I've been using the heat gun/dog bowl method for a long time. A friend started me that way, and I only later discovered the Poppery II method. I can't speak highly enough of it.
I have obtained beans from Sweet Marias a few times, but they are a bit on the pricey side. Some local shops sell them green, but not at prices I like. I usually get my beans from The Coffee Project. They have good prices, you can buy in 1 pound increments to test a bean with, then can get 5# (or 25#) of beans at a lower rate if you like them. Plus they send 5# increments in really nifty burlap sacks. One roasting friend gets all his from Coffe Bean Direct, but you can only purchase in 5# or more increments there. Another friend buys from the Green Coffee Buying Club, which is very community oriented and sometimes hard to navigate and get what you want. (Rather Linux like, in some ways.)
There are many great things about buying green and roasting it yourself. You can buy tons of it, and it won't go bad unless you put it in sunlight, extreme heat or cold, or moisture. And the freshness is beyond measure. It also has a really fun DIY aspect.
For heat gun/dog bowl method, you get a heat gun ($20 or less at your local hardware store), a wooden spoon, and a metal bowl. (Dog bowls are the most popular, but I don't like them personally. I use a straight-sided bowl, or a deep egg-shaped bowl. When I need a lot of beans, a Kitchenaide stand mixer bowl is awesome.) Pour in 1/4 to 1/3 the number of beans you think the bowl can hold, kick the gun on high, and aim it point-blank at the beans. Start stirring. Keep this up for the 15-45 minute it takes for them to be ready. (This will vary by the gun's power, quantity and type of beans, ambient temperature, bowl shape, and moon phase.) Go at least till it seems to stop cracking the first time, and probably at least till it starts again. Then cool them in a metal (NOT plastic!) colander or perhaps a metal screen affixed over a horizontal box fan (easy to build and well worth it.) Wait until the next day has passed, then grind and brew. Even with a bad brewer, you've never tasted such good coffee.
Well, I'm not a social conservative, so I am not the one to explain that viewpoint. Perhaps you mistook me for one by my post; if so you missed the part where I said "someone like you comes along to keep me a firm moderate." Either way, you missed my point.
The point of the whole thing was that Un pobre guey had gone off on a rant that represented an American political "liberal" viewpoint. That rant (the word can frequently be used as a synonym for "troll") may have had "liberal" content, but is identical in style to the rants by "conservatives" that you complained about.
I agree with you about the whole open minded bit. By the dictionary definition, I am actually quite a liberal. However, I was referring to becoming more of a liberal in the american political sense. Do you really think Un pobre guey is open minded about his stance? Do you think that NOW is open minded about empowerment of women? Again, I'm NOT making a value statement about the position, only that they appear quite firm-minded in them. I find NOW to be no more open-minded than, say, Rush Limbaugh. They are both equally firm in their respective positions, despite the difference in those positions. I have found that any truly open-minded person that I have met is a moderate, for only they can see the strengths and weaknesses of both "liberal" and "conservative" positions. (Also note that I have not found all moderates to be open-minded; many are simply follow th crowd.)
All that having been said, you may be surprised how many of Un pobre guey's points I agreed with. I simply abhor the knee-jerk troll method in which it was presented.
Thank you. Every time I start to consider swinging towards becoming more of a liberal, someone like you comes along to keep me a firm moderate. It amazes me how as people swing further and further towards liberal and conservative mindsets, they actually start looking and sounding more and more alike.
Really, does this remind anyone of a typical knee-jerk reaction to, say, a story about a judge ordering a school to take down the ten commandments? The only difference I see is in the content being expressed; the tone, style, and quality of arguments is the same. Please note that this is a meta-comment about the argument style, not an agreement or refutation of the argument.
Put together that page. I've gotta see it when you get it done. I'll even help edit it if you want. All I ask in return is that I get credited with my new nickname. I've decided that I will now go by the numeric value [133], which is Q1 in base-12. As best as I can tell, that is properly pronounced "cutie-one", as in "ninety-eight, ninety-nine, cutie, cutie-one..." I was also thinking of going as Q5, just because it's prime, or as Q0, but decided I like the sound of Q1 best.
The best one is time: there are now 50 seconds in a minute, so we can move 2 minutes to one, then we get 26 minutes in an hour, by quadrupling the hour to 100 minutes we now get 6 hours in a day, halving the length of a second will now give us 10 hours in a day.
Don't DO that. My head is still spinning Q minutes later! Ack!
I don't know whether to commend you for coming up with all of that (though you may want to go back and begin using earlier conversions in it as you go on if you ever keep it) or hate you for that therapy-inducing whallop of raw nerddom. Then again, I read the whole thing, and followed it. I need to get out more.
There's no point getting good speakers if the audio being played on them is of poor quality.
I agree with this to a point. You don't go buy $10k speakers and run them off a Soundblaster 16. But, really, you don't run them off an Extigy either. The only things the Extigy has going for it is marketing and being external. It actually has nasty DA and AD converters, constantly dithers to various frequencies and bit rates, and generally mucks up the sound something awful. Not actually worth the money.
There are good external sound cards, but they don't come cheap. Try M-Audio (now with a consumer line!) or Echo or Aardvark or even Digidesign if you want "audiophile" sound cards for a PC. These are all "Pro Audio" companies (aka music production), but you can use the stuff for Quake just as easy as creating break beats.
