Things I remember from my brief sojourn in retail:
Sometimes the "N employees standing around gossiping and ignoring customer" thing is because N-1 of those guys are coming off shift/going on shift and aren't on the clock yet and aren't *allowed* to help customers[1], but are stopping to chit-chat with their friends. The place I worked had a breakroom in back, out of sight of the customers for that sort of chit-chatting, because the managers knew how bad it looked to customers.
Second, floor people were encouraged to keep an eye on customers (if not hover over them) not only in case they needed help, but because people don't tend to shoplift when someone is watching them.
Frankly, I'd fire the assistant manager and the staff if I owned that Home Depot. And probably the manager, since he obviously wasn't training his staff. You don't ignore (potential) customers if you want to stay in business. Not only do you lose sales, you lose merchandise to the less honest visitors.
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[1] Labor laws don't allow the company to require you to serve customers off the clock.
This is very interesting. I am a female programmer who has been coding for over 25 years now. Back when I got my computer science degree, several of my professors were women; in fact, my entire thesis committee were women. I had them as examples, and back then, RAdm Grace Hopper hadn't been all but forgotten. SHE wrote the first compiler ever and was the primary developer of the COBOL language.
When I was in college, I was enough of a self-centered misanthrope that it never occurred to me to worry that my own problems were a reflection on my gender; it was bad enough that they were a reflection on me. I always thought I was mostly average as a programmer until a few years ago, when I got my first honest-to-goodness Silicon Valley job.
It was a real eye-opener, starting from the first day I reported to work, when my fellow programmers introduced me with "Wow! We have a new female programmer who's NOT 20 years old and Asian!" Apparently women with a bit of frost in their hair who knew their way around Linux were not common. I found that in comparison with the young Silicon Valley hotshots I could hold my own, and that 25 years of experience and learning from my own and other's mistakes gave me a serious advantage when it came to writing good code. (I've done a hell of a lot of maintenance programming over the years, and gotten used to figuring out and fixing other people's weird code. You learn stuff doing that). I'm not an average coder; I'm actually quite a bit better than I realized.
Seriously, don't all programmers say "Well, I haven't worked with [buzzword x] yet, but just hand me the manual and I'll learn it, no problem"? The key isn't knowing the latest buzzword technologies, it's knowing how to solve problems, how to think, how to learn.
For those of you whose skills are out-of-date on your resumes--I had that problem, and inadvertently stumbled on the solution: work on open source code as a hobby. Nobody requires your resume to work on open source projects, they just want patches that work, and open source experience counts. I got that Silicon Valley job because I had lots of C/C++ experience on my resume--AND because I knew my way around the guts of a Linux system from playing around with Linux From Scratch systems for a few years as a hobby.
My current employer keeps raving about my programming skills, which almost makes me feel a bit uncomfortable; I think he does it because it's a lower-paying government job and he's afraid I might take a better-paying job elsewhere. The government job is an interesting balance of genders; while I'm the only female programmer, we're part of department of oceanographers, and they're about 50/50 each gender, so there's a lot of middle-aged women around the office. It makes for a very comfortable environment, as far as behavior goes.
Hey, you have a whole blog post about my favorite webcomic! Awesome!
Has anyone else noticed a trend towards good stories with strong female characters in popular media these days?
"Girl Genius" -- strong lead
"Bones" -- strong lead
"NCIS" -- strong ensemble members, if not leads
"Stargate SG-1" - strong ensemble member
"Firefly" -- strong ensemble members
"BTVS" -- strong lead AND strong ensemble member
...just to name a few off the top of my head, and gee, did Josh Whedon start this? Strong female characters who are competent, do more than be the victim of the week to be rescued by the guys, still feminine, but have things to talk about besides the guys in their life?
Or possibly my personal preferences send me toward shows like that, but I don't remember so many shows with good, strong female characters back in the 70s and 80s. Regardless, I like this trend.
We have a Kosher Cajun New York Deli down here in Metairie, Lousiana...
@84
Of course, it can be irritating for a non-fundamentalist Christian to be mistaken for a fundamentalist, but this is the internet and such things happen all the time.
