That was a brilliant series. I especially liked his excerpts from the Bible where in the narration he cast God with a very evil sounding, wheedly voice ( slightly reminiscent of Gollum in fact ). The excerpt about the man who is lost and goes to a nearby house to ask if he can stay the night is great. Shortly after he arrives a group of men arrive outside and demand to 'know' the stranger ( in the biblical sense ). The owner of the house says obviously he can't let this mob come and demand gay sex with his guest, however his daughter is still young but of a good age so why don't they get to 'know' her instead ? This isn't good enough because once they get to 'know' their victim they need to kill them and the daughter isn't good enough. So how about the mans wife ? He can always get another one and she's still quite pretty why not take her ?
God says this is all fine and the way it should be, rampaging horders of murderous rapists shouldn't be allowed to touch your male guest but any females you have around the place can be given freely, whether they like it or not.
I agree, my experience of university is roughly comparable to your own but back in '92. Not having turned up for most of my A-Level courses I managed to get a C in Computing and two unclassifieds in Maths and Physics which was enough to get me on a university computing course. I'd obviously become entirely bored with education during my A-Levels and didn't even bother turning up for the first year final exams since I'd missed so many lectures etc it really wasn't worth it. I left at that point because I although I was enjoying drinking partying I didn't think things would change at all academically if I managed to persuade them to let me back.
The thing is that although a certain percentage of people do get good, useful degrees in Uni and then go on to get good jobs using those degrees this is outweighed by the huge numbers of people who get bad degrees in useless subjects and it gets them pretty much nowhere, they'd have been better off careerwise not having gone to Uni at all.
There's a lot of industries which need trained recruits in areas such as building, plumbing and other similar trades but because the government is so hell bent on getting everyone into Uni these types of career are not really promoted to anyone ( apart from maybe car mechanics to criminals ). Partly this is because people tend to look down their noses at aspirations to be a plumber which is a point of view the government seems to be, wrongly, re-enforcing by attempting to pile everyone into a university to do media studies or management degrees, or whatever.
Thats right, some of the best holidays I had as a kid were with the Scouts and with the School and they were of a nature which would pretty much prevent them from happening nowadays.
For example with the Scouts we'd go camping to some of the big organised camps but our leader ( and only adult ) would make sure we got the tent up OK and then go back home for the weekend. Although there were other adults within a quarter of mile or so of us we were basically unsupervised and in charge a number of large axes, saws, petrol, gas and boxes and boxes of matches. Needless to say we had a great time and no one ever got seriously injured because we very quickly learned for ourselves the dangers of playing catch with large felling axes ( and that chopping up trees with them was more fun anyway ). We learned several important lessons about looking after ourselves and as a group from these camps; if no one cooks any food we all get very hungry, if no one gets up early to light the fire cold baked beans don't taste very nice, its better for people not to be constantly arguing with each other, if we look like we are looking after ourselves and everyone looks healthy and happy no one comes to interfere and we can do what we like etc etc etc.
There is no way anyone would let a group of 12 - 15 year olds go camping without any direct supervision nowadays for fear of the inevitable law suit as soon as someone chops their hand off with an axe.
A lot of webservers are named "www" by convention to make it easier to find the webserver for a particular domain but this is just a convention and, as delicious have done, can be changed to whatever you like.
The "www" in "www.whatever.com" is simply the name of the computer you are trying to access in the "whatever.com" domain which is why if instead of naming their webserver "www" they name it "del" instead then this is perfectly OK and should not cause anything to break. Whatever problems you were having have nothing to do with their naming conventions.
It generally means that no one really knows what they want to employ someone for and nobody you might end up working for could be bothered to draft the advert so it was just left to HR who cut and pasted a couple of previous adverts together.
You should stand up for yourself, if you're working effectively and still can't meet deadlines without constant overtime then your employer needs to employ more people. It won't do that if it thinks everything is fine, the deadlines are being met and everyone's happy.
If you don't want to do overtime then simply don't do it, work the hours you are contracted to work and go home, thank them for the opportunity to pick up overtime but exlpain you value the free time and rest more than you do the extra money. The employer doesn't own you, you have both agreed what you should do, how long you should work for and what you should be paid when you drew up the contract which will not say you must work any overtime offered to you.
It is perfectly reasonable for you to refuse overtime, you cannot be sacked for doing that and if your employer uses that as an excuse for any sanctions against you then you will do well in court against them. You do not own your company and there is no direct benefit to you whether these deadlines are met or not, your responsibilities are to turn up, do the work you are supposed to do and go home at the agreed time so you need to stand up for yourself and assert your rights.
