A map does help, it let's you know that you have missed your destination by a village or two (10-15 miles).
The biggest culture difference in the UK verse the US is how the signs give directions.
For example to go from where I used to live in South Dakota to where I lived in Missouri. Would go something like this
Get on I-90 go east, then go south on I-29, then west on I-70, get off on I-270 and go east, then go north on 67 then stop you are now in Florissant, MO. Pretty straight forward. There would be nice easy to read signs the whole way there, including what road you are currently on.
Not so in the UK. In the UK it's more about what's a long the way rather than what road you are on.
The same directions in British.
Starting in Rapid City, take the road to Wall (It's probably called Wall Road or just simply a sign pointing Wall this way), then follow the signs to Chamberlain, on to Michell, and then Sioux Falls as so on and so forth. The Motorways and Autoways do tend to have better signs that the local roads, but not that much better.
As long as you know where you are going (what town) it's actually very difficult to get lost, but man if you need a specific street in a specific town you are buggered my friend if you've never been there and doubly so if you are traveling at night. The smaller the town/village the worse the signs tend to be.
I can't tell you how many times I've driven someplace and missed a turn because there were no signs only to turn around at the next village and double back and hit the same intersection that I needed to turn at with a nice big fat sign plain as day but only visible from that direction.
Highway code shmyway code, I took the 20 question online US driver familiarization quiz and then went out and then went out the same day and rented a right hand drive manual transmission car (that was a mistake) until my truck could get shipped over here.
Now I gleafully terrorize people in Newmarket who didn't realize sidewalks are meant for passing, and not just just for parking!
The motor and autoways are easy enough to deal with since they are typically all divided by barriers, it's when you get into the cities, towns, and villages, were things stop making sense very quickly though I'm sure originally when the roads were layed out, in the 1700's, made plenty of sense.
Left, right it doesn't really matter. I took me all of two weeks to stop feeling weird driving on the left and a month to stop making random right lane errors.
The only thing that I find unfamthomable is the use of some of the colors on the road.
For example they only use white paint for the lines. In the States they use white and yellow. You can tell the difference real quick which lanes are for your direction of traffic (white) and which is the divider line (yellow). I've had more than a few moments of panic where I could not tell for the life of me which lanes were which.
I take that back there are two things about driving in the UK, the second is do you people believe in F'ing street/road signs? Considering that the names of the streets change every 3 blocks and they don't run in a straight line more than 25 yards at a go, it would be simply amazing to have both the street and the cross street names on a sign, you are lucky just to even have a cross street that you can see from the road you are travelling on.
I'm actually pretty comfortable about ignoring a mediocre 80s teen flick starring Val Kilmer.
Well then you my friend would be missing out. That movie is chock full of inside jokes and funny references. Google a list of things in the movie, get the biggest bowl of pop corn you can find, some beer, put on your favorite bunny slippers, and sit back and see how many of them you can spot.
I don't see how, HD & Blu-Ray ripping is easy as pie, now we have a "loosing" format that can roll right in and take over the cheap spot from DVD seeing as the HD DVD burners read and write all the back formats well enough.
If they were smart they'd keep on selling HD DVD players as "enhanced" DVD and put 2-5 standard quality DVD movies on a disc. It would also make a couple of seasons worth of TV shows fit on a disc or two instead of the 4-10 discs we see now.
HD DVD is hardly dead, they just need to wake up and smell the money and tell the movie industry to go fuck themselves.
Blu-Ray doesn't roll off the tonge as easy as DVD, Disc, Hidef, or any of another number of things, which is what the unwashed masses will end up calling it much to the Blu-Ray groups dismay.
And there's that other little thing too, so I agree with you "who cares".
What size disc do you want it on, 15 or 25?
Put it on 15gig discs, my $30 burner won't read the 25's, besides the 15's are only $.10 each and the 25's are still $5 each.
Cool get me some more discs and I'll get season's 3 & 4 ripped for you tomorrow.
