Ebden~SPARTA~

Very belated thanks! And Noscream is right. But ... I might outlive the bugger to see the Mars Landing, so there's always that forward-looking moment. It's been a while- almost a year since I logged on here. Very long story from Canada via the Middle East to Sweden...at the end of it I've landed in Stockholm and back to working on fisheries issues, this time in the Baltic. I've been meaning to write to DICE to see about a tour of their offices. I think it's only a 10 minute walk from where I work! No games for me though, only a struggling mac laptop and a lot of work to do. :-/ Probably good to curb the addiction though? Hope all is well!

Hey all! It's been too long. A year or so perhaps since I've really engaged the community. So I'm a dick. Sorry. I'm helping refugees. Sue me. However, if you also want to help refugees, can I make a selfish appeal to someone with decent graphic skills? Who's ever been in a plane and opened the in-flight safety card? Or seen internationally-accepted graphical instructions? Right, all of you. Good. I've been tasked through a volunteer project to create an instructional placard for fly-catchers. The instructions will be in arabic (not asking y'all for that part), with three images showing how to set up, open/close, and rinse this fly catcher. Size will be 1/4 of an A4 sheet, and all black and white. See where I'm going with this? If someone has the graphical skills, I'd like to collaborate for the base template of this thing, including giving you credit on the placard if you like, which will potentially be seen by tens of thousands of Syrian refugees in Jordan. So- base template. I need to be able to edit it here, preferably in a word document in the end with photoshop or other images exported and inserted. Remember that in Arabic reading is from right to left. This is one of those times to go as simple as humanly possible for these refugees. They've been through enough and apathy/gumption/initiative is at a lifetime low for these families. Here is an image of a sketch I used in a meeting the other day. Image 1 is alone on the right, then follow the arrows around. I need space for 2-3 bullets on each side. Image 1- the fly catcher as-is, except it does not have a hanging string. This string/line/wire will go through two layers of bottle, from the outside-in, then up to some hook in the refugee tent, then back down. Image 2 - lifting the top off/placing on. When removing the lid, it will slide up the string/line/wire and flick out of the way but always attached. Image 3 - dumping the contents. Easy enough. Anyone get the general idea and know how to turn this basic idea into some black/white outline cartoon/drawings? Myself, the volunteers I work with, and the refugees will be very thankful. I wish I could offer to pay, but I'm working for free myself. Thanks a ton! I'm available to discuss.

The best cure is to avoid the trigger (pun intended). It's part of why y'all haven't seen me around much. It's also why I skipped owning a car, so I don't have that urge to go GTA on some slow-arsed fool turning right from the left lane across two lanes of traffic on a busy street in front of me...as a hypothetical example. It must be somewhere else on this forum, but I recall research somewhere (will google and add to this post in a moment) about PTSD, combat stress, other emotional and stress triggers being extremely similar in combat games and actual combat. Hmm, contrary to my theory, looks like games might help treat PTSD? http://www.militarymentalhealth.org/blog/2013/06/can-video-games-help-ptsd/ Or here, to help reduce the stress, you could turn the music off according to this study from U-Montreal> http://www.eoa.umontreal.ca/documents/pdf/publicationsBelandR_physiologicalStress_HebertEtAll.pdf There is a ton on the web both supporting certain games for stress reduction, and others condemning games for increases in stress. Time for more research!

Dude, really. Not on the screen!

It started today, and went directly to run chkdsk. details of the log are here. The only thing it points out is a volume bitmap free-space error of some kind. Checking file system on C: The type of the file system is NTFS. A disk check has been scheduled. Windows will now check the disk. CHKDSK is verifying files (stage 1 of 5)... 318208 file records processed. File verification completed. 955 large file records processed. 0 bad file records processed. 0 EA records processed. 89 reparse records processed. CHKDSK is verifying indexes (stage 2 of 5)... 426862 index entries processed. Index verification completed. 0 unindexed files scanned. 0 unindexed files recovered. CHKDSK is verifying security descriptors (stage 3 of 5)... 318208 file SDs/SIDs processed. Cleaning up 2878 unused index entries from index $SII of file 0x9. Cleaning up 2878 unused index entries from index $SDH of file 0x9. Cleaning up 2878 unused security descriptors. CHKDSK is compacting the security descriptor stream 54328 data files processed. CHKDSK is verifying Usn Journal... 35232360 USN bytes processed. Usn Journal verification completed. CHKDSK is verifying file data (stage 4 of 5)... 318192 files processed. File data verification completed. CHKDSK is verifying free space (stage 5 of 5)... 37593026 free clusters processed. Free space verification is complete. CHKDSK discovered free space marked as allocated in the master file table (MFT) bitmap. Correcting errors in the Volume Bitmap. Windows has made corrections to the file system. 246290431 KB total disk space. 95342820 KB in 207655 files. 147776 KB in 54331 indexes. 0 KB in bad sectors. 427727 KB in use by the system. 65536 KB occupied by the log file. 150372108 KB available on disk. 4096 bytes in each allocation unit. 61572607 total allocation units on disk. 37593027 allocation units available on disk. Internal Info: 00 db 04 00 6c ff 03 00 68 a4 07 00 00 00 00 00 ....l...h....... cb 04 00 00 59 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 ....Y........... 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 ................ Windows has finished checking your disk. Please wait while your computer restarts. So wtf? Really though XViiiper, thanks for your input.

No dice on chkdsk. The few lucky startups I've had seem to have worn out. I set the chkdsk to run on a reboot, but the machine stopped as it has before. Same rigamaroll, no dice. No recovery point worked, not sure if it's worth restoring from a backup onto this HDD. I can accept if it's toast. So suggestions, SSD or another standard drive? Whatever I replace the current drive with will probably be an improvement, unless I should be fussy with particulars on my 2009-build machine?

HDD is a couple years old, but lots of use. I forgot to run tests yesterday, but I'll run 'em after work. Thanks for the tips, and I'll update as I diagnose. No overclocking. Memory is also a couple years old, but the MS memory test found no errors.

Something went haywire a few weeks ago. No idea what it was, I couldn't successfully recover from any of my restore points, so I reinstalled W7x64. The same thing has happened again! Startup sat and spun at the windows symbol. Restore points won't finish their restart from my boot CD, startup repair tells me there's some unspecified error preventing it from working. It may have to do with a windows update, which screwed it up last time. I know this laptop and my work machine both updated today, so possibly that shagged it up again. WTF? Is it a hardware issue? Bad HD? Stupid machines.

Article link: http://gizmodo.com/ships/

Funny!

Happy Birthday!

Poor bastards. I can't imagine they're getting out anytime soon.

Happy Birthday!

Happy (very late) Birthday!

Happy Birthday!