cringleman

You can start them mid-season; everyone's given the same accumulated knowledge if you don't draft it pre-season. It's just not as cool-feeling, as going in knowing nothing (although,realistically, you don't know a thing for the first two weeks).

There's a really slick setup for doing this on Yahoo, if I recall correctly. That might solve any logistical issues that you have.

It pretty much rules; of course, when asked if you'd bring him back dead or alive, Ryan, you should've just said, 'Of course.' I mean, experts would agree, man. Personally, I think it would be a pretty great cosmic joke if, after all of the money wasted on search for him, and the huge bounty offered, he was killed by a failed kidney or something like that. Nope, sorry George. Not felled by a precision shot from a Marine sniper; taken out by a pre-existing medical condition and weakness from old age. Senescence is a bitch.

Seriously. Awesome satirical paper. Of course, as with all good satire, you only laugh because there's some very scary stuff that it's alluding to.

You know, if he really just did what the majority of the fans wanted, he'd have made Hello Time Bomb and Load Me Up, repeatedly. I go to a show to see what the artist wants to play, and if they play something that's not my favourite, I try to enjoy it anyway. If they're really acting deliberately in song choice, then one might as well consider what's being said when an artist plays something for you (even if it's just Song for the Girl). Every fan has a song they want to hear. It's never all the same. The only slap in the face to the fans is walking off stage, mistreating your audience, or refusing an encore (and all only for a good crowd; if they're not, screw 'em).

Radiohead coolest band of all time? Beatles, man. It's still hip and stylish to drop their name, even if it's a clich

Hey, whatever keeps you from falling asleep, man. (Though you can get some great rest in a large lecture about C programming, trust me.)

Everyone should just come to Nova Scotia. Maybe if there's a massive influx of students, our moronic tuition rates will lower ... Plus, there's nary a better way to be taught to drink than by a Cape Bretoner (maaaybe a Newf) -- and isn't that what higher education is about: the hedonistic binge-wasting of money you don't even have?

You're right -- they do push university quite hard, and I believe this is a large part of the problem. I still don't think that in a general science degree, however, that you can call it a "job factory" situation -- you highlight this, yourself, in your last post: in a science, arts or math programme in a university, the focus is on knowledge, whereas in a college, the focus is on useful skills. Certainly there are both taught in both places, but the central philosophy is different. I'd also argue that, while you can learn a great deal for free online or at a library, it's difficult for most people to teach themselves as well as a good teacher (which is certainly not to say that professors are necessarily good teachers; many aren't, but that's a seperate issue), and one certainly doesn't have access to the experts in various fields as is the case at an institution like a university. Someone taking a Bachelor of Science degree in physics at the university level will end up trained as a physicist, which is not really a job so much as it is a specialty of knowledge. They're trained very poorly (in general) in the use of the wide spread of research and analytical equipment and software, etc. that's commonplace in the majority of physics-related jobs; they might know how to use what's in a couple of the labs at their school. I'm not going to learn anything about being a conservation officer for Candian Wildlife Services, here at Dal, but I'm hypothetically on the track to getting there (though it's not an ambition of mine); even if I did the work to get that job, I'd have to have independently developed a lot of the necessary skills for performing it. It's a massive and widespread complaint of employers, these days: university-fresh employees lack many general skills that they'd like them to have (and that community and technical college graduates have). A degree in math will teach you to be a mathematician, perhaps. That's not exactly an entire career track, right there. A degree in chemistry does not teach you how to be a consultant or to run a lab. It's actually notoriously difficult to get a job with nothing but a bachelor's degree in science, unless you graduate at just the right time with something that just happens to be in demand (physics was, a few years back, I was told). Math is a little different, just because skill in and deep knowledge of math is supremely useful for a lot of applications (everything from financial analysis at trading companies to the dirty, mind-boggling statistical calculus of actuarial science). Medical, law, nursing, engineering, etc. programmes are designed specifically to train someone for a given job. That's a job factory. They are a definitive stepping stone into a career path (though there is obviously some choice involved). You don't graduate from science and automatically become a scientist. I couldn't tell you what my options are, on graduation, if I don't take some further schooling -- they're probably slim to none, if I don't want to work as a field assistant or research assistant (which pay next to nothing, and really require surprisingly little specific knowledge). I respect the confidence with which you make your assertion, Moonlight Graham, but this is the continuation of my line of thinking. I just haven't seen any proof, in my time of seeing people graduate and get crappy jobs, that university could be considered at 'job factory,' despite the popular opinion that high school diploma + university degree = set for life in a cushy job. It's also why there are too many people here that don't want to be.

