"You have been playing with that goldarn Flight Simulator program, haven't you?"
One small nit-pick. I've lived in the Chicago area all my life and have *never* heard anyone use the term "goldarn".:)
On the plus side, yes, there are many small airports in the area so I don't doubt your story. I don't know if he would have been able to fly the small plane directly into O'Hare but there is a small airport about a 15 minute drive from O'Hare.
There is a small commuter airline in Rockford that I've been seeing a lot of advertising for lately. I was looking into their prices for a flight to Las Vegas (the new home of my in-laws). I did the math and found that their ticket prices were just about the same price for me as a flight out of Milwaukee. Milwaukee is much easier for me to get to so I couldn't justify driving the round-about way to Rockford. I'd like to give them a try one of these days though just to see how a small airline compares.
Back when I was in the service we had a new LT come into the unit. At the morning formation they announced the addition of LT. Dick. The whole company lost it. He had his last name legally changed to Dickson. Unfortunately I ended up working for him for about a year and a half and yes, he did live up to his original name. He was a complete wanker with zero people skills.
I have to agree about caffine being addictive. In my own personal case I've found it to be more-so than alcohol.
Back in the day when I was young, dumb, and full of you know what the guys and I would hit the bar two or three times a week (playing in a rock band you know). We drank a lot of beer and Rum and Cokes in those days. Towards the end of the era I started to taper off. Cut the Rum and Cokes, stick to beer. Down to have a beer, have a glass of water. Then to no beer after midnight. Down to no beer at all. After that I went about four years without touching the stuff. Now I will have an occasional beer with dinner or whatever, no big deal.
Caffine on the other hand, I've been trying to quit for about five years now. I get down to the "no Pepsi" point and last for maybe four or five weeks. Then I will be at work and feeling tired. "Oh, one won't kill me". Within a couple of weeks I'm back up to where I was. (sigh).
The nice thing is a few weeks ago I signed up with a water delivery service. Quite an incentive to drink water instead of soda when you have to go through two 5 gallon bottles of water before they drop off more.:) Before someone nails me about paying for what comes free out of the tap, yes I am paying for water but it's quite a bit cheaper than what I've been paying for soda and our tap water is horrible. I've even tried the Pur filters. They don't last too long around here.
On the plus side, I've dropped a few pounds and am as regular as a clock. Here's to hoping that this time is the one.
Because I see this as nothing but a big PR ploy by SBC. They put their name on a stadium and give everyone free wireless access (for the first year) but as usual, their normal, everyday customers, and I am a customer for phone service, get squat. It's like the commercial I mentioned. A big hurray for how they supposedly work hard to bring us the latest and greatest technology but in the real world they don't really perform.
Really, all they are doing is upping the scale on something every coffeehouse, library, and mall in this area has been doing for a couple of years, giving (selling) wireless access in their location.
I guess it's nice if you live near the park and run wireless. How I wish that SBC would move their ass so that I could get DSL though. When I moved into my current house four years ago Ameritech (which got taken over by SBC) told me that all the hardware was in place and was being tested and I could expect DSL in my area within a couple of months. Four years later and as of Monday, no DSL. My town's government got sick of answering questions so they sent out a flyer basically saying that yes, the hardware is there but SBC is in a pissing contest with the feds about who gets to co-locate so they refuse to turn the system up. It's funny, in the Chicago area where I live SBC's new ad campaign shows them starting to lay fiber back in the '80's and how broadband is all over the area. I guess they're trying to show how ahead of the game there were back in the day. Here I am, 30 miles north of the city and no DSL. I have to laugh whenever the commercial comes on.:)
I ran into a similar problem a few months ago. I had a user that had Windows crash while he was in a document. After that he couldn't open the document. We tried copying it to another Windows computer and opening it in that computer's copy of Word. No luck. Finally, on a lark I took it home and tried opening it on my Linux box. OO opened it with no problems. I resaved the doc and he was able to open it again on his computer in Word.
I think that the store I shop at gives coupons based on what you buy at that time. I've never gotten anything on a receipt/coupon that I can match to something I bought in the past. Their system seems to need some tweaking though. When I go shopping I usually get coupons for the competitors of what brands I buy. For example, if I am shopping for laundry detergent I always buy the 'free' version of All (unscented, no dyes added) because both my wife and I have allergy problems with the scented stuff. I don't know how many times I've gotten coupons for Tide detergent in whatever obnoxious scent they're pushing that week. I can also buy the store-brand of ice cream and be pretty much guaranteed to get a coupon for Hagan-Das... So basically, I seem to get coupons for what I bought that day, just never the right brands.:) Maybe they're just trying to get me to buy brands that they have a better margin on.
