mcjeff215

Friday the 13th. God that game sucked. My votes... Ninja Gaiden (the original) and anything Castlevania, especially #2. My 6th grade buddies and I lost tons of sleep beating that game. My wife and I actually ebay'd an original NES a few months ago... it's amazing how much fun those games are as compared to the fancy PS3/XBOX stuff these days. They were simple! We find that the two of us can waste hours playing Super Mario Brothers 2 (No no, not the one with T.O.). I bought Ninja Gaiden from an old used game store a couple months back. I can still get to that last boss, just can't beat him. It's just like I'm 9 again.

I almost went there 'cuz I scored really high on some tests back in elementary school, but it was way to damn expensive.

Not valet.. A lot of parking downtown has attendants. Someone's paid to sit at the lot and collect money from drivers. In turn, they get a little piece of paper to put on their rear-view or something. The homeless street people were pretending to be attendants.

I'll see if I can stir up a bunch of guys to go do that next week or so.... the presence of the "Bum Bot' ought to convince them.

I have a pretty mean hill too. I bought a POS push job and I just use that to hammer out that spot real quick. You'd probably be fine, though. Just shift your weight snowmobile-style and don't drive directly up.

I drive past the Civic Center every day, yeah, that's bum-ville. From there up towards Marietta St, and then down towards Peachtree.

Nah, they'd get out of the car and the homeless dude would play attendant. He'd run up and say something like '$20 flat rate.' The driver would fork over a $20 and be handed a ticket of some sort... perhaps from a sporting event the weekend before. The driver would walk away believing they've paid, the bum would pocket the $20. When the real attendants (or property owner) show up, the cars were getting booted. The parking lot they were doing this at was adjacent to a homeless shelter. The building I work in sent out an alert to all of the tenants. It was getting pretty bad for a while. The people that worked there knew better, but all of the day-to-day business visitors didn't fare so well.

Where exactly is it? The bums were parking cars at a shelter near the office for a while. Usually in private lots. They'd take the $20, hand the driver some stupid little tag (probably found on the ground), and go buy a shiny new crack rock or three. When the drivers would come back 8 hours later, they'd be quite shocked to see a boot on the car.

Good. That's the point. Toothless, drunken, B.O. smelling "street people" aren't intimidating? Atlanta and D.C. have got to be the worst two cities in terms of that. You can't walk a block without having some whacked-out scumbag ask for $1 so he can get some 'food' or a cab ride back home because 'his wife left him and took his wallet.' Tell 'em no and they're quite quick to tell you that you're the one on your way to hell. Give 'em a quarter and their little friends congregate around, much like a zombie film... (chaaaaannnggeeee...). This guy needs to start mass producing these robots. What a genius. They can drive 'em around from precinct offices. The City of Atlanta has gotten much cleaner over the past 5 years or so. They've put some anti-panhandling ordinances in effect. There's also been a resurgence of the downtown area, too. There are probably between 8 - 10 20 story buildings down there now that didn't exist 10 years ago. I actually do feel bad for people in a generally crappy situation, but I also think that the only way it gets better is by making it harder to be a bum down-on-his-luck quality person, with just a touch of bad luck. Advocacies and terming them 'street people' doesn't do a whole hell of a lot to curb the problem.

Damn straight, I'm already married. Just window shopping. Though you may call her whacked, I'll call her a smart investor.

Pics?

That's quite true. Did anyone ever have to carry one of those Nextel Direct Connect phones? One of the datacenter operations teams I was on carried those for a while. There's nothing like hearing "Hey, Jeff?' coming from your kitchen at 2:45 AM. I don't miss those one bit. They used to have this 'feature' where they'd automatically switch to Direct Connect mode when you had an incoming Direct Connect call. If you pressed the 'mode' button while the other guy was talking into it, he'd get a "user out of range" message or some such alert. Was a great way to get a bit of privacy. I haven't worked computer operations for 4 or 5 years now. I don't miss that stuff.

Just the ones that send text messages. I used a tongue-sticking-out smiley. That's an Internet-ism for "just screwing with you."

You know, I had to Google 'Brad and Janet NYC' before I knew what you were talking about. Rocky Horror? Even if I had known that, I don't think I'd be able to admit it. You know, that's a musical, and you're a guy, right? Oil and water my friend, oil and water... (But now that you mention it, that is kind of similar....)

Will do! I'm up there every 6 months or so!

