Things that were not immediately obvious to me

There are a lot of things to consider when looking for a job. These aren’t the things you bring up in an interview; there, you pretend to be focused on what the employer wants. But when no one’s looking, it’s worth your while to have a good, long, selfish think about what’s in it for you. Here are some things to consider when weighing whether or not a job offer is a good one … or, better yet, when deciding to which companies you should pitch your resume.

Continue reading →

A few weeks ago, I was out driving when by purest chance I encountered the perfect situation for a maximum acceleration run. My car is a 2004 “Terminator” Cobra, and while it’s quite fast, it can be a little tricky to launch; the motor will easily spin the tires, and the IRS setup generates a lot of wheel hop.

On this occasion I found myself rolling up to an on-ramp metering light in 1st gear at about 5 MPH just as it turned green. No need to fiddle with the clutch; all I had to do was squeeze the throttle just shy of wheelspin.

I happened to judge the thing perfectly, running up through 1st, 2nd, and into 3rd almost before I knew it. In fact, I was most aware of the blood rushing to the back of my head (and attendant light-headedness) as I wasn’t entirely prepared for the g-forces of acceleration. 400+HP, perfectly delivered, is a lot.

Automobiles are wonderful machines. You take them for granted so often, that you forget what they can do.

This is the world’s fastest computer. Really. Ok, not really. But it would have been the world’s fastest computer in 1989. Not pretty fast. Not world-class. The fastest. Faster than anything owned by any government in the world. I can’t think of any other technology that has ever followed a similar curve from gov’t-weapons-lab-restricted to nearly disposable consumer good in the span of 20 years.

Continue reading →

Today, a little rant in service to an attempt to quash one of the more irritating errors seen on the internet: the inversion of the proper order of “much less” phrases.

“Much less” phrases appear in sentences such as: “The CIA can’t tell you who’s really running the Egyptian protests, much less control their outcome”, or “Obama won’t reopen the Gulf to drilling, let alone push for exploration in ANWR”. The pattern is “blah blah blah not A, much less B”, where B is a more extreme version of A. In effect, you’re saying: “A can’t happen, and if A can’t happen, B certainly can’t happen.”

It’s pretty common (common enough to prompt me to complain about it) for people to flop the proper order of A and B, which makes the sentence a gibberish. If you say : “B can’t happen, and if B can’t happen, A certainly can’t happen”, the obvious answer is: “Why not? A is less extreme than B, so why does B’s impossibility have any bearing on A?”

We all make mistakes, but sometimes I get the feeling that some people just don’t know how this one is supposed to work. Which is why I’m here to help.

Dave Gibbons (by and large) calls them “comic books”. I think you can safely drop the “graphic novel” pretension, fanboy.