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I thought you had a girlfriend. Did something change recently? I worked up the courage to send someone an email on that personals site I joined. We've been messaging back and forth for a couple days on the subject of... depression and social phobias, 'cause we both have them. Today I found out...

I stand by my preference. :P Anyway, some nice person has scanned one issue (#8) of Warren Ellis's Transmetropolitan, which I insist is seven different kinds of brilliant and well worth your time to read. PM more for more details and/or information.

<threadjack> Sam is THE name in my family. I have four male cousins named Sam, two female cousins named Samantha, two uncles Sam, a nephew Sam and any number of more distant relations. We refer to each other by number. Sam isn't a particularly common name, but I almost can't escape it. There...

I seem to have gotten Liam confused with Will Rickards. :( We have too damned many people named Bill around here. I'm going to start calling everyone else "Bruce" instead.

Today I made somene who brought me their 4-month-old computer buy a new chassis, CPU fan, DVD burner, floppy and card reader. Why? Cause it was filthy. I wasn't going to touch it. The real problem was that their video card fan had failed and killed the card (Does anyone want a burned up...

That does look good. The only problem is that it's made by LG, a company whose hardware I've had consistently poor experiences with. :( The Samsung SCH-a970 looks a little better in terms of features, but it's a full ounce heavier than the vx8100. That's a PITA, since I carry my phone in my...

Cheapy Toshiba/Compaq/HP notebooks can be found for $400 if you manage to hit Walmart or Best Buy on Sunday morning just as they open. They don't get very good battery life and they're very heavy (7lbs or so, basically triple what the portables weigh), which in my mind means they barely qualify...

I've seen younger people do it, but that's the same group of people who use cell phones for things besides making phone calls and might actually carry around one of those little Nintendo handhelds that aren't Gameboys. You kids get off my lawn! Someone gave me an ipod a few years ago. I used...

The touch of Western Digital is filled with a viscous, hateful humour. To feel the incomprehensible rape of its slightest caress is akin the emptiness of shouting profound enlightenment into the night sky, and to realizing that universe is unmoved, for you are not but an insignificant mote in...

You won't hear this very often but: I agree with Stereodude. I think the first thing that needs to happen with solid-state players is that everyone needs to stop copying Apple or trying to copy Apple. At this point, no one is going to buy an Apple-like player when they can buy the real thing...

My first thought was "There's still Hitachi." Tannin, if you want to blaze a trail with WDamnsung, feel free, but I'm guessing that if Samsung eats WD it's because they like the WD product better, and that will pollute future Samsung drives, just like Quantum polluted Maxtor.

Groltz, I despise having my picture taken. I have no idea whether that's the same boat as you, but that's my problem. For as many pictures as there are of some others, here I figure there can be one of me to share as well. Besides, I can take it down if I want to. You'll all forget. :P And none...

Apparently the problem with that is that Tannin wants to be able to right-click to get to system properties, which that shortcut won't do. Tannin either doesn't know about [Windows Key]-Break or isn't using a keyboard with a Windows Key (like his laptop, probably). I kind of remember doing...

I usually have a bit of grey hair at my temples but I just had a haircut a couple hours ago, so there's probably not enough to see.

Picture was taken Monday night while I was hanging out at my ex's place. It's probably the first picture of me that's been taken in the last six or seven years. The dog is a lab/greyhound mix named Penny (the, er, inappropriately-shaped thing in the background is her favorite toy) who generally...

Asterix comics/media are very hard to come by in the States, Coug.

I'd rather die of congestive heart failure than emphysema. Hell, I'd rather die almost any other way than of emphysema. Putting that aside, Here's what happens when you run the Gettysburg Address through Powerpoint's Auto Content Wizard.

I like my Benq projector just fine. Their Optical drives don't impress me, however. I've been quite happy with various Samsung electronics I've purchased - hard disks, DVD players, LCD and DLP displays. At this point, if I'm purchasing electronics I'll look for Samsung first, if only as the...

Ghost 9 is a truly great program. It doesn't do anything particularly stupid or behave in any really unexpected ways. It images drives, just like its distant DOS ancestor. Symantec added much-appreciated CD and DVD burning, USB and Firewire support and wrapped in boot manager and a GUI for...

That's weird enough to be a warranty issue IMO.

If I ever set foot on a dealer lot again I will be sure to try that.

Right Click on the "Special", choose create shortcut, drag as usual.

Godaddy has been doing some kind of scummy things lately with redirects of parked domains. I can register/host it for you if you'd like. It'll give me something to do with the 19GBs of space I'm paying for and not using.

George Bush meets with the Queen of England. He asks her, "Your Majesty, how do you run such an efficient government? Are there any tips you can give to me?" "Well," says the Queen, "the most important thing is to surround yourself with intelligent people." "Bush frowns. "But how do I know the...