There's no point getting good speakers if the audio being played on them is of poor quality.
The counter to this is that there's no point in using a good amp/soundcard/cables/etc to produce good audio if the speakers it is playing on is poor quality. And there are no "computer speakers" that are not poor quality from an Audiophile perspective. Nor can you even buy any Audiophile speakers at Best Buy or Circuit City. Supposedly SoundTrack carries them, but the one near me does not. I can only find them in local shops; the shops that turn up thier noses if you ask if they carry anything by Bose.
For perspactive, there's audiophile and Audiophile. The former is like the guy who says he's into performace cars and slaps a "Type-R" sticker on his Civic. The latter is the guy who says he's into performace cars and labors over whether to buy a Ferrari or Lambroghini. (If these are misspelled, or are actually not the "nice" cars anymore, please forgive me. I drive a "paid for" Storm and a Grand Prix and don't pretend to care about cars.) My wife and I are 2/3 of the way from audiophile to Audiophile. She won't buy a speaker unless she can instantly tell whether Itzhak Perlman is pushing or pulling the bow across the strings. I want to hear what brand of compressors were used in the drum overheads. But we have a WIDE variety of systems we play music on, from MB Quarts (nice) to Altec Lansing PC speakers (functional for the beeps Windows makes) to 1964 Magnavox peice-of-furniture stereo (inacurate, but warm and perfect for Billie Holiday.)
So... If your husband is an Audiophile, spare him the agony of pretending to like what you get him Christmas morning and get him something else. If he's an audiophile, get him whatever is on the shelf for $200.
Actually, I mean "therefor". Either way is actually correct usage, though the version I used is the more antiquated. I liked the juxtaposition. Check it out if you don't believe me.
http://www.dictionary.com/search?q=therefor
Yea, the machine I grabbed that ping time from was having network troubles. Turned out to be the NIC.:-)
It was Christianson. Or Kristansen. Or something like that. I wasn't too worried about spelling at that particular moment. Woulda been fun to have inspired it, but I think all I inspired was a lot of legends about me among my friends. Oh, and an obsession with accents that I still can't get over 10 years later. I think I dated every exchange student I met that was even close to attractive for the next 3 years.
When I was a teenager, my best friend had a really nice table in his basement. By the time I left high school I was actually quite good at the game. But even when I was bad, I wouldn't have wanted a "smart" table. Part of the fun is really bolluxing up what should have been an easy shot, laughing at yourself, and learning how to do it right. The only "smart" table I want is one that knows more games than I do and will always be tabulating the score.
Off topic story now. When I was 16 there was a Danish exchange student in my circle of friends. I wanted her like mad, but hadn't found a way to get past that "good friends" stage. She was hot as all get out, and had an adorable way of mistaking what we were saying and/or not knowing the words, especially the slang. So we're all at my friend's place playing pool, and I just about won a game with an incredible shot on the 8-ball. But instead, the 8 hit the cue a second time, knocking in the cue. I lost, and exclaimed something about how I "double kissed"** it. Danish exchange student says "what's a 'devil kiss'?" Full deadpan, I said "step in that closet over there and I'll show you." She grins and accepts! All our friends' jaws drop, we head in the closet and come out 20 minutes later, breathless. Turns out all the guys knew I wanted her, and all the girls knew she wanted me, so they never said a word. Started a short-lived but highly passionate relationship that was broken up by her exchange parents. And that's my best pool story ever.
**"double-kiss" is when the cue hits the intended ball (in this case the 8) more than one time in a shot.
can achieve that state anywhere
on
Gaming Zone?
·
· Score: 1
I understand that "flow". I've hit it in soccer in HS, and now I hit it sometimes as a sound tech (more on that in a bit.) I think that it's possible to hit in any area where total concentration can be achieved and is desireable and pleasurable. Just what that thing is for you depends on who you are, how you are wired, and what you do for fun and/or money.
Back to sound... I've been mixing for a 9-member band. Full drum kit, bass, keys, lead guitar, percussion, two accoustic and one electric rhythm guitars, five vocals. 28 channels of instruments and vocals, two stereo effects channels. I'm tweaking levels, monitoring thier monitors and adjusting them, playing with the onboard EQs, playing with 6 offboard 31 band EQs, 16 channels of compressors/gates, and two effects processors. I've got more knobs to play with than I knew existed six months prior. I'm recording it all to a PC. I've got 1100 people dancing to it all around me.
Suddenly, I'm "There". I'm in the zone. The crowd is gone. I can only feel the board at my fingertips, but no longer need to see it. I'm maintaining eye contact with all 9 band members and reading what they are saying to me with miniscule eye movements for monitor adjustments. And the feeling was ecstacy. It was as good as an orgasm after an hour of lovemaking (though didn't feel like it, per se.) I was just, "There".
Five songs later I realized not only that my wife was in the building (I was not expecting her,) but that she had had her arm around my waist for 15 minutes and I didn't know she was there. That's the zone.
