Try living in a time zone that is a half-hour deviation from standard time (Newfoundland & Labrador). When I first got an iPod my time zone simply wasn't supported by the software: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/179539
It would yield GMT +0h 19m 36s to the above location. I assume it was tied to a more precise point inside Amsterdam which would give you the 32.13 seconds.
Every town used to have their own local time based on the sun being at zenith at local noon. For example, a place like Oxford would be a few minutes behind London.
With the advent of railways, it became necessary to standardize things a bit. You can imagine the difficulty if each town a train stopped in had its own timezone!
We had software choke on a birth date once. For some reason these were sent in milliseconds, and that particular instance, midnight July 1st, 1937 didn't exist for this particular locale. At that time, the time was changed to a different meridian, and the clock was moved forward a few seconds.
In the 1940s, the nazis set all of occupied Europe to Berlin time, and it stuck. Before that time, Europe had a large number of time zones.
I don't see why there isn't a bigger push to move all these underemployed programmers to careers as cashiers. They'll make more money and get better benefits than what they get as an underemployed programmer. They won't necessarily get much time to "solve problems," but with their typing and math skills, cashiering should be a breeze!
I think he was drawing a sarcastic comparison, not making an actual suggestion. The former doesn't require that there actually _be_ underemployed programmers
And that was also my point. There's no economic reality requiring programmers look at less-ideal employment right now. Anecdotally, I did work retail for a couple years after the first dot-com crash. It was very eye-opening and educational in a lot of ways; no regrets, would do it again if I had to.
Regarding 4 (Newfoundland): the Harper government pretty much pisses off the entire provice on a weekly basis. Harper's conservative base is out west, Newfoundlanders certainly don't think much of him. Peter Penashue was the only Conservative MP voted in here in the last election, and he's gone now, thankfully.
I've used Illustrator to draft website designs for years, and drawing in vector is especially useful now that I often find myself needing larger versions of graphics for hi-res screens.
This is a good idea, but a conceptual introduction to web development that dismisses UI/UX as "basically, what makes sites look good" is not one I could ever recommend to anyone.
In my experience, teaching has a way of ballooning to fill whatever time you have. Teaching one class feels like just as much work as teaching three, partly because either way you have to be available to students outside of class - office hours, answering email, and so on. I can't imagine teaching a single university class "for fun" while holding down a full-time job. Certainly it's not something I've seen very often.
