Why not just move? I've done it...moved to a job, no big deal, and each hop, I've made more money AND generally been happier.
I've often wondered that, myself. The way I figure it, these people who tolerate expensive areas fall into two categories:
Some people do find enough value in their current location to stay. If you highly value the amenities of urban living, there may be no better place in the U.S. than Manhattan, if you can afford to live there. (Although if you had to live three hours away from your job, the enjoyment of the city might be somewhat negated.) Many who live in Silicon Valley presumably find enough value in its unique technology and business environment to offset the outrageous cost of living.
Many people have a sense of regionalism and can't conceive of living anywhere else. If you suggested to a Boston resident that they might consider a move to, say, Kansas City, he'd probably react as if you suggested he move to Siberia.
And Portland, OR, is a quadrant city, so there's two 42nd Ave's, on the east and the west side of the river. And each of those is divided into north and south sections by Burnside...
so are we talking about NE/SE 42nd, or NW/SW 42nd, or both, or maybe just 1/2 of one of those Avenues?
It's too bad there aren't any numbered avenues in N Portland, the fifth of Portland's increasingly inaccurately named quadrants...
As someone who mostly associates the name "Activision" with old titles, the first thing that popped in my head when I read this was... "Massively Multiplayer Pitfall!"
I'll second the recommendation of the Table-Mate II. I picked up mine at Target, and they also have a web site. (Just watch out for ebay -- a friend of mine ordered one on ebay and it turned out to be a fake, and collapsed when he put his laptop on it.)
This thing isn't as sturdy as a regular table -- I wouldn't sit a glass of water on it -- but plenty good enough for a laptop. The primary feature is that it slides over your lap. This works well for couches, although not so well for my recliner (the table's legs need a clear area under the seat.)
This sort of table might not work so well for wild and crazy gaming, but it works great for coding. In fact, I'm using it right now.:)
That's interesting. I went to a similar school, and when we took the ACT/SAT, they asked us to use the school code for our previous school in an attempt to avoid the other schools getting upset for losing their high-scoring students. I think they were still upset, though.
Ha! This is funny *and* insightful. A co-worker and I are frequently researching web sites, checking out the potential competition to our business ideas, and such. More often than not, I look at a web site and say, "I totally don't understand their business model. How can they fund this sort of a web site without any ads at all? Oh... wait..." Many times it's: "XYZ web site has ads now, you say? No way! When did they start putting ads up?" Heh...
it doesn't help, because my friends use MSN, and probably the same for most tech savvy MSN users. I'm a little surprised to hear that MSN is still so popular. Almost all of my friends are on Google Talk now. I didn't really expect that to happen, since MSN and the others were so established. However, it seems that including a talk client on the Gmail page was exactly what Google needed to get their foot in the door.
The big problem is the oversimplification that someone is either "left," "center," or "right."...
The current political parties are trying to pigeon-hole everyone and say that if you are "pro-choice," you must also be "pro gay," "favor higher taxes, especially on the wealthy," and "favor gun control." They don't allow for the fact that you might have a "pro-choice, keep-what-you-earn, gun-toting homosexual" or something like that. Sir, you are putting forth some dangerous and disruptive ideas. What would people do without political parties to tell them what to think?
Their parties are "opposites" on whatever the issue is, yet most everyone I know is part D and part R, depending on the issue in question. I've noticed the same thing. But sometimes I wonder if my selection of friends is somewhat biased towards people who think for themselves. Maybe the masses really do turn to political parties for a prepackaged set of ideas, along with a set of canned debate points.
What's the most interesting laptop-only live act you have seen/heard?"
It's not laptop-only, but a local Denver band, Mr. Pacman, uses a Commodore SX-64 on stage. It's a portable version of the Commodore 64 (a "laptop", for sufficiently large values of "lap", I suppose.) Talk about old-school!:)
Well, which is more confusing to your average business user? "Unlimited" or "Limited to 5GB/month?".
The average customer a) is not going to use 5GB/month, and b) has no idea what his monthly usage is. But for all intents and purposes, 5GB is unlimited to them. Why make them attempt to compute it? You're arguing that the unlimited claim is a "white lie" -- a lie told out of convenience to avoid a more lengthy, but exact explanation. Such can be useful to get a point across in casual conversation, but when you start using white lies to describe the delivery of goods and services, you can get into a lot of trouble. I'm not sure a court would have much sympathy for "we lied, but it's a lie that won't matter to most people so it's okay."
