my wife is working on her doctorate in ancient greek history, and I'm posting on/. so you can guess what my proclivities are.
While I don't claim to be the world's leading expert on marriage, my geeky wife and my geeky self have managed to stay together 13 years now and we're still going strong. With that in mind, here are a few things that have saved ME a lot of grief over the years. (And trust me, I learned all of this the hard way.)
1. make time for each other. this sounds obvious, both when my wife and I are both in full-on geek mode (her in her library surrounded by old manuscripts, me in my office surrounded by computers) it can be easy to ignore each other. we schedule time to spend with one another, as terrible as it sounds that we have to schedule it, it really is necessary and that's the only way we remember to do it because we both get sucked into our work to the exclusion of all else.
2. try and find at least one common hobby. I definitely understand how difficult this can be, but make sure you have at least one activity you both like that you can do together. my wife and I play golf together a few times a month, and we go to the gym together a few times a week. sometimes it's a strain on our schedules to do so, but it has to be a priority.
3. this is going to sound exceedingly childish, but it's important: don't forget to make time for intimacy. (that's the grown-up word for fucking). when you have two stressy, busy, career-driven people, it can be really hard to a) make time and b) get in the mood. it can be really easy to laugh this off as silly and then have it edged right out of your schedule, but it only leads to unhappiness on the part of both parties.
4. there will be fighting. prepare for it. no matter how well you get along, you will eventually get pissed off at eachother. this is a fact of life and there's no avoiding it. marriages don't end because people fight, they end because people fight and say things they regret, get too emotional, take out job related frustration on each other, etc. try and see things from her perspective and remember that being right is not always more important than being nice. as a left-brained, type A control freak, I had a very bad time wrapping my head around this one. you don't always have to correct people when they are wrong, no matter how tempting, and your wife is no exception.
5. as awful and stereotypical as this sounds, it's generally true that girls tend to be more sensitive, so watch your mouth. it took me a while to realize that my constant joking around (e.g. calling your coworker a retarded douche when he screws up some code, or telling your friend that he's a monstrous blubbery whale when he eats a lot of nachos) was not always received in the lighthearted way in which it was intended. girls tend to take these kinds of things overly seriously, I have no idea why, so tread carefully.
6. money problems plague most marriages. my wife and I keep our money separate to avoid this. we divide up the bills each month and each pay our share, and we take turns buying groceries. while it might seem ridiculous for husband and wife to have totally separate bank accounts, it has saved me and my wife a lot of arguing. we each spend money as we please (none of this "I need to ask my wife first" bullshit) and we each take responsibility for our share of the shared utilities. ALL of the marriages I have personally seen fail failed because of money trouble and the arguing and backstabbing that goes with it.
7. try to have fun with it and don't take anything too seriously, this advice included. good luck!
seriously, let's bring back Metal Slug... can't tell you how much of my life I lost to those games. Proof that fun is more about gameplay than it was about graphics
As a kid, handwriting was considered it's own subject, and you got a grade for it just like science or math or history. To this day, I'm still glad I learned it. I generally write in cursive with a fountain pen, it's a curious affectation, admittedly, but a worthwhile one.
As an example, are you agnostic about Zeus, too? No? You're pretty sure that the possibility of Zeus's existence shouldn't inform your decisions and actions in everyday life?
I sacrifice a bull to Zeus every month, you insensitive clod!
but cliches aside, new technology always pushes old stuff aside. There will always be a contingent of fogeys young and old who maintain or revive the old arts. For instance, I am active in both calligraphy and fountain pen clubs, and a straight razor shaving club.
Within my frat, it was common to rent textbooks for a semester. If an underclassman needed a book you had, it was common courtesy to let him use it for the semester, and he would repay the favor with beer or twenty bucks. So this sort of thing DOES occur, just not in a formal or organized way.
actually, they still mostly are, just usually jacketed with copper. you've got your weird steel/bismuth rounds, too, but that's pretty rare. the military also occasionally uses tungsten and depleted uranium, but again, it's pretty rare.
Re:China seems to want to enhance its image...
on
China Bans Gold Farming
·
· Score: 2, Funny
And most likely you would be running several computers at once and using various hacks, working like a dog. Any semblance of it being a fun game would be completely gone, replaced by simple drudgery.
how is that ANY different than your average MMO player?
