Oh and at the time I could manage 6 - sort of, but I could do 3 in my right hand fairly well. So after someone complained about it being hard I'd do it one handed (in the same cascade pattern, not just up and down like a shower). Shut people up real good.

I used to teach people to juggle in college - and had similar stories - most people could manage at least a decent showing of the standard 3 ball cascade within a half hour at most - but every once in a while I'd come across someone that just couldn't learn - not sure why. .

Interesting to note that I would start with just tossing one ball from hand to hand - as soon as you can do that consistently, try two (as in left, right, catch, catch, right left, catch catch, etc). again do that until they look the same in both directions and the heights stay the same and you don't drop them. Then go for all 3, usually starting is the hardest part, and you'll try it a few times before you get the first throw decent.

Sometimes you have to have people stand right in front of a wall to teach them not to throw forward...

I taught myself while home sick from school - took about a week. This was pre internet and I had no references at all other than 3 balls.

I use LibreOffice on my computer while everyone else has MS Office - it's usually not a problem. The one thing Libre sucks at though is PPTs - now this is probably at least 1/2 the fault of the people that make incredible bad PPT's (bad here meaning bad underneath...lets not comment on artistic prowess for now). Opening anything beyond a very basic PPT usually results in terrible terrible things in LibreOffice.

I use Zimbra as the mail server for my company - it's quite the clone of google and open source (http://wiki.zimbra.com/wiki/Building_Zimbra_using_Perforce). I was amazed at how many of all those same nifty ajax-y features work on their web client as well. *And* it's now owned by vmware so it's got a strong corporate backer. The free version is not feature complete though - it has all the standard features, it's the enterprise level stuff they leave out (high availability, clustering, more advanced/faster search for super-large inboxes and a few other things - reasonable in my opinion).

I took a high level graph theory class...and the professor told us that we could choose how we wanted the final to be: a)no references at all, b) open book (the book for the course) or c) open anything (bring any references you feel like).

He then proceeded to explain that if we chose a) the test would be only require knowledge we had learned in class, b) the test would cover material that would not be answerable from the book or c) where he would choose open NP-hard questions and see how well we did reasoning through possible solutions.

Not surprisingly we chose option a)

I always find it strange when discussing this and people (like my gf even) don't see why one would want to live a longer, or even unending life. I think you will always find things to do. And of course no one wants to live to 150 with the last 80 years being all dementia - this is only a thing to talk about if the life extension adds "good" or at least "passable" years. I'd take more aches and pains in exchange for an extra 70 years of expected lifespan in a heartbeat.

The thing that will really piss me off is if I get to 80 or so, then they figure out the anti-aging tech, but I'm too old to use it. I want either to benefit from it or for it to still be "in the distant future" when/if I get old and die.

Oh and one more thing, I don't require incoming ptr checks on my mail server, as many have pointed out some people simply don't do it even if they should. The score will be weighted higher towards spam without it though.

I didn't read every comment, but the general theme seems to be that it's not absolutely required to have a reverse DNS entry. While this is true per the RFC - it's incredibly bad in practice. Google MX check, run the checker and if you don't have reverse DNS it'll point it out. Also people that say not one mail has bounced because of this must simply be wrong. Many blacklists will auto-add you if they notice you don't have reverse dns, then many companies will pick that up. Last time i had to move my companies mail server, the reverse was inadvertently not setup properly - not only did this cause problems fairly quickly it was slow to fix because while you'll be added to blacklists instantly, getting back off them is a manual process - you have to find every one you are on and then the companies that have picked up this info then have to get the new info - and some don't do this in a timely manner.

Running a real mail server for a real company without a correct functioning PTR record would be something that should get you fired.

The reasoning is simple, anyone running a real mail server will easily be able to set it up, if you don't have the PTR it likely means you are a spammer or you are running a server at home. Not that there's anything wrong with running your own SMTP server, but that's basically how botnets send spam...so there's a heavy correlation to that and spam.

I've only ever really worked jobs where results count. If what needs to be done takes 4 hours that week...it takes 4 hours, if it takes 60, it takes 60. If the president of company XYZ wants certain things done...and his employees get them done in less than 40 hour work weeks he has 3 choices:

• 1) Fire people until everyone is working 40ish hours/week (and are unhappy)
• 2) Keep coming up with more work to do until they are all working 40ish hours/week
• 3) do nothing, keep raking in whatever money you are and have everyone else be happy with the work load.

3 seems the smart choice to me.

More likely it's just that they get their "real" work done in 1 hour/day, respond to crap e-mails sporadically the rest of the day. I know plenty of people that waste 6+ hours/day with bureaucracy/meetings/chit chat/whatever at the office. It's just that when you work at home...you do the same work, and then watch tv, or tend to the lawn, or whatever the rest of the time rather than dealing with office bullsh*t.

If you can spare/build/whatever a machcine (and really it could probably be anything from the last decade), download pfsense, the installer pretty much works, the how-to's are very detailed. It's a mature stable product. It'll let you load balance your outbound connections as well as do everything a modern firewall does (you might, for instance, find being able to setup VPN on the box highly useful).

If you don't know anything about networking it might be a bit daunting, but probably still within the realm of possibility given it's all gui based and the docs are detailed.

I would love to find some part time work, the problem is that the IT work that I do...really doesn't lend itself to just being somewhere a few hours. It's all stuff that requires you to at least be available on-call 24x7. Not that I usually have to work that much, but still if you are the network guy and the network breaks, you have to fix it, whenever that is. And if you have multiple clients, and they all have problems at the same time...well it could get ugly...