Gene Splicer PHD

Dear Neighbor (who lives above me in a 1922 vintage duplex with wood floors and no insulation between your floor and my ceiling): I'm not sure how many children you have by different mothers, but it appears there's a number of them! Seems like there's a new mom/child set every week. Good deal, it's always important to get that gene pool spread far and wide. At 22 years old. The boy is quite a charmer, he really likes to bang on things, I think he's going to be an engineer. The little girl is really shy, until her mom leaves and the screaming starts. She may end up a singer, with those lungs. HOWEVER, I'd really appreciate it if they (the kids) didn't play tag all day, running from the back of the apartment to the front, and back again, all day. I know its cold outside and our backyard, such as it is, is full of a pontoon boat that neither of us own, so they're stuck inside with nothing to do (dad doesn't pay his cable bill very often, I hear), but could you please have them take off their shoes? Thanks. #joiningyouinarant

Well, aside from the fact that physical traits don't really hold up genetically like the article purports, like having a tiny baby toe denotes your fun loving personality etc, define "Roman". Rome was a very big empire. If you were born in Brittania in the year AD 240, you were a Roman. So was someone born in Germany, and France, and Egypt, too. My sister has feet that are completely different than mine. She's not Greek. So, article, I mock you.

Here's the article, should work every time: http://dailynewsdig.com/discover-familys-origins-shape-feet/ Also it says I have Egyptian feet. I'm about as white as mayo, about as Egyptian as a pyramid full of grain. I've done all the DNA tests. I'm literally ZERO percent Egyptian, about 99% "Northern European" and the rest is "British-Irish". I mean, I couldn't get any whiter if I was a bedsheet in a hospital. I bleed milk, I'm so white, is what I'm saying.

Link doesn't work...

It used to mean getting stressed out over who was hosting Christmas, who was going to be there and how drunk and mean they'd get, spending money I didn't have on presents i wasn't sure would be well received, trying to figure out how to bring a boyfriend without my family freaking out, shopping stress in general, decorating for the sake of decorating because no one was coming over anyway, and trying to figure out how I was going to find the time to cook food to take along to...wherever I was supposed to be. Nowadays it means going to the movies and having some Chinese food for dinner. +1

You're looking for Rick Beck's "The Farm Hand" and the sequel is "The Redemption". You can find them here: http://www.awesomedude.com/rickbeck/

Those are girls! Look at the hairstyles on the lady at the top and the man to the right, plus the style of his shirt. It looks like they're from the late 1930's or early 40's to me. Now look at the hair on the two kissing Santa. Men didn't wear their hair like that in that timeframe. So, girls. Cool picture, I love old photos.

Well ain't that something. Well done! Congratulations!

Yes, it does have a character - David's roommate - who works in a sub shop.

And here it is on CRVboy: http://crvboy.org/stories/draginacht/s001/c01.html

OH MY GOD, you mean you're HUMAN? Go easy. We've got time.

I recommend ikea. You wouldn't expect flat pack furniture to be good quality, but I had one of their Galant desks that I put together by combining pieces, and it was great. Very solid, high quality, and customizable. The Galant line is now the Bekant line, but it looks to be quite similar.

Drew: There's a bit of a history about why there aren't many likes on the story. Before Myr developed the current Stories software (in late 2010 and early 2011), a huge great lot of the stories were stored in a system called "efiction", which was a bolt-on, and was used for any authors that didn't have "Hosted" status. The efiction software didn't integrate with the rest of the site at all. Captainrick used the efiction system to post "The Sky's The Limit", long before the new story system came online. When GA's custom story software went live, there was a huge effort to get authors to migrate their stories over to the new system, but not all authors responded. As a result, a lot of the stories were migrated by a volunteer staff so they could be part of the new system, in bulk. Most of these stories never got any publicity as they migrated, so they don't have any (or very many) likes. You can often tell these stories by their publish dates, whih are in mid-January 2011, since that's when the migration was done. The solution is obvious: everyone should go back and read the old stories, giving them lots of reviews and likes

Hi Andy: I'm not sure why it's not on GA, but you can find Book 2 at awesomedude, here: http://www.awesomedude.com/captain_rick/SKY/index-2.htm Hope that helps!

Mark? You were busy when you wrote this. It's a terrible sentence. Right there in the middle: “It was awesome,” he said enthusiastically. “I met Bellona Carter, and she liked me enough to invite me to another event on Friday.” I knew who she was, mostly from listening to conversations about her with Stef and Claire. “She has as good of taste as you do,” I said. “Thanks,” he said, then paused. “I’m sorry I was such a dick to you.” “I deserved it,” I said. Let's try something else: instead of "she has as good of taste as you do" try "her taste is as good as yours" or "she has impeccable taste. Almost as good as yours" ...or something. But that's just a rotten sentence, dude Oh and this was a greet chapter, you're setting us up. I can tell

Happy Birthday Steve!

