Yeah, that sounds about right. I'd always been suspicious about the utility and value of LinkedIn, though I know several co-workers who swear by it. I suspect that it's not sufficiently better, than say, Facebook, aside from the fact that everyone attempts to be a bit more professional.
I'd recommend a more traditional job-search site, such as monster.com . I've gotten just about all of my jobs over the past 12 years through recruiters searching through there. These are used by companies when they're ready and somewhat desperate to hire, so I find it much more effective than trying to target a few employers when they probably don't/won't even have budget approved for positions for a few months out. Also the recruiters will usually be more than happy to help you tweak your application to best suit their clients, which is actually a big help.
The signal/noise ratio can be somewhat low, as you might expect... I use an alternative email account reserved for mailing lists and website bots, but it's not the spam-magnet I would have expected and have successfully been able to opt out of most of the other recruiter mailing list DBs that pull profiles from monster.
My largest gripe is that recruiters often won't care to honor your location preferences, so you'll get spammed with several short-term contracts in bumfark nowhere. But it's not a big deal and sometimes kinda interesting to sift through.
Yes, it will take a cyber Pearl Harbor. Congress is reactive, not proactive. Otherwise, they'd be called "Progress".
So just be happy that they're doing nothing now. Because after cyber Pearl Harbor, we're in for all kinds of pain. The internet kill switch will happen. They'll destroy that which they don't understand.
On the plus side, we'll finally be forced to implement the distributed p2p mesh network to get around it. Go set up your openmesh now... while it's still publicly available;-)
No. Netflix has an incestuous relationship with Microsoft. That's why they are using Silverlight while Amazon is using Flash.
So Amazon works fine in Linux.
Yeah, this is the real answer. Drop Netflix for Amazon Prime streaming until Netflix provides a Linux client. It's cheaper per year. Sorry you lose some of the content that's only on Netflix, but it seems like they've been losing some of the good shows anyway.
When Netflix first came out, it was pretty awesome. I was working in near-realtime video transmission then, and was pretty picky about mpeg4 quantization and vertical sync artifacts. Netflix had actually done a pretty good job with handling all that.
Until they moved to Silverlight, and then all the crappy artifacts came back. I feel like it was kinda a bait-and-switch... but it makes sense since early adopters were comparing it to DVD and eventually Bluray, while later adopters were coming from crappy youtube vids.
Netflix can either set minimum silverlight to 5 or find another way to block it. It will be interesting to see if they do that.
Um, I just happened to try this out a few nights ago on my Linux Mint 13 laptop. I had Silverlight 4 on Firefox 14 installed under Wine1.4. The Netflix page made me download a newer version of Silverlight which didn't work.
Of course, I didn't bother with any of the wine patches, so I probably lose anyway. I was going to try Win7 under VirtualBox next to see how that performs.
Well, ostensibly our sense of beauty is tied to having exceedingly average proportions across the population (based on research from plastic surgeons who have to do extensive reconstructive surgery and can't simply just make people look like what they looked like before).
And since most of the human population diverged from the birthplace of civilization between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, and Greece is somewhat nearby, they'd probably do a lot better by that metric.
But thanks to interracial breeding recently enabled by the jet age, the human race is sort of reuniting millenia of divergent evolution to specific climates, and converging again on what people from the seat of humanity would look like.
Cool... call me old-fashioned, but to make things even easier, create a listing on http://monster.com/ (and similar). The best way to get an offer is to have the openings find you, rather than the other way around.
Also, lots of headhunters pull from the monster.com DB, and are more than eager to help you tailor your resume and application to help you fill a position with one of their clients.
On the downside, you'll get lots of contacts for crappy short-term contracts in crappy places all over, so use a disposable email / google voice phone number. But it's not a terrible problem to have.
I dunno, there were a lot of great apps for PalmOS that still don't have decent replacements in the Android / iOS world. Troll around http://www.freewarepalm.com/ and other ancient "best PalmOS apps" lists for ideas.
OTOH, teaching is actually pretty difficult, if you don't have the people skills, classroom management, and "presence". Although people say "those that can, do; those that can't, teach", those people are idiots. If it doesn't come to you naturally, it can be pretty difficult to teach a teacher to teach (ironically enough).
Subby might also try subbing (heh heh) for a while, since the barrier of entry is ridiculously low, and you can kinda have a trial-by-fire to see how well you do with your classroom management skills. That should let build some quick experience and let you know if you have enough of a knack for teaching before you invest in all of the bureaucratic certs and stuff.
