Anyway, he doesn't seem to be in any hurry to get started. I guess I'll play phone tag with him for another week or two before starting down the list again.
A few years ago I could have rewired the house myself, but the city code office now prohibits that. You have to be a state-certified electrician. I checked into that, too. It turns out it's a guild system, like the Middle Ages. Sort of like a union, without the union part. Some testing is involved, but mostly it requires several years as an employee of someone else with a license before you can apply for a license of your own. Nice self-perpetuating closed shop there.
> Interesting. Did Hoyle have anything to do with that movie the > Andromeda Strain?As far as I know, no. That was Michael Crichton's film.
What's odd is that most SF plotlines have been hammered to death, other than the aliens-contact-us-by-radio plotline. There are darned few of those - the three by Hoyle, "The Ophiuchi Hotline" by John Varley, "Macroscope" by Piers Anthony, one by James P. Hogan that I don't remember the title of, and a handful of others.
> The terrorist watch list now contains more than 900,000 names.Someone really believes there are almost a million terrorists who might be boarding an aircraft?
More likely, it's the Homeland Gestapo adding random names to their watch list to keep their funding. "A million terrorists! Give us more money!"
> > I notice many people driving quite and dangerously slow > > these days on the highway. The speed differentials with these > > turkeys and the majority has caused some very close calls > > lately, besides making it more difficult to merge, etc.Come to Arkansas. Acceleration is Evil; it will take them most of a light to cross an intersection, they creep up onramps at 20mph, etc. Then they creeeeeeep up to 85+mph in a 55 zone. I've been in heavy traffic that was rolling along bumper to bumper at 100mph, 45 over the posted limit. Every now and then there's a 30-car clusterfuck and a few hours of road blockage.
Every time the price of gas takes a jump they drive *FASTER*. I used to wonder, but now I just accept is as one of the unknowable mysteries of the universe.
> > Almost any IT department worth its salt is deploying virtualization > > technology today to reduce power usage, make server and OS deployments > > more flexible, and better use storage and systems resources.
"Enquiring minds want to know."
> > But the NSA realized that this benefit of virtualization also introduced > > a new potential threat. After all, Simard said, "graphics cards and > > network cards today are really miniature computers that see everything > > in all the VMs."And golly gee, the NSA also pioneered the trick of using fancy antennas to read the EM signals right out of the video board...
> > employees, as well as other military and intelligence agents, access > > multiple secure networks from a single computer. It used to be that each > > network had to be accessed from a separate computerAnd there's damned good reason for that. There's no PC-based OS and hardware platform I know of that is 100% safe from hackery. When you have physically separate networks, you're guaranteed safe. That means separate wiring, routers, etc. too.
Looks like it's boiling down to convenience vs. security, and convenience is winning.
> > That's where IBM and AMD come in. AMD's scientists had similar concerns > > to the NSA's, so they worked with the NSA to design an authentication > > mechanism at the chip level that would be able to control what hardware > > could do with the virtualization engines that rely on their AMD-V > > on-chip virtualization assistance technology.Dave puts 10 quatloos on the real reason coming down to "hardware support for Microsoft Digital Rights Management," plus support for hardware copy protection.
> > Well, I installed the beta version of Microsoft’s new Internet Explorer > > 8, touted as the most compatible version of IE yet, and LGF—which works > > almost identically in all other major browsers—is almost completely > > broken in this new “ultra-compatible” version of Microsoft’s hellishCompatible with what? Microsoft FrontPage?
[recently having gone through Browser Hell with the cable company and the phone company...]
> > Doing the Linux From Scratch thing this > > time, I figured I've been barking about it long enough that it's time > > to shut up or put up.I started about a year ago, then the hassle of setting up a second machine diverted me. I've already set up VMware to make another try.
I tried Bochs, QEMU, and several others. QEMU worked, but very slowly. XEN wouldn't work at all, even in paravirtualization mode. VMware was the only thing that actually worked and did so at a reasonable speed, plus you can use the freeware version if you use the QEMU tools to make the disk images.
User Mode Linux looked like a bang-up way to do it, but it was too slow to be worthwhile, even though it came up and ran without any trouble.
With the new system I should be able to use XEN, which would beat the hell out of VMware.
You can download the packages from the links in the LFS book, but some of them will be 404, or will require different patches than they provide, etc. Ask me how I know. I strongly recommend using the package set from the demo liveCD.
