They're going to go to town on those Optional Comment boxes.
...typed he, into an Optional Comment box.
The comments will continue to be optional until morale improves.
There are so many things wrong with that survey (as a survey) that it could almost be used as a textbook case of how NOT to write a survey.
/she says, being immersed in survey-writing.
I suppose I do own a personal drone!
I don't own him. He has rights, just like everyone else.
I am a thought follower, which means my actions are not determined by physical forces.
8 is pretty darn funny. I may have to start using that. I already have to bite my tongue too much when people say "thought leader" uncritically.
I feel as though it should be like saying you are superstar. If you have to TELL me you are one, you aren't.
Except that the world arguably needs superstars.
Let's see: No, Android, about twelve, care a great deal. Thought all questions with the word innovate in them were silly.
"Do you own a personal drone". Oh, please. What you mean is "do you own a toy remote-controlled helicopter".
I own two personal unmanned ground vehicles, though I haven't used them for years - Scalextric is something you grow out of.
I don't own him. He has rights, just like everyone else.
SIGH, AH, IF ONLY MORE OF YOU MEATBAGS FELT THAT WAY.
What you mean is "do you own a toy remote-controlled helicopter".
Which I was able to answer "yes indeed"! Now I just have to figure out what impulse purchase qualifies me as a thought leader. I'm not sure I have any New Balance sneakers or Tab around.
"do you own a toy remote-controlled helicopter".
Please. Its a quadcopter.
"Quadcopter" makes nosflow cry, as it is a bastardised word based on a misunderstanding of the etymology of the original word: "helicopter" is not formed from the roots "heli-" + "copter" but from the roots "helico-" and "pter", meaning "spiral wing". "Quadrotor" would be entirely acceptable.
16 gets it exactly right. Trouble is, if you drop the word "pter" into an English conversation, people will think you're spitting at them. And, intention excepted, they may very well be right.
It really is astonishing what you can get for cheap in the way of remote-controlled aircraft these days. Last Christmas I spent £30 on one for an engineering colleague. When we got it flying, we realised the Chinese manufacturer had chosen a configuration that uses counter-rotating rotors for torque cancellation and directional control, and a tail rotor in the vertical axis to control pitch.
I still can't control my quadrotor very well at all.
You'll never be an innovative thought leader, then.
I'm going to go ahead and keep calling them quadcopters. Why? Innovation.
Mostly, it's all I can do to keep it from smashing the TV.
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I got some Ultex Jazz III XLs today.
http://www.jimdunlop.com/product/ultex-jazz-xl
Guitar nerdy, but these have been on the wishlist for years.
>
24: On first reading and before clicking through I thought that "Ultex Jazz III XLs" were basketball shoes. Unfogged and ttaM - expanding my horizons.
Trouble is, if you drop the word "pter" into an English conversation, people will think you're spitting at them.
And just try talking about hymenoptera without people thinking you're some kind of peeping Tom.
Hitting 24, 27, and also 28:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titanoptera
28: Take a grapefruit and a sharp knife....
Speaking of Titanoptera, a 4" long dragonfly has got into our kitchen and got stuck in a place where it can't get out without having a rather bigger brain. Any ideas?
What age should a child get his/her first smartphone? Allowed answers: 1-18.
And clearly if you're a thought leader quadcopters are deprecated- future thinkers have at least 6 and probably 8 rotors.
Are there any real helicopters which have contrarotating rotors plus a vertical-axis tail rotor?
36: I'm pretty sure I've seen such a thing from the early days of experimentation with helicopters. Nowadays everyone seems to have settled on the same design, as far as I can tell.
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Completely OT except that as a thought leader I need a working laptop. As of yesterday I merely have a laptop.
Does the Mineshaft have any experience of recent ultrabooks? In one sense I want a macbook air, of course, but in a very real sense I don't want all the faff of a new software environment, nor to spend all that money, either.
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Lots of rural police use autogyros, including the Kurdish police. Brilliant oil-starved Estonian aeronautical engineers + two tankers of Kurdish crude = innovation 2023!
38: Call me when they're transcendental. If your helicopter can't transcend, why is it even droning?
