Ask Dave!® is your chance to, as the name implies, ask
Dave his opinions on matters of Life, Love, Finance, Feng Shui,
Vitamins, or whatever questions you need answered.
Let me reach into the virtual mailbag
and pull out this weeks query...
Hey Dave!
Is there any way I can get in on the wind power bandwagon? I
am looking for a small windmill (10 to 14 feet high) just to
turn the meter dial back a little bit.
Brian Smith
Sent from my HTC Touch Pro2 on the Now Network from SprintR.=
Why don't you figure out a way to capture the voluminous
thermals coming out of your mouth to spin a turbine - that would
be a feat, you officious ass.
To be honest, unless you are looking to pump small amounts of
water or practice your putting,
windmills are not you best option. With all the hardware
involved, there is just not enough wind in your neighborhood to
make it payoff. Unless you have a $40 million dollar
budget and 20 years to recoup that investment. I think you
would be better off pursuing solar piezo-electric route.
So good luck with that...ass.
Sent from my sweet ass Intel Core i7,
Dave
Hey Dave!
With the Superbowl coming up, I was thinking about making
some of the side bets like on the coin toss and first team to
score. Do you bet on these or are they a suckers bet?
Curious,
Eric
Ah, how I miss the footloose and fancy free days of my youth
spent (literally) gambling. My old buddy Randy once said
that I would bet on Intramural Girls Volleyball if there was no
other action that weekend.
But alas, the highs and lows of the
gamblers lifestyle caught up with me. It came to a head
the night of the 1992 Sugar Bowl featuring Notre Dame vs Florida
when I watched a 2nd half lead slip away, along with the $500 I
had delicately placed on Florida to win. That was the
first mistake, the second happened when I told the future Mrs.
O'Brien to "just shut up" when she learned of this avoidable
tragedy.
Yes, my days as a serious gambler came to an end. I do
still enjoy the occasional baseball wager, and I will eat an
eggsalad sandwich that was in the back car window for 2 hours,
but that is about it for gambling.
If I get the itch, I remember the PT Barnum test that can be
applied to wagering: just fill in the blanks - A blank
and his blank are soon blanked.
With that being said, I do have $40 on the OVER 19.5
Rothlesberger completions, and $40 on both teams having FG of
over 33 yards. Hey, I am reformed, I'm not dead!
Paramutally Yours,
Dave
Hey Dave!
With the Superbowl coming up, I was thinking about making
some of the side bets like on the coin toss and first team to
score. Do you bet on these or are they a suckers bet?
Curious,
Eric
Ah, how I miss the footloose and fancy free days of my youth
spent (literally) gambling. My old buddy Randy once said
that I would bet on Intramural Girls Volleyball if there was no
other action that weekend.
But alas, the highs and lows of the
gamblers lifestyle caught up with me. It came to a head
the night of the 1992 Sugar Bowl featuring Notre Dame vs Florida
when I watched a 2nd half lead slip away, along with the $500 I
had delicately placed on Florida to win. That was the
first mistake, the second happened when I told the future Mrs.
O'Brien to "just shut up" when she learned of this avoidable
tragedy.
Yes, my days as a serious gambler came to an end. I do
still enjoy the occasional baseball wager, and I will eat an
eggsalad sandwich that was in the back car window for 2 hours,
but that is about it for gambling.
If I get the itch, I remember the PT Barnum test that can be
applied to wagering: just fill in the blanks - A blank
and his blank are soon blanked.
With that being said, I do have $40 on the OVER 19.5
Rothlesberger completions, and $40 on both teams having FG of
over 33 yards. Hey, I am reformed, I'm not dead!
Paramutally Yours,
Dave
Hey Dave!
I've been doing some traveling around out-state Minnesota
this summer and have come across many good pizza restaurants.
This always makes me wonder what the name of the pizza joint was
that you used to reference as "the greatest pizza ever", I
believe you worked there years ago. What was the name and where
is this place??
Hungry,
Shannon Wag-on-er
Ah, yes. Rafferty's Pizza in Brooklyn Park, MN.
These were the halcyon days of my Senior Year in High
School. Now, between the lifting up each keg in the cooler
to see which was heaviest, thus the one we would drink off of
that night, and repeatedly doing "Dough-Hits", my memory of that
summer is a little sketchy.
