We were together 12 years, perfectly happy and one night at a party she had a couple of drinks, kissed another girl and had an orgasm instantly.
She told me, a few days later, that she had never in her life felt lust before that instant, and that much as she loves me, she didn't want to live without that feeling.
How can I blame her for that?
Anyway, the total kick in the ass is that the woman my ex- finally hooked up with looks A LOT like me (overweight, pasty, geeky). I had never met her, but I attended their handfasting ceremony (which is a sort of pagan wedding-like ritual), and everyone was asking how I was related to the, er, bride. The other side effect is that my ex- remains about 95% closeted, so I was the only person from her old life who attended... along with about 20 women who fit every bad stereotype of "butch" you can think of, many of whom were actively hostile to my presence.
My point is, I don't know if women marrying women is something to joke about. The fact that my ex's true sexuality was so deeply buried she was almost 30 before she figured it out is a tragedy in and of itself, but so is the fact that I spent 12 years without ever realizing it either.
Much as I like to talk about porno there's no way I'd find a joke like that funny again. Girls who like girls don't really look like the ones on the internet, or in movies, and almost every coming-out story I've ever heard has involved a heterosexual partner getting hosed emotionally and psychologically. I certainly am.
Plasma monitors also burn in. In fact, it's a really stupid thing to do, to watch 4x3 content on a 16x9 plasma screen, or vice versa, since the black bars on the edges lead to burn in just as easily as any other static pictures.
My brother owns a plasma TV. Apparently the little logos TV stations put in the corner of the screen can do it, too.
LCDs burn in, too, sort of, but the LCD version of it goes away if you leave your display off for a week or so. The timeframe for LCD burn in is more like that for a CRT (several days/weeks). Plasma and projection CRTs both burn in VERY quickly (I've heard as little as 20 minutes).
While I'm at it, allow me to say something heretical, as someone who owns a 32" widescreen CRT: For everyday viewing, 4x3 is better.
Why?
I would've paid the same price for a 4x3 presentation monitor with the same horizontal measurement as my widescreen, and I would've gotten something like four more inches of viewable area in the vertical dimension. Since the horizontal area is the same, the total size of a 16x9 image is the same, but 4x3 content is A LOT bigger. And not distorted or surrounded by black bars.
I tested this out with my 4x3 projector and a tape measure.
Good IDE RAID is somewhat more expensive than that. It comes from a company called 3ware, and most of their products need 64bit PCI, something most PCs, even a lot of low-end servers, don't have.
The Constitution Party was at one time known as the US Taxpayer's Party.
Oddly, for a group with such a name, its primary function appears to be pursuit of extremely right-wing social goals (pro-gun, anti-choice, state's rights, anti-immigration and, bizarrely, a return to the gold standard).
Looking at their Year 2000 Party Platform, I'd say they're a "Racial Purity" plank away from being the Aryan Nation Party.
Y'know, I spend some time with 11 year olds occasionally, and they're far more aware of what "gay" is than you might think.
Between "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy", "Will and Grace" (admittedly shows 11-year-olds don't watch, but their parents do) and the odd chance at unfiltered web access, they do just fine in the human sexuality department.
I just replaced a 386 with 2MB of RAM and a 4GB SCSI hard disk with a 3.2GHz P4/256MB/40GB (it's what I had handy. Sue me.) to run a DOS 6 Clipper-based point-of-sale application that probably originated on an XT. The motherboard or CPU didn't survive a power failure.
I also have a couple 20MB Seagate SCSI drives that still work.... and I'm in regular contact with a customer who has a Netware 3 server with nearly 4000 days of uptime.
The myrealbox team informs prior to outage. It's been many, many times more reliable than my yahoo mailbox - the one I pay a bunch of money for - and even more steps above hotmail.
In ~3 years of using myrealbox, I've gotten four messages indicating that there will be an outage, a window of how long service will be down (two or four hours). I've never known my mailbox to be unavailable, other than that.
myrealbox allows access through the web and by POP3 and IMAP, for free.
I get *way* less spam through their service than through others that I use (crosswinds, yahoo etc).
Let's not say things we can't take back. The word "Good" presupposes a positive value judgement. It certainly doesn't belong in the same sentence with "The Matrix".
Maybe they'll give up on the postnatal abortion they call a "plot" and have 2 hours of Carrie-Anne Moss alternating between yoga stretching in tight leather pants and blowing stuff up.
Then we'd have something that's at least worth the cost of a rental.
Yeah. If I was watching it, and not recording it, that might be an issue. The speed at which data is transferred to the disc is absolutely irrelevant to speed at which it's played back.
In three years I'll remove the discs from my changer and transfer them to blue-laser DVD or HDDVD or whatever the hell the next format is, just like I did with my CDs of Divx.AVIs. In the meantime, I plan to buy a new changer every time I fill one up, so they'll be kept in pretty much ideal conditions (dry, no light etc).
