Personally I like the fact that in my small town in Virginia, I am able to go into many of the new stores and get either free wireless or very, very low cost wireless. As efficient as our state government is, I wouldn't trust the government for my internet access.
And it's because you live in a small town in Virginia that you can get away with it. That'd never work in Philadelphia. This city is too big, with too much red tape.
Speaking as a Philadelphia business owner, I can state with authority that Philadelphia is a very small-business unfriendly city. Wage taxes here are nigh well insane (4%!!), zoning and permit authorities can best be described as byzantine, and god help you if you employ contractors outside the unions.
Sure, Philadelphia could offer a tax rebate in exchange for providing community wireless. The application process would take more than a year, and the application fee would cost more than 5 years in taxes, BEFORE you finished paying your lawer, or bribing the appropriate officials in city hall.
At the very least, generally, when the city gets around to doing something itself, it gets at least partially done. Often shoddily, and incompletely done, but usually quicker than a private or community based initiative could.
What I'm saying is, if you are sharing a complete file of something on some P2P network, you have full access to that complete file and are therefore responsible for its content. If you are sharing random parts of some file on BT and have no way to inspect what the full file is, it would seem to me that you could not be held liable.
But the torren't file itself should be enough to show intent. I mean, one doesn't open a torrent without the intent to get the file that the torrent is indexing, right?
I've found that over time, the battery contacts on my jukebox recorder break either at the contact itself, or at the solder point behind the contact.
This might be because I keep several sets of NIMH AA batteries, and change them out in my Archos on a regular basis. The design isn't really conductive to frequent battery changes.
If you don't change your batteries frequently, sometimes this can be fixed by giving the unit a good squeeze along the axis the batteries are oriented by.
If you do change the batteries regularly, it might be better to disassemble the unit and check for broken spring contacts or cold solder joints.
It "can be used" to stalk fourteen-year old girls in short skirts.
Heh. Gotta do something to keep those boring shifts interesting. But we've already got plenty of cam-grils out there on the net.
I have to wonder really, how many slashdotters would feel more at ease if these feeds were available as webcams on the net.
From what I'm told, the inner harbor is an interesting place, both day and night, and if they had these cameras up for view by the public, I'd tune in every now and then.
Dragonfly has improved since the fall '03 term. Sonce they got around to enforcing wep, all those silly authentication issues us poor windows users were experiencing disappeared.
Only kills 1% of people. But accidents sure do shoot insurance rates up. Not to mention all the traffic tieups that come with people "rubbernecking" accident sites as they call it up here.
Now what I'd like to see would be an insurance discount for one of these units. I wouldn't mind forking out three times the quoted $500 cost, if I could get a 10% discont on my insurance.
Oh hell, who am I kidding? I'm far from the safest driver myself. I'll probably make back that $1500 and then some in body repairs.:-)
I'm doing physics right now, with a her for a prof.
She didn't write the text.
And she told us specifically that we didn't need the newest edition of the text, and that if we had the previous edition, or could get it, to simply find a way to copy the assigned problems out of a newer text.
She also manages to keep down the amount of time we spend on extraneous derivations of equations that we'd just end up memorizing anyway.
As for the campus book store... Well, It's now 4 weeks into the term (Which is only 10 weeks to begin with here at Drexel!) and we just now got our Japanese text books in.
But at least we got those. As if that's not enough, the campus bookstore, (Now run by B&N) deided that they weren't even going to ORDER the physics lab manual. They have the text books in, but the lab manual, which is a work book with datasheets and the like, (the kind of thing you CAN'T sell back used) which you really can't get by without having, they were simply not going to order.
Again, mad props to the prof. She managed to get a copy for each lab section, and smiled and nodded when a few of us skipped a lecture to do some copyright infringement.
>>Taking this one step further like the author suggests, I can envision some wacky japanese game where you get to play a sexual predator. The goal of the game is to prey on women and neighbourhood children. Getting extra points for doing things like luring kids with candy or the promise of toys, and performing date rapes on unsuspecting college girls.