Looks like the jhalfs thing is functional nowadays, to build it all from scripts.
It takes a couple of hours to build the freakin' kernel now; I bet it would take a couple of days to build xorg and KDE 3.5...
Gentoo seems to be LFS on steroids. I approve of the idea, but I have major problems with their web site. I admit I'm not good with GUI stuff, but the Gentoo page is a big splat of shit and then I go around and around in circles. The live CD boots to a command line, but I never could figure out how to build an X desktop on top of it.
After five or six years it got replaced with a candy-bar phone. I forget the brand now. The candy-bar phone required going through two or three submenus to lock it, instead of lock-on-close like the old phone, and it required a similar hassle to unlock. And the number of thy digits must be five. Not three, or four, or six, but five. But other than that it worked okay. I could just use the arrow key to scroll through the dialing directory, and if I missed a call, I could just hit "send" and it would call the last missed number. Downside, any time you hit a key combination it didn't understand, it attempted to contact XCingular by internet for "online help" which cost something like a dollar a minute, and couldn't be turned off.
The third phone was a Kyocera egg phone circa 2005 or so, from Alltel. I really wanted a digital camera built into the phone; other than that, I didn't really care. The Kyocera has literally hours of talk time, it's tiny, and it's quite rugged. The candy-bar phone's belt clip hung the phone low, gunfighter style. The Kyocera is at the exact height to be knocked off my belt by engine stands, doorknobs, etc. It has concrete scars all over it, but it still works.
It doesn't have a camera. I wanted one; sometimes I see things it would be nifty to have a picture of, like the guy riding a Harley down I-30 wearing a gorilla suit, complete with feet and head. We spent probably eight hours going through the options offered by the cellular provider, downloading online manuals where available, etc. Anything with a camera was way more expensive, nothing they offered had USB, and as for other local providers, most of them either turned the camera parts off and then charged by the month to re-enable them, or they set them up so they could only use "cellular internet" to send the pictures to their server (about fifty cents per shot, depending on resolution) where I could download them from someplace. After a while we said "screw it" and just took the default phone, which was the Kyocera.
The Kyocera has been a hate/hate relationship for the last four or five years. Everything is time-delay. Most of the buttons are mystery icons, which are NOT identified in the pathetic multilingual manual, and they're multifunction according to what mode the phone is in. No VCR was ever more obtuse. The main user input is a square rocker-thing with a button in the middle. It's time-delay, and outrageously stiff, and you have to sort of sneak your thumb up over it sideways and use the side of your nail, being very careful not to hit the super-sensitive center button. Any mistake and it bumps you all the way out and you have to dick with the damned rocker again.
If you press and hold down the front of the rocker for, oh, five seconds, it'll drop into the dialing directory. Any other direction and it starts "media services" and tries to connect to the internet, or drops you into "texting." We cancel these unwanted and insanely expensive "services" regularly, because they keep coming back on the bill...
The default display was something that look like bugs smashed on a windshield. Some kind of pastel icons, I guess. I seriously doubt they would make any sense even if someone had "color vision." I finally managed to get it to display its functions in a simple list.
If it misses more than one call, it only knows about the last one. And if I open the phone without looking at the little 12-character external display, I'll never know there were any missed calls, because dumps everything. You can go through about fifteen time-delay keystrokes and submenus down to recall that information, but piss on that.
As with EVERY cellphone I've ever used, there's not enough feedback through the earpiece; I have to be careful not to wind up shouting at the phone like the other f*cktards.
The microphone is probably six inches from my mouth, which means there's some truly impressive DSP going on. There's some more on the earpiece side; down in a submenu you can toggle some kind of ambient noise correction. This A) doesn't actually work and B) can't actually be turned off; the toggle just reduces its effect slightly. Try to talk in a noisy car, and goes into super-powermike-squelch mode, and all that comes out of the earpiece is barking noises, no matter what the volume level is set to.
Last week AB decided to get new phones. This time I didn't even bother to shop, and just told her to pick whatever she liked. She brought home a pair of Motorolas, less than half the thickness of the Kyocera. Bug-splat user interface. ANIMATED bug-splats. In color. I wound up reading the English part of the manual twice before trying to set it up.
