Fezmid

After thinking about it, I was curious what percentage we paid towards the house. Turns out we pay a little under 10% of our GROSS pay towards our house each year, and that includes property tax payments (but not general upkeep). I think that's pretty good!

I don't like those "rules of thumb." A person should look at their current expenditures and determine what they can spend on their own. Don't rely on a bank to tell you. That's partially how we got into this mess to begin with! For my wife and I, we pay nowhere near 28%. We bought our place 6 years ago making sure that, with proper budgeting, we'd be able to afford the house on just my salary in case we have kids at some point. We're both still working, and that gave us the ability to put my wife through Carlson to get her MBA without taking a loan, as well as doing things that we want (vacations and such). It also means that if one of us gets laid off, we won't be struggling -- just have to cut back on some of the extra "fun" stuff we buy.

The (albeit short) article implies that she did: "Apparently unable to stop her friend from driving drunk." If her friend refused the taxi and refused to give up the keys, what was the woman supposed to do? Tackle her to the ground so that she could be arrested for assault? Yeah, right.

Remember that when a drunk driver kills a friend/relative of yours, ok?

I said in the post -- "one could." So obviously is was #1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Riker

Back in the good old days, one could actually write a script that kept hitting the site to give your team votes.... But then the Soup Gods became angry and reset all of the votes so that Buffalo was no longer #1... And then the TSW gods got mad and shutdown the thread. I anticipate a repeat from the TSW gods.

Best of all - you can buy him in "Happy" or "Determined" mode! http://www.amazon.com/Chia-Obama-Handmade-...8318&sr=8-1 I thinik it's funny all the people giving it 1 star at Amazon saying it's tasteless, racist, etc, etc. My guess is that they're the same people who thought the various anti-Bush games/videos/products were just fine.

I just saw that! January 26th is "Boycott Chicken Wings" day! OBAMA -- FIX THE WING SHORTAGE!!!!!

I thought it was "Dirty Deeds in a Thunder jeep." That fits too, actually....

Yup, existing recordings stay. Basically when you have an external drive attached, it disables the internal one. But don't unplug it (either the eSATA cable or the power supply to the external drive), or you could lose recordings on the external drive (because the machine will get confused by losing the drive suddenly). To watch stuff that's on the internal drive, power off the DVR, power off the external drive, disconnect the external drive, and then turn the DVR back on. Check out dbstalk.com -- there are some external enclosures that work better than others from what I've read.

Yes, you can connect an external drive via eSATA. However if you do that, then the internal harddrive is no longer used -- meaning any recordings you have will be unwatchable without powering off the unit and starting it without the attached external drive. If you're feeling adventurous, you can actually open up the case of the HR20/HR21 and pop in your own SATA drive, then power it back up. The box detects the new drive, installs the OS on it, and you're done. Takes 15 minutes tops and is very handy. Note that this violates your warranty and is not supported. That's what I did though

I get it too -- you wanted something for nothing and got pissed off when they wouldn't give it to you. I quote from your initial post that you keep talking about: So they wouldn't give you a new printer and told you that they couldn't help you get the old printer working because the vendors (Canon and MS) do not support the combination you had. But yet you kept calling: I doubt a rep told you that. But even taking it at face value, that's an awful lot of calls you're making for a $109 printer. At what point do you say, "Hmmm, you're right, maybe I should buy a new printer and stop wasting my time?" My guess based on your posts - you're saving Dell money by not buying their hardware.

I have a 1TB drive in my main DVR and a 750GB drive in my secondary.... So I can get about 250 hours of HD recording through DirecTV Let's see if I can recall some of the stuff we record.... For new shows we usually record and then wait to see if the network cancels it - if so, we don't invest our time watching anymore. Here's a list of what I can recall: CSI :Miami (have all of last season recorded as well as this season... We're a bit behind ) CSI: NY CSI Smallville Daily Show Momma's Boys (lame...) How I Met Your Mother Gossip Girl Big Bang Theory Mentalist Simpsons Num3rs Ghost Whisperer (SDS' favorite show I bet) Eleventh Hour (haven't seen any yet) My Name is Earl Gary Unmarried Privilged 90210 (new one) The Unit Cold Case Superstars of Dance (?) Prison Break Heroes (haven't seen it this season) Fringe Kitchen Nightmares Life on Mars (was that cancelled?) America's Toughest Jobs (it's over, but we haven't finished it yet) Criminal Minds Reaper Terminator: Sarah Conner Chronicles Battlestar Gallactica I'm sure there's some others that I'm forgetting...

