I blogged about this last year when China wanted to be the first country in electromagnetic dominance. From my blog:
China: HEY USA, ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US USA: What you say? Taiwan: Somebody set us up the bomb USA: Why China yelling? China: CAPS LOCK KEY NOT WORKING. BEIJING NOT YELLING USA: China yelling at Washington DC. Scramble jets. drop bomb.
I have a BA in Classical Civilizations and Education from UCLA, but I'm currently a Senior Systems Engineer for a major defense contractor.
Most of my peers (almost all of them are new-hires and are way younger than I am) are getting their MS in EE, so that seems to be the status quo. They are all very book smart. They all know their way around documentation and can easily take charge during design meetings.
However, I have nine years of experience, field experience, and eight years of military service. I have facetime with the customer and can understand operational factors that my coworkers have no clue about.
I specialize in what I do. I know my limitations and constantly ask questions when appropriate.
It has been an uphill battle, but those who have worked with me can vouch for me. Those who only see my lack of EE degree can step aside and let me get the job done.
Experience, customer interaction, and ability to improve - These are the important things. Walking is easy when the road is flat...
Real Ultimate Power is the definitive ninja guide
on
The Ninja Handbook
·
· Score: 1
I think that any ninja reference that doesn't include ninjas wailing on guitars is probably a work of fiction.
If I can picture an actor who would be perfect for the part of a ninja, it would probably be Jack Black and KG, because they can do cock pushups and they beat the devil in guitar wailing.
This explains things. My ISP is AT&T and I lost all of my alt.binaries.* newsgroups two days ago.
No more crappy MP3's. No more crappy wallpapers. No more crappy MIDI's. Newsgroups have been going downhill since I first started using them in 1993. Back then, I actually participated in discussions...but with the proliferation of spam and crappy porn, it has become exponentially difficult to do anything.
I sure do miss those flamewars in the alt.tasteless.jokes...ah, the good old days.
Maybe I'll finally get rid of my Agent installation - the same one I've had for almost 10 years now.
My wife went to Costco and bought me an 8" Pandigital frame for my early Father's Day present.
It has 800x600 resolution, a card reader, plays MP3's, and videos (I've only tried AVI's, but it works pretty well)...and it's a USB host and client.
it's pretty slick, and with 128MB of memory, it can hold a LOT of 1024x768...so, I didn't even bother buying another card because after resizing 100 6MP pictures down to 1024x768, I still have over 120MB free.
(I size the pics at 1024x768 so I can zoom in to the pictures if I wanted to)...
Granted, I'll *never* use it for playing music or movies...BUT, I would love to find a way to hack it so I can attach it to my computer and use it as a second display or something...
I'm reposting this article I wrote (and published on a now-defunct website) when I first started working...and I wondered what high-paying jobs were available for Classics Majors who were in the Army and had lots of technical experience from playing games and downloading 0-day warez from questionable sources:
How to Land a Job in Corporate America
Nowadays, recent college graduates have two options to consider after graduation: go to graduate school, or join the work force. For the interests of the captivated audience reading this article, I won't bother discussing graduate school (but if you're interested in grad school, I can forward you my other article, "What to do after being denied admission into your favorite grad school").
The problem with finding a job is that most recent college grads don't have the experience that most employers want, and on the other hand, most recent college grads want a job that will best compensate them monetarily. Obviously, most entry-level jobs pay meager wages and won't cater to a person's decadent lifestyle (that is, if you want to continue eating out every night and hitting the bars and clubs once a week). What's not obvious is that if you want a good job, you have to start out at the bottom and work your way to the top. Nobody is ever going to offer a position for an entry-level CEO. So, reality has to dictate the fact that success and wealth come later in life. Evidently, success and wealth (at least the monetary kind...intrinsic wealth and success can be attained anywhere) can only be attained through the right job, and by the right job, I mean a career in Corporate America. Albeit, anyone can have success and wealth through any given vocation, but only through Corporate America can a person lose all that is meaningful to him and suddenly take on the values and responsibilities of a large group of people and do things for the interests of the company. Once this becomes ingrained in a person's mentality, then he is well on his way to success and wealth.
