if you plan it well and have either some good people and nature or at the very least a good music selection if you're alone, the length of the trip isn't a bad thing. I think most people try to do stuff like watch tv or some other activity that requires at least a little bit of brain power to keep track of. Just listing to music on the back porch, swimming, or playing with pets can make the 10 - 14 hours entirely enjoyable =)

In terms of TFA, this seems like a fairly well known aspect of LSD to me. Time takes on this feeling of a very long hallway filled with doors. Each moment is a room that the trip gives you the opportunity to explore much more fully than you would otherwise. What seems like 30 - 45 minutes is really 2 or 3 minutes. (Also, to my point above, doing that too much can make even a good trip seem like you'll never escape it and it becomes a somewhat pleasant annoyance.)

Shrooms give light a much warmer feeling and I tend to get that happier "at one" feeling, but I don't get the visuals, time distortion, or altered thinking patterns that some good acid provides. Plus, they're hell on my stomach.

Definitely a sometimes treat though.

I worked at apple for years and drank the Kool-Aid to the tune of more than 10k - but since Mavericks, they've gone down hill, so I will not be buying the new iPhone – Apple’s gotten even more customer hostile in recent years, and their QA has gone to shit – so what’s the point?

Dropping the headphone jack was the last straw. From my first iPhone on, they’ve always been a cellular enabled iPod Touch that I can occasionally make phone calls on. Now, in order to get what I consider to be basic usage out of it I have to use a dongle or some easily lost/stolen wireless monstrosities that I have to charge? No thank you.

So – rather than upgrading my 6 to a 7 like I’d intended to before the announcement of their bravery – I picked up a cheap Xaiomi Android phone, unlocked it, tossed on LineageOS and have been pretty happy with the change.

There are some things to get used to, sure, but the overall experience has been a good one.

There simply is no “killer app” that was keeping me in Apple’s ecosystem anymore. It used to be imessage, but then my MacBook Pro didn’t like 2 4k displays being attached and would constantly glitch out on one of them, so I installed windows. (problem solved.) Now I use AirDroid and haven’t looked back.

So have fun, Apple, with your one primary revenue stream and your customer hostile management style. Enjoy what being locked into what are increasingly maladaptive business practices yield. I’ll sit over here using my new phone that integrates better with my home automation stuff, my new PC that, while being midrange at best, blows your pro line out of the water in terms of performance on Adobe software, and laugh all the way to the bank with the money I’ve saved in the process.

Yeah, maybe a bit ranty, but when products from multiple venders “just work” better than having everything provided by one company, it’s time to look into what you’re doing and fix it.

I'm curious how this method works with the recovery partition - does it restore the lion one or do you still have the recovery tools for ML?

If you're going to do anything but be an end-user, using firefox with sharepoint is not as exciting. (this is on windows, btw)

For instance
- no opening up lists in datasheet view
- can't open up lists in access or excel - have to export a spreadsheet
- can't use the directory browser thing to add people to permissions groups
- Editing content editor webparts gives you a tiny source editor form box in the toolbox rather than giving a popup window

So yeah, not quite the same

you could go back to school & work at the university while you're there. Generally, the IT Departments at universities are pretty big and they give you a good idea of anything you're going to encounter. At my university when someone shows initiative and they're competent and not a douche they pretty much always get the chance to prove themselves - ymmv, but I get the impression that quite a few universities are like this.

If you get on as a student, that's cool, part time, focus on school, show some initiative and try to get a full time job

If you get on as a full timer - awesome for you - most universities offer pretty good benefits, a lot of them include stuff like tuition wavers (full or partial - either way, you're going to end up paying less.)

and finally, working at a university IT department doesn't necessarily mean being in a support role -

our it department has an application development group, a services group (support), a project management group, a system administration/network admin group, a business group that handles contracts & such with other departments/companies, a research computing group (super computers), a dedicated security group, an administration group (payroll), and an HR group. Of those, sysadmins, services, and app devs have to do support. Everyone else is only rarely customer facing. The likelihood that you're going to get into the non-support groups right away is pretty slim, but movement has a tendency to be really fluid.

In case you didn't get the main point of this - the important thing is showing initiative. Show that you're interested in doing something new and interesting - show it by talking to people who do it already and trying to shadow them. Work with your bosses to get involved in projects, do things to get noticed. =)

Call center jobs are very stressful. They're thankless. They don't have any sort of support from the rest of the organization. No one understands that the value of the call center is removed when processes that define productivity in the organization don't link to it. Not to mention the fact that most call centers are judged on completely irrelevant metrics that do more to harm the relationship with the customer than to actually provide good service.

It feels like you're stuck there. What sucks is that with an attitude like that, you probably are. Most organizations like to hire from within. Most of them will take people with a go-getter kind of attitude. The problem is that a call center is kind of a horrible emotional sink. You're doing the same thing over & over again. It's easy to get bogged down in the banality of it all.

So how do you do it? Meet other people in IT or in other departments. Offer to help with projects. Mentor with someone. Learn about what your company does - what the overall mission of your IT department is & then figure out what you can do to move that along.

It's something that may be easier or harder depending on where you work and what value your business puts on the growth of their employees. At least where I work, it's so much easier to move someone into another position than it is to hire externally. So go for that.

Call centers suck. It's hard to think of a way to design them so that they don't. Even in the most open of environments, there's still something completely draining about them.

You can get out of it & do something in the same company. It seriously is all about attitude. People get hired because of attitude. More importantly, people *don't* get hired because of attitude.

In short: "FIND YOUR HAPPY PLACE, MAGGOT" or something.