Pretty cool stuff, sir. I haven't really listened that hard to the lyrics, yet, but the vibe on Lady Luck is really cool.

I had a music teacher in high school who went to X. Brilliant head for music, and a fantastic teacher. My friends at X love it, there. Plus you get one of the coolest rings ever made, when you graduate.

I love Dali and Monet, and some of van Gogh's stuff. Mostly Dali, though.

It's Edwin McCain. My dad used to listen to him. Also, isn't Wild Horses originally a Stones tune? (Awesome song, too.)

I love it. If you've got a fairly reasonable system, latency isn't too bad, either. Really, it's such an enormous step up from the mic jack in the back of my computer that I'm sort of biased, but I've also worked with a 60s-era analog 8-track tape recorder, and a few different bits of mixing equipment (not really for recording, of course), and I'm genuinely impressed with the little box. It's very stable, reasonably intuitive to use and a very simple solution. I don't know what other sorts of products there are, in the price/application ballpark, but it's worth a bit of research. I love my MobilePre, though, and M-Audio stuff is generally very high-quality. Hope that helps, Shiri.

I boot both Win XP Home (for gaming), and Ubuntu, though I'm thinking of switching to Agnula, once I get the hang of this Linux thing (which isn't really that hard).

Universities are job factories? Hardly. You can become qualified for a job, largely, by taking a professional programme (engineering, law, medecine, nursing, etc.), but, in reality, a basic bachelor's degree in science or the arts does not prepare you for a job at all. In a lot of cases, it won't even get you a job. There's a seriously distorted perception that a bachelor's degree is the most logical step after high school for most people -- it certainly is not. If you want a job, you go to a community or technical college that trains you for a specific job track. If you want to be taught a vast, deep pool of knowledge by relative experts on the subjects, then you go to university. These institutions were never intended to train anyone for anything, except scholarship; they are inefficient and inadequate as "job factories" for this very reason: they were not designed for hard-focused job training, and it is difficult to shoehorn them into that task. I also don't understand where the irony is in this.

'I Am Trying to Break Your Heart,' by Wilco. It's sort of a lost love song, but it'd probably work for the wooing. 'Blue Eyed Soul' is also a sweet Wilco tune, that most likely qualifies.

If you want something simple and free, try Audacity. It's a recorder program that has a few simple editing features, and some basic noise removal and effects. Nothing too fancy (and actually legally free of charge). It also won't hog your system resources. For something more complex (and still open-source and free of cost), try Ardour. I've never used it, but I've heard good things, and an issue of Guitar Player I have kicking around, somewhere, makes reference to it as a very good solution -- especially if you're on a budget. Cheapest solution I've yet found for plugging a standard XLR microphone up to my computer is a recording device from M-Audio, called the MobilePre USB (sorry if that comes off as advertising -- it's just what I happen to be using, right now). There are other options, of course, but that's what I'm working with (unless you count my ... shady ... copy of Adobe Audition). Happy recording. [Edit: My mistake; you can only get Ardour for a UNIX-based system, like a Linux distribution or Mac OS X. Sorry, everyone. 'Course, setting yourself up with a partition with something like Ubuntu, or even better, Agnula, is damn easy, and still free.]

I think it's damn cool, man, though I do still prefer the oldschool lava lamp.

I agree, to some extent. I don't like my faith being given a bad name by someone who could not possibly speak for all of us. I guess people filled with hate (anyone at all, toward anyone at all) just make me sad, without exception, even if they'll always exist.

As far as my Davies comment, I'm sure you're familiar with hyperbole. You will do a large amount of work in Engineering because you are required to to pass. I will do a large amount of work in Biology because I love it. If you like friends, though, I'd highly recommend that you don't tell anyone that you work harder than they do: I spent 14 consecutive days, without breaks, working for 14 hours every day, getting paid about $5 an hour -- because it seemed an experience pertinent to my studies and my interests. How is that relevent? It's not! No examples of how much any single person does is really relevent to any of this -- as with everything, you'll get out of school what you put into it. The folks doing no work on your floor will get little in return from their studies. If you work lots, you'll get lots. It should really be left at that. I'm not going to argue about this anymore, either, because it's silly. To continue would be a mere pissing contest. Even if you do do more work than all of us, and every other person in any other area of study, was does that matter? If you're complaining, you should find something to study that you don't need to complain about. If you're trying to tell us that engineering requires a higher intellect or work ethic than another programme, then that's just arrogance. If I express any more opinions in this thread, it will be in haiku form. That seems more fitting. Edit: Apologies, re-reading the beginning of the thread, perhaps you're taking sciences, right now, ecnarf. It's all the same.