But, how, you may be asking, does a person go from a happy-go-lucky everyday joe to a person clawing and inching his way up the corporate ladder? Well, my first piece of advice is to network. Learn to make friends in the corporate world, attempt to maintain those friendships, and once those friends learn of your graduation from college (it doesn't matter what your grades were), take advantage of them and use your friendship as a basis for future interviews and job offers. Use them for all they are worth, because if they don't land you a job, then think of the money you wasted on the friendship.
If networking doesn't work, I suggest trying to attend information sessions hosted by corporations regarding employment opportunities. When you attend these info sessions, make not only a mental note of the people that are attending, but take down their names, addresses, and phone numbers. You can then begin to develop friendships with the people who share your career interests. Most likely, these people will have advice on resumes and would be glad to share their list of contacts with you. If they're not willing to part with such information, then sabotage them. If he's not with you, then he's against you, and competition lost is a position gained. If neither of these two tactics work, you can always do everything by yourself and go directly to a company for an interview. Don't bother calling and mailing a resume. I always feel that this method of gaining a company's attention is a waste of time and stamps. Rather, if you go directly to the Human Resources office without an appointment and refuse to leave without being seen for an interview, they'll see how determined you are, and isn't determination a respectable quality of a potential employee?
Once at the interview, don't be nervous, but rather, be straightforward and honest. It's never a good idea to lie about skills and attributes that you don't have. Instead, wear revealing clothing. If you can't wear revealing clothing, flirt with the in
Am I the only one who thought that the Clueless Newbie's Linux Odyssey referred to her minivan?
go figure - I'm a Honda Odyssey owner...and I got excited thinking that someone managed to implement Linux somewhere in the Odyssey!!!
I got all excited about hacking the nav or the ECU with some Linux distro...to the point where I was *about* to buy one of those "Linux" fishes from thinkgeek and put it on my Odyssey!!!
wow. I've posted a lot of crap on usenet (alt.jokes.tasteless anyone?), but I never thought people took usenet all that seriously...I mean, most ordinary people don't even know what newsgroups are.
just the other day, I asked some coworkers if they've ever posted/downloaded anything from newsgroups, and they were like..."is that anything like limewire?"
I was like, wtf? *EVERY* tech-savvy person (who is my age or older) should be well aware of newsgroups...hell, even the "King of the Hill" TV show made a reference to alt.conspiracy.black.helicopters !!!
BUT, all these young kids nowadays don't know anything about the struggling beginnings of the 'net. I told them that before I had a browser (NCSA Mosaic running from a VAX VMS), I used gopher...and before that, it was newgroups...and before that, it was BBS...
I'm only 30 and I've become the cranky old man who, back in his day, walked barefoot fifty miles to school - and they liked it!
(you get fifty points if you can name the reference for that old man joke)
I didn't RTFA, but just to repeat what everyone said, it's all about OPSEC.
Coming from the Army Reserve world and working for a major DoD Contractor now, anything we post online and made available to the interweb can be intercepted as some form of intelligence for the [insert enemy here]. Of course, there are also folks in the military (Psychological Operations - PSYOPS) whose daily lives revolve around propaganda and basically, guerrila marketing so that the [insert enemy here] or the folks most likely to be influenced by the [insert enemy here] believe that [insert good guys here] are the good guys.
So, maybe this is just another ploy?
Who is the enemy nowadays anyway? Terrorists? Global Warming? "Rich White Kids"? votefortheworst.com?
yep. yes I did. I went there.
maybe we just need an Iraqi Minister of Intelligence telling us that there's nothing to see here?
I'm a segmentor all the way. I work for a major DoD subcontractor and the environment here is such that people stay late at work for the sake of staying late at work because everyone else is staying late at work...because they feel more professional that way...and because for the most part, most of my peers are still single and in the process of getting their Masters...
It's such a 'status quo' thing here that it seriously pisses me off.
We had an "engineering joke" competition recently...and I submitted the tried-and-true classic about the engineer who finds a talking frog (we've all heard it)...but, the joke that won was a joke that basically praised the fact that the work environment here is such that most people come in during their Fridays off (we have alternate work-weeks available).
WTF? I think a talking princess frog is much funnier than that!
Anyway, I have a wife and soon-to-be two children at home. I finish what I need to at work, then on the drive home, I forget everything so I can get on the floor and play Hot Wheels with my son at home. I get in around 7-ish and leave before 4. When I arrive at work, the parking lot is full...and when I leave, it's still full.