I hate to tell you, but the price is going to come down alot slower if HD DVD is pulled from the market. You talk about cheap DVD's, but tell me which DVD format did you buy? Oh yeah that's right there were 2 burnable DVD (DVD+R & DVD-R) formats, and still are, so there has been some competion between the two driving down the price. If you think Blu-Ray is going to be cheap as DVD's any time in the near future then you are pretty dumb. Half of the movie industry's anti copy protection strategy is keeping optical media that is usefull for extact copies expensive.
If you need large amounts of space optical media is a shitty choice unless the need is for something you can pitch out the car window once it's been scratched. I'll take external harddrives and flash drives any day over crappy discs.
1 button easy pirating (fair use or Yarrrrrr!) has been available since practically the beginning for both HD DVD and Blu-Ray, it's called AnyDVD HD by Slysoft.
You can use it to rip or just simply to disable HDCP so that the disc will play on your non-DRM ready hardware at full resolution.
The downside to ripping is HD movies are 25gb vs 5gb for a DVD, and you'll need to find a software player that can handle HD content since most media players wont.
No I'm not misunderstanding it at all, though you seem to be a bit off. The Volt is really no different than the Prius, they are both purely electric cars. Neither of them have the gas motor attached any other way than electrically.
The only real difference is that the Prius battery pack does not provide enough juice to fully power the electric motor by itself which is why the gas motor kicks on for anything other than very slow speeds, the Volt's pack does so you can drive around without the gas motor kicking until the batteries are low.
You could if you wanted, gut the gas motor out of a Prius and put in a better batter pack and drive it around like an electric car, it doesn't need a gas motor.
Parallel hybrid systems are found in GM other hybrids and Hondas, where you have a car that is being driven by the gas motor, but has an electric motor attached to the transmission.
Now my point is do you really think a 3 cylinder 1L engine is going to be able to provide enough power to be able to drive the car normally if the batteries are depleated? Because that is exactly how much direct power your going to have access to till the much more capable battery pack gets chance to recharge. I don't unless its performance is going to be a lot less than its looks.
Maybe this example will better explain what I'm talking about.
GM tried doing something similar with a test truck they made hybrid. It was a fully sized truck with a 4-cylinder recharge motor. It ran great as long as you stayed well within the limits of the battery, but if you tried to tow, carry a load in the back, or travel beyond it's electric only range the performance would drop from being like a normal 8-cylinder full sized truck to the capability of a 4-cylinder full sized truck once the battery ran down. Which is to say it ran like an absolute dog. Sure it got 45mpg, but you couldn't use it as a truck except over short distances, so they put the 8-cylinder back in and it worked fine, but got only a more modest extra 5mpg boost over the standard model.
So what this means is there are going to be times where you're either going to need to pull over, time for a bathroom break anyway, so the auto-recharge function can do it's thing, or your're going to find your top speed and acceleration degraded to the power out put of a 3cylinder 1L engine (what the old Geo-Metro's had) until the recharge motor can get a chance to catch up. Not a problem if where you live is flat, it doesn't take much power to keep a car moving once you get up to speed which gives the generator plenty of time to store some power, but that won't be the case if you live someplace hilly.
Don't get me wrong I thoroughly love the concept of the Volt and I think plug in electric hybrids like the Volt and Prius are the only way to go, since I'll finally be able to generate my own "fuel" and tell the oil companies to go to hell. I just think they are being overly optomistic about how well it'll perform on long trips.
I've been looking at the Volt too. The thing with it it seems that technically it's a hybrid, but the motor they're talking about putting in it would be far too small to be able to drive around on. It would be more like a gas powered battery charger, you'd have to let it sit for a while in the parking lot running to get you enough battery power to make it home, if in the city, or to be able to get up to speed on the highway and then it could keep up once the load dropped and you were cruising.
Personally I like the idea alot. As a daily commuter a car like that would be perfect for me (6 miles - I would bike to work, but where I'm at between the weather and the crapy roads it would be a death sentence there's no way for anything but a few months out of the year.). Give it some black thin-film solar cell racing stripes and paint the rest of it blue and I'll take one.
I'm interested in anything that can do it completely without petrolium based fuel. As a back-up source like the Volt I can deal with. I want to be able to collect it myself and give the oil companies and countries the big double middle finger.
