HarryWeezer

Those are some beautiful girls Mule. Good thing they take after their mother...

Milky - why am i an idiot?? can anyone answer to that?? hahahahah btw i promise im not drunk!! haha It's genetic - not a damn thing you can do about it. No doubt, like the rest of us, you are descended from a long line of idiots...

Be great to have you back Mule - keep your shit in order!!!

Yo Collins, welcome. Please remember in COD2 to render a salute to all ADM, after which they will "salute" you back - heh heh.

Ey? Ey? Welcome!!!!!

I can see some of you folks need to download Fences - a program this thread put me on to. Great way to clean up the desktop and get things organized. Thanks to whoever mentioned that!!!

We're putting the sqeeze on them. I see voting has picked up for other clans near the top so they're trying to overtake us. We WILL NOT let that happen - that's an order!!!!! Now get off my freakin' grass.

To protect yourself, you should wrap your head in aluminum foil first thing tomorrow morning, and leave it on all day. Men might also wrap their "junk" while women are advised to so protect their nips.

HI Moonpie - welcome aboard...

Have a great birthday Van!!!

Teachers are grossly overpaid in most districts. In the district Shamu mentions, teachers average $83,000. They work an average of 190 days a year. That's $436 A DAY, plus benefits the average taxpayer who pays their salaries could never hope to obtain. And to top it off, they are job protected pretty much regardless of performance through tenure. The most power unions in most states are the teachers. And without question, their primary concern is not the students, but their wallets (may not be the case for your wife MoeBetta; I'm just generalizing here.) Meanwhile, the quality of education in this country continues to deteriorate. Teachers say it's because of bad/poor parents who don't get involved; but there are plenty of poor districts that are succeeding that put the lie to this claim. I've watched this for decades, up close. It began - doesn't it always - with federal intervention and so-called standards. To meet the standards, schools began teaching to the tests, or just plain lying about student performance. We began to graduate kids who hadn't earned the diploma; then went on to colleges who also just passed them along, and over the past few decades we flooded schools with "teachers" who don't know shit from shinola, who almost never get fired. There's only one way to fix the horrible mess our schools have become: compete against them. Take that $15-$20,000 per student and hand it to private schools who hire on the basis ability, and fire on the basis of inability; which are performance driven because they must compete. And let the public systems die the death they deserve. I know it's hard for some teachers in shit districts and I know there are a few districts where teachers aren't sufficiently paid. Easy to fix: move. That's what the rest of us do to find work. Or do something else. But the bottom line is too many teachers are doing an incompetent job and taking us to the cleaners for it. In Tennessee, a right-to-work state, teachers can't be forced to join a union but we still have them and a bill has been introduced to outlaw collective bargaining. Teachers responded that that collective bargaining improves the quality of education. So we took a look at how students are performing in school with, and without collective bargaining. Guess what, in district without collective bargaining, students do better. We need to outlaw tenure, and we need to outlaw ALL public sector unions. No one who works for the taxpayers should be allowed to unionize.

That's not only funny, but what an incredible voice!!!

No, the speed at which you download (bandwidth) depends on whatever arrangement you have with your provider. Hardware-accelerated browsers allow your system (depending on system hardware of course) to work faster compiling graphically-intensive websites. The data stream to your system can actually improve, because data is handled more efficiently by such browsers.

Firefox launched hardware acceleration in version 4.0 last September. Chrome will have it in version 7.0, not yet released.

We've had some folks with compability problems with our web site using Internet Explorer 8. If you're running Vista or W7 and using IE for your browser, you should immediately upgrade to IE9, which uses hardware acceleration and presents a dramatic improvement in site compilation speed. This is Release Candidate 1 for IE9, just released last week. Get it here: http://windows.microsoft.com/ie9. If you're still on XP, you should be using Firefox 4.0 which also employs hardware acceleration. Release candidate status means a program is through its beta testing period and all but finished. There may be a few quirks, and a release candidate is designed to find them. But I've not had a problem with IE9 RC1 and it will be a simple upgrade to the final version when it's released. IE9 leaves previous versions in the dust. Hardware acceleration opens the door to developers to offer complex graphics and images - the more powerful your GPU, the faster these sites will display - hardware acceleration offloads site compilation from your CPU or central processor, to your graphics processor. IE9 is much cleaner than IE8 with with less clutter at the top of the browser. The home, tools and favorites buttons are at top right and include the zoom and print functions which are separate buttons in IE8. Other than your search window, there’s nothing else to pull your attention away from sites unless you install various third-party toolbars. The IE9 address bar is now called "one box" because in addition to URLs, you may use it to search the web, check your site history and see frequently visited sites from one location. Notifications now appear at the bottom of the browser instead of as pop-ups. There's a site indicator bar that shows how often you visit various sites, and an add-on performance advisor that indictes which add-ons are affecting performance. IE9 offers tab management improvements: you may drag tabs to a new window or dock them to the side of the display, and you can snap two tabbed pages together in a single view. You also may pin favorite sites directly to the taskbar for one-click access, and keep track of anything you’ve downloaded through a download manager that lists all files you’ve downloaded, where they are located, and which allows you pause and restart a download.

Be careful using that stuff. I once tried to spray my monitor with that while I was reading some posts here and I had the can turned around. I kept running around in circles for about 15 minutes until it evaporated, trying to get away from myself.

That's great Rick. She's a sweetheart...

TBB Now if we could only teach Wezzer to do that... Teach me to fetch? Hah hah, read on... I have 11 brothers and sisters and when we were kids we'd play "cootie ball." We'd take a ball, pretend it was covered with cooties and hit a sibling with it, thus infecting them with cooties. They in turn would have to chase down another sibling and hit them with the ball to get rid of the cooties. About 1966 or so a few of us, then grown, got together for a reunion and somebody hit somebody with a small, hollow "cootie ball." After we tired of that, we all headed home and whoever had it put it in the hubcap of another sibling and called them when they got home. So, that sibling had no choice but send it to another sibling to get rid of the cooties. Thus began a family tradition that continued for about 30 years before the cootie ball was finally lost in the mail. In that time, that single cootie ball got sent around the world - to me in Vietnam, to a brother on board ship in the Med, to a sister in Guam, etc. It got packaged inside casette tapes, inside a hallowed out book, inside a cereal box, stashed in a turn signal light that was removed and replaced not two feet away from the brother who actually slept in the back of his station wagon to make sure no one would hide it in his car; even hidden inside a can of a favorite baked bean sold only in Northern NY, where a brother carefully removed the label, cut the can in half, put the cootie ball in the can, weighted it so you couldn't tell the difference, and glued the label back on. At least every Christmas it found its way to another sibling inside a Christmas gift. But I claim title to the best exchange of the cootie ball. On Dec. 23 one year, I drove 10 hours in NNY in the snow and cold to my brother's house, arriving at midnight. I put the cootie ball on his car antenna, turned around, and drove 10 hours home. So I know how to fetch.

Edited by me to remove references to web site. We do not allow advertising for commercial services here - free or otherwise. Thanks.

Yo JarHead - great to see you back!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Beautiful little girl - congrats!!!!!!

Yup: I'm all for gun control. The more the citizenry is armed, the more crime goes down.

Happy Birthday DeeJay. As an official XI Old Fart, may I advise a large supply of Post-Its. You use these to give yourself instructions for the future. In time, you will find them plastered everywhere around your monitor, on your mirrors, and stuck in various pockets. I can't live without them.

Yes, with a new key you may play on the servers (though there are some previously permanently banned folks we don't ever want to see back here; but that doesn't include anyone dropped from XI membership due to a discovered PB ban;) ; no, a PB ban is not tied to any system hardware.