Skip to main content

Career & Productivity

This category combines practical career advice, proven productivity systems, strategies for ongoing skill development, and thought-provoking industry commentary into a single resource for tech and engineering professionals. You’ll find guidance on navigating your career path, techniques for optimizing workflows and staying focused, methods for continuously learning new technologies, and critical analysis of broader trends shaping today’s workforce—all designed to help you grow, stay productive, and remain ahead of the curve.

My start as an IMA in the Air Force

This article has become incredibly popular. It was written six years ago at the start of my reserve career. Since then, I’ve had an amazing fun, rewarding and high-impact career. First, I’ve had amazing bosses, Shawn Barnes and Tim Kelly, who are both amazing leaders but understood the difficulty of balancing my day job with […] read more

Federal Employees’ Group Life Insurance Program

As a new civilian employee, I am interested in evaluating my options for life insurance (next will be health insurance, retirement plan optimization, etc). My first question was if the Federal Employees’ Group Life Insurance Program was/is a good deal. My initial view was that this program was a good idea only for those who […] read more

Post 9/11 GI Bill Availability

Department of Defense and Veterans Affairs officials are working out the details of a new education benefit recently approved by Congress that goes into effect Aug. 1, 2009. “The absolute most important part of the new G.I Bill is that none of it takes effect until next year,” said Rita Hughson, the chief of education […] read more

Ubuntu Troubles: Lost write access to root filesystem

Recently, I was in class and, after a suspend, I lost write access to my root filesystem on my eeepc 1000h. This was a really pernicious problem, because I couldn’t do anything to save my notes. It was a very difficult problem to get help with in #ubuntu on IRC and I had to get […] read more