One $250 ticket to a Madonna show could get you...
- 13 Madonna CDs at around $20 a pop
- 10 band shirts from a record shop
- 7 band shirts from the merch booth at their show
- 5 concert tickets to nearly any other major label band's shows
- 30-50 tickets to concerts by local artists
Just as I would never buy 10 shirts at once, 13 CDs at once, and so forth, there's no way I can justify paying $250 for a one-time event, given the available alternatives. I don't care what the production's like. And there is no way to justify that kind of ticket price on P2P sharing. Get fucked.
One thing I noticed about Digg stories in the last month or so is that scientific studies would get posted, and then marked as inaccurate, even after an excess of 500 diggs. I'm fairly certain you can guess the theory that was being discussed.
It made me want to post a tongue-in-cheek headline like "Digg and the Christian agenda" but I realize that people on both sides of the ID/Evolution pissing match wouldn't take well to that at all.
What gets really frustrating is that once your story gets marked for review, that's about all you know, and that URL can not be resubmitted. I had a story go front-page fairly quickly, only to disappear. It didn't say why - it had more diggs than other stories on the front page. I had to do a specialized search to find out that it was marked as 'buried.' If Digg can count and display positive diggs, why can't it show the negative marks as well?
I find it a little troubling that a site that rejects stories for not being techy enough seems to also reject stories that are too techie for modern semi-fundamentalist Christian religions.
This is a fundamental problem of 'true' democracy (assuming Digg is a simple voting system.) What is popular is not always what is best. It is for this reason that I personally prefer sites with editors, no matter how many mistakes they may make. I used to go to Digg several times a day, but after actively participating in the system for a few days (and managing to get the word cunnybungler on the front page, if only for a few minutes), this made apparent to me the opaque-to-a-fault rating system driving the site... and now I don't go there as often.
It's still interesting, but I felt pretty disappointed after watching this phenomenon.
Whenever I go to see a band play, it usually smells kinda funny at the venue. Sometimes the singer gets the words wrong, or the drummer messes up on my favorite fill. I usually have to drive an hour to the nearest decent venue, spend money on parking, and all that. The songs don't sound the same as they do on the CD, and the musicians aren't nearly as attractive as they looked on the album artwork.
That's why I like to buy DVDs of my favorite bands performing "live" in my living room. It's all the excitement of seeing my favorite band, without having to worry about the microphones not working, and especially without the bother of other people. I can pause the performance and go pee without anyone offering me illicit drugs. If you time it right, you might even get a package deal at the FYE, where you can get a discount on a concert tshirt if you buy the DVD at the same time. AND! And the concert's in 5.1! I don't think most venues are set up to play in 5.1 surround sound yet, they're still only outputting stereo.
No one ever says, Dude, you remember watching that concert at Matt's place in 2002? That was amazing!
I love searching in Visual Studio for a text phrase that's right there on my screen, only for VS to tell me there are no instances of that phrase anywhere in my project. Awesome search!
Before developing in VS.NET though, I would get the same kind of awesome results searching using Windows search, for files containing text. I was sure there were files containing the text I was looking for, but Win+F turned up no results. I've since tried out some little program called Effective File Search, which worked much better.
I'd love it if MS put their money where their mouth is and actually turned something good out, but Google spanks them in search quality, as far as I'm concerned.
My only problem with Comcast is their price. We got signed on for $20/mo. for our first year -- this was both basic cable and high-speed internet. Now we're back at the normal price, $56/mo or something ridiculous like that. I don't even want the cable TV, but the pricing structure for getting just internet is ridiculous too.
$20/mo for cable internet + $15/mo for Vonage beat the pants off of traditional telephone company charges.
Our Vonage service has been fine, although our cable connection in general started fritzing out this past weekend. Intermittent internet, scrambled captioning and noise on our TV signal... but hey, it's cable in Central PA, what can I expect?
Everything has more bacteria than a toilet seat.
on
Keyboards Are Disgusting
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
When I was in sixth grade, we sampled bacteria cultures from various parts of our school to see where the bacteria count was worst. My group, being the fans of gross-out that we were, sampled from toilet water, as well as normal places like the drinking fountain, and other less memorable places.
To peoples horror, the drinking fountain was way more bacterial than was the toilet water. But when you think about it, when was the last time they used toilet cleaner on the water fountain?
