Cripes
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Posts posted by Cripes
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I think ESPN had cause to fire him for predicting Bobby Crosby would be the 2006 AL MVP.
My favorite Harold Reynolds BBTN moment: in 2004, narrating a rare good highlight of godawful Kansas City Royal shortstop Angel Berroa, Reynolds bragged about the play just handled by "my man, .........um..............uh............."
Karl Ravitz had to remind him the name of his "man."
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Fancy cars? Not with a market share of $7 million in loans so far this year.
I think Prosper's is a great concept, and it seems to be working. It's got a default rate (under 5 percent) which is on par with most bank's tolerances for risk. And I think it's got a good chance to work long-term:
*They're going to land a lot of small business borrowers that can't get in the front door of a bank, and have no shot at landing an SBA loan (most of which go to large corporate subsidiaries today, anyway)
*High risk borrowers will have an alternative from the legal loan sharks offering them 30 percent credit cards with high monthly maintenance fees, or from pay day lenders. That's really the industry that Prosper is going to kill.
*Lenders will come because they can earn better returns than a savings account. The key plus for lenders is that it isn't one-to-one lending. If you put $1,000 into your account, that could be split up among a "portfolio" of high and low-risk borrowers that you bid for. And if the borrower's late with the payment, it's not the bank's collection goons who come calling first...it's that borrower's own group members, whose collective peer ranking takes a hit if one guy doesn't hold up his end of the bargain.
Prosper also has long term plans to boost the loan pool by attracting banks to the bidding process, so that a Wells Fargo, for instance, can bring millions to the auction block for the class of borrowers they feel comfortable with.
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Not to shill for them or anything, but FYI:
On Nov. 21, Emusic will cut the monthly allowance of downloads on their three tiers. For the $19.99 a month plan, the download cap will shrink from 90 to 75...on the $9.99 plan, from 40 to 30.
They promise that current members, and people who join before the changes take place, can retain the old plan allowances as long as they keep their account current.
You can also keep the higher download allowances if you buy a one or two-year annual subscription.
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The league should have stepped in beforehand to either ban aluminum bats, or ban these gentlemen's agreements that coerced all the other teams to bow to one club's wishes.
I'm sorry the team went through that tragedy a few years ago, but I don't think there's any conclusive science yet that shows balls off aluminum bats are more lethal than from wooden bats. I've never heard of a similar incident in collegiate baseball.
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Anybody picking up the guitar these days will be livid to learn that popular tab sites like OLGA have been shut down (temporarily). The National Music Publishers Association got bored after licking Kazaa, and decided the next best thing to do was go after hobbyists who were sharing self-taught tablature interpretations.
Hopefully OLGA and other sites prevail, and they'll be back online with tabs that by and large aren't even available for consumer purchase.
By the way, if anybody plucking around wants the entire Beatles tablature/chord catalog that OLGA had compiled into a neat PDF document last year, shoot me a PM and I'll send it to you.
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Anybody had any good/bad experiences with the refurbished iPods from Apple's online store? I ordered one of the first-generation Nanos today for a good price - $99 for a 2Gig black model - but it's not even going to ship until November 15. So I got plenty of time to cancel if I change my mind.
I was going to try for the 30-gig Ipod that was on sale for $179, but they removed them this morning...just in time for payday.
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I'll believe it when it happens, but USA Today conjectures that Ohio State could afford a loss to Michigan and still make it to the Sugar Bowl for a rematch.
So W. Virginia and Louisville are apparently NOT going to decide anything between themsevles, because the computer rankings are again making it a fait accompli for this year's model. Let's take a look at how screwed up the computer polls are already:
Florida loses to Auburn...and is still ahead thanks to a computer ranking that appears to be punishing the Tigers for losing to a team (Arkansas) with a lower computer ranking (14th) than the team the Gators lost to...which was Auburn (7th).
And I'm sure Bluefire and everybody else in Longhorn land have noticed the computer rankings are giving the nation's unquestionably second-to-fourth best team a big stiff middle finger...ranking them down alongside the two-loss teams and even behind the likes of Boise State and Rutgers. This apparently must be punishment for having such a poor non-conference schedule, a mediocre conference and a loss to Ohio State....even though that same gob of bytes and binary code have determined the Buckeyes, even with a poor non-conference schedule and (what are proving to be) mediocre conference opponents, are in the bag thus far for the BCS title game because of a schedule goosed only by a big road win at Texas.
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There are oldies, but are two songs that still make me wince:
"Death Country Song" by the Violent Femmes -- a desperately poor man driven to kill his youngest daughter he couldn't afford to feed. As he leads her off to the caverns where he'll throw her into a pit, he tells her: "Kiss your mother good night, and remember that God saves."
There's also "Getting Better," where John Lennon confesses he "used to be cruel to my woman, I'd beat her and kept her apart from the things that she loved." I think it's just the song being put into today's context that makes it more shocking (not to mention that it really happened, unlike this gang-member-initiation urban legend in the making). We've come a long way since the days when Don Siegel would nonchalantly include a scene in "Coogan's Bluff" where Clint Eastwood drags an uppity woman against her will into the barn for an I'll-show-you screwin'.
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What kind of shoes do chickens wear?
Ree-buck-buck-bucks.
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What's up with No. 100? John Doe?
What about Exene or Billy Zoom? I guess it's "who you know."
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Convenience. Not having to waste time with fake files. No RIAA (yet - and there's five million subscribers. Safety in numbers). Plus, I'm not sharing files, which is what the RIAA goes after.
If the RIAA goes after allofmp3 users some day, good luck. Five million (and growing subscribers)...they'll get to the "B's" when Chelsea Clinton is president.