So why would you confuse "Unlimited Access" (again, those were Verizon Wireless's actual words) with "Unlimited Data Transfer"? Wouldn't "Unlimited Access" just mean that I always have access to the service? As opposed to "Unlimited Usage", which you were describing, but which VZW never claimed to offer?
I think "unlimited" with respect to Internet access means exactly one thing in common usage. If there's any ambiguity, then Verizon should make it clear. I've had Verizon EV-DO service for a year or so without any problems, but after reading about this, I may look into Cingular as the ancestor poster suggested.
Your comment about the meaning of "unlimited access" reminds me of a story. Back in '96 I was working for a small ISP with POPs in several cities. One of the satellite POPs in a city about 60 miles away was served (more like underserved) by a 56k link, so it didn't take too many simultaneous dialup users to saturate it. The ISP prominently advertised "unlimited" on their billboards in this town, then proceeded to crack down on users who stayed connected too long. Naturally, users started calling them on this discrepancy. A member of the sales staff asked an executive what to tell users, and the executive issued the following proclamation: "Tell them that by unlimited, we mean we don't restrict what web sites they are allowed to visit." I kid you not. Coincidentally, this ISP is no longer in business.
Verizon will drop the connection instantly if one of your internal 192.x.x.x IP's shows up on the link.
That's good to know, thanks. I wouldn't be surprised if something like that was happening. I should add some extra iptables rules to my script to filter out RFC1918 addresses from the ppp0 interface.
Has anyone else with Verizon EV-DO noticed that they seem to be doing some sort of NAT detection?
Every once in a while, I(*) will let a friend of mine piggyback on my laptop's EV-DO connection (using Linux iptables, MASQUERADE, etc.), and the PPP connection to Verizon will start randomly dropping. When we stop using NAT and use a web proxy program (privoxy) instead, these random drops stop and the connection becomes rock solid.
(* - where by "I", I mean someone else who is clearly violating the terms of service and should be ashamed.)
This had me fooled for a minute. I was screaming "Noooooooo! Mozilla, you're playing with fire!" After all, if Mozilla really had such a patent, they'd do well to save it for defensive purposes.
I haven't hit the sack yet, so it didn't quite sink in that it was April Fool's Day. In fact, with all the all-nighters I've been pulling lately, I think my biological clock is only up to about March 20 or so.
What is latte? As far as I know it's not Spanish, in Italian it means milk, but I guess it means something else in the US...
I was wondering what latte means in this context, too. In the US, it's a drink made from espresso and steamed milk that you get at a coffee house. But I doubt such would have a long shelf life. But who knows... maybe NASA scientists have figured out a way to make space latte, like they invented space ice cream. Mmmm, space latte.
I've been in the job-hopping situation plenty of times, and this is something that I've given a lot of thought to, over the years.
If you're getting a 30-40% raise each time you switch, then you're probably at a point in your career (the beginning) where you've been undervalued and potential employers are beginning to see your true potential. Unfortunately, staying steady at one job isn't going to get you the income you deserve. Job hopping will, and quite quickly. The problem, as you and others have stated, is that potential employers will begin to second guess investing in you as a new employee if they think you may jump ship in a few months.
The solution is quite simple, really. Join the wonderful world of contracting. As a contractor (either independent or through a proxy), expectations are quite different. You'll usually work on one project for a certain amount of time -- one month, one year, until the project is complete, or until the company runs out of money or cans the project. It would be bad to jump ship in the middle of a contract, but at the end of the contract you're happy, your client is happy, and you can begin looking for the next 30-40% raise. Contracting is the best way for someone in your position to ramp up the pay quickly without feeling disloyal. If/when your pay increases begin to flatten out, you can then look for permanent work (if that's what you want) and potential employers will understand that your resume reflects short-term contracts.