Yeah, some of them are very professional, excellent to deal with and deliver a good result whereas others don't have a clue, are essentially fly by night chancers and are a total nightmare to work with.
My most amusing experience with a recruitment agency was 5 or 6 years ago when I had essentially no IT experience or qualifications and was trying to break into the industry. I went for what was supposed to be a chat with the recruiter but which turned out to actually be the first interview for pretty much my ideal position. As it turned out this was a position with quite a large IT company who were recruiting quite widely and I'd actually had exactly the same interview with another recruitment company a week or so earlier but had been advised I wasn't successful that time.
Having heard all the questions before this time the interview was quite straightforward and thanks to the feedback after the interview the first time I was able to say exactly what the recruiter should have been wanting to hear. The only problem was the recruiter quite obviously didn't have a clue what she talking about ( e.g. once I'd answered a question she'd say she thought we might be better to change it a bit and would suggest adding all kinds of buzzword related nonsense which clearly had nothing to do with the question being asked ) and was asking all kinds of weird unrelated questions and generally giving an excellent performance of being utterly inept at both recruitment and IT. Her boss kept coming in every minute or so to check everything was going OK and seemed to me to just keeping an eye on what she was up to.
Anyway I got out of there as quick as I could and didn't expect to hear anything further from the recruiter at all but a week later the actual company with the job called me and gave me a phone interview for a second line position ( the original one had just been 1st line call logging ) which I passed and offered me a temp position.
I arrived for my first day and was surprised to see my recruiter there as well, I assumed she was there to do some kind of liason for her agency but it turned out her agency had strongly suggested she fill the other position the same as the one I'd been offered. It was immediately evident to me and everyone else we were working with she knew even less about IT than she did about recruitment and would essentially just try to bullshit her way through anything she was asked to deal with. Inevitably the nonsense she was suggesting never worked so she'd announce that such and such was simply "impossible". Within a day or so no one assigned any calls to her and I ended up doing the work of both of us. She was obviously aware of what was going on and would go out and hang around the analysts who assigned us calls and basically grab the phone of them and attempt to deal actually fix something through the application of more bullshit.
A month later the boss called me in and offered me a job and asked what I thought of the other girl to which I said I thought she was useless and was basically just trying to blag it. I got a job and she was told we were both being asked to leave because the boss was worried about what she might do if she thought there was a chance of a job there. During the previous month it became increasingly obvious that the agency weren't going to have her back to her old recruitment role for love or money. She spent the rest of the afternoon going through the company address book phoning everyone with the title manager next to their name and everyone in HR begging for a job. All in all it was a very weird experience.
Equally I should have a right to not be poisoned by pollution from cars and factories, not to have 5 years or more knocked off my lifespan by working, not to have my brain rotted by listening to inane conversations on buses etc etc etc.
Life however doesn't work like that, you're perfectly free to protect yourself from all these things by living in solitude in the countryside or by not frequenting places where people are smoking but at the end of the day if YOU don't want to inhale secondary cigarette smoke then YOU should go somewhere else. It's not exposure against your will if you have the choice to remove yourself from the exposure and choose not to do so.
I also suffer from this, I never bother listening to people names when they're introduced since I think if I ever need to know there name I'll be able to find out when I need it. Right now I've been working in the same office for around 8 months and still don't know the names of dozens of people I've been introduced to simply because I've never had any cause to talk to them.
A common mistake many women make is assuming that men care about such things as cleaning, dusting, tidying things up etc. In this case since the only beneficiary of having vacuumed floors, dusted shelves and tidied away piles of paper is the woman then it's totally fair that she is the one who needs to put the effort in to do it.
A good example of this is women who believe that although you may be watching the England vs Germany World Cup Final with England leading by one goal you should be equally interested in tidying all your things off the table and vacuuming because her parents are coming to tea sometime next month.
To be fair in some cases men can exhibit the same behavious and enjoy cleaning and tidying and some women couldn't care less.
This has nothing to do with important things such as buying and preparing food and paying bills in which all participants should equally participate.
I'd like you to consider how much it would cost to replace my server, if it should ever become horribly mangled, and add this cost to the cost of initiating a recruitment process to replace me. If this figure is greater than the £1000 it would cost to fully train me then I would suggest this is what you do. If not then I'd just like to say that you can take your job and shove it and I don't think I'll be working here anymore.
