Comment Re:Finding the crowd (Score 1) 19
Oh and hey - that picture was taken BEFORE I turned ugly!
Oh and hey - that picture was taken BEFORE I turned ugly!
Never said I was coming, sorry if I misled anyone... it's too long of a drive for me now that I no longer live in the city, and too much time taken away from the family now that I have one.
I do know what it's like to be the only one showing up at a gathering, though - usually it's me!
If you're the first to arrive, set your phone's SSID to something relevant and let people triangulate on it.
I have a 6-yr-old and a 3-yr-old. So far the smaller one is happy enough with a few kid-friendly games on mom's iPhone (very sparingly, a few times a week at most) but I'm finding the 6-yr-old very engaged with online casual puzzle games. He's not quite ready for escape-the-room-type stuff, but there are quite a few kid-friendly puzzlers out there - check JayIsGames.com, you can search by tags and I use "kidfriendly" and "puzzle" (and "flash" because I'm not downloading anything, even if I did have Windows around)
While others may disagree, I'm happy to let the local schools teach the basic 3 R's; later on I'll supplement the history and geography and science. Right now I'm more interested in making sure he has analytical skills, including skeptical thinking and inductive reasoning. He's not the math/science geek I was at his age. So I'm trying to make sure he learns as much as possible about puzzles and different ways of solving them. "Rubble Trouble" is a current favorite, but that's only after we've gone through most of the Bonte stable (especially "Factory Balls"! he solved virtually all of them, not bad for (at the time) a 5-year-old)
As for the 3-yr-old, he loves Angry Birds first and foremost, but is just as happy tossing the birds to the left as to the right. He's developing differently and takes things at his own speed, so we're kind of feeling our way forward. (by contrast with the older boy, who's basically a carbon copy of my wife's personality) If he ends up more like me there'll be no keeping him away from the more analytical, strategy-type games - violence-based or otherwise - and he'll be wanting to modify the games as soon as he's finished with 'em... I'll certainly be showing him puzzles of every shape and size until we find a genre he likes.
Kids can only be steered so far. But there's enough out there that you can find something that you and the child can agree on for almost any combination of "you" and "the child"!
I was at the 10-yr event too. But back then I had a lot fewer calls on my time - now there's 2 small kids and a fulltime work AND school schedule to contend with. So I'm afraid I'll only be there in spirit...
Just when I think I live in a remote corner of the world, something like this shows up - this guy came within a few hundred meters of picking up my SSID...
And it's just about exactly one year after the "Craig from Windsor" notes began showing up all around where I work, and went viral online.
Wonder what'll happen next March?
I never see this mentioned, but I wonder, what's the shelf life of the charge on these things? Once topped off, how long can you leave it until it drains itself? It can't be indefinite, from my memory of physics.
I know NiMH cells drain fairly fast (compared to non-reusable batts) - I think the half life is in the range of a few months. If ultracaps are comparable, that's probably good enough, but if it's hours or days, there may be some adjustment issues...
The people who've said networking is the way to go are, of course, right. All my best jobs have come that way; what few I've gotten from the classifieds (online or otherwise) have been crummy.
But either way, I've learned that it's best to try for jobs with smaller companies. Anyplace big enough to have an HR department will, often as not, screen out your resume if it lacks some credential they specify (college degree at a minimum, usually), whereas a smaller outfit will have a human reading them and might actually give your application enough attention to see that you have something to offer.
Once you get an interview, your degree or lack thereof no longer is important. Just like it won't matter if you actually get the job. What the degree does for you is keep your resume from being tossed out the door during the first round of culling.
Numeric stability is probably not all that important when you're guessing.