J Larsen

Okay, I figured out a solution to my problem. You have to plug the iPod into your Mac, double click on the iPod icon in iTunes, click on the iPod icon in the lower right hand corner of the screen that pops up after that double click, and then select "manually manage songs". It sucks that I accidently erased anout 10 cds before figuring this out, but that's life I guess. I'm not too impressed with the clarity of the instruction manual on this issue, but on the other hand I've always had short patience for user manuals. Greg, I'll try to post a better review of iTunes in a few days after I've worked with it a bit more. I very rarely listen to music on my computer.

Well, seeing as it's been deleting songs from my iPod all night, I'm not too happy with it at the moment. Except for this very annoying feature, the iPod itself is fine. Not the best sound quality in the world, but perfectly fine for a portable device.

How does one update the playlists on an iPod without deleting songs that you've removed from your computer? My instruction book says that you do it by choosing "update selected playlists only" in the iPod preferences menu, but to get that menu I have to plug in the iPod to my computer which automatically starts the auto update which erases all songs no longer on my harddrive. I don't have 30 GB of harddrive space to devote to AAC files on my computer. Anyone know what to do?

Catesta....hmmmm, how do I put this politely....my upstairs neighbor is exceptionally "bouyant", if you catch my drift. If that's your thing, she's all yours. BTW, I had the lyrics to that song wrong. The actual lyrics are "How you gonna act like that, how you gonna act like when I'm making love to you". Definately a lot less strange than what I thought I was hearing this morning. I guess the whole bit about concerning death came from me being really tired and pissed off at 7:30AM.

Not to derail the thread, but another complaint I've heard about this release is that the cd layer sounds awful, much worse than the previous cd release. Would you agree with this?

You haven't heard the bass on any of my neighbors' systems. We're not talking about audiophiles here. To them, the ideal system is the one that booms the most. The courtesy call isn't too effective, as few of my neighbors speak English very well. Also, the neighborhood is a shade seedy (which is the only reason my girlfriend and I can afford it on our grad student budgets). I don't really want to rock the boat too much. Right now my neighbors have our backs, but I'm sure that could change.

Well, the ideal scenario is that my thesis results in a profitable patent, in which case I move back to California and buy a house in two years or so. However, I'm not exactly the first or only person with that aspiration . That actually is the main reason I don't plan on staying in New York. The average cost of a townhouse here is more than what the average person makes in their entire life, and this apartment shit is getting really old. (I've lived in apartments virtually my entire life, so it's not like I'm spoiled in that regard.)

Since this is a problem everywhere I move, perhaps I should call for pre-emptive strikes before taking up residence anywhere new.

St. Vitus, I loathe disco in general, but my feelings about "To Be Real" may have been shaped by having grown up too close to a seedy gay disco joint on Polk St. in SF. You have no idea how many times I've heard that song at high volume. For that matter, neither do I.

I learned that the hard way in 1994 when living directly above an early-rising polka fan.

I am cursed. No matter where I move, I wind up with an upstairs or downstairs neighbor who feels like imposing their awful music on me ridiculously early in the morning. I thought I had finally broken the curse with my new apartment, but I just got a new upstairs neighbor. Not only does she sound like an elephant walking around (she litterally shakes my ceiling lights when she walks over them), but she starts playing bad music at about 8am every morning including weekends. On Sunday I was woken up by a string of disco (there's NOTHING I hate more than disco). She played that "To Be Real" song about four times in a row, and then plowed right through the 70s for the rest of the morning. I finally left my apartment at about 10am to get away from it. This morning she woke me up at 7:30 AM by playing the WORST top 40-style song I've heard in years no less than seven times in a row (yes, I counted). It might be the most ridiculous song I've ever heard. There's a whiny male with a high voice singing "I don't want to die like that/I don't want to die making love to you" (I'm not kidding) in the so-called "contemporary R&B" style. In the background there's another guy with a slightly deeper voice going "Woah-oh-oh making love, making love to youuuuuuuuuu-oh-oh, I don't wanna die, I don't wanna die oh-oh, etc. etc.". If anyone else cares to share similar horror stories, I have an unlimited supply of them.

It looks just like Newton's rings from a lens in contact with a plane glass surface. The distance between fringes gives a measure of the precsion of the lens being tested. I'd go in to a little more detail, but I'm really busy right now! (In fact, I'm so busy I half-botched this the first time I posted, hence the edit!) Edit 2: Okay, as I have a second here and there I may add a bit to this post I said above that Newton's rings are often used for examining the quality of a lens. Another application is examining the quality of a thin film. If you have a lens of known precision (say, one wavelength of red light, which is very realistic for a quality lens), then the rings can reveal imperfections in the smoothness of the thin film. Another edit: It also looks like the diffraction pattern you get if you carefully aim a high-quality laser at a metal sphere, so that the laser beam is perfectly perpendicular to the surface of the sphere. It is very tricky to get this exactly right! I did this demonstration for a class I taught a year ago. In the morning section it worked perfectly. I spent less than 15 seconds adjusting the laser to get the diffraction pattern. In the mid-day section I struggled with it for over five minutes before giving up. I don't think the mid-day students ever believed that it should really work! It is really strange the first time you see it, as normally you only get the center fringe and then it appears that the laser light is going directly through the metal sphere.

How much does that snake weigh now? How long before it ate again?

Noj, this site may explain why they didn't believe you. http://dspace.dial.pipex.com/agarman/bco/fact2.htm I'm sure you saw a large black cat, but you surely didn't see a black panther.

