Paden's "Introduction to Old Occitan" is, to my knowledge, the only English-language text on Old Occitan. Overwhelmingly, the modern scholarship on Old Occitan is done in... French. As to there being mixed reviews, well, it's not for the faint of heart. It's not like a high school text book on intro spanish; it's a linguists book for graduate study of the language.
Another approach might be to try to learn Modern Occitan, and work backwards. I don't know what the resources are for doing that in English. In the Occitanian region of France, there are Occitan-revival schools, called, IIRC, "calendretas". I don't know if any of them have materials on the www for anglophones.
Personally I think everyone should learn English. A lot of problems will be solved if everyone uses the same language. It will be a lot cheaper in the long
run and remove many of the problems inherent in international commerce.
The issue of what language people should speak was never at hand; your comment is a total non-sequetur, and is off topic.
The issue is the preservation of languages which are fast becoming historical. The reason it is a big deal is that we lose part of history if we do not. The language itself is of significance to historians, but futhermore, all of the literature and linguistic art of that culture is lost to us if the language in which they exist is lost to the knowledge of human kind.
Let me give you a little example. You almost certainly are familiar with the word "troubador". You may have a vague sense that is refers to a sort of medieval minstrel.
What it refers to is an elite of songwriters, "trobadors", in the 12th and 13th centuries, famed for the quality of their lyrics, and for the fact that, unlike the "serious" artists of the rest of Europe at that time who wrote in Latin, they wrote in their vernacular. We now call that language "Old Occitan", though they did not call it that.
For some eight centuries -- right through to the present day -- their fame as lyricists was so great that the word for them has become a common noun. Their craft was legendary for centuries after their home land was conquered in the Albigensian Crusade, and their worldly, sensuous art repressed by the Church.
I'm willing to bet you have never heard a single word of trobador verse, neither in the original nor in translation. This is the single most famous body of literature in the history of Europe, and you have never heard a single word of it.
The reason why is that the trobadors loved word play -- e.g. double-entrendres, extremely tight rhymes -- and invented complicated poetic forms (you have a trobador to thank or curse for the sestina). The result is that while the sense of a troubador song may be translated, translating the form, bringing all the witty word play which was the point of their craft, into another language is pretty close to impossible. They even managed to invent a kind of rhyme (rims derivatatius) which is close to impossible to execute in English, requiring, as it does, a syllable's length difference in congugation of verbs or declention of nouns.
So if you want to appreciate the most famous poetry in the history of Europe, you have to learn Old Occitan and read it in the original.
And that is one example of why it is so important to preserve dead and dying languages. So that, should some weirdo in the future actually care about the bounty of the human artistic acheivement through time, the door to the libraries of the past may yet be unlocked by those crazy enough to learn the keys.
We preserve languages for the same reason we don't burn libraries.
If you think RTBLs are great, wait until you get on one of them. It's almost Orwellian. Amazingly simple to be in one, incredibly difficult to get out.
The irony here is killing me. The ISP Stein runs -- theWorld.com -- is locally renown for it's black holing of mail from all major free email services. It's impossible to email a TheWorld user from yahoo, fastmail, etc -- but theWorld doesn't bounce the messages, it just routes them to/dev/null. Subscribers have been leaving TheWorld in droves as they discover that they can't correspond with their Aunt Sally with her yahoo account -- and that this "feature" is not one that can be turned off on a by-user basis.
For any other ex-theWorld customers out there looking for alternative unix shell accounts, try jtan.com which has SpamAssassin.
"Hey, kid: you know that inexplicable and unsubstantiated conviction you have in your bones that school is a pointless atrocity and your parents only care whether you live or die on the basis of whether it makes them look bad to the neighbors?
Well, you're right.
You need to get out of your school, your family and your neighborhood. Here's how to go about doing that.
You need to find some residental educational program far away. "Residental" here is a power word, with which "to conjure with". (1a. Find a piece of paper and carry it with you at all time. Write powerful useful words on it so you won't forget them.) To find such a residental program, you are going to need to do some research at the Library. The one downtown.
Basically "residental educaitonal program" means "boarding school" -- but there might be some useful leads out there which aren't really schools or which don't call themselves schools. Apprenticeship programs, perhaps.
If you don't know where to start, go to the reference librarian and tell her that you are doing a report for school on boarding schools, and ask how she might recommend you search for information. Be sure to tell her you're interested in finding out what programs currently exist, because you're supposed to write letters to them to ask them questions.
Do tons of research. Find a program which sounds good. Small schools are good. Avoid places which bill themselves as "academic" in theme or focus, because at the time you are searching that was the buzz-word schools which didn't have any focus at all used to justify their existence. Schools which specialize in science, engineering (which you will love), music, the arts, philosophy, and/or rhetoric are good bets for you. Most trade schools and military academies however are not so good. That said, it is better that you get into *any* program, rather than stay put. Do not worry about the cost.
