Recent Comments

1. 1 day ago on Luann Againn

   It happens at the college level, too.

   I was once volentold to ‘teach’ Math 090, Remedial College Algebra. I discovered that university-level students were taking and failing the kind of maths that I had done at age 12 and 13 in the British system in colonial East Africa and the Caribbean. They had no clue, and didn’t want to have a clue. Not until they got ’F’s. Then they were interested and tried various things to improve their grade, usually screaming at the school admins. I did not change their grades. And I was never again volentold for Math 090. Math 115 and 203, yes. But never 090. No one else seemed to do it twice, either. Gee. I wonder why.

2. 1 day ago on Cleats

   Spaghetti legs…

3. 1 day ago on FoxTrot Classics

   BJs, where? Which state, which county? At the height of prices when Boy George was prez (remember him? the guy who’s looking so good compared to the Mango Mussolini?) gas was $5.20 and more at the Shell in Palm Beach Gardens, at the corner of PGA Blvd and RCA Drive, just off the off-ramp from I-95. The place currently charging $4.00. I didn’t blame Boy George for the prices, because presidents don’t have direct control over consumer pricing. Except, of course, for the presidents of Exxon, Walmart, etc…

4. 2 days ago on FoxTrot Classics

   ’tis a puzzlement. Dark Brandon has Powers Beyond The Ken Of Normal People, he does.

5. 3 days ago on FoxTrot Classics

   Interesting. Where are you? Palm Beach County has the highest gas prices in Florida; the Shell station on PGA and RCA is charging $4.00. However, the Chevron on Blue Heron next to the I-95 off-ramp is $3.49, the Racetrack on the other side of the McDonald’s to it is $3.47, and the Costco on Northlake is $3.31. All are less than five miles from the Shell. I have no idea how the Shell stays in business. Broward County, the next county south, averages 20¢ less than Palm Beach County, but I’m not driving to Broward to get gas. St. Luci and Martin Counties, north of Palm Beach County, are cheaper than Broward. I’m not driving to cattle country to get gas, either.

   If gas in PBC was $5/gallon but in Martin was $3.30, you better believe that I would be making a trip to cattle country with three or four gas containers and a bottle of Sta-Bil.

6. 3 days ago on Cleats

   Kat, m’girl, you look as though you would float just fine.

7. 4 days ago on The Boondocks

   “Noah, I want you to build an ark.”

   That entire sequence was just brilliant.

8. 7 days ago on FoxTrot Classics

   I don’t do MP3 unless I have to, and I usually don’t have to; there are much better formats (AIFF. FLAC. OGG. Even AAC. AAC is native to iTunes). And even MP3 can be good (nowhere near 20% losses) if the sample rate and bit rate are good enough. I usually go with 44.1 kHz/16 or 24 bit, 256 kbps (AAC) or 320 kbps (MP3) or whatever I can get (AIFF, FLAC or OGG). 320 is CD-quality. There is no difference, by actual test, between 320 kbps AIFF or OGG or FLAC and a CD, and very little difference with 256 or 320 kbps AAC. And I don’t pay twice for the same product. I especially would never pay for a digital product if I already had a physical disk, disc, or tape. And any digital version WILL be available on ALL my devices, Mac, Windows, Linux, whatever. It’s not going off my network; if I paid for it, you will, too. I’m merely not paying twice. Or three times. Or more.

9. 8 days ago on FoxTrot Classics

   The first thing I did when I got a (very expensive) CD was convert my audio tape and LP collections to CD. Once I had software that would break the copy protection on certain CDs, I made copies of audio CDs and put the originals away. With the arrival of iTunes and high capacity (500 MB to one glorious gigabyte, who would ever need more storage space than that?), I dumped all digitalized audio to a hard drive. Note that iTunes was a primary way of breaking copy protection; Stevie Jobs hated copy protection with the fury of 10,000 suns, so he pulled a fast one: users could NOT just copy CDs, but could assemble ‘playlists’… and could burn the playlists to CDs up to 7 times. And there wouldn’t be any copy protection on the burned CDs. Audio from the burned CDs could be re-imported into iTunes, with no copy protection and no limits on what could be done. And audio from the Apple Music Store had copy protection… until users created a playlist and burned that playlist to CD.

   When this strip first ran, all my music was in digital formats, on a hard drive, with copies on CD. And, so long as I didn’t put it out where the RIAA could see it, they had no clue that I had it, and there was NOTHING that they could do about it. And as every single track had been bought and paid for, I was legal; the RIAA wanted to charge for audio tape, charge for the same album on LP, charge again for CD, charge again for DAT, and charge one more time for ‘digital downloads.’ They got to make one sale to me, and after that, the album was on a hard drive attached to my home server and available to everyone on my home network… but not to anyone else.

   And if the RIAA didn’t like it (and they didn’t) , well, how sad, too bad, bite me.

10. 9 days ago on Tank McNamara

    It has stuff to do the bumping. And is usually with several other bits of floating stuff which also have stuff to do the bumping, lots of stuff to do the bumping. And will soon be joined by Enterprise and Doris Miller, both of which will also have a lot of stuff to do the bumping.

    And, besides, the original Jerry wasn’t as bad as some say. He bumped into fewer things than a certain Air Force reservist. And he never vomited into a foreign prime minister’s lap, unlike the reservist’s father.