Pain_Man

I love the John Cale cover of "Hallelujah" (it's in Shrek 1). The solo piano and his haunting baritone make for one amazing recording. I finally found a CD with that track on it. Apple has it on iTunes but you have to buy the entire soundtrack album for Scrubs to get it. They won't sell it as an individual track.

THANK YOU!!!! 14-15 years it took me to finally nail that sucker down. I'm firing up iTunes soon as I post this.

Beautiful shots, blu. The Great Barrier Reef?

Bastards are stealing air conditioners here for the copper. Literally ripping entire HVAC units off of roofs and either carrying them away lock-stock and barrel or ripping the copper off of them rendering them null and void. They even hit the Salvation Army and a homeless shelter/soup kitchen kind of thing. All to get some cash to score dope. Degenerates. I know anti-self-defense activists (so-called "gun control" proponents; what they really want to criminalize is self-defense) who love to quote the fact that there are some many more murders in the US. What they fail to mention is that Britain has a higher overall violent crime rate than we do! London is actually more dangerous than New York City (the latter's murder rate has dropped by 2/3rds over the last ten yrs; in fact all violent crime has been dropping; why? violent criminals are FINALLY being given REAL sentences!). A few months back I read an article in an English magazine (what it was doing in my hair stylist's salon I don't know) by a woman who husband was stabbed to death. It seems that "knife-crime" (I think that's the phrase) has gone up dramatically since the handgun ban. Too late now edit: I put ok coral -

Brevity has never been one of my strong suits--as my wife'll tell you. I was, when I wrote the comment about the confiscation of handguns, thinking of something Dr. Johnson wrote (and I paraphrase): "No matter how mean or humble, no matter if the roof leaks, or the walls do not keep out the winds, the government may not enter a man's house without a warrant." I tried to find the exact quote, but my Collier's collection of English Literature has gone MIA.

It's just that, to me, the 4GB limit in FAT32 is such basic knowledge it wouldn't occur to me that people would need to be warned. But not everyone has the same level of knowledge.

I actually do turn it off. Tho' I have, once or twice, written to DVD with it running. I figured that killing that, uh, Caribbean software in the middle of burn might have deleterious consequences. So I let it run. There were no problems. Not that I want to risk any; so I make sure to kill before hitting "Burn".

My bad. Just chose "Chat" out of reflex.

I use FAT32 in my USB drives because it's easier to access if there's a rig meltdown. All my internal drives are ntfs. Why use FAT32 anyway? convert [drive]: /fs:ntfs

http://www.afterdawn.com/news/archive/12971.cfm Assholes got my money and leave me swinging in the wind. Great. From Toshiba While we are disappointed for the company and more importantly, for the consumer, the real mass market opportunity for High Definition content remains untapped and Toshiba is both able and determined to use our talent, technology and intellectual property to make digital convergence a reality," said Atsutoshi Nishida, President and CEO of Toshiba Corporation. What's funny is movie's are still being advertised in HD-DVD. I guess the upside is I can look forward to HD-DVD on sale with huge discounts. Of course, now I have to buy a Blu-Ray player. If TimeWarner had made their annoucement before I'm almost certainly would not have spent $278 on my Toshiba A-30 HD-DVD player. At least the up-rezzing on SD-DVDs looks fantastic. Still, assholes!

Is there anyway to disable the warning that IB gives me, in the log, that FAT32 drives can't handle files bigger than 4GBs? I already know this. And I have four USB drives connected to my rig; just tired of looking at the explanation points!! Also, why does IB warn me when I have a certain piece of Antiguan software running and IB in read mode?!!

