taks

5 year education towards Ph.D.: ~$25,000 medical bills resulting from writing a dissertation in under 1 month: ~$5000 and climbing printing, binding, and publishing dissertation: $600 walking across the stage being called Doctor for the first time: priceless drtaks

I agree. kirottu the good thing about the USA shows is that they run in a split season format. several episodes in the winter and several in the summer. psych, burn notice, monk and the closer all fall into that category (wife loves kyra sedgewick, and the show ain't bad either). this summer we'll also get new law and order: criminal intent episodes. i'm a d'nofrio fan, btw. taks

one day last week i had to re-login probably 4 times, and i assumed it was because my ip changed (we're dynamic, though normally it does not change but once a month). it may not have been a result of that because i have a buddy that has an ssh tunnel into our network and he did not have to change his ip that day. haven't had a problem since. several other times over the past year or so i have had an ip change, and my buddy also had to reset his ssh, which is why i posted the above comment. oh, as for the "error," there really isn't any that i see other than the guest screen when i come here. it still has the ****** in the password box as well as taks in the login box, so i simply hit the button and i'm back in. maybe the software is having cookie issues (i.e., they're expiring quickly)? taks

turns out my stick won't SHIP till thursday. i should have it for my party on saturday, however. half the crowd are pool players (my team and other friends), so i get to get my arse kicked all day on my own table with my brand new cue. there's a rumored curse playing on your own table, which i have lived up to in the past. my table is also a different size than we normally play on. i got it when i lived in florida (there are pictures posted here somehwere) and we played on gandy "oversized eight-foot" tables, which are a bit bigger than a standard home "eight-foot table," and a lot bigger than the standard "bar box" tables that we normally play on in colorado. it's also an olhausen which is known for evil corner pockets. taks

psych would be my addition to the fray. corny, but often hilarious. taks

i'm thinkin' mermaids may become a reality... really. taks

ordered my pool cue this morning. the guy said there might be a delay if i put on a different tip, so i decided to wait till i get it. unfortunately, viking cues come with le pro tips, and i shoot with a moori (best tip on the planet). i'll also wait to get the butt engraved (deetee's) till later. oh, i should add, since the online purchase thingy wouldn't let me select my delivery options, he gave me free 2nd day air. thursday morning rejoice!!! i've been shooting with the same stick for over 10 years, a viking as well, which i won in a tournament in 1996/7 or so. it will become my break stick, possibly. taks

it happened to me for about a day or two last week. generally speaking, if your ISP changes your IP #, you will need to re-login. it could just have been that the IPs were resetting often for whatever reason. not a problem the past few days for me at least. taks

ewww... you didn't say you were going to eat it, too. and certainly you didn't need to share that little tidbit, either. reminds me of a funny futurama joke. bender is talking to the celestial being (a galaxy, but god, possibly) and he says: "So, do you know what I'm gonna do before I do it?", "yes" came the reply. "What if I do something different?" bender asks. "Then I don't know that." taks

which was one of the most moronic decisions i've ever seen from the PC industry. a melted bios chip would definitely imply an inability to boot, btw. taks

so you replaced the motherboard too? doubtful that the monitor could take down the rest of your system since it is driven off of a chip that is isolated from the system. if the monitor is bad, it might fry the output driver on the chip on your video card, however, which could then cause issues with whatever bus the video card is hanging off of (PCI, AGP, PCI-E, etc.). this would even be an oddity since a dead driver chip would generally result in no video, but a working system. otherwise, my guess would be mobo or both vid cards are crap to begin with, but if you replaced the mobo, then most likely bad video cards. got another (working) system to hook the monitor up to? a laptop even? taks

self-employeds also don't get their FUTA and SUTA paid for them (unemployment tax). i'd say at least the FICA is only on the first $95k or so, but less than 10% of the population makes over that anyway. taks

um, only now approaching 10%... hardly worth getting your conspiracy ire up over. qualcomm's profit margin, OTOH, is almost 36%. mine is eventually going towards this pool cue. graduation present to me (that i won't get till my bday in july, however). taks

actually, it doesn't sound like he actually replaced the battery. yes, if the CMOS battery is dead your pooter probably would not boot. try replacing that, first, then check back. taks

bummer dude. my wife is taking one of our cats to the vet today for a determination on whether her time has come. michele is worried (her cat). taks

