deliver at least six of 12 common hen eggs to Earth safely
Is this to distinguish them from rooster eggs?
Presumably they meant "chicken eggs".
And (based on my 0% success rate in 7th grade) I can advise participants that just suspending the eggs with rubber bands inside a box isn't an effective strategy. You definitely need some kind of gradual braking mechanism during descent (e.g. parachute).
I've changed jobs several times in my career. With one exception, each time I took a pay cut to do so, and I considered every one of them a "promotion" to a job I liked better. Except for the one time my pay went up, which turned out to be the worst work environment I've ever been in (despite being in academia).
Probably correlatively, the dress code (or expectations) for each successive job as been increasingly casual, starting in jacket and tie and currently in casual shirt and nice jeans. I figure by the time I retire, I'll be doing my favorite job, in my underwear. {smile} (And when I retire, I'll stop bothering with the underwear.)
A student at the art-and-design college where I work recently made a suggestion for how we could save some money on software licensing, so that the funds could be spent on other things. Great idea. Ideologically, I couldn't agree more. But I had to argue that it wasn't practical.
He was suggesting that we use OpenOffice instead of MS-Office, but one of the biggest problems is that OOo-Writer simply isn't MS-Word, and OOo-Impress isn't PowerPoint. Even if they were feature-compatible (which they're not quite), they still wouldn't be identical, and a substantial percentage of users (faculty and students) can't deal with having Feature X on a different menu than it is in Word. Me... I can deal with WordPerfect and MS-Word and OOo-Writer each doing things differently from the others. And I can manage moving from the GIMP to Photoshop to Fireworks, much like I can move from OS X to Windows to Linux. But I gain that flexibility at the expense of efficiency and proficiency. For a professional for whom the latter two factors are of greater importance, the "just as good as" argument isn't going to be very persuasive.
In reality, the judicial process isn't simply a question of who has the better, more expensive representative. In most cases (not your "trial of the century" contenders, or ones where someone is trying to set a precedent), it's mostly a battle of moderately competent counsels, in which the facts and the law have the most influence.
You're right it's not a perfect system, and it frequently works out badly. But the adversarial approach at least tends to approximate fairness, without depending on the kind of thoughtful wisdom that's in far shorter supply than the legal system requires. If it didn't, I think someone would have come up with something better by now.
My general contentment with my job has always been inversely proportional to the size of the employer. This is regardless of whether it was a retailer, school, or non-profit. The college where I work now (I'm half of the IT staff) merged with a larger university recently, and it's gradually getting bogged down. The functions the university has taken over have become slower to respond, and now they're trying to integrate our activities into their change-management system, and it's going to slow us down as well. There are some legitimate reasons for why this has to happen (more complex systems are more prone to failure) but it's annoying as heck. (Fortunately our college has a large Mac population, and the univerity staff know next to nothing about them, so they don't interfere too much in that area.)
This is a bit like a pro-union attorney going to work for a firm specializing in labor law, whose clients are all business management. Or a victims' rights advocate going to work in the public defender's office. The role of an attorney is not exploring legal philosophies from all viewpoints, but to advocate on behalf of his client. If you don't agree with the position that you've been hired to represent, then you probably aren't going to do a good job of it.
I was explaining how I'd thoughtlessly gotten that far down the road of "inappropriate use of resources", convincing myself at the time that I wasn't doing anything wrong, and how none of these mitigating factors justified it in the end. Sorry if that wasn't painfully obvious enough for someone of your interpretive skills.
What I did was stupid. It was foolish. It was a mistake. One I would never make again, and would seriously caution anyone else not to make. Which was the rather obvious point of posting the story. Do I think they should have given me another chance? Well, duh. But do I think I was blameless? No fucking way. Is that contrite enough for you, or do I need to get out the cat-o-nine-tails?
Don't count on the employee handbook to tell you whether it's OK.
Back in '95, I set up a web site on my desktop machine at the college where I worked. Nothing bandwidth-intensive, just playing around with HTML, publishing info about myself and things I'd written, etc. My boss knew I was doing it, and didn't particularly care. The only person directly affected by it was me (and even running on Win31 for the first several months, I rarely noticed any performance problems).
