Cataracts are one possible effect; clouding of the lens due to exposure to bands of UV light. Certain medication can also contribute to the effects of light on the eye, but the common one that many people use without knowing the potential effect is St. John's Wort.

I'm profoundly affected by the shortened (and usually sunless) days beginning in the fall, through the awful winter, and into the spring. (I'm self-diagnosing, but I'd say it qualifies as SAD.) I've used St. John's Wort in the winter months with a reasonable degree of success, but I think adding bright light to my work area helped a lot more. As in, four 300W fluorescent bulbs.

Much to my chagrin, however, I learned that St. John's Wort and Bright Light don't Mix.

Cataracts are (generally) easily treated, thankfully, but that might not be the extent of the possible effect. And I don't particularly want cataracts before I hit 40.

Amusing article. Definitely a bit cheeky -- although, unlike 19thNervousBreakdown, I'm pretty sure that it is mostly tongue-in-cheek -- and the author fancies himself rather witty, but the heart of the article, in terms of differences, is pretty spot on. No, I don't think we need to be "cared for" either, but I do feel annoyance at extroverted confusion sometimes; extroverts often just can't understand us, and feel that they need to 'fix' us. That's rubbish, of course, but similar to attitudes about 'nerds' prior to the dot-com era.

I find the The Introvert's Corner in Psychology Today to be interesting -- often the user comments moreso than the editorials.

Each introvert -- really, every person -- has their likes and dislikes, but it's interesting to hear to whos/hows/whys. I'm with the column-author in that I loathe talking on the telephone (except for a few close friends I'd otherwise never speak with), but am quite social and articulate face-to-face.

To make generalizations, you may be an extrovert and the prior poster an introvert.
Extroverts tend to communicate best by voice. Introverts, in contrast, tend to communicate better in a written medium.

Now, to show my bias, I perceive extroverts as people who never shut up and apparently lack an inner voice -- because all they do is unleash an unending, unfiltered stream of verbal garbage when they 'think aloud.' They bombard you with one idea after another without waiting for consideration or response. Even something as simple as, "Hey, how are you doing?" before they launch into their spiel. If you asked, why didn't you wait for a response?

Introverts, in contrast, tend to internalize and hash over a response before they commit it to the outside world. They think more about precise and appropriate wording. They don't respond as quickly, but they typically respond after giving due consideration to the question.This lends itself best to writing, where they can take the time to formulate their thoughts. An introverted friend of mine once commented that extroverts "are impatient and do everything and half-assed."

Introversion has nothing to do with shyness, although the two are more common together than with extroversion. Really, introversion and extroversion deal with how people receive and process information.

At the shopping mall nearest my home town, there is a department store that has had one of those ultrasonic bug & pest repellers installed above the doors since the mid 80s. As a kid, I couldn't stand being within 50 feet of those doors for any length of time; it wasn't just annoying, it bloody well hurt! While my father and I waited thereabouts for my mother to meet us, I thought I'd crawl out of my skin, and neither of them ever believed me about it.

Now in my early 30s, I recently went back, having forgotten about the damn thing. I walked through those doors and instantly felt uneasy, along with a pressure in my head and sudden ringing in my ears. It went away quickly, but came back as I later approached the doors to leave; then I remembered the device which, sure enough, was still above the door. It isn't the piercing sound that stabbed my ears as a child -- I assume my hearing has declined somewhat already as I've aged -- but man, it still makes my head throb. And nobody else seems to notice it.

There is (was?) a pay-restroom right by the western end of the Charles Bridge in Prague, presumably to fleece the high volume of crossing foreign tourists. You pay the big beefy man sitting at the window, he hands you a few squares of toilet paper, and gives you a big thumbs up and a "Good luck!" What service. Ah, free enterprise.

Yeah, definitely not cool from the standpoint of visitors, but still highly amusing.

