taks

hehe, read a funny thought a bit ago on a sports forum. now that manny is in LA, he'll never be on ESPN again. his media presence has ended. i must admit, i am tired of watching ESPN. it should be renamed BRSSPN: "boston red socks" sports programming network. taks

ah, yes, natal/neonatal teeth are what i was referring to, though i have heard them distinguished as milk teeth in the past. don't ask me where as i don't recall. i'm old now and can't remember yesterday. taks

different story here in the states. it's quite a bit cheaper in the long-run to own vs. rent, though it requires a bit more work and is definitely more of a headache. the house i'm in is three times the size of my last apartment and the mortgage is only about $200/month more than rent on the apartment (before tax deductions and appreciation, but also before property tax). some expenses are higher, however. overall the difference is probably about the same $200/month before appreciation, but for 2200 square feet more space and a much nicer place (and i can't hear my neighbors stomping around upstairs!). while i do have a yard, it's not very big. my next home will be on a few acres, however. that's the thing that chaps my hide right now. taks

sort of... i think milk teeth are teeth that babies are actually born with, as opposed to the first set of teeth that children get beginning around 1 year of age which are often referred to as "baby teeth." i think milk teeth fall out before the official "baby teeth" come in. taks

not that it matters nor is this an endorsement, but my school, the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, offers some kind of computer science degree with an emphasis in game design. it's one of their new "bachelor of innovation" degrees which i have not yet figured out (i never could tell what differs between bachelor of arts and bachelor of science and now i'm even more baffled). taks

i agree... satellite is soooo much better. directv is my current fix. taks

chinpokoman is more my style. taks

ouch, that's just not right! that would be 1.14, gfted1. taks

oh i realize that... as big as they apparently are, they must have the full range (i did not realize they contracted for everyone else, for example). this board in particular was what i was referring specifically to. of course, i get a kick out of people that purchase a cheapie, trying to put together a budget system, then gripe because they got what they paid for. taks

oh, i have 5 in my party, but i intend to kill of the coward and utilize minsc instead. i'm on my way to get dynaheir, but i may kill her off, too. spreading XP points across a party of 6 when you have a f/m/t main dude is, well, painful. minsc may get a boost to something shortly, too. taks

so thaaaat's how you do it. i always wondered. if there is anyone in the world that has played through these games as many times as i have, it would be you, that's for sure. i generally play through bg1 first, so i already have the tomes represented in my stats. my guy started with 94 this time, so it's almost irrelevant. i also bumped up poor imoen (only 78!) so she doesn't break her back under the weight of a few potions and actually has at least one 18 in a stat (INT). i dualled her to a weezard immediately, however, and gave her the ring 'o wizardry to make her usable early on. amazingly, it is still rather easy to take a dirt nap in BG1 depending upon how you approach things, even if you have a POWERGAMER! game going. i decided to take on borda (guy trying to sell cursed stuff at entrance to gnoll stronghold) and went down quickly. my f/m/t main dude is still first level, however, so he doesn't have much of a chance facing 3 magic missiles upside the head. taks

personally, i wouldn't ever buy something i know to be low-end anyway, which is what this board apparently is. generally i get highest-end mobos (since i burn them up faster than anything), high-end HDDs (next fastest burn rate as i recall), high-end mammaries and medium-high-end cpus. price is too volatile to buy highest-end cpu and highest-end is typically medium-high-end within a year anyway. the performance difference between highest-end mammaries and high-end mammaries is negligible, and their longevity is always sufficient to get me to my next rig anyway as long as i stay away from lower-end stuff. i can't actually recall ever killing any mammaries, TBH. taks

definitely... more appropriately in this case, laziness. they simply didn't care to attempt to fix the linux issues (which work out to a different problem than winders issues, btw, partly because of the way linux identifies itself). apparently some rep from foxconn said they intend to fix the problem. taks

yeah, i realize that... no matter. i figure if everything on the west side of the continental divide drops in, i'll be close enough to call it "beach front" to be happy. growing up in missouri i got to experience the occasional quake, and there was one recently as a matter of fact. never anything strong enough to do more than shake me out of bed, however. taks

btw, i'm still waiting for my home in COS to be considered "beach front property." ya'll in CA are going under one day, and i'll be RICH! taks

