Don't search for deals, let the hive mind do it for you.
posted to Ask Metafilter by grrarrgh00 at 4:43 PM on June 11, 2008

The Band's Visit was great. Don't miss The Flight of the Red Balloon, in theaters now, starring a frazzled, blonde Juliette Binoche. The movie is pure feeling and evocation. If you need something a little more plotted, try Roman de Gare.
posted to Ask Metafilter by grrarrgh00 at 5:45 PM on May 24, 2008

Thanks for the input, folks. The consensus (performance in this case is a software problem; throwing hardware at it won't fix it) makes sense. I still plan on creating a more powerful machine, but it'll probably be a new one.

File transer isn't really the problem for me; I've got a new, sizeable internal hard drive where I keep most of my data. The hardest part of a computer switch is the loss of that slow familiarity you and the machine build up with each other over the... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by grrarrgh00 at 2:30 PM on March 2, 2008

Thanks. Somehow I missed that earlier thread, even though I Google-searched AskMeFi.
posted to Ask Metafilter by grrarrgh00 at 9:24 AM on February 20, 2008

Try putting in some earplugs, getting to the show early, and plunking yourself in front of the stage. You'll probably find a crowd of solo, swaying music nerds who could not care less about anything not happening on stage. And if you go to shows semi-frequently, you'll end up seeing the same music nerds over and over again. Chat them up. Before you know it, you'll have folks to greet at any concert. After a while, even when your friends do accompany you to a show, you may... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by grrarrgh00 at 12:56 PM on January 7, 2008

Thank you all for your encouragement, your advice, and for sharing your own stories. I can't tell you how therapeutic it's been to read this thread.

After writing this post, as the original responses came in, I began drafting my sister an e-mail. I went to bed, and when I woke up, I read over the e-mail, made revisions and sent it. I won't quote the full thing, but here's an excerpt:

Whenever we speak in our veiled way about my sexuality, my head... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by grrarrgh00 at 1:31 PM on October 17, 2007

Yep, zixyer, that's what I want! I read a small bit on the difference between combinations and permutations and I think I want combinations.
posted to Ask Metafilter by grrarrgh00 at 2:51 PM on June 11, 2007

cmiller, I'm not sure exactly what I'd want from that one!

My array includes four other arrays that each contain between two and four items (none of which are arrays). So it looks like this:

((Happy, Sad, Angry, Hopeful), (Outgoing, Introverted), (Tall, Short, Medium), (Handsome, Plain, Ugly))

and I want to return

Happy Outgoing Tall Handsome
Happy Outgoing Short... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by grrarrgh00 at 2:57 PM on June 11, 2007

Awesome. Thanks much. Makes plenty of sense.
posted to Ask Metafilter by grrarrgh00 at 3:27 PM on June 11, 2007

Yes, cmiller, that's true. I didn't want to call it two-dimensional, because I wasn't sure I'd be using the term accurately, but you are right.
posted to Ask Metafilter by grrarrgh00 at 12:17 PM on June 12, 2007

I do have one folder, called "rock stars," that isn't topically organized, but includes a few of my must-reads. That actually works really well.
posted to Ask Metafilter by grrarrgh00 at 6:18 AM on May 2, 2007

I should mention also that this is more of a problem with video than with audio. Audio's mostly fine, with some of the stuttering occasionally showing up in WinAmp, even more occasionally in iTunes.
posted to Ask Metafilter by grrarrgh00 at 5:21 PM on July 12, 2006

Thanks for your suggestions, everyone, I'll check on all these things. Sonic_Molson, what ultimately did you find was causing the problem on your system?
posted to Ask Metafilter by grrarrgh00 at 5:04 AM on July 13, 2006

By the way, 6 months later, I realize I never posted an update on this. Spasm's comment ended up winning the day; I did a little Googling, ran across this guide to switching IDE channels from PIO only to DMA, and now my computer's working swimmingly.
posted to Ask Metafilter by grrarrgh00 at 11:01 AM on January 1, 2007

