My own story is a bit different.

I'll be recovering from the end of a relationship I thought was going to be for keeps. I thought I was getting the greatest lady in the world and maybe a % of two lovely and special kids. I did get a lot of wonderful gifts (not of the material kind) along the way.

It's not just a broken heart that makes this noteworthy, it is the reason. She's a trauma and abuse survivor dating back to pre-verbal times. The lovely, positive, smart, open minded, adventurous, beautiful lady I loved lived with a Dragon as a guardian. It slumbered most of the time. Then one day, something put her in a dissociative mode where she could not communicate her wishes clearly and her state of communication impairment wasn't at all obvious. The trauma got fully evoked, the Dragon woke up, and both of us sustained greivious wounds to the heart and the destruction of all our hopes, plans, etc.

Everything going fine, incident (no sign of problem), days pass of normal activity, text indicating things hadn't happened as she wished but she felt she owned it, more days pass of normal activity, small break, email declaring me the evilest creature in the universe.

I tried to get heard, to make the point about what I could know and what she could communicate, to reject projections as to my motives or thoughts, and to empathize. I tried to insert the grey and get the truth heard, but the old wounds brought forward (as happens in these cases) provided a context that tainted the memories of the current events. They also are clung to tenaciously by the brain as accepting a reaction that caused everyone harm occurred for no reason other than the traumatic past is a horrible thing for the survivor's brain to contemplate, so it buries good memories, distorts others, and generally finds rage at the impotence state they were in (again because of the old trauma) rather than face the unfortunate and tragic truth that no villains exist in the present. This is just an old, wicked wound reopening again and again.

This explains why many trauma sufferers never sustain long term close relationships and end up isolating then being desperately lonely then forming unhealthy relationships to cope. Then more trauma ensues.

I came to understand and accept this this by talking to a survivor of parochial school abuse and by reading chapter 2 (titled "Terror") in a book I think was written 30 or so years ago either called Healing Trauma or Recovery from Trauma. That chapter was hard sledding - it covers the experience and cognitive effects from the perspective of the victim and their psyche. It had examples from WWI/II/Vietnam combat victims, crime victims, and sexual assault/rape victims.

My heart wept when I understood deeply the experience she must have had. I don't blame her for the fact she could not, in the moment, differentiate the old trauma from new events. Her healing is not that advanced. She has strong hope with a good therapist and a friend of mine who is a psychiatrist said she has about an 80% chance of healing anyway within 10 years even without therapy, to be within the broad spectrum of normal.

Still, imagine that the person you care about most in the world thinks the most vile thing about you.

Then imagine that anything you say or communicate will evoke the trauma, put the elephant in the room (the trauma response not being accurate to current facts) in the spotlight, and will cause either greater harm or cognitive distortion of all of the good memories you created over nearly a year of hard work to learn to avoid any situation like this.

Imagine that person was a friend for 20 years. Imagine the love you shared was the deepest either had ever felt and that both took the time to share with the other things never shared elsewhere because of the close connection.

Then imagine that the high road, the best thing you can do for her, is swallow your desire to protect, to help heal, to try to go beyond and salvage something (anything) from the mess, is to walk away quietly, to let her version stand in her head because that will let her continue functioning, worry about her kids, and not inflict further trauma. You can't get heard, the truth can't reign, you know she has an extra dose of traumatic experience, and you know her brain may well work hard to forget you *as a valid defence mechanism for a damaged psyche*.

I don't hate her for giving up on our love or not hearing me. The Dragon is loud and powerful and she is a gentle, wounded soul.

I hate the people who hurt her when she could not defend herself or even speak. But they were probably sick and troubled too and thus not capable of much else.

I hate the world being so messed up that this kind of thing happens to the kindest, smartest, loveliest souls.

And I hate that I know that she may never, even after healing, talk to me again. And she's in a building I pass most days. And my heart is missing a piece. And that the best person I'll ever meet is stuck living in the same head as the Dragon of Trauma with all of the wounds and hurts and the gentlest, kindest heart I've ever encountered. And there's not a damn thing I can do about that.

