The thing that worries me about porting to Google Voice is the articles that Google is going to kill Voice in the near future and bring some or most of the features into G+. Whether it's still useful for my purposes will depend on what they do with the changeover. What they did with Latitude made that feature unuseable and we ended going to a different solution. So I'll wait and see and take another look post-transition.

Again, it must depend on the area. Wife has an (older) Roku downstairs, and daughter has a blu-ray player with netflix upstairs, and they can stream simultaneously with no issues. The only time this is not true is if I'm downloading something massive.

I dunno, it must depend on the area. I got FIOS from Verizon when it first became available, and when they sold it to Frontier (apparently because Verizon Wireless wanted to enter into a business deal with Comcast) the only thing that happened to us is that the customer service became more responsive and more pleasant to talk to. What I've seen is that the "minimum" speed keeps going up (probably pressure from Comcast cable modem) and our cost has not increased.

Mind you, I do not buy cable TV from Frontier (or anyone). These days, cable TV is an unnecessary expense. I only get internet and phone. (And the land line is also unnecessary, really. I only keep it because we've had the same phone number since the late eighties.)

If you don't want to buy one, you can rent a log splitter in many areas. Moreover, as someone else pointed out, a hydraulic log splitter works with knotted up wood, not just the very easy to split wood in the example.

I had this problem when I first started college. You can work at best part time while going to school full time, and have to crowd into an apartment to be able to afford it, and often we'd be counting out change to make rent, which left very little for food. You haven't lived until you've dined on boiled rice and ketchup packets because that's all you had in the kitchen.

I don't know how it is now, but I tried for food stamps at the time, and ran into a catch-22: You couldn't qualify if you shared a cooking area with roommates, but if you were well off enough to live by yourself, you were too well off to qualify.

A partial solution for me, since I had to work anyway, was to get a job in the food industry. I worked in a restaurant, which included one meal during my shift, so at worst I was guaranteed one meal a day three or four days a week. Later I got a job at a supermarket which gave discounts and other food related benefits to employees. For instance, they sometimes overbought on whole hams for the holidays, and employees were allowed to buy them at a reduced price, with free slicing and packaging. I loaded up my freezer and had ham... for a long... time... Moreover, working at the store puts you first in line for loss leaders, freight-damaged, and discontinued items. (And I know that's a misuse of "loss leader", but the store allowed it.)

Other issues to be cognizant of besides mere starvation are nutrition and food poisoning. The first because of the tendency to eat the same thing over and over, and the second because you may be too distracted to remember to put food back in the fridge, and too hungry not to eat it anyway.

Part of the problem, I think, is that college kids are young and often fresh out of home, and don't often have the life experiences to foresee what their needs are going to be and arrange to be in a place where those needs can be met. There's a tendency to live in the moment, not think ahead, and that causes "the moment" to often include boiled rice and ketchup packets.

> This fosters an unhealthy culture and climate by sending a message to employees that it is more important to focus on how things look from the top than how they actually are down below.

In what world is outsourcing not the same culture in spades? Specifically, a few suits and a few lucky fourth or fifth level professionals selling the idea that a bunch of farmers with three hours of training can take over IT? This only works when the people making the decisions have a fundamental misunderstanding of the problem they're trying to solve.

As if Californians didn't have enough power problems... I'm glad I don't live there.

...in this case, they might have a point.

> The idea of change management is to ensure that changes are tracked, but this sounds like bureaucratic crap.

Yep, that often happens when the people who are putting together the change management system have little experience with the issues that a change management system is supposed to fix. You then get hilarity like systems that prevent reasonable reaction time to production outages, "blanket" notification for every single change, a process that can't be successfully negotiated in less than a week, or my personal favorite, a mandatory process with no owners.

The issues as I see them are (a) what does the change entail? (a Red Hat "patch" sometimes will change the RHEL version number, which may take your apps out of compliance) (b) what else does it affect? (Sun patches often installed a virgin sendmail.cf, rendering email inoperable) (c) have you tested this change in a non-production environment? (if you're going to brick a server, do dev first) (d) will we be able to look back later and figure out what change occurred when and by who?

But this often degenerates into the managerial equivalent of a hen party, driven by people with way too much time on their hands, and the value is lost.

I'm not sure that CAB is necessarily the right solution, but patching really is a problem and can't be done blindly unless your business can take the occasional production hit.

