Go find a job working as a government contractor. Especially in the defense sector, there's plenty of open source / unixy stuff going on (all the military simulations have been ported from SUN / SGI / HPUX to Linux nowadays). My old job is available... that is, once they lift the budget freeze pending on Congress agreeing on something.

I'm a big Linux guy, but just started working at Microsoft itself last week. Ironically, there's actually lots of open source here... my development machine already had cygwin and the gimp loaded on it. The official policy is that it's OK to use, just don't put any time into developing OSS or looking at OSS source code... pretty reasonable efforts to prevent compromising their closed source revenue stream.

Word. I also found this infinitely more interesting than most of the legal proceedings and politics threads that parade through, even if those are somewhat more tech related.

/Had thought the oldest trees were only around ~1000 years old, and that's even after visiting Gen. Sherman.

I would submit that the plants contribute to a net increase in entropy, and human activity is contributing to a net decrease in entropy (at least on environmental scales not related to transforming rocks into microprocessors).

Also, the drastic environmental changes lead to a decrease in biodiversity (the simpler hardy stuff survives and prospers, think nothing left but grass, cockroaches, and jellyfish).

Finally, I would submit that a lot of conservation is about doing more with less, and not necessarily doing less with less as opponents make it out to be. But the point is to understand the energy balance and how to go on without having to ignore terms in the equation.

flooding the atmosphere with a caustic, corrosive gas that could, in high enough concentrations, make just about anything burst into flame.

Yep, with most of the big engineering firms I've worked for, it's maybe 5% hacking and 95% documentation and packaging. If you can enjoy doing mostly the latter (finishing the last 10% of a project that ends up taking 90% of the time), then you should be able to get along fine. If you spend all of your time doing the former, then you will quickly become reviled by your co-workers :-P

Here's the junk that seemed important to engineering companies:

• ISO9001 : Is your shit documented? Do you know where the most current version of that documentation is? Most of the companies skirted the requirement by creating an unironically named "Desktop Instruction" linked from a desktop icon to a version-controlled file that basically said: "1. find problems 2. fix problems 3. document fix". BTW, you fail if you don't have a footer that says "Uncontrolled if printed" (but CS geeks never print anything anyway). And bonus if you can draw every process and procedure in flowchart form, which is actually a little bit fun :-P
• CMMI : Is your shit version controlled? Can you rebuild an exact copy of something (and its documentation) that you delivered a month or a year ago? If you use version control tools, I think that automatically gets you to CMMI level 2, and if you use automated build tools in a version-controlled build environment, then you have most of CMMI level 4. I'm afraid that puts you well ahead of most project engineering teams.
• Six Sigma (or some other Quality Management System) : Does your shit break? Your shit really shouldn't break, but if it does you ought to have some way to fix it so it doesn't break the same way again later. This might be the hardest thing to get down pat, but fortunately it's considered a "bonus" and not required by most projects. If you use a trouble ticket system, and the shit you fix stays fixed, then you're probably in good shape.

So, in summary, if you can find your way around some sort of toolchain that involves doxygen, mercurial, make/ant, cobbler, jenkins, and redmine, to the point that you can hand a junior engineering a piece of paper (oops, I meant email a link to a desktop instruction) such that the junior engineer can build their own working copy of the product by themselves with nothing but cold iron and a revision tag, then you're doing well.

But really, the real trick is to figure out how to get everyone on the project team to use the same toolchain :-P

Aerospace nerd here, ended up getting her this: http://www.titanium-jewelry.com/r166b-d.html (the site has lots of other cool designs that might appeal to mechies and techies more than the typical jewelry store)

If you're going to have kids, better to get the right size afterwards though, don't think it's possible to resize this kind of ring for baby bloat ;-D

But ice also floats on water. If you have ice floating in a glass of water, and the ice melts, the level of liquid stays the same.

But salty water is more buoyant than freshwater! So the icebergs would sit a tad lower as the salinity of the water decreases.

But TFA says it's mostly caused by the wind gyre that sucks everything up with a low pressure system. And the main effect has nothing to do with rise or fall of ocean levels, but with ocean currents that keep the North Atlantic relatively warm, but could plunge it into an ice age if the currents reversed (as was the case during the last ice age). Fun and amazing stuff.

Hmm, sounds like I come from a similar background to you... have you tried simply maintaining a resume / profile at monster.com ? Sorry to sound like a shill, but I pretty much got every job from employers and recruiters looking for me, rather than the other way around.

Even with a degree from an Ivy-League school, if the employer doesn't first have the position open (and not just because it's a formality when they're already trying to hire someone specific, which is the case with most official job postings), then your chances are pretty slim that they're going to create a position for you just because you have an awesome resume.

Also, especially for engineers, you have that safe-haven in the military-industrial complex if you can land and maintain a position with a (job) security clearance. Sure, the standards and work ethic are often lower, but no H-1Bs there, go figure :-P

Extra-strength Damitol(TM) always worked wonders for me.

That's what you get for letting slip in an errant "import skynet" statement...