I don't mind discussing politics; I'd just like to keep in on an even keel. I know I've been as guilty as anyone else of personal attacks. "But I'm trying, Ringo, I'm trying real hard to be the shepard." If McCain wins there won't be much different. There's virtually no difference between Hillary's positions (or Barak's for that matter) and McCains except on abortion. He solidly pro-life. He was one of ONLY two GOP senator to vote against the Bush tax cuts; the tax cuts that ended the Clinton-Gore Recession of 2000-2001. And the election of a candidate pitching the discredited and failed ideas of 70 years ago will be a massive step backwards. It will mean MASSIVE tax increases in 2010 and a certain recession. If one thinks that's an improvement for America, I'd hate to know what one would think would be deleterious!

The way I heard it--sorry, I simply don't have time to read the story, got to get to bed, dr's appt in the am--Martin shot one of the home invaders as the man attacked him. Besides, what happened to a man's home is his castle?!?!? And, in Louisiana at least, you can kill an intruder in your home, whether he's armed or not, regardless of whether he's facing you, as long as you believe that you or your family are in danger. Every state needs a law like that. And don't underestimate the common sense of every DA. A guy in Cali, a few yrs back, caught a burglar in his house, chased the guy down the street and beat him bloody with a bat--broken bones and everything. The DA said, "Sounds like self-defense to me." And no charges were filed. Besides, every citizen in this country has the right to use any force necessary to detain a criminal during a citizen's arrest. E.g.: if I see a guy hit a woman with a tire iron and I draw my (legal) carry piece and order the guy to freeze and he attempts to flee, I can put him down. Just as any cop can can use deadly force to stop a fleeing felony suspect. I was in a situation once where I would have shot this asshole if I'd been strapped. This fucker follows me home--for no sane reason--and starts ranting and raving with me. I talked a little shit back and then, ignoring him, walked away toward my place. I had my then five yr old daughter with me. This asshole follows me onto the sidewalk with his truck, still ranting and raving. If I'd been armed, I'd have shot him dead on the spot to defend my daughter. Thank God he was all talk. Anybody messing with kid better be read to meet deadly force. No law says that a citizen, or cop, has to give a criminal the first shot. What matters legally, as I'm sure it did in Ohio, is the "imminence" of the threat. I could not have escaped from the guy in the truck because he was less than 10 feet from me and my daughter. If he'd floored his accelerator my daughter and I would have been bloody smears on the sidewalk. IF a criminal invades your home and threatens your life, what the hell difference does it make what his position was when you defend yourself? That's hypertechnical non-sense. The measure is whether or not YOU feel YOUR life to be in immediate danger--not where the criminal douche bag is standing. I'd rather be tried by twelve than buried by six any time. That would be...Tony Martin And, after reading the story that Alter linked to, presumably the same would have happened in the States. You have the right to protect your life and property here, but you do not have the right to shoot anyone when they are fleeing and are no longer a threat to you. The story does not recount the burglars as having been armed, and, either way, armed or not, once they are fleeing the scene a normal citizens right to apply deadly force is non-existent. The same does not apply to the police, however their use of force is not in question in this situation.

That would be him. The rather odd-ball farmer given to plowing his fields at midnite? I heard he was released from prison a couple of years ago, tho' I never found out if his conviction was quashed, he was pardoned or simply paroled? If our government tried what yours did--going door-to-door and confiscating handguns (and correct me if I've got that detail wrong) after the Dunblane horror (see, some of us Yanks do pay attention to what happens beyond the oceans), there'd be a lot of cops getting shot. No, in fact, and I believe 'wheel would agree, the vast majority of cops would simply refuse to carry such a blatantly unConstitutional law (sorry if I'm assuming something, 'wheel; but polls have shown that upwards of 80% of cops support concealed carry...). I couldn't believe that Britons so meekly acquiesced in such an incredible act of governmental tyranny. Should have been riots in the streets. That would be...Tony Martin