When my wife and I were first married, I was working for minumum wage 35 hours a week, and she was finishing college (aka not working.) We were living below the poverty line, but managed to live within our means, including no credit card debt, by simply not spending money we didn't absolutely have to. There was once a four month stretch where we ddn't even go to McDonald's because it cost too much.
Fast forward 18 months, we moved to Colorado Springs to her parent's basement. We got jobs that raised our combined salary to about 350% of what it had been, and started to get caught up in the BUY! BUY! BUY! pace of life in the North end of town. Eighteen months, a brand new car, a brand new house and ~$10,000 in credit card debt later, we were miserable, frustrated with each other, wondering how we were so amazingly happy when we were first married.
About then we started pondering the need for all the crap we were accumulating, and soon realized that the overspending bit was hurting us on a psychological/spiritual level. So we decided to change our way of life.
Fast forward another 16 months. We have the credit cards all paid off (and most closed, keeping 2 open for emergencies,) almost all of the school debts paid off, are knocking another $200+ a month away on paying off the car and house early, are socking away money for retirement, and are on track to be out of debt by the time we are 35, mortgage included! The trick? We quit spending money. No cable TV (she couldn't bear to drop broadband either,) eat out rarely, don't go to see more than 1 movie every 2 months (okay, so we broke it with Spiderman/AOTC, but shoulda skipped AOTC,) etc. In all fairness, we can sock away a bunch of extra due to some significant advances in pay the last 3 years as well, but the trick is to spend less than you want to, and only get what you need to.
Now my wife goes and rides horses with a friend at her new ~$750,000 place. She's worried about her friend, who just can't seem to figure out how to be happy, no matter how much stuff she gets. you can keep your stuff, I'll spend time with my wife and be happy.
Then again, maybe I'm destined to repeat this stupid cycle for eternity. sysiphus
You are confusing a settlement and a sentence. Microsoft could be sentenced to be split into, say, one company for every.exe,.dll, or.com the produce. That's a sentence (or is that sentance? I can never remember,) and they have to abide by it, like it or not. A sentence is a mandated punishment for a crime. A settlement is an agreement reached between two parties to avoid the judge's sentence, let the guilty choose their punishment, and still have them be punished. Microsoft has to agree to a settlement. If they can't, the judge must choose a sentence, which they don't get a say in (but can appeal.)
Secondly, follow GUI-guidelines wherever you can. Winamp (and most other mp3-players) are completely ridiculous. A gui built for usability would have larger buttons, standard focus mechanisms, less distracting eye-candy, etc...
True, the GUI is weak. Just make sure you do the one thing WinAmp does best as far as usability: basic keystrokes. The 5 most important keys are: Z - X - C - V - B, which does:
back, play, pause, stop, next. These are EXACTLY the same pattern on the keyboard as in the GUI, and are just one button to hit. I still use WinAmp on my Win computers, just because there's no CTRL key just to pause.
Actually, iTunes is better yet, just hit the arrow keys to skip and change volume (L-R, up-down respectively), and space to play/pause.
Lots of people here are saying to allow keystrokes for EVERYTHING. I say to make stupid-easy keystrokes for the stuff the program does most (play modes for media.) I've gone through dozens of MP3/media players looking for ones with more features, but keep coming back to WinAmp because I can just use it. I do this with LOTS of applications, and will frequently switch to ones that I can use. Just make it easy for everyday use, even if you want to make it have a bazillion fully configurable features.
Ach! and I don't have any mod points today! I wanted to mod this up +1"gets it", or maybe +1"understands there is more to life than tech and money and is a shining example to us all." It's a shame, because I don't see things this intelligent all that often.
Actually a pretty useful tool.
Not only tells you what you have on your system,
but reports free memory slots and current CPU speed as well.
Well, mostly useful. I like what it lists for my memory modules at work: 640 Megabytes Installed Memory
128 Megabyte Module Size - 1 Installed
2 Memory Sockets are Empty
So, I have 640MB of RAM in one 128MB module! Dang, I gotta buy a few of those for my home machines!
Also, while most of the software reporting is mostly useful, there are a few cases of the Belarc Advisor smoking crack. Here's a few programs I (apparently) have installed: Description
Version 2.2
Text Document
and my personal favorite... Separate Office documents from a binder document with the Unbind Office Binders Utility.
Well, at least it works as well as every other utility I've tried for asset and/or software tracking under Windows. To think that my boss is on my case because our asset tracking is never quite accurate.
Figures. I try to politely respond to a troll, and forgot to wear asbestos. We'll try this from the begining.
Okay, here's the actual quote from Exodus 20:17 (NIV)* "You shall not covet your neighbor's house. You shall not covet your neighbor's wife, or his manservant or maidservant, his ox or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor."
According to your post, That 10th commandment implicitly says that wives are property, as well as slaves. That's backing down quite a bit from the original you posted: Your other example, the ten commandments, has among other things, and implicit approval of slavery and classification of women as second class citizens. Acknowledgement is not the same as approval. Commandment 10 is about coveting, and gives examples of what not to covet. In those days, slavery was normal, as was ownership of wives. Bad as that was (is where it's still acceptable,) it was an accepted social norm. The rule was thus written using examples that people would understand. Unfortunately, the bible always reflected the prevailing philosophies and mores of the day (except the stuff from Jesus on forgivenes, but I'm working on understanding that.) However, to extract a statement of approval from a statement of (current understanding of) reality only serves your own self-interests.
