FlyingRhenquest

Ah well, here's the thing about the ID people; I'm a (mad) computer scientist. One of the recent trends in computer learning is genetic programming, where you have traits in code and you put a bunch of programs in an environment with a selection criteria and the ones that perform above a certain threshold get to "breed" and pass their traits on to the next generation, possibly with random mutations. If I particularly cared about the design of the universe, I really wouldn't want to exist in that kind of universe, because as a computer scientist I don't give two shits about any of the individual programs in any of the generations until the simulation arrives at "The One." One perfect individual according to my criteria will be saved. And it doesn't get a life of luxury, no. I dissect it and put the algorithm it arrived at to work doing whatever I was selecting for. If you buy into the ID philosophy, the only reasonable conclusion you could arrive at, if you think about it, is that God is a guy like me, with a REALLY big simulation which will get shut down the minute whatever the selection criteria humanity is working toward is met to the standard that he's looking for. That would be really, really bad for everyone involved. I'm trying to teach myself how to set things on fire with my mind. Hey... is it hot in here?

Not, like, www.omgthegovernmentpoisonedourwate.rs? I bet you could totally get that (Well now that I posted this it'll probably be a porn site in the next few minutes.) I guess this is how a career in government starts. I look at the people going in and they often seem to have the best of intentions at the start. The thing seems to be a meat grinder, though, and most of them end up completely different people, sometimes almost immediately. It always sucks to hear that the starry-eyed freshman Congressman you had such high hopes for was busted snorting cocaine off the dong of a male prostitute or something. If you run for office and the meat grinder gets you, at least try to not get caught! More Ted Kennedy (eew, OK maybe not that much) less Anthony Wiener! I'm trying to teach myself how to set things on fire with my mind. Hey... is it hot in here?

Dubstep. The system is pre-loaded with 15 gigabytes of dubstep. I'm trying to teach myself how to set things on fire with my mind. Hey... is it hot in here?

I had my checklist tattooed to the inside of my eyelid. I'm not sleeping, I'm reading the checklist. I'm trying to teach myself how to set things on fire with my mind. Hey... is it hot in here?

Why not? I hear the pigs will clean up the mess quite nicely! I'm trying to teach myself how to set things on fire with my mind. Hey... is it hot in here?

What, you don't like the Justin Bieber boy-band look? Some of us don't have hair at all. I tell people I'm 43 and they're stunned. I'm trying to teach myself how to set things on fire with my mind. Hey... is it hot in here?

Hmm. He could just move out here to Colorado and get all the MJ his heart could desire. I'm trying to teach myself how to set things on fire with my mind. Hey... is it hot in here?

I assume this is why the Air Force has navigators. One told me once that they put a rock on the control panel to the right if the pilot. When they say "Turn right" and the pilot says "Which way is that?" They say "Toward the rock." I'm trying to teach myself how to set things on fire with my mind. Hey... is it hot in here?

That says a lot about the company right there: They don't want creative people, nor people who think for themselves; They are looking for mindless drones. Maybe in the 70's. By the time I got to the company, they made it pretty clear that if your job wasn't customer facing, you could wear pretty much whatever you wanted. I tested them on that a couple times, once showing up with knee-high Indian leather boots, blue jeans I'd slashed horizontally down the legs, a denim jacket with a grateful dead skull on it, a leather cowboy hat and Ben Franklin-style shades. Someone asked me if I was a manager because they didn't think one of the phone support grunts would show up at IBM wearing that. No one else said anything about it. I'm trying to teach myself how to set things on fire with my mind. Hey... is it hot in here?

I propose we request permission to land at the Gunbarrel Commons Park. I'm trying to teach myself how to set things on fire with my mind. Hey... is it hot in here?

I'd think that'd depend largely on how you format it. It's awfully terse with everything collapsed, but if you set it to collapse everything older than 7 years you still get a fairly small document and provide the most relevant information from your past two or three jobs. Even fully expanded, after cleaning it up it's only about 4 pages long, which doesn't seem too bad to me for a 20+ year career. Oddly I hadn't realized that I'd worked for that few companies -- only 12 with a lot of contracting work. It really felt like more. I had to go back and double-check that I hadn't missed a couple. LaTeX makes a visually impressive document. Very clean. It was originally designed by Donald Knuth and handles white space and kerning better than any wyswyg word processor I've ever seen. My original resume was in TeX because they had it on the DEC Vax at the college I was attending at the time. I suspect that the output quality of the document got my foot in the door at more than a couple of companies back in the day -- that was back before laser printer output was common and the USPS was the name of the game for getting a document to a company. As more companies moved to the internet, more recruiters started asking for the document in Word format, which is why I'm going to write an HTML formatter for this thing in a week or two. You can load an HTML document into word and that works fine. Doesn't look great compared to the PDF from LaTeX, but it works. If enough of them ever agree to a standard XML format for data interchange, I could just emit to that and call it good, too. Oddly for all the job boards out there, you never seem to hear about anything like that. I really expected that to be the first thing that happened once Monster got rolling, but I can never find anything when I go looking. Maybe I should write a resume REST API for web services and pitch it to some recruiting companies. I'm trying to teach myself how to set things on fire with my mind. Hey... is it hot in here?