Admin is outsourced at out company, (I'm a former sysadmin who now does application admin, still local) and the contract apparently specifies "current minus one", which means we patch frequently on all platforms. The problem is, the offshore admins have no context, no idea what server provides what resources, (and yes, we've tried to educate them -- the information gets "lost" within weeks or months) and no conception of the idea of patching first on dev, then test, then prod. They manage patches by version numbers not by environments, which means a collection of patches may be announced (to all and sundry because they refuse to use the contact list) is a hodgepodge of development, sandbox and production servers. Information is commonly that the servers "will be patched" but not to what version, which has caused contractual support problems (where a server is running a more recent version of the OS than is supported by the app). Other joys have involved bricking prod servers with firmware patches, because they didn't try them in test first, insisting on doing nonessential servers on the weekends instead of evenings (because, no context) and forgetting that when it's daytime over there, it's dark over here, and I'm probably not going to be at my desk at 0'dark thirty to give some last minute approval to take a server down.

It's a mess, and the CAB process, as obnoxious as it is (we sit through 150 -- 200 change descriptions every week) serves to catch many of the above issues. The outsourcing company is annoyed by this -- they just want to patch -- but we have the process as self defense against very real issues.

What I'd recommend to the OP is to hire someone to manage the CAB process. We did, and it worked out pretty good.

> I'm glad I was able to make it, retire, and now I only program for fun again like I did back when I was young. But I did that by living on half of what I made (which was a lot thankfully).

This is hard to confess. That's one of my biggest regrets, that I wasn't strong enough at the time to stand up to my wife and say, yes, I make six figures right now, but it may not last forever and we should plan accordingly. I was under huge pressure to spend money on her, to the point that for a time I was spending more than what I was making. (I calculated once that just under 2/3 of my net pay was going into food and entertainment alone.) By the time I grew a spine and started cutting back, I barely had enough time to approach debt-neutrality before the bust came. And then, a long period out of work. I nearly lost the house.

Anyone who wasn't an idiot would have continued to live simply, invest, pay off the house, and get ready for hard times. Had I done this, I might have chosen to retire when the crash came, and pursue activities that aren't as profitable but are more enjoyable than my geek job. I take small comfort that I didn't live quite as large as some of my associates during the boom, and didn't fall as far during bust. I could have done better, and should have.

That article is an excellent example of the complete absence of usable statistics. "Involve a cell phone" is very different from "mugged for their cell phone". Thefts are up 40%... from what? 10 people to 14 people? Of those 1.6 million people who had their handsets stolen last year, how many had their handsets stolen in the commission of a robbery where they took everything? How many were a purse snatching which happened to include a cell phone? In other words, is the real issue that criminals are targeting cell phones, or is it that more people have cell phones than at any time in the country's history, which would necessitate an increase in having them stolen?

I could probably make a case that most muggings involve theft of driver's licenses. Does this mean that thieves are targeting driver's licenses, or is it because the card is usually kept in the same wallet or pocketbook as the cash and credit cards?

Stolen iphones can be sold for "upwards of" $2K. What's the median? What's the volume? Is this a real problem?

...and why would police care? Smartphones are rapidly becoming commodity items, and police have already demonstrated (to me at least) that they don't care about the theft of more valuable items than mere smartphones. For theft that doesn't involve violence, they give you a case number for your insurance and that's the end of their involvement. With the possible exception of stolen firearms, which the police seem to take far more seriously. So lessee... firearms, smartphones... what do these have in common?

Because law enforcement wants it.

Comcast swore up and down that they didn't do traffic shaping on their networks. But now that Netflix has paid Comcast not to do traffic shaping and they've stopped. Doing what they said. They weren't. Doing. I don' geddit.

I assumed that. I know "robbed" technically implies a home invasion, but I was assuming he meant "mugged". (Which I agree may not be a valid assumption.) My comment meant: If the crime rate in the area where you live is so high that being robbed for something as trivial as a cell phone (it used to be tennis shoes...) is common, you might consider relocating to some place where that's less likely to happen. Parenthetically, I think this (not robbed for cell phones but crime rates in general) might have been the original reason people who could afford it moved out of the city into the suburbs.

I travel around the continental US for work, was an early adopter of cell phones, (worked as a contractor for a provider for awhile) and I've never had a phone stolen. Not once. Of course, (a) I always have my cell on me, so stealing it would involve interacting with me in some fashion (and I'm pretty big...) (b) I tend to buy a little better than I need and then keep it for a very long time, so the cell I'm carrying at any given moment is pretty beat up, and (c) I've never owned an Apple mobile device. I think they're trendy nonsense and I'm not surprised that they get stolen a lot. Like trendy overpriced tennis shoes used to be. But mostly, I try to stay out of areas where crime is common. (That time in Miami was an accident....)