Make a list of your top five choices. I trust you have kept all this secret. For the next step to work you must never let on that there are alternatives which please you almost as well. It is only if the next step fails utterly -- or some force invites you to negotiate -- that maybe you reveal that.
Go to your father. He's the one with the big bucks, and the loser in the custody battle. "Confide" in him that your bestest dream is to go to that program you picked, but that you're sure your mother would never ever let you attend a residental program, and that she would be so upset by the idea of you leaving, that you don't even dare bring it up with her.
Then, go to your mother. Ideally before your father gets to her, but not necessarily. Ask her if she had ever lived away from her parents to go to school. You will have piqued her interest, and she'll ask you why you ask. "Admit" as if reluctant to say so, that you're interested in the idea of boarding schools.
In both situations, it is *imperative* that you never EVER explain why -- neither true nor false reasons. Any reason you give can be argued with, quibbled with. Just keep maintaining, when they ask you why you are interested, why you want to go, "I don't know, it just seems really cool to me." They can't argue with that, and won't try.
They won't cave immediately. You're going to have to bring it up about every 15 days. I recommend keeping a calender and tracking how often you bring up the topic with each of them. (Tell your mom you want the calendar for recording friends' birthdays.) Don't pick the same day each week or every other week; too obvious. 15 days is good.
You may have to keep it up for a year or two. But unlikely even that long. Eventually your father will bring you the brochures of some school which is not residental, or otherwise a "compromise". If it's not what you want, say "it's nice, but the program I want to go to is...." He is impressed by people who stick to their guns. Remember, that's how you got the loft.
Eventually, he will probably take you on a trip to the program of your choice, for a tour. Be sure when you are in an interview situation, especially if you feel you are getting weepy, that you ask to speak to the interviewer without your father present. It's OK to burst into tears -- so long as you flat out say "I'm so scared you won't take me, and I want to go here so much!" Tell them it's your dream (they like hearing that).
The 512h subpoenas, he notes, are "automatic -- no judge is involved. So you will have all these automatic subpoenas where the underlying facts may never have been checked by any human being. You have bots that search for files," and the findings of those bots will simply be passed along to a court clerk, who will order up a subpoena.
[Lameness filter foiler. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Aliquam ultrices eros ut purus. In posuere, leo vel feugiat tempor, libero quam semper wisi, at venenatis mauris tortor vitae diam. Cras sodales felis
eget justo. ]
He told me, instead of doing something you enjoy, do something that pays decent and works decent
hours, and pursue your hobbies. So I do. And now I've got weekends free and enough money to write
short stories, scuba dive, and contribute to Open Source projects.
FWIW, I've been doing that for the last 11 years, and I've decided it's got to end. It's a schizophrenic existence, and I find, because my "hobbies" also require a high level of commitment and administrative/management skill, that there is a tug-of-war between them for my energy. I can only put up with so much administrative bullshit in a day, which is going to get it: my job or my volunteer work?
I find I'm mentally in a place where I want my life to "hang together" better. I don't want to have to shift so much between work-mode and play-mode.
And this is part of the value of the book under discussion: it talks about the difference between expecting your job to be fun or entertaining (on one hand) and expecting your job to be satisfying and meaningful (on the other).
I'm not looking for a job that's "fun", but I need to do work the value of which is not solely in that it funds things which are of value to me. I need, increasingly, my work to feel like it makes a positive contribution to my community/world.
To bring this home a little: I'm a web dev. I've worked on a lot of corporate brochure-ware web sites. I feel proud of the quality of my work, and the value I gave for the money I way paid -- as a good craftsman will. But that's not enough any more. I now do web dev for a edu non-profit, which is better, I suppose, but also still not enough.
A quick word of advice to add to the review: this is not Studs Terkel's Working, this is not a lot of randomly assembled vignettes into jobs -- read the book in order. If, like me, you're inclined to cherry-pick excerpts from things that look like anthologies, don't. It's not several dozen little unconnected stories, they're actually arranged in an order to make a point. If you read them out of order, you often miss the point he was getting to. He also will make an analogy in one story (the "inner table" for example) and then refer to it subsequently, without further explanation. Read it like a novel.
So to answer the question of this post, "What Should [You] Do With Your Life?" I don't know. That's up to
you. But don't get the answer from a book, regardless of how well it is written. If you're looking to a book
to answer that question for you, I would suggest you have bigger issues.
Uh, the book doesn't try to tell you. It is about asking the question, and people's experiences in trying to answer the question. You'd be less of a doofus if when you tried to self-agrandize by spouting off ostensibly profound statements if you had half an idea what was in the book you are criticizing.
To be crystal clear: as a bunch of flames here have pointed out, Po has his head up his ass, and his self-involvement and provincalism make the book almost unreadable in places. But the criticism you have raised has nothing to do with this book.
I've rarely seen a career advice book that had any useful advice, and this sounds as if it fits into that pile.
How did this get moderated up to 5? It's not a career advice book. Jeesus, RTFB.
