Zomg I think I quite possibly meant http://drstyles.deviantart.com/ ... racking my brain to think of how that one went wrong but I can't figure it out - epic fail. Thanks, next time I'll just think it.

I love computers, but man oh man they drive me insane sometimes. Throughout high school I chose IT as my main optional class, because everyone in my family always told me to work with computers as I'm more proficient with computers than the rest of my family...

The "teaching" in these IT classes left something to be desired - I believe that something is commonly known as education. My IT teacher at the age of 15 was a grumpy old woman that should have been yelling at small children in a nursery or something, who worshipped the schools curriculum past the point of ridiculous.

There was a manual on how to touch-type, and what keys to press with what finger, and she was obsessed with retraining me to do what her silly little book said. I had already learned to touchtype at the age of 12 while messing around with html code and harassing strangers on internet chatrooms, and could touch-type with greater speed than the rest of the class - including the teacher, she was damn slow - but her little book said I was supposed to press certain keys with different fingers, so she spent most of her time with me yelling at me, from time to time striking my fingers with the ruler, it drove me freaking mad!

To her credit, in the final term of the year she conceded that as I have much longer fingers than most, the rules in her stupid book didn't apply to me - the words that I had repeated throughout the year, only to fall on deaf ears.

Aside from that, I learned how to create an ignorable advertisement for a crappy garage sale in MS Publisher - oh, the joy. I changed schools the next year and the IT teacher actually knew nothing about computers. I often helped him turn them on, one time he asked me how to close a browser so I informed him of the handy wee X in the top right corner. I am not joking. He actually conceded to me after class one day, "To be honest I don't know too much about computers, I just take this class for the extra money".

I was going to do a computer science degree after high school, but thankfully I have hesitated long enough to realize that my true passion is art - I got kicked out of art in my first year of high school for causing trouble with my art teacher, Ms. Barch - she happened to be a lesbian butch, rather unfortunate name there. So it's all new to me, but I know now that if I pursued a career in any IT field it would quite possible drive me insane. I use ubuntu as my main OS and Windoze solely to make art in Photoshop, and sometimes the day-to-day errors and idiosyncrasies can make me scream.

TL,DR; I know now that if I worked in IT I would die an early death with premature baldness and worry wrinkles. If you're not truly passionate about it, don't commit yourself to it!

I use 1600x1200 on a beastly old IBM CRT, and design desktop wallpapers for it - if you're interested most of them are here

Not off topic because I generally design them with smooth gradients so I can zoom in on them in compiz at a high resolution, which is why I love high resolution - compiz wins.

I'm a digital designer and artist, and I use a beastly 19" CRT - it's a relic of IBM in the early 90's (I have to move my computer desk about a foot out from the wall for it to sit on it)... I only ever sit up close to the screen when I'm designing in photoshop, which is also the only reason I have windows. For anything else I'm kicking back in my Lazyboy chair with my trusty MS wireless mouse and keyboard, running Ubuntu and zooming in on everything with Compiz!

This makes high resolution absolute bliss, because you can zoom right in and it looks freaking great. Theres a bicubic filter plugin hidden in Compiz-Config-Settings-Manager that makes things look so freaking schweet when you're zoomed in, it's unbelievable - then you introduce motion blurs and water effects and all that crazy crap and it's better than drugs.

I design all my own desktop wallpapers for exactly this reason, if anyone's interested most of my art can be found here. But I digress...

I recently had to stop gaming due to carpal tunnel / tendonitis / RSI / tennis elbow joy (pretty dumb to be a crazy digital artist AND a drummer!), but I can tell you theres a world of virtue in high resolution outside the realm of games.

The bastards keep hacking into our WiFi and pirating Starcraft! Now our ISP is sending us cease and desist notices! We tried to tell them it was the aliens but they just referred us to a local psychiatrist!

I'm pretty far away in New Zealand, but I look at your constitution and then I look at what your government is dong and I have true respect for those among you whose eyes are open and are fighting to reclaim the freedom you should be entitled to as an American. We don't have anything nearly as powerful to protect our freedoms in the rest of the world; fight to keep yours.

I hope they get in the crap with even more countries and are forced to do stuff like this, maybe eventually they'll have to declare themselves as an actual bank and give their users rights over their money for a change. There is so much dubious crap buried in the terms and conditions that none save a seasoned lawyer would figure out, and so many stories of people being royally screwed over by paypal (eg bank accounts being wiped out for no apparent reason)...

The banana market is flourishing here in New Zealand, they are hardly advertised at all.
(USA has refused to trade with New Zealand since 1984, due to the anti-nuclear policy; although there are talks of a free trade agreement in the works... To be honest, I don't want my country to be americanized any more than it has already been, but our leaders are sold out to the same people your leaders are)

Also, did you know Coca-Cola still uses Coca leaves?

-- Wikipedia article on Coca-cola

I can't believe you managed to say all that in only eleven sentences. Some of those were tiny sentences, the others were Huge.

Cool story though bro.

Well according to the fortune on the bottom of the page,

Is it just me or do these fortunes tend occur with an odd touch of synchronicity? Or do the story submitters choose what it will say?

How about this: the universe has expanded to it's apex some time ago and is now contracting, and the gradual deflation of the space-time continuum is causing time itself to slow down, befuddling our limited perception? Doesn't the basic theory that underlies all we know about the universe warn that this very scenario is a possibility? Or are we now under quantum theory where time doesn't start slowing down until we realize that it already is?
...Oh shit, I sure hope not, if we are then I've just triggered the end of the unive

And here they are...

Actually, 16 is an even arbitrary number.
/pedantry