Re:Tattoos and other forms of fan appreciation
on
Ask Neil Gaiman
·
· Score: 1
My girlfriend says that your Delirium tattoo must be awesome, she's very beautiful.
Kind regards,
Michael Judge SurveyComplete
Re:Tattoos and other forms of fan appreciation
on
Ask Neil Gaiman
·
· Score: 1
You know, that kind of thing is just sad. That'd be one thing if my gd wanted to get a small tatoo, like a heart, somewhere. But some other guys signature?
If I was you (not you Ian), I'd dump her and get some girl that didnt have issues of worshipping some author. After all, seems that she loves somebody that she met once, and not you.
Have you both had a mental examination?
Oh no! A random person from the internet disagreed with me. Questions my sanity, even! Argh, shiver me timbers.
Why should I care what you think if it's not constructive, mate?
Kind regards,
Michael Judge SurveyComplete
Re:Tattoos and other forms of fan appreciation
on
Ask Neil Gaiman
·
· Score: 1
...when you signed my girlfriend's lower back...she went to a tattoo parlor right afterward to have the moment made permanent...How do you deal with this kind of...fan appreciation?
The question is...how do you deal with this kind of fan appreciation?
Oh, it's just in good fun. If she wants to get a tattoo or twelve, more power to her. She just thinks that he's one of the best fiction writers of modern times and appreciates his artistry. From my perspective, it's much more fun to date a rocking, cute, artsy girl (with eccentricities) than someone who's into pop music, raving, or saving manatees.
Her next mission is to track down Shag (an artist) at a signing. She's hoping to ask him to draw a cat on her thigh for later tattooing. We met his brother Piet last weekend at an artsy thing and he said that he'd arrange to make it happen. Apparently, one of Shag's fans in Sydney had him draw something on her back (to get tattooed) and it's now one of his favorite stories. He took the request as a complement and it cheered him immensely.
So the tattoo thing is no big deal. At least they're good tattoos.
Tattoos and other forms of fan appreciation
on
Ask Neil Gaiman
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Neil,
Did you know that when you signed my girlfriend's lower back (at Vromans Book Store in Pasadena, 1999) that she went to a tattoo parlor right afterward to have the moment made permanent?
How do you deal with this kind of (admittedly deserved) fan appreciation?
And did someone say market research? SurveyComplete can get your web survey programmed and ready for interviewing today! 500,000 interviews conducted so far this year. Alternately, you can sign up as a member of our consumer panel to take surveys for cash and prizes (i.e. support your habit.)
Mortal Kombat: "The game was an instant hit... Fans persevered, but its popularity was driven more by infamy than quality. " WTF are you talking about!? Now you are saying it was popular, but for the wrong reasons? People liked it, people played it, people continued to like and play it; where is the problem? Who frickin cares why it was popular... are you honestly going to sit there and type that people dropped countless quarters into Mortal Kombat machines because of "infamy"? Get a clue.
Seriously! Mortal Kombat played a big part in my early college years. One of my fondest memories was the day when I beat twenty-one people in a row, securing my initials in the #1 position of the rankings. It was in a Del Taco during lunchtime and even middle-aged office workers were crowding around, watching me beat all comers.
I was happier about that victory then the time I won $20 in a game of chess against the top rated (at that time) Brazillian chess player at the boardwalk on Venice beach. He was a rated Grandmaster, and was shocked when I won after pulling out some moves that were unsettling in the opening (but technically wrong.) I forget his name, but he asked me mine:
"Who are you?! What's your rating?"
I said, "Mike Judge. Not rated."
"I've never heard of you."
"You will someday."
(Tourists burst into spontaneous applause.)
I quit chess a year later, took too much time.
Mortal Kombat was bloody and had an infamous advertising campaign (which if I recall correctly came out after the arcade game was already out of style) but it still was a good game. The controls were responsive and having a separate button for "block" was innovative at that time when poor clones of Street Fighter II were all the rage.
Robinson asks: 'Why are our imaginations retreating from science and space, and into fantasy?'"
I think we're a little more cynical than we used to be. Corporate and government abuses are wider-published, the gap between the rich and poor is steadily increasing, and although we've made amazing progress in computing power, the promised future of days past never arrived (e.g. "Dude, where's my flying car?") Why should we not be depressed about the future?
