hobbs

Just to clarify, I do find your original statement to be absolutely correct: "Anyone who's good at anything knows that there's an inverse correlation between talking about it and being good at it." The reason you have to explicitly say it, though, is that it goes against the grain of human behavior.

Being the type of person who actually does things without wasting time talking about it, I've had to learn the hard way that that's not what hiring managers look for. I would not trade my satisfaction of good work for money, but I've found that by spending a little more time on marketing skills rather than on programming skills, I can greatly improve my income.

Well, you can't be a total phony. There are weighted values applied to skill and appearance in corporate HR. My experience has shown that the weighted value applied to appearance is roughly 2x the value applied to skill. (Assuming that the typical HR person can even measure skill. Most can't.)

Speaking well instead of performing well will make you twice as likely to be hired by the average Megacorp, Inc. Quality provides satisfaction; appearance provides money.

One thing that I hadn't fully realized until I was about 30 or so: Your grades and test scores only matter to "the first". That is, your high-school grades and SAT scores only matter to the first college that you enroll in. After about a year or two in college, if you transfer to a different college, they don't care a whit what your high-school grades were. They want to know what your college grades are.

Similarly, your college grades and the name of the college only matters to your first employer. After that, future employers don't care what your college GPA was. They want to know what you've accomplished professionally.

This is not to say you can just slack your way through school. What it does mean, though, is that you shouldn't obsess about your GPA. Channel that academic energy into some actual achievements - not into ultimately meaningless points. In the end, accomplishments are worth much more than grades.

Tried coLinux. Had to go back to VirtualBox. I'm not sure what the problem was, but running network-heavy apps in coLinux caused my wireless connection to drop out in the Windows host. Never had that problem before or since with other VM products.

Otherwise, there were no problems and I felt it was right answer to the problem. Why bother running a full-on emulator, when the kernel is open-source and can be modified to run as a process within another OS?