(Part 2) Top products from r/talesfromtechsupport

There's a ton of cookie cutter quotes that I could throw out your way here...but none of them would cover exactly what I'm trying to say...so here goes...

Our capacity for pain and loss...our ability to recover from trauma and damage, is limitless. Just as is our capacity for love and joy.
If it was not, there are many "great" people who would never have attained that lofty title...Otto Frank, The Dhali Lama, Ishmael Beah, not to mention all the day to day heroes, whose will to go on, and to keep pushing, and keep striving, show a resilience not only of mind, but spirit and heart as well.

That may feel like a comparison....saying your pain, or your loss is not as great as many other people, and look what they have accomplished....and to be honest, to an extent, it is. It is not, however, intended to belittle your loss, as each loss is different, as is each person carrying that loss. It is intended to say this.....the option to live and love greatly still exists, and it exists for you. You are the only person in the entire world, that can prevent yourself from grabbing life, and savoring it to the fullest....from finding love, and happiness, and pure joy again. It simply requires you to commit EVERYTHING you are, back to the cause. If you hold back, if you hide away that part of you that's hurt so badly, you only do a disservice to yourself.

I believe you will find this life one day..that you will rediscover true joy, and love. Yes, you may suffer another loss someday, and yes it will hurt, but once you've found your way back to the path once, it becomes easier again, and again. This is the secret that those "great" people hold......"There is no loss, that cannot, with time, be healed; There is no spirit, that is better for remaining isolated; and there is no heart, that is made whole again, without love"

I'd go read books about the A+ cert (you don't need to certify but it's great material).

For other technical things I recommend a lot of books that are amazing:

• Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship
  
  
• Computer Networking: A Top-Down Approach (6th Edition)
  
  
• Introduction to Java Programming, Comprehensive Version (9th Edition)
  
  
• Scripting with Objects: A Comparative Presentation of Object-Oriented Scripting with Perl and Python
  
  
• Art of Computer Programming, Volume 1: Fundamental Algorithms (3rd Edition) WARNING: GOD TIER
  
  Use technology books to learn processes, not end results. To be a better IT person, you should know how computers work as a system, not how to do say "Map network Drive in Windows", learn how those drives are mapped, what are the underlying fundamentals?
  
  

Yeah man, no problem.

Before I find some specific books, I wanna mention one series that you've definitely heard of: Blank for Dummies. From my experience, if you want to start from no knowledge and work up to an intermediate level of understanding, For Dummies books are great. A lot of experts beg to differ.

But, to be frank, people who are experts in their field are just that: experts in their field. I have friends who are excellent in their fields, but they are terrible teachers. They expect people to pick things up as quicky as they did. We're not all wired that way, and For Dummies books get that.

So, for my first two recommendations, here ya go:

Networking for Dummies

Building Your Own PC for Dummies

Both of those are less than 20 bucks on Amazon, and I'm sure you can find them at a library.

Now, if you really want to get into networking, and you want to get in to the IT field, you should read the A+ and Network+ certification books from Comptia. These will be harder to find in a library, but there will probably be some older editions lying around somewhere. If you know someone who works in the field, they probably have a copy, or can get you a copy, for free or cheap.

These books are more expensive, and more difficult, but they are peerless if you want to jumpstart a career in IT. I'm not going to claim that getting an A+ and/or a Network+ (or a Security+) certification is going to guarantee you a job. However it will definitely help you get your foot in the door.

Other books that you'll want to eventually check out if you want to check out things from O'Reilly. Most of their books are not meant for beginners, but they are the quintessential reference books in the IT field, including computer science, networking, and security. To give you an idea of just how many books they have, check out this picture of the programming section at the Noisebridge Hackerspace in San Francisco.

That band of colorful books in the middle? Those are (some of) the programming books they have available. They have just as many on every topic of IT. Here's their networking section. 19 pages. Of just networking books.

I hope that gives you a good idea of where to start.

Going to a private, but non-profit institution, its cool.