Kind of off the subject, but why does buying a car feel the most degrading human activity of all time? Seriously, I went to look at a car Saturday morning and left feeling like I could look up to the jizzmopper at a Serbian Rape Camp.

Sometimes, ignorance of a certain scale is actually pretty scary. Glad none of my customers are that bad.

Asus brings back soundstorm.

I meant to say that "I've done Samsung RMAs three different times with a total of five drives. They got replacements back to me within a week of the ship date on my end." but I accidently deleted most of that line.

Man, Maxtor used to have a great RMA service here in the USA before the Quantum merger. No questions asked. You could send a drive back for being dusty or for making a noise you didn't like. Samsung's RMA here in the USA is on the same level with Hitachi and Seagate I think. I've . WD has the...

The ones I ordered from Newegg used Apex-labelled or Allied PSUs. They appear to be identical. I bought them because their looks have a nice "wow" factor associated with them, but found myself replacing about 40% of the power supplies from those machines within a year.

Apex are OK except that I've had problems with Apex-branded PSUs. I'd suggest FoxConn, which makes wonderfully sturdy mid-range cases that have the drawback of having kind of loud case fans, or CodeGen, which are also well constructed but have CodeGen PSUs (again, not a really great choice in...

Oh man, I remember when you were looking for that last one, Groltz. I was genuinely worried until I got to that last line.

Biostar's products are somewhat more reliable than Shuttle, in my experience. Not as nice as Gigabyte, but they're certainly high on the food chain of budget motherboard vendors.

Well, yeah. That's the problem. But realistically, who upgrades a CPU these days?

I normally either do 3 passes or let it run for 24 hours. I hate to bring up Sandra, but as it stresses a wider array of system components, it might be another tool to try.

Oh man, I know the feeling. One of the customers at my training company rolled out some low-end Optiplexes a couple years ago and asked me to stage and deploy them. One of PCs arrived without a hard disk (as in, it wasn't inside the case. At all.). I tried for about a week to get them to ship...

On the other hand, there's a substantial truth to some of his other claims; the copy protection really does insert itself as a low-level device driver on Windows. I'd like to see evidence of course, but it's worth following up - the list of complaints with regard to Starforce software, and the...

And dredging up something old, here's someone who seems to have found Starforce spreading from one PC to other computers on his network. I think that I want Starforce on my computers to about the same degree that I want a bad case of Herpes.

My local distributor is offering me a very nice price ($52) on some older Biostar Via socket 939 boards - the ones that can't run dual core chips. Knowing these boards have that mild flaw, I can't decide if they're really a worthwhile purchase. Any thoughts?

Some fun Vista Press Coverage. Ouch. And then there's this bit about MS rewriting 60% of the existing code for Vista. I think the phrase "Train Wreck" is appropriate at this point. I'm giving up on my Vista experiment for now. There are just too many things I can't do from Vista. Explorer...

OO doesn't really have a functional equivalent to Access, does it? Base is more like a frontend to whatever other database you have, I think. Anyway, you probably can use ADO between Writer and your mdb file to get the job done if it's really important.

For a time, VLK (activation-less) licenses for XP Pro were available with purchase of as few as five copies of Windows. That policy has been rescinded and now the only way to get a VLK is to to be in one of maybe five enterprise licensing programs (Select, Certified Partner, Gold Certified...

Plus! is a combination of the Mail Plus! Service and Yahoo's Music Download service. I don't think anyone cares about that. :)

Just to prove how right I am, Fortune 500 Companies are Advertising on what're basically porn sites these days. That would probably really awesome if I ever unblocked ads for some reason.

Santilli, if your PC is connected to a home theater or through a digital output to a fancy set of speakers with a Dolby Digital Processor, you're getting exactly the same sound you'd get from any DVD player. If you don't have either of those things, I wouldn't be terribly worried about sound...

Excel stuff works pretty well. I've seen Word documents that would choke Writer, but most things are perfectly fine. I don't think textboxes are all that common in Word docs. Are they?

Really? I've had great luck with them. I use 611BRPs to replace the failed WRT54Gs I keep running into, or Netgear AP/routers with unsatisfactory range. The trendnet 802.11 products for me have been a happy medium of not breaking all the time and having decent wireless coverage. I also have...

The Dual Core Thinkpad X60 is making me think very hard about how much I like money, Tannin. Of course, that's the other way. It's only got a 12" screen. But it weighs 3lbs and lasts over 5 hours on a single battery.

Goddammit Tannin, if you'd just buy a decent copy of Ghost instead of the for-shit old one you've been using, you'd like it, love it and it would be one of your primary tools. Anyway, I don't see a point in disrupting a functional Windows install because of a drive change. Motherboard upgrade...

You need to talk to the people who make the game. There's probably a patch or easy fix. There are tons of games that won't run unless you're an administrator (e.g. The Sims), for instance. As for what's going on with your DVD player, I have no idea. I use PowerDVD 6 on a Server 2003 PC just...