Just, like, don't visit sites with intrusive ads on your mobile phone. Otherwise you're just contributing to the arms race.
I only frequent a few sites on my mobile during my commute... fark, arstechnica, classic.slashdot.org, maybe a little ttac.com . facebook.com now works much better than it used to (uninstalled the facebook app once they started uploading my address book).
Rarely visit the linked news articles at sources with terribad ads, can glean enough of the interesting tidbits and analysis through the comments by fine folks like you.
Er, what's the problem with the explanation for how this works? All the stuff I can find to read about these mechanisms were just unraveled over the past decade or so, like: http://www.todaysdietitian.com... [todaysdietitian.com]
Subjecting yourself to those fad diets (eating significantly less) triggers increased release of cortisol (a stress hormone). Visceral fat has more receptors for cortisol than the subcutaneous fats, so they activate and start stashing away more of the energy from the food passing through your gut.
All your other points are right on the mark... so don't starve yourself; eat enough (good) food and be happy, since living a happy lifestyle really helps keep your hormones in check!
Er, what's the problem with the explanation for how this works? All the stuff I can find to read about these mechanisms were just unraveled over the past decade or so, like: http://www.todaysdietitian.com...
Subjecting yourself to those fad diets (eating significantly less) triggers increased release of cortisol (a stress hormone). Visceral fat has more receptors for cortisol than the subcutaneous fats, so they activate and start stashing away more of the energy from the food passing through your gut.
All your other points are right on the mark... so don't starve yourself; eat enough (good) food and be happy, since living a happy lifestyle really helps keep your hormones in check!
Hmm, yeah, you're probably right... I really never paid attention to calorie counts since I usually just eat until I feel full.
Looking up some of my food now, it looks like my typical day might be something like: * 400 calorie breakfast - cereal w/ 2% milk or pop tarts if I'm running late. * 600 calorie lunch - usually leftovers, but just going by the "Meatball sandwich" fallback at PotBelly's * 200 - 400 calories in candy and afternoon snacking * big dinner plate or two of spaghetti and meat or rice and meat and veggies, but probably not much more than 1000 calories, come to think of it.
Don't drink soda, mostly just tea and water, and have the occasional fruit or juice+seltzer. So maybe I still manage to operate at a bit of a deficit sometimes to make up for the occasional binge over the holidays or at buffets or finishing off other people's dishes when we go out:P
The body has no 'hoarding mechanism' that is triggered by 'dieting'.
The body always tries to 'hoard' or safe or store surplus. Depending on the food composition it can do that, or can't do it.
Sure there is. Read up on visceral fat vs. subcutaneous fat. It's really quite fascinating.
The visceral fat cells grow in your gut to store starches for slow release during winter hibernation. Once your body is convinced that it needs to bulk up on visceral storage, those cells get first dibs on any energy absorption from food in your intestines and then they grow as much as they can. Of course, if you never go into hibernation or suffer through winter food shortages, they become a problem. They don't die when you diet, they just get slightly smaller and start to complain. They might even be evil enough to withhold nutrition from the rest of your body, persuading you to eat more when you don't really need it.
Subcutaneous fat is stored all around your body. Those cells aren't as vicious and greedy as the visceral fat cells, since they compete for energy along with the rest of the cells in your body. And they also tend to be located near your muscles for quick release when you need it.
There are also differences between brown fat vs. white fat, where brown fat has a higher metabolic rate to help keep you warm in cold climates.
The body does a lot of interesting things to stay alive, and my point is that lifestyle can be a much more important influence than diet. And I kind of feel sad for people who are frustrated by trying to hack their diet alone.
Yeah, like I mentioned, the nightly beer and ice cream habit I began a few years ago pushed me over the line. Also need to start keeping my hands out of the free candy jar at work. But not too bad considering.
Yeah, I'm a computer nerd and not an athlete. But all I'm saying is that I pretty much do the minimum of 30 min of entertaining exercise per day and have a few minor lifestyle choices to be more active when the opportunity presents itself. For that, I've never had to limit calorie intake. I eat as much good food as I care to enjoy, and then a bit more to clean the plate.