I'm pretty sure the SAG would argue with you on that point.
Granted, you don't have to been seen when you're doing voice work, but (ESPECIALLY FOR ANIME) the types of roles you end up playing and the action so f the characters vary wildly when compared to "traditonal" acting. IMHO, you do a disservice to Dub voice actors by insinuating that they all do a lesser job than thier japanese counterparts.
Noone else has mentioned it yet, but if you have the cash, and regardless of what other method you choose to re-archive your tapes, purchase a time base corrector!
It'll really help clean up the audio synch for some of those older tapes with less than perfect quality.
I do video transfers to DVD ($20/hr of footage, 4 Chapter stops, post processing and cleanup extra, but I work cheap!), and most often my customers will bring me these truly ancient VHS tapes. (I consider myself lucky when I get SVHS, and I could probably count on one hand the number of times I was able to sucessfully track down a master...)
Prior to investing in a TBC, I'd often find myself having to recapture some areas of tape again and again to get a decent Synch between the audio and the video. I'd end up with foreign film effect, where the mouth movements didn't synch with the audio.
Now, while the quality of the video isn't noticeably better, I do save myself a lot of editing time, getting everything to synch up. For me, time is money. Assuming you're not getting paid for it, time is liesure, (or if these are home videos as I suspect, and you're a family man, time is family time) and even more important. Unless your original videos are in exceedingly good shape, a TBC at even minimum wage rates should pay for itself in time and effort.
Thankfully, here in PA, Guns are neither difficult, nor terribly expensive to obtain.
I live in a nice suburb of Philadelphia. (Yeah, yeah, I know what you're thinking. Ain't no such thing as a NICE suburb of Philadelphia.)
I belong to a mostly minority church. We moved our congregation out of the city in 1992, in an attempt to keep ourselves safe. Our old location in the city was in a neighborhood that had been rapidly declining. The old church had been broken into multiple times. We've never been a rich congregation. We've never had much of value, other than our friends and faith and our lives, and that's fine with me.
Still, prudence demanded that we do our best to AVOID trouble. So we packed our bags, and moved into Aston, PA. A nice neighborhood. Property values had a mean average of $120,000, taxes were reasonable, and the new location had a nice, big parking lot too. Seemed like a dream come true.
Last summer, someone burned our church to the ground.
It's memorable to me for a number of reasons. I had just that night, installed a new Laser Printer in the office in the chapel. One of the brothers had stayed later to print out some forms and, I guess we were just lucky he was still awake, to wake up the other five people who were sleeping there that night, and get them out, just seconds before the roof collapsed.
We'd had some minor problems with some neighbors before. Tire spikings, a bit of graffiti.
I was a bit put out by the dead rabbit that someone left in the foyer, but I tried not to let it get me down.
We'd even asked the township to let us put up a small fence, to keep our property safe from tresspassers. The small manufacturing concern down the street has the monster of a 12 foot fence, with BARBED WIRE on top.
All we wanted was a nice little wooden fence, to keep out the occasionaly miscreant. Of course the AUTHORITIES denied our request.
So the cops shoulda been there to protect us. Everybody just trust the police, they'll keep us safe, right?
The cops did NOTHING to help us. They took a few reports, smiled, drove away, and did NOTHING else.
They did nothing when I had rocks and bottles thrown at me while I was guarding.
I've been an on-again off-again martial arts student for 12 years. Dad always said that I'd have to depend on ME to keep ME safe. I've been in more fights than I can count, mostly instigated by others, and I'll grant that i've not got the best of tempers.
Not once, NOT ONCE has anyone in a position of "Authority" ever deigned to help me preserve my own personal safety. NOT ONCE.
