Topic: Alright, WTF is the deal? Why is the whole board MIA?

[Cobra951]

I know it's Friday and all that, but it's been dead here for like a week.  And don't blame IRC, because that's more like the reaction than the cause.

I went out for a few hours tonight.  I'm back now, and I'm bored stiff.  What's new with the world?

[Quemaqua]

I hurt my back again, which has left me rather incapacitated.  It's a long story, but the short version is that I slipped, tried to catch myself, and unfortunately succeeded, which hurt my back again.  Had I just let myself fall, I'd likely have been fine.

Working feverishly on the latest novel, since it's November and NaNoWriMo is happening.  That's kept me out two nights already with other writers, once until 1, another until 10, and on both occasions I pretty much just came home and went straight to bed (haven't gotten more than a few hours of sleep this week).

Planning to play the uncensored version of Manhunt 2 on my PSP.  Go violence.  I actually thought the first game was decent for a sneaker with an interesting premise and atmosphere, so what the hell.  I'll see what gives.

Been listening to inordinate amounts of jazz lately.  I picked up around 12 new albums in the last month, and have discovered Lee Morgan, Donald Byrd, Horace Silver, Sue Raney, and Peggy Lee.

I can't think of anything else.  Where did you go for your few hours?  Just out on the town?

[idolminds]

I am not really doing anything. Was just checking out a little Stalker, and am going to watch a movie in a little bit. Hooray?

[scottws]

My brother asked me to fix his computer.  Actually to just back up his documents and music and blow it all away and start over.  So I've been working on that.  I backed up his whole My Documents folder, which apparently - in addition to all the music and Word documents - had a sizable porn video collection.

But yeah it's needed this bad for awhile.  When he came home from school a year or so ago I discovered that his whole C:\ drive was shared and the system contained several viruses.  I updated his McAfee Anti-Virus and also ran Trend Micro's online scan but was never able to truly get rid of the stuff, it all just kept coming back.

[Quemaqua]

Who keeps their porn in the most traveled directory on their computer?

[iPPi]

Finished up Metroid Prime 3 tonight with 100%.

[Cobra951]

Yeah, I went out "on the town" for a bit.  I went out last Friday too, but prior to that it had been like a month since I did much of anything social.  I had a few drinks, dinner, then switched to caffeine before getting back in the car.

On Wednesday morning, I had to take my mom to he doctor to examine her incision and check that the pacemaker was doing its job OK.  They actually cranked up the rate a little bit.  I don't really know how that works, or how they even communicate with it.  It's not like there's wires hanging out.  I imagine it's some sort of radio thing.  They cost as much as a car, so I'm sure they spared no useful technology.

That afternoon, I returned the PSU I bought for my broken computer, and asked them to check it out, since I could never get a peep out of it.  Sure enough, it was dead.  (2 PSUs in a row dead.  What are the odds?)  The literature claims the thing protects itself against faults, so if it was me that killed it, it's their fault.  I exchanged it, but I have yet to deal with the damn thing.  I've gotten used to using my other PC for now, so I'm in no big rush to endure that frustration again.  I've already moved the external HDDs over, and I've updated Firefox.  The USB 1.1 to 2.0 problem is also solved, without SP2.  (You've seen my thread on it.)  I played a little Freedom Force vs the Third Reich too, since the shortcut was staring at me.  I never finished that one.  Now I wonder why.  It's very good.

[sirean_syan]

It's been a busy week for me and I had two tests to finish it off. Last night I didn't sleep much while preping for the other one and ended up crashing for a few hours when I got home from classes. That was actually the plan, I just needed to make it through the morning to kill the exam. Good news is I think I did. I more or less just woke up and ate dinner as Aimee got home a little more than an hour ago.

I've actually been meaning to get into Freedom Force for a while now... it's on that ever present pile of backlogged games. I guess the good thing about needing to upgrade the systems is that you don't feel bad going back to play some cool games that you missed.

[Pugnate]

I just plain don't like you people.

[Raisa]

*sends a rotten banana Pugnate's way*

I've been on the road again.  Traveled somewhere yesterday, traveled elsewhere today.  And then i'll hit the road in about 4 days.  I'm going to visit my grandma who's days are numbered.  Just spend a week with her or something and then it's back to the road.

I'm tired.

I still lurk here.

[ren]

I live in a dorm, full-time student, part-time worker and weekend drinker. Pretty much the case for any university student, doesn't leave that much time for the boards.

[nickclone]

No on has really posted anything, so I've been doing the same.

[Cobra951]

My brother asked me to fix his computer.  Actually to just back up his documents and music and blow it all away and start over.  So I've been working on that.  I backed up his whole My Documents folder, which apparently - in addition to all the music and Word documents - had a sizable porn video collection.

But yeah it's needed this bad for awhile.  When he came home from school a year or so ago I discovered that his whole C:\ drive was shared and the system contained several viruses.  I updated his McAfee Anti-Virus and also ran Trend Micro's online scan but was never able to truly get rid of the stuff, it all just kept coming back.