But the site somehow came to the attention of the upper administration, and some of the material on it did not meet with their {ahem} moral approval. (No, I wasn't running a pr0n site; I'd be rich by now if that were the case. But I was openly gay and had some erotic drawings on the site.) By the end of the day, I found myself in a conversation in which it was suggested that I resign.
Believe me: there was nothing in the employee handbook about what I'd done. There were no disciplinary policies or procedures involved. "At will" employment (which describes the jobs most of us have) doesn't require anything of the sort. All it requires is someone in authority saying "get rid of him". In retrospect, I can say that storing my personal files like this on a college-owned machine was the one of most bone-headed things I've ever done.
After that incident, I briefly tried commercial hosting, but quickly ran into problems with my provider that left me thinking "I can do it better than this". So I got me an ISDN line, installed Red Hat 6 on a spare Pentium box, and never looked back. OK, I admit: When the web server periodically locks up for no apparent reason, or the power goes out for several hours and the portable generator won't start, or a configuration oversight gets my mail server blacklisted as an open proxy, etc. I find myself wondering why the hell I'm trying to do this myself. But the feeling of self-sufficiency, the freedom and power of root access on everything, and the incredible learning experience of doing it all myself keeps persuading me that it's worth it.
It's also made me all the more valuable to the (entirely different) college where I work today. Where I'm careful not to use college resources for anything personal.
So why would someone use this service against say The Google Video Store, or iTunes.
They might have better prices, they might have material not available through other commercial channels, they might have more timely releases, etc. In other words, for all the same reasons that people buy from one store instead of another.
There are people who are perfectly willing to pay for licensed entertainment, and having multiple options of where and how to get it is a Good Thing.
Unlike word-processing or spreadsheet documents, which really haven't added any new data types or the like since the mid-90s (which is why WordPerfect 12 can still use the same file format as version 6), Adobe typically adds new constructs to Photoshop's repertoire with each version: layers, type, vector objects, adjustment layers, smart objects, etc.
This is a bit like asking if _____ can open MS Word DOC files. Which version? The PSD format is a moving target, and the GIMP is always going to lag behind Photoshop in supporting the latest iteration of it. Granted, users of Photoshop 7 or 8 are going to have problems with Photoshop-9-generated PSD files as well, but at least Photoshop users have the option of keeping current with "industry standards"; GIMP users don't.
In many ways, you've had it tougher than Andy. Although he hasn't been able to resume a relatively normal life as you apparently have, he usually isn't consciously aware of this fact. He doesn't live a life of bliss - he gets angry or frustrated at times like anyone else - but he doesn't have the ongoing angst to deal with. Best of luck with your continuing recovery.
Then you must not have been among those watching it live... or even by tape delay. The accepted popular consensus that day - until the facts later proved otherwise - was that the crew had died immediately.
Incidentally, what is terminal velocity for a human being falling through Earth atmosphere?
That depends on the aerodynamics of the situation: Head-first, feet-first, or horizontal? Wearing a flight suit, a billowing dress, naked? Inside a damaged space shuttle or in the open tail section of a bombed jetliner? If there's a lot of wind resistance, terminal velocity is lower, which is why skydivers assume the profile they do; it's not so they can take photos of each other "flying" superhero-style.
Depending on how it fell, that open tail section might have been catching a lot of wind... and of course hitting the snow-covered side of a mountain was probably a less abrupt landing (I'm guessing it hit at an oblique angle and slid down the slope before coming to a halt) than slamming into the surface of a calm ocean at a right angle. (Ever done a belly flop? Water's hard.)
I remember clearly that I did not see it live, as I was in college and didn't have cable TV (in a dorm? get real!) I was in class, and (this being college, not kindergarten), we didn't watch TV in them. I heard about it after the fact, and watched the coverage later in the day on the TV that served as the monitor for my Commodore 64.
