GasBandit
Staff member
Well, these days he's hard to catch in concert. It was a pretty narrow window, when he was popular you were probably very young.
You realize that Hawaii is one of the 49 that has snow. Florida is the no snow state.Somewhere, @WasabiPoptart is laughing at us. And then takes a sip of her drink.
Well sure, we had a snow day on Thursday, but now it's 60. Yay Front Range.
I'm honestly surprised you don't already have two compromised D-Link routers on your network, both fighting for control of DHCP.
--Patrick
GasBandit
Staff member
I handed my contractor a sharpie to mark a board.
I log into Facebook and get an ad for a sharpie.
It's reading my fracking mind...
I log into Facebook and get an ad for a sharpie.
It's reading my fracking mind...
My comment still stands.
The original posting was actually in @WasabiPoptart 's honor. After all, she seemed like the only one I could commiserate with about our respective winter weather and how brutal it was.
GasBandit
Staff member
She is extremely active on Facebook. Keeping herself very busy. I don't know if and when we'll see her around here again, but that's her call.
"I just want honesty in this relationship."
Ugh, I don't know why I go to job interviews like the one I just got back from. I didn't know it until I got there, but it was a position to sell insurance. No base pay, just visiting clients and making sales pitches.
The whole interview felt like a sales pitch in itself. He even compared the process to dating. The first part was a speed date: a quick, 2-minute get-to-know-you thing. If he liked me, I get upgraded to the 1-hour sales pitch (which I was blessed enough to get that). Then they'll contact me again for another interview. The guy was fast talking, loud, talking about how much money the company makes, how much money I'd make, the great places they have conferences.
Yeah, no thanks. That's just not my gig.
The whole interview felt like a sales pitch in itself. He even compared the process to dating. The first part was a speed date: a quick, 2-minute get-to-know-you thing. If he liked me, I get upgraded to the 1-hour sales pitch (which I was blessed enough to get that). Then they'll contact me again for another interview. The guy was fast talking, loud, talking about how much money the company makes, how much money I'd make, the great places they have conferences.
Yeah, no thanks. That's just not my gig.
Ergh, no. The kind of job you really, really don't want. Well, if you didn't know in advance, can't blame yourself for going. Hope you at least got a couple of drinks or a pen or something out of it to offset the cost and time.
Nope! Only got a waste of my time.
It's funny. During the pitch today, I grew more and more cynical about it. Didn't even try hiding it. And I think he knew by the way he kept looking back at me.
To be fair, I work in the insurance sphere, and it's a fantastic company... But we write industry software instead of selling overpriced life insurance to old ladies.Props to ya for going, but yeah. Hell no. I'd have been out the door at the first mention of insurance.
I went to a job interview once for a programmer position that required SQL Server knowledge. The guy specifically said "we need you to know how to make stored procedures and dts packages and that's it. We don't need a DBA"Nope! Only got a waste of my time.
It's funny. During the pitch today, I grew more and more cynical about it. Didn't even try hiding it. And I think he knew by the way he kept looking back at me.
First question he asked me in the interview was "So, how much does a database grow when you add an index to a table?"
Now, I happen to know the math to figure it out, but it requires knowledge of a lot of variables, such as what kind of data you're indexing, it's uniqueness, etc. But all that's beside the point--your typical developer wouldn't know it. His earlier assertion about how much database knowledge he was looking for was total bullshit.
So, I looked at him for a second, weighing how much bullshit I was going to have to put up with in that job. Then I stood up, said "Sorry for wasting both of our time," and walked out. I was just glad that I could assess that it would be a bullshit place to work in the first 5 minutes.
I once had an interview in the late 2000's where someone asked me, "What sort of concerns should you look for when someone says they can't get their 200MB hard drive to work?" I honestly thought I was being asked a trick question and replied that it should work fine, but he'd probably have trouble fitting his OS and data on there.
I did not get the job.
To this day I wonder if he really was trying to figure out if I knew about the 137GB limit in older BIOSes, if it was just an honest confusion on his part between MB or GB, or whether I really wanted to work under someone who would so easily confuse the two.
--Patrick
Last edited:
Maybe he was reading from a standard set of interview questions that hadn't been updated since... oh... 1991 or so.
Power outage. Hopefully it'll be on before morning.
Guess I get to see if the battery rig I built for my cpap machine for camping works. I wasn't successful when I went camping but that was because I was so congested (and why I now pack Afrin with my machine).
The outage also justifies a number of impulse buys this last year, mostly flashlights but also a few other things.
Guess I get to see if the battery rig I built for my cpap machine for camping works. I wasn't successful when I went camping but that was because I was so congested (and why I now pack Afrin with my machine).
The outage also justifies a number of impulse buys this last year, mostly flashlights but also a few other things.
A big technology company comes to us with an unusual case. They've taken a bunch of stuff in Chinese and used machine translation to translate it into English. They want us to edit the English translation to bring it up to acceptable standards. Naturally, the quality of the translation sucks, and we're going to have to spend a lot of time and effort to edit it.
But that's not the rant part. The rant part is that the client is going to feed our edited translations back into their machine translation software, to train it to become better at translation. In other words, we are actively training a computer to eventually replace us.
But that's not the rant part. The rant part is that the client is going to feed our edited translations back into their machine translation software, to train it to become better at translation. In other words, we are actively training a computer to eventually replace us.
Wouldn't you be able to provide a much more accurate translation if they gave you the original chinese?
Yes we would, but that's not their endgame. They want to stop having to hire us for translations altogether. We're willingly participating in this process of digging our own grave because if we don't take the case, some other translation company will, so we might as well make some money while we're doing the digging.
Fortunately, current indications are that the quality of machine translation will probably never match human translation entirely. Therefore, translators may end up getting replaced in a decade or two, but editors like me will still have a job.
When I was consulting, I had a company explicitly ask to make it easy to modify data tables, add drop downs, etc. And I did. And I gave them extensive documentation on how to hire a lesser-paid non-programmer to perform those tasks.
They proceeded to occasionally hire me over the next 6 years to do those changes anyway.
GasBandit
Staff member
Pull a Galen Urso and subtly sabotage the translation machine!
GasBandit
Staff member
Salesperson's e-mail: "Please use the jingle for this link for the commercial."
Me: (clicks link, is taken to vimeo of the client's completed TV spot that features voice talent talking non-stop from beginning to end over a music bed, with no "jingle")
My e-mail: "There's no jingle on this link, just a completed TV spot that uses a music bed"
Salesperson's e-mail: "I meant the bed, use the music bed."
Me: /headdesk. /headdesk. /headdesk.
My e-mail: "I can't pull just the music and not the voice off of a spot somebody else made. Sound doesn't work that way."
Graduated to a minor rant because this is at least the third time I've had to tell this person that, and I've lost count of how many times I've had to tell a salesperson that in general.
This particular salesperson has been in broadcast advertising at least 10 years, you would think she'd know the difference between a jingle and a music bed by now.
Me: (clicks link, is taken to vimeo of the client's completed TV spot that features voice talent talking non-stop from beginning to end over a music bed, with no "jingle")
My e-mail: "There's no jingle on this link, just a completed TV spot that uses a music bed"
Salesperson's e-mail: "I meant the bed, use the music bed."
Me: /headdesk. /headdesk. /headdesk.
My e-mail: "I can't pull just the music and not the voice off of a spot somebody else made. Sound doesn't work that way."
Graduated to a minor rant because this is at least the third time I've had to tell this person that, and I've lost count of how many times I've had to tell a salesperson that in general.
This particular salesperson has been in broadcast advertising at least 10 years, you would think she'd know the difference between a jingle and a music bed by now.