maybe

I tried Power Pro for the last little bit of the 08 season, and was surprised by how curly it came off the reel. Looked like a 20' pigtail sitting up on top of the surface. Constant knots, worse than when I was just learning to cast on mono. Dunno if I got a bad spool of PP, or what - but I've gone back to Rapala Titanium. The coating may rub off a bit, but it lays out flat for me and doesn't tie itself in knots.

Excellent - I was hoping to meet the only other OFNer nutty enough to pay for GCD's autographed jigs!

Here's a direct link to the podcast MP3 of that show. Warning to dialup users - it's a 25mb file. I've subscribed to the Vinyl Cafe Stories podcast for pushing a year and a half now. It's great - every week, a new "Dave bumbles, and something terribly funny ensues" story magically appears on my hard drive. I load them into our boat's MP3 player, and Jeff & I enjoy listening to them while we're fishing. BTW, if anybody's got MP3 of The Debaters, I'd really appreciate a pm!

1) Knowledge. Jeff and I will be at the Master Angler Bass Seminar Saturday morning. Really looking forward to seeing Big Jim speak again! 2) Face time with the OFC crew. We'll be at TJ's Meet Greet & Bleep at Dave Mercer's booth at 1pm. 3) A 7' spinning rod that feels a lot like a pool cue and has a smooth foam grip....but I've given up hope of ever finding this. If I see a 7'2 MH Cumara with a reasonable price tag, it's going in the truck. 4) A GPS receiver puck for my new cell phone. Bell wants $10/mo ransom to unlock the phone's internal receiver, but Garmin makes a cute little bluetooth puck that'll do both the phone and my laptop for under $150. Any excuse to swing by RadioWorld!

Not that I can see on the list. Looks like they will be making an appearance at the Sportsmen's Show March 18-22, though. Booth 1544 according to the exhibitors list.

Wonderful - thanks, TJ!!

True. Maybe next year they'll have it together and post the needed information in a time frame where visitors could actually plan their visit in time to book the right day off work! The seminar schedule still isnt posted on the site, but I've been told it will appear "this week." The one TJ posted a week ago has some holes in it that'll hopefully be filled by then. On last year's schedule, I found errors. Forget the specific details, but at least one presenter was shown as delivering seminars on 2 different topics in 2 different locations at the same time. Also, a training room was referred to by a name that bore no resemblance to the venue's signage or any posted floor plan. I'll doublecheck the final schedule whenever it goes up this year, just in case.

Don't worry about the focus - that photo does a great job of putting the tracer line in perspective. Thanks!

You're welcome! Glad to be useful now and then.

Vita from the show shipped me a Word file late last night, arranged alphabetically by exhibitor name. At 662kb, it's to big for an attachment. I transferred the information to an Excel spreadsheet, and added a 2nd version ordered by booth # for easy crossreferencing to the PDF floorplan on the show site. The Excel spreadsheet is attached here. You'll need WinZip or WinRAR (or equivalent) to unpack the file. 2009_Fishing_and_Boat_Show_Exhibitors_List.zip For the folks who are leery of opening .xls files from the net, here's a gif format picture of the spreadsheet. Awkward to print, but perfectly safe to look at.

Manage an IT firm that supports the province's public libraries & does assorted gov't projects.

I was all excited for a minute when I saw "organs"...then I saw the slideshow. Guess they meant the Crappio keyboards. Likely just as well - if I adopt another Hammond, Jeff'll try to use me as a boat anchor. (But all the same...if anyone stumbles onto a 31-series Leslie speaker...lemme know!)

http://www.springfishingandboatshow.com Feb 13-16 at the International Centre, which is at 6900 Airport Rd Mississauga (northeast side of Airport, south of Derry). Free surface parking. Don't forget the "OFC Meet Greet & Bleep" being held at Dave Mercer's booth at 1pm Saturday. Not sure which of the booths on the 2009 floorplan is Dave's. I've got an email in to Vita asking for a booth number to exhibitor name crossreference, will post whatever information I get back.

That was a beautiful sentiment, Lew. I'm sure we all hope to follow her example. Deepest sympathies from Jeff & I.

You can always check anyone's OFC profile to see when the server last saw them logged in. The info's shown down toward the bottom in the left hand column. Right now the Fishmaster profile is saying 2:47pm yesterday. While you're on the profile, in the center column you can hit the "Posts" tab to see the last 5 posts from that person in reverse chronological. Right now I'm seeing posts dated January 18, 17, 15, 13, 12. The only way I know to pull the complete list of anyone's posts is to find one of their forum posts and click their nickname over in the left column. It'll drop down a little menu, and the bottom option is "Find member's posts." Currently showing 19 posts pretty evenly spread out over the last 14 days. Lots of posting at the Niagara Fishing Forum, too. Doesn't look like an IT problem to me. Good luck!

I'm back in, too. Thanks, Dan!

It was our pleasure! There's something wonderfully restorative about an evening of coffee and good conversation, with a gentle hound curled up on your lap. I know Jeff takes it as a personal affront when one of our friends/family's furnaces isn't doing everything it could. It always makes him really happy to get them whipped into shape.

