postjack

birthday present to myself: stax basic system II with 15ft extension cable (202 +212). $370 shipped from eBay, which I think is a good price. I've always wondered how this humblest of contemporary staxen sound. actually I haven't heard any of the pro-bias lambas.

thanks guys and gal. on the road as we speak to Atlanta for a show.

I thought pattern recognition was boring.

Amazon.com: The Blade Itself (The First Law: Book One) (9781591025948): Joe Abercrombie: Books The Blade Itself i envy you being able to experience it for the first time.

how are you going to burn it in?

I admit, I fear the Jordan Effect when it comes to Martin. I guess a part of me is waiting for the series to be done before I pick it up again. I actually own a copy of Pandora's Star. since I only read on the kindle I might have to rebuy.

hi macstah, thanks for your suggestion! I actually am a ASOIAF fan, but I've only read the first three books. unfortunately by the time Dance with Dragons came out I'd forgotten quite a lot of the previous books. maybe if I just pick it up and start reading it'll trigger my memory. I had the same problem with Erikson (my favorite "fat fantasy" author). both Martin and Erikson make good choices in their storytelling. I can't stand bad choices. goodkind, for example, is the king of bad choices. annoying characters are another. again, great characters are a strength of Erikson and Martin. have you read any Joe Abercrombie? if you like Martin but are interested in a plot that moves a little faster with a lot of action, you'd love Abercrombie.

thanks everyone, all looks like good stuff. funny I've picked up the Engineer Trilogy a lot in the bookstore but had forgotten about it. I'll try a kindle sample. last night i started reading a sample of this: Amazon.com: Swords & Dark Magic: The New Sword and Sorcery (9780061723810): Jonathan Strahan, Lou Anders: Books. i'm usually not big on short stories but its gotten good reviews. the intro and the first story (erikson, one of my favorites, though malazan has gotten so dense I forgot what the hell was going on in the last book and set it down about 25 pages in) are interesting so far.

right on, I appreciate the warning. Drobo doesn't use RAID, though they don't really tell you how exactly it works.

i'm not really strong on the technical aspects of how the drobo do what it do, but a little light googling reveals they are an OK choice for a drobo. we'll see I guess.

Hey everyone- I'm in a bit of a pickle. I've run out of kick ass speculative fiction to read, and I need recommendations. Sci-fi/fantasy is such a scary genre to navigate. One second a book's premise seems promising, but then it delves into childish writing and predictable situations. I'm a short way into Peter Brett's The Warded Man, and it reminded me of these types of pitfalls. Of course it is hard to trust amazon-type reviews of fantasy, because not all fantasy readers are as discerning as me, you, and everyone else who likes good things. Anyway the premise starts out awesome: demons come out every night and try to kill people. The only thing the protects people from the demons are wards drawn on their houses. as long as the wards hold and they stay inside, everything is cool. The demons are pretty badass as well. They can really wreck shit. So that sounds awesome, but then it starts telling the stories of the individual protagonists, and I can just predict every little thing that is going to happen to these kids within a paragraph of the chapter "oh his parents are going to die and he'll be alone and angry" "oh this girl is either going to get raped or not raped and be regarded as a slut by the town" and so on. even judging by the title I can bet eventually somebody is going to draw wards on themselves and kick some demon ass. So I'm terribly disappointed and can't bring myself to read anymore. Primarily I blame Joe Abercrombie, whose books I just ate up earlier this summer and have really ruined me on other stuff. His fantasy is just so brutal, funny, unpredictable (well you can predict some things, but in a fun way), and full of the most fantastic characters. Anyway I like a lot of the new weird: china mieville, jeff vandermeer, neil gaiman, etc. But not the new weird stuff that gets so weird that is not entertaining. I adore Neil Stephenson, and his Baroque Cycle might be my favorite thing ever. Hopstretch turned me on to Tim Powers, and I read and enjoyed a bunch of his stuff until I had the misfortune of picking up the abysmal Declare which was really, really boring (I got about halfway through). I just read a pretty awesome Richard Morgan book, Altered Carbon, but I don't want to start on the next book just yet. So any suggestions? Throw out some sci-fi/fantasy authors that write good shit. I don't want anything super predictable or juvenile, just a good story with some fresh, original ideas and cool characters. And hell, if you got some non sci-fi/fantasty stuff you think I'd enjoy, throw that out there as well. Thanks for your help team. edit: or I'll just go on and read the next Ian Banks culture novel, Player of Games I think.

thaddy have you read my blog about nachos? it might help.

