That's not entirely true. IBM does use a numbering system (1-4 with 1 being roughly equivalent to "walks on water like Jesus"), but in my 7 years there, I never found, discovered, or believed that it was based on a bell curve-type assignment except for one year (2002) when the economy was crap, and our CIO at the time mandated that there would be no 1's given out that year without his express approval.
Coincidentally or not, I received a '1' that year and the two years previous to that. YMMV, so if you find yourself in the bottom of the pile, find another pile somewhere else. The only reason I was able to survive at IBM for 7 years was because I worked for an independently-operated subsidiary (Tivoli) for 5 of those years.
If I found myself in a company that rated people on a curve, guaranteeing that some percentage will receive low scoring each year, I wouldn't stay very long even if I was always at the top of that rating scale. It's a mentality problem that stretches all the way to the top.
Again, YMMV. If you're not happy, find some new cheese and move on.
This isn't much of a paraphrase. I've heard similar things from the inside of Dell in regards to Compaq's well-known and well-developed R&D division (now part of HP, but still intact as an R&D division last time I checked, which was admittedly many months ago).
Compaq's R&D may be bleeding edge, but to say that it's "yet to be proven to fulfill a need" is just plain ignorant. Just because a SMB (small- to medium-size business) doesn't need systems running RAID arrays that can survive multiple simultaneous drive failures [which Compaq pioneered], or systems employing "RAID memory" technology and can survive on vanilla Dell boxes, doesn't diminish Compaq's contribution in any way. Nor does it elevate Dell's position in the market.
Dell's best market is the ability to cater to the masses at a reasonable cost. However, those of us who have been working in and supporting the Intel server market (and those who've been around longer that have worked with mid-range systems) for more than a decade more clearly recognize the benefits of choosing a Compaq-level service/support/research organization BECAUSE of its R&D division. High-class R&D almost always breeds high-class products, and certainly breeds an environment of TESTING before release. I can name off only one or two faux pas from the Compaq server line (one with a RAID array firmware conflict, the other with a mobo firmware problem) from those 10+ years; I can point out that many problems in only 3 months of my last job where I supported a room full of current Dell's.
In my opinion , Dell does a great job repackaging the latest Intel processor in a vanilla, reference-level server-class [loose term in this usage] motherboard and shipping it out. What I DON'T see from Dell is the requisite testing of those systems together to provide a stable overall level of quality in those servers.
Compaq servers may be slightly behind the bleeding curve because it takes time to properly test hardware and software. If you skip testing, or do a poor job of it, of course you can be first out the door with the latest and greatest. But it's not worth it to me.
Real-world examples:
Company 1 - major 3-letter acronym subsidiary. Could not buy XXX servers internally because mfg couldn't keep up, so we bought Compaqs. We had a high-availability, enterprise class, global infrastructure that almost NEVER failed in 5 years. We had a few Dells in lab and development environments that required a fair number of repairs over the same timeframe. (Yes, this is anecdotal, I know.) For what it's worth, we paid less externally for Compaq servers than we would have internally for XXX servers, which is how I was able to run it right through the XXX CFO's office.:)
Company 2 - Anecdotal, and YMMV, but I've seen this repeated so many times... don't even get me started on the Dell workstations. If I ever have to call Dell Support and get another bonehead in India, I will go postal! Hands-down, the worst tech support I've ever dealt with was Dell's workstation/laptop folks in Bangalore (circa September 2003, and swore never again would I call!)...
Did you say "trained" in the same sentence as "New York City...cabs?" You must not have ever been to New York City....
And I seriously doubt that the (actual or perceived) recklessness of NYC cabbies has much to do with the "long hours worked." Don't get me wrong, I rather enjoy riding in NYC cabs when I'm there (not very often) because I tend to be an aggressive driver myself, but when I go to cross the street, I look *long and hard* before doing so.
It's not normal, and the return process is NOT handled very well.
I went through 3 60GXP's in less than 2 years -- that's an average of 7 months per drive. Yes, they spun 24/7 in a well-cooled case with ambient room temp. averaging 73F year-long (MRTG tracks that for me, too, courtesy of MBM).
The first drive failed after about 6 months. RMA process was a pain, and took more than a month to get a new drive. The "new" drive was actually a refurb with only a 90-day warranty on it. (Thanks, IBM. How gracious of you.)