(I also got an extra set of RAM; I now have 1.5 GB.)
posted to Ask Metafilter by grrarrgh00 at 11:02 AM on January 1, 2007

I'll quadrillionth the recommendations for Didion and Lewis. Are you into poetry at all? Didion draws on the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins all throughout The Year of Magical Thinking. He's easily as religious as Lewis, but he also knows how to penetrate an emotion like grief, expose it, turn it into something we can recognize and confront.
posted to Ask Metafilter by grrarrgh00 at 6:46 AM on December 20, 2006

I remember being in the lunch line one day at my Christian fundamentalist high school in the spring of '98, after we'd all announced our college choices. The lunch lady said, "I hear you decided on Harvard. I'll be praying for you." I was a little taken aback. I assumed she was questioning my ability to keep up with the academics, so I muttered, "Yeah, I'll be studying hard." Seeing I'd missed her point, she leaned forward and stage-whispered, "It's very... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by grrarrgh00 at 11:47 PM on August 12, 2006

TracksLife?
posted to Ask Metafilter by grrarrgh00 at 10:53 AM on July 16, 2006

You guys rock my socks off. I can die happy now.
posted to Ask Metafilter by grrarrgh00 at 11:26 AM on May 31, 2006

The funny thing is, before I asked this question, my Google-fu had gotten me as far as this. Which led me to search iTunes for a song with the keyword "sparks fly." But I stupidly assumed that because none of the songs with that title on iTunes was it, that I was going down the wrong path. Boy am I happy I asked.
posted to Ask Metafilter by grrarrgh00 at 11:35 AM on May 31, 2006

I should probably have specified styling dropdown select menus. Apologies. Thanks to those who've responded.
posted to Ask Metafilter by grrarrgh00 at 3:12 PM on May 2, 2006

The Zebra mini pen has been my faithful companion for years. The clip is flimsy, but the pen works just fine without it if it breaks. It writes like a dream. Also endorsed by Lifehacker's Gina Trapani.
posted to Ask Metafilter by grrarrgh00 at 10:22 PM on March 10, 2006

For me, a good critic isn't necessarily someone whose tastes in movies match mine, but a writer who can bring out a smart, unexpected reading of any movie. Someone whose analysis makes the moviegoing experience richer.

I'm a bigger fan of Manohla Dargis every day.

I'm going to counter anjamu and say I like Salon's Stephanie Zacharek a lot.

Also James Berardinelli.

For deciding whether or not to... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by grrarrgh00 at 12:10 PM on March 5, 2006

That's an option we're looking into. Although the dot-com alternative of our domain hack is currently taken, we would probably try to purchase it from the owner if we went ahead.
posted to Ask Metafilter by grrarrgh00 at 9:13 AM on February 24, 2006

FlamingBore, are most of the domains you manage keyword domains, or are they meant to be brands? One company with a quarter-million domains makes me think that most of those are of the www.best-vacation-spots.info variety, given the impossibility of actually managing 250,000 separate brands. Is that right, or am I totally off-base?
posted to Ask Metafilter by grrarrgh00 at 12:04 PM on February 24, 2006

The Brown Derbies' version of the Gummi Bears theme is pure art.
posted to Ask Metafilter by grrarrgh00 at 8:53 PM on February 6, 2006

P.S.: There is one variable I know how to control quite well, and for anyone wondering how I'm currently answering this question, my current running mix is: Fire, Fire (M.I.A.)Mushaboom (Feist)Don't Change Your Plans (Harvard Callbacks)Chewing Gum (Annie)The Stops (Elbow)1 Thing (Amerie)Earthquake Weather (Beck)One (Mary J. Blige & U2)Lazarus (Porcupine Tree)Daughters of the Soho Riots (The National)Chicago (Sufjan Stevens)First Day of My Life (Bright Eyes)Cold Hands, Warm Heart... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by grrarrgh00 at 5:55 AM on January 23, 2006

Here's what I want to see in a cover letter:

1) Absolutely no typos or grammatical errors.

