEdit Pro.
BTW, mine was not $179, I got really lucky. I paid $79 for BBEdit 6.5 and like a week later 7.0 came out and they gave me a free upgrade.
I spent about 3 years telecommuting up to 75% of my work week. I had flex time too, so as long as the work was done, I could spread the hours as they were convenient to me. I put a TV card in my PC and I ordered a second digital cable box, and while I was working I always kept the TV running something from one of the Discovery Channels (excellent background noise). I tried first the digital music channels but the play list was only a couple hours long.
The cabin fever issue is real. After a while you start craving for human interaction. On these days I would wake up at around 7 AM, do emails and push some paperwork until past traffic rush time. Then I drove the 20 or so miles to the office with zero stress, most of the commuters were already at work. Meetings for a couple hours, then lunch and then work an hour or two until just before the afternoon rush would start. After a nap and dinner I usually worked another 2-3 hours depending on the project.
On a normal work week, without even trying, I was averaging at least 50 hours, and most of these were billable so my overhead spending was very low. Instead of sitting over an hour in traffic twice per day I was breezing thru the DC beltway during the low peak hours, which lowered my stress level. On days that I did not go to the office, I worked in 4-hour blocks, between these I would either catnap or go to Starbucks, which was just 2 miles away. Or I could play a game or read a book for a while. Since the work was getting done (and I was a manager too, thanks God all my employees where outstanding programmers) and my project managers telecommuted too, it was a sweet gig. They even paid for my cable modem.
Of course, our VC managed to screw it up and most of us either left on our own or got laid off. My current job has zero room for real telecommuting, the only things I do from home are emergency things I can do thru ssh or terminal server, and I spend two hours a day commuting (at least now I can take metro rail and bus, so it is cheaper and less stressful).
Would I go back to telecommuting if given a chance? In a heartbeat, and I would even take less money to do it.
I also get 10+ hours from my 5GB iPod. I know people with battery issues but all of them use the newer generation with a different battery than mine.
Mine is not perfect. My first one died within 2 days, so the Apple store just replaced it with a new one. The second one lasted about 9 months of complete and total abuse. It was so beat up and scratched that the back of the iPod did not look like a mirror. One day the hard disk crashed, Apple charged me $30 for a replacement since even if it was under warranty it was more than 6 months old. The $30 is the maintenance charge that would normally pay for sending the iPod to the repair facility. I was bracing for the worse (you beat the crap outta it! we are not covering it!!!) so when they said $30 I just paid, got my new replacement and bailed. This third iPod so far works great, but I am treating it much nicer than the previous one because they don't make the 5GB anymore and I don't like the new buttons.
Hijack the HAZMAT truck and switch the semi to one excempt from the remote disabling requirement. They need to do it so the whole rig is disabled, just killing the semi is not enough.
It disturbs me too. I live in the Dulles corridor, the so called internet capital of the world, and I can't get DSL. Comcast is doing a really good job here, but it sucks not having an alternative. And yeah, when Comcast comes knocking to offer their VoIP phone I am going to ditch Verizon for good.
I have been shooting with a Sony DSC S70 for over 3 years and I have been so happy with it and its Carl Zeiss lens that I have dragged my feet when these new affordable digital SLRs started showing up. A friend of mine bought the 10D (which is way pricier than the Rebel Digital) and showed me some of his sample shots.
The added exposure and shutter control are obvious. The exposure is dead on target and very little noise at high ISO. He got two lenses so he deffinitely took a hit in the wallet, but at least you can notice the difference. The evening shots are simply gorgeous.
A week after he got the 10D, he met a photographer that was using a mix of film SLRs and Rebel Digitals. *His* samples look as good as the ones off the 10D. My friend was pissed because he spent over a grand above what the other photographer did and their pictures were pretty much identical.
I would love the Rebel Digital but my DSC S70 still has some kick left on her, and I got used to carry it (I used to carry a Nikon SLR and two lenses) so I don't know if I am going to grab a Canon G5 or the Rebel.
I am using it on a mac. At the office I have a MS Explorer Optical Wireless, which has the wheel and yeah, the wheel is a button too. Away from the office I am SOL unless I want to start carrying the mouse and RF unit everywhere.
I tried it a couple days ago when it came out. I thought it was some sort of crippled demo with a time bomb but it was just the full version with a bunch of "non commercial use only" messages splattered all over. This is great for people that are curious about it but can't spend the dough just to see if they like it. It pretty much keeps a big fraction of the experimenters from trying to dowload a warez copy.