Oh look, another poster who says "everyone on Buffalo sucks," while all of our former players (who also used to suck) are starting on playoff teams. Apparently they're not as sucky as some people here may have thought.

When they say that they sat in a room while writing the season finale and said, "Hey, let's make these four people the final four Cylons," that tells me that they don't have any plan at all.

Yeah, I agree with you here. We close tickets all the time because the (internal) customer can't be bothered to call us and let us know that it works and never returns phone calls/emails. But they can open the call back up if needed. However, they then take advantage of that by re-opening calls that are weeks old on issues that are only vaguely related to the initial issue.

Yeah, I'd proabbly call the police too.

It uses the sat for both uploading and downloading nowadays. Much faster than dialup -- but there's still the latency issue. I still think he's being offered DSL though.

It depends what you're looking at. Some companies (Qwest, I believe) will bundle "DirecTV and Internet," but the internet access is not through the satellite but rather is actually Qwest's DSL. Works great, and based on your $40/month quote I'm guessing that's what you're looking at. It's no different than the cable companies bundling internet and TV. There is an "internet over the sat" service, but that requires a second dish and lots of extra hardware. I believe it's called DirecWay. Here's a link: http://www.satellitefamily.com/Order-Now.asp I have no experience with it, but I've heard latency times are bad (which makes sense, since it's sending everything through space. ). You're probably looking at DSL. I had it for several years and loved it, personally. Mine wasn't bundled though.

You give them WAAAAY too much credit. I read an interview one or two seasons ago where they basically said they're winging it. When they were on the planet (not Earth) for example, the guy said, "We really though about having them see a guy walking around, asking who he was, and him replying, 'I'm God.'". It's ironic because at the start of episodes, it says the Cylons "have a plan," but they really don't. Read this interview, where you'll see there's no plan: http://www.nj.com/entertainment/tv/index.s..._ron_moore.html "In terms of "Galactica," how long have you known how you were going to end it? In general terms, over the last year and a half, somewhere in the middle of season three I started asking, 'What's the shape of the ending? What's going to happen at the end of the show and what's going to be the case when they meet up with whoever they meet up with?' As we got into season three, I started thinking of it more seriously, and last summer, almost a year ago, we had a writer's summit up in Lake Tahoe and said, "It's going to end here." But a lot of the pieces didn't fall into place until I was sitting at the computer writing the teleplay that I realized exactly how the cards were going to fall for different characters." and: "Whereas you've been pretty candid about the fact that you'll throw stuff out there and figure it out later, and yet people assume there's some cohesive plan to "Galactica." How do you pull that off to make it seem like there's a plan?" and: "So, for instance, when you decided who four of the Final Five would be, how much thought did you have to put into it before revealing it in "Crossroads," and how much was, "Oh, we'll say this and figure it out over the hiatus"? The impulse to do it was literally an impulse. We were in the writers room on the finale of that season, always knew we would end season 3 on trial of Baltar and his acquittal, the writers had worked out a story and a plot, they were pitching it to me in the room. And I had a nagging sense that it wasn't big enough, on the level of jumping ahead a year or shooting Adama. And I literally made it up in the room, I said, "What if four of our characters walk from different parts of the ship, end up in a room and say, 'Oh my God, we're Cylons'? And we leave one for next season.""

Wouldn't be surprised about that. The writers are good at making stuff up as it comes alnog with no foreshadowing at all.

For a problem that Dell has the power to resolve, I agree with you. However, Da Big GUy's problem is that his 7 year old printer doesn't work with his new computer because Canon didn't write drivers for a new OS. What's Dell supposed to do in that case? His "solutino" was to "throw the Dell away," and buy a new PC and a new printer. Ummm, buying a new printer in general would've solved the problem... Can't expect Dell to give away a free printer though, can you?

I've said it before - the writers are making crap up as they go. It's very obvious. They have to try to explain Baltar somehow as well. Also -- if the Centurian's were "a different model" on Earth, why are the other Cylons the exact same and kept their memories? Oh well... I'll watch the last 9 episodes.

So because you know "several" programmers, that means they can be hired for peanuts? Yeah, whatever. Reading comprehension isn't your strong suit, despite what you're saying about me. So I'll ask again: What would YOU have wanted them to do? I'm seriously curious what you think would've been "good customer service." Or are you just another annoying troll?

You mean like Wire can't start on another team? Or Bannan can't start on another team? Or Jim Leonhard can't start on another team? There's a reason you're sitting on the couch on Sunday and aren't scouting other players.