mrjamiam

Ha! I said that it looked like it had nearly bled out from the headstock break. For a short while I was trying to value it for my own purposes, but I didn't get as far as coming down on a number when I heard the asking price and switched to PSA mode. Pros: 80's Blitz, Hamer-quality mahogony of that era Non-paddle headstock Slammer pickups? Graphic finish Original HSC Nearby me, so no shipping Cons: Wear and tear Headstock repair Is the Kahler a pro or a con? I've never handled one, but I certainly see a lot of ridiculing of them, although I can't always tell if it's the Kahler itself or questionable quality conversions.

Dang, there's a Vintage 1982 Hamer XT Series Amber Solid Body Electric Guitar You don't see those every day! And only $2399.99!

I don't suppose anyone was already watching some used gear, to determine whether "regular" prices were boosted by 10% prior to the 10% off sale currently on?

True, I expect, but don't ask me how to do it. However, the great minds behind the site curtain can determine the IP addresses from whence we post. That can be spoofed - that's what VPNs do, I believe - but if the recent posts are coming from a different area than historical posts, that would be something to consider. Not saying it couldn't be done because I am not informed on the details of how it all works, but it seems difficult for a Moroccan scammer to determine the IP addresses from individual posters, looking in from the outside as it were, so as to spoof believably.

I might be risking getting tossed from the group, but I will admit that I have never paid $4k for a guitar. Also never bought one with a headstock repair. So I decided today was not the day to do both, but I would have been much more tempted had either one of those things, the price and/and the headstock, been closer to my comfort zone.

After I had texted with him a bit about the details earlier, the dealer had the courtesy to let me know that it had been sold. No additional info.

And sold. Nothing to see here (anymore).

My local dealer has this available: 1984 Blitz, "very obviously custom ordered and is all original, including the factory Kahler tremolo." Also "It's a great playing and sounding guitar that shows HEAVY wear and a pretty gnarly headstock repair that is stable but that we have not attempted to clean up. Original case is present and intact, but has seen better days." His price is $4,000. Some of his regular online advertising outlets won't let him advertise this one, which is why I don't have a link for you. His Facebook post is already filling up with the sort of commentary that isn't permitted on our fine well-administered website. I can put well-established members in touch if you message me. I also have a few more photos that give more detail on the wear and tear. I've bought from and sold to him and wouldn't hesitate to do so again, if he has what I want at a price I can handle.

I bought a USA Hamer from a shop in Ottowa earlier this year, shipped to the southern US. The experience was no different from dealing with a shop within the US. It was nothin' fancy, no exotic woods, so that stuff never crossed my mind and wasn't raised by the shop, which handled any paperwork involved.

I don't know about the origins of the practice, but as someone who recently experienced the seller side of a property auction, it was good to know at every moment the number that was being bandied about was the amount that would come to the seller. As a buyer, you certainly have to know your all-in price. But if as a seller I get to set some terms, one of them that I appreciated was hearing the amount that would come to me as the auction progressed. It didn't happen in my case, and that was my only experience, but certainly there are occasions when auctions get halted if the bids are unacceptably low. Just speculating, but maybe auctions are instances of transactions where the sellers are largely not engaged in commerce, and therefore not used to accounting for all of the costs of selling, and would find it confusing to have to do arithmetic in the fast-paced auction? These practices were firmly in place long before the advent of handheld supercomputers in everyone's pocket.

Happy birthday!

We do have NHRIBS to address those unfortunate threads that begin with IBS and a not dead yet subject. But we shouldn't have to. Maybe use GOS (getting old sucks) for announcements like Rick, or Lionel Richie, or any of the others who have suffered and the many who eventually will suffer tour-interrupting medical events and the like, but are not reported to be exceptionally grave? In the latter cases, we could use CTD (circling the drain). Or KOHD (knocking on heaven's door).

I might have come close, but never the cigar for me. Wife and I arrived in Toronto on Wednesday before an Iron Maiden show on Saturday. Rush was playing in Detroit on Friday, and had played there a couple of days before and I saw something in my social feed about a motorcade from the arena to the airport and a private jet flying from there to YYZ, so maybe our feet and their feet were on the same airport property on the same day, but I have no doubt that they didn't leave from the same Uber zone. So we were in the same vicinity, presumably. After check-in wife and I rode up in the elevator with a chatty guy, saying something about how it's disorienting staying in a procession of hotels. Wife comes from a no-small talk culture, and I'm more reticent when not on home turf, so I responded politely but didn't really engage. Turns out we're on the same floor, and he even trails us down the hall - we're in the last room, he's next door. He observes this, and I respond "I hope you don't mind loud parties." He chuckled, said he didn't, and that was that. BUT - I spot more than one Iron Maiden t-shirt in the lobby. And the next couple of mornings we ride down in the elevator with burly-ish men with British accents, aforementioned Iron Maiden shirts and tool belts and bags with Iron Maiden laminated tour passes hanging from them, chatting among themselves about whether to walk to the jobsite and how well the IMAX setup was going. It was about this time that I checked and found that Iron Maiden was to play Toronto on Saturday night. I have zero confidence in my ability to identify any of them mixing with the muggles in the hotel lobby, etc., and besides I figured that they would be hopping over to Detroit to see Rush on Friday since they had the night off, so odds were low to spot the talent during our elevator trips. And from the pic it looks like that's what might have happened, unless they got together in Toronto.

