Surely the school didn't purchase a bunch of new heart monitors because it might improve the calorie-burning of their students.

If you haven't been paying attention this summer -- fat people are the new terrorists. It seems a lot more plausible to me that a school is implementing a weight control plan than that they're expecting a gym teacher to diagnose cardiac abnormalities with a heart rate monitor, something a cardiologist couldn't do usefully.

Thinking this over some more, though, I'm more sympathetic to the asker's paranoia than I was at first. If school's can embrace policies of publicly weighing and humiliating children, they might well decide that the heart data might be shared in some inappropriate way, although the insurance thing seems unlikely.

Back in the olden days, we used to monitor our pulses in gym class using a finger and a clock. No, there's nothing suspicious about this, and anyone who used common equipment in gym should understand the benefit of buying your own strap instead of digging through a box to find the least sweaty one from the period before.

This is good advice, and gives me an opportunity to speak to the community at large: some of us who go to cons and are in a position to shake tons of hands politely decline. It's not because we're being dicks, it's because we know it's a good way to substantially decrease our chances of catching and spreading any germs.

I played the PAX Pandemic game, where the Enforcers handed out stickers to attendees that read [Carrier] [Infected] or [Immune] (There was also a [Patient Zero].

I got the [Immune] sticker, and by the time I got home on Monday, it was clear that I had the flu. I've had a fever between 100 and 104 all week that finally broke last night, but I'm going to the doctor today because I think whatever I had settled into my lungs. I'll tell him about the H1N1 outbreak and get tested if he wants to run the test, but at this point I think it's safe to assume that I was [Immune] to the Pig Plague, but definitely [Infected] with the damn PAX pox.

Even though it's been a week of misery, it was entirely worth it, and I don't regret going to PAX for a single second.

Last night, Evan unprotected his twitter account and Reifman began to follow him, under the disguise of a fembot.

Twitter seems as appealing to me as gluten-free pizza, so presumably a "fembot" is some Twitterism with which I'm unfamiliar, and not an actual fembot?

Don't talk to the police, or the FBI, or any authority without your lawyer.

Everyone knows that, but how many people have the number of a criminal defense attorney when they've never needed one before? Talking to the police (especially if you think your innocence is obvious) is an attractive option compared to sitting in a police station while you research lawyers or wait for Legal Aid to show up.

Of course, if I'd accidentally walked out with ultra-secret Goldman Sachs code while trying to download vi from an internal server, I'd be one of those people!

Same here, it riles me up when people are too lazy to write things right, especially when I know these are educated people. There is no excuse for MBAs and PhDs to send me emails full of spelling and grammar errors, it means they are too lazy/stupid/whatever to figure out how to turn on the spell checker.

Casual messaging? sure, who cares? But in business communications? Absolutely unacceptable.

It is so bad that we have a standing order at our shop to never type customer-provided content. 100% cut-and-paste for any text provided to us. Why? So *their* typos are carried over. If and when they are caught during QA, we have them resubmit the content, instead of doing spot fixes. It is much easier to paste the whole paragraph than to chase each word that is misspelled.

For those of you that already have the Kindle, the Calibre application works extremely nice with it. While it is ugly as sin, it is a very nice book manager and it works with both of our K2s just fine. I see it as a rudimentary iTunes for ebooks.

As a web programmer, I wanted to take offense at your statement, but something that happened to me only a few weeks ago is making me have a hell of a lot less faith about the available pool of web programmers out there:

During a round of interviews, we sent out a take-home quiz. We mostly wanted to know if the candidates either knew the actual answers, or could at least google it. One of the questions involved simple aggregates in SQL. Given a table with a unique id and a date of birth, I wanted a query that would produce a list of the months of the year, and how many unique records had a DOB that fell on that month. It's a one-liner.

One of my candidates wrote TWELVE counting queries, each one counting DOBs between the (hardcoded) start and end of each month, then she used UNION to make it send out the 12 one-row queries as one 12-row query.

Both of us evaluating the results screamed when we read her answer, and we did not pursue her further. I used to complain that programmers simply didn't give a shit about learning beyond the querying aspects of the RDBMS, which kept us at the mercy of overpaid DBAs. Now? Now we are starting to see that programmers don't even give a shit about learning how to query.

The men, who appeared to ProtesterHelp to be either Iranian or Lebanese...

I'd take that to mean that he's guessing that they were Iranian or Lebanese. There's no common element in those two ethnicities that distinguishes them from Jordanians, Syrians or what have you. You might recognize an Iranian by face, dress or (obviously) language but not "either Iranian or Lebanese".

At least for Comcast in zip 20190:

$ nslookup
> insomniaccoder.com
Server: 208.67.222.222
Address: 208.67.222.222#53

Non-authoritative answer:
Name: insomniaccoder.com
Address: 72.32.231.8

That's one of the two OpenDNS servers on port 53. Unless Comcast is faking/proxying/whatever the traffic and responding with OpenDNS' IP address.

... with SQL Server Data Transformation Services.

The DBA's excuse: it's less of a pain in the ass.

What really happened: the DBA obviously didn't know how to RTFM.

Finish your degree, work for a while, then do your masters. Why? So you have field experience before you do your masters.

Why is this important? Because as a norm, you are a less attractive candidate if you are over educated for your experience level. You are in reality a paper Tiger, you have two pieces of parchment that say that you have spent a lot of time in school, but the only practical experience that you bring to your new employer is whatever little you could pick up during school.

Your competitors, on the other hand, got their bachelors degree done, then worked for a few years, and finally got their masters done. Most of them got their masters completed while still working.

When I, either screening resumes or running the interviews, compare you to them, what I see is that for basically the same amount of money I can get an employee with the right education and with some relevant experience, instead of a guy with just the education and still needs to be trained on the job.

Education is awesome, get as much as you can get away with it, but pace yourself. Your school probably isn't going anywhere. Your masters program will be there for you whenever you are ready to go back to it.

Let them make an offer, then give them a reasonable counter offer with NDA and covenants to not compete fully understood before you sign on the dotted line. So what if they want to buy you out? Make them pay for the privilege, enjoy the reward for your hard work for a little bit, then move on to your next big thing. It is obvious that you can't start a new business to do the same kind of thing a week after you sell out, but there's got to be something else out there that you can do without blatantly competing against Megacorp.

Alternative approach: you don't sell because after all, the company is your baby and you want to see it grow for a little longer. And you are more than pleased to license to Megacorp whatever it is they are really after. By this you prove that you are in for the business, that you are not just trying to pick a fight with them. What you don't want do to is be petty and tell them something stupid like "stick your offer up your ass, I will never sell out to youse bastards!"

I would propose a partnership, but that makes you rely too much on Megacorp and they can use this reliance to control you, so it is not really feasible. Either sell out, or offer them a reasonable license that gets them what they want, within very strict limits, and you open up one more revenue stream.