Haha, yeah I was thinking along those lines too when I was writing it.
Of course having a full charge on your cell phone when she calls you while you are "out with the boys" could get you in a lot of trouble.
" WTF?! Your cell phone battery isn't about to die, YOU'RE CHEATING ON ME! Don't try to tell me you put it on the car charger because took the cable out of your car when I got suspicious.
Yeah I'm a bit bent about the spending too. I've spent the last 10 years digging my self out of debt, 6 months to go, and all around me the government and everyone else has lost their damn minds.
NO!!!! OSX.5 sucks, Steve Jobs is the Devil and eats babbies, OMFG! I have to pay a $130 Apple tax and it doesn't even fucking work right, where are all the real tech adv all I see is some stupid fucking transparency bullshit, the piece of junk uses an extra 1.5% more CPU than the last version....SWEET BABY JESUS why don't you just GOUGE OUT MY EYES, who picked these fucking colors for the UI!.....
....oh wait that's right we're not critiquing an MS product......sorry.........
.....Let me change to the proper tone.........
E'hem, I'm sure Apple is hard at work to make this the best OSX product ever, and all the bugs are minor I'm sure, Steve Jobs is just the BEST, he's my B.F.F.!
How do you do you see the screen to type while giving Apple a rim job at the same time?
Internet bandwidth is not a scarce resource, the price will not double or tripple. Just like everything else these days companies are trying to come up with ways to justify price increases while decreasing what they deliver. They want to sell you "unlimited" bandwidth even though they want to either block what you can send or put a cap in the name of "fair use". Conservation pushes are a crock whether they be for electricity or internet bandwidth, they are about maximizing profit with no new input on the part of the supplier.
If they can reduce useage by 10 percent and raise prices by 10% and then sell the extra they've saved to new customers they've just double billed the customer by 20% but given the customer nothing in return. If they doubled their bandwidth prices would fall by 20-50% and they'd have to sell more at the lower price or give you more for the same price, great for the customer, but not for their bottom line. This same Mikey Mouse game is being played by the power companies in the States. Their goal is to force useage as close to 100% of capacity as possible by limiting new plants (Do you really think a bunch of tree huggers or government red tape would stop companies when there was money to be made?) the amount of new generation being brought online, or by taking plants offline for "maintenance" to keep everything in a constant state of scarcity and of course ever increasing premium prices.
The government should tie the companies hands to keep them from doing traffic shaping and hold them to the things they advertise and then don't deliver.
ISP FRAUD
Unlimited service....but with fair use
Up to 8Mb connection!....but only if you live within 1/4 mile of the exchange on brand new wire, be happy that you get a 1.3Mb connection on the stuff we strung with a government grant in the 60's
DSL connections....but you have to get our phone line service too even though the only thing it has in common with DSL is the wire running to your house.
Unlimited long distance service in the US for only $20 a month....even though we use the technology that most chat programs do voice for FREE worldwide. We forgot to mention that the technology that we send your paid long distance service over, yeah it's the same internet we are billing you for, thanks by the way for paying 3 (phone, long distance, ISP) times for the same service, and if you don't mind we want to restrict you from using the internet the way you want so we can continue to take money out of your pocket.
You have a point, the Geekdome has had it's low and high points at various assignments.
My first assignment was at Ellsworth AFB 1996-2000. The 90% of the Spec flight were computer gamers. COM, IFC, and DAS. Winter time was the killer there so anything to stay sane when ambient was -20F and the wind chill -85F for a month at time. 5-10 man lan parties happend every other weekend with the occassional 15-25man get togethers. There were about 5-6 guys that were the true geeks out of that crowd and they were the ones that taught the rest of us the basics
AT Edwards AFB the group was much smaller, but there were 5-6 different lan party groups (lot's o engineer and spec types everywhere).
