I live in a big city apartment in the downtown core. I can generally sleep through anything. The thing I notice though is that human voices will always wake me up.
I don't live far away from the fire department, so I'm quite sure that sirens are going off at all hours of the night but I never hear them while I'm sleeping. I find that even though its much quieter, people talking, screaming or even faint whispering (like my alarm radio starting to turn on) is enough to wake me up.
I noticed this after the last few nights where its been relatively silent and then at 2 or 3 in the morning I'll hear my neighbors talking or listening to their TV. I usually wake up in the middle of the night, so its possible they were also talking for a while and I didn't hear it.
Just a thought for other insomniacs, light sleepers who can't get anything done: I have a diagnosed sleep disorder and take medication for it. I've always been a light sleeper and for a while I considered myself an insomniac. In the last few weeks of trying different things (after years! of failed attempts), I'm finding that if I force myself to go to sleep 2 hours earlier and wake up 2 hours earlier (effectively instead of waking up for 7 am, I wake up at 5 am, I have a better day. I have more time in the morning to do other tasks or workout and I feel more productive during the day. I find reading something really boring for 15 minutes helps me sleep too.
I think the most challenging task in gaming at the time for me was convincing my parents that their multi-thousand dollar 486 needed a $300 sound card so their son could play Wing Commander 2 with the voice acting in its full glory (with the extra add-on pack, naturally). That will beat the snot out of taking any uber-demon on with a shotgun.
Its likely not the company that requires it (e.g. your coworkers, your boss, your boss's boss, the CEO) could probably care less what your academic credentials are. They likely care about your ability to consistently do a good job. It is HR. Whatever the reason, HR in companies increasingly and needlessly keep bumping up the requirements for a job. I believe the only two reasons are to legitimize part of their jobs which is interviewing and selecting new hires or to be able to show to their boss that their selection process is giving the company increasingly more educated staff.
To my surprise, since I went to the link, "The Museum: 10,000 square feet of display area with over 5,000 items to view". It seems well worth the visit.
That is really cool. I think on my next trip in the area, I'll go take a peek. Nice of you to make a donation, that would be my first thought as well. I woulda thought that NSA has a slightly larger budget for their museum than the CF so, the Canadian museum would be much smaller.
I'm trying to find a good book to learn Postgre (or MySQL) and Python. Ideally, I'd like to setup a project to setup a database of stock market and economic data. At least there's some object I can work towards and data is easy to get. Also, the only thing I haven't learned well in computing are databases and knowing a general use computer language really well, I've tried Perl but syntactically, doesn't work for me.
I've some introductory programming experience from college courses C, C++, assembly and Shell Scripts (not my major and been a long time). I've been able to pseudocode the program I would need to get this project started and what tables I'd setup in the database.
The thing is, I'm unable to find a good 'classroom' type of book on databases. I haven't found a book with a project in mind. Most of the books I've found have 10 out of 20 chapters on database theory - not that this is a bad thing (at least I have some clarity and I like learning the techie stuff). A lot of the books focus too much on techie stuff that they don't give any insight as to what is next. I've looked on iTunesU, bookstore, on-line and come up empty.
I'd take it someone who's learned to be a DBA has learn somewhere along the line in a classroom what to do. Also, a lot of programming books have one chapter on SQL and database books have one chapter on using X programming language with X database. Can anyone point to something more useful?
I expect to royally fuck up the database, it will be slow, unoptimized, and poorly organized. I could probably save 2000 lines of code by using Python modules but I'd like to learn from experience.
To me, I do have nostalgia for certain games. But, what I liked more about the 80's and early 90's video games was the range of games. Platform (which are virtually non-existant), shooters (like T2 in the arcade) instead of the 3D FPS, and of course the adventure games. Wing Commander and XWing are memorable as well. The stories in some of these games were much deeper (or at least not superficial) like a good portion of the games today.
I found this to be a rather piece in the article, considering that IMO Haliburton will probably bid and be awarded exclusivity to mining rights in Afghanistan. Never mind leaving it to the Afghanis. The Americans have to make money at this.
"Just last year, Afghanistan's minister of mines was accused by American officials of accepting a $30 million bribe to award China the rights to develop its copper mine. The minister has since been replaced."
