Gene Splicer PHD

Calibre rocks.

No, not really, although that would ALSO be fun. My idea is half-baked, which may imply that I am fully baked I'm not sure I can clearly articulate the thought, but bear with me. First, you divorce yourself from the characters. They're in your head now, but in THIS story, they're not. They are independent beings, and you have no idea what they're thinking or doing or planning. How can this be? I don't know. Now, set yourself in the story. Choose an age that's appropriate for the story. Whatever. - Sit down and have dinner with the family at Escorial. Engage Stefan and JP in a conversation. Would they like you? Would you like them? Would you have anything to talk about? Again, whatever. Point being, you don't know what the conversation will be about. You just go with the flow and tell us about it. - Move around in the story. Go to a game with Matt. Observe him, take him to bed... Take Stefan shopping.. Go see David, tell him about Robbie. Take Brad out back and pistol whip him. Still with the whatever. Think Galaxy Quest, where the cast of a show ends up in the show, which happens to be a real place and they have no idea how to be the characters they're acting. Or flip it around - years ago I read a story where the crew of the starship Enterprise beamed up from a planet, but didn't end up on the ship - they ended up on the set in Burbank. Suddenly cameras! Escorial is real, the characters are real. If they walked into your living room, what would you say to them? How would you introduce them to your family? Tell us the story through the eyes of Mark Arbour the individual and not the author, and not through Wade's or Will's point of view, but your own. In order to do this, you have to make the characters very real, and the timeline too - because you'll be moving along the same storyline as the characters are. And you judge them and their actions according to YOUR moral compass, not theirs. So, within the confines of the universe you've created, interact with your characters as if they were totally real, and you are totally there. You can't dictate what they do, you have to let them go do their thing, and tell us about it. Which is probably exactly how you write anyway, or, you may need to address this while baked. Whatever I TOLD you it was half baked...

I would like to see Mark Arbour as the narrator. Not the storyteller - the narrator. Divorcing himself as the storyteller, he goes into the story. How does Mark see the characters when he puts himself there in his own voice? THAT would be revealing

I've got rocks in my garden that are older than he is. That guy is so old he farts dust. His wrinkles have wrinkles. The only thing older than James Savik is his unfinished story, you know, the one with the spaceships and stuff. He's not around much, probably because it takes so long to feed him those strained green beans at the home. And I bet he can't type much, what with the arthuritis and the gout. ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED: One more year under the belt! Happy birthday to one of my favorite writers! Also, it's time to talk about your next car. That's right, James, it's time to talk about Buicks. Like the 2012 Buick LaCrosse. Leather-appointed seating, ice-blue ambient lighting and the soft-touch instrument panel surround you to make your ride smoother and more enjoyable. With MSRP starting at $30,170 and a 25/35MPG, there has been no better time to invest in a 2012 Buick LaCrosse! So head on down to your local Buick dealer and test drive one today. You'll be glad you did! *Includes under-seat Depends dispenser. Factory-installed dashboard magnifying glass available.

It's a good punishment, I hope there are stronger ones coming for the school administration. I was actually expecting and hoping for the death penalty but this actually sends a better message, I think. Paterno loses his wins back to the time when they started hiding the scandal, there's a clear message there for other schools that this was what could happen. The fine being paid to help victims - and not touchable by the school - is also a good thing. The scholarships - that's gonna hurt, so does the postseason ban. I think its a fair punishment. There are more coming, we'll see what happens when the criminal cases are done.

I've done two book reviews on the book's page on Amazon to let people know the story was stolen, and they're deleted within hours. So the author is obviously watching that. However, he's not watching this: http://www.goodreads...s#other_reviews So at least there is a place to notify people that it's plagiarized. Hopefully it helps drop some book sales (and KC has been there today, putting the word out).

You blew up a Ducati? FOR SHAME!

Support for anything to do with Windows XP stops in 2014, I wish it were sooner. Security Essentials support for later operating systems will continue. I have seen nothing about killing off security essentials - do you have a source?

Oh, sorry, I wasn't clear. The windows media (whether you download it or have them send you a disk) is a full version of Windows. That's how windows 7 works, anyway and I've seen nothing on the partner site to make me think MS will do anything differently this time. This means you can do a clean, fresh install with the upgrade media. When you do the install, it will ask if you are upgrading or want to do a custom install - the custom install is a fresh installation. At some point in the process it will ask you to insert an older version of windows (a disk) to verify that you own it, after that it finishes the installation and asks for the Windows 8 product key.

