Well we can all argue over the courage required for suicide but I think we can all agree it´s pretty stupid. I know it´s a cliche but it´s a permanent solution to a temporary problem. If you feel you can take a moment and be as logical and objective as possible about it as Balthazar suggested you might hopefully come to the point I did. Find the things that worry you. Put it into context if you can. Take the problems that you can change, try and think through how you could change it, and there and then start to make those changes. The things you can´t change, you are going to HAVE to accept them one way or another. It´s tough, but you can learn to compensate for whatever challenges this poses. Remember, there are very, very few things out there that cannot be changed. Finally, what´s this stuff about being good as dead in a couple of weeks? Unburden it, it helps a lot more than keeping it to yourself, you´ll find it hard to think straight from stress and worry whereas by talking to someone about it they might be able to offer you some help and let you clear your head a bit.
Posts by Recusant
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<font size=1 face="trebuchet ms"><BLOCKQUOTE><hr size=1 noshade>Oh! this thread is just going to cause trouble... All I´m going to say on this subject is: from VeriTest... Tests Show Windows Server Environment More Reliable and Easier to Manage VeriTest (April 2005): "Microsoft Windows Server 2003 vs. Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS 3.0: IT Professionals Running a Production Environment." This Microsoft-sponsored study found that the Windows Server environment was more reliable and easier to manage, achieving higher levels of end-user service. And yes I have and do use both operating systems. <hr size=1 noshade></BLOCKQUOTE></font><font face=´trebuchet ms, Verdana, Arial, Helvetica´ size=2> Can´t say I actually have an opinion on this having never tried Linux yet, but quoting a Microsoft sponsored study into the merits of Windows vs. Linux is not exactly the best way to back your case up.
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It´d be too hard for me to choose the best game I´ve played but for the worst game (that I actually owned) it´d have to be Aquanox. It came free with my graphics card at the time and was meant to show off the card´s capabilities. It´s a futuristic submarine dogfighting game, while in reality it was more like a space sim played in excruciating slow-mo with an incoherent storyline.
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*thwacks Jabez* stop being so over-sensitive and enjoy your birthday!! <img src=smilies/icon_smile_big.gif width=15 height=15 border=0 align=middle>
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Taw, you´re damn right about the first year of science courses. I´m studying mechanical engineering, so you´d expect everyone involved to at least have a good grounding in maths. Instead, we started learning basic calculus for the first few lectures. Then imaginary numbers, matrices and partial differentiation, frankly it just took the piss. In fact even worse was the very first engineering mathematics lecture where they went over the equation of a straight line and the difference between cartesian and polar co-ordinate systems! <img src=smilies/icon_smile_disapprove.gif width=15 height=15 border=0 align=middle> At the same time they assumed everybody had studied electronics so when it came to our electrical systems module their were large numbers of us turning up to extra remedial lectures for those who had no grounding in the subject. Incidentally there were few foreign students there, it seems that everywhere else in the world they teach a lot of electronics during physics lessons.
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Yep, I read Neuromancer quite a while ago, really enjoyed it, I´ve been meaning to read more of Gibson´s stuff at some point. Someone recommended Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson to me as well. I have quite a big list of books I want to get round to at some point. Sirens of Titan and Cats Cradle are the next Vonnegut books I intend to read, but right now, I´m getting seriously back into War and Peace
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<i>Slaughterhouse Five </i> - Kurt Vonnegut (This book is absolutely ace, I just loved it every single bit of it, finished it in record time and I´m a notoriously slow reader) <i>War and Peace </i> - Leo Tolstoy (I´m still working on this beast, it´s been almost a year now, but when I´ve had a chance to read it between studying, exams and other books it´s always been darn good) <i>1984 </i> - George Orwell (gee, who doesn´t have this on their list?) <i>A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There </i> - Aldo Leopold (an early work on conservation, some of the language seems a bit old fashioned anthropomorphising the animals a little but this man new his environment. In particular read his essay on Land Ethics, it ought to be compulsory reading for everyone) <i>On the Road </i> - Jack Kerouac (The Beatnik bible, before they became too concerned with infighting, coffee and bad poetry they went on mad road trips across the US and into Mexico, living life as fast and as full as possible, experiencing everything they could) <i>Into the Wild </i> - John Krakauer (The true story of Chris McCandless, who chose a different way through life, essentially chose a life as a bum but lived more in his few years than many people ever do. Essentially a modern day Thoreau. Tragically lost his life after living off the land in Alaska for 113 days by eating a plant that at that point hadn´t been known to be poisonous. You´ll both love him and hate him, but despite it all the guy´s a personal hero to me)
