Anyway, on-topic, do you really want to work for a company that requires you to know your legal status prior to a job interview? Discrimination is disgusting, and as much as it may hurt, you're better off being knocked back for the job than having it present 40 hours a week.
People need to feed their families, but degrading one's self respect by accepting work where it happens is only inviting more trouble.
Word. At a job interview I'm investigating my potential employers just as much as they're investigating me. I drop plenty of hints as to my life / education / health etc. status, and if it sounds like they might have a problem with that, it's better to work things out in advance rather than be miserable because they expected me to not have a family or something.
Heh, I'm renting a room right now, and pretty much had to do a wifi makeover to get good connectivity in the basement. The signal was very spotty, and it seemed like we would have to reconnect every few minutes if anyone upstairs was also using the signal.
They didn't want to run wires down to the basement, but I found that there was great wifi signal in the wine cellar around the corner. I bought a wifi extender to bounce the signal around the corner. It helped a little bit, but my system would still bounce between the repeater signal and the weak access point upstairs every once in a while. I guess the repeaters only work well if you're well beyond the range of the original access point, and I'm sure it was causing more congestion since it was repeating everything on the same channel.
Then I found if I set it to wifi-tether mode and ran a CAT5e cable to my computer, it would work much better than my computer's wifi. With the big antennas, it did a much better job holding on to the weak signal. But the bandwidth still wasn't ideal, was only getting 15Mbps instead of the full 25Mbps.
Also there were more devices we wanted hooked up to wifi, so I ended up setting it up in wifi-tether mode, and ran the long cable to an old wifi access point I had in our area running on a different channel. I'm actually using the old wifi access point as a wifi bridge (it's plugged into one of the LAN ports instead of the WAN port), so it doesn't act as another router hop, and the DHCP / gateway is served directly by the landlord's wifi AP. Not exactly an advertised setup with the wifi repeater, but now all of our devices get a wonderful and stable signal... definitely happy to have this flexible wifi repeater unit in my toolbox.
If you have an Android device, Wifi Analyzer will do a pretty decent job showing you what's on each channel and what the crossband interference might look like.
Using CyanogenMOD, I also quite often set my phone up as an HSDPA-wifi, HSDPA-USB, or even wifi-usb tether, depending on my situation... and it usually works much better than whatever lousy wifi access point I might encounter in public.
I cannot tell if all of this was a bunch of wanking-while-driving references, but I'll assume it wasn't:-D
I usually drive with my left hand at 8 and my right on the... shifter (even if it's an automatic, and not even one of those tiptronic things). That way I can actually use the armrests. There's a deep depression in the hard plastic under my left elbow.
I must be getting old, though, because my primary ergonomic problems when doing a lot of driving nowadays is with my lower back:P For a while it used to be my knees, but that was solved by getting in and out of the car more like a girl:P
Most planes like the one in the article sort of fly like darts, so of course it had a pretty lousy glide slope. They might have done a bit better with a glider design, that might have rode thermals for a while, but it probably would have been harder on the structural design.
My friends and I tried to make paper airplanes out of large poster boards back in high school, but they didn't do too well (one of my "reader's rides" on my site has video of an attempt to make a posterboard version one of my aircraft). Unfortunately, paper airplanes don't scale up very well. The best results I've seen look more like actual conventional glider aircraft that just happened to be built up using ribs and spars made of paper and covered with a light sheet of paper skinning material.
I like some of the ideas behind EVE... it's really more of an business/economy sim than anything else, except it has cool space graphics. And occasional "rock-paper-scissors" in space which is the best description I've heard of its PvP. Every 6 months or so EVE sends me 5 free days of play, which is enough to get bored of learning and grinding for the next 6 months.
But yeah, I'd much rather be flying... Vendetta Online is pretty decent at that, though I've kinda become disappointed with the ways they've become more EVE-like over the years.
Of course, if you really want accurate space physics, Orbiter is the only sim I know that does a good job of that... There's supposedly a combat mod for it, but most of the mods are kinda a mess.
Plus, it's easier for them to book you for thought crimes they catch you committing via their IP taps. They'll have none of that "but my wifi is open -- it could have been anyone" defense. That won't work for you, sir, you'll be held accountable for whatever flows through your pipes!
