Multani

Honestly, I'd say don't sweat it. In any case, yes, some girls like nerds. My girlfriend is a wonderful example. I start ranting about a gadget or some stupid network problem, and she just thinks its the cutest thing ever. She nerds out over comics and movies.. I nerd out over gadgets and computers. Anyhow, enough about me. There's nothing to "try." There are no "secret methods." Calm down, don't put too much stock in things, enjoy everything as it happens. Honesty is always ALWAYS the best policy. Get it out there, talk about it. Make friends. See how things work out. Every person I've ever dated, I've been close friends with before hand. If you think they like you, and you like them, ask them. Again, though, don't put too much stock in your what you think is happening. If you ask, and they say no, don't lose it. Don't mope. They don't hate you. Really.

Somebody plays Thief! Foible - A minor weakness or failing of character. Mercurial - Having the characteristics of eloquence, shrewdness, swiftness, and thievishness attributed to the god Mercury. Diachronic - Of or concerned with phenomena, such as linguistic features, as they change through time. Lexeme - The fundamental unit of the lexicon of a language Boson Any of a class of particles, such as the photon, pion, or alpha particle, that have zero or integral spin and obey statistical rules permitting any number of identical particles to occupy the same quantum state. Psychometry - The branch of psychology that deals with the design, administration, and interpretation of quantitative tests for the measurement of psychological variables such as intelligence, aptitude, and personality traits. Wheeee.

http://stuff.co.nz/stuff/0,2106,3390737a11,00.html :roll:

Yeah, I'm a Linguistics major. This isn't the most up to date schedule, I also have an Assembly language course in there.

WASP is an acronym, White Anglo Saxon Protestant. There's a family guy reference out there. We have africanized bees here in my state in the US, Arizona, and they really aren't that much of a problem. Just don't be an idiot and piss off the things, call the fire department or exterminator, and get the problem taken care of. Also, if you do run into a pissed off swarm, run, don't get in water. The bees stay there longer than you can hold your breath.

I'm sorry if this is tasteless, but it seems appropriate...

Ah, but data recovery is another matter entirely. I regularly get $40-$50 an hour doing network and hardware support for companies around town, so I'm sure I can charge at least $80 for basic data recovery stuff like I did on this particular disk. Basically just have to get it to spin up for long enough to make a ghost image of it, and you're good to go. :D

Yeah, I prefer to AVOID blackmail/extortion, that kind of thing. And I've already shipped it to them. I might get some highly paid tech work out of this, (like, $80 an hour) and I'd rather make a few grand legally, than by extorting it from some folks who just happened to mess up. I would imagine that this kind of thing happens fairly regularly, so I don't know how good a newspaper story it would make. Without the drive, or contents of the drive, I don't think the story would be terribly verifiable either. I do like what one of the people on my work's forums suggested though

Yeah, 50 hours. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4137782.stm

/me starts sending one of the VPs pictures of their childeren sleeping... Yes, those were on the drive too.

So on one of my frequent trips to my local used electronics store, I came upon a 20GB laptop hard drive. My girlfriend's MP3 player uses these drives, her 30gig died, and she is using my 3.5 gig, so I thought the 20 would be a nice upgrade. I get it home, plug it in to my "ide-2-usb" interface, it doesn't spin up. I figure, at this point, I have essentially nothing to lose, so I open up the drive, tweak the arm a bit, and lo and behold it works. As it comes up on my machine, I see loads and loads of corporate files. I tracked these folks down, and it turns out they're a social security, retirement, and healthcare consultant firm based in Pittsburgh. There's all sorts of highly confidental material on here, like HIPPA files, internal memos, that kind of thing. Plus, this drive seemed to be used almost exclusively by two of their Vice Presidents. Naturally, I send them an e-mail, and give them a call on Monday. I'm transfered to their tech guy, who seems quite freaked by the whole thing. He says that if I would just wipe the drive, we'd be OK. So I do. It crashes in the middle of the wipe, I figure, whatever. I get an e-mail today (Tuesday) from one of their vice presidents saying, in effect, "Um, actually, we DO need that drive back for record keeping purposes. We know that you have wiped it, and that it has crashed again, but we still need it. Tell us how much you want for it." So I'm shipping it back to them, total cost to me: about $35. I figure $75 is a good price for them, especially considering the fines they would face if the government found out they had messed up like that with confidential records. I have only theories about how the drive could have traveled 2,000 odd miles from Pittsburgh to Tucson.. something that I'll probably wonder about for quite a while.

Last I heard, there will be at least two releases of Vista, a 32 bit, and a 64 bit.

