Lithium_Golem asks: "My wonderful daughter will be nine months old next month and I figure that it's time to buy her some new bedtime story material. My problem is that I can't find any children's books that describe fathers as white collar workers, let alone computer geeks. For example, many of the stories I find portray the ideal father as a fireman, carpenter or truck driver. I'm not looking for anything specific like 'I love my dad because he's a programmer,' I'm just looking for a story that will help her understand what I do for a living when she's older. So, readers of Slashdot, does anyone know of a children's book written by or for geeks, or should I write my own?"

Gabe the Programmer asks: "I'm the lead developer for a website and we have a community there for gay/bi/tran athletes to talk to each other and interact. Well, not surprisingly, because of the sexuality of our members and the site's high profile, we get a bunch of homophobic/racist/hateful trolls who come on to the forum for no other reason than to incite our members and waste their time. Most of the trouble is caused by a cabal of users who hang out on Fightsport.com, and over the past three years they've managed to drag down the atmosphere of our community substantially." If users are going to be rude and disruptive to your community, it might be worthwhile to ban them. Be forewarned, however! This may turn out to be easier said than done, since saavy users can always try and work their way around site bans. If you were a site administrator, how would you deal with intransigent users, and if you were forced to ban them from your site, how would you go about it?

qm_37 asks: "I work for a small software company with a growing customer base. Our current support desk system has worked well for us in the past, but is going to become very unwieldy if it has to grow any more than it already has. We're looking for a more automated system that will do things like filter and direct incoming support e-mails to the support worker assigned to that task, assign and track support issue numbers, and give us a nice searchable database of previous customer issues. We've looked at various solutions ranging from commercial software packages to PHP/CGI-based server scripts, and nothing has really grabbed our attention. We have also considered writing our own system, but the trade-off is that we need to find the time to do it. Does anyone have any experience with a situation like this? Which route do you think we should take for our support system?"

An anonymous reader asks: "I have to run Win XP for work. However, I have not had the urge to download and install SP2 due to all of the problems that I've heard. Are lots of people still having problems with it? I know I don't have any viruses or spyware, and no, Linux is not an option. I am a consultant and my hardware has to match the client. I have done plenty of searching, but nobody has really followed up and shown what is currently happening with SP2, just what was happening when it was released. Did M$oft release any patches for SP2 yet to fix some of the reported issues? I do use a wireless network, and heard it messes up the connections. Is that true? Thanks for any help." Update: 09/18 04:15 EDT by C : Apparently there may still be some performance issues with XP-SP2, as this later article illustrates, however it may not be so bad as the article makes it out to be. Some readers are suggesting that the performance hit is due to bounds checking in the code, so it begs the question: Would you prefer a slower app that has more security, or a faster app that suffers from typical vulnerabilities that might bite you big-time, later?

occamboy writes "I'm trying to make a case for switching to Linux desktops, and would like to demonstrate how advantageous Linux is. While the advantages of Linux are more obvious for us techies, I'm finding that many non-technical types are immediately negatively biased by the look of Linux desktops. The problem boils down to screen fonts. It seems that, in the distributions that I've demonstrated, the screen fonts are either all aliased, or are aliased in some places and antialiased in others, which I've been told resembles a ransom note with letters cut from different magazines. I can understand where these critics are coming from; after all, they are staring at fonts on a monitor all day long. Are there any distributions that I can demonstrate which provide smooth and consistent screen fonts without requiring a lot of messing around?"

Antigua Nice asks: "I have recently been promoted to manager of a young IT department and would like to introduce a tradition and/or mascot for the upcoming season. Although we are busy 24/7/365 we are especially busy during the NFL season since we are a sports related company. The goal of this is to add some excitement to the new team, unite the members and keep department moral high. It might also be worth mentioning that I have recently added two more administrators to the team. If you currently have any department traditions or know of any, could you please take a moment to share them with me. They could be anything from going out for beer and wings after the first game to each member bleaching their hair. Any and all input is welcome."

Waiting-for-Ivan asks: "In Florida in the past month and a half, we have survived 2 hurricanes. During the last one I was within the areas with a hurricane warning (i.e. hurricane conditions are expected within 24 hours). My company (who will remain unnamed) wanted everyone to come in. Those who did not come in had their pay docked (salary or hourly didn't matter) and threatened with loss of their pay for Labor Day. We are not an emergency facility whose services are required during an emergency. Is this legal? Can they make us come in during a hurricane warning (or any other environmental emergency) and if we refuse can they punish us for not doing so? Do we as employees have any rights (and can they dock salaried employees so easily)? What laws are in affect explaining these circumstances?

medscaper asks: "I have an awesome opportunity this morning. Since the market is opening up, I was offered a great new tech job over the weekend, and have been stuck in a miserable one for the past several years. I spend more time stressing out and anxious about keeping my job than getting any quality work done. I'm SO looking forward to walking into my boss's office this morning to let him know that I'll be leaving. I'm tempted to do it with style, especially because I got a (completely unwarranted) PHB-style threatening lecture last week about my work habits. I really don't need the recommendation or a reference, so it doesn't matter much how I leave. Should I politely give the standard 2-weeks? Or should I have a little fun with it and burn some bridges? Anyone have any stories to relate?"