Numerous postings were made about it.

My friends warned me about it.

Yet, I never thought it would happen to me.

Yesterday, the RPM database on my Linux box was hosed. I've heard of this happening, but I've never actually seen it in the six or so years I've been running Red Hat.

I've been toying with moving my main box to another distro for some time now. I've also been toying with Gentoo on other machines. Maybe it is time to give Red Hat and their RPMs the boot.

One month of full-time left. Three weeks, really - I'm taking a week of unpaid vacation to go home & go sailing before school starts. Then I have at least two months of part-time, but more likely I will be working here part-time through December. My boss really wants to offer me a full-time job, but is not sure if there will be money in the budget to allow it.

I really should be happy with this opportunity: I'm making more money than I ever have before, I'm actually working in IT (at least mostly), and I'll be able to work & pay my rent while I'm finishing up my classes this fall.

But I don't enjoy much of the work I do here. Even though they've given me (almost) as much responsibility as a "real" webdev, the work is boring. I like interacting with the clients and figuring out their requirements, I like building spiffy pages that they'll be happy with. But most of my work is reworking templated pages, or doing QA. I'd imagine I'll get to do a bit more if I'm a salaried employee... or at least I'd hope so. I tried to get some work with the IT group, so I might actually learn something, but my boss said that we were too busy with one of the webdevs on extended vacation; they needed me too much here. Bullshit. I've been spending the last 2-3 days only doing QA and minor fixes, both of which I'd still be able to get done (OK, the QA would go slower) if I was working on other things.

I'm hoping it won't be so bad once I'm only working here 24 hours/week instead of 40, but I don't think that will address the root of the problem: I'm bored and I'm not being challenged. It'd be really nice if the people were a little geekier too, seeing as this is an IT company, but I'll take what I can get.

Need to polish up my resume (AGAIN) and start job-hunting for real - at least this time I have 4-5 months, and I'll be able to relocate.

Things are going pretty well at my job. This past week sucked, because I was trying to fit my normal 40 hours into 4 days (one of the perils of being a wage slave). However, I'm getting into some work that the "normal" webdevs do, finally. I don't exactly have my own clients, but I share them with the woman who trained me (who is part-time). I've done some "design" work (choosing colors, laying out front pages for IR sections), and my boss is absolutely thrilled. It's a nice feeling.

On top of it all, I am acclaimed as the Mac chic - especially when it comes to OS X. I don't think most of the people in that office have a clue about Macs. Though it's not hard - as far as web stuff is concerned, they really are pretty close to Windows nowadays.

~Two more months of full-time left, then two months of part-time. I need to start looking for a job again. With the excitement my boss has shown, it's plausible that they would offer me a real job; but I'm not going to bet on it. Just need to get my resume in shape *again*.

So, after whining and complaing and generally being annoying because I didn't have a job... guess what? I managed to land an internship at Shareholder.com. It's kind of weird working in a cube farm, and working 40 hours a week, but I think I'm getting used to it. It certainly helps that the general atmosphere is pretty casual (the CTO was crawling under my desk the first day, wearing jeans & a T-shirt) and the people tend to be pretty young. They're also starting to give me (mildly) interesting work, which makes the time go by faster.

So, I'm a web-development intern. In one respect, it's too bad - that's the one field/occupation/position/whatever I know quite a bit about.. and as an intern, they're trying to come up with stuff to teach me. Heh. I'm trying to figure out a way that I could spend time with the Tech team (the sysadmins & other people that the CTO is in charge of), but I don't see them much, and I'm a pretty quiet person by nature - compounded by the fact I'm in my own cube all day.

I want to extend my thanks to the people who gave me advice months ago on getting a job. I think I got this job not only because of my qualifications, but also because I wasn't as rigid and formal.. and I tried to sell myself on the web experience I already have (a fair amount actually, considering I knew nothing about computers 4 years ago.)

In any case, it's nice to have some money at my disposal for a change. It will be nice to have some free time once the internship ends (I'm part time in Sept/Oct, but then it's over)... but then I'll have to look for a "real" job. And hopefully, I'll have my degree by then.

So I stroked my own ego by making this post to the Aimee Deep conversation. Nice to hear people think I'm attractive ("in a geek chick kind of way"), even if I was fishing for it a bit.

Yet another discussion on jobs (or lack thereof).

