I also suggest Al-Anon. In fact, I personally believe that it's vital when one person in a relationship seeks some form of recovery, that the other person do their best to do the same. I urge you check out Recovering Couples Anonymous.
posted to Ask Metafilter by Dean_Paxton at 5:33 AM on September 1, 2005

There are one or two meetings specifically for beginners but they are a bit further away from me than I can manage right now.

There is always someone who is more than willing and happy to give you a ride. The point is, get to a meeting and don't expect it to take hold of you overnight. It may well take months for the "lights to go on" but, it will and the rewards are limitless. It will change your life.
posted to Ask Metafilter by Dean_Paxton at 6:43 AM on August 17, 2005

If you can run PHP / MySQL, phpSurveyor is a great choice. Can't recommend it enough. Don't reinvent the wheel unless you're getting paid for it. Even if you can't run it, I'd check it out for ideas, just the same.
posted to Ask Metafilter by Dean_Paxton at 9:31 AM on July 12, 2005

My friend was married in a fashion such as this. As groomsmen, we all wore great kilts. I still have it, in his colors of course and I remember it being about a 25 foot piece of cloth. I'm not sure where he got it, or what it cost, but I will ask for you (email is in profile).

I had someone wrap, knot and pin the thing for me. It was about a 2-3 man operation. But, we just wore tall black buckskin boots and plain white "blouse" for lack of a better word.... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by Dean_Paxton at 8:04 PM on May 22, 2005

For problem two... any hard drive that clicks isn't good. When they are failing they usually they only click when attempting a read/write and not at rest. When you say "at idle" I am going to assume you mean when the screen saver kicks on or, even after the screen goes blank.

In any case, check power management and find the spot that deals with turning stuff off. In laptops this is often controlled by the BIOS so frittering around with Windows PM may not... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by Dean_Paxton at 11:01 AM on April 25, 2005

Awesome, great news!
posted to Ask Metafilter by Dean_Paxton at 8:22 PM on April 25, 2005

I could be too late. How about (Eurythmics) Dave Stewart?
posted to Ask Metafilter by Dean_Paxton at 10:46 PM on April 13, 2005

I always try to make a big deal of all birthdays, money or not. I think that it's vital to acknowledge the banner birthdays in as big and public a way as possible. Plan a party with all friends and family that is reasonable, ask for help by all means. Get a good gift that will become part of your household for years, art maybe? Give it to her at the party, preferably as a surprise. If shes really, really not up for that sort of scene, try for a "birthday week" where lots and lots... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by Dean_Paxton at 7:04 AM on April 12, 2005 marked best answer

too busy to care

Oh my, that doesn't read well. I didn't mean that to sound like an indictment against you... just blabbering.
posted to Ask Metafilter by Dean_Paxton at 7:06 AM on April 12, 2005

^^^ There you go. 30 days... that ups the ante. I've also done theme birthdays too... those take some thought.

BUT...birthday week...NOW THAT ROCKS. I think I might could run with that!

What with moving, being away from family, and trying to declutter... you've definitely going to have to stick with qualitative stuff.
posted to Ask Metafilter by Dean_Paxton at 8:31 AM on April 12, 2005

I'm down with Alton Brown. As usual.
posted to Ask Metafilter by Dean_Paxton at 2:04 PM on April 1, 2005

Had a blowout this morning on the front. Then while changing the tire, I noticed a huge bulge in sidewall of my rear tire. Sadly, these tires were not cheap and only have about 10,000 miles on them. Lesson: Never buy the Discount Tire store brand tires, ever. I paid as much as I would for a semi-premium branded tire and they were toast by 9,000 miles. Of course they wiggled out of their warranty after being on the car for 5 months... I'm waiting for new Coopers as I type this.
posted to Ask Metafilter by Dean_Paxton at 11:55 AM on March 31, 2005

Would it make sense to use the IIS (or, Apache) logfiles? At least they are handled at the filesystem level and can be processed (if what you are doing could be resource intensive) on another machine. The only problem that I can see is that it wouldn't exactly be realtime. Otherwise, try the TrafMeter full version. It does a whole lot of stuff like Ethereal but, has an easier to use HTTP header monitoring tool.
posted to Ask Metafilter by Dean_Paxton at 2:16 PM on March 30, 2005