What is a dough hit? When
you mix up a big ol' batch of pizza crust dough, you put it in a
giant plastic bag the size of a garbage bag for 24 hours so the
dough will rise. The yeast in the dough eats CO2, gives
off alcohol in a gaseous form which fills the top of this bag
with what amounts to an aerosol martini. You then gather
up the bag, make a CPR like seal to your mouth and breathe
deeply. (not too deeply though as we found out when Pat
Patterson's eyes rolled back and his melon hit the tiled cooler
floor with a sickening thud)
The resulting sensation of doing a dough-hit is a mixture of
being launched off the deck of an aircraft carrier taking you
from 0-145 MPH in 2.6 seconds, and doing the Polar Plunge where
you jump into a hole in a frozen lake in February. In
short, Crack has nothing on dough-hits. But I digress.
The Rafferty's Pizza in Brainerd was still there the last
time I looked. It has been several years since I visited
on my way through town. When stopped to enjoy a medium
3,8, X7 (sausage, pepperoni, extra cheese) I could almost hear
the jukebox playing "We Are the World" for the 839th time that
day, except for the part where it skipped because Jim Ryan would
jump up and down on the machine when he couldn't take hearing
"We Are the World" for a 840th time.
I hope Raffery's Brainerd is still there and not a Comcast
Office like my beloved Rafferty's Brooklyn Park as I rudely
found out when I had to return a cable box last summer...
Who's hungry for pizza?
Also Hungry, (almost always)
Dave
Hey Dave,
I notice that your Don on your Mafia Wars page is languishing at
a meager level 61, How about something for the effort?
A Disgruntled Don,
James Gorney
PS I spelled "languishing correct the first time! No kidding!
Yes, you may have noticed that I have stopped playing Mafia Wars
on Facebook, due to the fact I have determined that at its core,
it is a boring waste of my time. Not that I don't engage
in activities that are a waste of my time. To the
contrary, most leisure activities in which I engage, such as
golf, web site design and the correct grammatical use of
prepositions in replies to Ask Dave queries are a total waste of
time.
Now admittedly, I do grow weary of games rather quickly.
My attention span for gaming is similar to that of Sergio Garcia
and girlfriends.
While I still do use Facebook to see which of my friends and
relatives are "sleepy like a mofo...LOL!" and who is a fan of
Strawberry Pop-Tarts®, I think that
is where I draw the <BR></BR> (<--- HTML Joke)
Knowledgably Yours
Dave
PS I was surprised to find out that a former Northside
boy knows the meaning of languish, let alone how to spell it.
Hey Dave,
I was just having a hankering for PB&J on toast but wouldn't you
know it, I have plenty of PB but no J. Being in the appropriate
aisle at good old Cub I got to thinking, what exactly is the
difference between jam and jelly and while we're at it how about
preserves and marmalade?
Thanks Man,
Amy C
Please, no brand names. If Cub wants a plug from the
do.com, they can give me a discount instead of charging me $167
for 6 bags of groceries like they did yesterday.
And as it would turn out, I
do have some knowledge in the area of jams and jellies.
Back in the day, these ingredients formed the backbone of one of my
more successful pickup lines "Hey Baby, that must be jelly 'cause jam don't
shake like that!"
Actually, there are some basic differences between Jam and
Jelly. Jam is creating using the entire fruit, where as
jelly is made with just the juice of the fruit. Preserves
are really just another word for jam, but marmalade is a
disgusting spoonful of chopped fruit, rinds and all.
Marmalades are many times used as an accompaniment to a main
dish, as in "You know this McRibb®
Sangwich could really use some more marmalade".
For my money, I don't know why anyone would want to screw up
the perfect food like peanut butter with jelly. But I do
like a little on a piece of toast every now and again. So
I guess what I am saying is, that makes me a jelly man, both in
the arena or fruit spreads and women's hind quarters.
Knowledgably Yours
Dave
Hey Dave!
If I buy a lunch at a Taco Bell drive-thru
may I refill my pop at another Taco Bell?
From the mobile device of
Brian Smith
Ok. We get. Your very
important. You can send an email from your phone.
Look at me! I'm talking into a tiny Bluetooth headset!
Impressive.
As far as refilling your
fast food soda, there are some very specific rules here.
You can refill the your soda from the restaurant where you
bought it at any time that same business day. If anyone
gives you a hassle you can say "What? I ordered a #2 with
no pickles from that kid at register 2. I'm not allowed to
refill my beverage? I want to speak to your
manager...Antonio" and when you say Antonio, you have to
pause long enough to theatrically look at the persons nametag
and use their name.
