mustang84

Yeah...I guess the management shakeup and sudden replacement of Katsuaki Watanabe with Aiko Toyoda as CEO is indicative of a company that isn't suffering.

Oh, how the mighty have fallen! For all the arrogance, all the crap in the media about how Toyota no longer considered GM or Ford competitors, all the "best evers" and bragging about taking over the number one spot.......wow. The same cash reserves as "lowly" Ford? How can this be?? Can't say I feel sorry in the least bit for them.

Sorry to hear that Dodgefan...

Never smoked a cig, but I've smoked a couple cigars before. What ruined smoking for me was my childhood friend's dad. He'd take us places when we were kids in his single cab Dakota and would always smoke inside the truck, even during the winter when we couldn't roll the windows down. My aunt also smoked heavily. Every time we went to her house it was a haze, and I hated staying in there as a kid. Add in that hardly any of my friends smoke and not many people my age smoke...the appeal just never really caught on with me.

There's a little pond at Iowa State where all the Canadian geese would hang out, and we passed by it almost every day to get to the dining center. My buddy was always riling up the geese, making noises and flapping his arms at them. It got to the point where they knew who we were 1/2 a block away and would stand off to the side hissing the entire time we walked by.

I was a mischevious little devil when I was a young sprat. I would poke holes in the tops of all the wrapping paper plastic.

I did some research and found out my problem is pretty common. It seems to be something with Flash Player 10...if you uninstall and go back to Flash 9, the freezing problem goes away. On the Adobe help website, tons of people have stated this exact same problem dating back to October '08 and hardly any of them have had responses from Adobe support. It seems like Adobe dropped the ball and not Chrome/Firefox. Anyway, I guess I'll try uninstalling Flash 10 and see if I can find a link for Flash 9.

On Chome, most of the time I get an error message that says Flash has crashed before the video even loads. On Firefox, it will load, but it takes a long time and visuals start off choppy (about 1 frame per second) and usually the video ends up frozen on a frame after about 10 seconds. Sound works fine though. I installed the driver components, but they don't seem to have made a difference.

It shows 0% loss. I'm installing the driver components and it's taking a while...I'll let you know the outcome tomorrow.

Awesome post Capriceman, very helpful! I tried the prompt log, but as soon as the window opened it ran through the first five lines ending with TTL=54 and then the window closed automatically, so I wasn't able to see the % loss. How do you keep the window from closing? My internet is very fast when a page is simple HTML, but anything with Flash seems to cause it to slow or freeze up. I've tried reinstalling Flash before but it didn't seem to make a difference.

I think I've figured it out. Apparently Firefox 3 and Google Chrome are both not optimized to work with Flash (or at least not as well as IE), so 3/4 of the time a page with flash graphics will either crash or cause the browser to slow to a crawl. I'm using IE7 right now and it's doing pretty decent (I hadn't used IE in a long time, so disregard my first post...IE6 used to be pretty painstaking for me and I rarely used it). Oddly, Google Chrome worked ok when I first downloaded it, but now it seems like it can't handle any sort of Flash graphics. YouTube videos are choppy to the point of being unwatchable. Firefox 2 used to work fine with Flash, but the latest version sucks. With the amount of webpages that have some sort of Flash interface or Flash advertising, I don't understand why they are not optimized to run it like IE is.

Download speed according to that site is 6.8 mbs. It seems to do ok with simple graphics, but when a page has a plethora of Flash graphics it can struggle quite a bit. I'm thinking it might be the ISP since everything feels about the same as my old, slower computer (choppy performance, slow page loading).

Noped, wired.

I bought a refurbished computer a couple months ago (Gateway QuadCore 32-bit, 4 gigs RAM, GeForce 9800 GT card, Vista Home) and keep it defragged and do a file clean on a regular basis. It's fast and has no problems with graphic-demanding games like GTA IV. But when it comes to the internet, it can be a real bitch sometimes as far as speed goes. My internet provider is Mediacom and I have an 8 mb/sec download speed, but the overall performance ranges from horrible on IE7 to mediocre on Google Chrome. Firefox falls in the middle. Does anyone know what the cause is, and if there are any solutions? Is it due to Vista? Perhaps Norton system scan is being a pig in the background? I really have no idea, so any help would be appreciated!

It has warmed up, but last week we had two days were the high hovered around -14 and the low was down to -27 the first night and -24 the second night. My poor car had a bit of a struggle both those days due to not having a garage. Apparently the -27 was a record setting coldest temperature for this area. We also had gusts, so the wind chill index was down to -45. But by the time the temperature drops that low, it oddly doesn't feel much different than -15 or even 5 above. Your body is so numbed after only a few minutes that it doesn't really register.

I used one of these yesterday...not really sure if it was a "netbook" or just a really small laptop, but my friend basically uses its internet for work. Something like that would be handy for travel, but I don't think I could justify one since I have a decent desktop at my apartment and it wouldn't be able to handle any of the programs I use for work (not to mention the screen size would be brutal when trying to work in max/sketchup/photoshop/CAD).

If that whole post is true, that leaves me much more at ease about the future of RWD at GM. I can handle the waiting game until things stabilize.

Isn't Donald Trump putting up a new highrise that's supposed to be Charlotte's new tallest? I thought I read that somewhere.

Yeah, I noticed that while most of the city's street layout looks pretty haphazard (as do many East Coast cities), the city center is actually grided. I wonder why Charlotte would be against parking garages. Des Moines had quite a bit of surface parking as a result of urban renewal in the 50s and 60s, but they started building parking garages and are filling in a lot of the remaining surface parking with new buildings. Some of the parking garages are even pretty architecturally interesting (as far as parking garages go). Des Moines went through the same thing in the 60s when they bulldozed an African American neighborhood to make way for I-235. Most moved into the area around Drake University. Omaha also destroyed a massive historic district of 8-story warehouses from its meatpacking days to build a suburban campus for ConAgra right on the edge of downtown. This was back in the 80s before the loft conversion trend. They really missed out on an opportunity and destroyed some architectural gems in the process. Preservationists were pretty PO'ed at the time.

I was just looking at a Google map of uptown Charlotte (this kind of stuff always interests me) and HOLY PARKING LOTS BATMAN! What's the story behind that? I'm guessing urban renewal, but it's amazing how much of that area within the interstate loop are surface lots. Charlotte has a pretty nice skyline for its size.

I make a comfortable amount....nothing too great but enough to pay back loans / rent / bills and still have money to tuck away into savings and a 401K, plus a little left over to play with in the stock market.

Wow, how did I miss this? This is my favorite GM show car at NAIAS. I actually like it better than the CTS Coupe...just too bad it isn't driven by the rear wheels.

Yuck. I would've rather seen an MKR Coupe. This has no place in Lincoln's lineup...maybe Mercury, but even so it needs to look less "weird."

My only real problem are the overhangs...I think it would look better if they had increased the wheel base a little. It has some nice detailing, despite some odd proportions.

Nice Regal Bob. It looks great after having so many miles put on it.