I'm not as big or as strong as a lot of folks out there. If somehow the Glock 23 I'm wearing didn't work, how would you expect me to defend myself from a meth-head with a knife?
Far from being an unfair advantage, guns ARE the great equalizer. I'm a law-abiding citizen with a carry permit, and my high-capacity pistol has killed fewer people than Ted Kennedy's car. What's wrong with that?
Dreamhost is nice for a small site, but there is an unpublished CPU limitation that you can't go over, meaning that unless you're serving a few large static files, you're going to hit that cap before you ever hit their oversold promises. I use dreamhost, and they're OK, but you should know their limitations.
By the way, if you DO decide to use dreamhost, use the MAX97 code instead... the parent's code gives them $90 and you $7. MAX97 takes the entire referral fee off your bill.
I'd be concerned about boune-back with anything less than slugs. Unless you're NOT talking about a CRT, in which case, shoot it with whatever the heck you feel like..308 for me.
-Wog, who knows a lot about guns but not a lot about modern CRT design.
We played the heck out of the audio CD that comes with Final Fantasy Anthology.
But everybody gets tired of the "Mario Techno Remix" CD after a while.:)
Lots of other things work, but we stayed away from extremely upbeat stuff like the fight songs from recent Final Fantasies... they don't sound right if they're played at a background level and are exhausting for staff and customers when played louder.
Judge your audience. On weekends when there were lots of younger kids with parents, we played a lot of 80's classic rock. Remember that if they've got young kids, they probably spent a good part of their adult lives in the 80's and 90's.
We eventually spent a couple of off-hours during the school year when it wasn't busy getting together an MP3 CD with a selection of "Universally Acceptable" music that wouldn't drive us nuts, that would get some customers tapping their feet, but wouldn't offend or annoy anyone. It ended up being quite the variety.
A clean store, good lighting, relatively clean-cut staff, and "familiar" sounding music can keep customers feeling good and spending money. The teenagers tend to be less picky, but it certainly doesn't hurt business from them.
I worked at a GameXchange for three years in high school. This made us laugh until we cried.
To the OP:
As someone else said, screw new releases for the most part. They won't make you any money. The REAL money is in used older games. Take in a playstation game, give store credit. Clean it, test it, and turn around and charge 150 to 200 percent of that. You've got to be up-front about your customers about the fact that you must be selective in order to survive. Be honest and pay well for the good stuff, and not well for the crap that won't sell.
You've got to know your games. The two or three guys that ran the store with me knew what they were doing, and liked the history and trivia of the stuff, so they had background when someone asked them a technical question. We also had our preferences and warned customers about them. "Me? Oh, I dunno man, I suck at the newer console FPS games. You need to talk to Ryan over there. Ryan! Get your pasty butt over here!"
Get used to explaining to parents with young kids about ESRB ratings and make sure they understand full well that GTA isn't okay for their second graders. Be ready with some age-appropriate but not sucky alternatives. They'll love you for it.
Play upbeat but not "offensive" music and keep the place well-lit and clean. You can carry a store on hardcore gamers, but just barely and you have to hit the right market. Nothing worse for a casual gamer than the grungy, dark place with obscure games and shady employees.
If you have a regular that seems to be a decent kid, hire him and treat him right. Your good employees will earn their pay many times over, and love you for giving them an awesome college or high school job. A little store credit sprinkled here and there can do good things for you... most of the really enthusiastic ones will save it for the rare stuff that only comes in so often anyway...
As far as help goes, you're going to either be hiring students or people who are failures at life. I'm sorry, but that's the way it is. You need to BE THERE to be a good influence on the business. Remember the great guys I worked with? They moved on with life and I was the only one left when the new crop got trained in. I didn't want to manage the store because I wanted to keep my grades up. The owner came in for 20 minutes every two weeks, being so stretched thin trying to open new stores that he let mediocre employees drive his business into the ground through incompetence and theft.
He hired a "mid-level guy" to manage three of the stores. We pegged him as a crook as soon as we met him. I went over his head when my pay had been shorted two periods in a row, and he retaliated by claiming missing inventory and deposits. I was fired the week before I was going to leave for college anyway. When I came home for Christmas, I found out that the guy had emptied a $10k bank account and split.
