Pity you'll never see this reply. AC is an appropriate title for you.
1) My boss knew we were expecting two days after our families knew.
2) I had sufficient sick leave/vacation time, my boss refused to give me time off.
3) They may have violated the Family Medical Leave Act, but I couldn't very well risk being fired by asserting my rights at the time.
I quit as soon as I was able, and left them without a network administrator in the midst of a major deployment (quite deliberately). It took them six months to recover, and they've been through three more admins since I left. I don't take kindly to being pushed around, and will push back however I can.
Agreed. I'm only in my fifth year of marriage, but I understand that my job is one of the LAST things that will get in the way of my marriage. Now, *I* could place my job above my marriage, but that can happen with any job.
IT can be demanding, I'm not arguing that. I've pulled a lot of late nights and been called in at 3 am more times than I care to count. But my wife understood that all of those things factored into my salary; if that wasn't expected of me, I wouldn't be paid as much. It was always understood with us that if my job got in the way of our marriage that I wanted to know so that I could find another one.
I left my first adminstration job because they gave me a day off when my son was born. One day. Labor started at 11 am, he was born at 1 am the following day, and I was back at work at 8 the same day. It was then and there that my wife and I agreed I needed to look for another job.
We'll leave it to the courts to decide if this is sound legal doctrine, but there's certainly something in what Draker says. As we have repeatedly argued when it comes to video games, parents need to take an interest (and a supervisory role) in the media that their children consume, and that holds true when it comes to the Internet as well. Sticking a computer and a DSL modem in your child's room and never showing the slightest bit of interest in what he does with that technology is the height of irresponsibility.
So should parents be following their kids around full time? Because they could never get into trouble on the internet and still find PLENTY of trouble out in the real world. Parents *have* to let their kids go their own way, especially teenagers.
It's funny how people seem to want parents held responsible in everything their child does but want no blame for their part in the child's life. Parents should make sure their kids only play approved games, but retailers should be able to sell whatever game they want to the kids.
I recently learned that something very like this was happening at the school district where I work. Several teachers learned that someone had assumed their identities on MySpace and were posting defamatory remarks. My suggestion was to have the district's lawyer informally contact MySpace asking that the sites be taken down, and follow up with a C&D letter a week letter if they didn't comply.
No word concerning a lawsuit against the student(s) responsible.
Quick rant on printing slides, and PP use in general:
Power Point does NOT by default enhance your presentation. In fact, the vast majority of PP "enabled" presentations I've seen have sucked because the speaker simply read off the slides; this means either the slides would have been better off as a Word document because they're so wordy, or the speech is more of an outline. Write your speech, THEN make your slides to match your speech.
If you're going to give a handout, copy the text of your slides into an outline format. It won't take ten minutes to give people the same information in two pages that they're going to see in twenty slides. Why waste paper?
That said, I like paper. I like being able to quickly sketch out ideas--especially small flow charts and layouts and the like--and can put information together faster on paper than I can with a computer. If I have to write more than a few sentences I turn to my computer and I don't use paper for anything I plan to keep (yay for Google Desktop's scratch pad), but for brainstorming paper is where it's at.
A lot of really good certs have been mentioned here, and most of them will help you get a really great job. I just want to point out that there are a lot of people with the "big" certs (like Cisco stuff) that aren't nearly as competent as their certs claim they are. Grabbing a few smaller certs as well can pad out your resume a bit and help you stand out above the guys who just study to the test.
I have a friend who won't hire anyone, not even a database admin, unless they have an A+ cert (or something eqivalent) somewhere in their past. It's not that he'll actually expect them to do any hardware work, he just thinks it's important to have some experience with it. It could be that he and I once saw a guy with a half-dozen certs that couldn't diagnose a very obvious memory problem.
"25 year old games are still popular because of people like myself who still think that Stratosfear, Dark Side of the Moon and 2112 are fantastic albums but couldn't name a song by Blink 187 or Disturbed."
That's okay, you're not missing much.
"Part nostalgia and part not keeping up with the times is what really makes retro popular."