Likewise, your desk, your keyboard, your chair, probably even your monitor probably all have far worse bacteria counts than would a toilet seat in any regularly maintained toilet area. Put away the Lysol.
I wouldn't go so far as to make such a sweeping generalization. Both Gmail and Picasa use tagging to help sort and search their data. Google videos and Google Base also use similar meta data to aid in categorization and in searches.
The hypercolor shirts from the 80s sure sounded neat in theory, but in practice, it basically accentuated your sweaty bits. Likewise, if this is put to use on cars, you'll probably end up with a hood that's a different color from the rest of the car. awesome.
With all this buzz over the XBOX360, I remembered that I had an old USB Gravis Eliminator gamepad that I picked up at a computer show in a $1 box, but never put to use -- at the time, no game emulator I had found could handle USB joysticks.
So I hit Google and found ZSNES, a really nice Super Nintendo Emulator. Onward, I went looking for ROMs of my favorite games, as well as games that I never owned or rented at the time. To my mild surprise, most of the games I scrolled past were pretty terrible. I downloaded about a dozen, and mostly play Metroid, Megaman games, and Super Mario Allstars. (I don't have time for the two SNES Final Fantasy games.)
For all the years that the SNES was out, only a handful (or two!) of games were really excellent. The rest, mostly so-so, sometimes really really bad.
Though that may sound somewhat optimistic for the 360, I think these new consoles suffer the NeoGeo problem -- Lots of hype, lots of tech, but way too expensive for what you get back, in my opinion. The games sure look shiny, but that only gets you so much.
Since the 9th of this month, my Nine Inch Nails fan site shows 63.4% of our traffic comes from IE, and 23% of the traffic comes from Firefox, with 6.2% of our hits coming from Safari users. That's from 4.1 million hits from 97,000 unique visitors, courtesy awstats.
9% of our viewers use Mac, 87.3% Windows, 0.6% use Linux. Tada.
Das Keyboard seems to come up over and over again, and every time, the comments section is filled with tales of how this is a Keytronics Ergoforce 3600, but entirely in black.
So I went on eBay and got an ErgoForce for $8 shipped. Having painted a keyboard entirely black when I was 16, the variable force on the keys was all I was really interested in, and frankly it's nothing to type home about.
I realize contextual advertising like this is certainly the most clever and least obviously obtrusive form, but I would have hoped it would have displaced less actual content. Is there a way in our settings to turn off Ad Posts like these?
I bought a Thinkpad back in 1997, and after I got used to the little red dot in between G & H, I really couldn't go back. Luckily for me, I found a really nice standalone IBM keyboard with that same dot at a computer show for $5 -- they regularly sell for $45 and up on eBay. I bought a second one a few years later, in case I spill something on my current keyboard.
Not having to move my hand off the keyboard to do simple mouse tasks is immensely helpful and saves a whole lot of time when I'm coding or otherwise working in text. The sensitivity of the controller is also great for detail work in Photoshop.
I'm getting the same sinking feeling reading this news that I got when I first read about my.mp3.com... something that worked decently enough hastily steps too far into the wrong territory, and suddenly gets sued into nonexistance.
I don't know how it will be justified yet, but it seems like this is exactly what needs to be done to get the lawsuit ball rolling.
When I couldn't connect to google.com, I just loaded up google.co.uk (...and news.google.co.uk) - I guess some of you junkies don't need the fix as bad as I do.
Publishing this stuff in this format under this license looks more like sowing the seeds for some nice future lawsuits than anything else.
You'd be hard pressed to be more paranoid about this kind of situation than me -- I was once named in a lawsuit by Universal Australia for sending someone an MP3 of a Reznor remix. (nothing ever came of it...) I also had some unhappy dealings with Trent's previous buttwipe management, but that's another story.
I was assured that if any such lawsuit against a fan were to arise, Trent Reznor has veto power and would certainly use it. Otherwise, what's the point of doing this in the first place? Trent did not post this file just so he could get his fans sued.
Hi there, just thought I'd comment on this, I run a big fat nine inch nails website...
We were concerned at first about the license, especially the bit about "other distribution of any of these sounds, either as they exist upon downloading, or any modification thereof."
