In Xenosaga, both the video game and the anime, the protagonist always hears a certain sound before she has a vision of things past, present or future. This is a sound you may hear at certain times in your life. The irony is that it doesn't actually come through your ears.

It is like Elijah's still, small voice, just a whisper in the mind, but nevertheless you are always stunned when you hear it.

Another writer here on FA has talked about her experience of finding out her husband had passed away. Suddenly and unexpectedly.

I remember from high school two individuals who were stunned in the same way - the mother of one was the victim of a random and pointless murder, while the other was rammed by a drunken motorcyclist and, in attempting to regain control of his car, crushed two pedestrians.

I had a similar experience, that "weekend from hell" I mention earlier in my writing. Twice that weekend, really. Once Thursday night, when a friend called me to let us know that my then-fiancee's mentor had died; once Sunday morning, when my fiancee called me and spoke to me gently, telling me that my elder brother had been found dead. That was what she said, it was what my younger brother had said to her (and to me in a voicemail that I hadn't gotten). "Found dead" is a bit of an understatement, of course, but there's no polite way to say "a jogger discovered his shattered corpse near the bridge".

My mother, for her part, knew what had happened as soon as she saw the police officer coming up the front walk.

And all of these revelations - and hell if they don't seem to revolve a lot around death, eh? - can be accompanied by this still, small sound. It's like the sound of a pin dropping onto a crystal wineglass. It resonates in your mind, and although it is not loud, everything else in your environment fades into the background. It is the sound of the foundations of the universe crumbling beneath your feet.

Based on a dream I had.

I conceived of werewolves as parasitoid organisms that rely on humans as hosts for one of their life-cycle stages, much the same way that certain wasps do with spiders or caterpillars (or the way genestealers, of Warhammer 40,000 infamy, sort of do). It is as follows:

0- Where there are enough werewolves in an area, they will mate. (They are hermaphroditic but unable to fertilize their own eggs.) Otherwise, ignore this step and proceed:
1- A mature adult ("werewolf") seeks out a victim for implantation. This can be a long-term process involving gaining the trust of the victim or even sexual seduction, but the mature adult is physically similar to an adult human. Then the werewolf mauls the victim. The wounds look like animal bites, but conceal the implantation of an egg sac usually in the abdominal cavity. The wounds heal remarkably fast, though... This discourages close inspection of the subject's body.
2- The egg sac, itself a living organ, secretes hormones and other neuromodulators to alter the behavior of the victim. These changes are generally slight at first, such as eating more, gaining weight and becoming a little more risk-averse, a little more shy and reserved. Unless this is a dramatic contrast with the victim's earlier personality, most people will write this off as stress, mild illness or, ironically, as pregnancy.
3- As the eggs hatch into larval wolves, the victim finds somewhere quiet to lie down. At this point the larvae push their way out, a slimy and disgusting process that inevitably destroys the victim's body, usually leaving behind only a few scraps of flesh, fragments of half-dissolved bone and shreds of clothing. The larvae can travel for a considerable distance before they begin to actively feed. While the larvae look superficially similar to juvenile predatory mammals, they are fully omnivorous and capable of avoiding larger predators. So they eat, and grow, and eat some more...
4- As they grow, the larvae metamorphose into an intermediate nymph form, similar to a human child. Again, they are capable of taking care of themselves, but they more often take advantage of human empathy; people will adopt them and train them in the language and culture of their host society, as well as offering them food and shelter. This stage is sometimes called a "changeling".
5- The changeling grows into a mature adult in about 15-20 years, although sometimes they grow faster. The mature adult is known as a werewolf, and it is at this point that its shape-shifting ability manifests itself...
(Lather, rinse, repeat)

Compare to demon-worms, another parasitoid organism which have no human-shaped life stage. They resemble hookworms, both physically and in life-style. Adults living in contaminated water burrow through the skin of new hosts; they have sex in the blood, whereupon gravid females enter muscle tissue and form egg-laden secretory cysts whose secretions slowly drive the host aggressively insane; by this time the eggs have hatched into larvae, and when the host is inevitably killed as it attempts to attack others, the larvae burrow their way out and escape into the environment. Those that reach water will eat microscopic organisms until they grow into adults. Those that don't reach water, or those that dry out early in the larval stage, encapsulate themselves and enter a state of suspended animation. As the capsule is generally smaller than a grain of rice, it easily escapes notice. When rehydrated, it resumes its normal life cycle (which takes about a year, from adult to adult, in the presence of stagnant water).

