Caraccioli

You were female in your last earthly incarnation.You were born somewhere in the territory of modern USA North-East around the year 1500. Your profession was that of a designer, engineer or craftsman. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Seeker of truth and wisdom. You could have seen your future lives. Others perceived you as an idealist illuminating path to future. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Find a good teacher and spend a good part of your time and energy on learning from his wisdom. A female designer, engineer or craftsman (presumably) among the American Indians in 1500? That seems like an unlikely combination for the period and people. Just for fun, I put in another day and came up with the same description (for the first two parts) but a different lesson. I tried to look at the code, but some of the calculations aren't shown and I'm not very familiar with how the calls are made. The past description changes when either the month or year changes. The lesson changes when the day changes.

Can you get Action Figures on the cheap? When I was in my teens and the Star Wars AF line was dying out, I met a woman who worked at TRU. I asked her if she could get me some for less than store price. She said she could, but she couldn't pick which ones she got me for some reason. So I took her up on it. She got me four figures for 10 or 20% less than retail. I already had them all (Ben Kenobi, Darth Vader, two random Ewoks), so I just tossed them in a box without opening them. The only person who will probably appreciate this is Capt. Grey, but they were all Power of the Force figures with the coin on them. Years later, I realized I had some very collectible figs because they were still minty and on card. Anyhow, I'm an engineer, part owner of a business that does design and troubleshooting work who moonlights as a self-help skills trainer. So is Mission. Phil, don't you run a training business of a sort?

Actually, they decided to clean up the old posts a few months back without telling us mods. The old thread about professions got deleted with a lot of other good stuff. If I'd have known, I'd have resurrected some of them - like that one - before the chop. Alas. So you may as well begin again.

You're dominant and powerful. You always need to be in charge. (Wrong. If no one is doing a good job of being in charge of something I care about, then I will allow myself to be in charge. IFF (math term, not a typo) both of those two conditions are true, I care who's in charge. Otherwise...nah.) While others respect your competence, you can be a bit of a dictator. (Now this is somewhat true.) Hard working and serious, you never let yourself down. (How is this possible? You never let yourself down? You can do your best and that's about the extent of it.) You are exact and accurate - and you expect others to be the same way. (Again - not possible. I do expect a lot of others who are working toward the same end.) Your strength: You always get the job done (That's mostly true.) Your weakness: You're a perfectionist to a fault (Perfection is impossible - this is silly.) Your power color: Gray Your power symbol: Checkmark Your power month: April Your power ball number: 31 Your power trip: Key West Your power outage: The one on January 27th @ 2:12 pm Your power tie: Red with yellow and green polka dots Your power hour: 7am Your power flower: Goats-rue Your power glower: sneer

Great responses, Phil! (Change is ever constant.) (Of course it's the best type. Ask Red-Handed Jill.) One of the keys to MBTI (according the Jung, who really layed the foundations for the test) was to make people aware of their differences so that they could learn to better get along with people who have different personality typings. I like your response too, "If these simplified tests serve only as a tool for people to quest within themselves, I think they'll have accomplished their purpose."

Not to carp, but when we were discussing this a year ago, wasn't it you Phil that said, "Boy the labels are flying tonight!" INTJ - the best type - with a long memory. FWIW, I post on an INTJ mail list and they are very strict about how you determine your type. Apparently the online tests are not considered to be very accurate. Only the several hundred question written test (which you can take at most colleges) is considered truly accurate. Also, be mindful that your results can change (particularly if you're using the simpler tests) depending on your mood and environment. It's one of the big flaws with this test IMO. This does bring up a question I had been pondering awhile back. If you're an NT, you tend to be future focused. I posit that this has something to do with the INtuitive function. (25% of the population are iNtuitive, 75% are Sensing). From wikipedia: "Sensing and Intuition are the perceiving functions. They indicate how a person prefers to receive data. These are the nonrational functions, as a person does not necessarily have control over receiving data, but only how to process it once they have it. Sensing prefers to receive data primarily from the five senses, and intuition prefers to receive data from the unconscious, or seeing relationships via insights." Now, the ultimate goal of Taoism is to live in the moment. Being NT (iNtuitive Thinking), I have a strong predilection for the future and thinking about other possibilities and projects - which is completely opposite to living in the now. If you read up on the NT type, you'll find this is typical, however. As explained above, a Sensing type, is focused on the five senses - which (to my Rational mind) would tend to be preferential for focusing on the now. Since the majority of the people in this world are Sensing according to the MBTI (Myers-Briggs Temperament Indicator data - this is the test you're all discussing), could it be that Taoism merely reflects what the majority prefer? I personally don't find the now all that interesting for the most part. I have always found better long-term payoff in playing to my strengths.

