Bob Cratchet got Christmas off. I, on the other hand, do not, despite it being an "official" company holiday and having made travel plans and requested vacation days (which were approved) in *September*.
The conversation with my boss went something like this:
Boss: "We need you to come in on Tuesday -- we have to upgrade a customer system in Taiwan and we'll need you there if something goes wrong."
Me: "But I'm not customer service or support! I'm the Release Engineer! Besides, I haven't seen my family in a year! I'm flying out day after tomorrow!"
Boss: "Well, some of the developers are coming in."
Me: "Yeah? They're Chinese nationals on H1-B visas who are afraid you'll have them deported if they say no. Besides, I already cut short my Thanksgiving vacation for you!"
Boss: [waving hand] "You can can work on Christmas; you can always see your family later."
Me: "I can work on Christmas; I can always see my family later."
Pathetic, eh? The worst part is that this isn't even an emergency; my boss just decided that the 25th was as good a time as ever. So, I sat at work for 7 hours and they didn't even need me to be there. To cap it all off, my boss finished up the day by thanking us for coming in, telling us he'll "need us in all day tomorrow", and finished off with his morale-building "don't forget, the economy is bad and you won't find another job" speech.
I really, really miss the.com days where employers had to kiss your ass -- my girlfriend has been out of work for three months, and I'm fresh enough out of school that I'm not positive I could find another job right away (we'd be completely broke in two weeks with neither of us working). As soon as things recover a bit I'm out of this soulless excuse for a company.
And maybe I'll call Microsoft and tell 'em about the company's somewhat lax policy towards licensing all the software we include on our systems.
Cutting back now is like buying a V8 Mustang, then scrapping your plans to add a body kit, slicks, blower, aftercooler and nitro -- you can't do as much as you originally planned, but you can still get from place to place.
Hey, looking for ships at sea is one of the easiest things to do with a computer, at least so far as image recognition goes.
Think about it: you're looking for something that's a fixed shape and a fixed size (well, relatively fixed -- you can calculate by what angle the satelite is looking from) against a background that's usually pretty free from noise images.
'course, then there's always infrared. These nuke-yoo-lar suckers tend to run pretty hot.
It should be pretty obvious by now that Arnold's way too old for this -- didn't anyone else in Hollywood see The Sixth Day?
Good enough should have been left alone after T2; I'm not sure how you'd make a sequal to improve on that movie even with a younger Arnold and a Linda Hamilton who isn't sick of James Cameron.
But yeah, I'm sure I'll see it, but this is a big mistake.
A judge in New Jersey has sent 100+ teachers to jail because they won't work without a contract (would you?).
*That's* what I call abuse of power. This strikes me more as steps to help ensure that the carelessness of a dimwitted government agency doesn't end up hurting anyone unnecessarily.
It seems to me that the Government wasn't taking proper steps to keep that which was entrusted to them safe.
This would be like the Government sending my tax return in cash -- it's irresposible because anyone could easily open my mailbox and find almost $3 of totally spendible money ready and waiting.
It seems to be that forcing the whole system offline until it's ready for the modern internet was the only responsible course of action here.
It you can regenerate the optic nerve (or rather, prompt it to regenerate), what about other nerves? Spinal cord? Maybe you could make Rush Limbaugh hear again (or at least make him deaf only to the poor, human suffering and forward-thinking ideas like he was before).
How on earth do you lose freedom here? You're still free to go buy a car that doesn't use this sort of antitheft system -- get a Kia or something. I don't recall seeing legislation requiring you to go buy a Honda.
Jesus, this is on the level of whining that you can't use the windshield wipers from your old car (which were brand new!) on a new car you just bought.
Actually, CA pointed out to me that the only time I wanted to smoke is when I'm out drinking (bad habits love company, I guess) -- to this day, even just having a beer can set me off. Since you can't smoke in bars, and since I don't drink at home, it was easy to quit.