This amounts to a cover-your-ass clause... the band and Interscope are encouraging people to remix or whatever with this file. Interscope suggested to the band that they hook up with MySpace for fan distribution of the glut of remixes that will come out, but for one reason or another, that (and the notion of doing this as a contest) didn't happen.
So if you do soemthing with these files, you are welcome to host them without fear of the record label coming at you -- otherwise what would the purpose be of doing this in the first place?
That being said, I have a PC, and I just extracted the AIFF files... never saw the license;)
Interesting. I haven't voted yet, but I will after work, and I suspect I'll run into a similar issue.
I moved from Lancaster, PA to Harrisburg, PA at the beginning of October, and changed my address online through PennDOT, who in turn sent my information to the Elections Registration Bureau.
I received my new Dauphin County registration card a day after the books closed in Harrisburg. The funny thing was that someone had altered my name and changed my party affiliation to Republican.
I've contacted local newspapers and tv stations, no one cares to follow up. I posted something touching on it on my website, and got mail from another PA voter, his registration never came to him after he moved.
I talked to Harrisburg, they said it came from Lancaster. I talked to Lancaster, they started out confused but helpful, then turned kind of shady, and told me that PennDOT made the error.
Either way, I'll bet that even if I do vote, my vote will be thrown out in the recount. I'd like to find out who's going through registrations and tampering them though. That's seriously bad news.
Actually, you can finagle Comcast to get you a good deal if you work on it right. I just moved into a house in Harrisburg, PA, and we got basic cable + High Speed Internet for $30/mo (for a year). After a year, we call and cancel, and use my wife's cell phone number to get whatever promo rate they're offering then. And our Vonage is only $15/mo.
At my last place, we had to get DSL, which was $45/mo, on top of the phone charges, which had us at about $90/mo. And we could only get Sprint for local, long distance, and DSL. I even got a Sprint cellphone, but there was no discount in my rates.
That being said, my DSL had only one noticeable outage over the course of the year, and in my prior-prior abode, the DSL never went down over the course of the year. All my friends with cable modems always have problems.
My wife's in Mensa, and one of the best things about that are the Google ads that generally take up the inside front page or two. It's a nice brain tease, and while I'm pretty sure I had a few of them figured out, I never sent them in because I like how Google hires PhDs, and I'd worry about being in over my head.
I was disappointed when I didn't see any ad in the first page of this past month's Mensa mag, but overjoyed when I found the GLAT. Then I was a little intimidated. Still, I might sit and work it out one of these days, when I come up with the time for it. (As opposed to, say, killing time posting on Slashdot.)
...has Pizza Hut logos in it. So in-game ads aren't all that new.
Neislen ratings figuring on calculating how many times someone runs past the wall with Pizza Hut written on it is new, but the fact that their ratings systems seem pretty shoddy at best isn't all that new either.
I still find it pretty crazy what people accept for ad exposure rates when buying ads for TV, radio, magazine and newspapers, when the one surely trackable ad system (teh interweb) shows just how infrequently people really pay attention to the stuff.
Paypal saved my ass when some dude from the Philipines ordered a notebook PC and a modded Playstation using my account -- while my network is ironclad at home, it turns out that the one at work... not so much. Never doing anything like that at work ever again. I could have been out $2000+ because of fraud, but they fought the good fight.
On the other hand, back in 2002 they beamed $172 into nowhere and never returned the money, so some of this lawsuit does kinda ring true. The crap I had to go through was more than I should have, and I still didn't get my money back. Here's to filling out another form and hoping to see that cash.
>With the exception of really old music, no two >record companies ever sell the exact same album and >most all have exclusive deals to everything a group >produces (for a set number of albums or such, but >effectively years). There is no competition in art.
Have you tuned into "modern rock radio" any time in the past five years? Several different bands on several different labels are in fact writing the exact same kind of music, particularly following the success of Creed, and some were loafing off of the Limp Bizket wave. The first thing that happens when one band breaks with a new sound is that other labels seek out similar bands, then feed a genre name to the music rags. Remember Grunge? Electronica? (Radio-friendly) Industrial? Rock-Rap and Nu-Metal are two of the more recent examples of this.
While it's true that Clint cannot play a violin (well), he can handle a sequencer and/or keyboard better than even I. All the music for Requiem for a Dream was composed by Clint Mansell - the string bits were simply performed by the Kronos Quartet.