The second drive began to fail on day #79, just 11 days away from its warranty run-out. RMA process was again difficult, and took even longer this time to get another replacement (again, a refurb w/ 90-day warranty) -- almost 5 weeks this time.
The third drive I let sit in the static bag for nearly 15 months because I was afraid to even use it. I only recently (last month) installed it, only because I needed some temporary storage space for a DVD project. I fully expect this drive to fail as well, and probably before summer. It's only a matter of time with the DeathStar line.
On the flip-side, I bought 3 Western Digital WD800JB 80-GB drives for a RAID array last January (2003), and immediately had one of them fail (wouldn't even spin up). Within 3 days, I had an ADVANCE-SHIPPED replacement, and the array was back to full power in less than four days. I sent the failed drive back a week or so later, and never gave it a second thought until now.
As a former IBM employee, let me add... no, nevermind, let's not go there. Don't get me started.
No way... not if you had a FastLoad cartridge. God bless those guys at Epyx, R.I.P. !:)
(I'm almost ashamed to admit I have 3 completely functional, entire C-64 systems, 1541 floppy drives, tape drives, and so much software it's not even funny sitting in the back of my closet... )
That's one of the crudest, most foul/. postings I think I've ever seen.... and I laughed my a$$ off throughout the WHOLE thing!:)
(Modded up as INFORMATIVE for the real-world examples I'll have to try with my new camcorder...)
Hogwash. We've been through 3 hurricanes on our dish and never lost signal for a moment. (Not including the eventual complete loss of power through some of them, though.) Having a good signal to begin with is critical, as is properly installing and aligning the dish.
Conversely, others who had cable (and when we used to have cable as well) lost our cable TV signal (digital or analog, didn't matter) very early into the storm, making things pretty boring.
As I'm fond of saying, anything involving more than 3 people is a MEETING. In the same vein, if you try to talk to more than 2 other people (3 at the outside) while gaming, you end up concentrating on the MEETING part of the conversation, rather than enjoying the gaming experience.
We usually try to keep the voice chatter to 1 or 2 other people, which, as the parent mentions, is really keen for ganging up on someone (in Unreal DeathMatch, for example) without them knowing it.:)
Get some boom/headset mics for you and your SO and fire up one of the free voice engines, like TeamSpeak or Roger Wilco for voice chat (in or out of games). I've used TeamSpeak with excellent results while playing Unreal Tournament and other games, as well as just for conversing with distant family members on a semi-regular basis. (Free is good!)
For gaming, you have a chuckwagon full of choices. Unreal
Tournament, Star Wars: Jedi Knight - Jedi Academy and Need for Speed: Underground top my recent list of multi-player games
for raw fun and enjoyment with minimal commitment level (and I sense a
commitment issue from the OP anyway!). Then of course, there's the obligatory mentions of The Sims, Everquest, Age of Mythology and Civilization III (find your own URLs for those),
if you're into that kind of gaming (these require a higher commitment level).
If you two are more cerebral in your gaming, go hunt down a board game
called Settlers of Catan and its
offspring (Seafarers of Catan, et. al.) and play that with some friends next
time you two are together. Once you get hooked on the board game -- and you
will -- start playing it online. There's a nefarious,
somewhat-underground (not after/. gets wind of it!) online client called
Sea3D that works pretty darn well
(Win32 only, sorry -- but if this is a problem, use the
Java client instead), and is terribly enjoyable for raw strategy and board game
fun, although it can sometimes be difficult to get players to join hosted games
(there doesn't seem to be a LARGE community of Sea3D users yet). If you
host your own games and have people you know join in, this is a non-issue.
If
you're side-stepping the guy-girl conversation thing, your best bet is probably
one of the action games, like Unreal and its similar-engine spawn (anything
based off the Quake2 or Quake3 engines). There's usually so much going on
in a DeathMatch or Team DeathMatch, there isn't much time for deep chit-chat,
but you can both probably come out feeling like you had a onversation.
[Note to Guys: this probably isn't going to lead to a long-term, deep
relationship, mind you, but will suffice for temporary distance relationships.
Chicks don't generally like games, and especially don't like the KINDS of games
we guys like, so YMMV. Board games and strategy type stuff, though, are
generally universally enjoyable, which is why I mentioned
Catan (this is the original German
site).]
