I had a large gift certificate, and my Sprint contract was up, so I got an iPhone for $100.

I have a question, maybe this belongs in tech? I want to make a couple of ringtones, and I followed the instructions, but I'm unable to use any snippets of songs (convert to an ACC) because they are protected files. Is there a way around this?

We should have an arts and crafts thread. Not like MInearverse. A proper one. And, in it, I'd put this guide to smoke in your digital photography. It totally would belong there.

I use Myxer. Free and I've had no problems. There's even an app that is also free. But I have better results online. More precision.

There were apparently 63 murders in Boston in 2011. And Boston is almost twice as big as New Orleans.

Thanks, Cass!

These kids are in a free fall. No one will educate them (in an all-charter system, they can be kicked out for whatever reason with little to no recourse or appeal) and the horror of Katrina and the response and lack of rebuild and being left to rot or be relocated imprinted upon thousands of black boys 6+ years ago and no one gives a shit enough to help them.

Just want to build bigger prisons to house them instead of trying to solve the underlying and systemic issues.

Obvs, the craptastic social issues of New Orleans predate Katrina, but this has exacerbated them to an almost untenable degree.

I think, per capita, New Orleans' murder rate ranks in the top five of the WORLD. (my sleepy half assed googling does not find that cite, but I'm pretty sure this was something released in the last couple weeks.)

You guys, I am so fascinated by this chart: [link] I have always been obsessed with population density.... Because the city I grew up in is still more dense than any city on that list, save NYC, and that's even with gentrification making apartments less crowded, and no high rises.

We managed to determine for a paper Sis was marking that we're long beyond first or second place as murder capital. That might just make us #3. Dunno.

Allyson, under Ringtones there is an option to Make Your Own and that's what you want.

For an iPhone you will do all of the adjusting to perfect your ringtone (39 seconds max, I think under 30 for tones you want to use as alerts and alarms), click the button to create it and then you'll have to download it and throw it in iTunes where it automagically shows up as a ringtone and will transfer over to your phone easy peasy. Myxer will walk you through that part once you get to the the Make Your Own also.

Well, I went downstairs to eat leftovers and watch Bridesmaid's and Dan had found out all but the last Dies Hard movies were on. I hadn't seen the first Die Hard with all the cussing, and then I'd never seen the one with Sam Jackson. So we watched that, and then Bridesmaid's. Which was pretty damn funny.

Kansas City's nickname among the cognoscenti, by which I mean gangbangers and wannabe's, is Killa City. And we DO have a startlingly high murder rate for such a medium sized city. We are the 9th most dangerous city in the US. Missouri has the highest homicide rate in the country in the US for black people, (St. Louis is the most dangerous city in America, that "helps.")

I can't find out how many official reported homicides there were in 2011, but we generally break 100. 106 in 2010.