I didn't feel the earthquake in San Jose, which is further south than Sunnyvale. The real fun begins when the East Coast media starts running stories about how California is sliding into the ocean. CNN once did a story about a minor 3.0 quake in Los Angeles by showing a grocery store surveillance tape with nothing falling off the shelves as the camera shook from being mounted on the wall. Most Californians don't even notice quake unless its 5.0 or higher.

I was misdiagnosed as mentally retarded when I was kindergarten due to hearing lost in one ear that wasn't diagnosed until years later. I traveled around the county in little yellow school buses, and puking my guts out every morning from motion sickness, to attend special ed classes. For six years in a row, I blew out the evaluation exams on the genius side of the scale and told each time that it was statistical fluke.The school system made three times more money from mentally retarded students. From the first through eight grades, I was told I was an idiot.

I didn't bother to go to high school. Spent four years at home teaching myself from a personal library of 400 books, reading newspapers and news magazines, and watching documentaries on public television. Learning what I wanted to learn with a wide-ranging curiosity.

After working with my father in construction for a few years, I enrolled in the adult re-entry program at the local community college. With a fifth-grade math and writing skills, and a college-level reading comprehension, it took me four years to get my associate degree in general education. I had trouble getting level-entry jobs because I didn't have a high school diploma.

A decade later I went back to the community college to earn an associate degree in computer programming. Uncle Sam picked up the tab with a $3,000 USD tax credit to change careers. That took five years going part-time while working 80 hours per week as a lead video game tester. I made the president's list for maintaining a 4.0 GPA in my major when I graduated.

Some people still think I'm an idiot to this day.

I worked at a video game company that went on a spending spree prior to the dot com bust. Only later did upper management realized that they paid two to four times the actual value of each takeover. Crap in, crap out.

I did a PC refresh project where I came upon a cubicle that had 40+ half-filled cups of coffee with mold growing at different stages. After consulting with my project manager, the user didn't get a new computer and the daily report noted why. Both the user and the moldy cups got the boot shortly thereafter.

Boring as hell. NSA people lived uninteresting lives. No wonder they're spying on the rest of America.

You can pretty much ignore everything around you that doesn't violate company policies. Except child pornography. I did a PC refresh project at a local hospital when my coworker came across child pornography on a workstation. He reported it to our supervisor. Together they reported it security. They each had separate meetings with the security chief and the hospital attorney.

The worker -- a high-level administrator -- freaked out when he didn't get a new computer and his old computer sat on his desk without the hard drive. We stonewalled him on what happened to the hard drive, as security confiscated the hard drive as evidence. He spent a whole day running around like a chicken with his head cut off, unable to do any work and no one saying anything to him. Police were waiting for him the next morning. Because this was a hospital that had a reputation to protect, the news media didn't report on the case.

Did I say Rolodex? Sorry, I meant LinkedIn.

My new job is like that. A 90-minute training session goes on for three hours. Most of the trainers are working from home as all the new contractors are working on site. They're comfortable with kids and dogs running underfoot at home. Like most tech companies where everyone has worked for a long time (eight or more years), there's no documentation and key work knowledge are locked away in people's head.

My time limit is 15 minutes. If no one shows up or I'm not informed that people will be late, I'll leave. I startled many recruiters and hiring managers by walking out on them if an interview doesn't start promptly. Since my Rolodex contain the names of 600+ recruiters, my time is too valuable to waste.

My father and my first boss taught to me complete my work first and then slack off because there was no more work to complete. Most people try to stretch things out during the day to look busy and get into a jam when something urgent crash lands on their desk. It's not my fault if my boss can't provide me with enough work to keep me busy all day.

As a tech contractor, I only work 40 hours a week from Monday through Friday. My contract doesn't allow me to work overtime or make up time(i.e., if some idiot throws himself in front of the morning train). I earned enough money and live a modest lifestyle to salt away half of my income into savings. The only work I do from home is filling out and submitting my time sheet.

Nah... He has ball sack hanging off the truck hitch.

My older brother used to drive around with an opened beer can between his legs in the 1970's. I wonder why he never thought to duct tape the beer can to the steering wheel and drink from a straw.

I got 500+ FPS when I ran Quake on a dual-core AMD processor and a Radeon 3870 video card. Haven't tested it since I got a quad-core AMD processor and a Radeon 6970 video card.

LinkedIn has a new feature to list your certifications and corresponding badges on your profile page. While checking it out, ACM was listed in the pulldown. I had an ACM membership while in college. I was wondering if becoming a member again and adding ACM to my resume would make a difference.