Patrick

TimeOfDeath said:

PROTIP: Receive a handjob whenever you want by using your own hand.

Or just visit a whorehouse/hooker if you want the "real thing". You won't be the first, nor the last Joe (or John?) to do so.

but then u get std

You can get it from random encounters or steady partners too, for that matter. That's what condoms are for, also.

Perhaps their centers are a nice place to work in, relatively speaking, compared to other jobs in India or compared to centers in some other countries. India has a lot of poverty, which could explain wages that are well-above average, yet cheap internationally speaking.

One drawback Indian telemarketing and support centers have in providing services to Americans, who make a huge demand, is that they make a particular use of English which is not entirely clear to Americans. That is, English is taught a lot in India but it has British roots with Indian particularities in accent and tone. To counter that they usually develop other skills such as a high degree of technical expertise.

myk said:

Perhaps their centers are a nice place to work in, relatively speaking, compared to other jobs in India or compared to centers in some other countries. India has a lot of poverty, which could explain wages that are well-above average, yet cheap internationally speaking.

Of course. I don't think this is a bad thing, it enables India's economy to grow whilst providing Dell with cost savings. Indians obviously work cheaper, there is no point paying Indians the same as Dell would pay Americans/Brits/Australians as this would negate the advantages of hosting a foreign call centre and India would get nothing.

I read in the news a little while back that there is an increasing trend of skilled Indian workers moving back to their homeland after getting experience and promotions in Western jobs. A large proportion apparently move back from non-management roles into management roles, living very well in a place I assume they would rather be.

40oz said:

I work at a Subway restaurant

Please tell them to bring back all the cheese choices. I am seriously pissed off that they took away my provolone >:(

Use3D said:

I'll be sure to tell my old hippie friend who's been baking, smoking and growing weed longer than most of you have been alive that some kid on the internet thinks he's not doing it right. Also, bugger off.

What is this 'get off my lawn' attitude? :P

"I remember when a dime bag cost, like, a dime, you know?"

I haven't smoked any smoke since uh....last night? /me loves t3h w33d

Although it's possible, there doesn't have to be any particular "cause" or reason why something like this would develop. As geekmarine says, for example, paranoid schizophrenia often develops in the early 20s. It's probably a waste of time trying to find a "cause" for it because there likely isn't one.

That said, smoking weed really isn't likely to help things.

...

Regarding another brilliant person and his schizophrenia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Forbes_Nash,_Jr.#Schizophrenia

My sister recently dislocated 2 fingers so bad she had to get surgery on them. Rehab on that alone caused a lot of strife for her. To rehab one's good arm... That calls for a lot of effort.

I wish for you only the best. Get well soon.

Snakes said:

My sister recently dislocated 2 fingers so bad she had to get surgery on them.

Must... not...

Real tight vagina!

Seriously though, must suck.

Get well man, sucks when this kind of shit happens.

lupinx-Kassman said:

I am skinny, but that doesn't necessarily mean I live by a healthy diet. I eat junk food, exercise irregularly, and have a freakishly fast metabolism (although those don't last forever).

Ditto.

myk said:

A large percentage of the population doesn't have that the "benefit" of getting fat. While it's spreading with the spread of McDonald's and similar junk food, it's mainly a "developed world" phenomenon.

Dunno, I never understood this "Mc Donalds will make you fat" fad.

There are surely more cost-effective ways of getting fat than eating at Mc Donalds, at least with the prices and portion sizes I've witnessed in Italy and Greece. If anything, many people don't factor in the amount of calories from soft-drinks: a big 400 ml serving of iced coke can give you as many calories as that teeny-wheeny hamburger you just ate, and they will all be pure sugar, too. Diabetics' delight!!!

In fact, pretty much any mainstread Greek eaterie serving gyros, souvlaki, pizza etc. can make you fat quicker and cheaper than Mc Donalds can, and in a much tastier way, too.

