The Human Race
Comic Bakery
Thrust
Max Headroom
Warhawk
Mancopter
M.U.L.E.
How to be a Complete Bastard
Commando
Alien
Spy vs. Spy
Ballblazer
Master of the Lamps
Uridium
A bit more recently, I really love Dean Evans' soundtrack from the game Silver (1999), and The Resident Evil 2 soundtrack. The latter is very haunting, great mood music!
A few years ago I decided to move to Canada (not for political reasons). First I needed a job, and I just attacked that problem from every angle I knew -- I posted my resume to job sites like dice.com, monster.ca, etc. I visited the city I wanted to live in three times, and spent as much time as possible during my visits networking with people, going to interviews, and walking around the city to get an idea of where I wanted to live. It took me nearly a year before it happened, but I made it out here and never looked back. Incidentally, the employer I ended up going with found me through dice.com.
I would also recommend that, if possible, you get a phone number and mailing address local to where you want to end up. I got a Mailboxes, Etc. mailbox and a phone number that went to voice mail before I even moved here. I used that number and address on my resume, so that employers wouldn't know outright that I didn't already live in the area. A lot of employers will dismiss your resume as soon as they see you don't live in the area. If they don't know that, they're a lot more likely to call, and once you get them on the phone you're in much better shape:-)
My advice is to be creative -- make as many contacts as possible and look for jobs everywhere you can think of. Develop a thick skin and be persistent as hell, and it will happen eventually.
At my last job, we had a pretty busy on-call week (maybe ten pages a day), and most "weird" problems would be handled by the on-call person. We had a simple script to log all on-call problems and solutions. The script would throw you into a vi session with a template (date/time paged, server(s) impacted, resolution, etc.); this on-call log would be mailed to all the SAs nightly, and also to a mail account that existed solely to store these logs. Every month that mail file would be archived under the name yymm.log. When you got paged at 3am because of a weird problem, you could go into that archive directory and do a grep or three and often find the solution. Admittedly, this is only a partial solution to your problem, but for its simplicity it was the most useful setup I've seen for this kind of thing.
Why should I produce good documentation anyway? So it's easier for you to fire me? What's in it for me?
I know a guy who knows a guy that had this same attitude. He would never document anything he did, keeping it all in his head, for job security. After a while he started wondering why he never got promoted. They couldn't promote him because no one else in the department could take over for him due to the lack of documentation.
In my experience, doing a good job (part of which is documenting what you do) is the closest thing you'll ever get to job security. If they want to fire you, they'll always find a way.
I always hear about how "Sun boxes are tanks". However I have not seen that to be the case.
I think this *used* to be true, back in the pizza-box days, and the sentiment has just kind of stuck around even though it is no longer valid. Back in the days of the sun4m architecture (basically all pizza boxes up to and including the sparc 20), Suns had a very low failure rate. The bigger cabinet systems (Sun x500) were solid too, but also more complex, and therefore more prone to failure. At my last job we had sparc IPCs that were running just fine after 10 or 15 years of service.
Beginning with the SunFire line, however, it all changed. My impression was that Sun pushed the SFs out the door too quickly, as they were already in financial trouble at that point. The result was a LOT of failures, often on delivery! I haven't considered Suns to be any more reliable than PCs for at least four years. I think the "tank" days are long gone.
Why is it that 90% of people responding to Ask Slashdot posts just slam the poster instead of providing any useful info? I was in Austin recently, and I did see some people that weren't wearing ten-gallon hats and spurs. Anyway, for the OP:
Are you sure that there are no suitable internships for you? I interned once a week during high school for three years. This was a program my school had in place for all students grades 10-12, but I didn't like any of the internships they already had to offer, so I sent a letter to a local government research organization, and they found me a spot. I would suggest treating this like a job hunt -- find places you'd like to intern and send letters asking if they've got anything. Also, assuming you're starting college next year, you may want to look into co-ops; most colleges have such programs as a way to allow students to gain experience before graduation.
