You are absolutely right -
there was an option in IE
somewhere that does this. I set it a long time ago and have been much happer (well, as happy as one can be when forced to use IE). You use a little more memory, but when IE takes a nosedive, it doesn't take your entire desktop with you.
Do you realize you are asking exactly for the Motif file selection widget as of about 10 years ago, which everyone uniformly hates because it does exactly this?
Telling a musician they should write music in lilypond with a text editor is similar telling a graphic artist not to use that silly Photoshop, or even GIMP -- he should be be writing PostScript code with a text editor.
Now, most pros prefer Photoshop over GIMP for lots of reason I don't pretend to understand. But I do understand why they don't program in PostScript. I've done it, it's nasty. It's unnecessary.
There currently is no GIMP-level quality free software for music typesetting.
If getting thing done is all that makes proprietary "better" than free, there can be no overall winner. Individual packages can be better by this criteria, but not the movements themselves.
I never said at any point said propietary is better than free. I said that free and propietary sofware should coexist, because there are current needs that free software alone does not fill right now. I have an example of need that I have that's not met by free software, but is by propietary. It's my need. You cannot judge what I need, like I judge cannot lilypond is not right for other people. This is why I support both.
There are some people who don't think this is the case, they think that no software should be propietary. That's what I'm disagreeing with.
Can you prove that number, or are you just pulling out of where most such numbers seem to come from? Anyway they don't seem to be very fond of Finale(R).
Of course I have not counted the features, it is hyperbole. Their review of Finale only touches on its output, and gleefully ignores how fast it is to enter the music, which is the time-consuming part. Plus, they are wrong on two points:
1) They turned off all the automatic layout options, which only a rank newbie would do. I can produce output far nicer than that without much effort.
2) In the Real World, notation does not have to be perfect works of art. It needs to be legible and accurate enough so that it can be played correctly. It needs to be produced on schedule. Until recently, most working music was hand-copied, and difficult to read. If I can copy out a score 100 times faster, at 90% quality, vs. no faster at 100% quality, guess which wins, by a landslide? Most music isn't written by royalty like Bach, and doesn't get the hand-engraving that the classics do. That's because Bach was a working musician back then, and over time his scores became classics and worthy of republishing. Take a look at a score from the 1800s some day, what working composers wrote, and working conductors used, and you'll see how amazingly illegible they are.
Hey mister "serious musician who prepares real scores for a living" what do you think about LilyPond?
These testimonials are junk. Nothing there states that the person produces a lot of large scores. In fact, you have three musicians who are not composers nor arrangers nor copyists, plus a few random hackers that I could not care less about.
Note that none of them say "Hi, I work for Sandy DeCrescent music contracting, and we just produced the scored for Harry Potter XXVI played by the London Symphony. We produce all our scores with lilypond, and we're far more productive than we were in Finale! By example, Our last 400-page score only took 10 hours in lilypond, whereas in Finale it took us 200 hours." That would a telling testimonial, not "hey I like it!"
Go ahead, call up JoAnn Kane or DeCrescent or any other big-name music contractor and ask what they use.
That sound a bit superficial doesn't it? Ask any serious mathematician what they write their papers in.
Irrelvant. What a mathematician needs, and what a composer needs are completely different. Latex is written by a math guy on tenure for other math guys on tenure. A math person can grasp the nested structures and indirection in lilypond's computer-language-like syntax, where an average person cannot.
Entered music can also be converted to MIDI output. The performance is good enough for proof-hearing the music for errors.
Note the words "can be"; it's not integrated. I can play it at the touch of a single button, muting certain tracks when needed. I can spot-check a single voicings by clicking on just on the chord I want to hear, and it plays just that chord, ignoring all the other instruments.
They also admit they don't do swing, articulations, and many other things Finale does. I mean, this is just off the top of my head, I can find more if I dig.
My point still stands: free software is nice, but I want to get things done, and sometimes propietary software is better.
LilyPond doesn't do 1/10000th of what Finale does. Ask any serious musician who prepares real scores for a living, and they will laugh... if they even knew what it is.