A practical example: with 3-4 Euros in the Italian Mc Donalds you get something like 6 Mc Nuggets with some pityful pickled cucumbers and a few french fries, and that was in 2001. By comparison, with 3-4 Euros in Greece you can take TWO fully stuffed and flavoury gyros servings, jam-packed with fried, fat, oily meat, french fries, tzatziki, ketchup and mustard, for what must be at least 1200-1500 kcals, even though I know several people than can eat 3-4 of them in one go.

Will eating like that once or twice a week make you fat? Surely no. If you do eat like that EVERY day though and you do nothing but snaking at home or at a cafe watching football every day like a slob...then yeah, even Mc Donalds' overpriced and insipid shit will make you fat ;-)

In a way, we really do live in a fat world. You could say all this water and organic growth makes the Earth fat. Maybe healthy fat, although perhaps we humans are contributing some of the unhealthy fat :p

Maes said:
Dunno, I never understood this "Mc Donalds will make you fat" fad.

A fad? That would imply it's not true. It's more of a slogan. "Quick and cheap meat in bread with fried potatoes and soda." Sure, there are many other cheap fatty food places. I am aware of equivalents here as well, but they all occur due to the same phenomenon; the predominance of the meat and corn industry. Most are local and don't have the global implications of McDonald's or the like.

There's probably nothing better than McDonald's to point out the economic "model" all this works under, with an image in few words. It's enterprises like McDonald's that managed to first exploit and then spearhead the diffusion of mass-produced cheapened food.

Coffee is really a too broad topic to sum up in one paragraph. Just the way of brewing it results in totally different drinks with different qualities: e.g. filter or instant coffee is usually nothing but an insipid gut-shrapnel, and for me drinking even two sips out of a big cup of that abomination will cause me to fibrillate and send me straight to the throne where I'll put the AVGN's diarrhea dumps to shame.

OTOH, Espresso coffee, if properly made, is like having a little Xmas each time you prepare one (Espresso is by far the best way to brew coffee, at least for what regards striking a balance between caffeine content and taste. Filter, instant and frappe are too watered down to taste good, plus they have MORE caffeine per serving than espresso and are nasty on the bowels. Greek/turkish coffee is prepared with entirely differently ground coffee and tastes very different than both. Not particularly stimulant, but at least not as bad on the guts.

The only drawback to espresso is that you need a special machine to make it at home, and most of them are expensive and/or use very expensive coffee pods (even though LIDL already took care of that with a machine that is so awesome and cheap that it stomps on the colons of other espresso machines). I've yet to find an espresso machine for the home that can produce bar-quality coffee, though (I guess those $1000+ ones do but heh...I don't have that much money to burn).

The next best thing is "Moka" coffee, using that hex-shaped screw-top pot. The pots themselves are very cheap, even top-quality ones, can make up to 6 or even 12 cups of near-espresso coffee at once. The final result is similar to espresso, but not quite as good.

ArmouredBlood said:

Heh, I liked eight-legged freaks too. The reasoning behind apocalyptic movies is usual stupid to me, only a few like armageddon, and I guess you could call independence day apocalyptic, were ok, to good. The day after tomorrow ... wasn't bad, but not even quite as good as armageddon.

ARMAGEDDON WAS THE BIGGEST PIECE OF SHIT IN ALL EXISTANCE.

Heh, there's a list like that for Washington. In fact, I think there's one for every state. They all have the one about jumper cables, oddly enough (which is true here).

Women (and probably men) need to start realizing a relationship isn't exclusive until someone actually says it first. Anyway, Patrick, I hope you're telling her this, and not just Doomworld. Personally, I get off on telling them once they realize they've made the mistake.

Danarchy said:

or that one guy whose cock started bleeding in the middle of sex and he was the only one chill about it.

that one

Reminds me of the one Howard Stern show where the frontman for some old rock band (Foghat or something) told the story about how his penis exploded. FYI, don't have lots of continual sex in a short time span.

