Zixar

P-Mosh: It's an electric, a Silvertone Fastback, to be exact. My mandolin is an acoustic-electric Alvarez A-Style, so I already had a small practice amp. A local store had the guitar on sale for $99, so I figured it must be a piece of crap. I looked around on the Net and found it was surprisingly well-reviewed for a cheap guitar, so I figured it might be worth a hundred bucks to see what all the fuss was about. I was expecting it to be like the $40 mandolins on eBay--technically a guitar, but with a warped neck, or a finger-slicing high action, or some other corner-cutting. Well, not being a guitar expert, I can't say for sure, but judging it against my other instruments, it's surprisingly well-made. A solid rock maple neck, with truss rod, a fully-bound quilted-maple top stained a nice dark blue, a solid alder body, fully-enclosed chrome tuning machines, dual humbucker pickups, and a vintage tremolo system. I expected it to go out of tune quickly, or not be tuned on the 12th-fret harmonics, or have the tremolo bar throw the whole thing out of tune, you know--it's a hundred-dollar guitar, it has to suck, right? Surprisingly, no. The only problems are a slight buzz on the 6th string (too low to the frets), which was a minor adjustment to fix, and the pickups do have a bit of 60Hz hum if played too close to the amp, although that may be a normal thing for electric guitars, I just don't know. It stays in tune, has a lot of sustain, sounds pretty good, looks pretty good. So, yes, it was certainly worth a hundred bucks. I'm starting to figure out the major scales on it, so I'm encouraged, but the chords are really alien to me so far. Take a basic G major, for instance. On the mandolin, that's a two-finger open chord, 0023. On the banjo, it's even easier, since it's tuned to an open G. On the guitar, it's 320022 or 320002. Now that's not so difficult after you practice it awhile, but it looks like in order to switch back and forth quickly between G, C, and F, you need to use your 2nd, 3rd, and 4th fingers and leave your index finger open. Weird. Then there's the chords that exclude some strings... Oh well, every instrument is different, with their own strengths and weaknesses. You play a mandolin for speed, a banjo for self-harmonizing, and I suppose a guitar for its range. Might as well learn to play them all, just in case!

With Firefox+Adblock, I no longer need Proxomitron, although Proxomitron did come already setup for most ad-stomping. Still, Adblock isn't that difficult to use if you filter things like "ad.doubleclick.net/*" The speed increase is notable, and quite refreshing. I also installed the Gestures plug in so everything can be controlled via the mouse. Slick!

I just downloaded it, and I must say, I like Firefox a lot. I like the Extensions like Adblock, NukeAnything (the best! Don't like something annoying on a page? Right-click and remove! Poof! GONE.) and IEView(for those pages that insist on IE). Unless something goes horribly wrong, I may just switch permanently.

Well, I finally went ahead and bought a guitar last week. Jury's still out on whether or not it's worth pursuing, though. Melodies are easy enough, since the fret spacing is close to what I'm used to on the banjo, but some of the chords are unusually hand-contorting. I don't know if it's because the fingerboard is slightly radiused, or perhaps the neck is a bit too narrow, but it doesn't seem that there's really enough room for six strings to be individually fretted without accidental muting. On the plus side, it is nice to have the extra low-end strings, since both the mandolin and the banjo tend to be high-pitched instruments. There certainly is a lot of music to be found for guitar, and accessories are plentiful and widespread. It was also much cheaper than either of my other plucked wonders. I suppose you get used to the quirks of each instrument with time. I may set the guitar aside until I can get better on the banjo, then come back to it. Maybe not. Too soon to tell.

It's called Proxomitron (www.proxomitron.info) and although the author isn't supporting it any more, there is a fan base keeping it alive. It functions as a proxy server, sitting between your browser and the net. You set your browser to point to Proxomitron as your web proxy, then the browser sends all requests to Proxomitron instead of the net. Proxomitron makes the request, filtering out your personal info. The net sends back the web page, and Proxomitron runs through the text and strips out known banners and ads from the page, replacing them with a simple "Ad" place holder. It also blocks cookies, nosy JavaScripts, popups, pop-unders, flyovers, and browser hijackers. You can allow certain sites like GSC to pass things through, like cookies, with a couple of mouse clicks. There's a couple of setup steps, but it's not that difficult. Once running, it's pretty transparent. The only thing you'll notice is the lack of annoying intrusive ads. Worth a look.

If you're using Outlook Express, you probably have that option turned off for security. You should only turn it back on if you have a mail-scanning antivirus program running.

John: Yes, you can disable that safely--unless you've just worked on a bunch of stuff you really don't want someone to see. Nuclear secrets, child porn, that sort of thing.

If the partner is neither the biological parent nor the adoptive parent, child support is not legally required. It's the same way with non-adopted stepchildren. The parent's new spouse is not obligated to pay child support in a divorce.

mj: If the child was legally adopted, your concerns are already covered under existing law.

Al: Have you had a recent head injury? AIDS treatment is already covered by insurance.

Long Gone: Exactly. Once you throw all the hysteria away on both sides, you see that it isn't about tolerance or acceptance, it's about a claim for a new publicly-funded entitlement.

