As a manager, here are the two pieces of advice I'd pass on:

1. We don't use passive voice in our memos. College is wrong. I've been out of college for a long time, but I always want to write to the business writing prof I had and let him know. We stress active voice.

2. I picked this up from a Murawski course (which deals with active voice writing). It was, "Doing work is bringing your supervisor a solution, not problems." That is, me going to my boss and saying, "Hey, I've got a problem here," isn't doing work. The work is going to my boss and bringing him or her a solution to the problem. Now, sometimes you get stuck and need help, and that's fine, and I'm happy to help - but your goal as an employee should be to bring me proposed solutions to problems (or, better yet, just take care of it, if you can).

Note, I have yet to meet anyone who calls them "Freedom Fries". Most Europeans probably understand the difference between a publicity stunt and reality.

From what I read, it sounded like even if the car had the feature, it would have been deactivated because he was accelerating - in other words, the car assumes the driver is behaving in a sane manner and deactivates the feature.

...because people don't want to pay for features they won't use? We don't have a sunroof in our truck, because we know we'd use it only rarely. Someone else might use that sunroof all the time. On the other hand, for our car, we paid extra for the memory driver's seat, because my wife is much shorter than I am, so we're always readjusting the driver's seat between us, and it's a time saver, plus there's probably a small safety bonus from getting the seat in the same position every time. But for a car that's normally only going to be driven by one person, a memory seat is kind of a useless feature.

Actually we're building a large scale data collection operation using iPads, Android tablets, smartphones, and the like. We just have to develop the apps. The hardware is taken care of for us!

Yeah, when I switched back to iOS that was definitely something that took getting used to. It didn't bother me before I switched to Android, but after coming back to iOS, it was like, "Hey, what's wrong with the shift button?" Neither platform is perfect, though. Android irritated me with some of its quirks, too.

Relax. I was in a jury for a civil trial a few years ago, and I think most of us agreed from the moment we started deliberations, but we took a few hours to make sure that we understood the facts, made sure the claims didn't meet the requirements set forth in the law, talked about our impressions of the expert testimony, talked about different viewpoints, etc. It was time well spent. Some people had picked up on things that others hadn't, and it was worth taking the time to ensure we made the correct decision. I'd expect to do at least as much diligence for a criminal trial. Of the 7 days total I was involved in that trial which should have taken 3 days, I didn't regret the few hours of deliberations.

As I recall, they had actually gone several months before applying for the food stamps - i.e., on savings. You know you probably could look up the article and get the info for yourself.

Actually, if it's the Kompressor article I'm thinking of: The situation was that the husband and wife both had had well-paying jobs, then they both lost their jobs via the downturn in the economy, and the CAR WAS PAID FOR and not worth much, so they kept it, rather than - what? Trading it in on a used beater or something? So, yes, she was driving the Mercedes to pick up welfare checks, but they were, for lack of a better term, newly poor. It was likely if something happened to the Mercedes that they wouldn't be buying another one while still on welfare. Holding it up as an example of poor people owning nice cars and the handouts being out of control is misleading.

Pilots have to go through the same security checks the passengers do. Or, at least, the pilots in the US do - I've seen them in the security checkpoints several times.

I live in Maryland in a home with a slab foundation and no crawl space or basement. We also have a very high water table, so high that I could probably go out right now with a shovel and hit water within a foot of the surface of the ground.

I've been using Pairnic for all of my domain names, no complaints, and the prices seem reasonable. I use them to host my website, too. At one point I switched to someone else (phpwebhosting.com, I don't know if they're still around) and complaints from my site's users about slow/unresponsive pages went from zero to daily, at least. I switched back to pair.com and those complaints dropped back to zero.

Me either. I have ~250 gigabytes of pictures to back up, and I wanted to do it offsite (they're our family memories). Before Glacier came along, I was looking at building NAS machines for my brother and I that we would host each other's backup data. It would've worked, but what a PITA, and a lot of up-front expense. Glacier is easy, and cheap - my AWS bill last month was $2.50. For that kind of money, it's hard to justify the time and expense of rolling my own remote NAS solution. (I know over the long run I might be able to build the remote NAS solution for less money, but figure in electricity costs and potential drive replacements, and I'm not sure that solution would be that much cheaper. It would all depend on how long the drives last.)

I saw a young woman in EPCOT back in December that was walking around with the selfie stick constantly extended. It looked like she was videoing her entire vacation... and she was at the center of the video the whole time. Everything else in EPCOT was background - all of its beautiful buildings, people in costumes, performances, fountains, etc. The amount of narcissism required to accomplish that astounds me. I get self conscious when my wife and I snap one or two pictures of ourselves (no selfie stick). I can't imagine having - and watching - and entire video of myself walking around all day.

He rides outside when the weather is good and uses an indoor solution when the weather is bad, and you say he's likely a danger when he rides outside again? Seems a bit extreme. People don't forget balance and handling when they get outside again; neck problems kept me off bikes for ~10 years and I was able to hop right back into it without a problem.

If you're so tightly wound that a wiggle out of the guy next to you would cause a problem, then you're the danger, not him.