Hoskins

WHAT THE HELL? Why do you hate Cavendish's leg so much?? YOU'RE A MONSTER Good chapter!

Yang, I agree that each one of those questions are valid on their own. The peeve comes in not telling me up front what had happened to get the computer to that state to begin with. I actually distilled the example above down from an even longer exchange. A good conversation (and this is for those of you who expect us to read your minds) goes like this: "Hi. My son tried to install this foxfire thing and he took off the blue e on my desktop, and now I can't read the internet or use Adobe." From that statement, I can deduce what happened and what needs to happen now. The customer didn't want to admit their kid had screwed up the computer. They wasted my time and theirs. Drives me nuts, especially when I don't charge for email support. And most of my residential customers would have no idea how to to back up their files and restore to a factory state...

1. Don't stand in my personal space. If I can touch you without stretching my arm out to *here* you are too close. Back AWAY. 2. Don't stand over my shoulder either. 3. Don't hold pieces of a story hostage. If we're discussing something, and you want my opinion, give me the whole story. Don't cherry pick: 4. Don't talk over me and don't interrupt. It's rude and it's disrespectful. 5. Call waiting does not mean you don't finish the conversation with me before you have a conversation with someone else. I was here first. If you're on the phone with me, and tell me you'll call me back because you "have to take this call", it's a guarantee that when you call ME back, I'm going to "have to take this call" right back. And I won't call you back, either. 6. Don't sit there and text when we're trying to have a conversation. You keep groping that cell phone like you're expecting the launch codes from the Pentagon. I feel better.

Bush 2 was just delusional, not dumb. My experience with boot (navy): - Getting up way too early and marching everywhere. If you were on your own, you walked in a straight line and made a military maneuver at every turn. If you were with more than one person, you formed up. - Missed my family TERRIBLY for the first two weeks. Then I got over it. - Standing in line. "NUTS TO BUTTS, BOYS!" was music to my ears, anyway. - Shin splints. - I was below average in most things. This did not make me popular, but it did make me more physically fit than ever. It also proved that my being really smart didn't mean squat. - Spent a lot of time fighting fires. We fought a lot of fires. I think where Army/Marines do gunnery, navy boots do firefighting. Probably related to the fact that you're destined to be onboard a floating can a thousand miles from anything, and might have to put out a fire. - We learned a lot about linehandling and about how to clean a ship. - No where to uh, "relieve backpressure" for 8 weeks. I went straight from boot camp in Florida to training school in Meridian, MS. So I didn't go home for (I think) 16 weeks. While I was at school I got orders to a ship based out of Guam, which gave me a longer leave than normal (like 45 days), plus paid my way home and then to Virginia where I shipped out. The trip from Florida to Meridian was epic in drunken asshattery since about 16 of us were on the same flight. Keep drunken asshattery in mind, soldiers do it a lot (see: Subic Bay. I was in Subic 7 times while stationed on the ship. Magsaysay Drive was the road out of the base. The bars were about 12 feet wide and pretty deep, and there were bars on two floors lining both sides of the street. Over a thousand bars in one mile. All of em with a mamasan and a $20 drink for the young lady... I never did the benny boys, but I did get propositioned by a young man that wanted me to count his pubic hairs !!). Consequently, when I got home, I was very confident, much more so than before. I felt like I had changed a lot compared to my friends, but I hadn't been gone long enough for that to last, so we were all hanging out as before (except without the pot smoking). After I came back from Guam (18 months later) I felt like I had almost nothing in common with them anymore. More importantly I felt like I had something to do, kind of a mission I guess, so that made me see things differently and by the time I got to about 30 days, I called my detailer (the guy that assigns you your orders) and told him I wanted to get to the ship early. He wouldn't let me change my orders. Also, I couldn't stand anyone I'd gone through boot with, and three of the guys I went through with ended up stationed with me at two different duty stations.

STOP SWEARING my sensibilities are suffering horribly :sniff:

Happy Birthday you cantankerous old coot! **gets off Myr's lawn**

Anyone interested in the zombie apocalypse should consider this book, Zombie Punter, required reading. Zoe E. Whitten, the author, clearly has experience with this sort of thing (and the gay subplot is pretty cool too). Zoe's a pretty cool girl who lives in Italy, and if you like dark stories, she's got em.

I can't top that. I won't top that. I couldn't top that. Happy birthday, Mark! Did you get anything good from those low-rent, sold out wankers you call students?