My father was 300 lbs when he was my age. The rest of my family on both the Western and Eastern sides certainly qualify as obese. I'm just saying that we think we can control our bodies by "outsmarting" it with "nutritional science", but it's not that easy. Hoowever, just adapt the lifestyle you want to live (ninja, mountain climber, badass bus commuter, whatever) and your body will adjust to the shape it needs to support that activity... a good 6 months to a year after maintaining steady state.
I suspect that any of the simple "calorie input - calorie output" dieters are not adequately accounting for their shit. It's not like any of those diet plans include a shit calorimeter, so they're probably missing some body hacks that they could be using to manage energy balance in their control volume.
Exactly! That also sounds precisely like what people do when they 'diet'. And then they get all pissy when their bodies return to normal for their lifestyle next season and blame the science for failing them.
I agree with you that the science is good. But the human body is complex, and people are simple.
I eat a lot (I am The Finisher at dinner parties) and never dieted. Dieting trigger's your body's hoarding mechanism, where it doesn't know when it's going to get its next fix so it packs everything away just in case. My digestive tract tends to just take what it needs and dumps the rest.
Sure there are a bunch of other things I do to remain relatively svelte 6 ft ish 200lbs. I'm usually doing interesting things, so I don't eat or snack out of boredom. When I do eat, I take it slow, so I don't usually keep eating after I get full. No fast food. Lots of Asian food. A good amount of Asian blood that has had a few thousand years of agrarian culture over the hunters and gatherers. I walk and bike and take the stairs whenever practical. An hour of martial arts every other day.
So I have gained 10 lbs in the past few years, mostly since I started drinking (only on non-martial arts days) and started eating candy at work. I'm starting to replace the candy with veggies and the beer with hard liquor, so maybe that along with breathing a little more deeply should even it out again.
I found myself happiest in places where I was trusted to go off and make things happen. Examples:
* A P-card, even if it was a small limited one, to spend however I thought would give the company the most bang for the buck. Maybe we just need a special cable to get a demo project working. Maybe I save it up for a second monitor. Maybe the group just needs to chill out together over a beer at the end of the day. We can deal with full transparency and expense reports, just don't make us go through a months-long procurement cycle for silly stuff that will make our lives better.
* Business travel perks - some of the larger companies I worked for had pretty nice deals worked out with airlines and hotels and rental car agencies. I kinda miss some of those loyalty perks more than I thought I would. Transit passes are also a nice one, and a big tax-deductible perk as well.
* Control over some of my own time. Maybe call them "hack days" or whatever Google's 20% time used to be back in the day, but give your workers their own small budget of time to work on whatever they see fit to fix. Whether they invest it in new R&D or tackling old tech debt that's been nagging them, they probably know better than any of the project managers where their time would be best spent to give them more free time and capabilities in the future.
* Pet projects: in a similar vein, some of my best managers would kinda create projects that... didn't exactly make business sense, but would be nice engineering challenges to offer our engineers to allow them to take ownership of a relatively unimportant component that would nevertheless challenge them to use parts of their engineering education that would otherwise not get engaged. Examples might be a little custom button box interface for an HMI engineer, or a custom sensor for an electrical engineer... things that would be almost trivial to adapt an existing COTS part for or just outsource and bill the customer. But these give a nice, polished, customized touch to the delivered product that the engineer actually had a deeper hand in designing, implementing, and showing off.
* Access to good office administrators. Haven't really had one to take care of the many administrative hassles until recently. They are a big help! Unfortunately the larger companies had spent so much money building "self-service" web-based junk that they were continually changing (and retraining for), that we were always wasting lots of high cost engineering hours taking care of expense reports and office supplies and maintenance when a well-connected office administrator at half the pay could deftly take care of that stuff for us and shield the engineers from a lot of the frustrations.
* Mentoring opportunities: I'm not going to say that you'll get more work out of interns than you put in to training them (and fixing some of the jobs that you inadequately trained them to tackle:P ). But nothing really forces you to know your job well than teaching someone else to do it. And it does foster a certain amount of pride in your work at your workplace, if only because you're constantly reintroducing your people as "this is my co-worker X, and they're good at Y; and if you need something done with Z, go seek person DD". It's important to occasionally acknowledge what your working group is good and functional at, because if you only complain about everything, then what are you doing surrounding yourself with incompetents?
