I am an independent contractor right now, so I guess I supplied all my own clothes. Kinda freaky though when you consider then that "my employer" also provided my underwear and socks.

However, my current assignment, they provided me nothing other than a desk and a computer. Since I don't wear either of those, I choose none.

It's all a matter of perspective...

I have an old Dell PowerEdge 350 that I used for quite some time as my home router/Asterisk box. Just recently retired it - replaced it with a VMWare ESXi 4.0 box with a single VM running my router/Asterisk instance. Works like a charm too.

Find someone who has an old rack mount server for sale (eBay is your friend, so is CraigsList), install a Linux Distro of your choice and unless you are trying to run a BGP instance with a full view, you should be fine.

Does powering off the computer when you leave for the evening count as a reboot?

Modern drives have "servo tracks" on them - used for setting the head position. If you use an eraser powerful enough to wipe the drive, then the servo track is most likely also wiped - rendering the drive totally useless to most folk.

This one is easy.

On the factory floor at the Caterpillar Medium Engine plant in Mossville Illinois during the summer. Temperatures where I had to work exceeded 100 degrees regularly and there was no air flow to speak of in the area. The noise level was outrageous and there was a persistent mist in the air that you weren't too sure what it consisted of.

Nothing like trying to program and debug ladder logic when you can't think or necessarily breathe. If you screwed up in your programming, you brought down the entire production line for the plant.

Fun Times!

Aluminum, generally with some sort of lining/coating on the inside.

I will say that VLC did just recently play a DVD that none of the other DVD players I have (mplayer, xine, etc...) wouldn't even touch. Heck the other players would crash and burn badly - even lsdvd had troubles with this one DVD - the Dark Knight.

What I don't like about VLC is how there is absolutely nothing intuitive about what combination of codecs will work on a transcode. With a recent example, I could get MPEG2 video to encode into a mpeg container or an avi container, but I couldn't get any audio to go into the same container at all. Using mpga would crash the program where using mp2a would go through the motions but you would end up with no audio in the output.

If you find that you need "support" of any sort for VLC, good luck with that. I have found in many cases that the forums are unmonitored and the IRC channel folk ignores people with real questions.

I just don't think that VLC deserves the title of "the best" in anything.

The first thing you want is a natural gas powered generator, not gasoline. Nothing like having to take a trip to the local gas station (presuming THEY have power) to fill up the generator every 8 hours or so. This, by definition, will make the generator a stationary unit (not on wheels, designed to be bolted down to a concrete pad).

Next, you want a generator with auto-start, auto-transfer with manual return. You want the thing to automatically kick in if the power dies, but YOU should be in control of when it decides to return to the grid. Nothing like finding out that the power died 10 minutes after you and the family left the house for a couple of days and coming back to a cold house with no power and potentially burst pipes.

Wattage - you will want at least a 5000 watt unit for whole-house use. Forget this idea of running power cords everywhere - unless you like the idea of tripping over power cords everywhere. With the transfer switch mentioned above, the generator takes the place of the grid so your internal house wiring will continue to serve it's duty.

There are several manufacturers of house generator systems. You can find low-end units at places like Home Depot or Lowes. Better units are best obtained from an electrical wholesale house.

Do yourself a huge favor here and hire a licensed electrician to do the work. It'll get done right the first time, the electrical inspector won't get excited (in a negative way) when he sees the work, and the odds of "something going wrong" go way down.

From another guy in Michigan (Westland)...