Best advice my old boss gave me just before I left Big Corp to be a freelancer:
"Find the person (individual) in Accounts Payable who will actually process your invoice, and make friends. Show the person a sample of your invoices and ask if it is in the format they prefer. If not, alter the invoice till it is easiest possible to process (if necessary, split it in two to get amounts below the authorisation limits for the person you are doing work for so that it doesn't have to be escalated unnecessarily). Then when you have done work, and have prepared the invoice, get it signed off, and take it to your friend in Accounts Payable and hand it to them, or at least put it on their desk. Buy flowers or chocolates for this person on their birthday and Christmas, and whenever they have helped you, if they can accept such. At the very least be friendly, polite, and respectful. This approach not only sharply increases your chances of getting paid on time, it also means that when you don't get paid, you have an insider that you can ask what went wrong, so you can put it right."

I have used this approach at many clients, and it really helps.

Not true - only one supplier has been that incompetent, and that one will wake up and ship if you cancel the order. There are plenty of alternative suppliers that promise 1-week delivery, and actually achieve faster than that. There's a factory in Wales producing 16,000 units a week, and the Foundation reckons they will have shipped 1 million units this year (the original target was 100,000).. As for what people are doing with it, you are rather behind, shipmate. Read the Foundation blog http://www.raspberrypi.org/ to catch up on what's going on.

French widow in every room?

You might to solder up something like http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/nov/04/12-things-to-make-raspberry-pi

You want comments before breakfast? You can't handle comments before breakfast. Translation: this is a European event, we haven't had our first coffee yet.

The Pi has GPIO pins. You can control almost any electronic device that you can build or modify or connect to during the competition. Personally, I would use a breadboard, but that's because I am absolutely crap at soldering.

The actual phrase is "nose to the grindstone". Less pleasant than you thought.

Actually, MS has tried to put Office out on rental at least four or five times before.

It's never worked, of course, because MS could never get all the parts of MS to work properly together. The user rapidly discovered that none of the supposed advantages of renting actually existed.

I was deeply involved in one such attempt back in 2005. The local supplier (who was responsible for the relationship with the customers; MS did not want to dirty their hands with any of that) got screwed and had to give the trial customers each a full permanent license to get out of the deal.

I have watched several other attempts since. There must be some undead person at MS who keeps reviving the corpse of this idea, and they clearly have such a short corporate memory that the seniors approve yet again.

>I have to wonder what the impact is on the wildlife then :(
First, the icebreakers are active in the hardest of winter, when almost no wildlife is active. Second, they are mostly active out at sea, where wild life is (a) sparse (b) able to avoid them. I recognise your concern, but I'm convinced the impact is minimal in this case.

Correct, should be infrasound...apologies, electrical fault in text composition memory, reboot in progress.

I used to live in Stockholm, and used to see the icebreakers going out to do their stuff. I lived on top of a granite cliff two thousand yards from the path the ship was taking, and I could feel the engine vibration up through the soles of my feet into my chest cavity. I could clearly understand how those ultrasound-based crowd control weapons work. [Note that these were by comparison "tiny" icebreakers - one example of several http://www.sjofartsverket.se/en/About-us/Activities/Icebreaking/Our-Icebreakers/Research-VesselIcebreaker-Oden/Icebreaker-Oden/

and every really hotshot piece of software I have ever encountered (and I'm talking world-wide success here) has been written by a very small team of highly-motivated developers working very long hours at very odd times of day with no management interference at all. They weren't rock stars before the project or they would have been managed into oblivion. After they had completed the product and it became successful, then they were rock stars. The self-motivation usually came from "fuck you, manager, I'm going to prove that my ideas are correct" One of these projects, where I knew the people well, became one of IBM's top 5 most profitable products world-wide (you've never heard of it), and those guys broke every rule in the book. They worked nights, never went to meetings, smoked cigars at their desks, suppressed all records of how many hours they were really working. By working those hours, the two of them held the entire structure of a big application, its database, and all its interactions with the operating system in their heads, and that mental state enabled them to write vast quantities of simple clear code that contained no serious errors on shipment, and none revealed in the first year. Later people added on to the project for subsequent releases never found any serious errors in the backbone written by the first two guys, nor did they have any problems adding to the code.

Code written during the normal working day, with constant interruptions, will never soar like that.

Wow! That's new! Speech never used to be "auditory" before. That's a real breakthrough. Maybe these guys can tackle the old problems of Visual Sight, or Sensory Touch, or even ... Olfactory Smelling.

Crap. I just ordered a new router. Why can't the Prez just buy one of his own instead of pinching mine?

Those showers? Would they be showers in Zyklon B? [This post is not subject to Godwin's Law, since it does not mention the H person]