Having worked my way up from a Wafer Probe Operator (Semiconductor Industry) to just under a Staff Scientist without a degree I can agree it is getting harder these days. For the most part, as a programmer, not having a degree hasn't held me back too much but there are certain cultures where if you don't have your piece of paper they won't even talk to you. When I was first promoted to be an Engineer my boss said "We all have 98.6 degrees, show me what you can do". I wonder what use a degree I would have received in 1979 would be today. Other than a check on a form.

I was at that RSA Conference and what was interesting is that there was a data recovery booth across from the data destruction booth. I though it would be interesting to see which one would win.

Name three

My wife is an HR Director and I 'pity the fool who tries to mess with me'. Seriously, even though California is an 'At Will' state you would be surprised the number of way you can legally protect yourself if a company tries to screw you. Such as not pay for services rendered.

As opposed to?

I had the same problem and after I lost over 80 hours (my time to rip) of work I setup a Server the has 4 one terabyte (low power) drives in a RAID 5 setup. I use a hardware RAID controller (3Ware) since software RAID 5 is REALLY slow and you are usually moving several hundred megabytes per ripped file to the system. I setup the server to be low power and it uses around 65Watts when its idle, which is most of the time.

And I was 'That' close to inventing this myself.

And my barber said I need a haircut, what were the odds?

Over 48 but then I fell asleep on the road and almost killed my family. I don't do that anymore.

One company I worked for marked me 'Do not rehire' when I refused to extend my notice. Which is weird since I gave them the same notice I received when they terminated my contract the first time I worked there (2 weeks).

Power over Ethernet. I have visions of the movie Christmas Vacation and the cat eating through the XMas tree light's power cable.