Anyway, rant off. I've got lots of little tidbits from general management to inventory proceedures that I've seen work well, so send a message if you want any help...
I'll tell you this: There were about 12 months of really good times with good co-workers. We made 3x the profits of the other two years and I would have done the work for, well, not for free, but I was a happy guy when I was coming in to work. Don't screw it up.:)
If I am behind a semi-thick wooden wall, and someone is aiming a shotgun at me through the wall, I want them to use birdshot, not 1oz slugs.
Same mass, but many small points of impact instead of one hole. The wood will block the shot but the slug will punch right through. Even if some of the shot does get through, it'll be a whole lot less damaging than an ounce of hot lead in one piece.
The Earth's atmosphere was put there for a reason (flamesuit on) and part of that reason was to protect us from all those little rocks that hit Earth on a regular basis.
If that's too big to wrap your head around... would you rather lay down on a bed of 1000 nails or try to balance on one really sharp spike? Owwie.
9mm,.40,.45... Any of them will have overpenetration issues if you use FMJ. Also, any of them will stop an attacker. What's important is shot placement... You can't miss with a big enough bullet and win.
I like my.40 G23, shot a G21 and a 1911 and couldn't get back on target nearly as quickly with the.45. I'd rather have good follow-up shots than a cannon I couldn't control.
Step One: Go to http://packing.org/ and check the laws in your state. Find out if your destination honors a permit from your state.
Step Two: Apply for a handgun carry permit according to the laws of your state. Hopefully you're in a state where it'll be quick. In a lot of places it's 1-3 months, so look out.
Step Three: While you wait for that permit, do some research on handguns. Can't go wrong with a Glock, and they're cheap compared to lots of their alternatives. Get something in 9mm or.40. Get a cheap holster that holds the gun close to your body so you can wear an untucked shirt and not show off your gun. Get 200 rounds of full metal jacket and get to the range. Get 100 rounds of hollow points and make sure to fire a dozen through your gun so you know it's reliable.
Step Four: Get your permit and try not to tell anyone that you carry a weapon now. Be safe down there and try to stay out of situations that would call for using that thing. Live your life and help people.
I'll third that. I moved my and my dad's domains to dreamhost and they've been an, uh, DREAM to work with. Best part I think is their very well-done control panel. Not the standard CPanel that I hate so very very much.:) Everything is easy to find and links directly to help.
Only downside with dreamhost is that they have no phone support. They make up for it by answering all emails within an hour. I've never had trouble with them, even when it was to fix something I broke.:)
If you use MY referral code, you get half the referral back, so it's $48.50 to your account. Just thought you'd like to know.:)
Maybe a better way of putting it is that violence is *unnatural* for us.
I went to the range a few weeks ago, and practiced up-close (kissing range) drawing and firing unsighted at a target. I was at an outdoor, private range, so I practiced by shouting "STOP! GET BACK!" etc. I found that after I had shot my "attacker" I felt really, really weird.
If I'd had to kill those young men, I would have lost some sleep. Anyone who wouldn't is a sociopath. But at least I'd be losing said sleep next to my wife.
But unless we have a police officer escorting every civilian, the law will never be enough to stop every crime. The cops are there as a deterrent and to clean up the messes that result in their not getting there in time.
Imagine: I'm about to get into my car at Target, when two guys walk up and politely "ask" for some money. They split and circle around me. One of them starts to dig his hands in his pocket.
If I don't have any means of self-defense, I basically take whatever punishment they're about to dish out, and hope they don't decide to kill me before they run off.
If I had, say, a pistol, I could draw it. If they back off, everyone goes home. If they draw a weapon or advance further, I defend myself.
How is that wrong? I don't *want* to hurt anyone, but I've got a wife at home who needs me around a bit longer, and I didn't start this.
By the way, it *did* happen, three weeks ago. As soon as my hand went to my belt, exposing the handle of my legally carried handgun, they backed off and peeled out in their car. I called the police with their tags and went home for supper.