This isn't about the cynicism in my generation. It's about the driving ideas behind the sci-fi genre which now seem cliched and cheesy:
* Cheap, available space travel? * Space trade/space pirates? * Sexy aliens? * Apocalyptic mad-max futures with cybernetic implants and laser weapons? * Terraforming planets? * Cyborgs? * Space mining?
It's all rubbish.
I used to read a lot of Sci-Fi (e.g., Ursula K. Le Guin, Octavia E. Butler, Heinlein, Orson Scott Card, etc.), but frankly, I'd be embarassed to buy any of those novels today. These days I'm into Tom Robbins' novels and the Illuminatus Trilogy. At least they have fresh ideas, believable characters, and good writing.
I bought an ounce of the blue phosphorescent powder for my apartment. It's actually blue, and glows really well. The plan is to dump the stuff in clear paint ("sealer?") then paint the livingroom ceiling with it. I think it'll be neat.
"Study after study after study have shown this to be the absolute truth."
I agree with point of your post, but ambiguity bugs me.
Do you have 1 specific example? Something along the lines of "Study #1756 at New York University..."
I agree. He certainly should have just left that part out if he didn't have the name of a single study on hand.
You know, I'm the owner of a Market Research company. If someone came to me and said, "We want you to craft a research study measuring whether a show of active law enforcement in a society is correlated with a reduction in crime," why, I wouldn't even know where to start. It would have to be a massive, massive study, and I really doubt that any do exist on this topic. It's just too broad, with too many variables.
(Of course, my specialty is the technology behind Market Research, not the crafting of questionnaires.)
For the pinball machine in our office (The Simpsons Pinball Party) we bought some Dynamat soundproofing material and soundproofed the bottom of the cabinet, then we put foam flipflops under the legs. It makes a big difference in the sound that can be heard outside the room. We were also going to put some foam baffles inside, but the flipflops and Dynamat were enough for our purposes. I'd say that it's about 50% quieter. You might want to try it out, Dynamat is pretty easy to find online and Target has flipflops for just a few bucks a pair.
We bought The Simpsons Pinball Party for the office here last spring. Most people (even the girls) play it daily. We're all pretty good at it. I think the game is a positive thing for the company. It helps contribute to the relaxed, informal atmosphere here.
I wouldn't recommend a pinball machine for most workplaces though. It would be too much of a distraction in a cubicle farm/concrete hive.
It works for us because we're really more like a think tank. We're inventors. A quick pinball game is a good way to give the creative wells time to recharge.
Of course, I like pinball myself and find the "creative wells" line is just a way to justify purchasing a pinball machine for the office.
This product sounds fantastic, but it's not currently available on the market. How about some links to water-cooling kits that are available for purchase now? Which ones are recommended? Which ones not?
As a bit of backstory, we have a couple of new AMD Athlon computers here in the office with excessively loud fans. They're so loud that most of us (myself included) choose to do our work on old laptops, only using the desk computers when we need to calculate tabulations for our research studies. It's a real shame to see good computers wasted, so I'm thinking that watercooling may be the way to see that our investment in hardware actually gets used. Interesting/informative watercooling kit links would be appreciated.
In an old straightdope column on the subject of mushroom clouds, Cecil Adams says, "You don't need an atom bomb to make a mushroom cloud, just convection. Mushroom clouds typically occur when an explosion produces a massive fireball. Since the fireball is very hot and thus less dense than the surrounding air, it rises rapidly, forming the cap of the mushroom cloud. In its wake the fireball leaves a column of heated air. This acts as a chimney, drawing in smoke and hot gases from ground fires. These form the stalk of the mushroom. Since the center is the hottest part of the mushroom cloud, it rises faster than the outer edges, giving the impression that the cap is curling down around the stalk. Thus the familiar fungal form."
Go check out the rest of the article, it's pretty informative and easy for non-physicists like myself to understand.
irt.org is a very nice site. Your javascript FAQ has saved my ass more times than I can count. It's certainly the first place I go when I have a javascript problem or just need a quick solution. Mega-kudos to you my friend.