I need to separate home and work.
It's funny because I actually applied for a job at a local Google here, but I was denied. At first, I kicked myself in the butt for it, but after a while and after talking to a good friend who works at the Googleplex, I'm pretty glad I didn't get the Google job.
As much as I'd love Google perks and and the 'prestige' of working for Google, I value my finite free time so much more...and I refuse to be issued a Treo or a Crackberry.
There's so much technology and electronic doodaddery (I just made that word up) going into a standard 'car', but the basic premise of a 'car' hasn't evolved at all. A car still rides on four wheels, has an internal combustion engine dependent on some sort of fuel, a standard drivetrain to go along with the engine, and a steering wheel. Sure, racing technology applied to everyday street cars *improves* a car's capabilities, but does it really improve the car's utility?
With the population of India and China growing to become energy consumers and having more access to mobility, the definition/idea of a 'car' will change. A 'car', per se, will become a utilitarian implement...and the very nature of a car will change to allow for common use in third-world economies.
- Four wheels? Who needs four wheels when you can get by with three? - An internal combustion engine that runs on one type of fuel? Some countries don't have the infrastructure to support refueling with one type of fuel, so that's going to have to change... - Having the ability to go >200 MPH? Seriously, most people just need to go from A to B... - proprietary parts that can't be exchanged from one vehicle to another? - electronics?
As much as I love cupholders (my Honda Odyssey has ELEVEN cupholders...but only SEVEN seats and a new Mazda Miata has FOUR cupholders...but half as many seats) and headlights that turn so I can see the bicyclist I'm about to run over, I'd really love the ability to NEVER have to go to the dealer again and be able to fix everything on my own without the use of a computer or a multimeter.
My prediction...is that in 20 years or so, most cars in "third-world" countries will resemble Citroen's 2CV, but with a composite body.
I actually worked with several open-source network management solutions at my last job...which I used to verify if our in-house network management solution worked properly.
FWIW, OpenNMS was easier to setup and configure than the other options, but in the end, I ended up using nTop for the majority of my NMS needs, considering the fact that our test setup only had FOUR nodes.
The OpenNMS folks were all very helpful though...I kind of wished I sent them a postcard to add to their wall.
In summer of 1994, I was between my junior and senior year of high school and went to Cal State Fullerton for a summer internship in Engineering, where I was loaned a computer (286SX with orange monochrome screen, baby!)...logged onto the VAX, played some MUDs, did some fingering, and checked email and gophered my way around...eventually I had to return the computer, but my parents bought a 486SX with a COLOR SCREEN and a 200MB Hard Drive...and ended up gophering to "some Akebono site at Stanford" which led me to lots and lots of downloadable images. Eventually, I discovered BBS and downloaded a lot of free games and pr0n from non-ratio sites. Then, I discovered newsgroups...and how to uudecode...and then, found friends who were couriers...and the rest, they say, is history.
It was pretty funny but when you fingered users on the VAX, they were either in MUDs, on gopher, or in Pine.
I was pretty busy yelling at stupid uuencoded posts that were incomplete...so I'd just type in the "end\" to hopefully at least get the top half of the picture. It wasn't until my freshman year when I learned of downloading short video clips from different places...
I'm sure the hack was funded and/or initiated by Pete Carroll.
in other news...I'm an alumnus too...lifetime member of the Alumni Association...and let me tell you, the UCLA pop3 server is always hacked...considering how much spam I get forwarded to my *@uclalumni.net account!
whoa. almost 600 replies and no references to the Flying Spaghetti Monster or the inverse relationship of pirates with global warming?
what is this world coming to?
Slashdot Mirror
President Roslin's cancer *was* cured by cylon fetus blood. Just sayin.
not one 'finger' joke. yet.
I had an emotional attachment to my Cherry 2000 at one point too...
I blogged about this last year when China wanted to be the first country in electromagnetic dominance. From my blog:
China: HEY USA, ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US
USA: What you say?
Taiwan: Somebody set us up the bomb
USA: Why China yelling?
China: CAPS LOCK KEY NOT WORKING. BEIJING NOT YELLING
USA: China yelling at Washington DC. Scramble jets. drop bomb.
the time cube. wow. I haven't seen that in a long time. I didn't think it still existed. thanks for the flashback.