I may not be the only rabid libertarian posting here that thinks this was an awful violation of 4A (yeah yeah, I know, 4A doesn't always apply in schools) but I'll go one further and say that the offenders ought to be sent off to federal PMITA prison and branded as sex offenders.
All for a fucking Advil!
Re:A few comments from a guy from this field...
on
IT and Health Care
·
· Score: 1
Thanks for the update about NCPDP... I haven't been in that game for years. Otherwise sounds like everything is about the same... a giant circle-jerk of blameshifting and beuacracy.
A few comments from a guy from this field...
on
IT and Health Care
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I spent a few years writing commercial healthcare software, and here are a few quick thoughts:
1. HIPAA is a problem. everything you do, EVERYTHING, has to be HIPAA compliant. this means checking, rechecking, checking a 3rd time and then hiring an outside party to check your checking. if you screw up in any way, it's possible to be held criminally liable, personally. the HIPAA rule book was around 1200 pages long the last time I had to use it. My small company (150 employees) had a full time staff of FIVE that did nothing but interpret HIPAA and document changes everytime some politician lobbied some bullshit minor rule change thru the system. Each time this happened, we had a mere 90 days to version our software to match. This is a big deal when you have 3 developers working on 4-5 million lines of code. Summary: any screwups can land you in jail, so review and testing is off the scale thorough.
2. Mistakes can be fatal. During my time writing healthcare software, I had to opportunity to work on a system I'll call the Pill-Counting-Robot. It did exactly what you'd think it would do: scripts would come down the wire, the robot would count pills into a bottle and label it. Counting the wrong kind of pill can mean instant death for a patient. Counting the wrong number of pills can make a patient very sick or dead. Printing the wrong instructions on the label can also kill them. ZERO SCREWUPS CAN HAPPEN! None. Not one. We debugged that thing for months on end, trying as hard as we could to break it... we did testing with red and green M&Ms to make sure it never mixed medicine. You really don't even want to hear what kinds of scary mistakes that thing can make when it jams or crushes a pill or breaks a pill in half, etc, etc. Summary: a tiny glitch can kill people.
3. The final roadblock to quick progress is ancient standards. When scripts go over the wire, they use a format called NCPDP. This was made in the 70's for use over non-duplex modems. It is slow as snot. It cannot handle whitespaces in the wrong place, it can't handle variable length text, and it can't handle certain kinds of punctuation. It definitely can't handle long names or hypenated names (e.g. married folks who share names with eachother). And yet, as bad and old and broken as the standard was, we were required to use it because of a federal mandate. See Item 1. Summary: laws make the field obsolete and obtuse.
Think about it:
1. it's a story about government censorship (with all the usual iron-fisted delicacy wielded by big-government)
2. it's a process that is completely non-transparent, and creates a sort of internet-secret-police
3. it's happening in Germany
It's the perfect storm of internet flamewars, completely immune to Godwin's Lawn!
I'm no MS fanboy, but Sharepoint is great. I work for a large engineering company and we use it to organize blueprints, as well as pretty much all of our non-code documents. Even the most clueless HR-types can use it, and it's really not hard to set up.
Comic Book Guy from the Simpsons (to name one) is not a caricature. He's a real guy. I've met him. He lives in most comic book shops. He will make fun of you for liking the wrong comics, he will make fun of you for buying the wrong set of dice. He is the alpha nerd, and he's not going to let you forget it.
AFAIK, I'm still banned from the Laughing Dragon in Dallas because when I was 12 years old, I suggested that I liked DBZ better than Akira.
agreed. let's look at this realistically: it would wind up being nothing more than state-sponsorship of a few select producers of AV. it stands to reason that the bigger the lobby group, the more attention that corporation would receive.
do we really want our tax dollars buying ads for McAfee and Symantec?
Slashdot Mirror
my wife is working on her doctorate in ancient greek history, and I'm posting on /. so you can guess what my proclivities are.
While I don't claim to be the world's leading expert on marriage, my geeky wife and my geeky self have managed to stay together 13 years now and we're still going strong. With that in mind, here are a few things that have saved ME a lot of grief over the years. (And trust me, I learned all of this the hard way.)