It's a journalistic exploration of the experience of people who have had interesting relationships to their careers. It is a book about interesting questions, it's not a book about answers. As to whether it does a good job at that is one thing.
There's two questions here: how often do you have to upgrade to keep up with new software, and how sturdy is the physical machine.
A lot of people have spoken to the first. I will speak to the second: My home machine is a PowerMac 6100/66, with a Sonnet G3 upgrade card. I bought it used in the first place, back in 94 or 95. Periodically I drop a bigger HD into it, or get some random SCSI periph; I maxed out the memory at some point, and a friend gave me a bigger monitor. I've had to replace the battery twice.
I still use the same damn keyboard, and it still has exquisite response. I'd be using the same mouse if it weren't for CTS; I bought a $25 trackball at a fleamarket and have been using that for some number of years.
In short, the machine (including keyboard and mouse) is built like a tank. I'm still hammering away on it, and not one component (save the battery!) has failed in the 8 or so years I've had it.
Now, I'll warn you that about the time the first G3s came out, Apple lowered its factory standards, and machines today are comparatively more prone to defects than older Apple lines -- but I've given to understand that compared to PeeCees recent Macs are still have *much* lower parts failure rates.
I'm female. And one of the things I have been coming to realize of late is that I need to worry less about the people in my life, and more about having meaningful work in my life. I was raised on the "it doesn't matter what you do..." idea, and it turns out that that can be a real subtle way of dismissing women's ambitions.
After all, if what really matters is the people in your life and not the kind of work you do, it's just as good to be a nurse as a doctor, a secretary as an executive, etc. Heck, you might as well stay home and raise babies.
So, actually, I've been coming to see the reverse of your conclusion -- that is really does matter what kind of work you do.
I do wonder if the issue is that men are (still) raised to see their whole identities in their jobs, while women (still) are raised to eschew taking any identity from their jobs. That you had to learn that the people matter, and that I had to learn that the work matters.
When you look at results, most of the prestigious schools are defeated, beaten down, and put to shame by a relatively unknown class of schools, the small liberal-arts
college.[...]
CalTech, 1818 students, 40.0% Ph.D. production
MIT, 5438 students, 20.9% Ph.D. production
I... I never thought I'd ever see MIT or CalTech called a "small liberal-arts college".
I wouldn't at all be surprised if the idea even predated Heinlein.
I have a dim recollection of some ~1950s-ish story having the idea, as a throw-away line; there were people who subsisted on the income of allowing advertisers to advertise to them. I think it was "The Space Merchants", by Pohl and Kornbluth, 1953, but I may be misremebering which story.
An OK read, but it was mostly obvious and did not get into the difficult issues of community building -- maintaining subject, tone, reputation and control without becoming
unpleasantly authoritarian.
Slashdot does not present these issues in as acute a form as, for instance, a commercial product-users community site.
Worse than that, the entire article presupposes open, public "communities". What if I want to do community-building within my place of employment? I certainly am unconcerned with attracting drive-by interest from the general public. What if I want to do community-building amongst my geographical neighbors? I actively want to discourage participation from people not in that demographic.
The rules of the game are very different when one isn't building a public community. Frankly, "closed" or "private" communities are a lot more "community-like", because they aren't a bunch of strangers, and often have shared resources and projects.
That is one crucial thing which he failed to mention at all: one of the reasons that Open Source project-based communities are so strong is that the members aren't just shooting the breeze, they actually have shared interests in a common good and project (e.g. the code they are working on). It is not totally necessary for a community to have a shared work, but it is a real boost.
Nor, for that matter does he differentiate between a vital "community site" and a vital "community". Consider all the argument about whether/. is a community. Clearly/. is a vital community site with an enormous amount of traffic. But it's not really much of a community in that, I think it is fair to say, most people here are unconcerned with the day-to-day lives of the other people here.
A big rolicking on-going discussion does not a community make. It's one part of the whole, and it may be the foundation on which a community can bloom, but a community is more than conversation.
what is the mass transit like in Boston? Do they have subways and busses that are easy and cheap?
As a "car-free by choice" Boston-area resident: fuck, no.
The MBTA is massively erratic. Different lines (both bus and subway) get different levels of service. Most of the other commentators in this thread have talked about the Green Line, which is abysmal (runs *in* traffic on several routes). I live on the northern arm of the Red Line, which is fantastic; however, it splits into two southern arms which are, definitionally, half the frequency of the unified northern arm. Thus it takes a Harvard professor half the wait to get a train to Boston Common as it does a housewife in Fields Corrner, despite them both being "on the Red Line". The Orange line is fast, but is essentially a commuter line, connecting impoverished residental areas to downtown; at times it is no more frequent than every 20 min, and is usually overcrowded and filthy. And so on.