Among their other similarities, the "cure" for those infected by either werewolves or demon-worms is a swift death followed by immediate immolation.

Not that I will be going to any conventions until and unless I have an income that is large enough and secure enough to pay all the bills, but I wonder if there are any conventions other than Otakon held in or near Baltimore, MD. I'm not interested in driving eight hours, so CT or western PA are out.

What color are your underwear/panties?
At the moment, green.

Do they have a design?
Plaid.

Girls, what color is your bra?
-

Is there a design?
-

What color are your socks?
Light brown.

Is there a design on them?
The weave is intended to suggest stripes.

Are you a virgin?
I'm a married man. What do you think? ಠ_ಠ

Happy that way?
Definitely. My wife is my favorite woman in the world. I don't regret losing my virginity (with another boy) many years before, though.

What is your favorite sex position?
Cowgirl.

What is your sexuality/sexual orientation/What the fuck do you consider yourself?
I would say I am bisexual except that doesn't quite cover it. I don't devote a lot of thought to it.

Do you look at hentai?
Yes

Real porn?
Yes

Do you read smutty/porn stories?
Yes.

Do you read/watch/look at gay porn/hentai/stories?
Yes

Who was your first kiss with?
Tova (who happens to have the same name as my mother's adopted name... kind of odd)

Are they of the opposite sex?
Yes

Have you ever kissed or had sex with someone of the same sex?
My first time having sex was with another boy.

Is there any one of your friends that you would ever consider having sex with?
Apart from my wife, yes, there IS one, but I would have to get my wife's permission first. Sooooo... probably not happening.

Do you have any piercings other than your ears?
No. Not even there.

Do you have any tattoos?
No. Not only am I not interested, I am not allowed to for religious reasons. (A joke: a man goes to his rabbi and says, "I want to get a tattoo, but what should it say?" The rabbi thinks for a while, and finally says, "Get one on your shoulder that says 'heresy'.")

Have you ever been pregnant/got a girl pregnant?
Yes, a few years before I met my wife.

Ever done any illegal drugs?
I've used illegal drugs and I've used legal drugs illegally, yes.

If so, which ones?
Marijuana, alcohol (both in typical drinks and as laboratory-pure EtOH), oral opiates. I've also had enough caffeine to start hallucinating, and found that fluoroquinolone antibiotics also act as hallucinogens for me. I hate all that stuff, though - tried it and rejected it. I prefer sobriety. (Well, coffee is still god-tier.)

Have you ever cheated on someone?
Not in a physically intimate relationship, no.

Ever been cheated on?
It's not cheating if I say it's okay, is it? But it wasn't a physically intimate relationship, so... (not my wife obviously)

Have you ever been called a whore/slut?
Yes, my wife calls me her favorite man-whore. My best male friend also calls me "you whore" sometimes, but also in an affectionate way.

Do you own any sex toys?
A few, yes.

Have you ever had a sexual fantasy involving a relative?
Yes, a lady cousin... do cousins count? Of course they do. In my defense, she's really cute.

Have you ever masturbated?
If you get to be older than sixteen without masturbating, you probably have the libido of a rock. Even babies masturbate.

Have you ever taken a naked picture of yourself?
No. My wife took one of me though.

Have you ever taken a naked picture of someone else?
Not naked as such, no. Under-dressed, certainly.

Are you on any form of birth control (the pill, the patch, etc)?
No, we're trying to form babby.

Have you ever written/drawn smut/porn?
Of course.

Do you swear in front of your parents?
Not usually, although I learned to swear from my mother.