1. make time for each other. this sounds obvious, both when my wife and I are both in full-on geek mode (her in her library surrounded by old manuscripts, me in my office surrounded by computers) it can be easy to ignore each other. we schedule time to spend with one another, as terrible as it sounds that we have to schedule it, it really is necessary and that's the only way we remember to do it because we both get sucked into our work to the exclusion of all else.
2. try and find at least one common hobby. I definitely understand how difficult this can be, but make sure you have at least one activity you both like that you can do together. my wife and I play golf together a few times a month, and we go to the gym together a few times a week. sometimes it's a strain on our schedules to do so, but it has to be a priority.
3. this is going to sound exceedingly childish, but it's important: don't forget to make time for intimacy. (that's the grown-up word for fucking). when you have two stressy, busy, career-driven people, it can be really hard to a) make time and b) get in the mood. it can be really easy to laugh this off as silly and then have it edged right out of your schedule, but it only leads to unhappiness on the part of both parties.
4. there will be fighting. prepare for it. no matter how well you get along, you will eventually get pissed off at eachother. this is a fact of life and there's no avoiding it. marriages don't end because people fight, they end because people fight and say things they regret, get too emotional, take out job related frustration on each other, etc. try and see things from her perspective and remember that being right is not always more important than being nice. as a left-brained, type A control freak, I had a very bad time wrapping my head around this one. you don't always have to correct people when they are wrong, no matter how tempting, and your wife is no exception.
5. as awful and stereotypical as this sounds, it's generally true that girls tend to be more sensitive, so watch your mouth. it took me a while to realize that my constant joking around (e.g. calling your coworker a retarded douche when he screws up some code, or telling your friend that he's a monstrous blubbery whale when he eats a lot of nachos) was not always received in the lighthearted way in which it was intended. girls tend to take these kinds of things overly seriously, I have no idea why, so tread carefully.
6. money problems plague most marriages. my wife and I keep our money separate to avoid this. we divide up the bills each month and each pay our share, and we take turns buying groceries. while it might seem ridiculous for husband and wife to have totally separate bank accounts, it has saved me and my wife a lot of arguing. we each spend money as we please (none of this "I need to ask my wife first" bullshit) and we each take responsibility for our share of the shared utilities. ALL of the marriages I have personally seen fail failed because of money trouble and the arguing and backstabbing that goes with it.
7. try to have fun with it and don't take anything too seriously, this advice included. good luck!
11th grade AP english class where I live. Again in college for English Lit II
seriously, let's bring back Metal Slug... can't tell you how much of my life I lost to those games. Proof that fun is more about gameplay than it was about graphics
I'm in the same general boat.
As a kid, handwriting was considered it's own subject, and you got a grade for it just like science or math or history. To this day, I'm still glad I learned it. I generally write in cursive with a fountain pen, it's a curious affectation, admittedly, but a worthwhile one.
It is very windy. You are likely to get blown by a grue.
That's hot.
As an example, are you agnostic about Zeus, too? No? You're pretty sure that the possibility of Zeus's existence shouldn't inform your decisions and actions in everyday life?
I sacrifice a bull to Zeus every month, you insensitive clod!
http://www.logitech.com/index.cfm/mice_pointers/mice/devices/2987&cl=us,en
the mouse I use for programming is an older variant of this one. I've been quite happy with it. scroll wheel has nice feedback for flipping thru code, it's heavy and has a nice solid feel.
I am in no way affiliated with logitech, I just like their stuff.
you insensitive clod!
but cliches aside, new technology always pushes old stuff aside. There will always be a contingent of fogeys young and old who maintain or revive the old arts. For instance, I am active in both calligraphy and fountain pen clubs, and a straight razor shaving club.
Within my frat, it was common to rent textbooks for a semester. If an underclassman needed a book you had, it was common courtesy to let him use it for the semester, and he would repay the favor with beer or twenty bucks. So this sort of thing DOES occur, just not in a formal or organized way.
Bullets are lead*,
-nB
*I know, not any more they aren't...
actually, they still mostly are, just usually jacketed with copper. you've got your weird steel/bismuth rounds, too, but that's pretty rare. the military also occasionally uses tungsten and depleted uranium, but again, it's pretty rare.
