?

All I see are leaderboards for points earned.

I was mostly wondering if my having a 25% ratio of best answers (from just over 700 answers so far) was unusual.

Here's a tough one...I only heard this song once. It was on a radio station in the San Diego, CA area in the mid 1990s. (Probably 91X, knowing my roommates at the time.) It starts off with a faux country sound, with some guy singing about how he wants to be a cowboy, then somewhere in the middle of the song, it switches to a hardcore electro-industrial sort of sound, and the guy continues to sing "I wanna be a cowboy".

I've heard the Boys Don't Cry song, and that is NOT it. But I've never been able to track down who made the song. Stylistically, it sounds more like Mighty Force than any other band I can think of.

Any ideas?

After trying out several of the hard liquors, I finally settled on vodka, because it's just pure grain alcohol and so it impacts my system less than the darker liquors. (Thanks to comedian Pete McCarthy for that tip!)

My favorite nightcap is 4 ounces of vodka and 16 ounces of cranberry juice. One day, I decided to try Everclear (151 proof is all they sell here in California) as a sort of "double-strength" vodka, i.e. my nightcap becomes 2 ounces of Everclear and 18 ounces of cranberry juice.

But I swear that Everclear gives me a much nastier "kick"...I'll take a good swig of my nightcap and shudder with nausea. I don't get that with vodka. Granted, I'm drinking Tito's Handmade Vodka, which is distilled six times to get rid of the residual higher & lower alcohols, and then carbon-filtered to get rid of the phenols, esters, congeners, and organic acids (at least according to the back of the bottle).

So what's the deal? Is Everclear just distilled to get rid of the water? As it stands, I'm back to Tito's Handmade Vodka. I'll pay extra for something that gets me drunk without all the nastiness. Still, I'd like to save money on this...a 750 ml bottle of Tito's is like $18 at Trader Joe's.

I have a 1992 Corvette coupe, automatic transmission, with somewhere over 150,000 miles on it, but I keep it perfectly maintained -- it always goes in for its 30,000 and 60,000 mile servicing, and just for extra care, I almost always take it to the dealer, even for oil changes.

A few years ago, it developed a weird sputtering problem. It happens once the car is warm; in warm weather, it's soon after it's started. The sputtering generally happens between 1500 and 2500 RPM, and tends to make the transmission shift into higher gears. When it's really bad, and I'm trying to drive around town, I can shift into second gear and that seems to reduce the problem vastly.

I've had the transmission soft-rebuilt, I've had the water pump and OptiSpark replaced, and I had a blown head gasket replaced. Nothing has helped. Right now my plan is to drive the damn thing until it completely breaks, and then see what the heck was wrong, but obviously I'd prefer to fix it before that.

Any idea what could be wrong with it? Or what to test? It never seems to happen for the mechanic.

I've been doing audio manipulation on my computer for over ten years, and I thought I knew it all...but this one is mystifying me.

I'm just trying to use Audacity to mix a backing track with some vocals I recorded. There is no noise in either signal. But when I mix them together, the vocals start to crackle!

The signal isn't clipping...I export the track and it's actually got a good amount of space before I have to worry about clipping. My only theory is that somehow the frequencies in my voice are interfering with the frequencies in the music somehow. I did the usual processing on the vocals to make them sound nice -- DC offset fix, level compression (4:1), and echo (0.01s with 25% wet/dry mix).

Any idea what I should try?

And while I've got the attention of pro audio people...now that I'm recording more of my own stuff, instead of just fixing already-recorded stuff, I'm ready to move beyond the microphone port on the back of my computer. I want a nice breakout box that Audacity can recognize. Any recommendations?

My nearly twenty years in the software industry is a complete clusterfunk, and I don't know what I did to cause it, except for having a brain, caring about my work, and maintaining personal integrity. At least that's my side of the story. Maybe one of you can figure out what I did wrong, or where I'm full of it.

