Randox

Today is an exercise in doing assignments before they are due. I did one already that I should have done over a few days in 2 hours, because I have had this procrastination problem for a long time, and I've learned to poop out high quality work really quickly (which is actually a valuable skill). I almost wonder if I still procrastinate not just out of habit but because I realize that I can work much faster with a closing deadline (like, 2 to 3 times faster than I would if I had no rush). I just need to learn like I'm about to be late without the danger of that being possible. I also had a short math quiz today, right after I got up (always fun). I'm a bit rusty with my general math skills, but I feel like I know a lot more than I seem to be aware of. After not knowing what to do for like 30 seconds its like another part of my brain just went 'you obviously have no idea what your doing, move over, I got this' and bam! Math happened. And lastly, I was at the school bookshop looking for staples, and I discovered they have 0.3 pens. Almost as good as my 0.5 mechanical pencils. Not quite, but very close. Seeing as I take all my notes in pen so that I can actually read them later, this is very nice. I did not know they made pens that fine.

What I find weird is that the bans didn't work. If the game is going to ban half the players, then it should actually ban them, not half-ass the job so that all they have to do to get back in is try logging in again. That's not a ban. That's a kick. I just find that really odd that at least most people we're able to log in again (to be promptly re-banned, or maybe be unable to trade or chat, but they are still logging back in). Perhaps because it's because I got miss all of this, but that concerns me at least as much as the false bans, if not more (to be clear, more false bans is preferable to a handful of them, because a handful is a lot of people who are probably just lying, while half the community is probably something iffy going on, which means the problem will be fixed). A state of the art 100% perfect system is worth jack if it's not actually banning.

Hey, I know someone did some playing around with blackberry playbooks (and I imagine this has been done with other phones and tablets) seeing what drained the battery, and the screen lighting level was just staggering. Cranking the screen up to 100% from 0% absolutely annihilates the battery (it seems to account for ~50% of the battery drain I think). As a really odd side note, its battery drains a fair bit slower when videos are played in full screen. Apparently a full screen video is less work for it for some reason. For cell phones, the actual battery murderer is using it as a phone. When you make or take a call, it cranks up the power the antenna uses (to get a signal usable for more than short communication bursts to the cell tower to let it know that it exists) several times over. Using cell tower internet will also drain you pretty quick the more you use it, since again, to get a usable signal the power usage has to go way up. My torch does pretty well for screen life. Back in like March when we got stranded on the way back from the states in the airport, I watched a good 7 hours or so of Babylon 5 on my cellphone, using headphones and having all its wireless abilities turned off because I didn't need them (and the more wireless stuff your using, the more power your asking your battery to provide). That said, I keep my back light very low, and the back light consumes way more power than the screen just being on does.

Some early pictures (don't know if we'll still get any friday). Not really sure of what to make of them either. It's like new armour meets dressing up like animals. I guess the Barbarians like cats a lot more than I thought :lol:(it looks like barbarian armour to me).

Week 69 - September 25, 2012 [hide] [/hide] Visit the Teaser Discussion Topic!

Got my eyes examined today, even though they are performing better reading the screens in class than they did last year (they can normally focus well enough, but it takes time to switch from distance to near). As far as eye shape goes, they are identical to what they used to be (.5 right, .25 left), they are just older and no longer capable of total compensation for eye shape. I do however have a .5 astigmatism at 33 degrees in my left eye. So it looks like I'll end up with a pair of glasses for classwork and night driving, and any other cases I find where I need more detail vision at a distance. On the plus side, none of my medical conditions or the drugs that have been used to manage them seem to have done any damage to my eyes at all, and they are both in perfect health biologically speaking, and the doctor doubts that I will ever need a strong prescription for either eye, which is nice.

Never been my thing, mostly because I don't really enjoy gambling. In general I guess I have a very low risk threshold, so rather than getting any excitement out of risking money, I just get stress. That said, I do enjoy a good poker game with a group of friends with a low fee (usually a $10 game), and I can normally break even (house rules are first place gets the fee from everyone but second place, who keeps their money). By the time a group of 6 or so gets down to two people, everyone tends to be pretty tired so the games normally end with the person with the smaller cash pile calling it a game. I'm probably net positive from the games, by now, by like 10 or 20.

