caw

All of my work music has vocalists. Most of what I listen to is rock w/female vocalist. But basically there's consistency and familiarity in what I'm listening to, as well as minimum interruption between songs so I'm able to tune it out. I think radio would be super jarring going between songs and commercials and morning shows, so I never listen to it unless I'm in the car.

The new redesign also breaks the "Personal Blocklist" Chrome extension by Google. The text overlaps with the first line after the link.

I was able to get rid of the new styling by doing incognito mode. If I'm logged in to either my gmail or google apps account I get the redesign.

I'm going to have to echo whichdan's sentiments in that working remotely will separate you from the networking and social side of things. You need to have something else in mind (hackathons, meetups, other social type things) because you don't have the social aspects of work if you choose #2.

I've noticed in the IT industry is that while many things are being automated, a lot of IT work is being shifted.

What do I mean by shifted? Besides the obvious "cloud" and on demand resources, you also have the rise of "self service IT". This puts the burden of providing IT support on the user. Amazon doesn't host your web servers, they just let you push the button to make a server. Now the server is your problem. With enterprise IT, they don't want to staff support so they make FAQs and Knowledge Bases for people to search through. Nevermind that this puts burden on the IT group to document all of this and keep it up to date.

So what I think is going to happen over the next 5-10 years is the continuing growth of speciality providers for services, in an effort to shift from an internal IT cost to an external IT cost. In some ways this will allow technology to grow quickly, because these companies will be experts at their problem domain and need innovative solutions for their problems.

Over the longer term (10+), you might see the pendulum swing the other way in IT. Things will be brought in house again to maintain control and solve business specific problems that the outside providers don't address because they're generic providers.

Every year in IT, the IT people will be asked to do more with fewer resources. So of course things are being automated and will need to be automated. If you're in charge of creating this automation, make sure you don't have any unnecessary human glue. I've seen "automated" processes that would absolutely die without enough human input. These don't scale, as you have another 50% more machines dumped on top of you without additional headcount.

At no point will the human element of automation go away -- you'll just need the skills to maintain and improve the automation rather than the skills to do what the automation is doing.

I run a Django app on AWS Ubuntu machines managed by Chef. I have my own chef server, but you could also do hosted Chef to avoid the extra infrastructure.

Basically chef bootstraps the node from EC2, since you can only give it an initial keypair. Chef server will SSH into your box and install user accounts, the firewall, the webserver, tweak some settings (like mounting EBS volumes, restricting SSH, etc), install virtualenv and python. We use fabric to deploy, and that's when the code installs Django and whatnot in the virtualenv, as well as put the code on the machine.

Can't tell you if Chef is the best option. It's what I've been learning but it does have some rough edges. Finding the "right" cookbook is hard, because Opscode's listing isn't always the best. If you have concerns about using any particular setup to keep your environment homogenous (e.g. all init, upstart, runit, or supervisor) you'll have to put in quite a bit of work.

TWC is ridiculous on price. My complex was wired for it but they would only sell me "business class" rather than consumer. I instead got U-Verse (18 down / ?? up) for $45 per month.

There's a distinct lack of images on that website. I for one would like to see how I would diagnose problems without opening 5 tabs. A "demo" mode would be even more helpful.

I was wondering if the rate of voting or the absolute value of the post's rating (it had a ton of upvotes) triggered a Disqus protection thinking it was a flame war, similar to flamewar protection on HN.

The government contractors will want a security clearance for that level salary though, particularly the ability to get a top secret clearance or SCI.

I have 2 similar Ikea desks in a L shape, though it was something like $20 for the table top and 4 legs since the tabletop is pressboard. Ikea has a more expensive height adjustable leg for $15 a piece, which I would recommend over the fixed height legs so you can make the desk the right height rather than try to adjust everything around the desk (chair, footrest, etc).

I think it's interesting that some of the premium/upscale brands appear more "premium" with the minimalism, but the commodity brands appear cheaper with the same minimalism. Sometimes the last images take it too far though and leave a lifeless product.

For example (just my opinions)

Premium:

* Guinness #2, #3

* Evian #3, #4

* Redbull

* Schweppes (the glass bottle makes it look more premium I think)

Commodity:

* M&M #3 (It looks OEM or bulk quantity)

* Jelly Belly #3, #4 (Same bulk feel as M&Ms)

* Nesquik

* Pringles

There's another app called "GlassesOff" that seems to do the same thing.

It might work, assuming the building can support multiple cable providers (e.g. it's not all just 1 trunk from CableCo), but it would cost more in equipment. You would need to convert the fiber to coax (maybe with an intermediate step of ethernet), and then the customer would need a modem to convert from coax to ethernet. It'd be a pricey installation and continual maintenance of hardware.

I think what you're looking for is sale of a partnership. The company may not be structured the same as how a doctor or law office does it, but valuing something with limited physical assets would be a similar methodology.

Oh okay, so you can approve in batch (I also read your other reply about roll up notifications). That makes more sense now, and I can see why this system makes sense.

My previous companies were super rigid about expense reports to avoid any of these problems so I never knew they were problems for some people. You only had so long after your trip was complete, so there would be no "expense report from 2 months ago", and only a minimal delay before getting the quarter's numbers for travel and training. If you had a corporate card, it had to be reconciled each statement for accounting to directly pay the card, otherwise you were on the hook for the balance and responsible for getting it reimbursed to you.

