Sandy Bridge

Nightwish is the one band where I prefer the live albums to the studio albums. They're just the best at live recordings. Hadn't seen this one though, since it isn't an official live album of theirs - so thanks for posting it!

This has been an interesting twist in the new GPU generation - the melting of 16-pin adapters on the RTX 4090. I don't know if there is any way to estimate how prevalent the problem is, but it sounds like it's more than just one or two rogue GPUs. Should we start taking bets on how long it will be until there's a class action lawsuit? Would you buy an RTX 4090 today given the stories of melting 16-pin adapters? If you've already bought one, are you concerned about your GPU going up in a puff of smoke? I wasn't in the market anyway due to the price and having no need for that level of performance, but I definitely wouldn't buy a GPU with that sort of problem.

Haha, no, that would be major news! I can only see them announcing that on April 1st. It would make no sense otherwise! I did consider writing the title with "80486", maybe I should have...

According to Linus, Linux is considering dropping support for the venerable 486. It would be the first x86 CPU architecture to lose support since the 386 was dropped a decade ago. Is anyone around here running Linux on a 486-class CPU? According to Wikipedia, Intel discontinued production of them in 2007. If you are running Linux on a 486, I'd be curious to see some pictures! Ideally with something to document that it's 2022!

So, similar performance to AMD but at significantly higher power consumption, and without any future upgrades on the platform. Though the prices for the processors themselves, and at least for the time being the platform as a whole, are lower to compensate for the higher power costs and lack of future upgrades. In other words, AMD is the high-end premium CPU manufacturer, and Intel is the value processor manufacturer. The 13900K is the current-gen answer to the FX-9590, pushing clock speeds and power consumption to extreme levels to technically be similar on a raw performance level to the competition, all while being on an end-of-the-line platform. Though Intel has set the price to a more reasonable level than AMD did with the FX-9590. I'll stick with my plan to go AM5 so long as they get motherboard pricing sorted out eventually.

Yes, and thankfully this will likely fit into that quite nicely. I for one welcome this new speed-based branding. And yes, 40 Gbps is quite fast. Full speed external PCIe SSDs, it's a crazy world we live in. I think I have a 10 Gbps port as the fastest on my desktop, but it might be 20 Gbps, I'd have to find the box to look it up. I don't have an external device that's fast enough to figure it out by testing. I have no idea what my laptop maxes out at, other than it's at least 5 Gbps. If they'd introduced the speed-based labeling a decade ago, I'd know for sure how fast my ports are. But hasn't USB always been at least mostly of backwards-compatible, as long as the connector shape is the same? Plug a USB 2.0 device into a USB 3.0 port, or vice versa, and most of the time it works just fine. I think there was some backwards-compatibility with 1.1 as well, though I'm less sure about that.

The USB Promoter Group has announced the next version of USB, which will be backwards-compatible with USB 4.0. Rather than the names you might expect, such as USB 4.1 or USB 5.0, it will be known as USB 4 Version 2.0. You can read the official announcement at https://usb.org/sites/default/files/2022-10/USB-IF USB 80Gbps Announcement_FINAL_v2.pdf The marquee feature appears to be 80 Gbps operation, including over existing 40 Gbps passive cables. It will also be possible to configure a 120 Gbps/40 Gbps asymmetric mode. Anyone chomping at the bit to upgrade? Or perhaps to lobby the USB Promoter Group to adopt a better naming scheme? I don't think it's quite as bad as the Generation I/Generation II confusion with USB 3.1/3.2, but I'm sure there will people mistakenly buying USB 4.0 instead of USB 4.0 Version 2.0 in a few years...

Did I read that right that the motherboard package was 6.1 kg? That's a chonky motherboard! Though perhaps not relative to that beastly GPU! Props on the cable management, too. There are definitely a lot of cables, but you've got them nearly organized!

Just finished (or likely finished) a Hearts of Iron IV campaign as Italy. It's a great game for rewarding (or punishing) long-term planning. In this case I made a couple strategic blunders in battlefield planning, such as failing to adequately protect Romanian oil fields, but in the end strategic successes in industrial planning, diplomacy, and timing were the deciding factors. France became Italian, Germany was defeated, primarily by Italy and Belgium, Japan was convinced to stop expanding after taking over China, Bulgaria wound up at war with all its neighbors, and the British dueled the Soviets, most recently landing troops at Leningrad, all while the U.S. sat back and exported arms to the Soviets, destroyers to Britain, and oil to Italy. I could play on and potentially intervene in Britain vs USSR, and test out that shiny new navy I've been building over the past five years, but fighting Britain would mean fighting Belgium and it feels wrong to fight a Belgium that successfully fended off Germany for the whole war. So what game is next? Eh, maybe it's time I pick up the Texas expansion to American Truck Simulator and drive a big rig from Texas to Seattle.

