somabc

I swear I was not looking for ahem 'adult material' when I found this - http://www.picturesforsadchildren.com/comics/00000167.gif Japanese companies are always looking to meet the needs of the "niche-ist" of niche markets. For example, top-selling record label Avex has discovered a new way to reach extremely anti-social sets — the NEET (Not in Education, Employment, or Training), and the most reclusive of the recluses, the hikikomori. Most believe that these groups’ refusal of social participation stems from their lack of social skills. The hikikomori almost never socialize with other people and prefer to spend their time in their bedrooms, completely locked away from the world. The total numbers of NEET and hikikomori may have been overestimated in the past, but they do exist to some extent and are mostly male. Avex is trying to reach these groups with a new DVD — part "corporate social responsibility," part traditional content delivery, and part talent blog/model promotion. The DVD is called Miteiru dake (Just Looking), and it features various talent/models just staring straight ahead. That’s right, the models on the DVD do very little other than stare straight at the camera. According to the website, the idea is to get young males who aren’t used to socializing with women to become more accustomed to making eye contact and/or handle the fact that a sentient being sits across from them and awaits interaction. The DVD hopes to cure those afflicted with shyness so that they may rejoin society. The result, from what one can see on the website, is strangely disconcerting. A girl will stare back at you for an extended period of time, expressionless and periodically blinking (the blinks are eerily profound). Once in a while the model will utter a phrase like "ohayoo" (good morning) or make a move to say something, but for the most part there is just an uncomfortable silence. Most of the women on the DVD are jimusho-based talento (most have blogs on Ameba and other DVDs of their own to sell), but there are also foreign women, young girls, and older women thrown in the mix to give the viewer experience in handling long, uncomfortable silences with those of different races and ages. Without even broaching the logic of creating a product expressly for a niche that doesn’t have a whole lot of money, Miteiru Dake is a bold new experiment in combination idol promotion and social charity, using a conventional Japanese content business model (nothing’s free, but you can buy it on DVD and follow up with the stars through their blogs). And one of the payoffs is that the reformed NEET and hikikomori may just become lifelong fans of the female idols who saved them from the hells of an asocial existence. clast ’EElŒ©’m‚èIˆãŠw”ŽŽm‚©‚ç‚̃G[ƒ‹ | ƒCƒ“ƒ^ƒ‰ƒNƒeƒBƒuDVDwƒ~ƒeƒ‹‚¾‚¯x

Sorry I am not trying to put you off, your can totally live cheaply and have fun here, I would try renting a room with some other young professionals / students / travellers can prob find this on the net at somewhere like Gumtree.com and get a temp job in a bar or perhaps IT contracting if you can, when you get bored just go and move to another country / city. Not sure how easy it is to find work without the right visa, but you might avoid tax that way . Even the cities in the UK are quite different to each other, I recommend visiting Scotland for a change and you will be fine in UK, Ireland and much of Europe only speaking English. You will find most (all?) of the UK to be quite cosmopolitan with people from all over Europe and the rest of the world living and working here so I'm sure people will be friendly to you. I'm pretty sure that anyone who comes here gets free healthcare (yay!) and has to pay the various taxes though (boo!). Gumtree.com: UK's No. 1 in classifieds - jobs, property, cars and more Europe travel guide - Wikitravel Britain for Americans Britain - Uncyclopedia, the content-free encyclopedia (these last two are jokes do not pay any attention to them!)

You want to move from California to London. Hell I want to move the other way you want to swap? Seriously though I hope you know what you are getting yourself into! It is very very different to California in the UK, which is I guess why you want to move here. You sound like you have a good background in IT with some experience, you could probably get a job starting at $50,000 rising to around $100,000 if you can move up. You have to bear in mind that your salary will not go as far in the UK. Ok we have free health care (NHS), but you will have to pay high taxes - income tax 20% basic rate, 40% higher rate, National Insurance contributions as well, VAT (sales tax) on anything you buy at 17.5%, Council Tax (property tax) at likely $2000 a year. Gas at $10+ a gallon and most things are priced in £ as they would be in $ so that's twice the price as well. Oh and the weather generally sucks. Hope I'm not putting you off they are many good points to the UK (and europe) and it would certainly be good to stay here for a while!

