No really, I've been trying to talk my employer (company of about 30 people) into getting some cubicle dividers, or just some sort of separation between desks, for some time now.
What we have now is I guess what is meant by an "open office" plan... by which is meant, desks right up against each other in clumps, with very little in the way of dividers or walls, except for maybe a couple bookshelves. We're pretty packed in right now, and I suppose it's par for the course for a growing company -- you're going to be strapped for space now and then. The company has seems to have to move to or expand into a larger space about three times a year, and have plans underway to do so again early next year.
I would kill to have a little more separation, and I've had a couple of my co-workers also say that they would prefer cubicles over the current arrangement, so long as they were spacious enough to get two people into, so that pairs of people on a project can work collaboratively when needed, and there wouldn't be too much barrier to communication. The new office floor plan looks like they're organizing it according to large projects, although realistically any one of us is usually involved in multiple projects.
The people I work with are generally very considerate about trying not to interrupt each other much, but occasionally there will be just a lot of hubbub and loud conversation going on, like if a client visits the office or if the sales department is all hyped up over something.
Anyway, what's got me clamoring for something more cubicley is that my next-desk neighbor has some kind of medical condition I guess, that causes his breathing to be very loud and labored and peppered with gross snorting noises. It puts me on edge something fierce. No one else seems to notice, but then no one else is sitting four feet away from him eight hours a day. I can break out the headphones and put on music, but depending on the kind of activity I'm doing, music can be a distraction too. And besides, wearing headphones for several hours at a time makes my ears sore. To make matters worse, the guy has... how can I put this... a rather strong odor. Point is, it would be much easier to work with him if I wasn't *forced* to be right up against him all the time.
I don't imagine that my situation is anything all that out of the norm, though; so I don't think enough discussion is being given to this aspect of things. I don't think that separate offices are realistic, cost-wise, for most companies I would want to fork for. And in any case, when I picture such a situation, it feels like *too* much isolation -- I envision communication being very reduced, which seems counterproductive to working on a project team.
Plus dividers make for convenient places to hang up cheat-sheets, charts, a personal whiteboard, etc. I could really use that.
I think the cubicle gets a bad rap, frankly. But there are also probably better and worse ways to do the cubicle thing. People you need to work closely with should be easily accessible, so I like the idea about arranging them around a central space. Likewise, people need to be considerate about interrupting one another for any office arrangement to work.
Calc I sure. Calc II maybe. Calc III and Differential Equations maybe not so much, although DiffEq does kinda jive nicely with functional programming.
Graph theory and set theory yes. Combinatorics in general yes.
Linear Algebra yes, for graphics programming. Likewise Numerical Analysis (approximation/interpolation stuff).
Logic, well DUH.
Category theory, don't know much about it... Abstract/"Modern" Algebra, wish I'd have taken it. I run across some great theoretical literature that I feel I could learn a lot from if I understood it, and which seems to use a lot of these two.
CRap! sorry for the bad formatting, I keep forgetting/. doesn't insert paragraph tags when you leave blank lines like *most* online mesage boards to. Try to deal.
This gives me a thought as to some piece of what it may be that's made OS X so successful; I myself have yet to use it, but numerous friends and others around me seem to have gotten into it of late.
Here are two recent experiences:
1. Working on a team project for my Software Engineering class (I'm a student as yet); the code we were given to work on was VB.NET (a major hindrance from the get-go, as we had little or no experience or exposure to VB, and VB is a huge language that's very different from what CS students at UNI typically have used (Java, C, C++, Ada). We have the occasional VB course but it's not required, and only a few students find time to take it. Anyway, VB seems to be built on the philosophy that I hears complained about in another recent post about Longhorn -- it tries to do everything for you. The problem with VB is, it's done for you, but you have no idea where it put it.