* Personal development plans: (not to be confused with the performance review for business objectives)... this includes continuous education and training (hey, more things with favorable tax incentives!), professional certifications, attendance/presentations at conferences and trade shows, and other forward-looking goals. It does mean much to me that my managers take an interest in developing my long-range plan, with both serious and somewhat entertaining pursuits, and what they can do with their network to provide opp
Eh, we used to live in the DC metro area and went to those parties. Government employees are government employees, and friendly people. Even the ones in the military.
Also, at least half of the people who work at the NSA are the whitehats, responsible for really boring things like system hardening guides https://www.nsa.gov/ia/mitigat...
Frankly I'm glad they're there doing their thing, and hopefully keeping an eye on some of the blackhats they have running around on their TS/SCI projects.
It's also pretty heavily used for development and test of server deploys. A lot of DevOps types are trying to use VirtualBox to build disposable test clusters for their applications, and has been the default and one of the best supported engines for vagrant.
Unfortunately, a lot of app footprints are starting to rely on deploying other "appliance VMs" in your VM (yo dawg), and VirtualBox is still straggling behind the others on implementing some form of nested VM capability. https://www.virtualbox.org/tic... So it's kinda getting to a point of having a large and growing number of server apps that you won't be able to use VirtualBox to set up a local development and test environment for things that involve, say, using a Stackato PAAS, or a FEO appliance, or an Apigee API gateway appliance, etc. to pick a bunch of essential pieces from recent memory. At least not without a lot of work to host those VMs directly on VirtualBox and not looking or working at all like they would when they hit production.
Also, Airbus refused to submit a proposal for this when approached several years ago (while there was no bidding process, basic proposals were requested from both Airbus and Boeing) because they knew it was a no contest decision.
Does the contest have to come from Airbus though? The last big scandal for the KC-135 tanker replacement came from Northrup Grumman, who wanted to buy Airbus jets and refit them for for aerial refueling here in the US. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K...
Of course, that was a much larger project with more money at stake.
My description of a Software Architect was mostly tongue-in-cheek... at most of the places I've worked they were the ones that determined "high-level" things, like what expensive commercial middleware everyone was going to have to integrate with and spend all of their time coding around its deficiencies. Architects rarely touched actual code. Maybe they had a PHd or something but more often not, but they did get to make decisions that involved the movement of large amounts of capital budget (which of course is completely separate from the labor budgets required to cope with them).
My description of a Software Engineer might have been closer to what's nebulously referred to as a Systems Engineer (which is more of a glorified term for SysAdmin these days). Yours might be closer to what companies refer to as a Software Development Engineer, which is the job code most big software companies hire under nowadays.
But yeah, there's really no difference between any of these categories other than HR labels. And pay grades. And social structure. And job satisfaction garnered from different skillsets and abilities.
Yeah, there's probably a matrix of skills and abilities, depending on how much collaboration you need to do with customers / suppliers / other developers.
Great Coder: can make a computer do stuff. In code. No one else really cares how they do their thing. They just take a defined process and codify it to automate it or whatever.
Great Programmer: can write programs, presumably that other people have to use. Hopefully you still have this programmer around if you need to fix their program.
Great Software Developer: Now we're getting somewhere... they probably work together with other programmers as a team and start worrying about more of the stuff they learned in CS classes, like code reusability, refactoring, complexity, maybe some analysis of algorithms and pure math logic.
Great Software Engineer: Maybe less of the pure math and algorithms on how to do tricky things in code, but more of the practical stuff like defining code standards, test harnesses, and social aspects of code maintenance, like the discipline of setting up and maintaining the process through peer reviews, continuous integration, etc.
Great Software Architect: Solves problems before they occur by drawing pictures. But still gets blamed for all of the new problems anyway.
A lot of greatness involves managing complexity and making things as simple as possible for other people to understand and maintain. But no simpler.
But compared to Seattle? No. There's a reason people here in Seattle spend so much on dial-up. We long for the Internet. I pay almost $450 per month for the T1 to my house. The city granted a monopoly to Comcat for my neighborhood and will not allow competition but the city's rules also block Comcast from providing access so we're stuck with either dialup or paying for expensive typically business-only telco lines. Here in Seattle we care about Internet access. When I lived in Cary, NC, I had more than ten times as much bandwidth nearly ten years ago as compared to what I have in Seattle. It was also 1/8 the price. That shows NC doens't give a damn about the Internet. Here in Seattle we put our money where our mouth is. We are educated unlike those people that suck at the tit of cheap access. We pay our own way.