The one thing I did not like was I found some commands that require the 3-button mouse, which I only use at the office.
Dell 600cx, Celeron 600. Got it new for $576 (opted out of the monitor and modem to keep the price down). That littl tower is already 3 years old and has seen WinME, Win2000 Pro, WinXP Pro and Suse 8. And it still runs fine. Only mods it has is the ethernet card and was upgraded to 256MB ram.
The first I used a dual monitor setup was over 12 years ago in an Autocad 9 workstation while doing a co-op project. I had grown used to the limitations of having crappy graphics and terrible mice, so I (and most of my classmates) got used to type in coordinates into the command line for ACAD and never had to worry about forgetting to turn on grid snaps, etc. Well, we went to this pharmaceutical and they had a sweet CAD rig, and it had TWO nice monitors instead of a crappy one.
What did I get out of it? A nasty neck headache. The monitors were setup with all graphics in one, and text commands on the second. Terrible neck strain because of the monitor placement.
Next multi monitor setup was working at an Army satellite network ops center, the telemetry workstation had 5 monitors but the placement was more ergonomic so it was much easier to handle than if all the info was crammed into one huge screen. That pretty much worked.
At my previous job (dot bomb) as we started shutting down branch offices we got an influx of extra equipment and eventually most of the people that had desktops were assigned a second monitor. In almost every case the second monitor translated into increased productivity. These people were doing things like building flash animations, editing videos or doing web programming, so they appreciated the increased screen space. Even our instructional designers were doing great because they could have more documents opened side-by-side.
Of course, it is awesome to have a second monitor if you are a gamer, but for most of us that work with a gazillion windows opened at the same time, having dual monitors (or for the lucky bastards, a huge widescreen monitor like the Apple studio series) is a godsend.
I had the dubious honor to be part of the last graduating class at my school that had to train in both technical drafting by hand and CAD (we were the transition year). After us all the following classes trained for CAD exclusively. Rotring was the most popular brand for these. Expensive but much more consistent quality and very dependable.
I have been writing with these pens since the mid 80's. The balance feels just right and the ball glides pretty well. The only problem is people keep stealing them. Also, be careful if you fly with these, this is not a safe pen to keep on your breast pocket (insert pocket protector joke here).
I thought I was the only one that was so picky about pens, but a few weeks ago I found a coworker that did just that. When she was in high school she found a specific pen that she liked and that is what she has purchased ever since. Since she is now the ops manager that happens to be the main brand of pen she buys for the office.
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I tell you what, Issue Tracker felt like a nuissance for the first day or so, then I saw how I had gone thru 16 trouble tickets in less than four hours, each of the 16 issues were insignificant and I would have forgotten about them before the end of the day, which would have resulted in just putting 4 hours of generic IT work in the timesheet!
Now I am a believer. The extra effort to document all this work is well worth it.
I read about his experiment yesterday and I could not agree more. I got two very different extremes of his concern:
1. I am a Mac switcher. A little bit after I switched to Mac I noticed that, once the euphoria of the new computer wore off a little bit, and OS X stopped being a novelty to me, I was running out of things to do in the computer. I thought I was hallucinating, because as far as I could tell, and this includes many years messing with every flavor of Windows plus SuSe and freeBSD, I seemed to be spending at least one hour less per day in front of the computer. Then I figured it out: I was too used to spend about one hour a day just doing things to keep the PC running.
The Mac was pretty much maintenance free and updates don't come out every day, so unless you are a tweaker, there is not a lot of stuff to do to mess with the OS itself. Most apps I use check for an update on startup, and on my daily list of websites to visit is versiontracker, which will tell me any other of my apps that needs to be updated.
2. At work I wear many hats: I am the lead programmer, but at a moment's notice I have to switch gears and become the CIO/CTO/Director of Technology/Mac guy/Windows server Guy/Network Guy/Printer Guy, etc. I work for a 14-employee company, and I am the only technically-oriented person (everybody else is either a biologist or a statistician). I kept having trouble because even if I only spend about 50% of my week working on programming tasks, I was always working 60 hours weeks because of all the odd jobs that had to be done around the office. Worse, there was no way to track these, so my timesheets for a week would show 20-30 hours broken down between a few billable projects, then another 20-30 hours clumped as "IT."
