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Comment I try to find a home for nearly every part of it (Score 2, Informative) 308

Platters = mirrors and windchimes. I attack them with a grinder if they really need to be wiped.
Magnets = good fun and usefulness
Logic boards = into a box at work until I call for the next pickup from the free PC recycling company
Aluminum chassis and aluminum platter spacers = aluminum recycling bin
Screws = trash

Comment Re:Died with Woowoo BS but... (Score 2, Interesting) 131

I noticed this phenomenon about a decade back. Used to be in the 70s and 80s, when you went to Walt Disney World in Florida, it had this solid "golly gee" factor when talking about the future, especially at Epcot or Tomorrowland at the Magic Kingdom. I don't pick up on that so much now; in fact I pick up on a definite retrospective and/or nostalgic feeling when I go there. It's like, now that pretty much any thing is possible technologically, talking about something that's not present but possible is just an exercise in talking about something that will be here when the engineers figure out how to make it profitably.
To paraphrase Yogi, "The future ain't what it used to be."

Comment Driving is the issue (Score 1) 287

I drive 60 miles a day for work, whether I work 15 minutes or 14 hours. I'm all for whatever has me driving one less day, since that's 60 miles off my car and gas tank at a whack. Actually, 4 longer days would work really well, since that would put a sizable amount of my work day outside of normal office hours, so I'd get fewer people contacting me for help during my work day, which translates into more concentration.

Comment Re:nobody has heard of kvm? (Score 1) 628

How will I use two mice then? I usually have two computers with their monitors close to each other, one set up for right-hand mouse and the other set up for left-hand mouse, so if I need to do two different things on the computers, I can sit between the monitors and grab a mouse in each hand and glance back and forth and alternate what I'm doing. There's no way I'm the only one doing this...

Comment Re:Getting old in IT is the kiss of death. (Score 1) 783

That's where being older can be either a curse or a benefit. If you can age but still retain the ability and desire to learn new things, you have the potential of possessing several assets newer workers don't have:
1) A sense of perspective. This problem may be bad, but you've likely seen worse.
2) More emotional maturity. The ability to deal with non-IT types and not lose your cool is invaluable.
3) Deeper troubleshooting senses. Familiar or not, if the device's optical drive doesn't work, you're not likely going to shout "Defrag!".
4) A grasp of the way computer systems in general work. Bits are bits. Directory systems are directory systems. Permissions are permissions. The implementations change, but if you're around long enough, you will have seen something like it before.
5) You've learned that specializing is great for the short term, but if you want to keep it up, that can be a real bear. A CCIE from 1999 won't still be a CCIE in 2009 unless they've been studying for the last decade. But that 1999 CCIE is likely a very good networking tech.

Comment Re:Experts everywhere are bound to be weird... (Score 1) 579

Old news, old news. The portrait of J. Random Hacker from way back still holds true.
http://catb.org/jargon/html/appendixb.html
I find, however, that my best understanding of programmers and other computer gurus is by visualizing them as the intersection of several descriptions:
Asperger's intersecting J. Random Hacker intersecting the local definitions of "weird", "geeky", and "nerdy". Usually, no one of us fits any one of these definitions exactly, but in that confluence of them, a very real commonality emerges.

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