after working my old job for 6 years, waking up every morning saying "i don't want to go to work", I finally completely changed industries and got a new job this year. It was 100% the right decision. But, I gave up working at home, hanging out with my dog all day, and about 10% of my pay. Still, I only have a 10 minute bike ride to work (or 30 minute walk), I can wear shorts in the summer, and I'm more or less my own boss. I've been here for the better part of a year now and I still enjoy every day. It's all about deciding what makes you happy.

I graduated with a mechanical engineering degree and got into an industry that I didn't particularly care for out of college. I sat at a computer working in 2d autocad all day. It was supposed to just be a pay check while i searched for my dream job and ended up lasting 6 years. Long story short, through my entire year long search for a "dream job", every company I interviewed with said they didn't care about degrees, they just wanted someone with experience. When I interviewed for programming positions, they just wanted a strong portfolio. When i got tired of interviewing for programming positions for over a year and not even getting one offer, I changed my search to linux system administration and found a job within a month. I got a junior position and my boss said he didn't really mind that I am lacking in the more technical aspects of networking and such. I think it mostly came down to me presenting myself in a professional manner at my interview, having general corporate experience, being organized, and generally not being an idiot. Apparently the only other person they interviewed didn't even come in, it was over skype and the girl didn't even dress up. And there were about 30 other resumes, some of them were University of Phoenix grads. My boss just laughed at them. so, tl;dr: as long as you know your stuff, it doesn't matter what your degree is in.

In case you want more than just hothardware, here's a decent selection

• Overclockers
• pcperspective
• Hardware canucks
• hardocp
• neoseeker
• tweaktown
• hexus

i agree the test should be "which sounds correct", not "better". They should also test and record with a mic first to prove that what the subjects are hearing is in fact different. If you play two mp3 tracks and people say "none sound like the original", then you know people can detect the loss due to compression. Which is also an argument for buying better equipment to play audio on. In theory, the more expensive the audio equipment, the more accurate the reproduced audio should be, just like FLAC should be able to reproduce the original audio better than mp3 at any bitrate. Which is why it's important to listen to the audio equipment in the store first, to make sure you are spending your money in a way that goes with your listening preference.

i have a pentium 1 laptop (100mhz, 32mb ram i believe) that I was able to run DSL on and NetBSD. I tried installing debian but it ran for 3 days grabbing packages so i finally just killed the install.

i still use my original xbox as my media box with XBMC. The main downside is the slow processor which limits what can be decoded, but there is a pretty good HOWTO in the wiki for tailoring the settings of h.264+ac3 for output on the xbox.

I have a Brother MFC-7840W and can confirm that Brother has great OS X, Linux, and Windows support. My OKI C8800 also works very well on all three, but isn't quite a consumer model printer. So, I wouldn't discount OKI right away either.

i have ATT and live in PA with a MD number. I only pay PA tax on my line.

Apart from not bringing the laptop to class, how about you don't take it out during class? If people don't see it, they won't know it's there and they won't ask to use it. I'd bet they are already trained on asking you so they'll ask you for a few weeks even if they don't see it, but keep saying "sorry i didn't bring it" and soon they'll learn to rely on other resources.

I wrote an overclocking buyers guide and I have been updating it relatively frequently over the last few years. it hasn't been updated in a few months tho as my work has started taking up more of my time. but, it too could also be seen as a gaming guide http://www.ocforums.com/showthread.php?t=483065

It's funny that people don't think of this, or don't want to do this. I was sent to Europe for a two week engineering conference and took an extra weekend to explore a little on my own. Out of the 7 americans on the trip, only one other did the same thing.

We had another engineering conference in Colorado and I was amazed that only two other people wanted to go out early and hit the slopes. The company payed the airfare so all I had to do was pay the extra nights stay and lift tickets...total no brainer to me. I'm sure everyone has their reasons one way or the other, but opportunities like these don't pop up everyday so it's hard for me to understand why everyone doesn't make the most out of them.