I also use Total Recorder to record the streaming songs on subscription sites. Those are surprisingly good quality (not CD level, but adequate).
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I know it's shady, but frankly, I use AllofMP3 to get music that I bought in record format years ago, and isn't available digitally in the U.S. Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Elvis Costello, AC/DC. When new records come out, the companies deliberately leave off a few tracks to goose store sales.
And what I'm paying for the big boys per track (about 17-25 cents) on AllofMP3 is the same as I'm paying the indies on emusic.
Anyway, if the record companies were fair to ME, I'd be able to trade an old 8-track straight up for the new format.
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Interesting column from John Dvorak over at Pcmag.com. Although he gets a little apocalyptic about it (hospital life support systems crashing because of Windows!) he makes some good points about "Windows Genuine Advantage" activation.
From what we know, Genuine Advantage is activation on steroids. In the tech podcasts I've listened to, many reviewers are warning there's a crippling feature on Vista -- if it finds you're running a bootleg or unregistered version of Vista, it'll all but shut down your PC's functionality. Again, that's what they're saying. I don't know (and don't care - it'll be a long time before I make the jump to Vista, if I don't go with a Mac first)
Here's the problem: hackers will find a way to trick GA into authenticating a bootleg version. And they'll inevitably write malware that will make GA de-authorize legitimate copies. The result is a bug that causes GA to override your automatic updates and patches -- leaving Microsoft with no way of delivering the patch to you to fix the bug on Genuine Advantage.
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Last 10 years?
Flaming Lips - The Soft Bulletin. 1999.
Case closed.
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I just downloaded IE7, and it only took me one hour to find a problem!
I go to eMusic to finish up my monthly download allotment by getting the Kinks' Muswell Hillbillies. The eMusic Download application crashed each time, with the warning that Explorer's cache had to be emptied.
I went back to Firefox, tried the downloads again...and I'm now listening to "Oklahoma U.S.A."
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Or else what?
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1989, after buying my Mac Plus and splurging on 1,200 baud modem.
I joined Compuserve, but it was expensive as hell. My monthly bill could run $70-$100 based on the time I spent pulling down Bills articles from the AP every Sunday.
That same year I joined AOL, and some other Internet service I can't recall at the moment (It was run by Sears, of all things)...
But by 1991, I was going broke and sold my computer to my brother. I managed to get along fine without the Net until about 96 when we got access at work.
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When the frakkin' Cylons come to get us, we'll be thanking Bush.
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So Al Qaeda will be training jihadists from maddrassas, and then sending them directly to the new Bin Laden Institute of Advanced Sciences and Technology?
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[New York: After getting onside kick, can’t even adequately throw a screen pass to McGahee and the drive dies quickly without even sniffing a chance at the end zone.
Were you at that game? When they recovered the onside kick, the skies literally opened up and the winds were blowing twice as hard as they were earlier in the game. He couldn't throw an adequate screen pass because the wind was blowing so damn hard. They probably should have burned a timeout and hoped that it passed over. (I think the hard rain stopped about 5 minutes later so it wouldn't have mattered anyway.)
I think the Detroit game was his best chance to lead the Bills back but with the Defense playing the way they did, they should have gone for it on 4th and 9 instead of punting.
Three questions:
If JP can't play in bad weather, what's he doing in Western New York?
What's the excuse for how Losman nearly got Willis crippled last week with another awful screen pass in the Detroit dome? Somebody turn on a fan?
And if you were at the Jets game, did you run off to take a leak after that three-yard loss screen play? You may have missed how JP had no problem completing the 10-yard pass to Parrish to set up 4th and 3. (Apparently, the bad weather kicked in again to muff up his short-armed, two-yard carpet-burner on the final play).
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Help me out here - who are his arch-blood rivals?!!
Xzibit?
Anticon?
Gospel Gangtaz?
I'm playing those guys in the dead pool.
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Maybe it's the line's fault. Maybe it's the coaching. Maybe it's receivers who don't run the routes correctly, or fell down. Maybe it's just a coincidence, and maybe it's a small sample. But JP Losman has had the following decisive opportunities to win or tie games late in his short career, and he's come up short every time -- and he doesn't have a Neil Rackers to blame for it like Leinert:
2005:
New Orleans: Down 13-7, a JP drive stalls just past mid-field late in third quarter on downs. Saints go on to kick two field goals to cinch win. (Sealed by JP’s fumble with 1 minute left).
Atlanta: JP’s final two drives to tie the game: one ends in four downs (he failed on a sneak), and the other he fumbles with 1:48 left dropping back to pass.
Carolina: JP throws interception in final drive (13-9 loss).
2006:
New England: Albeit from a bad offensive pass interference call, JP can’t lead the team into Ryan Lindell’s generous field goal range after getting the ball in New England territory.
New York: After getting onside kick, can’t even adequately throw a screen pass to McGahee and the drive dies quickly without even sniffing a chance at the end zone.
Detroit: JP has a hole to climb out of at the Buffalo 3 after Ko Simpson's interception, but he overcomes that only to later take a bad sack and force the Bills to punt with four minutes left. Ballgame.
People say he's young, he's still learning, has talent and shows promise. But doesn't an 0-for-6 mark in games where he had the chance to win late indicate that he's clearly missing something (presence, confidence, whatever) and is NOT progressing? Yeah, the team's a mess and is rebuilding, but I also think people doubting JP Losman have more than good reason to do so at this point.
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The ONLY thing wrong with "The Departed" was I had to keep all the teeth and brain matter from landing in my popcorn.
VH1's Greatest Songs of the 80s
in Off the Wall Archives
Posted
No wonder we invented crack.