I'm more and more convinced that the Westboro Baptist Church people are either a hate group or a bunch of nutcases.
I think its a bit of both. And if you look at their behavior, it is very much like the KKK and Neo-Nazis at their own rallies. They use intimidation (some of them really are), yelling and a one-world view to convince the masses they are right.
When there's one person to challenge them, they still try to make their message strong. When there's more people walking up to them and challenging their views, the one-world view of these hate groups quickly dissipates. They know they are wrong and share a limited world view. They know they tried, they know its a futile fight but they hope they can sucker in a few more with these protests.
IMO, life is too short to be so hateful. These people at Westboro are truly demented if they decide to protest loud and proud at people's funerals.
(sorry for length, hope this might be helpful, probably overstaing obvious, anyways.....)
I don't want to bash Rogers, they paid me a good salary and I had a great experience working there many years ago.
I'm far removed from the company now, but I *think* and it appears marketing/management strategy remains unchanged.
My experience though in sales has been that the marketing and upper management has some strange way of making promotions and changing products for better (and unfortunately) worse. Most of the promotions are pretty positive and get a lot of new customers and sales for cable, PPV, specialty channels and Internet. This new download cap probably won't be a problem since most customers don't use or understand the Internet much. I'll bet most are just check e-mail and news and won't even use close to 15 GB. I'd be more concerned if I were a parent. Kids with an XBox 360 or PS3, what with downloading patches, playing online, demos and Torrent, Netflix, Youtube, blah blah blah. The parents don't use the net much, but the kids you can't control and the kids and parents probably don't realize how much is being downloaded.
I makes no sense to me that it would cost the ISP (Rogers) more for bandwidth as time goes on. I would think bandwidth costs would decrease and extra services like mail servers (a lot use Gmail, hotmail), news servers are no more, and I would think less people have 'homepages'.
Rogers is not unlike Bell, Shaw and to the US neighbors AT&T and Sprint etc in that they like any company wanting to make a profit and draw people away from competitors. Bell also has TV/Satellite offerings. So given industry trends, I won't be surprised if this bandwidth change is directly related to a conflict of interest, one they know the CRTC won't touch or are too slow to move.
I live in Vancouver, so I've also the opportunity as with Ontario and Quebec residents, to be a TekSavvy customer. It costs me more with a dry line, but well worth escaping the Telus or Shaw. Bonus - they are more than generous with bandwidth. I'm happy with service - as long as Telus doesn't start pissing me off by trying to get the useless CRTC to cap non Telus DSL subscribers on their loop. As taxpayers, we've more than subsided the Ma Bells - to the point these should probably be considered public infrastructure.
I'm just waiting for a press release from Snoop Dogg - btw I did check his twitter account before posting this - nothing...... yet!!!.
FOR PRESS RELEASE. Oakland, CA - Acclaimed rap star Snoop Dogg, a multi-platinum record seller, has today announced that he is moving to Oakland, California. Snoop would like to tell his fans - "the shizzle is more growing opportunities for my rap in Oaktown. Ain't nothing growin' where I am. You know, I need more green for my raps.". Snoop hopes his fans can support him while he waits for the growing opportunities in Oakland to help him record his next album.
I certainly don't have that luxury. The problem is, what if your employer looks you up online and says hmmmm, he's a member of this non-profit and that one, does skydiving, and likes to knit.
Well, the non-profit might not coincide with their beliefs, skydiving could be seen as a risky sport (are you going to show up after your next jump???) and knitting sounds pretty boring if you want to be a sales person. This company doesn't want a boring person. Its so easy to jump to conclusions. And this is where its risky. And the HR for any company gets resumes by the hundreds or thousands a year. They just want to filter through as many of them as possible. You see skydiving.... you're out and you'll never know it.
My real name isn't very common. And there's someone with serious jail time that has a name close to me and lives in Canada. I don't use my real name often and if you Google me, then you only find one hit that is really me. I'm kind of concerned they might associate that person with me. Apples and oranges I suppose. I've never had much of a problem finding a job anyways.
I actually kind of liked the copy protection in the Sierra Adventure games (I thought I'd purposefully mention their games because those were some damn fine games ! ).
It was a test of honest and was kind of fun figuring it out, and it did involve reading the manual which were often pretty funny (Space Quest and Freddy Pharkas).
