Anyone who has kids will understand this, 3 sick children recently meant we both went about 5 days with maybe 8 hours sleep total
I think the longest I've gone without any sleep at all is 4 days. I used to regularly go 24-48 hours in college, but that was due to staying up all night partying.
Tried it, the local gun range said "HELL no!". I wish I knew someone with a bunch of land somewhere who didn't mind me doing target practise.
So, anyone in Central Florida who has a bunch of land and doesn't mind - please drop me a line
Securely wipe them if you must, then just give them to your local recycling plant. Personally, I dismantle old drives, give the magnets to my kids to play with and send the rest to the local recycling plant. There's really little else use for a 50Gb drive these days!!
My coworkers think I'm crazy, but I just prefer the old school way of doing things. Makes for a great conversation piece too.
-I was 18 and in my first year of University.
-I was a chanop in #ircbar on Undernet and had a misguided idea that this made me important. I used ircII-EPIC to connect and everyone was bitching about some guy named RevWhite (remember him?)
-ICQ didn't exist, real time chat was achieved via YTalk
-Social networking existed, it was called Usenet. I spent hours on alt.fan.pratchett.
-I submitted my personal web site, hosted on my University's web server to Yahoo! I don't think they ever added it. (http://www.wibble.co.uk/zerbswibble for the terminally curious)
-CD-R drives were ridiculously expensive, but that didn't matter, the media was almost impossible to find and cost a fortune anyway.
-My PC was an X5-133 with 32Mb of RAM and I thought it was cool.
-My home internet connection was a 14.4K modem. I had to run a telephone cable from my room, down the stairs and into the only telephone socket in the dining room. It cost me 1p a minute to connect and my parents would FREAK OUT.
-Luckily, I had a broadband connection to my room when at University. It's a big part of the reason I flunked out
I did actually learn calligraphy in school. If I really, really put in the effort my handwriting is fairly presentable. In the end, it is wayyy to much effort though. My normal handwriting is atrocious!
I think the only handwriting I do anymore is writing cheques and signing my name (my signature has gotten messier and messier over the years). I do make a point of writing personal letters instead of typing them on the rare occasions I write one. Even my parents use e-mail nowadays, so that's becoming a real rarity.
I did hear that some schools are giving up cursive/joined up/double writing/whatever you wanna call it. That's a shame, it's a useful skill to have.
Most weekdays I drive my truck to work. If there was a viable public transport option I'd use it, but there is not
If I'm working from home (most weekends) I just roll out of bed and stagger over to my desk at the foot of the bed.
Been that way my whole life, I've yet to see what I'd consider a stable economy. We're either on a huge upswing or we're in a recession.
The Good: I'm loving paying less than $2 a gallon right now. My various creditors are being much more reasonable with my refinancing requests than they were 6 months ago. Stocks are cheap. House prices are cheap. Store discounts are everywhere. It's a buyers market to be sure
The Bad: My employer has already had to make cuts, now there's rumours there may be more. Family members have been laid off, so I've been helping them out. My son's school is running out of funding with no respite forthcoming. Certain government programs I love are being cut back (eg NASA).
It'll end soon, give it one to three years and we'll be in a booming economy again. I'm just riding it out and enjoying the unexpected benefits, whilst keeping my options open!
Nice, I'll add that to my list.
I've set up a number of PCs for family members of the years. I'll talk about the XP/Vista/2000 side of the house, I've done Linux before but about 100 people already posted ahead of me
Some hints:
1. Install the OS on one drive, or partition and then the very first thing you want to do is point the users's profile (My Documents, etc.) at another partition or drive. We'll get to that later.
2. The "blob" theory. I've learned in over a decade of working support that the average users has blobs. They have an "e-mail blob" a "web blob", a "get my iPod synched" blob. They don't care what the blob is called, they just know it does some mystical thing that lets them get to want they want. So make sure those blobs are in an easy to find place
3. Replace IE with Firefox/Opera/Chrome/Your choice. 99% malware is dealt with this way. Install AdBlock Plus or equivelent. replace Firefox's icon with the IE icon if your user is particularly stupid. Remove all shortcuts to IE.
4. Set up automatic updates for the Windows crap and the anti-virus. Set it to go off at some point when you know they'll be using it. Most people turn their PCs off so having automatic updates happen in the middle of the night is a waste of time. Spend several patient minutes teaching them to pay attention to that little yellow shield and obey it when it appears.
5. Install TightVNC, or DameWare, or subscribe to Webex, or some other way that you can remotely control it with. Install a blob on the desktop that'll tell them their IP. Punch a hole in the firewall to allow access. Webex has saved my parent's PC (they live 4,000 miles away) on dozens of occasions.
6. Don't let them install ANYTHING without contacting you first. Preferably have them call you and let you do it. It's amazing how much crap users put on their PCs on a whim.
7. Now you done that, Ghost the system partition. They're going to have it broken in a month or two and you're going to want to quickly reinstall it. That's why we put their profile on a separate drive or partition.
A decent tape library can be had on Ebay for less than $100. DLT tapes are coming down in price all the time and I can store all my important data on one of them plus have one to spare for things like my music collection and projects I'm working on.
So, I backup to disk daily and do a duplication to tape over the weekend. I used to do a more or less continuous backup to disk but decided it was a little bit like overkill.
Those tapes have saved me from losing data on about half a dozen occasions (failed drives, stupidity with the delete key, etc.).
You can tell I work for a Data Protection Company right?
I live in the USA and married into an American family. I still have English relatives of course, but they all live in England.
Strictly speaking my kids are English also but they've been raised in the US.
There's an ongoing battle in my family between keying in the "standard definition" version of channels and the "high definition". They all think I'm this weird limey geek (I'm the only English person in the family) who's obsessed with it. They're right of course. You should've seen the argument when I blocked the SD channels *grin*.
The fact is, most people really don't care so long as the TV is reasonably sharp and the sound is reasonably good. Standard definition is perfectly watchable to the average user, HDTV is still seen as just another buzz word. The majority of people with newer HDTVs are watching them with the coaxial cable stuffed into the antenna port in SD, and they're none the wiser.
Happiness is twin floppies.