> 1) CPAN isn't flawless: yesterday, I tried using it to install File::Temp and it tried upgrading perl from 5.6 to 5.8. That simply isn't the correct thing to do, under any circumstance.
I've found through experience with just this very thing that the first command run through CPAN should be:
perl -MCPAN -e shell
install Bundle::CPAN
Upgrading to the newest version is necessary to get it to leave perl the hell alone.
So once you get past that hurdle, I find the worst part about CPAN is that some packages which everyone uses like mod_perl, DBI, and DBD::mysql fail to install unless Apache was compiled the correct way and currently running, or MYSQL is running and allows some bullshit nameless user to access all databases (!)
In RedHat Linux 7.x (maybe 8.x and later too), the mod_perl RPM is installed by default, but Apache isn't compiled correct to play nicely with it. So if you want to actually use mod_perl's features (i.e. install Bundle::apache in CPAN) then you have to uninstall apache and compile it by hand.
Frustrat-o-rama.
But in general, CPAN rocks. If it wasn't for CPAN then perl wouldn't be as popular as it is today. Why, just earlier this evening I was thinking that I'd love for users of a web app I'm working on to be able to import data from Excel files rather than just comma-delimited, I did a quick search at search.cpan.org and WHAM, one 'install Spreadsheet::ParseExcel::Simple' later and now users can upload Excel files. I can't think of any other language that makes it this easy to find and reuse libraries.
CPAN makes me look like I'm really good at what I do.
I can just echo the comments made in the media. SoBig is the worst email virus I've seen -- BY FAR.
Ugh, absolutely. I've received over 500 SoBig emails today. Yesterday wasn't as bad, I only received 300+.
My email account isn't setup exactly as a normal users would be. All support emails for the surveys we do get forwarded to my regular pop3 account, so I'm indirectly in a few thousand clueless people's address books.
> The whole "XP" thing is insulting. I'm not a child with a 5-minute attention span who needs to be entertained with childish graphics, "movies", or any of this other BS.
I do.
Give me a choice between an operating system with a command-line and an operating system with a graphical interface, I'll pick the graphical interface any time. I've spent too many days configuring Redhat over SSH to appreciate command line OSes.
'/usr/bin/apachectl restart'
Damn, didn't work.
'/bin/apachectl restart'
ARGH! Where are you apachectl?
'locate apachectl'
Oh.
'/usr/sbin/apachectl restart'
Menus are a good thing. Standardization is a good thing. Having to relearn how to interface with each and every application due to a command-line interface is a bad thing. Too much knowledge required to do something simple.
While I understand not allowing employees to install software which ends up breaking their Windows install, killing their web browsers because they don't need internet access as part of their job, it's just fuckwitted, primate behavior. I've worked for companies with policies like that and it's just a symptom of a company that's rotting at it's core.
People aren't built like robots and expecting them to act like robots leads to employees staring at their monitor, daydreaming while pretending to work -- or socializing with neighboring cubicles. I know, I've been there. That's considered a "normal" office job. Instead of constantly improving your skills and getting better at your job, you get good at hitting ALT-TAB. In one company I worked for that was completely draconian (they had an oil painting of Napoleon in the stairwell) they tore out the head-height cubicles and replaced them with waist-high cubicles to foster "communication." Of course, everyone could see each other's screens too. I'm sure that didn't have anything to do with it.
The only outcome of this sweat shop mentality is inferior work. People aren't robots and if you treat them like robots, then they'll subconsciously sabotage their jobs as much as they can without actively being fired. Employees will be working on the quarterly earnings report while thinking, "I hate that asshole Al, that dumb-ass Al. Who does he think he is coming in here and asking what I'm working on... Oh man, this spreadsheet is going to require a special formula to add up right if they change the BT earnings at the last minute like they always do... You know what? Fuck it! I'm just going to type the number in rather than spending 30 minutes setting up a formula. I don't have time for this crap. This isn't even part of my job description anyway..."
I think I've successfully overcome this sweat-shop bullshit in my business, SurveyComplete. First off, my employees are treated like contractors. As contractors, they get paid a percentage of the gross fee the company receive's for any research study they setup. Typically, I pay 30%. So if a typical, three-thousand dollar research study takes a day to set up -- the employee gets a check for $1,000. That's motivation.