To me arguably the most fascinating thing about exploring a long-abandoned PC, especially one that I used to use, is seeing the state-in-time aspect of the files. What was my browser history or bookmarks like in 2011? Was this the computer where I set my Minesweeper high score? Etc. So that Phenom II 955 does indeed sound like a great find. And sure, it's also great experiencing the slow hardware again, and hearing the sounds of a Maxtor hard drive getting up to speed. But I don't think it would be the same if it were just old hardware I'd never used. It needs to have that Windows 98 desktop with so many icons that they would fill up the entire screen if it were at 640x480 resolution. ---- I haven't dug one out of a closet lately, but over the years I've explored or tried to restore various old family computers. The most reliable is, not surprisingly, a circa 1997 ThinkPad with a whopping 104 MB of RAM and a gigantic 2 GB hard drive, that runs Windows 98 SE and has both a floppy and a CD-ROM drive, swappable. Actually pretty high specs for its time, the RAM is maxed out. I've wanted to put an SSD in it, but the screw securing the compartment with the hard drive is stuck so that'll probably never happen; it also would require a specialty 1.8" PATA SSD and those aren't exactly numerous these days. Next up after that, and the best from a revisiting-old-times standpoint, is a 1998 Sony desktop that pairs Maxtor and Matrox on HDD/GPU. It supports 1200p resolutions over VGA flawlessly, Matrox might not have beat 3dfx in speed but they built good GPUs. That desktop got regular use for about 8 years, and had a large enough hard drive to accumulate a lot of files. It even features an original late-'90s DVD drive, and on a day with enough good luck and favor from the gods, its GPU can even play a film from that drive. The real "pulled from a closet" though, was an unsuccessful attempt to revive my family's first PC, an AMD 486. At some point in the early 2010s its motherboard failed, probably due to capacitor leakage, maybe old age... research indicates it was a cheap mobo so if anything it lasted longer than expected. I still have a bunch of parts from that one, it seems wrong to recycle parts that are increasingly rare. If anyone needs a questionable 486 motherboard, vintage 250W no-name power supply (still working a few years ago!), or a VLB graphics card, you now know where to ask. Probably going to keep its no-longer-functional 800 MB Caviar 2850 though, it looks good on a bookshelf and is a good reminder of the progress we've made since the '90s. The one part I was able to rescue intact and working from that ancient 486 was its floppy drive, which now lives in my primary desktop and works as good as it did when it was new. I plan to carry it forward to my Ryzen 7000 build this winter. Do I need a floppy drive with Zen 4? Probably not. But do I want one? Absolutely. It's interesting though, the logos on the case indicate a Sapphire ATi card and an Athlon CPU. Was that from the case's previous build?

If you want something economical, particularly from a maintenance perspective, go Japanese over German. The wisdom in the U.S. is that the most economical is Japanese, then American (cheap to maintain, but tend not to last as long), then German (expensive repairs). So I'd definitely go with the Accord. Is is as great as a 1996 Accord? Maybe not, but it still should last a long time. 160K KM does seem high for a 2017, but that would be about what my former boss put on her car per year. It's a Honda though, so it ought to be good for at least double that. Just make sure you have an inspection done, at that mileage a major service probably has been done but I got my Honda to almost 140K KM before its first major service so it's good to check. (And yes I realize you probably aren't considering that car 3 months later, but in case you're still looking...) ------ My new workplace has Level 2 chargers, so I am now somewhat more interested in potentially buying an EV. Even with a plug-in hybrid, I could quite likely make my commute without ever burning any gasoline thanks to those chargers. Probably still not going to buy anything until 2024 or later, but I'll be following the hatchback EV market a bit more closely now. Anyone have experience with an id.3? I don't know if Volkswagen will ever introduce them to North America, but if they did I'd at least take one on a test drive.

