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This seems more efficient, but I've run into a few issues when I've tried it. It's harder to clip the leads when there are so many of them sticking up. Populating the board component by component gives you more focus on that component, meaning if you made a mistake you're more likely to catch it. Soldering it all in one go, at least for me, tends to lead to poorer joints, largely because I try to do more joints in between wiping the iron on the sponge.

Plus, populating the board is the fun part. I'd rather find a way to speed up the other stuff.

I actually don't have much of an issue getting solder to stick to oxidized pads, but I probably run my iron hotter than necessary. Generally, once the board is etched and drilled, I use cotton balls with acetone to take off the toner, then get the copper nice and shiny with some steel wool, then go over it again with cotton balls and acetone to clean it up. The solder sticks incredibly well for the first hour or so after that. Then it still sticks well, just not like it did before. I can come back to it a week later and still get decent joints though.

My favorite bass overdrive has always been the Ibanez PD7. There's a schematic here: http://www.freeinfosociety.com/media/pdf/4086.pdf, but as far as I know, no one has made any pcbs for it.

Other bass overdrives have never really impressed me. I like the classic guitar circuits on bass- TS, Klon, Rat. The OCD is also great.

*Sigh...*

This pedal says so much about how gimmicky pedals need to get to draw attention to themselves, whatwith how saturated the pedal market has gotten.

I kind of want one because it looks cool, and the idea is cool. But would it sound any better, or different? Probably not. The old TS is fine and always has been.

I think it was not just the poor acting, the storyline was unbelievable too. On the one hand we have a character we should root for having a tragic fall, but we don't root for him because we hate his guts. And on the other hand his tragic fall was just plain stupid. Again, I have seen fan fiction with better storylines and execution handle things better then Lucas did with the prequels. It was just badly written. Him going Dark Side over some vision? At the very least show us, the audience his vision. Repeatedly. In all the gore and technicolor. Show us why he was so troubled. But that aside, if it were up to me I'd have him go Dark Side over the death of his mother. Let him find out it was some Sith. And let him go over the course of three movies slowly but surely become consumed by a burning desire for vengeance, until not even the love of his wife and his friendships could save him until he kills the Sith responsible. And by doing so become the very thing he despises. And let him be actually likable. A person that others would willingly follow into battle. And drag with him into his fall.

This. Breaking Bad is a better transition to the dark side.

[is]

Considering that Star Wars is a rip off (or hommage) of a Kirosawa movie (The Hidden Fortress), I'd say that fight is Star Wars.

Star Wars was originally an homage to a lot of things. If you read old interviews with Lucas, it seems he had different ideas for it at different times and it all kind of coalesced into several different drafts of varying quality that his friends helped him tweak. He was slated to direct Apocalypse Now, but it didn't pan out, so he described it his Vietnam War movie for awhile. Then he got into Akira Kurosawa's films and toyed with doing a remake of The Hidden Fortress. A lot of the elements from The Hidden Fortress show Up in Star Wars, particularly the idea of having the action come from the perspective of two bumbling peasants/droids. But Star Wars departs from the The Hidden Fortress too much to be just a sci-fi themed westernization of the same story. Then Lucas goes on about the old sci-fi serials like Buck Rogers, usually in the context of how he intended to break things up into multiple episodes. He also pays homage to The Searchers, a pretty great western where John Wayne plays a racist anti-hero. That scene with Owen and Beru's smoking corpses is meant to be a direct reference to that movie. Even a lot of the cinematography on Tatooine is done in a similar style to the desert shots in The Searchers.

Then there's a little bit of Dune in there too, but I think Lucas keeps quite about that. I draw the line between ripoff and homage where the creator admits influence. Lucas is open about most of his influences, but I've never heard him mention Dune. But it's also possible that the similarities between Arakkis and Tatooine weren't intentional, so who knows.

Considering TFA that seems to be a theme with these movies. Crazy Force powers for everyone! No need to go to Dagobah and collect 200 Jedi points!