It's perhaps good for producing small toy scores, but not for real work.
Does lilypond have a UI? No. It's a file format. Lilypond's "interface" it looks like the files that Finale saves.
Can Lilypond play back my score via MIDI for aural proofreading, the fastest way to catch mistakes before they hit the orchestra? Can it automatically prepare parts from a 25-line score? Can it automatically transpose an entire song to a different key? Can it cut and paste music between different instruments, automatically transposing for different instruments? Can it take a five-part harmonized line and split it out into five separate staves?
These features are not just "candy", they are what makes preparing a score by computer hundreds of times faster than by hand. Currently, free software does not fill this niche, and seems likely never to.
You're cheap? So am I. I work at a place with a lot of smart of people. Most have MS in math or engineering, quite a few PhDs, all from the obscure local schools you've never heard of like MIT, Northeastern, or BU.
Anyway... my undergrad was at an unknown state school, so I guarantee you I paid a whole lot less that most of the other folks. I started my entry-level job with friends who went to school in the same town as me, the only difference being they had a whole lot more debt than I did.
But I also have "name brand" masters. Cost to me? $0. How? Night school, tuition reimbursement. Not all companies have it but, but the two jobs I had both I have do (one, a huge multinational defense contractor with untold thousands of people, and two, a small ISV with about about 30 people).
I have a friend who got a full scholarship from the company we worked for, to go to school full-time to get his master's. They gave him part of his salary and he didn't have to go to work for 2 years. Part of the deal was you'd work for X more years for the company, or repay the value. But, a place hired him away and paid it off for him (yeah, late 90s, that kind of stuff happened).
There are tax implications, too. If you take classes to improve or maintain skills in your current profession, and even if you don't get reimbursed, it's all tax deductible. Why do you think employers offer it? You need to have a "current profession", obviously, in order to qualify for this.
So: go to a state school. Get a job. Go to a "name school" on your employer's dime. To be extra miserly, start at community college and transfer to the state school.
Of course, it helps to get kick-ass grades. Fumble a course in grad school and you'll find you're stuck with a whopping bill - your employer doesn't pay for lousy grades. How's that for motivation?
I think you hit the nail on the head here. I am both a user and author software, both free and non-free. But I think he fundamentally thinks as a programmer and forgets the legions of people who want to use the computer to accomplish some task, and want the computer to take off some of the burden.
Using only free software would restrict me. Let's say I had no interest in writing software. I frequently use a music typesetting program Finale, which has been under active development for close to 20 years. Nothing in the free sofware world even remotely comes close. I write and arrange a lot of music for various bands for fun, and music typesetting is small enough niche. If it weren't for commercial software, then I'd have nothing.
Word processors and email clients and text editors and fine to be free, because there's a huge need for it. There are lot of people to scratch that itch, and it significantly overlaps with the programmer's contingent. But try finding anything that your average programmer isn't going to need -- music-typesetting or what have you. Forget it.
I am perfectly willing and happy to spend money on it, because I can prepare music in a fraction of the time compared to pen and paper. (When you're writing for a 25-piece band or orchestra, the asstistance of a computer in invaluable in uncountable ways).
Yes, I am at the whims of the publishers. I can't copy their binaries. I can't read their source. They might drop it at the drop of a hat. Get this: I don't care.
I'd rather be non-free than spend two weeks copying out 50 six-page parts by hand and still have to make 5 rounds of error correction, after wasting the orchestra's time because a typo left out 10 bars in the French Horn 3 part. Over and over for each new piece I write.
To RMS and all other zealots I say: until I see how niche software can be free and as high-quality as their propietary counterparts, there is no way I am going to use exclusively free software.
You realize how much Windows software will not work? Ever since I upgraded to Win2K, I have made sure to never run with admin privileges. From my Unix background, this was the only sane way to run.
Then, you being to realize how much crappy sofware wants to write logfiles inside of its directory or other random places about the hard drive. It took me forever to figure out what files the apps wanted to fart around with, and either move them into a writable "home" style directory or add the right bits so it could write to them.