It's like, how much more pink could it be? And the answer is none - none more pink.

Score of the year, I'd say! Good argument for not sleeping. Congrats and enjoy!

From the article: "Billy Gibbons, the lead singer of legendary Texas band ZZ Top".

"Plays like butter" always puts me in mind of a locally infamous used gear seller who had a housefull of guitars and amps. I bought a couple or three there early along in my guitar interest resurgance, but it very much seemed to me that the seller must have invited buddies over in the evening and shared buckets of fried chicken as they passed the guitars around, they were so dirty and greasy. So - plays like schmaltz?

It's certainly a spy-vs-spy situtation, if you remember the Mad magazine cartoon. If you don't, it's alternating advances in offense and defense. I like analogies, and since security has multiple applications, here are a couple: When hiking in bear country, make sure you can outrun at least one of the folks you're with - you can't outrun the bear, but if you outrun someone else, the bear might not pass them up and come for you. And I've had a couple of experiences with the local cops addressing a community group about Neighborhood Watch, and both times it came down to this, very roughly paraphrased: Criminals gonna crime. What you wanna do is make your neighborhood so obviously nosy that the criminals say "forget this place, I'mma go on down the road". The general idea is to be a harder target than some or many, and you'll be less likely to be the victim. But there will always be victims.

Not to be argumentative, but why can't it be both? A two-character password that only uses lower-case alphabetic characters (standard English keyboard, sampling with replacement) has 262 or 676 possibilities. If you allow upper-case also (that is, shift+letter), then you have 522 or 2704 possbilities. If you also allow numbers 0-9, then you have 622 or 3844 possibilities. Now allowing the shift+number characters too, you have 722 or 5184 possibilities. If you stretch the password to three characters, and following the same scheme, you have 263 or 17576, 523 or 140608, 623 or 238328, and 723 or 373248 possibilities. Using a passphrase, like "takesonetoknowone", increases the exponent: something to the 17th in this example. In fact, in this example, I used only lower-case letters, so it would be one of 2617 or 1,133,827,315,385,150,725,554,176 possibilities (unless I mis-entered something on my calculator). Obviously this is a much bigger number than you get from a two- or three-character password, but the same principle applies: Allowing more characters increases the number of guesses it takes to cover all possibilities. When I hear "they used to say that but now they are saying this" I wonder what they will be saying next. If it's a matter of just increasing the number of possibilities, adding other characters is a way to do that, if we live in a world where the password protected site allows thousands and millions and kajillions of consecutive guesses until the right one is finally entered. Sites can do everyone a favor and implement a lockout or at least a cooling-off period when a number of incorrect entries are tried. Starting with a passphrase and then applying some creative misspelling (to counter the use of dictionaries in the guessing game) and alternative characters makes the number of possibilities skyrocket. I think it used to be that the worry was that if you wrote the password down, someone would access it and be able to log in. You'd have to judge your exposure to that, but in my case it's just my wife and me here at home, and in fact I'm at the age where I have an estate plan and part of that is to have passwords available to my wife or whoever survives me or us, so they have to be written down. I can make them as wacky as I want, and reference them when I need them. This is especially useful if the site that requires a hard-to-crack password also requires me to change it yearly, quarterly, or whatever. Passphrases might be easier to remember, but is what I remember the current one, or that cool one I used a couple of years ago? Of course I don't leave the passwords right at the keyboard. And if there is a key-logger malware on my computer, it doesn't make any difference how cute I get with the passwords, so I use anti-malware software. Ultimately your security is your responsibility, and good security is inconvenient.

You'd have to play metal on it.

Carhartt had a TV ad out a while back - "Every day is someone's first day on the job."

The show goes on, it seems. Unless this is a hallucination of our AI overlords.

RIP Frank. Same three guys, same three chords had a good run.

I'm no authority, and I was a tyke back in the days of these amps, but I sort of generally sort preamp distortion as "fizzy" and power amp distortion as "creamy". Maybe the idea was to deliver a less- (or un-) distorted preamp signal to the overdriven power section?

Come on now - it's had its octave adjusted!