WindowsPager still seems to suffer from one of the main drawbacks with VirtualWin... it doesn't work on windows owned by another user. Unfortunately, my current work environment has to have a lot of stuff running as Admin:-/ But now that I know what the problem is, I'll try to do more to rectify that...
I have to agree with the first poster, though, to just use Linux. Compiz Fusion, WindowMaker, Enlightenment, even Metacity offer a lot more control over the windowing environment beyond just nice multiple virtual desktop handling.
Focus follows mouse on Windows is... available (with a regedit hex tweak), but pretty horribly broken. Some apps (Visual Studio) still insist on raising themselves while focused (argh). Other apps won't raise on click (Excel), unless you go through the extra trouble of clicking on the border or titlebar. And of course it still doesn't fix the problem of popup dialogs grabbing focus while you're typing. (Earghhh!) Most of the Linux window managers will put popup dialogs on top of the window that spawned it, without interrupting what you were doing. Finally, it causes problems with popup menus disappearing at times. But I still deal with all that just to get the minor benefit of being able to jump between windows quickly to push more workflow along without screwing up stuff by clicking somewhere.
Also, I'd love some way to push windows down. All of the Linux window managers have some way to do this. I hate having to move or minimize stuff just to get to something important that fell behind. I end up wasting a lot of desktop space cascading windows into a staircase of titlebars just so I can easily raise the one I need without digging through a bunch of identical icons on the taskbar / Alt-Tab window.
It doesn't even really matter if the device is capable of creating interference. The fact is, when the aircraft suddenly jumps and the lights flicker out and the oxygen masks drop from the overhead compartments, everyone and their flight attendants are going to be glaring down with dirty looks at the guy with the little glowing electronic device, thinking "what the FUCK did you DO?!" and they're not going to care one bit what the answer is. Not even the NTSB report that comes out months later is going to vindicate him or ease that guilt one bit.
I've known plenty of people in IT without CS degrees, including English majors. They're great co-workers and seem quite happy getting things like technical documentation and training, which companies always need to handle their attrition, and are a hella more respected than the phone support / QA "infantry".
You might want to look into getting some technical certs to help get your foot in the door... just look at what kinds of requirements some of your job reqs have and invest in some of those certs. You could likely cinch one in maybe a month of cramming with a study guide and an exam for a few hundred $$. If you have a couple thousand to invest, you could even do one of those 1-2 week-long prep courses and get it done faster.
Preferably once you have a nice job, they would be happy to help put you through further certs and degree programs to strengthen their workforce (and your credentials), so try to take advantage of that situation.
Why study engineering? 1) Hardest course loads through college (excepting perhaps hard sciences and premeds).
Yep, I enjoyed the challenge. Actually took quite a few extra honors options that I didn't technically need to, and enrolled in a bunch of pretty difficult electives for the heck of it. Yes, I also failed / withdrew / incompleted some of them... over a few rough semesters I managed to collect one of every possible grade... but really, where else can you explore your limits? I didn't get into a hard school just to try to skirt by with the bare minimum easy classes and avoid all the challenging courses and professors. Besides, no one has ever asked for a transcript (maybe if I went the academic route grades would be important)
2) No girls in classes (5-14%, falls as engineering major gets harder (ie electrical))
Wish this would increase... but at least the girls that are there can be super nerdy++, which is a turn-on for some of us . Besides, this is a plus if you already have a gf from HS like I did. Can be tricky, since you can't really count on girls and relationships to mature until after college. I suppose I lucked out (esp. since my gf/wife ended up financing my last semester of college).
But yeah, unless you get lucky with project teams, chances of finding love on the engineering quad are slim. However, a lot of our professional engineering societies were pretty much run almost exclusively by women... even the Society of Women Engineers wasn't sexist about letting guys join in if you get really desperate. Also, there are usually plenty of girls in classes / clubs like ballroom dancing who dig science / engineering types (particularly the foreign girls)... because face it, you don't really want to be talking to your gf about problem sets all the time.
3) No girls in companies you will end up working at
Given how much trouble people get into for shitting where they eat, this is probably a plus.
4) Facebook friends list is 80% men, most of friends are men. Great if you are networking, crappy if you are trying to network to find the perfect gf/wife. Other majors make balanced set of friends naturally through classes. Their networking, as a result, is exponentially easier.