Now the 2nd one is a little more
dicey. Lets say you buy a Cheesy Bean and Rice Burrito and
a medium Mountain Dew from the Taco Bell in Minnetonka.
You then travel to Coon Rapids and see the Taco Bell there.
Can you walk in and refill? The answer is yes, but you
must have at least a small amount of ice left. This is so
you can shake the cup and pretend to take the last sip from the
cup as you pass the register. This tells them just going
to top 'er off before I leave.
Of course if you are a pretentious ass, you can pretend to be
too busy to notice anyone as you are sending an email from your
phone. Ass.
Hey Dave!
What is the air-speed velocity of an
unladen swallow?
Eric Strey
Minnetonka, MN
Now the obvious question that comes to mind is
African or European Swallow. But I am not going to ask
that. No, there are too many varieties of swallows in the
Genus Hirundo. For the purposes of this argument, we will
draw upon some generalities of the various species.
While looking through some back issues of the Journal of
Experimental Biology I had in the downstairs bathroom, I ran
across some averages of wing beats per second and wing angles of
various birds. Using their data I would estimate the
average airspeed of an unladen swallow to be between 8 and 10
meters per second or roughly 17.9 to 22.3 miles per hour.
And no, I am not suggesting that
coconuts migrate.
Hey Dave!
If my Ash Wednesday Services were cancelled for Church tonight,
does that make it Fat Tuesday again?
Jennifer Aither
Ripon, WI
While I don't normally delve too deeply into
ecclesiastics, lets be honest, it has been a dry winter for Ask
Dave questions.
Back in my single days, we used to call many a
Tuesday night Fat Tuesdays depending on who we went home with
after a Hoopsnakes show at the 5 Corner Saloon. HEY-O!
Unfortunately, there are very few do-overs when it comes to
Christianity. You either believe in a loving, omnipotent
God, or you are a Presbyterian. Pick a side.
You should also have a care with what you wish for. I
think if you were to drop dead while flashing your boobs to the
crowd to get some more beads on do-over Fat Tuesday, you would
reach heaven with some serious 'splainin' to do. And
besides, didn't you see the movie Groundhogs Day? It would
probably get old in a hurry. You would start thinking how
you were going to give up soda or watching American Idol as your
Lenten Sacrifice, and you would start feeling guilty about it.
And the guilt is really the whole point anyway isn't it?
Plus, no Lent = no 99 cent McDonalds Filet o' Fish.
Knowledgably Yours
Dave
P.S. Now this is a first, but I am going to ask the Ask
Dave questioner: What is the current conventional wisdom
on additional homeowners insurance to cover a back yard swimming
pool? $1 million, $2 million? Does inground or
partially inground make a difference? On a particular
weekend that I am planning to drink 37 MGD lights can I call my
agent and increase the insurance just for that weekend?
Just curious.
Hey Dave,
I was just reading that excellent (see
www.daveobrien.com/popups/kenc.asp) article about Ken
Carlson. Is he the same Ken Carlson that starred in such films
as "The Construction Guy Pounds Hard", "Star Whores" and "Free
Willy" the unrated version?
Carol
To answer your question, no, I don’t
think that sounds like the Ken Carlson I know.
I think the Ken Carlson you are thinking of was in
“Does Size Really Matter?”, “AARP – Not Just For Grandpa” and
the Philipino Health Ministry Film “Gau’gu, tarentado,
buong-boung”. I will admit, that one loses a little something if
you don’t speak Tagalig.
And I hear they are starting production on “Hunting -
Small Prick, Big Gun”, and finalizing the script for “Fishing –
How To Do It, And Why You’d Want To”
Next time I see him sweeping the warehouse, I will let
him know he almost had a fan.
Knowledgably Yours
Dave
Hey Dave,
Could you explain why the television in my bedroom is about 5
seconds ahead of the television is my family room? Is there some
sort of time warp that is happening here?
A C
Richfield MN
Much in the same way that water bends
light rays, the intense field of desperation that surrounds and
emanates from your bedroom area affects the electromagnetic
spectrum, thus changing the Cable TV signal. Digital cable
runs right around the 566 MHz, so depending on the the day of
the month, how many romance novels you have read recently, and
how chocolate you have consumed, the signal can be
increased in speed by anywhere to 3 seconds to 8.6 days.