The only things I can do is be the custodian of our love and good memories and find a way to get myself up from this horrible nuclear ground-zero to live a life and find happiness and take forward all the gifts I discovered with her. That and pray for her (or send good karma or whatever you will) and hope that she finds her healing and happiness, however that occurs.

That rebuilding of my own head, and treating my own post-traumatic stress, is going to occupy my summer.

But I won't end this on a down note:

I believe in her. I believe in the soul and spirit that animate the person who lives with the Dragon. I believe she can one day heal and have a safe and loving relationship and reach her objectives in life. I want her to with all of my heart.

I refuse to surrender hope, for her or for myself, to the harsh injuries of trauma. It's not a choice so much as a scream of defiance against the darkness. I won't give the bastards that inflicted that trauma the satisfaction.

I will recover, I will move forward into a good life of some sort, better for the good things that happened and seasoned by the awful ones. I will always love her and always want to hear from her if she elects it. But I will not let the bastards win by letting this leave me in a heap - I have a life to work on as a memorial and successor to the great things we had.

Never give up hope and never let the bastards win while you are still breathing.
 

Remove shortcut and replace with 'Northern Paradise' (excluding Toronto which is our karmic balance for being a Northern Paradise). :0)

You can do much better work with a high quality soldering station. Good temperature range, temperature control, and a fine point on your iron will compliment good technique.

Soldering surface mount stuff is a bit more finicky.

I always liked wave soldering as a neat scientific application.

Companies should protect themselves.

OTOH, if you behave like a jerk, that's not exactly on their head either. Yes, they left themselves open, but it still took you being a jerk as part of the equation before it was a problem.

Companies treat you as cattle, 'tis true. If you work for a company knowing that, it is either carrying on under false pretenses or accepting that. If it is the former, then you're not deserving of any better conduct from your employer really. if it is the latter, then striking back later when you knew the score when you signed up is just some bitter jerkish behaviour.

Try maybe to have a bit more class than the employer.

The last sentence is the real secret.

If an employer doesn't want me, I don't want to be there. If they want me but can't keep me due to overall economics (it happens in contracting regularly), then you just smile, thank them, and move on and you may well be back working there again later sometime.

Revenge is not only infantile, its often criminal. Is it really worth getting your @$$ kicked and fined or jailed? Don't think so.

Never burn your bridges, even if the other side are unmitigated jerks. You can be the bigger man. Even if you get the short end of the stick, somebody will probably notice your conduct and recognize it for the right way to behave. Sometimes you might end up working for them 5 years down the line.

Case in point:

Final year of college (software engineering) in city A, I did a project with well known embedded POSIX compliant OS vendor in city B. I met some of their staff.

After completing the year, I had a bunch of interviews in city B at a different company. On arriving, I recognized one of the guys I'd be working with/for. It took us most of the time there to twig to what it was. I'd met him in City C at COMDEX working for the POSIX OS company from city B. He was now working for another company (whom I went to work for as well).

I'd met him months before at a computer show in another city entirely and only coincidentally happened to be doing a project for the company he worked for, then we met at an interview for the company I was actually interested in working for and there he was.

If I'd been a jerk beforehand, he'd have remembered. As it was, he remembered me favourably. The interview was good enough I got hung with a fun nickname even before I was officially hired!

Beware the bridge you burn, it might be the one you need to advance across later.

HR people at a lot of companies move around between those companies and have HR contacts elsewhere.

There's the official statement a company you used to work for might make ("yes, X was employed here." "what were they like as an employee?" "yes, X was employed here." "I see....") and then there's what happens when the HR people talk to each other and you don't get the job, but for other reasons than the ones that were the actual reason (that they talked to a friend and found out you are a problematic person to employ).

Most people talk about how to deal with potentially disgruntled workers... I found the best way is to treat them reasonably (as a company). It cuts your odds of a problem a lot. You still have to be cautious and restrict access, but your odds of a nasty scenario are much lower that way. Some companies get this.