You could make parts of it show text, but the rest was only bug splats. When you opened it, or tried to do anything, the default for EVERYTHING was "internet." No, I'm not paying forty dollars a month for something I have on the desktop already. And it couldn't be disabled, they just charged you per-minute for the "service". Second level down was "texting", at fifty cents a pop.
I eventually told AB to take the phone back; there was a 15-day grace period. They turned the Kyocera back on. The killing blow was, unlike (apparently) most people, I want a telephone. I want to scroll through the dialing list and push a button, and talk.
The Motorola wouldn't do that. It took EIGHT time-delay keypresses just to GET to the dialing directory ("contacts"), every menu animated, then keep punching the wiggly animated (magnified, too) highlight bar down to the number I wanted. Absofuckinglutely not.
Trying to guess how a phone works is a waste of time; none of this was apparent from the manual, should I have bothered to locate and download it ahead of time. I'd already been through that on the previous phone. And I don't have hours to stand around in some phone store full of asshole Radio Shack rejects randomly punching buttons. Who knows how things will be when the hated Kyocera finally craps out - forty keystrokes to get to dial mode, then enter the number from a piece of paper kept in my wallet? WTF? Half of the people I see anymore have a phone stuck to the side of their head, do they go through all this shit to make a call, or just wait for one to come in and then hang with it the rest of the day?
As the capper, Alltel apparently turned "voicemailses" back on when they switched the phone back. This generally takes one to two hours of AB's time, with multiple phone calls to Alltel's "support" people, who always start off by saying they can't turn the "service" off...
> > I'd like to be able to use a 9-pin Panasonic printer on it, but can find > > no drivers or advice on the web on how to do it. Is it my imagination, > > or does CUPS on this distro support only printers that can accept > > postscript?"Printing from Unix. Very dangerous. You go first."
If there aren't any CUPS drivers for that printer, see if the printer will emulate an Epson or IBM of similar vintage. Panasonic was always a little weird, and usually worked better when you flipped the DIP switches to make it look like something else.
If you'd be okay with just a line printer instead of graphics, just talking to the "lp" device should work. Do a "dmesg | grep lp" and a "dmesg | grep parallel" to see if there's a parallel port and lp device configured in the kernel - many distributions don't bother with lineprinter support any more.
Printing from Unix is completely configurable. You can print through any output device, talk to printers or print queues on different computers, filter and reformat the output, recode from one type of printer commands to another, and send it to anything from a Teletype to a mainframe output processor to a PostScript laser... but it requires going through a dozen levels of poorly-documented tools that are implemented differently on different systems. CUPS has its warts, but it's a big help when it works.
> > The global scientific communityLet me translate that for you:
"Grant whores at universities."
>> None of the local stores carries Makita any more. > Jacksonville Fastenal and Home Depot stores are > listed as dealers on the Makita website?You're so cute when you google.
There isn't any Home Depot in Jacksonville. We're down to an Ace Hardware and a Lowe's; the other three hardware/lumber places closed in the last few years.
There's a Home Depot a couple of towns over, but it's not a place I'd head for unless I had other business in the same area. It's in one of Arkansas' special "you can't get there from here" traffic black holes.
There is a Fastenal. Looked like all Bosch to me.
> > "We can get that for you - will be here Thursday".It's not on the shelf, it's not here. And Fastenal charges for shipping if it's not on the shelf, same as NAPA. If I'm going to wait and pay shipping, I'll buy it off the 'net for half the price Fastenal will gouge me for.
dave: "Can you arrange for a live webcast of that?"
"Mr. Garibaldi, there're days I'm very glad I don't have to think the way you do."
-- Ivanova and Garibaldi, Babylon 5, "And the Sky Full of Stars"
"There is nothing more annoying than Mr. Garibaldi when he's right."
-- Ivanova, Babylon 5, "Legacies"
> Nyet, based on 10 rounders and the lefty thing. (a personal issue with > me as well)That's one reason I was always fond of Savage's bolt action rifles. Besides a really clean design, they were all available in left hand.
Savage machined their receivers from thickwall tubing instead of complex forgings or castings. The barrel threaded into the receiver, but was retained by a jam nut, which also held a tabbed washer that took the recoil load. Simple, easy to bed the action in, easy to remove the barrel, and you could adjust headspace by screwing the barrel in or out and re-tightening the jam nut.