I may be able to help you with that. A friend of mine was playing with scraping browser screens on a particularly popular trivia site and it worked pretty well. I'm not sure what format the data is in but, I know that there is about 4-5k questions and answers. I'll ask him if he would part with the data. You don't have an email listed so, email me when you get the chance.
posted to Ask Metafilter by Dean_Paxton at 1:45 PM on March 11, 2005

First, before you get into a lot of complicated stuff, go to:

"C:\Documents and Settings\[your profile name]\Local Settings\Temp"

and delete everything in there and reboot. Of course [your profile name] being the name of the folder in which corresponds to your username.
posted to Ask Metafilter by Dean_Paxton at 5:30 AM on February 8, 2005

Also, the Photoshops prefs, as SNAKER indictes, is in:

"C:\Documents and Settings\[your profile name]\Application Data\Adobe\Photoshop\7.0\Adobe Photoshop 7.0 Settings"

The file you're looking for is called "Adobe Photoshop 7.0 Prefs.psp" You can safely delete this file but, all of your personal photoshop settings (cursors, rulers & units, plugin directories, etc...) will be lost.

When you delete... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by Dean_Paxton at 5:36 AM on February 8, 2005

(SNACKeR sorry about borking your name)
posted to Ask Metafilter by Dean_Paxton at 5:37 AM on February 8, 2005

It almost sounds like Gout but, not exactly. Regardless, it's easy enough to get checked for it. I'd see a doctor if I were you.
posted to Ask Metafilter by Dean_Paxton at 6:41 PM on February 6, 2005

My kids school has asked me to assemble some programs, hopefully GPL but, at least freeware that would be suitable for a training laboratory. I'm thinking of including some of the following: Celestia, Artrage (for older artists), tuxpaint (for younger ones), and open office. But, I'm really sure that I'm missing some great titles in a sea of great (and terrible) software. Particularly, I'm looking for an easy IDE to attract some of the would be coders whom could take a little direction (like... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by Dean_Paxton at 5:35 PM on February 3, 2005

Oh Ebay, that's a great idea... I hadn't even thought of it, thanks mecran01. Squeak is looking pretty good, I'm thinking to offer them both.

PS: ¿Would simple video editors / composers / FX machines be relevant?

Yeah, actually it would. I know that there are some new projects starting up that look awesome but, it's too early to consider them yet. Thanks for checking that out for me. I'd love it if you did that for me, so would the kids.
posted to Ask Metafilter by Dean_Paxton at 5:25 AM on February 4, 2005

Awesome! For taking the time to put that list together, thanks again.
posted to Ask Metafilter by Dean_Paxton at 10:39 AM on February 4, 2005

lease take into account that boths "kid" and "training laboratory" remain a bit nebulous

Yeah, it is ambiguous. I really didn't provide near enough background information. Sorry about that. Here's (probably) too much:

Well, there are about 25 Dell machines of resonable capacity. The kids in mind come in for 1 hour, each day. They range from Kindergarted to Eighth grade, boys and girls. This came... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by Dean_Paxton at 10:51 AM on February 4, 2005

I've tried a few but, none are really great. This is for a legal matter involving an employee who was, big surprise, browsing stuff he shouldn't have been. It's a winxp machine and I know where the index.dat files are, I know that there is a rather complicated cache system. I also know that there should be something out there that will do the index.dat as well as give listings of websites visited and be able to examine the html and graphics left behind. I can do it by hand but, the job won't... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by Dean_Paxton at 4:09 PM on January 23, 2005

Thank ajr, that one I hadn't found... I like it.

Jairus, EnCase probably is overkill but, I wish I had a copy just the same. I was really just wondering if there were other neat tools that I was missing. I'm following the development F.I.R.E. for some things. It's not quite there yet but, it's coming along pretty nicely. Sadly the project seems dormant for the time being.
posted to Ask Metafilter by Dean_Paxton at 9:45 PM on January 23, 2005

This will fix you right up: Alton Brown's Creamed Corn Cornbread
posted to Ask Metafilter by Dean_Paxton at 6:57 PM on January 3, 2005

By resigning, you won't teach them any lessons. They are never going to apologize, beg you to stay and offer you the job you deserve.

Meanwhile, I'd start my own head hunt if I were you, familiararity with this company will continue to breed contempt. Besides, a good paycheck can be hard to come by these days.