Perhaps I shouldn't say they are bad ships, but very different. The ships special ability is certainly interesting, as are the crystal people. Part of my problem might be that I looked at them a while ago, and my arsenal of tactics is now much larger and more competant, and I would love to give that B ship a try (the one without weapons). Crystal peeps should be the ultimate boarders depending on how long that lock out lasts, since they you are garunteed to go in and dismantle the shields and there is nothing that can be done to stop you. Of course, this assumes your ship can repel weapons fire long enough for you to make the weapons effective (just load it up with beam weaponry). I do like that. Every ship is unique, and requires a different approach to the game. The most similar ones are the kestral and cruiser, though the cruiser because of its artilarry beam has the option of defencing the shit out of itself and replying mostly on the artilarry beam to make the world go round. I have also discovered that many of the lets plays were a lot better before I got good at the game. Seeing people mismanage their weapons and zoltons (there is no excuse for having a zoltan pilot when you have literally any other species on your ship), and stuff. Also the guy I am watching now will run out of missiles, be having a hard fight by their shields are down enough for the beam weapon to work and he jumps out when you know that every ship in the sector will have at least a double shield that your beam can't penetrate. Edit: I made a bad with the Kestral B. I had 3 of my starting guns, and a big missle launcher, and maxed out engines and shields and all that good stuff (and an evasion of 55). I steamroll the first boss form taking all of 3 hull damage (without any drone systems to boot), then realize that I can't damage the 2nd form at all because my missles can't get to him, and my lasers can't penetrate 4 shields (if only I have found a burst, it might have worked). I sold my breech bomb systems back, and I got 4 people killed trying to take down the shield generator by force with my boarding party (which has won me sooooooo much scrap), and my two fix it men. If I had many mantis, or even more rocks, it might have worked, but I suspect that to take the shields down by raid I would pretty much need to send in like 6 mantis to secure the entire ship. So note to self, don't sell the teleporting bomb, because I am going to need it. What is nice is that all those weapons each only have 1 guard, so it's not impossible to take them out, though it does take a while. Also, breech bombs are the best because they damage the system, and force the crew to deal with a breach first. Also, improved blast doors handle boarding drones suprisingly well (since I had had both 'teams' on the enemy ship while they were boarding me. The Kestral B is however an epic ship.

No, what should make you sad is that I have yet to watch fight club (by the way, if this gives you the urge to send me a list of movies/games that I absolutely must see/play, feel free to pm them to me, especially movies). And I wouldn't be surprised if it was inspired by AC, at least in a visual sense. Some of the Jmods are really big gamers (and one of them looks like Bass Hunter to boot <3: ). If I were designing content for a game as open as RuneScape, you can bet that I would take inspiration from my favourite games and movies, both because other people have awesome ideas too, and as homage to them.

Well, to see if it is a firewall issue I have two questions. My first is are you using a router? (I would assume you are, since pretty much everyone does now) And if so, is it the same one you had when you played RuneScape in the past, or is it a new one. If it's a new router, I suppose it would be possible that the routers firewall would block RuneScape, though it would probably have had to be manually configured to do so in the first place. I've never encountered one that blocked the RuneScape port (or ports I guess) by default. If that's the case, there are guides that can walk you through opening up ports on pretty much any router ever made. I also changed your title to be a bit more descriptive of your problem in the hopes of attracting people who have more ideas than I do.

Yeah, what I really want would probably be a survival mode. You can even keep the fleet. Eventually your ship will be maxed out (though I don't think any ship can power itself entirely when maxed, at least not without an entire crew of Zoltans), and then the enemies would just keep getting harder until you go boom. I've also looked at the stats for that secret ship, and I'm pretty sure it's just there to give you a bit of a challenge, unless its crew are better than I think, I also noticed that many (or just all) of the B variants aren't actually better than the ones you start with. Just the opposite in many cases. Or maybe I should say more advanced, like the B varient of the Engi ship which starts with one crew and two repair drones, The drones don't need sensors, and can't permanently die (which is good because it doesn't have sensors), but you have no one to man anything but the helm. Looks like a tough ship to survive long enough with to survive. And the rock cruiser A which starts with just missles, and you have to pray that you find something like a burst two which can deal with two shields all on its own in a pinch. The guy I was watching use it found a pegasus launcher (2for1) and then messed it up by using his artemis at the same time to speed the fight up, when he should have been using pegasus to nuke their shields and then his heavy laser (because he found a gun with no shield bursting power) to pummel them. Natually he ran out of missles a lot, and would have never survived the boss anyway because he essentially had to skip entire sectors.