Forget trying to run anything if you're not a "Power User". Gave up on that a long time ago.
Then there are the few that don't won't work at all unless you have unfettered access to everything.
I mean, I can run this way, but there's no way in hell my sister or parents could. It has to be wide open, otherwise nothing would work for them.
One hopes that with XP getting popular apps will become better-behaved. But as long as the default remain "I'm an admin, he's an admin, she's admin, wouldn't you like to be an admin too?" I suspect not.
All good email programs I know linkify http:// links.
All good email programs I know of can show attached pictures inline.
All good email programs I know of can be configured to show text at any size the user desires, making it perfect for deciding what the user thinks is legible... unless it's HTML, where the sender decides that you can read 4-point yellow-on-white text with a flashing magenta border.
This reminds me of an anecdote. I remember, as a kid, getting all this junk mail with my name misspelled. But not like a single letter, but compeltely unintelligably wrong. The name was: AXORR J REINFLI. My name is Scott Tringali.
It took a few weeks to figure this one out. Eventually realized the person who entered it into some junk mail system was touch-typist, but accidentally had their left hand homed exactly one key to the left. The right hand was precisely in correct position.
So, next time you want to make a password something obvious like your cat's or kid's name, do some secret transformation on it. Move your left hand up.
Another interesting way of creating a password ito make it something completely kinesthetic like FT^gy7HU*ji9 on a standard US keyboard - type this a few times into your keyboard. Though it looks completely random, but it's startingly easy to remember once you try it.
Yeah, they suck. But I almost always have closed-captioning turned on, so that blocks the space usually used for popups.
Plus, the ReplayTV has a thing called Commerical Advance. And it works on popups, believe it or not: when you press the button, it displays a notice ("commercial advance on") overlayed on the bottom 10% of the screen - just big enough to block the spinning dancing "WATCH JOE MILLIONAIRE!" underneath.
Interestingly, I've noted the popups tend to happen right before commercial breaks (well, which I never see anyway, but the replayTV is kind enough to tell you when it skipped a commerical set). Someday there will be a tivo/replay feature that blanks out the bottom 10% of the screen automatically.
And so we adapt back. If it comes to the point where Jack Bauer stops in the middle of 24 and says "And I'm going to drink a Pepsi before I kick your ass, Salazar" is the day I adapt by, uh, not watching it -- Salon already adapted themselves out of an occasional reader.
Yeah, it's gotten real bad lately. I couldn't afford my own house today, if I had to buy it at today's rates. Isn't that crazy?
Fortunately I bought a few years ago (and found a bargain at that), before housing prices doubled.
This is why it's always a good idea to get into the market as soon as you can. Start small and build your assests, which is what the OP is doing. Move or commute if you have to. But just don't sit there and rent for the rest of your life...
I'm terrible at home maintenance, so if they saw me trying to apply for a permit, they'd probably laugh me out of the office. And in this state (MA) you are not allowed to do your own electrical or plumbing unless you have a license. Or so I'm told, maybe it's just the contractors lying to me...
But you should be bragging, you got some serious financial sense... something many older people never acquire. Nice job.
It's not just about the money. When a bank lends out that amount of cash over a long term, they want to see you have a steady job, had it for a few years, and will have it in the future. It's not $just 300/month, it's $300 for 30 years. They are concerned about the 30 years part.
Even if you did have $300 a month free for use, the $300 month comes out of a large slice of pie. Most banks will not let you have more than 30% of your total income tied up in debt. (People who try to spend 75% of their income on a house are neglecting the fact that they have to buy utilities and eat.) Any other loans you have count against that. If you're racking up student loans, then they know what's happening and won't let you. RPI's
tuition is not cheap either. Where is that coming from? Unless you have a full scholarship, or your parents are paying all of it... there's no way a bank would give you a loan with $100K near-term debt.
20% of 60K is $12,000 - and if you don't have 20% down payment they will ding you on mortgage insurance.
$300/month is $3600/year, which means that with no other debt at all, you need a steady job about $10K/year to hold it. Even at $10/hour you'd have to work about 25 weeks to pull that kind of cash. Maybe you have a great job. I made $5/hr managing a movie theater in college.