Real helicopters use rotor pitch for vertical axis control, but I think it would be a pain to get that working on a scale small enough for model helicopters. Fixed pitch rotors are a lot less complicated.
39: to be clear, the contrarotating rotors were on the same axis, like a Skycrane, not like a CH-47. And the funny vertical tail rotor was driven by its own electric motor.
Both main rotors had a motor of their own, IIRC, so it got away without having any but the most trivial drive train. Presumably just a microcontroller that varied the voltage on the three motors.
Does the Mineshaft have any experience of recent ultrabooks?
I just got the Surface 3, which is a sweet piece of hardware, hampered by bugs in the WiFi connection software that one hopes will be fixed in an upcoming patch. I'm digging the tablet/laptop hybrid thing.
I want one of those, but cannot find a reason to spend the money on it.
Since my computer keeps not becoming obsolete, I'll probably spend my computer budget on some nice clothes and getting one of those shoe/boot cleaners installed outside the garage door.
50 years ago I think the configuration Alex describes was fairly standard. Vertical tail rotor certainly was, and I think contrarotating rotors on a single axis was believed to be the coming thing.
49: vertical-axis tail rotor, chris. In other words (I think) the tail rotor is in the same plane as the main rotor.
I want a macbook air
This is what I have (my first mac) and I love it. I think it's going on three years old, and it hasn't slowed down at all, which is probably due to the solid state drive. When I decided to stop fiddling with my computer as a way to procrastinate, the software actually made very little difference. I spend most of my not-working time in the browser anyway, and then for work you can always find the few applications you need for whatever environment.
That might be a perfect example of saying "Not x" and people responding "Get x," but you did leave the door open.
Oh good, ogged broke the ice, so I don't have to point out that "hampered by bugs in the WiFi connection software that one hopes will be fixed in an upcoming patch" is just the sort of thing those stupid apple fanboys with the steve job belt buckles and the white pants and the fauxhawks and whatever are always pointing out as a major down side of buying a not-macbook, totally ignoring the sweatshop workers whose ghostly solder-burned visages stare imploringly out of specifically the macbook screen and not the screen of any other "ultrabook", which by the way isn't a made up category for "laptops trying to copy the macbook air but often as not failing because they don't have apple's supply chain leverage".
I typed your message into ELIZA, Sifu, but I didn't get anything useful in reply.
Poor Apple. So persecuted. So unfairly maligned. The Nike of our time.
I don't give a fuck about Apple. They just make better computers, mostly.
So, tell me more about this wifi connection issue. Will it ever connect to wifi? Is there a workaround?
The Surface Pro 3 sounds cool if you want a touchscreen laptop. But it costs basically the same as an Air, so it's not what you want.
The Mac Mini I use at work crashes a lot but I suspect I may be doing something wrong with VirtualBox.
About one out of every eight times it wakes up from hibernation, the Surface can't find any wifi networks. MS has already put out a patch for it that didn't work, and I think another one is on its way. Basically, I think they jumped the gun on their shiny new hardware launch; probably should have given it another month of testing to shakeout the bugs.
So far my workaround to get wifi back is "restart the machine," which on this machine is super fast, unlike other Windows boxen I have owned. The problem is the fact that I like having all sort of shit open on my desktop and hate losing it by restarting my machine.
On the other hand, the regular restarts have had the nice benefit of forcing me to have less shit open on my desktop.
No lie, I have pretty much the same problem as 61 with my IPad. I've assumed it's because I'm doing something wrong, not the machine, but who knows.
The IPad and the Surface might well have the same wifi components.
I don't have that problem, but I also don't have any advice. Maybe you're having range issues, Halford; try attaching your wifi router to a quadcopter.
So I can crash it into a ravine? My wifi is already set up at the maximum level of incompetence compatible with producing semi-functional wifi. I had to give up on trying to use the Apple products to stream music to my speakers through Airplay completely because trying to play music through the Apple system resulted in things cutting randomly in and out. The Apple TV crashes regularly and cuts off from WiFi, etc., the IPad has the problem where it loses and then finds signals, I use the cellular network for my IPhone at home because of wireless issues. I'm sure there's some easy fix for all of this and something obvious I've screwed up, but setting up your wifi and fixing its problems is one of these things that seems weirdly hard to figure out, certainly if you have no knowledge and nothing but access to Google.