Generally in the UK we use the word weather to refer to the weather but I must admit that having lived in the UK for 30 years I have never heard this saying of yours. Of course this doesn't detract from the fact that it is always raining in Manchester, The Lake District and Wales.
It seems unfair to me because I don't believe there would any benefit to me with this new arrangement and yet I would be expected to pay for it anyway.
Maybe I am being cynical but I suspect the Telco's involved would provide a better and quicker network for those customers paying them for the new service by degrading everyone who isn't paying. If this is the case even if I am not benefitting from the improved access I can gain to Amazon for example I am experiencing a worse service from other sites I might use who would not be able to or wouldn't want to pay the Telcos extra money.
Clearly any price increases faced by businesses will be met by corresponding price increases for those businesses customers. For example Amazon would have to charge you more for their products if they wanted to use this prioritised system and Yahoo/Google would have to charge more for adverts which would in turn be paid for by increases in the prices of the advertised products.
Really the only winner in this is the Telco with everyone else ending up paying more for much the same level of service ( I suspect that rather than their customers seeing any great increases in network speed you would see people who weren't paying for this scheme to suffer decreased network speed ).
The best bet would be for no company to sign up to the improved service but this it's probably optomistic to hope this would happen.
I thought Gold was constantly losing it's value as they keep digging more of it up but regardless of whether or not that is the case it's far more sensible to keep your wealth tied up in as many diverse things as you can and the best way of doing that is to leave it in a bank or some sort of investment fund.
In the various companies I have worked for in and around Birmingham I've worked with a lot of black and asian ( probably more asian ) people with IT related degrees. Thinking about though I'd say that the helpdesk probably had more asians than caucasians, and technical support was roughly split between caucasians and asians. There were one or two asian managers and a couple of black people in HR but these roles seemed to be predominantly white.
Obviously this is just company amongst millions and is probably not representative.
Slashdot Mirror
That was a brilliant series. I especially liked his excerpts from the Bible where in the narration he cast God with a very evil sounding, wheedly voice ( slightly reminiscent of Gollum in fact ). The excerpt about the man who is lost and goes to a nearby house to ask if he can stay the night is great. Shortly after he arrives a group of men arrive outside and demand to 'know' the stranger ( in the biblical sense ). The owner of the house says obviously he can't let this mob come and demand gay sex with his guest, however his daughter is still young but of a good age so why don't they get to 'know' her instead ? This isn't good enough because once they get to 'know' their victim they need to kill them and the daughter isn't good enough. So how about the mans wife ? He can always get another one and she's still quite pretty why not take her ?
God says this is all fine and the way it should be, rampaging horders of murderous rapists shouldn't be allowed to touch your male guest but any females you have around the place can be given freely, whether they like it or not.
This guys reviews are excellent, the one about this book is the funniest thing I've read all week.
I know what they are, but my gripe is "Why not just call them 'keywords'?"
People understand shit like that.
What the fuck are tags anyway ?
"About 1,000 years ago Greenland didn't *have* a covering of ice. So in 1,000 years Greenland won't have a covering of ice."
I don't know what you measure your years in but the bottom layers of ice in the greenland ice cap are over 2 million of our standard earth years old.
I agree, my experience of university is roughly comparable to your own but back in '92. Not having turned up for most of my A-Level courses I managed to get a C in Computing and two unclassifieds in Maths and Physics which was enough to get me on a university computing course. I'd obviously become entirely bored with education during my A-Levels and didn't even bother turning up for the first year final exams since I'd missed so many lectures etc it really wasn't worth it. I left at that point because I although I was enjoying drinking partying I didn't think things would change at all academically if I managed to persuade them to let me back.
The thing is that although a certain percentage of people do get good, useful degrees in Uni and then go on to get good jobs using those degrees this is outweighed by the huge numbers of people who get bad degrees in useless subjects and it gets them pretty much nowhere, they'd have been better off careerwise not having gone to Uni at all.
There's a lot of industries which need trained recruits in areas such as building, plumbing and other similar trades but because the government is so hell bent on getting everyone into Uni these types of career are not really promoted to anyone ( apart from maybe car mechanics to criminals ). Partly this is because people tend to look down their noses at aspirations to be a plumber which is a point of view the government seems to be, wrongly, re-enforcing by attempting to pile everyone into a university to do media studies or management degrees, or whatever.
Thats right, some of the best holidays I had as a kid were with the Scouts and with the School and they were of a nature which would pretty much prevent them from happening nowadays.