--- As an alternative to working at Walmart, I've always fantasized about becoming a bus driver for a school or university. At least then you could always hold onto the dim hope that you somehow end up mentoring the next Sergei Brin or Danica McKellar and someday might get kickback for movie rights for your side role in their life story.
I finally bought a whole bunch for myself a month or two ago when they were on a fire sale for $5 a pack. They're really quite wonderful, esp. for chemistry buffs... they naturally form 90deg or 60deg bonds, so you can can arrange them in body-centered-cubic and face-centered-cubic crystalline formations. It's fun and actually challenging bending them into various regular structures, since a single stray magnet can disrupt the field enough to turn them into a jumble again.
Never looked at them twice at their normal boutique prices of $40 a pack, though.:/
I had to color in lines, stuff my ballot into multiple envelops, then drive it to a ballot drop box. Thanks, WA, that is much better than walking to the polling place that used to be a block away.
Yes, yes it is. Just moved to WA from MD. This was much more pleasant and easier... it's almost like they want you to vote.
Back in MD, only on election day would we be able to walk to our polling place at the condominium office before or after work, depending upon what we wanted to be late for. The walk was pleasant enough, but might have been difficult for the elderly and disabled. Then we got a smartcard and stood in line for half an hour. Then we put the card in some Diebold machine and pawed out some options we had memorized onto the touchscreen. Then we returned the smartcard into a box. My wife (a teacher) never bothered with any of this.
Last weekend in WA we had a leisurely read through the voter's pamphlet that had statements for and against each measure and candidate, and bubbled in the options together. Then we dropped off our ballots in the box next to the library after returning an overdue book. The line was 1 car.
Yeah, someone just needs to introduce these people to running their own server with some of the realism mods... maybe that will get this survivalism fetish out of their systems.
(but really, all the more power to them. When it hits the fan, I'm certainly gonna have some bloody knuckles from punching trees)
Eh, I think we should just be glad that the extra energy is being accounted for... I'd be more worried if there was all this extra energy and it was disappearing somewhere to be unleashed later.
And while both Katrina and Sandy were somewhat strong as hurricanes come, the main reason that they did lots of damage was that they actually hit densely populated areas.
And for all the people whining about climate change "raising taxes" to encourage people to "conserve energy" (hey, I though getting more done with less was always a central tenet of conservatism), you're definitely going to see it in your insurance premiums already.
So the lawyers can negotiate and meet in the middle somewhere. The guy didn't make a defense, so they went with whatever the plaintiff's lawyers asked for.
Lawyers gotta lawyate. What makes you think a court is about justice?
Thanks, will have a look at this when I'm off work...
I don't buy into the a most of the dogma and spirituality of meditation, but IMHO, transcendental meditation does seem a lot like overclocking your brain... a systems maintenance task I think most Slashdotters would enjoy.
For the most part, MRI scans have shown that we barely use more than 10-20% of our brains at a time based on blood flow. And we typically don't use more than 20% of our lung capacity while at rest either. Through this "mindful" deep, slow breathing, we can maximize the utilization of our lung capacity, increasing the oxygen flow in our circulatory system, and give our brains more energy than it knows what to do with. Simultaneously, you try to clear out all of your TSR processes that clog up your thoughts, and kind of let your neural network grow unconstrained, focused yet without thinking about anything in particular. A lot of people have trouble with not thinking in particular... I think most of the practices have you focus on your breathing or repeating a keyword, but I think that's kind of a crutch.
The other part is learning how to relax _all_ of your muscles, zero-ing out all of your neural outputs, which is actually much harder to do than you would imagine, but this helps you recalibrate and reduce oxygen consumption by the rest of your body, leaving more for your brain (the brain typically uses up 20% of your oxygen supply, even though it only accounts for about 10% of the body weight by mass). I typically go through all of my muscle pairs in multiple passes, and am usually able to bring them to a slightly lower 'zero' in each pass.
Finally, and perhaps the most difficult task... you kind of have to open up all of your 6 senses -- all of the inputs to your neural network -- and simultaneously acknowledge all of them, yet basically ignore/dismiss them (at least consciously). Unblock all of your filters and allow your subconscious neural network process everything.