Sierra did things : "Identify this mugshot" at the start of Police quest. Mugshots of the characters were placed throughout the manual. I think the Space Quest 3 one involved a spinning wheel you had to match up symbols. With Leisure Suit Larry, they didn't really care as long as you answered some questions to "prove" you were old enough to play the game.
At the least, if you keep the manual and you still have a system to run the game, you should effectively never lock yourself out of the game.
I not much of a gamer now. I tend to buy games retail (maybe 2 or 3 a year). I download demos for most games I want to play and I really haven't seen many I want to play lately. I think Steam with the sales and often beating retail prices, the increasing library and such, I'm really strongly considering dropping retail purchases altogether and going Steam.
What about CNN and BBC? I'm curious because it would seem to me, it would be in the interests of the government to block access to outside new sources. I've never been to China. Maybe you were in HK, where I hear it is much more progressive than the rest of the country (and sheltered a quite a bit more from the "communism" aspects).
A Canadian relative once went to Cuba and they were plenty pissed when he brought magazines and newspapers from North America for leisurely reading during his vacation. Luckily he wasn't arrested, but the materials were confiscated. Who knows, maybe the security guards wanted to read it for themselves.
I think what he is talking about is taking FedEx or UPS out of the map. Amazon usually offers free shipping on orders over $25. I'm in Canada so its around $40. Anyways, I remember because there's a lot more stuff on Amazon.com (partner resellers etc), that people would find $0.99 items or less when their order was nudging on the free shipping price. That second item will cost Amazon more than its worth FWIW.
A fair amount of bandwidth is gobbled up just browsing the Amazon website. Amazon has to upkeep their website anyways. So I think the cost of delivery of the digital goods which would probably be a few bits and bytes more than some other user is friendlier to Amazon's pockets than paying free shipping on parcel delivery regardless if its a minimum order or a $1000 order books or not. I'd wager digital delivery is also friendlier on the environment.
Here's an easy fix and get your 'revenge' at the same time. Buy iPad + accessories. Go back to your car and put your iPad in the trunk. Accessory in hand, go back to the customer service desk. Tell them, on second thought, this accessory I bought wasn't what I thought it would be. I'd like a refund.
Now I'm sure they would have to refund you. I doubt their terms and conditions of refund behind their receipt would have any wording that would suggest that the iPad would also need to be refunded.
Its a PITA. But I'll bet when it starts costing the store thousands and taking up staff time, they will get the message.
I'm sure this is going to go over well in a few years when Alice and Bob can't do high-school level math nor write proper essays. If the objective of this exercise is to help students who will go on to higher education be better prepared, then they should start with improving the curriculum. Focusing entirely on a computer based education without the right foundation is going to change squat. There's probably a reason, as I seem to recall, that North American students on average do not test as well as their counterparts in other countries on math and science.
You're not being fair here. The LoC is a moving target. I've done some surveys and everyone seems content with getting a complete copy of the LoC as of 1901. Seems they agree they don't need anything past that.
Here's an easy fix for the casino. Rename them machine: "Feel Like a Millionaire". In the small print somewhere add that the "Maximum payout is $1627.82". You'll feel like a millionaire, for that brief second you though you won $11 million. And then, rejoice in your whopping $1627.82 winning after putting $1627.82 into the machine.
"They actually won $1627.82," said Burmania, "The $11 million was what we call a 'reset value.' It's what the jackpot would have been after the prize was claimed."
I don't get this last sentence it seems ambiguous. It seems to indicate to me that the "reset value", in this case an $11 million jackpot, would have been the prize on the next play. Had the couple been able to play one more round the prize -would- have been the $11 million. Since this mechanical error caused the machine to be shut down, the couple lost out anyways.
I would think that 1 months' worth of business would easily have that casino lose more than $11 million. I'd say pay them out, or they risk losing more money long term.
I thought the Gaming Commission was to be a neutral party. Instead, I found the rep's behavior in the video absolutely inappropriate since he's laughing throughout the interview.
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I live in a big city apartment in the downtown core. I can generally sleep through anything. The thing I notice though is that human voices will always wake me up.
I don't live far away from the fire department, so I'm quite sure that sirens are going off at all hours of the night but I never hear them while I'm sleeping. I find that even though its much quieter, people talking, screaming or even faint whispering (like my alarm radio starting to turn on) is enough to wake me up.