Tell me about it. I find it particularly annoying when other people tell me what my beliefs are and what's wrong with them without even asking if those are, in fact, my beliefs--because they've assumed that all Christians are Young-Earth Creationists, Bible literalist, evangelicals.
Apparently there are no Catholics or Lutherans on teh intertubes.
@81
a) isn't much of the difficulty with people who feel that the whole context of the "archaeological, historical and cultural context of the Ancient Near East, plus the history of textual criticism, plus scriptural exegesis" should be ignored in favour of what they believe the bare (translated) words mean? See also Slacktivist's (Fred Clark) taking apart of the Left Behind books, from the viewpoint of another Christian, assorted mullahs, rabbis, etc;
I feel bad that I didn't come back to answer this before, but now that the view-all-by function is fixed, I can use it to find the old threads I commented in and check for replies. Yay for progress!
I am a regular reader of Slactivist, and found it enlightening regarding the evangelistic subculture. I've brushed the fringes of it, and it bothered me, but I didn't know what was wrong with it, beyond "that's not the way I was taught as a kid" (i.e., I was brought up Catholic). My current church is Lutheran, and they encouraged Bible study that took in the context of the Ancient Near East cultures, history, etc. The more I learn about the ANE, the more many parts of the Old Testament become clearer. (Why did Moses' staff turn into a snake? Why did the Pharoah's magicians turn their staves into snakes? Probably because a staff carved into the shape of a living snake was an important magical tool for ancient Egyptian sorcerors invoking Heka, like a modern neo-pagan's athame.)
Whether you are believer, non-Christian believer, agnostic or atheist, the more you know about the ANE, the more comprehensible the Old Testament is. I think people who read "only the bare words" miss (more than) half of what's there.
As a computer programmer who has done a lot more embedded and technical processing than database and web applications, I find this thread quite educational. Thanks for giving us the "behind the scenes" look at what you are doing to this beastie.
The thing about obsolete tools for critical argument is that nobody ever bothers to box them up and put them away after acquiring a shiny new set. Instead, they're left lying around out in public where untrained amateurs can pick them up and use them for god-knows-what.
This is exactly why I don't argue Christian apologetics with internet Atheists. I don't have the energy to explain the entire archaeological, historical and cultural context of the Ancient Near East, plus the history of textual criticism, plus scriptural exegesis to everyone who stumbled on "101 Contradictions in the Bible" and thinks it's the greatest new thing in religious criticism.
feels pedantic
In U.S. law, marriage is a civil function, not a religious one. State law determines who can marry, not religious requirements, so it is not "entangled with religion". When a priest or minister performs a wedding, there's paperwork he has to file indicating that he's standing in for a Justice of the Peace, to make it valid legally.
The Roman Catholic Church considers marriage a religious sacrament, and may not recognize marriages conducted outside the bounds of Canon Law. Protestant denominations, on the other hand, follow the lead of Martin Luther, who felt strongly that marriage is a state matter, not a church matter--probably in reaction to the Catholic Church of the time's habit of trolling for bribe money (er, "dispensations") by throwing all kinds of ridiculous barriers in the way of considering a marriage valid.
In many pre- and non-Christian societies, marriage was (or is) a civil, contractual matter; priests were only involved in their roles as judicial bureaucrats.
The others were never seen, only the effects of their bites. The area itched for 20 minutes, and if you could keep from scratching during that time, you'd heal without a problem. If you scratched, you ended up with a large ulcerated wheal that took forever to heal.
Hmm, if you were in the Deep South, U.S.A, I'd say those were chigger bites. I had the joy of experiencing those last summer while looting a choice thicket of wild blackberries of their fruit. The bites behave exactly as you describe, and you never see the chigger because it is a near-microscopic red bug-thing.
Do they have chiggers on St. Kitts?
Ratbat makes me think of Megatron's accountant, but I have weird fandoms.
There's actually a live person with a name attached to this bit of hysteria? I'm used to seeing that kind of crap as Nth-generation e-mail forwards originated by God-only-knows somewhere on the Internet. You (and Snopes.com) never seem to be able to pin down the people mentioned in the tale--or if they do, said people don't ever remember saying any such thing.
So what does Snopes say about this one?