Conceivably, if you play your cards in the romance department
correctly, you could watch the Super Bowl in mid-January.
Knowledgably Yours
Dave
Hey Dave!,
What are those things on telephone polls that look like big
cans?
Kevin Johnson
Brooklyn Park, MN
I never pass up an opportunity to
answer a question that contains the phrase “big cans”. Those big
cans are nothing more that giant capacitors that act as buffers
so there is an even flow of electricity. There are a lot of
steps between the generation of electricity, and you TIVOing
American Idol. Think of electricity
running through the power line like water flowing through a
hose. If you had to move a large amount of water over a long
distance you would want it to travel through a large hose. But
once that water got to your house and your kitchen sink, you
don’t want the faucet to deliver 10,000 gallons per minute. It
has been stepped down from that big hose to a little hose.
Electricity is no different. They step the voltage up
tens of thousands for transfer across the state and across
town and by the time it gets to your house, you really only need
110 volts. So it is stepped up and back down by transformers
along the way, and those capacitors provide a nice even flow of
electricity during its trip.
Good stuff. Not only did I get to say “Big Cans”, but I
also said “Big Hose”.
Knowledgably Yours
Dave
Hey Dave!,
Do we really save daylight during daylight savings time or is
merely
deferred daylight? If it is saved, where do they keep it?
Bill M.
(Former Boss, Current CIO of a Fortune 100 Company and clearly
the man with the most Juice I know)
Dag-Yo! You sure gots a lot of free time to be aksing all these
questions.
To answer your question, yes,
daylight savings time is actually saved. You know how when you
are standing in line to have your license renewed, or getting
that one exam with the pointer finger recommended for males over
40, or serving as a corporate officer for doomed new and
pre-swung sporting goods retailer? Well, time seems to drag
doesn't it? What is actually happening, is all the
pressure built up by that saved up time is leaking out. It has
to bleed off or it could cause a rip in the time-space
continuum, and we all know how bad for business that could be.
Yet another example of why I think that
Ben Franklin was the smartest, and most smooth talking of all
the founding fathers.
Knowledgably Yours
Dave
Hey Dave!
I hope you can settle a longstanding dispute between my wife and
me. Is professional wrestling real or fake? My wife says it's
real - I say she's full of crap. Although, I must admit that
fake blood looks pretty real sometimes. Please answer soon -
We've got five bucks riding on it.
Joe Gorney
Dallas, TX
Thanks for the question Joe. This is one of those areas
where if you ask the question, you better be prepared for the
answer. Pro wrestling or "wraslin" as it is called in some
parts, can be a very touchy subject. Like me, growing up
on a steady diet of the AWA. Andre the Giant, Jerry
Blackwell and Sheik Aden-el Casey, "Jumpin" Jim Brunzell and of
course 94 lb Promoter Wally Carbo "There's gonna be fines and
suspensions!" I wanted to believe it was real, but just
like when you were a kid and you thought your dad was Superman,
eventually you figure out he was really just a drunk guy in a
cape. You can't escape it the conclusion: Pro Wrestling is
as about as real as Carmen Electra's boobs.
That is not to say that gigantic men in tights, pumped full of
bovine growth hormone, don't theatrically hurt one another
causing great harm. I am sure it hurts to be hit by a
folding chair, or catch an elbow flying in from the top rope or
smell what the Rock is cooking. But unlike Carmen
Electra's boobs, I can't stand watching pro wrestling. I
have forbidden it in my house. But in fairness, it doesn't
get much better than when Jesse Ventura would call Tito Santana
"Chico Santana" or Randy Macho-Man Savage would announce "I
think I am going to let Elizabeth touch the belt...oh I changed
my mind"!
So, while it pains me to say it, I
think you have a 5 spot coming your way, because Pro Wrestling
is indeed fake. And so are Carmen Electra's boobs.
Knowledgably Yours
Dave
Here are some previous weeks Questions. Consider it a "Best
of Ask Dave!®" episode.
Hey Dave!,
Is it true that if you had found gingerbread lattes while at
[Now Defunct Golf Retailer and Former Employer] that we could
have saved the company?
Bill M.
(Former Boss, Current CIO of a Fortune 100 Company and clearly
the man with the most Juice I know)
Thanks for the question Bill. You may have
inadvertently started a new feature: "Hey Dave, What if?"
