I see where this is going... I just finished (re)reading Antrax (one of Terry Brooks' Shannara series). We're all screwed when this printer gizmo becomes self-aware!
I don't think I could be any more involved in my 16-year-old son's gaming and circle of friends. After hearing that I was a Counter-Strike addict in a former life, they introduced me to Call Of Duty 4. After I proved that I don't completely suck, they all now invite me into their games. They also like hearing "stories" about how things were before the Internet - dialing in to individual BBS systems, acoustic modems (yes, just like in Wargames), saving programs to cassette tapes, etc.. In the late 80's, I wrote a war-dialing program that found its way onto several BBS's, and still lives on the Internet today (it's even referred to in at least on computer security book, found on Google Books). They all thought that was just the coolest damned thing ever, so I'm seen as the "uber hacker".
Hilarity ensued one night when several of them were at our house - one of them brought a laptop. In my house, Facebook and Myspace are banned, blocked via several methods (Squid, Dansguardian, and OpenDNS). The "lead hacker" at the time thought he could get around my blocks by using another open proxy. The entire time he was messing around, I was upstairs watching the logs, watching all this take place. I let him struggle for about 15 minutes, then went down and casually asked "Who's trying to get around my firewall?". His face turned beet red, he stammered around for a few seconds, and then said "I didn't even know you could block proxy servers." The rest of them all laughed hysterically, and my son chimes in "Dude, my Dad gets paid to protect computers!". From that point on, I was seen as "l33t". Imagine, me, "l33t". Hilarious...
Can do anything about the DNA, but I dragged my wife and kids 900 miles away from the entire family, both sides, to keep them away from this kind of stuff. Seems to have worked, the kids don't like to go back for visits, and the last time they came to visit us, it was an awkward few days, and everybody was glad to see them leave. Took me a week to pick all of the cigarette butts out of my driveway and flower pots.
> Many are pledging to not vote for Obama out of some kind of principle
Right, principles... My father-in-law (about as close to West Virginia hillbilly as you can get), has already started with the crude Obama jokes. He's standing on his "principles", refusing to vote for Obama because "you can't trust a black man". Obama's comment about guns and religion really set him off, "dumbest goddam thing I ever did hear". Excuse me, you live in the woods, go to church every Sunday, have a cabinet full of guns at home, carry a gun in your truck, and threaten to shoot everybody who crosses you? Truth hurts, I guess.
Re:Half of the innocent stuff I did as a kid...
on
A Home Lab/Shop For Kids?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
So true, so true. After getting "in trouble" for trying to show my kids various things, I finally just gave up:
- model rockets, only place to launch is a city park a block away. Kids loved it, even attracted a couple of the neighbor kids. Cops showed up after the third launch and put a stop to it, "can't do that in a city park".
- used dry ice and water to explode plastic pop bottles - neighbors called the cops
- having a perfect unobstructed view of nearly the entire night sky, I bought a nice 3-inch telescope to use on the back deck. The kids got to see Jupiter and three of its moons, they were able to barely make out the rings of Saturn, Mars and Venus were interesting, and the moon of course was fun to look at. Neighbor lady accused of looking in her windows (even though the scope was pointed UP and 90-degrees away from her house). After that, she made it a point to slam windows shut and to make sure we noticed her jerking the blinds closed every time we were out there. Made me uncomfortable enough to just say f*** it, took all the fun out of being out there.
Truly depressing. Now one kid won't move away from the Xbox, except to eat, and the other has tuned in to various MTV garbage and American Idol. Sigh....
This doesn't work for any of the Google plugins. Silly as it may seem, the Google Toolbar has become a must-have for me. Keeps my bookmarks in sync, and the Google "Web History" feature is incredibly handy for finding those "I remember reading this, but I don't remember where" sites. Yes, I know this is Google's problem, just commenting that the well-known validation hack doesn't work for some useful plugins.
