|
I hate telephones, speaking on them anyway.
Part of it is because I have very slight hearing problems and have to concentrate very hard without a person's mouth to watch as well to get what they are saying.
Part of it is that without the rest of their face to look at I cannot tell how they are reacting to what is being said.
Part of it is that I get a tired arm a hot ear.
In half an hour I have to have a phone conference with someone called Bong (I think they are in the Philippines) and a bloke with a French accent who is in North America somewhere.
I struggle face to face with people who have strong accents, even strong regional English ones, on the phone it is even worse.
I hate telephones.
“I believe that there is an equality to all humanity. We all suck.” Bill Hicks
|
|
|
|
|
Perhaps you could use a conference phone (or at least a speakerphone) and conduct the conversation in a room whose door you could shut so you could turn up the volume to a comfortable level? That's what I do when I have to conduct a candidate phone screen. My hands are free to take notes (or play make-believe piano).
/ravi
|
|
|
|
|
Ravi Bhavnani wrote: My hands are free to take notes (or play make-believe piano).
That is awesome, do you compose your own songs, as a singer-songwriter type, or do you do covers of other songs?
|
|
|
|
|
Both. Although guitar is my primary instrument. You can find some of my work here[^].
/ravi
|
|
|
|
|
Hah, I was trying to be facetious, but oh welll
My 6 yr old wanted to play guitar. So we hooked him up with an acoustic nylon string guitar (too hard to fret the steel for his hands). And I decided that if I want to teach him, I gotta learn too, so we both have guitars now (about 6 months into it). We have a few songs in process, which we are writing, a few songs we can play together from "easy books" as lead and rhythm. It's lots of fun.
He plays my dread on the neck now and frets the big chords easily. "Look Daddy, you have to go buy me a steel string guitar now"... he really likes steel over nylon. As soon as he is big enough for a 3/4 scale guitar, I'll get it for him (he is on a 1/2 scale rigth now).
|
|
|
|
|
/ravi
|
|
|
|
|
Same here. Recently our company made two of my colleagues redundant and have replaced them with Local support in our main production facilities in Malaysia and Mexico. They seemed to think this was a good idea despite having tried it numerous times in the past and only to fail. As they spend all the money flying them over, training them up only for them to move on to another company for more money once they are capable. This time I'm assured it will be different though because "now we have JIRA".
Anyway, now everyday at 3pm I have to sit in phone conference with a Malaysian, a Mexican and an Irishman, I feel like I'm in a really sh*t joke.
|
|
|
|
|
PB 369,783 wrote: Anyway, now everyday at 3pm I have to sit in phone conference with a Malaysian,
a Mexican and an Irishman, I feel like I'm in a really sh*t joke.
One in which you are the punchline?
|
|
|
|
|
PB 369,783 wrote: I feel like I'm in a really sh*t joke.
No, just Havant. To many they are the same, but at least a joke, no mater how bad, makes you smile.
Reality is an illusion caused by a lack of alcohol
"Nagy, you have won the internets." - Keith Barrow
|
|
|
|
|
ChrisElston wrote: I hate telephones, ...
What you want is Skype[^]. Most literate computer people have it, and I think it addresses most of your concerns/peeves.
--
Harvey
|
|
|
|
|
Skype is very blocked where I work, not that I have sound on my PC anyway.
We do have full video conferencing facilities, but I don't know that it has ever been used.
“I believe that there is an equality to all humanity. We all suck.” Bill Hicks
|
|
|
|
|
|
So...I havent been on here in a while, but I cant seem to find the wall of shame so I thought here would do :P
While going through our current framework I came across a module written by one of our senior devs, who apparently doesnt know what a break is, here is an example of what he does :
for (var i = 0;i < myArray.length; i++) {
if (conditionIsMet) {
i = myArray.length;
}
}
I gave him the benefit of the doubt and thought that maybe he was using i somewhere else, but he wasn't. Anyways, just a little laugh...Has anyone else found any gems like this??
-- Dom
|
|
|
|
|
|
DominicZA wrote: I gave him the benefit of the doubt and thought that maybe he was using i somewhere else
"Never mess with loop indices", even Klingons follow this rule.
Veni, vidi, vici.
|
|
|
|
|
In school I was taught that it was very wrong to break out of a loop. It wasn't just taught, there were 2 commandments students had to live by. One had to do with goto , the other was "You never break from a loop". You could get points off your project for that, or possibly a bad grade. What you posted is exactly what I learned, however with some instructors you could get away with adding a compound condition to the for loop.
Of coarse in the real world you can break
If it moves, compile it
|
|
|
|
|
loctrice wrote: "You never break from a loop" That's nonsense.
/ravi
|
|
|
|
|
You're forgetting the old maxim: "Those who can, do; those who can't, teach"
There is nowhere where this is more apposite than in university computer education.
If you wish proof of this, just visit QA...
(My apologies to any good teachers out there: you do know you are in a teeny, tiny minority, right?)
The universe is composed of electrons, neutrons, protons and......morons. (ThePhantomUpvoter)
|
|
|
|
|
Had I listened to college and university tutors in in 2001 I'd have learnt COBOL as "nothing is as good for manipulating text files".
|
|
|
|
|
jim lahey wrote: COBOL as "nothing is as good for manipulating text files". I just everted my upper gastrointestinal tract. The ejecta (formerly my lunch) achieved an appreciable fraction of c[^] as it punched through the roof of our building.
Software Zen: delete this;
|
|
|
|
|
|
In school we learned never ever to use break, continue or goto (only exception is break in switch statements). If we had to break we were told to develop a construct like you mention here.
Similar for return statements (only allowed for each method). This one however I support.
You were downgraded if you didn't obey this rule.
|
|
|
|
|
V. wrote: In school we learned never ever to use break, continue or goto (only exception is break in switch statements). If we had to break we were told to develop a construct like you mention here.
Wow, that's crazy. Not using break is wasteful, if you know you're done with the loop you should just get out of it, and it's not like it's unclear where it goes. continue I can kind of get, you could just reorganize your code in most cases (since probably 99.99% of the time it's already in a condition, and that condition could be flipped).
It really sounds like your teachers heard "don't use goto" and decided that included any instruction that directly created a jump (minus structures like conditionals and loops)
|
|
|
|
|
V. wrote: You were downgraded if you didn't obey this rule.
We didn't have grades but marks, -15
Beauty cannot be defined by abscissas and ordinates; neither are circles and ellipses created by their geometrical formulas.
Source
|
|
|
|
|
What the actual elephant.
A for loop with a conditional break is a standard idiom for finding things in collections ... never mind permitted, it's a standard pattern!
|
|
|
|