You should move to Galion. You'd be happy here. We're under some kind of exotic grandfather clause from Hell that has prevented us from ever joining the twentieth century and getting fluoride in our water, even to this day. So we don't have it.

And actually, if you can get past the crazy high dental bills and somewhat low educational standards, Galion *is* a fairly nice place to live, in many other respects.

> 100 months rent maximum (and lower in times of high interest rates)

Ok, but interest rates are kinda not real high right now, so.

Where is 500 a month a "very low" rate? Around here that's about average.

Oh, right, Southern California. Of course. Meh. Why would anyone voluntarily live there?

I live in Ohio. We have 3.x and even 4.x quakes, I'm told, "all the time" (albeit, not nearly as often as California).

I've never felt an earthquake, nor do I know anyone who has ever felt one of these 3.x or 4.x quakes. Back in the eighties (I want to say '86 maybe) we had a 5.x, which of course was all over the news for weeks. I knew several people who claimed to have felt that one, including my father. Invariably, they were sitting at the time, and not on a padded surface like a couch or recliner, either. People who were outdoors walking around at the time -- including me -- felt nothing. We could only hear about it later and envy our friends who had actually experienced this amazing once-in-a-lifetime phenomenon.

I don't doubt that it's /theoretically/ possible to feel a 3.0, under perfect laboratory conditions. But under normal real-world conditions, there's no way you're ever going to notice it. It's way too subtle.

> And the German word for "piano" is "Klavier".

I don't know about modern German, but in Bach's time any keyboard instrument would be called a Klavier.

However, you are certainly correct about the Well-Tempered Clavier being by design particularly suited, more than any of Bach's other music, to newer instruments that were more closely approaching the modern piano than anything that had come before. That's the whole point of the piece, in fact.

> I went to Bach's childhood home and they have a number of his harpsichords

Yes, but those harpsichords were probably all justly intoned for a particular key (not necessarily all for the /same/ particular key, mind you). Well tempered instruments were a relatively new thing in Bach's time, and the instrument most widely associated with well temperament (and later perfectly equal temperament) is the pianoforte.

Most of Bach's works would be better performed on some other instrument -- violin, harpsichord, or in a few cases the pipe organ. The Well-Tempered Clavier is the exception. More than anything else Bach wrote, it really does belong on the piano.

The more you study Bach's work, the more you get the impression that he didn't really prefer one instrument over another. The man routinely took pieces that had been originally written for one instrument and reworked them for another. He made violin pieces work on the harpsichord, harpsichord pieces on the pipe organ, organ pieces on the violin, whatever. He really seems to have been more interested in the music itself than in the specific acoustic properties of any particular instrument.

Besides that, of all the works Bach wrote, the WTC specifically is probably the best suited for pianoforte. Virtually every other keyboard instrument available in Bach's time was tuned to a just intonation in almost every case, making them unsuitable to play this particular piece. A justly intoned harpsichord (or a set of justly intoned violins for that matter) would be fine for BWV1079 or 1080, but it clearly wouldn't work at all for WTC.

Yeah, it depends.

I think I've had five power supplies go bad for every one other component that has failed. So if you count by the number of incidents, definitely PSUs.

But, when a power supply goes bad, you replace it, and *usually* the computer then works just fine.

If you count by the number of hours of my time that have been spent as a result of hardware failures, then obviously hard drives have caused me the most trouble. They're the second most common thing to go bad after the PSU, and you typically have to _at least_ do a full OS reinstall after you replace one, then install updates and applications. That's if the system in question didn't have any data on it that you have to restore from backup, or any significant customization...

At least they've improved the performance of using .zip files in Windows Explorer. Back when they first introduced that, it was *awful*. If the zipfile contained more than a couple of dozen files, copying them out took an amazingly long time. (It's still not as fast as some other software that works with .zip files, e.g. info-zip; but it's way more reasonable now than it used to be. It's no longer bad enough to drive me to put the .zip file on a USB 2.0 flash drive and hand-carry it to a Linux box to unzip it and hand-carry the contents back and copy them from the USB 2.0 flash drive to the Windows computer -- at one time, this was actually significantly faster than using Explorer's zipfile support, if the zipfile had a lot of small files in it.)

> You'd get whiter skies. People wouldn't have blue skies anymore.

I grew up in northeastern Ohio. I always assumed the notion of the sky being "blue" was a cultural symbolic thing, like how they teach you to draw yellow lines radiating from the sun to represent the sunlight coming from it, or the black lines you draw behind a moving object to show the motion.

When I was in seventh grade we moved to western Michigan. The first day, I got out my camera and took photographs of the sky being *actually* blue (well, sky blue), because I didn't think anyone would believe me, or understand that I was being literal, if I just told them about it.

Actually, there are German and Japanese variants. (The German one is a translation of UnNetHack, done I think by the same guy who did the English version of that variant. The Japanese one, somewhat older, is called NetHack Brass and seems to be mainly a flavor variant, i.e., it changes much more than just language.)

Actually, that could happen, if you've eaten a purple F, for example. (Admittedly, the fact that "gnome" and "gargoyle" both start with g would be an irrelevant coincidence in such a case.)

Five bytes. In decimal, it'd be 38 115 104 121 59. HTH.HAND.

Honestly, it'd probably taste better than some of the other stuff NetHack characters eat.