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I'm sorry, this crosses my mind from time to time.
Please don't use the phrase "First Annual" It's called the "inaugural" Then at least you won't seem like an ass when the "Second Annual" doesn't happen. Annual your planning a serial event, inaugural... well... you have wiggle room to fail.

I honestly fear for the upcoming generations. My girlfriend's cousin sent 3000 text messages in 15 days... that's a constraint of 160 characters and I know his vocabulary is not that strong to be that concise. It will become more common place for people to communicate with as few letters as possible using a less than accurate vernacular. In 30 years time, the state of the union address could be a MySpace post by "BestPrezForeva028". Our foreign policy will be decided by people who can't even find the countries it pertains to on a map (and frankly, I think that's already happening). Economic policies will be picked by a generation deluged with credit card offers as soon as they entered college and filled out student loan forms. The generation who saves a negative percentage will be burdened with the Baby boomers seeking a non-existent social security because their generation spent it all by dipping into it for "other programs" as well as an astronomical debt from a nearly 8 year war in the middle east during the start of the millennium that was going to "pay for itself", wall street greed, and who knows what else. In the mean time, my apathetic A.D.D. ridden generation will have to clean up some of that before it causes some major implosion. Unfortunately, they're too busy making asses of themselves on the internet before it's reigned in even further from the wild west attitude left on it since it's become more "user friendly". Most of them have another 5 to 10 years to go before they realize that playtime is over and they have to start actually caring about genocides and elections and why ousting a military dictator might NOT actually be a good idea. Until then, we must endure: corporations dictating government policy, global in fighting, and general ignorance.

I always get amazed at the number of art geeks on Slashdot. It's not just the art geeks, but, the actually well informed art geeks who can hold a well informed discussion or debate on the topic.
I've seen my fair share of "my kid can do that" posts when discussing art but just as many, if not more, defending actual art and the artistic process. Now my girlfriend is the artists, I just draw things I want to see, but she actually holds a degree in fine art. She's hanging in galleries in the area... And has hit that inevitable slump all artists hit after a good creative run.

So, If there is anyone reading this I ask you: What's a good way to get her creativity going again? She specialized in screen printing and our apartment is too small for the equipment she would need, but, I hate to see her not working on her craft. I've asked her and get the ever so esoteric answer of "when the muse decides to return..." however, could it be a lack of space/materials that is keeping her "muse contained"

There seems to be some artistic people in the crowd or at least involved with artistic people. Any ideas of what I can do to help her get back to her art work or is it just a waiting game? ...Waiting game sucks, let's play hungry, hungry hippos!

I just took a procedure back to one of my developers, not for anything that was particularly WRONG with his SQL code, but because I just didn't want to have to figure out time in seconds needed to change from 8am to 9am if we ever decide to change it in the code if the future. I gave him the code that could fix it, and I felt vindicated that a senior developer agreed, that if you're setting the time to a static value just set it as a string and convert it. It's the same value in the end and far less headache when we look at it later and much easier to update.
When I went over to help him with it (frankly, it seemed to take him a while) he was staring at his OWN code, which while documented was quite confusing. We rewrote it and I told him that if it was hard for him to figure out, what about the other guys who may have to look at it later. So, yes while there may be some nifty date function that buy you a nanosecond in execution. I'm a DBA that says burn that to save us an hour of future development time and frankly... I'm lazy, I didn't want to do the time conversions myself to make his date functions work.

Mouseland was a place where all the little mice lived and played, were born and died. And they lived much the same as you and I do. They even had a Parliament. And every four years they had an election. Used to walk to the polls and cast their ballots. Some of them even got a ride to the polls. And got a ride for the next four years afterwards too. Just like you and me. And every time on election day all the little mice used to go to the ballot box and they used to elect a government. A government made up of big, fat, black cats... But, oh, they were hard on the mice. And life was getting harder and harder. And when the mice couldn't put up with it any more, they decided something had to be done about it. So they went en masse to the polls. They voted the black cats out. They put in the white cats...And life was tougher than ever. And when they couldn't take that anymore, they voted the white cats out and put the black ones in again... You see, my friends, the trouble wasn't with the colour of the cat. The trouble was that they were cats. And because they were cats, they naturally looked after cats instead of mice...

http://www.saskndp.com/history/mouseland.html