Wow, this sounds framiliar. I actually lost friends to MUDs. Actual memorable exchange from my freshman year:
Me: "Hey, it's Friday and we're going to get a pizza and play some air hockey, wanna come?"
Him: "No, I've got to attend a towne meeting in Midgar to figure out how to handle this whole issue of that newbie constantly breaking character, and THEN we still have to deal with the Orc invasion."
I'd always figured that most people who really lived in the MUDs just didn't have the social skills or friends in the real world and were compensating, but that wasn't really so in this guy's case. We'd invite him to go do stuff, while it wasn't mind-blowingly entertaining (movies, bowling, pool -- this was Wisconsin so we needed to stay mostly indoors during the winter), but he just couldn't drag himself away. I guess playing skee-ball with your friends just doesn't compete with slaying dragons in a telnet session.
I think college really, really aggrivates the whole situation -- you're alone with no supervision for the first time in your life, oftentimes separated from your HS friends and without set responsibilites (you can skip class with no repercussions until the end of the semester, after all). Hell, in some majors, you can skip a majority of your classes and still C- your way though each semester.
My SuperSenior year I knew a guy who was so addicted to EverQuest that he could not quit. He'd even cancel his account, only to reactivate it at 3 AM some day a week later and play for two days straight -- it was seriously like watching an alcoholic fall off the wagon. So, yeah, while gaming addiction sounds pretty funny at first blush, it actually is a major problem for some people.
What to do about it? Got me. Hey, a 12-step program might sound bizarely overboard, but I'll bet it'd do some people some real good just to have the support there from people who don't just think it's funny.
I think you sound like a bit of an idiot with your little rant, but it did help me come up with one:
- Hire a bunch of people who don't share fluency any one language in common. Throw them all together and make no provisions to improve communication.
This is happening at my comany -- we're roughly 50% Chinese and 50% Americans/Canadians (not all white, but all native english speakers). We can't communicate very easily because the Chinese don't speak much english and the rest of the company doesn't speak much Chinese.
So, we end up just trying to work around each other -- since we only have two people who speak both languages fluently, we have to pick and choose how we use 'em. Pretty dumb.
I'm in the alternate situation: Too many of my execs (except, for some reason, the VP of Development) are engineers.
This leads to a whole host of problems:
Many of them tend think they're smarter than people in non-engineering roles.
Pursuant to this, they don't think PR and marketing and sales are "hard" or really even "important".
Again after #1, they're always right when in disagreement with marketing or sales guys.
Most of them haven't developed in a decade+, so now they know just enough to be dangerous -- make micromanaging decisions about detailed subjects things they don't understand well enough, chase unnecessarily after bleeding edge tech, etc.
Fail to understand that not everyone wants to always work 14 hours a day.
Laugh off meetings, so that eventually nobody in the company knows whats going on.
As a result, nobody's heard of us (no marketing budget, no trade shows, no nothing) and nobody's buying our products (engineers tend to make lousy sales guys; despite what they might believe, nobody wants to listen to a 3-hour ridiculously detailed presentation on your product).
This is why it's important to force your developers to (gasp) comment their code. Of course, 99 times out of 100, this won't happen because either (1) the boss thinks that'll slow you down and you'll miss your release date or (2) your boss has never written a line of code in his life and doesn't even know you can comment on that computer codes thing.
It's also an excellent place to dispose of the bodies of the consultants your boss hired 'cause he thinks you're a peabrain (hey, he could be right; you're working there, aren't you?).
Step 1: Hire my boss (God, please hire him away!).
Step 2: Put him in charge of software development.
Step 3: Do nothing as priorities change weekly and deadlines slip away.
Step 4: Do nothing to stem exodus of clued-in employees to less-screwed companies.
Step 5: Force remaining employees to work 15 hour days. Provide subtle reminders that there's a recession out there.
Step 6: Do nothing as even non-clued-in employees flee.
Step 7: Hire a sweatshop in China to crank out code; present this sound like a good idea.
