My college friends used to complain about "Anthrospeak" quite often, and when I took a upper divisional Anthropology class I found out exactly what they meant.

For example, we read a paper written by our teacher (an Anthropologist) who was studying a primitive tribe in Africa (it might have been the Bushmen) and tried to teach them how to play the game Monopoly. It took a lot of work, and the whole thing turned out to be a failure because of cultural differences. People didn't want to charge their friends rent when they landed on their properties, and they would haggle down to the last dollar. They also didn't like the fact you couldn't use pennies for setting prices.

I just paraphrased the article to make it sound interesting, and it could have been an interesting story, but the way it was written, filled with obscure jargon and twisted narrative made it a terrible bore. I can't really describe it any better than that. In reading Anthropology/Sociology Journals (the two were a combined major for a while at my school) I'd see what would look like an interesting topic but the writing would be so bad it turned me off to the field completely. I'm pretty sure it gave me some bad writing habits since I thought this is how you're supposed to write.

I grew up in the 70's and had a chemistry set. It was fun, but the child safety caps they put on the chemical bottles were industrial strength. You needed either a special key, or as I found out later, a heavy duty screw driver to get the lids off. But it was still a lot of fun.

Around the same time, an older relative gave me an old chemistry set that had belonged to her older brother. No child safety caps, more interesting chemicals and experiments to run, and more interesting glassware (beakers, you could order a thistle funnel, etc). I wanted to order the more cool stuff out of their catalog but it was no longer available.

In high school chemistry, our class was 95% lecture. We only did lab work 2 or 3 times that I recall. The lab was there, but gathering dust. This was an honors chemistry class too.

From the early 1990's on, Ektachrome had some excellent emulsions. I believe it was up until the mid to late 1980's when Kodachrome was king, before Fujichrome started to take over market share. Then Kodak spent most of its R&D on improving E-6 films (Ektachrome) and let Kodachrome alone.

I used a fair amount of Kodachrome when I first started with slides but mostly moved on to Ektachrome and Fujichrome before going digital. I found Kodachrome excellent for certain situations, like on a sunny beach or high noon on a summer day when other slide films couldn't handle the contrast. Kodachrome would soak up all the light without losing shadow detail. I read that even though Kodachrome didn't have the fine granularity of more modern slide films, it had a excellent accutance (edge sharpness) which help make up for that.

I read the book too before seeing the movie (on broadcast TV, so I'm sure it was heavily edited) and I'm guessing they changed the age to 30 for practical reasons. They had actors in mind and didn't think they could all pass for under 21.

I was about 11 or 12 when I read the book, it may have been too mature for me, but I loved it anyway.

Worthless in the sense that I want a hi def TV, but I don't have any hope of selling my current standard def TV for any kind of money.

Not only that, I'm worried about how I'm going to dispose of it. Like I said, it weighs about 100 lbs and would need two guys with a dolly to move. I'd need to get a truck from somewhere and find a proper place to dispose of it. I can't exactly put it in the dumpster. What I may try is putting an ad on craigslist and if I can't get money for it, see if anyone will take it for free.

They're not useless, more like worthless? I have a 32" Sony Wega TV that I bought in 2002. It has a fantastic picture, but is only standard def. Last fall I was dropping some things off at a thrift store and someone had dropped the exact same size and model of my TV in their donations pile. There it sat, free for the taking for anyone who wanted it. Well, it weighs 100 lbs and would need two men, a dolly and a truck to haul away, but there it was.

I'm still using my old TV, it may not be high def, but I paid a lot of money for it at the time and it is paid for.

My elderly mother still has OTA for her TV reception. The picture is pretty good now that its digital, but watching broadcast only TV is like torture. When I go to visit we mostly have it on PBS stations, because if you watch regular network TV, its nothing but pharmaceutical commercials. I feel like a doctor in training.

If anyone ever asked me in a job interview to show them my facebook page, I'd laugh out loud. If they persisted, I'd tell them to kiss my ass and go to hell. I'm not kidding.

I had almost the same thing happen to me. A user "couldn't get into his email". After troubleshooting over the phone for a while:

1. His laptop was infected with MS Blaster
2. Which caused it to reboot as soon as Windows loaded
3. Which prevented him from launching Outlook.
4. Which meant his email didn't work

Strange logic, but once we cleared off the MS Blaster his email worked again. If only he had started off saying that his laptop kept rebooting and wouldn't let him do anything we could have figured it out a lot faster.

Phonics is one of those things that goes into and out of favor over the years. Growing up in the 1970's we learned phonics. From what I've heard it fell out of fashion, maybe sometime in the 1980's? Then parents were upset their children weren't learning reading and grammar as they felt they should, so we got hooked on phonics and it came back into fashion again. Now it looks like people are becoming critical of it again.

What if they work for AOL?

Eric Clapton has always been a Fender Stratocaster man. Never heard of him playing a Les Paul.

What's wrong with NT4?

NT does not support USB at all.
NT limits you to a 4 gig C: drive
Change your IP address? Change DNS? Change any network setting? Reboot the machine.
NT4 with SP6a by itself won't protect you from Code Red, nimda, MS Blaster, Sasser, or many other exploits in the wild.
I shudder to think about supporting IIS4 again.

I too am not the first to get on the new Microsoft OS bandwagon, it took me a while to love XP, but I'm looking forward to Windows 7. For older machines, there's still XP with SP3 (and Firefox/Thunderbird).

What ever happened to microwave lighting that I saw on TV over a decade ago that was going to kick ass???

I was wondering about that too and looked it up. I found info about it here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sulfur_lamp