Need Some Advice

[CrouchingLiger]

This is way off topic, but I figure you guys can help me out on this one...

We've all seen the movie Office Space, right? All the lower level workers consumed in a mess of cubicles, ass-kissing, and long periods of boredom...

I work in a very similar environment. The people (boss included) are all very friendly, but it's still a sea of cubicles where work gets done in short spurts, leaving lots of empty time. We're of course encouraged to study new policies and material, but it takes about 5-10 minutes to go over what's really necessary. Which brings me to my question, can you guys recommend any books or websites that might help pass the time??

Any advice would be GREATLY appreciated

[MentholMoose]

You can read a newspaper website, like The New York Times, or The Washington Post. I have a Wall Street Journal subscription, so I read it when I have spare time. I bought it for very cheap using frequent flier miles.

Magazines are an option, so find some that cover something you're interested in. I work in IT, so I subscribe to a bunch of free IT-related magazines. Subscriptions to most magazines can be found for a very low price online (the best deals used to be on eBay before they banned the selling of subscriptions ).

Another option is self-improvement. Find a subject you want to learn for whatever reason, procure resources for learning it (books, magazines, websites, videos, etc.), and spend your spare time on it. During the last six months I've been studying for and taking Microsoft exams, and working toward earning MCITP certifications. There are tons of professional certification programs out there.

Wikipedia is a good source of information. Search for something you are interested, and start reading. Follow the various links to other entries and references and you will be set for hours!

[Flyer]

Be thankful you even have a job

You can always do something constructive, like build an even better set of twinsticks...

[CrouchingLiger]

Thanks for the advice, I typically use BBC as my main news feed and Wikipedia as my primary source of mental stimulation. As for self-improvement, I'm going for my CPA right now, the average study time necessary to pass (need a 75 on each exam, 4 exams total) is around 300 hours, but I usually save that for when I'm at home because I need a quiet study environment.

[graefocs]

WSJ Online is a great paper to read. Even though it sounds like a financial paper, it's not and covers many worldly and cultural issues (including popular culture). It's very well written, and is geared towards an audience of a more distinguished caliber. Its readership consists mainly of highly educated people who average $200,000 annual household income. So if you are a driven person, it's definitely good to involve yourself in that mindset. And seeing that you're interested in a CPA, I think this is right up your alley. I find it more interesting and a better read than the NY Times personally.

[MentholMoose]

Its readership consists mainly of highly educated people who average $200,000 annual household income. So if you are a driven person, it's definitely good to involve yourself in that mindset.

That may be the case, but you would think otherwise if you read the comments on some of the articles!! They're not quite youtube-quality, but sometimes I wonder.

[Nusakan]

LOL I'm glad I don't stay in a cube TBH. One of these days I'll have to post a pic of my cube. It's anime themed and there's quite a bit of Gundam models as well a few VOOM figures.

Unfortunatly I'm way too busy here at work after several people got axed due to the economy, we're expected to do almost everything so....... ;_; But whenever there's downtime I pretty much work on expanding my infrastructure. I work at intel as a Virtualization specialist and do server validation work so in my spare (if i ever get any) time I try and test out different things in that field. It doesn't really get boring cause i got god knows how much money worth of server equipment to play with. My suggestion? If you got anytihng that looks fun to play with at work... do it!

[MentholMoose]

Heh I'm working on a XenServer deployment... on Opteron-based servers.

[Nusakan]

Oh the Xen man. Let me ask you this then. What's your opinion about xen? Me personally, I'm not impressed at all. Though if i had a choice, I'd rather deploy something thru SLES 11 rather than Red Hat (5.2 or 5.3). In my experience, I've always liked VMware and Microsoft's Hyper-V (windows 2008's solution). LOL I don't normally say good things about microsoft...

I've built servers for testing that have RAM up in the 128Gb+ (the monster I'm working on can handle WAY more) and logical processors up in the ## of processors (sorry can't say but it's LOTS.) and all it took was like ~6 virtual machines with four virtual-processors and like 6GB of ram before the system as a whole started croaking. More like Linux has issues scheduling proper CPU time to each virtual machines. Citrix is something I haven't touched yet so I can't comment on that. They pulled Citrix testing off me at the last minute =(

SORRY >.<; this thread has been hijacked LOL

[MentholMoose]

Oh the Xen man. Let me ask you this then. What's your opinion about xen? Me personally, I'm not impressed at all. Though if i had a choice, I'd rather deploy something thru SLES 11 rather than Red Hat (5.2 or 5.3). In my experience, I've always liked VMware and Microsoft's Hyper-V (windows 2008's solution). LOL I don't normally say good things about microsoft...

I haven't really played with Xen except on XenServer. The XenServer management tools are limited... you can tell that VMware is years ahead. But, it's good that there is some sort of competition to keep VMware somewhat honest.

I've built servers for testing that have RAM up in the 128Gb+ (the monster I'm working on can handle WAY more) and logical processors up in the ## of processors (sorry can't say but it's LOTS.) and all it took was like ~6 virtual machines with four virtual-processors and like 6GB of ram before the system as a whole started croaking. More like Linux has issues scheduling proper CPU time to each virtual machines.

The Dell servers I'm working are dual 4-core CPUs with 64GB of RAM, and the storage is a Sun Storage array. I really hope XenServer doesn't croak too easily... these are for VDI, so each server will need to host A LOT of VMs!

[DeepInTheHops]

Can't help with accounting. IT people have more than enough stuff to read during downtime, though.

I have a pretty standard list of sites that I check:
Slashdot
Hacker News
Reddit Programming
Coding Horror
The Daily WTF

For non-IT stuff, also pretty standard:
BBC News
The Onion

[circuscommando]

Read the ender series (ender's game, enders shadow, Etc.)


-get a PSP.

[neo helbeast]

Read the ender series (ender's game, enders shadow, Etc.)


-get a PSP.

LIIIIIIIEEEEEEEEEEEESSSSSSSSSSSS. Get a PSP fat (1st gen) and mod it to play snes games along with nes. Or a DS, if your like me and played your gameboy into oblivion. (R.I.P little guy)

[circuscommando]

well yeah, gameboys are great, i like the SP, but use my color a lot. as long as you get a modded battery you can customize the firmware. PSP 2001 and 3001 though have more ram and are generally better.