Yes, you are in error here. The phrase "separation of church and state" comes from a letter that Thomas Jefferson wrote. I can't remember to whom the recipient was...perhaps someone else remembers? It has no basis in the Constitution itself (that document bans only "an establishment of religion"; i.e. the Federal government is forbidden to create an official church such as the Church of England or Roman Catholicism in Italy or Russian Orthodoxy in, er, Russia. In fact before the Supreme Court began it's war on religion in general--and Christianity specifically--no one gave much thought to Jefferson's off-hand phrase. Once the Left began the systematic assault on faith and people of faith, that sentence from a letter was raised to Holy Scripture. There is absolute nothing in the Constitution, for example, which prohibits prayer in school. We had a rabbi--I believe--give the benediction at my high school graduation and I don't remember anyone pitching a bitch about it. Of cousre, that was in San Diego which, back then, was far more Conservative than the rest of Cali (excepting Orange County). I haven't read all of the Federalist papers; it's possible that one of the writers mention it (the chief writer of which was Prez No. 4, Madison). Obviously on many, but not all, issues we're going to have to agree to disagree--and that's cool. I've gotten personal with some people on this forum and I regret that. So I tried not to attack you; apologies again if I did so, it was unintentional. My vitriol was saved for people like Steven Schneider, the Clintons, the Punk (aka Democratic National Committee Chairman--and Clintonista--Terry McAuliffe who took an $18,000,000 bribe from the head of Global Crossing, a man who stole hundreds of millions from the company and his currently building a $120,000,000, yes one hundred and twenty million dollar house!!! And he was never prosecuted! Shocking!!! I could go and on and on with the facts, but what's the point? Obviously we're not going to convince each other. The most we can do is state our positions as civilly as possible. I have a VERY liberal friend. We're both fanatic Rush fans--the band not the dude--and we went to their last concert together and we had a blast. And spoke nary a word about politics. We finally decided that since neither of us would accept the other's sources that continuing to argue was pointless. And, personally, doesn't that bother you? The two sides, Lib and Conservative no longer talk to each other, we talk past each other, as if the other side were a mere abstraction. Only one other time did political differences become so set in cement: the 1850s. And we all know what that led to. And I'm terribly afraid we're heading there again. Conservatives would win, of course, 80% of the military support us. But that's hardly the point. 2%, or 600,000, Americans died last time. That would be 2,000,000 in a replay fought with weapon unimaginably more powerful than those used then. I've been listening to Rush for 18 years (not everyday, but often enough and I'm a 24/7 Member) and, in all that time, I've never heard him lie or distort facts. He makes factual errors, sure, who doesn't? But I've heard him many times correct those. (E.g., "Oh yeah, yesterday when I said yadda yadda, I had the facts wrong on that one . Apologies to John Smith...") I remember some nutball left-wing group published a book called "300 Lies Rush Limbaugh Tells" or something like that. NOT A SINGLE LIE WAS DOCUMENTED. (SORRy XP's FucKING up With the capslock, there it seems to have stopped.) Anyway, the entire book was simple this group printing something Rush said and then disagreeing with him and calling the disagreement a lie!!! Rush always sources his facts. Always. If he doesn't have a source or can't produce it, he says so. Finally: the article I mentioned was not written by Rush. In fact it was published in a magazine who's name completely escapes me at the moment. Some cerebral flatulence. The mag's published by The Washington Times and it's editorial stance is very conservative; it's news coverage is as objective as one can reasonably expect--unlike the outright lies and propaganda disseminated by the Drive-bys. I'm going to have my wife pdf the article (not that I order her about; we dont' have a scanner at home) and I'll email to you. Here's a question: yes I know you've been (were?) a life-long Republican, but did you ever consider yourself a conservative? I ask that because the criticism you're making (and support for the policies implicit in them) appears very Left-wing to me. You even use some of the Left's favorite (and, imo) non-sensical catch-phrases. Oh, and I agree with you about the new Medicare "drug" benefit. It's ridiculous and will just advance the date at which Medicare runs out of money.[/b] There are many things to admire about The Younger Bush--he's kept us safe and destroyed two terroristic dictatorships. His willingness to allow people like The Hero of Chappaquiddick run over him (he let the latter write the so-called "No Child Left Behind Boondoggle." Funny how the party was against mandatory testing until the Prez co-opted the idea... And don't even get me started on that goddamned farm bill. Not to be a wise-ass, but the GOP controlled the House for 12 years and the Senate for 11 of 12 (thanks to "Jumpin'" Jim Jeffords' treason; not that it matters, he was RINO anyway.) (BTW: glaciers in the Andes are thickening.)