2) Clear references to the job description and how the candidate fulfills/exceeds it.

3) No jargon. By that I mean that technical terms related to the position are fine ("I'm well-versed in creating valid XHTML pages with clean, elegantly structured stylesheets"), but "I have a demonstrated capacity for efficiently... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by grrarrgh00 at 11:12 PM on January 13, 2006 marked best answer

Could I put in one more giant recommendation that you take the project online? Distribute postcards with your site address; make announcements in your classes. Free yourself and your fellow seekers of truth up to spend a lot more time/money/energy doing journalism and a lot less on the hassles of layout, production and distribution. If you're doing a good job, especially with a college audience, your voice will have every bit the influence online that it would in print. And you can free yourself... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by grrarrgh00 at 10:43 PM on January 13, 2006

Thanks a ton, everyone. Now I'm loaded with good winter car advice and I'm jonesin' for my first-ever meetup sometime soon, with all these MeFites around. (After four years of membership! Where are all my Fresno MeFites? St. Pete? Dang.)
posted to Ask Metafilter by grrarrgh00 at 4:42 PM on November 9, 2005

Very good essay, and although I subscribe to Mr. Shirky's blog, I hadn't read it, thanks.

Captain_Tenille, that's related to my meaning, but doesn't encompass it entirely. Posts are relatively static things, which works well with the tagging. Someone might update or correct or slightly change a post, but it will probably hew to its tags into the indefinite future. But something with more possible variability, like the freewifi example, stands to suffer from "tag rot,... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by grrarrgh00 at 2:41 PM on October 11, 2005

Thanks for the thoughtful answers, everyone. Thanks especially, Dan, I hadn't seen that PlasticBag discussion, which led me to this broad vs. narrow folksonomy distinction, which I haven't encountered before. A lot of good stuff to look through.

Any thoughts on the tag-flagging?
posted to Ask Metafilter by grrarrgh00 at 10:05 AM on October 12, 2005

I've had this problem forever, but only when it's cold outside. Just a sharp, tight soreness of the throat when I run. Anecdotally, someone on this thread describes running with the mouth covered to keep from breathing in cold air, which I'm planning to try when it gets freezing (haven't had to deal with this in the last two years while I was living in FL & CA).
posted to Ask Metafilter by grrarrgh00 at 3:42 PM on October 5, 2005

By the way, before we upgraded, we were facing a couple-hundred spam comments a day. We were spending maybe 20 minutes a day putting those in MT-Blacklist and de-spamming. We decided to upgrade because our blacklist got too large to add any more entries, and poking around the Web indicated that short of trimming our blacklist, upgrading was the only way to solve this. I'd say the number of spam comments and the time it takes to fight them has at least quadrupled since the upgrade.
posted to Ask Metafilter by grrarrgh00 at 8:30 AM on September 30, 2005

Briank, as far as I can tell, we completely overwrote the old MT-Blacklist. The new one installs into a completely different directory, and the Perl file for the old one was deleted.

Marquis, I was hoping not to have to resort to captchas, making another obstacle for our longsuffering commenters. If the spam were even at the same level as it was before the upgrade, I don't think the captcha would be worth it. But I just have this feeling there's something we must not be doing right.
posted to Ask Metafilter by grrarrgh00 at 9:04 AM on September 30, 2005

Zhang Yimou, especially Red Sorghum and Raise the Red Lantern. I'll go ahead and second Eric Rohmer. Ang Lee's non-English works are also excellent.
posted to Ask Metafilter by grrarrgh00 at 12:36 AM on August 28, 2005