A Microsoft Natural 4000 keyboard. I would've bought them new till the end of time, but they discontinued 'em, so I had to find one on eBay. MSFT's new wireless ergonomic keyboard just isn't the same, the 4000 has the perfect key depth and actuation force for a non-mechanical keyboard. I'll be returning the Adesso keyboard I bought that I hoped might be a good replacement. Ergonomic, adds backlighting, sensible layout... but requires a lot more actuation force.

Ryzen 7000 has not sold out on day 1, but I for one am glad that is the case. After years of everything selling out except perhaps GTX 1050s, it's refreshing that it's totally unnecessary to stand in line all night to have a chance to buy a new processor. I agree with jaybee83 though, it's too early to say that Zen 4 isn't selling well. Maybe AMD really did get tons of chips to retail now that TSMC isn't quite so swamped as they were during the pandemic. Maybe the expensive mobos are slowing sales and once B650 arrives the floodgates will open. And I agree with jaybee83, 90% of people bought a rig of some sort during the pandemic, so even though it's a good uplift over Zen 3, it's a bit of a tough sell. I'll also admit that I'm in the lazy gamer kid camp when it comes to overclocking these days. I had fun with manual overclocking and undervolting on my old laptop, both CPU and GPU, but hardware speed improvement has so exceeded my need for speed that I just don't get excited by overclocking like I used to. Yeah, I'll install Ryzen Master Tuner and play around with the wattage limits, but I doubt I'll go much beyond that. And that's okay, it's more time that I can spend posting at EFGXT, or pursuing other interests. Still, it's good to know someone's keeping the flame alive. There's something to be said just for the sake of being able to tune a CPU manually, even if I'm not personally going to push the limits. I'm still mildly annoyed at my laptop's 2.2 GHz base chip that will overclock all the way to 3.9 or 4.0 GHz on its own without me even telling it how fast it should go. Yes, it's nice, and it chews through work quickly. But it was exciting back in the day when Turbo Boost was brand new and you really didn't know how high things could go until you put the numbers in and tried it yourself.

As for the Blue + Red combo (Raptor + RDNA3) option missing from the poll... I doubt many would go for it, but maybe some EVGA fans who prefer Intel CPUs would, just to stick it to nVIDIA? I have Blue + Red currently and have for the past decade, but I was building when Bulldozer was current so going Blue was an easy choice. I actually switched from nGreedia due to another of their mishaps, the Soldergate issue with their early lead-free GPUs cracking over time and failing early. That had affected my previous GPU, so when I built this rig I was determined to go AMD for the GPU. Got a screaming deal on an HD 6870 close to the end of that generation's life cycle, too. I know what you mean about it being fun to share online too. One of my mates is also into computer hardware like I am, and a couple can appreciate graphics cards, but only that one friend is going to ask which motherboard I bought. I bet you'll like the keyboard. I used the Das Keyboard 4 with Cherry MX Brown switches at work pre-pandemic and it was fantastic. Unfortunately my new office isn't staffed solely by keyboard enthusiasts so even a Brown would probably be a bit noisy for that environment. But when my home-based, well-loved Microsoft Natural 4000, on which all letters but Q, T, and Y have lost their labels, eventually wears out? I'm definitely going Team Brown. I'm a bit curious about the gallium nitride 65W super compact charger. I think there was one GaN desktop PSU on the market at the time I bought my SeaSonic, and I considered it but it was at least twice as expensive and for the levels of power I was going to be using with it, it wouldn't have actually been any more efficient than a SeaSonic Titanium. Still interesting tech, and this is the first of I've heard of it being deployed in a presumably-for-laptops charger. I kind of agree on Thermaltake, I knew a chap in college who had one of those big (for the time) 1200W Thermaltakes in his self-built desktop with a $400 case and all the latest hardware for the time (his parents must have been minted, either that of he spent all of a semester's loans on a new rig). Well a couple months later the PSU caught fire and fried itself and the DVD drive (which in that case was somehow mounted above the PSU), but he got fairly lucky as IIRC just the PSU, DVD, and maybe the mobo was all that got fried. They RMA'ed it but he sold the replacement and bought something else. Granted it's one anecdote, and I'm sure they far exceed that on average, but I haven't trusted my precious with them since. SeaSonic? We might have ATX 7.0 by the time you need to replace that one! You're doing a great job building up excitement! And now that Micro Center is throwing in free DDR5, 32 GB no less, albeit slower than your beastly DIMMs, with Ryzen systems, I'm sorely tempted to also go out and buy an R9 7950X. I don't really have the time to build one this week and haven't properly researched the motherboard options, but...

