2/8     I decided to sign up for 24 Hour Fitness. They want $38 per month
        (all club access) plus about $150 to start. Can I do better?
        \_ They are willing to deal just like a car salesman. When I last
           signed up there we went back and forth on the deal 3 times before
           they ended up cutting the signup fee in half and giving me $10 off
           the monthly fee. Show up prepared with pricing from other gyms.
           -shac
        \_ Find a friend who works there. Employee discount coupon:
           $40 signup. $20 a month.
        \_ I have seen something like ~$650 3-year prepaid and then ~$50
           / year after that.  Try doing a search on some of the "Hot
           Deal" message board at http://fatwallet.com or http://forums.anandtech.com
           \_ I'll check, but I don't want to cough up this kind of money
              up front. I'm not even sure I'll like the club.
              \_ Oh yeah, definitely check out the club first.  3 years
                 is a long commitment (but at substantial discount down to
                 ~$19 a month).  Also, I think the membership is good
                 for all 24 Hour Fitness (exlude the "Super Sport" or
                 the highest tier one).  This is good if you will be
                 moving.
        \_ My deal's $970/3yr (~$22/mo) and $50/yr after. My friend got an
           even better deal of $750/3yrs and $20/yr after.
           \_ Oh yeah, both cases, no sign-up fee, and package includes
              six free training sessions ($45-65/session normally), though
              YMMV with those
        \_ absolutely try working out a better deal, and if they don't
           give in, leave them. a gym like 24-hour shouldn't cost more than
           $30/month.
        \_ Don't pay a signup fee. Just refuse to do it. You can get
           them to agree to $38/mo with no signup fee.
        \_ I went in with a friend around Thanksgiving and got a major deal
           - all club access, $575 the first year (each), two years free
           (effectively making the club $15/mo for 3 years), $20 every year
           afterward.  I don't know whether it was just that promotion, but
           I'm happy with the price.  -chaos
        \_ How many of you who signed up for 1-yr or 3-yr plans both
           (a) signed up over 6 months ago, and
           (b) still attend gym regularly(at least 2-3 times/wk)?
           \_ I'm on my 4th year. I go 6x a week. I have 7% Body fat. I
              don't drink soda. I eat salad with no dressing.
              \_ Wow. 4 years, 6x a week... how long do you spend in there?
                 You've spent the equivalent of around 5 months of straight
                 labor in there.
                 \_ Used to be 3 hours, now it's down to 1.5 hours.
           \_ Signed up for my gym 6 years ago.  Go on average 2 hours
              a week (usually 2-3 times a week when I can, but with
              interruptions for running, snowboarding, holidays, etc.)
           \_ Entering 3rd year soon. I used to be @ 5-6x/week, but now
              down to 4x. I also spend far less time there (1-1.5hr vs.
              2-2.5hr), mainly because I've switched from bodybuilding to
              mostly exercises/cardio geared around long distance running.
              \_ If running is your sport, and you live somewhere with nice
                 weather, why the gym?
                 \_ He didn't say anything about nice weather.  I also like
                    to go running but it can get shitty here.  Plus sometimes
                    a change is good.  -John
                 \_ Workout Bettys.
                 \_ Obvious you've never seen hot chix with big boobs in sports
                    bras running on those belt machines.  I used to watch a
                    couple in their downtown Oakland location.  That was the
                    driving force to keep me going thru that boring workout
                    routine every morning.

2/9     What are some good oss search engines that can parse an HTML page
        and spit out the top X relevant keywords?  TIA.
        \_ lynx -dump $URL | sed '/^References$/,$d' | perl -ne\
            'while(s/([a-z]+)//i){print "$1\n";}' | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn
            \_ Pretty cool.  But I think the op was thinking something
               kind of like google.
               \_ Yea, as much I figured, but google or anything remotely
                  of the sort relies on _multiple_ documents linking to each
                  other to establish relevance/importance/etc. If all you have
                  to work with is a single document with no context, there's
                  rather little you can do unless you want to get neck-deep
                  in natural-language issues (well, knee-deep if you hack up
                  something to figure out which words are "unusually" common
                  in this document compared to the language at large, but
                  any serious solution would require some amount of parsing
                  and language understanding). Hence the above silly hack,
                  which I meant largely as a joke.  -alexf
                  \_ What if you can assume that the page authors aren't
                     trying to game the system with off-topic keywords, etc?

