Yeah, I used to work with a lot of those people from Autometric. They used to have a cool Star Trek LCARS interface. They were trying to sell it to do airport security, and had some pretty nifty 3D models that showed the coverage field of every camera. It was more geared to giving you realtime alerts of stuff that's happening on cameras and sensors, though.
It was a spinoff of EDGE, which was pretty much that 3D Earth sensor fusion thing from Snow Crash that was around on SGIs and big iron before being ported over to Windows... just before Google bought Keyhole and made that kind of thing cheap/free. Still has lots of extra analysis features, like calculating radio and radar line-of-sight through mountainous terrain, satellite sensor coverage, and lots of other cool stuff.
Yeah, I second that motion... probably the best software video monitor. Just point it at a V4L2 device, and it'll fill up a directory of still images or short.mov or.swf videos of everything interesting that happens in front of it. Very tunable.
I had it looking out my window for a long time, so you can see snippets of cars driving by, and people walking up to and away from your door. Also had it aimed down the hallway to my computer room at one point, so you can see everyone enter and leave. You can configure it to upload everything to an ftp site or something, so if someone comes in and steals your computer, you might at least see who it was before they jacked it.
Probably not what you're looking for in terms of sifting through lots of prerecorded feeds and alerting you to the interesting bits, but motion probably is the best place to start if you're going to try to hack together a batch script to identify interesting timestamps.
Get into project management, or documentation & training, or something in between. There should be some way to leverage your awesome experience.
It's great that you want to learn more programming or something more "white collar". But a lot of that stuff is a tool, not a trade. And sitting around programming all day is actually pretty hard on a body.
And I don't think industrial programming toolkits really ever go obsolete, or even advance enough for the skills to not be transferrable. So don't be afraid to dive into any of that stuff if it interests you. I'm sure a lot of those automation kits go pretty underutilized, so I'm sure you can make some kind of living going around optimizing them or something.
Yeah, you might have to get on your parents' account, but after $50/mo. for 2 lines, the next 3 lines for kids are just another $5/mo., but are usually/free/ for the first year (and also any subsequent year you renew your contract to, say, take advantage of a cheaper family plan).
Text is extra, but I never use text enough to justify $10/mo. anyway.
I'd sooner pay $15/mo. for a full android plan with a 2GB "soft cap" (you get only 3G instead of HSDPA after you exceed it) or $25/mo. for "unlimited" android data. Then use a free Google Voice account for free unlimited SMS.
I guess in "DevOps", they've started calling sysadmins "Systems Engineers". Which is sort of an insult to my "real" MSSE degree, but it does kinda use the same techniques, sorta. But you ultimately have root on the production servers, so yeah, you're a sysadmin. So search jobs listings for both.
Some main categories of experience we look for (these are some suggestions of the leading FOSS versions of these tools, but bonus for having experience with other tools that do these things... your employer will probably make you use some commercial equivalent anyway)
Monitoring: Nagios / Zenoss , SNORT, NTOP. Know how to write your own monitors. Also get good with writing filters in Wireshark for deeper diagnosis.
Load Balancers: F5 BigIP irules, or NGINX
Build Automation: set up Jenkins to run and report on all of your boring, repetitive tasks. Hands off server deployment with Puppet / Chef; know how to build your own RPM / DEB packages.
Virtualization: VirtualBox and VMware, might as while play with AWS and then set up your own OpenStack cloud too.
Version Control: know your way around Mercurial / GIT / etc. The GUIs are fun.
Ticketing systems: Set up and use Redmine or similar for tracking tasks.
Databases: Know how to backup / restore, poke around using myPHPAdmin or similar.
Agile / Scrumban: yeah, it's just a management fad, and no one practices it right. But at least buff up on the basic concepts so you're familiar with the terminology and what problems they're attempting to solve.
There's more, but these seem to be what I spend a lot of my time doing, and playing with these FOSS tools should get you some familiarity with the concepts and terminology.
Get a job, and make them pay for more education / training / certifications. It's tax-deductible if it's relevant to your job.
It'll also help you maintain your sanity a bit, since the work and projects you do and how you approach things are very different between work and school. You'll also end up less frustrated with the work projects that you don't have complete control over, and more motivated with the school projects that would probably be pointless if you were just doing them for a grade.
