It's not just "let's get started, folks". There are intra-song cues and signals coming from the conductor's baton that must be detected - instructing a small group of instruments or voices to start and stop independently of the rest of the group, instructions to hold and fade a note, instructions to chop off a long finale ... it's a complex and almost entirely gesture-based communication.

However, when it comes to the very moment of starting, or the change of tempi, my start will always come too late.

Ah .. the trauma of remembering band practice:

Every conductor has a different style. The signal to start your part of a song that has already begun may be a small flick or pointing of the baton in your general direction, barely interrupting the overall tempo of the conducting, or if you have a dramatic conductor it can be a two-handed "picador going over the horns" gesture ... or no gesture at all.

Because the baton may be signalling to someone near the OP - in front or behind - but not the OP, the problem is discrimination as much as detection.

Also, it's not always a down beat. Changes of volume, extended notes and the final cut off of a long final note may be sweeping or tiny gestures sideways or straight towards the choir or orchestra.

Very few conductors will make big changes in tempo from what was practiced. No good will come of it.

In short, it might be more practical to start on the second note and drop out on the next to last note, paying attention to the parts of the production that immediately precede your bits so you are ready for it.

Almost every university has a technical writing department. Those students often need real-world projects for their classes.

Call the professors and ask them if they would like some real-world software for their students to document.

I used to get paid to WTFMs. If there was a good functional specification for the hardware or software, I could have the first draft done about the same time the early testing started, and much of it was lifted from the specs. You don't have to see it working to describe what it is supposed to do.

If I had to WTFM for something with a bad spec or no spec, something that was being developed ad hoc ... it took a lot longer.

So when will they implement [Bug 3959] Outline View. It's been on the request list for 10 years, has 343 votes, and it's the only thing that keeps me using MS Word.

I'll edit books for pay if you have the money up-front, but if I were expected to work on contingency (not being paid until the book sells, and only getting a portion of the sales) I would reject all books that didn't have a chance at making it ... just like a real publisher. If Amazon were paying me to edit books, they would want me to reject books that are unfixable, those books that wouldn't make enough money to pay for the cost of my editing services and their overhead ... just like a real publisher.

So how will your deal with rejection?

Have you read what's on Lulu.com and in the Amazon self-pubIished sections?

I buy books from real publishing houses because their editors have slogged through the piles of badly written crap for me and picked out books with an interesting plot.

This is the kind of schedule that should be banned if only by a QC manager concerned only with productivity and quality ... you can't possibly be efficient when your schedule is being yanked around like that.

I have tried, but never could adjust to swing shifts ... my biological clock wants me comatose between 9PM and midnight. I can easily work night shift as long as I get a few hours sleep just before going to work.

Also skeptical because they reports don't distinguish between types of shift work. There is a huge difference between working "straight swing/night shift" (always on the same shift), "rotating shifts" where you never get a chance to settle in to a schedule because every couple weeks everyone is rotated to another shift, and even working random shifts like the air traffic controllers do where they are working all three shifts during the course of any week.

Your body can adjust to straight shifts - I worked for several years on a straight 11-7 night shift and never had any of the problems they mention. Coming home in the early AM before the boy-toy left took care of the sexless part. :) My sleep schedule shifted to two 4-hour sessions (11AM to 2Pm and 6PM to 10PM) ... waking up to have dinner with the boytoy and head for work. I had plenty of time in the morning and late afternoon to do things ... I loved it. We had a evening and night shift that was self-selected ... most of the night shift were early risers when not on night shift, not ones who normally stayed up until 2AM. WE had convinced our bodies that we were getting up just "extra early". The swing shift (3-11) had most of those "owls".

Rotating shifts ... suck! You barely get your schedule set in and are sleeping well again when they yank your inner clock out by the roots and toss it in the trash. I've worked them, but only briefly. No one on ANY of the shifts is at full efficiency for the first couple of weeks of the new schedule.

Random shifts, double and triple shifts ... utterly stupid! There's enough research on sleep and efficiency and biological clocks to convince me that these are designed to ensure maximum inefficiency. I've coped with a few extraordinary work sessions ... three straight days (that's 9 work shifts) during a blizzard when the rest of the staff was snowed in, but we were taking frequent naps to keep our efficiency up. If you expect to get efficiency on really long or random shifts, you need naps.

Let's flip the question and see how it sounds:

"I'm interested in getting an English Lit degree. I've been reading since I was 5, and like many of us, taught myself. I am familiar with a number of languages, understand paradigms, themes and subtexts; I'm familiar with common plot arcs and am a decent writer. I learn quickly. I work 2 jobs and I have a life. I want to get an English Lit degree from an accredited school (a BA, that is), but I have no interest in wasting any of my precious time taking classes in Math, Science, Biology, Chemistry and the like. While these fields are useful, they will not contribute to making me better at writing. Moreover, I attended an excellent high school that covered these fields of study in great detail, and I feel no need or desire to spend more time studying these things. I want a BA in English Lit with no science requirements. Any suggestions?"

Would the OP agree that high school presents enough of a background in the sciences to let me slide through without setting foot in any of the gen-ed science courses?

While the Internet played a huge role in relatively developed Egypt, it might be worth pointing out that less than 7% of Libya's population has Internet access, and most of those people are in Tripoli.

You might have said the same about telephone in Belgium during WWI - almost no one had a telephone in their home except the wealthy and the business and government offices - but it was critical to their resisting the Germans as long as they did.

While there are surely isolated pockets of connectivity in the Western parts of the country, the usage is minimal and may not actually have a great impact on this revolution.

It already has. This is as much a "hearts and minds" kind of war as it is a bullets war. Uploading videos to YouTube and FaceBook, IMs with reporters, Twitter to coordinate relief efforts.

I didn't have burns, I have recurring bouts of tendonitis which makes it impossible to work a mouse or grasp a stylus.

So I switched hands. The first few days really pissed me off! I was so slow! But it got better fairly rapidly, and now I tend to switch off a few times a week to give the dominant hand a rest and keep the other hand in practice.

The non-dominant hand will never be as fast as the dominant hand, but if I have a choice between nothing and 70-80% ... I'll take what I can get.

Having to learn new equipment and/or software as well as new dexterity would have been much harder. Switching hands left the domain knowledge usable, and all I had to do was train some muscles.