I heard this song when I was married to my first wife (that means it was before, uh, 1994; yeah, I know, I'm dating myself). The (late) Cohen was appearing on Austin City Limits a PBS*--and it was a fantastic show. It was the first time I'd even heard of him and I was amazed. Unfortunately, back then, I was too poor to buy any of his albums. Anyway, the line from the Cohen song is: ...in a hallway where love's never been.../ If anyone knows which song this belongs to, my gratitude will overfloweth. I'll even name my second born after you. Found a great site for song lyrics: http://www.lyricsspot.com/ *(if you don't know, PBS is sorta/kinda/a l'il bit like the BBC, in that it is far, FAR, FAAAAAR left, and stands for "Public Broadcasting System" and is, partially, gov't supported; even tho' the Feds only supply 10% of its budget). Despite PBS' essentially Soviet politics, they do show some good stuff and Austin City Limits is one of them. (Johnny Cash did a fantastic performance back in '85; all the more interesting because it was the lowest point in his career since he kicked the pills back in the late Sixties).

I burned a full-length DVD-Video (a demonstration video for my wife's company; copied with permission, bien sur! It was a Ritek and--shock of shocks--it actually not only burned it completely--it Verified. Of course there was a catch: I ran a PiPo scan with DVDInfo and the result was 46%! The first layer was beautiful. The second layer was a disaster. If the second had been as good as the first I think the score would have been about 98%. Check it out:

Several times now, the virus scan component of ZoneAlarm (Kaspersky, they changed from CA's Pest Patrol), has found malware in files that I downloaded, in some cases, months or years ago. The latest example is not-a-virus:PSWTool.Win32.GetPass.h. Which showed up yesterday evening. The weird thing is, according to Kaspersky's this ".h" variant was first "discovered" more than a month ago! The infected files were downloaded in November of 2006. So despite the fact this trojan horse has been in Kaspersky's virus signatures and despite the fact the infected files have been scanned daily by ZoneAlarm's AV module for more than a thirty days, they were only flagged yesterday?! How could the Anti-Virus industry have missed a Trojan horse/keylogger for at least 16 months?! What gives with this? Lastly, I've used these executables--on three different computers--without any infection/activation of the malware. Could this be some kind of false positive?

My 8 yr old daughter was running around without a shirt and I said to her, "Put some clothes on, dammit, people are gonna think we're from Kentucky." I remember when the whole Branch Davidian thing was going on and it came out that Koresh was having sex with ten year old girls he had "married." A Congressman named Mark Souder (from northern Indiana who's still sitting) said, I shit you not, on the floor of the House: "This [having sex with young girls] is just terrible! Why this is the kind of thing that happens in Tennessee and Kentucky!" Naturally, he was eating a lot of crow and kissing a lot of Volunteer asses and Bluegrass state asses.

That about be it. Another bumper sticker I remember well: IMPEACH CLINTON AND HER HUSBAND =)) =))

Funnily enough, I don't want to live in any other country (though that could change...). In Britain they convict you of murder and put you in prison for defending yourself against home invaders who try to kill you. No thanks. In this country I can blow those fuckers away without having to worry about breaking laws against self-defense. (Not that there aren't plenty of whackjobs in this country who would rather see my wife and daughter raped and murdered than my having a pistol to defend them.)

Ditto. But I'm trying, I'm really, really trying. That runs on my dad's side too and I've unfortunately inherited it, just ask my wife and most of the people I work with.