When Iw as in grade school, and high school, I got it from boths sides. The black students didn't particularly like me. The white students definately didn't like me. The administration's solution to me defending myself against pysical harm? Call home and tell my mother, "Come and pick up your son. Half the school is sreaming for blood, and we can't keep him safe." Thanks ever so much.
A little old grandmother in a bad part of Trenton is afraid the cops won't show up in time? I live in a NICE neighborhood. The kind where people don't worry about thier homes being broken into. Where kids can safely play at the park. Where you'll still see joggers out after dark.
Damned if *I* can bring myself to trust that the cops will show up to protect me.
Damned if I want to trust anyone other than ME to keep ME safe.
Maybe I'm weak for owning a gun.
I mean, logically speaking, a gun can't stop someone from burning down a church if I'm not there to shoot them.
It can't stop bad men with box cutters from dropping a plane on the city of thier choice.
It's not likely that it'd stop a sniper hiding in a car trunk from shooting me in the chest with a high powered rifle.
It's hard enough trying to do the right thing, the safe thing, and keep my gun unloaded. I bought myself this $400 revolver, because I wanted something that would just plain work. Service via simplicity, the same reason that I didn't buy an automatic. I want my gun to work if I need it. I'll have enough trouble fumbling my bullets into the cylinder. Don't need to be grabbing for some sort of smart key too. I especially don't need to have my gun refuse to fire because of ELECTRONIC failure. There's enough danger inherent in the PHYSICAL things that can keep a gun from firing.
It's not reassuring. And assurance is most of the reason I bought my gun.
For 6 months in 2001, I slept with a Tarus.357 Mag snub nosed revolver on my bedstand, and a 5 shot speed loader under my pillow.
None of the techniques set out on this webpage will help you if the problem was caused by bad source material, or bad encoding, but they're worth a try.
Re:First they came for the Indians...
on
Shop Till It Drops
·
· Score: 1
Having worked for Wawa Corporate (At Red Roof in Media PA, for those in the know), I can tell you that they have an entire group devoted to developing the "Conveinence Store of the Future". I'd imagine that most of the bigger chains (7-11, Sheets, etc) do as well.
You'd be surprised at the things they've been considering. At home ordering, where your goods were bagged up and ready for you on arrival, with monthly billing.
Smart Card style payment tracking was one of thier things too. Thei idea being you'd sign up for an account, and using some technology similar to the sticker style anti-shoplifting security tags, the machine would total and bill your account accordingly, without you having to interact with a cashier at all.
On the vending machines however, the reaction is mixed. On the one hand, you have the chance to eliminate the labor costs entirely. On the other hand, you lose almost all of your capacity for add on and impulse sales.
When you buy a pack of gum, or a bag of chips for a vending machine it's because you wanted them.
When you buy a pack of gum, or a bag of chips at the Wawa, you probably bought them while you went in to get cash at the ATM, or while you stopped in to get something to drink, or the like.
Off Topic: As far as I'm concerned, regarding the previouos topic of stuff to drink to keep awake... For those in Philly and surrounding suburbs, nothing beats a pair of 1 litre Wawa Peached Iced Tea.
Incidentally, the backoffice functions of a conveinence store are often more interesting that you might imagine.
While I was still working there, Wawa had a mixed environment of several dozen NT Servers, and maybe half a dozen Big Vaxen at the corporate end. Almost all of the stores themselves had ISDN lines (2 B-Channels) and ran Citrix to get to the financials apps, and Exchange for interoffice comms. Wawa was surprisingly good at cutting down the amount of actual "paper" paperwork.
For that matter, while we're on the topic of automated systems that grab items and deposit them, the Wawa distribution system for loading the trucks was amazing.
Imagine a large picker style crane that would grab pallets from a huge cube like grid of prepacked pallets, would bring it down, rotate it, and load it on one of 20 trucks sitting in the loading dock.
Almost completely automated, with only 4 people up in the control tower, monitoring the crane for problems.
