These are great!

I didn't buy Quadrophenia until I was 31.  So many wasted years...

1. Master of Reality is an awesome album, Ironrod.

2. My first CD (not first album, as previously noted):

Thanks.  It's a girl, and we're naming her Greta.

The kid actually, at this point, has very little to do with my lack of sleep. It is mostly my complete lack if skill at sleeping. All this will change in a month with kid #2, I am sure... but at least I will have been in training for it.

I slept for 11 hours the past two nights.

Total.

Did you see that crap earlier this year about how King was taking 'Slayer' on the road in Europe this summer... without Lombardo, without Hanneman, and without Tom Araya either?  Pretty sure that's not Slayer.

Yeah, he's been fucked up from the spider bite for like two years.  Shitty, shitty news.  Guy was the best of that pair by a mile.  Plus he wasn't a huge douche like Kerry King.

Suck it, LUMBUS!

and

I also have a panasonic, but I'm not super impressed with it.  It does okay.  It's really, really pokey when navigating menus for streaming content, either wired or wireless.  I wish it would remember where were were in multiple discs.  I suppose a nicer one would do more.  Also of major annoyance is that it for some reason stopped supporting NHL Gamecenter Live this season, and I have no idea why, so I have to go through the 360 to stream that.

Also, if you don't have internet to your blu ray player, you are doing it wrong!  So much streaming content to get...  most of the new ones are wireless, so that should make things easier.

New Black Sabbath is kinda meh.  God is Dead?

Meh indeed.  Some of the heavy parts are ok, but mostly wtf? No.

Nooooo!

An unexpected $13K vs. monthly payments is not a small deal, rshetts... it's not like the $40K was due right now.  Suddenly needing to come up with $13K would suck for any of us, I imagine.  Maybe not gellar.

Also, this makes me feel better about the $2K I had to send the feds yesterday.

(And glad your wife is ok.)

I had just read yesterday that he was stepping back from reviewing for a while because the cancer had resurfaced, and that he'd only be doing a few reviews here and there... shocked to see that he died today.

Didn't always agree, but I could always see where he was coming from, and I think he did a better and more thoughtful job than a lot.  Bummer.

Toy Story 2 and 3 were both amazing.

So what's the magic number for you to be on board with having better control and restriction of firearms?  Is there a certain body count where you say 'Ok, we need to rein this shit in'?

I don't totally disagree with you, fwiw.  As I said, the cat is out of the bag, and I think that everyone now suddenly being all anti-assault weapon is just reactionary.

I do think that the enforcement of even our already existing gun laws is a goddamned joke.  I do think that assault weapons are pointless, and just feed this macho 'I need to be able to cap some fuckers!' mindset that a lot of assault weapon owners have.  I do think that in terms of actual crime, handguns are clearly far more dangerous.

I live in the state with the highest percentage of gun ownership in the country, but the per capita gun murder rate is super, super low.  I think something like 80% of the guns owned in this state are bolt action hunting rifles.  There is a cultural difference to how firearms are regarded here vs. other places.  I know a lot of responsible gun owners.  I have even been one.  So how do we foster that sort of an attitude elsewhere?  How do we keep guns out of the hands of people who want to use them do do bad shit?

I am willing to see my 'rights' (I put that in quotations, because I think it's a silly thing to be so up in arms about (sic), really) curtailed somewhat in the interest of the greater good.  We do this all the time - we have speed limits, even though that infringes on my right to drive 120mph.  We have a legal drinking age, even though that curtails my son's right to get brain damaged...

I'm not sure what it is about this particular issue that makes people so unwilling to give an inch, though I suspect it has a lot to do with the macho nature of the subject to begin with... and especially with how that macho nature is especially strong in the average guy who feels the need to own an assault rifle.  I take issue with that attitude.

I also sort of get it... they are neat as shit, and I'd love to go shoot one sometime.  I think it would be super fun.  But I don't *need* to, and I certainly don't feel like my life will have been bereft of freedom if I'm denied that chance.

I am probably not explaining this well, because it's sort of an intangible concept in a lot of ways.  Oh well.

It's not April Fools... there have been previous trailers.

C#/ASP.NET/SQL Server Software Developer for a tiny company that contracts with, primarily, State agencies, primarily in Wyoming, but in some other states as well.

