Randox

To be fair, there are a lot of expenses beyond your mortagage. I suppose some of them might be considered optional if you don't mind tanking your value, but you still probably want insurance and utilities at least. You do get the equity though, and a lot more bang for your buck, especially if you don't need to spend too much time on upkeep. And I thought no down payment mortgages in Canada were illegal? I was under the impression that before the summer, the mandatory up front cash you had to have was 15%, now set to 20 or 25%.

Yes, you are at the mercy of both yield and the seasons. It helps to not be too picky about your vegetables, and being creative enough to find uses for them. This is what stew and salad are for. If all else fails, you can turn just about anything you get into one or the other. We also have the farmers market.

There is certainly a line when trying to eat cheep where you descend into unhealthy food which I try to avoid. I eat cheep, but still recognize bulk where possible, and stay away from most of the processed stuff. Something we have around here if you want to go a bit hippy is you pay a farmer a sum of money along with a group of other people, and every week, you all get a share of that weeks harvest (so really fresh fruit and veggies). The price tends to work out quite favorably. I used to work with a girl who ran classes out of her house on the side about cooking on like $10 a day or less (and keep in mind, she was an organic farmer so this is quality food that will make your poop sparkle). Kinda wish I had attended one actually, but shes the one who told me about the farmer co-op stuff. You can't grow veggetables here though, unless you like mercury and lead in your salad. My issue with McDonalds, is that for launch at a job where I do a moderate amount of physical labor I'd be looking at a quarter pounder with large fries and a 10 piece mcnugget meal, or I could bring leftovers from home (McD's costing me almost $13). I have no idea what food prices are like in the UK though, or even in the states (I think food, or at least milk, is a lot cheaper in the states than in Canada). And actually, I have thought of something. I wouldn't mind getting back into swimming, just as a sort of general fitness thing. I can't stand the gym. It is a wholly unpleasant ordeal from start to finish in every conceivable aspect. But I don't mind swimming.

Just a thought. Don't look at the pen when you draw lines. Look where you want the pen to end up. That's how we do it in drafting. Also, move your hand quickly across the paper. If you go really slow over a large difference your going to get a big squiggle. If were going to talk about not talking, the people who assume that quiet people secretly want to talk but are too shy. It gets annoying when people get pushy.

In my experience, it's much easier to focus on things that interest you. It's also much easier to remember things your interested in. Pick something you really want to know more about. That's how I do it. I also fidget a lot, which really helps. It occupies that part of your brain that wants to move around so that the rest of your brain can focus on paying attention. As a bonus, you'll the equivalent of a 20 minute run in calories a day just sitting on the couch playing with your hands.

Moved back home. Tomorrow is going to a be lot of unpacking and cleaning, since in the state I left my room (that is, no cleaning at all during exams followed by tearing my room apart while packing for home) I think a grenade or two might be an improvement. It is nice to be home though. Yesterday we took the car to another province to get it serviced (we took it back to it's dealer, better customer service). 3 hours up, 3 hours back, and 3 hours there. Was a long day, but it's also nice to get a day with Mom. After shopping today though, when we got home my right leg was getting sore/stiff, especially in the knee. I've never driven that much before, even if much of it was cruise control. Car got a clean bill of health, and they fixed the drivers side door handle which was apparently stiff because it was leaking it's lubricant. works much better now. That car also gets fantastically ridiculous fuel economy on the highway. It's about 540km round trip, it normally refuels at 600. It wasn't particularly in need of gas after that trip though, maybe a third in each direction, which would give it something like an extra 150km range by going only on the highway. Cities suck :razz:

I totally did, but this was kind of unforeseen. I had actually forgotten about this game, and I wasn't expecting to come across it it so soon for so little. With any luck, Dead Space 3 will be the next game I get, and then I'll have to take a break for like 4 months to get through everything.

Picked up Mass Effect 3 today, which is going on the pile. It was an oppourtunity buy, on sale, to avoid needing EA's version of steam (wasn't going to happen). Now I realize I need to finish my replay through of Mass Effect 1, which means I also need to get through Mass Effect 2 again :lol: This could take a while >.>

I play minecraft as an architect. Quite frankly, I hate mining. It's boring and tedious. I don't care much more for building structures, which is why I now use MC edit to help me out. I like designing things and playing around. To be fair, I only got around to seeing terraria very recently, after I had already started toying around with the technic mod for minecraft, which has revived the game for me by taking out a lot of the tedium in designing circuits (don't get me wrong, I loved the mazes of red wire, but I'm ready to move beyond that), which means I am actually comparing vanilla terraria to technic.

No, you need to learn to cook. Eating at McDonalds every day, if nothing else, is ridiculously expensive. You can eat for less by cooking for yourself, and you can eat at other resturants and get 2x the food for the same price, or more (I get Chinese delivery for about the same as a McDonald value meal with large fries, which is easily twice as much food or more). If I cook for myself, I can eat nearly a pound of ground beef and a salad (it's a combo, I call it taco salad) for an average of like $7 or less per night (mostly enough times to use up the spinach and cheese). As for my resolutions, there is nothing in my life I would change that I am not in process of changing already.

I've seen the game. I still don't understand why people who know I have minecraft keep telling me to get it. I suspect they might be crazy. Maybe I'm just missing something, or maybe it's just the way I play Minecraft.

