Dr. Tom

The General wasn't getting his share of the profits, that's what.

Meh, somebody slip Death Row Bubba a shiv for this cocksucker...

The preseason should be two games. There's no reason that grown men getting paid millions of dollars a year need more than two games to learn the system and get in shape (and they should already be in shape when they arrive to camp). Colleges don't play four bloody exhibition games a season. It's a way to make easy money off the fans, but if prominent players keep getting hurt in meaningless games, the owners may need to reevaluate that equation.

Now that I've looked into this a little more, it's definitely a pyramid scheme. I wonder how much longer Paypal's involvement will last, which may be part of the scheme itself. Closed. And let's keep this place spam-free. Send emails if you want to be a spammer, like every other asshole in the world who does it.

All signs point to no.

RAY~! > John Madden. This is the year the so-called "jinx" ends. I think Kilborn has done a decent job so far. He seemed a little overwhelmed at first, but now he's got his feet under him and is doing fine. The rust was apparent for a while, though.

Al, I wouldn't say it was a rules change, but I'm pretty sure Blyleven was responsible for the Balk Craze of 1988. I remember Whitey Herzog going crazy in the 1987 World Series, insisting Blyleven was not coming to a complete stop with his hands from the stretch position. The next season, that rule was enforced to a ludicrous degree, resulting in about a billion balks called. Sanity returned the following season. Other than that, spot-on.

Alex Rodriguez. Yes, he's a great player, and he certainly deserved a lucrative contract that offseason. Rangers owner Tom Hicks, however, eager to prove he is a spoon in a drawer full of knives, outbid the next closest team by over $70 million for A-Rod's services. Hicks saw the $200 million total as a bump in the road, and went $52 million past that, when there was no indication he needed to spend anywhere near that much. The ridiculous A-Rod contract spawned more fiscal irresponsibility in baseball, which has since been corrected. The contract proved to be an albatross for the Rangers, as paying one guy, no matter good he might be, $25 million a year meant they could do little to improve the rest of the team. Texas was actively bad despite having the league's best player on the field everyday, and it was entirely due to his absurd contract. This offseason, Texas tried to relieve themselves of that burden. They almost traded A-Rod to the Red Sox, which angered fellow elite SS Nomar Garciaparra. Recently, Nomar was traded in an awful deal for the Red Sox, getting them two players barely above replacment level. Rodriguez ended up with the Yankees, moving himself to third base so defensive liability Derek Jeter could continue to pollute the SS position. The Rangers got Alfonso Soriano in the deal, but they're also paying $7 million of A-Rod's salary for the balance of the contract. Once Soriano gets what he's worth, they will have saved very little. All because of a stupid quarter-billion dollar contract.

Y'know, I was actually going to mention that you should make sure there are no floppy disks in the A: drive and no non-bootable CDs in the CD drive. While 9X operating systems used to give the "non-system disk or disk error" message, NT-based OSes usually give you the NTLDR message. I can't tell you how many panicked people I've calmed down by simply having them eject a floppy disk.

This could possibly be because the Olympics are a cynical, for-profit commercial venture, and usually suck.

This is most likely a bad hard drive. Go into BIOS and see if the hard drive is being detected there at all. If it's not, then your drive is dead, and the data on it is most likely irretrievable without spending a lot of money. This, of course, presumes all connections and cables are good, so you should make sure of that before going out and getting a new drive. Well, reformatting WILL solve this problem, but it might not be necessary. If you have the original XP Pro CD, insert it into the CD drive and boot from it. When it loads, go into the repair console and try to fix the install. Missing files can sometimes be replaced this way, but it's far from 100% successful. Not good. Loud hard drive usually = bad hard drive. "Horrendous clicking sounds," in particular, usually mean a problem with either the heads or the reader arm. If you can, hook it up on the primary channel and see if the same thing happens. Longer IDE cables can be found, and they're usually necessary to add drives to Dells, in my experience. Make sure you get an ATA-100 cable with 80 wires, too. That's very odd. I'd definitely run a chkdsk on that and see what happens. If it reports any bad sectors, as a new hard drive, it was defective out of the box. It doesn't happen a lot anymore, but it still happens. At my previous job, we lost six hard drives in a series of Dells within the first month they were deployed. Simple: don't shut down the PC. Try hooking the drive up on the primary channel and determining whether or not it's defective. It sounds like it is, and that might be the cause of your blue screen error message.

