Well, I'm going to rant about Packard Bell Easynote laptops, at least the three (!!) I've had from PC World. In each case there was a clear keyboard defect - it was impossible to get through a sentence without it missing numerous letters and often whole- or half-words. Each time I took it back and they reluctantly changed it. On this third occasion I insisted on a different model, so have got an Acer Aspire, which is excellent (a bit more expensive, but worth it, dual processor and excellent graphics software). To anyone buying a new laptop, and who types even moderately quickly and will need to use the laptop keyboard, I'd say keep off Packard Bell like the plague. They are crap.

A,

It has been explained that if you upload your own avatar (like you have) you run the risk that the php system messes it.

Stick your avatar in our Photobucket and link it.
- then only any member here can mess with it 

John W

Well, at home I have an external keyboard as well, but I thought I'd give this a good try, having been well familiar with such a problem in the last weeks. I typed in the following (just from a book that was close to hand) at the laptop keyboard, using Word 2003:

'But the question for the analyst-semiologist is to know how far one can analyze ritual impurity. The historian of religious stops soon: the cultically impure is that which is based on a natural “loathing”. The anthropologist goes further; there is nothing ”loathsome” in itself; the loathsome is that which disobeys classification rules peculiar to the given symbolic system. But as far as I am concerned, I keep asking question. Why that system of classification and not another? What social, subjective, and socio-subjectively interacting needs does it fulfil? Are there no subjective structurations that, within the organization of each speaking being, correspond to this or that symbolic-social system and represent, if not stags, at least types of subjectivity and society? Types that would be defined, in the last analysis, according to the subject’s position in language, that is, by the more or less partial use he can make of his potentialities?' (Julia Kristeva - Powers of Horror; An Essay on Abjection)

And it was fine save for two typos of my own. Nothing like the situation with the Packard Bell. What type of Acer Aspire do you have? This is a very new one, the 9303WSMI.

(I realised after posting there was also a missing 'm', but that was my fault, not the computer's!)

Erm.
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGH!
That feels better.
I feel really grumpy for no good reason, except, perhaps, because I've been doing favours for people all day and fielding phone calls and emails about problems which shouldn't be mine, which means that I'm going to have to go to the head of department and tell him that I've been working my bottom off because someone else should have done all these things for me and I've got to write two coursework essay titles tomorrow after three hours of orchestration tutorials for which I have received minimal support and I haven't got anything bought in for lunch which means that I'm going to spend some unnecessary money (sorry, more unnecessary money), which I don't, incidentally, have, and since I don't have so much money at the moment I can't actually go and see Birmingham Royal Ballet in Sunderland tomorrow night like I had planned to...

I cann't cheer up today. In this situation it is better to go to sleep and morning could be wiser than the evening.
Good night all, I hope tomorrow will be a good  day.

Incidentally here are the two posts wot were modded:

Wasn't it Sweelinck?
There seem to be a number of people travelling to Basle at the moment... Can't think why.

Mixing It is (I nearly wrote was!) great because it opened a different kind of window onto a different kind of new music to that normally offered on Hear & Now and its loss lessens the both the network and its outreach.
and
T-P is merely alerting you to the fact that this thread is likely to be removed at any minute for being off-topic. This sort of thing happens round here nowadays.

R3's New Music output has been severely slashed since the new schedules came into play.
Mixing It has disappeared (but thankfully reappeared on the schedules of Resonance FM)
Hear & Now has been cut by half an hour
Late Junction has been slid into the early hours (whilst thankfully staying the same length).

The loss of the New Music board has, for many, been the last straw and many have high-tailed it out of here to the R3OK boards (just google it).

New Music, in all its forms, is slowly being squeezed out of the schedules on Radio 3.
But look at what's left: http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/mbradio3/F6643899?thread=3938349
How long will those three remaining posts remain?
WEIRD WEIRD WEIRD  (I think that almost covers it)

And it's half-past midnight, I haven't done the washing up or made my bed, and I've got three hours of tutorials starting at 10am tomorrow!!!
Whose fault is this? We all know don't we?

I should forget it hh, I don't really feel the old board is worth bothering with any more, I'm only posting there to vent a bit of my frustration about what they've done to it. They don't usually remove a thread entirely unless it's had no replies and the only post on it gets modded, so presumably they've modded all posts. But who knows what they're up to?