Knar

A thank you email. Courtesy goes a long way in today's day and age. Even if it's a person's job to interview you, everyone likes a little appreciation these days. Yes, you do thank them in person, but also when you send a thank you email, you're keeping your name fresh in the hiring manager's mind. And also, it's your way expressing interest in the position. It shows courtesy and professionalism. When you're interviewing with companies, they are going be interviewing not just you, but multiple people. What seperates you from everyone else if how you conduct yourself during the interview, the skill sets and your personality. (Plus anything that seperates candidate A from B for the manager) This lets you stand out from your competition (even if it's just a little thing)

Yeah. I forgot to add that I'm a technical recruiter for a staffing agency. I think I have a little more of a clue when it comes to getting that J-O-B. Only a little bit though.

I'm not sure what type of market you're refering to (US or UK), but this is what I will say. Generally, if you get a business card, I'm inclined to say yes, give them a Thank You email. For high level positions, I make my people write a quick thank you email and I forward that to the hiring manager. It's just professional courtesy and a way of showing your appreciation of having the other person take their time out to interview you. It doesn't have to be anything long or fancy, but rather something that expresses your interest and a way of saying "hey, I look forward to being a good addition to your company" (or something along those lines) In addition, when companies are interviewing people for positions, they are seeing if they are a good personality fit and have the right skills. They want to find someone they can work with in the long run and giving a thank you email is saying "hey, I can show appreciation but also understand professional etiquette" which translates to you having a general clue of how to act in the workplace. However - if you're in a more of an informal environment (like gamers versus financial industries, or heavily regulated companies), it won't be as important. Hope this helps!

I can't believe no one put: Shawshank Redemption Usual Suspects Also er. uh.. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind Run Lola Run The Incredibles Amelie Harold and Kumar go to White Castle And almost anything with Kevin Spacey in it.

Yeah, whoa, it's me. I was in the same time zone as you guys for a while, but then I ran out of vacation time.

I've noticed that Spaff has yet to answer to this thread.

This is me with Stefan at Oktoberfest in SF. I was trying really hard to get him in pictures with alcohol. There was one where I wanted him to pose next to a huge bottle of Jagermeister, but he stood in front of the bottle. I was blocked! It's a scanned picture - hence the graininess of it.

Wow Savage, I'm waiting for your reference to looking at the lovely Inara, the handsome Malcolm, or the adorably cute Kaylee. It's not all about shooting scumbags and robbing trains, but the unforgettable character interactions and tongue in cheek humor.

Is that 100% true? I mean, listening to Chinese Opera - it's a very unique art form and truth be told, very non-western. A cry is very dramatic and not very western at all. Actually I think Chinese Opera sounds very much like cats yowling at night. Don't tell my grandma that, she loves the stuff. The Guqin and the Erhu have very unique sounds and some of the "older" compositions I've heard tend to have very unique asian elements. Things such as note choice and tempo. These are instruments that are staples in Chinese soap operas displaying the olden days with Emperors and the like. The music is a bit cliched, yes, usually playing the same song, but they don't sound remotely classical or from the romantic period from what I can tell. For you guys who don't know the Erhu or Guqin, they're the main instruments used in olden day china kung fu movies. I was about to say "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon", but Yo Yo Ma composed the entire soundtrack and he plays the cello. They're both string instruments, the Guqin being a plucking instrument and the Erhu is a bow instrument.

I don't know. Originally it was one person, but I bet with these type of things, once you start, you can't stop. I'd probably go into a killing rage or something. See? I'm a timebomb.

It's a her. And it's on - much killing will commence.

EDIT: My friend told me the wrong night. The screening was last night. Dammmmitt!!!! brb, must kill friend.

Update: A friend has given me her spot + 1 guest. I get to watch Serenity tonight at the Chinese Mann theater. (The one they always show in Hollywood clips). Woot! Right now, I'm dancing - inside.

There are many theories as to what Booker is, none that i want to hear about. I have yet to see Serenity and I have friends watching the screening at this very moment (jealousy fills me). Them not being like typical friends failed to tell me about a free screening in the area in time therefore I am NOT on the list. Sadness fills me.

He's a singer and a producer, a pretty prominent one in American R&B.