For those of us old enough to be nostalgic, that's true. But what about the generation that doesn't remember Pac Man and Galaga in the arcades? I'm finding that they're the ones who seem to be the most into those games. Could it be that the story-driven nature of the major games released today makes them less fun to replay? Is it possible that multiplay is so rife with cheating, stupidity, and general lameness that it's not as fun as it once was? Retro games are "pure" in a sense; they don't burden you with story arcs, they don't bore you with cut scenes, they don't annoy you with having to deal with stupid people. They don't try to yank at your emotions or evoke startle or gag reflexes. They're just fun.
"They mean that parents should have known, because you can't possibly live in the same house as the kid, talk to the kid every day, and not realize he is THAT screwed up."
As a former kid, I know how easy it is to mask certain behavior. My parents had no clue I was into a lot of the things I was into until they got "the call" one day. Why didn't they know? Because much of what I said and did at home regarding it was done on a computer, and they were clueless about computers.
"The only explanation for this is that either you never talk to your kid, or you ride his ass so much with all your surveillance that you've escalated his normal teenage rebellion into something bigger and completely and utterly screwed up his mind."
Or he's just really smart and knows what will happen if you find out.
"They should have taught her, not locked her in her room because you intercepted an e-mail from her boyfriend."
And what happens when the daughter you've taught starts camwhoring for grown men at the ripe old age of 14? It happens. Kids, especially girls, will go to great extremes to get approval and attention of people outside their own families. If she's not feeling socially fulfilled--something her
"And as to your little rant about your kids illegal internet actions leading to you...if you're really thinking along the lines of "better him in jail than me," you're one of the most screwed up parents I've ever heard."
Or maybe, just maybe, I want to know my kid is doing something that puts me at risk so that, you know, I can tell him to STOP. If my son decides to start distributing movies on the internet when he's old enough to do such things, I'd kind of like to know it was happening, stop it, and explain to him that it's illegal and puts me and the rest of the family at risk.
I expected a few knee-jerk reactions like yours. You assume a lot about me and how I choose to raise my kids. Any monitoring that I do in the future (my son just turned 2, it's gonna be a while) will be for the purpose of knowing what is going on in their lives, NOT for oppressing them. If my 16-year-old son is looking at porn, I'll probably ignore it. If he's searching some P2P network for videos of teenage girls getting raped, he and I are going to have to have a little chat.
I was focusing on the specific topic of monitoring computer use and saying that you can't have both; if we're going to expect parents to be responsible for their kids' action and accountable for what happens to their kids, we've got to accept that parents need to monitor--sometimes covertly--what their kids are doing.
It's not a matter of black and white. Privacy and responsibility aren't an all-or-nothing matter; I can respect my daughter's privacy by not reading her diary while still keeping an eye on what she's actually *doing*. I might trust my kid to do one thing, while feeling he's not mature enough to do something else. Computer use is just one issue of many.
The house, the phone line, the DSL service, and the computer are all in my name. I'm the one my kid puts at risk if he does something illegal. Can someone give me a good reason to *not* monitor what my kid does on the internet?
When kids shoot up schools, people ask "where were the parents? They should have known." When kids end up teenage parents, people ask "where were the parents? They should have taught them better." When kids get connected to the internet, people say "mind your own business! Privacy! Big Brother! OMG 1984!!!"
Pick one. Either kids have a right to privacy and the responsibilities that come with the lack of supervision, or they don't have that right, and the parents have to accept some responsibility if they don't know what their kids are doing.
There is some concern over whether the controllers will promote ergonomic use. Throwing a football or swinging a bat somewhat comes naturally; pretending to do so...doesn't. It really just depends on what kind of motions people are prompted to make, but I'm betting on there being a failed class-action suit for repetetive strain injuries within the first year.
There are large parts of the US that don't have 5 Mb as an option.
Best I can get is 3 Mb DSL. A mile away from me (and for another 15-20 miles beyond that) there is no broadband at all, and no plans by any company to install it.
Remember that MS has faced years of harsh criticism over the insecurity of their products. They view WSC as a major step forward in combating future criticisms. By allowing someone else to replace WSC, they open themselves up to inferior products disabling it and making Windows in fact less secure, and once again making MS look bad.
