I generally use MP3 (car, iPhone, etc.), but I rip to FLAC for archival purposes. It's nice to know that in the future I can re-convert the music and start from scratch.

Also, I like the fact that I can use FLAC track/album gain on my Squeezebox at home but normalize the tracks for output to MP3 for use elsewhere.

MP3 encoders/decoders have gotten seriously good and if you don't know the songs well it's easy to be fooled. However, if you DO know the music very well it's often easy to tell the difference. It's not worse, really, just different and for people with strong auditory memories it can be a little annoying.

I also listen to a lot of music with significant distortion and MP3 seems to be weak in this area.

I live in Arlington, VA and this is a very bike friendly area (as are some of the suburbs beyond). There are numerous bike trails and bike lanes throughout the area.

I bike to work and for pleasure regularly and generally find that the driving public is very polite. I think often that is because they can clearly see that I'm commuting to work. When I bike for pleasure I stay off the roads as much as possible.

I do regularly see bikers acting like assholes, but then again I see the same from other drivers when I'm in my car. The difference is that bikers run a much higher risk by violating the laws than drivers do.

I run a laptop with 4GB real memory and a desktop with 8GB - both are running XP64 and have 64GB SSDs (though the desktop is 3x32GB RAID0). I have no swap under either and they are both stellar performers. I never use all my real memory - so why would I need swap?

On my old desktop the drive ran continuously even when RAM was not completely utilized. The drive was a Raptor so I really noticed it and it annoyed me. It's one of the reasons that I went solid state (besides having an insane urge to blow money) but the constant swapping is gone as well.

Right now I am running my normal system and 2 1GB VMs and I still have 4.8G available.

Seems good to me...