Windows Sharepoint Services 3 (WSS3) is free and can be installed on Server 2003 and Server 2008. Sharepoint Portal Server 2007 (MOSS) is part of The MS Office family and you have to pay for it. There is a workaround you need to follow to install WSS3 on Server 2008 bharry's WebLog : Installing Sharepoint on Windows Server 2008 Microsoft SharePoint - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I want to see it at IMAX but its booked solid until end of august!

If you actually want to work it out mathematically then work out the no of days in each month and then add them up! 30 days -September, April, June and November. All the rest have 31 except February which has either 28 or 29 days depending on a leap year. Today 28-Jul Remaining days until august = 31-28 = 3 Days in August = 31 Days in September = 30 Days in October = 31 Days in November = 4 Total days = 31 - 28 + 31 + 30 + 31 + 4 = 99 days

There is also the kibibyte but does anyone use this term? Kibibyte - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia IEC - IEC in action | SI zone > Prefixes for binary multiples

Life as a teacher is just one long holiday | Mortarboard | guardian.co.uk

I'm not saying its not a nice place to work, just that its a discount supermarket (the clue is in the name ALbrecht DIscount). I might wonder if they take moneysaving too far so it affects staff but who knows? Only someone who works there would know for sure, hopefully they are not like Walmart? BBC News | UK | Damages for sacked HIV manager ALDI Group Company Profile - Yahoo! Finance ALDI keeps it cheap so shoppers can, too. How has discount food retailer ALDI Group become one of the world's biggest grocery chains, running about 8,500 stores worldwide? By offering deeply discounted prices on about 1,300 popular food items (a typical grocery store has 30,000). ALDI (short for "Albrecht Discounts") buys cheap land mostly on city outskirts, builds cheap warehouses, employs a tiny staff, and carries mostly private-label items, displaying them on pallets rather than shelves. ALDI has about 900 stores in more than 25 US states, but Germany (where ALDI has a network of some 4,200 stores) accounts for about two-thirds of sales. Brothers and co-founders Theo and Karl Albrecht own the company.

Aldi's method is to keep costs down, this means very few staff, sometimes only 5 say on at any time for 1 supermarket. The food gets loaded off the truck and put into the supermarket still on the pallet. You could make more money if you stick at IT I think than retail management, but if you like working with people and variety then go for it. Don't go for supermarket manager get into the Regional Manager scheme (boss of a few supermarket managers) that is also widely advertised, more money, and a better car. Starting salary £40k and an Audi A6. Aldi Recruitment :: Rewards Personally I feel that any company that has to advertise a particular car is a waste of time(look a shiny Audi), if you were hot stuff they would let you negotiate whatever remuneration package you wanted. In fact if you were hot stuff and could take your pick of leading companies the I bet you wouldn't work for Aldi!

In Soviet Russia ... Or you could print some of these slides from IBM off IBM Slides

If I was a poser it would be a Macbook Air!

Here is my Linux Desktop on another PC Ubuntu 8.04 (64 bit) Gnome (Human) 1280x1024 background from gnome-look

naa, Macbook Pro with external display.