Opps, I read the replies but never said anything. Thanks for the advice, I think I might need to look at my strategy again for lowering the impact of the cost of a sweet computer in any given year. In honesty, my computer is still doing just fine, and probably will for at least another year before I really have to start compromising on the graphics. The mobo and CPU will take adequete upgrades when that does happen, so there will be no point in replacing them until they can't keep up. I am on the fence with a solid state. In all honesty, I just really don't want to go through the nail biter of migrating my OS, because I don't trust that process to actually work. Also, truth be told I am perfectly happy with the speed my hard drives work at, and am more than happy to keep being happy until SSD's get even cheaper and bigger. My HDD's have a another 3 years left in them at least, maybe more. I probably wont go solid until I have to change OS's.

I have the game, but I haven't even gotten to installing it yet. I had the same problem during the last release. My interest in this game comes and goes, and right now my focus is FTL. I'd like to get to this next weekend though.

The stealth cruiser is tricky from what I have seen, what with not having any shields (you'll probably want to buy some before the boss). I finally managed to beat the boss on easy, so now I have the engi ship and the cruiser. The problem with the cruiser is the starting weapons are just terrible. That said, the artillary beam has promise. It's very effective, but it is also pretty much a garunteed 4 damage, that will damage at least a couple systems, regardless of defenses. While it costs a buttload to max out (and run, at a mighty 4 power), it does give you a third offensive system (along with guns and drones) making it a little bit harder to cripple your offensive power. I am learning the value of getting good engines. When I beat the boss with the Kestral on easy, I did not have nearly enough evade, and only my defense drone saw me through it. I also suspect that a transporter and a couple mantis would do wonders against the boss. With a high evade and shield and teleporter, rather than focus on a huge array of big scary weapons that can beat down 4 shields and keep them down. Beam in, blow the shields, then use your weapons to demolish their helm and weapons. I'd like to try that. I've also watched an unhealthy amout of lets plays for this (which is a first for me). Game is almost as fun to watch as it is to play, though if I have to see one more ship named with the maturity of the PoopNFartz I might scream. It's an interesting look into the dominant demographics we are aiming at with these things. Not sure I like the engi ship or not. I seem to have generally bad luck with drones, and I'd probably end up at the boss with a Mk1 attack drone and a couple to repel boarders. I would also love an extra sector to get more money, but I guess thats part of the challenge. However, a sandbox mode where you just keep going through sectors and the enemies just keep getting better would be very cool. This game might also get me back into Starpoint Gemeni. I sort of stopped playing that game when I got myself a dreadnaught and the enemies never really scaled up to match it (or the arguably more dangerous battleship predecessor), and thus all encounters are either me basically swatting flies, or running for my life because I got mobbed by a small fleet.

Telling people how drunk you get is only acceptable in the form of an epic story. However, becuase you were so awesomely drunk, the story will either have to be told by someone who was a (moderately) sober bystander, or must be about the aftermath. As an example (with much of the funny removed because I can't tell a story worth jack)... The guy who went back to the girls house after a one night stand, and got caught by one of her roommates while sneaking into her room through the window. He was getting his wallet back.

Heh, by the time I'm done with RuneScape I'm pretty much fantasied out. Most of my gaming library is sci-fi. I have a reasonably formidable collection of space games. And I labled the pictures, since they go to two different pieces of content. The first 5 are botany bay, the others came labeled as Ozan Quest (if you ever wanted to know what the jmods are calling it).

The really silly thing is I never really looked at them myself when I was posting that. The Botany bay gives me a serious Canifis vibe. If I didn't know what piece of content they were, I might have actually thought that's where those pictures are from. And the quest looks like they are going to have some fun with it like I was hopping. Looks like fun. I'd say it looks like assassins creed but I have never played that game, or seen it played so I can't really judge :lol:

Just to be clear, it was your friends ex and not the (latest :P) girl from the bar right? I think you've got it right that it is going to be best if he hears what happened from you. Tell the truth and get it over with, because the anticipation and the worrying about how people will react is really the worst part, even if they go ballistic. Once you've said your bit, you can find out how little or how much shit you are actually in, and then you can move on to dealing with it. The longer you wait, the worse it will get in every way. That said, there is also something to be said for timing. If he is in a really bad mood, that is probably not the most opourtune time. And don't be clever and tell him when your both drunk or he'll probably think you only told him because your drunk. You don't need to wait for him to be farting rainbows though (in fact it would be kind of mean to ruin that for him).

Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy? Was up late last night (woo), and now I get up very late today. Monday is once again going to suck in the morning. Oh well.

Week 68 - September 22, 2012 [hide] Botany Bay: Ozan Quest: [/hide] Visit the Teaser Discussion Topic!