By the way, I am aware that other parts of the bible implicitly allow ownership of women and slaves. I am also aware of parts that implicity forbid it. I only know of one of the drinking urine passages; can you give me the references. I also know about the mistranslation of swearing on the king's "thigh" (it is better translated testicles), and that Ruth didn't lay at the king's "feet" (the word also means genitalia.) I know the dirty parts and contradictions in and out. Maybe you know the bible better than I, maybe not. Doesn't really matter, kind of like this conversation in the middle of this thread.
Oh, and since you seem sure I am trying to prove a point about my religion, could you let me know what my religion is? I haven't even started trying to figure out what it is, as I'm currently busy trying to find out what my faith is (if it is.) Don't mistake correcting (what I feel to be) a dishonesty for defending religion. I have none right now.
* NIV was the default translation at bible.gospelcom.net. I do not endorse it over any other translation (except King James, which is just terrible), nor do I neccessarily endorse the bible over any other religios source material. Pick any translation, they all say the same basic thing here.
Your other example, the ten commandments, has among other things, and implicit approval of slavery and classification of women as second class citizens.
Really? I don't remember seeing those in the 10 commandments. Let's check them again... (summarization mine)
...no other gods before me
Don't take my name in vain
Don't worship graven images (idols)
Keep the sabbath holy
Honor your father and mother
Don't kill
Don't commit adultery
Don't steal
Don't lie about your neighbour
Don't covet his(her) stuff either.
While I won't go in depth on any of this (and the twisting of these is easy to talk about,) I think that you will have a hard time finding slavery and gender inequality in there. I'd love to have an honest conversation about where that IS and is NOT found in the Bible, but that's offtopic here. Feel free to email me about it though.
I live and work in Colorado Springs, with a great view of Cheyenne Mountain (home of NORAD) from my cube. There wasn't a peep of rumor out here about somebody taking NORAD. Personally, I think it's because we know that anyone with the smarts to pull off what happened yesterday has the smarts to know that the entire fleets of American Airlines and United Airlines planes combined couldn't penetrate that mountain. It is pretty much impervious to low-tech attacks.
Now, somebody with a hundred million bucks or so to spend on smart missiles and nukes could take it out. However, they'd be crazy to try, as the same nukes could take out all of Washington DC and NYC, with plenty of firepower left to thrash our military/industrial complex to make NORAD worthless to us. But that's another story entirely.
But the growing "freedom from speech" movement is spawning communities in which people will find only opinions they already agree with.
Okay, name me one online community where people find a lot of info they don't agree with. The reason people join the community in the first place is because they find a place that basicly agrees with what they already believe. The net does bring "all sorts of people together", yes, but not in the same place. Some communities are filled with MicroClones, this one is filled with a different kind of geek, some are for sports fans, others are religious communities. But they all have a focus, and should the focus change, the members would leave.
To assume that we are the only intelligent life in the universe seems like it would be the true irrational act.
It seems that way to you. Given the statistic improbability that life on this planet even began, that assumption does not seem so irrational to me. Rather, it seems that assuming that there is no God would be an irrational act (from my perspective). Both of us take our views from our particular flavor of faith.
I have long held the belief (even during my days as an agnostic) that all human beings have a powerful desire to believe in something unprovable. I now call it a God-shaped-hole, but I would be just as satisfied calling it anything else. Believing in God, Allah, Budda, the Great Spirit, extra-terrestrial life, or even the Loch Ness Monster all fit that bill from my perspective.
The other thing that I have learned in my life is that a person can use scientific truths to "prove" their own beliefs, but that that does not make their beliefs correct.
Religion has no evidence either way, and therefore currently falls outside the scientific method. Deeply religious people like this are prejudiced against science.
Unfortunately, many modern religious groups feel that they must justify their faith with science because so many people believe so deeply that science will be humanity's 'savior'. However, religion is a poor foundation for science. Likewise, science is a poor foundation for religion.
I have always understood science and religion/philosophy to be mutually exclusive endeavors. Science is data collection and subsequent application of that knowledge to the physical world. When scientists take their observations and attempt to make philosophical or religious arguments from them, they have left the world of science. The problem lies on both sides of the rail (religion and science.)
The truth of the matter is that religion cannot tell us why the sky is blue, where babies come from (physicly speaking), or what will happen when we mix chemicals x,y, and z in certain proportions. It is not supposed to. Likewise, science cannot tell us why flowers are beautiful, why we shouldn't kill every person that annoys us, or why (or if) life has meaning. It is not supposed to.
Of course religious people are prejudiced against science; they see science as trying to define religion when it has no right to! Of course scientific people are prejudiced against religion; they see religion as trying to define science when it has no right to!
Where I have problems is in "scientific" endeavors such as SETI. Basicly, people who say that there is no scientific evidence for a God who will use vast resources to listen for Extra Terrestrial intelligence, when there is no scientific evidence for it. To me, that takes a great amount of (scientificly) non-rational faith. Just like belief in any diety. (Of course, most religions' gods could be described as extra-terrestrial ultra-intelligence...)
Because Christian fundamentalists tend to be stupid, bigoted, and don't know what they're talking about.