I get a kick out of seeing that she started a gofundme campaign, and they cancelled it lol. She's a real piece.

http://www.sidetrackchicago.com/

Hey Eric, Yeah, I'm an MS partner, I've been running Win10 in a sandbox (and now live on my cranky old laptop) for what, over a year now? Since the first preview, anyway. I do like the OS. I just don't think it's fully baked, specifically when non-technical people attempt to upgrade and it fails. Because non-technical users don't deal well with when Windows, or an upgrade attempt, is in a failed state. My issue with Microsoft and Win10 runs a little deep, mainly because my customer base is not by and large technically literate and many run old programs and old hardware. You are technically literate, with google-fu at your fingertips and the ability to read a knowledgebase article and apply its instructions with little to no fear. That's not at all true with a very large subset of Windows users. - Yes, there are ways to dismiss the nag screens, but if you don't know you can, then it bugs you multiple times a day until you push the button. Show a non-technical user the word "regedit" (which you need to use to disable the gwx string to kill the nag screen) - with its attendant WARNING YOU'RE ABOUT TO DESTROY YOUR COMPUTER BY EDITING THE REGISTRY warning, and it scares the crap out of them. My point is that there should be an option right on the nag screen that says "I don't want to upgrade right now. Check with me in 30 days" (and one option should be "never". By not including that, Microsoft is in my opinion forcing this upgrade. - Speaking of the "never" option: I have a laptop here that will never ever ever run Windows 10. I'm surprised it survived an upgrade to 8.1. But there's the nag screen, with no obvious way to actually kill it. Because it'll check again in a month, and let me know in a month, that I (still) can't upgrade. That's annoying and it should be dead simple to remove. - When your Spotify software killed your machine, you knew what to do. Including having a backup to restore from in the first place, which isn't all that common unless it's absolutely dead simple to use and understand (see Time Machine on a Mac). I've got a client that per a standard process document, swaps out their external hard drive backups every three days (I didn't write the procedure). Problem is that the power strip that the backup drives were plugged into is dead. It hasn't had power for about a week, and they never checked to see if the backups actually ran (status is sent to them in an email. They stopped reading the emails). And they're panic-scared about using cloud backups. - Yes, MS is moving to incremental updates. It's a really good idea. The old saw about "wait for the first service pack" isn't there anymore. But by waiting a while before upgrading, it matures on its own. In other words, it's the same effect: Install a clean Win10 via the upgrade, then download 1,320 pending updates to correct deficiencies and get the security up to date. I'd really rather have non-literate users do that then install it today, and have issues, some which may well be pain points, incrementally fixed. - Sure Windows 10 is going to get a lot of adoption, and get it pretty early. It has some seriously good features in it, and I know that a lot of users are able to get up and running very seamlessly with it right out of the gate. That's awesome. I just think that the upgrade experience will be vastly improved in six months to a year by removing fail points. And that's what I'm recommending to my clients: wait a while, let the early bugs get worked out, and then do it.

Also, Microsoft forced this upgrade, they didn't just make it "free". They did that because several features need a critical mass of data to work well (Cortana, specifically). They weren't going to get widespread acceptance of the OS - meaning it woulda looked a lot like the windows 8 debacle - without it. So they pushed it. In my experience so far - about a month after RTM - it wasn't done yet, it isn't done yet, it won't be really solid for a few more months. So, unless you have the technical chops to deal with failure - because there's a good chance it will fail - the need to upgrade to access software or features that are missing from your current version, or are mandated by a corporate policy, just wait. It'll still upgrade in six months. There's time.

Yep. Business is booming with all the failed upgrades, reverts to windows 7, features that don't work properly, graphics and sound driver problems, privacy concerns, and general ignorance about the upgrade process. Hey lady! When it told you it was going to uninstall that genealogy program because it was incompatible, did you even read that? And now your data is unusable because you didn't back it up to a compatible format? Thanks for the $400! Glad it's working again after the total wipe and reload. Hey graphic designer who "knows about computers"! You didn't notice that it told you you had an incompatible driver for your graphics card? So you uninstalled the driver and installed the upgrade only to find Photoshop won't run anymore? Thanks for the buck fifty! Always happy to install a new graphics card. Hey kid! Your dad told you not to upgrade, and you did anyway, and you stopped it in the middle because you were gonna get caught? Talk to dad about your phone upgrade, because it's not happening, he paid me instead. I'll say it over and over and over again: unless you are absolutely sure it's absolutely necessary, WAIT SIX MONTHS TO A YEAR BEFORE UPGRADING TO NEW OPERATING SYSTEM VERSIONS. You'll note that Microsoft is not reporting that a lot of those 75 million users are HAPPY that they were forced to upgrade.

It is way too early in the cycle to even consider which candidates are viable. Let's talk next summer.

Sooo... did you color in Africa with the same crayon as Konstantine?

I started to clean my bedroom closet out, and was putting things away, but then I found a bill I forgot to pay in the jeans I wore the other day, so I ran a load of wash to get the jeans out of the way, and then I remembered the bill so I paid that, and that led me to file all the paid bills, and then I organized the top of the desk, and found some other stuff to file, and then I found a spoon that was dirty, so I took it to the kitchen, and I was hungry so I had lunch, and then I started cleaning out the refrigerator, and took some stuff out to the trash, and then I passed by the car, which needed washer fluid so I did that, and then I took a nap. Final frontier, indeed

Well, ain't THAT a shitshow, lol Great start, Mark, wth was Isidore thinking?