Windows 7 has some functionality which requires you to run an application as Administrator to modify any file outside of your home directory.

This caused me dramas with Doom Builder and XWE until I figured it out.

I never had a problem getting DB or XWE to work on my Win 7. Are you running 64-bit or 32-bit?

32-bit. It was Doom Builder 1 which was probably half my problem. I just had 7 on my laptop to stuff around and see what it was like. I run both through Wine on Linux normally.

Patrick Pineda said:

... On top of that, not meaning to sound racist (I'm Mexican after all), ...

For the record, mexicans and mexican americans have been known to be racist.

I'd mention Carlos Mencia, but he's not actually Mexican. That's not even his real name.

Patrick Formerly Known as Janitor, pictures? Hope you're enjoying Thailand®: The country with the Happy Endings

What's your major?

MAJOR PAYNE

Custodial Arts

Three words:
Bitches be crazy.

Jesus you guys are lame.

Meh. I hate eccentricity in women, by now. Nothing good ever came out of it.

Uh, I highly doubt that. Otherwise, there wouldn't be so many Cuban refugees in Florida. And Audioslave wouldn't have been able to come back. And other things. However, Cuban cigars are illegal in America, and pretty much everyone who goes to Canada around here ends up coming back with a smuggled box of them. :P

Oh right, just some woman at work went and other people where saying "Oh you won't be able to go to America now, they'll see the Cuba stamp and turn you away". Wonder what that was all about...

Wow, goth caves, what won't they think of next? :o

I'm 29 and eat shit. 19? Too old.

Danarchy said:
http://youfailit.net/danarchy/yadhtriBFBP.png

That's Awesome.

Honestly, getting an education is my biggest goal for right now. I think I'm going to end up selling a lot of my stuff to try to raise enough money next week to do both. I'll post an ebay page here later on if anyone here is interested in buying some of my junk.

Danarchy said:

Fix'd

Why would you have to postpone community college a whole year if you miss Fall admission? The three community colleges that I went to let you start any of the terms.

exp(x) said:

Why would you have to postpone community college a whole year if you miss Fall admission? The three community colleges that I went to let you start any of the terms.

My bad. Year == Semester. Will change that on the original post. I think of school in terms of years, not semesters :S

Patrick Pineda said:

CS4 is way beyond my budget

You sure about that?

Really?

I just got that first package. After shipping, it was a little less than $80 per program. It's a bit more than I'd normally pay per software package, but those ones are a bit more capable than the normal software package as well.

You have to prove you're a student to order them, and then you have to do the same process with Adobe to get the serials. In either instance, you have to submit a scanned student ID or enter your name into a public student database search for instant verification (provided your school is registered with that program). But for the price, I didn't mind a bit of hassle.

You can probably imagine a hitch with the offer though - people running businesses taking a random online/community college class to technically remain a "student" and leech the discount rate, so I'm pretty sure you wouldn't be able to publish works for profit using the student versions - but I never intended to in the first place, so that's not a concern for me. All program functionality is intact and that's all I need.

Not sure what you could do about the laptop though - is that just because it's too old to run the newer versions? If you bought one of those student packages, maybe you could work something out with Adobe. I think most support reps are trained to give you the benefit of the doubt with stuff like that - at least, I've consistently gotten plenty of extra serial numbers and work-arounds and authorizations for programs I was having issues with.

Lüt said:

I'm pretty sure you wouldn't be able to publish works for profit using the student versions

That would be very unfair in my opinion, and there's no term like that in "Restrictions on Use of Adobe Student Editions" on the pages you linked to. I'm guessing that there aren't enough businesses exploiting studenthood for a catch like that to be necessary, or, more likely, Adobe is preventing businesses from using these licenses through terms such as "This license may be used only on privately owned computers," and the complexities of proving eligibility.