^^ What he said! ^^ It ain't greener here in Raleigh, NC. I've been out of work since October and am just now getting to the in-person interview stage with about 10 companies (actually had 7 interviews THIS week, which is outstanding). I have skills and 10+ years of solid experience and performance in IT (technology and leadership/management), but there is such a GLUT of other techies out there now, it's hard for even someone like me to differentiate myself.
On a positive note, I'm sure I'll be getting at least 2 offers next week, and possibly more (and probably a few others that will come in too late to do anything with), so things are looking up for *me*, but I know many others who don't have as positive an outlook.
We're all suffering to some degree, either by being out of work, or by being OVERworked to take up the slack of those who were let go. It will take several years to level out again, I think.
Best advice I can give is to tailor your resume and cover letter VERY TIGHTLY to job requirements, highlighting your past successes and what you bring to the specific position. A generic resume will do NOTHING in this market. As a previous IT Manager, if I saw resumes that listed only job responsibilities ("Responsible for daily backups, server maintenance...", etc.), that resume IMMEDIATELY went into File 13.
Good luck, and most of all -- when you do get hired, live WELL below your means. You don't know when you'll be back out of work again! The only reason we're surviving (and doing quite well, I might add) is that we turned down the screws after I was laid off from IBM/Tivoli in 2002 and had a cash store to fall back on.
You have NO IDEA how true this is. I used to work in both buildings in RTP, back in the day. We actually did the first full-scale Ethernet deployment in the entire RTP IBM complex, which is frightening considering when we did it -- 2000/2001!! Before that, all we had was Choken-Ring.
Let me tell you -- the glorious feeling of leaving the old 1960s, dark, dank dungeon and moving into the Tivoli building was probably one of the highest intangible points of my career (notwithstanding all the work I had put into the new building's datacenter design amd power/networking infrastructure).
I miss that nice window office, too, but the Tivoli I worked for is long, long gone now. It's all IBM Software Group, with Lotus and Tivoli just brand names. Most of the things that made Tivoli a great place to work have vanished. It sure was a great ride, though (free Snapple? who can complain about that??).
Not gonna happen. I, too, used to be employed at Tivoli (once an IBM subsidiary, now just a brand name piece of Software Group), and I can assure you, there is no way this is going to happen, even by 2008. Like it or not, OS/2 died horribly (I used to support that, too), and they mass-moved a lot of PCs to Windows-based OS's for user simplicity sake.
There are just too many Windows-based apps (as mentioned prior -- MS Project, Lotus Notes is a HUGE one, etc.) that are still required and very much in use. Heck, even at Tivoli we used MS Office exclusively, and always had trouble when someone from the rest of IBM sent in a Freelance or Ami Pro document because we couldn't open it! MS Office is the de facto standard in nearly every office setting everywhere, and OpenOffice and StarOffice's success (Office compatibility/features without the EULA/cost) just confirms that.
I'm sure IBM is downplaying this, and for good reason.
I ran a WWIV BBS for about 5 years from 1990 - 1995 (The Rubicon), just before The Big Internet Push. What a blast. Of course I'd bought the source code and modded the crap out of it. If I recall, I think I even found a few minor bugs in the code and sent the fixes to Wayne Bell (good old #1@1... hmm, I can't remember my node # now that I think about it.
I remember we also had a side network aside from WWIVnet called FILEnet, which enabled us to transfer files via a similar technology. This was rather revolutionary at the time because you could request files from another networked BBS and have them appear locally. AT&T loved me because I was one of the only folks willing to pony up cash for the project and ended up tying in a few nodes in faraway places, like Alaska!
I also remember digging into how the message board storage was done and realizing how badly fragmented those mini-databases became very quickly. Recall the timeframe -- even at the latter end, a 300MB hard drive could cost you over $250! Heck, when I FIRST started, a 30MB RLL hard disk cost me over $140!! After that I created an application called Defrag to defragment those databases and free up valuable disk space. Actually made a bit of money off that software to help with school.
This was in the DOS 5.0 days... shortly after, when Microsoft released DOS 6.0 with its built-in DEFRAG.EXE tool, I toyed with the idea of sending them a legal letter about the naming and yada yada, but let it slide because I really didn't care enough to pursue it. But it was fun to get e-mails from people looking to "register" the DOS version of DEFRAG.EXE to unlock the "full version." No, I'm not making that up!!)
Most sleep researchers have concluded that the human body clock runs around 25 hours per cycle. The obvious conflict with our 24-hour terrestrial/lunar/solar-based clock is noticed by more than few folks who've replied already.