I have very fond memories of working with OS/2 - by far my favorite operating system. I remember how "amazing" it was to be able to format a floppy disk and still use the computer for other things, couldn't do that with Windows at the time. Go Team OS/2!!!
Thanks for the info. As it turns out, I hooked up with a guy at the same office I work in, who also rides in from Eden Prairie. He gave me a couple of routes, one on surface streets, one 90% trails through/around the Bush Lake/Hyland area. Going to take the bike in on Friday for a tune-up, new tires, etc.. Let the adventure begin!
"Proactive virus protection". Does this mean that by being proactive and not clicking on attachments, keeping my machines patched up, and not running Internet Explorer, I'm violating their patent?
Fellow Twin-Citian here, SW metro. My 4 mile commute takes me from one side of 169 (Eden Prairie) to the opposite side (Bloomington, near the Hyland ski jump). I'm stuck driving for another 2 weeks until the kids get out of school for the summer, but I am seriously considering parking the car for the summer. I have showers available at work, and a locker room. I've scoped out some routes already, none are perfect, but I think they're do-able. I'll admit that I'm not thrilled about crossing 169 on a bike. My choices are Anderson Lakes Parkway (overpass, which is good, but longer route), or Highwood (crosswalk at a stoplight). One thing in my favor is that I typically work 5:30am-2:30pm, so I'm not looking at rush hour traffic.
I'm serious about trying this. That said, what suggestions/requirements are there for:
- finding "off street" routes, trails, etc. I suspect there are trails around Bush Lake, I just don't know how to find them. - equipment? I have an older mountain bike, I know the tires are dry-rotted and need replaced, but the bike itself is in great shape. - safety gear? Helmet, obviously. What else? - rain gear? - other tips?
- I have monitoring at work that will send me SMS messages (email to procmail script to "mail2sms" to Google's SMS page). I get probably 100 alerts a week for everything from database blocking, long-running queries to low disk space, server down, etc..
- I use Google Calendar to send SMS reminders for events/appointments
- I have two teenage kids whom I communicate with via SMS more than face-to-face
I have no idea how many messages this (combined with wife/kids usage) amounts to, but I've not gotten any complaints about excessive usage.
I currently drive an SUV, a 15-year old Explorer. For status? Nope. For intimidation? Nope. It's ugly, rusty, and rattles/squeaks like crazy. So why do I drive it?
- easy maintenance. I do 99% of my own maintenance and repairs. This past weekend, for example, I replaced the outer tie-rod ends and did a "good enough for government work" front-end alignment. Cost me ~$25 in parts and 2 hours of my time. This same work, done "professionally" would have cost $300-$400 and involved dropping off/arranging for alternative transportation. I get the added benefit of knowing EXACTLY what was done to the truck.
- reliability. Cue the Ford jokes, but seriously, this (and the two previous rust-bucket trucks) are mechanically simple and reliable. It starts every time, even in February in Minnesota. I know every rattle, squeak, shimmy, vibration by heart, and can tell in an instant when something is wrong and generally where the problem is. No worries like is that the "electronic ride-height-ass-massage-dynamic-comfort-doodad" or simply a wheel bearing that needs greased?
- vanity. Actually, the opposite. I love driving in the snow. I work "odd" hours, often leaving the house before the snowplows have been out. I know that my truck will get me there, regardless of the weather conditions. I also know that should I have an accident and drop it into a ditch, or against a tree, no harm done. New scratch? Knocked off some rust? Big deal. Sure beats getting bent out of shape because I got a door ding on my new car.
- utility. A couple weekends ago, I hauled home ten bags of mulch from Home Depot. Wet, muddy, dirty bags of mulch. Could I have thrown these into my wife's mini-van? Yep, but then we'd have been upset about staining the carpet. Tossed them into the back of the Explorer however, and the stains blended in with the others, no harm, no foul.