Mny, I'm sure you've caught on, but in case anyone else is concerned, the site is a joke. It looks just legit enough to make you wonder for a second though! The dodo is sort of a giveaway.

Afghan Hound, perhaps? http://www.petsorfood.com/exotics.shtml

Hmm, having poked around a bit on the site I linked above, I feel compelled to caution the faint of heart. They have koala, dodo, spotted owl and afghan hound meat for sale in addition to many other questionable cullinary offerings.

Mny, evidently they are as tasty to us as we are to them. Check out the second item from the top on this site: http://www.petsorfood.com/reptiles.shtml .

Don't those eat people?

Well, I'm sure that's an emergency in their book. That, a fire, or a prowler is probably the extent of their definition of emergency. In retrospect, I should have had a femal friend call. If it was a bat in a girl's room, I bet they would have come out. Never mind - I see where you got confused. I've edited to clarify. Note the rewording.

I don't know that it's the more exciting of the two, but sure! In 1999 I was invited to conduct a research project at Princeton for about five months. They set me up with what they call a "visitor's dorm" (or something like that). It was in a very old building where Winston Churchill once resided. The building was not in the best condition. Mind you, I am a city boy and not too swift about nature and animals. As of 1999, pigeons were pretty much the extent of my exposure to wildlife. Anyway, it's about two weeks into my stay (excuse me as I change verb tense), and I'm up late one night in my room working on my project. I'm listening to very loud music on headphones to stay awake. I look up for a moment for a brief mental break, when I see a very strange shadow streaking across the wall right in front of me. I'll admit that my first thought was "Holy shit, there's a terydactal in my room!!!" I spin around and see a large, dark object rapidly circling my room, and BOLT! I run downstairs where I run into a guy from Bikina Faso who became my closest friend at Princeton. I tell him there's a bat in my room. He is skeptical, as the previous night I had admitted to him that I smoked my share of marijuana as a teenager and he is convinced that such induglence permanently damages one's mind. He says if anything, there is a bird. I bet him five bucks it's a bat. He goes up to look, and sure enough there are not one but two large bats hanging from the ceiling. Much to my dismay, they have been deficating on my floor. He hands me five bucks and I use my neighbor's phone to call building services. "Hello, building services." "There are two large bats in my room, how soon can you get over here to get rid of them?" "Oh, we can probably be there by tomorrow morning around 10AM." "What are you talking about, man? You're right around the corner! How can it take you 10 hours to get here?" "University policy. Between 6PM and 10AM we only come out for emergencies." (It was around midnight at the time.) "I've got two big bats in the room where I sleep, shitting all over the place. That isn't an emergency?" "Nope. If you just don't like bats, don't you have a friend you can stay with?" A long string of explicitives follow, which precipate the jackass on the other end hanging up on me. Ahmed, my West African friend and one of the most colorful people I've ever met, walks in to my room, goes right up to one of the bats, and starts having a conversation with it! "What are you doing in here, mon? You do not belong inside!" By this point about five or six people who live in the building have come by to observe the bats - the person most freaked out by them was the biggest jock in the group! Ahmed then picks up a garbage can, and, showing no sign of apprehension whatsoever, places it directly over the bat, trapping it against the ceiling. He then releases it out the window and repeats for the other bat (the other bat resisted capture a bit, but it only took a few minutes to get him out of the room). Next we turn our attention to how the bats got in my room in the first place, as the windows are screened. It doesn't take us long to realize that there is some sort of bat nest in the roof of the building, and being on the top floor that meant that there were bats in one of my walls. There were two holes of approximately golf ball size in that wall, through which the bats must have come in. The next morning I repaired the holes, and never had bats in the room again (at least, not while I was awake!). I would hear them every now and then, though, and it was a little creepy. It sort of made it hard to have female guests over. Ahmed used to give me a really hard time about that ("Mon, if some bat scared a girl out of my room, I would fry that bat and eat it!"). I hope this was entertaining enough to read. I think it was probably a lot wierder, creepier and funnier if you were actually there. I edited this to clean up the paragraph breaks and clarify a couple points. Hopefully it's easier to follow now.

At the Bronx Zoo (a very depressing place that I don't recommend to visitors) they have an anaconda with a maximum cross section larger than a dinner plate. I still have the following stories that I haven't told: my bat-infested Princeton dorm room and a chance encounter with a stray llama in near total darkness late at night in the woods in Santa Cruz, CA. If anyone's curious I can fill in the details.

Tony, I encountered one of those milipedes in that same house in portland where we had the color-changing ladybugs. It scared the hell out of me at first just because it was so fast. My roommate caught it and fed it to his very large goldfish.

When I first moved to New York, I temporarily moved in to my friends' apartment in Brooklyn. The apartment was pretty gross, with lots of cockroaches. About a week into my stay, a praying mantis showed up in the apartment. My theory is that it came in with the organic vegetables one of my friends had delivered every week. At first, we were a little bummed on the idea of having such a large (and somewhat aggressive) insect in such a small apartment. But we soon realized that the cockroach problem was virtually eliminated. We decided to let the mantis stay. It lived with us for about a month. We found it dead in the living room one morning (perhaps it overate). The next day the roaches were back. I moved out shortly thereafter.

The world's largest spider: Legspan: 28 cm. Body: 10 cm. Diet: Birds. Lots of birds. Evidently this thing is considered a pet by many!