My current place is overseas. The WOW crowd has taken over and almost all of them are married (whole family plays) computer illiterate types, since WOW has about zero system requirements. The number of hardcore computer geeks have dried up here, but the numbers of interested people are very high and the numbers of people who are software literate (artists mostly) is pretty high as well (Having access to a $30,000 laser etcher helps). There are a few, I'd say no more than 5 people around the work area that I would call truly computer literate, but none of us are friends so there is no core group to get things going to spread the word. I'd love to get things organized, but I'm avoiding like the plague becoming the "computer guy" at this squadron aka the "free tech support guy".
Too much work and not enough gratitude(beer) to be that guy anymore.
My own computer geekiness is dying out and even gaming has become less appealing. It seems these days things like sailing, photography, scuba diving, and flying hold more appeal. Don't get me wrong I've got a second 24" monitor on the way and half built water cooled computer sitting here waiting to be finished, but it's more like a means to an end rather a hobbie in itself anymore.
Why can you see it? Well because light goes really really fast and even a small amount pointed in your general direction is easily spottable from a great distance.
As a GA pilot, city light is a love hate relationship. I love it because it helps keep the vertigo (no barfing or flipping the plane over because of a lack of visual references) at bay, I hate it because it's freak'n pain in the ass to pick out the airport out of all the background clutter.
On my first night cross country flight on the way back to base my instructor complimented me on my navigation skills, that I never peeked a look at the GPS, and kept a solid heading. Not the easiest thing to do since since you are half flying IFR once you get away from the city lights with no moon out. What I didn't mention to him is that I could see the new baseball stadium style lighting on one of the parking ramps of our destination airport even though it was over 80 miles away and mostly hidden behind some low mountains. I could see the lights directly, I'm sure the sky glow would have been visible at a much further distance.
5000 square feet? Thats not a house - thats a mansion! Are they going to China to find a full time cleaning crew to chase after the dust bunnies in their 8 bedrooms and 6 1/2 bathrooms?
My sister lives in a 5400sqf McMansion in Houston. When I went to visit over the holidays I had the same thought in mind. The funny thing it had pretty much the same number of rooms as the 2400sf house they used to live in, just each room was alot bigger.
4 bedrooms, 3 1/2 bath, 2 living rooms one upstairs one down, theater room, office cubby upstairs, giant kitchen with walk in pantry, laundry room, entry room with two identical rooms one on each side, one being used as a dining room the other a den.
The only difference from their old house was the den, the theater room, and the walk in pantry which were not all that big in the grand scheme of things. All the other rooms just seemed 5' longer and wider or so.
It's just a longer walk to get around the house. Personally I find it annoying, especially with how big it is and there are no secret passage ways or hidden shortcuts. I mean WTF, if you are going to go all out and have that big of a house it better have a secret lair, a panic room, or a walk in florecent lit armory or something?! Nada one to be found, color me unimpressed.
Military culture is kinda sorta the complete and total opposite of geekdom.
You've obviously never been in a maintenance shop before then. LAN parties were the norm most weekends back in the day. Now that almost everyone has broadband most everyone is playing WOW or other online game together. Whole sections go raiding and then talk about it the whole next day. It drives me nuts and cracks me up at the same time since these same guys pick on the "socially inept" for being nerds.
The level of geekdom varies, but the whole spectrum can be found, most are just gamers, many build their own computers, some are digital/3D artists, and a minority are your uber "look what hardware/software creation/hack I came up with this weekend" nerds.
I wouldn't buy the whole "they may not be able to run three miles and carry a pack" the Air Force is kicking people out left and right for being too fat and lazy. They like to call it "Fit to Fight", even though most of our jobs requirements are "Fit to Sit", they're just trying to cut down on the medical bills they have to pay.
Slashdot Mirror
/. Duh?
The biggest culture difference in the UK verse the US is how the signs give directions.
For example to go from where I used to live in South Dakota to where I lived in Missouri. Would go something like this
Get on I-90 go east, then go south on I-29, then west on I-70, get off on I-270 and go east, then go north on 67 then stop you are now in Florissant, MO. Pretty straight forward. There would be nice easy to read signs the whole way there, including what road you are currently on.
Not so in the UK. In the UK it's more about what's a long the way rather than what road you are on.
The same directions in British.
