Something Random

Handruin

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Almost Chewy. Now it's 10000. I wonder how many forums have a thread that large on the Net.

Your post actually shows as number 10001 in the top-right corner. Technically Chewy was correct in his post being number 10000.
 

CougTek

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Awww...I looked at the number of replies to the thread. So he posted the 10000th post and me the 10000th reply. Whatever. My post is at the top of the page and his is burried at the bottom of last page. No one will see his, but all can admire mine :p

Do you guys know if there are many other bigger threads in the other forums you visit?
 

Handruin

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Awww...I looked at the number of replies to the thread. So he posted the 10000th post and me the 10000th reply. Whatever. My post is at the top of the page and his is burried at the bottom of last page. No one will see his, but all can admire mine :p

Do you guys know if there are many other bigger threads in the other forums you visit?

One of the larger threads I visited for a while was related to the Dell Perc 5i and 6i on overclock.net but it's only slightly larger than half the size of this thread. other than that, this is the largest reoccurring thread in a forum that I visit and post in. I'm sure there must be a larger thread out there somewhere, but I don't think there are many forums that have a very large single thread.
 

Mercutio

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A big thread on fark will generate 3 - 5000 replies over maybe three days. Big threads usually involves tragedies or female members attention whoring.

Reddit has a whole subculture of attention whoring. I point that out every time it happens but farkers are different animals I guess.
 

Will Rickards

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The way happy meal toy distribution worked back in the day was as follows. It is probably still the same.
What happens is that the toys are broken down into weeks. Week 1 gets x toy, week 2 y toy and so forth.
Generally it was 4 - 8 weeks, with two toys per week (one boy - one girl). And every store had the same toys that week.
The places that have more toys just have leftover from last week, or have their deliveries on a day such that they have this weeks early.
Leftover toys are saved and then given out for the period when they have no specific promotion or when they run out of the promotion toys.

Ask which toys they've had and it will tell you whether rainbow dash is coming or has already come and gone.
 

Clocker

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I just spent about 90 minutes deciding on and then looking for the books I want to take to my son's classroom tomorrow. I'm the 'secret reader' that will show up by surprise tomorrow and read to the class. Funny how things change when you become a parent! :study:
 

Mercutio

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My family has a small number of long-ish books that are traditionally read aloud to children at a certain age. "Swiss Family Robinson", "The Three Musketeers", "Man in the Iron Mask", "The Little Prince" and "Anne of Green Gables." There may be other books as well, but those are the ones I remember. A particular treasure I have is the tattered family copy of "Swiss Family Robinson", which has been inscribed with a start date and end date by each person who has read it, and to whom the book was next gifted. It's a bit sad that the traditional will die with my generation. No one at this level in my family tree has procreated, and I am the youngest. There's no one to pass on either gift or tradition.

At any rate, being read to is unquestionably my fondest memory of childhood, even moreso that I knew that what was being read were grown-up books with long and intricate plots and no (or almost no) pictures. My father read aloud a chapter or two a night until he judged that I was old enough to read those books myself, probably until I was about six or seven years old. Doing so undoubtedly instilled a particular relationship with books that I didn't observe in other children.
 

Chewy509

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I just spent about 90 minutes deciding on and then looking for the books I want to take to my son's classroom tomorrow. I'm the 'secret reader' that will show up by surprise tomorrow and read to the class. Funny how things change when you become a parent! :study:

It sure is funny how life changes once you have kids.

My wife and I have been looking at schooling options for our eldest for next year (he's due to start in Feb 2013), and will most likely home-school due not being able to find an establishment that can fully cater for our child.

But on the book side, anything by Mem Fox, Pamela Allen or any of the "Spot" books (Eric Hall) are usually a hit with the 4-6yr age group. What did you end up choosing?
 

Chewy509

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My father read aloud a chapter or two a night until he judged that I was old enough to read those books myself, probably until I was about six or seven years old. Doing so undoubtedly instilled a particular relationship with books that I didn't observe in other children.

My wife and I ensure we always read a book each night to each of our kids just before bed, (as part of their bedtime routine). It's certainly a good bonding moment between child and parent, and we've found it's certainly installed a love of books in both of them.

PS. My daughters favourite books currently are "Dinosaur Roar" and "Good night, Sleep Tight Little Bunnies". Isaac, well, being a typical 4 yr old, likes to read through his many plane or space/rocket books at the moment.
 

Mercutio

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Other books my brother remembered being read: Kidnapped, Call of the Wild, Rebecca, The Wind in the Willows, The Jungle Book (Kipling not Disney), My Side of the Mountain.