Anyway, fun times, but let me know if there are other good reads about the physiology of meditation... I think relatively simple, straightforward body-hacks like this are somewhat underappreciated these days because of all of the spiritual hype (which I kinda just see as clever marketing... there's no way I could convince my 10-year-old or anyone for that matter to sit still long enough to try all of this unless he believed it would help him levitate eventually).
What kind of engineer needs to ask hundreds, or thousands, about what type of pen to get?
Yeesh... yeah. You're an engineer, not a teacher. Just take whatever they stock in the supply cabinet at work and be happy with it! And if it sucks, well, it's their loss in quality of your work output:P
Personally, I would just find some cheap mass manufactured pen that was comfortable to hold and get good at controlling it. If one started having problems with globing or irregular coverage, I'd just pitch it. But I remember doing lots of ballpoint pen drawing/shading as a kid and rarely running into problems.
But since I'm a cheapskate, I just picked up a handful of cheap 19" - 21" CRTs from craigslist for between $5 - $20 each.
For laptops, I would just as soon try to set up compiz-fusion to scale (with full anti-aliasing) a large VNC session or something, so I can zoom in and out of a large X server session. I'm kinda wondering why more UIs aren't really going this route (other than maybe being slightly nauseating.)
"breaks" works too in this context... as in "made a fast break for it". I suppose they just left that little double entendre homophone in there to ruffle some feathers that need ruffling, though.
"breaks" works too in this context... as in "made a fast break for it". I suppose they just left that little double entendre in there to ruffle some feathers that need ruffling, though.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, that sounds about right. I'd always been suspicious about the utility and value of LinkedIn, though I know several co-workers who swear by it. I suspect that it's not sufficiently better, than say, Facebook, aside from the fact that everyone attempts to be a bit more professional.
I'd recommend a more traditional job-search site, such as monster.com . I've gotten just about all of my jobs over the past 12 years through recruiters searching through there. These are used by companies when they're ready and somewhat desperate to hire, so I find it much more effective than trying to target a few employers when they probably don't/won't even have budget approved for positions for a few months out. Also the recruiters will usually be more than happy to help you tweak your application to best suit their clients, which is actually a big help.
The signal/noise ratio can be somewhat low, as you might expect... I use an alternative email account reserved for mailing lists and website bots, but it's not the spam-magnet I would have expected and have successfully been able to opt out of most of the other recruiter mailing list DBs that pull profiles from monster.
My largest gripe is that recruiters often won't care to honor your location preferences, so you'll get spammed with several short-term contracts in bumfark nowhere. But it's not a big deal and sometimes kinda interesting to sift through.
Stop all this rhyming right now! I mean it!
Yes, it will take a cyber Pearl Harbor. Congress is reactive, not proactive. Otherwise, they'd be called "Progress".
So just be happy that they're doing nothing now. Because after cyber Pearl Harbor, we're in for all kinds of pain. The internet kill switch will happen. They'll destroy that which they don't understand.
On the plus side, we'll finally be forced to implement the distributed p2p mesh network to get around it. Go set up your openmesh now... while it's still publicly available ;-)
No. Netflix has an incestuous relationship with Microsoft. That's why they are using Silverlight while Amazon is using Flash.
So Amazon works fine in Linux.
Yeah, this is the real answer. Drop Netflix for Amazon Prime streaming until Netflix provides a Linux client. It's cheaper per year. Sorry you lose some of the content that's only on Netflix, but it seems like they've been losing some of the good shows anyway.
When Netflix first came out, it was pretty awesome. I was working in near-realtime video transmission then, and was pretty picky about mpeg4 quantization and vertical sync artifacts. Netflix had actually done a pretty good job with handling all that.
Until they moved to Silverlight, and then all the crappy artifacts came back. I feel like it was kinda a bait-and-switch... but it makes sense since early adopters were comparing it to DVD and eventually Bluray, while later adopters were coming from crappy youtube vids.
Netflix can either set minimum silverlight to 5 or find another way to block it. It will be interesting to see if they do that.
Um, I just happened to try this out a few nights ago on my Linux Mint 13 laptop. I had Silverlight 4 on Firefox 14 installed under Wine1.4. The Netflix page made me download a newer version of Silverlight which didn't work.
Of course, I didn't bother with any of the wine patches, so I probably lose anyway. I was going to try Win7 under VirtualBox next to see how that performs.
Well, ostensibly our sense of beauty is tied to having exceedingly average proportions across the population (based on research from plastic surgeons who have to do extensive reconstructive surgery and can't simply just make people look like what they looked like before).