This sub-forum needs some love, so let's have a poll about wired network speeds. I'm particularly curious about the fastest link between two points. I.e. if your desktop supports 5 Gbps but your laptop only supports 1 Gbps, and those are your only two end-user devices, the fastest link would be 1 Gbps (assuming no bottlenecks at the router or elsewhere in between). I'm still at 1 Gbps. I'd like to get up to at least 2.5 Gbps, but between updating multiple adapters and the router (or adding a switch), it hasn't quite been worth it yet. Though I do have a few Cat6 cables so that part of the upgrade is done.

It also depends somewhat on the game as to whether SSDs give a perceivable difference in load time. Some games pack their data into a few large files, and if the game just loads up those files in whole, a hard drive will be at less of a disadvantage relative to an SSD than if it were loading a thousand small files. The game also might be doing various CPU or GPU or memory limited tasks while loading. The SSD will still be faster, but if loading from disk only takes 20% of the time when it's on a hard drive, by Amdahl's Law there is a maximum 20% decrease in load time no matter how fast of an SSD replaces the hard drive. What that percentage figure is depends on the game and the other components of your system. I've found that for many of the games I play, the difference isn't as large as I would have guessed (though there are a few where it's quite significant). Generally the ones I play the most get prime billing on the SSD, all the rest go on the HDD unless they're glacially slow there. In the end, if a game takes 45 seconds to load from the HDD versus 30 seconds from the SSD, it's a question of is it worth paying more for that faster load time? What if it's 45 seconds vs 10 seconds? Etc. Disclaimer: I only have SATA SSDs, the difference may be more noticeable once I have an NVME drive. Or not, since then I'll also have a Ryzen that decreases the CPU-limited part of game loading. I would be curious if 4K films max out hard drives. For 1080 Blu-Ray quality a hard drive is perfectly fine, and for playback there is no benefit to having them on an SSD. In theory, as long as the bandwidth is below the sequential transfer speed of the hard drive, 4K/3D films should be 100% okay on a hard drive too, but I don't know what their bandwidth needs are.

Not sure how global this launch will be, but Intel is launching the A770 in the U.S. on October 12th for $330: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-arc-a770-launching-oct-12-starting-at-dollar329 So who's gonna buy one and see how it does? I'll admit I'll probably buy a Radeon instead, seems risky from a drivers standpoint to buy Arc Alchemist this generation. But I'll be curious to read the reviews. Who knows, maybe in a few years I'll be running a system with an AMD CPU and an Intel GPU instead of Intel CPU+AMD GPU as I run today...

Now that looks like a beastly rig! You weren't kidding about building a monster desktop. But like you say, with only a few months to enjoy it before your free time mostly goes away... now's the time! With the other specs, I'm expecting at least 64 GB of RAM. SeaSonic PSU for the awesome 12-year warranty and rock solid reliability? Or do they not go quite as high-wattage as a 4090 + OC'ed 7950 would prefer?

Congratulations on that 7950 purchase! The cheapest AM5 mobo at my local MicroCenter is $260, with a $20 discount if you buy it at the same time as a CPU, so effectively $240. I paid $130 (before a $20 MIR, which was honored) for a Z68 mobo back in 2011. So X670/X670E is expensive, even after being adjusted for inflation. I'm thinking wait till B650 and put the savings towards more SSD, as those have come down nicely in price. $165 for a 2 TB PCIe 4 TLC SSD is not bad at all, I think I'd rather put the mobo savings towards more fast storage.

At 4:58 in the GN video, it's specifically stated that they expect to run out by the end of the year, not a year from now. That's still a few months' of partially-unprofitable revenue, but far less than a year.

I wouldn't be shocked if the reason they haven't explored AMD/Intel is something in the contract that prevents them from doing so for 12 months (give or take) from when they stop working with nVIDIA. A corporate non-compete of sorts. Though I also wouldn't be shocked if they looked at the AMD/Intel margins, saw they weren't a whole lot better, and weren't too enthused about that route either. Still, it definitely doesn't reflect well on nVIDIA as a business partner. I watched the whole GamersNexus video, and saw the Jon Peddie profit margin charts... I'd be looking for alternatives too if I were in their shoes and had the means to not be beholden to nVIDIA forever. Hopefully they are able to find enough lines of business to keep a decent number of their staff employed. The probably do have the reserves to do so for some time but as Steve says, that can't be the case forever (unless perhaps they made a boatload mining Ethereum?). I've only bought a mouse from them (which is working well) as I have SeaSonic PSUs and Radeons, but they certainly have a good reputation. I'd consider buying an EVGA motherboard for my future AM5 system, for example. For that matter, I wouldn't be surprised if their first X570 motherboard was released last year (late in the X570 cycle) with some foreknowledge that they might not be extending their nVIDIA contract. It could be a coincidence, but it sounds like they had been frustrated with nVIDIA for quite some time, probably many years. An X570 motherboard might have been their way to test the waters of working with AMD.