In that case, I think I'll stick my frame rate, at least for now. I get more out of the massive draw distances and nice textures and effects than I do out of a smoother game, so if I want to run at 60+ fps I need a computer that can do it at the games highest settings. In the mean time, I'm just happy that my computer can still max or nearly max many games out, even if it is at a frame rate that seems to make other people pull their hair out.

Not sure if anyone has beaten steams DRM or not. Most people don't need to, and most of the games in their catalog can be pirated with varying degrees of know-how required to get them to work already. Also, I think you can run games in steam offline. Speaking of which, I was looking on the steam far cry 3 forums, and possibly compliments of uplay, the pirates seem to be having an easier time with the game than the people who paid for it. But anything that runs the game entirely on your computer can be defeated with the application of enough effort and knowledge, with a bit of creativity. The only games that are never pirated are games like Diablo 3 where your computer doesn't run the game, the server does, though it is potentially open to being reversed engineered (someone could theoretically construct an emulation of the game to allow you to play it locally).

I thought I'd ask this here because I'm pretty sure this question would get me laughed out of most corners of the internet. Why do people care about their frame rate past like 40-45 frames per second? I read discussions on games, and I fee like I must belong to some other species whose eyes are either vastly inferior or superior (depending on how you look at it), because for me, I stop being able to notice the frames (As in, the game becomes smooth) at about 25 frames per second. Get up to 30 or 35, and the game will tend never to drop into the point where I can actually tell I am watching a very fast slide show. Now, I do like to push the graphics as far as they will go while still not getting visible frames (or in the case of GTA 4, a hair over that line during some of the better police chases), so maybe I just got used to low frame rates. Mostly I am just wondering if there is some magical world of gaming I have yet to experience because I've never seen a movie or game at anything above 60fps, or if other people are just obsessing over numbers that have no practical value.

Not all the distribution companies are like Valve. I got the remade Baldurs gate from a different distributor (beamdog). Aside from not being a DRM measure (and thus not requiring you to install their client), the game is yours, tjhey can't remove it from your account or computer. I can't say I particularly like the licensing either. It seems okay right now, but it leaves the door open for some really shady practices. Not that they have the only the User Agreement that does that.

I'e enjoyed the bit of dawnguard I've played so far (I stopped because I started playing right as I got interested in the next game in my rotation). After I found the bloody fort that is (I walked right past the entrance, and the warp point is oddly distanced from the fort itself, which is my only gripe thus far). As for heathfire, I like it, but I'm not crazy about it. It is very neat to come back back to the house with my adopted daughters though, and some day I will have a husband too. I would have liked it more with more flexibility, but if you can pick up cheap then go for it. I got the two of them for less than dawnguards regular price.

I'd argue that most of the hatred towards hipsters stems from attitude. If you like music that I think sucks, power to you. But liking music no one has ever heard of doesn't actually make your farts smell like roses, and trying to convince us sheeple otherwise will only earn our scorn. Then we become the blind followers of 'the man' which only gives the hipster more reason to be smug, and us more reason to hate them. Society loves to hate on some group of people. The hippies, the emo teenagers, and now the hipsters. And in a few years, we will start to grow board of ripping on hipsters, and we'll rip on whatever other group is loudly proclaiming that they are special at the time, and the cycle will continue. Or at least the teenagers will. Most of my primary education was set during the emo hate years, thus my natural enemy is guys with tight jeans and bangs over their eyes, not people who wear cargo shorts and toques all 12 months of the year.

This is why I don't drive with glasses on, at least most of the time. They are good if I need to read road signs, but I feel like I get tunnel vision. I mostly wear them for class, so I am used to focusing only on what I can actually see through the lenses, which doesn't translate well into driving.

After being given a great sales pitch for Thaumcraft, and realizing that if I continue with my castle as is I'll still never use it, I think I am going to copy the original (again) and put it in a technic world instead of tekkit (and maybe technic will be MP someday). I'm going to scale back the tech a bit, and spend some time with world edit making the castle less 'oddly shaped box next to tower'. For now, the shields will have to go. I am going to keep eqipment exchange around a bit though, at least in terms of the condensor. The new idea would be more to install the technological infrastructure in the castle and around the island, and do the work to make it less full of monsters, and some building ahead of time. I'll also be setting up things like the power plant and the quarries, to get me over the starting hump a bit. After that, I would like to go back into normal mode and stop spawning things, and actually work on Thumcraft, and maybe work a bit on some of the tech mods. They also released a voltz mod, and maybe I'll look into that, though I was looking forward to my multi type power plants.

I suppose Canada does count as commonwealth. Boxing day (or rather the day after since it's a statutory holiday) is our biggest retail day of the year.

I think my Mom has every book she ever wrote. She also has at least most of Tom Clancy.

I thought about going in to go shopping today. Then I got out of bed at lunch time. Naaaaa.

I think I'm done, with just the one game. I am already well beyond the number of games I can really rotate through reasonably, so it's time to stop. The only game I still need is DeadSpace 3 when that comes out. I must complete that collection.

Is that the one with comments under many of the strips? I'm pretty sure I too have a copy, though I can't currently find it. Been toying around with my new mouse, and very happy with my choice now. They actually do a bad job of advertising it, massively underselling the features it has available to it once you download the software. It is a gaming mouse in every respect (as far as I can tell) except for it's lack of custom weight.

Hard to get a better resume listing for customer relations than doing it for Disney. That's their thing. And the coconut thing is kind of cool :lol: