1/24    Need to come up to speed quickly on modern C++. Any book
        recommendations?
        \_ job interview?
           \_ yes.
        \_ Stroustrup
           \_ I said "quickly". :-)
        \_ Accelerated C++
           \_thx.

1/24    Saddam's Brain
        "It is  Michel Aflaq who created the party and not I,"
        Saddam told an interviewer in 1980.
        http://csua.org/u/875
        \_ Stop deleting my comment about liberalism. Too bad you can't
           stand open debate, eh?
        \_ Interesting article.  So why did we give this guy weapons to
           fight Iran?  If you give a guy WMD and he uses them to kill
           millions, are you responsible for those people's deaths?

1/24    Little Willie
        pair of skates
        hole in the ice
        Pearly Gates
        \_ Burma-shave?

1/24    How much do people tip for their lap dance?
        \_ nothing. unless it's a private one, then it depends.
        \_ tip?  Only if she goes down on my gf.  She's a prostitute.  WTF
           are you tipping?

1/27    To the guy who used TaxCut before.  Does it allow you to print to
        a file?  Turbo Tax does not have this option. The only way to generate
        a postscript or PDF tax return was to buy adobe pdfwriter or distiller.
        \_ I got disgusted with TaxCut.  Now I use ed to edit the tax document
           in raw postscript like a Real Man.

1/24    Speaking of C++, I was working on refreshing my memory on it using
        Soda, and I had a problem with the cin.getline() function.  It
        gcc claims not to have a function that inputs into a sting object
        only one that uses a char buffer.  But even then it doesn't work
        completely correctly.  We have Gcc 2.95 here, is that too old?

1/24    Mech Warrior 4 Mercenaries: do not buy. Serious game suckage. The only
        thing that made the game take more than 5 hours to complete was having
        to restart a few of the "oh no instantly dead again" missions many
        times each.  When I saw the final cut scene I was thinking, "Oh cool,
        now I can really get into the game" before I realised this was an
        outro, not a cut scene leading to more interesting missions and mechs.
        The only good thing I can say is that it has God Mode so that I could
        quickly see the other 2 mediocre alternate ending cut scenes without
        a lot of replay hassle.

1/26    I asked my two managers (why do I have two? for double the work!)
        to hire another sysadmin to help with the workload they
        are forcing on me.  I asked for an SA with experience and
        who knows some Perl.  Am I being unfair to expect an SA to know Perl?
        They are trying to get me to accept 3 internal candidates of
        which only one even knows bourne shell programming. I feel
        they are trying to dump someone on me which will only make
        my workload worse. They refuse to hire someone external.
        How do I convince my boss(es) of the validity of my concerns?
        I have one meeting with them tomorrow (Monday) before they decide.
        \_ I can't really help you with convincing pointy-hairs about anything,
           but I'd be surprised if any mid to high-level sysadmin didn't
           profess at least familiarity with perl.  On the other hand, if
           they're a decent shell programmer it won't take long to pick it
           up.  -tom
           \_ They will be paid $80K/year. Is that considered
              low or mid level nowadays?
              \_ In this climate, probably mid level.  Can you make the
                 economic case for it?  Perversely enough, even pointy hairs
                 with poor analytical skills tend to buy well reasoned
                 arguments when it comes to money, provided you walk them
                 through slowly.  Something like this:
                 a) You are overburdened.
                 b) This is costing your company money.
                   i. There are a fair number of studies that show employees
                      are more productive when they are not scrambling to
                      smash too many tasks into their day-- find one.  In the
                      worst case, you quit, and they incur the cost of hiring
                      a replacement, which some HR wonks claim this runs as
                      high as 25% of hiring salary (presumably your salary
                      is greater than that of the new sysadmin they will
                      hire/transfer)
                   ii.There are other arguments you can make to support the
                      idea that overworking you will cost your company money
                      in the long run.  Just make sure you don't end up
                      threatening to quit unless you're willing to make good
                      on it.  And don't shoot yourself in the foot by somehow
                      making it look like it's your fault that you are
                      overburdened.
                 c) Thus, you need a junior or co-sysadmin
                 d) If the new sysadmin has any holes in his skill set, then
                    it will obviously fall to you to train him.  Training
                    the new recruit adds to your overburdened status, and
                    though it benefits the new guy, it takes away from time
                    that both of you could be doing productive work that
                    benefits the company at large.
                 And on that note, I may be looking for a job, I know perl,
                 and have references that can vouch for this.  If you do end
                 up looking outside your company, and you'd like to chat
                 further, drop me an email. -dans
               \_ In this climate i'd say someone already there for the last
                  year who is making 80K would be "mid-level".  You can
                  definiteley hire "senior level"  sys admins in this market
                  for 80K.  You CERTAINLY should be able to get someone
                  who knows at least some PERL.  Also, if this was 1 year
                  ago, i'd tell you that you should quit any place that
                  doesn't let YOU as the only Unix admin, have a pretty
                  damn big say in hiring another one.
                  \_ For 80K they should write perl while juggling hot spares
                     on the main file server and hand-crafting packets to get
                     them through the shitty router...  Call me.  I'd love to
                     do just a little perl on top of mid-level SA stuff for
                     80K. --scotsman