"I wouldn't want to trust my life to remembering that the convex side is the side that could kill me."
It's not that hard to remember really. My drill sergeant back in '87 told us to think of the Claymore as a belt buckle (must have been a Texan). You wouldn't wear the buckle with the convex side towards you. Not a bad little memory device since I remember it 17 years later. It also works well when setting up a Claymore in low-light situations where you wouldn't want to depend on being able to read green letters on a green background.:)
"I haven't read any of the books yet. But a friend of mine highly recommends it. I'll probably go out and register for a library card (haven't needed to do that since grade school)."
I'll probably get flamed to hell for this one but... I loved the first book in the Riverworld series. It was a really cool idea that could have gone so far in so many different directions. As soon as I read it I went out and borrowed a copy of the next three books in the series from a friend. Man, that was probably the most disappointing series that I ever read, epecially after such a great start. The story just plods on and on and never seems to go anywhere. I gave up halfway through the third book, or was it the forth, whatever the next to the last one is. I've tried to pick up the story every couple of years thinking I'm just missing something but never get far. Reading through the reviews on Amazon I don't think I'm alone in this. The ratings for the series drop steadily down as you go along.
I can see why they wouldn't make a full mini-series of this. Great pilot episode, snooze through the rest.
Hey, a question for someone that actually finished the series, do they ever find out what the meaning of it all is?
"Tired arms I can deal with, its the crotch splinters which are the real problem."
Crotch splinters nothing, try poison oak on your privates.:)
This actually happened to a guy I went through Basic Training with back in the 80's. I don't know how he got it, I don't want to know. The poor bastard then had a severe reaction to the medication that they used to treat it. The rest of us graduated while he was in the hospital recovering. Some folks just can't win I guess.
"And I can't imagine what Survivor fans are going to do."
Simple, they can do what people do in my office (I don't watch it or get into the pools). One person actually watches the wretched show, then they come in on Friday morning and tell everyone else what happened so the pool can be updated. I think that's it's kind of funny that they can get 25 people into a pool for a show that only one or two actually watch.
I guess it depends on where you are in Wisconsin. I have to travel up to Elkhorn from Illinois quite a bit for work. I take Route 12 to get there (major four lane highway that leads eventually to Madison). Within a minute of crossing the border AT&T drops off completely. Not a weak signal, no signal at all for miles and miles. It pisses me off because I got AT&T specifically because of these trips and their coverage map says that they cover the entire route. Cingular, on the other hand, has a nice strong signal all the way up so I guess this is a good thing for me. I know from experience that AT&T will charge roaming if you use the Cingular network. I do get a good signal along the Chicago-Milwaukee-Green Bay route with AT&T. Anything more than a couple of miles west of Interstate 94 though sucks.
I'm sure they had some kind of 'cya' clause in their TOS, it's been a few years so I don't remember. Basically it wasn't worth fighting over for me. Whether they specifically had a 'terminate without warning' clause or not the damage was done. Since I don't make much money from the site it wasn't worth going to court over. The hosting was only costing me $20 a month. Plus, I was on a new host by the end of the week. So I basically voted with my checkbook. That's the nice thing about capitialism, if one company pisses me off I can easily switch to another. Of course now if I change hosts I contact the company ahead of time and let them know that I'm running a music site of songs that I hold the copywrite to and send them a copy if they request, so I consider it a cheap lesson.
I agree with you on this. I can take it one step further, I had on old host go in and totally erase my band's site back when the RIAA first started ramping up their attack on Napster. No phone call, no e-mail, no warning what-so-ever, the site just disappeared. Apparently they were afraid of being the next target so everyone that had any mp3's on their site was a pirate until proven otherwise. Once I sent them a fax of my copywrite I find out the damn fools didn't even have a backup of my site so I had to go back and re-upload everything. I wouldn't have minded so much because I keep a current version on my own computer but I'm on dialup so it took a couple of hours to recover. Needless to say I moved to a new host right quick.
GMC is now offering four-wheel steering on some of their trucks and they use parallel parking as an example in their commercial. When I was a kid I saw a cartoon that had a car that turned all four wheels perpendicular to the road and drove the car straight into the parking space. I can't remember which studio but I think it was meant as a gag on the "products of the future"-type shows. I still think that would be a neat idea.
