Dave Garrett

All of the Barnes & Noble stores local to me have a separate "Media" department combining DVDs/Blu-rays and music (CDs and, more recently, vinyl), and they have staff dedicated to the Media department. Granted, the music selection is pretty bare-bones compared to what it once was, in contrast to the DVDs and Blu-rays which are quite well-stocked. Or did you mean that B&N didn't have staff specifically allocated to music and not video?

The R2 set of the B&W shows is great. Amazon UK's occasionally had it cheaper in the past (I got it from them for around GBP 30 shipped several years ago), but the current price is still a good deal.

You might find this of interest: https://medium.com/matter/shitphone-a-love-story-a44e66434807 Also the discussion regarding this piece at Reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/2z6zd7/shitphone_a_love_story_switching_from_an_iphone/

You might want to give Firemin a try: http://www.rizonesoft.com/software/firemin/ I tend to keep a *lot* of tabs open, and rarely reboot my machine, so Firefox winds up using between 500MB to well over 1GB of RAM if it runs for a day or two without a restart. With Firemin running, it's using anywhere from 2MB - 40MB. Note that some people have reported mixed results with Firemin, so it may or may not work well for you. I've noticed that it does seem to increase CPU load a bit, but not enough to be worrisome. Also note that when you start Firemin, it doesn't appear that anything is happening, but it should be running. You just have to look in the Processes tab in Task Manager to see that it's running. I still have to restart Firefox every couple of days as it seems to slow down eventually after a long period of uptime, but memory management has been vastly improved with Firemin in the interim.

There are other browsers based on Mozilla source code in addition to SeaMonkey, such as Waterfox: https://www.waterfoxproject.org/ I haven't personally used it, but my dad has and liked it, plus it's supposed to be performance-focused. I can't get by with a single browser, and use both Firefox and Chrome heavily. I'll even use IE 11 on occasion for specific tasks, and think that the perception of it as risky is overblown if you keep your machine up to date with critical and recommended updates for Windows, IE, and other MS applications such as Office (for those that prefer not to have updates automatically downloaded and installed, Microsoft traditionally releases scheduled updates on the second Tuesday of every month, aka "Patch Tuesday", although they also release urgent non-scheduled security updates on other days as necessary).

Really? Similar silliness here: 'My number plate could have cost £1m' The dealer that bought the plate clearly aims to use it to bump up the asking price of the car it's affixed to in the photo. It's a Ferrari 250 SWB, and the current average market value for one of those cars in top shape is north of $12 million, but vintage Ferraris have been on an insane upswing over the past couple of years, so it could very well go for more. This particular one was apparently owned by Clapton: http://www.talacrest.com/Ferrari-Sales/Ferrari-250-SWB/4240.htm

That's almost certainly a factor, but transatlantic shipping just seems to be taking longer in general these days. I ordered a book from a bookseller in Germany in mid-January, and the delivery estimate was slightly less than a month. It took closer to six weeks before it showed up.

Keep telling myself I'm going to get a tablet when this desktop finally quits, but I don't think I'm ready to be that modern, at least not while I'm alive. I love my iPad, but even with a Bluetooth keyboard case it'll never completely replace my desktop or laptop. Different tools for different tasks.

The "apocalyptic Y2K pronouncements" were indicative of an abundance of caution, which is a good thing. If the shit had hit the fan and the worst-case scenarios had previously been downplayed, can you imagine the uproar that would've ensued? Anyone who's ever been involved with supporting mission-critical, high-availability systems (network, mail servers, financial systems, etc.) will tell you that no one ever says "hey, great job you're doing keeping [Critical System X] up and running", but if one of those systems hiccups or, God forbid, goes down, the backlash is swift and fierce. Communication and having properly set expectations are key when such events occur. There are very good reasons why support staff for such systems tend to prefer a conservative approach.

Yeah, I know it's "the girl with kaleidoscope eyes", but long after having first read about the well-known mondegreen of that line, I can't help but hearing "the girl with colitis goes by" now.