I guess the point is that not everybody who drives an SUV fits the same mold. I could get all of these benefits from a small pickup truck, with two major differences - not enough room to pick up both kids from school, and winter traction (light pickups are a bear to drive on snow, even 4WD). My Explorer, I can beat it up, abuse it, fix it, and it continues to get me from point A to point B.
> Programming a TI99-4A in BASIC and trying to save to an audio tape... get the tape queued up manually, tell the computer to try, press record... nope, didn't take, change the volume slightly, try again...
Typing in code listings from Compute! magazine, finally getting the game Crazy Climber to run properly... Ahh, to be in the 8th grade again...
This has to be one of the dumbest things I've read about today. No, actually I think it's THE dumbest thing I've read today, and I've been at work for three hours already. Why is this necessary?
It's the norm in IT. It's the norm in Development. It's the norm at McDonalds. It's the norm at Home Depot. It's the norm, period.
Last weekend, I went into Home Depot to purchase a new propane grill. I already knew the model I wanted. I tracked down a droid to fetch it for me, pointed directly to the one that I wanted (4 burner model, $449). I told him that I had some other shopping to do, and he said he would load the grill onto one of those flatbed carts and have it waiting for me at the service desk. Fifteen minutes later, I go to the service desk to retrieve my grill. It's the wrong one. The grill he pulled for me was nothing like the one I pointed out, different color, three burners vs. four, price of $499. I promptly rolled it back to the grill aisle, found the same droid, and proceeded to have him fetch the proper grill.
I actually just dealt with a similar situation. Until October 2007 I was happily employed as a production DBA with a rather larger company, great benefits, good $$$, really had no plans to leave. Somewhere around mid-October, a friend of mine, who was working for a start-up, called me up, saying that the company had lost their DBA, were suffering lots of database performance issues, "if you're interested I can get you six figures", yada, yada, yada. Sounded like a chance to do something new, be a "hero" for a while, and pad the checkbook a little bit, so I took it.
November 1st, I walked into the new place, setup the basic DB monitoring and traces, and started nailing down the biggest performance issues. First thing I noticed was that there were lots of ad-hoc queries being run that were textbook examples of how NOT to write SQL queries - massive temp tables, non-sargable filters, you name it, they did it. Further investigation revealed that many of these queries were being run by DEVELOPERS. Hmmm, wait, this is a production database!?!? Whattya mean ALL developers have read/write access to production? Even the offshore group in Russia???? The same production database that contains SSNs, medical claims, etc..?? Holy shit! I proceeded to yank every developer login I could find out of the production database. Almost immediately, high-level developer A and high-level developer B went to golf-buddy CEO and complained. I was promptly instructed to restore the permissions that I had revoked, because developers needed access to production in order to debug issues. I argued briefly, but backed down until I could regroup.
Soon after that fiasco, I think actually the same week, I discovered that our production database servers (actually ALL of our database servers), which are hosted by a third-party, were PINGABLE from the Internet!!! After picking myself up off the floor, I proceeded to the "IT guy" to find out why. The response was "they're behind a firewall, so it's all good". Umm, no, it's not "all good", they shouldn't even be VISIBLE! If a no-goodnik can ping them, he knows they exist, and he's going to want to know what they contain. I insisted that the public-facing interface be UNPLUGGED (each server has three NICs - one public, one internal, one for admins). "Can't do that, it's not the vendor's standard configuration". Holy shit! I've only been here three weeks, and I'm developing a constant migraine.
The final straw came the week after Thanksgiving when all of the SQL servers rebooted overnight at 3:00am. Anybody care to guess what it was? Yep, Windows Update. Automatic updates were enabled on EVERY machine, even the production SERVERS, because the "IT guy" didn't want to have to worry about keeping up with patches. But what if an update bricks a machine? "I trust Microsoft to test their patches before releasing them, I've NEVER had a problem". Guess you weren't around for some of the NT4 service packs, huh? We have overnight processes running on some of these servers, a reboot will kill those! "Don't schedule anything to run at 3:00am". Holy shit!!!
