(n)A-GAME

Mailed this morning, also sorry to my person, I've been a bit under water myself.

There are much easier ways to get a FWD 6 speed gearbox than shipping one from Yoorup. Hit up Car-part or similar sites. Very curious to see how you get to 40 MPG on an almost 20 year old turbo motor!

And you speak from experience, right? I've seen them in about half the 98-00 V70s that come up on the local Craigslist and multiple times in the JY. And Detroit is hardly a mecca of Volvo-dom.

Soooooo....back to the original point of the thread: New MTB...Trek X-Cal 7. Might be a touch big for me but the price was so good I couldn't pass up.

I don't know, maybe I got a bad one, but I was not overly impressed with it quality wise. If he's into the "military" style (and you don't mind buying a more off-beat brand) I got a Tsovet last year as a gift and absolutely love it. Not that it means anything but Esquire's written them up a few times, and always given them positive reviews. I've been asked if it's a Panerai more than once, which I'll take as a compliment!

I returned my Luminox. It stopped glowing after 2 months. Total piece of trash. And putting on my watch snob hat for a moment I don't think I'd qualify Omega and Tag as "fine" timepieces, except for a few of them. Don't get me wrong, I love my Tag, but for the most part they are solid mid level mass-produced consumer luxury watches. Obviously 20 steps above Timex, but you get the point. What's your budget for this gift? And anything in particular your friend would like in a watch? Face size? Water resistant? Leather/metal band? Etc.

Tell your guy if he wants to experiment with Volvos I would be interested in buying/bringing my car there to have work done and/or supplying donor ECUs for him to mess around with. I know several other locals who probably would too. Maybe an economy of scale will make it worthwhile for him.

But I added 2GB of ram to stock...updated the OS, and even changed out the fan, to ensure proper cooling! I wonder if there's a reduced tech support price for me to send my laptop out to him. I don't think the thing is worth $75.

So....I guess now's a bad time to chime in that the VIDA/DICE unit I got from Lucky stopped working and is crashing the VADIS laptop?

I rarely foray into this forum, but have to disagree with you Alain. Yeah, it would have been better had we brokered a deal like this, and I agree that the President's handling of the whole thing leaves something to be desired. The other side of the coin though is that Syria probably would have come to this junction anyways - with or without Russia - as a last ditch effort to prevent the Tomahawks from raining down. So rather than Putin brokering the deal, Syria would have put the US in exactly the same spot. All of this is to say that Putin probably does not deserve all of the credit you are giving him. He put his face on the deal, so I suppose nice job on the PR front, but this was inevitable. The real problem is that Obama didn't have the votes in Congress to get a resolution through, which is more demonstrative of how broken Congress is. It's amazing to me how the Republicans continue to stonewall even on issues over which they (and some of their leaders) should not be having an issue with. The Dems never played like this with Bush I or Bush II, and even the Republicans of the 90's never did something like this to Clinton. The contrarianism merely for the sake of opposing the President is really tragic.

Actually Alden, I think it's far from semantic, even though I agree with the points made by Erik and Chuck 100%.

OK, I'll play. Erik, your characterization of the Supreme Court case (I assume you are referring to Shaare Tefila v Cobb?) is not technically correct. That case only found that Jews were a group who were entitled to the same protections under section 1982, which traditionally protected members of certain racial groups. In getting to that holding, though, the Court was careful to note that it was not finding that Jews were a separate race but that they deserved protection because they were the type of group Congress intended to protect when it enacted 1982. The Court even went so far as to note that today (today being 1987 when the case was decided) it's not technically correct to consider Jews as a separate racial group but rather as a subset of Caucasian, but that in the past (and at the time 1982 was enacted) Jews were considered to be a separate "race." That bolsters my point that at best, referring to Jews as members of a race is an outmoded way of looking at it. Again, I have no comment on the actual validity of the story. If the group wasn't targeted for who they are then shame on them for saying they were. If they were targeted then shame on Airtran. Either way we have no way to figure out what actually happened.

I'm only going to respond by saying Jews are not a race and I don't agree with your comment in that respect. That's exactly how Hitler classified the group which was just as wrong then. Otherwise I have nothing to add on this. That article has absolutely nothing useful from anyone involved. Sounds like a he-said, she-said and much more information is needed before we can form a judgment about what happened. I too would tend to doubt that it had anything to do with the group's religion but Airtran flight crews are among the worst and nastiest I've ever experienced.

I'm sorry you feel the need to resort to bashing someone's religion to get your point across. Really, it's a sad state of affairs in this country when you can't engage someone in a spirited political debate on the substance of an issue without going down that road.

Nope.