A Mauser or Enfield action looks ridiculously complex by comparison.
> Me, I think they should outlaw the gift giving and commercial aspect > of the holidays, and get back to it being about being with friends > and family.AB was going nuts trying to service the Christmas needs of her extended family when we got married. After a few years of this, and observing that most of the gift-giving appeared to be one-way, I suggested we just opt out of the whole thing. It took a couple of years for her to agree, but we've been Christmas-free for the last 15 years or so.
It took quite a while before some of the relatives actually understood, as opposed to having been told, what was going on.
The Holiday Spending Season's stress factor is much lower now. Other than not being able to enter a store for the month of December, and horrendous traffic - all the malls are at highway choke-points - the whole thing slides right by.
> > It's also illegal to flash your "brights" at someone in this state as well, > > but I'm not certain if thats common elsewhere or not.No problem here in Arkansas, all the lusers with their Glare-O-Matic late model aero headlights drive around on high beam all the time anyway.
That's why I used to have a couple million candlepower on the front of my truck, to PUNISH the wipes who can't seem to remember where their dimmer switch is.
> > "They say, 'That would be very frustrating or confusing, to have things > > on my windshield. I need to see the world,'" Seder said. "I'm enhancing > > the world. I'll take a feature that should be important to you, like the > > edge of the road, and paint a line over the real edge." > > > > The windshield is designed specifically for older drivers, who have > > vision problems at a much higher rate than other age groups.GM has been promoting their "smart windshield" or "enhanced HUD" technology to ship Real Soon Now since the mid-1980s - I have a number of articles from that era in the to-scan pile for FB.
They were targeting Cadillac division and "older drivers" back then, too.
As computing power has become cheaper they've increased its claimed capabilities, but the even for its target market the option has always been too expensive.
The old system touted infrared-to-visible and photomultiplier capability for enhanced night vision, but it's the same basic deal.
Downsides: the new shape-enhancement software could mislead the driver and cause a crash. I don't know how many lawsuits are current against GM at the moment, but they've always been a fat target.
Same deal with the autopilot/IVHS systems the Fed has been tossing money at lately. The technology is no problem - the problem is who and how liability is decided.
The French government, which owns Airbus, decided up front that all Airbus crashes were going to be pilot error. The Fed could decide that any vehicular crashes were going to be driver error... some programmer in Detroit is going to know every emergency situation you can get into better than you do... and you're going to take the fall if he guesses wrong.
Before I drive, or voluntarily ride in, a car with "smart windshield technology", I'd like for some relevant case law to be thrashed out...
Thud lost the ability to remember the position of the message window several versions back; it pops up at some random location, or even underneath the view window. It only does that sometimes now, but now the view window can't remember its last location, though it does remember its size. And it can no longer remember its default view font. It remembers the size for the reply window, but the main window always shows a microscopic font until you hit ctrl-+ enough times to make it visible.
I expect much of this is that the main code is developed on Windows now, and these peculiarities are artefacts of Windows compatibility. But they're annoying as hell in a product that *used to* work well, and given that it's 15 years old, ought to be a mature code base.
On the flip side, it has been years since message search quit working on the X version. Well, it would let you search for a string in the current message, not very useful. It lost the ability to search a "folder" or the entire message base. The other day I tried it again, and now it works again.
We've also lost even more screen space to crap that can't be turned off. The newest is the revised header panel. Only about half of the vertical space of the monitor can show message text. WTF? I guess this is fine if you get three messages a day, and two of them consist of "me 2" squatting on top of 50,000 lines of untrimmed quotes.
Some years ago I did extensive design and layout for creating my own mail reader, but the work involved was too extensive to justify. Now the suck factor of Thud is even higher, but e-mail is a dying means of communication, and I only get a trickle compared to the old days. Still not worth the effort. [sigh]
-- (Terry Pratchett, "Eric")
> I think about this too, but remember, there is a lot > of industry pushing for longer-lasting, more compact > power sources in a LOT of different devices. A hundred > years is ETERNITY in technological years.Technological progress doesn't always move along smoothly. Sometimes it just makes a few giant steps and stops.
Take a look at a cartridge. The cartridge is technology. It incorporates a whole set of other technologies - the forged brass case, the use of an encapsulated primer, a propellant based on nitrated cellulose and maybe nitrated glycerine, and a flat or tapered base bullet, possibly jacketed. That's a long, long way from ramming a round ball down on some black powder and setting it off by scraping a rock against a piece of steel... and that cartridge is no different technology than one made 120 years ago, or 140 if you discount the powder.
