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In my teenage years I went down south to visit some of the good 'ol boys in the Vinson clan (that's clan with a "c," though I have my concerns that some of them might be members of a clan with a "k," too). Regardless, we went to their church for some light gambling, where bingo cards were advertised as being "$5 each or 5 for $25." I'm not kidding. That's still a better special offer than Bob D. was offered on audible.com, though...
Making ends meet while attending college is tough. Tuition is ridiculously expensive, books are ridiculously expensive, and food is ridiculously... reasonable, generally. Still, it's hard to afford everything. You could work a crappy part-time job, sell your bone marrow, sign a waiver and let the med students have their way with you, or improvise to make money. Jesse's friend who we'll call "Giuseppe" chose improvisation.
Now, by "improvisation," I don't mean he got on stage to talk about how white people tie their shoes versus how black people tie their shoes (what's the deal with that, anyway? Heyoo!). No, he found himself a client! He could use all the skills he'd gleaned from his few years in college and make some money on the side.
Jamin doesn't trust traditional filesystems. You can keep your FATs and your NTFSs; he'll stick with paper. Of course, file storage takes up more physical space in this case, but copying a file is as easy as setting the printer to print and collate two copies every time a file is saved. The only issue he has is that booting from the scanner takes several days.
Sometimes the best WTFs don't come from without; they come from within. If you think back across the history of your career, you've probably had your share of red-faced, forehead-slapping moments from doing something stupid. You've got some coming up ahead, too. And if you've never made an embarrassing professional mistake, congratulations, you're an oblivious "Expert."
Dan O. was enjoying the fruits of working for a dot-com venture in early 2001. Well, like most dot-coms at the beginning of the century, Dan's went bankrupt. Maybe they were ahead of their time, maybe they were big dreamers, or maybe it was the fact that a client that represented 80% of the company's revenues dried up.
If you're working on a feature of an application that is hidden off in a dark, cobweb-covered corner that maybe one in ten thousand users will ever use, you might be a little lax about it. Maybe it'll stay out of the smoke testing plan, maybe it'll even be forgotten by the time the software ships. A good example of an insignificant feature would be the ability to select a background color in a print preview screen. A bad example of an insignificant feature would be creating a new document.
(submitted anonymously)
Dave T. sent in this message that I've been trying to figure out. As I understand it, FontLab's import failed because it couldn't find the reason the import failed... but it wouldn't have a reason to fail to begin with. It's as though it predicted a failure that didn't actually happen, which caused an error. I swear, this'll lead me to trepan myself like the guy in that movie Pi.
"You Tris?"
Luke had just blown his opportunity to make a good first impression, as was his custom. Luke was a huge, imposing, surly man who'd been in IT for far too long. Tris tried to feign a smile.
Everyone has rebellious impulses. Doing the exact opposite of what signs, your conscience, authority figures, or common sense tell you to do is always more fun than obeying them. Honestly, the "Do Not Feed the Tigers" sign at the zoo might as well just read "Fun Prohibited." Sometimes you have to listen to the Avril Lavigne in your head and just, like, totally reject authority!!
(Submitted by Nit)
Before popup blocking was a common browser feature, I developed a high level of skill manually blocking popups. I could zoom the mouse over a window and close it almost immediately after it appeared. This became second nature, and after getting used to it, I became incapable of not closing popups. Similarly, I subconsciously check "Do not show this message again" boxes and uncheck "show this message next time [x] starts" any time I see it. If this is what I'm missing out on, I'll deal with it.
(Submitted by Ben)
Keeping employee morale up is a hard thing to do, so businesses do their best to keep spirits up. Maybe a company picnic, maybe you get to wear a Hawaiian shirt to work one day (thanks, soulless employer, I've always wanted to look like a total boob in a Hawaiian shirt), or perhaps a game of friendly competition.
Well, John Q. Public and his coworkers were offered a crossword puzzle. It's safe and has a fun factor somewhere between breathing and finding a penny on the ground. Essentially, it's the minimum amount of fun you can have before moving into the territory of not-fun. Plus, the company could fill it up with generic words like QUALITY, PROCESSIMPROVEMENT, and TRIAGE.
Despite the fact that we work together and literally sit within arm's reach of one another, I was overjoyed when Alex made me an author on this site. "They'll talk about ya in the papers, kid. Stick with me and you'll go far," he said. Of course I'm paraphrasing; "Jesus, this is taking way too much time out of my day. Can you write an article so I don't have to?" might be a little more accurate. Still, I was honored to have the opportunity for several reasons:
(Submitted by Chris)
Call me jaded, but every time I'm starting up on a new project as a maintenance developer, I expect the worst. It helps to soften the blow when the code I have to maintain is, in fact, "the worst." Plus it makes it all the better when I get to maintain good code.
In the early 90s, Tim was called on for help with a beautifully written TurboPascal system (and he assures me that such a thing exists). His company was tasked not with improving the already excellent system but, puzzlingly, replacing it altogether. It was there that he first met Hung.
With an offer like this, Dan Q. would be an idiot not to spend £100,000.00 on several copies of Sage Instant Accounts 12 (Google cache) from across the pond. Order now and get it before whatever the hell Red Nose Day is!
Here's a secret about your company's tech department: they hate you. They really, really, really hate dealing with your stupid questions because you're a stupid user who never learns. They're even devising ways to avoid dealing with you.
In fact, I worked with a tech support guy who developed a strategy to avoid doing work; he'd pretend he'd identified the problem, give the user a task that takes a minimum of five minutes to complete, and ask that the user call back if the problem wasn't solved (with a high probability of the call going to one of the other support guys). The tech department at Alise's friend's company was roughly as helpful as my former coworker.
S. B. S. knows that employment scammers are waiting around every corner. Your neighbor might be one. Your coworker. Even your grandmother is probably running work-at-home scams on the internet! S. B. S. fortunately wasn't taken in by this one from Monster.ca:
We all know the rules for good passwords. They should be at least 90 characters long, have no recognizable words or phrases, consist of 30% lowercase characters, 30% uppercase characters, and 40% special characters, and they should be changed daily, if not hourly. Where I work, if you forget your password, you're fired on the spot and recommended for execution.
OK, maybe I'm exaggerating a little, but let's quit jerking each other around and get serious. Password security is a big deal. Enrique knows this as well as the rest of us. Sadly, two developers he worked with missed the message.
Christian K. needed to wash his Nitro, which according to Google is probably either a Dodge car, snowboard, fishing boat, punk rock album, sexy movie guide, or web development framework. Anyhow, he had no outside spigot to use in his apartment complex, so he needed a way to hook it up to his kitchen sink. Google tried to correct his search, and I have to admit that I'm more than a little afraid to check this out in Google Image Search.
Mar 07
