JamesSavik

I have a sure cure for hangover: I don't drink. I used too- I've been clean & sober for 2 years. Before then, I never had a hangover. You get a hangover when you sobering up. I stayed too wasted to sober up.

Dom- You did the right thing. My old friend Booger the cat got dreadfully sick from kidney failure in Nov 2002. The kidney failure killed him. I had him put to sleep to save him the misery. I still miss Booger, he was great. He was a wise old cat at 16. I named him after the character from Revenge of the Nerds. Unlike many cats, Booger was one of the guys. He would hang out and cut up with us. He had seasonal allergies and sneezed mighty wet, snotty sneezes during the spring. One of my favorite memories of Booger is when two cute Mormon guys came to the door. I went to the door and Booger went to investigate our visitors who pet him and commented on what a nice cat he was. Booger then hauled off and sneezed blowing chunky boogers on their navy blue slacks. I'm going to have to work that into a story somehow. JS

Jeez- Cheese-heads are sensitive.

This movie has GLBT content. The female lead *may* be a lesbian. When the female lead was being held in a camp, she read a letter from a lesbian that had been killed in the camps that provided a description of how things had changed and tyranny came in small increments.

Red Cayenne pepper for the hot Southern dude that I am. I have a recipe for chili that I call seven pepper Chili that I make for my annual super bowl party. It's not really hot but I'm Southern you see. It has to go over 110 to make me sweat. The person below me is a fan of a college sport team that's a lovable loser. e.g. I'm a big fan of Mississippi State that is 0 for the millinium and the New Orleans Saints which are considering changing their name to either the Cast-aways or the Refugees.

Is America Punch-Drunk? American history is lousy with them. The twentieth century started with one. World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, the 50 year Cold War, the Gulf War, Somalia, a hundred other conflicts that only historians remember and finally rounding out the nineties, we just couldn

I run into this problem sometimes. I solve it by smuggling in a one liter drink and nachos into the theater. It doesn't solve the problem of not having a companion at the movie, but you do get to see the movie of your choice. James the Nacho smuggler.

I just watched it three times in a row!!! This is a movie you must see to believe!

They're both real cuties.

I recently got hold of two programs that I love dearly: Mathematica and Delphi 2006. Niether are cheap- both run about $100 if you are a student or teacher. If not, they'll run 10 times that. Delphi 2006 is the latest incarnation of Borlands Object Pascal and C++. It is a industrial strength programming environment with debugger and lots of bells & whistles. It produces lightning fast executable code. While I am not the worlds greatest C++ programmer, I am a competent Pascal programmer. The Delphi environment lets you mix & match. Mathematica is absolutely awesome. It is an environment that allows you to do higher math. What makes it so cool for me is that I was never a good math student. I always knew the concepts but I have problems with my vision that makes things really difficult. BAM! Along come Mathmatica and I can put the problems on the screen and I don't have to draw (which I can not do). It also gives you confidence to explore math that might have sounded entirely too scary to mess with. There is a series of 5 differential equations that I needed to learn. After putting them in mathmatica and running them through their paces, I ain't skeered of a few little differential equations anymore. I sure wish I had this stuff when I was an undergrad. I really envy you guys that are in or starting college now. You've got some of the neatest toys in world history to play with. Jump on that wave and ride! New technologies like Delphi and Mathematica make new worlds open up; worlds that are accessable to all- not just a few ivory tower coneheads. Just think what Einstein or Schrodinger might have accomplished with a tool like Mathematica! JS

Bah! Life does not have a happy ending. People that want everyone in a story to get rich, laid and live happily ever after should try comic books. If you write for readers, it's not hard to create pleasent fluff but it's like Chinese food: you won't remember it after an hour. If you write for yourself, Write what is true to you. Let your reader cut themself on a jagged edge and bleed a little. It is the pain that they will remember, not the chukles.

A variation on this one: Drunk Guy (slurring): Hey baby, guess my sign and I'll buy you a drink. gender-neutral disinterested party*: You are definitly a feces. *- trying to be politically correct for Kitty.

Her behind was sooo fat that during aftermath of Hurricane Katrina helicopters started landing on it. She had to quit going to the beach. People kept pouring water on her and trying to roll her back out to sea. She tried to fly once but the only planes she could get on were flown by UPS. She is required by law to always use the freight elevator. She has so many rolls of fat that every time she moves, another roll is exposed creating a new oder.

She had a face that launched a thousand suicides. He had the kind of voice that that made you want to kick his ass and then kick his daddy's ass. She was so ugly as a child that her mother kept her on a leash because vultures kept mistaking her for carrion and trying to carry her off. After reviewing the casefile on the Hanson murder, the only mystery left for Detective Carson was why it took so long for for someone to wack the miserable SOB. The only use I could think of for Carol was to put her at reception to scare off anyone who wasn't serious.

Cats are a lot like people in that they have very distinctive personalities. Some are good natured and friendly, skitish and fearful or grouchy and mean. If you know cats well, you can tell that some cats are smarter than others. Some are very sensitive and you can hurt their feelings or make them angry and they don't forget easily. My cat Boo is dumb as a rock. He's afraid of everything. He used to get lost in the house. He is skitish to the point of being hysterical. My mother once told me only you would have a retarded cat. I scolded her for using the "R" word and told her that he's special. When I first got this cat, I though I was going to hate him. He wasn't fond of me either. It took an enormus amount of attention and affection but he's turned out to be a pretty good cat.

The right-wankers, those who would restrict the rights of others, have all the warmth and charm of used car salemen. "Trust us, just sign here."