I agree, I can't see the approver's perspective on this one. I sent you a gas receipt today, and I send you a bunch more receipts tomorrow, and some more the following day. How do you know which transactions are legitimate if you're getting them piecewise and not for the whole trip (i.e. bombard the approver with requests so they can't tell falsified charges)?

I agree. Split the expenses with whatever seems logical.

Suppose your trip for Company A would be a flight in, hotel for the evening, interview day, then hotel for the next evening (you fly out the next morning). If you want to add another night, that would be paid by company B, and company B would cover food and expenses for that day.

If halfsies seems easiest and both companies are fine with it, then that just makes the receipt tracking easier.

Because there's a niche market for people like myself that wear noise canceling headphones without music?

Seriously though, if I go in a server room I'm putting noise canceling on. I still need to hear if someone is talking to me, so no music unless I'm doing repetitive work.

I think OP means Twitter OAuth tokens?

And I might add that double the salary is a good reason to re-negotiate. You're not jumping for 5-10K, which may be reason not to negotiate ("Hey, he's jumping at the drop of a hat, if I keep him he'll jump at the next offer"), but when you're looking at a severe discrepancy in valuing an employee, it's worth the discussion. For most people a 2x salary is something you can't put down, even if you absolutely love your job. I think most people would understand and if you have a good transition plan you won't burn any bridges.

The counter may or may not be the full 2x. They may counter lower and try to keep some fuzzy items like "You know what it's like here, you enjoy your job", etc.

The counter may involve more responsibility. Why is company Y valuing you at double? Do they expect you to take on different responsibilities? That's definitely going to be a factor in the discussion.

ext3 without dir_index has a limit of 32K directories in any one directory.

Where I saw it crop up was 32K folders under /tmp on a cluster system. So no it's not a limit on number of directories entirely (that's inodes), but rather how many subdirectories you can have.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ext4#Features <-- Fixes 32K limit

Similar to free inodes, you should also check for maximum number of directories. dir_index option helps, but I've seen it become a problem.

I just started working from home in January.

My suggestions:

* A dedicated space is a nice to have. It helps separate the work/not-work relationship

* I have two computers for 3 reasons. First is work/not-work balance. Second is related but there's a clause in my employment contract that's basically "work done on company's computer is owned by work". Lastly, the company paid for the computer.

* I have a Herman Miller Embody chair though I've also used a Steelcase Leap (v1, v2) in my last job. Regardless of what anyone tells you, go sit in the chairs at a store. I found the Aeron to be uncomfortable for myself, even though everyone seems to love them.

* On setting up the office, make sure it's ergonomic. Get a monitor riser, laptop riser, footrest, or whatever else you need to avoid destroying your body while sitting all day.

* Make sure you take breaks. My last workplace used "Wellnomics" on Windows for break alerts, but it gets moderately annoying at times.

* I've been meaning to get a whiteboard for myself, just to get some doodling space. A notebook or similar would probably also be fine if you work with images or anything spacial.

A "jumbo" box be an idea there. The office manager could get 1 jumbo box a month and then pass out candy to everyone (versus multiple subscriptions for multiple employees, which would add up fast)

VSP is Voluntary Separation Plan. It's different than early retirement, because it's not just to get people to retire early. Typically there's some target criteria, like having a particular rating on your review for the past N reviews. Not everyone will take VSP -- they're assuming a certain percentage of people offered will. There's also limits for groups to prevent a mass exodus from one division.

I know a few people who were offered VSP previously, but they're still at the company so it's not like "If you don't take VSP you're going to be fired soon."

Wow, I have an AMEX but didn't know about it.

For anyone else curious: https://www.shoprunner.com/americanexpress/

EDIT: Apparently it's not all American Express cards. My Fidelity AMEX doesn't qualify.

You can preorder for $39.99, or priority preorder for $189.99. If you simply pre-order and multiple people pre-order, then it goes to auction. I assume everything it's telling me is "available" is available as a pre-order, and the ones that aren't are priority pre-orders.

Most of the obvious guru addresses are already gone, and GoDaddy is still doing preorders (5am NZ is still another hour from now).

I've seen a couple, but nothing that makes me want to spend $40 on.

Basically all generics are taken already (code, software, IT, devops, etc). Most languages are gone, except for Golang and Erlang. I checked a few frameworks, and RubyOnRails is still available, but stuff like Django is out.

I didn't do an exhaustive search though.

Having been at a company that recently underwent a CEO change, the first email is always fluffy. It's a greeting, gives their "big picture" strategy to give some idea of what's new with the new CEO, because that's every employee's concern right now.

In the next few weeks, the new CEO will be solidifying everything with Q&As, visiting the various campuses, and announce any new org changes. Org changes will be the big thing that impacts what individual contributors actually do in their jobs. Major changes to the 2014 strategy or goals would be announced soon, but seeing as how it's mid Q1 it's probably going to be changes for Q2 or 2H.

Or maybe you got the guy who knew how everything worked re-write it to function better than it had before, versus having core devs learn exactly how it worked and then implemented it.

To go back to your original question, of is Django pay for features, I don't know enough about it. But one place you could look into is the amount of corporate support Django gets. Maybe Rails has enough corporate support + people who want to work on Rails in their free time in order to get the features, versus Django. Sometimes you need to pay people to work on open source projects and the crowdfunded thing is just more visible than the corporate employees.