I second the motion for Resident Evil 2. One time I was playing RE2 at a friend's house, with his wife sitting in the room watching TV. I climbed the ladder from the lobby to the second floor, and as soon as I got there I saw a licker not five feet away, crouched, ready to pounce! And the licker had that eerie-as-hell hiss that really sealed the deal. I screamed and nearly fell out of my chair. My friend's wife thought it was pathetic, but I couldn't argue with her as I had to go change my underwear.
I would also recommend seti@home or any other distributed computing project. You can run as many instances of seti@home as you have CPUs, and bind each instance to its own processor. As for monitoring the CPU usage, I would recommend gkrellm.
I interned at a government research lab when I was in high school, working in the PC maintenance/software installation department. Several of the guys there had taken a few years off and then gone to college, so they were in their mid- to late-twenties and still in school. All of those guys told me to go straight to college and not wait. They said it was a huge pain to start after you've tasted the "real world." I went straight to college after high school, and by the end of my six years, I was dying to get out. I for one am glad I just went and got it finished. But, you know yourself best. I would say that if you REALLY will travel, it might be a great experience and could be worth it. If you're the type of person who will plan to travel, but next thing you know it's been a year and the furthest you've gone is to Denny's on the other side of town, then skip it. Good luck, whatever you choose!
I understand that, but I'm not moving to Canada because I dislike corporate life in America. I'm moving to Vancouver for personal reasons; I've traveled quite a bit both inside and outside of the US, and Vancouver is the only place I've actually felt a real attraction to. Getting a new job is more incidental than anything else.
Maybe I'm missing something, but it seems to me that the RIAA is determining copyright infringement by the filenames that users are sharing. If I'm sharing a file named "Michelle Branch - All You Wanted.mp3", how are they to know it isn't a bunch of static, a JPEG, or a text file containing the string "Go to hell RIAA" for 4MB? How can they prove I was sharing what they think I was sharing?
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.networkworld.com/community/blog/napkins-where-ethernet-compaq-and-facebook
The Human Race
Comic Bakery
Thrust
Max Headroom
Warhawk
Mancopter
M.U.L.E.
How to be a Complete Bastard
Commando
Alien
Spy vs. Spy
Ballblazer
Master of the Lamps
Uridium
There are some great C64 remixes at http://remix.kwed.org/.
A bit more recently, I really love Dean Evans' soundtrack from the game Silver (1999), and The Resident Evil 2 soundtrack. The latter is very haunting, great mood music!
A few years ago I decided to move to Canada (not for political reasons). First I needed a job, and I just attacked that problem from every angle I knew -- I posted my resume to job sites like dice.com, monster.ca, etc. I visited the city I wanted to live in three times, and spent as much time as possible during my visits networking with people, going to interviews, and walking around the city to get an idea of where I wanted to live. It took me nearly a year before it happened, but I made it out here and never looked back. Incidentally, the employer I ended up going with found me through dice.com.
:-)
I would also recommend that, if possible, you get a phone number and mailing address local to where you want to end up. I got a Mailboxes, Etc. mailbox and a phone number that went to voice mail before I even moved here. I used that number and address on my resume, so that employers wouldn't know outright that I didn't already live in the area. A lot of employers will dismiss your resume as soon as they see you don't live in the area. If they don't know that, they're a lot more likely to call, and once you get them on the phone you're in much better shape
My advice is to be creative -- make as many contacts as possible and look for jobs everywhere you can think of. Develop a thick skin and be persistent as hell, and it will happen eventually.
At my last job, we had a pretty busy on-call week (maybe ten pages a day), and most "weird" problems would be handled by the on-call person. We had a simple script to log all on-call problems and solutions. The script would throw you into a vi session with a template (date/time paged, server(s) impacted, resolution, etc.); this on-call log would be mailed to all the SAs nightly, and also to a mail account that existed solely to store these logs. Every month that mail file would be archived under the name yymm.log. When you got paged at 3am because of a weird problem, you could go into that archive directory and do a grep or three and often find the solution. Admittedly, this is only a partial solution to your problem, but for its simplicity it was the most useful setup I've seen for this kind of thing.
Why should I produce good documentation anyway? So it's easier for you to fire me? What's in it for me?
