One of my all-time favorite pastimes is saleing. Garage saleing, yard saleing, rummage saleing, you name it. If there’s a large pile of household junk that someone’s selling, then I’ll be there, picking through it. It’s hard to explain; there’s just something sublime about finding stuff that I definitely don’t need and then incessantly haggling over its price.

Like all passionate salers, I dream that one day I’ll find that Joseph Decker original worth a cool million and actually fork over a full $5.00 for it. But until then, I’m perfectly content with the “lesser treasures” that I’ll come across, such as Louis A. Safian’s 1965 masterpiece entitled 2000 Insults for All Occasions.

For as long as The City (as I'll call it) has supplied water to its residents, it has had one big headache called "The Annual Water Survey." Like residents of all large metropolises, The City's residents want to make sure the water they drink has only a miniscule amount of the "bad stuff," such as heavy metals and pathogens, and just the right amount of the "good stuff" -- chlorine, fluoride, etc. The water survey -- a 100-plus-page report that details test after test after test -- was their vote of confidence.

Compiling the survey had always been a long and tedious process. At first, field technicians would take samples from across The City, add drops of various indicator chemicals and record the results in their logbooks. From there, lab technicians would transcribe the numbers and use special slide rules to create tables of meaningful results. Typists would then compile the various tables into a giant binder and send it off for duplication.

"I took this picture at the local post office," George writes, "I guess they must have installed the same computers they use in airplanes and hospitals."

CommQuack hires like crazy. They hire in good times, they hire in bad times. They hire before, during, and after periods of massive layouts. Only one department was sheltered from the endless churn of hirings and layoffs — HR. For a company of ten thousand people, the fact that one thousand of them worked in HR should tell you something.

And the HR staff was busy. Résumés came in by the hundreds, and those that weren't referrals from existing employees were fiercely fought over so that the first person to grab it could claim the bounty. The HR staff were paid near-minimum wage rates, and like time-share salesmen, they were paid primarily on commission. Each referred employee that turned into a hire netted the referrer a cool $5,000.00. The upshot of this is that this meant that if you were qualified but not referred by someone in HR, you didn't get hired. The upshot of this is that a lot of unqualified boobs got hired. After interviews from HR, the candidates would be sent to the departments they hoped to work for, which meant that Grig L. had to conduct many of the interviews.

The Applicants

"When we interview people," cablecar wrote on the Sidebar, "we give them simple programming tasks to test their ability. The below code was an attempt to solve a problem I found on Project Euler. It's from a candidate for a senior development position with '10 years of PHP' experience.

No one really liked Martin P. This is not to say that Martin was unlikeable per se, it’s just that everyone seemed to have a hard time getting over his unofficial title: the CEO’s sycophant.

In all fairness to Martin, he never really aspired to become the CEO’s sycophant. Or anyone’s sycophant for that matter. He simply saw a job advertisement – Windows Software Engineer – applied for it, interviewed, and accepted the offer. Little did he know that he’d be the company’s first non-UNIX developer. Or that he’d report directly to the Head of Research & Development instead of one of the several development managers. Or that the Head of Research & Development also happened to be the CEO.

"Looking back," Nathan Redding wrote, "I really should have taken advantage of this offer. I'm not quite sure we'll see 0% interst rates with $0.00/month payments again any time soon..."

As the seasons change and years pass, trees accumulate rings that can be used to determine the age of the tree. This is a result of seasonal growth — the inner section of each ring is formed in the early part of the rapid growth season; this wood is called "early wood" (*snicker*). Then as the temperature changes and growth slows, the darker outer portion of the ring forms ("late wood"). And who can forget the classic scene from Vertigo in which Kim Novak's character hints at a passion for dendrochronology as she finds the years of her birth and death on the rings of a tree. Why do I bring this up? Because seeing bits of the past frozen in time is fascinating.

Nathan B. was called for help when an internal Access application was hanging. After some tinkering, he found that it wasn't hanging, as three reports had successfully printed and the fourth was on its way — it was just taking three times longer than it usually did. Sadly, the reports had to be done that day, and at this pace, they'd still be printing until 6:00 the next morning.

For several years, Clint's company has been working on a game that's undergone several engine and tool changes. And I'll stop you right there- it's not Duke Nukem Forever because this game exists, and has been released.

If you've ever seen or worked in a codebase that has seen significant change, you know that the replaced component is seldom completely exorcised. Little hooks from it remain in some random function that need to stay there or else everything breaks. To give you an idea of some of the changes this game's codebase has seen, have a look at this:

For as long as anyone could remember, there had always been two server rooms: the Cool Room and the Hot Room. The Cool Room was exactly what you’d expect a server room at a mid-sized technology services firm to be: floor-to-ceiling racks along the walls filled with various servers, battery backups, monitors, and KVMs, all tied together with Ethernet and power cables that were neatly tucked in their trays. And, of course, it was a cool 65°F thanks to a pair of dedicated air conditioning units.

The Hot Room, on the other hand, was more like a server closet. It was a cramped 8’ by 10’ room that housed core telecommunications equipment including the firewalls, routers, switches, VPN concentrators, and the PBX system. This room also served as the central hub for the facility’s wiring and had hundreds of cat5 cable running through countless junction boxes. And, of course, it was a sweltering 98°F thanks to all of the equipment that had become even hotter to the touch.