We began getting a strange error after we made some minor modifications to a subroutine. The program wouldn't compile or run. The error said something to the effect of "infinite recursion detected" and said that the code where this error occurred was not available or could not be found. To our knowledge we were using no recursion in our new code whatsoever, so the source of the error was mysterious. We wasted hours blindly undoing, redoing, and modifying parts of our changes trying to get rid of the error, up to the point where we had actually returned the code to its original state. The error persisted, it was getting late. We gave up for the day.
Later, my teammmate had to reboot the computer for an unrelated reason. When we returned to the problem code our next meeting, the error was gone. Obviously the error had nothing to do with the code we were writing.
It struck me how typical this was of my experience of Windows: mysterious error grinds all work to a halt. You reboot and it magically goes away.
It also reminded me why I prefer to do my programming in a GNU/Linux environment: I don't get weird random and misleading errors when working on my own stuff. If there's an error, I can be pretty close to certain that it's my own fault... either in my code or in how I have some part of my Linux machine configured. If it's the latter, I have access to fix the problem myself, or make it worse. 99.9% of the time, the problem is the code I'm writing. In either case, I'm not helpless. The error is my own, not something I'm merely at the mercy of.
2. I was in the mode of trying to shift everything I do with my computer to my Linux partition. I hoped to (and still do) eventually get rid of the Windows installation entirely. So I was burning some music CDs. I'm a musician on the side, and I was using K3B to burn some copies of a mix CD for the guys in my band of songs we were working on cover versions of. One of these was the Kings' classic two-parter, "This Beat Ges On/Switchin' To Glide." I gave the CDs out to the guys and started getting complaints that they didn't play properly. They could be played straight through all right, but you couldn't advance directly to a track beyond a certain one. After some figuring on the subject, I traced the problem to the two-part song: on the Kings CD, the medley is split with each of the two parts on its own track, and one plays straight into the other with no pause between; the lead-in of the second track is 0 seconds. I tried to burn the CDs I made the same way, because after all it kind of ruins the flow of the two-part song to have it suddenly stop for two seconds. For some reason K3B didn't handle this correctly, and horked up the starts of all the tracks that followed it.
In fact, I generaly have a hard time with media in Linux. The Flash plugin for Mozilla is slow, and the animation lags behind the sound. Most videos on web pages don't play at all, or play choppily, or are simply replaced with a plain black box with the words "no picture" in it. I showed a friend of mine a video clip of some singers doing acapella renditions of Nintendo game music --
The article summarizing incarnatios of the book mentions the comutyer game, which I presume to refer to the Infocom text adventure... but states that it was "famously impossible to complete." I know this to be false, however... a friend of mine back in junior high (late 80s) actually completed the game and went so far as to repeat the feat, whilst sending the entire game to his printer in progress. I believe I still have said printout in a file cabinet somewhere.
Anyone know if the game is still available somewhere? I'd love to play it again...
Odd. In that case, shouldn't the 6502 compiler mentioned have used just BEQ then? IIRC, BEQ acts as "branch if equal to zero" when appears by itself, and "branch if equal" if it appears after a CMP (which essentially just subtracts).
I thought about this a couple days because you remind me a lot of my younger self with the possible exception that you might have some actual social skills. But if not, I think my advice will help a bit there too. Basically, I'll advise you to do what I wish I'd done.
Take a break. Not from life, or work, just from school. I suspect you're sick of school. You think college will be different, but basically, college is just more school, only a little bit harder because nobody's nursemaiding you through it. Also, you're not really sure what you want to do with your life. I think it's a load of bunk that we expect 18-year-olds to choose career paths. Probably your teachers have talked about how bright you are all your life in terms of your being "gifted", as if some divine lightning bolt struck you in the womb and made you special. The truth is a little more mundane. You've just managed not to let them bore it out of you. Kids are naturally born curious, bust most of them lose it once they get into school and get the idea that learning is something being inflicted upon them against their will by a bunch of boring old people they don't even really know. A few of us manage to accidentally not fall into that trap; as Mark Twain put it, "I never let my schooling interfere with my education." If you love learning, then go learn; school need not be requisite to that. You can learn from everything around you and everything you do or that happens to you, as well as from reading and studying things on your own. And much of what can be learned there turns out to come in handy in college, which you should be able to put off a couple years, and I really believe most people should do so.