Most consumer-grade Windows laptops suck, with the exception of the high-end models. The business-class ones are in general much better built, and are free of crapware (although as was pointed out earlier in the thread, most decent-sized companies usually build a standardized custom software image so they have complete knowledge of and control over everything installed on a computer at initial deployment). If you want a good Dell laptop, best advice is to keep an eye out for off-lease business machines in the Latitude family that are refurbished and sold at a discount via their factory outlet: http://www.dell.com/us/dfb/p/latitude-laptops?~ck=anav

(h/t @SethMacFarlane)

My wife once was given a cruise by an employer. That was a once-in-a-life for both of us. About 15 years ago I won a cruise after the business card I dropped in a fishbowl at a restaurant wound up getting selected. I thought it was a joke at first when they called to inform me I'd won. My wife and I went on the cruise, and although I'm not sure we'll ever do it again, I'm glad we were able to have the experience once. Some folks really become enamoured of it, and it becomes a lifestyle to them.

I've worked with a lot of consultants on ERP systems (Oracle and SAP) in the past few years, and a significant percentage of them favored MacBook Pro and MacBook Air laptops, but they were all running Windows virtual machines within OS X using VMWare or similar tools. Of course, you still have to pay for a Windows license to do this, and I'm not sure how acceptable the performance would be with large SPSS data sets in such a scenario, but assuming those aren't insurmountable hurdles, you'd have all the advantages of a Mac while still being able to run most any Windows program without worrying about compatibility issues.

Yeah, this definitely sounds like a Windows and not a Chrome issue if it's happening across multiple browsers. Since Chrome's been unstable recently for you, a reset/reinstall wouldn't be a bad idea, but it's almost certainly not going to fix the font issue if the font issue's showing up in IE as well. Some additional details as to the malware that was removed might be helpful - if you didn't capture the info on the screen in IE that notified you about it, you may be able to run a report out of Norton directly and Google the malware specifics to see if anyone else has reported font problems in connection with it.

This is primarily about italics, but the entire thread is worth reading for other suggestions: https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=408393 Since you mentioned that your computer "seemed to have restarted", do you by any chance have Windows updates set to automatically download and install? Wondering if this was triggered by a security update, as has been reported on occasion by other Chrome users.

I've had a similar problem in Chrome (display fonts all defaulted to italic), and Googling "chrome font problem" turns up many, many reports of people with similar issues. I tried all sorts of recommended fixes, and none of them worked, but the config change detailed in this brief YouTube video appears to have fixed the problem for me on the affected computer. May not fix your problem, but it's worth a try as it's a simple change. http://youtu.be/cHHBnHRcOjQ

Alive but in somewhat fragile health after a stroke in 2007. Her older sister Alice just died in November at the age of 103! http://www.vulture.com/2014/07/decline-of-harper-lee.html?Src=longreads

An interesting article about tipping from a couple of days ago: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/01/business/dollar3-tip-on-a-dollar4-cup-of-coffee-gratuities-grow-automatically.html I'm starting to see the iPad + Square reader-based POS terminals mentioned in this piece more frequently, in many cases at businesses where you might not automatically be inclined to tip (ice cream parlors, or restaurants where you order at the counter and the only "table service" is the cashier bringing your food out). One thing I've noticed is that many older people seem to hold firmly to the belief that a 15% tip at a restaurant is more than adequate for excellent service, as opposed to a minimum baseline. I usually tip 20%, or a bit more for outstanding service.

What the game-clinching INT looked like from multiple POVs: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/02/02/sports/football/wilson-saw-a-window-to-victory-but-butler-stole-the-show.html?smid=tw-nytimes

So those are not the original colors just cleaned up? They're actually altered? Not knowing the original, I have to say that I love these colors, but also getting the whole digital "tampering" thing, that's kind of a drag as well. The version of Star Trek you're watching on Netflix are the blu-ray special edition versions with the replaced special effects. They retain the original intent of the fx from the series, but they have all been redone using CGI. All the outer space and planet shots have been replaced, they also replaced some of the horribly bad matte paintings from the original series. This was mostly done because the nature of how these FX were done at the time would have made the scenes with effects look far worse than the scenes without when it comes to picture quality. Most people don't even realize it's CG because they kept the "late 60s cheesy look" so it would match. Probably worth mentioning that the physical blu-ray discs give you the choice of viewing the eps with the original SFX or the redone versions. Having read various analyses of the changes, I understand why they felt it was necessary to redo them, and the enhancements aren't as frequent or numerous as one might expect, but more often than not when I pull out the blu-rays I've wound up watching the original versions as those are the ones I grew up with.

RIP, Herr Froese. Listening to this now in remembrance:

Amazon has had the complete series bundle (all 18 boxes) on sale for just over $180 on at least two occasions before. It usually happens sometime between Black Friday and Christmas or shortly thereafter, so if you want to get them all at once at around $10 each, it might be worth keeping an eye out for price changes.