My mother actually lives in Greenville, as does an aunt of mine. I like it quite a bit, most people are very nice. Lots of classic Southern charm. Tell 'em the check is in the mail! It's amazing to me how much money still goes towards license tracking and whatnot. I've been through the same audits myself. Usually over dumb stuff.. perhaps someone installed a proprietary mail server on more systems than they should have. Now, the one damn thing the OSS folks have got to crank out... is a decent diagramming tool. Dia's nice and all, but... it's no Visio.

http://www.ubuntu.org The other popular Desktop distribution is Fedora, though it's a bit more "edgy.' You can find that at www.fedoraproject.org. Ubuntu comes from the Debian base whereas Fedora is a Red Hat child.

In all seriousness, the latest round of desktop Linux releases is actually quite good. Ubuntu and Fedora seem to lead the pack. They're both stable and pretty complete. They work fine for 99% of what people usually do: check email, browse the web, send instant messages, and so forth. USB drives work, cameras work, wireless works, and there are graphic configuration programs for just about anything you can imagine. I'm running Fedora 8 on this machine as I'm at work; I don't really have to think about the hardware or the system at all. It basically works out of the box. I spend 95% of my time switching between emacs buffers anyways. There are still a few gotchas. The biggest problem is that hardware vendors don't necessarily validate the Linux distributions on consumer class hardware. You wind up having to Google around to figure out exactly which option to pass at boot-up when using the latest and greatest whiz-bang gear 10-15% of the time or so. It's apparent in some applications that the developers aren't professional UI designers. Most of those problems are things only us nerds are going to catch. Now, if you had said you made the switch to OpenBSD on an old Alpha, I'd have been impressed!

If he paid for it, his daughter's friend should go into sales. I stopped running Linux on my desktop at home. I did it for a few years, but I got sick of screwing with video drivers, patches, Windows emulators so I can run games, and so on and so forth. I've been using it professionally for about ten years now. It's not a question of ability or stability, I'm just lazy so I bought a Mac. I think about that stuff all day at work, the last thing I want to do is care about it when I get home!

Wow. Talk about a night and day landing. When one flies into La Guardia, one gets a pretty damn good view of Manhattan on approach. I've only driven *through* NYC a few times, though I've been there quite a bit. The last time I drove through has to be about 7 years ago now. It happened to be on the 4th of July, during a scheduled brown out. I wasn't expecting that. I drove over the GW bridge after letting the man in the toll both rape me, and because of the weather and whatnot, it looked as though Manhattan just wasn't there. Sure, you could see a few buildings and a couple outlines, but it was very creepy. Because of the power outages, the cross Bronx expressway was almost empty. It felt like I was in some strange post-apocalyptic movie. Not the strangest thing that's ever happened to me, but fits in with the story. Very odd feeling. My wife was with me and I remember saying to her, "Where the hell is NY?" We ended up driving right on up into CT a bit and giving up... spent the night at some Red Roof or something. Went back the next morning and New York had come back from wherever it was it was hiding. The clerk at that hotel actually let us stay for free -- some line about us being a young couple and needing the money, so this one was on him.

There's a reason they're called 'TicketBastard.' Didn't Pearl Jam try to sue them back in the 90's over this exact thing? I can get past the additional charges as I really don't have a choice in the matter. What really bothers me is that they charge to print your tickets. You can elect to have them mailed for no additional charge, but they *recommend* that you print them yourself at the time of purchase. They charge an additional $2.50 or some such fee to email you a PDF file of a ticket. I'm using my ink and my own paper, you recommend I do so, and then charge me an additional $2.50 for it? That's ridiculous. With the Internet, I'm a bit surprised there isn't a viable alternative yet. It made sense back in the 80's and 90's when the bulk of people got in line at a Movies Plus for tickets. If I had to hazard a guess, I'd think that a good 75% of concert goers purchase tickets via the Internet or via telephone now. A good chunk of the remainder probably buys them at the venue. Wouldn't be surprised if a startup popped up.. hell, you could even send a bar-code image to a cell phone and use that as the ticket I'd guess. I guess the difficult part would be accounting for who actually shows up.

I completely forgot that the townships generally handle collection up there. We get to pick our own collection company here. Sounds good, but on any given day 1/5 of my neighbors have garbage sitting out at the end of the driveway. What about just renting a trailer for someplace and taking a ride down to the dump?

After the fact that makes a lot of sense, but I doubt that was going through her mind when that snake was wrapped around her.

Got any contractor friends? I've done it twice here in GA, both right prior to moves in order to get rid of junk I no longer need. Just had one last weekend, actually. Drop-off and pick-up, as much as I could pack into the thing... $180.

I'm still stuck on Journey's new singer. That guy's amazing.