I tried to help one brother with basically the same thing (although there was no porn there that I know of).  It was all but crippled by malware.  The thing is he adamantly refuses to dedicate any time to it.  He can't be bothered with sitting down in front of it to get things running smoothly.  I mention a firewall and creating rules, and all he cares about is that it's going to take up-front time to get it set up.  I tried to clean it out, but had a similar experience to yours.  And it's so slow because of all the crap that's weighing it down that what little I did took forever.  He gets so mad and loud that it's too irritating to even bring up the subject again.  He goes into tirades about how it should not be such a nightmare to have a stupid PC work right, that he already has a job and it's not computers, blah blah.  That was about a year ago.  I have no idea what it's all like now.  I can guess.

Edit:  Que, I'm really sorry about your back, man.  You're too young for that problem.  I hope you can find some effective help for it.

[scottws]

Who keeps their porn in the most traveled directory on their computer?

Well it was in My Videos.  I would think it's a safe place.  NTFS permissions keep the other users out unless everyone is an administrator.

I tried to help one brother with basically the same thing (although there was no porn there that I know of).  It was all but crippled by malware.  The thing is he adamantly refuses to dedicate any time to it.  He can't be bothered with sitting down in front of it to get things running smoothly.  I mention a firewall and creating rules, and all he cares about is that it's going to take up-front time to get it set up.  I tried to clean it out, but had a similar experience to yours.  And it's so slow because of all the crap that's weighing it down that what little I did took forever.  He gets so mad and loud that it's too irritating to even bring up the subject again.  He goes into tirades about how it should not be such a nightmare to have a stupid PC work right, that he already has a job and it's not computers, blah blah.  That was about a year ago.  I have no idea what it's all like now.  I can guess.

Yeah all I did was make a BartPE boot disc and booted with that (so rootkits and programs which tried to otherwise hide themselves from virus scanners wouldn't be initialized), ran a full virus scan using the McAfee scanner I put on the disc, backed up his My Documents to an external drive, then I used dban to completely delete and overwrite all data - including the MBR - with garbage.

At that point I figured the computer was relatively safe so then I hooked it up to the network and reformatted and installed XP.  It was actually pretty interesting to see.  XP, even with SP2, was quite snappy upon first installation.  But as I installed more and more apps and services and downloaded more updates, it just got slower and slower.  And we're just talking Java, Flash, OpenOffice, Firefox, and Thunderbird.

[Cobra951]

Java - hog
Flash - monster hog
Firefox - eating 25% of my CPU right now (2.4-GHz P4)--probably cumulative effect of idle Flash crap in some tabs.  Memory use is like 360 MB.

Everything you get wants to have its own background process running.  Even this external HDD wants to run a process to drive its LED indicators.  AVG tells me it's in an error state because I don't have the Resident Shield running.  Nooo, it's that way on purpose.  I don't ever download and run shit without scanning it for viruses first.  I want those resources for myself, thank you very much.  Norton wouldn't even let me use it as an offline scanner.  It was a 2-ton gorilla last time I made the mistake of using it.  It's no wonder we need multi-GHz multi-core CPUs.  We'd have nothing left to do real work with.

This reminds me, why is text entry stuttery for me in Firefox 2.0+?  It was silky smooth in 1.5 and before.  I'm typing along just fine, and then the text stops flowing for a second or so, and eventually catches up all of a sudden.  The problem happened in the other PC before.  I assumed it was due to its relative slowness.  I've looked in the Mozilla forums and about all I have gathered is that performance problems may be related to session restore js files?  I tried disabling the spell checker, to no avail.  It's pretty sad that even text entry is challenging in the modern PC climate.  A 6-MHz 286 used to handle it so well.  I do like the session restore capability of FF.  I hope I don't have to disable it to get acceptable text entry out of it.

[scottws]

Everything you get wants to have its own background process running.  Even this external HDD wants to run a process to drive its LED indicators.  AVG tells me it's in an error state because I don't have the Resident Shield running.  Nooo, it's that way on purpose.  I don't ever download and run shit without scanning it for viruses first.

I found a Firefox extension that may or may not interest you.  It's called "Download Statusbar."  I prefer it very much over the pop-up Download Manager that FF uses by default.  I point it out here because there is a feature you can enable that lets it automatically initiate a virus scan on the downloaded file as soon as it completes.

Norton wouldn't even let me use it as an offline scanner.  It was a 2-ton gorilla last time I made the mistake of using it.

No kidding.  Norton is garbage.  Not only have I seen it bork 3 systems all by itself first-hand, but it is a system hog and it doesn't even do anything!  I've seen it pick up a virus a couple times, but it was unable to clean, delete, or even move the file to its quarantine in each case!  I had to manually kill the files using Killbox.  Amazing.

This reminds me, why is text entry stuttery for me in Firefox 2.0+?  It was silky smooth in 1.5 and before.  I'm typing along just fine, and then the text stops flowing for a second or so, and eventually catches up all of a sudden.  The problem happened in the other PC before.  I assumed it was due to its relative slowness.  I've looked in the Mozilla forums and about all I have gathered is that performance problems may be related to session restore js files?  I tried disabling the spell checker, to no avail.  It's pretty sad that even text entry is challenging in the modern PC climate.  A 6-MHz 286 used to handle it so well.  I do like the session restore capability of FF.  I hope I don't have to disable it to get acceptable text entry out of it.