Damn... let me know when that changes. Here on the Eastside in Redmond we have 50/50Mbps FiOS from Frontier for $60/mo. or so. Back when I lived in DC, we had Verizon FiOS and it was pretty great, except I had to pay extra for the Business FiOS so they'd unblock HTTP(S)/SMTP on my home server (and get vaguely more helpful customer service). But none of that silliness is necessary at the Frontier Residential tier.
I grew up in the DC metro area. Snowstorms in New England are notoriously hard to predict, especially nor'easters like this one (which are typically a combination of 2-3 storm systems).
Sure, you can see it coming down from the Midwest, but it's always hard to tell exactly what's going to happen to a blizzard after it stumbles over the Appalachian Mountains, which will divert some of it and squeeze some or all of the moisture out of it. Then it collides with some storm full of rain coming in from the North Atlantic. Then the wildcard is some sort of warmer air coming up from the south... It all collides over New England. The computer models can tell you what's going into the mix, but who knows exactly where it's going to transition from rain to snow? WHICH STORM WILL WIN?! A butterfly in Miami decides.
Eh, I've had it happen to me... I won a small paper airplane competition (really more of an art project) years ago, in just one category out of several, and not really anything notable. But all of the news sites ran a little blurb with the headline "Engineer from $AEROSPACE_GIANT (NYSE:$BLAH) wins airplane competition"
I try not to assume too much these days, like that the corporate-controlled media isn't in it for the money if there's money to be made.
Plus, they subliminally put the word "dump" right there in the headline next to the company names, and you know all the robotic stock traders make trades automatically off of the incoming stream of news feeds.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, agreed for most planets... but what about Uranus?
(serious question, since it rotates sideways on its axis)
Just, like, don't visit sites with intrusive ads on your mobile phone. Otherwise you're just contributing to the arms race.
I only frequent a few sites on my mobile during my commute... fark, arstechnica, classic.slashdot.org, maybe a little ttac.com . facebook.com now works much better than it used to (uninstalled the facebook app once they started uploading my address book).
Rarely visit the linked news articles at sources with terribad ads, can glean enough of the interesting tidbits and analysis through the comments by fine folks like you.
Oops, wrong "Reply To" link :P
Er, what's the problem with the explanation for how this works? All the stuff I can find to read about these mechanisms were just unraveled over the past decade or so, like: http://www.todaysdietitian.com... [todaysdietitian.com]
Subjecting yourself to those fad diets (eating significantly less) triggers increased release of cortisol (a stress hormone). Visceral fat has more receptors for cortisol than the subcutaneous fats, so they activate and start stashing away more of the energy from the food passing through your gut.
All your other points are right on the mark... so don't starve yourself; eat enough (good) food and be happy, since living a happy lifestyle really helps keep your hormones in check!
Er, what's the problem with the explanation for how this works? All the stuff I can find to read about these mechanisms were just unraveled over the past decade or so, like: http://www.todaysdietitian.com...
Subjecting yourself to those fad diets (eating significantly less) triggers increased release of cortisol (a stress hormone). Visceral fat has more receptors for cortisol than the subcutaneous fats, so they activate and start stashing away more of the energy from the food passing through your gut.
All your other points are right on the mark... so don't starve yourself; eat enough (good) food and be happy, since living a happy lifestyle really helps keep your hormones in check!
Meanwhile, on the other end of I-90 ....
http://www.thestranger.com/slo...
Hmm, yeah, you're probably right... I really never paid attention to calorie counts since I usually just eat until I feel full.
Looking up some of my food now, it looks like my typical day might be something like:
* 400 calorie breakfast - cereal w/ 2% milk or pop tarts if I'm running late.
* 600 calorie lunch - usually leftovers, but just going by the "Meatball sandwich" fallback at PotBelly's
* 200 - 400 calories in candy and afternoon snacking
* big dinner plate or two of spaghetti and meat or rice and meat and veggies, but probably not much more than 1000 calories, come to think of it.
Don't drink soda, mostly just tea and water, and have the occasional fruit or juice+seltzer. So maybe I still manage to operate at a bit of a deficit sometimes to make up for the occasional binge over the holidays or at buffets or finishing off other people's dishes when we go out :P
The body has no 'hoarding mechanism' that is triggered by 'dieting'.
