LiveJournal and OpenID
If you don't know what the title of this post means, then you're not affected by this :)
I was going to post a comment to Modern Perl Books, but didn't. Seems that when I try to use my LiveJournal OpenID, I get an "unclosed token" error.
As it turns out, it's an MT error. If you have "too many" friends, LJs FOAF (Friend Of A Friend) response is too large for MT to handle. The fix is to create a "FOAF-knows" friends group and only add yourself to it.
Believe it or not, I don't have much tech talent. I am really good at programming and teaching people software design and large systems, but computers in general mystify me. Go figure. It's really strange and many of my tech friends are mystified by this.
Schools? Hmm ... one kindergarten, two elementary schools, two junior high schools, two high schools, two colleges ...
And yes, I'm an avid reader. I read "litra-chah" (as the snobs are wont to say) such as Lolita, The Magus, The Book Thief (it made me cry), The Reluctant Fundamentalist, etc. I also read a huge amount of tech books and works on economics and politics. The rest of my time is reading "fluff" like hard science fiction[1] and the really awesome Harry Dresden novels. People like to sneer at them as not being "proper" writing (sort of the same way I sneer at Tom Clancy, I suppose), but so what? I think they're a gas. I guess I'm all over the map reading wise. I just read whatever strikes my fancy.
1. "Hard science fiction" is a genre of science fiction where the science is meticulously described and plausible. It's not for everyone.
And I figured you read a variety of subject matter.
So yeah, I guess I am techy, but in a specialist sort of way. It means that there are many "tech" jobs I'm not even remotely qualified for and which many of my tech friends are. The trade-off is that for the much smaller pool of jobs I am qualified for, I'm often the first choice. I still don't know if this is a good thing, but it's worked out well so far.
Funny enough, if I tell people I use Macs these days, they stop asking me to fix their Windows problems, but if they don't know what OS I use, they think I must be able to fix it.