I suggest a compromise: create a method of adding widget-like components to WSC, so that Symantec and others can interface with it seamlessly and add information without Microsoft having to sacrifice their (probably false) sense of security from having it there in the first place.
Here in Texas, we're facing the problem of wondering of a P3 will be counted as a PC by the state for long after Vista comes out.
The current minimum is a P2 400 with 128 MB RAM. Anything less than that is not a computer that can be counted in the students per computer ratios and that sort of thing.
There's talk of it being raised to 1.5 Ghz not a year or two after Vista. That's going to leave a lot of school districts looking really bad because they can barely afford to keep up what they've got (or they just aren't willing to spend the money to replace it until they have to, which is often the case).
There's the kid gamer, who's spending power is entirely in the hands of his parents.
There's the teenage gamer, who will probably spend more money than the kid, spend more time playing games, and explore the social aspect of gaming more. This makes an ideal demographic for in-game ads.
There's the college gamer, who you might as well not bother targeting since he's going to pirate all his games anyway.
Of those, you've got a few subgroups:
The casual gamer who just plays a few games on his PS2.
The social gamer who likes anything so long as it plants a bunch of his friends on the couch with him.
The mobile gamer, who's attention you can never get when you need it, but at least you've got something interesting to watch waiting in line.
The obsessed gamer, who talks about games to people who care nothing about them and think a fun weekend is only stopping to order pizza or sleep.
Then there's us old types. We're the hardcore gamers, the ones who while everyone else is trying to "grow up" refuse to put down the control or step away from the mouse and go mow the lawn of our overpriced suburban homes. "Core gamer" as a marketing demographic is much younger than the older term of "hardcore gamer", and means soemthing completely different.
Was shooting the bull with a friend, talking about the cold winters of our childhood in the early 80s. I've always heard that weather attributed to the St. Helens eruption, and jokingly suggested we shove a nuke down a volcano every few years to counter global warmning.
It's funny how often my wacky ideas wind up being suggested by scientists shortly thereafter. Maybe they've got my office bugged.
Slashdot Mirror
And yet they seem to be quite plentiful in space.
Pity you'll never see this reply. AC is an appropriate title for you.
1) My boss knew we were expecting two days after our families knew.
2) I had sufficient sick leave/vacation time, my boss refused to give me time off.
3) They may have violated the Family Medical Leave Act, but I couldn't very well risk being fired by asserting my rights at the time.
I quit as soon as I was able, and left them without a network administrator in the midst of a major deployment (quite deliberately). It took them six months to recover, and they've been through three more admins since I left. I don't take kindly to being pushed around, and will push back however I can.
Agreed. I'm only in my fifth year of marriage, but I understand that my job is one of the LAST things that will get in the way of my marriage. Now, *I* could place my job above my marriage, but that can happen with any job.
IT can be demanding, I'm not arguing that. I've pulled a lot of late nights and been called in at 3 am more times than I care to count. But my wife understood that all of those things factored into my salary; if that wasn't expected of me, I wouldn't be paid as much. It was always understood with us that if my job got in the way of our marriage that I wanted to know so that I could find another one.
I left my first adminstration job because they gave me a day off when my son was born. One day. Labor started at 11 am, he was born at 1 am the following day, and I was back at work at 8 the same day. It was then and there that my wife and I agreed I needed to look for another job.
I recently learned that something very like this was happening at the school district where I work. Several teachers learned that someone had assumed their identities on MySpace and were posting defamatory remarks. My suggestion was to have the district's lawyer informally contact MySpace asking that the sites be taken down, and follow up with a C&D letter a week letter if they didn't comply.
No word concerning a lawsuit against the student(s) responsible.
Quick rant on printing slides, and PP use in general:
Power Point does NOT by default enhance your presentation. In fact, the vast majority of PP "enabled" presentations I've seen have sucked because the speaker simply read off the slides; this means either the slides would have been better off as a Word document because they're so wordy, or the speech is more of an outline. Write your speech, THEN make your slides to match your speech.