I've never noticed this problem on any of the systems I've used FF on, including this ancient one here at work.  That's not to discount it as a non-existent problem, but I'm just pointing out that it doesn't seem to be a true FF 2.0 problem to me.  The problem must lie someplace else since I've never experienced it on approximately six different computers.

[Cobra951]

I don't know what these 2 PCs could possibly have in common, other than Windows XP and Firefox itself.  One thing that's common is that FF 2.0 was an upgrade over a previous version, not a fresh install.  I don't see why this would should cause a stupid problem like this, but the answer has to lie somewhere.  I'm also thinking that the problem may not manifest itself immediately, but only after a good while of use.

[Ghandi]

I've been at my folks house doing various fun things. Going to a Medieval festival on Sunday. Pics to come.

[beo]

i didn't pay the phone bill, so my internet connection's been down for the last week or two. in that time i somehow mananged to find employment though, which i start tomorrow. a lot of the work is going to involve the testing and refurbishment of laptops for a local remote learning enviroment, so i'll probably be on here quite a bit hastling you guys with techy questions over the next few weeks.

[Cobra951]

Age brings dust into them, and dust causes heat, which screws up stuff.  There.  I just helped you with at least a third of what you have to deal with.  There is no need to thank me.

My daughter's laptop has been causing her some grief.  For some reason, it stopped recognizing the CD/DVD drive.  She had heat issues too.  Since everything is in there so tight, fixing anything is a major disassembly job.  I keep trying to talk her into using a desktop, but she won't hear of it.  They have one sitting in the basement which I know would work fine.  Unless you really need portability, laptops suck.

[shock]

I found a girl and I am madly, madly in love.

[idolminds]

Pics?



wow, been a while since I've asked that.

[shock]

http://www.mustangmods.com/ims/u/627/784/204803.jpg

Left.

[idolminds]

shock delivers! Hooray!

[Quemaqua]

Cute!  Nice job.  Not that this should exactly be the height of one's romantic aspirations, but knowing nothing else about her, that's about all I can comment on.

[ren]

Sometimes all you have to do is ask

[NatchDan]

I don't have my own internet connection, so I have to use my landlady's PC. Doesn't work out, usually.

[shock]

She's about the cutest fucking thing EVER.  She's incredibly sweet to everyone/everything, reserved, introverted, and creative (she's really artsy).  I could go on using adjectives, but I know this is right.  I've known her for around a year now, so I know she her so well that I won't be surprised.  It just took a while for me to grow a pair and make a serious move on her.  It definitely paid off.  She's all I can think about.  I feel like a middle schooler again.. Haha.

[/hijack]

[nickclone]

She's about the cutest fucking thing EVER.  She's incredibly sweet to everyone/everything, reserved, introverted, and creative (she's really artsy).  I could go on using adjectives, but I know this is right.  I've known her for around a year now, so I know she her so well that I won't be surprised.  It just took a while for me to grow a pair and make a serious move on her.  It definitely paid off.  She's all I can think about.  I feel like a middle schooler again.. Haha.

[/hijack]

A sweet, creative and not insane woman? She's a terrorist, kill her now, it'll make it easier on yourself.

[Quemaqua]

Also, beware surprises.  I hate to break it to you, but you can know somebody for ten years and still get surprised.

However, I'm happy for you.  When you find a good one, remember to do what you can to keep her!  There are always more fish in the sea, to be sure, but a surprisingly large number of them are whorefish and piranhas.

[Pugnate]

Don't forget crazyfish.

Wait that's just fish in general.

Also I am really pleased for you Toxy.

[shock]

I'm trying to not get too ahead of myself, but I just can't help it. Haha.

Thanks for the heads up, though, guys.  I'll be sure to let you all know how things are going.  I'm just happy to be out of my slump.  I've been lonely and searching for someone compelling for so long now..  But it does make me appreciate it that much more now that I have found someone.  I'm not going to take her for granted like I did with my last girlfriend.

[Pugnate]

If she feels the same way about you, then you are set.

[Raisa]

congratulations!  Good for you.  I'm over relationships/friendships for now.

[Ghandi]

Just make sure that she doesn't have a penis. Not that she looks like a man, she is very pretty. But it's crazy how these things can sneak up on you.

...

[scottws]

What's wrong with girls that have penises?

[TheOtherBelmont]

I've been at the Texas Renaissance Festival since Friday and just got back a couple of hours ago.  Pics will be posted soon.

[Ghandi]

Yeah, I just got back from the Renaissance Festival today. It was great fun. Pics to come after I get them from my dad / sisters.

Edit: In NC, not TX.

[Pugnate]

What's wrong with girls that have penises?

haha that's the first joke I've noticed you make in a while.


You are joking aren't you? 

[TheOtherBelmont]

Yeah, I just got back from the Renaissance Festival today. It was great fun. Pics to come after I get them from my dad / sisters.

Edit: In NC, not TX.

That's funny we went the same weekend in different states of course, did you just go for one day or camp out the whole weekend like me?