All in all, it was a company that was surprisingly with the times, and I was sorry to see my tenure there end.
The same Article Text and a better picture of the monstrous bugger can be found Here. Scary lil bastard eh?
Can't find much out there on the actual habits of the lil bugger. I user a vermicomposter with redworms to reprocess kitchen vegetable waste for the garden. Anyone know how well these little(?!?) monsters eat? Be interesting to toss one in a bin, and see how it does.
Not that it's topical, but I use the extra large, high contrast theme under win98 on the PC I've got hooked up to my TV to play divx anime fansubs and the like.
With the rez being so bad on my card (a sis 6326m which only outputs at 640x480 to Tv...), nothing else is readable due to blur. On the positive side, with the inherent blurring of a TV, atrifacts in the video are much less noticable.:)
Sounds like your friend has about the right idea...
For those of you who haven't already shot your credit to hell, and who haven't racked up $2500/Month in fixed expenses, this is the perfect time to go back and get your degree.
Heck, Alan Greenspan tried to get us to borrow more money by lowing the interest rate what, like 11 times last year?
For those of us in the U.S., the prime rate is at lowest it has been at in almost a decade. If you're gonna drown in debt to get a degree, ya might as well do it while the interest isn't back breaking.
Re:Keep your chin up, make your own path
on
The Laid-off Techie
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Any chance you could share some of your sources for self purchased insurance?
I'm sure there are a ton of struggling slashdotters who'd love to know where to get reasonably priced health insurance.
Slashdot Mirror
And it's because you live in a small town in Virginia that you can get away with it. That'd never work in Philadelphia. This city is too big, with too much red tape.
Speaking as a Philadelphia business owner, I can state with authority that Philadelphia is a very small-business unfriendly city. Wage taxes here are nigh well insane (4%!!), zoning and permit authorities can best be described as byzantine, and god help you if you employ contractors outside the unions.
Sure, Philadelphia could offer a tax rebate in exchange for providing community wireless. The application process would take more than a year, and the application fee would cost more than 5 years in taxes, BEFORE you finished paying your lawer, or bribing the appropriate officials in city hall.
At the very least, generally, when the city gets around to doing something itself, it gets at least partially done. Often shoddily, and incompletely done, but usually quicker than a private or community based initiative could.
Parchive is your friend.
But the torren't file itself should be enough to show intent. I mean, one doesn't open a torrent without the intent to get the file that the torrent is indexing, right?
I've found that over time, the battery contacts on my jukebox recorder break either at the contact itself, or at the solder point behind the contact.
This might be because I keep several sets of NIMH AA batteries, and change them out in my Archos on a regular basis. The design isn't really conductive to frequent battery changes.
If you don't change your batteries frequently, sometimes this can be fixed by giving the unit a good squeeze along the axis the batteries are oriented by.
If you do change the batteries regularly, it might be better to disassemble the unit and check for broken spring contacts or cold solder joints.
It "can be used" to stalk fourteen-year old girls in short skirts.
Heh. Gotta do something to keep those boring shifts interesting.
But we've already got plenty of cam-grils out there on the net.
I have to wonder really, how many slashdotters would feel more at ease if these feeds were available as webcams on the net.
From what I'm told, the inner harbor is an interesting place, both day and night, and if they had these cameras up for view by the public, I'd tune in every now and then.
Hello?? Crest of the Stars anyone?
Dragonfly has improved since the fall '03 term. Sonce they got around to enforcing wep, all those silly authentication issues us poor windows users were experiencing disappeared.
...or get mugged for it while listening toyour white earbuds... :-)
Only kills 1% of people. But accidents sure do shoot insurance rates up. Not to mention all the traffic tieups that come with people "rubbernecking" accident sites as they call it up here.
:-)
Now what I'd like to see would be an insurance discount for one of these units. I wouldn't mind forking out three times the quoted $500 cost, if I could get a 10% discont on my insurance.