Get a gf/wife in education, then their social sphere is the exact opposite, and you have achieved balance. Plus then your SO can have all her hot teacher friends over and you can impress them with your... whatever. (Teacher friends are easily impressed, or at least do a great job being super friendly about it even if they aren't.) Also you get to constantly play hookup master with all of your respective friends. (not recommended with friends you want to keep, but entertaining nonetheless)
5) You end up working at a multinational company that pays you less (much less) than finance, law, BUSINESS. Argh. Note that business, finance, and law types went through the OPPOSITE of #1-#4, meaning they end up knowing way more girls, earning more, and having had a better life.
Yeah, but those people are sleazy looking. Also you feel better when you find out they're all indirect overhead and the first on the chopping block when it's time to tighten belts.
6) Yet, you feel as if you contribute way more to society than money movers, patent leeching lawyers, and smoothtalking male/female bimbos/bimbettes.
Heh, yeah, people who make money out of money are in it just as long as other people buy into their bluff. But when it hits the fan, the resourceful ones with the ability will still be... working. Woo. At least it's something that will always have value, and not just evaporate.
You tell ME how f*** up engineering is. You ask why I do it? Because I love analysis, creating, designing, and doing.
And some people's life goal is to be able to go shopping on som
Meh, can't really see much that AI-teacherbots could do that TV-instruction already failed to do in the 70s. Other than just divert resources away from more traditional teaching resources.
Teaching isn't a respected profession in the US (read about how they're treated in Finland). The few teachers that do stick it out pretty much do so on principle until their morale is beat down by administration and lack of resources. They face strict quotas on pencils and copier paper, and annual fads where everyone and their monkeys drop by to tell them exactly how to do their jobs down to where they write the objective on the board and the minimum number of flyers to have on their bulletin boards. The good teachers I've met are very internally motivated, and usually have very supportive spouses with "real" jobs (incidentally, they also tend to be smokin' hot). The rest eventually burn out and sit back and decide to just give as good as they get, which isn't terribly much. Trying something different is typically punished or at the very least not rewarded.
Every once in a while (actually, all the time, it seems) someone comes around and wants to throw a magic bullet at the problem... "oh, if only every child had textbooks, let's throw all this money at textbook publishers!", "oh, if only every child had TV instruction, let's put VCRs in every classroom!", "oh, let's put computers in every classroom, but not really provide a way to use them productively", "oh, if only no child was left behind, let's make them take a month's worth of standardized testing and threaten to fire everyone if their scores don't show Acceptable Yearly Progress!", "oh, let's buy everyone iPads!" (OK, my teacher wife actually sort of liked the last one, because they actually provided decent training and she can use it as a ridiculously expensive workaround for not having a decent pen & paper quota)
But really, the things that have the greatest impact on the students are the things that are closest to the students: their parents, their teachers, their classmates. Invest in improving those first.
Sure technology could help improve productivity, if they have a decent IT department -- just like any other profession. Technology might enhance, but is not going to effectively replace teaching... it happens to be a very human, social interaction. Sheesh, even the Diamond Age featured a human prostitute/teacher ractive for interaction.
Disclaimer: I support public education; I married a teacher
Re:I have an organ donor card...
on
When Are You Dead?
·
· Score: 3, Funny
No, domesticated turkeys are the dumbest birds in the world! They'll drown if they look up at the rain!
I'm just thinking of all the dopeslap moments I'll have when sneaking home late at night and having the lights come on just AFTER I smack my head into a wall.
Well, I was sort of a quasi-IT engineer, and good friends with the real IT folks, so that's probably the only reason this flew. But my best setup was running some 64-bit Linux distro on the bare metal, and installing the stock IT WinXP Pro build with the ancient IE6 we needed for mandatory training in a VM, with all of their stock full disk encryption and everything.
Also had a separate WinXP Server x64 install for a few games. But never porn. Even booting from LiveCDs, I'd never use work equipment for porn, if only for the pure terror from the inevitable nightmares that you'd get from imagining your strange donkey porn popping up onto your laptop during staff mtg presentations. Just don't go there!:P
If you could somehow set yourself up with data access, something like Google Voice or maybe Skype might work well. Then you just have one number to give out to people to reach you that you could set up to ring whatever temporary number(s) you have set up at the time. That way you only have one voicemail to check as well, esp. if you forward all your temporary vm accounts to this service as well.