And don't worry too much about the BA in Philosophy bit... a lot of the good IT folks I know have bachelor's degrees in English or other stuff. And they're great, because they can communicate with people a bit better sometimes. Certs and perhaps an MS degree in your field will help you later secure more pay and promotion opportunities with the HR of larger companies, though. But to get in the door, you just need demonstrable skills and experience, which sounds like you're on track for.
And thanks to all those lawyers that do get work doing medical malpractice suits, MD degrees aren't much fun either due to insurance costs. It's kinda turned into a less glamorous service sector job these days, with doctors getting overworked by stingy care providers to maximize their return on investment.
I suppose there's still glamour in the "medical tourism" industry, though... where people fly around the world to other, less litigious countries to visit affordable doctors / dentists for major work.
Another interesting sidenote was that Von Braun and his group intentionally surrendered to the US forces ahead of the advancing Russians, because the US was a Christian nation and the Soviets were atheist.
Well, I suppose they have it insulated well. It just needs to maintain energy through a typical stoplight cycle, so just a few minutes. Or maybe they go full retard and and hook up a stirling engine to the pressure vessel so they can at least extract some useful work out of the heat loss;-) Well, that might actually be somewhat useful for keeping A/C and accessories powered while the ICE shuts down at stoplights.
But I suppose compressed air tanks are simpler and easier to maintain, and can probably be made to release their energy in a safer manner during accidents.
I'm guessing the magnetic braids are somewhat similar to the fields used to contain the plasma in a fusion reactor. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokamak
IANANP, but my armchair physicist understanding of fusion reactor containment is that you can't easily control the high energy neutrons in a hot plasma, just the protons. So the magnetic field is kind of a way to at least make the protons flow around in the plasma without touching the walls (and thus melting them). And perhaps they also help corral the neutrons and other high energy matter that aren't affected by electromagnetic interactions. Every once in a while a neutron manages to get free of the container, hits the wall, and releases a lot of heat energy into the wall that would be used to drive a steam turbine.
But I find it interesting that the sun likely seems to have a similar magnetic container in the corona that prevents too much energy from escaping... it's not simply a strong gravitational well that prevents all of the energy of the sun from evaporating out into space inefficiently.
I think the mistake is that they call it a "password" and not a "passphrase".
Most of my better passphrases are made from a few bars of a poem or song I know. Even better, when it comes time to change passphrases every 90 days or so, I can just go on to the next verse without too much thought. The only hard part is not to hum or dance to an obvious tune or rhythm after logging in. And maybe remembering when letters you turn to 133+ if necessary.
I forget the brand, but REI carries a line of secure purses and travel bags with steel-reinforced straps and interior locks and bolts and low-profile carbiners on the straps to make it easier to lock them to furniture and a bit harder to casually snatch your bag.
Of course, they cost more than anything I'd actually put in them.
Actually, the king of Thailand is just as censored as anyone else. He's not allowed to speak to his people, and is always silent and muted in public and on TV. All the lese majeste laws are created and enforced by parliament. The Thai monarchy is very much a symbolic post... the only political thing the royal family appears to do occasionally is send flowers to their favored candidates, or sometimes the news media picks up on a certain color they're wearing and interprets it to mean that they support this group - which has led to some hilarity as everyone else starts wearing whatever color to associate themselves with whatever support.
The king is just some Harvard-educated jazz musician. He's probably pretty groovy, we'd never know. Some people blame the queen for starting some of the political upheavals, but I'm guessing it's mostly due to misogyny.
Meh, I've seen some nice deployments of Dell-branded remote thin clients based on http://www.teradici.com/pcoip-technology.php That was already nettop-sized, and was fast enough to remote 3D content and HD video at decent framerates with enough bandwidth... It was great for secure environments and quiet work environments, so you could maintain all of your hot noisy compute nodes in a central efficient climate-controlled server room, and you could deploy anyone's desktop(s) anywhere with a CAT-5e endpoint..
I could see this getting incrementally smaller and more bandwidth efficient....and Dell selling your PC-on-a-cloud--any-OS-you-want backend as a service if you didn't want to run your own server room.