I was just talking about this yesterday with my counterpart in another office. He told me that now that IE is going to block pop-ups that I should come back to the fold (I'm the only Mozilla user in the I.S. group). Nope, IE still doesn't have a "block images from this server" option to kill banner ads. About all I use IE for at work is for pages that don't work well with Mozilla, which includes our corporate intranet site, damn Frontpage.:) I don't use it home at all. What can I say, I was using Netscape long before I tried IE and have never seen a reason to switch.
You got lucky. I was traveling across country a few years ago with some friends and we stopped in Lincoln. The first hotel we came to had the vacancy sign lit so we tried to get a couple of rooms. Oh no, *they* didn't have any vacancys but their sister hotel across town did. The place turned out to be a regular roach hotel. Since then I never stop in Lincoln.:)
Rats, you got to it before I did. Bubba Ho-Tep was the first movie that came to mind when I read the subject. Not only the best movie that I've seen this year but the best I've seen in a long, long time. C'mon, Bruce Campbell playing an elderly Elvis, and making the role thought-provoking? How can you beat that? My only regret is that I didn't get into the theater in Chicago where Bruce made an appearance (all shows sold out before I could get there). I'm waiting (im)patiently for it to come out on DVD. Definately a must-have.
"Telemarketers dont try to hide, spammers do. Thats the difference."
Then explain to me why every telemarketing call I get shows up on my caller ID as a blocked or unknown number. I personally don't see a difference between telemarketers and spammers. They both rate high on the vermin scale to me.
I thought that I was the only one that this bothered. I've been noticing over the last couple of years that your basic drug commercial is a fly-over view of a dozen or so people that have apparently been cured by the new wonder drug being advertised but they never say anything about what the drug is or what it's supposed to do. Why on earth would I question my doctor about a pill that even the company that makes it won't take two seconds out of their precious commercial to tell me what it's for?
You'd be right and I wouldn't care if I only got the headers. Unfortunately about 95% of the bounce messages I've gotten contain the original attachment as well. Thank goodness I check that account on webmail so I didn't have to wait to download the messages over dial-up(stuck in the great broadband wasteland). It was easy to get rid of from my point of view because all I had to do was was go down the list and mark all the e-mails that were 100k for deletion and get rid of them. If I had to actually download each message over my dial-up account because some sysadmin decided to bounce the entire message I'd be seriously pissed.
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"if that need were gone, i don't see why males would need to be created at all".
To quote Tim Allen, "lawn care and vehicle maintenance".
"You have been playing with that goldarn Flight Simulator program, haven't you?"
:)
One small nit-pick. I've lived in the Chicago area all my life and have *never* heard anyone use the term "goldarn".
On the plus side, yes, there are many small airports in the area so I don't doubt your story. I don't know if he would have been able to fly the small plane directly into O'Hare but there is a small airport about a 15 minute drive from O'Hare.
There is a small commuter airline in Rockford that I've been seeing a lot of advertising for lately. I was looking into their prices for a flight to Las Vegas (the new home of my in-laws). I did the math and found that their ticket prices were just about the same price for me as a flight out of Milwaukee. Milwaukee is much easier for me to get to so I couldn't justify driving the round-about way to Rockford. I'd like to give them a try one of these days though just to see how a small airline compares.
Back when I was in the service we had a new LT come into the unit. At the morning formation they announced the addition of LT. Dick. The whole company lost it. He had his last name legally changed to Dickson. Unfortunately I ended up working for him for about a year and a half and yes, he did live up to his original name. He was a complete wanker with zero people skills.
I have to agree about caffine being addictive. In my own personal case I've found it to be more-so than alcohol.
:) Before someone nails me about paying for what comes free out of the tap, yes I am paying for water but it's quite a bit cheaper than what I've been paying for soda and our tap water is horrible. I've even tried the Pur filters. They don't last too long around here.
Back in the day when I was young, dumb, and full of you know what the guys and I would hit the bar two or three times a week (playing in a rock band you know). We drank a lot of beer and Rum and Cokes in those days. Towards the end of the era I started to taper off. Cut the Rum and Cokes, stick to beer. Down to have a beer, have a glass of water. Then to no beer after midnight. Down to no beer at all. After that I went about four years without touching the stuff. Now I will have an occasional beer with dinner or whatever, no big deal.
Caffine on the other hand, I've been trying to quit for about five years now. I get down to the "no Pepsi" point and last for maybe four or five weeks. Then I will be at work and feeling tired. "Oh, one won't kill me". Within a couple of weeks I'm back up to where I was. (sigh).
The nice thing is a few weeks ago I signed up with a water delivery service. Quite an incentive to drink water instead of soda when you have to go through two 5 gallon bottles of water before they drop off more.
On the plus side, I've dropped a few pounds and am as regular as a clock. Here's to hoping that this time is the one.