I'm happy to pay this much (~30%) because while I paid for the advertising to get the business and designed the interviewing system and survey programming language, they're really doing most of the work in implementing each research study. I check their work and deal with the client before and after, but even so -- I'm making more if they helped me than if they didn't, so they should be paid what I can really afford to pay them, not what I think I can get away with paying them.
When employees screw up and make simple mistakes, I don't metaphorically throw my feces at them, I just tell them, "We have to fix this, this, and this, before turning it in to our client." I'm surprised that they're a little embarassed usually, I guess I spent too much time working for corporations where the first rule was to cover your own ass and make excuses before accepting responsibility. So when an employee is a little embarassed I just tell them it's not a big deal, it just needs to be changed.
We're all bloody humans and with our dazzling ability to create brilliant solutions to problems, we often make mistakes too. I'm interested in the brilliant solutions. I'm interested in encouraging experimentation and motivating people to find these solutions and make us more money. Mistakes get fixed. They're no big deal, really.
If one of my employees programs a study in a morning and collects $600 from me before lunch time, then what do I care? As the owner of a business, that's the kind of job I have and it works to motivate me. Why shouldn't my employees get treated the same way? They can see the books, see how much I'm charging for each study, and they know that they're getting paid really well. I'm not making a lion's share of the profit off each study ju
When you go gambling, make sure you look for the payout percentage, because (obviously) you're better off playing the 97% machine than the 92% machine.
Where exactly do you find this? The past few times I've been to Vegas I never noticed a payout percentage printed on the machine!
Of course, I was drinking too. Maybe it's printed on the back of the machine.
Because of Gorilla.bas and snake.bas I wasted many of my childhood years trying to make games in QBasic... Ultimately futile of course. Basic was a crappy language for graphics and I was just a little kid, what did I know about programming toolkits and scanners? I tried to plot out my sprites on graphing paper.
The knowledge I did acquire though eventually lead to learning C so I could modify WWIV BBS systems, which I was moderately successful at. I wrote a bunch of cheesy mods that ended up being pretty well adopted.
Fifteen years forward to today, I own my own company. I program online surveys for market research companies in a programming language of my own design. It's pretty neat. I certainly feel like there's been a progression.
So games do teach you something, just not always in the way the creators intended. If it wasn't for gorilla and snake, who knows where I would have ended up? Maybe I'd have a degree in English or Psychology.
Your post reminds me a little of one of my clients who always calls with huge lists of changes instead of just laying them out in email as bullet points and sending them over.
"Okay, here's the next one, are you ready? Okay. Bold and italicise the words 'previously used' on paragraph two of question three."
Drives me absolutely batty. I get the impression that he read on the MSN home page ten tips to increase his career and tip #8 was something like, "Call, don't email. A personal touch is always appreciated..."
Bah. Just email it to me and I'll take care of it at my earliest convenience, don't call, interrupt me from what I'm doing, and make me transcribe your directions. Not all of us enjoy being interrupted from our work to take notes.
I really like email. It makes my business a lot easier. I just go down the list, taking care of email after email from clients. When I'm done, I can stretch and do something different. Calls interrupt that natural checklist-like flow by forcing me to break off what I'm doing and take care of their issues first. In email I can even be polite and cordial even when I don't feel like it!
You do use email when it's appropriate, right?
The worst ever is when someone calls AND emails. "Hi, I just sent you an email containing a list of changes!"
(You fucking loser!) "Sure. I'll be looking for that shortly. Thanks!"
I have three computers in my office (one media editing station, one regular computer, and one laptop) and I store all my programming scripts on an USB keychain so when I switch between them I'm always assured that I'm working on the latest versions of my scripts. It seemed a much easier solution than setting up a fileserver, especially with the often-times spotty network access that a wireless access point gives to the laptop.
It cost me about $70 for a 128 meg chip, and that's plenty of space for storing what essentially amounts to copious amounts of text files with perhaps a whole web site or two I'm developing. It's weird though to hold a whole year of work in your hand.
Sometimes I worry about the reliability of these things, they're still fairly new. I make backups to CD occasionally, but still, I'd hate to lose a couple days of work due to a device that got bumped one too many times...