My "old" boss had been in regular contact with me, continually asking if I was ready to come back. December 7th, I told him I was, gave my 2-weeks notice, took 2 weeks off for Christmas, and returned to my old job on January 2nd. Before leaving, I summed up the three issues above for the CEO of the start-up company, and fired them off in an email before walking out the door that last day. To this day, the SQL Server machines are still pingable from the outside world.
I used to feel the same way, but about a year ago, I ditched my electric razor:
- quicker? I'm not so sure about that. At first, yes, it took a lot longer to shave with a blade. Now that I've been doing it for a while, it honestly only takes 5 minutes.
- don't cut you, ever? Probably wouldn't say "ever", but I agree, it's hard to cut yourself with an electric shaver. However, I always seemed to end up with nasty red splotches, almost like a burn or rash, all over my neck after shaving. Haven't had that problem since switching to a blade & shaving cream.
- dumbass shaving foam? I actually rather enjoy the "tingly" feeling that some of the shaving creams out there provide.
- smooth shave? I have to solidly disagree with this one. My previous electric was one of the fancy Braun models with the self-cleaning base, which I purchased after hearing the "shaves as close as a blade" pitch. Having never used a blade before, I really didn't have anything to compare to, so I just assumed it was true. However, now that I've been using a blade for several months, I can tell you without a doubt, my electric never came CLOSE to the shave a blade can offer. At least not the 4-blade razors that I've been using.
Everyone has their preferences and needs, what works for me may not work for you, that's why we have options to choose from.
Slashdot Mirror
I've found that the Google Toolbar (for bookmarks and web history) combined with Mozilla's Weave (for everything else) is working quite nicely.
Sorry, couldn't resist. Just finished watching the cheesy modern remake of The Andromeda Strain last night...
I see where this is going... I just finished (re)reading Antrax (one of Terry Brooks' Shannara series). We're all screwed when this printer gizmo becomes self-aware!
I don't think I could be any more involved in my 16-year-old son's gaming and circle of friends. After hearing that I was a Counter-Strike addict in a former life, they introduced me to Call Of Duty 4. After I proved that I don't completely suck, they all now invite me into their games. They also like hearing "stories" about how things were before the Internet - dialing in to individual BBS systems, acoustic modems (yes, just like in Wargames), saving programs to cassette tapes, etc.. In the late 80's, I wrote a war-dialing program that found its way onto several BBS's, and still lives on the Internet today (it's even referred to in at least on computer security book, found on Google Books). They all thought that was just the coolest damned thing ever, so I'm seen as the "uber hacker".
Hilarity ensued one night when several of them were at our house - one of them brought a laptop. In my house, Facebook and Myspace are banned, blocked via several methods (Squid, Dansguardian, and OpenDNS). The "lead hacker" at the time thought he could get around my blocks by using another open proxy. The entire time he was messing around, I was upstairs watching the logs, watching all this take place. I let him struggle for about 15 minutes, then went down and casually asked "Who's trying to get around my firewall?". His face turned beet red, he stammered around for a few seconds, and then said "I didn't even know you could block proxy servers." The rest of them all laughed hysterically, and my son chimes in "Dude, my Dad gets paid to protect computers!". From that point on, I was seen as "l33t". Imagine, me, "l33t". Hilarious...
Can do anything about the DNA, but I dragged my wife and kids 900 miles away from the entire family, both sides, to keep them away from this kind of stuff. Seems to have worked, the kids don't like to go back for visits, and the last time they came to visit us, it was an awkward few days, and everybody was glad to see them leave. Took me a week to pick all of the cigarette butts out of my driveway and flower pots.
> Many are pledging to not vote for Obama out of some kind of principle
Right, principles... My father-in-law (about as close to West Virginia hillbilly as you can get), has already started with the crude Obama jokes. He's standing on his "principles", refusing to vote for Obama because "you can't trust a black man". Obama's comment about guns and religion really set him off, "dumbest goddam thing I ever did hear". Excuse me, you live in the woods, go to church every Sunday, have a cabinet full of guns at home, carry a gun in your truck, and threaten to shoot everybody who crosses you? Truth hurts, I guess.