I can't believe that people still think they're "debating" in this thread. This is ludicrous. Look at it this way: ecnarf (and others), you will be allowed to belittle English as a field of study when you can write a novel better than the average product from either Robertson Davies or Timothy Findley. Not after writing a high school paper on the Vietnam war. There are other reasonable examples of the difficulties inherent to various programmes of study (if you don't have a damn sharp palate, you'll make an awful chef). Cursory study of a subject at the secondary level does not begin to reveal the subtleties necessary to be a true student of most subjects. As an engineering student, in fact, you'll actually end up with a fairly poor grounding in every science you take, compared to someone who studied that, specifically. You can correct me when you've taken more classes in engineering than I have, but you won't: it's a necessary evil -- there's no time to give an engineering student a real grounding in all of the physical sciences, a good understanding of the calculus and statistics behind what (s)he uses, as far as magical equations go, nor even a truly decent understanding of the importance of other people that are not enrolled in professional programmes. As an aside, the over-enrolment in certain programmes says nothing about that programme. There are lots of people taking university degrees for no reason -- that's a separate problem. Let's leave that red herring to rot in the sun. This is a bunch of he-said, she-said. Someone thinks that their degree is easier than someone else's: awesome. You're probably pretty good at it. The truth is that none of this is all that 'easy.' I couldn't write a 10 000 word paper for sociology. I'd shoot myself. It just comes to some people, though, just like how some people can pile through 2000 calculus problems, only to learn that computers do most of that for engineers, now. The only thing that's been determined, here, is that lots of people look down on other groups of people simply for what they've chosen to study. I'm all for looking down on idiots, but I have a good friend in Acting, and it'd be a damn injustice if someone thought they were smarter than him, just because they were training to be a physicist. This is really just a 'my dad can beat up your dad' argument. Let it die. It will forever be an impasse.

Ah, The Planets. Once you've listened through the suite, and familiarized yourself with the themes, you'll hear it every day. It may be the most stolen music for soundtrack use I've ever heard. Good thing copyright doesn't exist retroactively and in perpetuity.

Let's be frank. I'm a Biology student at Dalhousie University. It's neither widely considered the hardest program, nor the toughest or most well-respected school (though, if you want to do Marine Bio, good luck finding a better place, in this country), but I'll say that's irrelevent. I used to be an engineering student. I spent a year and a a half at this institution studying biological engineering, only to realize that I hated it. I know people in essentially everything -- Histoy, English and Acting to Geology, Computer Science, Math and Neuroscience. I also know a damn lot of scholarship-holding engineering students. None of them impress me as more intelligent, hard-working or better-educated than the others. The person with the most well-rounded education I know is a double major in History and Political Science, who only has three days of classes a week. Engineering is a programme which is artificially hard -- I've taken it: the courses are simple, and the workload is far too much for anyone to reasonably handle, simply to simulate 'stress,' which is a spotty attempt, at best. Mostly, it just turns off brilliant (and I'm certainly not referring to me) students from the programme, because they can't understand why it's at all hard. I can write as well as most English students, and interpret data as well as a reasonable majority of Physics students, but there's a single thing I can't do: understand why people still manage to get into pissing contests about what degree is 'harder' or 'better.' Leastways do I understand why who gets a job faster is, at all, relevent to any of it -- if you're just interested in getting into the workforce, then you'll find a college much more efficient at this, and you've definitely lost sight of the goal of a University (the pursuit of knowledge). You know what's a great degree? Philosophy. We'd all be lost without it. So's Costume Studies. Hell, I live with a guy who dropped out of school, altogether. He works in a call centre. He's smarter that most folks who're in his old programme (CS), and certainly almost as well-rounded as I am, without a formal education. Factor that into your stereotypes and generalizations.

As for instrumental Wintersleep, check out their version of We Three Kings (a Christmas carol, I know) -- just the intro is so soothing (vocals start, eventually). Plus, Nerves Normal, Breath Normal is almost instrumental, if you think of the lyrics/vocals as just another instrument. They don't alter the tune thaaaaaaaat much. Of course, I'm drunk, so what do I know?