Christopher

http://www.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUSTRE52E06H20090316

so if I go and marry her in a few month I could have her fill out a W-7 and I could start declareing 2 then file joint as 2 dependents and get more money back at the end of the year also. Right now they are holding about 400 amonth out on taxes but if I declare 2 I should get an extra 200 to send her now I can only afford to send her 200 because of the economy. She does have a job making 15$ a month I wonder if she will have to declare that or not? We are planning on having a child also so the baby will get a ss right away and I can declare 3. You do not have to report her income. You can Google the W7 and find the form with instructions. I think you do have to report her income for the MFJ status But the first $70K (has it changed recently?) of income earned outside the US is tax exempt. Probably there is a separate form for reporting such income. IMO, if I find a woman in China making $70K who wants to marry me, I will move to China and let her support me in the style to which I should be accustomed. (just kidding)

Well I would like to see a credible article that can justify with XP or Vista more than 2GB RAM. Special applications aside, we are talking about a typical user here I use the Firefox web browser at work, which with all the addons and extensions and plugins I have installed is a huge memory hog. 5 or 6 windows with 8 or 10 tabs each, and I am up to over a gigabyte. Add in a chat client or 2, a bookeeeping application, and yeah I think you would start encroaching on a 2 gig limit. Now I browse with Google Chrome, which is smoking fast and very lightweight, I think it uses like 1/4 the RAM. I can't wait until the Linux version come out, I will never go back to Firefox. Well, maybe if the reachitect that POS from the ground up.

Shanghai Pudong is one of the largest airports in the world. The nice thing about it, is that it's well-laid out, and easy to navigate. I've always tried to allow at least two hours to get though the airport when traveling, which so far, has been more than enough. It should't take you more than 30-minutes to exit your flight, get your bags, and get through customs. Thing is, one never knows whether there will be delays or long lines. Hanging out in the Shanghai airport isn't really too bad though. They have lots of beer and pretty girls walking about. Only downside to Shanghai Pudong is that domestic flights out of there are not so cheap. I've paid much less for longer flights in the US. Beijing has less expensive flights out, and the flights in seem to cost the same as PVG. OTOH, beer and pretty girls is nice.

I've forgotten to ask, how long should I allow for getting though passport control and customs when I arrive? There is a flight 3 hours after I arrive in Shanghai. If I can take that, I could arrive in Chengdu in the early evening, where my girl would feel safe picking me up by herself. Christopher PS. Actually, minimum/average/maximum times for passport control and customs at different Chinese airports would be a valuable reference.

No, it's still there. http://computershopper.com/ If you do buy an off the shelf system it will come with inferior components, that's why it seems so inexpensive. If you have one built it'll still be reasonable, do some footwork. And the computers that come with MS Office are 60 day trials. For a free full featured MS Office compatible suite see here http://www.openoffice.org/ I remember the old computer shopper. It couldn't rightly be called a magazine, it was at least an inch thick, crammed with thousands of ads. Anyone remember "Treasure Chest" computers? In any case, useless unless you know what you want, and are doing comparison shopping. It sounds to me like the OP is your standard user: web, email, light word processing, maybe some bookkeping and taxes. I'd say get a low end laptop in the $600 range and be done with it. You can hook up a nice monitor and mouse/keyboard to it and you are good to go. PS. I forgot: If you can wait for Windows 7. It seems not to be the lipstick wearin' pig that Vista is.

I need a roundtrip ticket from Shanghai-Pudong to Chengdu. The prices are a tad steep for my taste (although not out of reach). I'd like to show my honey that I can avoid spending money like a drunken sailor if I can (she's an accountant, which makes it even worse). Any sites I can go to for comparative shopping? So far the best prices have been on ctrip. Christopher

Is it possible to get a tourist visa to in 1 or 2 days there? I travel to Chicago from Minneapolis every now and then, and if I don't have to spend the $$$ on a visa service, I would consider that an additional incentive to go there.

Tony, no reason you can't do it yourself. You should be able to reuse a lot of the parts your old computer has, like the case and keyboard. It takes me about 45 minutes to build one, and about 1.5 hours to install an OS. Check this link out: http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/the-idiots-gu...r-own-computer/ Good luck whatever you do.

I just want to thank you for the link to this woman's videos. What a lovely and delightful person she is, it makes me feel proud of our species.

Most of the benefits white collar workers take for granted, were initially won by unions, and corporations had to extend them to white collar people too. Medical/dental insurance, 40 hour work week, paid vacation, etc. Note, I am not saying there aren't times when the unions went overboard.