Starting in Rapid City, take the road to Wall (It's probably called Wall Road or just simply a sign pointing Wall this way), then follow the signs to Chamberlain, on to Michell, and then Sioux Falls as so on and so forth. The Motorways and Autoways do tend to have better signs that the local roads, but not that much better.
As long as you know where you are going (what town) it's actually very difficult to get lost, but man if you need a specific street in a specific town you are buggered my friend if you've never been there and doubly so if you are traveling at night. The smaller the town/village the worse the signs tend to be.
I can't tell you how many times I've driven someplace and missed a turn because there were no signs only to turn around at the next village and double back and hit the same intersection that I needed to turn at with a nice big fat sign plain as day but only visible from that direction.
Now I gleafully terrorize people in Newmarket who didn't realize sidewalks are meant for passing, and not just just for parking!
The motor and autoways are easy enough to deal with since they are typically all divided by barriers, it's when you get into the cities, towns, and villages, were things stop making sense very quickly though I'm sure originally when the roads were layed out, in the 1700's, made plenty of sense.
Well in that case they must think 'Ze Germans' are still on there way because even the new housing is built the same way.
The only thing that I find unfamthomable is the use of some of the colors on the road.
For example they only use white paint for the lines. In the States they use white and yellow. You can tell the difference real quick which lanes are for your direction of traffic (white) and which is the divider line (yellow). I've had more than a few moments of panic where I could not tell for the life of me which lanes were which.
I take that back there are two things about driving in the UK, the second is do you people believe in F'ing street/road signs? Considering that the names of the streets change every 3 blocks and they don't run in a straight line more than 25 yards at a go, it would be simply amazing to have both the street and the cross street names on a sign, you are lucky just to even have a cross street that you can see from the road you are travelling on.
I foresee a GPS in my immediate future.
Well then you my friend would be missing out. That movie is chock full of inside jokes and funny references. Google a list of things in the movie, get the biggest bowl of pop corn you can find, some beer, put on your favorite bunny slippers, and sit back and see how many of them you can spot.
It's a movie reference genius. Not a budgetary proposal for a new weapons systems.
You Geek status is suspended.
Really what did I expect, 3/4 of the people here weren't even born yet or were still shitting their diapers when Real Genius came out.
I guess I should have wasted "first post" on something obvious like "Sharks with frikin' laser beams attached to their heads"
If you've never seen the movie, your ability to post on /. is hereby suspsended until you do.
Now if you can get it to fit in the weapons bay of a B1-B we might have something.
If they were smart they'd keep on selling HD DVD players as "enhanced" DVD and put 2-5 standard quality DVD movies on a disc. It would also make a couple of seasons worth of TV shows fit on a disc or two instead of the 4-10 discs we see now.
HD DVD is hardly dead, they just need to wake up and smell the money and tell the movie industry to go fuck themselves.
And there's that other little thing too, so I agree with you "who cares".
What size disc do you want it on, 15 or 25?
Put it on 15gig discs, my $30 burner won't read the 25's, besides the 15's are only $.10 each and the 25's are still $5 each.
Cool get me some more discs and I'll get season's 3 & 4 ripped for you tomorrow.
If you need large amounts of space optical media is a shitty choice unless the need is for something you can pitch out the car window once it's been scratched. I'll take external harddrives and flash drives any day over crappy discs.
You can use it to rip or just simply to disable HDCP so that the disc will play on your non-DRM ready hardware at full resolution.
The downside to ripping is HD movies are 25gb vs 5gb for a DVD, and you'll need to find a software player that can handle HD content since most media players wont.
:) Yes I was thinking that as well when writing both the first and second post.
You could if you wanted, gut the gas motor out of a Prius and put in a better batter pack and drive it around like an electric car, it doesn't need a gas motor.
Parallel hybrid systems are found in GM other hybrids and Hondas, where you have a car that is being driven by the gas motor, but has an electric motor attached to the transmission.
Now my point is do you really think a 3 cylinder 1L engine is going to be able to provide enough power to be able to drive the car normally if the batteries are depleated? Because that is exactly how much direct power your going to have access to till the much more capable battery pack gets chance to recharge. I don't unless its performance is going to be a lot less than its looks.