Maybe it's for the best, sounds like you don't want to move up the chain and get closer to people who don't understand you. There's... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by Dean_Paxton at 1:40 PM on December 10, 2004

You know, FTP and HTTP are very rude and featureless protocols for file transfer. It affords no error correction, no compression, and very little security. It's always been that it's a common protocol for file transfer between different systems therefore it's convienent and there are lots of clients, most notably (and sadly too) the browser.

However, we're really forgetting our salad days. There's plenty of file transfer protocols that offer error correction,... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by Dean_Paxton at 9:26 AM on November 24, 2004

Are your speakers next to it? If so, consider moving them away a bit they could be causing some frequency problems. If not, sometimes that hum is indeed caused by some kind of unwanted AC noise... perhaps try plugging the monitor into a different outlet? There is also a possibility of some kind of electo-magnetic interference but, most monitors have an in-line magnetic sheild to help with this stuff. Just some thoughts... I agree with cairnish about the flyback mounting. Sometimes, just... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by Dean_Paxton at 7:07 PM on November 18, 2004

I went to my 10th. (9 years ago) and was accosted by one of my high school tormentors at the buffet line in front of about 25 people. The conversation went exactly like this:

"Dean Paxton! You're still wearing those same glasses!"
"xxxxxx xxxxxxx! You're still an asshole!"

The whole bunch of folks exploded in laughter. So, I don't have to go to one of those again 'cause I won forever.
posted to Ask Metafilter by Dean_Paxton at 1:20 PM on November 2, 2004

I think that I've suggested this before, perhaps in the blue. Anyawy, you could try out The Power Tab Editor (it's free) with the Cutewriter PDF plug-in (it's free too). Here's a sample I did really quick. Give it a try and let me know what you think.
posted to Ask Metafilter by Dean_Paxton at 4:34 PM on October 22, 2004

I have a self-modded xbox too. I have a 130GB hard drive in it and used the exact steps that shepd described above to mod mine. With the exception of actually installing the mod chip, he left that part out and it wasn't easy.

I would never have anything else. For a little under $300.00 I can play new games I can never play on my PC now. A decent sound card and vid card would be way more. I have all of the older game emulators and ROMs I could ever want including... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by Dean_Paxton at 7:59 PM on September 26, 2004

I hesitate to suggest an american minivan but, here goes nothing. The 2000 Dodge Grand Caravan Sport/AWD can be had for about 9-13k. It has good consumer reviews, features dual sliding doors, all-wheel-drive plus it's pretty plush with a lot of bells and whistles for that kind of money. A friend has one, it's got back of the seat LCD/DVD's that were pretty trick back then. If I only had two kids, this would probably be what I hauled them with. As a longtime GM consumer, I've finally... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by Dean_Paxton at 8:54 PM on September 16, 2004

A friend who is a research chemist in a small town, just lost hist job and asked me about this sort of thing. Beyond becoming a Google expert, I didn't really know what to tell him. Apparently, Google has enough experts at the moment, he couldn't apply there.
posted to Ask Metafilter by Dean_Paxton at 8:36 AM on September 7, 2004

Cuppatea, right up his alley! I'm passing it on now
posted to Ask Metafilter by Dean_Paxton at 8:54 AM on September 7, 2004

Follow up: My friend contacted them today and they may possibly hire him to help coordinate and help assign research projects, from his home. So, things suddenly look up for him. Thanks for the tip.
posted to Ask Metafilter by Dean_Paxton at 7:37 PM on September 7, 2004

I dealt with it for many years... Honestly, as frustrating as it can be, the end result is always the same. When that end result does finally and inevitably come... you will feel guilty. Especially if you loose it once or, twice. But, it's natural and people have been dealing with it for all of human history.

Here's some things that helped me:

1). Don't argue. They're old and deserve to be right even when they aren't.... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by Dean_Paxton at 6:02 AM on September 2, 2004

UltraVNC http://ultravnc.sourceforge.net/ allows users to browse to your IP addesss at a port (5900?) and view your desktop with their browser... I've used it a few times to explain things while showing them to people. It even works moderately well for dialup users. Much better than pcNowhere and live meeting. There may be other VNC clients that allow the same thing but, UltraVNC has a file transfer app... which is cool.
posted to Ask Metafilter by Dean_Paxton at 10:17 AM on September 1, 2004

I second Eamon's advice if there's no spare RAM to test (ask a friend to borrow their RAM for an hour if you have to).

