What you consider legitimate is not necessarily what someone else considers legitimate. Small business owners have a LOT of leeway in how they schedule their time. A buddy of mine does IT consulting work. He takes time off to drop his daughter off at school. He takes time off to go have coffee with his wife. He takes time to go dirt bike riding with friends. He takes time off because he accumulated 10 errands to run and wants to do them all at once.

This works for him, but how is he supposed to deal with it if somebody gets offended because it's a nice day and he would rather go fishing? To him, it's a perfectly legitimate excuse. He simply doesn't need the work and has other things he would rather be doing with his time.

You take a wrong turn getting here buddy? This is one of the most clearly written and insightful comments I have seen on ./ in many years.

Probably the last time I flew to Las Vegas. The trip home on the other hand was a different matter...not so many smiles.

Except that it kind of has the opposite effect. I get more annoyed that I have to wait *after* pressing the button. Without the button I just think to myself, "of course I have to wait, there's no button"

Exactly, plus until the Galaxy S came out a week ago AT&T didn't even have a high end Android phone. They has some pretty poor hardware running an outdated version of the OS. Their phones couldn't run most of the new software which makes them think there are no apps on Android. Give them a Galaxy S and then see what they say.

This is part of the reason banks have to honor what the amount as written in longhand rather than the numeric value. If the box says $1000.00 but the longhand text says "one hundred and no/100" then the check is for $100.00. So unless you can change that to say "thousand" when it used to say "hundred" then it doesn't matter.

Normally I wouldn't say that a bank has a lot of clout, but considering that USAA happens to be "the" bank of the United States military...

I bought a PS3 for the main purpose of watching movies and for my kids to play a few games on here and there. I use it for watching BluRay and DVD and find the interface as easy as any DVD player I've ever owned. I own the remote control also, but even when the kids have lost it and I have to use the controller it's pretty much just one button click to get the movie going. I never owned a PS2 so I don't know how it compares. I did use an original XBOX as a DVD player for a little while and found it so pitiful (even with the remote) that I bought a separate DVD player instead, however my XBOX remote was flaky and I don't know which one caused the other.

Who the hell sifts through all these pictures after they are taken?

And for your career 1) Like what you do 2) Make lots of money 3) Operate within the law
Pick any two

Seagate has long been my brand of choice for hard drives. I have never had one of their drives fail. I still use one of their 9 GB SCSI drives in an old Sun Ultra 5. That drive is about 12 years old. Recent news makes me wonder if I've been lucky and whether I need to start looking elsewhere.

In the past, I've lost more WD drives than I can count but they seem to be doing better in recent times. I lost all four drives in a Hitachi RAID within one week of each other (makes you really doubt the controller). I lost one of the four in an old Maxtor RAID, but there have been no issues with the RAID in the approximately 2 years since replacing that drive.

I have about 15 Fujitsu drives that are still in their static wrap. A friend gave them to me after having an entire RAID replaced off an RMA. He never trusted the drives enough to use them after that. I never hooked them up either so I don't have any personal experience with them.

No experience with Samsung drives either.