The body always tries to 'hoard' or safe or store surplus. Depending on the food composition it can do that, or can't do it.
Sure there is. Read up on visceral fat vs. subcutaneous fat. It's really quite fascinating.
The visceral fat cells grow in your gut to store starches for slow release during winter hibernation. Once your body is convinced that it needs to bulk up on visceral storage, those cells get first dibs on any energy absorption from food in your intestines and then they grow as much as they can. Of course, if you never go into hibernation or suffer through winter food shortages, they become a problem. They don't die when you diet, they just get slightly smaller and start to complain. They might even be evil enough to withhold nutrition from the rest of your body, persuading you to eat more when you don't really need it.
Subcutaneous fat is stored all around your body. Those cells aren't as vicious and greedy as the visceral fat cells, since they compete for energy along with the rest of the cells in your body. And they also tend to be located near your muscles for quick release when you need it.
There are also differences between brown fat vs. white fat, where brown fat has a higher metabolic rate to help keep you warm in cold climates.
The body does a lot of interesting things to stay alive, and my point is that lifestyle can be a much more important influence than diet. And I kind of feel sad for people who are frustrated by trying to hack their diet alone.
Yeah, like I mentioned, the nightly beer and ice cream habit I began a few years ago pushed me over the line. Also need to start keeping my hands out of the free candy jar at work. But not too bad considering.
Yeah, I'm a computer nerd and not an athlete. But all I'm saying is that I pretty much do the minimum of 30 min of entertaining exercise per day and have a few minor lifestyle choices to be more active when the opportunity presents itself. For that, I've never had to limit calorie intake. I eat as much good food as I care to enjoy, and then a bit more to clean the plate.
My father was 300 lbs when he was my age. The rest of my family on both the Western and Eastern sides certainly qualify as obese. I'm just saying that we think we can control our bodies by "outsmarting" it with "nutritional science", but it's not that easy. Hoowever, just adapt the lifestyle you want to live (ninja, mountain climber, badass bus commuter, whatever) and your body will adjust to the shape it needs to support that activity... a good 6 months to a year after maintaining steady state.
I suspect that any of the simple "calorie input - calorie output" dieters are not adequately accounting for their shit. It's not like any of those diet plans include a shit calorimeter, so they're probably missing some body hacks that they could be using to manage energy balance in their control volume.
Exactly! That also sounds precisely like what people do when they 'diet'. And then they get all pissy when their bodies return to normal for their lifestyle next season and blame the science for failing them.
I agree with you that the science is good. But the human body is complex, and people are simple.
I eat a lot (I am The Finisher at dinner parties) and never dieted. Dieting trigger's your body's hoarding mechanism, where it doesn't know when it's going to get its next fix so it packs everything away just in case. My digestive tract tends to just take what it needs and dumps the rest.
Sure there are a bunch of other things I do to remain relatively svelte 6 ft ish 200lbs. I'm usually doing interesting things, so I don't eat or snack out of boredom. When I do eat, I take it slow, so I don't usually keep eating after I get full. No fast food. Lots of Asian food. A good amount of Asian blood that has had a few thousand years of agrarian culture over the hunters and gatherers. I walk and bike and take the stairs whenever practical. An hour of martial arts every other day.
So I have gained 10 lbs in the past few years, mostly since I started drinking (only on non-martial arts days) and started eating candy at work. I'm starting to replace the candy with veggies and the beer with hard liquor, so maybe that along with breathing a little more deeply should even it out again.
I found myself happiest in places where I was trusted to go off and make things happen. Examples:
* A P-card, even if it was a small limited one, to spend however I thought would give the company the most bang for the buck. Maybe we just need a special cable to get a demo project working. Maybe I save it up for a second monitor. Maybe the group just needs to chill out together over a beer at the end of the day. We can deal with full transparency and expense reports, just don't make us go through a months-long procurement cycle for silly stuff that will make our lives better.
* Business travel perks - some of the larger companies I worked for had pretty nice deals worked out with airlines and hotels and rental car agencies. I kinda miss some of those loyalty perks more than I thought I would. Transit passes are also a nice one, and a big tax-deductible perk as well.