My philosophy is that more spindles are almost always better, and the $110 160GB drive has a LOT of bang for the buck. When a case gets full, I start building another computer. Even with 400W PSUs, after the seventh or so hard drive, you really start to worry about how much you can cram into one case.
I'd strongly suggest that you re-think what you're doing a bit.
1. SATA is overpriced. 2. Other companies make cooler 5400rpm drives that are just dandy for media storage. I personally recommend Samsung drives. Someone will undoubtedly chime in that Samsung sux0rs, but I've had amazing luck with them, they're dirt cheap, cool, quiet and can be found in both 5400 and 7200rpm models, some with 8MB cache (though those don't match the performance of WD *SEs). 3. PATA 3ware controllers are cheap on ebay, if you're willing to debase yourself with 7x00-series models. 4. Most of the space you're talking about will probably end up being working space for DVD rips and temp files while you're doing video encoding. This stuff doesn't need to be part of a RAID5 array. It's largely replacable (hardware RAID5... doesn't perform well. Ever. Software RAID5 works pretty well but can bog your PC).
I have four machines each containing between five and ten drives (almost all Samsung 160GB drives in my case) in the 120GB - 250GB ballpark. Real storage is a little under 4TB. I use 3ware controllers whenever possible. I buy 'em off ebay for $80 or so, and they're well supported by everything. The boxes in question are 2GHz-class AMD machines with gigabit NICs (moving large files sucks otherwise). The PCs are probably worth about $1500 apiece. I have two Windows boxes with ATI All-in-Wonder cards that're more than capable of grabbing video and encoding it to nice, native 4000kbps MPEG2 that's very easy to export to a bunch of.VOB files.
Stuff that I really do want to keep gets encoded and burned to DVD. I keep as much as I can online - on the fileservers - because that stuff is easy to index and to access. The rest gets periodically deleted. I purposefully choose not to do divx encoding or anything similar. It takes too long.
For the rest, I have a pair of 400 disc Sony DVD changers. They're addressed as one unit, and in addition to being attached to my "main" receiver, I run the receiver's output to a A/V-to-cat5 distribution system to move everything up to a second receiver upstairs. I have in-wall wired controls for upstairs, and I keep an index of what's in the changers (I have another three CD changers of similar capactiy that run in a different series) in an easily-searchable Apache-mySQL application I can hit from basically any PC in my home (it's a VERY simple app. I'm lazy about that part of things and even more lazy about data entry. If I really wanted to I suppose I could hit CDDB but frankly, most of my stuff won't be in there).
Now, I'm going to say something, and it's going to sound stupid, but... this stuff really wasn't THAT expensive. I did the wiring and set up the A/V distribution myself. A receiver that can handle video isn't that expensive ($300 for the cheapest thing money can buy). No one instantly NEEDS a $350 400 disc DVD changer right away, but it's nice to have. And a single PC with around 1TB of disk space can be had for $1300 if you really want to bargain-hunt.
So for maybe $2000, you can get 1TB of disk space in an HTPC, a receiver that'll handle A/V distribution, and DVD Changer to handle the spillover. I don't think that's a bad deal at all.
Slashdot Mirror
Yup, this is OT. Fuck you. I modded myself down.
My ex- did that.
We were together 12 years, perfectly happy and one night at a party she had a couple of drinks, kissed another girl and had an orgasm instantly.
She told me, a few days later, that she had never in her life felt lust before that instant, and that much as she loves me, she didn't want to live without that feeling.
How can I blame her for that?
Anyway, the total kick in the ass is that the woman my ex- finally hooked up with looks A LOT like me (overweight, pasty, geeky). I had never met her, but I attended their handfasting ceremony (which is a sort of pagan wedding-like ritual), and everyone was asking how I was related to the, er, bride. The other side effect is that my ex- remains about 95% closeted, so I was the only person from her old life who attended... along with about 20 women who fit every bad stereotype of "butch" you can think of, many of whom were actively hostile to my presence.
My point is, I don't know if women marrying women is something to joke about. The fact that my ex's true sexuality was so deeply buried she was almost 30 before she figured it out is a tragedy in and of itself, but so is the fact that I spent 12 years without ever realizing it either.
Much as I like to talk about porno there's no way I'd find a joke like that funny again. Girls who like girls don't really look like the ones on the internet, or in movies, and almost every coming-out story I've ever heard has involved a heterosexual partner getting hosed emotionally and psychologically. I certainly am.
Plasma monitors also burn in. In fact, it's a really stupid thing to do, to watch 4x3 content on a 16x9 plasma screen, or vice versa, since the black bars on the edges lead to burn in just as easily as any other static pictures.