Instead, just take some time to do some regular living, and learn how that works. Learn how to be an adult. Maybe get an apartment with a couple friends as roommates. Work the kinds of jobs you can get without a college education; develop a work ethic. That will help you immensely once you do finally go to college. You'll also learn a lot from interacting with people you never thought you had anything in common with, and the workplace is a great place to do that. Travel a bit if you can work it out, and especially if you can pay your own way doing it, even by picking up day labor along the way, or whatever. Don't turn down any experience you have a chance to have, because you probably won't have a lot of those chances again down the road once you've got a career and family to take care of. If you're musically inclined, start a rock band; write dodgy poetry and read it aloud in front of strangers; anything that gets you communicating in front of an audience will be valuable. Party your ass off a few times. Get arrested. For Bog's sake DON'T knock anyone up (or get knocked up, I guess I don't know your gender from the post).
As for the more strictly "scholarly" pursuits, there's always spare time, bookstores, the public library. Delve into several subjects on your own. Try to learn a little something about everything that interests you. Read it, think about it, try it. Eventually you will get a little more focus and find what excites you most. Live and read and live some more.
Most of all, do all these things on your own dime. Depend on mom and/or dad for as little as possible, and take only that which they offer off their own free will, and probably not all of that. Become resourceful as well as intelligent.
There's no law that says you have to go to college right out of high school, and I think our society makes a huge mistake by pushing young people to do so, before they really have any perspective with which to decide what they really want out of life. Besides, you're only young once, take advantage of the relatively few big attachments and responsibilities you have right now, and in the process get a better focus and perspective on what you really want to do with your life. (Also, after age 25, your parents' income doesn't count on financial aid applications anymore, so the loans and grants and things get sweet
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No really, I've been trying to talk my employer (company of about 30 people) into getting some cubicle dividers, or just some sort of separation between desks, for some time now.
What we have now is I guess what is meant by an "open office" plan... by which is meant, desks right up against each other in clumps, with very little in the way of dividers or walls, except for maybe a couple bookshelves. We're pretty packed in right now, and I suppose it's par for the course for a growing company -- you're going to be strapped for space now and then. The company has seems to have to move to or expand into a larger space about three times a year, and have plans underway to do so again early next year.
I would kill to have a little more separation, and I've had a couple of my co-workers also say that they would prefer cubicles over the current arrangement, so long as they were spacious enough to get two people into, so that pairs of people on a project can work collaboratively when needed, and there wouldn't be too much barrier to communication. The new office floor plan looks like they're organizing it according to large projects, although realistically any one of us is usually involved in multiple projects.
The people I work with are generally very considerate about trying not to interrupt each other much, but occasionally there will be just a lot of hubbub and loud conversation going on, like if a client visits the office or if the sales department is all hyped up over something.
Anyway, what's got me clamoring for something more cubicley is that my next-desk neighbor has some kind of medical condition I guess, that causes his breathing to be very loud and labored and peppered with gross snorting noises. It puts me on edge something fierce. No one else seems to notice, but then no one else is sitting four feet away from him eight hours a day. I can break out the headphones and put on music, but depending on the kind of activity I'm doing, music can be a distraction too. And besides, wearing headphones for several hours at a time makes my ears sore. To make matters worse, the guy has... how can I put this... a rather strong odor. Point is, it would be much easier to work with him if I wasn't *forced* to be right up against him all the time.
I don't imagine that my situation is anything all that out of the norm, though; so I don't think enough discussion is being given to this aspect of things. I don't think that separate offices are realistic, cost-wise, for most companies I would want to fork for. And in any case, when I picture such a situation, it feels like *too* much isolation -- I envision communication being very reduced, which seems counterproductive to working on a project team.
