Thank you

[Fairlight]

The honourable and venerable Bill Campbell spoke thus:
> Thanks John for posting this as well.  On occassion I feel like
> going on an NPR-Style begging week, but can't figure out how to
> get good shows to get people's attention (although having TiVO is
> a godsend in avoiding those things :-).

Not so bad on PBS.  They put a lot of things on that I don't give two damns
about (and sometimes not even one), but you do get things like Fleetwood
Mac concerts, live hosting and interviews with Moira Brooker and Phillip
Breatherton, interviews with Judi Dench, and more.  Things they wouldn't
ordinarily put on.  The only reason I have Mac's "The Dance" DVD is because
I saw it on PBS first, and the only reason they had it was because it was
pledge time.

It's kind of a mixed blessing, I guess.  It's 95% "who cares" but (usually)
a good 5% "ooh, cool!"

Still haven't joined the ranks of the DVR club, nor the iPod club.  No
real intent to, either.  Maybe a DVR -if- we had cable or satellite.
Considering our lousy reception in this EM black hole we call an apartment,
it's really not worth the investment.  That, and I've had VCR's since they
were like $1000+ at Sears (in fact, my parents' first model was one of
those, back in the day--complete with -wired- remote), and I know firsthand
that unless it's something you're taping for posterity, there's a horrible
disparity between time available to watch, and recorded programming.  I
always ended up taping things I wanted to watch, and I always actually got
to about 1% of it before I had to wipe a tape because I was out of room and
had no more tapes handy.  When you get to like 9 tapes full of programming
and aren't getting to it, you learn that you should become a bit more
selective about what you think you'll actually get to later.

iPod's just make zero sense for me.  If I'm not in front of my mp3-playing
computer, I'm out next to the Sony 1170 boom box sitting next to my
Kurzweil synth, playing.  I'm not really in need of portable, especially
as when I'm not at my computer, the only time I listen to mustic is when
I'm playing it--and the synth weighs 90lbs.  You can't even use an Apex
stand, as it's too deep; you'd have to extend the holding arms, but
then it overbalances the stand entirely and it'd fall.  Not good.  So
anyway, if you don't need -portable- music, what's the point?  Gave up on
anything with headphones for extended use long ago, as I tend to want to
blow my ears out with the volume, which isn't good, so I just avoid that
temptation.  It's bad enough I can get these Altec Lansing speakers as high
as I can.  :)

Sometimes I wonder how I can consider myself a respectable geek when I'm
so far behind on the novelty device adoption curve the last five years or
so.  But when I think about it, it doesn't make sense to hop on just for
the sake of hopping on.  I'm plenty geeky in other ways though.

And on that note--we had to add another hard drive to my wife's system
last week (it was more expediant than taking a week to burn out data to
DVD's), and I came to the realisation that we now have over a terabyte of
active (ie., non-removable) storage between us.  We each have over half a
terabyte.  Man, I remember when I thought 1.4gig was huge.  You couldn't
even fit many of the new games into that, pre-installation, nowadays.

As for the original point about a notice, why not alter the list signature
file a couple weeks a year?  I see no problem with that, and it's about as
close to a MOTD as you're going to get in this medium.

mark->