My brother owns a plasma TV. Apparently the little logos TV stations put in the corner of the screen can do it, too.
LCDs burn in, too, sort of, but the LCD version of it goes away if you leave your display off for a week or so. The timeframe for LCD burn in is more like that for a CRT (several days/weeks). Plasma and projection CRTs both burn in VERY quickly (I've heard as little as 20 minutes).
While I'm at it, allow me to say something heretical, as someone who owns a 32" widescreen CRT: For everyday viewing, 4x3 is better.
Why?
I would've paid the same price for a 4x3 presentation monitor with the same horizontal measurement as my widescreen, and I would've gotten something like four more inches of viewable area in the vertical dimension. Since the horizontal area is the same, the total size of a 16x9 image is the same, but 4x3 content is A LOT bigger. And not distorted or surrounded by black bars.
I tested this out with my 4x3 projector and a tape measure.
Hope that Helps.
King of the Hill is justification for giving Texas back to Mexico.
As if George Bush isn't a good enough reason.
It has been my observation that geeks tend to be VERY responsive to their SO's needs.
The problem is getting SO-type invdividuals to consider geeks as partner-type material to begin with.
Good IDE RAID is somewhat more expensive than that. It comes from a company called 3ware, and most of their products need 64bit PCI, something most PCs, even a lot of low-end servers, don't have.
I'd be happy if it had more than a smattering of Western Classical Music. It doesn't. It has virtually none, in point of fact.
All the for-pay services are a total letdown if you aren't into some form of popular music.
The Constitution Party was at one time known as the US Taxpayer's Party.
Oddly, for a group with such a name, its primary function appears to be pursuit of extremely right-wing social goals (pro-gun, anti-choice, state's rights, anti-immigration and, bizarrely, a return to the gold standard).
Looking at their Year 2000 Party Platform, I'd say they're a "Racial Purity" plank away from being the Aryan Nation Party.
Y'know, I spend some time with 11 year olds occasionally, and they're far more aware of what "gay" is than you might think.
Between "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy", "Will and Grace" (admittedly shows 11-year-olds don't watch, but their parents do) and the odd chance at unfiltered web access, they do just fine in the human sexuality department.
I just replaced a 386 with 2MB of RAM and a 4GB SCSI hard disk with a 3.2GHz P4/256MB/40GB (it's what I had handy. Sue me.) to run a DOS 6 Clipper-based point-of-sale application that probably originated on an XT. The motherboard or CPU didn't survive a power failure.
... and I'm in regular contact with a customer who has a Netware 3 server with nearly 4000 days of uptime.
The oldest hardware I still use is a Honeywell Footed Mouse.
It's probably 12 or 13 years old.
I also have a couple 20MB Seagate SCSI drives that still work.
You must like drives with one-year warranties.
Current Warranty Policies, all Manufacturers, Desktop drives
Hitachi
Deskstar: 1 year
Deskstar w/8MB cache: 3 years
Travelstar: 3 years
Maxtor
Diamondmax+ > 100GB: 3 years
Maxline (5400rpm, 250GB+): 3 years
Everything else: 1 year
Seagate
All retail drives: 1 year
All OEM drive (IDE or SATA): 1 year
160GB SATA Barracuda V: 3 years
Samsung
All drives: 3 years
WD
All OEM and retail drives: 1 year
OEM *SE (8MB cache): 3 years (i.e. the ones at the store have a 1 year warranty)
Raptor (OEM or retail): 5 years
Easy:
.doc extension. Email. The recruiter will never know the difference.
Create a resume in HTML. Rename it to have a
That comment imples that I've stopped at some point, which is emphatically not the case.
:)
4.1 million images and counting.
You've obviously never tried it on a directory with 200,000 images in it.
The myrealbox team informs prior to outage. It's been many, many times more reliable than my yahoo mailbox - the one I pay a bunch of money for - and even more steps above hotmail.
In ~3 years of using myrealbox, I've gotten four messages indicating that there will be an outage, a window of how long service will be down (two or four hours). I've never known my mailbox to be unavailable, other than that.
myrealbox allows access through the web and by POP3 and IMAP, for free.
I get *way* less spam through their service than through others that I use (crosswinds, yahoo etc).
In short, it's a very good service.
What's really disturbing is the sheer number of search results I get from "Anal Golf".
Those are two words that, taken as a phrase, boggle my mind. Let's talk about weird mental images...
Let's not say things we can't take back. The word "Good" presupposes a positive value judgement. It certainly doesn't belong in the same sentence with "The Matrix".
Maybe they'll give up on the postnatal abortion they call a "plot" and have 2 hours of Carrie-Anne Moss alternating between yoga stretching in tight leather pants and blowing stuff up.