For the record, back when I took it, my TaeKwonDo instructor made it very clear that it was going to be worth very little in a real fight. I'd almost argue it has a negative effect, because you condition yourself to aim for the most ineffective spots.
Yep, but how many real fights are you really ever going to encounter?
So my CSBs:
When I was maybe a gold or green belt and in 8th grade at a new school, some guy at my bus stop was having a bad day and decided to bully me. I was pretty weak, but threw a round house at his temple as a warning. I meant to stop without touching him, but ended up tapping him gently since I had my shoes on. Anyway, it worked, and word got around school not to mess with me or I'd kick you in your face. It wasn't much, and it was half-jokingly, but it was enough to glide me through the rest of middle school without incident. Eventually I grew much taller, and even though I was a lanky awkward teen, I still had a modicum of poise and confidence to not really draw much more attention from frustrated people looking for easy prey. Best way to win is to not fight and all that.
When I was young I used to have dreams about people chasing me, and I'd run away like my feet were stuck in molasses and wake up in a cold sweat. After a few years of training (longer than I would have expected or like to admit;-) ), I was gradually able to take control of those dreams and successfully fight back and sleep better and wake up in a better mood. It was actually a lot like the dream sequences that Bruce Lee struggled with in "Dragon", which I found creepy, but I guess it means that other people grapple with that kind of thing too.
Anecdotally, I've heard of others trained in the martial arts who had gotten into actual fights and situations where they actually had to apply their skills. In the one funny one, the guy realized that he was pulling his kicks and punches to his assailants as he would in class. They'd step back and blink for a bit, and then get back to attacking him. Then he remembered to move his targets about a foot into the other guys' bodies, and altercation quickly ended.
Combat and self-defence ability can be a side-effect of studying martial arts... but it's not (I'd even say shouldn't) be the primary reason you're doing it. It's just a way of life... learn to appreciate and respect your body and others', develop better command and utility of your body and emotions, and help find and maintain peace in the world.
Heh, yeah, there are actually two main schools of Tae Kwon Do, WTF and ITF (World and International Tae Kwon Do Federations, respectively). WTF is mainly focused on competitive sparring and is the style used in the Olympics... therefore it has a lot of rules and strategies to kind of make it non-lethal and a bit more "showy"... no kicking below the belt, no jabs, more flying / spinning kicks, lots of body armor. ITF schools seem to be a bit more rare, but are closer in theory to the self-defence courses taught to the Korean army.
Either style (and any form of Martial Art) is probably fine for exercise, though... just choose whatever is better for what you want to get out of it. If you want to avoid injuries, you probably want to investigate your school a bit too to find out how aggressive and careful they train your co-students to be.
Tae Kwon Do by itself gets a bit boring after a while, of course, since it's meant to be quick basic training for an army. Every school I've seen mixes up the teachings from a few other styles to add some interest and variety. I recently moved and the school I've been training with does a combination of 8 different styles, and I'm finding parts of it really helps with my back pain and posture.
Anyway, it's a bit pointless arguing about which Martial Arts style is the "best", kinda like arguing about which religion or state university is the "best". They all strive to teach you how to be a better person in one way or another, and give you a foundation to relate to other styles so you can at least have a useful conversation and learn more about what would be a better fit for you. And yes, people get fanatical about whichever style they start with first and have the most personal time invested in, but they all teach humility and respect... respect for your teachers, peers, subordinates, and yes, even for other schools and styles that you might encounter in friendly tournaments. And those are pretty useful skills for everyone to develop.
I've been doing Tae Kwon Do most of my life, and it works pretty well for nerds. I found a school with lots of scientists and engineers, and the emphasis was more on personal growth than competitive sparring.
There's a lot of geometry and physics to think about while you're practicing your drills, and you spend a lot of time thinking about optimizing the various systems in your body. And you get to collect a lot of tools and hacks, various things you can do with your body and other people. Also, I learned a bit of Korean, and get conditioned with some of the exotic cultural protocol as well.
So it might be a good option to check into if you find gyms boring and team sports out of your league.
