Interesting timing on this question. I just spent the last couple of weekends building a stand up desk. I've been using a large corner desk I bought from Walmart about 10 years ago. The particle board underside of it was falling apart but the horizontal surfaces are fine so I mounted my monitors on the wall. I took a 30 inch long board, mounted it across the corner with medium fence hinges hidden on the back side. The hinges adjust at any angle and provide a lot of strength. I mounted the center monitor to the board so it would sit in the center of my view. I bought a couple of wire microwave carts from Walmart to put the desk surface on. The rest of the horizontal surfaces are mounted to the wall as shelves. The desk is now 35 inches high. I can stand at it. I need to raise my desk chair up a bit. I eventually want to get or make a standing chair. Something like the standing chairs from the bridge of the Liberator on the Blake's 7 series.

I swear I saw Jay and Silent Bob look a likes hanging outside the Trinity Mills site. I know more than a few came back from lunch stoned. You can't work any call center in the DFW area without running into a few ex-Stream folks.

Most of the help desks in the US are manned by people without degrees. There are plenty of people working help desk jobs while working towards a degree also. It’s kind of the new fast food job. The biggest difference between help desk workers with a degree and those without is the ones without don't owe huge student loans. I've seen plenty of people get a degree and stay in the help desk job. One of the biggest problems is if you have a degree and have a help desk job on your resume; employers will say "I see you have help desk experience!"

I'd like to see the original Red Faction open sourced. Many things could be done with it as an open source game. Besides porting, the geo mod engine could be improved to keep the player from hitting the damage limit wall. Best way to do that is to apply the damage back over a copy of the original map. It could also be the basis for a creation engine to all the player/user to add elements while in the map. Given how well it worked on limited resource machines of the time, updating it to make use of newer resource models while keeping how efficient it was at handling resources would make for some fantastic game play. I'd like to see Stargate / Guild Wars style portals added to jump from map to map in shared worlds.

I definitely do my share of Apple and Facebook bashing. I refuse to buy an i device because of the forced usage of iTunes to load content.

I only use Facebook to distribute links and other minor data to friends plus keep up with a few people I wouldn't otherwise have any contact with. I find Facebook to be very cumbersome and erratic on privacy settings. Disabling apps got mysteriously re-enabled on it's on.

My biggest problems with Microsoft lately is the same with most big companies; the patent trolling and they seem to want to take Windows in ways that annoy both users and people supporting those users. They are like supermarkets that insist on changing the whole store around to make the store "fresh" yet just confuses the hell out of customers. Plus they seem to want to reinvent the wheel with every version of the OS rather than building on stable code/features. It's no surprise that they aren't doing as well as they used to because it cost lots of $ to reinvent things over and over and over...

I admit I haven't bashed Google as much as they deserve, give me time. ;)

I was discussing 3D printing with the parts guy at the Honda dealership this morning. Like most people he had no clue that this tech even exists and what kind of impact it's going to be over the next 10 years. I told him it's only a matter of time before companies see downloadable 3D models as a threat and start trying to protect their designs. I also told him it won't be long before companies start screaming to have the patent laws extended like they are doing with copyright law.

Just make a keyboard with high copper content (copper, brass, bronze), any microbes on it will die... Just goes to show you that steampunk is the way to go with keyboards!

Saw that one coming...

Why is he relying on such archaic equipment? There is far better equipment out there than what he is using. Even assuming he doesn't want to undergo some sort of implant, there is eye scanning tech, EEG devices, etc. They are even putting them in toys these days.

Link the EEG from a Force Trainer into a computer with a eye scanning device and a android tablet in front of him. He could use the EEG device to let the eye scanning computer to know when to start looking at his eye movements, it would track where he's looking at on the android screen interface and using either the EEG or a twitch to let the interface know when to simulate a screen touch. He would be able to communicate on a large tablet at least as fast as normal person using their finger to touch the screen. He could even have an app setup to control the chair movements or even to control a robot.

For that matter he could even have someone implant a control device in a tiger and use an android app to control the tiger to take out his enemies. :)

If you want to push the metric system, start with the meteorologists, weather broadcasts and such. If people are eased into thinking of the temperature in metric the other systems will be that much easier.

I'm all for the US changing to metric but in a trade off, I think a push should be made by the few left hand drive countries to convert over to right hand drive as it's used by a large majority of the world. They money savings by the auto industry would be huge.

The old phrase "No good deed goes unpunished" comes to mind. This is never more true than in IT. The more work you do, the more your expected to do, usually without any additional rewards, monetary or otherwise. If you do that then what's to stop them from expecting you to support this on top of your existing duties plus they'll start coming to you when they need other things done. If companies expect their IT people to do development work then they need to add free time to your schedule to allow you to do activities such as development.

I work on a help desk. I have seen more and more work expected of people in my position over the years. At one of the companies I've worked for over the years, a corporate big wig said something in a company wide email about why the company couldn't be more like Google. My thought is that the trend of micromanagement gets in the way of being more like Google. If companies don't put free time in people's schedules and a clear reward for free time work done then employees don't have incentive to do anything extra for the company. If employees come up with something important to the company then they should be migrated to work on that project full time.

I think Paramount or CBS should sue Apple over the IPAD.

If Apple is the new MS, then that would make MS the new Commodore.

And I bet he is one of the ones that called into a help desk during the Blackberry outage while it was being broadcast all over the news and he likely heard a front end message on the help desk line about the outage then stayed on the line to get help because he couldn't get email on his Blackberry.

I wish the source code for the original Red Faction would be released. The damage & map sizes could be increased for larger amounts of memory. Also the core of the game could be used for other types of games. I'd like to see it modded to allow portal jumps added to allow people to cross from server to server.