The busses are a valient attempt to make something work in what must be the most bus-inimicable metro area in the US. But they still suck. For comparison, the MUNI in SF publishes (or did when I lived there 10 ya) a massive book of bus schedules, to which the busses run, +/- 2 minutes; it had many "timed connections" throughout the city whereby one bus would not leave a certain stop until another bus had dropped of (transferring) passengers. That's inconceivable in Boston. There are NO timed connections, in the entire bus system. You have *no* idea when one bus drops you off when the next bus will really be along. Busses regularly get 5 or 10 minutes behind schedule -- in part because this is traffic hell, and there's nothing to be done about it.
Wow, I'm astonished at the unanimity of "crack whip" as a response.
I'm going to take the questioner at his word: he doesn't know why this is happening, and has never been responsible for other coders (or other employees) before.
There's many reasons people might be turning out insufficient or inadequate code. Whether or not you think them good reasons is your call. But you need to find out what they are. It may just be that they are lazy good-for-nothings, in need of "motivation". But maybe:
Some other project has been imposed on them, and the other manager(s) are squeekier wheels? Maybe they've been working their buns off on another project. Or worse, they're saddled with administrative duties ("please restore my drive from backup!") which are absorbing their time. First check to see if something has been competing with you for their time.
They are angry at you or the organization, and they are expressing their anger in the only way they feel they can? Did you piss these guys off? Did their employer piss them off? Are the brushing up their resumes to jump ship, and just going through the motions while they job hunt?
They not coming to you with help because they think you have priorized their being self-sufficient over getting things done quickly? Do they know what your coding standards are (e.g. variable naming protocols)? Do they know you're disappointed?
They've never had to cooperate with another coder before? They are used to pulling a heroic all-nighter and handing it in, interoperability never before required?
In other words, use your problem solving skills. If there is some thing (e.g. other project) getting in their way, remove that thing. If they are having a problem you can solve, solve it. If they lack clue, impart clue. All that may be insufficient in the end, but until you investigate, you'll never know.
And ask people in ways which give them outs. "I had expected more from you by now. Have you been very busy with other things? If so, how can we get this project pushed up your priority queue?" allows someone who was slacking off a chance to realize that they were slacking off and pull their act together, without being shamed or losing face.
Guardsmen/watchmen and lawyer/advocates are more of a 15th century than a 12th century phenomenon.
??? Ah! You must study English history. Because all those Troubadors and Trouveres writing albas mentioning watchmen ("gaitas") in the 12th/13th centuries would sure surprized to hear they don't exist.
In the 12th/14th century what you have is in towns (any area thickly settled enough) small numbers of people who stay up all night to watch the town for attack or, more importantly, fire. They carry trumpets and sound an "alls well" periodically all night. This is not the standing garrison familiar to D&D players, but they are the NPCs most likely to notice your 3rd level thief plying his trade in the wee hours; they won't try to apprehend them himself, but rather raise the entire town (won't that be a nice surprize.:)
(English dude: "Gaita" eventually became "Wait" across the Channel, and by the 15th century the duty had evolved to being a mostly musical job. But even through the 17th cen, the Waites of English cities carried badges ("cognizances").)
As far a laywers and doctors go, you forgot the idea of the university town. By the end of the 13th century Europe was pocked with not only university towns (Paris, Salerno, Oxford, e.g.) it was swarming with roudy students. Town/gown riots go back that far. Defitely a flavor of specialization you want to allow for.
it could be an interesting management experiment (if you
want to call it that) to rotate people's desks around... maybe every month. That way, if people have a problem with coworkers, you can separate
them, and that way everyone can get to know everyone else... and the new people don't feel so alienated. Of course, when you have roaming
profiles, or dumb terminals, that makes things that much easier.
Uh, or you could just issue everyone laptops, and have them pick up and move.
Forrester Research has (had?) an interesting way of doing things. They didn't have private offices. They have "pods" which are a rooms which has 3 to 6 desks, and are organized by division. Some divisions, of course, had more than one pod; the one I was in had three pods, next to one another, with internal doorways. Seeting was very egalitarian and random -- as a new temp, I wound up a koosh-ball throw away from the CTO. From time to time, someone would decide they needed a change of view, or to be closer to someone they were working with, and would pick up and move to another (open) desk in the pod (or another pod of the same division). Since their philosophy was to issue laptops by default, moving was a matter of a hour or two, if you had a lot of plants or papers or something.
So it was for IT, Web Development, HR, Marketing, and, of course, all the Research divisions (the people who make the product:). I get the impression Sales may have been organized differently (cubes).
I found it really great. The low population of a pod (and I was in one of the crowded pods) meant everyone was quiet enough I could think. People I was working with were right there, and I could see if they were busy/on the phone/etc. before I interrupted them with a question, and without my having to leave my desk. It was pleasantly convival without being distracting. It was nicely flexible and the egalitarianism was very nice.
And they did it without thin clients. A lot of the putative benefits of thin clients can be gleened from investing in laptops as the default machines for everyone (regardless of platform).
They did a bunch of unusual business practices which worked really well.
OMG, someone besides me remembers "Fantasia Mathematica"! "Twas' Euclid and the Theorem Pi//Did plane and solid in the text//All parallel were the radii//and the angle convexed."
