VaBeachGuy

9 hours ago, Mr.Picard said:

I have personal reasons for not watching the show. I have to support it as a Sir Patrick fan because it's what he wants to do and I want for him to be happy, but on a personal level I can't bring myself to watch it (has nothing to do with the perceived quality of the show). So, I support it as a Sir Patrick fan, but that's about it. Not easy, to say the least.

I kind of felt the same about the new generation of movies. I was excited when the first one came out, until I watched it. Then my enthusiasm died down. I wasn't happy with what they did. 

With "Picard", I was somewhat surprised that he agreed to do it. I seem to remember him saying that he was finished doing any Star Trek (I could be mistaken though). Still, I'm curious to see how it is and if it's done well. 

As a fan of his, if you ever do watch it, I'd be very interested in your opinions of whatever episodes of it that you watch. 

23 hours ago, Mr.Picard said:

I have. Just don't really have anything to add to it since I don't watch the show.

You don't? I thought for sure you would. Why don't you? I haven't either, not yet, anyway. I've read a few things about the first few episodes, but no specifics. Only that the people who wrote about them, liked them. 

I've intended on watching them, but just haven't gotten around to them yet. 

@Mr.Picard, have you noticed the new Picard forum? 

Wow, I'm just seeing this. Sad news, regardless of when I'm learning it. He played Nog very well and he became one of my favorite DS9 characters. 

On 6/6/2020 at 5:56 AM, Mr.Picard said:

Yes, it works now, it looks just the way it used to! Ah, I really missed this place. 

It is very reminiscent of one of the very old skins from back around 2003, isn't it?

16 hours ago, Mr.Picard said:

Thanks for the upgrade, VBG! So sorry to hear that your family health isn't good. I hope everyone will be okay!

As for your question, I'd love to see the forum on the front page - just like it was in the old days - but that might just be me.

Thanks, we're getting through it. 

I've had the original theme (skin) of the board tweaked, and a new one created. If you're seeing the same theme that you've been used to for about the past 10 year (or is it longer?), you can switch themes by clicking the 'Theme' drop down, all the way at the bottom of the site. 

You should be able to see it, if you can't just let me know. 

I don't buy a lot on eBay, but I've been a seller on there since the late 90's. I've had two different seller accounts on there, the first one from the late 90's to very early 00's kind of got lost to time. I sold a lot of computers that I built, back then but I have no idea what the total dollar amount of sales were. If I were to guess, I'd say probably in the $25,000 to $35,000 range. 

On my current seller account, which I've had going since 2002, I just looked up the total dollar amount of sales since then and was blown away by the total amount. Almost $98,000.00. Of course, that's spread out over 18 years worth of selling. In all that time, zero negative feedback, all positive. 

Seeing as this is a new series, it should have had its own forum before now, so this forum is for the discussion of Picard.

With the family health issues that I've been dealing with for the past couple of years, I haven't really taken a lot of time to sit down and watch any of the new Star Trek stuff, so I haven't even seen the first episode of this show yet.

What I may do is watch it and record my reactions to each episode for YouTube, and give my opinions/thoughts to each episode... good, bad or indifferent.

I'm not sure when (if) I'll do that, but maybe I'll get started on that in the near future.

Finally got the upgrade completed, after a week and a half of trying. The skin may need some tweaks, so I'll see about that going forward.

I'm sorry that I've been so long absent. For the past year+, I've been dealing with some serious family health issues. Actually, it's been for about the past 7 or 8 years with various family members and close friends.

I haven't even had (or taken) the time to watch any of the new Star Trek series that have come out these past couple of years. I've meant to watch Picard, but just haven't yet.

One of my non Star Trek interests, well my main non-Trek interest, as I'm sure you may recall is the Philadelphia Eagles. They recently decided to do away with their message board, which had been in existence for about 21 or 22 years and was actually the inspiration to me to create STF oh so many years ago.

Well, a bunch of the Eagles Message Board members started a GoFundMe campaign and raised nearly $4,000 to create a new Eagles Message Board... so guess who owns the new Eagles Message Board? Yep, you guessed it, I was the one who was drafted to create it (well, re-create it... it's identical to the old one).

