Ternaugh

Re: What Are You Listening To Right Now? "The Bells" by Eric Woolfson. It's on a followup album to the classic Alan Parsons Project album, Tales of Mystery and Imagination: Edgar Allan Poe, entitled, POE: More Tales of Mystery and Imagination. This track uses the EAP classic poem verbatim as an eerie carol. Fitting the source material, it starts out with a cheerful tone, but it changes subtly as the poem works through each of its parts, becoming much darker. After two days of play on my minidisc, and several plays on computer, this is perhaps my favorite song on the album. You can find a sample here: http://www.poe-cd.com/audiovideo.html This sample of "The Bells" is actually the last minute or so. JoeG

Re: What Are You Listening To Right Now? "The Border" by Bankstatement (Tony Banks of Genesis). From a good album that went nowhere in America. JoeG

Re: What Are You Listening To Right Now? "Owner of a Lonely Heart" by Yes. JoeG

Re: What Are You Listening To Right Now? "You May Be Right" by Billy Joel. JoeG

Re: Smart Metals? Shape memory metals (for example, Nitinol) tend to be a behind-the-scenes thing. It can provide material for animated sculptures, servos that behave like muscles in robotic arms and prosthetics, bendable eyeglass frames that respring back to normal, even underwires in bras. It can be used for medical uses, including braces, vascular stents, and setting bones. Figure it's a common tool for those in the future. For more info: http://mrsec.wisc.edu/Edetc/memmetal/index.html http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/755819.stm JoeG

Re: Traveller Hero, a major announcement It all depends on the printer. My HP 2610 uses a large black cartridge (compared to other printers). I just switched in my third black cartridge, with a page reading of around 1240 or so (about 600 pages per 96 cart). Now, I'm almost half-way through my third color cartridge (the 97), and will probably end up switching it out in a month or two. This seems fairly typical for the higher end printers. Lower end HP printers tend to burn through their carts about every 200 pages or so. Lexmark also varies considerably. The high end units do produce good page counts with good print quality, but usually charge a bit more than what I pay for my HP carts. Low end printers can be awful; one model of Lexmark that was featured as a giveaway with computers after rebate used a single, small tricolor cart, that has to mix all three colors to make "black". Print quality was also spotty on these low ends, as many produced a banded picture on the test page with frequent dropouts. For a bit of the time, my company would offer one of the Lexmark fax printers as an unadvertised replacement, to which we would frequently steer our customers. It had the larger, separate black and color cart, and a generally better build. Of course, for high volume, there's always laser. Meanwhile, back on track, I've printed out the Traveller 1248: Out of the Darkness supplement, with 2 pages per printed page, with very good results. Makes interesting reading for anyone curious about the loose ends left after TNE. Well worth the money. JoeG

Re: What Are You Listening To Right Now? "Tell Her About It" by Billy Joel. And pretty much the rest of An Innocent Man. JoeG

Re: What Are You Listening To Right Now? "Three Stooges Intro" and "The Spirit of Radio" from the Grace Under Pressure Tour Soundtrack disc in the Rush Replay X3 box set. JoeG

Re: What Are You Listening To Right Now? "Just Good Friends (Close)" by Fish. One of two Fish songs that remind me of a long-ago friendship, and that which was not meant to be. The other, "A Gentleman's Excuse Me", represented the closure needed (though I didn't realize it at the time). And, because I "finally get it inside my head", my followup is "For My Lady", by the Moody Blues, for my wife, my love, my everything, for nearly 13 years now. JoeG

Re: Advanced energy sources: Some thought and pretty big numbers. A few clarifications. Typically, glass storage produces sealed stainless-steel cylinders of waste, not easily-stackable blocks. Waste usually makes up about 25% of the mix, with 75% usually a form of borosilicate (Pyrex). It is being considered for some of the liquid waste from the Hanford Reservation. And the storage isn't 100%, as certain metals can react with the glass and migrate (palladium being one, ironically enough), and exposure to water can result in a containment failure over time (estimates are 10% failure within 1 million years). http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/specials/eternity/index.html Half-life of radioactive materials may become shorter by enrichment, but this isn't necessarily useful for us. Uranium 238, for example, has a half-life of around 4.5 billion years, and Plutonium 239 has a half-life of around 14,000 years. While quite short on a geologic scale, it's probably not all that useful for short-term storage calculations. Now, plutonium is mainly an alpha emitter, which means that the containment will block most of the radioactivity, but other materials are gamma emitters, meaning that they are not so safe. A better idea would be to recycle the radioactive materials, using reprocessing or other methods (for example, radiothermal generators). Ultimately, however, you'll end up with lots of stuff that's either contaminated and must be stored, or with gunk that can't be reused. JoeG

Re: What Are You Listening To Right Now? "The Turn of a Friendly Card, Pt. 1" by Alan Parsons Project. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Welcome_to_vegas.jpg JoeG

Re: What Are You Listening To Right Now? "Emperor's Song" by Fish. JoeG

Re: What Are You Listening To Right Now? "Domino: Pt.1 In the Glow of the Night/Pt. 2 The Last Domino" by Genesis. JoeG

Re: What Are You Listening To Right Now? "Take the Reins" by Mike + The Mechanics. Great "character" song, which I've used as a background piece representing a power struggle within a criminal organization that opposed the PC group in a FH game. JoeG

Re: What Are You Listening To Right Now? "The Web" by Marillion. From the album Script for a Jester's Tear. JoeG

Re: What Are You Listening To Right Now? "My Sweet Neo Con" by the Rolling Stones. JoeG

Re: What Are You Listening To Right Now? "Several Species of Small Furry Animals Gathered Together In a Cave and Grooving with a Pict" by Pink Floyd, from Ummagumma. JoeG

Re: Fringeworthy Hero & the Battery Delima. Maybe, they do cause the instant death of living beings, but, like Asimov's hyperspace, it's only a momentary problem. An undefined part of the function, as it were. As an aside, would nuclear power units or radiothermal generators fail from the transition? If not, they might be really popular (with suitable shielding). JoeG

Re: Fringeworthy Hero & the Battery Delima. Well, there's always fuel cells. Pour in the proper stuff, and you'll get power.See: http://www.fuelcells.org/ JoeG

Re: What Are You Listening To Right Now? "Bigger Wave" by O.S.I., from the new album, Free. JoeG

Re: What Are You Listening To Right Now? "The Stranger from Within" by Ayreon. Thanks to Lord Mhoram for the suggestion! JoeG

Re: What Are You Listening To Right Now? "So Sincere" by Gentle Giant, from the album, The Power and the Glory. JoeG

Re: Irksome players The swords, polearms and axes were limited to "oohs and ahs" before the game, though at one point, we banned crossbows and blowguns from the gaming table, too. JoeG But, strangely, we rarely used minis.

Re: Irksome players This document has been in use by me over 15 years, in one form or another. It's been distributed to a few other local GMs, mainly to deal with excessive tardiness or frequent interruptions. I usually include it into the basic documentation about the game I'm running. For one game, I had to include a ban on cleaning handguns*, but that's a different story. [ATTACH]21471[/ATTACH] JoeG *Real ones, as opposed to "in character".

Re: What Are You Listening To Right Now? "The Pilgrims Inn" by Roine Stolt (of the Flower Kings). JoeG