Coldplay.
posted to Ask Metafilter by Doofus Magoo at 9:05 AM on July 19, 2008 marked best answer

Dec One -- a more obvious comparison would be this (Coldplay) to this (Kraftwerk). The link provided by the blogger goes to a thirty-second excerpt that (as best as I can tell) doesn't even encompass the riff that Coldplay uses.
posted to Ask Metafilter by Doofus Magoo at 9:51 AM on July 19, 2008

Subhanahu wa ta'ala
posted to Ask Metafilter by Doofus Magoo at 1:50 PM on July 18, 2008 marked best answer

The wikipedia article on clans might be of use. Speaking from personal experience, guilds operating across multiple games is not at all uncommon, and I've personally been parts of guilds with multiple family members, including parents and children.

Back when I MMOd, I actually had people call me to tell me to log on to kill some mob X, at which point I'd dutifully log on, so yes, it could definitely "interfere" with real-life activities. My wife actually woke... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by Doofus Magoo at 5:35 PM on July 16, 2008 marked best answer

And here's an article about the apparent relative commonness of in-game feuds spilling over into real life in South Korea.
posted to Ask Metafilter by Doofus Magoo at 5:36 PM on July 16, 2008 marked best answer

...unless someone can give me a good reason to go loan at 3.9%

If you can find a way to grow your money at more than 3.9% per year, take the loan and dump the cash into the interest-bearing account. Assuming a $40k loan and a 5% return on the $40k you'd otherwise drop on the car, you're about $5k up after 60 months (that is, you'll have spent $44k on car payments, but you'll have nearly $50k in the account).
posted to Ask Metafilter by Doofus Magoo at 12:54 PM on July 12, 2008

I can't speak directly to the metrics used by political lobbyists, but at its core, it's probably just a simple matter of tabulation -- that is, calculating the percentage of issues on which the elected official votes in accordance with the request of the lobbyist. Directly applying this to your example, just tabulate the issues that you bring up to the product teams, and then calculate the percentage that are addressed. You might need to tweak it bit to account for issues being partially... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by Doofus Magoo at 10:00 AM on June 23, 2008

In Harrisburg (and probably most of PA outside Philly and the Turnpike monopoly), Marlboros run around $4.20 per pack, or as low as $4.00 if you buy them by the carton.
posted to Ask Metafilter by Doofus Magoo at 5:00 AM on May 24, 2008

I'd go with adipocere's method (see here for an example of how to remove an element from an array in VBA). If you try to do it by building the list from the ground up, it's going to get computationally expensive at an exponential rate. I just built a quick function to do it that way, and while it could spit out the numbers from 1-1000 randomly ordered in under a second, it took over a minute to do 4000.

On preview: My comment isn't a knock against the method... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by Doofus Magoo at 11:52 AM on May 13, 2008

Divide the total amount of the compensation by the number of days worked. Divvy each days' pay up in proportion to what you did -- that is, three days it's an equal split, while the other four days it's split in proportion to both (a) the number of hours you each worked; and (b) the ratio of pay scale A to pay scale B.
posted to Ask Metafilter by Doofus Magoo at 8:08 AM on May 1, 2008

bunnytricks: Don't tip people for just doing their job unless they count on tips for income, like taxi drivers and wait staff in restaurants.twirlypen: To me, it just intuitively seems outrageous that I should pay for service on top of the meal/whatever. Surely that's what I'm paying for! I don't tip extra for the freight to the restaurant, or the liquor license, or the rent, so why should I pay extra for that one particular expense?
Keep in mind that most waitstaff in restaurants... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by Doofus Magoo at 5:41 AM on April 29, 2008

I'm a chewer too, but I use straws -- it's a hell of a lot safer. Any time I go to a fast-food joint with good straws, I grab a handful before I head out.

Arby's and Chik-Fil-A have really good straws for it -- nice and thick. Avoid McDonald's -- those stripes are apparently just painted on, and it's annoying when they start to peel off.
posted to Ask Metafilter by Doofus Magoo at 3:42 AM on April 29, 2008

For what it's worth, when we moved about six months ago, we did a change of address to a PO box. From that point, we filtered out all the mail that warranted us doing an address change directly with the sender (bills, magazines, etc).