Maybe this example will better explain what I'm talking about.
GM tried doing something similar with a test truck they made hybrid. It was a fully sized truck with a 4-cylinder recharge motor. It ran great as long as you stayed well within the limits of the battery, but if you tried to tow, carry a load in the back, or travel beyond it's electric only range the performance would drop from being like a normal 8-cylinder full sized truck to the capability of a 4-cylinder full sized truck once the battery ran down. Which is to say it ran like an absolute dog. Sure it got 45mpg, but you couldn't use it as a truck except over short distances, so they put the 8-cylinder back in and it worked fine, but got only a more modest extra 5mpg boost over the standard model.
So what this means is there are going to be times where you're either going to need to pull over, time for a bathroom break anyway, so the auto-recharge function can do it's thing, or your're going to find your top speed and acceleration degraded to the power out put of a 3cylinder 1L engine (what the old Geo-Metro's had) until the recharge motor can get a chance to catch up. Not a problem if where you live is flat, it doesn't take much power to keep a car moving once you get up to speed which gives the generator plenty of time to store some power, but that won't be the case if you live someplace hilly.
Don't get me wrong I thoroughly love the concept of the Volt and I think plug in electric hybrids like the Volt and Prius are the only way to go, since I'll finally be able to generate my own "fuel" and tell the oil companies to go to hell. I just think they are being overly optomistic about how well it'll perform on long trips.
Personally I like the idea alot. As a daily commuter a car like that would be perfect for me (6 miles - I would bike to work, but where I'm at between the weather and the crapy roads it would be a death sentence there's no way for anything but a few months out of the year.). Give it some black thin-film solar cell racing stripes and paint the rest of it blue and I'll take one.
I'm interested in anything that can do it completely without petrolium based fuel. As a back-up source like the Volt I can deal with. I want to be able to collect it myself and give the oil companies and countries the big double middle finger.
Of course having a full charge on your cell phone when she calls you while you are "out with the boys" could get you in a lot of trouble.
" WTF?! Your cell phone battery isn't about to die, YOU'RE CHEATING ON ME! Don't try to tell me you put it on the car charger because took the cable out of your car when I got suspicious.
"Damn it woman, leave me alone and go to sleep. Don't give me that "my iPod needs charging", I already checked it, it's full.
Yeah I'm a bit bent about the spending too. I've spent the last 10 years digging my self out of debt, 6 months to go, and all around me the government and everyone else has lost their damn minds.
E'hem, I'm sure Apple is hard at work to make this the best OSX product ever, and all the bugs are minor I'm sure, Steve Jobs is just the BEST, he's my B.F.F.!
How do you do you see the screen to type while giving Apple a rim job at the same time?
Apple Fan boys are amazing.
If they can reduce useage by 10 percent and raise prices by 10% and then sell the extra they've saved to new customers they've just double billed the customer by 20% but given the customer nothing in return. If they doubled their bandwidth prices would fall by 20-50% and they'd have to sell more at the lower price or give you more for the same price, great for the customer, but not for their bottom line. This same Mikey Mouse game is being played by the power companies in the States. Their goal is to force useage as close to 100% of capacity as possible by limiting new plants (Do you really think a bunch of tree huggers or government red tape would stop companies when there was money to be made?) the amount of new generation being brought online, or by taking plants offline for "maintenance" to keep everything in a constant state of scarcity and of course ever increasing premium prices.
The government should tie the companies hands to keep them from doing traffic shaping and hold them to the things they advertise and then don't deliver.
ISP FRAUD
Unlimited service....but with fair use
Up to 8Mb connection!....but only if you live within 1/4 mile of the exchange on brand new wire, be happy that you get a 1.3Mb connection on the stuff we strung with a government grant in the 60's
DSL connections....but you have to get our phone line service too even though the only thing it has in common with DSL is the wire running to your house.
Unlimited long distance service in the US for only $20 a month....even though we use the technology that most chat programs do voice for FREE worldwide. We forgot to mention that the technology that we send your paid long distance service over, yeah it's the same internet we are billing you for, thanks by the way for paying 3 (phone, long distance, ISP) times for the same service, and if you don't mind we want to restrict you from using the internet the way you want so we can continue to take money out of your pocket.
