Nachimir

There's nothing quite like murdering gnomes and elves to create a bit of Christmas cheer.

I troubleshot about 10 different problems last night, and after each one a new and unexpected problem unrelated to the last popped up. Seriously, thanks for trying to help but I'm just going to try it with a different system; it's not worth the aggravation with either of these. Both of them have cruddy chipsets that seem to have had features hacked in before they were properly standardised. One BIOS can't see SATA drives without some fooling around elsewhere in the chipset, and one can't see IDE drives to boot from when a SATA one is plugged in. The XP installation was done on an IDE disc last night solely for copying files from one drive to the other; no point troubleshooting it any further now I've found out neither motherboard is intelligent enough to handle the hard disks properly. I think I'd be pretty much asking for it if I let either system get closer to my XBox drives. Also, I'm going to break my desktop and sell the bits within a few months, but the motherboard itself is getting burned. A good friend sold it to me as one of the best he's had, which is true... if you only use IDE drives. Noone is going to suffer this p.o.s. after me.

No, XP with full admin rights :(

I have to give up on the HDD for now Got all of the hardware and software I need, but trying with two desktop systems tonight I didn't even get close to being able to talk to one of the portable drives. Mainly due to bloody fucking windows (The best of which was an absolute stunner of a chicken-egg problem involving a missing DLL file coupled with Windows being unable to register new DLLs), but also flaky USB on one system (i.e. the BIOS can see all the wired and wireless keyboards I've got, but Windows setup/boot menu can't) and a non-standard (i.e. idiotic) SATA implementation on the other and it's been a clusterfuck of an evening. One system can't see SATA drives except by fooling the BIOS into thinking they're IDE ones, and the other can't get to a command prompt. :spiraldy: After nearly two years of mainly using OS X and Ubuntu, I'd pretty much forgotten what this was like. Windows cannot be history soon enough for me. Likewise for desktop PCs, I'm getting rid of mine ASAP and replacing it with a Macbook Pro or something next summer. How can Windows be sustained as 80% or so of the market? That's not so much an invisible hand as a retarded invisible hand. It seems like everyone in this house is switching to laptops, and desktops are rotting away. They already look like ridiculous piles of modern stuff piled together with quaint legacy hardware. ======== That said, I think the NXE is absolutely great. Everything is laid out nicely, it looks and works much better than the blades system, the avatars aren't as annoying as I thought they would be Only gripe is that the friends list is less straightforward now, but it's not catastrophic.

Beautiful. The best bit is that the owner, despite it being so evidently crappy in the photos, is blaming all their problems on "a small group of professional troublemakers". Nice work if you can get it?

I like your epic names for GTA nights Toblix And yes, once a week will keep it fresh.

That would be radio advertising

I think wednesdays are going to be good for me too.

That last map we played was pretty thin on cars and weapons. For some reason, when you're driving there's always something hilarious about the way you steam onto the screen at full ramming speed

. It still is, though vocoded robot voices are cool now.

I'll take a pop at being online. Housemates might be playing badminton.

Yeah, I saw the clan tags turn up in the lobby and though "Oh shit". They were almost impossibly good, i.e., getting kills when we so far away that we could hardly see each other through the distance fog. The others weren't so good (You and I came ahead of one team in the last match with three teams), just those green tagged guys who ripped everyone apart. I was quite relieved when the four of us moved through the park to start on purple and red near the end of that game. Also, last night I saw a lot of small bits of the map that I didn't see at all while playing on single player. That park and the nearby sports courts - never went near them before, must have just drove past. That bodes really well for the DLC I think.

A bit cumbersome to unmount and remount the monitor to switch though I'd want one I can just turn and lock at 90 degree increments.

Hmm, I always wanted one that could do that when my primary work involved word processing. I wonder if there are VESA arms that swivel...

I might be around since DS night just got cancelled for today... then again my housemates might be annoyed with me hogging the living room two nights in a row

Bah! 100 is a meagre limit.

I don't know, but that had some brilliant moments! My first contact with anyone was nearly getting run over by Thunderpeel, then shoving a rocket up his arse while his car tangled with a lamp post. Also managed to snipe Villane through his windscreen in the same free for all On the first team match when Toblix was driving all of us around I managed to get the Let Sleeping Rockstars Lie thing, which was exciting until I realised you get it for killing someone who killed someone who killed someone (etc). who killed a RS developer at some point. During team deathmatch we (actually everyone except the really good teams) didn't seem to be picking up much money. I made sure to grab everything I could and often found it just lying around where people had had big fights and left it. Thunder and I stayed on for some good team deathmatch after the rest of you left too, and despite some incredibly awesome players around we did okay Good playing with you all

Hope he's better soon Wrestle. I'll be joining you guys in a minute, just installing it to the HDD.