After about four months in the new place, once we had done all the address-changing we needed to, we just canceled the PO box.
posted to Ask Metafilter by Doofus Magoo at 11:00 AM on April 24, 2008

Seconding jenkinsEar -- let the market decide (and do it on a year-to-year basis). Sure, you can alternate picking weeks, but that doesn't allow for the variations in the degrees to which each family wants the place in various weeks. Do I want to shell out $40 to get Fourth of July weekend, or $5/week for the entire month of August? It all depends on how much I value the various weeks (relative both to other weeks, and to the extent the other family values it). That method is an easy way to... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by Doofus Magoo at 5:06 PM on April 21, 2008

Seconding toilet paper, and in the same vein, paper towels. Pens, especially if you write left-handed. Coffee. Batteries.
posted to Ask Metafilter by Doofus Magoo at 3:59 PM on April 13, 2008

Not really answering the question per se, and I apologize for that in advance, but you could always buy yourself a tabletop range with one or two burners -- they only run about $30.
posted to Ask Metafilter by Doofus Magoo at 10:22 AM on March 26, 2008

DVDShrink is good (and free!), but I've found that CloneDVD + AnyDVD works a lot better, but it's not free (although there is a 21-day free trial). Like DVDShrink, however, I don't believe they can use the DivX codec for compressing the video, so you're probably limited to its native compression (which seems to work fine for the backups I've made, even at compression rates up to 40-45%).

NB: As best as I can understand the relationship between the two, AnyDVD will remove... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by Doofus Magoo at 10:16 AM on March 26, 2008

So you've got a sheet of sales data. And for each item in that sheet, you want to pull information for each product sold from the inventory page (based on the "code" that is shared between both sheets)?

If so, then you want to look into the VLOOKUP formula in Excel, for which there are Open Office equivalents.
posted to Ask Metafilter by Doofus Magoo at 3:19 PM on March 24, 2008

To keep the lookup array static, interpolate dollar signs in the address depending on whether you want the row, column or both to not change on copying the formula. E.g., instead of
=VLOOKUP(Sales!A1,Inventory!A1:C500,2)... you'd do this:
=VLOOKUP(Sales!A1,Inventory!$A$1:$C$500,2)This will keep the "A1:C500" reference constant regardless of the cell(s) to which you copy the formula. (You're prefacing the column letter with a $, because you want it to remain... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by Doofus Magoo at 6:20 PM on March 24, 2008 marked best answer

Option 1:
Take the hard copy to Kinko's, copy all of the pages (at 64%, if memory serves), and then manually paste them onto 8.5x11 pages (two per side, double-sided). Copy as needed. I worked at Kinko's in the mid-90's, and we had people coming in all the time that wanted exactly what you need, and this is how we did it.

Option 2:
There are printers that do this automatically (we've got a giant Konica in the back of our office that has a... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by Doofus Magoo at 10:30 AM on March 24, 2008

Seconding galactain, maybe. VLOOKUP will do exactly what you need if you have the same "key" (e.g., name) in both sheets. No need to go all fancy Web 2.0 with it.

If, however, all you have are the names, and you'll need to look up the phone numbers for each person, that's a bit trickier. You'd either need to (a) write a script (VBA, Perl, whatever) that looks up each name on something like yellowpages.com; or (b) find a downloadable database of all phone... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by Doofus Magoo at 6:21 AM on March 18, 2008

I worked on a job for a client that wanted this very thing -- ebay's search functionality wasn't good enough, as he wanted to know THE VERY INSTANT something was posted that matched his criteria (I think ebay's notifications are only daily) so that he could snatch it up. I wrote him a few Perl scripts to do what he wanted, but then it ended up turning into a full-fledged (subscription-based) site that offers this functionality plus bid-sniping ability. If you're interested in the address, MeMail... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by Doofus Magoo at 8:55 AM on March 14, 2008

It's www.bidtrix.com.

I think that generally the auctions my client was interested in were exclusively BIN auctions, otherwise the site isn't much more useful than ebay's notifications. We had it set up where he could reply to the email notification (which got sent to him via SMS) to place the BIN bid, but I don't think that's part of the subscription model on the site.
posted to Ask Metafilter by Doofus Magoo at 10:11 AM on March 14, 2008

I think part of it could be done in JavaScript, but to a certain extent Jairus is correct -- you never want to rely solely on JS to validate forms.

