When I hire a new graduate I look for two things.

1. Have they had a job? Not necessarily a programming job but just some job. I can't abide with having to teach the basic stuff like arriving on time (and on time is up to 10:00am ino ur team), calling in when sick and dressing tidy (daily showers are a bonus). But more importantly I don't want to hire someone who has good grades because mum and dad paid all the bills so they could spend all their time studying. If they've done 20 hours a week somewhere and received good grades they I'm really interested. It's nice if they've got outside interests too, Football, Church, Charity, Travel whatever. Oh and volunteer work is a huge bonus

2.Can they fit in with my team? Do they have a personality that will fit in or are they a really smart turd?

Once they start with me us I expect it to take six months before I'm getting class work out of them. I expect them to take on some of the crap jobs to start with (another reason work experience helps) but I have a plan in place. I start them on something important but not urgent so there is time for them to do rework. I expect them to make mistakes, I expect them to fix their own problems with support of peers and I expect to spend time mentoring them. They are an apprentice and I treat them like they still need training. I do not accept other developers fixing the trainees mistakes without their involvement.

If we get it wrong we cut the relationship.

I spend a lot of time on them and expect them to work hard but we're very generous with ensureing that they become a very worthwhile team member.... then the challenge is keeping them but that is a whole other story...

We are in the middle of summer and the whole country is getting stomped on. On the West Coast around Perth (faces the Indian Ocean) there has been a huge heat wave followed by massive storms and Cyclones.

On the east coast Queensland (facing the Pacific) has had record rains and floods and Victoria (facing the Southern Ocean) has had floods, Victoria is about to host the Australian Open Tennis final and it is predicted to exceed 40 Degrees Celsius (104 F)...

I can't wait for winter, but it does get pretty cold in Brisbane... I mean we actually had a day last year get down to 2 Degrees Celsius (35.6 F) but that was the middle of the night so it wasn't too rotten... but I was forced to cuddle up to my wife ;-)

The Queensland flood is supposed to be a 1 in 100 year event, we had the city under in 1974 and now 2011 but we also had enough water to do it in 1999 but the dams held it back...

Yep - I'll take pussy over TV every time

Sounds fair they should go to tender and be fair to all the other tablet pcs and not mention "ipad" directly. Chances are the idea won't fly anyway so there will never be ipads to complain about, people know what an ipad is not a tablet PC this is an election stunt :\

"I'm as just as capable as being sorry as you are"...

I love a "The Government are Idiots" story as good as anyone but this one just doesn't make sense. Last year the Birmingham Post (http://www.birminghampost.net/news/politics-news/2009/08/04/cost-of-new-birmingham-city-council-website-spirals-to-2-8m-65233-24307674/) stuck it to the council over a 383% growth in the cost of the website... it went from £580,000 to £2.8m. Where does the £48.4m come from? It comes from Capita's case study which IS NOT about the web site (http://www.capita.co.uk/about-us/Pages/Birmingham.aspx) Birmingham Council may or may not be doing the smart thing and Capita might be ripping off the good people of Birmingham... if it's like City Councils where I live then they are probably screwing up badly but this article is a load of crap

Try telling them that, they still believe they are descendents of Alexander the Great, it's become a madness in the country. The ruling party VMRO are using the whole "we are Alexander's people that conquered Persia the Greeks were our slaves" to a ridiculous level. It seems they have to in order to stop an invasion from Bulgaria and Albania. One quarter of the population are Albanian and Bulgarians claim the FYRMians speak Bulgarian (hell, they even televise their tv shows there an understand it). Greece has no territorial ambitions and only wants the facts to be know.

Fortunately the people who we should leave history to, the historians at well known universities, have stood up and done something about it:

http://macedonia-evidence.org/obama-letter.html

It depends at which point in history you are talking about when you say "historicaly". The Ancient region of Macedon is 90% within Greece. The Romans later redrew the borders and it changed several times until the Ottomans redrew the borders again to what the region is now. So, the current "historical region" is with the Ottoman drawn borders. The Ancient capital has always been Pella in Greece (where Alexander the Great was born).

As for the gentically descended part another nice piece of FYROM propaganda, the far right also claim they invented white people and that Greeks are from Ethiopia. They'll also claim Greeks are Christianised Turks but forget that the entire Balkans was occupied by the Ottomans, must have ommitted that part from the revised school textbooks (fact: they were revised again last week - "Textbook errors shame FYROM schools" http://www.balkaninsight.com/en/main/analysis/30188/).

Greece has every business to oppose the name, it is within the UN rules for a country to call itself whatever it wants as long as it doesn't offend anyone else, and quite frankly it offends many Greeks for a country having no business with the name "Macedonia". Tito renamed the area in the 40s to start a dispute with Greece to gain access to the Aegean. Communist propaganda goes a long way...

Think about this then, a country that has around 30% of a region, not even the Ancient region (which is 90% within Greece) but with Ottoman drawn borders, calls itself "Macedonia", of which Greece has 50% of that region, and then claims Alexander the Great (names the airport Alexander the Great airport - wtf), plans to build a 30metre statue in the capital Skopje (not even in the Ottoman drawn border region of Macedonian), claims Thessaloniki (they use the Bulgarian name Solun and call it their capital) is occupied by the Greeks (Serbia, Greece, Bulgaria, Ottoman Turkey fought in WWI, where is this "Macedonia" in these battles?), speak a Slavic-Bulgarian dialect, call their language "Macedonian", claim the "Macedonians" were expelled from Greece (were actually Communist traitors, some even Greek and still hold a grudge, for example Prime Minister Gruevski's grandfather fought for Greece and family want their property back after being exiled for being Communist traitors)... the picture that starts to unfold are a lot of people (not all) that use Greece as excuse for their problems much like most of the Middle East use Israel as a root of all evil.

Besides, Greece can wait this out, FYROM, which is 1/4 Albanian can't wait it out forever and when/if the current PM is gone the issue will be resolved.