Meh, everyone is out there just playing CYA. It's amazing that there are some dedicated teachers around making things work in spite of all the hurdles and accompanying low morale.
What would be really cool (and probably more effective) is if administrators were to start tracking metrics on services they should be providing to their staff, like "days gone by without a working copier" and "resources provided vs. resources requested" and stuff. Instead the teaching staff is kinda treated like students... we don't care about you, just deal with it yourself and see how you turn out. Which is a bit apropos for public education... after all, you can't fire students, so what's the point of fostering a culture where you can fire teachers? Just make the whole experience a weed-out drop-out environment:-P (well except that the students can eventually survive and leave for something better:P )
-- I support public education; I married a teacher
Go find a job working as a government contractor. Especially in the defense sector, there's plenty of open source / unixy stuff going on (all the military simulations have been ported from SUN / SGI / HPUX to Linux nowadays). My old job is available... that is, once they lift the budget freeze pending on Congress agreeing on something.
I'm a big Linux guy, but just started working at Microsoft itself last week. Ironically, there's actually lots of open source here... my development machine already had cygwin and the gimp loaded on it. The official policy is that it's OK to use, just don't put any time into developing OSS or looking at OSS source code... pretty reasonable efforts to prevent compromising their closed source revenue stream.
Word. I also found this infinitely more interesting than most of the legal proceedings and politics threads that parade through, even if those are somewhat more tech related.
/Had thought the oldest trees were only around ~1000 years old, and that's even after visiting Gen. Sherman.
Slashdot Mirror
http://hairball.mine.nu/~rwa2/aircraft/
"The arrow" for straight-line distance.
"The flying wing" for glide slope.
"The super guppy" for cargo capacity (usually water).
"The basic glider" is good for loops and stunts.
"The slant-nose glider" for wet terrain (it has landing gear that help keep the wings dry).
Anyway, on-topic, do you really want to work for a company that requires you to know your legal status prior to a job interview? Discrimination is disgusting, and as much as it may hurt, you're better off being knocked back for the job than having it present 40 hours a week.
People need to feed their families, but degrading one's self respect by accepting work where it happens is only inviting more trouble.
Word. At a job interview I'm investigating my potential employers just as much as they're investigating me. I drop plenty of hints as to my life / education / health etc. status, and if it sounds like they might have a problem with that, it's better to work things out in advance rather than be miserable because they expected me to not have a family or something.
Heh, I'm renting a room right now, and pretty much had to do a wifi makeover to get good connectivity in the basement. The signal was very spotty, and it seemed like we would have to reconnect every few minutes if anyone upstairs was also using the signal.
They didn't want to run wires down to the basement, but I found that there was great wifi signal in the wine cellar around the corner. I bought a wifi extender to bounce the signal around the corner. It helped a little bit, but my system would still bounce between the repeater signal and the weak access point upstairs every once in a while. I guess the repeaters only work well if you're well beyond the range of the original access point, and I'm sure it was causing more congestion since it was repeating everything on the same channel.
Then I found if I set it to wifi-tether mode and ran a CAT5e cable to my computer, it would work much better than my computer's wifi. With the big antennas, it did a much better job holding on to the weak signal. But the bandwidth still wasn't ideal, was only getting 15Mbps instead of the full 25Mbps.
Also there were more devices we wanted hooked up to wifi, so I ended up setting it up in wifi-tether mode, and ran the long cable to an old wifi access point I had in our area running on a different channel. I'm actually using the old wifi access point as a wifi bridge (it's plugged into one of the LAN ports instead of the WAN port), so it doesn't act as another router hop, and the DHCP / gateway is served directly by the landlord's wifi AP. Not exactly an advertised setup with the wifi repeater, but now all of our devices get a wonderful and stable signal... definitely happy to have this flexible wifi repeater unit in my toolbox.
If you have an Android device, Wifi Analyzer will do a pretty decent job showing you what's on each channel and what the crossband interference might look like.
Using CyanogenMOD, I also quite often set my phone up as an HSDPA-wifi, HSDPA-USB, or even wifi-usb tether, depending on my situation... and it usually works much better than whatever lousy wifi access point I might encounter in public.