I've used vob2mpg, etc, in the past. However, I like the MKV format, and for my application, MKV is fine as the prime (really, only) use is from a home theater PC. MakeMKV was a simple, easy to use solution that just worked. If I want to put a movie on my phone, I'd shrink it anyway, so I'd convert it to MP4 at that time. (Likewise, it is simple to rip an HD disc to MKV, then Handbrake* it to a smaller h.264 MKV.)

As an aside, I've have TONS of issues with MP4 -- compatibility, non-seeking files, invalid streams -- and none with MKV. My BluRay player supports MKV too, for that matter.

*VidCoder, actually. Less headache, more options.

I wanted a home theater PC with instant-access to all of my films. My solution was as follows:

(a) Rip all discs to hard drive,
(b) Index and link to files with software solution

In detail:
(a) I chose to go with MakeMKV for most of my ripping. It rips the mpeg2/4 video directly to an mkv file, without reencoding, and you can choose all the tracks you want to go with it. (I.e., some titles I rip multiple audio streams and subtitles, some I take just English 2.0). For me, I just ripped the main title from each film; if I want to see the special features later, I'll take the box down off the shelf and pop the disk in. (Special features don't really matter to me that much.) Each rip averages 3 to 6Gb. Now MKV, while a great file format, isn't compatible with some (especially older) consumer electronics. You can always re-encode, if you really need to make a particular title portable. And for my Blu Ray / HD-DVD titles, I re-encoded anyway. I found a 1080P 6Gb-target-size h.264 two-pass re-encode to be indistinguishable on my 52" TV from the original. In fact, it's probably quite a bit of overkill.

  For storage, I have a couple of 3Tb drives in an external enclosure, with a duplicate unit for backup. (Got them for a song before the manic price gouging going on now started!.) So far, it's holding over 500 titles and several TV series, and plenty of room to grow. And I can always increase capacity.

(b) For keeping track of everything, I eventually went with Collectorz.com Movie Collector. I've tried many solutions, both free and payware, and Movie Collector was the one that fit my needs the best. (There is a lot of good software out there -- look around!) As I ripped my collection in my spare time, I simply scanned in the UPC on the back of each film using an old CueCat barcode scanner. The software then populates all of the data for the film. Once the film was ripped, I simply linked the title in Movie Collector to the video file on the hard drives. Now I can visually browse my entire collection and watch any title at the click of a mouse. And it's nice to be able to go, "Hey, how many Humphrey Bogart movies do I own?" and find out with a simple filter.

What worked for me might or might not fit your needs, but hopefully it gives you ideas.
   

Just to supply some more information:

The EU Treaty establishes four fundamental "internal market freedoms" which are the free movement of goods, services, people, and capital within the EU, without regard to national borders.

Article 28 of the Treaty affirmatively prohibits "quantitative restrictions" on trade. The court in du Roi (Procureur du Roi v Dassonville (1974)) found a "quantitative restriction" to be anything "capable of hindering, directly or indirectly, actually or potentially, intra-community trade." That's a very broad definition.

Article 30 exempts "Industrial Property" -- so, patents as defined under the Paris Convention -- but not copyrights under the Berne convention. If I recall correctly, that argument had been tried, and the Court found that the distribution right under Berne was curtailed by the prohibition on artificial partitioning of the markets under the EU treaty.

So overall it's not hard to see why the court would find such an exclusivity agreement to a single nation to be invalid.

>>
These days most employers have some boilerplate they hand out when you take a job that says they will do this if they feel it necessary. Really you should assume they monitoring you while you are on the job, if for no reason than protect themselves from things like that $2 billion loss UBS is stuck with.
>>

The point is that these were government workers. Your constitutional rights trump most of what they would ask you to waive. And courts have said that, say, your fourth amendment right require informed consent to waive, which a blanket waiver cannot satisfy.

I should have clarified. Yes, I updated the firmware when the issue became known and never experienced problems before or after, until now. I've run across threads mentioning that the first firmware released to correct the issue...didn't. Perhaps I nabbed that one without realizing it.

