What is IRC?

You're confusing orthography and phonology.

I know the difference. They always teach vowels and consonants as letters instead of as phonemes, and most people seem to use them that way, so I just have to talk about the phonemes corresponding to those letters. I also don't know IPA very well, and I can't assume anyone else does, so I tend to just say things like "y sound".

Also, there isn't a y sound in "mate" if you pronounce it at normal speed.

http://dictionary.reference.com/ has my as /meɪ/ and mate as /meɪt/. Vowels are a lot more vaguely defined than consonants, so I don't know how consistently dictionaries use the same letter, but it has to have something close to an ɪ in it, or it would just be "met".

But there's no reason for the r in "beard" to have to be a vowel since it's followed by a consonant, since that's never stopped most other consonants before.

You can have multiple consonants in a row like that, but there's always caveats. You can't follow an n with a b, for example. This is because consonants are difficult to pronounce consecutively, unless there's some reason that those two work particularly well. r is like a vowel, and can be placed next to any consonant.

It's true in the kind of English that Google speaks. Maybe Californian English?

How do you tell if it's a consonant or just part of a diphthong? For example, is the y in may a consonant? If so, how about the y sound in mate?

Also, by that reasoning, even the r in beard, which has another vowel in it, would have to be a vowel since it's immediately followed by a consonant.

Regarding where to draw the boundary, are R, W, and Y really vowels? The biggest difference I've noticed between vowels and consonants is that vowels don't involve touching parts of your mouth together. This makes it a lot easier to transition between letters. The second thing is that vowels are always voiced. H is otherwise a vowel, but it seems like it might be worth calling a consonant on that basis.

R at least is always considered a consonant, but the sound W makes is considered a vowel if it's a hard U or an OO, and the sound Y makes is considered a vowel if it's a hard E or the second half of a hard I (which seems to be a soft O followed by a hard E). Also, Y is often stated as being sometimes a vowel, even though it seems to always be a hard E.

W and Y are generally placed like a consonant would be, but this doesn't seem like it means much, since vowels can be placed anywhere. Consonants can't be placed three in a row. (Unless the first two have the same place, the first is not a stop, and the second is, like "mp" or "nt", which makes it particularly easy to pronounce. This leads to things like the Japanese word senpai being consistently mispronounced by Japanese speakers as "sempai", even though the only consonant Japanese syllables can end with is an N.) It looks like W and Y have this rule, but it's not so much that Y is never between two consonants as it is that if a hard E is between two consonants, it's not represented with a Y. And this still doesn't excuse R, which is frequently the only vowel between two consonants. For example, "bird", "herd", and "turd" are all written with different "vowels" next to the R, but they are all pronounced with just the R sound.

This always bugged me a lot. Am I the only one that sees this?

I'm about to start working with a remote writing buddy. We're going to send each other emails for 'clocking in' purposes, but we also want to use some kind of screen-sharing or remote login software to keep tabs on each other. Does anyone have any good recommendations for software along those lines? My netbook is sufficiently slow and old that if I'm not careful even typing can get pretty laggy, so resource- or processing-light software would definitely be preferred.

I am troubleshooting my method for writing papers in an attempt to make the process go faster or at least more efficiently. So far, I have asked a couple of my colleagues about their methods, and intend to try to collect a representative sample before I try to extract any important general bits

Today in failures of agency/playing a role as opposed to being a role: I have a friend who is somewhat paranoid with respect to their possessions and physical safety. Said friend recently got their laptop stolen from their lab, which has understandably heightened their paranoia about their lab's level of security, particularly since their work often involves being there alone at odd hours. It turns out that their lab is even more insecure than was first apparent, and there's a relatively simple procedure for getting in without any credentials. Friend posted the details of this procedure on Facebook in order to complain about it and garner social support from their close friends. Friend has also complained to their immediate supervisor and been ignored.

It strikes me that at this point Friend seems to be more interested in playing the role of victim than in actually putting effort towards solving their problem. I can think of several strategies I would consider if I was in their situation (eg. keep moving up the chain of authority with my complaints, try to drum up support amongst my coworkers, post the details in as public a venue(s) as possible in order to create public outrage and/or make the issue too well-known to be ignored, etc). The strategy that they actually chose (post the details in a pseudo-but-not-actually-private venue) seems to be one of the worst in terms of actually addressing their problem - not only have they not increased the probability that the security hole will be fixed (since none of us work in the same lab system as they do), but there are now N more people aware of the hole who may or may not accidentally leak the info to others.

A friend of mine has mild anorexia (she's on psych meds to keep it contained)

I don't have good ideas about dealing with anorexia, but I think you should suggest to your friend that she is being used as a pawn by the psycho-pharmaceutical industry to extract dollars from her health insurance provider.

Long shot again:

Any LW NYCers have a room available for <$1,000 per month that I (a friendly self-employed 23-year-old male) might be able to move into within a week or two? Or leads on a 1br/studio for <$1400? I could also go a bit above those prices if necessary.

PM me if so and I'll send more details about myself. I'm also staying with some friends in NYC right now so we could meet up anytime.