It is very unusual for a college student to mortgage a house, unless you've been working the same place for a few years and don't plan on moving around. Otherwise someone would have to guarantee (cosign) the loan, which is probably what you did.
PS: If you can renovate an entire house yourself in 3 months including all plumbing, electric, carpentry, sheetrocking, and trim... all while working full-time to pay for the house, and going to college and passing your classes (okay, maybe you did it during the summer)... and, you got all the proper licenses and permits, and it's legal and up to code, you should quit college and become a contractor immediately.
The band doesn't get $2 million dollar advance to blow on new house and cars and beer and keep it. The advance goes right to making the album itself, which they do not own.
So for your example... it would be like if Bob borrowed the $100 with the stipulation that anything he bought with it is really owned by Tom. So he goes and buys a $100 VCR with it... except he has to give back both the VCR (the album created) and the $100 as well.
This summary, and some comments here imply that the DVD is merely the soundtrack augmented with the movie itself, which of course is untrue. If you're a music fan, the soundtrack CD contains all the music in the picture, without most of the sound effects that all too frequently obscures (and sometimes destroy) the music. The soundtrack does have something that the DVD doesn't have.
Now I agree the soundtrack should be cheaper than the DVD, but if you liked the music to any film, you owe it to yourself get the CD. That way you can hear the music without all the explosions.
Perhaps someday DVDs will include a "soundtrack-only" alternate audio track. The only thing I've seen come close is "The Matrix" in which composer Don Davis has the entire track to himself. One of the best alternate audio tracks out there (in a sea of crappy ones where the actors describe what flavor of coffee they had that day when shooting).
I just went through the same thing. And, might I add:
When a binary module fails to compile, you have no idea what to do. You're SOL unless you feel like debugging perl's C code; which I don't, because the reason I'm installing bugzilla is because I have my own bugs to deal with.
When a module fails its tests, you have no idea what to do. Similarly SOL.
Lesson learned: never install a binary Perl package with CPAN. Go get the RPM for your distro, and hope it hasn't been EOL'd yet (trying to find RedHat 7.2 RPMs is a treat).
To its credit, CPAN worked for the perl-only modules, except it wants to download the 300K index file each time you start it. Hello!? Wouldn't once per day be enough?! And WTF is with using lynx to download stuff? What is wrong with wget?
Slashdot Mirror
That, plus these 3,000 websites.
You are absolutely right - there was an option in IE somewhere that does this. I set it a long time ago and have been much happer (well, as happy as one can be when forced to use IE). You use a little more memory, but when IE takes a nosedive, it doesn't take your entire desktop with you.
In the US, real votes are called "dollars", that's why. Voting is mostly pointless.
Do you realize you are asking exactly for the Motif file selection widget as of about 10 years ago, which everyone uniformly hates because it does exactly this?
Telling a musician they should write music in lilypond with a text editor is similar telling a graphic artist not to use that silly Photoshop, or even GIMP -- he should be be writing PostScript code with a text editor. Now, most pros prefer Photoshop over GIMP for lots of reason I don't pretend to understand. But I do understand why they don't program in PostScript. I've done it, it's nasty. It's unnecessary.
There currently is no GIMP-level quality free software for music typesetting.
If getting thing done is all that makes proprietary "better" than free, there can be no overall winner. Individual packages can be better by this criteria, but not the movements themselves.
I never said at any point said propietary is better than free. I said that free and propietary sofware should coexist, because there are current needs that free software alone does not fill right now. I have an example of need that I have that's not met by free software, but is by propietary. It's my need. You cannot judge what I need, like I judge cannot lilypond is not right for other people. This is why I support both.
There are some people who don't think this is the case, they think that no software should be propietary. That's what I'm disagreeing with.
Of course I have not counted the features, it is hyperbole. Their review of Finale only touches on its output, and gleefully ignores how fast it is to enter the music, which is the time-consuming part. Plus, they are wrong on two points:
1) They turned off all the automatic layout options, which only a rank newbie would do. I can produce output far nicer than that without much effort.
