Gary B

I am looking at buying an approximately 20 year old piano that was not played very much. It's not clear to me whether it was also not tuned very much in its lifetime. But if it went long between tunings, would that cause problems? How would I know?

I'm looking at adding an exhaust fan in a closet for cooling purposes. I am thinking of using 4 inch semi-flexible aluminum duct. What is the minimum bending radius for material like this? I'm having a hard time finding much on the subject, but what I've found indicates bending radius is 1x diameter or less.

I am not an electrician, but I have done a fair bit of (permitted and inspected) wiring around my house. Normally I'm good with wire nut sizes for typical 14 or 12 AWG boxes, but I'm wiring up a three-gang box that will require joining 7 ground and neutral conductors of 14 AWG. Please don't just tell me to read the box. I have, and I am having a hard time finding this combination, but I know they are available because our electrician did at least that many in another box. Does anybody know a wire nut that will work for this combination? Thanks.

I don't want to spend a ton of money, but my budget is somewhat flexible. Here's my background on my requirements. What I want is an HD projector for a smallish (14x17) darkened dedicated theater room, which will have a 96" diagonal screen (16:9) and two rows of seating. It will be used primarily (and almost daily) for watching sports and science shows on HD channels; to a much lesser extent, watching current movies on DVD or B-R. It will be ceiling-mounted. I'll have some kind of (most likely) 5.1 audio system.

I've been looking at the Optoma HD20. My question is what would I really gain by spending several thousand more? Less noise (but HD20 is already low noise). More features (but would I really use them)? It's already 1080p native. I don't mean to be cheap, and I am open to suggestions, but I am honestly wondering if I should save a couple grand on the off-chance I might use some extra feature.

OK, I know there are lots of books on the electronics. But what I am more interested in are the considerations that go into room design of a HT. Examples of the kinds of questions I need answers to:

- How do I best proportion the room?

- Should I enclose the projector for noise reasons, and if so, what about cooling?

- I see all these rooms with stages at the front. I read about vague acoustic benefits of such stages, but cannot find any real explanations.

- What are the best room proportions? If I can't do the ideal proportions, what are the consequences?

- Is there a certain amount of room required between the seating and the side walls?

- What's e minimum ceiling height needed (and consequences for violating)? I see recommendations of having 8-10 foot ceilings but that's an unattainable luxury. And is it a good trade off to give up some ceiling height for acoustic drop ceiling?

- Do I need special heating ducts and returns?

- What about acoustic wall treatments? I read you want sound deadening "but not too much." Is there any any way to quantify this?

I recognize I can hire somebody to figure all this out for me, but surely there are books that explain it all. I've seen http://www.home--theater.com/ but wonder how good an eBook is where every google hit is a site selling it. Thanks!

Is there such a thing as a person who helps us to make a budget and then forces us to live on it for a few months until we get the hang of it? Kind of a personal exchequer. We've tried listing the "ins" and "outs" and making them balance, but with no success. Serious answers only, please.

OK, so don't laugh at me - but I have not played sports for 35 years, and never really played baseball or softball. Now, at 48, after falling in love with baseball, I have the softball bug ... but I stink. I would love to get better, and I always give 100% on the field... but I'm terrible. Can't judge balls to catch them. I'm going to the batting cages so I'm getting a little better at hitting. I really need to improve my fielding though. I can't just go play - teams want somebody who can play already. So I'm stuck. Is there such a thing as an adult slow-pitch softball clinic? Any other ideas?

I am remotely connected to a running JVM on another system and suspect that application may be running the wrong version of either the JVM itself or (more likely) one of the library jars. The specific problem is that we should be running 1.6 everywhere, but it cannot find (i.e. gets a NoClassDefFoundError) sun.text.normalizer.NormalizerImpl, which is a class that moved packages between 1.5 and 1.6. So I'm wondering if there's a specific place in a running JVM - such as a specific method call I can make - to find out this information.

http://leg1.state.va.us/cgi-bin/legp504.exe?000+co...

I'm not sure who it applies to. Does it mean that as an investor I cannot buy a property in VA and sell it within a year? Or that I can't get a new loan on it after I buy it? It is very unclear to me what its purpose is.

I would like to do something fairly simple: accept a URL that looks like this:

http://www.mysite.com/some_file_name.pdf

I would like this request to actually access the same file you would get if you did:

http://www.mysite.com/images/resources/some_file_n...

In other words, I want to make some shorter URLs for the users. This seems fairly straightforward, but it's not working. Here's the mod_rewrite line I'm trying to use:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>

RewriteEngine On

RewriteBase /

RewriteRule ^[a-zA-Z]+://[^/]+/([^/\.]+\.pdf)$ /images/resources/$1 [L]

</IfModule>

Thanks!