Those subtechnologies I referred to are, in turn, based on two primary lines of technological development - the forging of metal, and modern chemistry. Hammered metal goes back to prehistory, but chemistry only goes back two or three hundred years, depending on where you want to place the origin.
We have so *much* technology, and it comes to rapidly, that sometimes it's easy to forget that it all depends on a smallish number of breakthroughs, which mostly come along by accident.
Richard Feynman was a young physicicist who worked on the Manhattan Project. Shortly after the war the Army called Feynman to the Pentagon and he met with a group of generals who wanted to know if he wanted to run his own mini-project. The Army wanted to him to find a way for them to run engines on dirt. The modern mechanized Army was dependent on trucks and tanks, and not only was it a hassle to get fuel up to the front lines, it was flammable and therefore dangerous to people occupying vehicles that were under enemy fire.
If all their equipment burned dirt, all they would need was a bunch of PFCs with shovels, and they were good to go.
The generals were all intelligent, well-educated men. They'd been briefed on the atomic bomb. And what they were asking seemed entirely reasonable to them - if scientists could spend hundreds of millions of dollars to make bombs of exotic metal that exploded really good, it should be simple enough to make dirt burn. It was just technology, right?
Well, no. Unfortunately, there's a lot of wishful thinking out there, some driven by unscrupulous grant-whores in white lab coats, some simply parroted by media flacks who don't know any better. Typical subjects are batteries, solar cells, and fuel cells. The technology for all of these is pretty much pushed to the limit. The only thing that's going to make more than an incremental change is a basic breakthrough, and not only can they not be predicted, sometimes they don't come at all. There *might* be a breakthrough that would let you shovel dirt into your Blazer and drive it to work, but you'd be better off waiting to win the lottery and hiring a chauffeur-driven limo; at least it's statistically certain you *might* win the lottery.
I dunno, maybe something's going on there... I'd ask the Voices, but they've only been broadcasting at 300 baud lately, and they're still arguing about whether "Spanky" is of-the-body or not...
-- Robert Orben
> > In these days of 5 and 6 speed automatics with locking torque converters, a > > switch-pitch is a rather obsolete design. Even a 4 speed auto would be > > better.I don't think so... in fact, I've been casting longing looks at the Turboglide in one of my repair manuals. It was one of the half-dozen variants GM had before the T400/PG became the corporate boxes of choice.
The Turboglide is a *nonshifting* transmission; there are no reduction gears. There's a fat shaft running into a planetary and a fat shaft running out; the planetary is only there to provide reverse gear.
The Turboglide has a fancy multi-element torque convertor with three driven members, one for each "gear." As revs come up, the low-speed member turns while the other two freewheel on one-way sprags. Once the low speed member reaches stall, the next member takes over, and same with the high speed member.
I found an old srticle with a drag race comparison between equivalent cars with the Turboglide and four speed, and the TG won every time.
It's just so nicely elegant... it's not *quite* a CVT in the usual sense, but some variable-pitch vanes would have done that trick, too.
A two speed auto seems like a poor choice for a baseline engine Corvair, except the Corvair was a Chevrolet project, and Chevrolet didn't have any three speed automatic. In 1960, the other divisions had huge and complex three speeds, some with two fluid couplings. Anything based on one of those designs would have been much larger, and perhaps more to the point, *much* more expensive. Not good for an economy car.
The Corvair 'glide internals were strong enough to hold up to a dual quad 409 in an Impala, so I suspect there were no major problems with a flat six...
Looking through one of my auto trans books, I noticed most overdrive automatics stick the overdrive section right behind the torque convertor, then drive the regular 3-speed bits off that. Okay, that makes good sense; the overdrive parts see the least torque there, so they can be lighter than if they were on the output end.
There's one major exception - the Chrysler A500/A518, which is a TorqueFlite with an overdrive bolted to the back of the case, with all of its bits behind the parting line. The output shaft is piloted and splined to go down inside the overdrive bits, but you'd have to modify your output shaft anyway...
I'm going to keep an eye out for one of those boxes. It would sure be nice to have a source of cheap overdrive bits...