Honest to god, the fish tracking part of the captain paperwork is nothing. 2 minutes max per fish, and you don't wind up swapping them out very often. Our team came in 3rd last year (woohoo!), and several of our final entry fish were the first and only ones submitted for their category. Granted I'm a bit of a stickler when it comes to information transfer and effective communication, but take a look at my 2008 team's entry thread. I created a form right out of the gate with placeholders for everything, and just inserted #s and pic links as they came in. Took maybe 2 minutes per fish, max. End result - all the information you need, in a logical format that's really easy to refer to, zero confusion. Easy for the team, easy for the admins, and it looks good. The time consuming paperwork for me was chasing people who signed up, and then couldn't be bothered to take their team signs out with them for pics. I had a couple guys who posted several "looky what I caught" threads to the general forum, with great fish, and never once touched a team sign. REALLY unfair to their teammates. I spent more time trying to encourage those guys to participate than I did keeping track of everybody else's fish. Sign me up, guys - I wanna do it all again!

You'd be surprised how often Limewire is front and center on systems that hit my bench with massive virus/trojan infestations. Moreso than other file sharing apps. Like everything else, I'm sure there are 4 people who use it without problems - but I wouldn't go near it. uTorrent is a nice P2P program - stable, clean, easy to deal with. You'll want to use Mininova or Torrentz as a search engine. Bear in mind that if the torrent is for an entire album (or discography), 9 times out of 10 you have the option to uncheck the songs you don't want before the files start downloading. This happens between when you click the "download the torrent" link, and when you hit "go" in uTorrent. If you have a membership with a premium usenet service like Giganews, you can use Binsearch to search for files. It's awkward and kludgy, but download speeds are usually faster than P2P. Tick off the file you want in the search result, Binsearch will make an nzb file for you. Open the nzb file in something like Newsbin Pro, and it'll allow you to download the files you selected. Now, if you're doing the torrent/usenet thing, it goes without saying that you'll only be downloading files that are the original work of the uploader, and are being offered with no copyright or other restrictions. Right? MuchMusic has an online music store that offers files in wma and mp3 format. Doublecheck you're getting the format you want before you hit that download button. I accidentally wound up with useless wma copies of the latest Serena Ryder tracks, had to pay for them twice to get mp3s. Worth it, though - Little Bit of Red is incredible.

Geez...for such wild men, you go to bed awfully early! (And thanks, HD...I'm gonna be hearing Ralph sing that song all night now. )

They had a few Suburbans up for grabs when I was looking for ours. The whole "give us all kinds of personal information before we'll tell you what the price of the car is" thing struck me as pretty slimy. After plunking in some fake ID, the prices turned out to be quite high. We paid less for an Optimum recertified vehicle at an actual GM dealer - sticker price, no haggling. I'd think if you missed enough payments to have the car taken away from you, you likely haven't splurged on oil changes or alignments for some time. Have you seen the North Toronto Auto Auction? We saw some absolute steals there, just nothing on the block in the year/model we wanted. They put the results of the most recent sale online so you can see what things went for. Here's a link.

I think there's some confusion about which show is when/where. Just so everybody's on the same page, the spring shows: Toronto International Boat Show (what we're discussing right now) January 10-18 2009 - Direct Energy Centre (parking $$ below) Spring Fishing & Boat Show February 13-16 2009 - International Centre (free surface parking) Toronto Sportsmen's Show March 18-22 2009 - Direct Energy Centre (parking $$ below) The Direct Energy Centre's parking page shows surface lot locations, and entrances to the garage under the hall. Rates as of July 1, 2008: Surface $12.00 ($9.00 after 6:00pm) Underground: $12.00 ($9.00 after 6:00pm) Just across Lakeshore Blvd are 2 parking lots for Ontario Place (Google Maps satellite shot). There's a catwalk between the 2 lots that connects them to the Direct Energy Centre lots. I've seen people park there before for shows at the Direct Energy Centre. The Ontario Place website is kind of lacking, but I'm guessing if parking was $5 on Dec 31st, it's still $5 now.

For a slightly less "doom & gloom" perspective, you might want to look at TahoeForum.com We've had some issues with our '04 Yukon XL, but by and large they come down to a lying car salesman (whatta surprise!) and dealership ineptitude. Nothing to warn people off the trucks for. Shining example: the front edge of the driver's seat base stopped working. No big deal - you take it in for an afternoon, they slap in a new part, and you're back on the road. At least, that's how it's supposed to work. Round 1: they put the replacement part in BACKWARDS. You press "down" on the control, the seat moves UP. Round 2: they got the seat moving in the right direction - but unplugged the airbag mounted in the side of the seat back. Truck dash uses plain english to tell you what happened - this isn't a subtle problem. Round 3: they plugged the airbag back in, and then hosed something else that caused heated seats to shut down after a few seconds. Round 4: seat heaters fixed, but now there's a big odd trim piece floating around the 2nd row floor. Round 5: no more spare parts rolling around, and nothing else broke while they were reinstalling the trim. Glory halleflippinlujah. Much as I still love my stiff little Saturn, I gotta say the big beast's finally won me over. I just wish he'd fit inside a parallel parking spot!

Could we please start figuring out what day we're going? Jeff and I really would like to meet up with everybody else, but we have to submit our on call schedules by Monday.

Anyone actually have any experience with this model? My father tried to get something like this up and running ~10 years ago. Bunch of electronics whizzes monkeyed around with several different motion sensors and chewed through $$$$, but in the end it didn't work. Not only would these gizmos go off if one of the chipmunks got within 30', the wind would set them off too! Talk about a frustrating waste of time and $$$. I'd really like to find one that actually *works*.