Pain_Man

That's Texas, land of my mother. Y'all ain't gonna take my family pride away from me, ya damnable Yankees! Tabacky juice, hangovers, panther piss and bar fights--iz the Texas national past-time! (Which is why I live in Nevada...hookers* and slot machines and the highest smoking rate in the nation--but no goddamned state income tax!!!!!!) *Oddly enough, prostitution's legality is determined by all counties with less than 400,000 population. There are only eight counties in Nevada and only one has more than 400,000 people. Guess which county Vegas is located in? $$ + = (Unless you're Anna Nicole Smith or my ex-step-mother-in-law...)

I have those switches on some of my equipment. I believe you'll find that the equipment that is meant to be sold in one country only won't have the switches, but those items that are to be sold in several countries will have them. It also has to do with how new/old the items are. My desktop's power supply has one of these switches. As did my previous one. But I haven't seen one on my set-top DVD/CD player or my HDTV. Given the differences in TV formats, that makes sense. And given that a computer power supply is, well, a computer power supply and most of them are made in China or Taiwan, why wouldn't they make only one model to cut down on production costs?

No argument. Just hoping I'd get one from a new lot. Apparently I didn't. Oy vey. Guess I'll have to hit Tower Records or BestBuy or even Wal-Mart and see if I can pick it up there. For serious Rush fans check out this awesome collection of hard to get concerts and CDs... Rush Replay (3 DVD/CD Boxed Set) I don't believe the concert film from the Grace tour was ever released. I saw it on MTV back in '84 or '85 and happened to tape it on VHS. A non-stereo VHS. (I know, I know, Beta had 5.1 Surround Sound, DTS and was already digital...) I never saw it on store shelves. Here it is.

you could say the same thing about America..if you were not born here its great... Jersey was somewhat reading my mind. You guys have no idea how lucky you are to be completely separated from all other countries by water ('cepting the "Chunnel" which has got to be easy to control). When you're neighbors to a Third World shit hole, it's a nightmare. I grew up in San Diego, usually ten minutes from the Mexican border; lived there for 25 years. I've seen people wetbacking the border, watched them crawl out of the marshes like friggin' swamp thing. Now, I have no problem with immigration, per se. My Dad's family came down from Canada about 1890. My Mom's family has been here since Plymouth Rock. And the Cherokee part of the family's been here for 50,000 years. (My late maternal grandfather, 1/2 Cherokee, used to say, "Half the family was here waiting for the other half." An apt description.) The problem is our southern border is an utter mess. It's absolutely wide open for every kind of criminal activity you can possibly imagine. And now we've got all these illegal aliens demanding--DEMANDING!!--the "right" to citizenship in a country they broke the law to enter. Wait--it get's sillier. Some of these Mexicans and some Mexican-"Americans" think they should own California, Nevada, N. Mexico, Texas, and parts of Utah and Colorado because we kicked there asses in 1848 and took the land. Is Russia supposed to give up Siberia? France supposed to give up Burgundy to Austria? Is Poland supposed to give up East and West Prussia to Germany? Is Belarus supposed to give itself back to Poland? Is Turkey supposed to get back Serbia, Macedonia, Romania, Greece, Egypt, all of North Africa, and the entire Middle East? And, by this logic, then Ireland should return to British rule!? (Do my British cousins WANT Ireland back? ) Excuse me, but we won that war fair and square. It's hardly MY fault that the ONLY way Mexico can celebrate military glory is because they beat the FRENCH! (I mean, how PATHETIC is that! Your only claim to fame is that you beat Napoleon III's lame-assed army that the Prusso-Germans, 3 years later, would kick the complete shit out of in 1870??!?!). So these wankers claim that the land I'm sitting on right now is really "theirs" and therefore they have the right to break American laws at will. I know, I know. I sound like a raving fucking lunatic. But I swear to GOD I am NOT making this shit up. Sorry for the rant, but this has been pissing me off for a while. Besides, I'm in massive pain. Time to grab the pills!

I ordered R30, the concert DVD (plus CDs) of Rush's 30 anniversary tour (a concert in Frankfurt). First disk: at 1:05:57, during Alex's solo in "Dreamline", the sound drops out for a second. The sound resumes at 1:05:58. There are two sound subchannels, L-PCM and 5.1 Dolby. The problem is in both of them. I checked them in my laptop DVD-ROM to be sure, sho' nuff, the defect is there as well (which is something of a relief, I don't want a problem with my precious 5-disc Sony set-top). Well, I reordered it the set, got it today, same goddamned problem/same goddamned place! I called Amazon, or rather had them call me back, and told the dude the story. He was apparently surprised I had so much detail about the issue. He issued an alert to all their distribution centers to pull R30 to see what's going on. He suggested I wait a couple of weeks before I reorder. He also put a note in the computer so I would get free overnight when I do reorder. (I'm a "Premium Member" so I get two-day air free anyway.) This is the first problem I've had like this with Amazon in 9 years of doing business with them. Can't say that about many other businesses. My question is: has any other Rush fan had a problem with this DVD set? Please let me know, especially if you bought it from Amazon whether in the UK or not. Thanks.