* Control over some of my own time. Maybe call them "hack days" or whatever Google's 20% time used to be back in the day, but give your workers their own small budget of time to work on whatever they see fit to fix. Whether they invest it in new R&D or tackling old tech debt that's been nagging them, they probably know better than any of the project managers where their time would be best spent to give them more free time and capabilities in the future.
* Pet projects: in a similar vein, some of my best managers would kinda create projects that... didn't exactly make business sense, but would be nice engineering challenges to offer our engineers to allow them to take ownership of a relatively unimportant component that would nevertheless challenge them to use parts of their engineering education that would otherwise not get engaged. Examples might be a little custom button box interface for an HMI engineer, or a custom sensor for an electrical engineer... things that would be almost trivial to adapt an existing COTS part for or just outsource and bill the customer. But these give a nice, polished, customized touch to the delivered product that the engineer actually had a deeper hand in designing, implementing, and showing off.
* Access to good office administrators. Haven't really had one to take care of the many administrative hassles until recently. They are a big help! Unfortunately the larger companies had spent so much money building "self-service" web-based junk that they were continually changing (and retraining for), that we were always wasting lots of high cost engineering hours taking care of expense reports and office supplies and maintenance when a well-connected office administrator at half the pay could deftly take care of that stuff for us and shield the engineers from a lot of the frustrations.
* Mentoring opportunities: I'm not going to say that you'll get more work out of interns than you put in to training them (and fixing some of the jobs that you inadequately trained them to tackle :P ). But nothing really forces you to know your job well than teaching someone else to do it. And it does foster a certain amount of pride in your work at your workplace, if only because you're constantly reintroducing your people as "this is my co-worker X, and they're good at Y; and if you need something done with Z, go seek person DD". It's important to occasionally acknowledge what your working group is good and functional at, because if you only complain about everything, then what are you doing surrounding yourself with incompetents?
* Personal development plans: (not to be confused with the performance review for business objectives) ... this includes continuous education and training (hey, more things with favorable tax incentives!), professional certifications, attendance/presentations at conferences and trade shows, and other forward-looking goals. It does mean much to me that my managers take an interest in developing my long-range plan, with both serious and somewhat entertaining pursuits, and what they can do with their network to provide opp
Eh, I think the restaurant business was looking into doing something like this as well... (maybe they do now that FourSquare is processing payments).
Imagine if a restaurant knew as soon as walked in how much you tipped them (or other restaurants in the "socio-financial network") last time?
RTFA, it was just an elaborate troll to get this surrealist theme song parody stuck in your head:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Good for CPUs numbering up into the 80's. Sheesh.
Oh, I don't think you have to be a Republican to appreciate how well "Ballghazi" just rolls off the tongue.
Eh, we used to live in the DC metro area and went to those parties. Government employees are government employees, and friendly people. Even the ones in the military.
Also, at least half of the people who work at the NSA are the whitehats, responsible for really boring things like system hardening guides
https://www.nsa.gov/ia/mitigat...
Frankly I'm glad they're there doing their thing, and hopefully keeping an eye on some of the blackhats they have running around on their TS/SCI projects.
For basic workstation stuff it's fine.
It's also pretty heavily used for development and test of server deploys. A lot of DevOps types are trying to use VirtualBox to build disposable test clusters for their applications, and has been the default and one of the best supported engines for vagrant.
Unfortunately, a lot of app footprints are starting to rely on deploying other "appliance VMs" in your VM (yo dawg), and VirtualBox is still straggling behind the others on implementing some form of nested VM capability. https://www.virtualbox.org/tic... So it's kinda getting to a point of having a large and growing number of server apps that you won't be able to use VirtualBox to set up a local development and test environment for things that involve, say, using a Stackato PAAS, or a FEO appliance, or an Apigee API gateway appliance, etc. to pick a bunch of essential pieces from recent memory. At least not without a lot of work to host those VMs directly on VirtualBox and not looking or working at all like they would when they hit production.
Also, Airbus refused to submit a proposal for this when approached several years ago (while there was no bidding process, basic proposals were requested from both Airbus and Boeing) because they knew it was a no contest decision.
Does the contest have to come from Airbus though? The last big scandal for the KC-135 tanker replacement came from Northrup Grumman, who wanted to buy Airbus jets and refit them for for aerial refueling here in the US.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K...
Of course, that was a much larger project with more money at stake.