If you're going to give a handout, copy the text of your slides into an outline format. It won't take ten minutes to give people the same information in two pages that they're going to see in twenty slides. Why waste paper?
That said, I like paper. I like being able to quickly sketch out ideas--especially small flow charts and layouts and the like--and can put information together faster on paper than I can with a computer. If I have to write more than a few sentences I turn to my computer and I don't use paper for anything I plan to keep (yay for Google Desktop's scratch pad), but for brainstorming paper is where it's at.
I think you missed the "or something equivalent" part.
Activate it.
Doesn't seem particularly troublesome to me...did I miss something?
A lot of really good certs have been mentioned here, and most of them will help you get a really great job. I just want to point out that there are a lot of people with the "big" certs (like Cisco stuff) that aren't nearly as competent as their certs claim they are. Grabbing a few smaller certs as well can pad out your resume a bit and help you stand out above the guys who just study to the test.
I have a friend who won't hire anyone, not even a database admin, unless they have an A+ cert (or something eqivalent) somewhere in their past. It's not that he'll actually expect them to do any hardware work, he just thinks it's important to have some experience with it. It could be that he and I once saw a guy with a half-dozen certs that couldn't diagnose a very obvious memory problem.
PHB = Pointy Haired Boss = Any management-level person in the Dilbert comic strip, or anyone who acts similarly.
Up next: his remake of the remake of Battlestar Galactica.
Now the humans fire first.
I thought about those. They're just be an opportunity to stretch my hands and take a sip of my drink.
"25 year old games are still popular because of people like myself who still think that Stratosfear, Dark Side of the Moon and 2112 are fantastic albums but couldn't name a song by Blink 187 or Disturbed."
That's okay, you're not missing much.
"Part nostalgia and part not keeping up with the times is what really makes retro popular."
For those of us old enough to be nostalgic, that's true. But what about the generation that doesn't remember Pac Man and Galaga in the arcades? I'm finding that they're the ones who seem to be the most into those games. Could it be that the story-driven nature of the major games released today makes them less fun to replay? Is it possible that multiplay is so rife with cheating, stupidity, and general lameness that it's not as fun as it once was? Retro games are "pure" in a sense; they don't burden you with story arcs, they don't bore you with cut scenes, they don't annoy you with having to deal with stupid people. They don't try to yank at your emotions or evoke startle or gag reflexes. They're just fun.
...all they did was increase your energy level. Will the wonders of magnetics never cease???
"They mean that parents should have known, because you can't possibly live in the same house as the kid, talk to the kid every day, and not realize he is THAT screwed up."
As a former kid, I know how easy it is to mask certain behavior. My parents had no clue I was into a lot of the things I was into until they got "the call" one day. Why didn't they know? Because much of what I said and did at home regarding it was done on a computer, and they were clueless about computers.
"The only explanation for this is that either you never talk to your kid, or you ride his ass so much with all your surveillance that you've escalated his normal teenage rebellion into something bigger and completely and utterly screwed up his mind."
Or he's just really smart and knows what will happen if you find out.
"They should have taught her, not locked her in her room because you intercepted an e-mail from her boyfriend."
And what happens when the daughter you've taught starts camwhoring for grown men at the ripe old age of 14? It happens. Kids, especially girls, will go to great extremes to get approval and attention of people outside their own families. If she's not feeling socially fulfilled--something her
"And as to your little rant about your kids illegal internet actions leading to you...if you're really thinking along the lines of "better him in jail than me," you're one of the most screwed up parents I've ever heard."
Or maybe, just maybe, I want to know my kid is doing something that puts me at risk so that, you know, I can tell him to STOP. If my son decides to start distributing movies on the internet when he's old enough to do such things, I'd kind of like to know it was happening, stop it, and explain to him that it's illegal and puts me and the rest of the family at risk.
I expected a few knee-jerk reactions like yours. You assume a lot about me and how I choose to raise my kids. Any monitoring that I do in the future (my son just turned 2, it's gonna be a while) will be for the purpose of knowing what is going on in their lives, NOT for oppressing them. If my 16-year-old son is looking at porn, I'll probably ignore it. If he's searching some P2P network for videos of teenage girls getting raped, he and I are going to have to have a little chat.