2) In the Real World, notation does not have to be perfect works of art. It needs to be legible and accurate enough so that it can be played correctly. It needs to be produced on schedule. Until recently, most working music was hand-copied, and difficult to read. If I can copy out a score 100 times faster, at 90% quality, vs. no faster at 100% quality, guess which wins, by a landslide? Most music isn't written by royalty like Bach, and doesn't get the hand-engraving that the classics do. That's because Bach was a working musician back then, and over time his scores became classics and worthy of republishing. Take a look at a score from the 1800s some day, what working composers wrote, and working conductors used, and you'll see how amazingly illegible they are.
Hey mister "serious musician who prepares real scores for a living" what do you think about LilyPond?
These testimonials are junk. Nothing there states that the person produces a lot of large scores. In fact, you have three musicians who are not composers nor arrangers nor copyists, plus a few random hackers that I could not care less about.
Note that none of them say "Hi, I work for Sandy DeCrescent music contracting, and we just produced the scored for Harry Potter XXVI played by the London Symphony. We produce all our scores with lilypond, and we're far more productive than we were in Finale! By example, Our last 400-page score only took 10 hours in lilypond, whereas in Finale it took us 200 hours." That would a telling testimonial, not "hey I like it!"
Go ahead, call up JoAnn Kane or DeCrescent or any other big-name music contractor and ask what they use.
That sound a bit superficial doesn't it? Ask any serious mathematician what they write their papers in.
Irrelvant. What a mathematician needs, and what a composer needs are completely different. Latex is written by a math guy on tenure for other math guys on tenure. A math person can grasp the nested structures and indirection in lilypond's computer-language-like syntax, where an average person cannot.
Entered music can also be converted to MIDI output. The performance is good enough for proof-hearing the music for errors.
Note the words "can be"; it's not integrated. I can play it at the touch of a single button, muting certain tracks when needed. I can spot-check a single voicings by clicking on just on the chord I want to hear, and it plays just that chord, ignoring all the other instruments. They also admit they don't do swing, articulations, and many other things Finale does. I mean, this is just off the top of my head, I can find more if I dig.
My point still stands: free software is nice, but I want to get things done, and sometimes propietary software is better.
LilyPond doesn't do 1/10000th of what Finale does. Ask any serious musician who prepares real scores for a living, and they will laugh... if they even knew what it is.
It's perhaps good for producing small toy scores, but not for real work.
Does lilypond have a UI? No. It's a file format. Lilypond's "interface" it looks like the files that Finale saves.
Can Lilypond play back my score via MIDI for aural proofreading, the fastest way to catch mistakes before they hit the orchestra? Can it automatically prepare parts from a 25-line score? Can it automatically transpose an entire song to a different key? Can it cut and paste music between different instruments, automatically transposing for different instruments? Can it take a five-part harmonized line and split it out into five separate staves?
These features are not just "candy", they are what makes preparing a score by computer hundreds of times faster than by hand. Currently, free software does not fill this niche, and seems likely never to.
Anyway... my undergrad was at an unknown state school, so I guarantee you I paid a whole lot less that most of the other folks. I started my entry-level job with friends who went to school in the same town as me, the only difference being they had a whole lot more debt than I did.
But I also have "name brand" masters. Cost to me? $0. How? Night school, tuition reimbursement. Not all companies have it but, but the two jobs I had both I have do (one, a huge multinational defense contractor with untold thousands of people, and two, a small ISV with about about 30 people).
I have a friend who got a full scholarship from the company we worked for, to go to school full-time to get his master's. They gave him part of his salary and he didn't have to go to work for 2 years. Part of the deal was you'd work for X more years for the company, or repay the value. But, a place hired him away and paid it off for him (yeah, late 90s, that kind of stuff happened).
There are tax implications, too. If you take classes to improve or maintain skills in your current profession, and even if you don't get reimbursed, it's all tax deductible. Why do you think employers offer it? You need to have a "current profession", obviously, in order to qualify for this.
So: go to a state school. Get a job. Go to a "name school" on your employer's dime. To be extra miserly, start at community college and transfer to the state school.
