This is one way to mention "circuit" and "220" in the same sentence having nothing to do with electricity.

Some suggestions:

1) Pick a job where you will be involved with writing software/firmware in the manufacturing business. Chances are you will be on your feet for a good part of the day, walking out to the production floor to debug various things.
2) During your daily breaks (most employers allow 2 or 3 of these throughout the day) go for a walk around where you work.
3) Take a "real" lunch where you physically leave the office instead of eating at your desk, reading slashdot. Walk to the eating place or bring your lunch and walk with it and eat it outside. That way you will get sunshine (Vitamin D) and some physical movement as well.
4) To reduce "chair time" further, actually get up and walk over to whomever you need to speak with vs. just dialing them up on the office phone system. Every little bit helps.

I believe Target (and other retailers) _do_ encode pricing information when marking down items for clearance. That way they can keep marking the price down and not have to create separate products in their database. The barcode often contains the markdown info as well as the SKU. I bet he was sticking red "clearance" stickers on these items and setting his own price, encoded in the label.

Costco for me too... another bonus is you can (for a fee) get an archival-quality DVD along with your prints. Those two together should make for a decent archival system that lasts a long time. Also, it's nice to be able to share with family members and they can order their own prints to pickup at their local Costco. I used to print my own at home, but it got too expensive and time-consuming, especially with a growing family.

Funny, we just ran into this very situation at work today. Since we happened to have a band saw capable of cutting metal, someone just simply cut it right in half. Took about 30 seconds and it was rendered useless.

I'd rather have one of these: http://www.mbed.org/ I've been using these for personal projects and various tasks at work, and they've been a dream to work with, especially coming from the world of closed-source, proprietary PIC microcontrollers and the expensive compilers they require to get a decent high-level language working.

Having recently installed several more Linux boxes at work and home after being away from Linux for awhile, I am once again reminded how elegant and efficient the Linux OS really is. It was actually a fun project to install, configure, and add packages to these machines. Unlike installing a new Windows box where I need to reboot at least 3 times in order for it to pull down all the required updates, this was refreshing and reaffirmed my appreciation of the Linux OS. Linux isn't going away any time soon, sorry.

This isn't a "secret"... it's been in the iPhone (and iPod for that matter) for quite a long time. This same serial port is how 3rd party docks and cables control the device from the outside: http://www.adriangame.co.uk/ipod-acc-pro.html

I disagree. Look at images #3 and #4. The WebP versions are clearly sharper and more detailed than their JPEG counterparts. Other than that, the rest of the images are so close it's difficult to tell which is better. For a 39% size reduction, I think WebP has a clear advantage over JPEG. Some questions remaining are a) will companies actually adopt WebP and popularize it, or will it die a quiet death, and b) how CPU and memory-intensive is the algorithm to implement compared to JPEG, especially in mobile devices with limited resources and CPU power?

If you try the google search engine in Chrome right now, the RT search is working, and it's awesome!!! I tried FF3.5 and IE8 and they still show the old "static" search ATM.

I've done a lot of scripting for Windows in Python lately and I must say it's been a pure joy. There'a a TON of APIs and it's very easy to whip up something powerful quickly. You should be able to find an easy way to talk to the LAN printers (via sockets, etc.) and sending email from Python is also a breeze.