Heh, not trying to be patriotic or anything (eagle-on-flag meme notwithstanding)... just popped into my head as a quick way to point out the fallacy of buying too much into stereotypes and "conventional wisdom" spouted by one of the downmodded AC trolls, who was obviously already quite bitter.
Nah, I agree with GP... the Windows Steam client seems to have gotten much slower over the past year or so, at least with respect to browsing the store. Launching games you already have installed is pretty swift, though.
Speaking of which, what are the good Linux games in the Linux store? I played with the Steam Linux Beta a little bit last week, but their Linux section is kinda full of indie stuff, and using search seems to return results for all platforms. Couldn't even find L4D2 for Linux, and not really interested in Serious Sam 3.
Esp. interested in games for children, since I have this multiseat Linux box I built for my kids to run Minecraft, but I'm sure they'd love to have access to a little Steam library, and I sure as hell am not going to invest in a second machine and two Windows licenses for a gaming box for them:P
Word... the only reason that 2012 is the end of the netbook for me was because I somehow lost my EeePC while moving across the country:(
I had an EeePC901, which I really think was the perfect size and functionality. If I could find a netbook the same size that had the nVidia ION chipset, I would buy another in a heartbeat. Unfortunately, all of the ones I see on the market nowadays are 10-12" and just too large.
The Nexus 7 is cheap and functional enough for doing most things, but I'd love to have a more hackable platform to run "real" applications. But these days I suppose the Raspberry Pi is what we're supposed to be using for little "kiosk" hacks or video baby monitors or portable wireshark sniffers or whatever.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, I used to work with a lot of those people from Autometric. They used to have a cool Star Trek LCARS interface. They were trying to sell it to do airport security, and had some pretty nifty 3D models that showed the coverage field of every camera. It was more geared to giving you realtime alerts of stuff that's happening on cameras and sensors, though.
It was a spinoff of EDGE, which was pretty much that 3D Earth sensor fusion thing from Snow Crash that was around on SGIs and big iron before being ported over to Windows ... just before Google bought Keyhole and made that kind of thing cheap/free. Still has lots of extra analysis features, like calculating radio and radar line-of-sight through mountainous terrain, satellite sensor coverage, and lots of other cool stuff.
Yeah, I second that motion... probably the best software video monitor. Just point it at a V4L2 device, and it'll fill up a directory of still images or short .mov or .swf videos of everything interesting that happens in front of it. Very tunable.
I had it looking out my window for a long time, so you can see snippets of cars driving by, and people walking up to and away from your door. Also had it aimed down the hallway to my computer room at one point, so you can see everyone enter and leave. You can configure it to upload everything to an ftp site or something, so if someone comes in and steals your computer, you might at least see who it was before they jacked it.
Probably not what you're looking for in terms of sifting through lots of prerecorded feeds and alerting you to the interesting bits, but motion probably is the best place to start if you're going to try to hack together a batch script to identify interesting timestamps.
Get into project management, or documentation & training, or something in between. There should be some way to leverage your awesome experience.
It's great that you want to learn more programming or something more "white collar". But a lot of that stuff is a tool, not a trade. And sitting around programming all day is actually pretty hard on a body.
And I don't think industrial programming toolkits really ever go obsolete, or even advance enough for the skills to not be transferrable. So don't be afraid to dive into any of that stuff if it interests you. I'm sure a lot of those automation kits go pretty underutilized, so I'm sure you can make some kind of living going around optimizing them or something.
So.... is there an equivalent to rc5stats for GIMPS, so we can compare, uh, our harnessed computing prowess?
No, I'm not going to google it. I want your opinion on whether it's any good or not.
I mean, c'mon
http://xkcd.com/413/
Yes, I feel bad that I have a set of Lego Mindstorms and an Arduino in my basement that I haven't done anything with yet.
I did get my EeePC interfaced with this though, via the USB control dongle:
http://www.amazon.com/OWI-OWI-535-Robotic-Arm-Edge/dp/B0017OFRCY
Yeah, you might have to get on your parents' account, but after $50/mo. for 2 lines, the next 3 lines for kids are just another $5/mo., but are usually /free/ for the first year (and also any subsequent year you renew your contract to, say, take advantage of a cheaper family plan).
