Pain_Man

Don't mind South Carolinians. They're still pissed off about the Civil War (losing it, that is). They are different down there. And they'd much prefer you to a damned Yankee like myself (despite the fact I grew up in California and not in damned Yankeedom; i.e. the Northeast and Old Northwest--Ohio to Minnesota).

for the majority (present company excluded of course... ) But of course! As far as I know 'Septic Tank' as in Yank has no reference to Americans being full of Shit as you put it, but I think your probably right there.... That's nice to know. But you left out "as most of us are." If assholery were confined to one nation or one people then we could simply nuke them and, presto, no more assholes (There's actually a book called Assholes No More!). Unfortunately, it doesn't work that way. And assholery also varies among particular peoples and nations depending upon the period in history. In the 18th century, the Germans were, by and large, not very warlike, rathe docile farmer-types. We all know what happened in the 19th and first half of the 20th century. In the 19th century European-Americans used to sell African-Americans to each other just blocks from the building where the document was which says, "All Men are created Equal--" In the 18th century British politics was the most corrupt in history. In the 20th, British politicians, relatively speaking, have been among the cleanest. And I could go and on and on ("What makes you think you don't already?!" That's Bubba, one of my 32 personalities. Shut the fuck up, Bubba, or I'm taking the beer away. And, no, we're not watching Dukes of Hazard again no matter how good Jessica Simpson's ass looks.) Isnt it the case most Ameican TV shows portray English people as talking like that all the time and Dressing like Pearly Kings and Queens? Not quite. But whenever movies or tv shows are made about ancient Rome (such as HBO's Rome) the actors always speak British. I don't know why, but we Americans just expect actors protraying Romans to have British accents. And it's almost universally true. (One exception would be Joaquin Phoenix's Commodus in Gladiator but he's a rare one.) Remember: the English royals are more popular in America, their former subjects than they are in the UK. Maybe it's because we don't have to live with them? Or pay them? But probably it's because we don't have a monarchy, just quasi-monarchical presidents who's "regal" character is wholly subordinated to their political character. Like grandparents, we can always send Chuck, Billy, Harry and Bess home when we've had our fun (tho' interestingly enough, Elizabeth II is the largest land-owner in Virginia--named after her namesake.) Only kidding m8. But, of course.

First time they went up my ass, somebody'd be going to the hospital and it wouldn't be me! In most cities--in the US anyway--UPS trucks get a pass from the Meter Maids (what's male Meter Maid called? A Meter Dude?). Not it New York City! I saw on a documentary: a driver left his truck in front on an office building and when he came back a meter maid was impounding his truck. She let him unload all the packages and pile them on the street to wait for another truck. But they towed his. It's $500 cash-only fine to get the vehicle out of impound. It seems in NYC if you park where you shouldn't don't nobody catch a break.

That lfcurle, a regular clockwork orange, 'e is.

Forgive me, Reich, I don't getcha. Americans are sometimes called "septic tanks". Granted, we are sometimes full of shit--but who isn't? And we (and the English) do call the French frogs. But Septic Tanks? Must be that particularly Aussie sense of humor. Or, rather unique sense of humor. "Fair dinkum." Hun? One of Steve Irwin's favorite expressions, along with, "Crikey that fucking hurt!" Every dialect's got its own idiosyncracies. One of the television's many crimes is the loss of regional dialects, not to mention accents. In many big cities in the American South, close your eyes and you'd not know you weren't in a Northern or Western city. "Network Standard" is what the linguists call this homogenization of American dialects. Canadian English is considered no different than American English; I imagine its undergoing to same loss of regional uniqueness (Grain & other friends from the GWN, that's not my opinion so don't bitch slap me; find a linguist and bitch slap him or her.) Ahhh, progress, you are a greedy bitch, exacting ever higher prices for thy favors.

I could build my own machines, tho the lack of a standard for mobo and case formfactors make it harder than it has to be. Two reasons I don't: I've priced out a self-build vs buying it complete and the savings really is'nt enough, imo, to justify all the anoying labor. Second, no warranty comes with a self-build. The warranty Gateway offers, especially the Idiot Insurance, is more than worth the cost (3 yrs on site service plus the Idiot Insurance was $169). I spill a coke on it or my kid knocks it off the platform it's on and it's covered. That like. The price is so good, I may add the extra yr to it.

You are welcome, mi amigo. It's only $50-60, but any cent I don't have to give those bastards, the better.

Blu I understand "Pommie" (we call 'em "Limeys" sometimes Uh, "Septic Tanks"? Who d'ya call that?