I started using Issue Tracker (issue-tracker.sourceforge.net) and forced myself to write a trouble ticket for every stupid little request I was made. It did not matter if it was a 5-minute job: if it was not a "billable" task, it would go into the issue tracker. After a couple weeks, I got to the same conclusion as Marshall. All these little jobs suck in a hell of a lot of time. The 5-minute printer clearing job is actually a 15-minute job: 5 minutes for somebody to come to you to interrupt what you are doing, explaining the problem, then 5 minutes to fix and test and a final 5 minutes to explain the problem was fixed and to return to work.
The worst thing was that the boss acutally had the nerve to tell me that the reason I was working 12-hour days was because I was goofing off 8 hours at the office and then catching up from home. Now I can show him the issue tracker log and show him that no, even with 14 Macs at the office there is just too much crap that has to be dealt with thru the day.
The Macs at the office run fine, thank you. Even the ones still on OS 9 (*cough*cheapskate boss*cough*). Most problems we have with the Macs are due to programs we run in classic mode (have I hinted at how cheap my boss is?\): once these lock up there is no way to kill just one classic app without restarting the classic mode itself. The two Windows servers are cheap and sturdy but require constant TLC. Thanks God the mail server is freeBSD.
It is not $10/hour for everyone. Monthly unlimited is $30/month. I have had it for a year and it works much better than my own cable modem. I live in a very busy town (suburb in North Virginia) and I can drive to at least 5 Starbucks within 2-3 miles that have T-mobile Hot Spot installed. I never find more than one person online at a given time, and regardless of what they do, it never feels slow.
The logistics of doing this should not be complicated. You can land a T1 for less than $1000/month if you look around. The tip jar should be able to offset whatever the T1 costs. And make sure the antenna is set so it does not go beyond the outside tables at the coffee shop. Make people get close to the store in order to connect, the smell of coffee will do the rest. I would not even worry about bandwidth control.
I got a custom built Timbuk2 "El Ocho" and the sleeve that is fitted for the Titanium Powerbook form factor. Best laptop bag I have owned in my life!
The thing is made with ballistic nylon, has plenty of pockets and has a double waterproof liner. I have been soaked in a downpour and the bag has stayed completely dry. The straps are very strong and confortable and the cross-strap makes it easy to move fast since the bag is not swinging around. I carry my iPod on a strap pouch which is quite handy.
The bag holds a lot of stuff. Mine carries:
1. A Titanium Powerbook G4
2. Power adapter for the Powerbook
3. Portable firewire drive
4. Digital camera
5. Small tools.
6. Extra keys (it has a detachable keyring)
7. CDs for all the software I have on the Powerbook, in case I need to do an emergency restore.
8. Cables for the digital camera, iPod and firewire drive (these I keep in a cheap plastic pouch)
9. Contact lenses, spare change, etc.
10. A starbucks thermos (the ones that are long but sort of thin)
11. My lunch.
12. At least one book, sometimes two or more.
All the stuff fits perfectly without the bag bulging in any way. This is handy when riding the Metro because people get pissed if you are carrying a back pack and it sticks too much to the back. Messenger bags are usually flatter than a backpack and hang lower, so there is less chance of you hitting a short person in the face when turning around in a crowded train.
It was expensive as hell but the bag takes a lot of abuse and so far it still looks new. BTW, stay away from the Timbuk2 "commuter" bags. These are NOT waterproof (a friend of mine got his camera manuals totally soaked in a Timbuk2 commuter) and are not in the same league as their traditional messenger bags. Also, you need the sleeve (they have one for every form factor Apple sells); it is about an inch of padding all around the laptop, and you can pull it out of the bag if you are just walking around the office with it or just for a very quick trip.
The "master" copy of the music resides in the mac. You can have more than one iPod sync to your iTunes. That means if your iPod dies and you get a new one you can just sync it like the old one. If it was the other way around, say the mac dies and the iPod is good, you cannot extract the music unless you use a third party app to pull the music (iPod Viewer is really good and it is free).
You are correct: since the main copy of the music resides in my mac, I did not lose anything. And yeah, I used to be kinder to it before I had an external firewire drive to do backups, so 1 GB out of the 4.5 GB space was reserved for backups.
I treated mine like shiiite for 10 months, then the drive crashed. I took it to the store and no questions asked: I was handed a refurbished iPod of the exact same series as mine and was only charged a $30 handling fee. I walked into that store expecting them to tell me that I had to pay for a new one since mine obviously broke due to misuse. The replacement iPod is already 6 months old and still gives me almost 11 hours of battery power.