I have a BA in Classical Civilizations and Education from UCLA, but I'm currently a Senior Systems Engineer for a major defense contractor. Most of my peers (almost all of them are new-hires and are way younger than I am) are getting their MS in EE, so that seems to be the status quo. They are all very book smart. They all know their way around documentation and can easily take charge during design meetings. However, I have nine years of experience, field experience, and eight years of military service. I have facetime with the customer and can understand operational factors that my coworkers have no clue about. I specialize in what I do. I know my limitations and constantly ask questions when appropriate. It has been an uphill battle, but those who have worked with me can vouch for me. Those who only see my lack of EE degree can step aside and let me get the job done. Experience, customer interaction, and ability to improve - These are the important things. Walking is easy when the road is flat...
I think that any ninja reference that doesn't include ninjas wailing on guitars is probably a work of fiction. If I can picture an actor who would be perfect for the part of a ninja, it would probably be Jack Black and KG, because they can do cock pushups and they beat the devil in guitar wailing.
This explains things. My ISP is AT&T and I lost all of my alt.binaries.* newsgroups two days ago.
No more crappy MP3's. No more crappy wallpapers. No more crappy MIDI's. Newsgroups have been going downhill since I first started using them in 1993. Back then, I actually participated in discussions...but with the proliferation of spam and crappy porn, it has become exponentially difficult to do anything.
I sure do miss those flamewars in the alt.tasteless.jokes...ah, the good old days.
Maybe I'll finally get rid of my Agent installation - the same one I've had for almost 10 years now.
My wife went to Costco and bought me an 8" Pandigital frame for my early Father's Day present.
It has 800x600 resolution, a card reader, plays MP3's, and videos (I've only tried AVI's, but it works pretty well)...and it's a USB host and client.
it's pretty slick, and with 128MB of memory, it can hold a LOT of 1024x768...so, I didn't even bother buying another card because after resizing 100 6MP pictures down to 1024x768, I still have over 120MB free.
(I size the pics at 1024x768 so I can zoom in to the pictures if I wanted to)...
Granted, I'll *never* use it for playing music or movies...BUT, I would love to find a way to hack it so I can attach it to my computer and use it as a second display or something...
I'm reposting this article I wrote (and published on a now-defunct website) when I first started working...and I wondered what high-paying jobs were available for Classics Majors who were in the Army and had lots of technical experience from playing games and downloading 0-day warez from questionable sources:
How to Land a Job in Corporate America
Nowadays, recent college graduates have two options to consider after graduation: go to graduate school, or join the work force. For the interests of the captivated audience reading this article, I won't bother discussing graduate school (but if you're interested in grad school, I can forward you my other article, "What to do after being denied admission into your favorite grad school").
The problem with finding a job is that most recent college grads don't have the experience that most employers want, and on the other hand, most recent college grads want a job that will best compensate them monetarily. Obviously, most entry-level jobs pay meager wages and won't cater to a person's decadent lifestyle (that is, if you want to continue eating out every night and hitting the bars and clubs once a week). What's not obvious is that if you want a good job, you have to start out at the bottom and work your way to the top. Nobody is ever going to offer a position for an entry-level CEO. So, reality has to dictate the fact that success and wealth come later in life.
Evidently, success and wealth (at least the monetary kind...intrinsic wealth and success can be attained anywhere) can only be attained through the right job, and by the right job, I mean a career in Corporate America. Albeit, anyone can have success and wealth through any given vocation, but only through Corporate America can a person lose all that is meaningful to him and suddenly take on the values and responsibilities of a large group of people and do things for the interests of the company. Once this becomes ingrained in a person's mentality, then he is well on his way to success and wealth.
But, how, you may be asking, does a person go from a happy-go-lucky everyday joe to a person clawing and inching his way up the corporate ladder? Well, my first piece of advice is to network. Learn to make friends in the corporate world, attempt to maintain those friendships, and once those friends learn of your graduation from college (it doesn't matter what your grades were), take advantage of them and use your friendship as a basis for future interviews and job offers. Use them for all they are worth, because if they don't land you a job, then think of the money you wasted on the friendship.