Actually, another interesting article is a transcript of a radio interview with the Mayor of New Orleans asking for help and criticizing the government's ineptitude. I can only imagine what this man is going thru, a city that he loves and represents, is responsible for, and he can't do anything. http://edition.cnn.com/2005/US/09/02/nagin.transcript/

I know this is a bit late, but I finally got this picture from my friend. Basically what happened was we were standing in line for an event and we saw a really good joker. After taking a few pictures of him (he has great facial expressions), he spontaneously decided to get between the dividers of the window. What we got was this awesome surreal image of a joker, in a box. Enjoy!

Usually the games from Cheapass games are pretty fun and hilarious. There's a lot of spin off RISK games like Axis and Allies, Nexus Ops, and Buck Rogers of the 21st century. Some more complicated spinoffs would be something like Air Baron. What's considered Chinese poker? There is a game called 'Gang of Four" that i know about. Another good card game is "Dalmuti" which strangely enough can be used as a drinking game. As for children's games, I remember Rampage. Don't know why, but I really liked it, especially the sound effects to when I'm smashing a window open and eating people.

Yeah, it seems like it. I just read an article on XMLTV - even though the program itself can be used for making your own PC TIVO. Funny how they won't let you modify their data. I mean, the best you can do is work on a personal copy of XMLTV and maybe discuss the interface with us. This guy seems to a have a solution on how to make the query for his chosen shows, but once again, you still run into the legalities of using XMLTV in the first place. http://www.hackdiary.com/archives/000038.html Maybe you can ask the author of the website for any suggestions. Hope this helps!

My brother instillled a fear of anthrax into my younger sister a few years ago (during the Gulf War which was during the early 90s). She was convinced she would die by anthrax.

I had an interesting technical conversation about a developer developing the latest graphics code for the next gen PS3. He told me about the differing architecture between the PS3 and Xbox 2 and the strategies employed by both companies. The biggest problem these days for chip manufacturers is that they can not physically make a single chip go faster these days (they've crammed as much as they can onto a chip). So these days, the only way to increase speed is parallel processing, which means a bunch a chips (CPUs) are interconnected on a bus. But no one has written a really good algorithm along with the architecture design to manage such a complex system. Both Xbox 2 and PS3 have such an architecture, much to game developer's chagrine. So, my friend described to me the differences in both of the architecture and told me the shortfalls of each. In the PS3 architecture, there are 7 SPUs (Synergy Processing Units), and 1 managing CPU. Each SPU have their own local 256Kb cache that stores all data (so we have memory problems). All of the units have direct lines connected to each other, which also means latency problems. And that the designers of the board were a bit arbitrary on the calculations on the best path, so we get random bottlenecks. Another problem is memory management, though we have global memory, each SPU has to access data from global and store into local cache and rewrite to back to global memory. And we have to do this with 7 units. To deal with all the random arbitrary rules (because there are many) and management, this has to all be done in assembly- a coding language that everyone thought was going to be phased out of existance. And the managing CPU is not that good of a manager. In fact, in some cases, it's better that the SPUs communicate with each other. I think it has to do with bottlenecks and delays on the bus. The Xbox architecture however, are 3 CPUs interconnected, but they're stripped down versions of PC CPUs apparently. They all share memory. Unfortunately, they got rid of the ability of preloading the best path taken in code (I might have the term wrong, but code consists of a series of if statements, and PC CPUs calculate what the best path is and preloads the solution into memory, therefore speeding up the loading process). And the Xbox 2 has a really nice graphics card. He works for Sony, so I guess I couldnt' get much about Xbox 2's coding problems. From what I gauged from the conversation, the Xbox 2 architecture is a lot simpler and easier to develop for. Basically it's a stripped down version of a PC with a really nice graphics card. The PS3 however, has a lot of computing potential, but it's so complex at the moment, that they need to tweak out a few things before going on with the next step. Anyhow, I thought it was a cool conversation to learn more about the complex machines that run our games and to know some of the shortcomings developers have to deal with even before making the game.

Perhaps it is Google's way of tracking you, gaining more information on who your friend are, and what type of things you like. Insiduous marketing by searching your email and finding your buying habits....

What country are you looking at?

The story can be seen here. http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20050826/ap_en_mo/halo_movie

I think she decided to ignore this thread a long time ago.