I noticed this after the last few nights where its been relatively silent and then at 2 or 3 in the morning I'll hear my neighbors talking or listening to their TV. I usually wake up in the middle of the night, so its possible they were also talking for a while and I didn't hear it.
Just a thought for other insomniacs, light sleepers who can't get anything done:
I have a diagnosed sleep disorder and take medication for it. I've always been a light sleeper and for a while I considered myself an insomniac. In the last few weeks of trying different things (after years! of failed attempts), I'm finding that if I force myself to go to sleep 2 hours earlier and wake up 2 hours earlier (effectively instead of waking up for 7 am, I wake up at 5 am, I have a better day. I have more time in the morning to do other tasks or workout and I feel more productive during the day. I find reading something really boring for 15 minutes helps me sleep too.
I think the most challenging task in gaming at the time for me was convincing my parents that their multi-thousand dollar 486 needed a $300 sound card so their son could play Wing Commander 2 with the voice acting in its full glory (with the extra add-on pack, naturally). That will beat the snot out of taking any uber-demon on with a shotgun.
Its likely not the company that requires it (e.g. your coworkers, your boss, your boss's boss, the CEO) could probably care less what your academic credentials are. They likely care about your ability to consistently do a good job. It is HR. Whatever the reason, HR in companies increasingly and needlessly keep bumping up the requirements for a job. I believe the only two reasons are to legitimize part of their jobs which is interviewing and selecting new hires or to be able to show to their boss that their selection process is giving the company increasingly more educated staff.
To my surprise, since I went to the link, "The Museum: 10,000 square feet of display area with over 5,000 items to view". It seems well worth the visit.
That is really cool. I think on my next trip in the area, I'll go take a peek. Nice of you to make a donation, that would be my first thought as well. I woulda thought that NSA has a slightly larger budget for their museum than the CF so, the Canadian museum would be much smaller.
I'm trying to find a good book to learn Postgre (or MySQL) and Python. Ideally, I'd like to setup a project to setup a database of stock market and economic data. At least there's some object I can work towards and data is easy to get. Also, the only thing I haven't learned well in computing are databases and knowing a general use computer language really well, I've tried Perl but syntactically, doesn't work for me.
I've some introductory programming experience from college courses C, C++, assembly and Shell Scripts (not my major and been a long time). I've been able to pseudocode the program I would need to get this project started and what tables I'd setup in the database.
The thing is, I'm unable to find a good 'classroom' type of book on databases. I haven't found a book with a project in mind. Most of the books I've found have 10 out of 20 chapters on database theory - not that this is a bad thing (at least I have some clarity and I like learning the techie stuff). A lot of the books focus too much on techie stuff that they don't give any insight as to what is next. I've looked on iTunesU, bookstore, on-line and come up empty.
I'd take it someone who's learned to be a DBA has learn somewhere along the line in a classroom what to do. Also, a lot of programming books have one chapter on SQL and database books have one chapter on using X programming language with X database. Can anyone point to something more useful?
I expect to royally fuck up the database, it will be slow, unoptimized, and poorly organized. I could probably save 2000 lines of code by using Python modules but I'd like to learn from experience.
To me, I do have nostalgia for certain games. But, what I liked more about the 80's and early 90's video games was the range of games. Platform (which are virtually non-existant), shooters (like T2 in the arcade) instead of the 3D FPS, and of course the adventure games. Wing Commander and XWing are memorable as well. The stories in some of these games were much deeper (or at least not superficial) like a good portion of the games today.
I found this to be a rather piece in the article, considering that IMO Haliburton will probably bid and be awarded exclusivity to mining rights in Afghanistan. Never mind leaving it to the Afghanis. The Americans have to make money at this.
"Just last year, Afghanistan's minister of mines was accused by American officials of accepting a $30 million bribe to award China the rights to develop its copper mine. The minister has since been replaced."
I'm more and more convinced that the Westboro Baptist Church people are either a hate group or a bunch of nutcases.
I think its a bit of both. And if you look at their behavior, it is very much like the KKK and Neo-Nazis at their own rallies. They use intimidation (some of them really are), yelling and a one-world view to convince the masses they are right.
