mmrmnhrm

If it's Socket A (Original AMD Athlon up through Athlon XP 3200+), I've got four HSF combos (one's a water block) you're welcome to take for nothing more than whatever it costs us to meet up and maybe have a beer over.

Last time I needed one, I used the NTB on Billingsley, about a mile off Sawmill on the north side of 270. One year guarantee, and the guy even "suggested" bringing it back after 50-51 weeks just to take advantage of that. They're reasonable on speed so long as you don't get caught in the after-work rush, and haven't tried to sell me something I didn't need.

There's one at Sawmill and Hard, but I'm sure there's others around town. It's one of those "trade/swap/buy" type chain shops that also go by the names 'New Uses', 'Computer Renaissance', and 'Play it Again Sports' depending on what that particular store is geared for. Quick rundown of the chain: Play it Again Sports: Durable sporting gear, stuff that people tend to outgrow or upgrade. Good for active kids in high-equipment sports like football, hockey, and lacrosse. Also a decent place to pick up your first couple sets of golf clubs. Computer Renaissance: Computer gear that's a generation or two behind. Good if you need a system just to surf the net, keep kitched recipies on, or let the kids abuse. Occasionally you'll find a printer here, but it's usually not worth the asking price. Couple of cards and cables, but their strength is the refurb stuff. Plato's Closet: Clothes swap, great if you're a 'retro' teen, or need a bunch of clothes fast for a school production. You'll get name brands here, but usually at least a season or two out of style. Once Upon a Child: Same as Plato's, but targeting newborns up through maybe 5 or 6 years old. Rockers, strollers, cribs, and a crapload of clothes. If you're on a budget or don't have family dumping clothes on you already, you'll save more than just your money by going here. New Uses: See "flea market." Music Go Round: We beginning to see a pattern yet?

I'd think you could find just about anything at a Plato's Closet.

Yes...see http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/06/06/03/1220249.shtml Possibly one of the best quotes I've seen in a slashdot thread yet... "a true pirate starts drinking before the sun hits the yard-arm. yarrrr"

When you're already cruising 70+, anything faster seems to fly by (at least to my non-NASCAR eyes), especially with the way some of these nutters weave. This ain't the Montanabahn.

In my best Richard Karn voice: "What are the odds of added patrols helping reduce the number of flaming assholes on the highways? You said 'good.' SURVEY SAYS????" ***** BUZZZZZZZZZ ***** Honestly, I'm all for going a faster, but when everyone is doing 70, having someone come whipping by at 85 is a recipie for disaster. That's why (in many places, at least) the 55mph limit for trucks has been scrapped. The speed difference between them and autos was a greater danger than letting them go faster in the first place. And in other news, if our freshly minted officer would like to pick up an easy ticket or two a day, just hang out at the northeast corner of Hard and Sawmill, in the drive to Max & Erma's. There's a 'No left turn' sign there that's active during the evening rush hour, and I can't begin to count the number of times I've missed the light because some nutsucker was holding up the entire line of cars trying to make a left there.

But that does beg the question... given that Wolverine has adamantium skeletal enhancements, could the Hulk actually rip Logan in half like that? (has a nagging suspicion Mensan's about to fly in here and demand to know whether or not his hamster-wheel airplane is going to take off)

That's a negative from my friends... for both the worries I had. RX7, she's yours for the taking.

Let me check with one of my friends. Their 3yo has been a bit distraught ever since their year old huskie pup snapped her chain and ran off a month and a half ago, but between hoping she'll turn up, and another little one less than 5 months away, they may decide to take a pass.

Did you at least get the temp tag number? That'll give the cops something to tail with an unmarked.

Eli's right. Unless it's at least a couple horse, you'll get more for it as scrap than you will after sale-repair. You could list it as "In need of repair", or see if a motor shop will buy it off you if they need one, but odds are it's smeltfodder.

Got one buddy just back from the sandbox who's a combat medic (and has never loved being a EMT/paramedic more now that he's back), and another who's a surgeon in Cleveland's Level 1 Trauma center at Metro. I get all the horror stories I need already.

What's my plan? Number one: Get every single frackin lobbyist out of Washington. There's a reason politicians pander to lobbyists, and it's a simple five-letter word. Greed. See any number of articles related to Jack Abramoff. Of course they'll whine about restriction of free speech, but let's be real. They aren't speaking, they're bribing. Number two: Pass a constitutional amendment to provide the president with line item veto. I don't even want to think about how much money can be trimmed from the budget if the president, regardless of who holds the office, had the ability to cross off individual items instead of having to deep-six the entire thing. There's no way Bush is going to veto a popular spending measure, so all sorts of unrelated crap (like Alaska's "Bridge to Nowhere") gets attached to it. See http://www.forbes.com/business/2006/05/18/katrina-pork-storm-cz_em_0518pork.html. While it may not eliminate the deficit, it'll at least be a start in right direction. Sad that a Democrat with a coochie-soaked cigar could run a surplus, while a supposedly conservative Republican can't. Third: Term limits. The longer someone's in power, the more likely it is they'll be tainted. Democrats held Congress through much of the 80s until '94, when they collapsed in spectacular fashion amidst crap like bounced checks. Now we see this happening all over again. We elect people to serve *OUR* interests, not those of the best funded lobby. Not only that, but term limits forces higher turnover, reducing the number of favors congresscritters call on to get their pork passed. Number four: This is gonna take a while, but we *need* at least a third, and preferably a fourth or even fifth party. The two-party system as we know it results in a lesser-of-evils situation where we're left to pick our poison, rather than what we really want. My general leaning is conservative, which means my only option is Republican. But right now, they're pissing me off bigtime by getting into things which the fed has absolutely no business touching (like their brash charge to "save" Terry Schiavo). They've also, for the past five years, been pretty much a rubber stamp to anything and everything King George wants, leading to domestic spying, stupid policies (No Child Left Behind, which has turned out to be a dismal failure), and tax cuts where they aren't needed. So despite my hatred for liberal tree-hugging hippies, unless the Libertarians have someone on the ballot this fall, I'm voting (with full bio-suit protection) Democrat. Number five: All surplus money must, by law, be used to pay down the debt. Can you imagine any bank allowing you to run up the kind of deficit that the fed has? Or even better, telling you "Hey, because you've exceeded your credit limit numerous times, we're going to give you even more credit despite no indication you've brought your spending down"? How long will it be until we're spending so much on interest that we can't even pay the principal anymore? Sound familiar? Yep, it's just like all those folks with "interest only" mortgages who are going to be underwater when the time comes to meet their balloon payment. Finally, no matter what anyone says, easy oil *is* on the decline. Sure, there's a couple pockets we haven't tapped yet, but eventually they will be no matter what the greenpeace folks try, and then they too will be gone. There's only so much of the stuff in the ground, and soccer moms are pissin it away in their Hummers and Escalades. Do you really think this sudden breakthrough with Libya is coincidence? We need their oil, they need our cash. Nothing but motivated self-interest there.