I'm going to say something that's probably going to be unpopular, but I'm tired of everyone who ignores a mandatory evacuation order being regarded as "stupid" or "evolution waiting to happen".
The state officials don't always give the best orders for every single person in the area. Case in point: the Gustav evacuation. Damn thing was only a Cat 2 when it hit the coast, the floodwalls held just fine, and the rains were severely attenuated by a band of dry air that got caught up in the storm circulation and essentially gutted it. A lot of people who could NOT afford to evacuate listened to the overblown, deliberately-panic-inducing warnings from the likes of Nagin and Broussard and bugged out, spending their rent money, their utility money, their mortgage money, their grocery money on gasoline and hotel bills that were completely unnecessary. When the evacuation was ordered, FEMA officials assured people that FEMA would pay for evacuation expenses, and there was no need to hurry back. Afterwards, however.... FEMA officials suddenly remembered that you only get paid for evacuation expenses if your house is unliveable when you return, and a power outage doesn't count.
There's a whole lot of people who aren't evacuating next time, because they were lied to and burned up money they couldn't afford for NOTHING.
I've ridden out quite a few hurricanes over the years. I always monitor the NHC advisories and forecast discussions carefully, study the satellite imagery, and make up my own mind based what the NHC says about how dangerous the hurricane will be where *I* live. I evaluated Katrina, and evacuated out ahead of the crowd to someplace above sea level. I evaluated Gustav, realized from the keywords used that Nagin et al were trying to panic people into fleeing (and Aaron Broussard went into panic-mode like he does every single hurricane), weighed it against my personal situation, and stayed put. My home took less damage and there was less risk than to the place I would have evacuated to did.
That being said, staying on the beachfront with a big hurricane coming in is either suicidal or retarded. Go visit a friend who lives somewhere well above sea-level until the storm passes. Riding out hurricanes is only for those with good roofs on their houses and a house that is somewhere well above and beyond the storm surge.
I'm riding out the storm in Jefferson Parish, East Bank. Still have power & DSL, though cable is out. Surprising little rain for a hurricane. Tropical storm force winds in general--mid-sized green branches down, but no big tree limbs or trees that I can see.
NHC's doppler radar reveals that the band of dry air that's been feeding into Gustav (and slowly killing it) for the last few days is sparing New Orleans/Metairie from the heavy rains. Northshore is getting the rain bands instead.
The Industrial Canal thing could be bad, ACOE thinks it will hold. Coast Guard apparently had to chase down some loose barges as well. Checkout http://www.nola.com/ and http://www.wwltv.com/ for our local news coverage.
re: #20
Since archaeologists have found ancient greek lead sling bullets with epithets carved in them ("Take that!" and such like), I have to agree with you.
Re: #37
Could anyone name any other president who, given the attack of 9/11, would have had as his first reaction, "Let's invade Iraq!"
Well, who was president when the Maine exploded? I'd nominate him.
Katrina was a disaster of horrific magnitude, greater than anything in American history. I got to see it all from ground zero. The civilian agencies seem to fumble the ball badly, and the military agencies did a magnificent job--Coast Guard especially. Given the unprecedented magnitude of the disaster, it's hard to say if any administration could have handled it well. I certainly don't have the personal experience to compare handling of disasters, and don't want to. Living through one Katrina was enough.
On the other hand, Louisiana's own incompetent politicians didn't help. Compare our idiot former governor and our indecisive mayor with the governor of Mississippi and the respective rate of recovery in both states....
I was going to recommend Dreamhost .com, but I see that all the other Dreamhost users already did. ;-)
Good company, skilled professional ISP, runs Debian Linux and more free goodies than you can shake a stick at even with the basic plan (basically, damn near everything you could want for a website that comes with an open source license, starting with LAMP and going from there.). I've been with them for quite a few years now, always been happy with their service. It keeps getting better every year.
Customer support is good, responsive, tech-savvy, and doesn't dumb it down if you let them know you are tech-savvy. Bandwidth allowance is huge.
They have a sensible, tolerant TOS, which was why I picked them in the first place, over several other cheap hosting services.
I'm anxious to see Absolute Write back up again. I've learned so much from Uncle Jim's writing thread, and I refer people to it constantly.
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