His integrity failed him when his loyalty trumped it, I agree with you there. But a grown man who knows that kids are being abused and does nothing about it except find a way to protect the friend - what about protecting kids from that dirtball in the future? What about helping the abused kids - even if that means exposing the friend (and it probably would)? There was no integrity in protecting Sandusky at any level here.

The upgrade will be the full version. The current rumor is that there isn't going to be a retail boxed version - only the OEM system builder version, and the upgrade. Microsoft has never made money on a boxed version, so its rumored that they're eliminating it. If your laptop is pretty new, consider running windows 8 as a host, and running windows 7 as a virtual machine within it. That's my current plan. Anyone running the preview version qualifies for the upgrade, which implies to me that you don't have to do a clean install, it should take your existing install up to the released version without losing anything. Interesting read here: http://www.neowin.net/news/windows-8-could-be-cheapest-yet-due-to-no-retail-option

This is a good story! And this chapter let us see what's driving Jordan's hesitance. You really should start a forum thread in the GA Stories Discussion forum and link it to the story - you'll get more traffic

I'm definitely interested in getting a Surface if the pricing is right and the app store isn't a huge MS walled garden, aka Apple. I do think the Metro interface is really sweet on a tablet. It does have the potential to get under Apple's skin - the Apple IOS is getting pretty dated, in my opinion. Daddydavek, Windows 8 doesn't have a standard desktop and start menu as its primary interface. It has the Metro interface, which is touch-oriented. On the Start screen, you have a set of panes that you touch to launch applications. To access the computer more deeply, you touch the right-lower corner of the screen to present "charms" which offer access to things that aren't visible in Metro. Many things are not visible in Metro - without coaching, it's difficult to find the "shut down computer" command, for example. Now, I have two 22" screens that make my desktop something like 3840 pixels by 2160 pixels. This is because I run a lot of windows/applications concurrently. And Metro scales up or down to fit the monitor. A 1" pane on a laptop is about 4" on my monitor - in mousing, it's about a full wrist-turn. So I have this huge blot of very big boxes on the screen, and to drag a mouse from the left side of the screen over to the "charms" area is a real pain. Also, what is intuitive on a touch screen, like swiping down from the top or swiping up from the bottom - which is how you get to the Windows 8 logon screen - isn't intuitive with a mouse. There are no instructions for it anywhere - the first day I had it running, I had to google how to access Windows 8 to know what to do. Also, file management in Windows 8 is pretty bad and I really hope they fix it,. When you want to access files (and not applications - for example, I open Excel spreadsheets directly, I don't open Excel and then open the file - I just double click the file or drop it on the Excel icon on my desktop). Windows 8 kicks you into the old "desktop" interface from Windows 7. That's great if you have the precision of a cursor and a mouse to do things like expand a folder list, but it's awful when you try to use it from a touch screen - your finger just isn't that precise of a tool. I don't like that it limits how many applications I can run at a time - its common for me to have 12-15 windows/programs open at once, and it limits this. I really like how fast Windows 8 is, especially on my 4 year old desktop - its even pretty quick in a virtual machine. I like that I can just start typing commands - without a directed window for me to type in - and things happen - the keyboard is pretty much always on. So, start Windows, type "2008 budget folder" and the "2008 budget folder" opens up. That's very cool. The touch interface is quite good on a touch screen - I've been playing with it on an old Gateway tablet PC and its pretty intuitive. Gestures (two and three finger touch commands) are pretty good. The biggest pain though, is that the interface is so different, and can be so frustrating if you don't "get it", that it can be pretty frustrating for people - like my mom - who are going to have to be almost completely retrained to use it well. Ever try to train a 65 year old? Like herding cats, I tell you. /rant

Microsoft security essentials - free, top rated, low overhead and unobtrusive. Add the free version of malwarebytes antimalware for cleaning up if you do get a Trojan and you're well covered. MSE is considered to be one of the best AV packages by just about anyone I know in the IT industry. It's actually the 'client' to microsoft forefront, the corporate software, running standalone. Runs on XP, Vista and all flavors of Windows 7. www.microsoft.com/securityessentials www.malwarebytes.org I sell a fair amount of Trend Micro into corporate environments and it does well at catching bugs. There is a home version of it that also gets decent reviews, but I haven't used it. I see it a lot as trial ware and generally remove it in favor of MSE.

