First and foremost: DO NOT ACCEPT CAREER JOBS YOU WILL NOT ENJOY. I made the mistake of grabbing a VisualBasic 6 job when I'm a Linux and C++ guy. Now I've 4 years experience (3 in VB6+DB2, 1 in Linux/KSH scripting + Netezza Database warehouse) and I'm having a VERY tough time using that experience to land anything that I might actually enjoy. Your first couple of jobs define the path of your career in both the short and mid-term which then makes it easier to steer it the way you want in the long-term.
I suggest a sys-admin role. In the right place, you'll do some shell scripting, update hardware and (politely) smack the occasional end user. I'll let others speak on this as I've only seen it from a distance and don't have much hands-on with it.
Another possibility (and I REALLY really hate to suggest this, although it might be better suited to you than me) is go into a consulting firm under the Consultant or Solutions workforce. As a consultant, you'll do some paper pushing (eventually you'll help design how major, high volume applications) and some coding. As a Solutions Consultant, you'll be mostly coding.
The advantage of both types of consulting positions is that you'll do something for 6-12mo. and move on to a new project. The disadvantage to both is you'll find yourself with twice the number of bosses (Office space, anyone?). One set of bosses for The Client and another for Your Consulting Company. Personally, this drives me crazy. Also, you don't get a whole lot of say on what client you'll be working for which can be a big problem (e.g. non-smokers working for a major tobacco company... nothing like your boss lighting a stogie in a meeting).
As a Consultant, you'll have to travel (plus or minus, depending) and make quite a bit of money. On the flip side, you'll have longer hours and more stress.
As a Solutions Consultant, you'll have less stress and it'll be easier to stay at home, but you won't make as much.
My final suggestion is Application Support. You'll do a little coding, a little debugging, interact with users who are knowledgeable about how the process should REALLY work (assuming the organization is well structured) and get the occasional amusing service ticket like, "Have the magical elves in APP-land fix the claim again."
I experienced the exact same symptoms. (Mythbuntu 8.10, HD-5500, Pinnacle 800i, AMD 64 3500+, nVidia GeForce 6200) Of the/var/log files I checked, I couldn't find a satisfactory explanation. Oddly enough, however, my wife believes the crash happened closer to 10 than midnight.
...and yet, once again, I'm late to the Ask Slashdot party, but here we go...
I, too, just got a BB device and I've just started enjoying this today: Using the port forwarding options of your home router, forward port 80 to a combination file/web server. and use a Dynamic DNS (aka DDNS) service like DynDNS so you can refer to your home machine by URL instead of IP. Some routers support automatic updating of your IP address with DDNS services and DynDNS even provides a tool to do it for you. Once your port forwarding/DDNS is set up, make some kind of index.html/php/py/etc. file in your web-root so that directories are not immediately apparent and then also in your web-root also make soft links to your audio collection and any other files you may want to access with your Blackberry device. This means that I have instant access to all 24GB of my audio collection on a device that would otherwise support a meager 1GB of files. If you're concerned about your ISP yelling at you for sharing your MP3s with the world, setup SSL with Apache and access your files using s://domain.abc.xyz>.
You can also enable SSH on your server and forward port 22 to your home machine to be able to manage access to these files using your MidpSSH install.
aria2c: Get a file from BitTorrent, HTTP and FTP all at the same time! Every distro should come with this by default and a GUI for it, too. I used it to download the Ubuntu Intrepid Beta ISO from 5 HTTP sources at once. Oooh that was lovely. Of course, it drove my wife crazy for the 12min it took to download the file over my crappy internet connection.
wget: I've used this little utility to log me into a page, fetch the cookie and then used the cookie with my login info to mirror a website. Before I discovered aria, I've also used it in shell scripts as my download manager to fetch files directly onto my file server at home. There's also wput, but I haven't had need for it.
rsync: I use this to backup my stuff from server to lappy at work and also to get around Comcast's slowing of FTP traffic. Specifically: `rsync -e 'ssh -ax' -avz/home/user/sourceDir/ user@192.168.1.1:'/home/user/destDir'` you can, of course, swap the source and destination parts to move files the other direction.
...speaking of/var/mail reminds me of a bash script I wrote that did a `cat "$fname" | mail -s "Alert!" user@myWorkEmail.com`. Yea. That was in an infinite loop and while I had port 22 (SSH) forwarded to the machine in question, the network at work had all communication to the outside world on that port blocked and I had gotten a lift from a co-worker that morning.