So basicly Christian fundamentalists have the same tendencies as every other human? Careful... it almost sounds like you are saying Christians could be people too!
Please keep your hatred to yourself and post things worth saying.
Slashdot Mirror
I've been using the heat gun/dog bowl method for a long time. A friend started me that way, and I only later discovered the Poppery II method. I can't speak highly enough of it. I have obtained beans from Sweet Marias a few times, but they are a bit on the pricey side. Some local shops sell them green, but not at prices I like. I usually get my beans from The Coffee Project. They have good prices, you can buy in 1 pound increments to test a bean with, then can get 5# (or 25#) of beans at a lower rate if you like them. Plus they send 5# increments in really nifty burlap sacks. One roasting friend gets all his from Coffe Bean Direct, but you can only purchase in 5# or more increments there. Another friend buys from the Green Coffee Buying Club, which is very community oriented and sometimes hard to navigate and get what you want. (Rather Linux like, in some ways.) There are many great things about buying green and roasting it yourself. You can buy tons of it, and it won't go bad unless you put it in sunlight, extreme heat or cold, or moisture. And the freshness is beyond measure. It also has a really fun DIY aspect. For heat gun/dog bowl method, you get a heat gun ($20 or less at your local hardware store), a wooden spoon, and a metal bowl. (Dog bowls are the most popular, but I don't like them personally. I use a straight-sided bowl, or a deep egg-shaped bowl. When I need a lot of beans, a Kitchenaide stand mixer bowl is awesome.) Pour in 1/4 to 1/3 the number of beans you think the bowl can hold, kick the gun on high, and aim it point-blank at the beans. Start stirring. Keep this up for the 15-45 minute it takes for them to be ready. (This will vary by the gun's power, quantity and type of beans, ambient temperature, bowl shape, and moon phase.) Go at least till it seems to stop cracking the first time, and probably at least till it starts again. Then cool them in a metal (NOT plastic!) colander or perhaps a metal screen affixed over a horizontal box fan (easy to build and well worth it.) Wait until the next day has passed, then grind and brew. Even with a bad brewer, you've never tasted such good coffee.
Well, I'm not a social conservative, so I am not the one to explain that viewpoint. Perhaps you mistook me for one by my post; if so you missed the part where I said "someone like you comes along to keep me a firm moderate." Either way, you missed my point.
The point of the whole thing was that Un pobre guey had gone off on a rant that represented an American political "liberal" viewpoint. That rant (the word can frequently be used as a synonym for "troll") may have had "liberal" content, but is identical in style to the rants by "conservatives" that you complained about.
I agree with you about the whole open minded bit. By the dictionary definition, I am actually quite a liberal. However, I was referring to becoming more of a liberal in the american political sense. Do you really think Un pobre guey is open minded about his stance? Do you think that NOW is open minded about empowerment of women? Again, I'm NOT making a value statement about the position, only that they appear quite firm-minded in them. I find NOW to be no more open-minded than, say, Rush Limbaugh. They are both equally firm in their respective positions, despite the difference in those positions. I have found that any truly open-minded person that I have met is a moderate, for only they can see the strengths and weaknesses of both "liberal" and "conservative" positions. (Also note that I have not found all moderates to be open-minded; many are simply follow th crowd.)
All that having been said, you may be surprised how many of Un pobre guey's points I agreed with. I simply abhor the knee-jerk troll method in which it was presented.
SysiphusThank you. Every time I start to consider swinging towards becoming more of a liberal, someone like you comes along to keep me a firm moderate. It amazes me how as people swing further and further towards liberal and conservative mindsets, they actually start looking and sounding more and more alike.
Really, does this remind anyone of a typical knee-jerk reaction to, say, a story about a judge ordering a school to take down the ten commandments? The only difference I see is in the content being expressed; the tone, style, and quality of arguments is the same. Please note that this is a meta-comment about the argument style, not an agreement or refutation of the argument.
Sysiphus
Sysiphus
Put together that page. I've gotta see it when you get it done. I'll even help edit it if you want. All I ask in return is that I get credited with my new nickname. I've decided that I will now go by the numeric value [133], which is Q1 in base-12. As best as I can tell, that is properly pronounced "cutie-one", as in "ninety-eight, ninety-nine, cutie, cutie-one..." I was also thinking of going as Q5, just because it's prime, or as Q0, but decided I like the sound of Q1 best.
Sysiphusaka Q1
The best one is time: there are now 50 seconds in a minute, so we can move 2 minutes to one, then we get 26 minutes in an hour, by quadrupling the hour to 100 minutes we now get 6 hours in a day, halving the length of a second will now give us 10 hours in a day.
Don't DO that. My head is still spinning Q minutes later! Ack!
I don't know whether to commend you for coming up with all of that (though you may want to go back and begin using earlier conversions in it as you go on if you ever keep it) or hate you for that therapy-inducing whallop of raw nerddom. Then again, I read the whole thing, and followed it. I need to get out more.
SysiphusThere's no point getting good speakers if the audio being played on them is of poor quality.
I agree with this to a point. You don't go buy $10k speakers and run them off a Soundblaster 16. But, really, you don't run them off an Extigy either. The only things the Extigy has going for it is marketing and being external. It actually has nasty DA and AD converters, constantly dithers to various frequencies and bit rates, and generally mucks up the sound something awful. Not actually worth the money.