And since most of the human population diverged from the birthplace of civilization between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, and Greece is somewhat nearby, they'd probably do a lot better by that metric.
But thanks to interracial breeding recently enabled by the jet age, the human race is sort of reuniting millenia of divergent evolution to specific climates, and converging again on what people from the seat of humanity would look like.
http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/200512/mixed-race-pretty-face
So the mixed-race melting-pot American might do OK faced-off with a near-the-birthplace-of-humanity Grecian.
Maybe it also explains why middle eastern chicks are so hot they have to throw a burka on them? j/k
*whew*
Now I don't feel so bad about not getting most of the jokes in Shakespeare without referring to the Cliff's notes.
I'm *so* relieved. Sort of.
I ought itanic it n ceberg nd ank nto he ea
Cool... call me old-fashioned, but to make things even easier, create a listing on http://monster.com/ (and similar). The best way to get an offer is to have the openings find you, rather than the other way around.
Also, lots of headhunters pull from the monster.com DB, and are more than eager to help you tailor your resume and application to help you fill a position with one of their clients.
On the downside, you'll get lots of contacts for crappy short-term contracts in crappy places all over, so use a disposable email / google voice phone number. But it's not a terrible problem to have.
I dunno, there were a lot of great apps for PalmOS that still don't have decent replacements in the Android / iOS world. Troll around http://www.freewarepalm.com/ and other ancient "best PalmOS apps" lists for ideas.
OTOH, teaching is actually pretty difficult, if you don't have the people skills, classroom management, and "presence". Although people say "those that can, do; those that can't, teach", those people are idiots. If it doesn't come to you naturally, it can be pretty difficult to teach a teacher to teach (ironically enough).
Subby might also try subbing (heh heh) for a while, since the barrier of entry is ridiculously low, and you can kinda have a trial-by-fire to see how well you do with your classroom management skills. That should let build some quick experience and let you know if you have enough of a knack for teaching before you invest in all of the bureaucratic certs and stuff.
---
As an alternative to working at Walmart, I've always fantasized about becoming a bus driver for a school or university. At least then you could always hold onto the dim hope that you somehow end up mentoring the next Sergei Brin or Danica McKellar and someday might get kickback for movie rights for your side role in their life story.
I finally bought a whole bunch for myself a month or two ago when they were on a fire sale for $5 a pack. They're really quite wonderful, esp. for chemistry buffs... they naturally form 90deg or 60deg bonds, so you can can arrange them in body-centered-cubic and face-centered-cubic crystalline formations. It's fun and actually challenging bending them into various regular structures, since a single stray magnet can disrupt the field enough to turn them into a jumble again.
Never looked at them twice at their normal boutique prices of $40 a pack, though. :/
I had to color in lines, stuff my ballot into multiple envelops, then drive it to a ballot drop box. Thanks, WA, that is much better than walking to the polling place that used to be a block away.
Yes, yes it is. Just moved to WA from MD. This was much more pleasant and easier... it's almost like they want you to vote.
Back in MD, only on election day would we be able to walk to our polling place at the condominium office before or after work, depending upon what we wanted to be late for.
The walk was pleasant enough, but might have been difficult for the elderly and disabled.
Then we got a smartcard and stood in line for half an hour. Then we put the card in some Diebold machine and pawed out some options we had memorized onto the touchscreen. Then we returned the smartcard into a box. My wife (a teacher) never bothered with any of this.
Last weekend in WA we had a leisurely read through the voter's pamphlet that had statements for and against each measure and candidate, and bubbled in the options together. Then we dropped off our ballots in the box next to the library after returning an overdue book. The line was 1 car.
Hmm, disappointed it wasn't a minecraft video.
Yeah, someone just needs to introduce these people to running their own server with some of the realism mods... maybe that will get this survivalism fetish out of their systems.
(but really, all the more power to them. When it hits the fan, I'm certainly gonna have some bloody knuckles from punching trees)
... You mean two body shots and one headshot?
Just trying to keep things sexual ... o_O
Eh, I think we should just be glad that the extra energy is being accounted for... I'd be more worried if there was all this extra energy and it was disappearing somewhere to be unleashed later.
And while both Katrina and Sandy were somewhat strong as hurricanes come, the main reason that they did lots of damage was that they actually hit densely populated areas.
And for all the people whining about climate change "raising taxes" to encourage people to "conserve energy" (hey, I though getting more done with less was always a central tenet of conservatism), you're definitely going to see it in your insurance premiums already.
