IM works great, except when a tester wants to talk to you from the lab, where they don't have a personal machine. I don't travel, so there's no reason for the company to give me a phone. I'd rather there wasn't a compiled list of people's personal cell phone numbers for anything other than emergency on-call purposes.

My fiance works on Thanksgiving, as he is in a profession (he works at a group home) where someone must be there 24/7. My family is a several hours away, and I admit that I'd rather not go do that without him. So his family, who live in the same city we do, are doing Thanksgiving on Sunday instead.

Huh, we certainly don't get unlimited overtime. Though I think OT is authorized at the moment as we bust our butts to finish some changes for the new material release of our software. I assume "Beltway bandit" means people actually working around DC, which hardly applies to my location, in the midwest.

My elementary school was pretty cutting edge - we had computers at all. They backed the wrong horse, however, as what we had to start with were TI 99-4/a computers. The idea was sound, but there weren't enough for an entire classroom, so it was a case of privileged students being given computer time as a reward for good work and/or behavior, which was then mostly spent on games. I think that they might have changed to something else by the time I left, but I don't remember whether it was Commodore, Atari or Apple, since I had unlimited access to similar machines at home. We had to take a keyboarding/word processing course in junior high; first, we learned to type on electric typewriters, and then learned word processing in MS Works. In high school, I had a programming class that was in qBasic on 286 machines. There was a theoretical follow on class that didn't have enough interest to happen that would have, I believe, been a Pascal class.

I suppose technically, one could say that they are "dried chillies", but that really doesn't seem to go far enough in describing paprika or other ground pepper spices.

There are several problems there, but I don't think I'd say any of them are because they're both programmers. 1) Romance within a team is fraught with peril 2) Er, she tried to two-time her boyfriend? She lied a lot? I'm female programmer (oh, shut up) and my ex-husband is a male programmer turned "entrepreneur" or small business owner. Our marriage didn't end because we had too much in common, it ended because of our differences, none of which had to do with work, but with differences in our fundamental goals for the future. I'm dating a man who has a degree in art, and we are together because of how well we relate together, not because "opposites attract" - I may be more left-brained than he is, but we are in no way opposites.

I assumed it was the traditional bizarre SF choice of physically identical, or at least adult, and with full memories and picked A Parent. If I thought it was with a blank mind, I would go with either a pet or no one, as I think having a copy of my boyfriend, a parent, etc that was just an identical physical shell would be creepy beyond all belief.

Glad to know I'm not the only one - I read all of the Xanth books out (through Golem, I think) as a kid, and then moved on to his less humor based work, and then came to a grinding halt after some of the Mode books, Shade of the Tree and the second half of the Adept series made me seriously question the morals of the person I was reading. Particularly mortifying given his apparent attitudes toward teenage girls while I _was_ a teenage girl. Ick.

In retirement, my dad assembles computers part time for a living, but he also puts together computers that are nowhere near cutting edge and donates them to churches and the like. Many of them are used to run lighting rigs, or for point of sale at charitable stores.

No, not me, the guy that I'm dating. Our days do not overlap overly much - I have a standard daytime programming job, he works second shift. So he calls me every day while he's driving in to work, while he's driving to pick up a client and calls me during his drive to my place (all on a blue tooth headset for those concerned about cell phone laws or his safety). Oh, and if he has a chance, since his co-workers take smoke breaks, he takes an evening Call-the-Girlfriend break. So, before we were dating, I probably talked less than ten minutes on an average day, with occasional spikes from talking to the parents. Now, I'm over an hour every day. It certainly was enough to make the boyfriend switch his cell provider so that our calls don't count towards minutes!

I can safely say that's not true in Dragon Age, in which there are romantic options for male-female, female-female and male-male choices - there are four romantic choices, Alistair the hetero male, Morrigan the hetero female, Zevran the bi male and Leliana the bi female. I believe that Mass Effect has similar options, even if the videos they chose to promote would suggest otherwise.

Anne was one of the first female authors that I managed to find in the SF&F field. She was one of the first authors I read that had really great, strong female characters. She helped teach me that you don't have to be a man to be smart, strong, successful, that you don't have to be a man to be a hero. Her fiction helped shape my perspective, along with authors like Andre Norton and eventually (scoff if you will) Mercedes Lackey. Thank you, Anne McCaffrey.

It wasn't a software house - it was a laser engraving business, doing custom work for businesses and individuals, and then also catering to the roleplaying gamer market. He frequently said (well, says, I imagine) that owning your own business is the second most over-rated thing in the world. The number one most over-rated thing being natural childbirth.