Hey, I'm a rugby league fan from the US. I was watching State of Origin II yesterday, and when the players were being introduced, they gave teams that I had not heard of before. I don't remember hearing any NRL teams named, although I know that many (all?) of the players do play in the NRL. What teams were being named, and why? I think I remember a few NSWRL teams named. Thanks!

I am about to give up on this stupid thing. We don't use it that much, perhaps once or twice a week at the heaviest times, though we go weeks without using it at all. (I usually continue to shock the water every week or so anyway and keep the bromine floater in.) Every time we fill it, after a few times people are in the water, it gets oily scum on top. Since it's the summer we don't heat it up much, raising perhaps to 90 degrees at the most, and in the day time using it at around 80. See picture of scum here:

http://i822.photobucket.com/albums/zz146/gbisaga/s...

I have tried everything. The water chemistry is correct. I bought a new filter awhile back and just recently cleaned it by soaking it overnight in the filter cleaner they have at the pool store and then rinsing with plenty of water. I bought one of those "scumballs." Nonetheless, the scum remains. I bought a panty-hose-like fabric that goes over the leaf skimmer, that seems to lift the scummy areas off the top of the water. Unfortunately, next time I turn on the water circulation, it comes back.

This all makes me wonder if there's something in the circulation system that is causing this. We don't take showers every time before we go in, but we often do. The bathers have not typically used suntan or other lotions recently. Any ideas?

Answers to one or more are appreciated. I'm investigating converting some software for use in the UAE, among other places.

1. On calendars in the UAE, do they commonly use the Western system of months or Arabic?

2. What days are children in school - Mon-Fri or Sat-Wed?

3. How are the days of the week presented: is it Sunday through Saturday across the top, or something else?

4. Is there an equivalent of a social security number, in other words basically a unique number to identify people?

5. If #3 is yes, do all people have them, including expatriates?

6. What is the date format used? In other words, how would you commonly display a date? In the US, an example would be 7/4/1776 for July 4, 1776.

7. What is used for writing numbers, western "arabic" numerals or typical Arabic ones? I understand some countries use Arabic writing yet use western "arabic" numerals rather than regular Arabic ones. Examples of the two are on:

http://www2.ignatius.edu/faculty/turner/arabic/anu...

Thanks much!

I just brought a drum set (Pearl Forum) with a hihat and crash/ride combination. Is it possible to use the latter as both a crash and a ride by playing it differently (e.g at the edge vs. the bell)?

I know that you can have virtual hosts in app servers like tomcat and apache. Most of the solutions I know of require you to list the vhosts in a text file which, I understand, requires tomcat/apache to be restarted. So my questions are two:

- Is there any way to store this information in a database? I've seen an apache module somebody wrote, but a large-scale solution would require that information to be cached because it changes so seldom.

- If it is stored in text files (perhaps automatically copied there from database contents), do all the servers have to be restarted? And doesn't that take a long time, during which the servers are unavailable? I cannot see a system like blogger.com having its servers being constantly taken down and back up.

I am starting to play in coffeehouses and am looking to expand my repertoire. I normally just play solo acoustic guitar and sing. I received a request last week for America's "Horse with no name," which I think is a good example of the kind of song I'm looking for. Fairly laid back, must be family-friendly.

Just wondering. 10%? 80%? I know it's not hard to do.

Playing games at the gym, you always rotate positions so you play all positions. Now, I've started watching higher-level volleyball and notice that they don't appear to rotate, at least not entirely. Although all the players do seem to take turns serving, for example the libero never starts out on the front line. Are they only rotating service, or are they actually rotating ALL positions at service time and immediately changing to pre-set positions?

This is driving me crazy. I have a DI-624 wireless router with two computer connected to it wired and one computer and an iPod Touch connected wireless. I can get out to the internet from all computers just fine. However, I cannot connect from one to the other, so if I try

http://192.168.0.101:8080/

it does not work. I know there's a web server on that machine because I can type the exact same URL on the 192.168.0.101 machine and it works fine. I also have disabled all firewalls on the computers. I logged into the router console and there don't seem to be any settings to disable access from one local machine to the other. All are using DHCP and the subnet mask is 255.255.255.0. I can't ping between any of the machines, either, even from the router's console. Everything I can see looks fine.

Any ideas? Thanks!

I am somewhat familiar with baseball strategy, but one thing I haven't quite figured out is this: at certain times, I can't figure out when, the announcer will note that "they now have the fielders in (or out).

What are times when you'd bring fielders in/out? One obvious time to bring them in is a likely bunting situation - man on first/second, <2 outs, especially if the pitcher is up. But if there's two strikes would you move them back out because of the two strike bunt into foul territory rule?

There must be lots of other situations... please enlighten me. Thanks! 10 points to the most thorough answer.