I'm glad to see they're offering an upgrade version. It's so cheap for one reason: they know that Windows 8 is going to go over like a fart in church for anyone that has any actual productivity needs on their PC. It's great for "consuming content", terrible for anyone that actually DOES anything with a PC. It will be fine as a tablet interface. It absolutely blows for people like me. When they come out with a version that actually offers a desktop and a flipping start button (or something) rather than a "blazing new paradigm", I'll consider it.

Actually as an 18 year old in 1981, a crappy economy is a crappy economy, just like it is now. It makes no difference how you compare the different time frames,my point is that if you can't find work in your "chosen" career path, the effect is the same and what you do about it is too: you work yourself out of it using whatever means you have available to you until it gets better. I had dinner with a 25 year old whose been done with school for 2 years and still lives at home with no job because he won't stoop to clerking in his dads law firm, and he's got a law degree of some type. He's "waiting for the right opportunity".

Wait. Who's a victim here? Whats all this responsibility shifting? Other people aren't responsible, no matter how young OR old they are, for people's personal life situations. You can't go blaming generations for your problems, what's the point of that? You got handed a crappy economy. Well, so did I, in 1981 as Reagan cleaned up Carter's mess. I don't recall being so...unhappy about "other generations" as I looked for work. I recall feeling lucky I got a job at a drug store for a couple of years to pay for gas and my car note. The economy in Michigan didn't turn around for years. Who should I blame for all the problems I had finding work in 1982 or 83? Would that be the president? Or my grandparents and parents for voting him in? The unions? The car makers? Who? Had I not gone in the military at 21 (having blown my chances at college, but I equate my navy time as the same kind of life experience), I'd be fixing mufflers somewhere. I got a job doing inventory control counting little bags of grease and CV joint boots for a big automotive, and taught myself how to fix PCs as I went. That job sucked. So did the one after it, and the one after that, and the one after that. So I used each job to learn more and more and more and then built it into a business where I get paid to do what I like to do. It wouldn't have happened right out of school, it took 20 years of learning to do it. It wasn't handed to me, I didn't get a big check and I sure know that the long periods of doing crap work were my choices, not some "burden" that got put on me by a previous generation. I don't think my dad intended to lose his money and his mind in 2007 and 2008, but here we are, supporting Mom (who can't work) and whining about it accomplishes nothing. No one is intentionally screwing people out of jobs, no one's trying to stick it to anyone because of their age. This is life. The real deal, where no one's looking out for you and no one's going to hand you a six figure income or a new insurance card. This is how it plays out. You find your opportunities and you use them. You don't wait for a job to open, you find or make one. Yeah its tough and no, it might not be on your career trajectory yet, but I didn't hit my "career" until I was 35. Get into the workforce, whatever the job. Start where you can, and move up or sideways or juke or whatever you have to do, but no one, not the generation before you, and not the ones that follow you, owe you a thing or even an explanation. You, and you alone, are responsible for making your way in the world. Don't expect handouts, don't expect anything but some possible commiseration about your fate. Now I realize I'm coming off as some oldster kicking you off my lawn, but really. Really? Do you really feel entitled to a job? To a successful economy? Who owes you this? I don't.

It's called parenting. Teaching your kids that being shitty to others is an inexcusable, ugly thing. Maybe letting them know that not only are they a disappointment to the parents, but to the wider community, that they are an embarrassment, that they make the family ashamed of their behavior. That when they act like assholes, their presence is unwanted, not desirable, get away from me. That their behavior is shameful, that their thinking is warped. Let them know that while it might feel badass to be a dick, they're really showing their lack of potential and stupidity. It doesn't fall on a teacher to show a kid how to be a good person. It's the parents that have to do it. You can't shift this to an education issue, this is about teaching them respect, not only for elders but for everyone around them and for themselves. I don't think its hormonal, not like Tim thinks it is. Kids do have brains, they do think. They can create good situations for themselves that don't involve bullying, and given the right parenting, can think their way out of being a member of the pack. But it's parents that have to bring that to them. And shame, good old shame, is a good way to do it. * I would be a lousy parent

It must be fun for the parents of those special snowflakes to realize that they are raising the kids that other parents will be telling their kids to avoid. Responsibility? I think it's about 75% parental and 25% dumb children.

FINISH IT many chapters may be needed

ITS PINK. ACCEPT YOUR PINK LOVING SELF. My living room was that color once. ONCE. And I caught shit for the pink living room. ITS PINK

Let the power of the dark side...

Oh yes you do. Officers aren't necessarily smarter than you and might even welcome some ideas. At least off duty anyway. Also, do you have a saw?

FIRST WORLD PROBLEMS