OK, if you are a small island country in the Caribbean, and you are trying to develop your local mobile app development industry, but there is no way any of your local peeps have any kind of budget or the experience needed to market shit in the app store, what alternatives do you consider so that local app development companies can actually make a profit? Or is it all just a fools game?
You could just give up and try importing cocaine into the United States for profit.
65: maybe something is interfering with your signal? Or possibly you have an uneven power supply to the router? I'm guessing with little knowledge but have spent a lot of time trying to figure out network problems at my parents' house.*
*Windows wifi has never been a problem there.
There is already plenty of that going on. I'm looking for something that involves less gunfire.
40: Nworb, I have one of the Asus ultrabooks from a couple years ago. I've been happy enough with it, the trackpad could be better but the screen is great, good battery life (I hate that it's not user-removable but that appeared to be true of everything available; at least it's not glued in), keyboard fine (for a chiclet keyboard), super thin/light but very solidly built. Not as pretty as a Macbook Air but my inner tightwad couldn't get over the ~35% (I think it was) price difference for similar specs.
Does the wifi signal short out every time you microwave popcorn?
My wireless router is at least ten years old. You just plug it in and it works. What's hard about setting up wifi?
My wife's Asus ultrabook from a couple years ago is solidly built and doesn't give us any problems.
I think it's probably some signal interference thing, but I have no idea what it could be (sometimes there are issues from running the microwave, but that's pretty obvious). Can't be range b/c the house isn't big enough. The shaky power supply seems like a possibility, but other stuff doesn't seem to have the same problem. And, weirdly, the signal to the laptop seems to mostly function fine, or at least better than the other devices. It's mostly functional though, which is sort of good enough for me.
Wifi can be sensitive to interference from other wifi, too, if you're in a relatively dense neighborhood. There are apps you can run that will tell you what channels are relatively clear but... eh. New (Apple!) wifi routers are also a fair bit better, especially if you're using one that came free from the cable company or whatever.
Maybe I should try a new router. I have an Apple Airport Extreme but it's ... 9 years old? at this point.
Re: 40
The macbook is actually cheaper than almost all the alternatives. If you compare like for like, at the level Apple compete at, they are pretty price competitive. I just went through the same process. And was fairly anal about it. Hilariously, one 'cheaper alternatives to the Macbook' ultrabook featured entirely laptops that were more expensive, or much lower in spec.
Re: 74
If your microwave affects wifi, your microwave sounds like the shielding is damaged.
There are three channels WiFi can run on... channel 6, 11, and, uh, maybe channel 16? Usually the things are set to automatically pick a channel on their own, but you can try setting everything to run on, say, channel 11, which may fix the problem if you problem is interference on channel 6.
Getting a new (Apple) router mostly solved my parents' problem. Both Apple and non-Apple routers previously had problems there.* But I think they also have a range problem.**
*Mainly with iOS.
**But not with my Windows machines over the years, which have connected in every room.
I did have some problems when I was briefly using the cable company's router. I asked the cable installation guy to plug into my old Apple router and he told me that any use of a router other than theirs required me to purchase a different plan that cost an extra $30 a month, or something like that, so I let him plug in their router and then after seeing how poorly it worked unplugged it and plugged my own in.
In the meantime they've raised my cable rates by much more than $30/month anyway.
9 years old
Dooood. Get a new router. I used to think that a router's a router, but I bought their last recommendation, an Asus something-or-other, and the difference has been remarkable--stable connection, all corners of the condo now have signal, etc.
My current wifi problems are general infrastructure problems: AT&T says the building is only wired for 1.5 Mbps/sec. Which was ok 10+ years ago.
This is an unexpected opportunity to bolster my rural cred.
In that case the router functions as a flux capacitor.
86: I would be less annoyed by my connection speed if I weren't in a city that bills itself as being tech-oriented.