Randal Schwartz is a regular over at PerlMonks.org. He's replied to a couple of my threads and helped me out of some sticky situations. It's rare for such a talented programmer to be so accessible and helpful to the public.
Slashdot Mirror
My girlfriend says that your Delirium tattoo must be awesome, she's very beautiful.
Kind regards,
Michael Judge
SurveyComplete
Oh no! A random person from the internet disagreed with me. Questions my sanity, even! Argh, shiver me timbers.
Why should I care what you think if it's not constructive, mate?
Kind regards,
Michael Judge
SurveyComplete
Oh, it's just in good fun. If she wants to get a tattoo or twelve, more power to her. She just thinks that he's one of the best fiction writers of modern times and appreciates his artistry. From my perspective, it's much more fun to date a rocking, cute, artsy girl (with eccentricities) than someone who's into pop music, raving, or saving manatees.
Her next mission is to track down Shag (an artist) at a signing. She's hoping to ask him to draw a cat on her thigh for later tattooing. We met his brother Piet last weekend at an artsy thing and he said that he'd arrange to make it happen. Apparently, one of Shag's fans in Sydney had him draw something on her back (to get tattooed) and it's now one of his favorite stories. He took the request as a complement and it cheered him immensely.
So the tattoo thing is no big deal. At least they're good tattoos.
Neil,
Did you know that when you signed my girlfriend's lower back (at Vromans Book Store in Pasadena, 1999) that she went to a tattoo parlor right afterward to have the moment made permanent?
How do you deal with this kind of (admittedly deserved) fan appreciation?
Kind regards,
Michael Judge
SurveyComplete
P.S. American Gods and Coraline are fantastic!
Here's a link to a java applet port of Elite:
http://www.spectrum.lovely.net/Elite.html
And did someone say market research? SurveyComplete can get your web survey programmed and ready for interviewing today! 500,000 interviews conducted so far this year. Alternately, you can sign up as a member of our consumer panel to take surveys for cash and prizes (i.e. support your habit.)
"Too much pie! That's your problem."
Mortal Kombat:
"The game was an instant hit... Fans persevered, but its popularity was driven more by infamy than quality. "
WTF are you talking about!? Now you are saying it was popular, but for the wrong reasons? People liked it, people played it, people continued to like and play it; where is the problem? Who frickin cares why it was popular... are you honestly going to sit there and type that people dropped countless quarters into Mortal Kombat machines because of "infamy"? Get a clue.
Seriously! Mortal Kombat played a big part in my early college years. One of my fondest memories was the day when I beat twenty-one people in a row, securing my initials in the #1 position of the rankings. It was in a Del Taco during lunchtime and even middle-aged office workers were crowding around, watching me beat all comers.
I was happier about that victory then the time I won $20 in a game of chess against the top rated (at that time) Brazillian chess player at the boardwalk on Venice beach. He was a rated Grandmaster, and was shocked when I won after pulling out some moves that were unsettling in the opening (but technically wrong.) I forget his name, but he asked me mine:
"Who are you?! What's your rating?"
I said, "Mike Judge. Not rated."
"I've never heard of you."
"You will someday."
(Tourists burst into spontaneous applause.)
I quit chess a year later, took too much time.
Mortal Kombat was bloody and had an infamous advertising campaign (which if I recall correctly came out after the arcade game was already out of style) but it still was a good game. The controls were responsive and having a separate button for "block" was innovative at that time when poor clones of Street Fighter II were all the rage.
Robinson asks: 'Why are our imaginations retreating from science and space, and into fantasy?'"
I think we're a little more cynical than we used to be. Corporate and government abuses are wider-published, the gap between the rich and poor is steadily increasing, and although we've made amazing progress in computing power, the promised future of days past never arrived (e.g. "Dude, where's my flying car?") Why should we not be depressed about the future?
This isn't about the cynicism in my generation. It's about the driving ideas behind the sci-fi genre which now seem cliched and cheesy:
* Cheap, available space travel?
* Space trade/space pirates?
* Sexy aliens?
* Apocalyptic mad-max futures with cybernetic implants and laser weapons?
* Terraforming planets?