Like, Hey Dave! What if Dewey had defeated Truman or What if the
Beatles had decided to go into a career as car salesmen?
It has potential.
To directly answer the question, no, I
don't think [Former Employer] could have been saved by the
introduction of specialty coffees to the IT staff. Think of it
this way. You can tie a chair to the end of a string and
call it a kite. Now if you run fast enough, that chair
will get air borne. But lets be honest, even after several
lattes, I don't know anyone who can run 160 mph.
No, I think most would agree, the
problems with the business model at [Former Employer] could not
be overcome by a mere caffeinated beverage, no matter how creamy
and delicious it may be.
Knowledgably Yours
Dave
Hey Dave!,
Why is it when you make chocolate milk by mixing chocolate syrup
and plain old white milk, if left to sit it will separate and
the chocolate milk purchased at the store does not?
Thanks
Amy C
Sent from a large Minneapolis based consumer electronics
retailer's email address (the one with the big yellow tag for a
logo, now get back to work)
Holy Crap. That is a really good question. Luckily
the crack Ask Dave Staff is very knowledgeable in the arena of fortified
beverages.
Back in Ye
Olden Days, when you had to milk your own cow and pour it right
from the bucket onto your Honey Bunches of Oats, it was a crap
shoot what you were going to get. Heavy cream, buttermilk,
whole milk. Because the milkfat is heavier than the cream,
the cream rises and the milkfat settles to the bottom. Not to
mention, there are probably little bits of straw and cow hairs
in there too.
The dairy industry, or Big Milk (which
incidentally was one of my high school nicknames) decided this
was just plain gross. So they went about perfecting a way
to put the milk into a more stable state so it would not
separate. Homogenization
is the process which milk is put into a state which evenly holds
the different weights of milk parts. The unprocessed milk
is shaken violently (it's been years since I had my milk shaken
violently) or sprayed through nozzles at high pressures.
The Wisconsin Dairy Board describes it
this way: "Homogenization breaks up and
disperses milk fat throughout milk, resulting in a smooth,
uniform texture. Most whole milk is homogenized to prevent the
cream from rising to the top." And you thought
Wisconsin farmers were slow.
So in this example, when you add chocolate product to your
plain old white milk, it is more dense then the equally weighted
homogenized milk and it ends up at the bottom of the glass.
Where as in the store bought homogenized chocolate milk, the
chocolate product is equally dispersed with the milk fat and is
suspended. And here all this time you thought it was
magic.
Knowledgably Yours
Dave
Hey Dave!,
A pal of mine is telling me that I need to start playing “World
of Warcraft,” but I’m nervous. Will I turn into a pale,
overweight, unemployed, liberal sloth? And what exactly is
“World of Warcraft”??
Mark Simpson
St. Louis Park, MN
Careful my boy, you are already a pink slip away from filling
that dance card out.
Blizzard Entertainment's World
of Warcraft® has won all the awards, and is the king of all the
MMORPG - Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game games.(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mmorpg)
Being on the cutting edge of things
that would be sure to get you beat up when you were 13, I used
to play Ultima Online, which was really the first game of this
size and scope. I found myself coming home from
work, playing for 11 hours and repeating the cycle. I finally
quit playing when I lost my job, the dog bit me, and my wife
left me (cue the steel guitar).
Last year, some guys at work were
talking about World of Warcraft. Like a reformed alcoholic
stranded in Lynchburg Tennessee, I couldn't take it and
started playing it. It is an awesome game. The
technology has finally caught up with the concept. Ultima
Online was plagued with downtime and lag and all varieties of
annoying technical difficulties. WoW has a rich extremely
detailed interface and story line. And while the addiction
was not quite as powerful as with UO, I did begin to pour vast
amounts of free time and $15 a month into WoW. I quit
playing earlier this year, right up until I got this email when
I started up again.
So if you find yourself on the Llane
Realm and want to run a few Instances, look for a bad ass level
49 Dwarf Hunter named Orlon.
Knowledgably Yours
Dave
Hey Dave!,
Who do you think killed Kennedy?
Jon Hillsburn
Bend, OR
The crack Ask Dave!® staff rarely sticks it snoot into areas
where it doesn’t belong, but I will give you the skinny on what
is referred to as ‘That Whole Kennedy / Dallas Deal”.
Oswald/Lone Gunman- While the sexy lifestyle of the lone gunman
is an appealing story, I wouldn’t have trusted that nut to be
able to accurately follow the Washing and Care Instructions on a
cotton tee shirt. So Oswald is out.