So true, so true. After getting "in trouble" for trying to show my kids various things, I finally just gave up:
- model rockets, only place to launch is a city park a block away. Kids loved it, even attracted a couple of the neighbor kids. Cops showed up after the third launch and put a stop to it, "can't do that in a city park".
- used dry ice and water to explode plastic pop bottles - neighbors called the cops
- having a perfect unobstructed view of nearly the entire night sky, I bought a nice 3-inch telescope to use on the back deck. The kids got to see Jupiter and three of its moons, they were able to barely make out the rings of Saturn, Mars and Venus were interesting, and the moon of course was fun to look at. Neighbor lady accused of looking in her windows (even though the scope was pointed UP and 90-degrees away from her house). After that, she made it a point to slam windows shut and to make sure we noticed her jerking the blinds closed every time we were out there. Made me uncomfortable enough to just say f*** it, took all the fun out of being out there.
Truly depressing. Now one kid won't move away from the Xbox, except to eat, and the other has tuned in to various MTV garbage and American Idol. Sigh....
This doesn't work for any of the Google plugins. Silly as it may seem, the Google Toolbar has become a must-have for me. Keeps my bookmarks in sync, and the Google "Web History" feature is incredibly handy for finding those "I remember reading this, but I don't remember where" sites. Yes, I know this is Google's problem, just commenting that the well-known validation hack doesn't work for some useful plugins.
I have very fond memories of working with OS/2 - by far my favorite operating system. I remember how "amazing" it was to be able to format a floppy disk and still use the computer for other things, couldn't do that with Windows at the time. Go Team OS/2!!!
Thanks for the info. As it turns out, I hooked up with a guy at the same office I work in, who also rides in from Eden Prairie. He gave me a couple of routes, one on surface streets, one 90% trails through/around the Bush Lake/Hyland area. Going to take the bike in on Friday for a tune-up, new tires, etc.. Let the adventure begin!
"Proactive virus protection". Does this mean that by being proactive and not clicking on attachments, keeping my machines patched up, and not running Internet Explorer, I'm violating their patent?
(I kid, I kid)...
Fellow Twin-Citian here, SW metro. My 4 mile commute takes me from one side of 169 (Eden Prairie) to the opposite side (Bloomington, near the Hyland ski jump). I'm stuck driving for another 2 weeks until the kids get out of school for the summer, but I am seriously considering parking the car for the summer. I have showers available at work, and a locker room. I've scoped out some routes already, none are perfect, but I think they're do-able. I'll admit that I'm not thrilled about crossing 169 on a bike. My choices are Anderson Lakes Parkway (overpass, which is good, but longer route), or Highwood (crosswalk at a stoplight). One thing in my favor is that I typically work 5:30am-2:30pm, so I'm not looking at rush hour traffic.
I'm serious about trying this. That said, what suggestions/requirements are there for:
- finding "off street" routes, trails, etc. I suspect there are trails around Bush Lake, I just don't know how to find them.
- equipment? I have an older mountain bike, I know the tires are dry-rotted and need replaced, but the bike itself is in great shape.
- safety gear? Helmet, obviously. What else?
- rain gear?
- other tips?
Put Linux on one, plug in a webcam, and use Motion to turn it into a motion-sensing security camera.
I'm on Cingular/AT&T's unlimited plan as well:
- I have monitoring at work that will send me SMS messages (email to procmail script to "mail2sms" to Google's SMS page). I get probably 100 alerts a week for everything from database blocking, long-running queries to low disk space, server down, etc..
- I use Google Calendar to send SMS reminders for events/appointments
- I have two teenage kids whom I communicate with via SMS more than face-to-face
I have no idea how many messages this (combined with wife/kids usage) amounts to, but I've not gotten any complaints about excessive usage.