Newegg.com - Western Digital Caviar Green WD20EARS 2TB 64MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive -Bare Drive WD 2TB Green internals, $99.99 shipped after promo code, which requires you are subscribed to the newegg newsletter. i picked up two for the new drobo.

looks like i should have RTFM. thanks nebby!

Hi everyone- Simple question before I cram this drive in my Drobo: can I put a drive in there that already has stuff on it, or should I only insert blank drives? I tried and tried to google this info up but no dice. Just want to make sure before I proceed. By my calculation there should be plenty of space left for protection after I insert the drive.

^^^i like olivas. G and O anyway, the V is too full for me. I had an acid kuba kuba today. I guess it must be my favorite cigar since I smoke more of them then anything else.

holy crap that's an awesome quote.

happy birthday laine!

the wire is better then the sopranos, IMO. at times the sopranos stumbled, like it wasn't sure where it wanted to go. to me, this never happens with the wire. everything is so deliberate and just seems right, like it was thoughtfully and painstakingly planned and executed. I've only watched about 4 episodes of treme. it's wonderful because it's new orleans, and the music and musicians are awesome, but it's nowhere near as plot driven as the wire. it's more like a beautiful painting, while the wire is like a kick ass adventure. beautiful adventure taboot. I think the wire is helped greatly by it's familiar genre: the cop show. it's just the greatest damn cop show of all time. greatest series of all time for that matter.

i haven't heard the new vinyl, but the newest SACD remasters are wretched. i have an old pressing of selling england by the pound that sounds marvelous, I don't think I paid but like $15-20 for it over at the hoffman forum. its been a while since I bought it though.

for the record, I'm running the steam version on win 7/64. I had some issues with odd colors but they were fixed by running the exe 1) as admin and 2) in winxp sp2 compatability mode. the videos still aren't perfect, but it that doesn't bother me. I just rolled a new char named Sandwinches. I misspelled the name so I'm stuck with him. stats are something like: str 7 per 9 end 4 cha 6 int 9 agi 9 luck 5 gifted and finesse, small guns/speech/lock picks. this is from memory so it's not wholly accurate. I was a huge arcanum fan and this reminds me a lot of arcanum, it's great sandbox fun.

hey so here is a fallout question: lots of times I see references to a quest or something that let's you boost your stats by 1. they say it's not worth starting with stats higher then 9 because you'll be able to boost them by 1 at some point. in particular I want to be able to boost my agility to 10 so I can shoot twice in one round. I'm having a hard time googling for info on this. can anyone give me some tips?

i can get out just fine, its once I've traveled for about a day after leaving that the radiation kicks in, all my stats drop to zero, and I die. i've done lots of googling, its pretty much a your screwed situation. what I should have done was built up my resistance more before entering. its funny, because I did use all the save slots, so much in fact that I saved over my last pre-glow slot. so i won't do that again in the future. anywho I'm just going to roll a new character. it sucks but not that bad, it will be fun to start a new character knowing what I know now.

So I told myself I wouldn't play Fallout 3 until I completely exhausted Oblivion. Well I haven't completely exhausted Oblivion, but I thought I'd play Fallout 1 and 2 before I play Fallout 3. I actually never played the original Fallout games. Fallout 1 is great! Definitely holds up, and I'm really enjoying it. Well, up until now. I was doing the Brotherhood mission to head to the glow. I'm not using a walkthrough or anything, but I did read to get some Rad-X and Radaway. I took some rad-x before I went in, and ran the whole dungeon, but now I always die a short while after I leave. I don't have enough radaway to clear all my radiation, and taboot I saved so much while I was in the glow that I ended up saving over my pre-glow game! So I'm pretty much screwed, and just wanted to share.

smoked a Natural by Drew Estate Root Deluxe yesterday while mowing the lawn. Last week I was smoking some awesome Full Virginia Flake (samuel gawith) from my corncob. this stuff is great! unfortunately i'm told it is getting hard to find. I also smoked some Stokkeby's Balkan Supreme, which would have been great had it not tasted like body odor.