vibes

I didn't know who James Oddo was before this, but that was pretty awesome.

I love this stuff.

You are being sarcastic? Guy Uh. No. I am being obvious. The American people were the ones who demanded inexpensive toys (and other goods)... the manufacturers complied. Guy Yeah, but not to get poisoned. Of course not. I was only objecting to GoodSpeak's specific claim that Americans had inexpensive Chinese products somehow "forced upon them". Guy You're not a father of small children are you...figures. Tell me, Guy....where the hell else do you go to buy children's toys but from a trusted manufacturer. One who you expect to take precautions in making sure kids aren't hurt or poisoned. Mattel [and others] wantonly abused that trust and forced upon us lead tainted Chinese toys. And all in the name of money. Filthy profit in favor of protecting kids. Force the Chinese to make toys beyond their production capabilities and reap the profit from the low wages. And your problem what that is, uh...what again? The Chinese complied with lead paint because they had no time to check for errors or misuse. The ability to make a huge profit was at stake, or worse, Mattel [and others] would pull the business and give it to somebody else. Why would a profit making Chinese company want to destroy their own business, Guy? I fail to see the objection here. Mattel was more interested in making money than protecting children. And that disgusts me to the very bottom of my Soul. What evidence do you have to prove any of this? Controlling a factory, especially a contract manufacturer, is not an easy thing, even when you do random inspections, as most companies do--I'm speaking from experience at my own company. It seems highly unlikely to me that a company like Mattel, which pioneered factory inspections in its industry in order to ensure decent wages and working conditions for its workers, would try to cut corners on materials just to make a buck. But, of course, Mattel is just a big, evil corporation--no reason to give them the benefit of the doubt.

To prefer low prices is not the same as demanding low prices, especially when the long-term consequences of that preference are both enormous and not at all readily apparent. If the long term consequences aren't readily apparent, there doen't seem to be much difference between prefer and demand. Demand is mass preference. MG I forgot that "demand" in economics has a more specific meaning than the sense in which I was using it. I guess my point is that there would have been a much smaller demand for Chinese-produced goods at Wal-Mart if the Wal-Mart consumers had been able to see the logical long-term consequences of their Wal-Mart purchases. This assumes that people care about long-term consequences. There's enough going on in this and other countries in the world today to prove that most people couldn't care less about the long-term consequences of anything they do.

You've gotta get some more storage. With portable external hard drives going for so little these days, I'd put that at the top of my list of things to buy. It sounds like you're going to have to delete your files from your computer as soon as you transfer them over to your iPod. That's going to become a lot of lost work if anything should happen to your iPod. It took me over five hours to transfer ~125GB over to my iPod, and that was stuff that was already ripped/encoded. You're going to be busy for a long time!

Shortly after 12:00 p.m. yesterday. Same here.

Just got a shipment notice for this. That was fast!

Thanks for the tip. I never wanted to pay a ton for this set, but always wanted it. Order placed.

You must not be a fan of Howard Stern. I had both XM and Sirius for a while, but now only Sirius. I've been hooked on satellite for almost four years, and I'm never going back. I like Howard Stern (but haven't listened to him since the late 90's, since I've lived in markets that didn't carry him), but he's not enough to make me switch. I've been told that XM has better sound quality and more musical variety than Sirius (don't know if that's true or not), but since I've always been happy with XM, I've felt no urge to switch. Plus, my car has built-in XM, and I have a portable XM unit that I use at home, which I got for free. I'm very happy.

Here's another vote for satellite radio (XM). I haven't listened to terrestrial radio for years. There's nothing that XM doesn't offer that I want to hear, and the fact that I can get a signal anywhere in the US or Canada is a major bonus. I might consider listening to terrestrial radio again if the ads were cut by 50% and there was actually a variety of music to listen to. I don't expect either to happen.

Nope.