wow, i had a busy day. scheduled an appointment with a GI doctor (gastro-intestinal) to deal with my stomach issues (ulcer, perhaps) as well as a cardiologist. my physician saw my cholesterol numbers and decided we need to work on the heart, too. nuttin like approaching 40 after years of abuse, bad diet and an overall lack of exercise coupled with stress that i never could have imagined. anyway, i have a clock/local oscillator board that i designed (my buddy did part of it) and got the re-spin back a couple days ago. when i got the new board assembled, the PLL (phase-locked loop) chip was programming, but working incorrectly. i spent an hour or so last night on the phone with the support guys at national semiconductor and they were baffled. talked to them again today and tried a few other things to no avail. finally made the right change and oila! it worked. both the output clock (just under 100 MHz) and local oscillator (just under 2.3 GHz) are now programmed and functioning. i then smoke tested the board by inserting it into the chassis and that worked as well. re-wired the 12 V supply to use the backplane (compact PCI) and after shorting the whole system and shutting it down, got it re-wired CORRECTLY and all works well (we were using an external supply for the 12 V previously). i also found a spare amplifier in the back room (we got a s**t-ton of various comm devices lying around, a tinkerers heaven) and put it on the LO since it was too low for use in our RF circuitry (need about 20 mW and the LO output was only 1 mW). so now my little system in a chassis is almost done. my buddy is setting up so we can boot the linux kernel directly from on-board flash rather than over the ethernet as we are doing now. testing begins tomorrow!!! woohoo!!! oh, i also got my final grades for school, which included 30 hours of dissertation work that had been listed as I for "in progress"... i'm quite pleased. taks

i've got a book on being successful in business... one of the main points is "stick to the knitting." what does that mean? it means that companies need to focus on what they are good at. extending themselves into other realms, almost always done so they can capture those additional profits, often leads to disaster because the other realms are not their "knitting." in terms of developers, they are good at developing, not publishing. vice versa for publishers. it requires too many skillsets which makes general operation a much more difficult task. it also requires balancing the separate needs between the two realms, developing and publishing in this case, which are often at odds with each other. much more efficient paths to completion are often found when separate entities negotiate their own paths and come to some agreement in the middle. when one company does both, it may lead to poor performance on one side or another, and an otherwise inferior product (or poorly marketed or funded product), which does not help the bottom line. those extra profits are then lost to inefficiency. taks

one of the misnomers of using corporate data, however, is that corporations have a HUGE expense in updating an OS. think about it: every single operator must upgrade, and in a big corporation, that could easily be thousands, if not 10s or even 100s of thousands, of upgrades. corporations as well as government entities are always slow to upgrade (lots of government servers are still running 2k, btw, though the standard "desktops" are mostly upgraded to XP). companies simply can't afford to upgrade every time the latest OS comes out. i can't wait to see what happens when linux begins to get a foothold (for desktops it will be a while; it is already pretty popular for server farms and network/ethernet stuff). the government is pretty dicey on the use of linux in their embedded stuff because (last time i checked) only one version of red hat had been approved by the NSA for use in critical systems (this requires a line-by-line check to verify the lack of security holes/exploits). taks

i had the same problem a while back and emailed atari with what my key was supposed to be, and they emailed me back a new key. taks

i'm guessing there's a point at which the "skin effect" takes over and microwave radiation won't penetrate certain materials beyond a certain depth. the same thing happens with current in a wire, and is a big reason most electrical cords are braided rather than solid conductors (besides flexibility). more, smaller, strands equates to a higher cross-sectional conduction area. mm waves range from 30 GHz (10 mm) to 300 GHz (1 mm), btw. taks

it's difficult, however, given that we are such a suburban populace. you can live 30 miles from a city and still be in a heavily populated area. most major cities do indeed have mass transit, but at a hefty expense to the taxpayers (which generally discourages voters) and considerable problems during construction (since cities were in place well before the concept came up). denver just got a rail system, and i have not heard how well it is doing, but it is rather limited in its reach. most people still have to drive just to get to the danged thing. same in st. louis. the latter is used, but only by people that live near the stations. st. louis' has generally been considered a waste of money by those that don't live along I-70. taks

barring impact. taks

i should add that we watched bridge to terabithia recently. i was really getting in to it then... WTF!!! nobody ever said anything about THAT!!! arrrrrgggghhhh!!! my wife was in tears. i'll admit to nothing other than screaming at the tube for a second or two. taks

yeah, i've heard that. taks

i wonder if 12 oz. curls count as part of the fat zone, training zone or "adding fat" zone? taks