For example with the Scouts we'd go camping to some of the big organised camps but our leader ( and only adult ) would make sure we got the tent up OK and then go back home for the weekend. Although there were other adults within a quarter of mile or so of us we were basically unsupervised and in charge a number of large axes, saws, petrol, gas and boxes and boxes of matches. Needless to say we had a great time and no one ever got seriously injured because we very quickly learned for ourselves the dangers of playing catch with large felling axes ( and that chopping up trees with them was more fun anyway ). We learned several important lessons about looking after ourselves and as a group from these camps; if no one cooks any food we all get very hungry, if no one gets up early to light the fire cold baked beans don't taste very nice, its better for people not to be constantly arguing with each other, if we look like we are looking after ourselves and everyone looks healthy and happy no one comes to interfere and we can do what we like etc etc etc.
There is no way anyone would let a group of 12 - 15 year olds go camping without any direct supervision nowadays for fear of the inevitable law suit as soon as someone chops their hand off with an axe.
What the fuck are keywords anyway ?
A lot of webservers are named "www" by convention to make it easier to find the webserver for a particular domain but this is just a convention and, as delicious have done, can be changed to whatever you like.
The "www" in "www.whatever.com" is simply the name of the computer you are trying to access in the "whatever.com" domain which is why if instead of naming their webserver "www" they name it "del" instead then this is perfectly OK and should not cause anything to break. Whatever problems you were having have nothing to do with their naming conventions.
It generally means that no one really knows what they want to employ someone for and nobody you might end up working for could be bothered to draft the advert so it was just left to HR who cut and pasted a couple of previous adverts together.
That's 17 hours a day every day which is ridiculous.
You should stand up for yourself, if you're working effectively and still can't meet deadlines without constant overtime then your employer needs to employ more people. It won't do that if it thinks everything is fine, the deadlines are being met and everyone's happy.
If you don't want to do overtime then simply don't do it, work the hours you are contracted to work and go home, thank them for the opportunity to pick up overtime but exlpain you value the free time and rest more than you do the extra money. The employer doesn't own you, you have both agreed what you should do, how long you should work for and what you should be paid when you drew up the contract which will not say you must work any overtime offered to you.
It is perfectly reasonable for you to refuse overtime, you cannot be sacked for doing that and if your employer uses that as an excuse for any sanctions against you then you will do well in court against them. You do not own your company and there is no direct benefit to you whether these deadlines are met or not, your responsibilities are to turn up, do the work you are supposed to do and go home at the agreed time so you need to stand up for yourself and assert your rights.
Yeah, some of them are very professional, excellent to deal with and deliver a good result whereas others don't have a clue, are essentially fly by night chancers and are a total nightmare to work with.
My most amusing experience with a recruitment agency was 5 or 6 years ago when I had essentially no IT experience or qualifications and was trying to break into the industry. I went for what was supposed to be a chat with the recruiter but which turned out to actually be the first interview for pretty much my ideal position. As it turned out this was a position with quite a large IT company who were recruiting quite widely and I'd actually had exactly the same interview with another recruitment company a week or so earlier but had been advised I wasn't successful that time.
Having heard all the questions before this time the interview was quite straightforward and thanks to the feedback after the interview the first time I was able to say exactly what the recruiter should have been wanting to hear. The only problem was the recruiter quite obviously didn't have a clue what she talking about ( e.g. once I'd answered a question she'd say she thought we might be better to change it a bit and would suggest adding all kinds of buzzword related nonsense which clearly had nothing to do with the question being asked ) and was asking all kinds of weird unrelated questions and generally giving an excellent performance of being utterly inept at both recruitment and IT. Her boss kept coming in every minute or so to check everything was going OK and seemed to me to just keeping an eye on what she was up to.
Anyway I got out of there as quick as I could and didn't expect to hear anything further from the recruiter at all but a week later the actual company with the job called me and gave me a phone interview for a second line position ( the original one had just been 1st line call logging ) which I passed and offered me a temp position.
I arrived for my first day and was surprised to see my recruiter there as well, I assumed she was there to do some kind of liason for her agency but it turned out her agency had strongly suggested she fill the other position the same as the one I'd been offered. It was immediately evident to me and everyone else we were working with she knew even less about IT than she did about recruitment and would essentially just try to bullshit her way through anything she was asked to deal with. Inevitably the nonsense she was suggesting never worked so she'd announce that such and such was simply "impossible". Within a day or so no one assigned any calls to her and I ended up doing the work of both of us. She was obviously aware of what was going on and would go out and hang around the analysts who assigned us calls and basically grab the phone of them and attempt to deal actually fix something through the application of more bullshit.
