Have you talked to your eye doctor about the weekly/monthly lenses? I only have to take mine out once a week, and I throw them away for a fresh pair every month.

Again, scale. There are very few party games that can accommodate twenty people and still make everyone feel included.

Uno for long time friends who probably won't end up hating each other. Scrabble for a small group of newer friends. Apples to Apples for larger gatherings, since it can scale up to accommodate teams.

They actually made me think a bit, though. I too thought it was funny as heck that you could beat up the hookers in GTA and get your money back, but that's because I recognize that the GTA franchise is all about doing things that would be illegal or outright immoral in real life. But I'm a mentally healthy, socially well adjusted (mostly) adult, and I recognize that video games are not meant to be an instruction manual for life. Someone who is mentally ill, younger, or un-educated might not recognize that nuance as well.

The problem is that if it wasn't for PCs, I'd have never gotten into IT. My 19-year-old female self realized that if I couldn't repair my own PC I'd be dependent on other people for the rest of my life every time something went wrong. (Like I am with my car *cough*) My video card blowing out is what started me down the rabbit hole to begin with.

Most local schools are funded primarily at the county or state level, not the federal level. The tax that supplies our district's funding is our property taxes. So they got a double whammy with the foreclosure crisis - property values and thus taxes went down, and there were fewer homeowners paying taxes at all.

I wouldn't mind doing this, but I would like to eat too.

It depends on the school and location. Some public schools in the US are great. Most are mediocre. Some are terrible. Same thing applies to our universities - some are great, most are average, and the rest are for-profit.

There's also the fact that a lot of foreign applicants completely fabricate their credentials, with the full buy-in from the institutions that churned out their degrees. So while there will be some applicants who graduated from top tier schools, there will also be a lot who graduated from the equivalent of DeVry who have fantastic resumes that are full of BS. And you won't find that out until long after you've hired him.

I wonder if this practice is also influencing the "requirements bloating" that happens in HR departments. Fake resumes get turned in that have all these fabulous sounding things, so they plop them into the job requirements - if some resumes have them, that means some applicants should have them too! Next thing you know they want someone with 10 years experience with Ruby on Rails.

Even if the accent isn't a problem, sometimes cultural biases can make communication rough. I once spent a two hour long meeting going in circles with someone who'd lived in the US for a decade now and spoke nearly flawless English, but who entirely failed to grasp the concept of what we were supposed to be discussing. We needed X, he assumed we needed Y, and it was only at the end that we finally convinced him to give us the X we'd asked for in the beginning.

Where did I say I was documenting problems? We've got a ticketing system for that. (Which is also going to send a dozen email blasts per incident.) I was talking about plans and project status updates. Some things won't require immediate fixes, but we still want to make sure everyone is aware it's coming up.

I just don't bother reading my work email if I'm on vacation. If it's a serious enough problem they can call me on the work phone.

They aren't things I expect them to handle when they get back. It's more along the lines of "X broke while you were gone. We did Y to fix it. Here's the status on Y." Otherwise, they're going to encounter Y a month from now and go "wtf is this Y thing?" and we'll have to explain that Y happened while they were skiing in the Swiss Alps but we didn't bother CCing them on the plans for it.

Email's strength is that it is asynchronous. I send CC emails to people that I know are not available because I want them to read it when they get back, so they aren't totally clueless as to what happened while they were out scuba diving or whatever.

I actually have to do just that a lot of the time. Also, music helps a bunch - background noise that isn't random allows me to keep my mind on the task at hand instead of bouncing all over the place.

We also a problem of celebrating the ability to multi-task as an adult, and yet getting on the case of any child who exhibits those abilities because they're not "focused" enough.