Eh, honestly I haven't looked through that trashheap of technical details they call the EULA yet, but it's not entirely uncommon among student software packages with such huge discounts to have some kind of restriction on professional production.

I mean, it's not like Adobe can tell once it's published, and it's not like they'd be able to keep track of everybody publishing from Illustrator or Photoshop or whatever. Plus any worthwhile graphic design company will provide the employee with a functional workstation, so even if I did get a job like that, it still wouldn't matter what my home versions were.

Regadless, the furthest I'd likely ever get with anything like this is an online gallery or comic with a "donate if you feel like it" link.

Then again, maybe you can do solo contracting with it. I haven't checked because I haven't needed to. I just didn't want to mislead anybody into thinking they could get more than they really would. Stores don't always list little things like that since they're not selling points (though their wording seems to imply individual/private contracting is legit). The packaged program documentation will tell for sure.

I'll probably read it sometime this year.

Did they offer to lower your price back to the introductory rate? Over here, they tell students to drop by the local office every 6 months and complain when the price goes up so that they can lower it for another 6 months.

Qwest sucks. Pings are high, connection drops too frequently, and the bandwidth is so narrow that if somebody so much as gets on youtube the rest of the house slows to a crawl.

If you can talk them down to the introductory rate, I'd stick with Comcast. I use them in the Twin Cities after having used Qwest for a year and Qwest is total dogshit.

GreyGhost said:

Re-enact the Kennedy assassination?

Funny you should mention that. I was taking the Greyhound once and wound up with a several-hour layover in Dallas. I was bored, so I decided to wander around in search of food, and instead I wound up stumbling upon the Grassy Knoll.

I dated someone from TX, I learned a lot about the state from her.

I also learned about Texas from the bumper sticker "Texas is Bester!"

Hilariously enough, I did find the Grassy Knoll as well. My layover in Dallas ended abruptly when the friend who I was supposed to meet in Waco decided to drive all the way out and pick me up. Since then we've been jumping into bodies of water to get out of the heat. I might also add that Greyhounds suck.

I assume there to be nothing else to do here other than to jump into holes in the ground filled with water.

Super Jamie said:

it's amazing how one tab of blotter paper can change your entire perception of your environment.

fix'd

But seriously, Cold as Hell comes very close to what I have in mind. Think: Desolation. Emptiness. Abandonment. Alone.

Even in a Doom map, you're not alone, because there's monsters and guns. When its just you and yourself in a room? That's even scarier.

I once fell asleep while watching a lava lamp.

Patrick said:

Think: Desolation. Emptiness. Abandonment. Alone.

I can't help but think of David Firth's cartoons man, even though they also have a strong psychosis component. Some of his older B&W "paperflashes" are probably close to what you're looking for:

A BLACK AND WHITE CARTOON ABOUT ROOF TILING

A BLACK AND WHITE CARTOON ABOUT BERRIES

Go to college, you'll get smarter like that. Smarter gets you rich and laid and you'll be all the more awesome for it.

Seriously, I love college.

Trade school's another option you might like to explore if you've the slightest interest in that kind of shit. A Buddy of mine has been raking in good cash as a Boilermaker. Once he has enough hours and there's no work, they still send him cheques in the mail till his next job. At times he gets sent up to shitty locations. When he does they give him a chunk of money just to travel there, lodging, and a daily food allowance. All ontop of his 30 bucks an hour.

If you decide on College just make sure you can actually use it towards something. There's already enough people in this world that have degrees which put them into debt that never brought them any benefit.

Money for college is easy to come by. There are so many types of financial aid you can get, and even if you fail to get that you can always get a student loan.

My advice for what type of schooling to get is this: work towards getting a career, not getting a degree. I know way, way, way too many people who have gone to school for four years and have gotten a degree and are now working dead-end jobs while wondering just what the fuck they're going to do with their English/Philosophy/Psychology/Marketing/Computer Science degree. The people I know who are actually making good money right now aren't even working jobs they got degrees for. I have one friend who has climbed quickly up the Microsoft ladder and is now head of network security in one of their departments at the age of 24, and he never finished college. I have another friend who is making pretty good money programming at THQ, but his degrees were in Psychology and Advertising.