What we hear in the trailer is in fact a full blown orchestral take at the Requiem theme, and it translates very well from such a minimalistic piece. Kudos to Clint, now if only they'd figure a way to get that RfaD remix CD out.
Only three comments in and the page seems to be slashdotted.
I used to think a SoundBlaster 16 worked fine for me. I didn't need a crappy wavetable synth for MIDI. But I got an AWE32 on the cheap from a friend, and was amazed to hear the dramatic increase on the low and high ends of the spectrum. And I then felt, alright, now that's taken care of, an AWE32 will do me just fine.
Until my roommate bought a Delta 1010. This soundcard is rackmounted, has ten inputs, ten outputs, and 24bit/96khz audio with top notch A/D & D/A converters. And all that stuff's grand - when it comes to recording and playing back music. And it's got Linux drivers, which doesn't matter for us because we record with Sonic Foundry software, because we're too cheap and uneducated to use Macs, or something. Whatever.
But I'd say for 90% of computer users out there, any old two-channel sound card is as good as the next. As far as I'm concerned, if I want to watch DVDs, I run those through my stereo (I guess that's not a proper term, with 5.1 and such...) and watch em on my TV. The 5.1 implementation in most PC stuff is laughable at best.
Can't wait for Doom III though... there's some wicked sound engine design going on there...
Slashdot Mirror
One $250 ticket to a Madonna show could get you...
- 13 Madonna CDs at around $20 a pop
- 10 band shirts from a record shop - 7 band shirts from the merch booth at their show - 5 concert tickets to nearly any other major label band's shows
- 30-50 tickets to concerts by local artists
Just as I would never buy 10 shirts at once, 13 CDs at once, and so forth, there's no way I can justify paying $250 for a one-time event, given the available alternatives. I don't care what the production's like. And there is no way to justify that kind of ticket price on P2P sharing. Get fucked.
It made me want to post a tongue-in-cheek headline like "Digg and the Christian agenda" but I realize that people on both sides of the ID/Evolution pissing match wouldn't take well to that at all.
What gets really frustrating is that once your story gets marked for review, that's about all you know, and that URL can not be resubmitted. I had a story go front-page fairly quickly, only to disappear. It didn't say why - it had more diggs than other stories on the front page. I had to do a specialized search to find out that it was marked as 'buried.' If Digg can count and display positive diggs, why can't it show the negative marks as well?
I find it a little troubling that a site that rejects stories for not being techy enough seems to also reject stories that are too techie for modern semi-fundamentalist Christian religions.
This is a fundamental problem of 'true' democracy (assuming Digg is a simple voting system.) What is popular is not always what is best. It is for this reason that I personally prefer sites with editors, no matter how many mistakes they may make. I used to go to Digg several times a day, but after actively participating in the system for a few days (and managing to get the word cunnybungler on the front page, if only for a few minutes), this made apparent to me the opaque-to-a-fault rating system driving the site... and now I don't go there as often.
It's still interesting, but I felt pretty disappointed after watching this phenomenon.
That's why I like to buy DVDs of my favorite bands performing "live" in my living room. It's all the excitement of seeing my favorite band, without having to worry about the microphones not working, and especially without the bother of other people. I can pause the performance and go pee without anyone offering me illicit drugs. If you time it right, you might even get a package deal at the FYE, where you can get a discount on a concert tshirt if you buy the DVD at the same time. AND! And the concert's in 5.1! I don't think most venues are set up to play in 5.1 surround sound yet, they're still only outputting stereo.
No one ever says, Dude, you remember watching that concert at Matt's place in 2002? That was amazing!
Before developing in VS.NET though, I would get the same kind of awesome results searching using Windows search, for files containing text. I was sure there were files containing the text I was looking for, but Win+F turned up no results. I've since tried out some little program called Effective File Search, which worked much better.
I'd love it if MS put their money where their mouth is and actually turned something good out, but Google spanks them in search quality, as far as I'm concerned.
$20/mo for cable internet + $15/mo for Vonage beat the pants off of traditional telephone company charges.
Our Vonage service has been fine, although our cable connection in general started fritzing out this past weekend. Intermittent internet, scrambled captioning and noise on our TV signal... but hey, it's cable in Central PA, what can I expect?
To peoples horror, the drinking fountain was way more bacterial than was the toilet water. But when you think about it, when was the last time they used toilet cleaner on the water fountain?