There, that was pretty easy. And, to be honest, everything beyond Step 1 pretty much happens on its own.
Wow, this is so stupid, it must be from California
on
This is IT?
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· Score: 1, Flamebait
Let me get this straight:
I can get from place to place at roughly 20 MPH. Therefore, it would be useful in really densely-packed places -- homes and offices in skyscrapers (as opposed to packed but spread-out urban areas like San Jose).
It's open, so it would only be useful where it's not likely to rain, snow, or be otherwise environmentally extreme on a regular basis. Strike Chicago, Seattle, San Francisco, New York, Minneapolis, Boston, DC and Detroit, to name a few.
You will look so stupid riding these, that you'll get even more shit than those idiots who rode razor scooters around back in the.com days.
It's worth $3k, and all I really need to do is kick you off at a stoplight and ride off. Far easier than carjacking; more like stealing a very, very expensive bike. If you have any cargo that you can't easily carry, forget about it.
Yeah. Revolutionary. A thing that makes sense in San Diego, LA, Miama, Dallas and Atlanta, and then only if you want to get, er, Ginger-jacked and contribute to various crack habits on a semiregular basis. Oh, and forget about impressing the ladies -- motorcycles are cool, scooters just call for a beating.
On the other hand, I drive a bright red 2000 Mustang convertible with leather interior and a kick-ass sound system. Yeah, I'm racing to ditch it and pick up one of these suckers.
Ever since that year right after the IPO when ESR posted the list demanding items such as "a solid gold toilet", "bigger fireplace to burn stacks of $100 bills", "private Lear jet (w. heatseaking missiles)" and "hot tub filled with Dom Peringon", I stopped paying attention to the wish lists.
j/k -- that would be nice to see, eh? I wouldn't think it's too late; most people don't buy the bulk of their xmas gifts until after Thanksgiving.
My girlfriend and I were actually talking about this over dinner on Saturday. We figured that the MST3k folks could do a commentary channel on the DVD release of even decent movies.
I figure the biggest issue would be that you wouldn't have the heads or the clips before/after the commercials (some of the funniest stuff is the movement of the heads in front of the screen, etc). Can you do a digital overlay?
I also think that a pop-up video style factoid feature would be great with a lot of movies. Imagine how much interesting stuff you could come up with.
Of course, the real question is: Would directors and studios be willing to have their own movies subjected to the ribbing they would take from either of these formats? Probably not.
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The conversation with my boss went something like this:
Boss: "We need you to come in on Tuesday -- we have to upgrade a customer system in Taiwan and we'll need you there if something goes wrong."
Me: "But I'm not customer service or support! I'm the Release Engineer! Besides, I haven't seen my family in a year! I'm flying out day after tomorrow!"
Boss: "Well, some of the developers are coming in."
Me: "Yeah? They're Chinese nationals on H1-B visas who are afraid you'll have them deported if they say no. Besides, I already cut short my Thanksgiving vacation for you!"
Boss: [waving hand] "You can can work on Christmas; you can always see your family later."
Me: "I can work on Christmas; I can always see my family later."
Pathetic, eh? The worst part is that this isn't even an emergency; my boss just decided that the 25th was as good a time as ever. So, I sat at work for 7 hours and they didn't even need me to be there. To cap it all off, my boss finished up the day by thanking us for coming in, telling us he'll "need us in all day tomorrow", and finished off with his morale-building "don't forget, the economy is bad and you won't find another job" speech.
I really, really miss the .com days where employers had to kiss your ass -- my girlfriend has been out of work for three months, and I'm fresh enough out of school that I'm not positive I could find another job right away (we'd be completely broke in two weeks with neither of us working). As soon as things recover a bit I'm out of this soulless excuse for a company.
And maybe I'll call Microsoft and tell 'em about the company's somewhat lax policy towards licensing all the software we include on our systems.