I'm not sure "beserk" covers it, but opinions vary. The irony is that after a commerical drought in the 80s, Cash had a revival in the 90s just at the time his health began to fail. It was declining so quickly in the late 90s that many around him assumed he'd die first. But his wife preceeded him in 2003. And he followed three months later. The album with "Personal Jesus" (The Man Comes Around, the "Man" in particular being Jesus) does have Trent Reznor's "Hurt" on it. At first, the story goes, Reznor was pissed that his song has been covered, he considers it deeply personal. But after hearing Cash's cover, he really liked it. Covers are nothing knew for, or were nothing new for The Man in Black. Typically, he only wrote 1/3rd of the songs on his LPs. Records have been gone for, what, 10-15 years and I still call 'em that. I've only seen one of his videos and it wasn't anything like you describe. I tried to watch another on MSN Music, via WMP 11, and it crapped out. Whether one's a Cash fan or not, his contributions to Rock n' Roll, Country, Folk, Rockabilly (in no particular order) are pivotal. Remember, he was big star before than that boy from Mississippi with famed pelvis. He helped to make Rock n' Roll acceptable to Southern audiences. Anyone who hasn't seen Walk the Line should. The movie doesn't follow all the facts but it stick as close to the truth as one can in 2 hours 10. Oh, is that when Cash went berserk and started covering Nine Inch Nails songs and making weird music videos where he's pouring out goblets of wine over large piles of jewels? It's the only explanation I have of that odd Cash piece that plays over the opening credits of the remake of Dawn Of The Dead.

Using Windows Picture and Fax Viewer on my P4HT 2.8GHz with 1.5GB 333MHz RAM with a quad-piped 800MHz FSB; an ATI 9550 256MB AGP 8x connected via DVI-D cable to my 225BW 22in Samsung Monitor, The time to display a JPEG 362KB in size, by stopwatch was... 00:02.16 seconds! So, in what, 15 years, we've shaved off a stunning .84 seconds!

Yes! My Commodore 64! Like you said, TV for the monitor. And a cassette deck to record data. I don't remember having to load anything to get to fire up, the OS--if it could be called that. I learned how to type on that thing. I wish I still had it. Wonder what the RAM on it was? 640K?

The ironic part of the cost of Shamus "new" PC (OS/2? Jay-sus) is, figuring in inflation, it's probably closer to $4000 in today's money rather than $2500. A 386 from Radio Shack. Just priceless. My first wife, in 1994, got a 486DX 33MHz lattop. Being the cheap bastard her "daddu" With Prodigy. I remember when I got my first XT clone in 10th grade (1986). It had a 20MB hdd. Then we got a second 20MB hdd. We were stylin'!!. The school computer lab had nothing to match it (and it was one of the best in the district and our high school was, then at least, one of the best in the nation. All kinds of national awards and other shit I could have cared less about.) And I was badass because no one else had a hdd, let alone a 20MB. And that price! Isn't that, ah, priceless? My new machine that's coming soon cost, without tax, $2700. The ironic thing is that my second computer, I had a long drought in between, that I bought in 1997 (a Pentium 200 MMX, 64MB EDO RAM, CD-ROM, 2MB Trident (they even still in business??) video card, etc. It also cost $2700. And this machine of Shamus costs almost the same thing. Looks like the price, for the Top o' the Line, has roughtly stayed the same. Thank God the technologies improved. Again, Shamus, where do you find this stuff?!?

And sweet too. Never really had problems with UPS. Although they did leave a new 320GB hdd just laying on my front porch w/o waiting for signature. If I were the type to take advantage, I could have claimed I never rec'd it and got another one on UPS' dime. Dumb driver. When they delivered the monitor, DHL had me sign for it--thank God. UPS had better req. a signature for my PC when it gets here. Whereas they used to require signatures for everything no matter what it was, nowadays they hardly every wait. They ring the door bell and book. Almost as tho' they were playing Knocking. (If you don't know the beginning of that phrase, I sure as hell ain't gonna tell ya. Mom raised only one stupid child and he ain't typing this. Revenge is a dish best served cold. --French proverb

And this one is straight from the Snopes' mouth. A one-time, this Tax Year only (i.e. 2006) Tax Credit for US Taxpayers for an excise tax illegally collected by the IRS. Full story here (For some reason I can't copy/past the text in either IE7 or FF2, so I had to get creative.) You claim up to a $60 tax credit. Granted, it ain't a fortune. But it's better than a kick in the head. The $1000 a kid tax credit (that has made tax season much more pleasant for we parents) goes away in 2008, if memory serves and given the election results this year, it will not be renewed. So starting in Tax Year 2008, your taxes will go up by $1000 per kid since the now majority party has refused to even consider making the credit permanent. (I'm not being political here: this is just a fact. The marriage penalty will also come back, raising the taxes of married couples as well, sometime before 2010; again the new majority has refused any consideration of making it permanent.) So grab every Tax Credit you can get your hands on.

I always wondered what the guy dropped on that when he, ah, had to drop it into the trash. Why not just take it back to his car? Because they would have banned him from the show. So tons of stuff ended up in the trash.

I don't know, man. The late Sixties are really fuzzy for me, man. Especially considering I wasn't born till 1970. Just a big blur........ -->"Did you ever get into your hand, man?"<-- "Can you name the sitcom character that spoke those words and the show they were uttered on. Remember this question is worth exactly 23 English pence.....so think carefully."

When I managing returns for a contract w/ Motorola (supercomputers were the item in question, tho' not the "Cray" kind), their shipping/receiving system was absolutely insane. It was completely automated. If there was anything and I mean the slightest thing wrong with the goddamn shipping label or paperwork, they would send it back regardless of how important it was to their own operation!! I had a really good relationship with my opposite number but it mattered not. If our S/R dept hosed it up, back it came. So we'd have to ship it out FedEx "Ass On Fire" mode (i.e. before 8:30AM the next day).

