Tony Camonte

I was thinking of visiting the lower portion of the Blue Ridge Parkway in North Carolina soon (roughly from the southern starting end up to Grandfathher Mtn and Blowing Rock). How bad is the traffic? Are there many slowdowns or traffic jams? Can it be hard to find parking spaces at overlooks? How are the weekdays vs. weekends?

OK.... I HATE shopping for shoes, as my foot is really picky about what shoes it likes. Well, I found a pair it likes, and recently its been being sold for very cheap prices (to make way for the new models). So I thought I might just buy a bunch of them and get enough to last the next few years. However, it occurred to me that the materials (synthetic mesh, plastic, gel on the inside, whatever it is they make soles out of) might deteriorate with age and become brittle or crumbly before I could use them. Any thought or info?

This is the shoe:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B007K5X5ZU/ref=oh...

Hi there,

I'm sure your all eager to hear about gross toe stuff...

Anyway, in between my 3rd and 4th toes its oozing significant amounts of clear fluid. The skin in that area has become white and dead looking and it looks like I could tear it off if I wanted to. It has actually torn by itself in a couple spots.

It was quite itchy for a while, although not right now for some reason. Also, it smells kinda bad.

Is this an infection? What should I do about it?

Hi there, I have SSI (social sec, disability). I have several student loans, and every month I make the minimum payment (well, usually...). Am I allowed to pay more than the minimum required, if possible, or would that not be allowed? The quicker I pay them off, the less that gets eaten up by interest charges...but I don't want to tick off Uncle Sam if I can avoid it.

I'm thinking about adding top fans to my desktop PC, but I notice in the comments that many fans run loudly when mounted horizontally. I want to avoid this because I like my PC to be as quiet as possible. Are there specific types of fan, or brands and models, that run reasonably quietly when mounted in a horizontal position?

OK, so I recently got some Sanyo Eneloop batteries (2nd gen). They seemed to work fine until I lost my normal charger and used this very cheap 2005-vintage Energizer charger I had lying around. It takes 8 hours to charge a battery. I used it up to about 2009 with Energizers and it seemed to work. Anyway, I tried charging the eneloops on it and they appear to be dead now.

Should I blame the charger, or is it something else?

I have a Crucial M4 SSD. Got it last December. The other day I noticed that my Firefox tabs were getting scrambled - the text and images would be all jumbled or they'd disappear completely. Next day, the SSD wont boot. I get the startup screen, it sticks on there for a really long time, then it gives me an error message 0xc000000e, and says "1. Insert your windows installation disc and restart your computer. 2. Choose your language settings, and then click next 3. Click "repair your computer."

The SSD seems to have vanished. If I hit F8 at the startup screen, it lists all of my drives except the SSD. Its not visible in Linux Mint or when I boot Windows from my mechanical drive either.

Is my SSD dead? Or could this be a problem with software or other hardware?

System:

AMD Athlon II X4 Propus 3 Ghz

12 GB Kingston HyperEx Blu RAM

Asus M4A88TD-M mobo w Ati HD4250 graphics currently

two 2 GB Samsung Green drives

Liteon Blu-Ray drive

Hi there,

I'm thinking about going into therapy to deal with my mental and emotional problems. The trouble is that I will have to discuss the behavior of my parents when I was growing up. Due to their own emotional issues probably, they did a fair amount of abusive behavior. Most of it was just of the irrational behavior and yelling and screaming variety, but it did also become physical sometimes. This included lots of punching and slapping, but no really serious injuries.

However, these days they have reformed themselves and become a lot more sane and no longer engage in abusive behavior. I have a teenage brother (13 years younger than me) who seems very well-adjusted and happy. So what I really dont want is for the therapist to call child protective services and stick my brother in a foster home because of stuff that is ancient history. Also, for all their faults, I know they love me, and I love them.

So I guess I'm mainly wondering about what I can safely tell the therapist without risk of them taking any action.

OK, I just opened u-torrent, and its not showing most of the torrents that I had sharing. Like not at all- its as if they weren't there at all. The data files, and the torrent files themselves, are all still there.

Restarted program, and computer- no change.

What the heck happened, and how do I fix it? Big thanks to anyone who helps.

In the theater, at home, wherever, it all counts.

For example, me:

Trollhunter (2010)

Public Enemies (2009)

The African Queen (1951)

Beverly Hills Cop (1984)

Natural Born Killers (1993)

Ringu (1998)

Cat People 1942)

Pursued (1947)

Cisco Pike (1972)

A Separation (2011)

I have nothing against Ford, but he wasn't exactly the most important president. He was only in for 2 years, and he did...I'm not sure actually.

But FDR was in for 13 years. And he led the US in the biggest war in history, and he presided over the biggest expansion of the navy ever. He was also as asst. navy secretary in WW I and a big proponent of a large navy.

So what is the problem? Are they afraid people will confuse it with the USS Theodore Roosevelt?

Recently my friends van started having tranny problems- burnt fluid, shifting poorly, noise- and it sounds like a goner. It sounds like that tranny model is very failure-prone.

Its been completely dependable up to now and has lowish miles so it would be nice to fix it, but if it means replacing it with the same junky tranny that will die again, then no thanks.

