The poster must be a guy and a nerd at that. Some of the most intense music making of all time happened during the bleakest periods of human history, including the Middle Ages. So, a medieval gymel expert might well find better and more lucrative employment compared to someone who services a machine. Gymel is not so abstruse after all, unless one listens exclusively to bad classic rock... riffing on what your voice can do, the first human instrument, may have occupied a lot of talented people back in the day. Bards, jesters, poets, writers, and other creative types made it big in tough times, as they do now sometimes.

Hello Frosty, hang in there. My first day of work in 1995 was the first day of the shutdown and I didn't get paid for 2 months, but I did get paid. My creditors did not allow me to pay when I got the check, I had to pay on time. But I was proud of my work taking care of veterans. Still am. The entire IT department is going to be furloughed, so if there's a computer problem, and it impacts veteran care, people will just have to be patient (I am non-IT, but rely on it a lot). You make total sense to me, a disabled veteran who cares about his country and his brother and sister veterans who have been injured and who need medical attention. Oh, the election following the shutdown saw the political ouster of a lot of the people who had brought it on, so you are right about that too.

The Witches of Karres by James H. Schmitz. A wonderful not too long story about magic and spaceship technology geared for the younger crowd (but I love it). Anything by Edgar Rice Burroughs, but especially the John Carter of Mars series. The Lost World by Arthur Conan Doyle (and you can suggest Sherlock Holmes as well). Down Town by Viido Polikarpus and Tappan King. The Earthsea Trilogy by Ursula LeGuin. All very interesting and short enough, as well as cool.

One of the best forgotten books of children's' science fiction is The Witches of Karres by James H. Schmitz. Try to find an unedited copy. The edited editions are subject to severe remarks on Amazon, for example, and for good reason. The highly idiosyncratic dialog penned by Schmitz is a delight. The story is one of the most entertaining and original in early sci-fi.

Amen Jason. It's why the internet was shut down in Egypt, wasn't it? Again, amen.

You think being called an IT guy is bad, try being called a "male nurse." Which is what I am, but I mostly support the electronic medical record software for a hospital. There's just a way that people say it, "oh, you're a male nurse?". Every time I hear the "male nurse" remark, it's like reliving the meet the parents dinner scene in "Meet the Fockers." "You work for IT" is not as bad, but again, you are being lumped into a vague non-white non-blue collar job category in some weird way. I have friends who are certified, trained electricians who work for the Engineering Department and people say to them, "you work for Engineering?" as if being a trained guy who works in a dangerous environment shouldn't command a level of respect. All of this may have more to do with the lingering bias in the health care and hospital world towards physicians, actually. I liked Avatar8's remark, that anyone who says you work for IT simply means to say they don't have a clue about what you do or how to use computers (I think that's what he meant).

As a botanist, I worry about some of the new genetically engineered or the kind of super plant getting out of control. In the same manner, I guess I should worry about an enhanced high yield algae escaping some sort of super algae farm. Would it have the same effect on the environment as other specialized "plants"? Would it be some kind of fairly fragile monoculture type algae that would not do well in the wild? Algae is already a major problem in the Mediterranean and along the west coast of the US recently. I wonder if anyone has examined of this critter might be a problem? A high yield algae would certainly find it's way back into the oceans and lakes.

Yep, that's exactly what I thought as well after my next door neighbor had a break-in. It's a safe area, but why risk 10 years of digital photos? We have the safe deposit box anyway, so I bought an OWC drive that fits into it like a Russian nested doll. I back up all 3 Macs on the partitioned drive. The safe deposit box costs about $55/year, cheap at the price.

That's exactly what happened to us... the hit took out 2 Macs and the power bricks/adapters for nearly everything else electronic in the house. And it was a strike across the street that travelled thru the dsl line, not the well-protected outlets. I always have at least one backup NOT connected and stored off-site since then. The other awful thing that convinced me to use 3 external drives was backing up to a single drive and having a bad thing happen to both the main drive in my PowerBook and the backup at the same time. The screwup was a funky restore from backup (I'll never use Intego Personal Backup again). Yes, the stupid things happen and you'd better be ready...

I have so many drives from so many years of external data that I do 2 Time Machine backups to 2 separate drives, a 3d SuperDuper backup about every 3 months to a drive stored in a safe deposit box and I avail myself of MobileMe sync services. Like I said, I use SuperDuper for the backups to the externally stored drive. That way, if a Time Machine backup is corrupted or wonky, the pooch is not you know what. On an ad hoc basis I backup my user folder using SuperDuper to a portable firewire bus-powered drive from OWC... so, I really have 4 backups. Between MobileMe, my smtp email, my use of gmail and the panoply of manually run backups, I feel pretty safe. Why feel safe? Bc I have done backups to a single drive before and ruined the backup and the main drive simultaneously. It was my fault, but I learned to never depend on a single backup again. Yes, it takes time, but the 3 months I needed to sift through 5 years of data (I used Data Rescue II from ProSoft successfully) was a lot worse. The other 2 Macs in the house are also backed up to 3 backup drives each using the same approach.