Old Man

Re: Quote of the Week From My Life. Which is why, in my former positions as a manager of engineers, I seemed to spend all my time keeping the layers of management above me from interfering with them while they tried to do real work. I suppose I should have realized this was a doomed approach from the outset.

Re: Like Cold Fusion... Except It Works?

Re: Cool Guns for your Games The UTS-15 shotgun holds... *drumroll*... 15 rounds!

Re: Quote of the Week From My Life. And that is exactly the kind of fire drill that was standard operating procedure at this last job. A shockingly high percentage of their customers were buddies with the CEO and probably wouldn't have been customers otherwise. Kind of hard to make money when you get a CEO make-it-happen mandate once or twice a week. I feel bad for the front line workers there, who are really resourceful, really good at CYA, and strangely prone to stress related health problems.

Re: The cranky thread Both? How many extra toes did you have installed?

Re: Make Your Own Motivational Poster There's text?

Re: Quote of the Week From My Life. The only question is whether the PM came up with the nonsensical deadline or whether that was imposed by higher/external personnel. Certainly this last job that I had had a lot of the latter. Customer wants their stuff installed and working in four weeks, order leadtime with Cisco is at least six. Customer has decided to change the scope of the project halfway through install, still wants to meet original deadline. That kind of thing. Naturally every single one of these customers had the company CEO on speed dial and the order would come down to "just make it happen". I'm glad I'm not going to be there at end of year for the P&L statements and resulting housecleaning.

Re: Like Cold Fusion... Except It Works? Gamma rays aren't going to interact with the crystal structure. Even if there were something about it that caused it to absorb gamma at that exact energy, I still don't see how it could block all the photons and prevent them from being detected. Has anyone looked at the powerpoint from the Brillouin site? This is why graphic designers exist, people.

Re: Like Cold Fusion... Except It Works? If I were one of the people working on this technology, I would be trying very, very hard to get the media to call it something else.

Re: Cool Guns for your Games In case the zombies come?

Re: "Neat" Pictures

Re: "Neat" Pictures

Re: Space Currencies It occurs to me that, in genre fiction, the subject of money rarely comes up. It's there in the background--there are bounty hunters after Han Solo, and hiring him costs more than Luke and Ben have--but you never see SF characters go to the market to buy gear, and you never see them discuss hard numbers.

Re: Miracles vs Magic: The Faith Reserve I like the END reserve idea because it provides a good mechanism to relate faith-based spellcasting to actions in game. In addition to the usual daily prayers or fasting or whatever, you could add to the reserve whenever the character gives money to a beggar or helps an old lady across the street. And you could increase the END cost for a spell that kills orc babies in their sleep, if you were so inclined. It would work a lot like karma does in real life.

Re: The cranky thread I appreciate it, but if I could leave Hawaii I'd probably have done so by now already.

Re: The cranky thread Don't worry about it, guys. That was easily the worst job I have ever held. This way I get two months of "administrative leave" and a dinky severance, as opposed to what I'd have gotten if I'd just walked.

Re: The cranky thread Laid off! Again! This will be the fifth time in my career.

Re: Quote of the Week From My Life. Tempting! I am a manager, and I am a problem. Georgia is very far, though. And didn't the Russians invade you last year?

Re: Quote of the Week From My Life. You guys hiring?

Re: More space news! Time is money.

Re: Quote of the Week From My Life. I'm actually the opposite. I have a really hard time delegating any work that I know I could do better and more efficiently than whoever I would have delegated it to. Usually by the time I have sufficiently communicated and documented what it is I want, I might as well have done whatever it is myself. So my plate fills up and things start to fall off. Of course this company has managed to drive away half my engineers in the time I've been here, so I really don't have anyone to delegate to anyway.

Re: "Neat" Pictures Why would a kill order need to be legible?

Re: "Neat" Pictures http://swampland.time.com/2012/04/26/the-last-days-of-osama-bin-laden/

Re: The cranky thread Can you get me their numbers?

Re: Planetary Resources