Seriously, though, that's pretty darn cool. Pretty soon, we won't even need that stupid blimp over our favorite sporting events.
Cutting back now is like buying a V8 Mustang, then scrapping your plans to add a body kit, slicks, blower, aftercooler and nitro -- you can't do as much as you originally planned, but you can still get from place to place.
Think about it: you're looking for something that's a fixed shape and a fixed size (well, relatively fixed -- you can calculate by what angle the satelite is looking from) against a background that's usually pretty free from noise images.
'course, then there's always infrared. These nuke-yoo-lar suckers tend to run pretty hot.
Hey, I know you! You were the CEO at my old .com who kept telling us that profits didn't matter!
Awright! Just think of all the old porn that awaits my eager stare! No sleep for me tonight.
No, really. Imagine the potential impact on resale value, especially if organized crime ever moves into your area.
LOL... Someone get Jenna Jameson on the phone and let her know we have a mainstream movie role for her.
Good enough should have been left alone after T2; I'm not sure how you'd make a sequal to improve on that movie even with a younger Arnold and a Linda Hamilton who isn't sick of James Cameron.
But yeah, I'm sure I'll see it, but this is a big mistake.
*That's* what I call abuse of power. This strikes me more as steps to help ensure that the carelessness of a dimwitted government agency doesn't end up hurting anyone unnecessarily.
This would be like the Government sending my tax return in cash -- it's irresposible because anyone could easily open my mailbox and find almost $3 of totally spendible money ready and waiting.
It seems to be that forcing the whole system offline until it's ready for the modern internet was the only responsible course of action here.
It you can regenerate the optic nerve (or rather, prompt it to regenerate), what about other nerves? Spinal cord? Maybe you could make Rush Limbaugh hear again (or at least make him deaf only to the poor, human suffering and forward-thinking ideas like he was before).
Jesus, this is on the level of whining that you can't use the windshield wipers from your old car (which were brand new!) on a new car you just bought.
Actually, CA pointed out to me that the only time I wanted to smoke is when I'm out drinking (bad habits love company, I guess) -- to this day, even just having a beer can set me off. Since you can't smoke in bars, and since I don't drink at home, it was easy to quit.
(The way to do it? Move to California -- the only legal place to smoke is under my bed with the lights off)
Me: "Hey, it's Friday and we're going to get a pizza and play some air hockey, wanna come?"
Him: "No, I've got to attend a towne meeting in Midgar to figure out how to handle this whole issue of that newbie constantly breaking character, and THEN we still have to deal with the Orc invasion."
I'd always figured that most people who really lived in the MUDs just didn't have the social skills or friends in the real world and were compensating, but that wasn't really so in this guy's case. We'd invite him to go do stuff, while it wasn't mind-blowingly entertaining (movies, bowling, pool -- this was Wisconsin so we needed to stay mostly indoors during the winter), but he just couldn't drag himself away. I guess playing skee-ball with your friends just doesn't compete with slaying dragons in a telnet session.
I think college really, really aggrivates the whole situation -- you're alone with no supervision for the first time in your life, oftentimes separated from your HS friends and without set responsibilites (you can skip class with no repercussions until the end of the semester, after all). Hell, in some majors, you can skip a majority of your classes and still C- your way though each semester.
My SuperSenior year I knew a guy who was so addicted to EverQuest that he could not quit. He'd even cancel his account, only to reactivate it at 3 AM some day a week later and play for two days straight -- it was seriously like watching an alcoholic fall off the wagon. So, yeah, while gaming addiction sounds pretty funny at first blush, it actually is a major problem for some people.
What to do about it? Got me. Hey, a 12-step program might sound bizarely overboard, but I'll bet it'd do some people some real good just to have the support there from people who don't just think it's funny.
- Hire a bunch of people who don't share fluency any one language in common. Throw them all together and make no provisions to improve communication.