There are good external sound cards, but they don't come cheap. Try M-Audio (now with a consumer line!) or Echo or Aardvark or even Digidesign if you want "audiophile" sound cards for a PC. These are all "Pro Audio" companies (aka music production), but you can use the stuff for Quake just as easy as creating break beats.
There's no point getting good speakers if the audio being played on them is of poor quality.
The counter to this is that there's no point in using a good amp/soundcard/cables/etc to produce good audio if the speakers it is playing on is poor quality. And there are no "computer speakers" that are not poor quality from an Audiophile perspective. Nor can you even buy any Audiophile speakers at Best Buy or Circuit City. Supposedly SoundTrack carries them, but the one near me does not. I can only find them in local shops; the shops that turn up thier noses if you ask if they carry anything by Bose.
For perspactive, there's audiophile and Audiophile. The former is like the guy who says he's into performace cars and slaps a "Type-R" sticker on his Civic. The latter is the guy who says he's into performace cars and labors over whether to buy a Ferrari or Lambroghini. (If these are misspelled, or are actually not the "nice" cars anymore, please forgive me. I drive a "paid for" Storm and a Grand Prix and don't pretend to care about cars.) My wife and I are 2/3 of the way from audiophile to Audiophile. She won't buy a speaker unless she can instantly tell whether Itzhak Perlman is pushing or pulling the bow across the strings. I want to hear what brand of compressors were used in the drum overheads. But we have a WIDE variety of systems we play music on, from MB Quarts (nice) to Altec Lansing PC speakers (functional for the beeps Windows makes) to 1964 Magnavox peice-of-furniture stereo (inacurate, but warm and perfect for Billie Holiday.)
So... If your husband is an Audiophile, spare him the agony of pretending to like what you get him Christmas morning and get him something else. If he's an audiophile, get him whatever is on the shelf for $200.
SysiphusActually, I mean "therefor". Either way is actually correct usage, though the version I used is the more antiquated. I liked the juxtaposition. Check it out if you don't believe me.
http://www.dictionary.com/search?q=therefor
Yea, the machine I grabbed that ping time from was having network troubles. Turned out to be the NIC. :-)
It was Christianson. Or Kristansen. Or something like that. I wasn't too worried about spelling at that particular moment. Woulda been fun to have inspired it, but I think all I inspired was a lot of legends about me among my friends. Oh, and an obsession with accents that I still can't get over 10 years later. I think I dated every exchange student I met that was even close to attractive for the next 3 years.
Off topic story now. When I was 16 there was a Danish exchange student in my circle of friends. I wanted her like mad, but hadn't found a way to get past that "good friends" stage. She was hot as all get out, and had an adorable way of mistaking what we were saying and/or not knowing the words, especially the slang. So we're all at my friend's place playing pool, and I just about won a game with an incredible shot on the 8-ball. But instead, the 8 hit the cue a second time, knocking in the cue. I lost, and exclaimed something about how I "double kissed"** it. Danish exchange student says "what's a 'devil kiss'?" Full deadpan, I said "step in that closet over there and I'll show you." She grins and accepts! All our friends' jaws drop, we head in the closet and come out 20 minutes later, breathless. Turns out all the guys knew I wanted her, and all the girls knew she wanted me, so they never said a word. Started a short-lived but highly passionate relationship that was broken up by her exchange parents. And that's my best pool story ever.
**"double-kiss" is when the cue hits the intended ball (in this case the 8) more than one time in a shot.
I understand that "flow". I've hit it in soccer in HS, and now I hit it sometimes as a sound tech (more on that in a bit.) I think that it's possible to hit in any area where total concentration can be achieved and is desireable and pleasurable. Just what that thing is for you depends on who you are, how you are wired, and what you do for fun and/or money.
Back to sound...
I've been mixing for a 9-member band. Full drum kit, bass, keys, lead guitar, percussion, two accoustic and one electric rhythm guitars, five vocals. 28 channels of instruments and vocals, two stereo effects channels. I'm tweaking levels, monitoring thier monitors and adjusting them, playing with the onboard EQs, playing with 6 offboard 31 band EQs, 16 channels of compressors/gates, and two effects processors. I've got more knobs to play with than I knew existed six months prior. I'm recording it all to a PC. I've got 1100 people dancing to it all around me.
Suddenly, I'm "There". I'm in the zone. The crowd is gone. I can only feel the board at my fingertips, but no longer need to see it. I'm maintaining eye contact with all 9 band members and reading what they are saying to me with miniscule eye movements for monitor adjustments. And the feeling was ecstacy. It was as good as an orgasm after an hour of lovemaking (though didn't feel like it, per se.) I was just, "There".
Five songs later I realized not only that my wife was in the building (I was not expecting her,) but that she had had her arm around my waist for 15 minutes and I didn't know she was there. That's the zone.
Institute for the Promotion of the Internet Protocol Utility.
Um, the IPIPU? Personally, I'd never let myself be associated with an organization pronounced "eye pee eye poo."