The notion that the crew died immediately was "common wisdom" following the disaster. It's what everybody said to comfort each other: "At least they didn't suffer" "It was all over before they knew anything was wrong" etc. I remember being chilled by a report shortly afterward that the captain had opened his mike to talk just before the break-up, because it meant that he did know something was wrong, which took the gloss off that presumption that they'd died blissfully unaware of their peril.
It wasn't until much later (memory's admittedly hazy on the timeframe), as the investigation into the disaster progressed, that it was reported that the crew had survived the booster failure, and possibly even the whole way back down, and that news was generally buried and ignored, because people really didn't want to hear that. So if people remember it wrong, it's either because they wanted to remember it that way, or more likely because they remember the initial breathless news reports and not the factual follow ups.
I dare you to use GIMP for a month without using photoshop. Almost everyone who does stays with GIMP.
That's because they've lost all of their clients and can't afford Photoshop (or OS X or Windows upgrades) anymore. {rimshot}
Seriously, the only people who'd take you up on this challenge in the first place are geeks. The non-geek creative professionals out there would slap you silly if you tried to replace their Photoshop with the GIMP. And that's even assuming you're talking about GIMP 2.x (tagline: "the UI doesn't suck anymore"). I am a geek, and I'd rather use Photoshop 6 under Classic than the GIMP 1.x under X11 on OS X. GIMP 2.x has gotten good enough that I now suggest it to regular people who can't get Photoshop without bootlegging it, but it's still a substitute for what they really want, and a stumbling block to file compatibility with their colleagues.
Getting back to the real world, I think Adobe is going to be preoccupied for the foreseeable future with getting their apps converted to Universal Binary format for the new MacIntels (where they currently walk instead of running). Even if they got it into their heads to port some of them to Linux, that project would be stuck on the back burner (or the freezer) until 2007.
Some of us earn salary, and are expected to put in extra hours for no more pay.
You should look into the latest regs on whether your position is in fact exempt from overtime pay. Being "salaried" doesn't necessarily mean they don't owe you overtime pay, and the regs (especially related to "computer" jobs) were adjusted a couple years ago to disallow "exempt" status for a lot of positions.
[Disclaimer: I Am Not A Lawyer, but my father is recently retired from practicing labor law, and this is based on what he told me.]
If you're working a lot of overtime, that should be bringing in some significant money. Bank it. Then when you've saved enough to get you by for a few months, quit. Or use it as your personal "unemployment insurance", as you simply stop with the overtime, scale back to a more reasonable work schedule, and take a chance that they'll fire you for it.
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Is this to distinguish them from rooster eggs?
Presumably they meant "chicken eggs".
And (based on my 0% success rate in 7th grade) I can advise participants that just suspending the eggs with rubber bands inside a box isn't an effective strategy. You definitely need some kind of gradual braking mechanism during descent (e.g. parachute).
Probably correlatively, the dress code (or expectations) for each successive job as been increasingly casual, starting in jacket and tie and currently in casual shirt and nice jeans. I figure by the time I retire, I'll be doing my favorite job, in my underwear. {smile} (And when I retire, I'll stop bothering with the underwear.)
He was suggesting that we use OpenOffice instead of MS-Office, but one of the biggest problems is that OOo-Writer simply isn't MS-Word, and OOo-Impress isn't PowerPoint. Even if they were feature-compatible (which they're not quite), they still wouldn't be identical, and a substantial percentage of users (faculty and students) can't deal with having Feature X on a different menu than it is in Word. Me... I can deal with WordPerfect and MS-Word and OOo-Writer each doing things differently from the others. And I can manage moving from the GIMP to Photoshop to Fireworks, much like I can move from OS X to Windows to Linux. But I gain that flexibility at the expense of efficiency and proficiency. For a professional for whom the latter two factors are of greater importance, the "just as good as" argument isn't going to be very persuasive.
e.g. "No one expects the Spanish Inquisition!"
No, it's most definitely my fault.
It's always my own damn fault.