What I assume you're looking for is two form fields -- one being a text box where they type in the amount, and then a dropdown listing all of the potential "premiums." Changing the available values in the dropdown based on what the user types in the textbox is pretty easy (Google for "javascript dynamic... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by Doofus Magoo at 5:33 AM on March 13, 2008

The Web Developer toolbar lets you disable caching. Is it possible you've done so?

(Slaps forehead, slinks away)

enn, if you're ever in Harrisburg, email me and I'll buy you a beer.
posted to Ask Metafilter by Doofus Magoo at 12:10 PM on March 12, 2008

Kind of surprised suki mentioned The Possum without pointing out his classic "Tennessee Whiskey:"

You're as smooth as Tennessee Whiskey
You're as sweet as strawberry wine
You're as warm as a glass of brandy
And I'll stay stoned on your love all the time
posted to Ask Metafilter by Doofus Magoo at 3:59 AM on March 8, 2008

Same here, racingjs. Every six months our office produces a series of 67 Word documents that run about 400+ pages each. Each has about 40-50 embedded images or graphs, and literally hundreds of tables. I've never had a problem, but we also generate 99% of the document through code. The 1% we do manually at the end, however, we've never had problems with.

If you do go with Word, I can't nth enough what tomcooke said about turning on picture placeholders.... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by Doofus Magoo at 10:46 AM on March 6, 2008

Mmmm yeah, the PhonoLog (and it's crappy cousin, the VideoLog) -- good times for a budding music geek working at the mall during his high school years. :)

I can't believe nobody's mentioned Gracenote (formerly CDDB) yet.
posted to Ask Metafilter by Doofus Magoo at 10:32 AM on February 7, 2008

Are you looking for recommendations on a database system you're planning to populate yourself, or an off-the-shelf dataset you can use? If the latter, I have no recommendations.

Access is generally about sixth on the list of possible RDMSs I'll recommend to a client, but I think in your case it might be a good option. It doesn't scale terribly well and its use of VB functions instead of standard SQL is usually a deal-killer for me. However, if you don't already know SQL,... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by Doofus Magoo at 3:48 AM on January 30, 2008 marked best answer

I think this is probably the page the OP is talking about (extra 'N' in the domain, extra 'T' in the page name).

I'm not having any problems copy-and-pasting (using Ctrl-C), although it is trying (/snicker) to disable right-clicking.

I would imagine that preventing copying something (or trying to; as Tuwa pointed out, circumventing it is usually pretty trivial.... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by Doofus Magoo at 5:20 AM on January 28, 2008

If it were me, I'd do it in Perl, but I can't imagine it's that much different using Ruby.

Audioscrobbler.net has an API that you can use to fetch the tag information for a given track -- see here for an example of the XML file returned when calling the API for Metallica's Enter Sandman.

From there, you'd need to parse the XML file to get the three tags, and then find a Ruby library to use that XML data to modify the tag information. Here's a... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by Doofus Magoo at 5:23 AM on January 24, 2008 marked best answer

Oh, and here's a list of all the last.fm data that Audioscrobbler makes available via a web API.
posted to Ask Metafilter by Doofus Magoo at 5:25 AM on January 24, 2008 marked best answer

Yeah, I've always seen it done as part of the first name, and assumed that it was for the reason decathecting mentioned -- to maintain the consistency of alphabetization.

Thinking about it sort-of-logically, I would think that the "Junior" modifies "John," not "Smith." That is, it's a quasi-different first name (but identical last name), not a quasi-different last name (but identical first name).
posted to Ask Metafilter by Doofus Magoo at 7:42 AM on January 22, 2008 marked best answer

If she's only going to be in the house for another two years, are the two of you positive that the monthly savings on the mortgage (x24) will outweigh the costs of the refinancing (also taking into account the gains that could be earned from investing that money for two years)?
posted to Ask Metafilter by Doofus Magoo at 5:45 PM on January 16, 2008

I live in Pennsylvania, and we've got a thriving rosemary plant in our front yard that's been going great throughout the winter. The thing looks like it's at least several years old (we only moved in in August). To top it off, it's on the northwest side of the house, so it's not exactly receiving full sun all day.
posted to Ask Metafilter by Doofus Magoo at 7:24 AM on January 13, 2008

I notice that during those same years (2001-2002), there's also a larger-than-normal increase in the number of property and drug crimes -- an increase of 39,000 between the two, which is roughly the same size as the decrease in the number of public order crimes.