It worked well for me, and I think it's a better approach than staying in one place at less pay than you're worth.
the subjects deliberately avoided government surveillance
Ok, so what does that mean, and when exactly is that taken as on offensive/criminal activity ? If you see a cctv camera and go around it, or if you don't take your mobile phone with you on the road, or wear sunglasses and baseball cap, or just simply don't leave your house ? Or what ? Since the wording of the short quote sounds like that avoidance is a bad thing or illegal or something.
I didn't get that impression from the article. It sounded like they had real reasons for suspecting these people of criminal activity, but since the suspects happened to be good at avoiding surveillance, the FBI resorted to even more sophisticated means.
Here in Denver, we have a solution in place for uninformed voters. It works like this: 1. Show up at the voting centers uninformed. 2. While standing in line for TWO AND A HALF FREAKIN HOURS, become an expert on all the ballot options and issues. In the time you have left over, you may wish to read a book or two, balance your checkbook, learn to juggle, or earn a second college degree by correspondence.:/
It costs $6/month and $0.1/kb to check email and browse the web from your cell phone.
That depends on your carrier and your plan. It costs me $15/mo and $0.00/KB to check email and browse the web from my cellphone. I'd hate to pay per-kilobyte charges -- I bet those would add up really quickly!
But... but... the rule of thumb says to have twice as much swap as RAM!
It's a pet peeve of mine that so many system administrators appeal to "rules of thumb" about decisions such as this, instead of actually thinking it through. Sys admins pass around these nuggets of wisdom with unquestioning reverence, like they were handed down from some bearded UNIX guru sitting on a mountaintop. These rules either 1) happen to reflect reality, 2) do not reflect reality, or 3) reflected reality 20 years ago but nobody got around to issuing some sort of "revocation rule of thumb".:)
My experience is that very little swap is needed these days, and the rule of thumb falls into category #3. Long gone are the days that the OS demanded swap space for all process memory.
If I have a machine with 1GB of RAM, I'll usually give it 512MB of swap or so. As discussed elsewhere in this thread, a little bit of swap is good for pre-emptive swapping and for emergencies (to avoid the dreaded Linux "oom killer".) Also, if you're going to use hibernate, you'll want at least as much swap as real memory.
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Dude. That is awesome. Too bad I don't have mod points today. :)
I've often wondered that, myself. The way I figure it, these people who tolerate expensive areas fall into two categories:
It's too bad there aren't any numbered avenues in N Portland, the fifth of Portland's increasingly inaccurately named quadrants...
As someone who mostly associates the name "Activision" with old titles, the first thing that popped in my head when I read this was... "Massively Multiplayer Pitfall!"
I'll second the recommendation of the Table-Mate II. I picked up mine at Target, and they also have a web site. (Just watch out for ebay -- a friend of mine ordered one on ebay and it turned out to be a fake, and collapsed when he put his laptop on it.)
This thing isn't as sturdy as a regular table -- I wouldn't sit a glass of water on it -- but plenty good enough for a laptop. The primary feature is that it slides over your lap. This works well for couches, although not so well for my recliner (the table's legs need a clear area under the seat.)
This sort of table might not work so well for wild and crazy gaming, but it works great for coding. In fact, I'm using it right now. :)
What about using IPsec or PPTP instead? I doubt the providers would risk angering their VPN-using telecommuting customers by toying with VPN filters.
That's interesting. I went to a similar school, and when we took the ACT/SAT, they asked us to use the school code for our previous school in an attempt to avoid the other schools getting upset for losing their high-scoring students. I think they were still upset, though.
Ha! This is funny *and* insightful. A co-worker and I are frequently researching web sites, checking out the potential competition to our business ideas, and such. More often than not, I look at a web site and say, "I totally don't understand their business model. How can they fund this sort of a web site without any ads at all? Oh... wait..." Many times it's: "XYZ web site has ads now, you say? No way! When did they start putting ads up?" Heh...
It's not laptop-only, but a local Denver band, Mr. Pacman, uses a Commodore SX-64 on stage. It's a portable version of the Commodore 64 (a "laptop", for sufficiently large values of "lap", I suppose.) Talk about old-school! :)
I think "unlimited" with respect to Internet access means exactly one thing in common usage. If there's any ambiguity, then Verizon should make it clear. I've had Verizon EV-DO service for a year or so without any problems, but after reading about this, I may look into Cingular as the ancestor poster suggested.