When my wife and I were first married, I was working for minumum wage 35 hours a week, and she was finishing college (aka not working.) We were living below the poverty line, but managed to live within our means, including no credit card debt, by simply not spending money we didn't absolutely have to. There was once a four month stretch where we ddn't even go to McDonald's because it cost too much.
Fast forward 18 months, we moved to Colorado Springs to her parent's basement. We got jobs that raised our combined salary to about 350% of what it had been, and started to get caught up in the BUY! BUY! BUY! pace of life in the North end of town. Eighteen months, a brand new car, a brand new house and ~$10,000 in credit card debt later, we were miserable, frustrated with each other, wondering how we were so amazingly happy when we were first married.
About then we started pondering the need for all the crap we were accumulating, and soon realized that the overspending bit was hurting us on a psychological/spiritual level. So we decided to change our way of life.
Fast forward another 16 months. We have the credit cards all paid off (and most closed, keeping 2 open for emergencies,) almost all of the school debts paid off, are knocking another $200+ a month away on paying off the car and house early, are socking away money for retirement, and are on track to be out of debt by the time we are 35, mortgage included! The trick? We quit spending money. No cable TV (she couldn't bear to drop broadband either,) eat out rarely, don't go to see more than 1 movie every 2 months (okay, so we broke it with Spiderman/AOTC, but shoulda skipped AOTC,) etc. In all fairness, we can sock away a bunch of extra due to some significant advances in pay the last 3 years as well, but the trick is to spend less than you want to, and only get what you need to.
Now my wife goes and rides horses with a friend at her new ~$750,000 place. She's worried about her friend, who just can't seem to figure out how to be happy, no matter how much stuff she gets. you can keep your stuff, I'll spend time with my wife and be happy.
Then again, maybe I'm destined to repeat this stupid cycle for eternity.
sysiphus
You are confusing a settlement and a sentence. Microsoft could be sentenced to be split into, say, one company for every .exe, .dll, or .com the produce. That's a sentence (or is that sentance? I can never remember,) and they have to abide by it, like it or not. A sentence is a mandated punishment for a crime. A settlement is an agreement reached between two parties to avoid the judge's sentence, let the guilty choose their punishment, and still have them be punished. Microsoft has to agree to a settlement. If they can't, the judge must choose a sentence, which they don't get a say in (but can appeal.)
True, the GUI is weak. Just make sure you do the one thing WinAmp does best as far as usability: basic keystrokes. The 5 most important keys are:
Z - X - C - V - B, which does:
back, play, pause, stop, next. These are EXACTLY the same pattern on the keyboard as in the GUI, and are just one button to hit. I still use WinAmp on my Win computers, just because there's no CTRL key just to pause.
Actually, iTunes is better yet, just hit the arrow keys to skip and change volume (L-R, up-down respectively), and space to play/pause.
Lots of people here are saying to allow keystrokes for EVERYTHING. I say to make stupid-easy keystrokes for the stuff the program does most (play modes for media.) I've gone through dozens of MP3/media players looking for ones with more features, but keep coming back to WinAmp because I can just use it. I do this with LOTS of applications, and will frequently switch to ones that I can use. Just make it easy for everyday use, even if you want to make it have a bazillion fully configurable features.
Ach! and I don't have any mod points today! I wanted to mod this up +1"gets it", or maybe +1"understands there is more to life than tech and money and is a shining example to us all." It's a shame, because I don't see things this intelligent all that often.
Well, mostly useful. I like what it lists for my memory modules at work:
640 Megabytes Installed Memory
128 Megabyte Module Size - 1 Installed
2 Memory Sockets are Empty
So, I have 640MB of RAM in one 128MB module! Dang, I gotta buy a few of those for my home machines!
Also, while most of the software reporting is mostly useful, there are a few cases of the Belarc Advisor smoking crack. Here's a few programs I (apparently) have installed:
Description
Version 2.2
Text Document
and my personal favorite...
Separate Office documents from a binder document with the Unbind Office Binders Utility.
Well, at least it works as well as every other utility I've tried for asset and/or software tracking under Windows. To think that my boss is on my case because our asset tracking is never quite accurate.
Figures. I try to politely respond to a troll, and forgot to wear asbestos. We'll try this from the begining.
Okay, here's the actual quote from Exodus 20:17 (NIV)* "You shall not covet your neighbor's house. You shall not covet your neighbor's wife, or his manservant or maidservant, his ox or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor."
According to your post, That 10th commandment implicitly says that wives are property, as well as slaves. That's backing down quite a bit from the original you posted: Your other example, the ten commandments, has among other things, and implicit approval of slavery and classification of women as second class citizens. Acknowledgement is not the same as approval. Commandment 10 is about coveting, and gives examples of what not to covet. In those days, slavery was normal, as was ownership of wives. Bad as that was (is where it's still acceptable,) it was an accepted social norm. The rule was thus written using examples that people would understand. Unfortunately, the bible always reflected the prevailing philosophies and mores of the day (except the stuff from Jesus on forgivenes, but I'm working on understanding that.) However, to extract a statement of approval from a statement of (current understanding of) reality only serves your own self-interests.
