She is amazed how many people are "full code" (meaning the staff must do anything to save them), even when they are very old and frail. It is usually the family that wants this. They don't realize what this will mean in reality. It means that if their heart stops they must do chest compressions which will probably break the persons ribs when they are old and fragile.

I played in 1977 at North Branch HS. We had a computer programming class with the teletype connected to MECC in Mankato. We thought it was funny that you could whistle into the modem to get it to try and connect (the modem was literally a box with cups for sticking the phone handset into). The terminal had a paper tape feed. We would have a BANG ready to feed in when it asked. We saved all our own programs on paper tape feed. When I went to Winona State University then next year we still connected to MECC, only now we moved up to punch cards. All our programming all 4 years was saved on punch cards. When programs were due towards the end of the quarter there would be sometimes a 2 hour wait from when you fed your cards in until you got your response from Mankato.

In the late 60's I would eat a can of spinach myself after school. It was my favorite. I ate it with apple cider vinegar on it. I can only figure it was because of Popeye. In 1977 when I came out of anesthesia from surgery, I sang "I'm Popeye the Sailor Man" to those in the room.

Yes - I was just typing off the top of my head and got it wrong.

I spent hours yesterday removing "AntiVirus Soft" from 2 computers at home yesterday. They are getting tougher now also by making it harder to run programs like AntiMalWareBytes and others even in "Safe Mode". This one also pops up porn sites once in a while. I have heard it lays dormant for a while.

Can You Imagine a Beowulf Cluster of These?

I wholeheartedly agree that the stories need to be SHORT as well as fairly diverse.

Short - as a parent of a number of past, present, and future high school students, it amazes me how much homework kids have these days. I had less than 10 hours of homework in grades K-12 TOTAL. We got time in class to do assignments and I got a great education. Times are different now also in high school. My 2 oldest ones in HS have jobs, sports, church activities, etc. I would hate it if they were assigned something like the entire LOTR (50 hours in mp3 format). My sister-in-law was a poor reader and was forced to read Crime and Punishment in HS which turned her off to reading like nothing else could have.

Diverse - this should be almost like a taste test at the food court. If what is chosen holds their interest they will develop their tastes accordingly. If they are forced into long stories they do not like it will turn them off for good.

Between red wine for the health of it and no showers no wonder the worlds oldest person in recent history was that 121 year old French woman.

I had a similar experience last year. I had a broken leg where they put 2 screws to hold my tibia and fibula (the lower leg bones) together at the ankle for a while while the ligaments healed. They were in for 4 months and my doctor recommended taking them out before they break years down the road. They used to do this procedure in the office - all they have to do is numb the skin, make a small slit, and remove the 2 screws. Now they do it in an operating room with 8 medical personel in attendance. The reason? The doctor saves $72,000 per year in malpractice insurance by not performing that procedure in his office. The only reason! Told to me by another doctor at the same hospital.

I am in a similar but different situation.

I have been consulting with a company for a year and they have offered me a job with the company now. They like my work and I know what my job responsibilities would be, but it would be a cut in pay and I could no longer deduct my mileage. I wouldn't have to buy my own health insurance anymore. I would also get trained in different technologies. I prefer the consulting, personally, but may be cut off if I don't take the offer.

I did something similar when we remodeled the kitchen in the 1948 house we bought from my in-laws in Canada. In 1948 there weren't many electrical appliances so the kitchen had 2 outlets - one being behind the fridge. The other one was actually linked to 2 breakers for one outlet (one to the top plug and one to the bottom one) but one breaker would always blow when you turned it on. It seems the person who installed the plug did not break off the tabs between the top and bottom plugs. In any case, I installed 8 outlets all on their own breaker.

Q: What do you call 10,000 lawyers in the bottom of the ocean?

A: A good start

I did not have a stress disorder, but in 1995 I was home sick from work once when I felt lousy laying down and lousy sitting up. I chose to sit up and play Tetris (and maybe Chips Challenge which was also on the Microsoft Best of Entertainment pack) and after a while I felt better.

Last year I was in an airport waiting for a delayed flight during a kidney stone attack. I bought Internet access at through Boingo for the day and it helped me get through the attack.

Maybe just getting your mind off things would have been a better test.

I lived in Manitoba near Winnipeg (the coldest city in the world over 500,000 people) for 6 winters. I heated my house mainly with a pellet stove and I wanted a backup mainly to run the fan in case of a power failure (I did not want my pipes to freeze). I had lived in rural Wisconsin prior to that where power outages on the rural electric co-operative lines were a regularity. I bought a Coleman generator from Canadian Tire for about $600 that put out about 1800 Watts.

If I had to do it over again I would have just used an inverter plugged into the cigarette lighter of my car and left the car running. For one thing in my case, where we lived had hardly any trees to blow onto the lines so we never experienced an outage the entire time up there (yay Manitoba Hydro!!). My generator still sits in the box never used after 10 years. Another thing is the gas tank on my car is much larger than the small tank on the generator. Inverters for cars are also much cheaper.

Obviously this will not work on a large scale, or when you are not home, but it is probably the cheapest solution.