Hard. Fricken. Game. In my first playthrough, I got up to a crew of six and then go slaughtered in a boarding action. I hate being boarded. On my second play through, I learned that blast doors are awesome, and all fights should take place in med bay whenever possible. I lost my second round shortly after getting to sector 5, when I got boarded (again). I was like 'lol I'll just run to med bay and depresurize the entire rear half of the ship'. Apparently Zoltans don't suffocate, and I failed to notice the enemy ship until it started shooting me. At this point I re-took the weapons room which had been utterly destroyed (but I still had oxygen unlike the last time I got boarded and depresuraized everything but med bay). I then scrambled to try and get weapons back online while trying to maintain my shields, but I was never able to bring both primary weapons back to life, and the Zoltan ship blew me out of the sky. I also learned to buy all the fuel, and take all options that give fuel, since I was in a constant state of running low during the entire fourth sector, and had to cut out a lot of my exploration. Might try for one more round tonight. I need to get more outloud 'getting into it' rather than just having my crew creatively string together expletives interlaced with declarations of bloodlust. I also really need a security officer if I can get one because damn. The only thing that takes down the mighty randox (on easy mode) are boarding parties. Also, when you first get your second shield, it's all win because nothing will really be able to hurt you for a while. but you can't get to the end of the game on 2 shield bars, eventually your going to need a third

Am I the only one who things that watching and listening to that guy is quite possibly even more fun than the game itself (and I'm sure the game will be lots of fun, which is why I just bought it)? He's just so into it. Fortunately, in my experiance with my vast collection of space ship games (he loves the Armada sound track too <3: though Red Alert 2 has the best game soundtrack of all time for an RTS ), I get into space games like no other, so I probably have that covered anyway. Looked at this and thought it would be like all teh space games I already have, but this is actually really cool, and looks to be quite a challenge.

Long story short, my goal is to slowly upgrade my PC every year or two, in an effort to keep it current while avoiding a large fee at any given time (during a single year). The specs page for it can be found here, but the nuts and bolts are: Motherboard: H-RS880-uATX(aloe) Processor: AMD Phenom II X6 1065T (6 cpu's @ 2.9 GHz) GPU: AMD HD 6770 RAM: 12GB Power Supply: 460W Hard Drive: 2x 2TB (I added one) Since as far as I can tell, the only time my cpu has ever been challenged was when the java process for runscape made 6 duplicates of itself, I figured I would upgrade the GPU first. I'm not really sure what my budget is, since this will be a Christmas present, but ideally I was thinking of this lovely HD 7870, which looks to be about twice as powerful as my 6770 in terms of pixel and texture fill rates, and RAM. However, I expect I will need a new PSU (I'll probably need a new one no matter what I do, I don't think the one I have is running with awesome amounts of power to spare). However, if that turns out to be more than I can ask for this year, I was also thinking about going for a CPU instead, since they seem to be a bit cheaper. I was thinking of this one, but I'm not sure that that thing is practical for me, and I don't think my mobo can take it anyway. Other than that, I'm not sure there is anything I am confident enough in being future proof in the 100-200 range (because I would be trying to find a cheaper alternative). Or maybe I am being silly, and I should just wait another year to start putting in new parts. Nothing in the computer except the second hard drive is more than a year old, and it does still run things quite nicely. So if it can get through another year while still taking everything I throw at it, then the money will just go that much further next year (or the GPU I am looking at will just be cheaper). Oh, and the games that I would be looking to handle in the future would be Dead Space 3 (should be fine), GTA 5 (might be a problem, especially if they optimize it with the same care they did with 4), and any new Fallout and Elder Scrolls games (should be safe for a while on those fronts). I think I just talked myself out of upgrading for now, but still, any thoughts?

Probably the easiest way for anyone to start turning their money into more money would be to do the Throne of Miscellania and Royal Trouble quests. These open up and improve the Manage thy Kingdom activity. With both quests, it will consume 10% of the money you store in it, up to a maximum of 75k per day at 750k stored, and in return it will 'gather' (create) resources for you. Many of the resources will be produced for less than market value, offering a cheeper alternative to gather resources for use in skilling (thus saving you money), or to sell for a net proffit. The linked guide includes the production quanities so that you can work out values. During the good times you can turn about a 100% proffit (that is, you get back twice what you put in, doubling your money), which would be about 27m annual proffit. 27m doesn't go that far in the higher classes of items (it wont buy you a DFH anytime soon), but it certainly gives you money to work with, and it will pay for a reasonable amount training, especially if you alternate between a profitable skill like hunter, and a costly skill like crafting or fletching. