He also does a friendly competition thing with his fans in his subreddit every year in November. He posts how many words he writes in a week and encourages others to post their word-count to see if anyone can keep up with his output.
Just finished his 4 secret project books. Also just finished the first Mistborn trilogy with my son and started in on the Wax and Wayne series with him (I’ve already read them). I freaking love me some Brandon Sanderson.
Nice. Yeah his prose is meh, but the world building, character writing, and volume are amazing. I’m in the middle of stormlight right now and loving it.
Stormlight is my absolute favorite series. Yeah, Sanderson doesn’t write as flowery as some authors, but that’s not what I’m looking for. I love how he puts together a whole world with a new magic system, history, religions, political climate, etc. Then is like, alright so that’s what the world was like hundreds of years ago, now let’s see what happens when they get guns and spaceships!
I’ve done it. You’re not supposed to come up with a finished product in 30 days (although some people do). Mine was a first draft of roughly 55k words.
I’m reading a short book by Patrick Rothfuss (The Narrow Road Between Desires). This dude is such a notoriously slow writer that it drives me crazy. He had the audacity to do an author’s introduction where he said this was an existing story of his, but he added 15k words to it. I’m like… what is that, a couple weeks? Write faster, you bastard!
And it’s not like this kind of attitude online has in any way made him self-conscious and led to us most likely never getting the conclusion to his series.
I love the idea of Rothfuss planning all day, coming up with the perfect next chapter in his life’s work, knowing just how to wrap up the intricate threads he’s woven. Then he boots up his laptop, slowly stretches and cracks his fingers. Just before he opens up his word processor to record his beautifully crafted prose, he decides to check out Lemmy for a few minutes. Then he comes across a random comment of mine saying how his fans are frustrated at his pace of writing, and just goes:
“I absolutely care about finishing the book… I feel bad about [not giving people what they want] all the time. It’s one of the things that’s fucking me up, I’m in a lot of therapy right now… I went from fiddling around with a book that I just liked to work on and I knew would never be published… then it’s like 'hey a million people are disappointed in you because they want this book. It’s not a great feeling. … If I didn’t care about the book, you’d have it by now… I owe everyone who loved the book something beautiful”
Exactly dude. He’s sold 10,000,000+ books and the pressure is clearly too much for him. And while we can’t unsell those books for him, the best we can do is spread the word far and wide that Patrick Rothfuss writes like old people fuck. If we each do our best to discourage new fans from jumping on the hype train, we just might have a shot at getting the 3rd Kingkiller Chronicles book before we die.
Your expectations of people understanding falconry in general and the gear that falconers use is far higher than I’d give the average person credit for tbh.
I think there’s something like 43/500ths of a Bigole Hertz to a regular Hertz; but that’s if you’re using English Bigoles. I think it’s 43.9/500ths for a US Bigole.
By convention, compound SI units (e.g. N•m) are separated by a space or multiplication dot and are not just smashed together. The lack of such a separator in the above example implies the “milli” prefix.
No one uses millihertz and neither meterhertz. If you want to do it correctly the first one would be acceptable for milli as scale. The second one would need to be written as m • Hz.
It does amaze me how many people I’ve met who have a vicious hatred towards speed cameras. Especially interesting e: in a country where people have so much respect for the police.
We don’t like the idea a private company is enforcing laws not for safety but for profit. Especially when things like shortening of yellow light time and cameras that don’t properly report speed. It’s horseshit.
It’s not the local government putting them up, it’s a private company who is in charge and keeps at least half the revenue. Plus when their location is known and they get less effective the same company will try other things like altering yellow light time length to keep profits up.
Do you have a link explaining this? I searched for “poliisi valvontakamera” and “poliisi nopeuskamera asennus” and didn’t find stuff about who puts them up and whatnot or about the income sharing. I have read articles about how they’re a nice source of income for the state but no mention of the companies involved.
In the USA, many or most speed cameras are owned and operated not by the local police or city, but by a private company that keeps some percent of the fines they give out.
They are contracted by the city, country, or other authority. They are not randomly placed or operated without permission.
Yeah. Even in the US many municipalities outsource almost the entire ticketing process to the company selling the cameras, and the company collects a (usually outsized) percentage of the fees. So the company has the incentive to use whatever shady tactics to increase ticketing infraction events. This could be by changing the camera angle slightly to falsely get plates from yellow throughers or sometimes they change light timing itself to increase ticketing events…
I would just assumed because they are using the same Swedish company (Sensys Gatso) that does profit sharing agreements with municipalities in the US, that the agreement is the same.
I can’t seem to find the finnish contract award details, so I can’t confirm that they are. I am thinking now, that their might be a chance that they aren’t, given how extreme finnish traffic violation costs can be (% of salary).
So what’s the point? How does this not make it more equitable to adjust it by income from there? That’s still extremely more equitable than our wildly unjust system that’s only designed to punish the poor.
Edit: Also, that’s totally wrong. If I convert euros to USD, then that’s ~$135, which is way less than an average speeding ticket in the US. Last one I had was more than $200, and that was in 2010. You’re wrong.
I’m in the lower income bracket, and I haven’t had one that low since the 90s. That figure must be skewed by places like Nowhereville where the police are so corrupt that they issue $10 tickets to family members or something, because $150 is not a realistic figure for most people. I bet if we looked into that, we’d find some really creative methodology.
It’s only % of salary (day fines) for more severe offenses, in this case for really speeding. Normal speeding tickets are just a set sum.
Here’s a pic showing the amounts. It has the speed limit, how much over the limit you were and how much you end up paying as a fine. Bottom one is “regardless of the limit” and “over 20 km/h”, so whenever you go over by over 20 km/h, you pay “day fines”.
The real problem is that people want to argue technicalities that deflect from the main point. For people who aren’t paying attention, they might come across this and think, “Oh, well I guess the US system isn’t so unjust after all.”
The Finnish system is probably inequitable, too! But it’s objectively not as inequitable as the US system, at least not where traffic fines are concerned. There’s nuance.
It seems like a fairly risky assumption to make just from you having it work like that in the US.
As a side note, that % thing (day fines) don’t cover all speeding tickets, since they’re considered so minor. It’s the bigger offenses (of speed limits and in general) that are covered. So it actually covers other stuff too, not just speeding.
Here’s a pic showing the amounts. It has the speed limit, how much over the limit you were and how much you end up paying as a fine. Bottom one is “regardless of the limit” and “over 20 km/h”, so whenever you go over by over 20 km/h, you pay “day fines”.
Us Nords are socialist enough to keep a tight leash on capitalism. Less and less of course, but capitalism doesn’t define us, the way it defines basically the rest of the world.
Capitalism wreaks a different amount of havoc on societies depending on any number of variables, mostly those which have to do with controlling capitalism.
Fun story, I worked IT for an American Telecom company. One day I recieved a phone call from a guy who was setting up his router. We were maybe five minutes into troubleshooting. He asks if he can eat his dinner while we troubleshoot and I say “no worries”. Within thirty seconds, I hear a bang and panicd screaming. He informs me he dumped soy sauce and rice all over his router and work space. I sent a field tech to replace the router and set it up.
I actually want to get into IT. I like tech, don’t mind dumb situations, and enjoy helping people, and doubly so if it’s sarcastically helping people. Fucking shame every company wants like fourteen degrees and your first born for a level 1.
So I’m going to go against the grain here and say to get some college under your belt. A 2 year degree and a cert or two (which can even be part of your degree program, or sometimes will allow you to skip some classes saving you time and money) will easily get you into a helpdesk job, and from there you can go into whatever specialization ends up tickling your fancy.
I’ll also say, helping someone with their nth password reset doesn’t have to suck. Sometimes there’s a root cause that you can help with which makes you far more helpful than the tech who just helps them reset it 10 more times. One of my proudest achievements in a previous role was successfully teaching all of our users who’d email us a scan of a printout of a screenshot of an error message how to send us the screenshot directly, and we went from 1 ticket like that per week to none for my final 6 months. All it takes is some compassion and meeting the users where they are without judgment for the common goal of getting both of our jobs done a little easier.
Unfortunately I’m already dealing with student loans and two degrees under my belt. So certifications and a shotgun approach to applications might be my least stressful path. I’ve always been tech support for friends and family, have built several computers, and good lord the micro Chernobyl event that was a PC I left with my parents and younger sister when I went away for several months. “Oh that? It just stopped working one day.” Did you know that back on I think Win7 you can bypass some start up errors by mashing the backspace key like you’re a triple expresso’d up Sonic? Cause that was the only way it’d even let me scoot into the actual boot process once I did what I could in safe mode.
Ah so a very different point in your career than most of us seem to have thought. Probably your best bet is to get an easy cert that shows basic PC knowledge and/or start throwing applications out in all directions. If you can get 6-12 months on your resume at a slog of a callcenter or other shitty entry level support role that should be enough to kickstart you into an IT career if that’s the direction you want to go. Get onto a corporate helpdesk and use that time to figure out what you need to learn and go from there.
I’m a hiring manager for a tier 1 help desk and soft skills and being able to deal with users who are bad with technology are way more important than any certification at that level. I can teach someone to do the technical stuff if they have a good attitude. If they have a shitty attitude and get frustrated on every call where the user has trouble following instructions there’s not much I can do for them. Don’t let your lack of certs/degree stop you from applying. You may end up someplace that’s desperate to get asses in seats (usually for good reason) for a bit but once you get some experience on your resume you’ll have an easier time finding someplace better.
I have zero issues helping people, I love it. What I won’t do it help people with the same issue over and over because they won’t pay attention and refuse to learn. Nothing pisses me off faster than repeating myself over and over and having to keep resetting your password and setup your VPN because you keep going into the settings and fucking with it instead of just connecting like we did when I taught you how.
Currently dealing with a guy with 2 Mac’s, a mini and pro and everyday one of them isn’t working because he keeps going to the VPN and changing shit rather than clicking “connect” from the task menu. Jesus fuck it’s annoying.
Others have said here but for a help desk job it’s definitely more based on customer service ability. I came in from an admin job with a very long time in customer service prior to that but no other actual certs other than just being the person that people go to in the office for help and was told by my hiring manager it’s much more about ability to handle clients.
Now the next steps in my career I’m more worried about because it’s all very competitive at least where I am and everyone seems much more involved and knowledgeable of technology than I am. I know I can learn but it is pretty overwhelming.
The majority of people are genuinely thankful for your help. Sometimes they put off asking for help until they are very frustrated and you catch some of that heat but they calm down quickly. They also really like it if you have to sit down and work on their computer because it means they have an excuse to not work and have some coffee. There always seems to be that one person though that you dread helping because they are always pissy and sarcastic and blame you for everything.
I have had an IT role and been a controls engineer for many years now. There is a fair amount of overlap in duties and you only need one degree for that. Basically, a lot of it is IT for machinery. I have a hell desk support team who keeps most of the basics at bay and every time they all get sick at once I remember why I love them.
I like how you skipped the preludes and just call them the hell desk. I am 100% sure that isn’t a typo and I’m never going to check to see if you edit it just in case.
Certifications certifications certifications. Get your A+ or net+, apply for shitty remote help desk jobs like support.com. They will suck and you’ll get back to back calls, but keep your ears to the ground and a few months experience should be all you need to hop to something else. A lot of places are desperate for competent techs. Degrees don’t prove anything, I’m fact it seems like kids are graduating with these technical degrees and zero actual practical knowledge.
Source: My decade long IT career off just an associates degree.
I can confirm this. I was able to get a decent job right out of highschool with my certs I got at a technical college. Really as long as you can prove that you’re a fast learner, passionate about tech, and have the skillet to back it up it’s not hard to find a job. In my experience at least, which to be fair is only 6 years
Absolutely correct. Every single place outside of giants like Google take equivalent work experience instead of a degree. I dont even have an AA but I have 16 years experience and 11 certifications and make low 6 figures.
I like you. You have the right mindset. The main motivator for working IT support is helping people. The tech usually takes a back seat to soft skills.
On top of that, you’ll figure out that, as long as you know the fundamentals of how things work, all the details are something you can google. Figure out the fundamentals and you’ll be able to work on anything. Convincing prospective employers of this skillset is a bit more difficult.
I wish you luck and I hope I have the pleasure of working with you some day.
I’ve been dealing with hardware and software issues since my first computer years ago. Like many of us it was either do, or take the PC out back and mourn its passing. I do lack the certifications, even if the knowledge is there. It seems I have some work in front of me.
I do appreciate the words of encouragement. Barring the rare toxic frequent ticketer, most people who have issues just don’t jive with tech well and are yet forced to use it, oh and the stubborn ones. That majority who need legitimate help are the ones I like most and even more I enjoy the challenge of finding ways to explain things to them in a way that clicks. Maybe save a support ticket in the future.
Perhaps this single mother should’ve tried just getting a better job, or just simply work a second hell why not even a third. Sounds like lazyness to me.
Single moms these days need to start pulling themselves up by their bootstraps. What I would do if my rent was tripled, is just reduce my avocado toast intake by 30% and go on a nice vacation with all the additional money I saved up.
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