It's nice to see that I'm not the only one that has to "reset" on a regular (bi-weekly) basis by staying up all night, crashing hard the following evening, and is then able to function again during "normal people" hours.
If it were me, I'd sleep from 2am - 10am on a rolling basis, forward by about 45 min. each night. By Friday, that means I'm not in bed until early daylight (6:15am-ish) and awake again around 2pm.
Being unemployed (again) has not helped keep this under control, to be sure...:)
As to the alarm clock solution -- others have given good suggestions, but the best one really is to NOT put your alarm clock nearby. Also, set it to music, and put it on some cRap station really loud so it annoys the cRap out of you when you wake up.:)
When I was a teenager and working various construction (roofing, masonry, carpentry) jobs for a general contractor friend, we'd always send the youngerlings to the truck to find a Left-Handed Screwdriver (or hammer, or saw, whatever).
About nine times out of ten, they'd spend half an hour looking before they came back, apparently because they didn't want to look dumb. (Oops - too late for that!)
In Scouts, the left-handed smokeshifter was the going gag for new/younger Scouts on campouts, along with the usual Snipe-hunting festivities.
Ahh, pranks... they just don't make 'em like they used to.
Canada small? I don't think so. I'm too lazy to look up the area, but check your local World Book Encyclopedia -- Canada is much larger than The United States.
We don't care about you (your words, not mine) because (a) you whine that no one cares and (b) because your government can't make up its own mind and think like a large country. It's much easier to just do what your neighbor does than to think for yourself. No bullying required.
Do I agree with this? No, but we need your cheaper prescription medications because we're screwing ourselves on that front (among others).
Believe it or not, I was cleaning out my office last weekend and came across a folder of "stuff" from ages gone by -- code wheel photocopies, code-lookup charts, hand-written codes from those pages you couldn't photocopy, etc.
I'm not sure which is worse -- code wheels or having to stick the CD in all the time?
Slashdot Mirror
That's not entirely true. IBM does use a numbering system (1-4 with 1 being roughly equivalent to "walks on water like Jesus"), but in my 7 years there, I never found, discovered, or believed that it was based on a bell curve-type assignment except for one year (2002) when the economy was crap, and our CIO at the time mandated that there would be no 1's given out that year without his express approval.
Coincidentally or not, I received a '1' that year and the two years previous to that. YMMV, so if you find yourself in the bottom of the pile, find another pile somewhere else. The only reason I was able to survive at IBM for 7 years was because I worked for an independently-operated subsidiary (Tivoli) for 5 of those years.
If I found myself in a company that rated people on a curve, guaranteeing that some percentage will receive low scoring each year, I wouldn't stay very long even if I was always at the top of that rating scale. It's a mentality problem that stretches all the way to the top.
Again, YMMV. If you're not happy, find some new cheese and move on.
This isn't much of a paraphrase. I've heard similar things from the inside of Dell in regards to Compaq's well-known and well-developed R&D division (now part of HP, but still intact as an R&D division last time I checked, which was admittedly many months ago).
Compaq's R&D may be bleeding edge, but to say that it's "yet to be proven to fulfill a need" is just plain ignorant. Just because a SMB (small- to medium-size business) doesn't need systems running RAID arrays that can survive multiple simultaneous drive failures [which Compaq pioneered], or systems employing "RAID memory" technology and can survive on vanilla Dell boxes, doesn't diminish Compaq's contribution in any way. Nor does it elevate Dell's position in the market.
Dell's best market is the ability to cater to the masses at a reasonable cost. However, those of us who have been working in and supporting the Intel server market (and those who've been around longer that have worked with mid-range systems) for more than a decade more clearly recognize the benefits of choosing a Compaq-level service/support/research organization BECAUSE of its R&D division. High-class R&D almost always breeds high-class products, and certainly breeds an environment of TESTING before release. I can name off only one or two faux pas from the Compaq server line (one with a RAID array firmware conflict, the other with a mobo firmware problem) from those 10+ years; I can point out that many problems in only 3 months of my last job where I supported a room full of current Dell's.
In my opinion , Dell does a great job repackaging the latest Intel processor in a vanilla, reference-level server-class [loose term in this usage] motherboard and shipping it out. What I DON'T see from Dell is the requisite testing of those systems together to provide a stable overall level of quality in those servers.
