There Hedgemony wouldn’t understand if they had handed the Shrubbery a clear statement of intent written in English with no words longer than two syllables. They think everyone is supposed to do things their way, and won’t accept that others have different goals. They can’t conceive of the reality that the Chinese don’t need the US for anything other than a market, and the US has no influence over them other than that.

I was sure it was a “K”, Hipparchia, but I haven’t used it years. It was very popular for rallying [timed racing on a road course].

Some people like RPN and find it a lot easier to use, it is easier to implement in some hardware environments.

It would make more sense to have someone who works in the field interview technical applicants, than personnel people who are only trained in bureaucracy.

i could probably still use a slide rule if you held a gun to my head. maybe.

not sure why rpn made more sense to me than the ‘normal’ way, but it does. much easier, even though i learned it only after using ti calculators for several years.

I was asked if I knew how to use a 4GL, and when I said I could write one, the interviewer didn’t understand what I meant.

🙂 i doubt i could write one, but i’ve used a few of them, and at least i understand what you’re talking about. gee, does this qualify me to get a job interviewing job candidates?

I was watching the opening ceremony in Beijing last night. It was all the pundits said it would be and more. The USA, if it has any intelligence left at all, should be scared to death. The Chinese had so many subtle (and not so subtle) messages throughout the ceremony, it’s taken me an entire day to digest and consider most of it. Little things like the fact that the crowd (mostly Chinese) cheered the loadest for Iraq, Australia and China, and were subdued for the USA and others. The fact that China had over 30k military police patrolling the streets of Beijing (along with a huge Police force) and had thousands of undercover agents amongst the people watching the ceremony. The technical ability they showed during the ceremony was simply stunning. And they did it all in 5 years or less!! As an Engineer, I am in awe. As an ex-intel op… I am concerned. And the themes of the ceremony were for the most part counter to everything the USA currently stands for (I mean of course the World view of the Bush administration’s track record). I wonder if anyone in Bushworld will realize they were just given a huge slap and a warning? I doubt it. If I had to sum up that ceremony… I would call it China’s *Coming Out* party! I think they just served notice.

Time, as always, will tell. 🙂

I gave up in the middle of one interview because the person was asking questions from a form and didn’t know enough about the job to understand that my resume answered all of the questions. I told her flat out that if a technology company didn’t have an interviewer who knew something about their own technology, it obviously wasn’t a place I wanted to work.

A guy I knew wanted to hire me for his project at this company, but I wasn’t going to deal with the management. He told me to put his name on the resume, but they obviously hadn’t read the resume they required me to submit.

Yeah, I’ve been hearing “You are over qualified for the position” for years, and I still don’t understand why that’s a negative.

I still have my trusty old slide rule too! And know how to use it. I used it to solve trig equations mostly. 🙂 It’s a good German one an Uncle gave me when I was accepted into Engineering school that will last forever… Faber-Castell I think… 🙂

You know what the most common thing I was told (with some arm twisting for an honest response that is) when I went for a job interview during the last 5 years was? “I can’t hire you. You’d have my job in 6 Months” (or some variation of that) by the *Exec’s* 10+ years my junior. My resume scares people. That’s why I’m doing my own thing now, once again. And the only thing they care about is “What have you achieved recently?” These Exec’s are morons, and they don’t understand what my resume is telling them. Comprehension is a lost art I fear, along with common sense.
/rant 😉

I do appreciate my last TI because it’s powered by a solar cell, no worries about batteries dying in an exam.

There’s nothing wrong with any of the systems, it’s just the hassle of remembering who uses what.

I recently discovered that the TI-59 still has a website!
TI-59 Home Page

Some things just work… at least, things designed in the 60’s, 70’s & 80’s did anyway. 😉

Kryten, Rumsfeld’s outsourcing and force transformation have eliminated many of the technical skills that the military once possessed on its own and replaced them with “contractors”, who might be able to hack it in garrisons, but aren’t worth anything in a war zone. A hardware tech guy doesn’t apply for a job thinking he might get shot at, so you end up with people who don’t mind getting shot at, but might not know which end a soldering iron to grab. “Just In Time” inventory control barely works in the US, and it damn sure doesn’t work when supply trucks and the roads they use are subject to being blown up.

There are a lot of guys trying to get out, but being held over. Only general officers seem to be able to schedule their retirements.

It not just the military, there are Z-80s in a lot of appliances functioning as controllers.

It’s tough to go back to thinking in single lines of code after a lay off. I’m doing some conversions and am having to remember what commands do and there parameters are in a couple of different languages. It’s almost as annoying as moving between a “Big Endian” machine and a “Small Endian” or switching to Reverse Polish Notation on a calculator.