Of course, mine was a first generation 5GB iPod. I have friends with newer units and nothing but problems, so who the hell knows? If any of you is interested in getting an iPod, go ahead and get it. It is an amazing gadget.
Or, if you live in the states, go to a local DRMO (Defense Reutilization Marketing Office) and try to buy a surplus rack.
I believe the last Heinlein you should read is "I will fear no evil." I almost did not read "Stranger in a Strange Land" because I had the misfortune to read "I will fear no evil" first.
I wasn't seeing Number 6, I was drooling at her and pawing on the floor the whole time she was on screen. Her stills at scifi.com did not do her justice.
My actual remark should have been "... The other thing I did not like is you barely get to see the battledroid-type Cylons..."
I loved it but I got pissed off when I realized that Sci Fi realized they could take over some of the black bars for widescreen and use them for promos. It is visually distracting and borders on the annoying.
The other thing I did not like is you barely get to see the Cylons. As far as I can tell the frickin things only show up in two scenes.
Everything else just plain rocked. I hope they can secure a series or at least maybe put together another 2-4 hours.
The productivity gains I have thanks to BBEdit save us a ton of money per week. I work in a mac shop with Microsoft-based web apps (the horror!) and the workflow process is terrible and with little hope. What used to take hours of cutting and pasting to convert between totally dissimilar formats is now done 99% with just one click, thanks to the Perl filters and built-in features of BBEdit Pro. It is not just a speed advantage, it also saves us a ton on quality assurance, since with all this scripting we got rid of hundreds of places where errors could be added to the documents.
The one thing BBEdit cannot do is select a column from a HTML table unless there is a specific pattern I can regex for. That one task is done in Dreamweaver MX, everything else is done in BBEdit Pro.
BTW, mine was not $179, I got really lucky. I paid $79 for BBEdit 6.5 and like a week later 7.0 came out and they gave me a free upgrade.
Ninjas are not tangible property. If you try to tax a ninja, then be prepared for him/her flipping and killing you and stuff.
... you could be one more unemployed techie.
I spent about 3 years telecommuting up to 75% of my work week. I had flex time too, so as long as the work was done, I could spread the hours as they were convenient to me. I put a TV card in my PC and I ordered a second digital cable box, and while I was working I always kept the TV running something from one of the Discovery Channels (excellent background noise). I tried first the digital music channels but the play list was only a couple hours long.
The cabin fever issue is real. After a while you start craving for human interaction. On these days I would wake up at around 7 AM, do emails and push some paperwork until past traffic rush time. Then I drove the 20 or so miles to the office with zero stress, most of the commuters were already at work. Meetings for a couple hours, then lunch and then work an hour or two until just before the afternoon rush would start. After a nap and dinner I usually worked another 2-3 hours depending on the project.
On a normal work week, without even trying, I was averaging at least 50 hours, and most of these were billable so my overhead spending was very low. Instead of sitting over an hour in traffic twice per day I was breezing thru the DC beltway during the low peak hours, which lowered my stress level. On days that I did not go to the office, I worked in 4-hour blocks, between these I would either catnap or go to Starbucks, which was just 2 miles away. Or I could play a game or read a book for a while. Since the work was getting done (and I was a manager too, thanks God all my employees where outstanding programmers) and my project managers telecommuted too, it was a sweet gig. They even paid for my cable modem.
Of course, our VC managed to screw it up and most of us either left on our own or got laid off. My current job has zero room for real telecommuting, the only things I do from home are emergency things I can do thru ssh or terminal server, and I spend two hours a day commuting (at least now I can take metro rail and bus, so it is cheaper and less stressful).
Would I go back to telecommuting if given a chance? In a heartbeat, and I would even take less money to do it.
I also get 10+ hours from my 5GB iPod. I know people with battery issues but all of them use the newer generation with a different battery than mine.
Mine is not perfect. My first one died within 2 days, so the Apple store just replaced it with a new one. The second one lasted about 9 months of complete and total abuse. It was so beat up and scratched that the back of the iPod did not look like a mirror. One day the hard disk crashed, Apple charged me $30 for a replacement since even if it was under warranty it was more than 6 months old. The $30 is the maintenance charge that would normally pay for sending the iPod to the repair facility. I was bracing for the worse (you beat the crap outta it! we are not covering it!!!) so when they said $30 I just paid, got my new replacement and bailed. This third iPod so far works great, but I am treating it much nicer than the previous one because they don't make the 5GB anymore and I don't like the new buttons.