> You know, SUVs are not the problem
I currently drive an SUV, a 15-year old Explorer. For status? Nope. For intimidation? Nope. It's ugly, rusty, and rattles/squeaks like crazy. So why do I drive it?
- easy maintenance. I do 99% of my own maintenance and repairs. This past weekend, for example, I replaced the outer tie-rod ends and did a "good enough for government work" front-end alignment. Cost me ~$25 in parts and 2 hours of my time. This same work, done "professionally" would have cost $300-$400 and involved dropping off/arranging for alternative transportation. I get the added benefit of knowing EXACTLY what was done to the truck.
- reliability. Cue the Ford jokes, but seriously, this (and the two previous rust-bucket trucks) are mechanically simple and reliable. It starts every time, even in February in Minnesota. I know every rattle, squeak, shimmy, vibration by heart, and can tell in an instant when something is wrong and generally where the problem is. No worries like is that the "electronic ride-height-ass-massage-dynamic-comfort-doodad" or simply a wheel bearing that needs greased?
- vanity. Actually, the opposite. I love driving in the snow. I work "odd" hours, often leaving the house before the snowplows have been out. I know that my truck will get me there, regardless of the weather conditions. I also know that should I have an accident and drop it into a ditch, or against a tree, no harm done. New scratch? Knocked off some rust? Big deal. Sure beats getting bent out of shape because I got a door ding on my new car.
- utility. A couple weekends ago, I hauled home ten bags of mulch from Home Depot. Wet, muddy, dirty bags of mulch. Could I have thrown these into my wife's mini-van? Yep, but then we'd have been upset about staining the carpet. Tossed them into the back of the Explorer however, and the stains blended in with the others, no harm, no foul.
I guess the point is that not everybody who drives an SUV fits the same mold. I could get all of these benefits from a small pickup truck, with two major differences - not enough room to pick up both kids from school, and winter traction (light pickups are a bear to drive on snow, even 4WD). My Explorer, I can beat it up, abuse it, fix it, and it continues to get me from point A to point B.
That's a yotta data!
I had no idea these were available! Oh man, gonna be a hot time THIS Friday evening I can tell you... :-)
http://www.atarimagazines.com/compute/issue42/021_1_CRAZY_CLIMBER.php
> Programming a TI99-4A in BASIC and trying to save to an audio tape... get the tape queued up manually, tell the computer to try, press record... nope, didn't take, change the volume slightly, try again...
Typing in code listings from Compute! magazine, finally getting the game Crazy Climber to run properly... Ahh, to be in the 8th grade again...
> spread the previous winter's manure collection on the fields
That's call "country air", and sometimes there's nothing finer.
This has to be one of the dumbest things I've read about today. No, actually I think it's THE dumbest thing I've read today, and I've been at work for three hours already. Why is this necessary?
It's the norm in IT. It's the norm in Development. It's the norm at McDonalds. It's the norm at Home Depot. It's the norm, period.
Last weekend, I went into Home Depot to purchase a new propane grill. I already knew the model I wanted. I tracked down a droid to fetch it for me, pointed directly to the one that I wanted (4 burner model, $449). I told him that I had some other shopping to do, and he said he would load the grill onto one of those flatbed carts and have it waiting for me at the service desk. Fifteen minutes later, I go to the service desk to retrieve my grill. It's the wrong one. The grill he pulled for me was nothing like the one I pointed out, different color, three burners vs. four, price of $499. I promptly rolled it back to the grill aisle, found the same droid, and proceeded to have him fetch the proper grill.
Incompetence reigns supreme.
I'm running OS/2 Warp in 256MB of RAM, and I can format a floppy disk and still run other programs at the same time...
I actually just dealt with a similar situation. Until October 2007 I was happily employed as a production DBA with a rather larger company, great benefits, good $$$, really had no plans to leave. Somewhere around mid-October, a friend of mine, who was working for a start-up, called me up, saying that the company had lost their DBA, were suffering lots of database performance issues, "if you're interested I can get you six figures", yada, yada, yada. Sounded like a chance to do something new, be a "hero" for a while, and pad the checkbook a little bit, so I took it.
