May 31, 2011

There were 2 posts published on May 31, 2011 (this is page 1 of 1).

Repair conditioning

This week’s heat wave has taxed our upstairs AC unit to the maximum. I work upstairs every day and became alarmed at the rising temperatures there. The AC was not keeping up with its settings. I didn’t notice this last year but this is the first summer we’ve had our new upstairs office/bedroom, so any cooling issue has become more apparent.

I called up the neighborhood HVAC guy who went through his troubleshooting checklist. Refrigerant was fine, the compressor was fine. The blower coils were fine. Everything looked good. That is, until he checked the bottom of the blower in our attic.
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College and enterpreneurship

I read with interest PayPal co-founderPeter Thiel’s publicity stunt of paying 20 college students $100,000 each to drop out and innovate. He’s got a point when he says:

“Turning people into debt slaves when they’re college students is really not how we end up building a better society,” Thiel says.

Some of the most successful folks I know in the tech industry do not have computer science degrees. Most of them attended college and most have earned degrees, but many of their degrees are in fields other than computer science. In many cases they might as well have skipped college entirely.

I worked with one guy who was so smart it was freaking scary. He could code rings around our degreed developers and yet his formal education ended with high school (and half of that home-schooled). I’ve met enough of these folks that I can say with certainty that college is absolute a waste of time and money for some people.
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