So...could a different tranny model be used? Even convert it to manual?

Hi...upgrading my RAM. (AMD Athlon X4 3 ghz, Asus M4a88td-m mobo) I mainly use the PC for Firefox and movies, so all I really need is 1333mhz DDR3. I currently have 4 GB of Kingston Hyper Ex Blu, which I got on sale and is at 1333mhz because was too lazy to change the BIOS or whatever to run at 1600 mhz.

I was planning to get another 8 GB, and since 1600 mhz RAM with heat spreaders is only slightly more costly than 1333 mhz without, and my room temperature tends to be 80-90 F most of the time, would the underclocked RAM with spreaders be cooler and more stable in this environment?

I still use a keyboard from 1998, that originally came from an IBM 300XL Pentium II. I also use an Epson inkjet printer from 2001 and an IDE DVD-RW from 2004. I also until recently used a 21" IBM CRT monitor from 1998.

I also somehow ended up with my grandma's 1940s mechanical adding machine. Its cool looking and it weighs as much as a Buick, but I haven't really found an actual use for it except as a conversation piece.

Anyway, what do you folks have?

Hi there...

I have a PC I built a few months back. It has:

3 ghz AMD Athlon II X4 Propus

4 GB Kingston HyperEX Blu 1333 mhz RAM

2 TB 5400 RPM Samsung HD

Asus M4A88TD-M mobo with integrated ATI Radeon HD 4250 video

Windows 7 64 bit ultimate + Firefox 8 with adblock

Also a Blu-Ray reader and ancient IDE DVD-RW

Now this was just intended as a cheap computer for multimedia and web browsing, not a game machine or anything. But still the performance leaves something to be desired. There are two problems, really:

I like to have a lot of stuff open at once. Especially, lots of browser tabs open, Not infrequently, as many as 5-12 windows open, each with about 5-10 tabs per window. This really tends to kill performance, though. First, web videos like flash or youtube start skipping. Then everything gets sluggish and there's a lot of disk activity, until eventually it becomes super-annoying (like it takes 10 seconds to do stuff like switch programs) and firefox will sometimes crash. Oddly enough, the RAM rarely fills up completely, and often the slowdown starts even when RAM use is at 50% or less.

The other problem is video. I don't play video games on it but I do like to play 1080p video, both blu rays and mp4/mkv files on the hard drive. It tends to stutter, and there is also a problem of tearing the persists to a lesser degree even with vsync enabled (this also happens with low-res videos). It depends on the program, though. VLC, which I normally prefer, is terrible. MPC home cinema is a lot better, while WMP 11 is pretty smooth but I hate everything else about the program. And having lots of other stuff open worsens things it seems.

So...I have some money to make some improvements in the old system,,,given my uses for it, what would help the most? Upgrading the RAM? Buying an SSD? And would a better graphics card help the video thing? How much better would it need to be?

Thanks!

Hi, I'd like to be able to listen to music off my desktop computer with headphones, but wirelessly. Ideally I'd like to be able to use the headphones I already have, which are good quality. The range doesn't have to be that high- just around the house and mostly in the same room. How do I go about this? What equipment would I need to buy?

I have a bunch of old camcorder tapes. Some are VHS, recorded in the late 80s and 90s. Some are more recent, using the smaller kind of tape. I'd like to convert them all to digital video files on the computer before they decay. None of them have exactly super-great video quality of course, but I don't want any quality to be lost while transferring, or for the colors or sound to come out different than on the tape. So, how should I go about doing this? Is it better to pay someone else? Would a video capture device be the way, and how much should I spend, what kind should I get, etc?

OK, I just installed a new hard drive and a new Blu-Ray reader...they both seem to be working fine, but I keep getting this message during startup: "Scan Devices, Please Wait..". And then it pauses a really long time before continuing. Any thoughts?

My system:

AMD Athlon II 2 ghz quad core

Asus M4A-88TD mobo, ATI Radeon HD4250 integrated graphics

Two Samsung 2 TB hard drives (same model)

Samsung Blu-Ray reader

Seriously, because to me they are both frigging ugly.

Men's equipment are the worst. They look like something you'd find in the dumpster of a Tyson Foods poultry plant, or like something our of a sci-fi horror movie.

But also, much as I find nearly every other part of a woman beautiful, hoohas not so much. The less unsightly ones do turn me on somewhat because I associate them with sex, but aesthetically I just don't much dig the snatch. The hairy ones look like some kind of animal died between their legs, while the shaved ones tend to have a bit of the same alien mutant /poultry fragment thing that men's stuff have. Also, why do they have to be so close to certain other orifices?

Do I need therapy?

This isn't really a problem unless I'm kind of looking closely at it, so naked women in general I'm fortunately still cool with.

I read lots of books. But I hate reading them off an LCD screen. Even aside from eyestrain, I just find it unpleasant to look at. I've heard of the kindle using e-ink, which is supposed to look more like normal ink on paper. I was wondering, to those of you who have tried them, how similar is it to reading ink on paper? Also, how does holding a kindle compare to holding, say, a hardcover book?