Needless to say, I didn't get much email-ing done that day.
Myself, I key in on whether or not it's "X.0" version software FAR more than I key in on that first number. 8.0, 12.0, 1.0, etc. I treat the same. However 8.1.39, 1.0.10, etc suggest some version control in action and I'm much more likely to give it a shot.
...I do have to question, why bother with a version number on the first release at all? Just call it "Brand New Product(tm)!" instead of "Brand New Product(tm) v8.9!" When the software has been around for several years and actually gets up to a higher version, then tack it on for marketing [ae]ffect. Not to mention that if I happen to follow your company's software and see a new product already in high numbered versions, I'll scoff and steer clear.
I've a few 2-4GB IDE hard drives kicking around, so I'll put one on a chain of its own and make the whole drive swap. Might not be the optimal performance solution, but neither is having to page anything out of RAM in the first place.
My thinking is that everything going to swap is stuff I'm probably not going to need anyway and when I do, I'm probably not going to notice the extra few milliseconds it costs to shove it back into my nice speedy RAM.
Wow. A lot of people are scoffing at this question, but I agree with OP that all these chargers are a pain in the ass.
The best I've come up with is to write on the side of each one (using white-out) what it is for, so when I unplug it and toss it in my bag of wires, I can tangle through the mess and pull out the one I need.
Another solution (and one I don't care for, personally because I know I'd just end up frying one of my toys) is to go to Big Box Store Co. and buy what is often branded as a 'universal charger' that has multiple plug ends and a slider on the power adapter to change the voltage output. Just watch out and make sure the 'universal charger' spits out enough current for each of your devices.
I've been waiting for the 4.1 release before trying 4.x. I didn't care for 3.x and while I'm not a huge fan of GNOME, I like it well enough for daily use. So, good news for be because it looks like Kubuntu has deb packages ready to install with a few easy steps... thinkin' I'll give it a whirl tonight.
Ok, not exactly fruit loops, but there's a program called Toucan. Whenever I need to swap files from one device to another I drop them through the handy encryption functionality first. Haven't needed it often, but kept a credit card number from floating away from me that way once already... not that I would have stored that un-encrypted in the first place.
For any device of dubious origins/destinations, I use Eraser to delete the files off.
The nice thing about what I've linked is that they're the portable versions of the app... meant to float on your thumb drive in your pocket so you can use them most anywhere.
My 7yrs with Linux distro's sums up to this: Mandrake -> Red Hat -> SuSE -> Red Hat -> OpenSuSE -> CentOS -> Debian
HOLY CRAP are DEB packages so much less painful than RPMs. All my machines have gone Debian (server) or Ubuntu (workstations) and I haven't looked back. Talked to a guy using OpenSuSE very recently and when he said he was having problems with RPMs, I couldn't hold back my scoffing snort... what's more, I was nice enough to try.
RPMs can burn in the dependency hell that they came from.
A lot of people in the country are still stuck on dialup. OP could Figure out their range and set up some kind of country wifi pringle-can network. Charge something small like a $1 a month to meet maintenance, hardware and driving-around costs. I was thinking about this as a service to keep country kids in p0... in fine knowledge based online communities like/.
I should elaborate: I pointed (metaphorically speaking) at my experience and they looked at it they said, "that's experience? We'll hire you at 2/3 of what you're making now which isn't even sustainable income for our area and as a bonus, we'll make you feel like shit before the interview is over." Being hired under those conditions doesn't really feel like a "50% acceptance rate" to me.
...as someone who's gone through 2 interviews in the past 4 months (I turned down the first and with the second, they turned me down) I can tell you wholeheartedly that no, it doesn't look good on a resume at all.
The advice to solder is based on the idea that breadboards (the plastic things with hundreds of square holes) can sometimes not connect properly or can introduce noise and signal problems... Soldering onto PCB's or vero will slow you right down and make it less fun.
For me it's based on, "let's replace the battery in my iAudio X5... oh shit. I hope it still works." I've done all the soldering-drills I listed, but I let my skills get rusty (my crappy soldering irons don't help, either) and as a result, I learned how important the skill is.
Breadboards DEFIANTLY have their use in design, testing and layout of a circuit you're building, but if you can't solder it all together when you're done, all that work won't count for much. I'm NOT saying "Always solder everything from the get-go." I'm saying, "Learn to solder first so when you know how to do what you want, you can job properly."