Text is extra, but I never use text enough to justify $10/mo. anyway.
I'd sooner pay $15/mo. for a full android plan with a 2GB "soft cap" (you get only 3G instead of HSDPA after you exceed it) or $25/mo. for "unlimited" android data. Then use a free Google Voice account for free unlimited SMS.
I guess in "DevOps", they've started calling sysadmins "Systems Engineers". Which is sort of an insult to my "real" MSSE degree, but it does kinda use the same techniques, sorta. But you ultimately have root on the production servers, so yeah, you're a sysadmin. So search jobs listings for both.
Some main categories of experience we look for (these are some suggestions of the leading FOSS versions of these tools, but bonus for having experience with other tools that do these things... your employer will probably make you use some commercial equivalent anyway)
Monitoring: Nagios / Zenoss , SNORT, NTOP. Know how to write your own monitors. Also get good with writing filters in Wireshark for deeper diagnosis.
Load Balancers: F5 BigIP irules, or NGINX
Build Automation: set up Jenkins to run and report on all of your boring, repetitive tasks. Hands off server deployment with Puppet / Chef; know how to build your own RPM / DEB packages.
Virtualization: VirtualBox and VMware, might as while play with AWS and then set up your own OpenStack cloud too.
Version Control: know your way around Mercurial / GIT / etc. The GUIs are fun.
Ticketing systems: Set up and use Redmine or similar for tracking tasks.
Databases: Know how to backup / restore, poke around using myPHPAdmin or similar.
Agile / Scrumban: yeah, it's just a management fad, and no one practices it right. But at least buff up on the basic concepts so you're familiar with the terminology and what problems they're attempting to solve.
There's more, but these seem to be what I spend a lot of my time doing, and playing with these FOSS tools should get you some familiarity with the concepts and terminology.
Get a job, and make them pay for more education / training / certifications. It's tax-deductible if it's relevant to your job.
It'll also help you maintain your sanity a bit, since the work and projects you do and how you approach things are very different between work and school. You'll also end up less frustrated with the work projects that you don't have complete control over, and more motivated with the school projects that would probably be pointless if you were just doing them for a grade.
And don't worry too much about the BA in Philosophy bit... a lot of the good IT folks I know have bachelor's degrees in English or other stuff. And they're great, because they can communicate with people a bit better sometimes. Certs and perhaps an MS degree in your field will help you later secure more pay and promotion opportunities with the HR of larger companies, though. But to get in the door, you just need demonstrable skills and experience, which sounds like you're on track for.
And thanks to all those lawyers that do get work doing medical malpractice suits, MD degrees aren't much fun either due to insurance costs. It's kinda turned into a less glamorous service sector job these days, with doctors getting overworked by stingy care providers to maximize their return on investment.
I suppose there's still glamour in the "medical tourism" industry, though... where people fly around the world to other, less litigious countries to visit affordable doctors / dentists for major work.
Another interesting sidenote was that Von Braun and his group intentionally surrendered to the US forces ahead of the advancing Russians, because the US was a Christian nation and the Soviets were atheist.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wernher_von_Braun#Surrender_to_the_Americans
So we get to blame the Nazis AND the Christians :P
Well, I suppose they have it insulated well. It just needs to maintain energy through a typical stoplight cycle, so just a few minutes. Or maybe they go full retard and and hook up a stirling engine to the pressure vessel so they can at least extract some useful work out of the heat loss ;-) Well, that might actually be somewhat useful for keeping A/C and accessories powered while the ICE shuts down at stoplights.
I don't really understand why more manufacturers are not using flywheels instead, though...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flywheel_energy_storage
But I suppose compressed air tanks are simpler and easier to maintain, and can probably be made to release their energy in a safer manner during accidents.
I'm guessing the magnetic braids are somewhat similar to the fields used to contain the plasma in a fusion reactor.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokamak
IANANP, but my armchair physicist understanding of fusion reactor containment is that you can't easily control the high energy neutrons in a hot plasma, just the protons. So the magnetic field is kind of a way to at least make the protons flow around in the plasma without touching the walls (and thus melting them). And perhaps they also help corral the neutrons and other high energy matter that aren't affected by electromagnetic interactions. Every once in a while a neutron manages to get free of the container, hits the wall, and releases a lot of heat energy into the wall that would be used to drive a steam turbine.
