It's really been a long time since I've taken a job because of the salary or I needed the money. Come to think of it, I can't think of a single job that I didn't go into because I thought it'd be interesting work. More often than not that was true, too. I've gotten to work at some very cool places over the years. Even my first job doing general IT and some programming support at a company that did dog track management software sent me all over the country and exposed me to a lot of challenges. Doing security auditing on AT&T's C library while working at Data General taught me a lot about C. Various contracting gigs at IBM and Sun always afforded opportunities to learn, and each time gave me more experience to leverage toward the next position. A while back I took a test position at Ericsson just to get my hands on that hardware, and learned an awful lot about how our telephone networks work. Ericsson's switches are masterpieces of engineering, if you ever get a chance to work with one don't pass it up. Lately I'm maintaining satellite tracking software in C++.

No company has ever used the full range of my abilities, but each one has taught me something new. Or rather, I've made a point to take away something new from each job. Of course, you don't need a degree to do that. I never got one.

Just because you're agile, doesn't mean you crap daisies and unicorns. I often see inept upper managers latch onto agile as the latest magic bullet which will solve all their problems with no other changes on their part. Except they keep all the micromanagement bits, discard all the engineer empowerment bits and hand their scrum team a year's worth of priority 1 stories to implement in the next sprint. Good managers will likely be successful no mater what methodology they use, bad ones will likely fail no matter what methodology they use and the ones in between will have mixed results no matter what methodology they use.

If I were designing them, they'd thrive on the poison in the traps. Of course, if I were designing them, the cockroaches would be the focus of the experiment. I'd throw increasingly difficult challenges at them, culminating in some moderately clever primates. Once the cockroach Alpha arises, it would be saved for future study, and the rest of the experiment would be reset. That's the problem with an intelligent designer, isn't it? One tends to believe that they're the focus of the experiment. One tends to think that they will somehow qualify for special treatment. When, in fact, all that awaits you is euthanasia and a brain dissection. And that's if you're one of the lucky ones.

It's just because the professors are vague about it. There's really nothing so difficult about "This particle collides with that one, causing the two to spin in opposite directions." If you measure one, you know the other one is spinning in the other direction. But I guess you can't write a $50 million research grant around THAT. I still suspect that some of the other mysticism around it is caused by artifacts of the measurement or modeling process, but I suppose that's where it might be handy to be a second year student...

Their computer works not by quantum entanglement but by magic.

Take RogueWave. Before the VCs took over, the coffee there was so good you really didn't mind the urine so much. After the VCs took over, the coffee there was so bad, the urine improved the flavor.

Maybe we should go have a talk to the FDA about "Radioactive materials Americans eat each year."

Your taxes go to pay for things we ALL need. Like roads, and firemen and teachers. When someone cheats on their taxes, they're cheating ALL of us!

Ahh ha ha! Why do you guys make me read this shit? They know we're just going to tax the crap out of them to pay for hooker and cocaine parties for Washington lobbyists! Why LIE to them? !#%!WA

Yup. The lawyers will get $30 million, and the users will get a $10 gift certificate to Hot Topic. Which they also don't have in Canada! Damn you, Bell Mobility!

Too bad the scientific method is no match for the stick-your-fingers-in-your-ears-and-yell-la-la-la-la-la method.

It can probably check your birthday on your facebook page. That information is probably also encoded on the magstripe or 3D bar-code on your driver's license.

I'll get right on that...

AWW! I accidentally COPIED it! God damn it! Hang on...

AWW! Now there are FOUR copies! And one of them's on xtube! Oh well, at least all the waving penises in the ads will distract you from the content of the video. What kind of idiot tries to DELETE things from the INTERNET anyway? Every time you try, THIS is what happens!

Those shiny geegaws might do well on the consumer side but there's always going to be some bank or some company that's going to need a batch processor running mainframe assembly running somewhere. There's plenty of room to work in things you don't think suck. I'm seeing more opportunities to do development work on Linux platforms lately, not fewer.

You have to solve your problems, though. If you think all GUI libraries currently suck, you could just write your own. You don't have to be satisfied with existing software, if you can just make your own.

I've been burned so many times by AMD's hardware in the past that I won't even consider buying anything of theirs anymore, no matter how awesome it is. They could make a hand job robot with perfect Linux drivers, don't care, wouldn't buy it.

AMD could get back on my list by NOT SUCKING for, oh, about a decade, but I don't see it happening. Say what you will about Nvidia, I've never had to spend two days fixing a system after upgrading THEIR drivers.

For once Microsoft actually gave users something they'd actually want. I'm actually starting to avoid youtube because of how obnoxious it's becoming. If youtube were my killer app, Microsoft's implementation would completely eliminate all the suck that's been introduced to youtube over the past year, and then-some! That'd be enough for me to buy their device. I'll give them props when they deserve it (They occasionally do.)

Since Google's inevitably going to shoot them down, I'm going to have to start looking for someplace else to upload my videos from now on. Maybe xtube. They're not pornographic, but at least there all you have to deal with is a browser full of waving penises while you watch your video. It's like a forest of penises, gently waving in the breeze...