I get more than 1.5Mbps on my phone, ffs. In fact, checking via Speedtest, I get 20Mbps on my phone.
That said, flat I lived in 3 years ago, the connection would regularly disconnect and the speed drop every time it rained.
Sometimes I tether my laptop to my phone so I can download something or run an update without breaking up whatever video stream I'm watching. Periodically I have to change streaming settings to lower the "auto-detected" speed since they often default to take the whole 1.5, which is not consistent enough to get a continuous stream.
This is also a real problem for cloud backups or even for learning things when I need to download lots of stuff to get started.
AT&T's fixed ISP is a sick joke. If it's that sucky cable will certainly be an improvement, and probably even getting a 4G data dongle (although not from AT&T because their cellular network pretty much sucks too).
I've just signed up for 4G with Vodafone and I am actually quite impressed - 12-14Mbps uplink!
OT, but tech related, I guess - Rosetta has reached Comet 67P!
re: 93.last
Yeah, with Three I get roughly the same up as down. 17-20Mbps or so, at home.
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So that job that I went on that interview for down south last week, the one where they they called me back the same day as my Skype interview and asked me to come down for an on-campus interview? The one where I was told that by the director that I was the only unanimous pick of the selection committee and that I was also everyone's #1 pick? The one where I had every indication after my on-campus interviews and my presentation that I had really hit it out of the park and pulled ahead of the pack ? The one that seemed so perfectly suited to my talents and inclinations? That job? They gave it to someone else.
Fucking hiring committees, how do they work?
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94 Watching the ESA presser here. Amazing pics.
So sorry, Barry. May the next job be even better!
Hiring committees work very badly, in my experience, and often choose to hire either the least threatening candidate ("This person is unlikely ever to show me up by being better than me in any way.), the most familiar candidate ("This person reminds me a great deal of myself."), or the candidate who seems most likely to provide members of the committee with a career boost ("This candidate has X important person in the field as a patron, and X might well provide me with some table scraps the next time I find myself begging at the foot of the high table."). Or sometimes they just make completely irrational decisions. Regardless, that totally sucks. If any of them are pundits, I'll be happy to change my as-yet-unrevealed choice in the other thread.
Hiring committees work very badly, in my experience, and often choose to hire either the...
..pretty young thing, if you're the chair of my department. The last search we did (which I was not on the committee for, for incredibly maddening reasons) the three candidates that he brought to campus were all beyond awful, but cute as a button at first blush. They ended up going back to the drawing board and finding a "second-tier" candidate who is excellent.
What the fuck, Barry. The hell with them.
108: that's actually a good point. I totally forgot that hiring committees sometimes try to hire the candidate who one or more of the members want to fuck.
96 both sucks and sounds par for the course. (I want to comment about what happened with the job I was excited about this past year, but I really shouldn't because my anonymity is too thin. But the outcome was completely bizarre.)
104: it seems like there's a fascinating fallacy in thinking around academic hiring, where people who have jobs refuse to believe that their succeess was essentially random and/or lucky, and therefore assume it was because of some inherent quality they have, and thus that they should try and hire people like themselves, who have what it takes to succeed in academia. I guess it's really not limited to academic hiring.
111 isn't exactly helping. Not only is Barry unemployed, but now you've made him feel unattractive as well. Nice going VW, you monster.
Thanks all. And the Ortberg is great, as usual.
VW's 104 makes a lot of sense. Especially with regard to the points about being threatening and familiar - I'm very NYC and this is an institution in middle GA. I also have a lot of energy and enthusiasm and brought a lot of ideas to the table; of course, the former two qualities were specifically asked for in the job description.
I keep second guessing what I did but I'm not sure I'd really do anything differently. I did do really well, it's just fucked up is all. I also need to shake that nagging feeling that this was my (last) best shot.
I'll now slink off quietly to cry, cry, masturbate post comments, cry. I'd feel a lot better if I could punch a passel of pundits in the face.
One thing to focus on is that you made it to the last step -- hiring may be insanely random, but the insane randomness operates as among the acceptable candidates. If you keep on making it into that group of acceptables, eventually you'll hit a job where you remind a decision-maker of their favorite cousin, and you're in.