When there's one person to challenge them, they still try to make their message strong. When there's more people walking up to them and challenging their views, the one-world view of these hate groups quickly dissipates. They know they are wrong and share a limited world view. They know they tried, they know its a futile fight but they hope they can sucker in a few more with these protests.
IMO, life is too short to be so hateful. These people at Westboro are truly demented if they decide to protest loud and proud at people's funerals.
(sorry for length, hope this might be helpful, probably overstaing obvious, anyways.....)
I don't want to bash Rogers, they paid me a good salary and I had a great experience working there many years ago.
I'm far removed from the company now, but I *think* and it appears marketing/management strategy remains unchanged.
My experience though in sales has been that the marketing and upper management has some strange way of making promotions and changing products for better (and unfortunately) worse. Most of the promotions are pretty positive and get a lot of new customers and sales for cable, PPV, specialty channels and Internet. This new download cap probably won't be a problem since most customers don't use or understand the Internet much. I'll bet most are just check e-mail and news and won't even use close to 15 GB. I'd be more concerned if I were a parent. Kids with an XBox 360 or PS3, what with downloading patches, playing online, demos and Torrent, Netflix, Youtube, blah blah blah. The parents don't use the net much, but the kids you can't control and the kids and parents probably don't realize how much is being downloaded.
I makes no sense to me that it would cost the ISP (Rogers) more for bandwidth as time goes on. I would think bandwidth costs would decrease and extra services like mail servers (a lot use Gmail, hotmail), news servers are no more, and I would think less people have 'homepages'.
Rogers is not unlike Bell, Shaw and to the US neighbors AT&T and Sprint etc in that they like any company wanting to make a profit and draw people away from competitors. Bell also has TV/Satellite offerings. So given industry trends, I won't be surprised if this bandwidth change is directly related to a conflict of interest, one they know the CRTC won't touch or are too slow to move.
I live in Vancouver, so I've also the opportunity as with Ontario and Quebec residents, to be a TekSavvy customer. It costs me more with a dry line, but well worth escaping the Telus or Shaw. Bonus - they are more than generous with bandwidth. I'm happy with service - as long as Telus doesn't start pissing me off by trying to get the useless CRTC to cap non Telus DSL subscribers on their loop. As taxpayers, we've more than subsided the Ma Bells - to the point these should probably be considered public infrastructure.
I'm just waiting for a press release from Snoop Dogg - btw I did check his twitter account before posting this - nothing ...... yet!!!.
FOR PRESS RELEASE. Oakland, CA - Acclaimed rap star Snoop Dogg, a multi-platinum record seller, has today announced that he is moving to Oakland, California. Snoop would like to tell his fans - "the shizzle is more growing opportunities for my rap in Oaktown. Ain't nothing growin' where I am. You know, I need more green for my raps.". Snoop hopes his fans can support him while he waits for the growing opportunities in Oakland to help him record his next album.
The kid isn't giving out *their* real name. But parent's last name should be enough - especially - for a phonebook. Creepy indeed.
I certainly don't have that luxury. The problem is, what if your employer looks you up online and says hmmmm, he's a member of this non-profit and that one, does skydiving, and likes to knit.
Well, the non-profit might not coincide with their beliefs, skydiving could be seen as a risky sport (are you going to show up after your next jump???) and knitting sounds pretty boring if you want to be a sales person. This company doesn't want a boring person. Its so easy to jump to conclusions. And this is where its risky. And the HR for any company gets resumes by the hundreds or thousands a year. They just want to filter through as many of them as possible. You see skydiving .... you're out and you'll never know it.
My real name isn't very common. And there's someone with serious jail time that has a name close to me and lives in Canada. I don't use my real name often and if you Google me, then you only find one hit that is really me. I'm kind of concerned they might associate that person with me. Apples and oranges I suppose. I've never had much of a problem finding a job anyways.
I actually kind of liked the copy protection in the Sierra Adventure games (I thought I'd purposefully mention their games because those were some damn fine games ! ).
It was a test of honest and was kind of fun figuring it out, and it did involve reading the manual which were often pretty funny (Space Quest and Freddy Pharkas).
Sierra did things : "Identify this mugshot" at the start of Police quest. Mugshots of the characters were placed throughout the manual. I think the Space Quest 3 one involved a spinning wheel you had to match up symbols. With Leisure Suit Larry, they didn't really care as long as you answered some questions to "prove" you were old enough to play the game.
