On Slashdot today there was an article from Computer World entitled 10 Things We Hate About Laptops. As I was reading it, I couldn’t believe some of the things being said. I’ve used laptops for a while, though I’ve never had to support them for other people. However, I found much of what was said to either be fallacious or misleading. > more <

I just treated myself to an early Xmas present. I bought a new Macbook Pro earlier this week and it’s great.

The laptop it replaces was a Sony Vaio, which is roughly five years old. The hard drive was starting to die (lots of clicking noises) and the CD drive was effectively dead. Oh, and the PC Card slots were also toasted. Linux ran reasonably well on it so that’s why I’ve kept it for so long. > more <

Found via Slashdot, Frank Wiles writes in his blog about why hiring the top programmers results in a better product and ultimately at a cheaper cost, contrary to popular thinking. His reasons are similar to what I’ve been thinking.

If you’ve ever read The Mythical Man Month, then many of his thoughts will sound familiar. A single expert programmer is equivalent to several average programmers. Therefore hiring a few experts yields numerous returns, such as: > more <

I finally got a chance to upload my MS degree papers to Google Docs. Below are the links to the new papers. As before, if you want to use them somehow please let me know. Thanks. > more <

In the course of pursuing my Master’s degree, I’ve written many papers (with more yet to come). In the interest of helping out others (and to toot my own horn) I’m going to be adding them to my Google Docs account and “publish” the links here.

Please be aware that, even though I wrote them originally for school, they are still copyrighted. If you wish to use them outside of normal “fair use”, please contact me. Heck, even if you link to them, quote them, or whatever, please let me know. I would like to know who’s benefiting from them.

The first couple of papers that I’ve uploaded are listed below: > more <

Well, I figure it’s about time to harvest the power of the Internet and see what happens.

I plan on getting out of the Navy next June and so I’m starting to get my resume in order and see where to send it. Naturally I’m looking at Monster, et al. but for many large Internet job sites, it’s like looking for a job in the classified ads: you’re just one of several thousand resumes mass mailed to prospective employers. It’s even worse now in the digital age; it takes nothing to email a resume so a lot of people essentially spam employers in the hopes of “shotgunning a job”. > more <