I know a guy who knows a guy that had this same attitude. He would never document anything he did, keeping it all in his head, for job security. After a while he started wondering why he never got promoted. They couldn't promote him because no one else in the department could take over for him due to the lack of documentation.
In my experience, doing a good job (part of which is documenting what you do) is the closest thing you'll ever get to job security. If they want to fire you, they'll always find a way.
You go after the "loosers", I'll start logging the I.P's of every idiot who can't spell "sepArate" (not sepErate) properly...
Fuckin' A. You guys just pegged my two biggest spelling peeves.
I once worked with a guy who was comically bad in this respect. My favourite email from him went like this:
"Successul Accomplished!
Much thanks
Scott"
We used to joke that he sent a 5-word email with as many spelling and grammar errors.
I always hear about how "Sun boxes are tanks". However I have not seen that to be the case.
I think this *used* to be true, back in the pizza-box days, and the sentiment has just kind of stuck around even though it is no longer valid. Back in the days of the sun4m architecture (basically all pizza boxes up to and including the sparc 20), Suns had a very low failure rate. The bigger cabinet systems (Sun x500) were solid too, but also more complex, and therefore more prone to failure. At my last job we had sparc IPCs that were running just fine after 10 or 15 years of service.
Beginning with the SunFire line, however, it all changed. My impression was that Sun pushed the SFs out the door too quickly, as they were already in financial trouble at that point. The result was a LOT of failures, often on delivery! I haven't considered Suns to be any more reliable than PCs for at least four years. I think the "tank" days are long gone.
Why is it that 90% of people responding to Ask Slashdot posts just slam the poster instead of providing any useful info? I was in Austin recently, and I did see some people that weren't wearing ten-gallon hats and spurs. Anyway, for the OP:
Are you sure that there are no suitable internships for you? I interned once a week during high school for three years. This was a program my school had in place for all students grades 10-12, but I didn't like any of the internships they already had to offer, so I sent a letter to a local government research organization, and they found me a spot. I would suggest treating this like a job hunt -- find places you'd like to intern and send letters asking if they've got anything. Also, assuming you're starting college next year, you may want to look into co-ops; most colleges have such programs as a way to allow students to gain experience before graduation.
I second the motion for Resident Evil 2. One time I was playing RE2 at a friend's house, with his wife sitting in the room watching TV. I climbed the ladder from the lobby to the second floor, and as soon as I got there I saw a licker not five feet away, crouched, ready to pounce! And the licker had that eerie-as-hell hiss that really sealed the deal. I screamed and nearly fell out of my chair. My friend's wife thought it was pathetic, but I couldn't argue with her as I had to go change my underwear.
I would also recommend seti@home or any other distributed computing project. You can run as many instances of seti@home as you have CPUs, and bind each instance to its own processor. As for monitoring the CPU usage, I would recommend gkrellm.
I interned at a government research lab when I was in high school, working in the PC maintenance/software installation department. Several of the guys there had taken a few years off and then gone to college, so they were in their mid- to late-twenties and still in school. All of those guys told me to go straight to college and not wait. They said it was a huge pain to start after you've tasted the "real world." I went straight to college after high school, and by the end of my six years, I was dying to get out. I for one am glad I just went and got it finished. But, you know yourself best. I would say that if you REALLY will travel, it might be a great experience and could be worth it. If you're the type of person who will plan to travel, but next thing you know it's been a year and the furthest you've gone is to Denny's on the other side of town, then skip it. Good luck, whatever you choose!
I should say that I do like backbacon. After all, I run a Bob and Doug McKenzie web site. And no, the irony of all this is not beyond me :-)
I understand that, but I'm not moving to Canada because I dislike corporate life in America. I'm moving to Vancouver for personal reasons; I've traveled quite a bit both inside and outside of the US, and Vancouver is the only place I've actually felt a real attraction to. Getting a new job is more incidental than anything else.
Maybe I'm missing something, but it seems to me that the RIAA is determining copyright infringement by the filenames that users are sharing. If I'm sharing a file named "Michelle Branch - All You Wanted.mp3", how are they to know it isn't a bunch of static, a JPEG, or a text file containing the string "Go to hell RIAA" for 4MB? How can they prove I was sharing what they think I was sharing?