I'll readily admit to an aversion to all things electrical (as opposed to electronic) but I've always been told we use 110. In fact, when I was in high school, my parents had a house with a 220 line in the garage for a jacuzzi. And, as I wrote above, the Frogs use 220 (if memory serves, this was 20 years and a bazillion dead brain cells ago). Why one would choose to use a voltage that is definitely deadly--I've done the dance with 110 and while it will sit you down--in my case literally--its not usually fatal unless you're standing in water or sticking a fork in the socket. (I don't know what my British cousins call jacuzzis, they're a kind of "whirlpool bath" to borrow Desmond Elliot's description to Eddie Murphy in Trading Places.)

A man after my own heart. "Yes, dear, I'm sorry, but we're going to have replace the entire electronic suite. I know it's a bitch..."

We use 110. That's the "nominal" rating though and, of course, it varies depending, among many other things, on the quality of the wiring in your house or your apartment. Oh and tho' I'm sure you've probably considered this, remember we use NTSC TV system; you guys use PAL. I believe there are DVD players that will convert between them, but you're probably going to have to buy TV(s) here. Surely somebody on the board's lived in both countries and knows. When I was an exchange student in France they warned us, b4 we left, that we'd need adapters for any electric device we took with us since the Frogs use 220 (which can kill you dead real quick). If you guys do use 220, you'll need adapters. If you use another type in the UK, I'd ask an electrician over there. Hell, you might even try calling the embassy or consulate. The State Dept. is normally as useful as tits on bull, but they might actually prove helpful. Virginia, BTW, is beautiful country. Rains like hell. But its very verdant, lush forest (of course, it also has the usual swarm of bloodsucking insects). My aunt's lived back there for years (she retired from the Air Force a couple years back and decided to stay there). I haven't been to Britain, but I don't think the climate should be that different than southern England. Good luck living on the East Coast. You couldn't pay me to do it. I'm a confirmed Westerner.

New firmware upgrade for the DW1655. Naturally, it won't work for me (and DIP reports that the drive is not "microcode upgradeable" which I take to mean it can't be flashed--or am I wrong?). But for those it does work for, here's the url: http://support.benq.com/files/storage/Firm...DW1655/BCHB.zip

Hopefully, for minty's sake, it's not an intermittant problem. I hate intermittant failures. I've had to deal with them on both the software and hardware levels. Major league pain in the ass--especially when the computer goes into a military radar or missile system and they're breathing down your neck demanding to know exactly what the problem is. I learned quickly not to bother giving them to one of the engineers or repair techs. The answer was almost always, "We don't know, the board [computer] just fails every so often. It's passing the diagnostics. No we can't explain it." I can say that. And it saved the engineers from snarling at me. Also helped me to get them to do me favors when I did have a really heavy problem that needed extra attention.

To be perfectly honest, I don't know. I thought the C1/C2--PI/PO were scanning for read errors. Is this wrong? (If it's not a burn error, then is the inference that the problem lies in the content? Also, I didn't see a choice. The Nero Tool calls it a Quality Check. DIP just calls it "PI/PO Jitter test." Can one use these tools to test for both read and burn errors?

Thanks, Lightning. That would explain why I couldn't get jitter measurements out of the Pioneer. I assumed there'd be one standard for testing (like there is for, say, gas mileage for cars, the infamous CAFE standards in the US). Obviously...NOT!

I hadn't thought of that. It's swine abuse! It must be stoped. Call the animal rights whackos! Quick! Al will have to go into serious crime, like politics.

Very weird. And of course you weren't installing anything or hadn't moment b4. I'm so used to my PC doing goofy shit I hardly notice anymore. Sometimes I'm roused to curiosity to check Event Viewer so I can be told absolutely nothing informative but as long as the machine keeps on running... I'm more annoyed over the fact that the latest Quake4 update has seriously screwed something up. They decided to reprogram it to take advantage of HT/dual core processors....and trashed it. Probably hired a new manager from Microsoft....