Hijack the HAZMAT truck and switch the semi to one excempt from the remote disabling requirement. They need to do it so the whole rig is disabled, just killing the semi is not enough.
It disturbs me too. I live in the Dulles corridor, the so called internet capital of the world, and I can't get DSL. Comcast is doing a really good job here, but it sucks not having an alternative. And yeah, when Comcast comes knocking to offer their VoIP phone I am going to ditch Verizon for good.
What he is doing is the same thing that Altria did.
I have been shooting with a Sony DSC S70 for over 3 years and I have been so happy with it and its Carl Zeiss lens that I have dragged my feet when these new affordable digital SLRs started showing up. A friend of mine bought the 10D (which is way pricier than the Rebel Digital) and showed me some of his sample shots.
The added exposure and shutter control are obvious. The exposure is dead on target and very little noise at high ISO. He got two lenses so he deffinitely took a hit in the wallet, but at least you can notice the difference. The evening shots are simply gorgeous.
A week after he got the 10D, he met a photographer that was using a mix of film SLRs and Rebel Digitals. *His* samples look as good as the ones off the 10D. My friend was pissed because he spent over a grand above what the other photographer did and their pictures were pretty much identical.
I would love the Rebel Digital but my DSC S70 still has some kick left on her, and I got used to carry it (I used to carry a Nikon SLR and two lenses) so I don't know if I am going to grab a Canon G5 or the Rebel.
I am using it on a mac. At the office I have a MS Explorer Optical Wireless, which has the wheel and yeah, the wheel is a button too. Away from the office I am SOL unless I want to start carrying the mouse and RF unit everywhere.
I tried it a couple days ago when it came out. I thought it was some sort of crippled demo with a time bomb but it was just the full version with a bunch of "non commercial use only" messages splattered all over. This is great for people that are curious about it but can't spend the dough just to see if they like it. It pretty much keeps a big fraction of the experimenters from trying to dowload a warez copy.
The one thing I did not like was I found some commands that require the 3-button mouse, which I only use at the office.
Dell 600cx, Celeron 600. Got it new for $576 (opted out of the monitor and modem to keep the price down). That littl tower is already 3 years old and has seen WinME, Win2000 Pro, WinXP Pro and Suse 8. And it still runs fine. Only mods it has is the ethernet card and was upgraded to 256MB ram.
The first I used a dual monitor setup was over 12 years ago in an Autocad 9 workstation while doing a co-op project. I had grown used to the limitations of having crappy graphics and terrible mice, so I (and most of my classmates) got used to type in coordinates into the command line for ACAD and never had to worry about forgetting to turn on grid snaps, etc. Well, we went to this pharmaceutical and they had a sweet CAD rig, and it had TWO nice monitors instead of a crappy one.
What did I get out of it? A nasty neck headache. The monitors were setup with all graphics in one, and text commands on the second. Terrible neck strain because of the monitor placement.
Next multi monitor setup was working at an Army satellite network ops center, the telemetry workstation had 5 monitors but the placement was more ergonomic so it was much easier to handle than if all the info was crammed into one huge screen. That pretty much worked.
At my previous job (dot bomb) as we started shutting down branch offices we got an influx of extra equipment and eventually most of the people that had desktops were assigned a second monitor. In almost every case the second monitor translated into increased productivity. These people were doing things like building flash animations, editing videos or doing web programming, so they appreciated the increased screen space. Even our instructional designers were doing great because they could have more documents opened side-by-side.
Of course, it is awesome to have a second monitor if you are a gamer, but for most of us that work with a gazillion windows opened at the same time, having dual monitors (or for the lucky bastards, a huge widescreen monitor like the Apple studio series) is a godsend.
I had the dubious honor to be part of the last graduating class at my school that had to train in both technical drafting by hand and CAD (we were the transition year). After us all the following classes trained for CAD exclusively. Rotring was the most popular brand for these. Expensive but much more consistent quality and very dependable.
I have been writing with these pens since the mid 80's. The balance feels just right and the ball glides pretty well. The only problem is people keep stealing them. Also, be careful if you fly with these, this is not a safe pen to keep on your breast pocket (insert pocket protector joke here).
I thought I was the only one that was so picky about pens, but a few weeks ago I found a coworker that did just that. When she was in high school she found a specific pen that she liked and that is what she has purchased ever since. Since she is now the ops manager that happens to be the main brand of pen she buys for the office.