Doubtless. Like most big companies, they're a big bureaucracy. Which means the simplest exercises are, to use an old country saying, going 'round the mountain to piss next door. The TSR I talked to at Dell called me back <!> to assure me that she was "on the case" and would contact sales first thing Monday morning. I'm going to do the same. I'll ready left a rather stern email to the sales rep about the fuck up. I just hope the email the Indian CSR sent to UPS makes it through the layers of bureaucracy and the right address gets slapped on the box. The fact that it was not in their system, gives me hope--that and the fact its a holiday weekend for most of the country--gives me hope that someone will be on the ball and correct the screw up.

I too used to "accidentally" find things in my pocket on my way into concerts. Only what I found was a good deal more, ah, combustible and contibutory to the audio-visual experience than a pocket tape recoder. funnily enough, Security was more interested in finding booze than anything else. One guy had to ditch a plsatic container that looked very much like a binocular's case. One of the "caps" for the "eye piece" was in fact the lid. The whole thing was filled with liquor.

Thanks for digging that l'il nugget up, Grain. I'm not quite sure all that much credit should be given to Dire Straits' Brothers in Arms. Which was, IMHO, not as interesting as their earlier work (it was what the A&R chumps call "accessible" and "radio-friendly"). Rush was at the peak of their commercial, not all would agree artistic, curve when they released Power Windows that same year. Those were the years when Rush albums were essentially guaranteed Top Ten intros and multi-platium sales. In another irony, despite continuing to sell out arenas consistently, the next studio album, Hold Your Fire broke the string of platinum records which had stretched back to 1976's 2112, just missing platinum status. With the release of their last studio album Vapor Trails, Rush returned to the top of the charts and multi-platimum sales. And the concert video of their show in Brazil, Rush in Rio went quintuple platinum. For those interested, I got an email from the "official" Rush site: the boyz are back in the studio and a new CD is expected Spring 2007. Not only that but when MTV debuted, Rush dominated its airtime, with videos culled from the concert film Exit, Stage Left (ironically enough, this recording is generally considered to be their worst sounding live effort ever; tho' the engineer/producers did an excellent job transfering it to video for the Rush X3 package of concert videos). They were also one of the biggest, most succesful arena rock acts in the US, UK, Germany and, it goes without saying, their "Home and Native Land." Power Windows certainly demonstrated to audiophiles that first rate recording expertise could shine in the new medium. And Rush and U2 are among the very, very small group of bands who, IMHO, have any real claim to the studio genius that was Jimmy Page's during Zep's glory years (i.e. 1970-76, or from Zep IV to Physical Graffiti). Of course, opinions vary.

To tell you the truth I haven't tried. I've got a VAIO. What brand do you have? Or did you build it yourself?

I read the question too literally. I didn't grasp that you meant you were unable to access the BIOS since you started using an LCD. That's baffling to me. Oof the IB Gods can probably give an answer to that. I can't. I have samsung lcd for my 360,'s they also have dvi and vga for pc, whilst using dvi i cannot get into the bios of the computer i have it hooked up to, wondering if it is inherent with samsung or maybe gfx card dependant, i have no problem whilst using dsub (vga)

The Dell Blues Bloody Dell!! I knew something would be screwed up with this order. My wife and I bought a computer for her best friend. Despite confirming that it was a gift and that the shipping address was different from the billing address on the credit card, the dipshit salesperson fucked it up anyway. Luckily, last night I decided to take a look at the "official" invoice. And, of course, there it was: my address in the Ship To: space. It was Dell; a screw up was inevitable. Also, the failed to send me an email telling me that the machine had shipped. And the UPS tracking number wasn't in the latter's system. Only Tech Support is open 24/7 so I called them. The girl was nice, gave me a case number said she would follow through with Sales Monday am. But since UPS already has the machine, waiting that long was a no go. Remembering "Chat" with CSRs, I found the page on Dell's website. A ten minute chat with a (Subcontinental) Indian dude seems to have taken care of it. He emailed UPS with the new address. Hopefully alls well now. Otherwise, I'll be refusing to take delivery of that Dell computer and sending it back to them so they can pay to send it to Utah where it belongs in the first place. Just have to hope that, at the end of the day, everything is: But I'll be holding my breath until my wife's friend has the machine. This is the same company that sold Firewire digital camera/computer packages where the computers didn't have Firewire ports. But they are the cheapest. Something tells me you probably got a better machine when Michael Dell was building them out of his dorm room in college.

(Can't resist this one; in the best tradition of Emily Dickinson, it makes no sense at all!) Nowhere is particular They don't let just anyone in. Somewhere they don't give a shit, About who, why or when. Anywhere's even worse-- There's no place you couldn't be If you got there first.

You could probably win money for some of these shots from certain TV shows. My favorite is still the Satanic "bog" cover you came up with. Nowhere is particular. A mate of mine emailed me the dog the other day.