Dave Garrett

iTunes retrieves cover art only from the iTunes store. Since Mosaic doesn't sell downloads, you're out of luck with that one. You can add your own cover art in iTunes, either from your own scans or from image files obtained from elsewhere on the net. I generally check Amazon first, but saving the full-sized image files there isn't as straightforward as it is on other sites and typically involves viewing the page source of the pop-up window containing the image and searching for all files ending in .jpg until you find the right one. This was just the first link I ran across when googling "adding cover art to iTunes". There are lots of others. Adding album cover art or images in iTunes

The drive in your JVC could be on its last legs. What you describe is the usual pattern I've experienced with several CD/DVD drives in computers - eventually due to age and use they can start to have problems recognizing/burning blank discs, but will still play discs OK. I've had a couple that progressed to the next step of finally refusing to play discs as well. I think this is typically due to the laser pickup in the drive wearing out. They have a finite lifespan.

From the alt.usage.english FAQ:

The Outland volume is available for preorder on Amazon, and looks to be coming out next month: Outland I also noticed that the 2nd and 3rd Bloom County volumes appear to already be out of print with ridiculous asking prices, despite only having been published a couple of years ago. Too bad I didn't get them when I had the chance, but for anyone that's interested, Edward R. Hamilton has remaindered copies of the first volume for $11.95 - quite a good deal: Hamilton link Looking forward to the final Krazy & Ignatz volume, I have the first two and they are magnificent.

That's a flathead in those pics, not a knucklehead. Different engines. Here's a '41 knuck:

The Brussels release and the newer L.A. Friday '75 are both essential to anyone with even a passing interest in the Stones. This is the kind of stuff they should have been releasing long ago. Mystifying why they're not being made available as FLACs in the US, only as mp3s, but the lossless files are out there for the determined seeker. Stones Archive

It's actually Friday (Tuesdays and Fridays), and it's up to $500 million now. I think last night's drawing was the biggest one in history, God only knows what it'll get up to with everyone coming out of the woodwork now that it's hit $500MM.

Yep. If you have a Twitter account, follow NYTimes. They tweet prolifically, and include links to many of the articles on the website. If you access the site via a Twitter link (and I believe Facebook and a couple of other major social media sites as well), it doesn't count toward the monthly limit. I've had the NYTimes app since the day I got my iPhone, and their Twitter feed is good enough that even before they put up the paywall I don't think I ever opened the app after I started following them on Twitter.

I had Childcraft when I was younger and remember spending untold hours reading every volume, then later on we got World Book when I got old enough for a "real" encyclopedia. My parents still have the World Book set in the bookcase it came in, but the Childcraft set was on the bottom shelf and was lost when their house flooded during TS Allison.

Google "Bild letzte seite 1 girl". I guarantee your disappointment will be short-lived.

Printer companies are really in the business of selling ink, not printers. That is why printers can be had so cheap, their cost is subsidized by ink sales. I have an Epson NX625 that I picked up at Fry's last year for around $60, which is a ridiculously low price considering its capabilities. The "starter" cartridges it came with didn't last long, and I wound up buying a set of high-capacity Epson cartridges from Amazon for about $70 or so. I'm still using those, so I'm not sure yet how much use I can expect to get out of a set of new cartridges, but most of our printing needs are fairly low-volume. The cost of consumables for consumer-grade inkjet printers can get expensive pretty quickly if you do a lot of high-volume printing.

PM sent on Duke Ellington: 1936-40 Small Group Sessions (Mosaic) $95

Looks like the trailing "l" got omitted from the URL - try this one: Link Texas gets 3 cities in the 25 listed. Time for a drink.

From what I can see from a bit of Googling, it looks like RR "turbo speed" is somewhere between 10-15Mb/s, which is plenty for streaming even full HD content (by way of comparison, most of the "internet TV" appliances for streaming video like the Roku, Boxee, Apple TV, and Google TV recommend a minimum connection speed of anywhere between 2 and 5Mb/s for optimal performance). And Leeway is right, most budget-priced computers these days have video and sound integrated onto the mainboard, so it's not really necessary to upgrade to separate, higher-performance video and sound cards unless you have a specific need to do so. I can stream full HD content on my computer and haven't noticed any lack of performance from the integrated video, and as for sound, your money is better spent on a good set of speakers before a new sound card. I like the Klipsch ProMedia 2.1 system (which I think has been discontinued, but can still be had for considerably cheaper than the 3rd-party seller in the Amazon link).

