It sounds like you are a bright guy who can pick things up and turn on a dime. I suspect you can use that talent to retool yourself. The elections will give you a good clue as to what to turn to next.

Don't kick yourself. It doesn't sound like you did anything particularly careless and I did not like some of Cary's tone about long versus short view. If that were just the case, I would have been mustered out of the software business in 2000.

There are services we will always need. There will always be banks. There will always be financial institutions. There will always be people who could use a quick study like yourself to work with them.

Set out those antennae and figure out what's next. I'll bet you'll be back in business in no time. (Or at least after election day.)

I keep eyeballing Texas on the map and sighing...

why it might do well, at least among horny guys who like politics.

Even though Bush has been a disaster, his appointments of Powell and Rice have really opened a lot of doors for Black people in the US.

I would have loved a high school reunion after 20 years. I went to a magnet arts school in New York City in the early 1970s. It seems that the arts attracts gay men more than a lot of other professions. I'd dearly love to have seen many of my fellow teenaged artists again, but alas, they were right in the bulls-eye of the AIDS epidemic.

Be glad of your incipient beer guts, retreating hair lines, saddlebag thighs and saggy boobies. At least you all still have each other.

If McCain wins, we're clearly too stupid to deserve to live in Norway, Sweden or Denmark.

Besides, if I'm going anywhere, its where the days are longer, not the nights.

that these reports keep coming out. This means they're being watched and being caught. They're being caught in time, too. My cousin in Ohio sent me all sorts of pained email 4 years ago about districts receiving more votes for the Republicans than there were actual voters. This should not happen again. I applaud the vigilant and hope the elections are smooth sailing.

I remember hearing something alarming in the news and talking to my dad about it. He said, "Visualize this. There's a long, long freeway that is clear and safe and over there on the freeway is a burning tire. Now guess were the press is?"

There are neurons that are fired in the brain that are the basis of our capacity for empathy and sympathy. If your own live is a total downer, you can read a happy story or watch your favorite TV characters get married or hear a kid talk about winning that soccer game and feel a lift. This is because you're empathic and your mirror neurons are firing.

When you watch a man say "angry" five times 30 seconds into the debate and watch a woman being critical of half the country and perhaps your town, you are going to feel angry and critical.

No one wants to feel bad.

Then, they change the channel and there's a very level headed man speaking in similar tones to Martin Luther King or a nice preacher about change and hope and his supporters are standing behind him smiling quietly, your mirror neurons are going to feel calm, controlled, and happy.

Feel better?

You know, it worries me that people have to buy baby formula, especially given that WalMart doesn't really care where it gets its goods from; as long as its cheap. Its a shame that, along with that government program to give out food, that they don't give free breast pumps to nursing mothers. At least you won't find melamine in mama.

Every woman I know was absolutely insulted that Palin was selected McCain's running mate. Every woman said something about Palin being no Clinton. Even women intereviewed at the RNC were struggling to find supportive words to describe Palin and McCain's choice.

Sure, its nice to have the second woman after Ferraro made a VP candidate, but it could have been someone well-considered and well-vetted, not an impulse selection.

When I lived in NYC, I only had to get mugged once to buy a car for my evening's outings. Its safer than a gun or taser.

Currently, I live in the East Bay of Northern California. The cost of property and rentals in Silicon Valley, as well as the volatility of the job market, made it seem unwise to leave a location that I actually enjoyed living in. I would have loved to take mass transit to work, instead of grinding my nose into the freeway for 90 to 120 minutes at a crack during the boom times, but there was no service in that direction. Transit agencies seemed to think that the only commute movement was into San Francisco in the morning and out from San Francisco in the evening. It amazed me that the transit people didn't twig to the fact that everyone and his brother was working high tech from 1998 to 2001. Now, I know BART could not have gone down that far, but would it killed them to have extra buses running during the day?

Fortunately, I managed to find a job 7 miles from my house. I can drive it in 20 minutes or so. I checked into buses, and that would take 70 minutes. When it was suggested I bicycle through West Oakland to get to work, I politely chuckled. You don't put a skinny middle aged woman on even a cheap bike in West Oakland after 5PM from October to April.

Buses are quick to deploy, unlike light rail or subways, but no one wants to pay for them. Seems the only folks who use them are those pesky poor people.

I'm voting yes on 1A, btw. I'd love to see fast rail between us and Los Angeles. Driving that is almost as agonizing as air travel there.