I loved these books, most of them are less than $4 and they are quick and easy for kids to start reading on their own as they get a little older.

From bn.com:
ISBN-13: 9780061626128
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Publication date: 12/22/2009
Pages: 24
Age range: 4 - 10 Years

Then it's a good thing I'm not a Mason, though from what I've seen they seem to be a good group of people. I found most of my father's family was involved and I enjoyed reading about and meeting a number of Masons locally.

In any event, reading about the decryption process was really interesting.

From the parts of the document I read I assumed it was about the Free Masons and only after reading some of the other pages did I see the assertions about ophthalmology.

I didn't continue reading to see if they had eliminated the Masons as the responsible party, but if they did there are quite a lot of similarities to the Masons (even loosely to the symbols used) and maybe the people involved with this society were also associated with the Masons as well.

Between getting AGP video cards running in whatever *nix happened to be on my box at the time along with the time I spent on the phones at Dell /. was one of the best diversions I had. Thirteen years and numerous geek related jobs later I'm still here almost every day.

You built something special, thank you.

Use the dgmgrl to convert the standby database to 'Snapshot Standby'. Once it is in that mode you can make any changes you want to the system and then convert the standby back to 'Physical Standby'.

During the conversion back to Physical Standby it brings the database back to the point in time that it was converted to snapshot and applies all the logs that have shipped while in snapshot mode. Just make absolutely sure that you've got enugh space in the FRA to hold the initial snapshot and any changes before the database is reverted.

All the while the DG brokers are still running and you never 'stop' DG, just change the standby to something more usable for those instances where devs need current production data.

We use DataGaurd and part of the process for opening the standby for use sanitizes any sensitive data and resets all the passwords to the development passwords. This has been an excellent resource since devs can see exactly what is on production at any point in time.

Then you just close it up and it reapplies all shipped logs for DR and you're good to go.

Love it.

I'm honestly curious about this, so please bear with me.

I've seen a number of times when cyclists are riding on highways and interstates with posted Minimum speed limits of 40+ MPH. Have you seen any particular laws or provisions for those situations?

That's a new one on me. I'll have to tell it to the rest of my Aggie family.

Reading this story and many of the responses I'm surprised that there aren't more akin to this. While some of the MMOs have been addictive to me (no more, children are much more fun) every game I've played that has given me the most enjoyment has been for reasons that you describe.

MUDs, Doom, Duke Nukem, Quake, Unreal, gobs of RPG type games and, lastly, MMOs provided me ample opportunity tweak and see what I could make them do. In some cases it was directly and easily modified. Other cases required external tools, but in every case I was interested in seeing how far I could push the mechanics.

Playing the games are fun. Pushing them to their limits are what I enjoy. This is pretty much true for me in most aspects of my life, though.

Oddly enough the online only option is largely why I quit playing games. The DRM was also getting simply unacceptable and I enjoy playing through games in single player/offline modes as well. Don't get me wrong, I love the interaction and experience that online games can provide, but dealing with people all day means that sometimes I just want to sit down and play and see the AI or game rules or whatever behave exactly as expected.

I guess in that regard it's a bit more like passive entertainment through TV and such, but I still like the puzzles and at least learning to understand how the developer designed the game play experience.

Other than that some of the most fun I've had in 20 some-odd years of gaming has been building and designing modifcations and levels and hacking games to see just how far you could push the engines and yourself with private servers and game connections among friends. So many games lack any ability to do that kind of thing and between that and the above mentioned problems I rarely (if ever) find myself buying games anymore.

That was how it is managed for me and the functionality is suitable for my uses. Sorry, I didn't intend to mislead anybody in this regard.

The only reason that I bought the original Xbox was for all the media center functionality. I like playing games and such, but that was not my primary interest.

I know there are and were plenty of media center PCs, but I never found one that I liked the look of and wouldn't require me to do all kinds of work. With the xbox I installed a mod-chip in about 15 minutes, loaded XBMC and was streaming music and movies inside an hour start to finish. I can even still watch Hulu from it.

Plus I got the xbox used with a couple controllers and games for less than I could even buy one of the little Nvidia pc boards. Best $100 I ever spent on a piece of electronics.

I'd never heard of Tripping the Rift, but it looks promising. Thanks for the recommendation.

I just use the new Emergency Services number: 0118 999 881 999 119 725! [short pause] 3!

It's so much better than just using 999.