(as a matter of fact, a friend has friends that go to bent state university and after comparing physics hw found that, well our curriculum is much harder, I guess their intro final had a "draw a line to match the term to its definition" type thing)

Anywho, one of our compsci upper level courses is based on this book http://www.amazon.com/Computer-Organization-Design-Fourth-Architecture/dp/0123744938/ref=la_B000APBUAE_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1406428553&sr=1-2 It goes through and explains computer architecture for an actual cpu, I don't recall how easy it is to read however. (if you buy it and it makes no sense, the intro book we use was called, "an invitation to computer science", but get an adition or two back from current if you buy)

Finally you can a bunch of info here http://ocw.mit.edu/index.htm

I'm currently camped out at my grandmother's house taking care of her while she recovers from complications of a heart valve replacement.


We are in the heart of the silicon valley (go east a couple miles and reach eBay intergalactic headquarters) and her internet connection is... Sonic.net DSL that my dad set her up with years ago. It's so freaking slow. 1.4 megabits from the test I just used on fast.com (the one using Netflix servers, not that I expect Sonic to cheat).


She says she spoke to Sonic six months ago. They said she was in the edge of their service area, which we knew. They also said they weren't planning to expand on her area for five years, which means the Fusion service they provide that's really nice isn't an option. I suppose she could switch... We wouldn't blame her for it. But we all rather like Sonic's business practices. It's a quandary.


This is ridiculous. It shouldn't be this hard to get usable, uncapped internet in the beating heart of the tech epicenter of the world.


Oh, and she keeps all her passwords in a booklet. The hilariously named "Original Internet Address Book", that acknowledges in its first pages that search engines are making it obsolete already.


^(EDIT: a compass direction)

Look, here's a good starting point:

Read this and you'll understand a lot more about troubleshooting this stuff.

p.s. The acronym MSP now means this, please update your links

Let me enlighten you.

Lol.

Sub $200 color laser: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07QBR7JFV/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_fgKIDb0MW9CZY

under $150 color laser: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07T6PGM4J/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_2gKIDb9KVCYSE

They're fucking CHEAP. just gotta look for em.

Haha. I'd agree except he doesn't really realize it. I think part of it is that he doesn't really have a good understanding of how to wade through forums, as well as his tendency to have gone for more thorough information on stuff rather than specific issues. He could read a modern version of this and be useful, or he can help track down drivers that will work with a laptop that isn't meant for a specific OS, but if he wants to know what kind of extension to download or has some kind of non-obvious error then he goes into 'help me' mode.

You should get the whole series. The link is for American Amazon; I don't know if there's a British version of Amazon or not...

http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0345453743?pc_redir=1411929427&robot_redir=1

One of my favorite books of all times, also by Joel Rosenberg, is also very hard to find on bookshelves. D'shai

http://www.amazon.com/DShai-Joel-Rosenberg/dp/0441157513/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1345058231&sr=8-1&keywords=d%27shai

Everything you've said is a mistake. None of this is right. Please go read this book (Douglas Comers Internetworking with TCP)

http://www.amazon.com/Internetworking-TCP-Vol-5th-Edition/dp/0131876716

Then come back here and apologize. Technical terminology can't evolve. It has to stay exact, or else change revisions. This is engineering, not english.

> He also worked on the guidance system for Polaris missiles, which was later adapted for use in the Apollo program!

MIT Instrumentation Laboratory? That was – worldwide! – probably one of the coolest places to work at until the 1970s or so. (At that point, the AI lab perhaps took a little bit over over. Also, PARC happened at that time.)

Also, required reading.

The mystery reference lives on...

EDIT: Found it

Saint Vidicon to the rescue!!

http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Bible-Testament-According-Milligan/dp/0140239707

Funny story about that

Because you asked...

Volume I
Volume II

Um, part of UI design involves considering how you expose functionality to your users. You provide affordances so that people can maintain their mental model of how the object works. In this case, there was nothing to indicate to the user that a significant portion of the functionality (all dragging and dropping) had been disabled, nor was there any affordance to indicate how to re-enable that functionality. Choosing to not indicate to your users what state the object is in is a textbook example of poor UI design.

UI design is not just about visual composition, as you seem to be implying. That's a very narrow view, mostly held by web designers who (in their defense) are limited to working within the user interface of a web browser.

If you're actually interested in UI/UX considerations, and not just trying to troll and insult people, you might want to read The Design of Everyday Things by Donald Norman.

EDIT: links