Thanks, odinsdream. It's the need for opening a separate application I most want to circumvent. I started off with straight links to the files, but quickly got tired of answering e-mails from folks confused because their DVD software opened up every time they wanted to play an MP3. I want to add the straight MP3 links back in, but I also want to keep an easier option available for people who prefer having less control over their technology.
posted to Ask Metafilter by grrarrgh00 at 9:03 AM on August 19, 2005

I definitely hear your want for some more information, phrontist. Something about the words "James Howard Kunstler" trigger an involuntary spasm of skepticism in my mind. I'm crunchy and dyed-in-the-wool and all, but I'd love to read something that takes a critical approach to Kunstler and Co.'s doomsaying, even if it ultimately supports or affirms their message.
posted to Ask Metafilter by grrarrgh00 at 7:26 AM on August 19, 2005

My favorite infomercial was for Nads hair removal cream. I actually taped it.
posted to Ask Metafilter by grrarrgh00 at 8:31 AM on July 14, 2005

I'm surprised no one's mentioned Monogamy (my personal favorite, I think), Pray and 81 Words. I have to second Enemy Camp, especially for the first act when James Fallows grills Richard Perle about the collossal bungling of the war in Iraq. David Rakoff's reading of his story "Before and After Science" in the first act of Family Business makes me do the milk-nose thing. For those who think "House on Loon Lake" is the scariest TAL episode, Perfect Evidence is much, much... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by grrarrgh00 at 2:47 PM on July 2, 2005

You, sir, happen to be both a gentlemen and a scholar. Please accept this check mark as a token of my gratitude.
posted to Ask Metafilter by grrarrgh00 at 1:43 PM on June 2, 2005

Garamond, baby! The gorgeous italicized z and the crossed bridge in the W stop me in my tracks every time. (But in a good way! Not in a pull-me-out-of-the-text way!)
posted to Ask Metafilter by grrarrgh00 at 5:07 PM on May 16, 2005

Don't just put that Web programming experience aside, xmutex. I heartily second drobot's suggestion that you consider pitching those skills to a news organization.

The newspaper industry seems to be on a bit of a death spiral right now, and however it pulls out of this tailspin, I'm pretty sure it won't look much like it does today. But while circulation at newspapers is falling rapidly, readership of newspaper Web sites is increasing.... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by grrarrgh00 at 7:51 PM on April 22, 2005

While many of these are somewhat specific to journalism, Roy Peter Clark's 50 Writing Tools at Poynter Online are kind of a gold mine. You may find some good stuff on their Writing/Editing index as well. (Disclaimer: Used to work there.)
posted to Ask Metafilter by grrarrgh00 at 5:01 PM on April 14, 2005

After years of French class, I have big, involuntary problems not pronouncing the word "crêpe" with an aspirated c and throaty R -- KHREPP -- as opposed to the anglicization -- KRAYP. I also feel stupid going to Spanish restaurants and ordering an enchillotta, only to have the waiter repeat my order -- So you'd like one en-CHEE-lah-dah?
posted to Ask Metafilter by grrarrgh00 at 1:46 PM on April 7, 2005

I'll add "Love Shack," "Jessie's Girl," "Margaritaville," and "Piano Man" right now. Thanks for these, and please keep 'em coming. I'm trying to compile a definitive list for my friends new to the discipline.
posted to Ask Metafilter by grrarrgh00 at 6:32 PM on March 31, 2005

You can also try women's pants if you want a slimmer, more European cut, honestly.
posted to Ask Metafilter by grrarrgh00 at 5:16 PM on March 11, 2005

You know, something to make us singles happy on the Worst Holiday Ever. Good movies? Food selections (I'm thinking Rocky Road ice cream)? Drinking games?
posted to Ask Metafilter by grrarrgh00 at 8:18 AM on February 3, 2005

I'd only take immortality if my parents, siblings, and beloved were getting in on it, too.
posted to Ask Metafilter by grrarrgh00 at 6:33 AM on January 20, 2005

Vesana.com.
posted to Ask Metafilter by grrarrgh00 at 4:38 PM on January 13, 2005