cool beans (dangit xard!). taks

i wouldn't say that 3E is more complex than 2E at all... quite the contrary, as the simplification going from 2E to 3E was actually a selling point. 2E is quirky, and very idiosyncratic, with all sorts of strange exceptions to rules. 3E broke everything out into skills and feats, rather than the strange methods of specializing different classes, so there were more options for your characters, though i think it is still much less complex overall. i think a good way to describe things, however, is that your characters can actually have a much more complex makeup in 3E, compared to 2E in which dual/multi-classing was a mess. btw, on topic, the IE games all have issues with direct draw. i just fired up BG1 and i had to disable direct draw (via the dxdiag option) in order to get rid of the black boxes around various things. the other option was to go into 16-bit texture mode and enable software blt, but that hosed performance (which seems odd, given that i have a rather fast machine). i had a similar problem with IWD1, but i didn't have to enable the blt, i.e., 16-bit sufficed so i didn't have a performance issue. i suppose there's something similar going on with IWD2, but obviously there is a patch that resolves the issue. not so for earlier incarnations of the engine. taks

i wouldn't call a 5.8 "strong," at least not compared to what southern cal experiences from time to time. still, anything near LA is worthy of concern given the density of population there. taks

btw, further reading into the thread discussion at slashdot has shed more light on this apparent slight by foxconn. it would seem that a more likely scenario is that ALL of the tables were screwed up from the bios provider and whomever had to adapt the bios to the foxconn board probably only went in to modify the winders versions. in other words, they likely did not sabotage linux compatibility explicityly, rather, only attempted to fix windows compatibility and did not attempt to fix linux compatibility. apparently the bios code is a huge pile of comedy gold (read: crap). taks

about time they got rid of reyes. o ye como va, felipe! taks

actually, the concept of pulling pitchers earlier than most of us think is acceptable began quite a while ago (in the early 90s maybe?) with the biometrics thing. someone did some analysis and determined that pitchers lose effectiveness around 100-110 pitches. basically, they noted that pitchers had much better w/l records, lower eras and gave up fewer hits if they stopped pitching before 100-110 pitches. tony larussa jumped on this and began yanking his guys in this region, no matter how well they were pitching. he's moderated his willingness to do this over the years (he lets carpenter complete games, for example, even if he hits 120 pitches), but he still has a knack for pulling a guy in the 7th even though he's given up only a few hits. other managers hopped on the bandwagon and it has become the norm across the league. yes, it is the manager's decision, but he's certainly talking to others for input (larussa and duncan are peas in a pod, for example). he's also watching the pitches to see if they're hitting their mark, and looking at pitcher mechanics (pitching coach's job) to see if bad habits are creeping in (which is a sign the pitcher is getting tired). it's incredibly complicated overall (the reasons), and i'm not 100% convinced it is always the right decision. sometimes a pitcher just has the opposing team's number and they ain't gonna hit him regardless of how many pitches he's thrown. taks

??? it isn't? taks PS: i was using the phrase "cool beans" back in high school, over 20 years ago. i got it from my mother, i think. she's 66.

pain in the arse to set up. it did not add enough for me to get excited about it. taks

uh, no. it's "Cheats=1", not "Debug Mode=1". the latter works with NWN/NWN2. it is different for the IWD games, too, and maybe even BG2 (not there yet, so i haven't hunted it back down). not D&D roolz, silly, BG roolz. it only took about 50 re-rolls, btw, since all i was shooting for was 18/00. i like to see what comes up randomly, particularly given my stats background. 90 and above (stat totals) is quite rare. the BG random number generator is borked, however, and i'm not even sure it implements 3d6 for the rolls anyway. it seems more uniform, though i've never tried to determine if there exists a bell-shape or not. besides, i've never had luck hacking into my characters or saved games with the shadowkeeper type programs. they always seem to screw something up. keep in mind, i've probably played through BG1/2 more times than the sum total of all the times the damned games have ever been played by everyone that has ever played them (try to figure out what's so wrong about this statement!). really, i've probably played BG1 30, perhaps even 50 times. i can no longer say for sure since it has been over 10 years since i started. ugh. i blame MC. taks

it's a feel-good thing to convince my kooky broken head that i actually played by the roolz. i know about the mod programs, just don't feel like getting 'em. taks