Compaq servers may be slightly behind the bleeding curve because it takes time to properly test hardware and software. If you skip testing, or do a poor job of it, of course you can be first out the door with the latest and greatest. But it's not worth it to me.
Real-world examples:
Company 1 - major 3-letter acronym subsidiary. Could not buy XXX servers internally because mfg couldn't keep up, so we bought Compaqs. We had a high-availability, enterprise class, global infrastructure that almost NEVER failed in 5 years. We had a few Dells in lab and development environments that required a fair number of repairs over the same timeframe. (Yes, this is anecdotal, I know.) For what it's worth, we paid less externally for Compaq servers than we would have internally for XXX servers, which is how I was able to run it right through the XXX CFO's office. :)
Company 2 - Anecdotal, and YMMV, but I've seen this repeated so many times... don't even get me started on the Dell workstations. If I ever have to call Dell Support and get another bonehead in India, I will go postal! Hands-down, the worst tech support I've ever dealt with was Dell's workstation/laptop folks in Bangalore (circa September 2003, and swore never again would I call!)...
Did you say "trained" in the same sentence as "New York City...cabs?" You must not have ever been to New York City....
And I seriously doubt that the (actual or perceived) recklessness of NYC cabbies has much to do with the "long hours worked." Don't get me wrong, I rather enjoy riding in NYC cabs when I'm there (not very often) because I tend to be an aggressive driver myself, but when I go to cross the street, I look *long and hard* before doing so.
The text message probably went something like this:
Sorry, I had to do it...
Neither is funnier -- The insanity humor of the one cancels out the pity humor of the other. :)
... and yes, the job outlook is bleak for us techies as far as I can see. Gone are the days my 90K+ (after bonuses) salary.
It's not normal, and the return process is NOT handled very well.
I went through 3 60GXP's in less than 2 years -- that's an average of 7 months per drive. Yes, they spun 24/7 in a well-cooled case with ambient room temp. averaging 73F year-long (MRTG tracks that for me, too, courtesy of MBM).
The first drive failed after about 6 months. RMA process was a pain, and took more than a month to get a new drive. The "new" drive was actually a refurb with only a 90-day warranty on it. (Thanks, IBM. How gracious of you.)
The second drive began to fail on day #79, just 11 days away from its warranty run-out. RMA process was again difficult, and took even longer this time to get another replacement (again, a refurb w/ 90-day warranty) -- almost 5 weeks this time.
The third drive I let sit in the static bag for nearly 15 months because I was afraid to even use it. I only recently (last month) installed it, only because I needed some temporary storage space for a DVD project. I fully expect this drive to fail as well, and probably before summer. It's only a matter of time with the DeathStar line.
On the flip-side, I bought 3 Western Digital WD800JB 80-GB drives for a RAID array last January (2003), and immediately had one of them fail (wouldn't even spin up). Within 3 days, I had an ADVANCE-SHIPPED replacement, and the array was back to full power in less than four days. I sent the failed drive back a week or so later, and never gave it a second thought until now.
As a former IBM employee, let me add... no, nevermind, let's not go there. Don't get me started.
No way... not if you had a FastLoad cartridge. God bless those guys at Epyx, R.I.P. ! :)
(I'm almost ashamed to admit I have 3 completely functional, entire C-64 systems, 1541 floppy drives, tape drives, and so much software it's not even funny sitting in the back of my closet... )
That's one of the crudest, most foul /. postings I think I've ever seen.... and I laughed my a$$ off throughout the WHOLE thing! :)
(Modded up as INFORMATIVE for the real-world examples I'll have to try with my new camcorder...)
Hogwash. We've been through 3 hurricanes on our dish and never lost signal for a moment. (Not including the eventual complete loss of power through some of them, though.) Having a good signal to begin with is critical, as is properly installing and aligning the dish. Conversely, others who had cable (and when we used to have cable as well) lost our cable TV signal (digital or analog, didn't matter) very early into the storm, making things pretty boring.
As I'm fond of saying, anything involving more than 3 people is a MEETING. In the same vein, if you try to talk to more than 2 other people (3 at the outside) while gaming, you end up concentrating on the MEETING part of the conversation, rather than enjoying the gaming experience.
We usually try to keep the voice chatter to 1 or 2 other people, which, as the parent mentions, is really keen for ganging up on someone (in Unreal DeathMatch, for example) without them knowing it. :)
Besides, how many people really enjoy MEETINGS??