Perhaps there was a change in the classification system used by BJS so that some offenses formerly classified as "public order" were newly-classified as "drug" or "property" offenses?... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by Doofus Magoo at 7:22 AM on January 13, 2008

For what it's worth, Wikipedia says that 1440x900 is WXGA+. Doesn't give you an answer, but it may make your searches easier.
posted to Ask Metafilter by Doofus Magoo at 11:26 AM on January 11, 2008

There's something similar here -- a list of resolutions by which you can shop for a projector, and they don't even list 1440x900 as an option.
posted to Ask Metafilter by Doofus Magoo at 11:35 AM on January 11, 2008

I'm with cushie -- I think "crossing the picket line" is more of a figure of speech referring to supporting the management position (either by working at or patronizing their business) during a strike, than the physical act of walking past workers on strike.
posted to Ask Metafilter by Doofus Magoo at 12:23 PM on January 8, 2008

It's not going to quite have the same impact as it did for those of us who played them "back in the day," since she's in an entirely different zeitgeist than we were at the time. That said, here are a few:

• Castle Wolfenstein for the Apple ][
• Zork for the PC
• Grand Theft Auto I for the PC
• Any of the Ultima games
• Goldeneye for the N64

posted to Ask Metafilter by Doofus Magoo at 10:20 AM on January 8, 2008

Thanks for the reminder, MaHaGoN -- can't forget Wizardry (Apple ][) and Bard's Tale (lots).
posted to Ask Metafilter by Doofus Magoo at 10:32 AM on January 8, 2008

Public places (e.g., parks) close all the time. I'm not sure why a school would be any different.
posted to Ask Metafilter by Doofus Magoo at 5:24 PM on January 5, 2008

My wife and I sold used books on Ebay for a several years. Here are some tips:

1) Learn how to grade books and accurately describe their condition.

2) Learn what a "book club edition" of a book is, and avoid them.

3) Learn how to find out a book's printing history by looking at it.

4) Goodwill and Salvation Army used to be gold mines, but I think they've gotten a lot smarter about... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by Doofus Magoo at 10:30 AM on January 5, 2008

I distinctly recall a couple of friends staring at me dumbfoundedly in 10th grade when I pronounced someone (perhaps myself, ironically) 'OM-nee-sigh-ent' rather than 'om-NISH-ent'
posted to Ask Metafilter by Doofus Magoo at 9:10 AM on December 30, 2007

I think by "lab" the OP meant "lap," desuetude.
posted to Ask Metafilter by Doofus Magoo at 10:29 AM on December 28, 2007

Merely by having the discussion, you've already acquiesced to working on her terms. Even if you were to point out one of the countless examples cited upthread, there's no doubt in my mind she'd rebut it with how, well, that's different than what you're doing.

As a freelancer, the most valuable thing you can learn is how to trust your gut when it comes to taking on new clients. There's a little voice in your head that will occasionally scream "RUN!... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by Doofus Magoo at 10:16 AM on December 25, 2007

Seconding WWW::Mechanize. Or, if you don't feel like dealing with the overhead of learning a language you may not know, go post a job at one of the many freelance coding sites out there -- this is probably something you can get done for about $20.
posted to Ask Metafilter by Doofus Magoo at 3:14 PM on December 24, 2007

Lawson's? (UK)

There also appears to be a site called natural-organic.co.uk that has it, but their site is broken. Here's a cached version of their product page -- it's listed as "Cover Flex Silicon Food Covers pack of 3" near the bottom of the page.... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by Doofus Magoo at 7:46 AM on December 24, 2007

How does the data need to be cleaned? Specifically, how does it look after importing, and how would you like it to look after importing? Is it that the data are being imported incorrectly, or that you need to perform calculations post-import, or do you just need to "pretty up" the results?
posted to Ask Metafilter by Doofus Magoo at 8:57 AM on December 21, 2007

I had a tobacco store in Arlington charge my debit card about a year and a half after several purchases I made with them; I tried to contest it with my bank, and they essentially said there was no time limit on it. Your mileage will almost certainly vary, however, based on your bank and whether there are any consumer protection laws in your state limiting the length of time a merchant can wait before submitting the charge.
posted to Ask Metafilter by Doofus Magoo at 4:26 PM on December 20, 2007