Do they care?
Yes, they do.

Are you uncomfortable yet?
Only slightly.

Are you taking this quiz of your own free will?
Yes.

In my religion, marriage is a sort of a sacrament, but it is also a contract. There's a standard form for a marriage contract, in which the parties are identified by their full names and patronyms. The contract is read before witnesses, who then sign it.

The contents of the contract are the interesting part. In essence, it says that the husband will put aside a certain amount of money (the minimum amount, for someone who can't afford a lot, is not that much) for his wife's benefit, in case he predeceases her or they divorce. However, it also describes the conditions of this contract. Foremost among these are the things a man must provide for his wife: food, clothing and sex. So, yes, this is a two-thousand-year-old tradition that lack of sexual satisfaction is a valid reason for divorce, and furthermore - not meaning to brag or anything, ha ha - that a man who stays married can satisfy his wife.

There was a mildly awkward bit in which my father goofed as he read the contract. As he hadn't rehearsed it, he accidentally read a part he wasn't supposed to. My full name and patronym are simple enough: it's my given name, then "son of [my father's name]". My wife's patronym, however, does not refer to her father Richard, but to one of the Biblical patriarchs. Had she simply been named in the contract "daughter of Abraham" that would have been okay, innocuous. However, the contract says "daughter of Abraham the patriarch", which identifies her as a convert. While it needs to be written, because she is in fact a convert, it is inappropriate to read it aloud; one does not mark out a convert as a convert to a public gathering, lest they become embarrassed.

I've worked four days in the past month, in a warehouse, as a day-to-day temp.

Warehouses such as this one receive and dispatch products by the truckload. However, the unit of shipping is the "wave". A wave may consist of any number of pallet-loads, each pallet holding 20-30 boxes and piled up about seven feet high.

For the particular processing job (preparing shoes to be shipped to JC Penny), boxes need to be unloaded onto a work surface on which said boxes can be rolled back and forth as needed; this is adjacent to a conveyor which will take boxes back out to the shipping department. The boxes need to be opened. Each contains a dozen shoeboxes. Shoeboxes must be opened and checked to see whether Micro-Pak stickers are needed, applying them as necessary. (Generally, if the first shoebox checked has a sticker, a worker only needs to check a second shoebox; if that too has a sticker, he can assume that the whole box has stickers.) Then JC Penny-pattern RFID price labels must be attached to the shoeboxes in the appropriate spot. For reasons I won't go into, a worker has to prepare each price label, so it's not as quick as all that. Then the shipping box is closed and either pushed out to the conveyor (if the wave is ready to go out) or piled up next to it.

Let's look at an idealized case here, discounting limiting factors like fatigue or limited work space.

Wave 600 consists of a dozen pallets of shoes. The pallets average 24 boxes apiece. It takes five workers fifteen minutes to unload all the boxes from the pallets and open them. Processing each box takes an additional five minutes on average. All workers can work on unloading at the same time. However, each box can only be processed by one worker; there isn't enough elbow room for them to work together on that.

The unloading step (five workers, fifteen minutes) hence requires approximately 1.25 person-hours (fifteen minutes times five workers is an hour and fifteen minutes). There are 288 boxes, each requiring five minutes of labor by one person, for the processing step. This means it will take 24 person-hours to process them all.

Hence, adding the two together, Wave 600 requires 25.25 person-hours to complete. With five workers, it will be done in five hours and three minutes. This is an idealized example. The actual work goes by considerably faster.

If you are a warehouse manager, you know when trucks will be coming in with unprocessed product (roughly, to the nearest hour), you know when trucks must be leaving with the prepared product (again, to the nearest hour), and you know what the trucks must contain. This means you know how much time you have to process each wave. So, to get the work done, you need to hire enough temps to get everything processed within your time budget, but not so many that they finish early and then sit idle, because that's a waste of money. Obviously any team of temps will vary unpredictably from any other in terms of their efficiency, but you can probably assume it's a normal distribution and be prepared to cover two standard deviations either way (which is to say, about 99% of cases).