It's the same pattern at every company I've worked -- the vast majority of my peers, who apparently have their college degree, are so horribly underqualified to do their job, that words fail me. Almost without exception, they are stupid, ignorant, lazy, and dishonest. They seem perfectly content to fake their way through their job and stick me with all the hard work. The number of co-workers I've had in my life that I could trust to do real work, I can count on one hand, and have fingers left over.

The only wildcard is my boss -- if he/she is actually competent, then I tend to keep my job, even though my job is sheer hell. If he/she is hopelessly average, I tend to get fired for "having a bad attitude", then I have to explain myself over and over at job interviews. More often than not, the interviewer gets a faraway look in his/her eyes, as if admitting that I would just have the same problem there.

I'm pretty sure I've done nothing other than work hard, strive to improve, care about my work, and not take shortcuts. Granted, my people skills aren't exactly politician grade, but what can I do -- a few years ago I finally heard about something called Asperger's Syndrome, and damned if I didn't match up with every single last symptom. (Actually, it mentioned clumsiness, which doesn't fit me -- my reflexes are quick and accurate. But if by clumsiness they mean awkwardness, never mind, that fits.) But given that many computer programmers have Asperger's Syndrome, it really seems like that can't be the source of my problems with work.

From my point of view, it seems like I can't find a decent company to work for. Every one is just a museum for lazy morons. I've worked in six different parts of the software industry -- word processing, OEM, business simulation, income tax, defense contracting, and video games -- and it's the same story everywhere. (The incompetent defense-industry programmers really floor me -- don't soldiers have to depend on this crap?) It seems like there would have to be a decent place to work somewhere -- please? Maybe? I've completely failed at finding one.

Is it because I never bothered to get a master's or PhD? (It took me five years and a quarter just to get my bachelor's. No, I'm not a slacker -- ask anyone that went to U.C. San Diego, they'll tell you this is typical. The course load is just too heavy for us engineering students.) I didn't get an advanced degree because I was quite sick of college and desperate to start my adult life. Besides, it's not like college really taught me much -- I tended to be years ahead of my peers, based on my own self-driven education. Maybe the jobs I'm talking about are reserved for PhDs?

I don't know. Am I just full of it? Feel free to ask for clarifications or whatever...I'll do my best to explain where I'm coming from. But as it stands, I feel like I'm living in Bizarro world, where good is bad and bad is good, and someone that actually knows how to do his job and achieve results in the real world is some sort of freak, good only for ridicule and stabbing in the back.

Oh, and one last thing...I am not looking for wishful thinking or well-meaning lies. How I feel about all of this is completely irrelevant. I don't need to be soothed. I'll feel good about this as soon as there is a logical reason to feel good about it, and not a second sooner, and anything less than that, as far as I'm concerned, qualifies as self-delusion, so don't even suggest it. I want answers, not pablum.

It's my understanding that the "proof" of special relativity (i.e. that a particle's mass approaches infinity as its speed approaches the speed of light) is mostly taken from particle-accelerator experiments. These particle accelerators tend to use powerful electromagnets to speed up particles.

But...magnetic waves also travel at the speed of light. Therefore, as a particle approaches the speed of light, the amount of speed that the magnet can contribute to the particle becomes less, since their speeds are nearly matched. So it takes more and more energy to drive the magnets to make the particle go faster, but of course there's no way a magnetic wave moving at the speed of light could ever push something to go faster than the speed of light.

I put it to you that this is a monumental oversight. Am I wrong?

Maybe Einstein was just a failed patent clerk with bad hair and a genius for marketing?

Here are my biggest two questions about women:

[1] Why do women spend so much time and energy to look pretty, only to get angry at men when we notice?

[2] Why do women say they want a nice guy, then fall for the first handsome B.S. artist that tells them all the right lies?

Say what you will about men, but at least we're obvious.

I know "va au mcdo" is French for "go to McDonald's", but I was wondering if it meant something idiomatically, i.e. if it was slang for something. I assume it's meant as an insult, but I don't know. Does anyone?