November 1st, I walked into the new place, setup the basic DB monitoring and traces, and started nailing down the biggest performance issues. First thing I noticed was that there were lots of ad-hoc queries being run that were textbook examples of how NOT to write SQL queries - massive temp tables, non-sargable filters, you name it, they did it. Further investigation revealed that many of these queries were being run by DEVELOPERS. Hmmm, wait, this is a production database!?!? Whattya mean ALL developers have read/write access to production? Even the offshore group in Russia???? The same production database that contains SSNs, medical claims, etc..?? Holy shit! I proceeded to yank every developer login I could find out of the production database. Almost immediately, high-level developer A and high-level developer B went to golf-buddy CEO and complained. I was promptly instructed to restore the permissions that I had revoked, because developers needed access to production in order to debug issues. I argued briefly, but backed down until I could regroup.
Soon after that fiasco, I think actually the same week, I discovered that our production database servers (actually ALL of our database servers), which are hosted by a third-party, were PINGABLE from the Internet!!! After picking myself up off the floor, I proceeded to the "IT guy" to find out why. The response was "they're behind a firewall, so it's all good". Umm, no, it's not "all good", they shouldn't even be VISIBLE! If a no-goodnik can ping them, he knows they exist, and he's going to want to know what they contain. I insisted that the public-facing interface be UNPLUGGED (each server has three NICs - one public, one internal, one for admins). "Can't do that, it's not the vendor's standard configuration". Holy shit! I've only been here three weeks, and I'm developing a constant migraine.
The final straw came the week after Thanksgiving when all of the SQL servers rebooted overnight at 3:00am. Anybody care to guess what it was? Yep, Windows Update. Automatic updates were enabled on EVERY machine, even the production SERVERS, because the "IT guy" didn't want to have to worry about keeping up with patches. But what if an update bricks a machine? "I trust Microsoft to test their patches before releasing them, I've NEVER had a problem". Guess you weren't around for some of the NT4 service packs, huh? We have overnight processes running on some of these servers, a reboot will kill those! "Don't schedule anything to run at 3:00am". Holy shit!!!
My "old" boss had been in regular contact with me, continually asking if I was ready to come back. December 7th, I told him I was, gave my 2-weeks notice, took 2 weeks off for Christmas, and returned to my old job on January 2nd. Before leaving, I summed up the three issues above for the CEO of the start-up company, and fired them off in an email before walking out the door that last day. To this day, the SQL Server machines are still pingable from the outside world.
I used to feel the same way, but about a year ago, I ditched my electric razor:
- quicker? I'm not so sure about that. At first, yes, it took a lot longer to shave with a blade. Now that I've been doing it for a while, it honestly only takes 5 minutes.
- don't cut you, ever? Probably wouldn't say "ever", but I agree, it's hard to cut yourself with an electric shaver. However, I always seemed to end up with nasty red splotches, almost like a burn or rash, all over my neck after shaving. Haven't had that problem since switching to a blade & shaving cream.
- dumbass shaving foam? I actually rather enjoy the "tingly" feeling that some of the shaving creams out there provide.
- smooth shave? I have to solidly disagree with this one. My previous electric was one of the fancy Braun models with the self-cleaning base, which I purchased after hearing the "shaves as close as a blade" pitch. Having never used a blade before, I really didn't have anything to compare to, so I just assumed it was true. However, now that I've been using a blade for several months, I can tell you without a doubt, my electric never came CLOSE to the shave a blade can offer. At least not the 4-blade razors that I've been using.
Everyone has their preferences and needs, what works for me may not work for you, that's why we have options to choose from.
Drive around northern Minnesota for a while - you'll find plenty of places where a paved road turns to gravel, and vice-versa.