Likewise, your desk, your keyboard, your chair, probably even your monitor probably all have far worse bacteria counts than would a toilet seat in any regularly maintained toilet area. Put away the Lysol.
I wouldn't go so far as to make such a sweeping generalization. Both Gmail and Picasa use tagging to help sort and search their data. Google videos and Google Base also use similar meta data to aid in categorization and in searches.
The hypercolor shirts from the 80s sure sounded neat in theory, but in practice, it basically accentuated your sweaty bits. Likewise, if this is put to use on cars, you'll probably end up with a hood that's a different color from the rest of the car. awesome.
So I hit Google and found ZSNES, a really nice Super Nintendo Emulator. Onward, I went looking for ROMs of my favorite games, as well as games that I never owned or rented at the time. To my mild surprise, most of the games I scrolled past were pretty terrible. I downloaded about a dozen, and mostly play Metroid, Megaman games, and Super Mario Allstars. (I don't have time for the two SNES Final Fantasy games.)
For all the years that the SNES was out, only a handful (or two!) of games were really excellent. The rest, mostly so-so, sometimes really really bad.
Though that may sound somewhat optimistic for the 360, I think these new consoles suffer the NeoGeo problem -- Lots of hype, lots of tech, but way too expensive for what you get back, in my opinion. The games sure look shiny, but that only gets you so much.
9% of our viewers use Mac, 87.3% Windows, 0.6% use Linux. Tada.
So I went on eBay and got an ErgoForce for $8 shipped. Having painted a keyboard entirely black when I was 16, the variable force on the keys was all I was really interested in, and frankly it's nothing to type home about.
I realize contextual advertising like this is certainly the most clever and least obviously obtrusive form, but I would have hoped it would have displaced less actual content. Is there a way in our settings to turn off Ad Posts like these?
Not having to move my hand off the keyboard to do simple mouse tasks is immensely helpful and saves a whole lot of time when I'm coding or otherwise working in text. The sensitivity of the controller is also great for detail work in Photoshop.
I don't know how it will be justified yet, but it seems like this is exactly what needs to be done to get the lawsuit ball rolling.
When I couldn't connect to google.com, I just loaded up google.co.uk (...and news.google.co.uk) - I guess some of you junkies don't need the fix as bad as I do.
You'd be hard pressed to be more paranoid about this kind of situation than me -- I was once named in a lawsuit by Universal Australia for sending someone an MP3 of a Reznor remix. (nothing ever came of it...) I also had some unhappy dealings with Trent's previous buttwipe management, but that's another story.
I was assured that if any such lawsuit against a fan were to arise, Trent Reznor has veto power and would certainly use it. Otherwise, what's the point of doing this in the first place? Trent did not post this file just so he could get his fans sued.
Hi there, just thought I'd comment on this, I run a big fat nine inch nails website... We were concerned at first about the license, especially the bit about "other distribution of any of these sounds, either as they exist upon downloading, or any modification thereof." This amounts to a cover-your-ass clause... the band and Interscope are encouraging people to remix or whatever with this file. Interscope suggested to the band that they hook up with MySpace for fan distribution of the glut of remixes that will come out, but for one reason or another, that (and the notion of doing this as a contest) didn't happen. So if you do soemthing with these files, you are welcome to host them without fear of the record label coming at you -- otherwise what would the purpose be of doing this in the first place? That being said, I have a PC, and I just extracted the AIFF files... never saw the license ;)
I moved from Lancaster, PA to Harrisburg, PA at the beginning of October, and changed my address online through PennDOT, who in turn sent my information to the Elections Registration Bureau.
I received my new Dauphin County registration card a day after the books closed in Harrisburg. The funny thing was that someone had altered my name and changed my party affiliation to Republican.
I've contacted local newspapers and tv stations, no one cares to follow up. I posted something touching on it on my website, and got mail from another PA voter, his registration never came to him after he moved.
I talked to Harrisburg, they said it came from Lancaster. I talked to Lancaster, they started out confused but helpful, then turned kind of shady, and told me that PennDOT made the error.
Either way, I'll bet that even if I do vote, my vote will be thrown out in the recount. I'd like to find out who's going through registrations and tampering them though. That's seriously bad news.