This is happening at my comany -- we're roughly 50% Chinese and 50% Americans/Canadians (not all white, but all native english speakers). We can't communicate very easily because the Chinese don't speak much english and the rest of the company doesn't speak much Chinese.
So, we end up just trying to work around each other -- since we only have two people who speak both languages fluently, we have to pick and choose how we use 'em. Pretty dumb.
This leads to a whole host of problems:
Many of them tend think they're smarter than people in non-engineering roles.
Pursuant to this, they don't think PR and marketing and sales are "hard" or really even "important".
Again after #1, they're always right when in disagreement with marketing or sales guys.
Most of them haven't developed in a decade+, so now they know just enough to be dangerous -- make micromanaging decisions about detailed subjects things they don't understand well enough, chase unnecessarily after bleeding edge tech, etc.
Fail to understand that not everyone wants to always work 14 hours a day.
Laugh off meetings, so that eventually nobody in the company knows whats going on.
As a result, nobody's heard of us (no marketing budget, no trade shows, no nothing) and nobody's buying our products (engineers tend to make lousy sales guys; despite what they might believe, nobody wants to listen to a 3-hour ridiculously detailed presentation on your product).
There's got to be a happy medium someplace.
This is why it's important to force your developers to (gasp) comment their code. Of course, 99 times out of 100, this won't happen because either (1) the boss thinks that'll slow you down and you'll miss your release date or (2) your boss has never written a line of code in his life and doesn't even know you can comment on that computer codes thing.
It's also an excellent place to dispose of the bodies of the consultants your boss hired 'cause he thinks you're a peabrain (hey, he could be right; you're working there, aren't you?).
Step 2: Put him in charge of software development.
Step 3: Do nothing as priorities change weekly and deadlines slip away.
Step 4: Do nothing to stem exodus of clued-in employees to less-screwed companies.
Step 5: Force remaining employees to work 15 hour days. Provide subtle reminders that there's a recession out there.
Step 6: Do nothing as even non-clued-in employees flee.
Step 7: Hire a sweatshop in China to crank out code; present this sound like a good idea.
There, that was pretty easy. And, to be honest, everything beyond Step 1 pretty much happens on its own.
I can get from place to place at roughly 20 MPH. Therefore, it would be useful in really densely-packed places -- homes and offices in skyscrapers (as opposed to packed but spread-out urban areas like San Jose). It's open, so it would only be useful where it's not likely to rain, snow, or be otherwise environmentally extreme on a regular basis. Strike Chicago, Seattle, San Francisco, New York, Minneapolis, Boston, DC and Detroit, to name a few.
You will look so stupid riding these, that you'll get even more shit than those idiots who rode razor scooters around back in the .com days.
It's worth $3k, and all I really need to do is kick you off at a stoplight and ride off. Far easier than carjacking; more like stealing a very, very expensive bike. If you have any cargo that you can't easily carry, forget about it.
Yeah. Revolutionary. A thing that makes sense in San Diego, LA, Miama, Dallas and Atlanta, and then only if you want to get, er, Ginger-jacked and contribute to various crack habits on a semiregular basis. Oh, and forget about impressing the ladies -- motorcycles are cool, scooters just call for a beating.
On the other hand, I drive a bright red 2000 Mustang convertible with leather interior and a kick-ass sound system. Yeah, I'm racing to ditch it and pick up one of these suckers.
Mmm... Sodium. Anyone else feel like getting some Ramen all of the sudden?
j/k -- that would be nice to see, eh? I wouldn't think it's too late; most people don't buy the bulk of their xmas gifts until after Thanksgiving.
I figure the biggest issue would be that you wouldn't have the heads or the clips before/after the commercials (some of the funniest stuff is the movement of the heads in front of the screen, etc). Can you do a digital overlay?
I also think that a pop-up video style factoid feature would be great with a lot of movies. Imagine how much interesting stuff you could come up with.
Of course, the real question is: Would directors and studios be willing to have their own movies subjected to the ribbing they would take from either of these formats? Probably not.