A month later the boss called me in and offered me a job and asked what I thought of the other girl to which I said I thought she was useless and was basically just trying to blag it. I got a job and she was told we were both being asked to leave because the boss was worried about what she might do if she thought there was a chance of a job there. During the previous month it became increasingly obvious that the agency weren't going to have her back to her old recruitment role for love or money. She spent the rest of the afternoon going through the company address book phoning everyone with the title manager next to their name and everyone in HR begging for a job. All in all it was a very weird experience.
I saw a job once requiring 3 years commercial experience of Windows 2000 and a relevant degree. This was advertised in 2001.
Equally I should have a right to not be poisoned by pollution from cars and factories, not to have 5 years or more knocked off my lifespan by working, not to have my brain rotted by listening to inane conversations on buses etc etc etc.
Life however doesn't work like that, you're perfectly free to protect yourself from all these things by living in solitude in the countryside or by not frequenting places where people are smoking but at the end of the day if YOU don't want to inhale secondary cigarette smoke then YOU should go somewhere else. It's not exposure against your will if you have the choice to remove yourself from the exposure and choose not to do so.
I can't remember jokes either, no matter how hard I try to they all turn into the only joke I do know which is:
What do you call a three legged donkey ?
A wonky.
I also suffer from this, I never bother listening to people names when they're introduced since I think if I ever need to know there name I'll be able to find out when I need it. Right now I've been working in the same office for around 8 months and still don't know the names of dozens of people I've been introduced to simply because I've never had any cause to talk to them.
I'd definitely lend Shania one, given half a chance I'd be in there like a rat up a drainpipe.
A common mistake many women make is assuming that men care about such things as cleaning, dusting, tidying things up etc. In this case since the only beneficiary of having vacuumed floors, dusted shelves and tidied away piles of paper is the woman then it's totally fair that she is the one who needs to put the effort in to do it.
A good example of this is women who believe that although you may be watching the England vs Germany World Cup Final with England leading by one goal you should be equally interested in tidying all your things off the table and vacuuming because her parents are coming to tea sometime next month.
To be fair in some cases men can exhibit the same behavious and enjoy cleaning and tidying and some women couldn't care less.
This has nothing to do with important things such as buying and preparing food and paying bills in which all participants should equally participate.
Dear Boss,
I'd like you to consider how much it would cost to replace my server, if it should ever become horribly mangled, and add this cost to the cost of initiating a recruitment process to replace me. If this figure is greater than the £1000 it would cost to fully train me then I would suggest this is what you do. If not then I'd just like to say that you can take your job and shove it and I don't think I'll be working here anymore.
Yours, Mr Employee.
Generally in the UK we use the word weather to refer to the weather but I must admit that having lived in the UK for 30 years I have never heard this saying of yours. Of course this doesn't detract from the fact that it is always raining in Manchester, The Lake District and Wales.
It seems unfair to me because I don't believe there would any benefit to me with this new arrangement and yet I would be expected to pay for it anyway.
Maybe I am being cynical but I suspect the Telco's involved would provide a better and quicker network for those customers paying them for the new service by degrading everyone who isn't paying. If this is the case even if I am not benefitting from the improved access I can gain to Amazon for example I am experiencing a worse service from other sites I might use who would not be able to or wouldn't want to pay the Telcos extra money.
Clearly any price increases faced by businesses will be met by corresponding price increases for those businesses customers. For example Amazon would have to charge you more for their products if they wanted to use this prioritised system and Yahoo/Google would have to charge more for adverts which would in turn be paid for by increases in the prices of the advertised products.
Really the only winner in this is the Telco with everyone else ending up paying more for much the same level of service ( I suspect that rather than their customers seeing any great increases in network speed you would see people who weren't paying for this scheme to suffer decreased network speed ).
The best bet would be for no company to sign up to the improved service but this it's probably optomistic to hope this would happen.
I thought Gold was constantly losing it's value as they keep digging more of it up but regardless of whether or not that is the case it's far more sensible to keep your wealth tied up in as many diverse things as you can and the best way of doing that is to leave it in a bank or some sort of investment fund.
In the various companies I have worked for in and around Birmingham I've worked with a lot of black and asian ( probably more asian ) people with IT related degrees. Thinking about though I'd say that the helpdesk probably had more asians than caucasians, and technical support was roughly split between caucasians and asians. There were one or two asian managers and a couple of black people in HR but these roles seemed to be predominantly white.
Obviously this is just company amongst millions and is probably not representative.