At the least, if you keep the manual and you still have a system to run the game, you should effectively never lock yourself out of the game.
I not much of a gamer now. I tend to buy games retail (maybe 2 or 3 a year). I download demos for most games I want to play and I really haven't seen many I want to play lately. I think Steam with the sales and often beating retail prices, the increasing library and such, I'm really strongly considering dropping retail purchases altogether and going Steam.
They better not patent this. I call prior art- Energon cubes!
What about CNN and BBC? I'm curious because it would seem to me, it would be in the interests of the government to block access to outside new sources. I've never been to China. Maybe you were in HK, where I hear it is much more progressive than the rest of the country (and sheltered a quite a bit more from the "communism" aspects).
A Canadian relative once went to Cuba and they were plenty pissed when he brought magazines and newspapers from North America for leisurely reading during his vacation. Luckily he wasn't arrested, but the materials were confiscated. Who knows, maybe the security guards wanted to read it for themselves.
More paint over the antenna? No! That will make it look ugly.
I will paint my hand instead.
I think what he is talking about is taking FedEx or UPS out of the map. Amazon usually offers free shipping on orders over $25. I'm in Canada so its around $40. Anyways, I remember because there's a lot more stuff on Amazon.com (partner resellers etc), that people would find $0.99 items or less when their order was nudging on the free shipping price. That second item will cost Amazon more than its worth FWIW.
A fair amount of bandwidth is gobbled up just browsing the Amazon website. Amazon has to upkeep their website anyways. So I think the cost of delivery of the digital goods which would probably be a few bits and bytes more than some other user is friendlier to Amazon's pockets than paying free shipping on parcel delivery regardless if its a minimum order or a $1000 order books or not. I'd wager digital delivery is also friendlier on the environment.
I h e r e b y d e c l a r e t h a t I w i l l n o t v i o l a t e y o u r p a t e n t . F e e l f r e e t o s u e M a n k i n d .
Here's an easy fix and get your 'revenge' at the same time. Buy iPad + accessories. Go back to your car and put your iPad in the trunk. Accessory in hand, go back to the customer service desk. Tell them, on second thought, this accessory I bought wasn't what I thought it would be. I'd like a refund.
Now I'm sure they would have to refund you. I doubt their terms and conditions of refund behind their receipt would have any wording that would suggest that the iPad would also need to be refunded.
Its a PITA. But I'll bet when it starts costing the store thousands and taking up staff time, they will get the message.
I'm sure this is going to go over well in a few years when Alice and Bob can't do high-school level math nor write proper essays. If the objective of this exercise is to help students who will go on to higher education be better prepared, then they should start with improving the curriculum. Focusing entirely on a computer based education without the right foundation is going to change squat. There's probably a reason, as I seem to recall, that North American students on average do not test as well as their counterparts in other countries on math and science.
Megatron never thought much of Starscreams' intelligence anyways ;)
(this is just a silly comment, no harm intended).
What's the matter? Its not trademarked. :)
You're not being fair here. The LoC is a moving target. I've done some surveys and everyone seems content with getting a complete copy of the LoC as of 1901. Seems they agree they don't need anything past that.
Here's an easy fix for the casino. Rename them machine: "Feel Like a Millionaire". In the small print somewhere add that the "Maximum payout is $1627.82". You'll feel like a millionaire, for that brief second you though you won $11 million. And then, rejoice in your whopping $1627.82 winning after putting $1627.82 into the machine.
"They actually won $1627.82," said Burmania, "The $11 million was what we call a 'reset value.' It's what the jackpot would have been after the prize was claimed."
I don't get this last sentence it seems ambiguous. It seems to indicate to me that the "reset value", in this case an $11 million jackpot, would have been the prize on the next play. Had the couple been able to play one more round the prize -would- have been the $11 million. Since this mechanical error caused the machine to be shut down, the couple lost out anyways.
I would think that 1 months' worth of business would easily have that casino lose more than $11 million. I'd say pay them out, or they risk losing more money long term.
I thought the Gaming Commission was to be a neutral party. Instead, I found the rep's behavior in the video absolutely inappropriate since he's laughing throughout the interview.