So the lawyers can negotiate and meet in the middle somewhere. The guy didn't make a defense, so they went with whatever the plaintiff's lawyers asked for.
Lawyers gotta lawyate. What makes you think a court is about justice?
Interesting notions but you assume that the lawmakers actually care about common sense.
They don't. They care about keeping their palms greased.
WRONG metaphor to use with this story, now it will take a few strong drinks to get that mental image out of my head...
Maybe a few 'shots'? <badumching>
Thanks, will have a look at this when I'm off work...
I don't buy into the a most of the dogma and spirituality of meditation, but IMHO, transcendental meditation does seem a lot like overclocking your brain... a systems maintenance task I think most Slashdotters would enjoy.
For the most part, MRI scans have shown that we barely use more than 10-20% of our brains at a time based on blood flow. And we typically don't use more than 20% of our lung capacity while at rest either. Through this "mindful" deep, slow breathing, we can maximize the utilization of our lung capacity, increasing the oxygen flow in our circulatory system, and give our brains more energy than it knows what to do with. Simultaneously, you try to clear out all of your TSR processes that clog up your thoughts, and kind of let your neural network grow unconstrained, focused yet without thinking about anything in particular. A lot of people have trouble with not thinking in particular... I think most of the practices have you focus on your breathing or repeating a keyword, but I think that's kind of a crutch.
The other part is learning how to relax _all_ of your muscles, zero-ing out all of your neural outputs, which is actually much harder to do than you would imagine, but this helps you recalibrate and reduce oxygen consumption by the rest of your body, leaving more for your brain (the brain typically uses up 20% of your oxygen supply, even though it only accounts for about 10% of the body weight by mass). I typically go through all of my muscle pairs in multiple passes, and am usually able to bring them to a slightly lower 'zero' in each pass.
Finally, and perhaps the most difficult task... you kind of have to open up all of your 6 senses -- all of the inputs to your neural network -- and simultaneously acknowledge all of them, yet basically ignore/dismiss them (at least consciously). Unblock all of your filters and allow your subconscious neural network process everything.
Anyway, fun times, but let me know if there are other good reads about the physiology of meditation... I think relatively simple, straightforward body-hacks like this are somewhat underappreciated these days because of all of the spiritual hype (which I kinda just see as clever marketing... there's no way I could convince my 10-year-old or anyone for that matter to sit still long enough to try all of this unless he believed it would help him levitate eventually).
What kind of engineer needs to ask hundreds, or thousands, about what type of pen to get?
Yeesh... yeah. You're an engineer, not a teacher. Just take whatever they stock in the supply cabinet at work and be happy with it! And if it sucks, well, it's their loss in quality of your work output :P
But seriously, I would ask what Samuel Silva uses for :
http://www.odditycentral.com/pics/talented-lawyer-draws-stunning-photo-like-ball-point-pen-portraits.html
Personally, I would just find some cheap mass manufactured pen that was comfortable to hold and get good at controlling it. If one started having problems with globing or irregular coverage, I'd just pitch it. But I remember doing lots of ballpoint pen drawing/shading as a kid and rarely running into problems.
Yeah, thanks for making me feel bad for breaking not one but two of my nice 1920x1200 LCDs.
OTOH, 1920x1080 is getting cheap enough that you could grab 2 or even 3 for the price of one WUXGA display. Which makes me want to work and/or play three screens...
http://techreport.com/review/23217/triple-screen-gaming-on-today-graphics-cards
But since I'm a cheapskate, I just picked up a handful of cheap 19" - 21" CRTs from craigslist for between $5 - $20 each.
For laptops, I would just as soon try to set up compiz-fusion to scale (with full anti-aliasing) a large VNC session or something, so I can zoom in and out of a large X server session. I'm kinda wondering why more UIs aren't really going this route (other than maybe being slightly nauseating.)
"breaks" works too in this context... as in "made a fast break for it". I suppose they just left that little double entendre homophone in there to ruffle some feathers that need ruffling, though.
"breaks" works too in this context... as in "made a fast break for it". I suppose they just left that little double entendre in there to ruffle some feathers that need ruffling, though.
I left out "like" because, like, it's supposedly one of those words that annoy people nowadays, my fellow grammar nazis.
I remember seeing that... BTW you can get your "nad" on Netflix... looks all of Top Gear is there