Recommend a Glock 23, 200 rounds of cheapo walmart metal jacket ammo, and 100 rounds of nice name-brand hollow-point. Add a nice holster, and you've got a complete, compact self-defense package + 200 rounds to practice with, for under $700.
Get a concealed carry license for any state you plan to meet people in, unless you've got the balls to disconnect so completely that you never see an authority figure again. In most states that have enough wilderness to dissappear into, it should be very easy, even for a non-resident to get a permit.
I say this not to make you a gun nut, but to keep you from being a victim when several larger people in the hills decide to take advantage of you. You're more likely to encounter animals that need to be put down for your own safety. Do some studying about the balistic reactions of different points in the animals that frequent your destination.
Just be careful, and don't burn too many bridges back home before you go out the first time.
You can buy.22 cartidges that have not one (tiny) slug, but about a dozen (tinier) balls. Think a tiny shotgun. I still wouldn't want to be on the receiving end of it, but it's so puny it's kinda cute.
Anyway, I've busted quite a few wasp nests with them in an old revolver. They're not powerful enough to make more than little dents in the old siding of that building. It's nice, because it's a tight little group, so it pretty much blows the nest and all the little buggers inside away.
Slashdot Mirror
Downtime?
I'm not as big or as strong as a lot of folks out there. If somehow the Glock 23 I'm wearing didn't work, how would you expect me to defend myself from a meth-head with a knife?
Far from being an unfair advantage, guns ARE the great equalizer. I'm a law-abiding citizen with a carry permit, and my high-capacity pistol has killed fewer people than Ted Kennedy's car. What's wrong with that?
http://www.dreamhost-sucks.com/
Dreamhost is nice for a small site, but there is an unpublished CPU limitation that you can't go over, meaning that unless you're serving a few large static files, you're going to hit that cap before you ever hit their oversold promises. I use dreamhost, and they're OK, but you should know their limitations.
By the way, if you DO decide to use dreamhost, use the MAX97 code instead... the parent's code gives them $90 and you $7. MAX97 takes the entire referral fee off your bill.
Geeks with guns. I wish there were more of us...
I'd be concerned about boune-back with anything less than slugs. Unless you're NOT talking about a CRT, in which case, shoot it with whatever the heck you feel like. .308 for me.
-Wog, who knows a lot about guns but not a lot about modern CRT design.
Not only will everything eventually show up here, but it will appear two or three times!
Often successively, so that one does not accidentally scroll past a juicy morsel!
Seriously. I'm here for the comments. Screw the editors.
Sure. Within reason.
:)
We played the heck out of the audio CD that comes with Final Fantasy Anthology.
But everybody gets tired of the "Mario Techno Remix" CD after a while.
Lots of other things work, but we stayed away from extremely upbeat stuff like the fight songs from recent Final Fantasies... they don't sound right if they're played at a background level and are exhausting for staff and customers when played louder.
Judge your audience. On weekends when there were lots of younger kids with parents, we played a lot of 80's classic rock. Remember that if they've got young kids, they probably spent a good part of their adult lives in the 80's and 90's.
We eventually spent a couple of off-hours during the school year when it wasn't busy getting together an MP3 CD with a selection of "Universally Acceptable" music that wouldn't drive us nuts, that would get some customers tapping their feet, but wouldn't offend or annoy anyone. It ended up being quite the variety.
A clean store, good lighting, relatively clean-cut staff, and "familiar" sounding music can keep customers feeling good and spending money. The teenagers tend to be less picky, but it certainly doesn't hurt business from them.
Yes!
:)
I worked at a GameXchange for three years in high school. This made us laugh until we cried.
To the OP:
As someone else said, screw new releases for the most part. They won't make you any money. The REAL money is in used older games. Take in a playstation game, give store credit. Clean it, test it, and turn around and charge 150 to 200 percent of that. You've got to be up-front about your customers about the fact that you must be selective in order to survive. Be honest and pay well for the good stuff, and not well for the crap that won't sell.