Oh hell, who am I kidding? I'm far from the safest driver myself. I'll probably make back that $1500 and then some in body repairs.
I'm doing physics right now, with a her for a prof.
:-)
She didn't write the text.
And she told us specifically that we didn't need the newest edition of the text, and that if we had the previous edition, or could get it, to simply find a way to copy the assigned problems out of a newer text.
She also manages to keep down the amount of time we spend on extraneous derivations of equations that we'd just end up memorizing anyway.
As for the campus book store... Well, It's now 4 weeks into the term (Which is only 10 weeks to begin with here at Drexel!) and we just now got our Japanese text books in.
But at least we got those. As if that's not enough, the campus bookstore, (Now run by B&N) deided that they weren't even going to ORDER the physics lab manual. They have the text books in, but the lab manual, which is a work book with datasheets and the like, (the kind of thing you CAN'T sell back used) which you really can't get by without having, they were simply not going to order.
Again, mad props to the prof. She managed to get a copy for each lab section, and smiled and nodded when a few of us skipped a lecture to do some copyright infringement.
I wonder if she's married?
>>Taking this one step further like the author suggests, I can envision some wacky japanese game where you get to play a sexual predator. The goal of the game is to prey on women and neighbourhood children. Getting extra points for doing things like luring kids with candy or the promise of toys, and performing date rapes on unsuspecting college girls.
Congratulations! You just described Interact Play VR.
So all of a sudden, voice acting isn't "Acting"?
I'm pretty sure the SAG would argue with you on that point.
Granted, you don't have to been seen when you're doing voice work, but (ESPECIALLY FOR ANIME) the types of roles you end up playing and the action so f the characters vary wildly when compared to "traditonal" acting. IMHO, you do a disservice to Dub voice actors by insinuating that they all do a lesser job than thier japanese counterparts.
I know y'all seem to be joking, but for those interested in the subject, here's a link to the Art Materials Faq from rec.arts.anime.misc.
:-)
You'd be surprised what a large variance there is from archival quality acid free paper, to the junk you can buy at the drug store.
But we've already got that! And slashdot is nothing like shakespear!
Noone else has mentioned it yet, but if you have the cash, and regardless of what other method you choose to re-archive your tapes, purchase a time base corrector!
It'll really help clean up the audio synch for some of those older tapes with less than perfect quality.
I do video transfers to DVD ($20/hr of footage, 4 Chapter stops, post processing and cleanup extra, but I work cheap!), and most often my customers will bring me these truly ancient VHS tapes. (I consider myself lucky when I get SVHS, and I could probably count on one hand the number of times I was able to sucessfully track down a master...)
Prior to investing in a TBC, I'd often find myself having to recapture some areas of tape again and again to get a decent Synch between the audio and the video. I'd end up with foreign film effect, where the mouth movements didn't synch with the audio.
Now, while the quality of the video isn't noticeably better, I do save myself a lot of editing time, getting everything to synch up. For me, time is money. Assuming you're not getting paid for it, time is liesure, (or if these are home videos as I suspect, and you're a family man, time is family time) and even more important. Unless your original videos are in exceedingly good shape, a TBC at even minimum wage rates should pay for itself in time and effort.
Google search for TBCs
The female characters have much better/larger personalities
:-)
I think you misspelled breasts.
(Siqquote gratuitously stolen from another slashdotter. And yes, I am an anime/manga fan.)
Thankfully, here in PA, Guns are neither difficult, nor terribly expensive to obtain.
.357 Mag snub nosed revolver on my bedstand, and a 5 shot speed loader under my pillow.
I live in a nice suburb of Philadelphia. (Yeah, yeah, I know what you're thinking. Ain't no such thing as a NICE suburb of Philadelphia.)
I belong to a mostly minority church. We moved our congregation out of the city in 1992, in an attempt to keep ourselves safe. Our old location in the city was in a neighborhood that had been rapidly declining. The old church had been broken into multiple times. We've never been a rich congregation. We've never had much of value, other than our friends and faith and our lives, and that's fine with me.