I imagine this is an issue with how the writers want to present the Force to the audience. If you're the writer, and you know that the audience has seen what's possible with the Force by watching Luke develop, you have two basic choices: show the audience yet another character starting from nothing and learning about Force over time (something they've already seen), or supercharge the new character so that you can show new things being done right away, even if it doesn't make sense within the story. This picks up where we left off with the Force so we don't have to retread narrative ground. For TFA and TLJ, they chose the latter.

Could they have done something more nuanced that accomplishes both? Definitely. We could have seen Rey learning from scratch, but beginner-level Force skills that we haven't seen before. But that would take some thought. Thought that distracts from X-Wings going pew pew.
 

GGG says Q5 should be set to 3.4v:http://www.generalguitargadgets.com/pdf/ggg_bsiab2_instruct.pdf

I believe I set my units that way, but it's been a long time since I boxed them up. They don't sound shrill or harsh at all.

Disney wants to recoup its investment and milk you suckers until there's nothing left to milk.

They can still do that and have a story that makes sense. The state of the galaxy post-RotJ lets the stories write themselves. The Force Awakens went out of its way to create a situation where the First Order and Resistance have the same dynamic as the Empire and the Rebel Alliance, which is jarring because it doesn't make sense for them to be in similar positions without some serious story going on between RotJ and TFA. It all feels very forced.

As much as the new movies don't make any narrative sense, I think The Last Jedi really failed with its tone and constant attempts to undermine audience expectations. TFA tried so hard to ape ANH that it falls apart as a story, but it also succeeded in capturing the tone and sense of adventure of the original trilogy (something the prequels never did). The Last Jedi keeps trying to build up a darker ESB-like tone, but consistently defuses that tone with humor throughout its entire runtime. When the OT was funny, it didn't break the tension or pace of any given scene. TLJ stops its own pacing dead in its tracks to deliver one-liners, and this makes it hard to get invested in the dramatic tension.

It would have been so much easier to just write a tight story that flowed logically from RotJ. No Star Killer Base, no stupid jokes. All they had to do was capture the feels of the OT, and Abrams did that part well with TFA. But TFA put actual effort into making no sense just so it could mirror ANH, and TLJ put even more effort into moving Star Wars into jokesy Marvel territory while also failing to explain any of the things from TFA that begged explanation. All we want is something that feels like Star Wars and doesn't insult us with dumb BS. That's not hard to do.

It says Star Wars on it, so people will go see it and buy the toys. But better movies could have been made with the same amount of effort, which is the reason these movies are so frustrating.

Saw movie. I'm not mad, just disappointed.

I have read in the past that Lucas had originally intended the whole thing with the ewoks to be with wookies instead and changed his mind at the last second because he worried that people wouldn't buy the idea that wookies were an undeveloped tribe of savages because Chewwie could fly the Falcon and use a Bowcaster.

It was really about money. Lucas had just gone through a divorce and lost a lot of what he had made on IV and V. So the wookies became ewoks so he could he could sell cuddly little Wicket plushies to little kids.

People talk about Lucas as if he's some sort of sci-fi geek with a vision. If you read his original drafts for what eventually became Episode IV, they mostly suck. The people around him helped him cut out the stupid and condense it all into one brilliant film. The planned sequel, Splinter of the Min's Eye, is pretty abysmal. His "saga", that extended to Empire and Jedi, wasn't even conceived until after A New Hope made tons of cash and they had the budget to do more. If you watch the making-of footage from the prequels, he seems unenthusiastic about them through the entire production. It's all about money.

I fully expect there to be disappointments

It's getting _very_ good reviews so far. I'm nervous, but it sounds like it's not going to disappoint.

Mike?

From Guitar Center?

Is that ....you??

Yes, I am hear to meet all your gear needs. Please buy this can of bees with the phone jacks plugged up so the bees can't get out. I need the commission to pay rent.

I needed a 12AX7. They were out    I guess I understand. It is such an uncommon tube value.

No one plays toobs anymore. Check out this rockin' Spider III, it's got all the built in fx and amp models you'll ever need. Pay with cash right now and I can cut you a sweet deal- I'll throw in this metal zone and a free cable! Also, would you like to sign up for our credit card?

Their phones.

Flappy Bird is a pretty cool game, I guess.