By the way, I am aware that other parts of the bible implicitly allow ownership of women and slaves. I am also aware of parts that implicity forbid it. I only know of one of the drinking urine passages; can you give me the references. I also know about the mistranslation of swearing on the king's "thigh" (it is better translated testicles), and that Ruth didn't lay at the king's "feet" (the word also means genitalia.) I know the dirty parts and contradictions in and out. Maybe you know the bible better than I, maybe not. Doesn't really matter, kind of like this conversation in the middle of this thread.
Oh, and since you seem sure I am trying to prove a point about my religion, could you let me know what my religion is? I haven't even started trying to figure out what it is, as I'm currently busy trying to find out what my faith is (if it is.) Don't mistake correcting (what I feel to be) a dishonesty for defending religion. I have none right now.
* NIV was the default translation at bible.gospelcom.net. I do not endorse it over any other translation (except King James, which is just terrible), nor do I neccessarily endorse the bible over any other religios source material. Pick any translation, they all say the same basic thing here.
Your other example, the ten commandments, has among other things, and implicit approval of slavery and classification of women as second class citizens.
Really? I don't remember seeing those in the 10 commandments. Let's check them again... (summarization mine)
- ...no other gods before me
- Don't take my name in vain
- Don't worship graven images (idols)
- Keep the sabbath holy
- Honor your father and mother
- Don't kill
- Don't commit adultery
- Don't steal
- Don't lie about your neighbour
- Don't covet his(her) stuff either.
While I won't go in depth on any of this (and the twisting of these is easy to talk about,) I think that you will have a hard time finding slavery and gender inequality in there. I'd love to have an honest conversation about where that IS and is NOT found in the Bible, but that's offtopic here. Feel free to email me about it though.I live and work in Colorado Springs, with a great view of Cheyenne Mountain (home of NORAD) from my cube. There wasn't a peep of rumor out here about somebody taking NORAD. Personally, I think it's because we know that anyone with the smarts to pull off what happened yesterday has the smarts to know that the entire fleets of American Airlines and United Airlines planes combined couldn't penetrate that mountain. It is pretty much impervious to low-tech attacks.
Now, somebody with a hundred million bucks or so to spend on smart missiles and nukes could take it out. However, they'd be crazy to try, as the same nukes could take out all of Washington DC and NYC, with plenty of firepower left to thrash our military/industrial complex to make NORAD worthless to us. But that's another story entirely.
If John Carmac uses the new Mac Cube, no geek can be ashamed of lusting after one!
Okay, name me one online community where people find a lot of info they don't agree with. The reason people join the community in the first place is because they find a place that basicly agrees with what they already believe. The net does bring "all sorts of people together", yes, but not in the same place. Some communities are filled with MicroClones, this one is filled with a different kind of geek, some are for sports fans, others are religious communities. But they all have a focus, and should the focus change, the members would leave.
To assume that we are the only intelligent life in the universe seems like it would be the true irrational act.
It seems that way to you. Given the statistic improbability that life on this planet even began, that assumption does not seem so irrational to me. Rather, it seems that assuming that there is no God would be an irrational act (from my perspective). Both of us take our views from our particular flavor of faith.
I have long held the belief (even during my days as an agnostic) that all human beings have a powerful desire to believe in something unprovable. I now call it a God-shaped-hole, but I would be just as satisfied calling it anything else. Believing in God, Allah, Budda, the Great Spirit, extra-terrestrial life, or even the Loch Ness Monster all fit that bill from my perspective.
The other thing that I have learned in my life is that a person can use scientific truths to "prove" their own beliefs, but that that does not make their beliefs correct.
Religion has no evidence either way, and therefore currently falls outside the scientific method. Deeply religious people like this are prejudiced against science.
Unfortunately, many modern religious groups feel that they must justify their faith with science because so many people believe so deeply that science will be humanity's 'savior'. However, religion is a poor foundation for science. Likewise, science is a poor foundation for religion.
I have always understood science and religion/philosophy to be mutually exclusive endeavors. Science is data collection and subsequent application of that knowledge to the physical world. When scientists take their observations and attempt to make philosophical or religious arguments from them, they have left the world of science. The problem lies on both sides of the rail (religion and science.)
The truth of the matter is that religion cannot tell us why the sky is blue, where babies come from (physicly speaking), or what will happen when we mix chemicals x,y, and z in certain proportions. It is not supposed to. Likewise, science cannot tell us why flowers are beautiful, why we shouldn't kill every person that annoys us, or why (or if) life has meaning. It is not supposed to.
Of course religious people are prejudiced against science; they see science as trying to define religion when it has no right to! Of course scientific people are prejudiced against religion; they see religion as trying to define science when it has no right to!
Where I have problems is in "scientific" endeavors such as SETI. Basicly, people who say that there is no scientific evidence for a God who will use vast resources to listen for Extra Terrestrial intelligence, when there is no scientific evidence for it. To me, that takes a great amount of (scientificly) non-rational faith. Just like belief in any diety. (Of course, most religions' gods could be described as extra-terrestrial ultra-intelligence...)
Anyway, that's my 2 worth.
Because Christian fundamentalists tend to be stupid, bigoted, and don't know what they're talking about.
So basicly Christian fundamentalists have the same tendencies as every other human? Careful... it almost sounds like you are saying Christians could be people too!
Please keep your hatred to yourself and post things worth saying.