... for the simple reason the desktop isn't cluttered (unless I want it cluttered), it's easy to add / remove app launchers, the desktop look and feel are easy to configure. It looks a lot like Windows 7, which worked for me no problem. I'm not a big "make your desktop like your personality" guy. I just like getting work done, and I want my desktop to do what it's supposed to do: gimmie GUI, with a minimal amount of fuss. I've been using Mint for the last 3 years and it's my favorite distro.

"Dean of Engineering School Internet-ted In Engineering Recruitment Scandal" 'Who says nerds don't like weed, beer, hookers, and a free Corvette?' said an anonymous source in the NCAA.

...as Yorke was able to pull the albums from Spotify. In the old days, he would have had to take the label to court to block distribution (see Ringo Starr's suit against Chips Moman)

Years ago, I met the guy who ran the company who made most of the wheels for Rollerblade. He's not a chemist, or an engineer. He's a former helicopter pilot who flew soldiers in and out of the jungles of Vietnam and later became a contract helicopter bush pilot, doing firespotting and transport for the US Forest Service. When he realized he was getting sick of risking his life for not much pay and very little thanks, he started looking for something else to do. Through a friend, he heard that IBM was looking for someone to assist them with an issue with rubber compounds-- they needed a specific rubber formulation for parts that wouldn't degrade even under the worst conditions. He didn't know a thing about rubber, but figured it couldn't hurt to give it a crack. Six months of studying, phone calls, etc, he got a line on it and contacted a friend who worked at a rubber company to produce a prototype. They did, and he presented it to IBM and won a contract, which grew into a business, etc. The point I'm making is that an open mind is substanitally more important than the chunks of knowledge that you're going to get from a degree. The best programmers I've met had college degrees or no college degrees. One had a master's in Speech Pathology (he ended up designing and implementing lease accounting systems). Another flunked out of college and traded his drum kit for a computer so he could play games (and ended up learning the system from the ground up). Another was driving a forklift in a warehouse and realized the picker routes the ordering system was generating were wrong or hugely inefficent (and ended up redesigning and eventually rewriting the picker system). In each case, they learned the skills they needed along the way. Having said that, the kind of maths you're looking at are good to have "in the toolkit", not so much for a specific skill, but because they give you a different way of looking at data, problems, solutions, testing, and implementation.

...it's good to know that colleges and universities (especially colleges and universities for African-Americans) is still a "presence". From Page 9:

Terrorist/Extremist Group Presence A wide variety of terror or extremist groups have links to Division 1 [area around the capital]. Richmond's history as the capital city of the Confederacy, combined with the city's current demographic concentration of African-American residents, contributes to the continued presence of race-based extremist groups. This area is also the site of several community colleges and urban universities that attract a diverse range of domestic and international students and professors; two area universities are designated as Historically Black Colleges and Universities. While the majority of individuals associated with educational institutions do not engage in activities of interest to the VFC, it is important to note that University-based students groups are recognized as a radicalization node for almost every type of extremist group. A small number of Division 1 area college students also align themselves with anarchist or animal and/or environmental groups.

Ha.

The problem with this kind of "in my day" topic is that it was your day. When I started my "professional" career in 1986, I was one of those dewy-eyed, easily disillusioned, "nothing in use is any good" developers.

It took me about 8 months at my gig before I was totally disabused of this notion. I had loads to learn. True, I could code and debug.

But I couldn't design worth a shit because I didn't understand the business, and I didn't understand user behavour. I didn't understand why my boss would get upset when I'd spend a weekend re-writing something that was working pretty well to begin with (I just didn't like the style), and I didn't quite get office politics.

And I suspect those kinds of things that people don't want to admit to when they're in the middle of saying "This job isn't what I thought it would be."

NO job is ever what you thought it would be, especially your first one. I thought I'd be coding and writing all kinds of neat stuff in my first year. Instead, I learned how to run cables from office to warehouse (not complying with building codes), debugging arcane tax calculations, distributing reports, re-writing MRP and MPS calculations, etc. None of this stuff I'd ever learned in college.

In the end, I accepted the situation, and made the best of it. I learned a ton of useful stuff, and then got out of there as soon as I could line up a better opportunity in what I wanted which was working in commercial software development. But there is no way I could have ever gotten that gig without going through my first job.