I was focusing on the specific topic of monitoring computer use and saying that you can't have both; if we're going to expect parents to be responsible for their kids' action and accountable for what happens to their kids, we've got to accept that parents need to monitor--sometimes covertly--what their kids are doing.
It's not a matter of black and white. Privacy and responsibility aren't an all-or-nothing matter; I can respect my daughter's privacy by not reading her diary while still keeping an eye on what she's actually *doing*. I might trust my kid to do one thing, while feeling he's not mature enough to do something else. Computer use is just one issue of many.
The house, the phone line, the DSL service, and the computer are all in my name. I'm the one my kid puts at risk if he does something illegal. Can someone give me a good reason to *not* monitor what my kid does on the internet?
When kids shoot up schools, people ask "where were the parents? They should have known." When kids end up teenage parents, people ask "where were the parents? They should have taught them better." When kids get connected to the internet, people say "mind your own business! Privacy! Big Brother! OMG 1984!!!"
Pick one. Either kids have a right to privacy and the responsibilities that come with the lack of supervision, or they don't have that right, and the parents have to accept some responsibility if they don't know what their kids are doing.
There is some concern over whether the controllers will promote ergonomic use. Throwing a football or swinging a bat somewhat comes naturally; pretending to do so...doesn't. It really just depends on what kind of motions people are prompted to make, but I'm betting on there being a failed class-action suit for repetetive strain injuries within the first year.
There are large parts of the US that don't have 5 Mb as an option.
Best I can get is 3 Mb DSL. A mile away from me (and for another 15-20 miles beyond that) there is no broadband at all, and no plans by any company to install it.
here is ZERO good about playing video games
Catharsis.
Besides that, they're fun. I've played PC games for 15 years now.
Hey, I said it was a suggestion, not a possibility in the real world.
Remember that MS has faced years of harsh criticism over the insecurity of their products. They view WSC as a major step forward in combating future criticisms. By allowing someone else to replace WSC, they open themselves up to inferior products disabling it and making Windows in fact less secure, and once again making MS look bad.
I suggest a compromise: create a method of adding widget-like components to WSC, so that Symantec and others can interface with it seamlessly and add information without Microsoft having to sacrifice their (probably false) sense of security from having it there in the first place.
Here in Texas, we're facing the problem of wondering of a P3 will be counted as a PC by the state for long after Vista comes out.
The current minimum is a P2 400 with 128 MB RAM. Anything less than that is not a computer that can be counted in the students per computer ratios and that sort of thing.
There's talk of it being raised to 1.5 Ghz not a year or two after Vista. That's going to leave a lot of school districts looking really bad because they can barely afford to keep up what they've got (or they just aren't willing to spend the money to replace it until they have to, which is often the case).
There's the kid gamer, who's spending power is entirely in the hands of his parents.
There's the teenage gamer, who will probably spend more money than the kid, spend more time playing games, and explore the social aspect of gaming more. This makes an ideal demographic for in-game ads.
There's the college gamer, who you might as well not bother targeting since he's going to pirate all his games anyway.
Of those, you've got a few subgroups:
The casual gamer who just plays a few games on his PS2.
The social gamer who likes anything so long as it plants a bunch of his friends on the couch with him.
The mobile gamer, who's attention you can never get when you need it, but at least you've got something interesting to watch waiting in line.
The obsessed gamer, who talks about games to people who care nothing about them and think a fun weekend is only stopping to order pizza or sleep.
Then there's us old types. We're the hardcore gamers, the ones who while everyone else is trying to "grow up" refuse to put down the control or step away from the mouse and go mow the lawn of our overpriced suburban homes. "Core gamer" as a marketing demographic is much younger than the older term of "hardcore gamer", and means soemthing completely different.
Was shooting the bull with a friend, talking about the cold winters of our childhood in the early 80s. I've always heard that weather attributed to the St. Helens eruption, and jokingly suggested we shove a nuke down a volcano every few years to counter global warmning.
It's funny how often my wacky ideas wind up being suggested by scientists shortly thereafter. Maybe they've got my office bugged.