I suspect "unlimited bandwidth" means "bandwidth which is not limited arbitrarily". i.e. They get as much of the pipe as they can use.
To say nothing of the fact that it consisted of digital signalling (Morse code) on wires (and later over the air).
You're right it's not a perfect system, and it frequently works out badly. But the adversarial approach at least tends to approximate fairness, without depending on the kind of thoughtful wisdom that's in far shorter supply than the legal system requires. If it didn't, I think someone would have come up with something better by now.
My general contentment with my job has always been inversely proportional to the size of the employer. This is regardless of whether it was a retailer, school, or non-profit. The college where I work now (I'm half of the IT staff) merged with a larger university recently, and it's gradually getting bogged down. The functions the university has taken over have become slower to respond, and now they're trying to integrate our activities into their change-management system, and it's going to slow us down as well. There are some legitimate reasons for why this has to happen (more complex systems are more prone to failure) but it's annoying as heck. (Fortunately our college has a large Mac population, and the univerity staff know next to nothing about them, so they don't interfere too much in that area.)
And the way we ensure a fair trial is by both parties' lawyers trying to win.
This is a bit like a pro-union attorney going to work for a firm specializing in labor law, whose clients are all business management. Or a victims' rights advocate going to work in the public defender's office. The role of an attorney is not exploring legal philosophies from all viewpoints, but to advocate on behalf of his client. If you don't agree with the position that you've been hired to represent, then you probably aren't going to do a good job of it.
Based on this, I'd say that Mister Flex is taking serious medical risks, and should seek the immediate care of a physician.
What I did was stupid. It was foolish. It was a mistake. One I would never make again, and would seriously caution anyone else not to make. Which was the rather obvious point of posting the story. Do I think they should have given me another chance? Well, duh. But do I think I was blameless? No fucking way. Is that contrite enough for you, or do I need to get out the cat-o-nine-tails?
I wasn't asking for sympathy (did you catch the part where I called it "bone-headed"?); I was offering a warning.
Back in '95, I set up a web site on my desktop machine at the college where I worked. Nothing bandwidth-intensive, just playing around with HTML, publishing info about myself and things I'd written, etc. My boss knew I was doing it, and didn't particularly care. The only person directly affected by it was me (and even running on Win31 for the first several months, I rarely noticed any performance problems).
But the site somehow came to the attention of the upper administration, and some of the material on it did not meet with their {ahem} moral approval. (No, I wasn't running a pr0n site; I'd be rich by now if that were the case. But I was openly gay and had some erotic drawings on the site.) By the end of the day, I found myself in a conversation in which it was suggested that I resign.
Believe me: there was nothing in the employee handbook about what I'd done. There were no disciplinary policies or procedures involved. "At will" employment (which describes the jobs most of us have) doesn't require anything of the sort. All it requires is someone in authority saying "get rid of him". In retrospect, I can say that storing my personal files like this on a college-owned machine was the one of most bone-headed things I've ever done.
After that incident, I briefly tried commercial hosting, but quickly ran into problems with my provider that left me thinking "I can do it better than this". So I got me an ISDN line, installed Red Hat 6 on a spare Pentium box, and never looked back. OK, I admit: When the web server periodically locks up for no apparent reason, or the power goes out for several hours and the portable generator won't start, or a configuration oversight gets my mail server blacklisted as an open proxy, etc. I find myself wondering why the hell I'm trying to do this myself. But the feeling of self-sufficiency, the freedom and power of root access on everything, and the incredible learning experience of doing it all myself keeps persuading me that it's worth it.
It's also made me all the more valuable to the (entirely different) college where I work today. Where I'm careful not to use college resources for anything personal.
They might have better prices, they might have material not available through other commercial channels, they might have more timely releases, etc. In other words, for all the same reasons that people buy from one store instead of another.
There are people who are perfectly willing to pay for licensed entertainment, and having multiple options of where and how to get it is a Good Thing.
Unlike word-processing or spreadsheet documents, which really haven't added any new data types or the like since the mid-90s (which is why WordPerfect 12 can still use the same file format as version 6), Adobe typically adds new constructs to Photoshop's repertoire with each version: layers, type, vector objects, adjustment layers, smart objects, etc.