So why does it seem to me that the warehouse management is making its labor-budget decisions on the basis of wild guesses? Bad business practice, guys! You're being cost-inefficient.

I moved to Baltimore. Hurray! The public libraries here are nice. People are friendly. My wife and I are both a lot happier here than in Highland Park.

Plus, there are more furries here, and also a Games Workshop store, so I can get my 40k fix just by going over to Pikesville (next town over, about 2 miles).

Recent events: my wife and I have completed a stressful move from New Jersey to Maryland. I have also run out of my pilz. As a result I have had a few odd dreams...

To start with. I thought about myself as my alter-ego... and in various other forms, including amorphous blobs with pseudopods and the like... having sex. With my wife, who also varied forms... not always matching mine. Things were highly entertaining and I reflected on our never having sex except out of love and affection. Yay.

I also dreamed of a friend of mine. She's tall, dyes her hair a dark red (I don't know its natural color, I suspect a dark brown), has a somewhat long and square-jawed face for a woman... not beautiful but striking. She also has a nice, not stunning but eye-catching figure. My wife was DMing a game of D&D and this young lady was trying to use her character's physical assets to seduce every NPC we came across. Now, the character was secretly a werecat... well, I dreamed that the girl herself was a werecat, and a very attractive one at that.

I also dreamed that at CES, a manufacturer was showing off new prototype sex dolls, very realistic. Disturbing, even.

Weird shit.

Yes, broadly it's about the economy, inequality of wealth, lack of good jobs, etc. (For more on the jobs front, read Ursula Le Guin's short story Ninety-Nine Weeks.)

But I've heard from my... acquaintances ("friends" can sometimes be a little too strong): Why don't these dirty hippies go out and get jobs?

But look, the thing is, there's hardly any point in working yourself to the bone in a job or jobs that treat you as expendable labor and don't come anywhere close to paying your bills.

But it's about more than just employment. There's housing - it's getting unaffordable, eh? Why? Well, it has partly to do with systemic mismanagement of funds on a local and state level leading to increased property taxes, leading to higher rents for those who lease and more taxes for those who own. Part of that problem is the investment of assets, by local and state governments, in risky financial products that they were lied to about, repeatedly, by investment banks. But the real core of the issue is the behavior of the banks in question.

They deliberately defrauded millions of people of their money through deceit and dishonesty. They pushed people to buy unstable financial products, despite knowing that the products were unstable and likely to implode. They pushed credit products with unfair terms (sometimes falsely and/or illegally) on people who could not afford to pay the fees or extortionate interest rates. They even stole houses from people. Yes, that last is literal - banks have foreclosed on houses they don't even own!

What it's really all about is law and order. We little people, ordinary individuals, have to obey laws. We aren't allowed to cheat or steal or (in some cases) murder with impunity. But those with power, and mega-corporations of various kinds, are permitted to do so.

That just ain't right.

And that lack of rightness is ultimately what the Occupy movement is about.

---

Disclosure: I work for a private non-profit mental health agency, and both through work and personal experience I know how thoroughly our economic system shits on everyone who doesn't fit the mold of being wealthy and obsessed with making more. Like, you know, the disabled.

You've been traveling through the foothills, but here a proper mountain looms overhead. A near-vertical cliff drops down hundreds of feet to a dusty mining town. It is surrounded by a high wooden stockade - not especially sturdy, but enough to keep animals inside or out - but you can see the tops of a few buildings over the wall.

As you approach, you see a large gate. (If you'd circle around to the east, you'd find another, as well as a couple of sally ports.) The top of the gate bears a shield crossed by a miner's pick and shovel. Beside the gate is a small shrine to the god of roads and travelers, bearing an impressive collection of rocks, trinkets, small fossils, whittled figurines, and candles.

The gate itself is made up of two solid-looking wooden doors, their hinges mounted in reinforced sections of adjacent wall. The doors themselves are open, though, and manned by a handful of suspicious-looking guards. If they question you, be sure to tell them nothing that can be used against you... but if you seem harmless enough, they will let you through.