Your comment about the meaning of "unlimited access" reminds me of a story. Back in '96 I was working for a small ISP with POPs in several cities. One of the satellite POPs in a city about 60 miles away was served (more like underserved) by a 56k link, so it didn't take too many simultaneous dialup users to saturate it. The ISP prominently advertised "unlimited" on their billboards in this town, then proceeded to crack down on users who stayed connected too long. Naturally, users started calling them on this discrepancy. A member of the sales staff asked an executive what to tell users, and the executive issued the following proclamation: "Tell them that by unlimited, we mean we don't restrict what web sites they are allowed to visit." I kid you not. Coincidentally, this ISP is no longer in business.
That's good to know, thanks. I wouldn't be surprised if something like that was happening. I should add some extra iptables rules to my script to filter out RFC1918 addresses from the ppp0 interface.
Has anyone else with Verizon EV-DO noticed that they seem to be doing some sort of NAT detection?
Every once in a while, I(*) will let a friend of mine piggyback on my laptop's EV-DO connection (using Linux iptables, MASQUERADE, etc.), and the PPP connection to Verizon will start randomly dropping. When we stop using NAT and use a web proxy program (privoxy) instead, these random drops stop and the connection becomes rock solid.
(* - where by "I", I mean someone else who is clearly violating the terms of service and should be ashamed.)
This had me fooled for a minute. I was screaming "Noooooooo! Mozilla, you're playing with fire!" After all, if Mozilla really had such a patent, they'd do well to save it for defensive purposes.
I haven't hit the sack yet, so it didn't quite sink in that it was April Fool's Day. In fact, with all the all-nighters I've been pulling lately, I think my biological clock is only up to about March 20 or so.
I've been in the job-hopping situation plenty of times, and this is something that I've given a lot of thought to, over the years.
If you're getting a 30-40% raise each time you switch, then you're probably at a point in your career (the beginning) where you've been undervalued and potential employers are beginning to see your true potential. Unfortunately, staying steady at one job isn't going to get you the income you deserve. Job hopping will, and quite quickly. The problem, as you and others have stated, is that potential employers will begin to second guess investing in you as a new employee if they think you may jump ship in a few months.
The solution is quite simple, really. Join the wonderful world of contracting. As a contractor (either independent or through a proxy), expectations are quite different. You'll usually work on one project for a certain amount of time -- one month, one year, until the project is complete, or until the company runs out of money or cans the project. It would be bad to jump ship in the middle of a contract, but at the end of the contract you're happy, your client is happy, and you can begin looking for the next 30-40% raise. Contracting is the best way for someone in your position to ramp up the pay quickly without feeling disloyal. If/when your pay increases begin to flatten out, you can then look for permanent work (if that's what you want) and potential employers will understand that your resume reflects short-term contracts.
It worked well for me, and I think it's a better approach than staying in one place at less pay than you're worth.
Here in Denver, we have a solution in place for uninformed voters. It works like this: 1. Show up at the voting centers uninformed. 2. While standing in line for TWO AND A HALF FREAKIN HOURS, become an expert on all the ballot options and issues. In the time you have left over, you may wish to read a book or two, balance your checkbook, learn to juggle, or earn a second college degree by correspondence. :/
But... but... the rule of thumb says to have twice as much swap as RAM!
It's a pet peeve of mine that so many system administrators appeal to "rules of thumb" about decisions such as this, instead of actually thinking it through. Sys admins pass around these nuggets of wisdom with unquestioning reverence, like they were handed down from some bearded UNIX guru sitting on a mountaintop. These rules either 1) happen to reflect reality, 2) do not reflect reality, or 3) reflected reality 20 years ago but nobody got around to issuing some sort of "revocation rule of thumb". :)
My experience is that very little swap is needed these days, and the rule of thumb falls into category #3. Long gone are the days that the OS demanded swap space for all process memory.
If I have a machine with 1GB of RAM, I'll usually give it 512MB of swap or so. As discussed elsewhere in this thread, a little bit of swap is good for pre-emptive swapping and for emergencies (to avoid the dreaded Linux "oom killer".) Also, if you're going to use hibernate, you'll want at least as much swap as real memory.