The Best Thing I've Read All Year Every couple of years, this letter bubbles up. It makes me all tingly whenever I read it. This time, it bubbled up via Reddit. Note that I'm not interested in the politics of this, I just think it's a really neat letter and it makes me go "YEAH!!" every time I read it again.

Shane by Vance Lista It Feels LIke Monday by Tom(lostone) *someday his boyfriend might let him finish it* Dominos by Cole Parker The Dark Side of the Moon by Terry Audette

1. All ebook covers have the same three ripped, shaped and cut men in different poses. In some cases I think they're shooping the body parts around too 2. The vast majority of the gay fiction ebook market is homoerotic porn. Also werewolf, vampire, dragon, and alien on man porn. There's not a lot of plot is what I'm saying 3. it's just weird to fap to a pdf document, the Adobe logo like stares back at you or something 4. If you pay $1.85 for an ebook, expect a certain level of "quality" 5. If you pay $7.95 for an ebook... who am I kidding? 6. There are a number of ebook publishing houses. I think they're all in the same basement somewhere but there is a wide, wide range in quality. With some, there are more typos and bad editing than you'd see anywhere in GA- land. You'd think they'd have some beta readers... 7. The soundtrack that you hear in your head when you read these ebooks is sometimes "Wildfire" and sometimes "musak" and sometimes it's just bad porn disco 8. It looks to me, in all seriousness, that ebooks might be a good way for GA authors who want to make a dime or two off their work to get published for cheap. In at least one case - "The Good Thief" - I know I've read the story online somewhere but I'll be damned if I know where. 9. Here are some Barnes and Noble ebook search results

Yeah, me too. I love reading your stuff James. Different writers have different stories to tell and different ways to tell them. Yours are hard hitting, and I've never been disappointed by your writing, ever.

You have some malware that has hijacked your browser. You should run some spyware/malware removal software to get rid of it. You should go here: http://malwarebytes.org and download their "antimalware" software - use the blue button. It may redirect you to a website called "majorgeeks" which is a software mirror and it's safe. The software is free. Download and install it, and then let it run an update. When its done with that task, run a "quick scan". It should clear up anything it finds.

Fried or baked?

Balut.

ISFJ

When I was in the Navy, I served on a combat stores ship that stood about 8 decks from the waterline, in the West Pacific. We were heading to Yokusuka Japan from the Phillipines in (I think) early spring. We were running in 10-12 foot swells, against the prevailing winds, so the waves were coming in bow-on. The waves were so high that, standing on the signal bridge (which was 7 decks up), we were getting wet. Not "sprayed" - wet. The bow was diving into the swells and at one point we saw a good swell break and roll right down the main deck. In those kinds of seas, we would go into the forward-most cargo hold and, standing on the deck, jump as the ship went down a swell, and grab the beams in the ceiling about 10 feet up and hang on. When the ship came back up the swell, we'd let go. So the total jump would be about a foot and a half, but you'd watch the deck fall below you and then rise up to meet you again. At some point in the middle of the night, a rogue wave hit the side of the ship so that the ship rolled to about a 29 degree angle (at about 31 or 32, we were told, it would have kept right on rolling over, it was pretty top heavy). I had a top bunk and had tied myself in, so I didn't fall, but a lot of crap went sliding sideways. We heard a very loud "BOOM" from above us, which was the sound of a forklift that had broken loose and had smacked into the side of the ship (it did it again when we rolled back, as it hit the other side of the ship). So yeah, my experience with a rogue wave. Fun!

I want to become a cutter when I hear this but I want to cut others http://www.youtube.c...h?v=QExQCwn6kwg Christopher Cross anything And ANYTHING with autotune. Also, Richard Marx and Fergie.

I really, really hate the board software here. I want the ability to delete a post when I screw it up. YOU HEAR ME?? lol. This is Hanson. They grew up. The new stuff seems worthwhile. Also, I have an ephebophilic crush on both Zack and Taylor. Zack is the drummer, Taylor is the lead singer. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hROgAZHmL2g

Oh sure, absolutely. And I have bought a couple that way, so it's a smart tactic.