PCWorld did the benchmarks I wanted to see, comparing power efficiency with the 65W/105W Eco Mode settings in Ryzen Master. Comparing the 7950X to the 5950X in Cinebench n-thread, the results for the 7950X were: 65W - 12% faster than 5950X (81% more efficient) 105W - 34% faster than 5950X (34% more efficient) 170W - 48% faster than 5950X (9% less efficient) They also found single-digit differences in gaming performance in Eco mode, not surprisingly since the GPU can also be the limiting factor, and gaming is lower-threaded, and thus more likely to still be at high clocks even in a limited power envelope. So I am favorable impressed. I didn't really want a 170W CPU, between expected higher power prices in the future and heat in the summer. But being able to use 40% less power and still get 12% better performance as the previous-gen, or the same power and 34% better performance? That's a big boost. And while that is one benchmark, the 65W figure is actually better than AMD's advertised efficiency gains. I'll probably go with a 7700X, but maybe a 7900X, paired with a B650 board once those are available. Grab 32 GB of DDR5 and an NVME TLC SSD and call it a day. Stick with my RX 480 for now, unless GPU prices crash in the next month, then maybe swap it for an RX 6600, which seems to be the sweet spot of price:performance:efficiency. Keep my current case and PSU. I think the CPU pricing is fair on the whole, too. Not quite Ryzen 3000 levels on hex/octo cores, but equal or lower than Ryzen 5000, and quite competitive versus all Ryzen generations for 12/16 cores, all with another nice leap forward in efficiency and performance. Mobo pricing could be problematic for X670, and DDR5 isn't at parity yet, but unlike nVIDIA, it doesn't feel like AMD is price-gouging on their own hardware. We'll see if that holds true for RDNA3 come November, but I'll take this is a good sign that it might. And sure, Rocket Lake might launch before B650, but even if it does slightly better than Zen 4 this fall, I'd still rather go AM5 for the platform support. Swap out to Zen 6 or Zen 7 in a few years and keep everything else humming along for a decade, why wouldn't I go that route? --- Edit: KitGuru also did some good metrics on this. They found that in CineBench, the 7950 in 65W Eco mode scores 334.9 points per Watt; in standard mode it scores 179.1 points per Watt; Intel's best entry is the 12700K at 142.4 points per Watt, and the 12900K scores 105.7 points per Watt. If you want efficiency in performance-oriented tasks, the 7950 in Eco mode crushes the competition. And since that's essentially what I'm looking for... the only choice is which Zen 4 model do I want?

Over the past year, I've noticed that I've been using LibreOffice Calc more and more, and haven't been missing Excel 2010 (the latest version I have). I think it started out as having LibreOffice on my new laptop because I didn't want to pay for another copy of Office for how infrequently I use it on the laptop, but at some point I installed LibreOffice on my desktop to work with spreadsheets I created on the laptop (rather than shifting formats all the time or relying on Excel's OpenOffice support), and nowadays most of the spreadsheets I create are in LibreOffice Calc, although I leave some legacy ones that are already in Excel and don't need to be updated on the road where they are. Why am I using Calc? One, it's stable and not laggy these days. But I think its UI has also progressed beyond Excel 2010. Conditional formatting works well, including for ranges. Cell formatting is easy, select some cells and right click and choose format, and it seems like it's less error-prone to modify the ranges for formatting than it is in Excel 2010. I also kind of like how if you're typing a formula, and have something like SUM(V43, and then use the arrow keys, it moves from V43 rather than whatever cell has the formula. Usually, that results in fewer keystrokes. Small things like that add up. I think they've also done a good job organizing the menus. It's not as cluttered as Excel 2003, so the fact that it isn't Ribbonized isn't really important. When I first tried conditional formatting, I was able to find it under a sensibly-named menu right where I thought it might be. Spreadsheets are the only office software I use regularly, since I write nearly all my text documents in Notepad++ or another plain-text editor. Though I did recently update my resume in LibreOffice Writer, and it did a fine job, including exporting it to PDF. Basically, whereas in 2010 I would have said OpenOffice isn't ready for prime time based on my playing around with it in Linux, now it seems like LIbreOffice may be. ----- Haven't tried Calligra yet, but I'd like to try it the next time I try Haiku. The UI screenshots look interesting, I like how they have sidebar controls, similar to what IBM Lotus Symphony had back in the day. Around 2008, that was my preferred alternate-office suite, due both to stability relative to OpenOffice at the time and its somewhat unique user interface scheme. I've read some complaints about Calligra's stability online, but the reviews all seem to be several years old, so those issues may have been resolved in the meantime.