The reason? SCOTUS--the Supreme Court of the United States. The same august body that told you, when you were a cop, that perfectly good collars had to be tossed because somebody fucked up and used a Drug Warrant Form instead of a Murder Evidence Warrant Form (seriously: this dude tied his girlfriend up with electrical cord and burned her alive and the case was tossed because a cop grabbed the wrong kind of warrant application!!!! Why--and who--decided that we have to bow down to the Supreme Court? (In fact, to what are often five old people!) The Supreme Court is not given absolute power by the Constitution. Theoretically co-eval with the other two branches, there's no way the Founders thought it should be the most powerful! Yet we've made it so by the lack of will in presidents and congresses to tell the Court to go fuck itself. Congress controls which kinds of cases SCOTUS can review; it could have pared back the Supreme Court (and has done so occasionally, e.g. when it exempted from SCOTUS review certain kinds of terrorist cases). instead of trying to rein in the Nine Supremes, both parties try to pack it with judges they hope will support their agenda. THANK GOD the Younger Bush was able to put such able justices as Roberts and Alito on the court. Alito's great, but there other judges I would have preferred as Chief to Roberts (i.e. Scalia). There is no such thing as The Religious Right. It's a Drive-by media myth. If it exists... 1.) Who's in charge of it? 2.) Where's it located? 3.) When was it founded? 4.) Who founded it? Are there Christians who are politically conservative? Of course. Just as their are Christians who far left whackjobs (e.g. ministers who support the "right" of women to kill their babies). Are there organizations (e.g. the Christian Coalition, the former Moral Majority) who have/had a politically Christian agenda, of course. But there is not now, NOR HAS THERE EVER BEEN, any monolithic entity called "The Religious Right". It's all stuff and nonsense--as our Brit cousins put it. A complete, total and utter myth. <bangs desk angrily> The "Global Warming" hoax/scam was created by a scientists named Steven Schneider. Guess what I got Dr. Schneider preaching on an In Search Of in 1982? THE NEXT ICE AGE!!! Rush posted a Time magazine cover story on "The Coming Ice Age"; which detailed the imminence of the next glacial period. 25-30 years ago the Drive-bys were coming all over themselves about glaciers covering Chicago again. Dr. Schneider has publicly stated that it is acceptable for scientists to lie and falsify data in order to convince people of the truth of the Global Warming lie! His political goal? World Communist Government run by the UN! I shit you not. I'll scan in an article I have on him and post it. It exposes this Big Lie for what it is. Here's the facts: For the last 8,000 years the Earth has grown consistently cooler. PERIOD! Nothing has affected that general and over all trend that we are inexorably moving into a new period of Glaciation. The so-called warming amounts to ONE DEGREE CELSIUS and almost all of this happened BEFORE 1940. That's right before 1940! Before China and the Soviet Union's massive industrial development (from the 70s on for the former and from 1930-1960 in the latter). China now burns more fossil fuels than the United States!! And yet the stupid, ridiculous "Kyoto Con Job" would impose significant caps only ONE country (completely exempting China) and guess which country THAT is?!? To implement this farce will cost this country 10,000,000 jobs and will retard economic growth on a massive scale--exactly what are economic and political rivals and enemies want. Finally, Mt. Pinatubo (in the Phillipines) in 1991 put more so-called "greenhouse" gases into the aptmosphere in THREE DAYS than humanity has in 200 years of heavy industry! If the Global Warming Hoax were true, the ice caps should already be completely gone and global temps should have risen 6 degrees instead of one. Now, I apologize for SHOUTING, but the truth about "Global Warming" has been so buried by the Environmentalist Whackos and their accomplices in the media and the Left that many people are walking around believing total horseshit as though it were Gospel. It's absolutely and completely a hoax. And, it's just that simple! The Earth has been in an Ice Age for the last 2,000,000 years, the latest of many such ages (the first one was 700,000,000 yrs ago when the ENTIRE planet was covered in ice a mile thick; all life nearly perished). It has been calculated that during this time there have been at least fifty periods of Glaciation alternating with warm Interglacial periods. We are at the end of the latter. Glaciers covering Chicago are an absolute inevitability. The irony is this: if the Global Warming Hoaxers are, the collapse of the Antarctic Ice Cap would result in massive GLOBAL COOLING. You see, the ice would spread out the cover nearly the entire Antarctic Ocean. The sunlight reflected by all the ice--coupled with the huge drop in ocean water temps caused by all that ice--would cause the next glacial period to begin. NO MATTER WHAT THE ICE IS COMING BACK. And there nothing, absolutely goddamn NOTHING we can do about it. Don't, take this personally 'Wheel, but you pushed some of my hot buttons and I feel I had to respond. Ahh, the good ol' Corporate America Controls the Government Myth. <shakes head sadly> WRONGO! It's the Federal Executive agencies (i.e. the IRS, EPA, the Departments of Commerce, of Justice, of Agriculture, et al) that have the real power in this country. Congress and SCOTUS have used the power granted under the Commerce Clause of the Constitution (Article I, Section 8, paragraph 3, if you'd like to look it up for yourselves) to emesh this country in a sprawling, ever growing octopus reaching into every facet and aspect of out lives. (The Tax Code itself is 65,000 pages!!) The plain meaning of the Constitution--the greatest governing document ever written; the product of the greatest collection of political geniuses in the History of Man--is twisted beyond recognition (the "right" to an abortion) or just plain ignored (the right to keep and bear arms). We are in the grip of a power-mad, greedy, ruthless and unscrupulous bureaucracy manned (and womanned) by people who are convinced they know how to run out lives better than we do. And, it's just that simple. Yes, we are weakening--because FDR and LBJ were allowed to create an entitlement mentality in the middle class. They sang the siren song that the middle class was "owed" everything from cash stripped from their children's wallets (euphemistically called "Social Security", more accurately called "Socialist Security" by my (tenth) cousin the late Sen. Robert Taft) to free medical care ("Medicare"). Now people are convinced they have the "right" to other people's money. Rome didn't fall until she had rotted from within. For five hundred years she withstood massive, often co-ordinated, attacks by Germans, Parthians, Persians, et al, and fought them all to victory or a draw. Once the inside was hollow, it was easily for my Germanic ancestors to simple walk in and knock the whole rotten edifice to the ground. Which is exactly what happened.

