Just like it's spelled.

You of course coded in the backdoors and blackmail material about 2 years into this 9 year farce, right? Or at least stole a lifetime supply of office materials? I can't see putting up with that for 9 whole years without becoming really, really suspicious.

Didn't know that, but I can remember thinking the string of adventures was particularly episodic and, well, strung together. I chalked it up to youthfulness and perhaps trying to mimic older style adventure books, but this explains a lot of it.

Yeah, I was just talking to my brother aboutthis. I went through a couple of the original MacBooks back in the day, when it was the low-end, low-price version compared to the Pro. I was kind of annoyed when we were in the market for another laptop a few years ago and realized the MacBook had been discontinued in favor of the Air, and I now had to choose between "paying more for performance" with the Pro or "paying more for miniaturization" with the Air, when I didn't care about either and preferred to just pay less for a low-end model.

Bringing it back now, it's in a very weird spot. The MacBook is more expensive than the Air. It's *thinner and lighter* than the Air. It's also more expensive than the low-end Pro, and equally priced against the mid-range Pro that's got a lot more stuff. Only the high-end Pro is more expensive. You know you've got a branding problem when your Air isn't the lightest and your Pro isn't the most expensive in the line.

My brother's main argument boiled down to "it's gold."

I can only assume given a few iterations of product this will settle back out to something sensible, but it's as confusing as heck. (Just like last night, when the paint store wanted me to choose between ultra and premium, or when McDonald's small drink was a medium and its large was an extra, and they'd correct you if you tried to order the small.)

In college during one spring break I unintentionally went on a 27-hour cycle and rotated through an entire week, 3 hours per day. And that's with actual sunlight still in the sky to theoretically keep me in line. I was pretty happy being up 17 hours and sleeping 10 (or 18/9) without much trouble, other than not always having a way to get something to eat when I was hungry.

An extra 40 minutes sounds relatively minor, especially if the whole world is on the same schedule. I'd say wake 20/sleep 20, or, if it's really that exhausting, just sleep the extra 40.

I think saying Asimov's writing demonstrates the laws are bad is an oversimplification, at best. He used the laws to create and guide interesting logical and philosophical problems that could be worked out through the story. I always saw them as more like rules of a game that had to be followed rather than being presented as ideas that were simply bad.

Don't want to pester you, but I still haven't seen a way to send you the book. Just let me know.

I think you and I are nearly the same age. The novel's set in Chicago in the late 90's during the dot-com boom and bust, just when I got out of college. The dating scenarios may be appropriate to you now, but the tech world ought to be familiar to you, too.

No, no, it's in the secret cow level.

I live in a small touristy town with a lot of visitors and window shoppers. Sidewalk navigation is unpredictable at best. Sudden stops, people veering from one side or the other to look at something, the odd dance where they step forward to look, then backward to take it all in, thus blocking traffic in both directions. We also get a lot of families who apparently think if they're not walking side-by-side they'll get separated and lost or something and refuse to scoot over for oncoming walkers. I'm usually more interested in getting by, and thus skip around the far side of parking meters or into the road itself if there's room, but I've often been tempted to just hold my place and see if they run straight into me.

I don't see an address for you, but feel free to email me with the address listed in the header, or use the contact page in my URL (a completely different project) and I can email in your preferred format. Feedback is definitely welcome. Thanks.

You've posted a lot here and keep saying things that resonate well with my youth. I don't have any answers (met my wife by coincidence of having the same birthday and both being out celebrating) but I can commiserate a little. I've written a novel about a guy resembling you (or young me) struggling to meet people in the wrong environment, who wants to pick up and move to a more likely location. It's humorous, and might be something you'd appreciate. Not trying to drum up a sale, here - if you're interested I'll get you a free copy just as a sort of "I know how it feels" gesture.

I know it's just a simple neighboring key typo, but I'm still laughing about a problem with "energy nerds" two minutes later.

What I'd really like is a house built with pre-installed vacuum tubes, so that you can get immediate distributions from a central depot. That would be awesome.

In the Catholic pre-marriage class they talked about birth control as "withholding your fertility from each other" which, by their standards, was as bad as withholding anything else in what's supposed to be a union. I'm not Catholic and really couldn't make sense of that one, but it seemed to be a universal argument against birth control of any kind.

I'm in the opposite situation. We've got two, she wants one more and I'd rather stop. She's had several of her friends say "Why don't you just stop taking birth control and not tell him?" to which she has replied, "I'm not going to betray my husband's trust like that." Guess that's how I know she's a keeper, as it would be a really uncomfortable situation if I couldn't trust her with this.