114 I knew should have kept that line in my resume about being DTF.
You could always try burning Atlanta. It would make you feel better, and there's a chance you might get a book deal out of it.
Ugh! Sorry to hear that.
104/108: Perhaps Barry's charming good looks were too threatening?
there's a chance you might get a book deal out of it.
My Year of Being General Sherman
116 is a good point.
I'm saving my best WTS material for Fresh Salt.
And now I just found out that I didn't get the job that I had strong signs I would get. Since this is for the position above me (which I have been doing for months), I really hope they pick someone competent whom I don't have to train. (Training someone for a job that I want really rankles.)
Boo employers not following through on encouraging signals. Also, some people suggest asking what you could have done to improve/why they went with someone else after an interview (tactfully, of course) but I don't think I'd be comfortable doing that.
I actually find the encouraging signals really reprehensible. I mean, once they've interviewed you, they should tell you yes, no, or we need more information, not string you along with indications that you're likely to be hired. What is that ever going to do but lead to disappointment?
What is that ever going to do but lead to disappointment?
Keep you from taking a slightly worse offer elsewhere.
Ugggh, Barry, that's awful
I keep second guessing what I did but I'm not sure I'd really do anything differently. I did do really well, it's just fucked up is all.
That's a familiar trap -- you know that it isn't useful to second guess yourself, but it's inevitable. Hopefully you know that and can minimize the second guessing.
122 That sucks, md 20/400.
123. I don't know how I'd ask tactfully. And I don't know that they would tell me why they went with someone else. Though you can be sure I'll google stalk a bit in the coming months just to check my suspicions that they went with someone more local and culturally comfortable.
I did send a reply expressing my disappointment as well as thanking them for the opportunity. How I was notified was a bit weird, I got a 3 line email from the director (pleasure to meet you/gave it to another candidate/good luck in your future endeavors) and then an hour later another longer email from the director on behalf of the committee expressing thanks for my coming down and what a difficult decision it was for them. Maybe she felt a bit threatened, I don't know, she was the one who told me most about well I'd been doing. I do know I made a real impression on them and that I had at least one friend on the committee (in particular a certain professor who had always seemed like she was in my corner- she'd really liked some things I'd said on the Skype interview and made a point of going out to dinner with us when I was taken out by the library staff).
123,124 I agree that it is unprofessional and made the disappointment sting all the more but it was also good to know that I had made such a striking impression on them, both during the Skype interview and for the campus visit (at one point I was walking past the director's old office on my way to a meeting and I overheard her on the phone saying to someone how someone, who could only have been me, had been absolutely excellent all day.) One always improve but I really do think I'd hit it out of the park from start to finish and it was just someone who made them feel more comfortable.
Sorry to go on and on but what else is Unfogged for but relentless rigorous overexamination of all life throws at one.
127.5 last sentence is a mess.
One always improve but I really do think I'd hit it out of the park from start to finish and it was just someone who made them feel more comfortable.
s/b something like:
There is always room for improvement but I really do think that I had hit it out of the park from start to finish and they just went with someone who made them feel more comfortable.
Yeah, encouraging signals are not nice. I had one member of the committee (all of whom I know) give me a very strong signal. Another gave me a strong signal. I am quite curious to see who got picked. I found that I placed much lower in the final ten than I had expected. Ah well, the vagaries of government hiring. Oddly, I wasn't totally sure that I'd take the job (I probably would, despite knowing some of the personalities), but I sure wanted to get the offer.
129: That just happened to a guy I work for/with. I think they didn't hire anyone that round and reposted the position. It was not exactly a desirable job, but I think the offer would have made him happy even if he hadn't accepted. Hiring is weird.
127: I just learned that my boss actually sent feedback to an interviewee's adviser (a friend of mine) on what needed improvement and mentioning opportunities for other advisees. I liked my boss before, but I thought that was a really nice thing for him to have done. I suspect if it was a perceived "fit" issue, you wouldn't get very helpful comments anyway, because any shortcomings they thought they saw might be strengths elsewhere.