And most likely you would be running several computers at once and using various hacks, working like a dog. Any semblance of it being a fun game would be completely gone, replaced by simple drudgery.
how is that ANY different than your average MMO player?
hah! good one.
quite as well as it does now.
I may not be the only rabid libertarian posting here that thinks this was an awful violation of 4A (yeah yeah, I know, 4A doesn't always apply in schools) but I'll go one further and say that the offenders ought to be sent off to federal PMITA prison and branded as sex offenders.
All for a fucking Advil!
Thanks for the update about NCPDP... I haven't been in that game for years. Otherwise sounds like everything is about the same... a giant circle-jerk of blameshifting and beuacracy.
I spent a few years writing commercial healthcare software, and here are a few quick thoughts:
1. HIPAA is a problem. everything you do, EVERYTHING, has to be HIPAA compliant. this means checking, rechecking, checking a 3rd time and then hiring an outside party to check your checking. if you screw up in any way, it's possible to be held criminally liable, personally. the HIPAA rule book was around 1200 pages long the last time I had to use it. My small company (150 employees) had a full time staff of FIVE that did nothing but interpret HIPAA and document changes everytime some politician lobbied some bullshit minor rule change thru the system. Each time this happened, we had a mere 90 days to version our software to match. This is a big deal when you have 3 developers working on 4-5 million lines of code. Summary: any screwups can land you in jail, so review and testing is off the scale thorough.
2. Mistakes can be fatal. During my time writing healthcare software, I had to opportunity to work on a system I'll call the Pill-Counting-Robot. It did exactly what you'd think it would do: scripts would come down the wire, the robot would count pills into a bottle and label it. Counting the wrong kind of pill can mean instant death for a patient. Counting the wrong number of pills can make a patient very sick or dead. Printing the wrong instructions on the label can also kill them. ZERO SCREWUPS CAN HAPPEN! None. Not one. We debugged that thing for months on end, trying as hard as we could to break it... we did testing with red and green M&Ms to make sure it never mixed medicine. You really don't even want to hear what kinds of scary mistakes that thing can make when it jams or crushes a pill or breaks a pill in half, etc, etc. Summary: a tiny glitch can kill people.
3. The final roadblock to quick progress is ancient standards. When scripts go over the wire, they use a format called NCPDP. This was made in the 70's for use over non-duplex modems. It is slow as snot. It cannot handle whitespaces in the wrong place, it can't handle variable length text, and it can't handle certain kinds of punctuation. It definitely can't handle long names or hypenated names (e.g. married folks who share names with eachother). And yet, as bad and old and broken as the standard was, we were required to use it because of a federal mandate. See Item 1. Summary: laws make the field obsolete and obtuse.
This thread is Godwin-proof!
Think about it:
1. it's a story about government censorship (with all the usual iron-fisted delicacy wielded by big-government)
2. it's a process that is completely non-transparent, and creates a sort of internet-secret-police
3. it's happening in Germany
It's the perfect storm of internet flamewars, completely immune to Godwin's Lawn!
+1.
I'm no MS fanboy, but Sharepoint is great. I work for a large engineering company and we use it to organize blueprints, as well as pretty much all of our non-code documents. Even the most clueless HR-types can use it, and it's really not hard to set up.
but neither is Jack Thompson!
Sorry, I'd been waiting a while for an excuse to say that in a slightly relevant way.
girls?
in a comic book shop?
pfft, yeah right
Comic Book Guy from the Simpsons (to name one) is not a caricature. He's a real guy. I've met him. He lives in most comic book shops. He will make fun of you for liking the wrong comics, he will make fun of you for buying the wrong set of dice. He is the alpha nerd, and he's not going to let you forget it.
AFAIK, I'm still banned from the Laughing Dragon in Dallas because when I was 12 years old, I suggested that I liked DBZ better than Akira.
I just use one of these badboys. It's great. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820233060 disclaimer: I don't work for newegg or corsair. I just like the drive.
agreed. let's look at this realistically: it would wind up being nothing more than state-sponsorship of a few select producers of AV. it stands to reason that the bigger the lobby group, the more attention that corporation would receive.
do we really want our tax dollars buying ads for McAfee and Symantec?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin's_Law
Godwinned.
that's really cool, thanks for the link