Have you ever considered cloning your dog? I have. Ruby is so cute and sweet, but she probably won't be around a decade from now. Since I don't know how to find her family and she can't have babies, it's the only way possible to keep a part of her near me forever.

I contacted RNL Biostar, a Maryland-based company that has successfully cloned several dogs already, to find out how exactly it would work. The company's director of strategic planning, Jin Han Hong, broke it down to me as four main steps:

1. The vet obtains small samplings of skin and fat tissue. The tissue samples are placed in separate containers with sterile saline and antibiotics, then shipped in a Styrofoam box with pre-frozen ice bags overnight to RNL's lab in Maryland.

2. RNL does a feasibility check, which takes one to three weeks. Researchers isolate stem cells from the tissue and attempt to culture them into millions of cells. If this works, the living cells are cryopreserved in liquid nitrogen at -196 degrees celsius — this allows them to be preserved for shipment overseas or for long periods of time, usually 15+ years.

3. The cryopreserved cells are sent to a cloning facility in Seoul, Korea. There, researchers make embryos using donor cells and enucleated eggs from egg donors. They're zapped with electricity, at which point they begin to divide and grow. The completed embryos are transplanted into surrogate mother dogs.

4. Approximately two months later, the surrogate gives birth to a healthy cloned puppy.

Hong tells me that it will take three to six months from the day the sample is submitted until I receive my Ruby clone. The whole procedure normally costs $150,000 but, he says, "If you can make a commitment for dog cloning within a few weeks, we can offer you great rate."

I'm not really going to clone Ruby — I realize that nothing lasts forever, and that even if I did artificially bring Ruby's physical existence back to life, her spirit may not necessarily follow. There are so many dogs in the world who need homes, and I don't really have $150K to be playing around with like that.

I am curious, however, to find out what would happen if I cloned Ruby now, and then kept the clone as a pet, too, while Ruby is still alive. Would they become best friends? Nemeses? Co-conspirators against human domination? Would the world come to an end?

Advisor is a column about how to juggle technology, relationships, and common sense. Got a story to tell? Email me at lisa [at] boingboing [dot] net.

Meet Koh and Yurie. They're a happily married young Japanese couple who moved from Tokyo to San Francisco a year ago due to a job transfer. In early September, while on a business trip back home, Koh bought a new game cartridge for his Nintendo DS. It was mostly out of curiosity — the Japanese Twitterati were all abuzz over a new dating sim called Love Plus, and he just wanted to see what the hype was about. "I've tried the other dating sims before just for kicks, but I never got hooked," he says. "I didn't expect this to be any different." He was wrong.

During that one week in Tokyo, Koh found himself fully committed to his virtual relationship with Rinko, a pouty, hard-ass high school girl who hung out at the library. The relationship was formal at first, consisting of awkward whispered conversations in which she sent mixed signals and called him by his last name. As things got more heated, though, she started calling him Kohichi (calling someone by the first name still carries a degree of intimacy in Japan) and became more demanding of his attention. "I felt like I might get sucked into this world," Koh, who is an engineer at a major game manufacturer by day, tells me. "It's not like any dating sim with young girls in it becomes a hit, but this one is really well-made."

An article posted on a Japanese tech site in September told the story of several women who had complained on an online bulletin about how their family lives were disrupted by husbands addicted to Konami's hit game. Last weekend, I invited Koh and Yurie over to my house to talk about Koh's virtual relationship with Rinko, and how — if at all — it had impacted their real world husband-and-wife dynamic.