After a mention of politics in another thread, where I mentioned that I consider myself a "diehard moderate" by today's standards, I got to thinking that an interesting question might be, how often do you get outside of your political bubble? By that, I primarily mean either interacting with people who generally hold different views (in a civil manner!), or spending time in places that generally have different political views, although spending time reading political views that differ from your own online or print also counts, if it's done intentionally. I suspect doing this more often than the average American is part of why I'm relatively moderate, with the other major factor being a general aversion to ideologues, and preference for practicality. One of the biggest items that I do in this regard is spend time on the other side of the urban/rural divide. I like in a relatively liberal city (by Midwest standards; it's conservative compared to Portland, Oregon). But most of my recreational activities are in rural areas. And the people I meet there have all been decent people, not the people pressed against the windows of the Statehouse screaming and looking like zombies during covid protests. Those people must live somewhere too, but I haven't met them. Conversely, I've read a surprising amount of comments on Fox News where people say some variant of "the big cities are like DMZs". I'd be willing to bet most of those people have not been to a big city in a long time. I have, including in some parts of town that even a fair amount of big city residents consider to be "bad" parts of town. Obviously the crimes the local media reports on must happen somewhere, but I've never felt unsafe. I've been to a couple other big cities in the past year as well, and same thing - even visiting friends in areas that people my parents' age raise eyebrows about, the only hazard was the possibility of not finding a parking spot. Another is reading letters to the editor or similar direct statements from politicians of the opposite party, or at least the moderate ones. I watched the State of the State address by the governor of my state, who's from the "other" political party, and you know what? It all sounded like pretty darn reasonable things to be working toward. Granted, he's on the moderate wing of his party, but it was a great example of, "the other guys aren't evil, and actually have some good ideas" I find it unfortunate that we don't see more focus on this sort of long-form direct quoting of elected officials in the news, where selective quoting (often without context) is often more common. I remember buying a copy of a small-town West Virginia newspaper last fall, where they had a lengthy letter to the editor from a state senator explaining why he supported certain policies he did, and also had a minimally edited version of a recent address from President Biden (just enough to make it fit on a whole page). It was refreshing to see that at least one newspaper still publishes direct news, not re-processed, even from politicians in the party their readers are not likely to agree with, so those readers can make directly informed decisions. Probably the most outside-the-book cross-aisle decision I've made it going to a rally of a politician in the opposite party, and not in the moderate wing of the party, either. Said politician failed to convince me to switch allegiances, but it was an interesting experience. Why do it? Well, tickets were free and available, and I had nothing else going on that night. Why not hear from the horse's mouth? I wasn't going to be the obnoxious guy who roots for the Yankees in Fenway, but no one seemed to notice or mind my fairly low amount of applause, and the supporters seemed pretty reasonable as we waited in line to get in, if a bit enthusiastic during the rally. Perhaps my biggest takeaway is that it's unfortunate that political rallies are aimed at those who already believe in the candidate. Sure, they're the easiest to convince to show up. But wouldn't you convince more people to vote for you if half or more of the audience was undecided, or leaning towards another candidate? I noticed a few other people with lukewarm responses, so I reckon there were some other people there trying to decide who to vote for, but they were a distinct minority. So, do you make sure you hear from the opposite side of the aisle, whether through real life experience or in print? Or do you just trust that whatever your side says is right? (And yes, I realize that I'm probably asking for 90% of the audience to hate me. It's okay, I cherish the 8% of people who are still on the moderate wings of their party, and the 2% who are really moderates. I've even found a few of them to be friends IRL, so I'll survive if you add me to your ignore list for being too moderate)

Well gosh, I don't want the song to be ruined! So I'm afraid I'm going to have to not listen to Seth Everman's version!