It took a good bit of work, but doing it reminded me of my neglect of STF.  I can't promise to be on every day, because family health issues are really more pressing. But one thing that I am going to do is upgrade the board. Invision is coming out with their 4.5 version soon and I'm targeting that as the next upgrade (unless they say that I need to upgrade to 4.4.10 first).

Upgrades always mean a new skin, of course. 15 years ago, I'd just dig in and do it myself. But I don't have the time or energy for that now, so when the time comes, I'll hire someone to skin the board for us.

My question to anyone here would be, should I keep the portal as the front page or go with just a forum view?

3 hours ago, A l t e r E g o said:

Great Nose! About time it got the recognition it deserved.

lol Yeah, I agree. You know, I actually still have the pay stub from that week? I worked something like 98 hours (though that may have been a 2 week period, I forget if we got paid weekly or bi-weekly). You'd think that 98 hours was a big pay check, but I believe it was under $300 after taxes. I'll have to dig the pay stub out, but minimum wage in 1987 was $3.35 an hour.

To tell the truth, I'd probably have worked that job for free lol.

Ok, let me kind of set the stage here. I was going through some old Betamax tapes and have been converting some of them to DVD. I came across one that didn't have a label on it, so I popped it into the machine and started it playing (and recording to DVD). When I checked it later, I discovered that a segment of Entertainment Tonight was near the end of the tape.

\As I watched the segment it occurred to me exactly what it was. It was from the summer of 1987, I believe late June. A local movie theater was playing a 22 episode marathon of Cagney & Lacy episodes, one after the other, all night and it was free to the public.

That theater was the AMC Academy 8 Theatre, at Beltway Plaza in Greenbelt, Maryland. I just happened to work at that theater in the summer of 1987, fresh out of High School yet about a year before I joined the Army. I also just happened to volunteer to work for that entire marathon, so I wound up working for about 24 hours straight that day. I may have fallen shy of 24 straight hours by 30 to 45 minutes.

A local radio station called in and interviewed me and, as you can see below, Entertainment Tonight came and did a story on it as well. I'm in the video, though you can never quite see my face. Before you hit play, you can see me in the still frame below with my back to the camera.

I can be seen a couple of other times, but only a hand or in one case, my nose lol.

I had completely forgotten that they did this story and that I had (partially) been on Entertainment Tonight... Until I just re-discovered it.

Pretty cool (for me, anyway).

Sad to hear, the first thing that I can remember seeing him in would be One Day at a Time, as the ex-husband/father.

My thoughts on 'These Are the Voyages' was that it was terrible. I was extremely disappointed in how they turned it into a 'behind the scenes' TNG episode. I can re-watch, and enjoy the nearly the entire series, but when it comes to the finale, I skip it. I don't bother watching it at all.

There were so many better possibilities for how they could have done the finale, but this was just awful and in many ways, insulting.

That first video kind of stutters, I'm not sure why that happened, so I re-uploaded it. I left some of the other stuff from the museum in it this time.

7 hours ago, Bethlehem said:

That is really Kool!

Yeah, it's always been cool to visit it. I think the first time I saw it there was back in the late 70's. I know they recently took it apart and did a full restoration on it.

8 hours ago, A l t e r E g o said:

What happened to them... did your Mom throw them out with your comic books? 

 

lol They were well played with through the mid-70's. By the mid-80's, when I was a teenager, they were probably donated, given to younger neighborhood kids or thrown out.

I made a visit to the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum in the summer of 2009 and stopped in to the gift shop to get some video and pictures of the Enterprise model, it's since been moved to the main floor near the entrance, but up until just a couple of years ago, it resided in basement gift shop.

Here's a short video of it from back then:

These videos are some Mego Star Trek Toy commercials. I had several of these toys, I got them for Christmas in 1976. I wish I still had them today.

I had the communicator Walkie-Talkies:

I also had the Phaser:

And I had the Bridge set, along with Kirk, Spock, Bones and Scotty:

I meant to include this in the previous post, it's a small bottle containing confetti from the field that was sent to me a couple of weeks after the Super Bowl.

Sorry I haven't been around. The past few years, life just always seems to pull me in different directions.

The 2017 Eagles season was truly a magical one for any long suffering Eagles fan though. For me, it had been 40 years of "Maybe next year", then 2017 became "next year" kind of unexpectedly.