This is a long winded way of saying that I agree that step 1 is to design on a breadboard and step 2 is solder it all together, but *learning to solder on your finished circuit design would be unwise and would result in a lot of frustrating false starts* whereas if you learn to solder first, you design and test your circuit and then you build it and do so without the burn scars, melted wire casing and blackened circuit board.
To save yourself frustration and headaches later, DON'T START SOLDERLESS! Learn how to solder first! Flow solder down a long wire. Strip parts out of a circuit board and put them back in without damaging them, without burning the board and checking with a magnifying glass that you don't have any solder tips that cross over onto the neighboring point. Get comfortable removing whole chips using both solder wick and a solder-sucker. Learn the components of solder so you're not wondering why you're leaving "tan stuff" (resin) on the board. Cut several parallel 'wires' on a circuit board and then fix it with solder and a single strand of copper wire... if you learn how to solder first you'll save yourself the frustration of knowing how to fix a problem but lacking the actual skill to do so.
I'd look around for kits aimed at high school students. My senior year of high school I took an electronics course where we had to put together a radio from a kit. The good thing about a radio is that there's a lot of cans that need tweaking and points that need to be seen on an oscilloscope to get everything properly calibrated. In fact, this is the kit I used (note that I'm not endorsing the seller. I just happened across the product is all).
I'd go ahead and pick up an electronics text book geared toward college students as well.
...or I could order one on amazon and save myself the expensive airline ticket:-P. My dad used to use one of these for his late-night french roast cuppa' (note: his roast preference, not mine).
I've heard lots of good things about the Aero Press (already mentioned downthread) which I hope to try next.
I'm currently using a cafetiere and I've still yet to try the Aero press, but so far, I think I prefer the Moka.
Slashdot Mirror
First and foremost: DO NOT ACCEPT CAREER JOBS YOU WILL NOT ENJOY. I made the mistake of grabbing a VisualBasic 6 job when I'm a Linux and C++ guy. Now I've 4 years experience (3 in VB6+DB2, 1 in Linux/KSH scripting + Netezza Database warehouse) and I'm having a VERY tough time using that experience to land anything that I might actually enjoy. Your first couple of jobs define the path of your career in both the short and mid-term which then makes it easier to steer it the way you want in the long-term.
I suggest a sys-admin role. In the right place, you'll do some shell scripting, update hardware and (politely) smack the occasional end user. I'll let others speak on this as I've only seen it from a distance and don't have much hands-on with it.
Another possibility (and I REALLY really hate to suggest this, although it might be better suited to you than me) is go into a consulting firm under the Consultant or Solutions workforce. As a consultant, you'll do some paper pushing (eventually you'll help design how major, high volume applications) and some coding. As a Solutions Consultant, you'll be mostly coding.
The advantage of both types of consulting positions is that you'll do something for 6-12mo. and move on to a new project. The disadvantage to both is you'll find yourself with twice the number of bosses (Office space, anyone?). One set of bosses for The Client and another for Your Consulting Company. Personally, this drives me crazy. Also, you don't get a whole lot of say on what client you'll be working for which can be a big problem (e.g. non-smokers working for a major tobacco company ... nothing like your boss lighting a stogie in a meeting).
As a Consultant, you'll have to travel (plus or minus, depending) and make quite a bit of money. On the flip side, you'll have longer hours and more stress.
As a Solutions Consultant, you'll have less stress and it'll be easier to stay at home, but you won't make as much.
My final suggestion is Application Support. You'll do a little coding, a little debugging, interact with users who are knowledgeable about how the process should REALLY work (assuming the organization is well structured) and get the occasional amusing service ticket like, "Have the magical elves in APP-land fix the claim again."
I experienced the exact same symptoms. (Mythbuntu 8.10, HD-5500, Pinnacle 800i, AMD 64 3500+, nVidia GeForce 6200) Of the /var/log files I checked, I couldn't find a satisfactory explanation. Oddly enough, however, my wife believes the crash happened closer to 10 than midnight.
...not to mention that modding your blackberry to have a custom back-light color for your trackball is not as hard as you think.
Oh, and TwitterBerry keeps me very well connected to not just my friends but also Jean-Luc.
...and yet, once again, I'm late to the Ask Slashdot party, but here we go...