Still, prudence demanded that we do our best to AVOID trouble. So we packed our bags, and moved into Aston, PA. A nice neighborhood. Property values had a mean average of $120,000, taxes were reasonable, and the new location had a nice, big parking lot too. Seemed like a dream come true.
Last summer, someone burned our church to the ground.
It's memorable to me for a number of reasons. I had just that night, installed a new Laser Printer in the office in the chapel. One of the brothers had stayed later to print out some forms and, I guess we were just lucky he was still awake, to wake up the other five people who were sleeping there that night, and get them out, just seconds before the roof collapsed.
We'd had some minor problems with some neighbors before. Tire spikings, a bit of graffiti.
I was a bit put out by the dead rabbit that someone left in the foyer, but I tried not to let it get me down.
We'd even asked the township to let us put up a small fence, to keep our property safe from tresspassers. The small manufacturing concern down the street has the monster of a 12 foot fence, with BARBED WIRE on top.
All we wanted was a nice little wooden fence, to keep out the occasionaly miscreant. Of course the AUTHORITIES denied our request.
So the cops shoulda been there to protect us. Everybody just trust the police, they'll keep us safe, right?
The cops did NOTHING to help us. They took a few reports, smiled, drove away, and did NOTHING else.
They did nothing when I had rocks and bottles thrown at me while I was guarding.
I've been an on-again off-again martial arts student for 12 years. Dad always said that I'd have to depend on ME to keep ME safe. I've been in more fights than I can count, mostly instigated by others, and I'll grant that i've not got the best of tempers.
Not once, NOT ONCE has anyone in a position of "Authority" ever deigned to help me preserve my own personal safety. NOT ONCE.
When Iw as in grade school, and high school, I got it from boths sides. The black students didn't particularly like me. The white students definately didn't like me. The administration's solution to me defending myself against pysical harm? Call home and tell my mother, "Come and pick up your son. Half the school is sreaming for blood, and we can't keep him safe." Thanks ever so much.
A little old grandmother in a bad part of Trenton is afraid the cops won't show up in time? I live in a NICE neighborhood. The kind where people don't worry about thier homes being broken into. Where kids can safely play at the park. Where you'll still see joggers out after dark.
Damned if *I* can bring myself to trust that the cops will show up to protect me.
Damned if I want to trust anyone other than ME to keep ME safe.
Maybe I'm weak for owning a gun.
I mean, logically speaking, a gun can't stop someone from burning down a church if I'm not there to shoot them.
It can't stop bad men with box cutters from dropping a plane on the city of thier choice.
It's not likely that it'd stop a sniper hiding in a car trunk from shooting me in the chest with a high powered rifle.
It's hard enough trying to do the right thing, the safe thing, and keep my gun unloaded. I bought myself this $400 revolver, because I wanted something that would just plain work. Service via simplicity, the same reason that I didn't buy an automatic. I want my gun to work if I need it. I'll have enough trouble fumbling my bullets into the cylinder. Don't need to be grabbing for some sort of smart key too. I especially don't need to have my gun refuse to fire because of ELECTRONIC failure. There's enough danger inherent in the PHYSICAL things that can keep a gun from firing.
It's not reassuring. And assurance is most of the reason I bought my gun.
For 6 months in 2001, I slept with a Tarus
Probably didn't make me any safer.
But at least I could sleep.
There's that saying...
Given 100 percent of any news program you get:
10% Human Interest
10% Weather
20% Sports
60% Tragedy
None of the techniques set out on this webpage will help you if the problem was caused by bad source material, or bad encoding, but they're worth a try.
Nicky's Pages' Digital Solutions
Having worked for Wawa Corporate (At Red Roof in Media PA, for those in the know), I can tell you that they have an entire group devoted to developing the "Conveinence Store of the Future". I'd imagine that most of the bigger chains (7-11, Sheets, etc) do as well.