You've got to know your games. The two or three guys that ran the store with me knew what they were doing, and liked the history and trivia of the stuff, so they had background when someone asked them a technical question. We also had our preferences and warned customers about them. "Me? Oh, I dunno man, I suck at the newer console FPS games. You need to talk to Ryan over there. Ryan! Get your pasty butt over here!"
Get used to explaining to parents with young kids about ESRB ratings and make sure they understand full well that GTA isn't okay for their second graders. Be ready with some age-appropriate but not sucky alternatives. They'll love you for it.
Play upbeat but not "offensive" music and keep the place well-lit and clean. You can carry a store on hardcore gamers, but just barely and you have to hit the right market. Nothing worse for a casual gamer than the grungy, dark place with obscure games and shady employees.
If you have a regular that seems to be a decent kid, hire him and treat him right. Your good employees will earn their pay many times over, and love you for giving them an awesome college or high school job. A little store credit sprinkled here and there can do good things for you... most of the really enthusiastic ones will save it for the rare stuff that only comes in so often anyway...
As far as help goes, you're going to either be hiring students or people who are failures at life. I'm sorry, but that's the way it is. You need to BE THERE to be a good influence on the business. Remember the great guys I worked with? They moved on with life and I was the only one left when the new crop got trained in. I didn't want to manage the store because I wanted to keep my grades up. The owner came in for 20 minutes every two weeks, being so stretched thin trying to open new stores that he let mediocre employees drive his business into the ground through incompetence and theft.
He hired a "mid-level guy" to manage three of the stores. We pegged him as a crook as soon as we met him. I went over his head when my pay had been shorted two periods in a row, and he retaliated by claiming missing inventory and deposits. I was fired the week before I was going to leave for college anyway. When I came home for Christmas, I found out that the guy had emptied a $10k bank account and split.
Anyway, rant off. I've got lots of little tidbits from general management to inventory proceedures that I've seen work well, so send a message if you want any help...
I'll tell you this: There were about 12 months of really good times with good co-workers. We made 3x the profits of the other two years and I would have done the work for, well, not for free, but I was a happy guy when I was coming in to work. Don't screw it up.
Nuke the moon!
If I am behind a semi-thick wooden wall, and someone is aiming a shotgun at me through the wall, I want them to use birdshot, not 1oz slugs.
Same mass, but many small points of impact instead of one hole. The wood will block the shot but the slug will punch right through. Even if some of the shot does get through, it'll be a whole lot less damaging than an ounce of hot lead in one piece.
The Earth's atmosphere was put there for a reason (flamesuit on) and part of that reason was to protect us from all those little rocks that hit Earth on a regular basis.
If that's too big to wrap your head around... would you rather lay down on a bed of 1000 nails or try to balance on one really sharp spike? Owwie.
9mm, .40, .45... Any of them will have overpenetration issues if you use FMJ. Also, any of them will stop an attacker. What's important is shot placement... You can't miss with a big enough bullet and win.
.40 G23, shot a G21 and a 1911 and couldn't get back on target nearly as quickly with the .45. I'd rather have good follow-up shots than a cannon I couldn't control.
I like my
Step One: Go to http://packing.org/ and check the laws in your state. Find out if your destination honors a permit from your state.
.40. Get a cheap holster that holds the gun close to your body so you can wear an untucked shirt and not show off your gun. Get 200 rounds of full metal jacket and get to the range. Get 100 rounds of hollow points and make sure to fire a dozen through your gun so you know it's reliable.
Step Two: Apply for a handgun carry permit according to the laws of your state. Hopefully you're in a state where it'll be quick. In a lot of places it's 1-3 months, so look out.
Step Three: While you wait for that permit, do some research on handguns. Can't go wrong with a Glock, and they're cheap compared to lots of their alternatives. Get something in 9mm or
Step Four: Get your permit and try not to tell anyone that you carry a weapon now. Be safe down there and try to stay out of situations that would call for using that thing. Live your life and help people.
(-1, Not Getting It)
He was implying that there is at most one womAn who reads slashdot.
Gosh. I hate you for making me ruin the joke.
Not true. Anyone who tells you that you'll lose your characters is an idiot.
I quit for four months, started again for two, and have quit again. Never lost a character.