Says who? Honestly, how many unemployed people do you know who would jump at the chance to go down to Cali and spend 12+ hours a day bent over picking strawberries? Now, how many folks do you know lost a job because of someone coming in from India or China on an H1-B? I'm willing to bet most of these so-called job "losses" are not being lost at all because frankly, every person I know would turn their nose up and call that sort of work beneath them. The real losses are coming in the skilled trades (car mechanics and assembly line workers, folks who can't be replaced by day laborers) because of short-sighted management and government policy, and information fields (sciences degree required) because of outsourcing or "guest" worker invitation. While I'll agree with you that they all ought to be sent back home and forced to do things the legal way, let's get real. The sheer logistics of rounding up 12 million people and shoving them across some line on a map just isn't a worthwhile pursuit when we're running record deficits, easy oil is on a rapid decline, two countries are clamoring for nukes while we're distracted by a third that wasn't anywhere close, and our elected government is bringing us ever closer to living in 1984.

My post count seems to be stuck at 20, though if you do a "search for all posts by" you get 48. Well, 49 now.

+1 for original thinking

Who the frackin' hell are the Oregon Ducks???

You mean to tell me you guys never saw that before? Didn't they show you 'Miracle of Life' in high school sex-ed?

I can just see it now... a handful of ricers all lining up to race there, and about ten state troopers hiding behind the bridge waiting with glee

iPod ftw. Got my brother one last Christmas (4G nano, flash memory so no moving parts, great for his evening 10mi runs), and I keep kicking around the idea of getting the cheapest of the video ones just so I can get iTunes and download BSG for $80 (or so) instead of paying Time Warner 6x that for crap I don't watch.

Expect more of it in the future. As nutrition and medicine advance, kids are becoming sexually mature at younger ages. Mind you, they don't have anything approaching the psychological or physical maturity to go along with it, so any of you folks out there with kids, expect your job to get even harder.

hope ur kidding. I'm pretty sure he is. Why else would someone bang their head against a brick wall and laugh while doing it?

While this is true for a lot of things, you have to take a look at what resources you have, and where they can be put to best use. Not all debts are bad. Home mortgages, in general, are OK. You get a tax deduction for the interest, which helps take a little bit of the bit out of it. Houses also tend to appreciate at a slightly higher rate than inflation, so you again tend to come out ahead. Now here's the not so obvious part... I retired das Boot at 125k miles, while spending an average of $400/mo on maintenance and repairs. Paying a little under half down, and financing a little more than half, I can spend as little as $267/mo on Jin-Qui Maru's financing. That means without doing any work at all, I'm now $133/mo ahead of where I was this time last year, I have a bumper-to-bumper warranty until 3/09 (or 36k miles), and because I was stubborn and wanted a dark color that wasn't black, filling up the tank half as often as I used to (roughly $50/mo savings at current prices). My insurance is, surprisingly enough, relatively unchanged (It went up maybe $3 or $4/mo, which is easily covered by not hitting Wendy's for lunch one day). Now, I can do a couple different things with the extra $180/mo in my pocket... I can go out to eat a lot more often (Bad idea, given that I already have a terrible time trying to find 36" inseams, and can ill afford adding to the waist line), I can pay down my 7.5% loan faster (Finance bastard at Immke neglected to file the paperwork at the time I filled it out, otherwise it'd have been 4.9%), I can shove it in the bank at 4.25% APY, or I can throw it into the stock market. Since 4.25APY is less than 7.5APR, it doesn't make sense to add any more to my savings account than I already have set aside as the "oh snap" fund. Which leaves either paying the loan off faster, or investing. Since I'm not particularly great at picking individual stocks, but can generally see the market's overall trend before the analysts (I was telling my dad to bail about six months before the bubble really burst), and think I'm seeing a sideways market for the next year or so, the solution becomes "Pay off the loan ahead of time." I haven't figured out what I'm going to do when the loan is paid off in under three years instead of the scheduled five, but at least that's a problem I don't mind having

I took a $13k loan for my HCH, plus putting $11k down. Pay especially close attention to the terms, things like the interest rate and any penalties for early/late payment. One of the biggest favors you can do yourself is to pay down your debts early, so even if your monthly payment is $250 like mine, send in bigger checks if there's no early payment penalty. Yeah, it means less money in your pocket today, but by the time the loan is paid off, you'll come out ahead since you'll have paid less in interest.