The town itself is unremarkable. Most of the buildings are two- or three-story constructions of dry, dusty wood. Some look sturdier than others. The ones most obvious to you as you enter are an expensive tavern and inn and the guard headquarters. Further down the street, in a town square of sorts, are the Town Hall, bank, and trade hall.

If you were to turn west and walk toward the mountain, the buildings would be less-expensive boarding-houses and stables for travelers, then sturdy if unattractive miners' housing (across the street from a guild hall), and finally warehouses, workshops and storage sheds. Any further west and you would be climbing up the cliff, if you weren't descending into the mine. Were it not for the current dry, freezing-cold weather, there would be shutters open, people leaning out of windows, and crowds in the street. As it is, workers are moving in and out of the mine and its outlying buildings, bringing tools in and out or hauling cartloads of rock and ore to the workshops or warehouses.

If you turned east from the main square, you would be in the Temple District, although you wouldn't necessarily know that these humble buildings contained shrines to the highest of gods. The largest and most impressive have facades of shiny metal or masonry, being devoted to the god of the sun and the god of earth and metalwork, respectively; but all are still made of wood, behind that.

If you turned north, you would be in another residential neighborhood, although the housing here is of a somewhat higher class than the apartments by the mine. The few in town who are wealthy live here, while some of the houses are reserved for the use of traveling guild masters and nobles.

Had you turned north and east from the square, you would be in the commercial district, such as it is. There are a few shops here, selling foodstuffs or a smith's expertise. The soothsayer's shop is here as well, offering fortunes foretold or petty charms and blessings for reasonable prices. The smithy, of all the buildings, is the only one with its shutters open - but, of course, the smith is working, and his shop would be an oven otherwise. Strangely enough, for a town whose major industry is mining, and whose major exports are ores and emigrants, this man is fashioning a heavy sword.

Both Israel and the USA have been having protests over the unaffordability of modern life.

In Israel, in the midst of an eighty-plus-year war, the government decided to cut defense spending in order to fund its social-spending commitments. Because such cuts cannot reduce salaries or benefits paid to soldiers and veterans, the money came out of the purchasing budget for Merkava IV tanks, Namer APCs, Trophy vehicle defense systems, and Iron Dome tactical missile defense systems.

In the USA, which has no conventionally-armed enemies threatening, the government has decided to cut spending on salaries and benefits to soldiers and veterans in order to fund purchases of additional tanks, other AFVs and the hardware upgrades for them.

Kind of depressing.

My wife is planning to lose her DMing virginity with a moderately mind-warping campaign. The characters will be members of a loose-knit mercenary guild, and will follow the contracts to explore dungeons, retrieve interesting treasure, deliver messages, retrieve or kill interesting people, and so on.

Here's my character, in brief:

He's a dwarf (my favorite race) and a cleric of Moradin Soul-Forger (what other god would a proper dwarf worship?). Neutral good, he seeks to advance the glory of the Soul Forger and make the world a better place, in that order. His main stock in trade, apart from the ministry, is weapon-smithing, in which he is a journeyman smith. It's a proper job for one of Moradin's clerics. He is trying to gather materials for his masterpiece, which will be a baroquely-decorated warhammer as deadly as it is ornate.

Despite following a god that is lawful good (and therefore opposed to grave-robbing and other thefts that adventurers usually get themselves up to), he reasons that anything he or his comrades do on their adventures advances the glory of Moradin thus: if it is a dungeon, it was probably built by dwarves, and he is merely reclaiming their treasures for dwarfkind. If it was not built by them it was probably at some time inhabited (and improved) by them. And if not, then he will claim that dungeon and its treasures in the name of the dwarven race and their creator, Moradin. It all works, if you don't look too closely.

What should I name him? My last dwarf character's name was Urist Korhal, Urist from Dwarf Fortress and Korhal from StarCraft (the character's biography was metaphorically reflected in Korhal's blasted wastelands).