* Cyborgs?
* Space mining?
It's all rubbish.
I used to read a lot of Sci-Fi (e.g., Ursula K. Le Guin, Octavia E. Butler, Heinlein, Orson Scott Card, etc.), but frankly, I'd be embarassed to buy any of those novels today. These days I'm into Tom Robbins' novels and the Illuminatus Trilogy. At least they have fresh ideas, believable characters, and good writing.
I bought an ounce of the blue phosphorescent powder for my apartment. It's actually blue, and glows really well. The plan is to dump the stuff in clear paint ("sealer?") then paint the livingroom ceiling with it. I think it'll be neat.
I agree. He certainly should have just left that part out if he didn't have the name of a single study on hand.
You know, I'm the owner of a Market Research company. If someone came to me and said, "We want you to craft a research study measuring whether a show of active law enforcement in a society is correlated with a reduction in crime," why, I wouldn't even know where to start. It would have to be a massive, massive study, and I really doubt that any do exist on this topic. It's just too broad, with too many variables.
(Of course, my specialty is the technology behind Market Research, not the crafting of questionnaires.)
For the pinball machine in our office (The Simpsons Pinball Party) we bought some Dynamat soundproofing material and soundproofed the bottom of the cabinet, then we put foam flipflops under the legs. It makes a big difference in the sound that can be heard outside the room. We were also going to put some foam baffles inside, but the flipflops and Dynamat were enough for our purposes. I'd say that it's about 50% quieter. You might want to try it out, Dynamat is pretty easy to find online and Target has flipflops for just a few bucks a pair.
We bought The Simpsons Pinball Party for the office here last spring. Most people (even the girls) play it daily. We're all pretty good at it. I think the game is a positive thing for the company. It helps contribute to the relaxed, informal atmosphere here.
I wouldn't recommend a pinball machine for most workplaces though. It would be too much of a distraction in a cubicle farm/concrete hive.
It works for us because we're really more like a think tank. We're inventors. A quick pinball game is a good way to give the creative wells time to recharge.
Of course, I like pinball myself and find the "creative wells" line is just a way to justify purchasing a pinball machine for the office.
Kind regards,
Michael Judge
President
SurveyComplete
Dear Slashdot community,
This product sounds fantastic, but it's not currently available on the market. How about some links to water-cooling kits that are available for purchase now? Which ones are recommended? Which ones not?
As a bit of backstory, we have a couple of new AMD Athlon computers here in the office with excessively loud fans. They're so loud that most of us (myself included) choose to do our work on old laptops, only using the desk computers when we need to calculate tabulations for our research studies. It's a real shame to see good computers wasted, so I'm thinking that watercooling may be the way to see that our investment in hardware actually gets used. Interesting/informative watercooling kit links would be appreciated.
Kind regards,
Michael Judge
SurveyComplete
In an old straightdope column on the subject of mushroom clouds, Cecil Adams says, "You don't need an atom bomb to make a mushroom cloud, just convection. Mushroom clouds typically occur when an explosion produces a massive fireball. Since the fireball is very hot and thus less dense than the surrounding air, it rises rapidly, forming the cap of the mushroom cloud. In its wake the fireball leaves a column of heated air. This acts as a chimney, drawing in smoke and hot gases from ground fires. These form the stalk of the mushroom. Since the center is the hottest part of the mushroom cloud, it rises faster than the outer edges, giving the impression that the cap is curling down around the stalk. Thus the familiar fungal form."
Go check out the rest of the article, it's pretty informative and easy for non-physicists like myself to understand.
> And [www.irt.org] is my site too!
irt.org is a very nice site. Your javascript FAQ has saved my ass more times than I can count. It's certainly the first place I go when I have a javascript problem or just need a quick solution. Mega-kudos to you my friend.
> 1) CPAN isn't flawless: yesterday, I tried using it to install File::Temp and it tried upgrading perl from 5.6 to 5.8. That simply isn't the correct thing to do, under any circumstance.
I've found through experience with just this very thing that the first command run through CPAN should be:
perl -MCPAN -e shell
install Bundle::CPAN
Upgrading to the newest version is necessary to get it to leave perl the hell alone.
