You sound like someone from the South West complaining about the Mexican Restaurants in Boston.

Headphones are almost standard issue at my office, and I cant really work without them. Since I work for a large ISP and our backbone is a router or two away, streaming over the Internet is more common then portable music player. In fact if there was ever a policy about music players in the office it would be more about a security risk of having a bunch of USB storage devices with gigs of space around the office then people making mistakes while coding to Lady Gaga.

In our office people have a habit to work outages on speaker phone. When there is a large enterprise wide outage there multiple people on the same bridge on speaker phone. For those of us that don't deal with support, the only alternative is to block out the noise and communicate over IM with the person sitting next to you. I find that it keeps my in my happy development bubble with my eyes on my monitors, and hands on the keyboard.

Your boss sounds like a control freak. However, you are mixed in with other groups where listing to music could be an issue. They probably don't want to give the impression that the developers have special privileges. This is probably more the case if there is a large difference in pay.

I am originally from the west coast, and have moved around North America. One thing I have noticed is that is wherever you go you will always find a former New Yorker saying that they can't get good pizza where they live now.

And all over North America you will find mom and pop pizza places run by former New Yorkers claiming to serve authentic New York style pizza. However, they will say that it not quite the same as it was back in New York. You will also find various theories as to why this is the case. The most common belief is the water.

Personally I think that New York style pizza is greasy. Here in Atlanta there is a small chain called Mellow Mushroom. They make a good Caesar salad pizza, and white chocolate chip cookies. The Chipotle Chicken from California Pizza Kitchen is good too.

No this was really a wormhole opened by the AI at the LHC that became self aware milliseconds before the the planet was destroyed by the same black hole that made the LHC's computer systems become self aware.

> Am I the only one who cares?

There may be one or two others.

I learned long ago arguing over what Linux disto is best is like arguing about the best beer. Each one is unique and appeals to certain people. You have popular distos like Ubuntu and Red Hat/Fedora. Just like you have your popular beers like Budwiser and Coors. The users of the less popular distros usually look down on the users of the more popular distros. In the same way the drinkers of less popular beers look down on the drinkers of the more popular beers.

As for me, I'm typing this response into Chromium using Gnome that is running on Gentoo with special combination of USE flags that is optimized for my unique usage pattern of pr0n, Slashdot, EVE Online, TV/VCR repair, and database administration.

Also, thinking of beer made me get a Guinness out of the fridge before finishing this post.

First you get the virus that turns you into a zombie. It follows the Resident Evil zombie model.

An electrician is also called a sparky on a construction site.
My grandma had a dog named sparky.
The Spark of Hope gives you +100 spirit
SparkOfHope.org helps disabled children
Sparkles the Clown does birthdays (i hate clowns they should sue him)
Jeff Dunham had a comedy central special called Spark Of Insanity - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=epsx2dlQQ6k

I could go on.

Magazines are good for the crapper. You can read an article in a visit, and you can throw them away when done so you don't have to worry about having a poo book. Scientific American is one of my favorites.

Most people see the 32 million dollar price tag and have this knee jerk reaction. They don't take into consideration the people they will have to pay, hardware, facilities, and all that other junk that goes into a large project. I stopped getting all worked up when I learned that a project I worked on cost around 200 million.

That flowchart does work wonders.

Hasn't the Internet already brought a golden age of sperm-jacking?

And the FTC gets its authority to regulate interstate commerce from the Constitution.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commerce_Clause

You forget the terrorist attack during the 1996 games. The guy that committed the attack did this because he believed that the games were to promote global socialism. Does this sound familiar? Whenever we get a Democrat in the White House this kind of crazy comes out of the woodwork. Personally, I wouldn't want to have company over when I have my crazy spread all over the living room.

Also, corporate sponsorship is part of Atlanta culture. This is probably due to the fact that many large corporations are headquartered in Atlanta, and employ a large portion of the population. It was one of the things that stood out when I moved to Atlanta 3 years ago, to work at a the headquarters of a large corporation.

Even with all that, I tend to believe that Rio's win has to do more with the fact that the US has hosted 8 games. More games then anyone else, and the 2016 Olympics will be the first time the Olympics are hosted in South America.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Olympic_host_cities#Total_Olympic_games_by_country

I am happy for Rio, and I hope for a successful 2016 Olympics.

My work laptop was a Latitude D620, but it was replaced with with an E6400 last week. It is lighter then my old D620 even with the , and has a much smaller power supply. This makes a difference when you have to lug a bag around.

I can't really comment on battery life since I my use consists of moving from docking station to docking station. I don't think I actually opened it since client support dropped it off, but I haven't had any problems running 2 monitors through the docking station.

I do like the fact that both the dock and the laptop have eSATA ports. For my use, this is probably the biggest improvement outside of the upgraded processor. If you are like me an keep most of your work on an external hard drive, eSATA is a big improvement over USB.

My only complaint is the sound quality, and you if you can't listen to Lady Gaga you can't do any real development. I don't think it pumps out enough power to drive my headphones. Maybe this is an excuse to build an Altoids amp.

I voted for the Windows key because I'm on Linux. I guess I could map it to something, but I have grown used to ignoring it.