4301

Well i dodged another bullet. 10 more people laid off today (about 8% of the remaining staff after last years debacle), but i’m not one of them. I’ve started looking around for something else, i can see more layoffs in the future.

4302

What is wrong with companies these days? Why is it that I have been given a 3+ year old PC at each of my last three new jobs?

I started my new job yesterday and my PC was an old cobbled together from spares piece of shit Celeron 2.6 with 1gig of RAM. I was wondering why the stuff I was building would randomly not produce a valid .exe and the system would grind to a halt after a while when I discovered that the fan in the ancient, salvaged PSU wasn’t working and it was frying the CPU.

Fuck, a new job is stressful enough without having to diagnose intermittent issues like this with scrap heap PC’s.

I earn a decent but not great salary but a new mid range core2 duo/quad costs a fraction of my monthly salary and will pay for itself in productivity in my first month.

It’s not that hard.

4303

So keep a log of your lost productivity for a week, then give them a projection based on your salary of what it’s costing them per year.

Businesspeople and managers are generally quite responsive to hard numbers :)

4304

I tried that at my last job and my boss told me “A new PC is not in the budget.” and promptly forgot about it.

Luckily my new company has said they will get me a new PC this week. It’s just something I could have done without on the first two days of a new job.

4305

So phone the Republican party office and get them to drive you. All this problem talk isn’t helping, you need solution talk!

4306

It takes me about half an hour to get everything up and running on my system at my job. It’s a decrepit, (at least) 5+ year-old Dell Optiplex, with a severely overworked, underpowered processor (quite possibly a Celeron, if not a Pentium III) and only 512 MB of RAM. I’m generally only running three programs at a time – Outlook, WordPerfect 8, and Amicus V – and while they coexist well with each other, the Symantec anti-virus scanner absolutely kills the system. I have to wait for that thing to finish its daily scan before I can even think about starting a program.

Fortunately, we have new systems arriving at the end of the month, with 17" LCD monitors, too. Those 11-year-old, 15" CRTs take up a hell of a lot of desk space.

4307

That’s one reason I love working here … we get top of the line machines and monitors. I have a monster of a machine.

4308

Yep, either party will happily come and get you to vote. I actually used to drive the vote vans on election day here in Pasadena.

4309

I ended up getting Bahimiron to come get me, skipping my lunch/dinner before class (the big 30 minutes that is) and racing down to vote then racing back to be late for class.

LOT OF GOOD IT DID ME.

4310

Well, thanks for trying anyway :(

4311

Um… Sure! No problem. I’ll PM you my daily rate. I know it might seem expensive, but I can guarantee you’ll never get eaten by a crocodile without knowing exactly how you pissed it off.

4312

So last night I endured a full 10 hours of yapping and crying from the new puppy, it was well worth it. What happened is that the Malmute we have is kinda old and cranky, and the Cairn Terrier is an 8 month old ball of OMGWTFBALLBALLBALLTHROWTHE BALL!!! So when I went to intro them, the Malmute was all chill, but captain Dunkin was all spazzing out, and trying to show off his small dog complex. We tried like 10 times before giving up and going to bed. I crated him in the basement, and covered his cage on the top so he could get to sleep, but left the front open so he could see out, and left the light on.

So yeah, all night with the yipping and squeaking and such, it sounded like a 10 hour NBA game. Welp, this morning, we let him loose with the Malmute, they did the butt sniffing thing, and all was well. I guess the Cool Hand Luke “Night in the box” approach worked out dispite all the wailing and gnashing of teeth. Now the Cairn follows the Malmute around the house like it’s his big brother, gotta love it.

Also Athryn, I got him a little frisbee, and he can catch it from like 10’ away, I’ll be working with him more this weekend if the weather holds. :D

4313

My US passport arrived yesterday! So I’m done. 100% American and finished with immigration forever. LOVE! Now to get on with living the rest of my Americanized life. Heh…

4314

Congrats man, that’s a pretty awesome thing, hope you enjoy yourself. :)

4315

Warren, your passport came with a complimentary pair of tickets to a monster truck rally, right?

4316

And a gun license!

4317

Congrats on the Cairn! We have two, and they are great dogs. Having raised them both from very young pups, I can tell you that they will be a bundle of trouble & energy until they hit about 2.5 years. Then, it is like someone turns a switch & they suddenly mellow out a great deal.

4318

Ok that makes more sense. I was trying to picture a little cairn catch a normal sized frisbee, which would be like, bigger than him!

4319

My grandmother has a 5 year old Cairn, and she hasn’t mellowed out a bit! She still does the OMGBALLBALLBALL thing, and I swear, if we could find a team to take her, she’d be the best soccer goalie ever.

4320

Ha, yeah, that would have been a bit much. The one I got Dunkin is about half that size, and made from canvas, and I think the outside part is surgical tubing because it’s rounded and really soft.

::EDIT::
Edited for "Pics or it didn’t happen…