Some points that have gotten missed, then I'll leave it to you again: The government cannot stop you from having sex with whomever you want, in whatever orifice you prefer, regardless even of close blood relationship, as long as both parties consent. The government cannot stop you from living with whomever you want, in singular or plural, as long as all parties consent. The government certainly cannot stop you from LOVING whomever you want. The government in the USA allows for certain nonmarried people to claim "Head of Household" status in order to be taxed at the lower married rates. In light of those, marriage would seem to be purely a religious ceremony, outside the notice of the state. Except for the children. Who really pays the price for any marriage benefit? Single people. Why should they? It's advantageous to promote the continuation of society through the birth of children, one example being that young workers pay into the Social Security/old age pension plans that support senior citizens today, and their children will pay into it for their generation. Single people as well as childless couples still must pay property taxes for the schools because it is advantageous to society to make sure children are educated. (Yes, it isn't working too well today, but you get the idea...) So, the state has a quite tangible interest in subsidizing marriage for the sole purpose of perpetuating the society. Extending the marriage benefit to those whose union does not normally foster the birth and care of children is a needless drain on society. Besides, those homosexual couples that do adopt children receive the same dependent deductions on their income taxes that hetero parents (married or single) receive, so they are not penalized if they do manage to acquire a child. (To a lesser extent, marriage subsidizes women as caregivers, too, but that's been touched on in other posts.) The civil argument then becomes akin to single and childless couples clamoring to be exempt from school-based property taxes, having no kids in the schools they're paying for. Sorry, but that's the price we all pay for living in society. So, live, love, f***** as you choose. Life, liberty, pursuit of happiness and all that. If a church wants to call you "married"--good for you. But if you want an unmerited piece of the public pie, you had better come up with a better reason.

AHA! Got it! That bridge.dll is a browser virus! Check this page: http://www.annoyances.org/exec/forum/win2000/t1072312997

On second thought, I'm curious as to why that bridge.dll is in a "Downloaded Program Files" directory...that makes me suspicious.

The first two are harmless. They're libraries for your graphics card, which was probably made by NVidia. (Hence, the "NV" at the start of the two.) One's a control panel to let you change things like graphic resolution for games. The bridge thing I'm not sure on. If you're running WinXP, it may be that it's bridging two network adapters, one of which may not be cooperating. I used to get autobridging between my Ethernet and FireWire cards, which was unnecessary, so I disabled the bridged connection. If you have something like a USB modem for cable or DSL, and a built in Ethernet port on your computer, it could be trying to bridge those two unsuccessfully. Or the bridge could be something else entirely... Sorry, but it's hard to tell long-distance!

Today I'm experimenting with a proxy-type web filter, and so far I'm quite impressed. It goes beyond popup blocking to automatically squash ad banners and inline ads, too. It doesn't catch all of them, only about 95%, but that's a HUGE improvement. I'll post more about it after I've found its quirks, but I'm enthusiastic about it.

Happy to help, guys. John: Well, if you've got some venture capital, give me a call... ;)-->

There's another key in the same place called WaitToKillAppTimeout and the default is 20,000 millilseconds (20 seconds.) It probably won't have anything to do with your problem, but you can set this lower to deal with flaky programs that take forever to finally crap out after an error. 10000 is a good value, less if you're adventurous.

Paw: This is it. Try changing the value upwards.

Oak: The Big Bang=tohu bohu? ROFLMAO! Whatta maroon! :D--> Guess there must have been a two-for-one sale on clown shoes...

Paw: Let me rummage around and see what I can find...glad you've got a workaround, at least for now.

Oakspear: Never caught that one... The limiting visual magnitude in Biblical times would have approached 7.0 on a dark night. There are TONS of stars at that magnitude and brighter between Ursa Major and Ursa Minor, notably bright Thuban, or Alpha Draconis. Martindale and Wierwille were both shull of fit.

Anyone remember the Earl Burton booklet they gave out at the Adv Class? Something about producing phenomena in the physical realm, or somesuch. While most of the science stuff was true, it wasn't really relevant to what was being talked about, as I recall. I'll have to see if I can't find my copy.

Paw: You don't happen to have any unusual storage devices or network-shared drives on that machine, do you? When Explorer tries to enumerate the storage device list, it can be very picky if another instance tries to do it at the same time, especially if one of the storage devices or network shares is slow in responding. Usually, both instances just hang until the lockout can resolve itself, but it can take out both instances if your registry is set to kill unresponsive processes faster than normal. (That's a frequent tip in tweaking articles, and most of the time it works ok, but this is one of those cases why it was set high in the first place.) Disconnect all network shares, unplug any USB digital film readers, external Zip drives, etc. and then try it again.

John: CPL applications are not directly-executable Windows programs. The "L" in ".cpl" stands for library, just like the second "L" in "DLL" does. (CPL=Control Panel Library, DLL=Dynamic-Link Library. All CPLs are really DLLs.) Most programs have a Main function, one that starts executing when the program starts. The Main function calls all the other functions of the program as needed, like FileOpen, FileSave, PrintReport, and so on. A library is the same as a program, except that it has no "main" function. It's just a chunk of routines that other running programs can access so they don't have to write their own code to access some functionality, they can just share it out of the library. Of course, if it has no Main Function, then you can't just double-click on a library and have it do anything. Some other program has to load it into RAM when it needs a function out of it, (dynamic-linking) or else a kind of placeholder program has to load the library then just sit idle, doing nothing but holding the library open. RunDLL32.exe is one of those placeholders. For functions that several other programs might need to access in a hurry, it's worth taking up memory and using a RunDLL to keep the library "hot" in RAM instead of having to be loaded off the hard drive every time. That's why it takes so frickin' long to boot up. Most all of Windows is nothing but a huge series of DLLs that get initialized at the start to speed up the computer afterwards.