Viewing profile — mechanical_fish

We didn't have iPhones in 1995, but television filled the same role. The result was no better. It was probably worse. We'd spend hours watching TV, often while simultaneously being…

The stakes are high, so I'm going to be blunt: This is terrible advice. [1] The amount you're trying to save with "option 4" can be estimated fairly accurately; it's about 0.09% pe…

In tandem with looking up the data, I also recommend broadening your social circle by meeting a former alcoholic or two. They're not hard to find. Alternatively, you can read their…

Fixed. Don't get me wrong, I own and rather like Rumours , though I cannot spell it. It helps that, after spending a decade mostly not listening to classic-rock radio, I can hear t…

My theory continues to be that the music industry is just unlucky. They entered the internet era with a product that was perfectly positioned to be annihilated by Napster, iTunes, …

You certainly can get clients through email, and I can think of no more valuable skill you could practice than the art of composing a really good email to a consulting customer who…

Your questions are good and relevant ones, I agree. Let me rephrase them a little: "Hello, coworker! Did you enjoy the cake we both got to eat the other day in the company cafeteri…

It's highly relevant to getting a job on a software team, but only because most teams are assembled via interviews, and verbally relating stories from your past in a face-to-face m…

Quite a few RIT grads have come through my employer's engineering teams. There seems to be, or have been, a program there in "network engineering" or something, which places a big …

If the question is an algorithms type question, then there is no ambiguity, and either the interviewee answers it or they don't. Imagine that our interview goes like this: --- Q: C…

You may think you're doing the candidate a favor by offering to handwave away the details, but the vaguer question might actually be worse. "Can you write a correct implementation …

Let me get the plug in first: if you are on a Mac, try Dash, the app that looks up docs for you. I have it mapped to a keystroke in emacs, and I can sometimes park the cursor atop,…

I work for a very large Drupal hosting company. We host important web sites on Drupal for corporations big and small. Web service software is not secure unless you patch it rapidly…

Hosting your own email works great until you try to actually send any. [1] But if you send enough, you eventually have to deal with the spam infrastructure. Customers will complain…

Wow, I forgot just how many days that was, I see. Though I now remember that one of my labs had a storage dewar full of precious biological samples that was a bigger version of thi…

The non-pressurized LN dewars I've seen had a "plug" that was just a cylinder of foam that slid into the neck of the dewar, with a light plastic cap on top. It was lightweight enou…

It's true, it is easy to get carried away by the fact that the Leidenfrost effect can protect you from small splashes of nitrogen on your skin. As the demos show, it's even possibl…

And, honestly, they are not that hard to learn. Compared to the amount of time it takes to understand the semantics of "stdout", the time required to learn the spelling of "stdout"…

Read and discover: http://www.kalzumeus.com/2014/11/07/doing-business-in-japan/ (I could pull an answer to your question out of this -- hint, search the page for a dollar sign -- b…

The USA is not Japan. Others have already pointed out that our geography is different. But that might not even be the real problem. I am a fan of trains, but I live in Arlington, M…

Speaking of emeritus employees: When do salarymen retire? What happens after that? Does the salaryman finally get to see that beach in Hawaii that his wife has been visiting every …

The glib response is " what 'inefficiencies'?" The U.S. version of the social contract has advantages, but "greater overall efficiency" is not one of them. U.S. employees are also …

Yes, and I also nerd out on the design of online discussion forums. So watching this discussion trip over a misfeature and nearly fall into the darknet was sad, and sad again.

Sigh.