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Well I can only say I´ve hallucinated once. I was incredibly dehydrated at the time while in Spain. I was feeling pretty rough and was well into that dizzy stage, i´d sat down and started to see these dark shapes on the peripheries of my vision. Everytime i turned round to get a better look they would of course move away till they were just on the edge of my vision. Being in a less than coherent state I got all panicked convinced there were these dark little critters scurrying silently over all the floor, walls and ceiling and no one was doing anything. Anyway, tried to stand up to run, was all dizzy and fell over and started getting more panicked that "they" would get me. Thankfully by this point a friend had cottoned on to how far gone i was and I spent the rest of the evening being looked after and rehydrated. Sometimes if you´re in the middle of nowhere or during the night, some easily explainable stuff will still scare the crap out of you. I´ve slept up on the moors in the peak district roughing it without a tent, and things like a curlew making it´s call just becomes plain eerie till you realise what it is in the morning. Similarly having a duck quack next to my head at 3am scared the bejesus out of me! It´s a combination of being in the unknown: unfamiliar territory and no one else to turn to for any help; and the darkness taking your most useful sense away. Quite often people get spooked by screams in the woods at night, but it´s almost always just a vixen calling. Trees take on strange threatening shapes and as the eye´s get worse in the darkness you start to think you see movement that isn´t there. What scares me more is actual people, when you´re out in the countryside and you sit down to rest from mountain biking and drink some water, thinking from the looks of things you´re alone. After ten minutes a funny looking bush just off the track starts to move, then it stands up. The "bush" is holding a hunting rifle, it nods at you and then walks away. What was really freaky was that this guy obviously just sat there and watched me totally hidden with his rifle, like he was spying on me, and then when he did get up he didn´t take the camo net off his face or even say anything!A few months later another guy mentions something in MBUK magazine about going to his local dirt jump spot in some woods and finding his spade missing from the undergrowth. So he picks up a big stick and starts to hack back brambles to search for it. Then he finds a large camo net with something in it. So he takes a closer look and realises there´s a body under it. By this point he´s pretty scared but he needs to check, he pokes the stick under it it to lift the net when the "body" jumps up and rushes forward at him. The guy under the netting grabs the stick and starts to tell him to clear off and starts threatening him. Mountain biker rides off **** scared and probably won´t ever go back alone. Who the feck are these people?!
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TET, you´ve got it the wrong way round. Pirates are an indicator species. Their slow demise is directly linked to global warming, we must lobby the US govt to rejoin the Kyoto protocol - "Think of the pirates" would be our slogan! <img src=smilies/icon_smile_tongue.gif width=15 height=15 border=0 align=middle> sylverfish, you forgot the staple requirements to sustain pirate life - grog and wenches <img src=smilies/icon_smile_big.gif width=15 height=15 border=0 align=middle>
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The funniest thing about it is the number of idiots convinced it´s not just a joke
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Arc, if you want to get picky the Prandtl-Glauert cloud forms at speeds equal to or in excess of Mach 1. So it does have something to do with the sound barrier. It´s due to the drop in air pressure behind the craft caused when it travels faster than the air can move behind it to equalize the pressure.
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I can´t think of many movies recently that I´ve actually hated. I saw Oceans Twelve and Meet Joe Black recently and slept through both so they both rate pretty lowly for me. I was unfortunate enough to see Bulletproof Monk when that came out at the cinema, now that was god-awful. Cold_Void , Dodgeball, Road Trip, Old School and Anchorman all set out to be dumb and immature so in their eyes you just commended them! <img src=smilies/icon_smile_tongue.gif width=15 height=15 border=0 align=middle> Trekkie , go watch Collateral or Magnolia, you´ll be pleasantly surprised.
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meh, bit of both really!
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If anyone cares: Mountain biking Kayaking Hiking/Scrambling
(A general interest in the outdoors going on there) Reading Talking unmitigated crap -
Jeez, ff, that´s generalising just a little bit don´t you think? I´m sure kimk will have something to say! S.Korea is known for having a much larger PC gamer proportion of its population, so it´s no surprise that stories such as this (and the other famous story of a man gaming for 14 hours straight in an internet cafe before dying in the bathroom) stem from there.
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Must have been 2003, Taw. I can remember those pre-Tawakalna days. Oh, the peace, the serenity... *wanders off into happy memories* <img src=smilies/icon_smile_tongue.gif width=15 height=15 border=0 align=middle>
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Hey Saiyan, it´s quieter in here these days, but Arcon´s around here somewhere most of the time.
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Unifying currencies ties the economic fates of the member nations together. It would seriously affect us if we decided to share our economy with rapidly failing economies since our money would quickly become worth much, much less. Basically a bad harvest year in Germany and France would adversely affect the UK as the value of the Euro dropped. The EU however is very strong so long as it retains membership for the more affluent countries. The main question is how far east will it expand? Places like Albania and Turkey for example could seriously affect the value of the Euro.