Because I see this as nothing but a big PR ploy by SBC. They put their name on a stadium and give everyone free wireless access (for the first year) but as usual, their normal, everyday customers, and I am a customer for phone service, get squat. It's like the commercial I mentioned. A big hurray for how they supposedly work hard to bring us the latest and greatest technology but in the real world they don't really perform.
Really, all they are doing is upping the scale on something every coffeehouse, library, and mall in this area has been doing for a couple of years, giving (selling) wireless access in their location.
I guess it's nice if you live near the park and run wireless. How I wish that SBC would move their ass so that I could get DSL though. When I moved into my current house four years ago Ameritech (which got taken over by SBC) told me that all the hardware was in place and was being tested and I could expect DSL in my area within a couple of months. Four years later and as of Monday, no DSL. My town's government got sick of answering questions so they sent out a flyer basically saying that yes, the hardware is there but SBC is in a pissing contest with the feds about who gets to co-locate so they refuse to turn the system up. It's funny, in the Chicago area where I live SBC's new ad campaign shows them starting to lay fiber back in the '80's and how broadband is all over the area. I guess they're trying to show how ahead of the game there were back in the day. Here I am, 30 miles north of the city and no DSL. I have to laugh whenever the commercial comes on. :)
I ran into a similar problem a few months ago. I had a user that had Windows crash while he was in a document. After that he couldn't open the document. We tried copying it to another Windows computer and opening it in that computer's copy of Word. No luck. Finally, on a lark I took it home and tried opening it on my Linux box. OO opened it with no problems. I resaved the doc and he was able to open it again on his computer in Word.
I think that the store I shop at gives coupons based on what you buy at that time. I've never gotten anything on a receipt/coupon that I can match to something I bought in the past. Their system seems to need some tweaking though. When I go shopping I usually get coupons for the competitors of what brands I buy. For example, if I am shopping for laundry detergent I always buy the 'free' version of All (unscented, no dyes added) because both my wife and I have allergy problems with the scented stuff. I don't know how many times I've gotten coupons for Tide detergent in whatever obnoxious scent they're pushing that week. I can also buy the store-brand of ice cream and be pretty much guaranteed to get a coupon for Hagan-Das... So basically, I seem to get coupons for what I bought that day, just never the right brands. :) Maybe they're just trying to get me to buy brands that they have a better margin on.
"I wouldn't want to trust my life to remembering that the convex side is the side that could kill me."
:)
It's not that hard to remember really. My drill sergeant back in '87 told us to think of the Claymore as a belt buckle (must have been a Texan). You wouldn't wear the buckle with the convex side towards you. Not a bad little memory device since I remember it 17 years later. It also works well when setting up a Claymore in low-light situations where you wouldn't want to depend on being able to read green letters on a green background.
"I haven't read any of the books yet. But a friend of mine highly recommends it. I'll probably go out and register for a library card (haven't needed to do that since grade school)."
I'll probably get flamed to hell for this one but... I loved the first book in the Riverworld series. It was a really cool idea that could have gone so far in so many different directions. As soon as I read it I went out and borrowed a copy of the next three books in the series from a friend. Man, that was probably the most disappointing series that I ever read, epecially after such a great start. The story just plods on and on and never seems to go anywhere. I gave up halfway through the third book, or was it the forth, whatever the next to the last one is. I've tried to pick up the story every couple of years thinking I'm just missing something but never get far. Reading through the reviews on Amazon I don't think I'm alone in this. The ratings for the series drop steadily down as you go along.
I can see why they wouldn't make a full mini-series of this. Great pilot episode, snooze through the rest.
Hey, a question for someone that actually finished the series, do they ever find out what the meaning of it all is?
"Tired arms I can deal with, its the crotch splinters which are the real problem."
:)
Crotch splinters nothing, try poison oak on your privates.
This actually happened to a guy I went through Basic Training with back in the 80's. I don't know how he got it, I don't want to know. The poor bastard then had a severe reaction to the medication that they used to treat it. The rest of us graduated while he was in the hospital recovering. Some folks just can't win I guess.
"And I can't imagine what Survivor fans are going to do."
Simple, they can do what people do in my office (I don't watch it or get into the pools). One person actually watches the wretched show, then they come in on Friday morning and tell everyone else what happened so the pool can be updated. I think that's it's kind of funny that they can get 25 people into a pool for a show that only one or two actually watch.
"But they're very sharp scissors".