My mom read to me too, but the things my mom read were things I could identify as "kid" books. When my father read aloud, it was from very thick books with no pictures, "grown up" books. And that's kind of how the idea was presented: Reading books is this wonderful thing that you can do when you're older.

I don't know how well that translates into the world of pervasive internets and video games but as I said it's something of a tradition in my family to do it and one thing I can say is that we're a whole big bunch of readers as adults.

Anyway Clocker, if you wanted to move up to something a little more challenging you could try telling your progeny the story of The Little Prince or Swiss Family Robinson (no swords but they live in a treehouse and skin a whale!) and see how that goes.
 

Chewy509

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Couple of my son's favorites that I'll be reading (he's 4):

Gorganzola: A Very Stinky Saurus

Mr. Tuggle's Troubles

If it shoots, blows up, has swords, or has lasers, Brendan likes that too but that's not appropriate for the class room. :)
We borrowed Gorganzola from our library not that long ago, certainly a good book. Will keep an eye out for the other one at the library - thanks for the tip. (We tend to borrow 20 books each fortnight for our two - they love their books that much).

Gabriel, she's going through her fairy stage at the moment, so anything with fairies has her interested. (She loves Tinkerbell - the recent Disney movies are actually very good). But she still has her favourites.

And like Brendon, Isaac loves anything that shoots or has lasers a must read. Luckily for us Transformers books (the older Gen 1 stuff) is okay for smaller kids, but has had a few of the LEGO Bionicles comics as well. Not to mention anything on modern military jets or attack choppers... (His favourite plane is the F-14 Tomcat (since it has the huge Phoenix missiles), and his favourite chopper is the Longbow Apache - despite my much insistence that he should be favouring the Tiger ARH (Australian version of the Eurocopter Tiger) :( ). And lucky for us, the local library has a very good kids non-fiction section, so getting age appropriate books is easy enough.

The only problem I have with Isaac, is that he refuses to read in front of me, but is happy to read aloud to my wife anytime I'm not in the room! It makes very frustrating when reading through the beginner reader books we occasionally get. (He's reading at an age 5-6 level at the moment).
 

Clocker

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Thanks for the book suggestions. They look like really good ones. As Brendan gets older it will be fun to get in to longer books like that.

We have the original He-Man series as well as the updated (2008 maybe) He-Man series on DVD. Got it on eBay. Isaac might like that...lasers, swords, and He-Man!
 

ddrueding

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At any rate, being read to is unquestionably my fondest memory of childhood, even moreso that I knew that what was being read were grown-up books with long and intricate plots and no (or almost no) pictures.

Same here. We started with The Jungle Book and then went into the Tom Sawyer series (Twain) and then the I, Robot series (Asimov). My parents are still sci-fi junkies (their library is 90% SciFi)
 

Mercutio

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Just a funny picture I found.

MRETo.png
 

Mercutio

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Yeah probably. The link is from imgur, which basically exists to be a place for redditors to put pictures.

I don't get reddit. It's complete and utter chaos that seems to be lacking in any greater sense of community.
 

Handruin

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Yeah probably. The link is from imgur, which basically exists to be a place for redditors to put pictures.

I don't get reddit. It's complete and utter chaos that seems to be lacking in any greater sense of community.

I do get reddit and enjoy the website greatly. I don't find it to be chaos at all. I found by creating an account (if you haven't already) and adjust your subscriptions, it makes a lot more sense. For a while there I was getting nothing but marijuana and politics on the front page. I down-voted the hell out of them until I realized creating an account and only seeing the things I cared about made it a much better experience.

I don't use their website to browse every reddit or subreddit to feel complete and up to date on every change...that's way too much. I rely on what's up-voted and displayed to me to find what's important to read. When I run out of popular items, I work through the new stuff and comment and vote as I feel fit. The community support is very specific to a given reddit/subreddit and there are moments of great laughter as carryovers from a specific threaded discussion make its way into other discussions. I've seen some great discussions that have been enlightening and thought-provoking and then the complete opposite of stupidity and fun. That's symbolic of almost anywhere on the internet.
 

Mercutio

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One of the reasons I appreciated my time on TotalFark is that it's a wider community made of up of people coming from different backgrounds with varied interests. It's really the only place I've spent communicating with non-nerds and/or women who aren't queer. The community is such that there's a broad idea that most people at least know of most people while at the same time being large enough to support a widely varied population. The larger population of Fark is itself too large to support much of a real community; being able to have an actual discussion about a topic is difficult because of the nature (i.e. comments are not threaded) of their forum system.

With Slashdot, the amazing thing is the availability of expert-level comments. There's tons of trolls too, but with plenty of folks mixed in who legitimately know their stuff. Slashdot discussions tend to send me off on tangents of reading and exploration.