I'll third that. I moved my and my dad's domains to dreamhost and they've been an, uh, DREAM to work with. Best part I think is their very well-done control panel. Not the standard CPanel that I hate so very very much. :) Everything is easy to find and links directly to help.
:)
:)
Only downside with dreamhost is that they have no phone support. They make up for it by answering all emails within an hour. I've never had trouble with them, even when it was to fix something I broke.
If you use MY referral code, you get half the referral back, so it's $48.50 to your account. Just thought you'd like to know.
http://www.dreamhost.com/r.cgi?SplitReferral
Enjoy!
Ah, but even at light speed there is some delay. What you need is LINT speed.
Think about it. When you put on your pants, what's the first thing you feel when you put your hands in your pockets.
Lint.
IT'S THAT FAST!!!
Step one: Download entire album. Listen.
:)
Step two: Buy CD from half.com, if you like it.
I did this this morning with the new Foo Fighters CD, and am listening now while my CD will be here next week.
Ah, but you notice how EVERY SINGLE CREATURE who has finished their journey through space has died?
:)
Space travel is fatal %100 of the time, my friend.
Oh, I'm glad we agree then.
Maybe a better way of putting it is that violence is *unnatural* for us.
I went to the range a few weeks ago, and practiced up-close (kissing range) drawing and firing unsighted at a target. I was at an outdoor, private range, so I practiced by shouting "STOP! GET BACK!" etc. I found that after I had shot my "attacker" I felt really, really weird.
If I'd had to kill those young men, I would have lost some sleep. Anyone who wouldn't is a sociopath. But at least I'd be losing said sleep next to my wife.
But unless we have a police officer escorting every civilian, the law will never be enough to stop every crime. The cops are there as a deterrent and to clean up the messes that result in their not getting there in time.
Imagine: I'm about to get into my car at Target, when two guys walk up and politely "ask" for some money. They split and circle around me. One of them starts to dig his hands in his pocket.
If I don't have any means of self-defense, I basically take whatever punishment they're about to dish out, and hope they don't decide to kill me before they run off.
If I had, say, a pistol, I could draw it. If they back off, everyone goes home. If they draw a weapon or advance further, I defend myself.
How is that wrong? I don't *want* to hurt anyone, but I've got a wife at home who needs me around a bit longer, and I didn't start this.
By the way, it *did* happen, three weeks ago. As soon as my hand went to my belt, exposing the handle of my legally carried handgun, they backed off and peeled out in their car. I called the police with their tags and went home for supper.
Did anyone else read that as GIF?
But tell us how you *really* feel!
Recommend a Glock 23, 200 rounds of cheapo walmart metal jacket ammo, and 100 rounds of nice name-brand hollow-point. Add a nice holster, and you've got a complete, compact self-defense package + 200 rounds to practice with, for under $700.
Get a concealed carry license for any state you plan to meet people in, unless you've got the balls to disconnect so completely that you never see an authority figure again. In most states that have enough wilderness to dissappear into, it should be very easy, even for a non-resident to get a permit.
I say this not to make you a gun nut, but to keep you from being a victim when several larger people in the hills decide to take advantage of you. You're more likely to encounter animals that need to be put down for your own safety. Do some studying about the balistic reactions of different points in the animals that frequent your destination.
Just be careful, and don't burn too many bridges back home before you go out the first time.
Not only that, but the "blade" can be stiffened somewhat by folding it correctly and wrapping the aluminum into multiple layers.
It's still somewhat fragile, but it would do anything that a boxcutter in a similar situation could.
Mineral Oil==Gasoline?
Mineral Oil==Morphine?
So Gasoline==Morphine?
*goes off to find syringe*
You can buy .22 cartidges that have not one (tiny) slug, but about a dozen (tinier) balls. Think a tiny shotgun. I still wouldn't want to be on the receiving end of it, but it's so puny it's kinda cute.
Anyway, I've busted quite a few wasp nests with them in an old revolver. They're not powerful enough to make more than little dents in the old siding of that building. It's nice, because it's a tight little group, so it pretty much blows the nest and all the little buggers inside away.