Thanks for mentioning the author; I think I have a date with ABE....
... the early days of the WWW, when journalists put their noses in the air and said "No one will ultimately use this newfangled net-thingy. There are no editors, no jouralistics ethics. It propagates wild rumors and out right-lies mixed in with the truth. When people see how untrustworthy it is, they will come running back to traditional media, which they can rely upon to be fact-checked, considered, and true?"
Is anyone else as amused as I am by the recent turn of events?
Considering part of the propaganda campaign of bin Laden terrorists is that this is a holy war by the 'Crusaders and Zionists', it is
surprising that Bush would take then choose a Christian Sunday to go in and start to deliver justice.
Er, you have that exactly backwards. In Christianity, Sunday is the sabbath on which one is not supposed to work, and certainly not to wage war. If anything, this is sort of a demonstration that this is not a religious action, by violating that religious restriction.
Slashdot Mirror
Nope. There is no error in my sig.
Paden's "Introduction to Old Occitan" is, to my knowledge, the only English-language text on Old Occitan. Overwhelmingly, the modern scholarship on Old Occitan is done in... French. As to there being mixed reviews, well, it's not for the faint of heart. It's not like a high school text book on intro spanish; it's a linguists book for graduate study of the language.
Another approach might be to try to learn Modern Occitan, and work backwards. I don't know what the resources are for doing that in English. In the Occitanian region of France, there are Occitan-revival schools, called, IIRC, "calendretas". I don't know if any of them have materials on the www for anglophones.
Bon fortuna!
OK, I'll feed the troll.
The issue of what language people should speak was never at hand; your comment is a total non-sequetur, and is off topic.
The issue is the preservation of languages which are fast becoming historical. The reason it is a big deal is that we lose part of history if we do not. The language itself is of significance to historians, but futhermore, all of the literature and linguistic art of that culture is lost to us if the language in which they exist is lost to the knowledge of human kind.
Let me give you a little example. You almost certainly are familiar with the word "troubador". You may have a vague sense that is refers to a sort of medieval minstrel.
What it refers to is an elite of songwriters, "trobadors", in the 12th and 13th centuries, famed for the quality of their lyrics, and for the fact that, unlike the "serious" artists of the rest of Europe at that time who wrote in Latin, they wrote in their vernacular. We now call that language "Old Occitan", though they did not call it that.
For some eight centuries -- right through to the present day -- their fame as lyricists was so great that the word for them has become a common noun. Their craft was legendary for centuries after their home land was conquered in the Albigensian Crusade, and their worldly, sensuous art repressed by the Church.
I'm willing to bet you have never heard a single word of trobador verse, neither in the original nor in translation. This is the single most famous body of literature in the history of Europe, and you have never heard a single word of it.
The reason why is that the trobadors loved word play -- e.g. double-entrendres, extremely tight rhymes -- and invented complicated poetic forms (you have a trobador to thank or curse for the sestina). The result is that while the sense of a troubador song may be translated, translating the form, bringing all the witty word play which was the point of their craft, into another language is pretty close to impossible. They even managed to invent a kind of rhyme (rims derivatatius) which is close to impossible to execute in English, requiring, as it does, a syllable's length difference in congugation of verbs or declention of nouns.
So if you want to appreciate the most famous poetry in the history of Europe, you have to learn Old Occitan and read it in the original.
And that is one example of why it is so important to preserve dead and dying languages. So that, should some weirdo in the future actually care about the bounty of the human artistic acheivement through time, the door to the libraries of the past may yet be unlocked by those crazy enough to learn the keys.
We preserve languages for the same reason we don't burn libraries.
The irony here is killing me. The ISP Stein runs -- theWorld.com -- is locally renown for it's black holing of mail from all major free email services. It's impossible to email a TheWorld user from yahoo, fastmail, etc -- but theWorld doesn't bounce the messages, it just routes them to /dev/null. Subscribers have been leaving TheWorld in droves as they discover that they can't correspond with their Aunt Sally with her yahoo account -- and that this "feature" is not one that can be turned off on a by-user basis.
For any other ex-theWorld customers out there looking for alternative unix shell accounts, try jtan.com which has SpamAssassin.
"Hey, kid: you know that inexplicable and unsubstantiated conviction you have in your bones that school is a pointless atrocity and your parents only care whether you live or die on the basis of whether it makes them look bad to the neighbors?
Well, you're right.
You need to get out of your school, your family and your neighborhood. Here's how to go about doing that.
You need to find some residental educational program far away. "Residental" here is a power word, with which "to conjure with". (1a. Find a piece of paper and carry it with you at all time. Write powerful useful words on it so you won't forget them.) To find such a residental program, you are going to need to do some research at the Library. The one downtown.
Basically "residental educaitonal program" means "boarding school" -- but there might be some useful leads out there which aren't really schools or which don't call themselves schools. Apprenticeship programs, perhaps.