I believe in cooperation with integrity. You have to know what lines you are not willing to cross (and you can't make them up as you go along), the woman must know what they are, and you have to be willing to go to the line on your principles, every time, without being a drama queen about it. Best if you keep your rules few, short and simple, because if you have to think about them too hard your opportunity to enforce them gracefully will slip by without you noticing. Mine are: I don't go about hurting other people. I don't take what's not mine. I don't deceive to get what I want. I keep my word. I don't wash women's underwear. Christopher

My wife is from Shanxi province, but quite a way from this site. There's a lot of coal mining going on in those hills, with companies and miners taking unsafe shortcuts. Yes . .ask the families of USA miners in W.Va, Kentucky, etc about these unsafe shortcuts. They know about them first hand. Remind me again what unions are for? To create extra costs for employers so that they can no longer pay employees? It's a hard life when the the only job that lets you feed your kids, is the one that might kill you before they grow up. History shows that people will do whatever they think they can get away with, and "taking unsafe shortcuts" needs to not be an option for them. There is no free market solution for that, and human lives should not be part of the commons anyway.

My wife is from Shanxi province, but quite a way from this site. There's a lot of coal mining going on in those hills, with companies and miners taking unsafe shortcuts. Yes . .ask the families of USA miners in W.Va, Kentucky, etc about these unsafe shortcuts. They know about them first hand. Remind me again what unions are for?

Ah, gotcha. Myself I would have written a program to do something like that. Probably, I would have turned it all into one big PDF file and printed it out on one of those big network laser printers at work when nobody is watching.

Well it took you 7 months but you can now mark this of your checklist. I'm a Linux user, so my chat client supports multiple protocols and logs all the chats. But it does not like file transfers, so my lovely girl in China has to email me pix. But I found another chat client that will do file transfers and I am in the process of switching over. There are several Windows based multiprotocol chat clients like trillian and adium. For those people just getting started meeting women, I think this is very helpful. Christopher

Pretty much that's what I'm doing. I hate it. I like things to work right. I don't like making excuses for other people's mistakes.

That's not the point. I picked flowers costing USD 27.99, specified the 14th as the delivery date, and the stupid site took my money. That is a contract. If they wanted to charge $40 extra, they should have done that up front, not after I was on the hook for some money already.

This isn't a dating site I ordered the flowers through. It was one of the vendors recommended by another CFL person. I shopped around looking for the best price for a dozen roses. $68 for a dozen roses, no way, no how. I spend a fair amount of time in South America, so I'm used to paying the "gringo price", but this is gouging of a different order. WE shall see. Right now, I have no way to communicate because the linky they gave is broken. But in any case, I posted because other people should be aware.

So I ordered some flowers for a nice girl in ChengDu, then I went out and hosted my tango party, then came back to bed. This morning I find this in my mailbox: ==================================== Dear Christopher Everett Order ID: china-flower-685 You have just received a message from our order-fulfilling unit regarding your order. Dear Christopher Everett,Thanks for your order.But for valentine's day delivery,the price for valentine's day is 67.79USD.therefore we need to charge you additional 40USD.please advise asap.thanks and best regards. Please click here to view or reply this message. http://zh-email.localstreets.com/en/orderm...messageID=19296 NOTE: For the efficiency and security reason, DO NOT REPLY TO THIS EMAIL ADDRESS. Otherwise your enquiry will probably be delayed to be processed. ======================================== How can you go through the entire order process and charge my card without noticing the date and informing me of the extra $$$ ahead of time? What should I do? Oh, and by the way, the link to reply above does not work.

Heh, I know Johnny Gray personally. We both belonged to the Transcendental Meditation cult. He got kicked out for breaking a taboo, then he got rich and donated his way back in to the Maharishi's good graces. He's as smarmy as they come, IMO. Christopher

Neurologically, it's when your both circuits for acceptance and pleasure are turned on. What you're really talking about is how those circuits get turned on. That's a question of conditioning. Partly cultural, partly personal. Christopher

I don't do freelance, because for that I would require I license. However even as I pursue my career, I stay attached to an old employer because I really enjoy being able to work and shop at the same time. If you break the law, at an employers behest, you are still in a world of pain. I would absolutely have an ironclad legal agreement in place that requires your employer to pay for a *good* lawyer under any circumstance, and obtain written specifications for every job you do, and store that agreement and those specifications at your lawyers office, the same one that your employer would be paying to defend you.

My aunt was an orthodontist. She and her (now deceased) husband operated their office in a small Indiana town for about 25 years. I know that she is a millionaire, how many times over I have no idea. But she lives on a 100+ acre farm, fends off cold calls from stockbrokers every day and is studying for a BFA at a 4 major state university.