You can tell when someone has done any kind of help desk work, because when confronted by "X isn't working" the first thing they do is inquire as to whether they've rebooted since X was installed. Everything from Active Directory changes to a Windows update can cause junk to break, and rebooting takes five minutes at most.

I did help desk work for three years and I still forget this lesson sometimes since I switched to software dev. DID YOU REBOOT should be stapled on everyone's wall in every office on the planet. Printed next to the help desk number. Engraved into the plastic of your computer monitor.

Ability is not the same as training. Every company has its own ecosystem of rules, and even someone who did the same job at another company will take a few months to catch up.

That's a princely amount anywhere outside of a big city, though.

Not necessarily good ones, though. A master's from most schools in India is worth about as much as a master's from Devry in the US.

If they're running Verisign, which is still pretty common around the web on large commercial websites, they were not vulnerable to Heartbleed.

I'm actually in a pretty good position to start applying hours toward PMP where I am now. I knocked out CAPM last fall. It'll still take me a few years to reach 2000 hours, though.

I'm trying to go the PM route and it's brutal. To get the good certification (the one that nets you that $150K salary), PMP, you have to have already been working as a PM for at least two or three years. And the training certification, CAPM, is a dime a dozen and every MBA on the planet is getting it these days. So like anything else, they only want to hire people who have already been doing the job for someone else.

Hey, it was enough to teach the very basic fundamentals of programming logic. I had a physics teacher who was totally okay with us using our programmable calculators to take his tests. His reasoning was that if you understood the formula well enough to write a quick and dirty program for it, you probably understood it well enough in general.

Debugging an acceleration formula program was the fastest way to learn that acceleration formula, period.

Because coverage is delayed a month. They don't want you getting insurance because you just broke a leg that morning.

Replacement. Too bad John Oliver's on HBO now.

At least when you do get a new job, if it doesn't have employer-based insurance, the exchanges can't prevent you from getting insurance because of your pre-existing condition.

Some of the initial proposals in what ultimate became Obamacare actually did include expanding Medicaid coverage far upward of where it is, or allowing early buy-ins of Medicare. Those ideas were swiftly rejected because, you know, socialism and stuff. And the private insurance industry would be shut out of the sweet sweet profits and we couldn't have that, no, nuh-uh.

Thus, the idea was nixed, and we're stuck with what we have for now. Thankfully, what we have is better in many ways.

Never underestimate the ability of the average American to procrastinate.

They also apparently hired several hundred thousand actors around the country to pretend to sign up at ACA navigation centers, clearly visible so that local newspapers could photograph them.

People who signed up in March won't even get their first bill until the end of April. It's not like employee coverage, where it gets deducted magically out of your paycheck.

Approximately 90% of the folks who signed up by the end of 2013 actually did, in fact, make their first payment on time. The remaining 10% either cancelled policy for some reason before payment (maybe they got a new job?) or just didn't pay (being poor sucks. No tax breaks for them.)

No reason to assume the numbers won't hold for the 2014 people, but it won't be until the summer until we know for sure.