The Hobbit Hole III - Journey to the Cross-roads!

[HairOfTheDog]

Welcome to The Hobbit Hole!

Journey to the Cross-roads
The Two Towers Edition

Come on! Come in! -if you would like to have some seedcakes and a pint and relax a while. (If it is a special occasion, we still have a few bottles of the old wineyards left!)

Our first thread ( New Zealander builds Hobbit hole ) reached 4,100 posts, and we thought that was big. Our second thread (The New Hobbit Hole ) held us for over 48,000 posts, and we loved it dearly. We talked about moving to a new thread for the last 38,000 posts, but we are really slow to muster! Finally, the time has come. Tomorrow (at 12:01 am, to be precise!) The Two Towers comes out, and we start a new chapter.

[Wneighbor]

Goodnight Corin.

I wish you the best with the trolls tomorrow. Shove them out into the sunshine.

[Wneighbor]

Yeah, well I think we've had more than that average in the 1 day that I was gone! I didn't even try to catch up.... there were simply too many.

[Wneighbor]

BTW - Howcome in the movie, LXG, the vampire lady can come out in the sunshine?

Corin's trolls reminded me to ask you that.

[Bear_in_RoseBear]

Howcome in the movie, LXG, the vampire lady can come out in the sunshine?

That's not an easy question to answer! The lady is Mina Murray Harker, the wife of Jonathan Harker from the novel Dracula, by Bram Stoker. In the novel, Mina was rescued from Dracula before being fully transformed into a vampire. In the comic book on which the LXG movie is based, she doesn't ever exhibit any vampire powers; she's physically ordinary, but comfortable with adventuring. I think for the movie the writers and/or director decided they needed something more exciting, so they gave her vampire powers. But, they either forgot about the daylight thing, or decided that she was somehow still partly human (perhaps because she hadn't been fully transformed) and could therefore withstand sunlight.

It's a mystery!

[Bear_in_RoseBear]

Actually, we haven't broken any records the last two days... although this is the 700th message for today.

[Wneighbor]

:-) Mysteries are good! Very good!

[Wneighbor]

700 is a big number compared to some days.

[Ramius]

Understood. Some of the dotbomb crash will simply not recover, or at least not recover for many years. Back in those days everybody and their brother were signing up for "IT" jobs. That glut will take years to settle out, and in the meantime there are a great many people that will have to figure out that they need to pursue another line of work.

The days of 70K starting salaries for helpdesk staff with no experience are over, but it will take a while for the local community colleges to stop cranking out MCSE's at the same rate.

[Bear_in_RoseBear]

Well, it's the most productive day in July... previous high was 671 on July 2.

I don't know if it's the most productive day ever in the HH, though. I've only collected numbers for the most recent month... so far... :)

[Wneighbor]

It's hard for the local community colleges to get it through the high school graduate's head that they oughta take classes in disciplines in which we can place them too. Funny how that works.

[Wneighbor]

It's good of you to be keeping the stats. Or bored of you. Don't know which to think.

I wasn't here on July 2. I was back home without a connection. So, I didn't even get to participate that day. And I missed most of the day today.

maybe I need to keep talking to make up for that.

[ecurbh]

Wasn't July 2 the day of the "scouring"?

[Wneighbor]

Wasn't July 2 the day of the "scouring"?

i dunno.

What are you doin' here anyway? Didn't you desert us tonight for backgammon?

[HairOfTheDog]

We are just takin' a break! Recharging our batteries!

[Ramius]

Yah. The other thing they need to figure out is that the paper-MCSE's that they are cranking out aren't worth the paper the cert is printed on.

I have yet to hire an MCSE or CNE or anybody with a BS in CS. I did hire one CCIE and a couple of A+'s, but those were by accident. I want people that grew up in the trenches before certs were cool, and I want people that can put together two sentences in an e-mail message that make sense and use the King's english. It's just staggering how hard that is to find. :-)

[Bear_in_RoseBear]

The 2nd was The Day After.

Heh, I was just paging back through the posts to check it prior to posting about it myself, when I saw you had asked the question.

[Wneighbor]

Recharging our batteries!

Okay, and this is code for...............

[Bear_in_RoseBear]

Nearly impossible to get hired without a cert, down here.

Once upon a time, Dell was running radio ads here asking for high school graduates to come in and apply for jobs. "All you need is a diploma and some knowledge of computers to work at Dell." Now, they're pressuring Rose to get *several* certs in order to keep her job.

All of the non-cert jobs, formerly held by HS graduates with some computer knowledge, have been shipped off to India.

[Ramius]

Well... it's about time for me to circle the wagons and call it a day.

[Wneighbor]

And ya see, I'm lookin' to drag students outta those programs cause I got companies that want graduates from my CADD program - yet I have fewer graduates than I have job possibilities.

But, they don't wanna take my classes.

I heard I'm a real *itch of an instructor. Rumor only I'm sure.