If you don't know where to start, go to the reference librarian and tell her that you are doing a report for school on boarding schools, and ask how she might recommend you search for information. Be sure to tell her you're interested in finding out what programs currently exist, because you're supposed to write letters to them to ask them questions.
Do tons of research. Find a program which sounds good. Small schools are good. Avoid places which bill themselves as "academic" in theme or focus, because at the time you are searching that was the buzz-word schools which didn't have any focus at all used to justify their existence. Schools which specialize in science, engineering (which you will love), music, the arts, philosophy, and/or rhetoric are good bets for you. Most trade schools and military academies however are not so good. That said, it is better that you get into *any* program, rather than stay put. Do not worry about the cost.
Make a list of your top five choices. I trust you have kept all this secret. For the next step to work you must never let on that there are alternatives which please you almost as well. It is only if the next step fails utterly -- or some force invites you to negotiate -- that maybe you reveal that.
Go to your father. He's the one with the big bucks, and the loser in the custody battle. "Confide" in him that your bestest dream is to go to that program you picked, but that you're sure your mother would never ever let you attend a residental program, and that she would be so upset by the idea of you leaving, that you don't even dare bring it up with her.
Then, go to your mother. Ideally before your father gets to her, but not necessarily. Ask her if she had ever lived away from her parents to go to school. You will have piqued her interest, and she'll ask you why you ask. "Admit" as if reluctant to say so, that you're interested in the idea of boarding schools.
In both situations, it is *imperative* that you never EVER explain why -- neither true nor false reasons. Any reason you give can be argued with, quibbled with. Just keep maintaining, when they ask you why you are interested, why you want to go, "I don't know, it just seems really cool to me." They can't argue with that, and won't try.
They won't cave immediately. You're going to have to bring it up about every 15 days. I recommend keeping a calender and tracking how often you bring up the topic with each of them. (Tell your mom you want the calendar for recording friends' birthdays.) Don't pick the same day each week or every other week; too obvious. 15 days is good.
You may have to keep it up for a year or two. But unlikely even that long. Eventually your father will bring you the brochures of some school which is not residental, or otherwise a "compromise". If it's not what you want, say "it's nice, but the program I want to go to is...." He is impressed by people who stick to their guns. Remember, that's how you got the loft.
Eventually, he will probably take you on a trip to the program of your choice, for a tour. Be sure when you are in an interview situation, especially if you feel you are getting weepy, that you ask to speak to the interviewer without your father present. It's OK to burst into tears -- so long as you flat out say "I'm so scared you won't take me, and I want to go here so much!" Tell them it's your dream (they like hearing that).
Good luck, and enjoy your new life."
"P.S. Don't look back."
From the article:
Who else was reminded of this story in NukeEs?
[Lameness filter foiler. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Aliquam ultrices eros ut purus. In posuere, leo vel feugiat tempor, libero quam semper wisi, at venenatis mauris tortor vitae diam. Cras sodales felis eget justo. ]
FWIW, I've been doing that for the last 11 years, and I've decided it's got to end. It's a schizophrenic existence, and I find, because my "hobbies" also require a high level of commitment and administrative/management skill, that there is a tug-of-war between them for my energy. I can only put up with so much administrative bullshit in a day, which is going to get it: my job or my volunteer work?
I find I'm mentally in a place where I want my life to "hang together" better. I don't want to have to shift so much between work-mode and play-mode.
And this is part of the value of the book under discussion: it talks about the difference between expecting your job to be fun or entertaining (on one hand) and expecting your job to be satisfying and meaningful (on the other).
I'm not looking for a job that's "fun", but I need to do work the value of which is not solely in that it funds things which are of value to me. I need, increasingly, my work to feel like it makes a positive contribution to my community/world.
To bring this home a little: I'm a web dev. I've worked on a lot of corporate brochure-ware web sites. I feel proud of the quality of my work, and the value I gave for the money I way paid -- as a good craftsman will. But that's not enough any more. I now do web dev for a edu non-profit, which is better, I suppose, but also still not enough.
A quick word of advice to add to the review: this is not Studs Terkel's Working, this is not a lot of randomly assembled vignettes into jobs -- read the book in order. If, like me, you're inclined to cherry-pick excerpts from things that look like anthologies, don't. It's not several dozen little unconnected stories, they're actually arranged in an order to make a point. If you read them out of order, you often miss the point he was getting to. He also will make an analogy in one story (the "inner table" for example) and then refer to it subsequently, without further explanation. Read it like a novel.
Uh, the book doesn't try to tell you. It is about asking the question, and people's experiences in trying to answer the question. You'd be less of a doofus if when you tried to self-agrandize by spouting off ostensibly profound statements if you had half an idea what was in the book you are criticizing.
To be crystal clear: as a bunch of flames here have pointed out, Po has his head up his ass, and his self-involvement and provincalism make the book almost unreadable in places. But the criticism you have raised has nothing to do with this book.
How did this get moderated up to 5? It's not a career advice book. Jeesus, RTFB.