Patton was an American general in Europe. A famous quote of his is

lol, Windows patanted bloatware, requires just one terabyte of HDD space to run! They'll probably make it require at least a GeForce3 or equivalent, a reccomended 1GB of ramm minimum of 512mb, around 5-10 gigs of hard drive space, possibly up to 20 gig. Minimum processor would probably be at least a 1.0Ghz processor. This is a fairly reasoable standard for them I think, most machines these days can meet those specs, and I'm sure microsoft doesn't want to make it impossible to run on all but the newest of machines, afterall, they reap huge profits from the upgrade market, so they want to make it as portable as possible.

I'm quite sure that Snape will be redeemed. Malfoy HAD to kill Dumbledore, and was unable to. Given the unbreakable vow, Snape then HAD to do it.

On the whole bully topic: If they have friends near them, engage them in conversation until they say something you can twist to your advantage. That way, you effectively put yourself above them on the social ladder. An example: I was at my highschool's homecoming halftime carnivale, and was running a tug of war booth for the German club. I was looking around for folks to come play, and ran into a group of about 15 big mexican guys. They tried to get me to let them play for free, and I refused. They got around me in a big circle. This was a decidedly unhappy situation. They started yelling at me to dance, "dance whitey dance!" Then, one yelled "shake your butt!" I whirled around and told him "Hey man, leave my butt alone." Everyone else in the group turned, looked at him, started laughing, and left. If it's a solo thing, always remain cool. No matter what they do, don't yell. The more you sound like a sociopath, the more likely they are to leave you alone. Sarcasm is also your friend. The quick and accurate use of pressure points is also an extremely effective method of getting people to leave you be. Another example: I was sitting on the bus. Some freshman is hitting me in the back of the head occasionally. I turn around and ask him to stop. Of course he refuses. In a commanding voice, I tell him to give me his hand. He eventually does, after taunting me a bit more. I squeeze down hard enough on the fleshy part of the hand between the thumb and fore finger that he's wretching and crying in his seat. Then, I go and sit next to him and very quietly tell him that I know pressure points that hurt much worse. I again ask him to not bother me. For the remainder of the year, he sat no closer than four seat away from me.

Yessssss.... Dumbledore the Gray -> Dumbledore the White. :P

I was about 8, and in the boyscouts. One of the things we had to do was see how high we could jump, so I was practicing in the kitchen. Now, a while before, a wooden carving had been hanging on the wall, but had been taken down for whatever reason. Didn't take out the nail though. The head of the nail drove itself into the heel of my hand, and as graity pulled me down, left a gash running all the way up my palm, exiting betwen my ring and middle finger. Not so fun. These aren't really injuries, but I've destroyed at least three lenses in my glasses. First one, I was around six, in a raquetball room at the req center with a bunch of other kids, making a run to the other wall. I stopped a bit too late, and my sock-ed self kept going, putting a good crack in one lense. About the same time, I was chasing someone on the playground, put on an extra bust of speed, and started turning to catch them. I misjudged my turning radius somewhat, and slammed into a telephone pole. I blame my lack of depth perception for that one. Last glasses story happened only two years ago, at 18. I went to the police department's SWAT team training range. When I was in the shooting house, I ended up putting a few rounds into the entering officers, and their partners responded in kind. Now, I was wearing a paintball mask that prevented me from wearing my glasses, so they were in my cargo pants pocket. Both rounds hit me right in that pocket, turning the "unbreakable" poly-carbonate lenses into dust. I got an interesting reaction when I told the people at my glasses store that their lenses wern't bullet proof. (FYI, we used real 9mm handguns, firing SIMs, a wax subsonic round filled with paint. Basically, paintball with real guns. :D)

I have cousins and friends who suffer from seizures. It's scary, but they're OK as long as they have their meds. My only advice is to hope that it's a one time thing, or that it can be easily treated. Bleib tapfer.

That's kinda like something I saw on Ebaumsworld, where Hooters had a competion between employees, though I don't remember what the competion exactly was. The employee who won thought she was winning a new Toyota, and was brought out to the parking lot blindfolded. When the blindfold was removed, there it was, in a box. A new Toy Yoda. I'm pretty sure she filed suit. Remember the Pepsi contest back in 1995 where they offered a harrier jump jet for a few million pepsi points? Some guy took them up on their offer and sued them when they wouldn't give him his jet. http://www.geocities.com/Colosseum/9137/pentagon.htm

http://www.rsinside.com $8.95 a year on godaddy. :D

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leet This is helpful too. Yay wiki!

Romance languages, the both of them. Learning Latin is a good idea if you're interested in Portugese, Spanish, Italian, French or Romansch. I haven't had any trouble with German, and I've been studying it for five years now.. The most annoying thing is remembering which articles go with which nouns. Cantonese is an interesting language to learn, not just because of the writing system (craaazy) but because it's an analytic language. You've got specific words participles for plural, gender, and other similar concepts.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leet

Don't knock it, it's how I learned to count! :o