I cannot tell if all of this was a bunch of wanking-while-driving references, but I'll assume it wasn't :-D
I usually drive with my left hand at 8 and my right on the ... shifter (even if it's an automatic, and not even one of those tiptronic things). That way I can actually use the armrests. There's a deep depression in the hard plastic under my left elbow.
I must be getting old, though, because my primary ergonomic problems when doing a lot of driving nowadays is with my lower back :P For a while it used to be my knees, but that was solved by getting in and out of the car more like a girl :P
Hmm, cool, thanks for that insight...
Will make me think twice about driving with my entire hands wrapped around the hub of the steering wheel between the spokes :P
I drive the same way! I've already had children, so I don't really care about what happens when the airbag goes off.
http://hairball.mine.nu/~rwa2/aircraft/ (/shameless plug)
Most planes like the one in the article sort of fly like darts, so of course it had a pretty lousy glide slope. They might have done a bit better with a glider design, that might have rode thermals for a while, but it probably would have been harder on the structural design.
My friends and I tried to make paper airplanes out of large poster boards back in high school, but they didn't do too well (one of my "reader's rides" on my site has video of an attempt to make a posterboard version one of my aircraft). Unfortunately, paper airplanes don't scale up very well. The best results I've seen look more like actual conventional glider aircraft that just happened to be built up using ribs and spars made of paper and covered with a light sheet of paper skinning material.
What, you mean like http://kotaku.com/5842950/blockade-runner-is-a-minecraft+inspired-spaceship-sim ?
I like some of the ideas behind EVE... it's really more of an business/economy sim than anything else, except it has cool space graphics. And occasional "rock-paper-scissors" in space which is the best description I've heard of its PvP. Every 6 months or so EVE sends me 5 free days of play, which is enough to get bored of learning and grinding for the next 6 months.
But yeah, I'd much rather be flying... Vendetta Online is pretty decent at that, though I've kinda become disappointed with the ways they've become more EVE-like over the years.
Of course, if you really want accurate space physics, Orbiter is the only sim I know that does a good job of that... There's supposedly a combat mod for it, but most of the mods are kinda a mess.
Plus, it's easier for them to book you for thought crimes they catch you committing via their IP taps. They'll have none of that "but my wifi is open -- it could have been anyone" defense. That won't work for you, sir, you'll be held accountable for whatever flows through your pipes!
Hmm, thanks for the recommendation...
WindowsPager still seems to suffer from one of the main drawbacks with VirtualWin... it doesn't work on windows owned by another user. Unfortunately, my current work environment has to have a lot of stuff running as Admin :-/ But now that I know what the problem is, I'll try to do more to rectify that...
I have to agree with the first poster, though, to just use Linux. Compiz Fusion, WindowMaker, Enlightenment, even Metacity offer a lot more control over the windowing environment beyond just nice multiple virtual desktop handling.
Focus follows mouse on Windows is... available (with a regedit hex tweak), but pretty horribly broken. Some apps (Visual Studio) still insist on raising themselves while focused (argh). Other apps won't raise on click (Excel), unless you go through the extra trouble of clicking on the border or titlebar. And of course it still doesn't fix the problem of popup dialogs grabbing focus while you're typing. (Earghhh!) Most of the Linux window managers will put popup dialogs on top of the window that spawned it, without interrupting what you were doing. Finally, it causes problems with popup menus disappearing at times. But I still deal with all that just to get the minor benefit of being able to jump between windows quickly to push more workflow along without screwing up stuff by clicking somewhere.
Also, I'd love some way to push windows down. All of the Linux window managers have some way to do this. I hate having to move or minimize stuff just to get to something important that fell behind. I end up wasting a lot of desktop space cascading windows into a staircase of titlebars just so I can easily raise the one I need without digging through a bunch of identical icons on the taskbar / Alt-Tab window.
I thought they were just moving the sweatshops to Vietnam, because, like, cheaper labor. So the Chinese are still out of work :-P
Word.
It doesn't even really matter if the device is capable of creating interference. The fact is, when the aircraft suddenly jumps and the lights flicker out and the oxygen masks drop from the overhead compartments, everyone and their flight attendants are going to be glaring down with dirty looks at the guy with the little glowing electronic device, thinking "what the FUCK did you DO?!" and they're not going to care one bit what the answer is. Not even the NTSB report that comes out months later is going to vindicate him or ease that guilt one bit.