There have been companies I worked for where I was billing overtime on the Friday night of my last day because I was still doing clean up and knowledge transfer. I've only once had the escorted out thing and that's because they were doing a mass dot-com-crash layoff and everyone had to be treated the same.

Frankly, its usually to the company's benefit to let me do handover, code base cleanup, project wind down, etc. and they usually understand that.

But really, if you have a volatile guy in a top slot who is likely to screw you over, the best HR process is a parking lot accident.... just sayin'.

Narcissism is optional.

To be fair, you are assuming the generalization applies to the poster.

Averages are just that... they include the people who are very likely to get shot with their own firearms (or people in their household who are) and those very not likely to get shot with same.

Averages are a reasonable basis for public policy. They are not necessarily how one should run ones life.

I'm more likely to get killed by a construction accident walking out the front door than I am by one of my various blades. The same will be true if I have a firearm at some point. I have the training, I have the experience, and I am unremitting in my security and safety regime. But then, in that respect, I am quite sure (if YouTube is any evidence) that I am not the average firearms owner.

(And yes, I understand YouTube is anecdotal and not statistical, but it has a lot of anecdotes from idiots with firearms...)

The difference is, with what I've saved over the 7 years of owning my 'not-quite-so-smart' cell phone (1st gen smart phone... CMDA/AMPS/EVDO... promised email and web, only really can do SMS text and voice), I could now buy about several top line smartphones. That's the big difference I see.

The phone does the major thing I bought it to do just as effectively as the day I bought it (make calls). Some of my friends use SMS regularly enough to make that useful, many don't (and I'm in high tech and so are most of them, oddly). Web and data access (the limited amount I have) really hasn't been a miss.

I do have one game on my phone, but I'll never really need another (Tetris).

The cost difference between $35/mo and $50-70/mo (Canadian prices) has meant I've saved let's call it $200-250 a year.

It also allowed me to avoid $27-50 a month in land-line bills from Bell. So if you want to figure that in, I'm saving a lot more by having it.

For long distance, I use Skype for $4 a month.

Then again, I binned Roger's TV, saving myself $40-60/mo, bought an HD antenna for local news and some OTA HD TV and pay netflix $8 a month instead for movies and TV series.

So, overall, doing things the cheap way has allowed me most of the benefits of technology for a net cost of about $47/month, instead of $107-170/month. Over the years, this starts creeping into the thousands of dollars.

I have no idea what my phone runs (Samsung A920 - probably some embedded OS).

This sort of law is the inevitable response to the G8/G20 and the student riots in Quebec as well as various recents sports-related riots.

Average folk in the business community, working folk, plus of course the cops, the firemen, the EMS guys, politicians, bankers, and students who don't want their ability to go to school impeded are all demanding the government deal with these violent protests.

Yes, free speech is a right. Impeding me going places is debatable and the more people use that sort of approach (and threaten me if I cross a picket line), the more likely I am likely to vote for a law that makes that sort of crap harder for the ***clowns involved.

Just because somebody has the right to speak freely to me does not mean I'm obliged to listen nor does it give them the right to impede my passage or cost me money by impeding my right to an education.

So, these sorts of issues, which go with all the recent protests and riots, will (if the riots and protests get worse) continue to be passed into law with broad support.

And in the long run, if the protesters push hard enough, they will find out the state cannot allow itself to be dictated to by pressure groups. I don't want to see that day come because their will be blood spilled if that happens. But if the protesters can't recognize when they have exceeded the boundaries of general public toleration, they'll find out what happens the hard way.

I think the Quebec students can protest as they want to and the G20 crowd to up until it impedes my ability to do what I want to. What gives them the right to impact my activities? Does that give me a reciprocal right to resist their impact on my activites? That's not the kind of scenario we want playing out because that just gets into mob clashes.

Your right to do whatever you want extends until it enters my personal space (generally). Many protesters at G8/G20 and at the Quebec protests violated this.

Also, the destruction of property is a criminal act. This includes the injury of police (which costs taxpayers money) and the destruction of government behicles. These things all requrie law enforcement to gear up their ability to pursue, capture, and prosecute offenders successfully.