This is a bit like asking if _____ can open MS Word DOC files. Which version? The PSD format is a moving target, and the GIMP is always going to lag behind Photoshop in supporting the latest iteration of it. Granted, users of Photoshop 7 or 8 are going to have problems with Photoshop-9-generated PSD files as well, but at least Photoshop users have the option of keeping current with "industry standards"; GIMP users don't.
In many ways, you've had it tougher than Andy. Although he hasn't been able to resume a relatively normal life as you apparently have, he usually isn't consciously aware of this fact. He doesn't live a life of bliss - he gets angry or frustrated at times like anyone else - but he doesn't have the ongoing angst to deal with. Best of luck with your continuing recovery.
Then you must not have been among those watching it live... or even by tape delay. The accepted popular consensus that day - until the facts later proved otherwise - was that the crew had died immediately.
That depends on the aerodynamics of the situation: Head-first, feet-first, or horizontal? Wearing a flight suit, a billowing dress, naked? Inside a damaged space shuttle or in the open tail section of a bombed jetliner? If there's a lot of wind resistance, terminal velocity is lower, which is why skydivers assume the profile they do; it's not so they can take photos of each other "flying" superhero-style.
Depending on how it fell, that open tail section might have been catching a lot of wind... and of course hitting the snow-covered side of a mountain was probably a less abrupt landing (I'm guessing it hit at an oblique angle and slid down the slope before coming to a halt) than slamming into the surface of a calm ocean at a right angle. (Ever done a belly flop? Water's hard.)
The notion that the crew died immediately was "common wisdom" following the disaster. It's what everybody said to comfort each other: "At least they didn't suffer" "It was all over before they knew anything was wrong" etc. I remember being chilled by a report shortly afterward that the captain had opened his mike to talk just before the break-up, because it meant that he did know something was wrong, which took the gloss off that presumption that they'd died blissfully unaware of their peril.
It wasn't until much later (memory's admittedly hazy on the timeframe), as the investigation into the disaster progressed, that it was reported that the crew had survived the booster failure, and possibly even the whole way back down, and that news was generally buried and ignored, because people really didn't want to hear that. So if people remember it wrong, it's either because they wanted to remember it that way, or more likely because they remember the initial breathless news reports and not the factual follow ups.
That's because they've lost all of their clients and can't afford Photoshop (or OS X or Windows upgrades) anymore. {rimshot}
Seriously, the only people who'd take you up on this challenge in the first place are geeks. The non-geek creative professionals out there would slap you silly if you tried to replace their Photoshop with the GIMP. And that's even assuming you're talking about GIMP 2.x (tagline: "the UI doesn't suck anymore"). I am a geek, and I'd rather use Photoshop 6 under Classic than the GIMP 1.x under X11 on OS X. GIMP 2.x has gotten good enough that I now suggest it to regular people who can't get Photoshop without bootlegging it, but it's still a substitute for what they really want, and a stumbling block to file compatibility with their colleagues.
Getting back to the real world, I think Adobe is going to be preoccupied for the foreseeable future with getting their apps converted to Universal Binary format for the new MacIntels (where they currently walk instead of running). Even if they got it into their heads to port some of them to Linux, that project would be stuck on the back burner (or the freezer) until 2007.
You should look into the latest regs on whether your position is in fact exempt from overtime pay. Being "salaried" doesn't necessarily mean they don't owe you overtime pay, and the regs (especially related to "computer" jobs) were adjusted a couple years ago to disallow "exempt" status for a lot of positions.
[Disclaimer: I Am Not A Lawyer, but my father is recently retired from practicing labor law, and this is based on what he told me.]
If you're working a lot of overtime, that should be bringing in some significant money. Bank it. Then when you've saved enough to get you by for a few months, quit. Or use it as your personal "unemployment insurance", as you simply stop with the overtime, scale back to a more reasonable work schedule, and take a chance that they'll fire you for it.