When I was 18 and home from college for the summer, I asked my father if I could take my girlfriend for a ride in his 911 turbo, since she had never been in a Porsche before. He agreed, after he made me promise to not speed, a promise which I quickly forgot about once I got behind the wheel. We drove around for 20 minutes or so, going as fast as 135 near my home (the speed limit was 35). When I got home, both of my parents were standing at the door, waiting for me. They did not look pleased. Father: "Did a little speeding, did you?", my father asked. Me: "What? No..." Mother: "That's funny, because you passed me while I was picking up your brother from basketball practice." Me: "Oops." At 135 (the speed at which I'm sure I passed her, based on where she was and her (really low) estimate (85) of my speed), you're just trying hard to go straight and not hit anything, and in doing so, I didn't even realize I had passed her. That was the last time I was allowed to drive the 911 turbo. For whatever reason, I've mostly gotten speeding out of my system, and I'm glad I have. Now, the only speeding I do is when I go home and drive one of my father's cars, and he's usually in the car with me and doesn't mind if it's just for a little while. We've had some fun with this, since he's had a lot of fast cars over the years in addition to the 911 turbo: Porsche 944 turbo (three of them) Supercharged Saleen Mustang BMW M3 (had the SMG transmission (clutchless manual gearbox), very hard to get used to) He let me drive his new Mercedes S600 when I visited him in July, and that was pretty entertaining. It has a twin-turbo V12 engine that puts out almost 500 horsepower. It's not really a sportscar, but it's very fast, extremely smooth and surprisingly quiet. Not very practical, though. It averages about 17 mpg.

2% milk. Man, I love milk.

How about Johnny and Duke? Or maybe Wynton and...Oh, forget it.

I think boiled chicken works quite well for chicken salad--no charred taste. Probably works well because the mayo, celery, pepper and whatever else you throw in mask the boiled taste.

Is Whataburger any good? My wife and I were in Dallas over the Labor Day weekend and saw a couple, and had never heard of it before, but didn't try it.

I had a version of that poster that had the players' names listed, including "Paul Chambers-base". Same here, but incorrect spelling bothers me so much that I didn't keep it up very long. I just ordered the Classic Records HDAD version of this album, and I think that will be the fourth version of this album for me. I hear it's the best digital version available, and I bought it primarily to listen to in the car (I have a DVD-A player in my car), so I'm really looking forward to it.

I voted for "Booker and Jaki," but how about some others? Pepper and Donald (or Byrd) - could work really well if one of the cats is black and white Lester and Teddy Oscar and Lionel Woody and Larry Grachan and Jackie Herbie and Hutch

I was my wife's manager at the job I had while I was working on my bachelor's degree. I managed market research projects in a call center, and she was one of the dialers. On difficult surveys, like the one I happened to be managing at the time (Viagra), there was a lot of downtime. When things were going especially poorly, I would sit down and make calls with the dialers. So, I talked to her a lot between calls, and that's how we got to know each other. On especially slow days, we would call friends and family to fill our survey quota. She's heard a lot more about my relatives' sex lives and difficulty "getting it up" than she ever wanted to. We got married three months after I graduated. I was 25, she was 19. We've been married for six years now. The only advice I would have based on my own experience is to look for someone with a similar background to yours, in experience and/or education and more. Our differences (cultural, socioeconomic, educational--she never went to college and I'm half-way through my master's degree--and now religious, as I officially left our religion last year) have put a major strain on our relationship.

Very wise words.

Actually...

Normally I would agree with you Chuck. I'm not wasting my money on the iPhone. I remember when I bought my first IPod, I tried my best to avoid buying an Apple product. However, I came to the conclusion that Apple was offering the best product in its class. Maybe that's changed since then. Guy ps I'm looking forward to the iTurd (new product that will make your shit come out in a glistening white color)... I concur with Guy. I'm no fan of Apple, and especially dislike the hype. Both of the iPods I've purchased were purchased solely because they had the largest storage capacity I could find. I definitely won't consider an iPhone or anything like that until the storage capacity is at least 100GB, if ever at all. Honestly, what I'd really like is a portable with sound quality like my old Sharp minidisc player (or the two Sony minidisc players I had before that). It has way better sound than any other portable music player I've heard, mp3 player or otherwise. I've taken it to work a couple times to let colleagues compare it to their mp3 players. They're blown away.

Actually, you do have 160GB available, if 1GB=1,000,000,000 bytes. See the "consumer confusion" discussion here. 160 * (1000*1000* 1000) = 160,000,000,000 bytes ---> divided by (1024*1024*1024) = 149 GB I hadn't calculated that, but I'm aware of the difference. It's just annoying. It would be nice if "160GB iPod" meant "160GB of usable space out of the box." Same idea goes for hard drives when you buy them. Oh well.

I picked up the 160GB this afternoon. It's exactly the same size as my previous 60GB video iPod, which is nice because I can use the cases I already have. Kind of annoying how I haven't loaded a single thing on it yet, but there's only 148.65GB of space available. If that's what the pre-loaded games and OS take up, that's pretty crazy.

If you do leave, then I wish you well, but it will be very unfortunate. You've always seemed like a very nice guy, from way back in the BNBB days until now.