Get some boom/headset mics for you and your SO and fire up one of the free voice engines, like TeamSpeak or Roger Wilco for voice chat (in or out of games). I've used TeamSpeak with excellent results while playing Unreal Tournament and other games, as well as just for conversing with distant family members on a semi-regular basis. (Free is good!)
For gaming, you have a chuckwagon full of choices. Unreal Tournament, Star Wars: Jedi Knight - Jedi Academy and Need for Speed: Underground top my recent list of multi-player games for raw fun and enjoyment with minimal commitment level (and I sense a commitment issue from the OP anyway!). Then of course, there's the obligatory mentions of The Sims, Everquest, Age of Mythology and Civilization III (find your own URLs for those), if you're into that kind of gaming (these require a higher commitment level).
If you two are more cerebral in your gaming, go hunt down a board game called Settlers of Catan and its offspring (Seafarers of Catan, et. al.) and play that with some friends next time you two are together. Once you get hooked on the board game -- and you will -- start playing it online. There's a nefarious, somewhat-underground (not after /. gets wind of it!) online client called
Sea3D that works pretty darn well
(Win32 only, sorry -- but if this is a problem, use the
Java client instead), and is terribly enjoyable for raw strategy and board game
fun, although it can sometimes be difficult to get players to join hosted games
(there doesn't seem to be a LARGE community of Sea3D users yet). If you
host your own games and have people you know join in, this is a non-issue.
If you're side-stepping the guy-girl conversation thing, your best bet is probably one of the action games, like Unreal and its similar-engine spawn (anything based off the Quake2 or Quake3 engines). There's usually so much going on in a DeathMatch or Team DeathMatch, there isn't much time for deep chit-chat, but you can both probably come out feeling like you had a onversation.
[Note to Guys: this probably isn't going to lead to a long-term, deep relationship, mind you, but will suffice for temporary distance relationships. Chicks don't generally like games, and especially don't like the KINDS of games we guys like, so YMMV. Board games and strategy type stuff, though, are generally universally enjoyable, which is why I mentioned Catan (this is the original German site).]
Good luck!!
^^ What he said! ^^ It ain't greener here in Raleigh, NC. I've been out of work since October and am just now getting to the in-person interview stage with about 10 companies (actually had 7 interviews THIS week, which is outstanding). I have skills and 10+ years of solid experience and performance in IT (technology and leadership/management), but there is such a GLUT of other techies out there now, it's hard for even someone like me to differentiate myself.
On a positive note, I'm sure I'll be getting at least 2 offers next week, and possibly more (and probably a few others that will come in too late to do anything with), so things are looking up for *me*, but I know many others who don't have as positive an outlook.
We're all suffering to some degree, either by being out of work, or by being OVERworked to take up the slack of those who were let go. It will take several years to level out again, I think.
Best advice I can give is to tailor your resume and cover letter VERY TIGHTLY to job requirements, highlighting your past successes and what you bring to the specific position. A generic resume will do NOTHING in this market. As a previous IT Manager, if I saw resumes that listed only job responsibilities ("Responsible for daily backups, server maintenance...", etc.), that resume IMMEDIATELY went into File 13.
Good luck, and most of all -- when you do get hired, live WELL below your means. You don't know when you'll be back out of work again! The only reason we're surviving (and doing quite well, I might add) is that we turned down the screws after I was laid off from IBM/Tivoli in 2002 and had a cash store to fall back on.
You have NO IDEA how true this is. I used to work in both buildings in RTP, back in the day. We actually did the first full-scale Ethernet deployment in the entire RTP IBM complex, which is frightening considering when we did it -- 2000/2001!! Before that, all we had was Choken-Ring.
Let me tell you -- the glorious feeling of leaving the old 1960s, dark, dank dungeon and moving into the Tivoli building was probably one of the highest intangible points of my career (notwithstanding all the work I had put into the new building's datacenter design amd power/networking infrastructure).
I miss that nice window office, too, but the Tivoli I worked for is long, long gone now. It's all IBM Software Group, with Lotus and Tivoli just brand names. Most of the things that made Tivoli a great place to work have vanished. It sure was a great ride, though (free Snapple? who can complain about that??).
