I blame Nascar. They have bacon Magaritas and the people love them.

I would suggest you inform your new employer that you may be able to start earlier and see if they can accommodate you. My experience is that when an employer decides to hire you they would like you to start as soon as possible so I would think they would accommodate you if you can start early. I live and work in Texas which is a "Right to Work" state. What this means is I can quit at any time without notice and they can fire me at any time without notice. You should review the employment laws where you work to see what your options are. I agree with other replies that it's customary to give two weeks notice to maintain good will with your former employer. But if you're in a bad situation you may want to just get out. Two weeks notice may not be enough good will to get you labeled as "rehireable". If it's one incident it will probably not affect your ability to get hired.

I am currently working in a SCRUM environment and I think it works well. We have daily stand-ups that usually last less than 15 minutes and our management does not inject additional features until all work scheduled for the current sprint is complete. My biggest issue is that, since we no longer do any type of group status meeting, I don't really know what other people are working on. I agree with some of the other comments here. Getting direction from two sources is a no-win situation for you. I've been in this situation before and it never ends well for the person in the middle. I would suggest you get the two conflicting parties together (email, meeting, whatever) and ask them to provide one direction for your work. Do whatever you can to publicly CYA in case everything hits the fan. Good Luck, RTS

For the server: Visual SVN Easy to set up and use. Standard edition is free. For the client: Tortoise SVN One of the best free SVN clients. I use this setup to transfer projects from my office desktop to my laptop. The SVN server resides on a RAID 5 fileserver.

My second system was the best personal computer built in the 80's, an Amiga 1000. Did the old memory stack hack mentioned in other posts to double the ram to either 512k or an insane 1mb. Cant remember which, I think it was 1mb. Bought some software (and some casio drum pads) and built an interface to one of the ports that turned it into an electronic drum kit. Too bad Commodore couldn't market their way out of a wet paper bag. Must have been all ex Xerox marketing people. I don't think I've ever purchased a pre-built PC desktop system. Used to get all the parts from Computer Shopper and build it myself. Now it's New Egg but the process is the same.

My first computer was a portable teletype like machine with built in acoustin coupled 300 baud modem and thermal paper (for output). Myu father worked for Xerox (Lewisville texas, not PARC) and brought it home for WORK. He used it to play Chess and used it to play Zork. Later we got one of their 820 systems which sucked beacuse because it had nothing in common with the Apple ][ which was the hot machine back then. It ran CPM and had dual 8-inch floppy system which was about as good as a frisby for storage (frequent head crashes). One advantage of the 820 system was that it came with a Diablo daisy wheel printer which meant I could use the word processor for my school papers. Back then teachers would not accept anything printed on dot matirx but the daisy wheel was indistinguishable from a typewriter. I spent a lot of time at the local compu-shop on the Apples and became the sales guys unofficial tech resource. After HS graduation I got my first real computer, an Apple ][c which was compact enough to take to and from college. Unfortunately the monitor was not.

On a side note I am surprised at how popular this tablet is with ZERO marketing. I imagine it could give the iPad a run if ASUS added a cell radio and put a little marketing effort into it.

I would agree that this is one of the best if no the best Android tablets available. I have had mine since mid-June (about the time I found out that the Galaxy Tab 10.1 release was a joke). The keyboard with extra battery allows the unit to perform very well as a netbook. The one thing that irritates me, and this is more of an NVidia issue, is that the hardware HD video accelleration requires a very narrow format to work.

My Apple ][c had a DVORAK switch!

DOn't know if it would work for most devs but an open space would not work for me. They put windows in our new 5'6" high cubes (WTF) and we have been comming up with ways to cover them up (whiteboards coat hangers work great). I'm sure they paid a premium for those windows too.

Seems like more companies these days are hiring Business Analysts to think and Developers to code. I think the theory is that business analysts cost less and can relate to the business better than a developer. At my current and previous job developers have little or no contact with users and all issues are mitigated through a BA. Some of this may also have to do with the personality of the department managers. Does anyone else work with BAs and what role do they play in your organization?

But how did they know that New Vegas would make a good gift??? I was skidish about getting it because of the bugs but by the time I opened up that familiar package at Christmas they had rolled out a patch and I was on my way. Currently delivering new security codes to all th ranger stations.

Your like a drug dealer you are. Pushin the games. "First one's free" :)

I play a lot of games. Right now Fallout: New Vegas (PC) and Call of Duty: Black Ops (XBOX) are sucking some of hours out of my life. Mostly garbage time between doing stuff after work and bedtime. I originally got into the XBOX because all the "cool" (read younger) developers in the office had one and I wanted to stay in the social loop. Then I found that XBOX live on the console is a viable social networking tool (not into Facebook or Twitter). Now I hook up with former co-workers and friends around the country I don't see enough and chat up whats going on. Like in the old days when mom would call aunt Gladdis and talk for two hours. Thing is for a lot of people Games are just another vice like smoking, drinking, drugs, and food. The important thing, like with any vice, is to be able to walk away.