Very strange - Norton blocked an intrusion attempt when I accessed the site just now. (This was not an email.) I also got the email as well. I will report it.

Perhaps they're testing the waters. I notice that a "Best of" F Troop came out long before they released a season's worth.

That has come up in my Netflix recommendation list. I'd run it by my typically reliable suggestion source, but I don't think this sort of thing would be her style. Hey Blackjohn! Have you seen this?

Really? Based on the size of the email files I get I thought pictures were files embedded in emails, not accessed directly from the site. That could provide a good explanation why he has them.

Yeah, but I don't see where it's to a site's advantage to give you a cookie. A cookie is not a program, it's just a collection of pieces of data to be used when you visit the site. When you go to most sites, they check to see if you have their cookie. If you do, they load your preferences and other information using the pieces of data in the cookie. If you don't, they give you a cookie for the next time you visit. Unwanted pop-ups are not caused by cookies. They are caused by trojan horse programs you pick up when visiting sites. Somehow, those sites that the cookies are from were visited by your computer, Captain. It may have been a mistake as I said previously. Or it may not. I'd check your cookies again in a few weeks. If you find more of them, someone is visiting those websites when you're not looking.

I don't think so. Cookies come from sites visited. Their primary purpose is to store information about what you did when you visited a particular site. Since it's just data, it's of no use except when you visit the site again. They keep track of your preferences (so that when you revisit the site, the links you've visited are greyed out, or things you "stored" in a shopping cart are still there) or for tracking (to keep track of the number of times you've been to the site and so forth). They're just pieces of data so there would really be no advantage to seriptiously store them on your computer. The only way they could get on your computer if no one in your household is going to the sites that I can think of is if someone were remotely controlling your computer. (Which seems to me to be a lot of trouble for little value.) Of course some pages can be sort of sneaky...if someone accidentally wound up on the right porn page and tried to leave, they could wind up with a bunch of pop-up links being created. Then, when they tried to close them, more pop-ups could be spawned and so forth. Pretty soon, without meaning to, you could have truly accidentally visited 30 similar porn websites - creating 30 cookies for porn sites. I'd suggest cleaning 'em out, not saying anything and checking again in a few weeks.

That's what you call "ironic."

Good old Amazon. For you fans of Tales of the Golden Monkey, Amazon is taking pre-pre-orders (basically, they're fishing for interest in getting this show to DVD). If you want to "vote" to get the 22 episodes of this show put on DVD, you can enter your email here. What the hell...I'd probably buy it if it was reasonably priced.

Yeah, that was my impression. Even if you can overlook all the inaccuracies and leaps of faith (heh) in the storyline, you still wind up with a rather lame ending IMO. I doubt I'll bother to see this at all. (I also doubt I'll bother reading any other Dan Brown books.) I'd like to see 'em make Crichton's _State of Fear_. (Bet that never happens...) While the research in that book is fascinating and the use of ideas is great, it suffers from the same problem that many of Crichton's books suffer from. The story needs some trimming and some more punchy editing to keep it moving along. It's the sort of task Hollywood is usually quite good at. BTW, I think seeing something because the Catholic Church is against it is still basically being controlled by the Catholic Church - just in a negative way. Food for thought.