Not gonna happen. I, too, used to be employed at Tivoli (once an IBM subsidiary, now just a brand name piece of Software Group), and I can assure you, there is no way this is going to happen, even by 2008. Like it or not, OS/2 died horribly (I used to support that, too), and they mass-moved a lot of PCs to Windows-based OS's for user simplicity sake.
There are just too many Windows-based apps (as mentioned prior -- MS Project, Lotus Notes is a HUGE one, etc.) that are still required and very much in use. Heck, even at Tivoli we used MS Office exclusively, and always had trouble when someone from the rest of IBM sent in a Freelance or Ami Pro document because we couldn't open it! MS Office is the de facto standard in nearly every office setting everywhere, and OpenOffice and StarOffice's success (Office compatibility/features without the EULA/cost) just confirms that.
I'm sure IBM is downplaying this, and for good reason.
I ran a WWIV BBS for about 5 years from 1990 - 1995 (The Rubicon), just before The Big Internet Push. What a blast. Of course I'd bought the source code and modded the crap out of it. If I recall, I think I even found a few minor bugs in the code and sent the fixes to Wayne Bell (good old #1@1 ... hmm, I can't remember my node # now that I think about it.
I remember we also had a side network aside from WWIVnet called FILEnet, which enabled us to transfer files via a similar technology. This was rather revolutionary at the time because you could request files from another networked BBS and have them appear locally. AT&T loved me because I was one of the only folks willing to pony up cash for the project and ended up tying in a few nodes in faraway places, like Alaska!
I also remember digging into how the message board storage was done and realizing how badly fragmented those mini-databases became very quickly. Recall the timeframe -- even at the latter end, a 300MB hard drive could cost you over $250! Heck, when I FIRST started, a 30MB RLL hard disk cost me over $140!! After that I created an application called Defrag to defragment those databases and free up valuable disk space. Actually made a bit of money off that software to help with school. This was in the DOS 5.0 days... shortly after, when Microsoft released DOS 6.0 with its built-in DEFRAG.EXE tool, I toyed with the idea of sending them a legal letter about the naming and yada yada, but let it slide because I really didn't care enough to pursue it. But it was fun to get e-mails from people looking to "register" the DOS version of DEFRAG.EXE to unlock the "full version." No, I'm not making that up!!)
Most sleep researchers have concluded that the human body clock runs around 25 hours per cycle. The obvious conflict with our 24-hour terrestrial/lunar/solar-based clock is noticed by more than few folks who've replied already. It's nice to see that I'm not the only one that has to "reset" on a regular (bi-weekly) basis by staying up all night, crashing hard the following evening, and is then able to function again during "normal people" hours. If it were me, I'd sleep from 2am - 10am on a rolling basis, forward by about 45 min. each night. By Friday, that means I'm not in bed until early daylight (6:15am-ish) and awake again around 2pm. Being unemployed (again) has not helped keep this under control, to be sure... :)
As to the alarm clock solution -- others have given good suggestions, but the best one really is to NOT put your alarm clock nearby. Also, set it to music, and put it on some cRap station really loud so it annoys the cRap out of you when you wake up. :)
When I was a teenager and working various construction (roofing, masonry, carpentry) jobs for a general contractor friend, we'd always send the youngerlings to the truck to find a Left-Handed Screwdriver (or hammer, or saw, whatever).
About nine times out of ten, they'd spend half an hour looking before they came back, apparently because they didn't want to look dumb. (Oops - too late for that!)
In Scouts, the left-handed smokeshifter was the going gag for new/younger Scouts on campouts, along with the usual Snipe-hunting festivities.
Ahh, pranks... they just don't make 'em like they used to.
Canada small? I don't think so. I'm too lazy to look up the area, but check your local World Book Encyclopedia -- Canada is much larger than The United States.
We don't care about you (your words, not mine) because (a) you whine that no one cares and (b) because your government can't make up its own mind and think like a large country. It's much easier to just do what your neighbor does than to think for yourself. No bullying required.
Do I agree with this? No, but we need your cheaper prescription medications because we're screwing ourselves on that front (among others).
Life's tough. Change it or live with it.
But wait! You're forgetting CODE WHEELS!!
Believe it or not, I was cleaning out my office last weekend and came across a folder of "stuff" from ages gone by -- code wheel photocopies, code-lookup charts, hand-written codes from those pages you couldn't photocopy, etc.
I'm not sure which is worse -- code wheels or having to stick the CD in all the time?