Anyone have suggestions or tips on how a college student with little to no experience can find a job in IT? Or am I deluding myself?

I really don't want to be flipping burgers come May...

Finally figured out what was causing my project code to segfault... a measly little 7 integer array... that wasn't being deleted. And that code is supposed to be used thousands of times in a single run of the program. Oops.

Now I just have to figure out where the other few (smaller) errors are coming from. Like why it occasionally fails in accessing the array.

This project will be done soon... this project will be done soon.. [chanting]

Funny. I post this comment, and by the time I look at it again, 2 more people have posted, also extolling the virtues of WBER. It's been a long time since I've listened, but it's still my favorite radio station EVER... I listen to the Christian AM station here in Worcester, MA, but it's kind of sucky. It just gives me something to listen to in the morning (and occasionally in my boyfriend's car).

I'm going to have to start listening to WBER again. Real soon now. After I finish my homework.

Oops. I meant to include this link (usability study on seniors) in this comment (about Linux in schools).

Don't get me wrong; I like Linux. But a system is not appropriate for the general public if they can't use it without looking at the guts of it. And from what I've seen of Linux, that just doesn't happen.

I guess if the environment is similar to that of our campus Unix system, where you can only make changes to the files & directories in your home directory, THEN it might be usable to the general public. But in a home setting, where you would like to install more software, etc., it won't work. Hell, I've never installed Linux without help.. and only one or two Unix programs/applications without help.

I like Linux... and it may be ready for business use. But it's not ready for casual home use yet. For that to happen, there needs to be a greater level of abstraction between the OS and the user.

My first comment with score 5 .

There isn't much more I can say. I was totally blown away by this entire game. The game is near perfect in every way. If you don't have a Game Cube, buy one and get this game. It is better than anything I've played on the PS2 and X-Box.

The even more exciting thing is that the new Zelda game coming out in spring is supposedly EVEN BETTER than Metroid Prime.

I just went through my old comments.. wow, am I whiny. I'm always whining about how I don't have a car, or a job, or something else that most /. users would probably consider important. Hm. I should try to say more stuff that's positive, maybe.. but I like my whiny style (especially when I'm actually making a point with it).

Last month my stereo was stolen while my car was sitting in a mall parking garage. The sad thing is that it was parked in an area that typically has constant foot traffic because it was right by the entrance to the movie theaters. The car alarm was apparently useless. The San Diego Police Department are even more useless. They refuse to investigate incidents like these even though the mall security guard I talked to said that he was noticing increased incidents of theft and that it was likely somebody operating in the area. The police also refused to investigate even though I found something that was possible evidence (it appears that it might have been left by the theives).

Fast forward a month. Someone I know had his Integra stolen last week. Today it was "found."
By "found," I mean that they only managed to find the body of the car. Just about all the working parts of the car were gone. By now his engine is in some punk's Civic. The people who did this are apparently still loose on the streets.

In either case the police likely decided to move too slow, or not at all, to find these thieves.
I don't want the people who stole my stereo to be caught so I can get my stuff back. I want them caught so that they can get their asses thrown into the slammer.

Thieves who steal cars, car components, stereos, etc. are basically getting the green light by the police. While the police are working with Fuhrer Bush to take away the rights of working citizens in the sake of fighting "terrorism," they seem to have no inclination to even investigate these crimes of theft beyond putting the data down into a "log."

I've been playing Neverwinter Nights recently. The single player campaign isn't as good in storyline terms as Baldur's Gate, but it is still decent. I think the implementation of 3rd. Edition D&D rules is very well done. Some people hate 3E, but I like it very much, so I'm am very pleased with this game.

Some people have prematurely called this game a Diablo/hack-n-slash clone... but I don't believe that to be true. There are lots of cool sidequests, tons of NPC coversations, class-based quests, etc. Plus the ability to have a DM is definately cool. I believe the game is very fun to play online with people who are serious about roleplaying their characters.

I beat the game, and have now gotten into some of the top rated mods out there. Some of them are really good. I can suggest "The Spires of Ravenloft" as a good one to downlaod. It got a bit tedious at the end, but it was fun.

Well, I'm not participating, mainly because I don't actually mind the ads. However, I do notice that there are noticeably fewer comments today. Actually,
there seem to be fewer trolls and idiots so far.
We'll see how this turns out.