Of course, it helps to get kick-ass grades. Fumble a course in grad school and you'll find you're stuck with a whopping bill - your employer doesn't pay for lousy grades. How's that for motivation?
I think you hit the nail on the head here. I am both a user and author software, both free and non-free. But I think he fundamentally thinks as a programmer and forgets the legions of people who want to use the computer to accomplish some task, and want the computer to take off some of the burden.
Using only free software would restrict me. Let's say I had no interest in writing software. I frequently use a music typesetting program Finale, which has been under active development for close to 20 years. Nothing in the free sofware world even remotely comes close. I write and arrange a lot of music for various bands for fun, and music typesetting is small enough niche. If it weren't for commercial software, then I'd have nothing.
Word processors and email clients and text editors and fine to be free, because there's a huge need for it. There are lot of people to scratch that itch, and it significantly overlaps with the programmer's contingent. But try finding anything that your average programmer isn't going to need -- music-typesetting or what have you. Forget it.
I am perfectly willing and happy to spend money on it, because I can prepare music in a fraction of the time compared to pen and paper. (When you're writing for a 25-piece band or orchestra, the asstistance of a computer in invaluable in uncountable ways).
Yes, I am at the whims of the publishers. I can't copy their binaries. I can't read their source. They might drop it at the drop of a hat. Get this: I don't care.
I'd rather be non-free than spend two weeks copying out 50 six-page parts by hand and still have to make 5 rounds of error correction, after wasting the orchestra's time because a typo left out 10 bars in the French Horn 3 part. Over and over for each new piece I write.
To RMS and all other zealots I say: until I see how niche software can be free and as high-quality as their propietary counterparts, there is no way I am going to use exclusively free software.
You realize how much Windows software will not work? Ever since I upgraded to Win2K, I have made sure to never run with admin privileges. From my Unix background, this was the only sane way to run.
Then, you being to realize how much crappy sofware wants to write logfiles inside of its directory or other random places about the hard drive. It took me forever to figure out what files the apps wanted to fart around with, and either move them into a writable "home" style directory or add the right bits so it could write to them.
Forget trying to run anything if you're not a "Power User". Gave up on that a long time ago.
Then there are the few that don't won't work at all unless you have unfettered access to everything.
I mean, I can run this way, but there's no way in hell my sister or parents could. It has to be wide open, otherwise nothing would work for them.
One hopes that with XP getting popular apps will become better-behaved. But as long as the default remain "I'm an admin, he's an admin, she's admin, wouldn't you like to be an admin too?" I suspect not.
All good email programs I know of can show attached pictures inline.
All good email programs I know of can be configured to show text at any size the user desires, making it perfect for deciding what the user thinks is legible... unless it's HTML, where the sender decides that you can read 4-point yellow-on-white text with a flashing magenta border.
Maybe it's time to stop reading so much /.
It took a few weeks to figure this one out. Eventually realized the person who entered it into some junk mail system was touch-typist, but accidentally had their left hand homed exactly one key to the left. The right hand was precisely in correct position.
So, next time you want to make a password something obvious like your cat's or kid's name, do some secret transformation on it. Move your left hand up.
Another interesting way of creating a password ito make it something completely kinesthetic like FT^gy7HU*ji9 on a standard US keyboard - type this a few times into your keyboard. Though it looks completely random, but it's startingly easy to remember once you try it.
Plus, the ReplayTV has a thing called Commerical Advance. And it works on popups, believe it or not: when you press the button, it displays a notice ("commercial advance on") overlayed on the bottom 10% of the screen - just big enough to block the spinning dancing "WATCH JOE MILLIONAIRE!" underneath.
Interestingly, I've noted the popups tend to happen right before commercial breaks (well, which I never see anyway, but the replayTV is kind enough to tell you when it skipped a commerical set). Someday there will be a tivo/replay feature that blanks out the bottom 10% of the screen automatically.
And so we adapt back. If it comes to the point where Jack Bauer stops in the middle of 24 and says "And I'm going to drink a Pepsi before I kick your ass, Salazar" is the day I adapt by, uh, not watching it -- Salon already adapted themselves out of an occasional reader.
