I have a St Louis number and I'm currently 400 some odd miles away and was able to port mine last month with Virgin Mobile. You might want to double check that.

There is way too much pressure on the teachers to take responsibility for their kids. They want the teachers to fill in the parental gap. Long term, that alone is a recipe for burnout. You make some very valid points, but there also need to be some other perspective changes from the administrative side.

My wife's a math teacher, who teaches primarily freshmen, with a high percentage of the classes having kids with learning disabilities. She's got attitude and behavior problems and is consistently sending the same kids to the office. If no action is taken to get rid of problem kids, how does that not engender an attitude of helplessness. If you can't take steps to make your situation better, how are you long term going to be motivated to try new things to get better results.

She's been teaching 5 years. She hasn't broken yet, but were I in her place... I'm not sure I'd be that resilient.

If you do things too well, there will be no impetus for management to change. If you don't have time to correctly fix the problems you are just continuing your pain. Many of those problems/hacks likely exist because the guy before you was trying to get them features as quickly as they wanted and it snowballed on him.

It will likely continue unless you can communicate with management. I personally speak in too much detail for non-technical people and this has been a huge hindrance. If you aren't speaking on their level of understanding, you're Charlie Brown's teacher.

I'm not saying don't put in extra time to fix things. I am saying if they are going to keep expecting you to work miracles, that it's abuse.

People undervalue technical work. You see someone building a house and you know that it is an actual object. It has 3 dimensions. It has running water and can withstand all sorts of weather. You have a visible, touchable result. With IT work, all your doing is typing in notepad or clicking on images to them. You're effectively building an iceberg.

To the non-technical, programs are anthropomorphic. The program thinks for itself and it reasons about a problem on its own. If you're consistently hearing "all you have to do is" after you've already explained what you have insufficient data in order to make a decision, you're not going to make them happy. They will forget your compromise and continue thinking in their terms without any basis in reality. In that case, run.

Guess so.. doubt I'll be doing many more identity manager products... wonder what happens to that and eDirectory.

No matter how much VMWare is willing to pay, Novell can't afford to lose that part of the company. They are already hardly relevant. They need SuSe and the clout they have to make sure that they have a suitable place to run all of their other software. I'd guess they'd have to get the whole company instead of just the SuSe division.

This was the first thing in a while on the internet to blow my mind. Thanks for the explanation.. my wikipediaing/googling failed.

AT&T was supposed to release one(HTC Lancaster) at the end of July, but backed out with little fanfare. I dealt with a Blackberry with a non-working 0 for a month in order to get that one with my upgrade.... only to end up with another blackberry.

I wouldn't count on anything from AT&T until you can see it in the store.