It's ironic that I never thought about the lyrics of Wicked's song "No Good Deed", with respect to people I know.

Let his flesh not be torn, let his blood leave no stain / When they beat him, let him feel no pain / Let his bones never break, and however they try / to destroy him, let him never die.

Too bad, they died anyway.

One, I have a full-time job as an electronic health-records support specialist.

Two, I like to play World of Tanks. If you like to blow stuff up in computer games (and you don't already play), why not check it out?

There's a bit from one of the movies about the "battle" at Bastogne, in which Gen. McAuliffe is contacted by the German commander and asked if he wishes to surrender. McAuliffe sends a messenger out to say "Nuts!" In the movie, although AFAIK nobody has any record of this, the German officers ask each other, "Is that a negative or a positive reply?"

But in any case, Gen. McAuliffe's famed politeness and refusal to use coarse language notwithstanding, I have this feeling that replying to a call for surrender with "Nuts!" is pretty much offering to teabag the enemy commander.

---

On an unrelated note, I remember being told the Tau (Warhammer 40,000's version of Communist China) are sometimes called "Fish" -as in the 4th-edition mounted infantry maneuver "Fish of Fury") because many of their vehicles are named after fish. Barracuda, Hammerhead, Orca, Devilfish... wait a second, neither an orca nor a devilfish are fish. A devilfish isn't even a vertebrate. I feel cheated.

Simple and delicious.

That is all.

Things are looking up. Sure, I have an interview with a talent agency and an insurance company, which will pay me although I don't really want to work for them; I also have an interview/training session with a psychiatric-social-work agency (in another state) which will let me work from home. And it would be, in essence, a help-desk position.

IOW, apart from doing back-end system tweaks and fulfilling requests by providers to have their files retrieved and altered, I'd be fielding calls from people saying everything from "I forgot my password" to "I spilled coffee on my keyboard and now it's all sticky" to "My computer doesn't boot and makes a clicking noise, am I screwed?"

(The answers to these questions are"Here you go, I reset it", "Go to the IT office and get a new one", and "Yes", respectively.)

This sounds like a fun job.

If it seems like I haven't been on in a long time, well, you're right. My laptop's hard drive is dying and so I've shelved it until I have time to do a backup and, hopefully, get a new drive.

I look forward to the day when I can get a new computer that I won't have to share. I love my wife, but since we're both clumsy... it's bad enough that my PC had one clumsy user, but two? That leads to where my PC currently is: loose and misaligned joints, cracked casing, and a dying hard drive.

about me going back to ye olde 4chan-inspired style of, let's face it, written porn. Cheesy. Not very good. Did she mind?

Yes, she said, she minded. She told me I was only allowed to post good porn.

...that we have workplace safety laws?

...that you have a right to know what potentially harmful materials are being used in your workplace?

...that you have overtime pay for hours beyond forty per week?

...that there's a minimum wage?

...that, at least in some places and in industries, workers cannot be arbitrarily fired?

...that whistleblowers have at least some nominal protection?

...that you get paid on time, in the right amount?

...that children are not taking your job, for less pay, and meanwhile endangering themselves?

...that your employer can't hire thugs to keep you in line by threatening you and your family with everything from broken bottles to vehicle-mounted machine guns?

...that you have a government agency watching your back, that you can ask for help if any of these rules is violated?

Thank a union member, because it was all due to organized labor.

All too often I see people working in FLSA-exempt positions, especially in industries where non-exempt positions are quite rare, who complain that union members get such "ridiculous" benefits as protection against arbitrary firing, collective bargaining rights, etc., etc. How dare those union members have better workers' rights than us! Tear them down! But they've got it all backwards. Instead of asking why union members have those benefits and trying to tear them down, they should be asking why they, FLSA-exempt workers, don't have those benefits, and trying to pull themselves up... by ORGANIZING. You don't have to have collective bargaining rights to pressure your employer into making concessions to your reasonable demands, e.g., no arbitrary firing, transparency in the hiring process, etc.