You couldn't have possibly meant sarcasm </sarcasm>
(trollface) :-D
Yeah, you probably have it right.
My description of a Software Architect was mostly tongue-in-cheek... at most of the places I've worked they were the ones that determined "high-level" things, like what expensive commercial middleware everyone was going to have to integrate with and spend all of their time coding around its deficiencies. Architects rarely touched actual code. Maybe they had a PHd or something but more often not, but they did get to make decisions that involved the movement of large amounts of capital budget (which of course is completely separate from the labor budgets required to cope with them).
My description of a Software Engineer might have been closer to what's nebulously referred to as a Systems Engineer (which is more of a glorified term for SysAdmin these days). Yours might be closer to what companies refer to as a Software Development Engineer, which is the job code most big software companies hire under nowadays.
But yeah, there's really no difference between any of these categories other than HR labels. And pay grades. And social structure. And job satisfaction garnered from different skillsets and abilities.
Yeah, there's probably a matrix of skills and abilities, depending on how much collaboration you need to do with customers / suppliers / other developers.
Great Coder: can make a computer do stuff. In code. No one else really cares how they do their thing. They just take a defined process and codify it to automate it or whatever.
Great Programmer: can write programs, presumably that other people have to use. Hopefully you still have this programmer around if you need to fix their program.
Great Software Developer: Now we're getting somewhere... they probably work together with other programmers as a team and start worrying about more of the stuff they learned in CS classes, like code reusability, refactoring, complexity, maybe some analysis of algorithms and pure math logic.
Great Software Engineer: Maybe less of the pure math and algorithms on how to do tricky things in code, but more of the practical stuff like defining code standards, test harnesses, and social aspects of code maintenance, like the discipline of setting up and maintaining the process through peer reviews, continuous integration, etc.
Great Software Architect: Solves problems before they occur by drawing pictures. But still gets blamed for all of the new problems anyway.
A lot of greatness involves managing complexity and making things as simple as possible for other people to understand and maintain. But no simpler.
But compared to Seattle? No. There's a reason people here in Seattle spend so much on dial-up. We long for the Internet. I pay almost $450 per month for the T1 to my house. The city granted a monopoly to Comcat for my neighborhood and will not allow competition but the city's rules also block Comcast from providing access so we're stuck with either dialup or paying for expensive typically business-only telco lines. Here in Seattle we care about Internet access. When I lived in Cary, NC, I had more than ten times as much bandwidth nearly ten years ago as compared to what I have in Seattle. It was also 1/8 the price. That shows NC doens't give a damn about the Internet. Here in Seattle we put our money where our mouth is. We are educated unlike those people that suck at the tit of cheap access. We pay our own way.
Damn... let me know when that changes. Here on the Eastside in Redmond we have 50/50Mbps FiOS from Frontier for $60/mo. or so. Back when I lived in DC, we had Verizon FiOS and it was pretty great, except I had to pay extra for the Business FiOS so they'd unblock HTTP(S)/SMTP on my home server (and get vaguely more helpful customer service). But none of that silliness is necessary at the Frontier Residential tier.
This.
I grew up in the DC metro area. Snowstorms in New England are notoriously hard to predict, especially nor'easters like this one (which are typically a combination of 2-3 storm systems).
Sure, you can see it coming down from the Midwest, but it's always hard to tell exactly what's going to happen to a blizzard after it stumbles over the Appalachian Mountains, which will divert some of it and squeeze some or all of the moisture out of it. Then it collides with some storm full of rain coming in from the North Atlantic. Then the wildcard is some sort of warmer air coming up from the south... It all collides over New England. The computer models can tell you what's going into the mix, but who knows exactly where it's going to transition from rain to snow? WHICH STORM WILL WIN?! A butterfly in Miami decides.
Eh, I've had it happen to me... I won a small paper airplane competition (really more of an art project) years ago, in just one category out of several, and not really anything notable. But all of the news sites ran a little blurb with the headline "Engineer from $AEROSPACE_GIANT (NYSE:$BLAH) wins airplane competition"
I try not to assume too much these days, like that the corporate-controlled media isn't in it for the money if there's money to be made.
Plus, they subliminally put the word "dump" right there in the headline next to the company names, and you know all the robotic stock traders make trades automatically off of the incoming stream of news feeds.