First of all, sorry about your not closing the quoting tag you used. I do that sometimes, and it's so sad to see all your hard work obscured under an italic fog... so I thought I would at least respond in detail to help make up for it.

The charging point you make is a great one. There are some powered mounts that you can plug a phone into, but they require more work to fit... I prefer a general mount you can use with separate power so that as I change phones I can maintain the same mount.

A really excellent non powered mount is the FlexPod, if a model exists for your car... it's very sturdy and is not obtrusive when not in use.

If notifications are an issue you can usually set the phone to something like Do Not Disturb mode. But I've never had that really cause issues.

Now about the Garmin device giving great directions - that may be true, dedicated devices have had a while to build good nav systems. I personally use Apple Maps and find the navigation for that works pretty well, it also gives land guidance... (it was better than Google Maps for navigation from Day One).

But, there also exists a Garmin dedicated app with offline maps. You get all of the Garmin benefits you detailed, only it's easier to update,

And you can switch to Waze when not needing navigation (I totally agree with you about Waze navigation not working very well). As you say, nothing beats the Waze Police/Hazard alerts.

Yeah, Excel is obtuse compared to it's former competitors. My favorite was Quattro Pro. It took years for Excel to catch up on some features. Sadly, the macro language was primitive even by VBA standards. Later on it adopted VBA, but it was too late - I had long abandoned it.

No, we absolutely are NOT using it as a shared network drive, because it sucks for that. It uses an inefficient protocol (webdav) and so is absolutely glacial when writing many files. It also has a large black list of file extensions. We end up putting a bunch of links to files on the shared drives. One of the intentions was to make documents (and information in general) easier to find then when they were in the Wiki. It definitely has not accomplished that, but I don't fault the product for that - it seems geared toward the control freak and it delivers there. It is also sold as being integrated with Office. I'd say that while it is more integrated than any other product, the integration is half-assed, unreliable, and somewhat painful.

In your haste to get FP, you missed the requirements in TFS.

I use pfSense extensively, but its bandwidth controls are not easy to use, and nobody would recommend deploying it on ARM in 2014.

I prefer to think of retirement as when I don't need to work in order to be able to afford a comfortable lifestyle. Approaching that point now. A couple more good years from the stock market and work becomes optional; not necessary. On the other hand, I actually enjoy doing software development and may keep working for quite some time after I "retire." The only obstacle I see is that a lot of managers can't deal with having someone working for them who doesn't desperately need the job and is therefore not willing to be treated like s**t.

Cheers,
Dave

The other day I needed to open a Visio document. I had created it a few months ago, before my old XP PC got refreshed with a Win 7 box. For some reason, while it still had Office 2007, it was missing Visio. Even worse, it wanted to open IE, which wanted to use an ActiveX viewer plugin... which proceeded to turn the line art into a bitmap when printing to PDF.

So I downloaded OO. No Visio for you! (This was actually the point at which I tried the ActiveX viewer.) Then I decided to check if Libre Office could handle it. Holy crap, yes, it opened it like a native document.

Then I made sure to save a PDF version of my document just in case someone else wanted to see it later.

Yes, good suggestion, especially if you already know MATLAB... they syntax and overall workflow is similar for plotting. I personally like the "Pyzo" distribution for Python.

I still find Excel plots to be faster, easier to modify, and easier to share for trivial data sets.

I really detest Sharepoint. It's the flavor of the moment at work. It's slow and saves from MS Office applications sometimes fail silently. It pretends to be a suitable replacement for shared network drives, but it doesn't work for that.

I use it rather than the old Wiki (TWiki, no gem itself) just to be a good sport, but it really sucks. It really exposes how poorly integrated MS's own internal teams must me - it is such an obvious bolt-on.

I'd be very happy with an open source equivalent to Publisher 98 to be honest. I know there are alternatives but they don't have the useability and functionality of good old Publisher.

Benefits that people working 2 or 3 part-time jobs don't get.

Even for employees without much in the way of the way of health insurance, life insurance, or disability insurance pre-tax compensation, employers still need to pay their part of Social Security & Medicare, Federal unemployment insurance, state unemployment insurance, and workers' compensation insurance as part of total hourly compensation.

Across all workers, the cost of legally required benefits is actually as much as the total cost of employer-provided health insurance. See this breakdown for more info.

and with the greater long term job security that working as part of a larger company provides

Aye, there's the rub. It works out until it doesn't. Wouldn't this guy be ripped if the put up with two years of this crap to just get outsourced anyway?

Because that's what they're saying here. They don't trust him to do his job. Maybe that's fair, maybe it's not, but it's something a professional in his line of work can handle and they're saying "no". They wouldn't ask a surgeon to file paperwork on each cut he intended to make, because they feel the surgeon is competent to make the best decisions in the time alotted. Him, clearly not (I'm assuming this is standard work, not 10-9's / life safety).

So, they're going to fire this guy anyway at some point. He might as well find employment with an outsourcing company that gets paid by the value and minimizes their time expense, which it sounds like the environment he's more comfortable being in.

You can live to work or work to live - it's not worth being in a sucky job when there are so many opportunities to get or create a different means of employment.

Excel is fantastic for exploring small sets of data... "quick and dirty" stuff. When you want rigorous statistics or a more formal analysis of data, R and friends are far superior. And anything even remotely repetitive should be done in something with a better scripting language. But I'd hate to lose Excel just as much as I'd hate to be forced to use MATLAB or Python to plot results from some small screening experiment.

And of course, we are completely deviating from Excel's forte as a financial tool, where it is much stronger.

Sometimes I'll even use it to clean up data for insertion into a database or some other such task. It has some nice built-in "Filter" functions.

Lifting should be hell on your knees, not your back. "You're doing it wrong."

The formatting is intentional, blockquoted to indicate that I am quoting it and did not write it.

Microsoft positions MS Office as part of an integrated solution for clerical work that scales to an enterprise of any size.

Microsoft Office 365 for Health Organizations

What will Texas Office 365 deal mean for healthcare security? [Feb 2013]