gina_w: "Everything a freight forwarding company delivers should be inspected by you or a contractor when it is delivered. Usually the driver will insist on it." Two years ago, we ordered a (single) toilet from NBS (HM Wallace of Austell, GA). When it arrived, if we had asked the UPS driver to wait while we unpacked it, we would have had to provide food and lodging for the driver overnight. Between the foam and the packing peanuts, it took us almost three days to get the toilet clear of the packing materials. (Admittedly, we could work only an hour or two per day on the unpacking itself; the remainder of the time we spent trying to keep the room -- and adjacent rooms -- clean, because the styrofoam had a wicked static charge and migrated to and stuck to everything, including clothing and shoes.)

Well... Doing away with a social media bar won't stop the stuff you post, here or anywhere else, from becoming available to everyone on the internet. Do a search of your user name with any search engine you like. I just Goggled mine and came up with 1540 hits, when I did it a second time I had 2710 hits. Didn't get anywhere near as many with Bing but it did show a response I posted on the Microsoft Help board, back in 2006. As for your pictures.... I hope.... No, I pray that you don't put your cell phone pictures anywhere on the internet UNLESS you turned off your GPS before you took those pictures... If the GPS was on then that picture can be traced back to where it was taken, not just the city and state but the address as well as the room in the house it was taken! Creating your own forum won't make a difference, all the above can still happen there... And the person who creates it may loose even more of their privacy; when you register a web site you have to use your real name & info now and unless the provider blocks that info then the entire internet has access to it. As Annie said, there is no "privacy on the internet". Nothing is free either. Rita

Hi there Carla. When I saw this topic, I couldn't believe how up my alley this question was. For the last five years, I've been working in selling cameras while going to school. Our store stresses superior product knowledge and I pride myself in keeping up to date on the camera market. Basically, I'm familiar with about 90% of the non-professional cameras on the market. Anyways, sorry for tooting my own horn there. The Yashica T4 is an excellent camera (I own one!). Lore hit the nail on the head in that it's all in the Zeiss lens. The T4 Super Date should run you around $200, about half of it's value being in the lens. The only other P/S camera that might come close to it is the Olympus Stylus Epic (make sure it's the one with NO zoom, and an f/2.8 lens). We did a side by side comparison of the two when the Olympus first came out and we couldn't really tell the difference. You may also want to consider upping your price range to get yourself an SLR camera. While spending more money doesn't GUARANTEE you better pictures, SLRs do tend to do a better job than P/S's. Lastly, Consumer Reports is probably one of the worst places to do research on cameras (though they did rate the T4 #1 for like 4 years straight). The problem is that they rate a small sampling of the cameras on the market and definately miss out on many models, both good and bad. Second, they rate cameras every 2-3 years, while in those off years, just reprint an old report with the updated models and just assuming that the new models are EXACTLY like the old ones. Good places to look are in photo magazines, though they don't "rate" as much as they just list them all and describe them. You kinda have to dig to find the actual tests they do. I'll try to dig up some URLs for you. I hope that helped for now... :)

Well, if you want the best, you should be looking at the small bags of either Persil or Ariel powder. Store brands by Aldi, Lidl etc. are also very good. I am very happy with Lidl's liquid Color Superconcentrate. There is also Omo by Unilever, which I'd like to try - but Unilever only sell "Coral" detergent in Germany, which has a so-so formula. Unilever also recently made a dishwasher gel with oxy bleach in it - a world first, they say. The Ariel pods are nice. Heavily scented, though, and not quite as well formulated as the "Compact" powders. I'd stay away from the new Persil Power Mix Caps (gel + powder in one pod). They are extra expensive and formulated by an idiot. The Color version contains optical brightener and the Universal version, unbelievably, does not contain oxy bleach.