2/9     Doing the jobs americans won't do
        Family Of Hit-And-Run Victim Angry That Illegal
        Immigrant Was Never Deported
        http://www.thedenverchannel.com/7newsinvestigates/4176452/detail.html

2/9     I watched the Tabasco ad that someone posted earlier, and I don't get
        it.
        \_ tabasco sauce is so hot it gave her a sunburn. yeah, dorky.
                \_ It gave her a sunburn on the INSIDE of her suit!
                   \_ that's only cuz she was wearing a tabasco bra.
                   \_ Got it!  Thanks!

2/9     There is a God! Carly Fiorina out at HP!

2/9     erikred  25339  0.0  0.1   944  588  CD  I+    9:18AM   0:00.00 sed s/[C\
c]unt/twat/g /etc/motd.public
        \_ hello Erik! cunt cunt cunt cunt cunt twat twat twat
           \_ Yeah, that's mature.

2/9     A lot of movies I get from Kazaa or Bittorrent are in AVI format, and
        I end up having to convert them back to MPG to burn to DVD or VCD
        which is a big drag. Is there any reason why people prefer AVI instead
        of the good 'ol MPG format? Is it the size, compression ratio,
        quality, or other factors?
        \_ http://www.videohelp.com has enormous amounts of information on
           formats and converters.  It's a bit dense with information, but if
           you can figure out the very basics it's a huge help.  -John
        \_ Um, DivX?
           \_ Yeah, basically.  AVI is really (like MOV) just a container file
              format.  Lots of different codecs are often used inside the AVI
              container: MPEG4, MSMPEG4v2 (which i think is like Divx), etc.
              MPG files are usually only MPEG1 (VCD) or MPEG2 (DVD), and
              compared to MPEG4 variants, they're much crappier for a given
              bitrate.  --dbushong
        \_ VCD sucks. Get a player that can play Xvids.
        \_ Mainly, it's the quality/size ratio.  I use DIKO to convert my avis
           to DVDs.  It can convert to VCDs as well, I believe.
        \_ Don't forget, Kazaa logs all of your downloads.
        \_ Anyone tried eXeem? the "distributed bittorrent" thing?
        \_ Size, compression ratio, and quality are all the same factor.
        \_ Anyone here use Limewire?  I really like it.
        \_ So what're suggested p2p or bittorrent client for music only? Looking
           for obscure world fusion bands, mostly.
           \_ "They mostly come out at night, mostly"
              \_ Your brain has been classified as: filled with too much pop-
                 culture crap.
                 \_ Aliens is pop culture crap?!  I challenge you to
                    thunderdome, biotch!
           \_ Soulseek

2/9     Stop the suicides!  Close the Golden Gate Bridge!
        http://www.saf.org/viewpr.asp?id=139

2/9     Is there a way to find out the name of a user with a hotmail account?
        There is a person that keeps emailing our listserve from a hotmail
        account, never revealing their identity, and no one knows who this person
        is. Anyone have any good ideas?
        \_ A leveraged buyout of Microsoft should do the trick.
                \_ let's hear some better ideas.

2/9     We're thinking of hiring a part-time intern who will be doing some
        part time windows sysadmin work for us - he's looking to get
        some resume experience, and we'd like to see how he works out
        before hiring him full time. Any tips on what would be a
        reasonable/fair hourly wage to pay him?
        \_ I'd pay him between $12 and $20/hour as an intern, depending on
           how competent he seems to be.
        \_ Does he have any experience? A degree? Are you guys a cheap
           outfit or lavish with salaries (in general)? How good will it
           look on his resume? ILM looks good. http://Pets.com less so.
           \_ startup environment, currently fairly cheap.  Not really
              good or bad resume-wise, just basic experience... Thanks! -op
              \_ How much experience does he have? Degree?
                 \_ degree in different field (B.S. biology), but some
                    experience as a sysadmin at home and previous job
                    (more for clients than for servers)
                    \_ If he went to a good university then you should pay
                       him the high end of the other guy's suggestion.
                       Maybe $20/hour. Is it full-time? Benefits?
                        \_ Only part-time for now, no benefits.  Thanks
                           for the input, we'll probably go with $20.