How are things up on New York's Upper West Side?

And then I make a spelling error that I missed in the preview. Yay me. *grumbles and goes for coffee*

Franklin, TN, no Frankin. It's a suburb of Nashville.

I'm going to trot out two authors that I think are very underrated. George Alec Effinger (Esp. his Marid Audran series); and; Walter Jon Williams (Esp. Hardwired and related books).

I went from Sunflower Broadband/Knology/WoW in Lawrence, KS to Chattanooga's all-fiber, all-the-time Electric Power Board (EPB).

... and it wants its interface back.

I voted "What, and leave all my friends behind?"

I love my job. My employer is awesome. My co-worker is awesome. I love the work I do, because I get to help people (bankruptcy/social security disability paralegal).

While I don't get the benefits or the pay I used to get when I was working for a defense contractor, I go home with a smile and I come to work with a smile. My stress level is the lowest it has ever been in the 26 years I've been working.

So, no. I'm not leaving. My employer will be retiring in a few years, once his daughter completes her college education. When that happens, I'll be extremely sad but I'll be happy for him. I'll walk away with marketable experience and an education in the law from a person who has practiced for almost four decades. So, yeah... I'm here to stay until he kicks me out or he turns the lights out for the last time.

There appears to be at least two inaccuracies in this article.

1) Defaulting on Federal Stafford loans do affect the school for a period of time. Schools who participate in Federal Student Aid (FSA) are beholding to a concept of the "Cohort Default Rate". The basic premise is this: The U.S. Department of Education (ED) monitors the number of loans that a school has in default relative to the total number of loans made to the school for a rolling three year period. If this ratio passes a certain point, ED begins applying an ever increasing set of penalties on the school. If the cohort default rate passes a certain point, the school loses its ability to issue FSA. Also, Federal Perkins Loans are subject to this as well, on top of the fact that schools partially fund Perkins loans with their own money.

More information can be gleaned here: http://ifap.ed.gov/DefaultManagement/CDRGuideMaster.html

2) There has been argument for at least the 13 years I worked as a contractor to ED that transcripts are school property. Mark Kantrowitz, noted FSA researcher and commentator, has posted an excellent article on his website describing the subject here: http://www.finaid.org/educators/withholdingtranscripts.phtml

If you read the Federal Education Rights and Privacy Act of 1974 (FERPA), there is one section of the regulations that may be useful as leverage in dealing with a case of withholding transcripts. Mark deals with this section in his article. If you are experiencing this issue, I highly suggest you read the article, as well as the reg itself and make your argument from there. I have semi-successfully made the argument on behalf of clients previously during my time as a contractor, so please note your mileage may vary. The larger schools may offer a compromise (which the reg allows) while the smaller schools may cave in due to how much it'll cost them to offer the compromise.

Good luck.

This.

Not really. It appears AMD may have agreed to use their XDR2 ram on AMD's upcoming higher-end video cards.

Do the TVs you use say they are "Digital Cable Ready" or that they have a QAM tuner?

Isn't it a bit early for April Fools?