This was a pretty good one: "Identity protection matters. And PayPal works day and night to help keep your identity safe. That's why it has come to our attention that your PayPal account information needs to be updated as part of our continuing commitment to protect your account and to reduce the instance of fraud on our website. If you could take 5-10 minutes out of your online experience and update your personal records you will not run into any future problems with the online service." And then there's a link to a page whose URL is clearly not Paypal. Very droll.

Ah. The quality of the topics in Beyond is finally improving. I'm a vegetarian so I don't eat bacon. I used to eat it - I must say I liked it better than sausage, but not as much as corned beef. So that would have been my thoughts 7 years ago.

frisson - 'freesân [n] an almost pleasurable sensation of fright "With frisson, Jim jumped into the battle for the merchant ship." I just like the sound of this word.

If you're very, very good at crying, you're in good shape.

The A-Team is a great show. Intellectually stimulating, like I said. I watched this one when it came out too. I think, for TV, I actually liked Golden Monkey better. The IJ shows well written and interesting, but for me they lacked a compelling aspect for some reason. Perhaps because they didn't include a dog with an eye patch. You gotta have standards. What are your thoughts on Red Dwarf? (Netflix keeps recommending it to me.) Roger. Netflix managed to convince me to put something Anime called "Mirrormask" on my list. Mostly because it was written by Neil Gaiman. Oh, yeah. It was definitely an oversight to forget putting that one on my list. When I started the thread, I figured it could be any show that's off the air. I guess that's not technically "old." Physics - it rots your brain. I loved MP when I was in high school, but I think I burned myself out on it. I have no desire to go back and rewatch them. It was an extremely clever show, though. Actually, there are a lot of shows like that which I used to really like that I don't care for as much now. Batman is one of them. Speed Racer is another. M*A*S*H too.

I think you should color Feynman slightly violet-blue. “When I see equations, I see the letters in colors - I don't know why. As I'm talking, I see vague pictures of Bessel functions from Jahnke and Emde's book, with light-tan j's and slightly violet-bluish n's, and dark brown x's flying around. And I wonder what the hell it must look like to the students." - Richard Feynman

I finally subscribed to Netflix so I could see some of the movies that Blackjohn and Duchess have been recommending to me. (You can't find a lot of this stuff at BlockBuster.) And a whole new world has been opened - DVD releases of old TV Shows. I'm not much of a TV fan, but when I was a kid... well I liked intellectually stimulating shows like Magnum P.I., The A-Team, The Dukes of Hazzard and Quincy. Anyhow, thanks to Netflix, I've been able to check out or catch up with some really interesting old shows like The Avengers, Baa Baa Black Sheep, Hogan's Heroes, Wooster and Jeeves & Cowboy Beebop (See ya' in space, cowboy...) - and all commercial free. Now I find they're releasing the first season of F-Troop to DVD. Joy unconfined. So it got me to wondering...what are your favorite old TV shows? (I bet I know some of Christine's...)

I'm putting together material for a training on creativity when I came across an on-line coloring book on physics. Now that's creative. I'm not sure how much sense it makes, but there you are. Get your tots started early!

I saw the POTC 2 toys in Target on Saturday. I don't remember everything they had, but among the stuff were three larger (8" or so) figures - Jack, Will and Davy Jones - apparently on steriods based on these figs, an assortment of 8 or 10 smaller (4"?) figures that were pretty decent but awfully expensive at almost $7 a piece, Jack and Pintel in some sort of rowing boats, the firing cannon mentioned above, a sword and some sort of playset with a structure and a paddle wheel for the little figures. The best thing I saw was Cotton's parrot - which apparently sort of mimics what you say to it. (I didn't try it but I thought it was a clever idea.) It was $20, which was probably reasonable, but I decided to save my Jackson. (I'd've quickly shelled out $20 or more for a life-sized undead Jack the Monkey if it was reasonably realistic, tho'.)

I suspect that most pirate lingo is public domain at this point. As such, copyright wouldn't even be a consideration. (I even have doubts Disney could lay claim to the phrase "A pirates life for me!" at this point.) Joshua made some really good points about not copying styles (fonts and so forth), which, if unique enough, are copyrightable, but for the most part, you're probably safe.