I'm guessing formal business attire, a blue spiky mohawk and a nose piercing. I'm trying to teach myself how to set things on fire with my mind. Hey... is it hot in here?

I got rolling on some C++ code again. Here's a link to the source for the application: https://github.com/FlyingRhenquest/resumetron I really like the PDFs generated from the LaTeX output. LaTeX documents are usually beautiful. It's a typesetting language that a lot of textbook publishers still use. I'm probably going to run it by my friendly neighborhood HR droid at work and see if they have any suggestions for improvement. In my experience they never actually your resume anyway, so I'm tempted to collapse the entire job history down (The program will do this for you) and fit the entire couple decades onto one page. I'm trying to teach myself how to set things on fire with my mind. Hey... is it hot in here?

Google on "Helper Monkey" Note that occasionally there's a news story about someone's helper monkey biting someone's face off. Your mileage may vary. I'm trying to teach myself how to set things on fire with my mind. Hey... is it hot in here?

I was that guy in AFF. They clocked me at 170+ mph a few times once I learned how to arch. Once I went down to one instructor, only a couple of them would jump with me, no one else was sure they'd be able to catch up with me if they had to save my life. You can keep going. I did. If you do, you damn well better make sure you're altitude-aware and pull at the correct time. You're just getting a head start in being responsible to save your life. Ultimately you always are, even in AFF. Later on one of my instructors told me I was "the fastest falling, most altitude aware student I've ever had." One of my goals in this sport is to never have the AAD try to deploy for me. The most important thing you can do on any of your skydives is pull. No matter what else is going on, pay attention to that altimeter and pull when you're supposed to. If you can do that, by all means, keep going. If you want to learn how to fly your body, do some time in the tunnel. It shouldn't take more than about 20 minutes in there to be flying about as well as you need to in order to get through AFF. Maybe spend another 10 doing practice pulls and some stability exercises (the ones where they have you put one or both hands on your head and then do a 360 degree turn is a lot of fun.) 30 minutes in a tunnel shouldn't cost much more than one AFF jump, so if it saves you just one repeat, it's about paid for itself. Get video, then you can watch yourself improve. I'm trying to teach myself how to set things on fire with my mind. Hey... is it hot in here?

I've never really been that into them. It's odd. Like football. I can watch it if it's on and appreciate the strategy of the game, but it doesn't hold me. Broken Hearts are For Assholes I'm trying to teach myself how to set things on fire with my mind. Hey... is it hot in here?

After all that I think I'm reasonably happy at a DZ where there are hardly ever any stabbings! I'm trying to teach myself how to set things on fire with my mind. Hey... is it hot in here?

I'd do that, if I could smack any of the five whenever something stupid came out of their mouths. I'm trying to teach myself how to set things on fire with my mind. Hey... is it hot in here?

Whoopsie! Apparently it's been canceled! I'm guessing they explained to George that he couldn't just shoot the guy when he came at him! Heh heh heh. Man. I'm mean... I'm trying to teach myself how to set things on fire with my mind. Hey... is it hot in here?

I've jumped at a couple of larger DZs and I haven't noticed much in the way of cliques. About half the time I go the DZ with no plan in mind and thinking I'll probably just do a solo tracking jump or two, I end up jumping with 4 or 5 other people doing a speedstar or something. Skydivers are pretty outgoing and it's rare you'll get a refusal if you ask to go on a jump with them. I don't think wind tunnels will significantly increase the number of people joining the sport. Most people who go to the wind tunnel do it once for a birthday or other special occasion. It's not that often they hang around. Same thing goes for tandem jumps. Occasionally you'll have someone here tell us they got their start with a tandem jump, but the vast majority of tandem jump and the slightly-less-vast majority of AFF students don't go on to get a license. Have you spent much time at the tunnel? Even the whuffos who are waiting for their turn in the tunnel have a similar vibe. They're excited and happy and even if they've never been in there they kind of have something in common in the desire to at least try flying. Perhaps the thing that makes skydivers get along so well isn't something they were born with. Maybe a little piece of sky gets stuck in them on their first jump. I'm trying to teach myself how to set things on fire with my mind. Hey... is it hot in here?

Have your engineers invent combustible lemons and burn life's house down! With the lemons! I'm trying to teach myself how to set things on fire with my mind. Hey... is it hot in here?

Lots of pantless people running around so far! I'm trying to teach myself how to set things on fire with my mind. Hey... is it hot in here?

I'm going to go with Boobies. If I have a good pair of those, it's a lot easier to earn the other things back! I'm trying to teach myself how to set things on fire with my mind. Hey... is it hot in here?

I've seen tempers flare a couple of times, and lots and lots of politics among the DZ employees. Most of the time we're at the dropzone we're pretty happy -- either about to jump out of a plane, just jumped out of a plane or both. Or having beer. Pretty much anywhere else, you're likely to be pissed off -- at work or just driving around. A few minutes at the dropzone and you're focused on what you need to do to stay alive for the next hour or so and the the daily BS just kind of gets pushed into the background. Then I go back to work on Monday and they harsh my mellow in 5 minutes. I'm trying to teach myself how to set things on fire with my mind. Hey... is it hot in here?

I'm guessing the big black dude will come at him and he'll pull out a gun and shoot him. I'm trying to teach myself how to set things on fire with my mind. Hey... is it hot in here?