To be honest though, in week 3 of the season when the Eagles played the Giants in Philadelphia and Jake Elliott kicked that 61 yard Field Goal to win the game, in my mind I knew that 'next year' had finally arrived. I never let that slip out of my lips though, so as not to jinx it but I really felt that this would be the year. I think the closest that I came to predicting it (at that point) was to comment to a few people that the 61 yarder would make a great chapter in our "America's Game" episode, come next September.

The Super Bowl itself was an awesome game to experience from the vantage point of a green bleeding Eagles fan who has been bleeding green since 1976 (when I was 7 years old). I'm not ashamed to admit that the victory brought tears to my eyes.

Since February 4th, I've probably re-watched the game 40 times. I turned the game into a Blu-Ray and added 3 different radio broadcasts to it, so I can watch the game with different announcers calling the game. I actually did that to the entire season, so I have all 19 games on Blu-Ray. I haven't re-watched the entire season (yet), but the Super Bowl is one that I never get tired of watching.

My plan, well my hope, is that I'll be able to get a ticket to the 2018 home opener so I can be there when they unveil the Championship Banner at Lincoln Financial Field. I've never been to an Eagles game in person, so that would be a great one to make my first. Well, the Super Bowl would have been a great one to be my first, but that would have cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $10,000. I'd have to have a 'Go Fund Me' page to raise the money for that! lol

Hopefully though, I'll be able to make it to Philadelphia for that season opener.

On ‎4‎/‎22‎/‎2017 at 2:01 PM, Kor37 said:

I am very sad to report that BakulaBabe and her husband both died in a fire at their home last December. Denise was an active member of this group and I was heartbroken when I heard this.

That is most definitely an upsetting thing. She was a great member here and like you said, very active. Very sad news to learn. Were there any news reports on the fire and cause?

I recently began watching DS9 all the way through (again). It's just as great the 30th time through as it was the 1st time.

1 hour ago, mj said:

What about this, AE.....you know those emails from foreign countries that ask for money for all kinds of personal catastrophes? Well I received an email from a friend saying something sad had happened. This was an out of state friend

and professional colleague so I emailed her back to say I was praying for her and to let me know if there was anything I could do.  As I left work it occurred to me to just call her....and lo, nothing was wrong! Plus, she had been getting calls all day from friends, and was in the process of investigating how she had been hacked.

The next day I received an email reply to the email I had sent, supposedly replying from my friend. According to the letter my friend was stuck in a foreign country was ill, and needed thousands of dollars, and oh...she was so embarrassed to have to ask for this money.

Now that reply site has been sent out to our IT people as a phishing site. But there is no restraint on these people.

You just got an America version!

In the past, I'm sure I had mentioned my neighbor and good friend Norm. He passed away in 2012 and his wife unfortunately followed in 2014. But around 2010 or 2011, she received a call from someone who started off the call by calling her 'Grandma' and going on to say that she was Norm's son (he had children from a previous marriage). "Scott", went on to explain that he was in the Bahamas or maybe it was the Virgin Islands, and was arrested for being drunk at a concert and the local police were demanding $2,000 as a bribe to let him go. "Scott" also asked "Grandma" (she was really his step-mother), not to tell his father anything about it. Now keep in mind, the real Scott lived in Alaska at the time and would never call her 'Grandma'.

Being a very stressful situation, she dutifully went to the Western Union office and wired him $2,000. After she got home, 'Scott' called back and said that they were demanding $5,000 more or they'd charge him and he'd spend a year in their jail.

At this point, she was very upset, and told Norm (my friend). He immediately realized that it was a scam, but just to double check, he called his son in Alaska and sure enough, he was safe and sound in his home.

The $2,000 was gone for good, an expensive lesson to learn for Norm's wife, but a lesson learned. These sorts of scams will never end, and will only get more creative.

I've read of the 'Can you hear me' scam, where someone will call you and the first question is 'Can you hear me?' or some other question that will get you to give a 'Yes' or other affirmative answer. They're recording your voice saying 'Yes', and later add it to a recording where it sounds like you're agreeing to buy something or pay some bill or something of that sort.

You can, of course, fight it. But like identity theft, it can be time consuming and expensive.

Yeah, I thought the same thing. You know who they're supposed to be, but they weren't very well done.