Yeah, we should control all firearms a lot better than we do, not just assault weapons.  Which we still don't need.  The Russians are not going to invade, the dead are not going to rise from the grave, etc, etc. 

M1 carbines are hardly hunting rifles.  I'm not an encyclopedia or state by state gun laws, but you certainly couldn't hunt big game with that round in this state.  I imagine that's the case in most, if not all, states.

Comparing European gun violence to US gun violence is silly.  The number of people killed with guns in this country vs. Europe is something like 34 times higher.  I don't think assault rifle bans will solve the gun violence problems we have in this country, I'm not that naive. 

Look, the cat is out of the bag.  To reduce the violence, we have to change attitudes.  I think the attitude that ordinary citizens for some reason need assault weapons, or that their rights are somehow being violated if they don't get to have them is what is scary - not the 'look' of the weapons themselves.  Don't put words in my mouth.  I think there is absolutely a point in, as a society, saying 'hey, we need to reign ourselves in, this is destructive'.

And for the record, I don't think that banning assault weapons is going to really make a big difference in the damage someone can do in most cases... but it sets a different tone for how view ourselves as a country.

There is a functional difference between a 5 round top feed magazine and a 30 round removable box magazine.

Thinking that it is appropriate for the military to have assault weapons and not thinking that it's appropriate for private citizens to have assault weapons does not seem contradictory to me.  In fact, that's my exact view.

Though I guess if all you are saying is that people in the military are less likely to favor gun control, then that is surely true.  Then again, there may have been something in his past that made him think that stricter gun control is a good idea... but how are we to know?

The word you actually want is hyperbole.

Cool!

We cut the cable a couple years ago and do netflix, hulu + and NHL Gamecenter Live.  There are some annoyances - I can't watch any Colorado Avalanche games, and and any nationally televised game is blacked out.  The major annoyance is that the playoffs are not available through GCL.  However, we've saved an absolutely *insane* amount of money by not paying the ridiculous cable fees every month.  Overall, it's a plus.  I might try adding an HDTV antennae, which would get me some playoff hockey, I guess, and we would have the option of watching some stuff when it aired.  Dunno though, might keep things as is... we certainly have enough going on that we don't spend much time watching anyway.

Things bought from that sale:





I bought this a while ago.  It is great:

Nice work.

I actually think that while pushing pace will help some (especially if you do pickups/fartleks) with speeding up, one of the real keys to getting faster and running more comfortably is the long weekend run - try going for a slow, long run one day a week.

Brutal.  But funny!

Aside from the injuries, it's pretty f'n awesome.

Based on a short conversation with KD about what he is looking for, I think automating it is going to be nearly impossible.

What you are describing sounds like something that would be best handled by a little script/program...

Hrm... I don't know if I think of my wife/kids as accomplishments per se, but I'm enormously proud of both.

Things that I've done on my own that I'm pretty proud of:
Putting out several albums and doing some touring behind them.
Quitting smoking, losing 70+ pounds and getting fit all of which allowed me to do some pretty cool stuff like running a half marathon and doing some long (50 - 72 mile) mountain bike races.

Newegg told me nope.  I see that the terms changed to be from 2/4.  Oh well.  Guess I should've ordered 4 days later. :/

I guess I'll have to call Newegg... it certainly appears that this promotion should apply to me, runs from January 22, and I bought on the 30th.

I may have a small sense of the CPU bottlenecking, but I'm pretty happy, overall.

I'm wondering how I can take advantage of that promotion... I see that it refers to a unique ID that I need, but I'm not finding anything like that in my stuff from Newegg...

And I do have 64 bit windows 8.

I have been up and running since Monday - the video card looks great, but holy hell does it get hot when playing games (~90C on BF3). I checked on the manufacturers site which said up to 95 is normal, so I guess it is fine. Running the game at 1920 with 'Ultra' settings is cool!

I have had a second monitor at the office - so I knew what I was missing. I had to mess with color settings a TON to get rid of a blue cast and general weirdness, finally going into the color settings in the catalyst control panel to get it non-annoying. Whites still seem a little cool, but it isn't actively distracting now when coding.

I will look into my board supporting SSD. I am already thinking it is a good idea.