It's a journalistic exploration of the experience of people who have had interesting relationships to their careers. It is a book about interesting questions, it's not a book about answers. As to whether it does a good job at that is one thing.
You missed "A drug which eliminates regret - even if you've just murdered 1000 innocent civilians".
Oh, wait... you were talking hypothetically....
There's two questions here: how often do you have to upgrade to keep up with new software, and how sturdy is the physical machine.
A lot of people have spoken to the first. I will speak to the second: My home machine is a PowerMac 6100/66, with a Sonnet G3 upgrade card. I bought it used in the first place, back in 94 or 95. Periodically I drop a bigger HD into it, or get some random SCSI periph; I maxed out the memory at some point, and a friend gave me a bigger monitor. I've had to replace the battery twice.
I still use the same damn keyboard, and it still has exquisite response. I'd be using the same mouse if it weren't for CTS; I bought a $25 trackball at a fleamarket and have been using that for some number of years.
In short, the machine (including keyboard and mouse) is built like a tank. I'm still hammering away on it, and not one component (save the battery!) has failed in the 8 or so years I've had it.
Now, I'll warn you that about the time the first G3s came out, Apple lowered its factory standards, and machines today are comparatively more prone to defects than older Apple lines -- but I've given to understand that compared to PeeCees recent Macs are still have *much* lower parts failure rates.
Hmmm. Are you male?
I'm female. And one of the things I have been coming to realize of late is that I need to worry less about the people in my life, and more about having meaningful work in my life. I was raised on the "it doesn't matter what you do..." idea, and it turns out that that can be a real subtle way of dismissing women's ambitions.
After all, if what really matters is the people in your life and not the kind of work you do, it's just as good to be a nurse as a doctor, a secretary as an executive, etc. Heck, you might as well stay home and raise babies.
So, actually, I've been coming to see the reverse of your conclusion -- that is really does matter what kind of work you do.
I do wonder if the issue is that men are (still) raised to see their whole identities in their jobs, while women (still) are raised to eschew taking any identity from their jobs. That you had to learn that the people matter, and that I had to learn that the work matters.
I... I never thought I'd ever see MIT or CalTech called a "small liberal-arts college".
I have a dim recollection of some ~1950s-ish story having the idea, as a throw-away line; there were people who subsisted on the income of allowing advertisers to advertise to them. I think it was "The Space Merchants", by Pohl and Kornbluth, 1953, but I may be misremebering which story.
Worse than that, the entire article presupposes open, public "communities". What if I want to do community-building within my place of employment? I certainly am unconcerned with attracting drive-by interest from the general public. What if I want to do community-building amongst my geographical neighbors? I actively want to discourage participation from people not in that demographic.
The rules of the game are very different when one isn't building a public community. Frankly, "closed" or "private" communities are a lot more "community-like", because they aren't a bunch of strangers, and often have shared resources and projects.
That is one crucial thing which he failed to mention at all: one of the reasons that Open Source project-based communities are so strong is that the members aren't just shooting the breeze, they actually have shared interests in a common good and project (e.g. the code they are working on). It is not totally necessary for a community to have a shared work, but it is a real boost.
Nor, for that matter does he differentiate between a vital "community site" and a vital "community". Consider all the argument about whether /. is a community. Clearly /. is a vital community site with an enormous amount of traffic. But it's not really much of a community in that, I think it is fair to say, most people here are unconcerned with the day-to-day lives of the other people here.
A big rolicking on-going discussion does not a community make. It's one part of the whole, and it may be the foundation on which a community can bloom, but a community is more than conversation.
As a "car-free by choice" Boston-area resident: fuck, no.
The MBTA is massively erratic. Different lines (both bus and subway) get different levels of service. Most of the other commentators in this thread have talked about the Green Line, which is abysmal (runs *in* traffic on several routes). I live on the northern arm of the Red Line, which is fantastic; however, it splits into two southern arms which are, definitionally, half the frequency of the unified northern arm. Thus it takes a Harvard professor half the wait to get a train to Boston Common as it does a housewife in Fields Corrner, despite them both being "on the Red Line". The Orange line is fast, but is essentially a commuter line, connecting impoverished residental areas to downtown; at times it is no more frequent than every 20 min, and is usually overcrowded and filthy. And so on.
The busses are a valient attempt to make something work in what must be the most bus-inimicable metro area in the US. But they still suck. For comparison, the MUNI in SF publishes (or did when I lived there 10 ya) a massive book of bus schedules, to which the busses run, +/- 2 minutes; it had many "timed connections" throughout the city whereby one bus would not leave a certain stop until another bus had dropped of (transferring) passengers. That's inconceivable in Boston. There are NO timed connections, in the entire bus system. You have *no* idea when one bus drops you off when the next bus will really be along. Busses regularly get 5 or 10 minutes behind schedule -- in part because this is traffic hell, and there's nothing to be done about it.
Wow, I'm astonished at the unanimity of "crack whip" as a response.