I, too, just got a BB device and I've just started enjoying this today: Using the port forwarding options of your home router, forward port 80 to a combination file/web server. and use a Dynamic DNS (aka DDNS) service like DynDNS so you can refer to your home machine by URL instead of IP. Some routers support automatic updating of your IP address with DDNS services and DynDNS even provides a tool to do it for you. Once your port forwarding/DDNS is set up, make some kind of index.html/php/py/etc. file in your web-root so that directories are not immediately apparent and then also in your web-root also make soft links to your audio collection and any other files you may want to access with your Blackberry device. This means that I have instant access to all 24GB of my audio collection on a device that would otherwise support a meager 1GB of files. If you're concerned about your ISP yelling at you for sharing your MP3s with the world, setup SSL with Apache and access your files using s://domain.abc.xyz>.
You can also enable SSH on your server and forward port 22 to your home machine to be able to manage access to these files using your MidpSSH install.
aria2c: Get a file from BitTorrent, HTTP and FTP all at the same time! Every distro should come with this by default and a GUI for it, too. I used it to download the Ubuntu Intrepid Beta ISO from 5 HTTP sources at once. Oooh that was lovely. Of course, it drove my wife crazy for the 12min it took to download the file over my crappy internet connection.
wget: I've used this little utility to log me into a page, fetch the cookie and then used the cookie with my login info to mirror a website. Before I discovered aria, I've also used it in shell scripts as my download manager to fetch files directly onto my file server at home. There's also wput, but I haven't had need for it.
rsync: I use this to backup my stuff from server to lappy at work and also to get around Comcast's slowing of FTP traffic. Specifically: `rsync -e 'ssh -ax' -avz /home/user/sourceDir/ user@192.168.1.1:'/home/user/destDir'` you can, of course, swap the source and destination parts to move files the other direction.
Along the same lines, there's pushd and popd. Alias pushd if you don't want to type the new path all the time.
...speaking of /var/mail reminds me of a bash script I wrote that did a `cat "$fname" | mail -s "Alert!" user@myWorkEmail.com`. Yea. That was in an infinite loop and while I had port 22 (SSH) forwarded to the machine in question, the network at work had all communication to the outside world on that port blocked and I had gotten a lift from a co-worker that morning.
Needless to say, I didn't get much email-ing done that day.
My first reaction, "Oh hey! It's KDE!" and it wasn't a "haha-I-made-a-funny" kind of thought, it was a "Oooh-Shiny-theme-to-download" kind of thought.
Myself, I key in on whether or not it's "X.0" version software FAR more than I key in on that first number. 8.0, 12.0, 1.0, etc. I treat the same. However 8.1.39, 1.0.10, etc suggest some version control in action and I'm much more likely to give it a shot.
...I do have to question, why bother with a version number on the first release at all? Just call it "Brand New Product(tm)!" instead of "Brand New Product(tm) v8.9!" When the software has been around for several years and actually gets up to a higher version, then tack it on for marketing [ae]ffect. Not to mention that if I happen to follow your company's software and see a new product already in high numbered versions, I'll scoff and steer clear.
I've a few 2-4GB IDE hard drives kicking around, so I'll put one on a chain of its own and make the whole drive swap. Might not be the optimal performance solution, but neither is having to page anything out of RAM in the first place.
My thinking is that everything going to swap is stuff I'm probably not going to need anyway and when I do, I'm probably not going to notice the extra few milliseconds it costs to shove it back into my nice speedy RAM.
Wow. A lot of people are scoffing at this question, but I agree with OP that all these chargers are a pain in the ass.
The best I've come up with is to write on the side of each one (using white-out) what it is for, so when I unplug it and toss it in my bag of wires, I can tangle through the mess and pull out the one I need.
Another solution (and one I don't care for, personally because I know I'd just end up frying one of my toys) is to go to Big Box Store Co. and buy what is often branded as a 'universal charger' that has multiple plug ends and a slider on the power adapter to change the voltage output. Just watch out and make sure the 'universal charger' spits out enough current for each of your devices.
I'm a developer and while most GUI apps that I've written have been mostly for myself, there were a few things that were requirements of my software.
Granted, the average user might be more picky than I.
I've been waiting for the 4.1 release before trying 4.x. I didn't care for 3.x and while I'm not a huge fan of GNOME, I like it well enough for daily use. So, good news for be because it looks like Kubuntu has deb packages ready to install with a few easy steps ... thinkin' I'll give it a whirl tonight.
Ok, not exactly fruit loops, but there's a program called Toucan. Whenever I need to swap files from one device to another I drop them through the handy encryption functionality first. Haven't needed it often, but kept a credit card number from floating away from me that way once already ... not that I would have stored that un-encrypted in the first place.