If networking doesn't work, I suggest trying to attend information sessions hosted by corporations regarding employment opportunities. When you attend these info sessions, make not only a mental note of the people that are attending, but take down their names, addresses, and phone numbers. You can then begin to develop friendships with the people who share your career interests. Most likely, these people will have advice on resumes and would be glad to share their list of contacts with you. If they're not willing to part with such information, then sabotage them. If he's not with you, then he's against you, and competition lost is a position gained.
If neither of these two tactics work, you can always do everything by yourself and go directly to a company for an interview. Don't bother calling and mailing a resume. I always feel that this method of gaining a company's attention is a waste of time and stamps. Rather, if you go directly to the Human Resources office without an appointment and refuse to leave without being seen for an interview, they'll see how determined you are, and isn't determination a respectable quality of a potential employee?
Once at the interview, don't be nervous, but rather, be straightforward and honest. It's never a good idea to lie about skills and attributes that you don't have. Instead, wear revealing clothing. If you can't wear revealing clothing, flirt with the in
Am I the only one who thought that the Clueless Newbie's Linux Odyssey referred to her minivan?
go figure - I'm a Honda Odyssey owner...and I got excited thinking that someone managed to implement Linux somewhere in the Odyssey!!!
I got all excited about hacking the nav or the ECU with some Linux distro...to the point where I was *about* to buy one of those "Linux" fishes from thinkgeek and put it on my Odyssey!!!
oh well. Didn't read the article.
hey, at least you could afford the tape recorder and the interface cable.
by the time I got a tape recorder and the ability to save my Basic programs (from my Tandy COCO3) onto tape, most people already had 3.5" floppies...
yep. 3.5" floppies - not the 5.25" floppies...or the even bigger ones, but 3.5" floppies.
figure that out in your timeline.
wow. I've posted a lot of crap on usenet (alt.jokes.tasteless anyone?), but I never thought people took usenet all that seriously...I mean, most ordinary people don't even know what newsgroups are.
just the other day, I asked some coworkers if they've ever posted/downloaded anything from newsgroups, and they were like..."is that anything like limewire?"
I was like, wtf? *EVERY* tech-savvy person (who is my age or older) should be well aware of newsgroups...hell, even the "King of the Hill" TV show made a reference to alt.conspiracy.black.helicopters !!!
BUT, all these young kids nowadays don't know anything about the struggling beginnings of the 'net. I told them that before I had a browser (NCSA Mosaic running from a VAX VMS), I used gopher...and before that, it was newgroups...and before that, it was BBS...
I'm only 30 and I've become the cranky old man who, back in his day, walked barefoot fifty miles to school - and they liked it!
(you get fifty points if you can name the reference for that old man joke)
I didn't RTFA, but just to repeat what everyone said, it's all about OPSEC.
Coming from the Army Reserve world and working for a major DoD Contractor now, anything we post online and made available to the interweb can be intercepted as some form of intelligence for the [insert enemy here]. Of course, there are also folks in the military (Psychological Operations - PSYOPS) whose daily lives revolve around propaganda and basically, guerrila marketing so that the [insert enemy here] or the folks most likely to be influenced by the [insert enemy here] believe that [insert good guys here] are the good guys.
So, maybe this is just another ploy?
Who is the enemy nowadays anyway? Terrorists? Global Warming? "Rich White Kids"? votefortheworst.com?
yep. yes I did. I went there.
maybe we just need an Iraqi Minister of Intelligence telling us that there's nothing to see here?
I wonder if this case will help alleviate global warming? /DRTFA //all hail the flying spaghetti monster?
I'm a segmentor all the way. I work for a major DoD subcontractor and the environment here is such that people stay late at work for the sake of staying late at work because everyone else is staying late at work...because they feel more professional that way...and because for the most part, most of my peers are still single and in the process of getting their Masters...
It's such a 'status quo' thing here that it seriously pisses me off.
We had an "engineering joke" competition recently...and I submitted the tried-and-true classic about the engineer who finds a talking frog (we've all heard it)...but, the joke that won was a joke that basically praised the fact that the work environment here is such that most people come in during their Fridays off (we have alternate work-weeks available).
WTF? I think a talking princess frog is much funnier than that!