But, this really sounds like a memory issue to me. Try swapping RAM into opposite slots if there is more than one stick. Make sure they are properly seated. If there are two, try just one.

Finally, if you do replace the RAM and find that there is still trouble. Check the BIOS settings for SDRAM timings and such tweaks... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by Dean_Paxton at 10:31 AM on August 4, 2004

There is a very nice community of quality tabs coming along over at powertabs.net. The file format is based upon the freeware Power Tab Editor which has primariliy replaced chordpro for me and many others. Members there are quickly building up an archive of tabs that are of Olga quality (circa 1995). There are some dud tabs but, the member rating/review system makes it pretty easy sort them out. There are a lot more gems than duds there. And the Power Tab Editor is just plain cool.... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by Dean_Paxton at 7:09 AM on June 8, 2004

Nic, that is sweet... I'm trying it now.
posted to Ask Metafilter by Dean_Paxton at 9:11 PM on June 1, 2004

For most lawn mowers made since the 70's, any unleaded gas is fine. If you try to add oil to the mixture, you'll fowl the plug and worse. A few few lawn mowers have 2 cycle engines like chainsaws and string trimmers. Those do require an oil and gas mixture. But, most mowers have a 4 cycle engine and much like a car, they have a seperate oiling system... So, that's the question, what type of engine does it have?

Speaking of gas powered string trimmer, that's your... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by Dean_Paxton at 8:14 AM on May 28, 2004

Did you try looking at Microsoft's removal instructions? (can't believe that I'm saying that).
posted to Ask Metafilter by Dean_Paxton at 1:53 PM on May 3, 2004

Short of central air, I would suggest a whole house fan. Those suckers move some serious air. I've seen doors slam shut and curtains suck in at 30 degree angles when they come on. For those that have them, they swear by them. They cost about $200.00 to install and are worth every penny. Do you own the house, is it a possiblity for you? If so, I'd hit the home improvement megamart and start pricing and asking the gray-hairs about them.

I once knew a man who figured... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by Dean_Paxton at 8:09 PM on April 26, 2004

Sorry, I totally missed the whole "...our landlord..." part. Well, there are free-standing and portable air conditioning units. I know that specifically what you didn't ask for but, given the limited options, it's the best way to deliver real cold, really fast.
posted to Ask Metafilter by Dean_Paxton at 8:14 PM on April 26, 2004

I'd like to dump text files in a desktop (win32) app and have it spit out mp3/wav files.
Here's what I've tried so far: Oddcast, Freets, IBM TTS, Elanspeech, Realspeak, Oddcast has the best and most realistic but, licensing is remotely hosted and I would really like a desktop app... for now. Any help would be greatly appreciated.... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by Dean_Paxton at 4:02 PM on April 8, 2004

I did check that one too... a great deal of the TTS products out there license the AT&T labs one.
posted to Ask Metafilter by Dean_Paxton at 4:15 PM on April 8, 2004

I think you are right in your music analogy and it is a step backwards. But, I'm trying various demos of it now. I'm almost intrigued enough to comitt to a developers license.

I'm really interersted in something from Russia called Sakrament. But, they haven't returned my calls or e-mails yet. Too bad because I've seen a lot and this one is awesome.

duckstab: Thanks for the link to festival, I hadn't seen it yet. This could go places too.... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by Dean_Paxton at 5:15 PM on April 8, 2004

Dragon NaturallySpeaking will do this but, it's a $200 bill for the software.
posted to Ask Metafilter by Dean_Paxton at 7:25 AM on April 9, 2004

I'm testing natrual voice reader now... the standard version. The enterprise version is only $40 and apparently includes a few voices. If they are like the samples I heard, they aren't too bad, I agree.
posted to Ask Metafilter by Dean_Paxton at 7:41 AM on April 9, 2004

Vinegar will stop the cracking problem and make the eggs a breeze to peel. 2-3 tbsp. per 12 eggs does the trick for me. I still add a few pinches of salt but, I'm not sure why anymore. It doesn't lower the boiling temperature of the water until you get to the 1 to 3 ratio and then only by a few degrees.

The vinegar breaks down the calcium carbonate that eggshells are made of, so thats something I'm pretty sure about.

I start my eggs, no more... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by Dean_Paxton at 9:38 PM on March 30, 2004