1.That's what backups are for.
2. I think that Seagate will fix it for you so that the data is recovered.

1. The video on the drive hadn't been worked with to be backed up yet; this is an additional 1Tb of raw footage. I've got 2Tb of completed video with a 2Tb backup already. And a crapload of DVDs padded by DVDisaster. I'm pretty serious about backups.
2. IF my issue was with the publicized bug, I've heard they offered free data recovery. If self-recovery doesn't work, I'll end up putting in a warranty claim and hoping its covered. Otherwise, it could be $300-500+, which I'd probably not pay. It'd just be a reaaaaaal pain to redo the recordings.

The bug is that if the pointer to the current log entry is evenly divisible by 64 (or some magic number like that), the powerup selftest code crashes and the drive never completes selftest.

Yeah, I remember reading a thread on ./ at the time from one of the Seagate engineers. I think it was something like, if the drive wrote a 360th log entry, but then powered off before writing the 361st, it got stuck. I created worse issues in assembly programming in college a decade ago, but thankfully my mistakes didn't make it to production. D'oh.

I've got a spliceable USB cable arriving tomorrow, so we'll see how it goes. Fingers crossed.

I have one of the Seagate 7200.11 drives I bought in Sept 2009 that had the firmware issue at launch. Never experienced any problem with it myself, always passed all tests, and SMART status was great. Night before last, it disappeared under Windows. I shut down, checked the cables, rebooted and...failed SMART on boot. I should have done some more testing then, but I rebooted to run a disk scanner (Ultimate Boot CD - hightly recommend keeping a burn around) and it stopped being detected by bios. That quick - no warning, nothing.

The disk spins up to speed, then clicks several times before spinning down. After much looking, I found several people who'd had a similar issue and were able to resolve it via the serial interface, so I have some test tools and cables on the way. Hopefully I can get it reset and accessible again.

It's still under warranty (5 years, thank god), but I want the DATA on the blasted thing and don't want to spend 10x its cost. I have redundant copies of the important stuff (family photos, genealogy research, documents, music), but have probably 60 hours of old family 8mm & VHS recordings on there I hadn't gotten time to go through yet.

Fun, useless fact of the day:
There's an old English unit called the Pottle that is two quarts. :-)
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/pottle

I had a dream a couple of years ago in which I somehow stumbled back in time to the late 80s/early 90s. It seemed very real and was quite entertaining. However, I cursed myself for not being better prepared. (Hey, it was a dream, okay?)

In the dream, I decided that "if it ever happens again" I am going to make sure I keep a notecard in my wallet with all the biggest stocks, when to buy, and when to sell like crazy.

Warren Buffet, eat your heart out ;-)

It doesn't surprise me much. I went to school from EE & CmpE, but the department had absorbed the CS program and I knew/worked with most of those students as well. I would say that 50% of the CS grads were one-trick ponies. They could hack together a program in MFC and that was it. They've probably gone on to be managers :-) Day to day IT work (building computers, installing software, setting up networks, etc) is not taught in a CS program -- it is IT, not CS, after all -- but one does kind of expect people in the CS field to at least have a minimal IT competence, right?

There were, of course, a few CS people I thought very highly of and would hire in a minute, including a guy who I would definitely hire if I ever wanted to knock over the world's banks. (Seems like there is always one brilliant and misguided computer hacker in every class.) On the other hand, there were definitely some class anchors. One guy I remember asking me a question that floored me. Bear in mind, this came from a senior CS major, final semester, in an advanced compilers class. "I just read the project assignment but...what's a command prompt?" Really. He wasn't faking. He'd never done any programming in anything but a GUI, never done any manual debugging, and had only ever owned a Mac.

I changed gears for grad school (physics / nuclear) and then law school, but I always loved the low-level CS/CmpE stuff. Chip design, assembly programming (barring the x86 instruction set - blech), electronics/software interfacing. Kind of miss it, especially when I get some cool project idea in my head and have zero equipment to implement it with.