For any device of dubious origins/destinations, I use Eraser to delete the files off.
The nice thing about what I've linked is that they're the portable versions of the app ... meant to float on your thumb drive in your pocket so you can use them most anywhere.
My 7yrs with Linux distro's sums up to this: Mandrake -> Red Hat -> SuSE -> Red Hat -> OpenSuSE -> CentOS -> Debian
HOLY CRAP are DEB packages so much less painful than RPMs. All my machines have gone Debian (server) or Ubuntu (workstations) and I haven't looked back. Talked to a guy using OpenSuSE very recently and when he said he was having problems with RPMs, I couldn't hold back my scoffing snort ... what's more, I was nice enough to try.
RPMs can burn in the dependency hell that they came from.
/rant
If he can make it to the end of the adolescent years, with all limbs and senses, then he may be able to achieve something.
...declines obvious comments as to Stephen Hawking's contributions to science...
A lot of people in the country are still stuck on dialup. OP could Figure out their range and set up some kind of country wifi pringle-can network. Charge something small like a $1 a month to meet maintenance, hardware and driving-around costs. I was thinking about this as a service to keep country kids in p0... in fine knowledge based online communities like /.
I should elaborate: I pointed (metaphorically speaking) at my experience and they looked at it they said, "that's experience? We'll hire you at 2/3 of what you're making now which isn't even sustainable income for our area and as a bonus, we'll make you feel like shit before the interview is over." Being hired under those conditions doesn't really feel like a "50% acceptance rate" to me.
...as someone who's gone through 2 interviews in the past 4 months (I turned down the first and with the second, they turned me down) I can tell you wholeheartedly that no, it doesn't look good on a resume at all.
Clickclickclickclickclickclickclickclickclick clickclickclickclickclickclickclickclickclick clickclickclickclickclickclickclickclickclick clickclickclickclickclickclickclickclickclick clickclickclickclickclickclickclickclickclick clickclickclickclickclickclickclickclickclick clickclick...
Steven Spielberg ruined the ending. That's what happened.
For me it's based on, "let's replace the battery in my iAudio X5 ... oh shit. I hope it still works." I've done all the soldering-drills I listed, but I let my skills get rusty (my crappy soldering irons don't help, either) and as a result, I learned how important the skill is.
Breadboards DEFIANTLY have their use in design, testing and layout of a circuit you're building, but if you can't solder it all together when you're done, all that work won't count for much. I'm NOT saying "Always solder everything from the get-go." I'm saying, "Learn to solder first so when you know how to do what you want, you can job properly."
This is a long winded way of saying that I agree that step 1 is to design on a breadboard and step 2 is solder it all together, but *learning to solder on your finished circuit design would be unwise and would result in a lot of frustrating false starts* whereas if you learn to solder first, you design and test your circuit and then you build it and do so without the burn scars, melted wire casing and blackened circuit board.
To save yourself frustration and headaches later, DON'T START SOLDERLESS! Learn how to solder first! Flow solder down a long wire. Strip parts out of a circuit board and put them back in without damaging them, without burning the board and checking with a magnifying glass that you don't have any solder tips that cross over onto the neighboring point. Get comfortable removing whole chips using both solder wick and a solder-sucker. Learn the components of solder so you're not wondering why you're leaving "tan stuff" (resin) on the board. Cut several parallel 'wires' on a circuit board and then fix it with solder and a single strand of copper wire ... if you learn how to solder first you'll save yourself the frustration of knowing how to fix a problem but lacking the actual skill to do so.
I'd look around for kits aimed at high school students. My senior year of high school I took an electronics course where we had to put together a radio from a kit. The good thing about a radio is that there's a lot of cans that need tweaking and points that need to be seen on an oscilloscope to get everything properly calibrated. In fact, this is the kit I used (note that I'm not endorsing the seller. I just happened across the product is all).
I'd go ahead and pick up an electronics text book geared toward college students as well.
...and start memorizing that v=i*r starting now.
...or I could order one on amazon and save myself the expensive airline ticket :-P. My dad used to use one of these for his late-night french roast cuppa' (note: his roast preference, not mine).
I've heard lots of good things about the Aero Press (already mentioned downthread) which I hope to try next.
I'm currently using a cafetiere and I've still yet to try the Aero press, but so far, I think I prefer the Moka.