So once you get past that hurdle, I find the worst part about CPAN is that some packages which everyone uses like mod_perl, DBI, and DBD::mysql fail to install unless Apache was compiled the correct way and currently running, or MYSQL is running and allows some bullshit nameless user to access all databases (!)
In RedHat Linux 7.x (maybe 8.x and later too), the mod_perl RPM is installed by default, but Apache isn't compiled correct to play nicely with it. So if you want to actually use mod_perl's features (i.e. install Bundle::apache in CPAN) then you have to uninstall apache and compile it by hand.
Frustrat-o-rama.
But in general, CPAN rocks. If it wasn't for CPAN then perl wouldn't be as popular as it is today. Why, just earlier this evening I was thinking that I'd love for users of a web app I'm working on to be able to import data from Excel files rather than just comma-delimited, I did a quick search at search.cpan.org and WHAM, one 'install Spreadsheet::ParseExcel::Simple' later and now users can upload Excel files. I can't think of any other language that makes it this easy to find and reuse libraries.
CPAN makes me look like I'm really good at what I do.
I can just echo the comments made in the media.
SoBig is the worst email virus I've seen -- BY FAR.
Ugh, absolutely. I've received over 500 SoBig emails today. Yesterday wasn't as bad, I only received 300+.
My email account isn't setup exactly as a normal users would be. All support emails for the surveys we do get forwarded to my regular pop3 account, so I'm indirectly in a few thousand clueless people's address books.
'which' certainly is a useful command. Thanks for replying.
(My knowledge of time-saving linux commands is pretty spotty.)
> The whole "XP" thing is insulting. I'm not a child with a 5-minute attention span who needs to be entertained with childish graphics, "movies", or any of this other BS.
I do.
Give me a choice between an operating system with a command-line and an operating system with a graphical interface, I'll pick the graphical interface any time. I've spent too many days configuring Redhat over SSH to appreciate command line OSes.
'/usr/bin/apachectl restart'
Damn, didn't work.
'/bin/apachectl restart'
ARGH! Where are you apachectl?
'locate apachectl'
Oh.
'/usr/sbin/apachectl restart'
Menus are a good thing. Standardization is a good thing. Having to relearn how to interface with each and every application due to a command-line interface is a bad thing. Too much knowledge required to do something simple.
While I understand not allowing employees to install software which ends up breaking their Windows install, killing their web browsers because they don't need internet access as part of their job, it's just fuckwitted, primate behavior. I've worked for companies with policies like that and it's just a symptom of a company that's rotting at it's core.
People aren't built like robots and expecting them to act like robots leads to employees staring at their monitor, daydreaming while pretending to work -- or socializing with neighboring cubicles. I know, I've been there. That's considered a "normal" office job. Instead of constantly improving your skills and getting better at your job, you get good at hitting ALT-TAB. In one company I worked for that was completely draconian (they had an oil painting of Napoleon in the stairwell) they tore out the head-height cubicles and replaced them with waist-high cubicles to foster "communication." Of course, everyone could see each other's screens too. I'm sure that didn't have anything to do with it.
The only outcome of this sweat shop mentality is inferior work. People aren't robots and if you treat them like robots, then they'll subconsciously sabotage their jobs as much as they can without actively being fired. Employees will be working on the quarterly earnings report while thinking, "I hate that asshole Al, that dumb-ass Al. Who does he think he is coming in here and asking what I'm working on... Oh man, this spreadsheet is going to require a special formula to add up right if they change the BT earnings at the last minute like they always do... You know what? Fuck it! I'm just going to type the number in rather than spending 30 minutes setting up a formula. I don't have time for this crap. This isn't even part of my job description anyway..."
I think I've successfully overcome this sweat-shop bullshit in my business, SurveyComplete. First off, my employees are treated like contractors. As contractors, they get paid a percentage of the gross fee the company receive's for any research study they setup. Typically, I pay 30%. So if a typical, three-thousand dollar research study takes a day to set up -- the employee gets a check for $1,000. That's motivation.
I'm happy to pay this much (~30%) because while I paid for the advertising to get the business and designed the interviewing system and survey programming language, they're really doing most of the work in implementing each research study. I check their work and deal with the client before and after, but even so -- I'm making more if they helped me than if they didn't, so they should be paid what I can really afford to pay them, not what I think I can get away with paying them.