I'm going to take the questioner at his word: he doesn't know why this is happening, and has never been responsible for other coders (or other employees) before.
There's many reasons people might be turning out insufficient or inadequate code. Whether or not you think them good reasons is your call. But you need to find out what they are. It may just be that they are lazy good-for-nothings, in need of "motivation". But maybe:
Some other project has been imposed on them, and the other manager(s) are squeekier wheels? Maybe they've been working their buns off on another project. Or worse, they're saddled with administrative duties ("please restore my drive from backup!") which are absorbing their time. First check to see if something has been competing with you for their time.
They are angry at you or the organization, and they are expressing their anger in the only way they feel they can? Did you piss these guys off? Did their employer piss them off? Are the brushing up their resumes to jump ship, and just going through the motions while they job hunt?
They not coming to you with help because they think you have priorized their being self-sufficient over getting things done quickly? Do they know what your coding standards are (e.g. variable naming protocols)? Do they know you're disappointed?
They've never had to cooperate with another coder before? They are used to pulling a heroic all-nighter and handing it in, interoperability never before required?
In other words, use your problem solving skills. If there is some thing (e.g. other project) getting in their way, remove that thing. If they are having a problem you can solve, solve it. If they lack clue, impart clue. All that may be insufficient in the end, but until you investigate, you'll never know.
And ask people in ways which give them outs. "I had expected more from you by now. Have you been very busy with other things? If so, how can we get this project pushed up your priority queue?" allows someone who was slacking off a chance to realize that they were slacking off and pull their act together, without being shamed or losing face.
??? Ah! You must study English history. Because all those Troubadors and Trouveres writing albas mentioning watchmen ("gaitas") in the 12th/13th centuries would sure surprized to hear they don't exist.
In the 12th/14th century what you have is in towns (any area thickly settled enough) small numbers of people who stay up all night to watch the town for attack or, more importantly, fire. They carry trumpets and sound an "alls well" periodically all night. This is not the standing garrison familiar to D&D players, but they are the NPCs most likely to notice your 3rd level thief plying his trade in the wee hours; they won't try to apprehend them himself, but rather raise the entire town (won't that be a nice surprize. :)
(English dude: "Gaita" eventually became "Wait" across the Channel, and by the 15th century the duty had evolved to being a mostly musical job. But even through the 17th cen, the Waites of English cities carried badges ("cognizances").)
As far a laywers and doctors go, you forgot the idea of the university town. By the end of the 13th century Europe was pocked with not only university towns (Paris, Salerno, Oxford, e.g.) it was swarming with roudy students. Town/gown riots go back that far. Defitely a flavor of specialization you want to allow for.
Uh, or you could just issue everyone laptops, and have them pick up and move.
Forrester Research has (had?) an interesting way of doing things. They didn't have private offices. They have "pods" which are a rooms which has 3 to 6 desks, and are organized by division. Some divisions, of course, had more than one pod; the one I was in had three pods, next to one another, with internal doorways. Seeting was very egalitarian and random -- as a new temp, I wound up a koosh-ball throw away from the CTO. From time to time, someone would decide they needed a change of view, or to be closer to someone they were working with, and would pick up and move to another (open) desk in the pod (or another pod of the same division). Since their philosophy was to issue laptops by default, moving was a matter of a hour or two, if you had a lot of plants or papers or something.
So it was for IT, Web Development, HR, Marketing, and, of course, all the Research divisions (the people who make the product :). I get the impression Sales may have been organized differently (cubes).
I found it really great. The low population of a pod (and I was in one of the crowded pods) meant everyone was quiet enough I could think. People I was working with were right there, and I could see if they were busy/on the phone/etc. before I interrupted them with a question, and without my having to leave my desk. It was pleasantly convival without being distracting. It was nicely flexible and the egalitarianism was very nice.
And they did it without thin clients. A lot of the putative benefits of thin clients can be gleened from investing in laptops as the default machines for everyone (regardless of platform).
They did a bunch of unusual business practices which worked really well.
OMG, someone besides me remembers "Fantasia Mathematica"! "Twas' Euclid and the Theorem Pi//Did plane and solid in the text//All parallel were the radii//and the angle convexed."
Thanks for mentioning the author; I think I have a date with ABE....
... the early days of the WWW, when journalists put their noses in the air and said "No one will ultimately use this newfangled net-thingy. There are no editors, no jouralistics ethics. It propagates wild rumors and out right-lies mixed in with the truth. When people see how untrustworthy it is, they will come running back to traditional media, which they can rely upon to be fact-checked, considered, and true?"
Is anyone else as amused as I am by the recent turn of events?
Er, you have that exactly backwards. In Christianity, Sunday is the sabbath on which one is not supposed to work, and certainly not to wage war. If anything, this is sort of a demonstration that this is not a religious action, by violating that religious restriction.
NPR is reporting another hijacked plane is still in the air; flying along the east coast; being shaddowed by a F-16.