Would you buy a computer from this man?

 thoudog

What I want to do is something like this: you tell me what you want a computer for, and give me names of any specific parts you want. I'll discuss the details with you based on my knowledge of computers. I will buy the parts and assemble it for you, then give it a test run to make sure it works before turning it over to you. You will pay for the cost of the parts plus a certain rate for the time it took me to assemble. If you want a specific OS I will get that for you, too, but otherwise I will install Puppy (basic functionality). I will guarantee any work I have done for the next three calendar months; if anything goes wrong not related to my work, I can still fix it for you but I will charge for that.

You want a gaming rig? If you don't have to have the latest and greatest, I can set you up for about six hundred dollars with a good power supply, processor, motherboard, memory and hard drive in a good case. That computer won't work properly without a GPU, but those range from around $80 to $300+ so you would probably have to tell me what you wanted, either in terms of benchmarks ("I want to be able to play SC2") or in terms of price ("Not more than $150"), or even just tell me which one ("How about the Radeon HD 6850?"). That would bring the price up to about $750, and the expected labor costs would bring it up to a little under $900. For an equivalent factory model you would probably be paying a lot more than that.

I'm shopping right now... I'll post later with details.

...okay, shopping newegg.com alone, I get about $900 before tax and shipping (with both, about $1000). You probably aren't going to break $1500, even after labor, even if I ditch the i7's cooling hardware for a more OC-friendly setup. I'm thinking more like $1300 including labor. A similar one from Dell will cost over $1700. Then again, from Dell you'd get Windows 7, so if that's what you wanted you've got it.

Out of a job again. I was told pretty clearly by management that, although I didn't have any actual misconduct against my name, I wasn't a good-enough salesman to be hired at any of the company's other stores in the region. (Not the district - the region, i.e., NYC and all of New Jersey. Basically, all stores within a 50-mile radius.)

I wonder how to quickly get a job that pays a minimum of $26,000 a year? Or rather, how to quickly get two jobs for two people, earning a combined total of at least $50,000?

Maybe it doesn't make sense to budget for New Jersey's costs of living when we're hoping to be able to move to MD, but then again, at our current pace we won't be able to afford moving... or staying, tee hee hee. At least, with family not too far away, we can stay with them if absolutely necessary. But given that they drive me hair-tearingly crazy quite often, I don't think that's a resource for anything but the most dire emergencies.

for heavy aircraft mounting large-bore cannon (i.e., >70mm)? There have been a few, in history, that mounted the guns roughly parallel to the spine of the aircraft, like in typical fighter aircraft; but you can't call a bomber an attack fighter just because it has a forward-mounted big gun. The essence of it, you might say, is that it is a heavy, relatively slow and possibly poorly-maneuverable aircraft that carries all manner of heavy weapons, specialized for low-altitude runs.

Because, you see, reading about bats of late (U of MD has a neat neuroethology lab working with them, and my wife is playing Chrono Trigger, which has lots of bats in it) I dreamed up something.

I am not a physicist so I don't know these things: what are the design limits imposed by a desire to make an aircraft hard to detect? I mean, obviously it needs to be comparatively quiet, and have comparatively cool-running engines, but I mean specifically the shape of the airframe.

"I need a sweater."
"A sweater? Umm..."
"I need a sweater to tear up junk mail."
[At this point I realize I'm having trouble with her accent; she wanted a shredder.]

---

"I need a DVD-ROM hard drive."
"I'm sorry, are you looking for a DVD drive or a hard drive?"
"I'm looking for a DVD-ROM hard drive!"
"Sir, those are two different technologies. DVDs are optical storage while hard drives are usually magnetic."
"Oh, the optical one then."

---

"I'm not sure I understand what you mean when you say 'corrupt driver', 'backup', or what the difference is between 'data' and 'programs'. I mean, I can't use this computer. This will fix it, right?" [Answer: yes, and it keeps all his files intact.]

If you buy an Averatec laptop for the purpose of using it as a computer, I will be forced to track you down, come to your house, and short out your new laptop with my bitter tears.

You have been warned.