Plus dividers make for convenient places to hang up cheat-sheets, charts, a personal whiteboard, etc. I could really use that.
I think the cubicle gets a bad rap, frankly. But there are also probably better and worse ways to do the cubicle thing. People you need to work closely with should be easily accessible, so I like the idea about arranging them around a central space. Likewise, people need to be considerate about interrupting one another for any office arrangement to work.
Calc I sure. Calc II maybe. Calc III and Differential Equations maybe not so much, although DiffEq does kinda jive nicely with functional programming.
Graph theory and set theory yes. Combinatorics in general yes.
Linear Algebra yes, for graphics programming. Likewise Numerical Analysis (approximation/interpolation stuff).
Logic, well DUH.
Category theory, don't know much about it... Abstract/"Modern" Algebra, wish I'd have taken it. I run across some great theoretical literature that I feel I could learn a lot from if I understood it, and which seems to use a lot of these two.
here's what I do at a certain work-study web "developer" gig I work:
In Word:
- Select All
- Copy
Open Notepad and:
- Paste
Voila! Plain text! Now:
- Copy again
- Paste into Frontpage
- add formatting tags at will
CRap! sorry for the bad formatting, I keep forgetting /. doesn't insert paragraph tags when you leave blank lines like *most* online mesage boards to. Try to deal.
This gives me a thought as to some piece of what it may be that's made OS X so successful; I myself have yet to use it, but numerous friends and others around me seem to have gotten into it of late. Here are two recent experiences: 1. Working on a team project for my Software Engineering class (I'm a student as yet); the code we were given to work on was VB.NET (a major hindrance from the get-go, as we had little or no experience or exposure to VB, and VB is a huge language that's very different from what CS students at UNI typically have used (Java, C, C++, Ada). We have the occasional VB course but it's not required, and only a few students find time to take it. Anyway, VB seems to be built on the philosophy that I hears complained about in another recent post about Longhorn -- it tries to do everything for you. The problem with VB is, it's done for you, but you have no idea where it put it. We began getting a strange error after we made some minor modifications to a subroutine. The program wouldn't compile or run. The error said something to the effect of "infinite recursion detected" and said that the code where this error occurred was not available or could not be found. To our knowledge we were using no recursion in our new code whatsoever, so the source of the error was mysterious. We wasted hours blindly undoing, redoing, and modifying parts of our changes trying to get rid of the error, up to the point where we had actually returned the code to its original state. The error persisted, it was getting late. We gave up for the day. Later, my teammmate had to reboot the computer for an unrelated reason. When we returned to the problem code our next meeting, the error was gone. Obviously the error had nothing to do with the code we were writing. It struck me how typical this was of my experience of Windows: mysterious error grinds all work to a halt. You reboot and it magically goes away. It also reminded me why I prefer to do my programming in a GNU/Linux environment: I don't get weird random and misleading errors when working on my own stuff. If there's an error, I can be pretty close to certain that it's my own fault... either in my code or in how I have some part of my Linux machine configured. If it's the latter, I have access to fix the problem myself, or make it worse. 99.9% of the time, the problem is the code I'm writing. In either case, I'm not helpless. The error is my own, not something I'm merely at the mercy of. 2. I was in the mode of trying to shift everything I do with my computer to my Linux partition. I hoped to (and still do) eventually get rid of the Windows installation entirely. So I was burning some music CDs. I'm a musician on the side, and I was using K3B to burn some copies of a mix CD for the guys in my band of songs we were working on cover versions of. One of these was the Kings' classic two-parter, "This Beat Ges On/Switchin' To Glide." I gave the CDs out to the guys and started getting complaints that they didn't play properly. They could be played straight through all right, but you couldn't advance directly to a track beyond a certain one. After some figuring on the subject, I traced the problem to the two-part song: on the Kings CD, the medley is split with each of the two parts on its own track, and one plays straight into the other with no pause between; the lead-in of the second track is 0 seconds. I tried to burn the CDs I made the same way, because after all it kind of ruins the flow of the two-part song to have it suddenly stop for two seconds. For some reason K3B didn't handle this correctly, and horked up the starts of all the tracks that followed it. In fact, I generaly have a hard time with media in Linux. The Flash plugin for Mozilla is slow, and the animation lags behind the sound. Most videos on web pages don't play at all, or play choppily, or are simply replaced with a plain black box with the words "no picture" in it. I showed a friend of mine a video clip of some singers doing acapella renditions of Nintendo game music --
It just about works.