Digg just looks to me like Youtube commentators trying to ape Fark by way of Down's Syndrome and Four Loko.

Reddit (yes, I register my normal username there) looks from the outside like a big self-segregating mass. I don't see any evidence of a wider community. I'm sure there's some sort of something in larger boards, but because it appears to be unmoderated (in terms of both topics and in discussions), and readership is so self-selecting, I generally think I've seen better discussion elsewhere. The few folks I know who do use reddit have said they tend to stick to local or regional sub-forums or have one highly specific interest that keeps them there.
 

Mercutio

Fatwah on Western Digital
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One of the reasons I appreciated my time on TotalFark is that it's a wider community made of up of people coming from different backgrounds with varied interests. It's really the only place I've spent communicating with non-nerds and/or women who aren't queer. The community is such that there's a broad idea that most people at least know of most people while at the same time being large enough to support a widely varied population. The larger population of Fark is itself too large to support much of a real community; being able to have an actual discussion about a topic is difficult because of the nature (i.e. comments are not threaded) of their forum system.

With Slashdot, the amazing thing is the availability of expert-level comments. There's tons of trolls too, but with plenty of folks mixed in who legitimately know their stuff. Slashdot discussions tend to send me off on tangents of reading and exploration.

Digg just looks to me like Youtube commentators trying to ape Fark by way of Down's Syndrome and Four Loko.

Reddit (yes, I register my normal username there) looks from the outside like a big self-segregating mass. I don't see any evidence of a wider community. I'm sure there's some sort of something in larger boards, but because it appears to be unmoderated (in terms of both topics and in discussions), and readership is so self-selecting, I generally think I've seen better discussion elsewhere. The few folks I know who do use reddit have said they tend to stick to local or regional sub-forums or have one highly specific interest that keeps them there.
 

Handruin

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One of the reasons I appreciated my time on TotalFark is that it's a wider community made of up of people coming from different backgrounds with varied interests. It's really the only place I've spent communicating with non-nerds and/or women who aren't queer. The community is such that there's a broad idea that most people at least know of most people while at the same time being large enough to support a widely varied population. The larger population of Fark is itself too large to support much of a real community; being able to have an actual discussion about a topic is difficult because of the nature (i.e. comments are not threaded) of their forum system.

With Slashdot, the amazing thing is the availability of expert-level comments. There's tons of trolls too, but with plenty of folks mixed in who legitimately know their stuff. Slashdot discussions tend to send me off on tangents of reading and exploration.

Digg just looks to me like Youtube commentators trying to ape Fark by way of Down's Syndrome and Four Loko.

Reddit (yes, I register my normal username there) looks from the outside like a big self-segregating mass. I don't see any evidence of a wider community. I'm sure there's some sort of something in larger boards, but because it appears to be unmoderated (in terms of both topics and in discussions), and readership is so self-selecting, I generally think I've seen better discussion elsewhere. The few folks I know who do use reddit have said they tend to stick to local or regional sub-forums or have one highly specific interest that keeps them there.

I would describe Reddit the same with regards to it being a wider community, but everything is relative. I've not used TotalFark, so I can't compare to reddit, so you may very well be right in comparing the two communities. Reddit is my non-tech forum where I like to spend most of my time reading rather than writing.

I never even visit Digg any more. I haven't in a few years now. It was only yesterday or the day before when you made a comment about Digg's founder that I even thought of seeing if the website was still around...but I never checked.
 

MaxBurn

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Whole process goes like this on my work computer this morning; launch FF and am told mandatory restart required to launch FF, once again I am completely unaware that FF was going to update itself again. I say no a couple times to the restart and it still refuses to launch FF. Restart and FF says 1password plugin no good now and disabled, update says no update available. Installed safari and opened 1password to put the plugin into safari and it says by the way new plugin available for firefox, install it? No, not really, I’m uninstalling firefox because I don't need this circle jerk every couple of weeks, thanks.
 

Mercutio

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I've probably updated Firefox to version 11 on twenty or thirty machines without seeing it cause an OS restart. I have no idea what 1password is but I use upwards of 20 addons on some of my personal systems.
 

time

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Maxburn, I strongly recommend selecting 'Check for updates, but let me choose whether to install them' under Options - Update.

On the other hand, add-ons need to be automatically updated or you guarantee them falling behind the insane update cycle that the manic POS inflicts on its users.
 

MaxBurn

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That work machine and the beast gaming machine at home were the only two holdouts I was still using FF on still, anyway gone now.

1password is a password manager that syncs via dropbox so you can have your passwords on all machines and it will enter them in the web pages for you. Pretty handy.
 
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