But I find it interesting that the sun likely seems to have a similar magnetic container in the corona that prevents too much energy from escaping... it's not simply a strong gravitational well that prevents all of the energy of the sun from evaporating out into space inefficiently.
I think the mistake is that they call it a "password" and not a "passphrase".
Most of my better passphrases are made from a few bars of a poem or song I know. Even better, when it comes time to change passphrases every 90 days or so, I can just go on to the next verse without too much thought. The only hard part is not to hum or dance to an obvious tune or rhythm after logging in. And maybe remembering when letters you turn to 133+ if necessary.
e.g.:
Ittrl,itjf(14ls;tnefr
(first verse of 'Bohemian Rhapsody')
I forget the brand, but REI carries a line of secure purses and travel bags with steel-reinforced straps and interior locks and bolts and low-profile carbiners on the straps to make it easier to lock them to furniture and a bit harder to casually snatch your bag.
Of course, they cost more than anything I'd actually put in them.
Actually, the king of Thailand is just as censored as anyone else. He's not allowed to speak to his people, and is always silent and muted in public and on TV. All the lese majeste laws are created and enforced by parliament. The Thai monarchy is very much a symbolic post... the only political thing the royal family appears to do occasionally is send flowers to their favored candidates, or sometimes the news media picks up on a certain color they're wearing and interprets it to mean that they support this group - which has led to some hilarity as everyone else starts wearing whatever color to associate themselves with whatever support.
The king is just some Harvard-educated jazz musician. He's probably pretty groovy, we'd never know. Some people blame the queen for starting some of the political upheavals, but I'm guessing it's mostly due to misogyny.
Meh, I've seen some nice deployments of Dell-branded remote thin clients based on http://www.teradici.com/pcoip-technology.php
That was already nettop-sized, and was fast enough to remote 3D content and HD video at decent framerates with enough bandwidth... It was great for secure environments and quiet work environments, so you could maintain all of your hot noisy compute nodes in a central efficient climate-controlled server room, and you could deploy anyone's desktop(s) anywhere with a CAT-5e endpoint..
I could see this getting incrementally smaller and more bandwidth efficient. ...and Dell selling your PC-on-a-cloud--any-OS-you-want backend as a service if you didn't want to run your own server room.
For the record, back when I took it, my TaeKwonDo instructor made it very clear that it was going to be worth very little in a real fight. I'd almost argue it has a negative effect, because you condition yourself to aim for the most ineffective spots.
Yep, but how many real fights are you really ever going to encounter?
So my CSBs:
When I was maybe a gold or green belt and in 8th grade at a new school, some guy at my bus stop was having a bad day and decided to bully me. I was pretty weak, but threw a round house at his temple as a warning. I meant to stop without touching him, but ended up tapping him gently since I had my shoes on. Anyway, it worked, and word got around school not to mess with me or I'd kick you in your face. It wasn't much, and it was half-jokingly, but it was enough to glide me through the rest of middle school without incident. Eventually I grew much taller, and even though I was a lanky awkward teen, I still had a modicum of poise and confidence to not really draw much more attention from frustrated people looking for easy prey. Best way to win is to not fight and all that.
When I was young I used to have dreams about people chasing me, and I'd run away like my feet were stuck in molasses and wake up in a cold sweat. After a few years of training (longer than I would have expected or like to admit ;-) ), I was gradually able to take control of those dreams and successfully fight back and sleep better and wake up in a better mood. It was actually a lot like the dream sequences that Bruce Lee struggled with in "Dragon", which I found creepy, but I guess it means that other people grapple with that kind of thing too.
Anecdotally, I've heard of others trained in the martial arts who had gotten into actual fights and situations where they actually had to apply their skills. In the one funny one, the guy realized that he was pulling his kicks and punches to his assailants as he would in class. They'd step back and blink for a bit, and then get back to attacking him. Then he remembered to move his targets about a foot into the other guys' bodies, and altercation quickly ended.