When employees screw up and make simple mistakes, I don't metaphorically throw my feces at them, I just tell them, "We have to fix this, this, and this, before turning it in to our client." I'm surprised that they're a little embarassed usually, I guess I spent too much time working for corporations where the first rule was to cover your own ass and make excuses before accepting responsibility. So when an employee is a little embarassed I just tell them it's not a big deal, it just needs to be changed.
We're all bloody humans and with our dazzling ability to create brilliant solutions to problems, we often make mistakes too. I'm interested in the brilliant solutions. I'm interested in encouraging experimentation and motivating people to find these solutions and make us more money. Mistakes get fixed. They're no big deal, really.
If one of my employees programs a study in a morning and collects $600 from me before lunch time, then what do I care? As the owner of a business, that's the kind of job I have and it works to motivate me. Why shouldn't my employees get treated the same way? They can see the books, see how much I'm charging for each study, and they know that they're getting paid really well. I'm not making a lion's share of the profit off each study ju
Where exactly do you find this? The past few times I've been to Vegas I never noticed a payout percentage printed on the machine!
Of course, I was drinking too. Maybe it's printed on the back of the machine.
That was the most coherent post I've ever seen on slashdot.
[The timeline]
Because of Gorilla.bas and snake.bas I wasted many of my childhood years trying to make games in QBasic... Ultimately futile of course. Basic was a crappy language for graphics and I was just a little kid, what did I know about programming toolkits and scanners? I tried to plot out my sprites on graphing paper.
The knowledge I did acquire though eventually lead to learning C so I could modify WWIV BBS systems, which I was moderately successful at. I wrote a bunch of cheesy mods that ended up being pretty well adopted.
Fifteen years forward to today, I own my own company. I program online surveys for market research companies in a programming language of my own design. It's pretty neat. I certainly feel like there's been a progression.
So games do teach you something, just not always in the way the creators intended. If it wasn't for gorilla and snake, who knows where I would have ended up? Maybe I'd have a degree in English or Psychology.
Your post reminds me a little of one of my clients who always calls with huge lists of changes instead of just laying them out in email as bullet points and sending them over.
"Okay, here's the next one, are you ready? Okay. Bold and italicise the words 'previously used' on paragraph two of question three."
Drives me absolutely batty. I get the impression that he read on the MSN home page ten tips to increase his career and tip #8 was something like, "Call, don't email. A personal touch is always appreciated..."
Bah. Just email it to me and I'll take care of it at my earliest convenience, don't call, interrupt me from what I'm doing, and make me transcribe your directions. Not all of us enjoy being interrupted from our work to take notes.
I really like email. It makes my business a lot easier. I just go down the list, taking care of email after email from clients. When I'm done, I can stretch and do something different. Calls interrupt that natural checklist-like flow by forcing me to break off what I'm doing and take care of their issues first. In email I can even be polite and cordial even when I don't feel like it!
You do use email when it's appropriate, right?
The worst ever is when someone calls AND emails. "Hi, I just sent you an email containing a list of changes!"
(You fucking loser!) "Sure. I'll be looking for that shortly. Thanks!"
(click)
I have three computers in my office (one media editing station, one regular computer, and one laptop) and I store all my programming scripts on an USB keychain so when I switch between them I'm always assured that I'm working on the latest versions of my scripts. It seemed a much easier solution than setting up a fileserver, especially with the often-times spotty network access that a wireless access point gives to the laptop.
It cost me about $70 for a 128 meg chip, and that's plenty of space for storing what essentially amounts to copious amounts of text files with perhaps a whole web site or two I'm developing. It's weird though to hold a whole year of work in your hand.
Sometimes I worry about the reliability of these things, they're still fairly new. I make backups to CD occasionally, but still, I'd hate to lose a couple days of work due to a device that got bumped one too many times...
Randal Schwartz is a regular over at PerlMonks.org. He's replied to a couple of my threads and helped me out of some sticky situations. It's rare for such a talented programmer to be so accessible and helpful to the public.
He's written well over 3,000 posts on Perl over at PerlMonks.org.