I imagine Tom'd have to do it. Try shooting him a PM. I'll do it too...let's see who's banned first! Not going to happen. "Ban" yourselves from the folder by not clicking on it. Then who's gonna hold my hand when we cross the street later? 'flow is right. We NEED THAT, G00D SiR! Really, I'm not going to make a new member group and a new permission mask just because two people don't want to go to a folder they can very easily avoid on their own. Suspensions from the WWE folder are punitive actions, not the result of people deciding they don't want to go there anymore. I think it's commendable that you don't want to participate in a folder you don't like, but it's going to be your willpower and restraint that hold you to that choice, not a new banned group.

Huh? Clinton was very popular, and I have no doubt he would have won a third term in 2000 if he were able to run for one.

Interesting sit-and-go on UB last night. I was up about 500 chips and had a K-10 suited on the button, so I called. A 10 flopped, as well as the 9 and 3 of my suit. It got checked to me, and with top pair and four to the flush, I bet at it. Three people called. The turn was the Ace of my suit, giving me the nut flush. The foon to my left bets big, another guy folds, the player to my right goes all-in, and I raise to put the player to my left all-in, too. The guy to my left has a smaller flush, and the guy to my right has 10-9, giving him 2 pair. So of course, a 9 falls on the river to give him the full house. I end up with a puny 450 chips since I won the side pot, and I now had a little more than half the chips the next lowest player had. I'm down to 350 when I double up with Aces under, and from there, I start picking up pots, soon getting back over 1000, and eventually becoming the chip leader again. It gets down to three of us, ensuring that I'll make money on the tourney, and the three of us play for quite a while before one guy finally gets eliminated. The other remaining player and I trade the chip lead back and forth for a while before he wins a pretty big pot. I have K-10 suited again, and raise out of the big blind. He calls, and the flop is A-3-A. He checks, and since I figure the odds are very small that he has an A in heads-up, I go all-in. He calls, and of course, has the Ace. I can't complain, since I still made money, played in some very good short-handed pots, and rallied back from being by far the low man at the table to the chip leader. Anyway... It depends. Ring games can get our of hand if one person is allowed to stockpile all the chips. If you make people buy in from the chip leader sometimes, this can be managed. In a tournament, it's fine (and expected) that one person will have a large chip lead, but in a ring game, it's unbalancing. If that's managed well, I prefer ring games, but only slightly.

It sounded like a scam before. Now it sounds like a scam involving Paypal.

I imagine Tom'd have to do it. Try shooting him a PM. I'll do it too...let's see who's banned first! Not going to happen. "Ban" yourselves from the folder by not clicking on it.

I hate you.

I'd love to see him in a RAVENS~! uniform. We have some young receivers who could learn a lot from an old reliable pro like Tim Brown. And we could do a lot worse than lining Brown up in the slot as the third receiver. He can still run the routes and catch the ball, which might make him the best receiver on the team.

Click here, my children Apparently, this is getting a LOT of hits, so be patient if it doesn't open the first time. This is a VERY funny little movie that spoofs both candidates extremely well.

Politicians lie. Sometimes, part of being Presidential requires lying. Maybe Bush lied, and maybe he acted on information he believed to be accurate; in the end, it doesn't really matter. To me, Bush could've said we were going into Iraq because Saddam had cornered the market on hats. Removing Saddam was the right thing to do. Why we did it is immaterial.

Do any of you (except Cerebus) know the first thing about intelligence-gathering and counterterrorism? "OMG WE WUZ ALREADY ATTAX0RED~!!!!!11" That kind of shortsighted, idiotic thinking will lead to thousands more deaths. It's a good thing cretins like you have no power in this country.

So you'd prefer Saddam still be in power? Tremendous.

Isn't that kind of the point? Or do I live in a time where guys running against each other are supposed to agree on everything...? That's not the point. Voters should be voting FOR something and someone, not against something or someone. A lot of things happened in 1992, but I think Bill Clinton tapped into a lot of people who simply didn't want to vote for George Bush. Thus, many votes for Clinton were not really votes for Clinton, but a vote for anyone but Bush. Kerry might run into the same thing, though unlike Clinton, he lacks the charisma to really magnetize people.