Combat and self-defence ability can be a side-effect of studying martial arts... but it's not (I'd even say shouldn't) be the primary reason you're doing it. It's just a way of life... learn to appreciate and respect your body and others', develop better command and utility of your body and emotions, and help find and maintain peace in the world.
Heh, yeah, there are actually two main schools of Tae Kwon Do, WTF and ITF (World and International Tae Kwon Do Federations, respectively). WTF is mainly focused on competitive sparring and is the style used in the Olympics... therefore it has a lot of rules and strategies to kind of make it non-lethal and a bit more "showy"... no kicking below the belt, no jabs, more flying / spinning kicks, lots of body armor. ITF schools seem to be a bit more rare, but are closer in theory to the self-defence courses taught to the Korean army.
Either style (and any form of Martial Art) is probably fine for exercise, though... just choose whatever is better for what you want to get out of it. If you want to avoid injuries, you probably want to investigate your school a bit too to find out how aggressive and careful they train your co-students to be.
Tae Kwon Do by itself gets a bit boring after a while, of course, since it's meant to be quick basic training for an army. Every school I've seen mixes up the teachings from a few other styles to add some interest and variety. I recently moved and the school I've been training with does a combination of 8 different styles, and I'm finding parts of it really helps with my back pain and posture.
Anyway, it's a bit pointless arguing about which Martial Arts style is the "best", kinda like arguing about which religion or state university is the "best". They all strive to teach you how to be a better person in one way or another, and give you a foundation to relate to other styles so you can at least have a useful conversation and learn more about what would be a better fit for you. And yes, people get fanatical about whichever style they start with first and have the most personal time invested in, but they all teach humility and respect... respect for your teachers, peers, subordinates, and yes, even for other schools and styles that you might encounter in friendly tournaments. And those are pretty useful skills for everyone to develop.
I've been doing Tae Kwon Do most of my life, and it works pretty well for nerds. I found a school with lots of scientists and engineers, and the emphasis was more on personal growth than competitive sparring.
There's a lot of geometry and physics to think about while you're practicing your drills, and you spend a lot of time thinking about optimizing the various systems in your body. And you get to collect a lot of tools and hacks, various things you can do with your body and other people. Also, I learned a bit of Korean, and get conditioned with some of the exotic cultural protocol as well.
So it might be a good option to check into if you find gyms boring and team sports out of your league.
Heh, not trying to be patriotic or anything (eagle-on-flag meme notwithstanding)... just popped into my head as a quick way to point out the fallacy of buying too much into stereotypes and "conventional wisdom" spouted by one of the downmodded AC trolls, who was obviously already quite bitter.
I'm not a vegetarian because I love animals...
I'm a vegetarian because I HATE plants!
http://memegenerator.net/instance/24860964
[Get called fat lazy and stupid by other countries; beat them at the olympics and land on Mars]
Nah, I agree with GP... the Windows Steam client seems to have gotten much slower over the past year or so, at least with respect to browsing the store. Launching games you already have installed is pretty swift, though.
Speaking of which, what are the good Linux games in the Linux store? I played with the Steam Linux Beta a little bit last week, but their Linux section is kinda full of indie stuff, and using search seems to return results for all platforms. Couldn't even find L4D2 for Linux, and not really interested in Serious Sam 3.
Esp. interested in games for children, since I have this multiseat Linux box I built for my kids to run Minecraft, but I'm sure they'd love to have access to a little Steam library, and I sure as hell am not going to invest in a second machine and two Windows licenses for a gaming box for them :P
Silly NASA, just make the astronauts wear a 6' lead helmet! It's not like it would weigh them down much in outer space!
I keed, I keed.
Word... the only reason that 2012 is the end of the netbook for me was because I somehow lost my EeePC while moving across the country :(
I had an EeePC901, which I really think was the perfect size and functionality. If I could find a netbook the same size that had the nVidia ION chipset, I would buy another in a heartbeat. Unfortunately, all of the ones I see on the market nowadays are 10-12" and just too large.
The Nexus 7 is cheap and functional enough for doing most things, but I'd love to have a more hackable platform to run "real" applications. But these days I suppose the Raspberry Pi is what we're supposed to be using for little "kiosk" hacks or video baby monitors or portable wireshark sniffers or whatever.