Yeah, I used to be that guy. :-P
I've known plenty of people in IT without CS degrees, including English majors. They're great co-workers and seem quite happy getting things like technical documentation and training, which companies always need to handle their attrition, and are a hella more respected than the phone support / QA "infantry".
You might want to look into getting some technical certs to help get your foot in the door... just look at what kinds of requirements some of your job reqs have and invest in some of those certs. You could likely cinch one in maybe a month of cramming with a study guide and an exam for a few hundred $$. If you have a couple thousand to invest, you could even do one of those 1-2 week-long prep courses and get it done faster.
Preferably once you have a nice job, they would be happy to help put you through further certs and degree programs to strengthen their workforce (and your credentials), so try to take advantage of that situation.
Why study engineering?
1) Hardest course loads through college (excepting perhaps hard sciences and premeds).
Yep, I enjoyed the challenge. Actually took quite a few extra honors options that I didn't technically need to, and enrolled in a bunch of pretty difficult electives for the heck of it. Yes, I also failed / withdrew / incompleted some of them... over a few rough semesters I managed to collect one of every possible grade... but really, where else can you explore your limits? I didn't get into a hard school just to try to skirt by with the bare minimum easy classes and avoid all the challenging courses and professors. Besides, no one has ever asked for a transcript (maybe if I went the academic route grades would be important)
2) No girls in classes (5-14%, falls as engineering major gets harder (ie electrical))
Wish this would increase... but at least the girls that are there can be super nerdy++, which is a turn-on for some of us . Besides, this is a plus if you already have a gf from HS like I did. Can be tricky, since you can't really count on girls and relationships to mature until after college. I suppose I lucked out (esp. since my gf/wife ended up financing my last semester of college).
But yeah, unless you get lucky with project teams, chances of finding love on the engineering quad are slim. However, a lot of our professional engineering societies were pretty much run almost exclusively by women... even the Society of Women Engineers wasn't sexist about letting guys join in if you get really desperate. Also, there are usually plenty of girls in classes / clubs like ballroom dancing who dig science / engineering types (particularly the foreign girls)... because face it, you don't really want to be talking to your gf about problem sets all the time.
3) No girls in companies you will end up working at
Given how much trouble people get into for shitting where they eat, this is probably a plus.
4) Facebook friends list is 80% men, most of friends are men. Great if you are networking, crappy if you are trying to network to find the perfect gf/wife. Other majors make balanced set of friends naturally through classes. Their networking, as a result, is exponentially easier.
Get a gf/wife in education, then their social sphere is the exact opposite, and you have achieved balance. Plus then your SO can have all her hot teacher friends over and you can impress them with your... whatever. (Teacher friends are easily impressed, or at least do a great job being super friendly about it even if they aren't.) Also you get to constantly play hookup master with all of your respective friends. (not recommended with friends you want to keep, but entertaining nonetheless)
5) You end up working at a multinational company that pays you less (much less) than finance, law, BUSINESS. Argh. Note that business, finance, and law types went through the OPPOSITE of #1-#4, meaning they end up knowing way more girls, earning more, and having had a better life.
Yeah, but those people are sleazy looking. Also you feel better when you find out they're all indirect overhead and the first on the chopping block when it's time to tighten belts.
6) Yet, you feel as if you contribute way more to society than money movers, patent leeching lawyers, and smoothtalking male/female bimbos/bimbettes.
Heh, yeah, people who make money out of money are in it just as long as other people buy into their bluff. But when it hits the fan, the resourceful ones with the ability will still be... working. Woo. At least it's something that will always have value, and not just evaporate.
You tell ME how f*** up engineering is.
You ask why I do it? Because I love analysis, creating, designing, and doing.
And some people's life goal is to be able to go shopping on som
Meh, can't really see much that AI-teacherbots could do that TV-instruction already failed to do in the 70s. Other than just divert resources away from more traditional teaching resources.