Thanks for the heads up, I sent it on to a few friends that might want one. That bitly link just leads me to a front page, I had to do a search to get to the monitor page. I suppose that might not work for anyone else either if the dell site is committing some kind of session based url fuckery.

Ok, I'll be there tonight.

I can make 9 p.m. tonight. I'll try for 9p.m. if it's tomorrow, but 9.30 is more probable. Would it be too much hassle for me to find you guys and join that late? If so, I can cut DS night very short to make it on time.

I think every form of therapy eventually hits a wall with this, where progress (subjective as it can be) involves building something good rather than destroying something bad. Third force psychology (60s/70s) strongly focused on this, though also tended to get a bit lost in hippie bullshit too.

Hello Paul. You respond well Not all. I read this years ago and quite like it. Business leaders are not necessarily wise. See credit default swaps, sub-prime mortgages, mortgage deals for sex on Wall St., the real estate and dot com bubbles, most punditry on the news, business response to piracy in the last decade, copyright term extensions and their resultant stifling of culture, the present state of the American auto industry... some people in charge of stuff are very, deeply reactionary, stupid and inflexible. This lack of wisdom is especially potent when mixed with hegemony and peer pressure. Companies that have paid for NLP can be just as much seminar junkies as the biggest "loser". That's not to say all of them are. Likewise, free markets can create some very stupid and screwed up situations. Money and wisdom do not necessarily follow each other. If they were someone I knew who worked like a dog and maintained a large amount of debt to have an Aston Martin, that's their decision. Nonetheless, I might point out their stupidity to their face I don't mean to discount NLP entirely. It has some excellent ideas, and I very much agree with you on some of the areas in which it falls flat. I'm a fan of anything that allows people to get a better grip on themselves. Self-therapy of one kind or another is something I've been interested in, practiced and experimented with for nearly a decade. Most modern self-help books are utter toss with a couple of good ideas buried in a load of fluff. Something like Karen Horney is really unpatronising and fundamental. Ultimately, I'd be most interested to see an open source form of self-therapy, which is kind of how I think it all started anyway. Talking to each other, writing, or otherwise expressing our problems to work them out and stop them going in circles in our minds, is something people just naturally do. Since psychological defenses are inherently unconscious, even when they're being counterproductive, this kind of natural process doesn't always work. However, I think different forms of cognitive therapy or practice take that and, ideally, amplify it by directing it along highly specific frameworks. What I've seen of NLP is generally better than most self help (For instance, John Gray, writer of the turgid and neverending Mars and Venus books bought his PhD from the same kind of people that spam hotmail accounts). I respect you a lot for saying that and what followed. I'm glad to hear about government monitoring, hopefully it will work. Glad to hear that, and yes, it's a really awkward problem. How do you communicate that to people without offending them? Brutal truth seems to be the only antidote to false hope (and I don't mean NLP = false hope, I mean the idea some pick up that reading the books and listening to the speakers is what they need to improve their lives, rather than sheer bloody minded effort, persistence and terrifying, grueling explorations of the unconscious). My very small and scientifically untenable sample tells me that average students on an introduction to Buddhism course are mortified and react defensively if someone points out they might get attached to Buddhism. The teachers, depending on which school of Buddhism they're from, quite like it when someone does that though If a figure is standing up publicly it also offers an opportunity for people to follow and idolise. This is something I've seen firsthand in a high control group: I was raised as a Jehovah's Witness and it was something that would happen around even slightly charismatic people in positions of oversight (I left them without fuss in my late teens after reading a load of philosophy, humanism, and psychology). Jargon coupled with hope and public figures raises a lot of red flags for me, because even if an organisation has the right motives, that combo easily sucks in and chews up vulnerable people. It's like the collecting mechanic of a Video game coupled to people's deepest lifelong hopes and insecurities. I don't think it always does, and psychology, too, is not a science. It's had it's many schools, splinter groups, and snake oil theoretical frameworks that have done harm. At the same time, it has helped many. I'm already very aware of problems with big pharma peddling "solutions" to "problems", and thankful they're not allowed to advertise direct to consumers here in the UK. Some people really need anti-depressants to be okay, hold a job down, etc. Some people are effectively turned into zombies because they've been prescribed the wrong pills, and that process is still largely trial and error. Sucks. I'm also very perturbed by the DSM-IV (and previous versions). A medical model with a bunch of nouns does not apply so well to mental states. I didn't mean to tar all NLP practitioners with the same brush, but when I see excitement over it, I think it's necessary to inject a dose of scepticism too. Please don't assume I'm arguing from a camp that typically trash talks NLP. I think more introspection and will would make a lot of people happy, which might make the world a better place.

Sorry, question was for Thunderpeel, not you I should have made that clear.

Double refund?