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I don't know about doing 200 pushups and a shitjillion jumping jacks, but I'm about some hiking. One of the first parks I'm checking out when I move up that way is Cloudland Canyon.

can we talk about GSM cellphone buzz for a minute? Bought a new alarm clock over the weekend and started getting bad buzz over night. Which was odd because I didn't have any issues until last night. I've always kept my cellphone on my nightstand, so I'd love to find a solution that lets me keep doing that. Especially since this clock actually came w/ USB ports meant to charge cellphones overnight (!!!). So you'd think it'd have decently shielded speakers.

What I don't really want to do is take the clock apart to shield it better. I feel like years ago there were these things that were sort of like mousepads that you'd just leave your cellphone on that would sort of eat up the interference or something. I can't seem to find any in stock anymore. Other solutions I've heard of include putting your cellphone in a static shield bag or wrapping it in tinfoil... both of which sound like kind of a weird thing to do every night. I mean it'd be more convenient to just shut the phone off rather than wrap it up in tinfoil. But I like to keep it on as I have my podcasts queued to update/download overnight.

Now that I have an extra keyboard, mouse, and monitor, I'm trying to get my old slim Gateway PC booted up that crapped out on me years ago. It's doing some system repair, not sure for how long haha.

What should I do with it if I can get in?

Xeogred wrote:Now that I have an extra keyboard, mouse, and monitor, I'm trying to get my old slim Gateway PC booted up that crapped out on me years ago. It's doing some system repair, not sure for how long haha.

What should I do with it if I can get in?

Acquire Star Trek Armada II and Star Trek Bridge Commander and live the dream.



Also, I hate this trend in education that there are a million and one legitimate learning styles, but if you don't teach according whatever flavor of the week teaching method administration is currently jizzing over, you're a horrible teacher.

It's actually Win7, so not anything too old or whatnot.

But, few hours since my last post there and still... "Startup Repair is checking your system for problems"

Oh dear. If worse comes to worse, I hope it at least has an interesting casing. That way, at the very least, it'll make a nice, decorative doorstop.

Or a planter.

I've also seen a couple people turn them into coolers.

Luckily I still have it bookmarked from years ago:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6883113112

Man, just nothing but a headache haha. The onboard video was awful but then it got pretty complicated trying to find a good low-profile graphics card. I think I could play Half-Life 2 decently enough, but that was taxing it out.

Suffice to say I learned my lesson, I went from that, to building my own PC entirely from scratch and I'm never going back now haha.

I've thought of trying to take it apart, but it looks so annoyingly put together I don't think I want to bother.

I still have an old Dell Latitude laptop laying around too. It feels like hot lava after a minute or two. lol, I guess I keep it around as some like emergency thing, when in reality by this point I could probably spend just a few hundred dollars on a laptop 10x better at least.

If the thing turns out to be a wash, I'd look into turning it into a mini-cooler and keeping it next to your current PC. It'd make an interesting conversation piece when you lift up the lid and pull out a can of Mountain Dew (or something.)

I have an old Gateway laptop from 2005, myself. I pretty much just use it as my iTunes machine I cringe to think about when it breaks and I have to transfer all my backup music files to another machine

ElkinFencer10 wrote:Also, I hate this trend in education that there are a million and one legitimate learning styles, but if you don't teach according whatever flavor of the week teaching method administration is currently jizzing over, you're a horrible teacher.

It's easier to force teachers to adopt a new method than to accept that some kids are just dumb and won't excel. But that's more the fault of the parents rather than the administration; they're just trying to keep the parents happy because they won't accept that little Johnny doesn't give two shits and should be focusing on his upcoming construction career.

MrPopo wrote:

ElkinFencer10 wrote:Also, I hate this trend in education that there are a million and one legitimate learning styles, but if you don't teach according whatever flavor of the week teaching method administration is currently jizzing over, you're a horrible teacher.

It's easier to force teachers to adopt a new method than to accept that some kids are just dumb and won't excel. But that's more the fault of the parents rather than the administration; they're just trying to keep the parents happy because they won't accept that little Johnny doesn't give two shits and should be focusing on his upcoming construction career.

No kidding. We're berated for having the negligent audacity for daring to lecture for more than 10 minutes (I'm not kidding; we're being told that 10 minutes should be the maximum). Look, if lecture weren't a valid method, it wouldn't still be the overwhelmingly dominant method of instruction in post-secondary schools. The purpose of high school is to prepare kids for either professional life (which involves sitting through boring ass training you give no shits about) or post-secondary education. I get it. Not all kids learn well through lecture. Some kids do. Stop shunning certain (completely valid) teaching styles and just accept what everyone who's ever been in school knows - some kids are going to learn better from some teachers than others. Stop trying to fucking turn us into damn cookie cutters. We're being expected to differentiate instruction using one or two "cure all" methods to prepare kids for a standardized test. It's fucking insane, and it's no wonder America sucks at educating kids. It's not the teachers' fault; it's the jackasses who run the system.