Actually, you can finagle Comcast to get you a good deal if you work on it right. I just moved into a house in Harrisburg, PA, and we got basic cable + High Speed Internet for $30/mo (for a year). After a year, we call and cancel, and use my wife's cell phone number to get whatever promo rate they're offering then. And our Vonage is only $15/mo. At my last place, we had to get DSL, which was $45/mo, on top of the phone charges, which had us at about $90/mo. And we could only get Sprint for local, long distance, and DSL. I even got a Sprint cellphone, but there was no discount in my rates. That being said, my DSL had only one noticeable outage over the course of the year, and in my prior-prior abode, the DSL never went down over the course of the year. All my friends with cable modems always have problems.
My wife's in Mensa, and one of the best things about that are the Google ads that generally take up the inside front page or two. It's a nice brain tease, and while I'm pretty sure I had a few of them figured out, I never sent them in because I like how Google hires PhDs, and I'd worry about being in over my head. I was disappointed when I didn't see any ad in the first page of this past month's Mensa mag, but overjoyed when I found the GLAT. Then I was a little intimidated. Still, I might sit and work it out one of these days, when I come up with the time for it. (As opposed to, say, killing time posting on Slashdot.)
Excellent! Now we have a scapegoat when everything falls to pot! :P
...has Pizza Hut logos in it. So in-game ads aren't all that new. Neislen ratings figuring on calculating how many times someone runs past the wall with Pizza Hut written on it is new, but the fact that their ratings systems seem pretty shoddy at best isn't all that new either. I still find it pretty crazy what people accept for ad exposure rates when buying ads for TV, radio, magazine and newspapers, when the one surely trackable ad system (teh interweb) shows just how infrequently people really pay attention to the stuff.
Paypal saved my ass when some dude from the Philipines ordered a notebook PC and a modded Playstation using my account -- while my network is ironclad at home, it turns out that the one at work... not so much. Never doing anything like that at work ever again. I could have been out $2000+ because of fraud, but they fought the good fight.
On the other hand, back in 2002 they beamed $172 into nowhere and never returned the money, so some of this lawsuit does kinda ring true. The crap I had to go through was more than I should have, and I still didn't get my money back. Here's to filling out another form and hoping to see that cash.
>With the exception of really old music, no two
>record companies ever sell the exact same album and
>most all have exclusive deals to everything a group
>produces (for a set number of albums or such, but
>effectively years). There is no competition in art.
Have you tuned into "modern rock radio" any time in the past five years? Several different bands on several different labels are in fact writing the exact same kind of music, particularly following the success of Creed, and some were loafing off of the Limp Bizket wave. The first thing that happens when one band breaks with a new sound is that other labels seek out similar bands, then feed a genre name to the music rags. Remember Grunge? Electronica? (Radio-friendly) Industrial? Rock-Rap and Nu-Metal are two of the more recent examples of this.
While it's true that Clint cannot play a violin (well), he can handle a sequencer and/or keyboard better than even I. All the music for Requiem for a Dream was composed by Clint Mansell - the string bits were simply performed by the Kronos Quartet.
What we hear in the trailer is in fact a full blown orchestral take at the Requiem theme, and it translates very well from such a minimalistic piece. Kudos to Clint, now if only they'd figure a way to get that RfaD remix CD out.
Only three comments in and the page seems to be slashdotted. I used to think a SoundBlaster 16 worked fine for me. I didn't need a crappy wavetable synth for MIDI. But I got an AWE32 on the cheap from a friend, and was amazed to hear the dramatic increase on the low and high ends of the spectrum. And I then felt, alright, now that's taken care of, an AWE32 will do me just fine. Until my roommate bought a Delta 1010. This soundcard is rackmounted, has ten inputs, ten outputs, and 24bit/96khz audio with top notch A/D & D/A converters. And all that stuff's grand - when it comes to recording and playing back music. And it's got Linux drivers, which doesn't matter for us because we record with Sonic Foundry software, because we're too cheap and uneducated to use Macs, or something. Whatever. But I'd say for 90% of computer users out there, any old two-channel sound card is as good as the next. As far as I'm concerned, if I want to watch DVDs, I run those through my stereo (I guess that's not a proper term, with 5.1 and such...) and watch em on my TV. The 5.1 implementation in most PC stuff is laughable at best. Can't wait for Doom III though... there's some wicked sound engine design going on there...