Teaching isn't a respected profession in the US (read about how they're treated in Finland). The few teachers that do stick it out pretty much do so on principle until their morale is beat down by administration and lack of resources. They face strict quotas on pencils and copier paper, and annual fads where everyone and their monkeys drop by to tell them exactly how to do their jobs down to where they write the objective on the board and the minimum number of flyers to have on their bulletin boards. The good teachers I've met are very internally motivated, and usually have very supportive spouses with "real" jobs (incidentally, they also tend to be smokin' hot). The rest eventually burn out and sit back and decide to just give as good as they get, which isn't terribly much. Trying something different is typically punished or at the very least not rewarded.
Every once in a while (actually, all the time, it seems) someone comes around and wants to throw a magic bullet at the problem... "oh, if only every child had textbooks, let's throw all this money at textbook publishers!", "oh, if only every child had TV instruction, let's put VCRs in every classroom!", "oh, let's put computers in every classroom, but not really provide a way to use them productively", "oh, if only no child was left behind, let's make them take a month's worth of standardized testing and threaten to fire everyone if their scores don't show Acceptable Yearly Progress!", "oh, let's buy everyone iPads!" (OK, my teacher wife actually sort of liked the last one, because they actually provided decent training and she can use it as a ridiculously expensive workaround for not having a decent pen & paper quota)
But really, the things that have the greatest impact on the students are the things that are closest to the students: their parents, their teachers, their classmates. Invest in improving those first.
Sure technology could help improve productivity, if they have a decent IT department -- just like any other profession. Technology might enhance, but is not going to effectively replace teaching... it happens to be a very human, social interaction. Sheesh, even the Diamond Age featured a human prostitute/teacher ractive for interaction.
Disclaimer: I support public education; I married a teacher
No, domesticated turkeys are the dumbest birds in the world! They'll drown if they look up at the rain!
OK, that wasn't actually true, but thanks for making me look that up anyway.
http://www.snopes.com/critters/wild/turkey.asp
I'm just thinking of all the dopeslap moments I'll have when sneaking home late at night and having the lights come on just AFTER I smack my head into a wall.
Sounds like good times.
Well, I was sort of a quasi-IT engineer, and good friends with the real IT folks, so that's probably the only reason this flew. But my best setup was running some 64-bit Linux distro on the bare metal, and installing the stock IT WinXP Pro build with the ancient IE6 we needed for mandatory training in a VM, with all of their stock full disk encryption and everything.
Also had a separate WinXP Server x64 install for a few games. But never porn. Even booting from LiveCDs, I'd never use work equipment for porn, if only for the pure terror from the inevitable nightmares that you'd get from imagining your strange donkey porn popping up onto your laptop during staff mtg presentations. Just don't go there! :P
If you could somehow set yourself up with data access, something like Google Voice or maybe Skype might work well. Then you just have one number to give out to people to reach you that you could set up to ring whatever temporary number(s) you have set up at the time. That way you only have one voicemail to check as well, esp. if you forward all your temporary vm accounts to this service as well.
Meh, everyone is out there just playing CYA. It's amazing that there are some dedicated teachers around making things work in spite of all the hurdles and accompanying low morale.
What would be really cool (and probably more effective) is if administrators were to start tracking metrics on services they should be providing to their staff, like "days gone by without a working copier" and "resources provided vs. resources requested" and stuff. Instead the teaching staff is kinda treated like students... we don't care about you, just deal with it yourself and see how you turn out. Which is a bit apropos for public education... after all, you can't fire students, so what's the point of fostering a culture where you can fire teachers? Just make the whole experience a weed-out drop-out environment :-P (well except that the students can eventually survive and leave for something better :P )
-- I support public education; I married a teacher
Sounds like the lawyers won.
Go find a job working as a government contractor. Especially in the defense sector, there's plenty of open source / unixy stuff going on (all the military simulations have been ported from SUN / SGI / HPUX to Linux nowadays). My old job is available... that is, once they lift the budget freeze pending on Congress agreeing on something.
I'm a big Linux guy, but just started working at Microsoft itself last week. Ironically, there's actually lots of open source here... my development machine already had cygwin and the gimp loaded on it. The official policy is that it's OK to use, just don't put any time into developing OSS or looking at OSS source code... pretty reasonable efforts to prevent compromising their closed source revenue stream.
Word. I also found this infinitely more interesting than most of the legal proceedings and politics threads that parade through, even if those are somewhat more tech related.