I feel for ya Kirk. I can understand the anxiety around Alzheimer's. It's the one that scares the shit out of me. It literally robs you of your identity; tho' to be honest I'm pretty sure I'd choose it over ALS (i.e. "Lou Gehrig's Disease"). Alzheimer's runs on my mother's side. My great-grandmother (mother's father's mother) died of it (of course, in the 50s they just said, "She went crazy! Just went plumb crazy. Had to put her in a home." Of course, once someone described the symptoms to me, I realized that great-grandma--who died before I was born--wasn't mentally ill). Two of her three children died of it (my great aunt and uncle) and my grandfather was showing signs of it before he died in a car crash (of course the fact that he was drinking two cases of beer a day, topped off by Demerol every 6h might have had something to do with it ). Basically, the disease killed all of my great-grandmother's children; or would have if my grandfather hadn't committed suicide @59. So, yeah, I worry about it. Parkinson's also runs in my mother's family. In my Dad's family it's mostly assholery: an incurable, highly irritating condition occasionally known for driving those around the sufferer to justifiable homicide....

Amen. Once the Slut From Hell decided her Old Man's money was more important than my love and dumped me (the bitch literally took a bribe!), I had the time of my life . Partying almost everynight with the uppercrust of Lafayette, IN. Cool thing about hanging with millionaires: you never pay for a meal or a drink. And I didn't for about two years. 'Course, I've since remarried and I've got an 8 yr old daughter with this wife. Ain't been easy, I admit; I don't think any marriage every is. But it's a lot easier when the wife ain't running around fuckin' everybody.