Shropshire Slasher

wth. Was that Leonard Nimoy?

Yeah... the caveman grunt screaming "wheel suck!" was hilarious. But my favorite was Charles Barkley Dewayne Wade. Well written, well directed, well edited, and well... acted. <That last line would be funnier if you heard me say it the way I thought it. Oh well.> Anyways... by the time Barkley says "I'm bored" I was in hysterics. SS

Had Dave for 8 years or so. Had Comcast for cable many years ago. Hated it in comparison. Visiting friends with Comcast/Dish has not shown me anything to make me want to switch. My experience with DTV has been generally good. The good old days of sweet talking CS into giving you all sorts of deals are over, but the support is still generally good. I recently got a new HD receiver for free as an upgrade... and have had 2 of the HD DVR's for a year and like them very much. Oh... and as for outages... if you have ANY tech savvy at all... you can tweak your setup to get optimal performance. I added a power insertion switch to my front end and tweaked my alt/az to get excellent signal on the new D10 sat (103b). Very few outages... only in the biggest thunder storms. When SWM rolls out things should get even better. With ANY service provider, I should point out... you'll only be as satisfied as the last tech you deal with. There are EXCELLENT field techs out there for all providers. If you get one, you'll likely be very satisfied. Get a bad one, and you'll be aching to switch. Just my 2cents.

I've read all the PS3 hate on the boards here. Don't know why I feel compelled to post this, but here goes. Back last July, in the midst of an ugly divorce from a cheating wife, I decided to do something for me. Something completely pointless. So, I went to Best Buy and picked up a PS3, controllers, games, remote, etc. Since then, I've gone from liking it to really loving it, and I'll tell you why. But first, some background. When the PS3 came out, I laughed about the price. Sony touted it as the "center" of a home entertainment system. I laughed at that. It looked like fancy graphics with nothing else of value to me. Now that I've had one for 6+ months, here is my assessment. Love the thing. Gaming is fun on it. There are some good titles. My 10 year old son and I are currently running through a Franchise Season with the Colts on Madden '08. I've got NFS Carbon, which EVERYBODY from 8 and up loves to play at get parties. We download free games and demos that have been pretty cool and led to decent game purchases. Even my 4 year old loves this bizarre little rubber duck game where you use the sixaxis controller to guide the duckes around a little pool to a drain. Now, I read that for the hardcore gamers the 360 is the better system. Can't argue for or against this since I've only played the XBox occasionally. But for me, as a casual gamer, the PS3 has been a great gaming console. Now the other features of the PS3 are what has really put it over the top for me. Blue-Ray rules on this. I've got a beautiful Sony XBR4 40" panel, and the BD movies are simply stunning on it. I have 300 and Casino Royal as demo disks, and watching them through the PS3 and XBR is amazing. Even my mom and dad are amazed by the picture quality, and they are not really impressed by such things. Everybody is simply blown away. When I bought the PS3, it was cheaper than a stand alone BD player at the time. I also use the PS3 to play my media library through my home theater. I've got several thousand WMA tracks that I serve through tversity. I've got several devices that can receive them from the media server, but the PS3 performs the best. I REALLY love this feature. All my tracks in one location and when the kids go to their mothers I can crank them. I even download HD movie trailers for stuff I wanna see. Not that this is a critical feature, but fun to play around with. At any rate, if any of you wanna pile on here and tell me I don't know what I'm talking about, feel free... I can take it. But, I wanted to put out there that there is at least ONE satisfied PS3 owner in the world. And, I was very wrong about a device in your hometheater that can do a lot of things. I still think all these consoles are over priced, but this is what they go for I guess. Cheers SS

Thanks all. Been an... interesting... year. Divorce was final on the 26th (merry christmas ). Found out I've received tenure a week or two before. Time to move forward, I guess. I hereby proclaim 2008 as MY year. The rest of you may use it if you wish. Cheers and Happy New Year. CEM

Putting. At night. With the 15 year old daughter of the Dean.

Found out today I'm being recommended tenure by the president of my college. For those who are wondering, tenure means you cannot be fired. ever. Unless you get caught night putting. It also means I'll have zero job mobility and be paid crap for the rest of my life. But, happy days. CEM

Heh... you can't answer a question without passing judgment, eh? When did we get married, SJ?

I need some help from the guru's here at .GC So I've got a rather largish music library on my HD. I use my PS3 and WMP11 to play the library through my home theater. Very happy with this setup. I have two different formats used to rip CD's to the HD: Windows Media Audio 9.1 192 kbps, 44 kHz, stereo 1-pass CBR Windows Media Audio 9.1 Lossless VBR Quality 100, 44 kHz, 2 channel 16 bit 1-pass VBR. The PS3 can play the constant bitrate stuff, but not the variable. So... off I go on a little project. 1. Is the reason the PS3 can't play the VBR content the VBR itself or the relatively high bitrates of those files (approx 1Mb)? 2. I can think of 2 possible solutions: a. find some software to do batch transcoding from VBR lossless to 192kbps CBR b. find a media server to do on-the-fly transcoding of the content to the PS3. So... can anyone offer their perspectives? Nothing I've found from Sony or a google search can tell me what the PS3 supports for bitrates... only that .wma is supported. I suspect 2a above is my solution... so can anyone offer a media transcoder (free preferably but any is welcome) that i can use to achieve the transcoding? Any other solutions that haven't occurred to me? Thanks for advice. SS

well no wonder it hurt. Remind me never to eat the salsa con quesa at Fatty's... FWIW, next time try soaking your hands in milk. after that try a little vegetable oil.Water won't dissolve the capsaicin in the peppers.And yes, I keep a box of latex gloves in the kitchen (use the powder free). It sounds a little weird but if you are gonna be handling your "sausage", peppers or other "raw meats" it's a good idea to wear gloves.