My first assignment was at Ellsworth AFB 1996-2000. The 90% of the Spec flight were computer gamers. COM, IFC, and DAS. Winter time was the killer there so anything to stay sane when ambient was -20F and the wind chill -85F for a month at time. 5-10 man lan parties happend every other weekend with the occassional 15-25man get togethers. There were about 5-6 guys that were the true geeks out of that crowd and they were the ones that taught the rest of us the basics
AT Edwards AFB the group was much smaller, but there were 5-6 different lan party groups (lot's o engineer and spec types everywhere).
My current place is overseas. The WOW crowd has taken over and almost all of them are married (whole family plays) computer illiterate types, since WOW has about zero system requirements. The number of hardcore computer geeks have dried up here, but the numbers of interested people are very high and the numbers of people who are software literate (artists mostly) is pretty high as well (Having access to a $30,000 laser etcher helps). There are a few, I'd say no more than 5 people around the work area that I would call truly computer literate, but none of us are friends so there is no core group to get things going to spread the word. I'd love to get things organized, but I'm avoiding like the plague becoming the "computer guy" at this squadron aka the "free tech support guy".
Too much work and not enough gratitude(beer) to be that guy anymore.
My own computer geekiness is dying out and even gaming has become less appealing. It seems these days things like sailing, photography, scuba diving, and flying hold more appeal. Don't get me wrong I've got a second 24" monitor on the way and half built water cooled computer sitting here waiting to be finished, but it's more like a means to an end rather a hobbie in itself anymore.
As a GA pilot, city light is a love hate relationship. I love it because it helps keep the vertigo (no barfing or flipping the plane over because of a lack of visual references) at bay, I hate it because it's freak'n pain in the ass to pick out the airport out of all the background clutter.
On my first night cross country flight on the way back to base my instructor complimented me on my navigation skills, that I never peeked a look at the GPS, and kept a solid heading. Not the easiest thing to do since since you are half flying IFR once you get away from the city lights with no moon out. What I didn't mention to him is that I could see the new baseball stadium style lighting on one of the parking ramps of our destination airport even though it was over 80 miles away and mostly hidden behind some low mountains. I could see the lights directly, I'm sure the sky glow would have been visible at a much further distance.
My sister lives in a 5400sqf McMansion in Houston. When I went to visit over the holidays I had the same thought in mind. The funny thing it had pretty much the same number of rooms as the 2400sf house they used to live in, just each room was alot bigger.
4 bedrooms, 3 1/2 bath, 2 living rooms one upstairs one down, theater room, office cubby upstairs, giant kitchen with walk in pantry, laundry room, entry room with two identical rooms one on each side, one being used as a dining room the other a den.
The only difference from their old house was the den, the theater room, and the walk in pantry which were not all that big in the grand scheme of things. All the other rooms just seemed 5' longer and wider or so.
It's just a longer walk to get around the house. Personally I find it annoying, especially with how big it is and there are no secret passage ways or hidden shortcuts. I mean WTF, if you are going to go all out and have that big of a house it better have a secret lair, a panic room, or a walk in florecent lit armory or something?! Nada one to be found, color me unimpressed.
You've obviously never been in a maintenance shop before then. LAN parties were the norm most weekends back in the day. Now that almost everyone has broadband most everyone is playing WOW or other online game together. Whole sections go raiding and then talk about it the whole next day. It drives me nuts and cracks me up at the same time since these same guys pick on the "socially inept" for being nerds.
The level of geekdom varies, but the whole spectrum can be found, most are just gamers, many build their own computers, some are digital/3D artists, and a minority are your uber "look what hardware/software creation/hack I came up with this weekend" nerds.
I wouldn't buy the whole "they may not be able to run three miles and carry a pack" the Air Force is kicking people out left and right for being too fat and lazy. They like to call it "Fit to Fight", even though most of our jobs requirements are "Fit to Sit", they're just trying to cut down on the medical bills they have to pay.