Anyone know if the game is still available somewhere? I'd love to play it again...
Odd. In that case, shouldn't the 6502 compiler mentioned have used just BEQ then? IIRC, BEQ acts as "branch if equal to zero" when appears by itself, and "branch if equal" if it appears after a CMP (which essentially just subtracts).
Wait... it sent 72 images of the comet to John Peter Lewis? Why? I guess he needed something to do after he got voted off American Idol...
I thought about this a couple days because you remind me a lot of my younger self with the possible exception that you might have some actual social skills. But if not, I think my advice will help a bit there too. Basically, I'll advise you to do what I wish I'd done. Take a break. Not from life, or work, just from school. I suspect you're sick of school. You think college will be different, but basically, college is just more school, only a little bit harder because nobody's nursemaiding you through it. Also, you're not really sure what you want to do with your life. I think it's a load of bunk that we expect 18-year-olds to choose career paths. Probably your teachers have talked about how bright you are all your life in terms of your being "gifted", as if some divine lightning bolt struck you in the womb and made you special. The truth is a little more mundane. You've just managed not to let them bore it out of you. Kids are naturally born curious, bust most of them lose it once they get into school and get the idea that learning is something being inflicted upon them against their will by a bunch of boring old people they don't even really know. A few of us manage to accidentally not fall into that trap; as Mark Twain put it, "I never let my schooling interfere with my education." If you love learning, then go learn; school need not be requisite to that. You can learn from everything around you and everything you do or that happens to you, as well as from reading and studying things on your own. And much of what can be learned there turns out to come in handy in college, which you should be able to put off a couple years, and I really believe most people should do so. Instead, just take some time to do some regular living, and learn how that works. Learn how to be an adult. Maybe get an apartment with a couple friends as roommates. Work the kinds of jobs you can get without a college education; develop a work ethic. That will help you immensely once you do finally go to college. You'll also learn a lot from interacting with people you never thought you had anything in common with, and the workplace is a great place to do that. Travel a bit if you can work it out, and especially if you can pay your own way doing it, even by picking up day labor along the way, or whatever. Don't turn down any experience you have a chance to have, because you probably won't have a lot of those chances again down the road once you've got a career and family to take care of. If you're musically inclined, start a rock band; write dodgy poetry and read it aloud in front of strangers; anything that gets you communicating in front of an audience will be valuable. Party your ass off a few times. Get arrested. For Bog's sake DON'T knock anyone up (or get knocked up, I guess I don't know your gender from the post). As for the more strictly "scholarly" pursuits, there's always spare time, bookstores, the public library. Delve into several subjects on your own. Try to learn a little something about everything that interests you. Read it, think about it, try it. Eventually you will get a little more focus and find what excites you most. Live and read and live some more. Most of all, do all these things on your own dime. Depend on mom and/or dad for as little as possible, and take only that which they offer off their own free will, and probably not all of that. Become resourceful as well as intelligent. There's no law that says you have to go to college right out of high school, and I think our society makes a huge mistake by pushing young people to do so, before they really have any perspective with which to decide what they really want out of life. Besides, you're only young once, take advantage of the relatively few big attachments and responsibilities you have right now, and in the process get a better focus and perspective on what you really want to do with your life. (Also, after age 25, your parents' income doesn't count on financial aid applications anymore, so the loans and grants and things get sweet
nah, you're just ripping off Canadians.