Organized Crime- The Mob? It does sort of fit their MO. Shot in
the head while in the back of a Lincoln, yeah – that says mob
wack all the way. But it was a relatively high profile crime. It
definitely made all the newspapers, so I think the mob is out.
Castro- That guy had enough problems of his own without planning
and executing an assassination. And I think he would have had
trouble blending his Marxist-revolutionary-hit-squad in with the
crowd in Dallas in 1963. Unless they were planning to kill him
with gardening implements.
No, none of those popular theories hold water with me. It is
quite clear that the death of the 36th President of the United
States was the result of a drug deal gone sour. We’ve all seen
it a thousand times. A guy trying to make a buck flies into a
border state for the afternoon with a briefcase full of money,
ends up with a slug in his head, and the dealer winds up with
keeping his product and the briefcase of cash. The whole thing
went down in front of his old lady, it’s sad really.
Wouldn’t that be cool if in the Zupruter Film instead of his
head coming apart, Kennedy wheels and deals on some punk Dirty
Harry Style? Oh well, he wasn't packing that day, so we will
never know. So, let that be a lesson to you kids, if
you’re going to carry cash, carry a gun.
Knowledgably Yours
Dave
Hey Dave!,
Has an individual state of the United States ever declared war
on a foreign nation?
Randall R. Knight
North Hudson, WI
The crack Ask Dave!® staff can only find a single instance of an
individual US State declaring war on a foreign nation. The
governor of the great state of Maine, John Fairfield declared
war on England over a boundary dispute between New Brunswick and
northern Maine. Things settled down before any blood was shed,
but reportedly the sinking of the USS Maine anchored in Havana
Harbor back in 1898 that started the Spanish American war was
actually a contract hit in retaliation.
Just for clarity, as we all know, the authority to declare war
is given to the US Congress alone as spelled out in Article I of
the US Constitution. So if an individual State did decide to
declare war, it would be without any legal authority whatsoever.
Thus your question is irrelevant, and almost landed in the
“stupid question” pile.
If you want it to take things to a level below individual
States, I can site many examples of brothers declaring war on
one another, such as the infamous Chip/Joe Gorney “Pencil in the
Bottle of Pepsi During a Particularly Intense Game of RISK” War
of 1978, which resulted many months of uneasy peace and a broken
wrist for Joe. Or the “Good God…How Does He Stand That Bitch”
War of 1960 where hostilities broke out after comments were
overheard by Steve Jensen made by his brother Chuck regarding
certain opinions about his brother’s new girlfriend.
There are also numerous examples of businesses declaring war on
high prices, usually around Memorial or Veterans Day.
Knowledgably Yours
Dave
My husband wants to know who is Dave O'Brien? Is he
just apart of my vivid imagination? He thinks that you really
may be Bill Brasky!
Penny Hestad
Minnetonka, MN
Well Penny, that is a common mistake.
Much like
Bill Brasky, I have achieved a certain folk-hero status for
many of my exploits with former Employers. While unlike
Brasky, I have never eaten a homeless person on a dare, or
had sex with a cigarette machine, but I did once send out an
email to the entire company aliased as an annoying co-worker
reminding everyone to wash their hands after they "make a
pee-pee". Remember Kids, it pays to keep an updated resume
on hand for those times that you get fired on the spot for
misuse of the company email system.
It is these kind of Bunyonian stories that keep the name
"Dave O'Brien" alive, long after I am gone. It is a little
like when you cook sauerkraut and days later you keep thinking
you can catch a wiff of it. I am that sauerkraut. So,
Penny, while I may need to give your better half a crisp
scissor-kick to the head for doubting my existence, I do
understand the confusion.
Knowledgably Yours
Dave
Hey Dave-
How can phone line DSL be so much faster then a modem and still
let you use the phone at the same time?
Dion M.
Ramsey, MN
Interesting question and I’m glad you asked.
DSL (Digital Subscriber Line) Internet service is able to run on
a phone line at the same time as voice service due to the nature
of analog signals running on copper wire. Even though it is
called a Digital Subscriber Line, the portion of the journey
that rides the phone line is Analog. Since voice communication
takes up relatively little bandwidth on a pair of copper wires,
some room is left over in the area that is a slightly higher and
slightly lower frequency. The DSL signal piggybacks in this area
that is above the frequency being used by the voice traffic.