LOL, Mo. you joined like 5 days after me, and have like 1.5Million x more posts... GET SOME WORK DONE ALREADY!

I understand there are many factors that will go into a decision like this. Also, I understand where Fatty is coming from. I would like to cast my solitary not so important vote for letting the server ride a little longer. Let's see if we can start to generate more consistent traffic from both inside and outside the community. FWIW, the Orangebox only came out a few weeks ago, and many of us only recently picked it up, many more will in the near future. Perhaps waiting through the holidays when people will be buying the game or getting it as a gift, are done with finals, travel, etc. would be a good idea. SS

LOL. For some reason, that pic really cracked me up. One thing mo... are you in that pic (with the friends you need new ones of), or is it a pic you found in the interwebs?

... WMU is in Kalamazoo. That is all.

I infrequently use AIM. I'm always pressing y before I start typing...

I think we need a scan of that portion of the document for the GC archives... -Fk Once the divorce is final, I'll make that happen.

Heh, my (soon to be) ex-wife was all "I don't play video games", and used to gently tease me about the fact that I did. Except the part where she played Mario Kart, Mario Party, countless solitaire/card games, puzzle games, and get this, CIV III and CIV IV! At one point she was so hooked on CIV that she would go into the bathroom in the morning at 9AM and play until noon. While the kids and I were in the kitchen having our first and second meals of the day. Then, before bed, same thing from 9PM until midnight. She even asked last fall if I would take her to FF. I said yes and was working on a plan to setup a CIV server so she could get pickup games going. Then, well, the part where she filed for divorce in may kinda obviated the need. I doubt the dude she's been dating since christmas plays civ... wonder if he now laughs at her? P.S. When we went to court for a motion hearing this fall, she made a big deal about me playing video games. It was my "obsession" and I went to FF to "improve my video gaming skills". I SWEAR TO GOD that is in a court document.

K. I've had a Comcast Cable modem for 5 years now. Actually, it was AT&T back when I signed up... Anywho... I switched my phone over to Comcast voice. They came on Thursday to install. First of all, i'm saving 15 bucks off my cable modem for having multiple services. Plus, the phone service will be substantially cheaper than what I paid for both phone/long distance with AT&T and IDT. So bonus there. Well, the installer shows up. We do a quick walkthrough and talk about where to put the phone modem. We agree on a location. As we talk, I ask him if this fancy modem will do phone AND data. He says yes. I offer to use it in place of my old linksys modem. he says, good idea, since the new modems are faster and have speedburst and other features. Cool says I. Then I ask him about the cabling outside the house, which has had an existing issue for several years. He's like, no problem... Let me go run a new line from the street. 5 minutes and the guy fixes a problem that has been there for 4 years. In short, I'm pushing 6Mb on a bad day, and 10+Mb off peak for downloads, and 1.5Mb upload. Problem is, now I've got no excuse for sucking at CS:S...

#84 "drgballer" STEAM_0:0:15294156 06:09 65 0 active tk'ing and mocking over chat. generally being an arse. Recrud, 10:15am... office/aztec

K. First, let me say thanks for all the work everyone put in this year. I had a great time, even though I logged a shockingly low number of minutes actually playing CS:S. This was my choice, as there were lots of other things to do. The Keg was a great idea. Hope to see this back. How about a keg of Sam Adams next year? My only constructive criticism is to make sure that the CS:S servers, both tournament and open servers, are up and running by the opening gun. We spent a big part of mid-day Friday playing off of other peoples computers. Not a huge deal, but for an organized event such as this it would reflect well on us to be up and running. Plus, we need to find a way to have multiple IPs for the servers, rather than ports. Perhaps this would require multiple NICs each with their own bandwidth. Finally, it would be nice if admins could setup various games on the servers (gungame, scopeless) more easily. Cheers, and hope to see everyone next year. CEM

Many of you have probably seen this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYhCn0jf46U I thought it was well done and rather poignant.

We wanna play footsies. Or handsies. Or that Bawls thing Fatty was talking about.

ROFL This needs to be on the front page NOW!!!! Yeah, last year I was all fishnet and hairspray. This year I'm more glam, think Ziggy Stardust. Chicks dig sexual ambiguity, don't they? Dont' they?!?

LOL, You guys all realize that I was being totally facetious, right? Oh, and what about this seat, Mo?

I've been trying to figure out why attendance is way off at FF this year. I was perusing the FF website, and I realized that there is no obvious or easy way to see pictures of last year's victorious random draw CS:S tourney team. Seriously, this is a tremendous oversight by the organizers of this event. You should have the names and faces of these illustrious, not to mention devilishly handsome gentlement shamelessly plastered all over the website so all can celebrate their uber-1337-ness. Maybe then you could get a few people to sign up for this thing! Sheesh. gotta think of everything around here.. mumble mumble...