Then we'd have something that's at least worth the cost of a rental.
That's what it looks like to me, too.
Of course, I really can't imagine playing a (real, PC-style) RPG on a console system anyway.
The faithful are probably going to be much better off with the fan-made recreation than they ever would be with this.
Yeah. If I was watching it, and not recording it, that might be an issue.
The speed at which data is transferred to the disc is absolutely irrelevant to speed at which it's played back.
The CDs I burn at 52x play back just fine, too.
DVD Shrink can reencode or reauthor a DVD in like 25 minutes on a decent PC. 15 minutes to burn at 4x on a $.70 disc.
Net cost to me: $1.50 for the rental, $.70 for the disc. Amortizing the DVD burner over, say, 100 discs, call that $2...
Wow. $3.20 and an hour's time.
I guess I'll use the other 5 hours to do five more discs.
In three years I'll remove the discs from my changer and transfer them to blue-laser DVD or HDDVD or whatever the hell the next format is, just like I did with my CDs of Divx .AVIs. In the meantime, I plan to buy a new changer every time I fill one up, so they'll be kept in pretty much ideal conditions (dry, no light etc).
Huh? I bought 100 blank 4x DVD-Rs for $70 this week. $.70 a disc, leaving me at just under $5 for the 7 discs needed to copy Futurama seasons 1 and 2.
It's been a while since blank discs were $7 apiece.
Also, rather that recording stuff from the Tivo, use Netflix and/or Wantedlist (for pr0n), and never pay for an actual DVD again.
You can get a pair of RCA stereo and SVideo to Cat5 transceivers for under $100 from a lot of places. Check google. I bought mine locally.
My philosophy is that more spindles are almost always better, and the $110 160GB drive has a LOT of bang for the buck. When a case gets full, I start building another computer. Even with 400W PSUs, after the seventh or so hard drive, you really start to worry about how much you can cram into one case.
I'd strongly suggest that you re-think what you're doing a bit.
1. SATA is overpriced.
2. Other companies make cooler 5400rpm drives that are just dandy for media storage. I personally recommend Samsung drives. Someone will undoubtedly chime in that Samsung sux0rs, but I've had amazing luck with them, they're dirt cheap, cool, quiet and can be found in both 5400 and 7200rpm models, some with 8MB cache (though those don't match the performance of WD *SEs).
3. PATA 3ware controllers are cheap on ebay, if you're willing to debase yourself with 7x00-series models.
4. Most of the space you're talking about will probably end up being working space for DVD rips and temp files while you're doing video encoding. This stuff doesn't need to be part of a RAID5 array. It's largely replacable (hardware RAID5... doesn't perform well. Ever. Software RAID5 works pretty well but can bog your PC).
I have four machines each containing between five and ten drives (almost all Samsung 160GB drives in my case) in the 120GB - 250GB ballpark. Real storage is a little under 4TB. I use 3ware controllers whenever possible. I buy 'em off ebay for $80 or so, and they're well supported by everything. The boxes in question are 2GHz-class AMD machines with gigabit NICs (moving large files sucks otherwise). The PCs are probably worth about $1500 apiece. .VOB files.
I have two Windows boxes with ATI All-in-Wonder cards that're more than capable of grabbing video and encoding it to nice, native 4000kbps MPEG2 that's very easy to export to a bunch of
Stuff that I really do want to keep gets encoded and burned to DVD.
I keep as much as I can online - on the fileservers - because that stuff is easy to index and to access. The rest gets periodically deleted. I purposefully choose not to do divx encoding or anything similar. It takes too long.
For the rest, I have a pair of 400 disc Sony DVD changers. They're addressed as one unit, and in addition to being attached to my "main" receiver, I run the receiver's output to a A/V-to-cat5 distribution system to move everything up to a second receiver upstairs. I have in-wall wired controls for upstairs, and I keep an index of what's in the changers (I have another three CD changers of similar capactiy that run in a different series) in an easily-searchable Apache-mySQL application I can hit from basically any PC in my home (it's a VERY simple app. I'm lazy about that part of things and even more lazy about data entry. If I really wanted to I suppose I could hit CDDB but frankly, most of my stuff won't be in there).
Now, I'm going to say something, and it's going to sound stupid, but... this stuff really wasn't THAT expensive. I did the wiring and set up the A/V distribution myself. A receiver that can handle video isn't that expensive ($300 for the cheapest thing money can buy). No one instantly NEEDS a $350 400 disc DVD changer right away, but it's nice to have. And a single PC with around 1TB of disk space can be had for $1300 if you really want to bargain-hunt.
So for maybe $2000, you can get 1TB of disk space in an HTPC, a receiver that'll handle A/V distribution, and DVD Changer to handle the spillover. I don't think that's a bad deal at all.