Home Laptop (MBP) OSX Leopard background via desktopia 1920 x 1200 excuse the messy icons please, keep meaning to tidy that up http://img512.imageshack.us/img512/5103/julypy9.jpg

90 desktops & monitors, HP dc7800 & 19" Monitors # Intel Core2Duo processor # 4.0GB memory (SFF) # PCI-E graphics bus # 3 Year on site warranty # 160gb 7,200 rpm hard disk etc, etc. PC Pro: Product Reviews: HP Compaq dc7800 Small Form Factor

I'm not saying that we replaced a lot of kit but look at the sculpture we built. (That was for 1 room) http://photos-887.ll.facebook.com/photos-ll-sf2p/v310/248/8/1156497887/n1156497887_30084720_4888.jpg

I would say its rubbish, but I now have Vista x64 on a quad core with 4GB of RAM and it is pretty good, certainly usable. note: still only performs like xp on dual core and 2GB of RAM

Yep its from Network, I urge anyone who has not seen it to check it out! YouTube - Network - "There is no democracy" [english subtitles]

I don't have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. It's a depression. Everybody's out of work or scared of losing their job. The dollar buys a nickel's worth; banks are going bust; shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter; punks are running wild in the street, and there's nobody anywhere who seems to know what to do, and there's no end to it. We know the air is unfit to breathe and our food is unfit to eat. And we sit watching our TVs while some local newscaster tells us that today we had fifteen homicides and sixty-three violent crimes, as if that's the way it's supposed to be! We all know things are bad -- worse than bad -- they're crazy. It's like everything everywhere is going crazy, so we don't go out any more. We sit in the house, and slowly the world we're living in is getting smaller, and all we say is, "Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster and my TV and my steel-belted radials, and I won't say anything. Just leave us alone." Well, I'm not going to leave you alone. I want you to get mad! I don't want you to protest. I don't want you to riot. I don't want you to write to your Congressman, because I wouldn't know what to tell you to write. I don't know what to do about the depression and the inflation and the Russians and the crime in the street. All I know is that first, you've got to get mad. You've gotta say, "I'm a human being, goddammit! My life has value!" So, I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window, open it, and stick your head out and yell, "I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!!"

http://images.icanhascheezburger.com/completestore/2008/7/17/dontdrownme128608054633532839.jpg oh my god! Bill Frist - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Yeah you should take sexual orientation into account too you know? Although would you need to get some straight/gay/men/women to assess the staff first! Maybe we should drop it instead don't want any lawsuits.

Oh the luxury, I never got a welcome pack, I got a list of problems to clear up. It took a day for the janitor to take pity on me and show me round the school. Good idea though, (s)he will need 2 welcome packs, 1 technical concerning the workings of the IT systems, servers, labs etc. 1 general pack for the school, a map of depts, staff contacts, break room, toilets, school hours etc.

http://idler.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2007/07/blast.png I think the point is that the public sector has had below inflation pay rises for the last 5+ years. Those were the 'good times' when money was floating about but still they never got to have their 'share' unlike the private sector. Now when the chips are down they are asked to sacrifice their salary even more for the good of the economy. There is no upside for public sector workers here, why should they accept an effective pay cut each year? If you put workers in a position where they earn less and less each year, cannot buy a house, cannot run a car, cannot raise a family, cannot go on holiday, then who will take these jobs? The way things are going if I was leaving school just now, I would be extremely tempted go to Uni as much as I can, rack up student debts that I would never pay back (thereby gaining an excellent education for free), get as many credit cards as I could and have fun in my 20s then file for bankruptcy. If I can never own a house / car etc then why not. Then I would move abroad and get a decent job / salary with my Masters degree / PhD in a different cheaper country and start a new life. Beats 20+ years of working 9-5 for a pittance, with no job security, staying in a rundown rented flat and living off baked beans in the vain hope I can save some money. (Then again I may have been reading The Idler too much) The Idler They should have told the government to get stuffed years ago, and bargained for a pay rise at least always matching inflation with possible reviews to see if they merit an increase on top. That is the only fair deal. The unions are in a weaker position now. If unemployment rises, the government can with some justification say that you are lucky to have a job at all, and that there is no money to fund pay rises due to the economic crisis.

Is there not problem with signed drivers and Server 2008, it might just be the 64bit version I'm thinking of. Do you have Hyper-V?