The right to protest is not the right to commit crimes. Crimes against property or the government are not victimless crimes.

The government is the only place I can think of where the people who spend the money are the same people who can arbitarily decide how much to take from their customers (taxpayers) without any recourse.

Of course, in such a system, such abuses are going to transpire regularly.

A more interesting question I haven't seen asked: Is it possible DHS asked for more pricey equipment and that the schools complied because the higher-end units implement more of the latest monitoring and security support? CALEA and other such measures.

Some of the cheaper units may not allow DHS to tap or to disable systems as easily or quickly. Each newer generation seems to add more of this sort of capability to the switches.

(I can't speak authoritatively to broadband switches, but I can speak to cellphone networks and their policy enforcement and AAA services, where this sort of thing is definitely always getting more capable without much public fanfare).

Your position seems a bit simplistic.

I do agree that intelligence personel (I know a few in military intelligence and some who were in federal police agencies' intelligence arms) tend to have better things to worry about than average citizens doing average things.

On the other hand, I've never met an authority figure who couldn't find a use for more power of surveillance if given it. There are also a lot of people in the apparatus who think that those of us not of in the government (or their agency) need watched for our own good at a fairly detailed level.

Citizens may disagree.

The fact that no government, even those like the current one that ran on getting rid of exceptional powers of surveillance, search, seizure, etc., have acutally removed the various secret wiretap and surveillance powers once in place means one of two things:

a) They got a briefing from the national security adviser and the heads of the agencies that scared them into keeping the power

b) They recognized that giving up this sort of power means giving up some convenience and some security

I find the men I know in the intelligence community generally don't think we need privacy if we're not up to anything dodgy. They seem to be of the opinion that they can make the judgement on what's dodgy and they seem to overlook the potential for abuse.

Even police datasystems that can query national databases can be abused. Officers have been arrested doing things like running background checks for landlords who are friends or who pay them. Imagine the sorts of abuses that the more broad data surveillance the intelligence agencies conduct could generate.

And it would be harder to catch. The police databases have some oversight and there are public police complaints entities that can raise the question in a way that gets answers. Who would perform this sort of citizen protection function within the intelligence community for individual incidents? Who would listen to individual concerns from citizens?

I think the answer is pretty much no-one.

So despite the fact there are real threats out there, despite the fact that our intel guys are mostly good guys, and despite the fact some bad stuff might be prevented by these sorts of powers, I can't support them. The potential for unchecked and even unseen abuse is so great and potent that its likelihood is probably 100%.

I choose to have some additional privacy, which is really a form of liberty, instead of a further veneer of security. I am willing to live with greater risks in today's world in order to retain some of my privacy. And I am willing to vote with this as one of my primary voting issues.

Darn. Where do I get my cheque? I'm missing out!

Not entirely convinced....

I keep old machines around because I have quite a farm of peripherals and moving them all forward each generation isn't likely to happen. So to keep some of the old peripherals available (I still have uses for them), I need the older hardware.

But beyond that, and older PC can make a decent firewall or a half decent embedded web browsing platform with a bit of work, etc. because you can generally run a decent version of Linux on one. You can use one as the basis for a NAS array. And those are the obvious projects. If you are a hacker, there are lots of other excellent projects you can get up to with old PC motherboards and memory at least.

Not all 'keeping' is 'hoarding'. Sometimes it is just a repurposing waiting to happen.

If Google's record on Google Docs and Gmail is any indication, they tend to update on *their* schedule (vs. any organization's schedule) and they freely delete key features (TOC in Google Docs comes to mind!).

Not sure why anyone in government would choose to have software they don't control the key feature set for.

In MS software, at least I could not update and not get the new misery until I felt like it. In Google's world, you get it when they tell you you'll get it and the changes they make, you'll just have to live with.

How anyone at Google could imagine a Docs rev without TOC (and it actually reformats old docs if you let it to remove existing TOCs) made sense, I can't imagine. But this is what you get if you let someone else control release schedules and inflict their current idea of feature set and UI on them on their timelines.