You'd be surprised at the things they've been considering. At home ordering, where your goods were bagged up and ready for you on arrival, with monthly billing.
Smart Card style payment tracking was one of thier things too. Thei idea being you'd sign up for an account, and using some technology similar to the sticker style anti-shoplifting security tags, the machine would total and bill your account accordingly, without you having to interact with a cashier at all.
On the vending machines however, the reaction is mixed. On the one hand, you have the chance to eliminate the labor costs entirely. On the other hand, you lose almost all of your capacity for add on and impulse sales.
When you buy a pack of gum, or a bag of chips for a vending machine it's because you wanted them.
When you buy a pack of gum, or a bag of chips at the Wawa, you probably bought them while you went in to get cash at the ATM, or while you stopped in to get something to drink, or the like.
Off Topic: As far as I'm concerned, regarding the previouos topic of stuff to drink to keep awake... For those in Philly and surrounding suburbs, nothing beats a pair of 1 litre Wawa Peached Iced Tea.
Incidentally, the backoffice functions of a conveinence store are often more interesting that you might imagine.
While I was still working there, Wawa had a mixed environment of several dozen NT Servers, and maybe half a dozen Big Vaxen at the corporate end. Almost all of the stores themselves had ISDN lines (2 B-Channels) and ran Citrix to get to the financials apps, and Exchange for interoffice comms. Wawa was surprisingly good at cutting down the amount of actual "paper" paperwork.
For that matter, while we're on the topic of automated systems that grab items and deposit them, the Wawa distribution system for loading the trucks was amazing.
Imagine a large picker style crane that would grab pallets from a huge cube like grid of prepacked pallets, would bring it down, rotate it, and load it on one of 20 trucks sitting in the loading dock.
Almost completely automated, with only 4 people up in the control tower, monitoring the crane for problems.
All in all, it was a company that was surprisingly with the times, and I was sorry to see my tenure there end.
The species in question is Namalycastis Abiuma.
A picture can be found here.
The same Article Text and a better picture of the monstrous bugger can be found Here. Scary lil bastard eh?
Can't find much out there on the actual habits of the lil bugger. I user a vermicomposter with redworms to reprocess kitchen vegetable waste for the garden. Anyone know how well these little(?!?) monsters eat? Be interesting to toss one in a bin, and see how it does.
Ya know, some of us treasure that 1/2 to 1 hour spent commuting.
Granted, I do have to put up with some of the other stoopid drivers.
But them aside, that's a garunteed hour that I can be alone, in my comfy vehicle, left alone to my thoughts.
It's an hour where I can listen to whatever music or books I want.
It's an hour where I don't have to listen to anyone's requests, orders, demands, whining, or otherwise be disturbed.
It's an hour that's MINE. And while it's sometimes stressful thanks to traffic, I'll take it gladly.
Not that it's topical, but I use the extra large, high contrast theme under win98 on the PC I've got hooked up to my TV to play divx anime fansubs and the like.
:)
With the rez being so bad on my card (a sis 6326m which only outputs at 640x480 to Tv...), nothing else is readable due to blur. On the positive side, with the inherent blurring of a TV, atrifacts in the video are much less noticable.
Sounds like your friend has about the right idea...
For those of you who haven't already shot your credit to hell, and who haven't racked up $2500/Month in fixed expenses, this is the perfect time to go back and get your degree.
Heck, Alan Greenspan tried to get us to borrow more money by lowing the interest rate what, like 11 times last year?
For those of us in the U.S., the prime rate is at lowest it has been at in almost a decade. If you're gonna drown in debt to get a degree, ya might as well do it while the interest isn't back breaking.
Any chance you could share some of your sources for self purchased insurance?
I'm sure there are a ton of struggling slashdotters who'd love to know where to get reasonably priced health insurance.