Compatibility, on the other hand, is one reason I've used them. In my youth I created a bunch of files in WordPerfect on the Mac. Originally they were compatible with Microsoft Word so I didn't care. At some point decades later I realized that by drifting from Mac to PC and to MS Office as a default, I could no longer open those files. Even installing a newer version of WordPerfect for Windows wasn't working for me. Out of desperation I tried LibreOffice a couple of months ago and got the files open. I was very pleasantly surprised, and extremely happy to have my old projects back.

Brought to you by the people who invented "click start to shut down." I like it.

Now I'm going to have to invent sun-baked potato chips, just to prove a point. And make a fortune on the marketing gimmick. I shall call them Sun Chips. No, wait ...

I like the scroll wheel for scrolling, but I don't find it at all easy to click the wheel. That function may as well not exist for me.

The most frustrating part about those posts is usually the entire analysis is correct, up until that last throwaway line "it will never happen again." Why do the authors feel the need to include it? In some cases the real answer is it won't occur for another thousand or ten thousand years, but that's not good enough? Of course some of the others (December has five Tuesdays this year) happen about half of all years and are complete junk articles, but I actually find the rarer ones kind of neat, with the exception of the completely erroneous disclaimer.

Thanks for the confirmation. I thought so, but didn't want to say that and give anyone bad information.

Schedule D won't apply to tax-sheltered retirement accounts (at least during the investment stage; I haven't gotten to the withdrawal stage to figure that part out yet), so it's only if you've got investments outside of that.

Taxable interest is a line-item on the 1040. It's not treated as "investment income."

Well, most retirement accounts (IRA, Roth, 401(k)) won't trigger a Schedule D, so it's only if you're investing outside of that, which many people may not need to.

Both my kids actually have sound soothers that are programmed to play white noise to muffle background sounds.

Last spring I was watching 'Uncle Buck', a John Candy movie that features multiple car backfires, and I commented that it was an aging joke because it's something you never hear. The next day a car backfired driving by my house, and I've heard a couple since then. I had to laugh at the coincidence, but I also wonder if maybe we tune them out rather than they never happen.

I'm sure I'd recognize it, but I'm struggling to actually pull that sound out of my memory--it's just gone. What's still there, though, is the sound of an older Macintosh ejecting a disk. That one has stuck with me.

I still hear that sound at least weekly. Durango, Colorado has a thriving narrow gauge railroad that runs between here and Silverton. Runs from downtown up into the mountains several times every day. My little girl is nuts for it so we ride occasionally and go out of our way to see it drive by all the time.

I've had good luck with that, too. I'd say over the past couple of years the ratio is about 20:1 for Pandora:Radio in terms of useful recommendations. One of my main problems with the radio is even when I hear something new that I like I either 1) miss who the artist was in the first place, or 2) hear but fail to remember the name later, when I'm out of the car and capable of doing something about it. With Pandora at least I'm already on the computer, and can just copy/paste, or at worst thumbs-up the song, and increase the chances it'll come back around a second time.

Both of those have been available for sale on GOG for years, FYI.