Translation: "The layoffs won't be announced until next week."
-Bill Adams
> > Loved that movie.... > > > > I thought it was exceptionaly done for the kind of movie it is. The details > > of production, such as the color cast the whole movie had so consistantly, > > the rotary phones, no pushbuttons, and the charactors were so, uh, well > > charactorized without feeling too stereotypical....Good acting, decent enough > > writing...I liked it a *lot*. Enough that I went out and bought the damned thing.
Oddly enough, though there were a number of "name" actors in the movie, many of them chose to work uncredited. Maybe they thought the movie would bomb and didn't want to be linked to it.
I noticed the "color cast" early on. They were trying for a retro-noir effect without the usual black gloom, and I think they pulled it off very well. "Sin City" tried the same thing, I think, but they didn't carry it off as well. I loved the 1970s-style titles, too. The show could have been time-warped right out of 1970... which was, after all, 40 years ago.
Sometimes it's sort of creepy. I used to remember things in strict sequence of events, but as I've gotten older, it all merges into "the other day", and 1970 is about the same as 1980, 1990, 2000, or 2010.
> > Go to any of the numerous political forums and that same style of rant is > > repeated, regardless of topic, on a daily basis by all professions,WHOA George! Put a lid on it!Keep on babbling that way, and the lusers might catch on to my technique of having only a dozen canned rants, which I just paste in from previously-written text files.
Since few people actually read political rants anyway, and those that do always get upset and leave before they realize they're seeing the same thing all over again, I can recycle my deathless commentary for years before anyone catches on.
One of these days I'll write a procmail rule to match keywords from incoming mail and dispatch an appropriate canned reply. Hell, it's what most companies' tech support email addresses do now...
Actually, I think I'm behind the curve on that sort of thing. For years, I've noticed all you have to do is mention, say, "beryllium", and within minutes of posting there'll be a knee-jerk reply from someone, indistinguishable from the various replies I got last time I posted anything with that word in it...Sometimes I wonder how many of us are just scripts, replying to other scripts. Then I take my meds again.
12/29/2009:
The trouble is that things never get better, they just stay the same, only more so.-- (Terry Pratchett, Eric)
12/30/2009:
> Personally I think it's because of the support of Israel and the US forign policy.Hey, that's *your* Israel; Britain conquered that land fair and square, and bargained with Ben-Gurion and his ilk to give them a chunk of it if they'd back the British Empire against the Nazis. Israel exists because Britain created it. Your baby, your problem.Besides, "everybody knows" the Secret Jewish Conspiracy runs America anyway, why should you be surprised the US favors Israel?
12/30/2009:
The local bank I've been with for 30-odd years has supposedly purchased another bank. I suspect it went the other way around, since they have added all sorts of charges for things that used to be free, (or, perhaps more accurately, "courtesies") and dramatically increased rates on things they charged for. I have a guy in England who's been wiring me installments for a motor project. They're hitting me $40 to *receive* a wire transfer now. That's getting expensive.I know most of the people at FJB by sight, and though their recent changes haven't been enough to send me to another bank, I decided it was time to do some shopping for another bank to use as a secondary. Several people had recommended Arvest, so I went to the Arvest Ank (leaving the first letter off a word to make a "new" word is ordinarily enough to make me refuse to enter the building) and walked out 45 minutes later with an account that doesn't charge for wire transfers, has no monthly fee, no per-check charges, a 12.6% VISA card, a separate debit card, a separate ATM card, $400 overdraft protection, and a bunch of other stuff. And that's the el-cheapo, no-frills account.
Oddly enough, though the credit and debit cards came with the account, they wanted me to fill out an "application" for internet access to my account. I asked if I could decline internet access and they said sure, no problem.
Damn. I've seen banks that wanted to do a credit check before they'd accept you as a customer, or who wanted a $500 minimum deposit to open an account. Arvest Ank only wanted $100 and a look at my driver's license, sign here and here, thank-you-very-much.
12/30/2009:
Managementspeak: "Times are tough and we all have to pitch in."Translation: "I have a 4 PM tee time, but you'd better work late."
- William Adams
[This is from Bob Lewis' "CTO Survival Guide" column that used to be printed in InfoWorld. A few years ago IW re-organized and killed off *every* column I read regularly, which was a spectacular display of targeted change if there ever was one... -dw]