To save having to type IMHO a dozen times, assume everything is IMHO... crule, congrats on your team's victory...(I remember both times when the Padres won the NLCS and the Chargers won the AFC Championship, feels great)...with all due respect, how can you call exciting three hours with a 2-0 score? I would have been snoring before the first period way half way through. I'm not being cheeky, I really don't understand the fascination of it. Now baseball, the interest there is easy to understand. It combines not only a team sport, but a mano a mano battle between pitcher and catcher. To watch a great pitcher and great hitter duel it out--well there's nothing in sports like it. Or even a pitching duel with a low score or a no-hitter. The attraction there is obvious. One man holds off the entire other team from scoring, or, in rare cases, from even getting a man on base (i.e. preventing them from even having a chance to score). To keep that up for 8.5 innings is a mental and physical feat that, again, has no parallel or equal in sports. But to watch two groups of men chase each other around for hours where a score of 2-1 is considered exciting. I just don't get it. The only Euro soccer match I saw was so bloody dull that the only thing that kept me awake was a cool Brit businessman (an IBM salesman oddly enough living in France) that talked to me during the match. Otherwise...

It's the slang. Like that Jerry Seinfeld Amex commercial where he goes into a restaurant and orders "bangers and mash." Now mash is potatoes, that's easy enough. But what the hell is/are bangers??? I'm a big Python fan but I realize that sometimes the jokes go right past me. Example: In Life of Brian the People's Front of Judea, Judean People's Front, et al. I thought they were satirizing the Palestintian terror groups. Instead, according to the commentary tracks on the DVD, they were actually satirizing the innumerable, tiny Leftist groups in England in the 70s. Sitting around doing nothing but circle jerking, arguing abstruse points only tangenitally connected with reality and talking shit about the other groups. The context went by me and, I'm sure, most other American fans who didn't live in Britain in the 70s. I don't know if Brits have the same issues with American slang, I don't really think so. Our movies and music are so widespread--whatever one's opinion of this--that the English-speaking countries have a window into our culture that we usually don't have into theirs. And, sad to say, a lot of that has to do with the fact that the majority of Americans really don't care about what happens on either side of our two oceans. I remember my mother saying one time, "Why doesn't everyone just learn English? Make things a lot easier."

Your last sentence can apply equally to any college football game in the US, except for the big teams, bump the # up to 100,000+ referees. Interestingly, one of the partners in the company my wife works for refs NCAA football games. If you don't know, NCAA stands for National Communist Asshole Association. Er, sorry. National College Athletic Association. It's the governing body for the majority of college sports of every description.

IMO, without Roger, it's the David Gilmour Band. And the albums are Gilmour solo albums. Floyd without Waters is like the Beatles without Lennon or Zep without Pagey. In other words, it ain't Floyd. Unfortunately I missed the Live8 reunion. Didn't care about the cause (it seems these causes always target my wallet; no thanks, the greedy hand of the government already takes way too much as it is), but would have loved to have seen them together, especially since they were broken up before I was really aware of their existence (1980). The Final Cut is an amazing album--Water's puerile politics aside. It was recorded with a revolutionary process that didn't sound so good on vinyl but sounds astounding on CD. I don't know of another album that's used the process (it was invented by an Italian engineer, if memory serves, there are some details in the liner notes). Gilmour and Waters were so much on the outs over that LP and other issues, that Gilmour demanded his name be taken off the album as a producer. Thus The Final Cut, up to now, describes the band's fate to a tee. Later when Gilmour decided to cash in on the name with bad music and worse lyrics ("On the Turning Away" is so nauseating I couldn't even finish listening to it and then I had to run for the pink liquid), all I need is some zillionaire rock star lecturing me on civic duty . Though Waters' sued to stop the desecration, unfortunately British courts refused to stop Gilmour's blatant greed. It really, imo, can't be disputed that it was Waters' brilliance that made Floyd one of the four most successful acts of the 70s (in order of sales: Zep, Floyd, the Eagles & Fleetwood Mac).

That would make me highly nervous. Did you run a virusscan or ad-aware scan?

Ooops. SATA. I want it! I'm still stuck with "PATA". <grumble grumble>

.... Pain Man is seriously PISSED OFF. The best western EVER. Aarggh!!!! TV executive nitwit idiot dumbshits!!!

IMO, she gets too much credit for this movie. Michael York and Joel Grey are the ones who make the film. Interestingly enough, Tomorrow Belongs To Me is only about 45 seconds in the original play book. It got extended into a longer song and sequence in the film version. (Strangely, when this film was translated into French, the song is sung in German, instead! ) How'd you come to watch a French dubbed version of an American film??

Help me out corn: what be "atm"? Not the same as a RAID array I take it? You don't mean Asynchronous Transfer Mode...do you?

He does seem to drive them hard. On the other hand, to be fair to him, it is a bit of an addiction. I took it up only in Aug of '03 and I've already had five on this Vaio. Ouch..... I quit now I've got money to spend on other more...durable things. Plus, it makes the wife happy. The asthma inhaler spends more time in the box. Don't have to hide from the kid. Win-win-win-win.

One little joke sparks like two dozens posts. What is it about this soccer/football thing?