I was in the same boat earlier this year - I had a 9-year-old desktop that I'd built myself and was way overdue for replacement. I wound up replacing both my own and my wife's desktops (which was an even older Dell) with refurbished HP desktops from Micro Center. I found that with a little patience in waiting for the right deals to come along, I was able to get machines with 4GB RAM, 1TB hard drive, a quad-core 2.9GHz AMD CPU, and Win7 64-bit Home Premium for between $300-400. I think those are the minimum specs you should be looking at - the Intel i3 or i5 CPUs are certainly worthy as well, but you'll pay a premium over AMD CPUs for them, and in my experience you won't be able to tell the difference for web surfing, word processing, spreadsheets, and all the other basic functions you'd expect to perform on a computer. Gaming, video editing, or other similar activities that are CPU-intensive may be a different story. The only drawback with the machines I got is that the stock power supplies, at 250W, are really undersized if I start adding additional components - I will likely have to upgrade to 450W or better ones before adding bigger graphics cards, additional internal drives, etc. But I haven't had the need to do so yet, and may not any time soon. Why those specs? Quad-core CPUs are the de facto standard now. There's no excuse to settle for a dual-core unless you're really aiming for a bare-bones system, especially if you're planning on keeping it for a long time. As for the RAM, it's cheap, and you'll need more than 2GB for Win7 to run with enough pep when you have multiple applications open; right now I'm using 2.75GB of RAM with two mail clients and two browsers open (Firefox and Chrome, albeit both with quite a few tabs open concurrently). Hard drive space can be pretty variable depending on how much downloading you do, but I don't see too many desktops with the above specs with less than a 500-750GB drive these days. You can never have too much disk space. Refurb machines are worth looking at because "refurb" does not necessarily mean "used". In many cases, such as with the HPs I got, the manufacturer designates them as refurb because they're discontinuing them, and want to get rid of existing stock. The warranty is typically 90 days as opposed to 1 year, but you're getting a pretty steep discount in return for rolling the dice in that regard, and most hardware failures are usually going to happen within the first 90 days. I got my dad a refurb HP machine earlier this year that turned out to be DOA out of the box (stuck in a bluescreen loop), and HP promptly sent him a prepaid shipping carton to return it for repair, turning it around within a week after going over it thoroughly. My dad has considerable work experience in the retail electronics industry and is very computer-savvy as well, and he was pretty impressed with HP's customer service in dealing with this problem, but as the saying goes, your mileage may vary. The prices I mentioned above do not include a monitor. You should budget $150 or so for a 23-24" full HD (1080p) LCD monitor - 1920x1080 resolution. I've had good luck with Samsung and Asus monitors. 23-24" units are in the sweet spot where they're plenty big enough for regular use, including watching movies, while still being relatively cheap. Anything bigger starts to get considerably more expensive. I went from a 19" analog CRT to a 23" digital LCD and could not believe the difference in size as well as resolution. A decent-sized monitor will make a budget-priced system much more livable, so don't skimp here. I would strongly recommend a router even if you only have one computer and don't have an immediate need to set up a wifi network, because having your computer behind a NAT router makes it far more secure than using a software firewall only - the router's IP address is the only one that's visible to the public internet, as the router assigns private IP addresses to all the computers or other devices behind it. Think of it as cheap insurance, another layer in the onion that you need to build an effective security strategy against the legion of malware purveyors out there.

A cursory forum search didn't turn up any mention of this, but I may have missed a previous discussion. Anyone else seen this? I recently picked up the DVD at the film's website, where it's available for the very reasonable price of $8.95. The film itself is fairly brief, but there's over an hour of extras in the form of interviews with many of the people featured in the film. Learned some things I didn't know, and if you're interested enough to be hanging here in the first place, I suspect you'd find it well worth watching. Website

Barns & Noble seem to have a Criterion sale every year or maybe even a couple of times a year. I'm not sure since there is no longer a B & N near me, but my son in New York has taken advantage of their Criterion sales. B&N usually has a 50% off Criterion sale in the summer and one in November. They just had one last month that ended three weeks ago. It's gotten to where I hardly ever buy Criterions until their sale comes around.

It's a good bet that anyone who trots that hoary old chestnut out has likely never been on acid themselves.

Anyone else seen this yet? It just opened Friday in limited release (NYC, Atlanta, Cleveland, and Houston), but will hopefully roll out to a wider release soon. It's a must-see for anyone with even a slight interest in 70s funk and soul, but the backstory should ensure broad-based appeal among other audiences as well. Official movie website Also looks like Now-Again Records is coming out with a new "deluxe" edition of the outstanding compilation of KSB recordings they released in 2006: Kashmere Stage Band - Texas Thunder Soul 1968-1974

Finally made it to this yesterday before it closed today: Helmut Newton: White Women - Sleepless Nights - Big Nudes Very impressive to see some of these photos in large-scale prints after being familiar with them in books. Also read a comment in the visitors' guestbook that made me laugh: "These photos smell like cocaine!"

Did you get rid of just the premium digital cable packages, or did you actually revert back to analog cable? Comcast, along with almost every other cable provider, is phasing out analog cable as they can cram a lot more digital channels into the same bandwidth that analog transmissions consume. Sooner rather than later, existing analog customers are going to get a letter mandating the switch to digital cable if they want to continue receiving service. Also, Comcast has a 250GB cap on residential internet service, so you may want to keep an eye on the usage meter available on their website under your account settings if you're going to be streaming a lot of video. I don't really use Hulu or Netflix streaming, so I'm not sure how much bandwidth they consume, but I've heard that streaming a lot of HD content can cause you to hit the bandwidth cap quickly.

As an aside, DeepDiscount.com currently has that disc and the other three live Airplane releases by Collectors' Choice Music for ridiculously low prices - between $2-3 per disc. Just search for "Jefferson Airplane" and you'll see them. Apparently they are blowing out these and a bunch of other CCM releases that have been discontinued in the wake of wholesaler Super D's acquisition of Infinity Resources (parent company of both DeepDiscount and CCM). I picked up all four for $14 and change shipped, only remembering after the fact that free shipping is offered on all orders of $15 or more.

$658.98. Somebody say something about a recession? Not that I'm defending yet another overpriced box set, but... Achtung Baby Price Tracker

Combine very sharp puppy teeth with the aforementioned puppy tendency to chew on everything within reach, and you're going to get regularly nipped even by the best-behaved pup. I had the same kind of scratches and bites up and down my arms and hands when our dog was a puppy, but she grew out of the biting/chewing habit (although not before ruining a coffee table I'd had since college and a few books) once her permanent teeth had come in. I'd definitely look into some basic obedience training before considering returning him to the agency, but this is probably not something you're going to fix in several days.