I've not gone through college myself (aside from doing some tentative classes at the local community college a while back), but next year I'm going to go to school to get a certificate for audio technology. I finally sat down and thought "okay, what career would I be the most comfortable with having?" I think my dream job has always been to be a musician, but looking at it more realistically, I figure doing audio production would be a surer bet. So knowing that, I looked up what kind of schooling I'd need, and that's what I'm going for. I'm a little disheartened that I'm getting a certificate instead of a degree out of it, but oh well. If you really think about it, what the fuck is the difference anyway?

I'll give you my Atari 800 with a visual basic cartridge and a sega genesis controller.

Technician said:

I'll give you my Atari 800 with a visual basic cartridge and a sega genesis controller.

I'll pay $500

Bucket said:

Apparently the ATI 4870 or something is your best bet for the money.

Not if his main concern is GZDoom compatibility.


Patrick:
Are you looking for a prebuilt or are you going to build it yourself? For a DYI system, $800 is enough, provided you don't need a monitor/keyboard/mouse/speakers. It will be a difficult budget to work with for a prebuilt system though. That is, unless you get a POS one from one of the major OEM's like Dell/HP/Gateway/Compaq.

Why I don't want to live in Colorado

Patrick said:

Colorado: 70F yesterday, 20F Today. Wat?

Sounds like a typical week in Missouri. I believe we've had 2 separate 40F fluctuations this month. And when they aren't fluctuating, we're either cold as hell, or 95F with 80000000% humidity... I want to move.

It was sorta like that here yesterday (south-western VA). A few days ago it was sunny and really nice out. Yesterday morning it was snowing and the rest of the day was overcast and cold. Today, it seems like the sun wants to come back out.

I love/hate March weather :S

I've been using Windows Media Center, rather than a hard drive based recorder, for about two years now. I put in a 500GB harddrive, which stores all of my music, movies and recorded shows. I think I'm only using a quarter of the drive at the moment.

The interface is clean and easy to use. Easy to setup, for me at least, as I have been told by others it can be difficult. Just drop in a supported TV Tuner, Video card and a decoder and off it goes. Stores as many shows as you have space.

The only issue I have with this setup is the size of the recorded shows - 30 minutes equates to approx 1 GB. I have a DVR-MS converter program that can strip the DRM (which honestly hasnt been a problem, I can watch the shows on any other PC without issue) and reencode it to Xvid, but am yet to set that up.

Just the other day we had cable installed and I was able to route it through Media Center without a problem.

I'm charged $10 per month for 5 meg service.

Before I had a TV, I used my tuner card with MythTV.

Ubuntu works great, as it's been the most popular distro, and thus has gotten the attention of Major companies, including Nvidia, so if you have an Nvidia chipset, expect it to work as intended, provided you install the drivers using this little menu they supply for you.

The way I did it, was to shrink the partition of XP to a size that I think would be enough.

HOWEVER, Ubuntu can install itself using the free space on the XP partition, so you don't really have to worry about setting up any partitions as you used to. But, if you wanna go the old route, there are many tutorials to achieve this. like, This one.

Well, first, what partitioning software are you talking about. The one that comes with Xubuntu? And also, is XP already installed?

I'm not 100% sure if the partitioning program that ships with (X)Ubuntu can partition NTFS drives since I haven't partitioned one in forever. If it can't, and XP is already installed, you may have to use a separate partitioning tool. I know the GParted/QtParted tool that comes with Knoppix will partition these correctly.

If you can get it partitioned, just remember the size of the partition you make and you should be able to tell the Xubuntu installed to just simply format it as ext3 and go.

EDIT: Looks like there's a GParted Live CD as well that's only about 99mb.