No, 668 would be the neighbor of the beast. 667 would be the guy across the hall. :)
I guess it depends on where you are in Wisconsin. I have to travel up to Elkhorn from Illinois quite a bit for work. I take Route 12 to get there (major four lane highway that leads eventually to Madison). Within a minute of crossing the border AT&T drops off completely. Not a weak signal, no signal at all for miles and miles. It pisses me off because I got AT&T specifically because of these trips and their coverage map says that they cover the entire route. Cingular, on the other hand, has a nice strong signal all the way up so I guess this is a good thing for me. I know from experience that AT&T will charge roaming if you use the Cingular network. I do get a good signal along the Chicago-Milwaukee-Green Bay route with AT&T. Anything more than a couple of miles west of Interstate 94 though sucks.
I'm sure they had some kind of 'cya' clause in their TOS, it's been a few years so I don't remember. Basically it wasn't worth fighting over for me. Whether they specifically had a 'terminate without warning' clause or not the damage was done. Since I don't make much money from the site it wasn't worth going to court over. The hosting was only costing me $20 a month. Plus, I was on a new host by the end of the week. So I basically voted with my checkbook. That's the nice thing about capitialism, if one company pisses me off I can easily switch to another. Of course now if I change hosts I contact the company ahead of time and let them know that I'm running a music site of songs that I hold the copywrite to and send them a copy if they request, so I consider it a cheap lesson.
I agree with you on this. I can take it one step further, I had on old host go in and totally erase my band's site back when the RIAA first started ramping up their attack on Napster. No phone call, no e-mail, no warning what-so-ever, the site just disappeared. Apparently they were afraid of being the next target so everyone that had any mp3's on their site was a pirate until proven otherwise. Once I sent them a fax of my copywrite I find out the damn fools didn't even have a backup of my site so I had to go back and re-upload everything. I wouldn't have minded so much because I keep a current version on my own computer but I'm on dialup so it took a couple of hours to recover. Needless to say I moved to a new host right quick.
That's the one I was thinking about. Thanks for the link, sure brings back memories from when I was a kid.
GMC is now offering four-wheel steering on some of their trucks and they use parallel parking as an example in their commercial. When I was a kid I saw a cartoon that had a car that turned all four wheels perpendicular to the road and drove the car straight into the parking space. I can't remember which studio but I think it was meant as a gag on the "products of the future"-type shows. I still think that would be a neat idea.
I was just talking about this yesterday with my counterpart in another office. He told me that now that IE is going to block pop-ups that I should come back to the fold (I'm the only Mozilla user in the I.S. group). Nope, IE still doesn't have a "block images from this server" option to kill banner ads. About all I use IE for at work is for pages that don't work well with Mozilla, which includes our corporate intranet site, damn Frontpage. :) I don't use it home at all. What can I say, I was using Netscape long before I tried IE and have never seen a reason to switch.
You got lucky. I was traveling across country a few years ago with some friends and we stopped in Lincoln. The first hotel we came to had the vacancy sign lit so we tried to get a couple of rooms. Oh no, *they* didn't have any vacancys but their sister hotel across town did. The place turned out to be a regular roach hotel. Since then I never stop in Lincoln. :)
Rats, you got to it before I did. Bubba Ho-Tep was the first movie that came to mind when I read the subject. Not only the best movie that I've seen this year but the best I've seen in a long, long time. C'mon, Bruce Campbell playing an elderly Elvis, and making the role thought-provoking? How can you beat that? My only regret is that I didn't get into the theater in Chicago where Bruce made an appearance (all shows sold out before I could get there). I'm waiting (im)patiently for it to come out on DVD. Definately a must-have.
"Telemarketers dont try to hide, spammers do. Thats the difference."
Then explain to me why every telemarketing call I get shows up on my caller ID as a blocked or unknown number. I personally don't see a difference between telemarketers and spammers. They both rate high on the vermin scale to me.
I thought that I was the only one that this bothered. I've been noticing over the last couple of years that your basic drug commercial is a fly-over view of a dozen or so people that have apparently been cured by the new wonder drug being advertised but they never say anything about what the drug is or what it's supposed to do. Why on earth would I question my doctor about a pill that even the company that makes it won't take two seconds out of their precious commercial to tell me what it's for?
You'd be right and I wouldn't care if I only got the headers. Unfortunately about 95% of the bounce messages I've gotten contain the original attachment as well. Thank goodness I check that account on webmail so I didn't have to wait to download the messages over dial-up(stuck in the great broadband wasteland). It was easy to get rid of from my point of view because all I had to do was was go down the list and mark all the e-mails that were 100k for deletion and get rid of them. If I had to actually download each message over my dial-up account because some sysadmin decided to bounce the entire message I'd be seriously pissed.