Where are the supermassive black holes hiding? 26 July 2006 ESA Press Release Source Link This artist's impression shows the thick dust torus that astronomers believe surrounds many supermassive black holes and their accretion discs. When the torus is seen edge-on as in this case, much of the light emitted by the accretion disc is blocked, creating a "hidden" black hole. However, the sharp gamma-ray and X-ray eyes of Integral can peer through the thick dust and identify the black hole within. An Integral survey of the local universe found few hidden black holes, implying that they must have existed earlier (deeper) in the universe. Credits: ESA / V. Beckmann (NASA-GSFC) ____________________________________________________________________ European and American scientists, on a quest to find super-massive black holes hiding in nearby galaxies, have found surprisingly few. Either the black holes are better hidden than scientists realised or they are lurking only in the more distant universe. Scientists are convinced that some super-massive black holes must be hiding behind thick clouds of dust. These dusty shrouds allow only the highest energy X-rays to shine through. Once in space, the X-rays combine into a cosmic background of X-rays that permeates the whole of space. The search for hidden black holes is part of the first census of the highest-energy part of the X-ray sky. Led by Loredana Bassani, IASF, Italy, a team of astronomers published results in The Astrophysical Journal Letters in January this year. They show the fraction of hidden black holes in the nearby Universe to be around 15 percent, using data from ESA

Just a thought: If you have Japanese or Chinese characters done- make good and sure you know what they say. I don't know if the is urban legend or not but there a story about some US marines & sailors who got some tats done at Okinawa. The characters that they got were supposed to be strength, Tiger or Dragon turned out to be "little bitch", "sloppy bottom" and "needle dick".

77 books is a few? Like fantasy a bit do you? There is a 200 book limit for free accounts. I ran into the wall and trimmed back. My entries are all from my professional library. The best thing about the site is that it simplifies creating the data for you.

I don't want a tat or piercing. That being said, I wouldn't disrespect anyone for getting inked or pierced. I'm all about freedom of expression The idea that tats aren't aceptable to polite society makes me think that I just may have to rethink tats. I rather enjoy giving polite society the rude finger but I usually go about it in different ways. Polite society shats on anything that is strange, unusual or different. Since I am strange, unusual and different, Polite Society and I have a fundamental disagreement. JS

Free space on LibraryThing.com is limited to 200 entries. I went back to cull some things out like certification test prep books. The whole database is a little short of 1,000 entries. Think I might spring for a paid account. Let's see- about organization: I organize my working library into hiearchies. The top level is: writing, technology, math, reference, science, etc. My recreational reading stuff is not organized. As I use the tech stuff professionally, it's useful to have a catalog for tax purposes. Then under these broad catagories, more specialties: Science: Astronomy & Astrophysics, Quantum Mechanics, Chemistry Math: Handbooks, Basics, Calculus, Multivariable Cal, Advanced Cal, DE, Integrals Technology: Programming, networks, Operating Systems, DBMS, applications Physically I put these "clumps" together. House Guests I would love to have house guests! However at the moment I am the primary caregiver for my elderly parents. My Dad has Parkinstons and my Mom just had cataract surgery. Needless to say, its a handful. When she is better, it will free me up. ADA ADA is a pretty good language. It's a structured language similar to Pascal with some OO features. Unfortunately there just aren't that many compilers for it and it's not getting much use. It's a shame as ADA was designed to be embedded software and it does very well in that role. Most companies are using C for that.

Everybody likes a good page turner. Heck- Tom Clancey and Steven King have grown fat and happy off of churning them out. Pacing really depends on the kind and type of story that you are telling. Even Clancey takes 200-350 pages to set up the action in his stories. A genre story (commercial) like action/adventure, mystery, war, etc-- are going to be face paced by necessity because action/adventures, mysteries and wars are quite fluid and move quickly. You can't generally wander around aimlessly for 20,000 words and build a plot that will work within those catagories. A genre story is about action. Characters may play key roles but the action drives the plot. Literary stories are quite different. You can wander a while developing characters and letting the reader bask in the setting. Literary stories are all about character. Actions may play a key role but characters drive the plot. The BEST stories, the ones that you remember, are a blend of both. Think of it this way-- which one of these movies do you remember: Commando w/ Arnold Schwartznegger The Color Purple w/ Whopie Goldberg Most people will say The Color Purple because all they could remember about Commando is gunfire.

If it can read the ISBN number off the barcode then I don't see why not. I use my database and paste the ISBN number in the right place and LibraryThing finds the right book.

If you are a book person, and who here on a literary web site isn't, you've probably got stack or two of books lying around. Not long after I moved the last time, I decided to create a database of my books for a number of reasons. One- to get a handle on what I have. My idea of a nice day out shopping is a visit to all of the book shops [and maybe a hardware store ]. The second reason I did the project was to physically locate everything after the move. Last- as I use my books constantly, I can now look at my database to see if I have anything that might address a particular problem or plan to add a new book(s) to meet a specific need. This was a *Huge* undertaking. I designed and wrote the database from scratch. Tested it of course- made a cool linky thing so an ISBN# could look up stuff at the push of a button. Then I spent days entering the actual data. After writing code and doing data entry, it was a couple of weeks work [not all in a row]. So I have this database for about 4 months and what do I diiscover? Someone has the nerve to offer the same service for free. The site can be found at LibraryThing. You can log in, create an account and get to work. It's WAY easier than the application that I wrote. All you have to do is enter the books ISBN number (on modern books it on the barcode on the back and title page. The site then looks up all the relevent information about your book and then you can add it to your personal catalog. You can then rate and review books in your holdings and see the ratings and reviews that other users have posted. If you are going to sink a bunch of cash into a book these days, it really pays to make sure that its worth it. If you want to take a look at my library, check out >> James Library (I don't have all of my books entered yet). It's really worth creating your own catalog and this site's tools make it a lot easier than a DIY project.

Perish the thought. Nor would I expect Ben to wear such a plain night shirt.