Fortunately I bought a few years ago (and found a bargain at that), before housing prices doubled.
This is why it's always a good idea to get into the market as soon as you can. Start small and build your assests, which is what the OP is doing. Move or commute if you have to. But just don't sit there and rent for the rest of your life...
I'm terrible at home maintenance, so if they saw me trying to apply for a permit, they'd probably laugh me out of the office. And in this state (MA) you are not allowed to do your own electrical or plumbing unless you have a license. Or so I'm told, maybe it's just the contractors lying to me...
But you should be bragging, you got some serious financial sense... something many older people never acquire. Nice job.
Even if you did have $300 a month free for use, the $300 month comes out of a large slice of pie. Most banks will not let you have more than 30% of your total income tied up in debt. (People who try to spend 75% of their income on a house are neglecting the fact that they have to buy utilities and eat.) Any other loans you have count against that. If you're racking up student loans, then they know what's happening and won't let you. RPI's tuition is not cheap either. Where is that coming from? Unless you have a full scholarship, or your parents are paying all of it... there's no way a bank would give you a loan with $100K near-term debt.
20% of 60K is $12,000 - and if you don't have 20% down payment they will ding you on mortgage insurance.
$300/month is $3600/year, which means that with no other debt at all, you need a steady job about $10K/year to hold it. Even at $10/hour you'd have to work about 25 weeks to pull that kind of cash. Maybe you have a great job. I made $5/hr managing a movie theater in college.
It is very unusual for a college student to mortgage a house, unless you've been working the same place for a few years and don't plan on moving around. Otherwise someone would have to guarantee (cosign) the loan, which is probably what you did.
PS: If you can renovate an entire house yourself in 3 months including all plumbing, electric, carpentry, sheetrocking, and trim... all while working full-time to pay for the house, and going to college and passing your classes (okay, maybe you did it during the summer)... and, you got all the proper licenses and permits, and it's legal and up to code, you should quit college and become a contractor immediately.
Most of the telemarketing calls I get are from them asking if I want to donate for whatever fundraiser they're doing this month.
...only a very small amount of population are really that stupid, right?
So for your example... it would be like if Bob borrowed the $100 with the stipulation that anything he bought with it is really owned by Tom. So he goes and buys a $100 VCR with it... except he has to give back both the VCR (the album created) and the $100 as well.
Totals: Tom is out $100, and Bob gains a VCR.
Now I agree the soundtrack should be cheaper than the DVD, but if you liked the music to any film, you owe it to yourself get the CD. That way you can hear the music without all the explosions.
Perhaps someday DVDs will include a "soundtrack-only" alternate audio track. The only thing I've seen come close is "The Matrix" in which composer Don Davis has the entire track to himself. One of the best alternate audio tracks out there (in a sea of crappy ones where the actors describe what flavor of coffee they had that day when shooting).
Give em a fake one. What are they going to do... say "sorry, give us the phone back" a week after you've had it?
Don't like giving a fake one? Change one number. If they ask about it... oops, sorry about the mistake. Chances are they never will.
If you fill out the form yourself, write it so ambiguously that no person can possibly tell whether that it's a 7 vs 1, or a 9 vs 4.
Story sans nag
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When a binary module fails to compile, you have no idea what to do. You're SOL unless you feel like debugging perl's C code; which I don't, because the reason I'm installing bugzilla is because I have my own bugs to deal with.
- When a module fails its tests, you have no idea what to do. Similarly SOL.
Lesson learned: never install a binary Perl package with CPAN. Go get the RPM for your distro, and hope it hasn't been EOL'd yet (trying to find RedHat 7.2 RPMs is a treat).To its credit, CPAN worked for the perl-only modules, except it wants to download the 300K index file each time you start it. Hello!? Wouldn't once per day be enough?! And WTF is with using lynx to download stuff? What is wrong with wget?
Could be?! 100K in the Boston area will buy you the housing equivalent of dumpster, except nobody comes to haul it away.