I did it. I jumped in with both feet. I have a Nook, and I really like it. I've got a lot of digital files, and I've been downloading/buying them as I go along. I didn't think I'd like the form factor, I like to hold a book when I read. But there's a lot to be said for changing the type size on the fly, storing a whole wad of books on it for traveling, and the screen quality is great. E-ink is pretty amazing. Because the screen doesn't take a lot of battery life, the thing goes a long way without needing to charge. I got the thing three or four weeks ago and it was crashing pretty regularly there for a while, but they just did a software upgrade and its much better. The Nook has a nice little touchscreen for interacting with it. I wish it turned pages faster, it's got to paint the screen every time, but that's just e-ink for you. I like the Nook better than the Kindle because of the epub support (not proprietary), the touchscreen rather than buttons, and I can add a micro SD card to it to add capacity if I want. Plus you can sit in a Barnes and Noble bookstore and read ebooks for free. It uses the same 3G network as the Kindle so it can get online pretty much anywhere. On the whole, I'd say the Kindle and the Nook are about equal, one just does things a little differently than the other and it came down to personal preference re: the ebook support and the touchscreen. I use Calibre (it's free, and open source) to manage ebooks and syncing to the Nook, because it has the ability to automatically convert (and reset page and line breaks as it goes) from one format to another. The Nook does best with books in epub format, and lots of books are out there as PDF (it can read those too), but they all get converted to epub. Calibre is really nice because it can take an ISBN number from an ebook and look it up in Google Books or isbndb.com, meaning all the data about the book can be associated with it (although the nook doesn't import a lot of it). Ebook availability HAS to improve. The Baen free library is pretty cool for scifi, but there are a lot of partial trilogies, etc. so digging around to complete a collection isn't simple. The BN ebook selection is okay, but not great. Amazon's is better, I think. Buying on line is easy enough from Barnes and Noble, you can buy right from the device, or you can go on the website and buy it and it will be delivered to the device automatically. Buying a book on the website is definitely better than on the device because the search on the Nook is pretty weak. There is some, but not a lot, of queer-oriented ebook publishing out there. There's lulu.com and a couple of other publishing houses like loose ID and some of the pornier ones. One of the authors here (Rigby/Clovis!) is offering one of his books as a free download from lulu. Thanks Clovis! And the quality of the writing in those gay ebooks is not exactly high. There are very definitely better writers here. The ebook industry is definitely low-end in quality and price, and it shows. Harlequin-esque and porny cheap romance novels are everywhere. I'd love to see GA develop some kind of resource for gay fiction ebooks, but I think the current quality of the writers here would give the ebook writers a bad name Anyway, my 2 cents. TL;DR: I love the nook, I like Calibre to manage ebooks, ebook availability has to improve, and there isn't a lot of high quality gay stuff out there.

I can see James point here. I can also see yours. But its a matter of degree. This is not apples to apples/oranges to oranges, is it? Neither is it such a black and white situation that labeling something as "homophobic" makes the two incidents equal under the law, or morally equal. It doesn't work that way. Can you see that, if Constance were to sue the school and win, her damages would be "x", and that if the TG kid were to sue the school and win, that kid deserves more than Constance? Because the TG kid, like it or not, has been damaged more than Constance and her prom date were. So, while what happened to Constance and her prom date sucks green canal water, it's not in the same league of "problem" as being denied an education, being beaten, being fired from a job, etc. The world is not black and white. There are different degrees of homophobia. We need to acknowledge that, and then choose our fights accordingly. Yes, its important for people in schools (and their parents and/or peers) to concentrate their efforts on making their schools safer, more accepting places for young people to be themselves and to attain the same level of equality as their non-queer peers. And lets be really, really clear here: An education is a right, and is required by law. A prom is not. That, in and of itself, should tell you where the priorities should be.

Sounds like you need to get the f**k out of Mississippi.

In setting up small companies (or people with no money, ie non-profits), I usually recommend they do these things: (1) Open Office for the typical office suite functions (2) Firefox for browsing (3) Thunderbird for email - Link! (4) Googlemail for an email provider, setting up Thunderbird to use Googlemail as its provider as an IMAP account - www.googlemail.com (this is gmail in the US). If everyone is using this, it makes it very easy to share calendars and use them over the web. www.googlemail.com (5) Google calendar for sharing calendars, although Mozilla Sunbird/Lightning isn't bad, it's not the best either (6) Google Docs for collaborating on documents (7) Dropbox.com for sharing files (8) Mozy for backing up files, if they can afford to pay, then Carbonite. All of these services are free, except for Carbonite and Google Apps for domain hosting.

If I were in the market today, that's what I'd get.