Sort of like when I had to hitch a ride on a freight train from
Elsnore Washington to Mandan North Dakota. A guy can learn a lot
riding the rails. If you give me an onion, a shoelace and a Mr.
Coffee and I can make you some Hobo-Chili! But that is another
story. So basically, the DSL signal runs on a different
“Channel” if you will from the voice traffic, in a similar way
that different TV channels ride the same cable at the same time.
As for it being faster than dialup, there is only so much data
you can pack into the same format as voice traffic. DSL
uses a different kind of signal than voice, so it is like
getting 6 pounds of beans into a 5 pound sack. Sort of similar
to many prom dresses I have seen over the years.
Click here for an
example.
Knowledgably Yours
Dave
Hey Dave-
My golf drives have a terrible slice. I have tried everything
and I still the slice. Do you have any sure fire ways to correct
a slice???
Signed:
Desperately in the Rough
(name withheld as to not embarrass my brother-in-law Charlie
Weis of Webster WI, 54893)
D.I.T.R, if I could answer this question, I wouldn’t need to
hold down a day job as a network jockey for the world leader in
high pressure pumps, Cat Pumps. (www.catpumps.com
for those of you who have desalinization or barnacle removal
needs)
My advice would be to take the change out of your right
pocket and put it in your left, turn your hat around backwards,
and don’t think about Rene Russo is a tight skirt. It works for
me, it worked for Ray “Tin Cup” McElroy.
There are some technologies that can help influence your
drives, such as a weight biased club. The Ask Dave!® Staff
highly recommends a club such as the Callaway Fusion FT-3 Draw
Bias. The draw bias club has more weight in the heel of the
club, than the toe, so it promotes a draw spin or as I call it
“SliceFighter”™ (patent litigation pending). There are some
drawbacks to this however such as reduced distance due to the
side spin generated, the price of said club, not to mention the
heartbreak of psoriasis.
Unfortunately, there is no magic bullet when it comes to
correcting a slice. I would recommend an hour with a PGA
Certified instructor at your favorite course. Only he or she is
qualified to break down that God awful trigonometry you call a
golf swing. Lets face it, you have custom built that broken
screen door swing of yours over the past twenty years out of a
thousand tips, trick and tweaks. Mess with it at your own
peril.
Knowledgably Yours
Dave
Hey Dave-
We have this big maroon tool box at work. It says, Jobox. I want
to know.
Is it a jo box or a job ox?
William Miller
Princeton, MN
Well, William- Thanks for your
Question, and I’m glad you asked.
I am a big fan of labels and sayings on products. Some of my
favorites are "caution: filling may be hot", "not to be taken
internally" and “Warning: A Red Rump May Signify Sexual
Readiness".
The proud name of JOBOX is a product line of heavy duty tool
boxes and cargo carriers made for the professional contractor
trades, manufactured under the Delta Tool brand by the Danaher
Corporation of Hunt Valley, MD. The name comes from the local
Nanticoke Native American tribe word Johaba loosely translated
to English “carries a shit-load of tools”. 17th Century Ferriers
and Blacksmiths settling in the Chesapeake Bay area took to
calling their large steel banded oak tool chests Joba Boxes,
taking the Indian name because indeed these chests did carry a
shit load of tools.
So in answer to your question, it is pronounced ‘JOB–box’, or
JAHAB-box to be true to it’s Native root word. “Whitey” or “The
Man” if you prefer, began painting the word JOBBOX on their line
of tool chests in the mid-nineties which are still selling today
at
http://www.deltastorage.com. Most people would think
it was a clever combination of the words job and box, but now
know you know better.
Knowledgably Yours
Dave
Hey Dave--
Are there any foods that never spoil?
Mary Jo Helmbrecht
Centerville, MN
Well Mary Jo- There are very few substances that I
haven't idly nibbled on to test their Snackablity®
(trademark pending). Purportedly, the only food
stuff that does not spoil is honey. Now in my position as Science
Advisor to the daveobrien.com, I have not personally eaten 200 year
old honey, but my sources lead me to believe if I dipped a knife
into the same jar of honey that James Madison did while he penned
the US Constitution, (if you look closely, you can see a stain
on the original copy right at Article IV, Section 10, something
about states cannot enter into treaties or some such thing) and
spread some on my morning scones, it would be indeed as fresh as
the very day the bee pooped it out.
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