I've been developing for almost 30 years now and I'm closer to retirement (I hope) than college. I Started with Apple basic/machine language and Pascal. In College I transitioned from Pascal to C. Through most of my career I was working with several fringe technologies: Pick, Mumps, Progress (12 years). Progress was good for a while but over time MS IDEs and SQL server began to take over the Progress market (lower cost alternative to Oracle) and their main competition, Sybase. As jobs started drying up I decided to get into something mainstream and spent several years transitioning to pure .NET development. 8-10 years ago would see on Progress job a month (most were on the east coast) where before there would be several a week. Right now, I see 20-30 jobs a week on www.dice.com in my area (Dallas, Ft. Worth Texas). This has been steady even through the economy meltdown (first half of 2009 saw a 50-75% decrease but there were still jobs). If I start to see a sharp decline that is no a result of the economy will will start to get concerned. I don't see a big threat to .NET as a development platform. There are very few companies that can allocate the resources to develop an architecture as robust and complex as .NET and maintain it. A lot of the new MS stuff is built on top of .NET so you still have a good foundation if something like Silverlight gets big. Mobile is a hot topic right now (and getting a lot of press right now) but you can't run a decent sized business on a mobile phone so that means Unix and Windows servers will be around for a while. The cloud is just another iteration of an old idea. Computer Time Sharing (through 80s), Application Servers (80s and 90s) and several others I can't even remember have come and gone. In my experience, companies will ultimately want to control their data and their code. I have only been involved in a few outsourced systems (salesforce.com being the most well known) and it never seems to go well. There is almost always a requirement to modify the stock application (users are never happy with whats in the box) and they never seem to integrate well with the legacy systems. As stated before, if you're good you can transition to the new technology. The key is to stay on top of your skills and make sure they are still in demand. It took me 5 years and a 25% pay cut to transition from 100% Progress to 100% .NET. Mainly becuase I missed the downturn by 2-3 years (Damn you 90s IT boom). So that's whay I am always watching the job market. Now I'm in a stable position wo

Choose the reply that best fits you. The first one probably does not apply since you have already admitted you help with the laundry :) Sexist Reply: Laundry is Women's work. Why are you sorting or folding anything? Separatist Reply: Everyone Does their own laundry. Even the baby! Post IPO/Bonus Reply: You wear cloths more than once? Throw the dirty laundry out and buy new cloths. The Slacker Reply: Is it really necessary to wash cloths? The Whiped Reply: Do whatever she wants and ask her if she would like her feet rubbed. Dissident Reply: Do shirts really need to be straight and do socks really need to match?

I agree with this answer. particularly if you are young. With smaller IT departments and an excess of middle management in a shaky world economy it becomes difficult to advance your career past a certain point. Build up your skills, update your resume, and move on when you reach a limit at your current employer. I have many friends who are trapped at their jobs because they became comfortable and sat on their existing skills. Now those skills are no longer in demand, their current employer is replacing old technology, and they have no place to go. I personally had this problem after the .com crash ~2000-2001. I realized I was working with a dying technology (Progress database) and wanted to make a transition to .NET. The problem was I had very little experience and the market was flooded with ex .comers. It took me several years to make the transition and now I am a .NET developer with a great job market. Bottom line, if you think you can benefit in the short term by developing new skills and adding to your resume you should go for it. It may pay off in the long term. You might also ask for leadership training in exchange for taking the promotion. See if you can find a way to make it a win for you.

I have a PC, xBox360 and a Wii and I use them for different things gaming wise. I don't have a PS3 so I can only offer my impressions on that one. Here's how I would break them down: xBOX360 - Large Game Selection. Great for driving games (with a wheel). Wii - Lower display resolution. Plays older Nintendo system games. More games for younger audiences. Great experience with any sports game. Also has fitness related games. PS3 - Built in Blu-Ray and lower price makes it the value choice. Gran Turismo! PC - Best for shooters (mouse) although the multi-player experience may suffer compared to the xBOX. Also, as a side note I have played many xBOX360 games that are ported for windows and I have not been impressed. They try to may the controller buttons toa keyboard and it just doesn't work for me.

I think that's a standard native resolution for the older 720P flat screen TV's. Our old Olevia TV had a similar resolution. Of course it was like 37".

Why is a Candian Company filing a case in Texas? BTW, the U.S. Court of appeals upheld the judgement... And, yes, I live in Texas (the non-hick part) :)