Anyway, I have a wife and soon-to-be two children at home. I finish what I need to at work, then on the drive home, I forget everything so I can get on the floor and play Hot Wheels with my son at home. I get in around 7-ish and leave before 4. When I arrive at work, the parking lot is full...and when I leave, it's still full.
I need to separate home and work.
It's funny because I actually applied for a job at a local Google here, but I was denied. At first, I kicked myself in the butt for it, but after a while and after talking to a good friend who works at the Googleplex, I'm pretty glad I didn't get the Google job.
As much as I'd love Google perks and and the 'prestige' of working for Google, I value my finite free time so much more...and I refuse to be issued a Treo or a Crackberry.
There's so much technology and electronic doodaddery (I just made that word up) going into a standard 'car', but the basic premise of a 'car' hasn't evolved at all. A car still rides on four wheels, has an internal combustion engine dependent on some sort of fuel, a standard drivetrain to go along with the engine, and a steering wheel. Sure, racing technology applied to everyday street cars *improves* a car's capabilities, but does it really improve the car's utility?
With the population of India and China growing to become energy consumers and having more access to mobility, the definition/idea of a 'car' will change. A 'car', per se, will become a utilitarian implement...and the very nature of a car will change to allow for common use in third-world economies.
- Four wheels? Who needs four wheels when you can get by with three?
- An internal combustion engine that runs on one type of fuel? Some countries don't have the infrastructure to support refueling with one type of fuel, so that's going to have to change...
- Having the ability to go >200 MPH? Seriously, most people just need to go from A to B...
- proprietary parts that can't be exchanged from one vehicle to another?
- electronics?
As much as I love cupholders (my Honda Odyssey has ELEVEN cupholders...but only SEVEN seats and a new Mazda Miata has FOUR cupholders...but half as many seats) and headlights that turn so I can see the bicyclist I'm about to run over, I'd really love the ability to NEVER have to go to the dealer again and be able to fix everything on my own without the use of a computer or a multimeter.
My prediction...is that in 20 years or so, most cars in "third-world" countries will resemble Citroen's 2CV, but with a composite body.
I actually worked with several open-source network management solutions at my last job...which I used to verify if our in-house network management solution worked properly. FWIW, OpenNMS was easier to setup and configure than the other options, but in the end, I ended up using nTop for the majority of my NMS needs, considering the fact that our test setup only had FOUR nodes. The OpenNMS folks were all very helpful though...I kind of wished I sent them a postcard to add to their wall.
sorry. fat-fingered it; meant 386SX.
Hey! I did the same thing!
In summer of 1994, I was between my junior and senior year of high school and went to Cal State Fullerton for a summer internship in Engineering, where I was loaned a computer (286SX with orange monochrome screen, baby!)...logged onto the VAX, played some MUDs, did some fingering, and checked email and gophered my way around...eventually I had to return the computer, but my parents bought a 486SX with a COLOR SCREEN and a 200MB Hard Drive...and ended up gophering to "some Akebono site at Stanford" which led me to lots and lots of downloadable images. Eventually, I discovered BBS and downloaded a lot of free games and pr0n from non-ratio sites. Then, I discovered newsgroups...and how to uudecode...and then, found friends who were couriers...and the rest, they say, is history.
It was pretty funny but when you fingered users on the VAX, they were either in MUDs, on gopher, or in Pine.
I was pretty busy yelling at stupid uuencoded posts that were incomplete...so I'd just type in the "end\" to hopefully at least get the top half of the picture. It wasn't until my freshman year when I learned of downloading short video clips from different places...
I'm sure the hack was funded and/or initiated by Pete Carroll.
in other news...I'm an alumnus too...lifetime member of the Alumni Association...and let me tell you, the UCLA pop3 server is always hacked...considering how much spam I get forwarded to my *@uclalumni.net account!
tiger hand.
come on, you don't know tiger hand?
http://www.rockpapersaddam.com/one.html
what is an 11-year old girl doing at DefCon?
I repeat...what is an 11-year old girl doing at DefCon?
what 'tween' (that's what she is - not a kid, not a teenager) goes to DefCon for fun?
whoa. almost 600 replies and no references to the Flying Spaghetti Monster or the inverse relationship of pirates with global warming? what is this world coming to?
yes, but only if everyone became a pastafarian as a result.
I will pay for a game about the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
r-Amen!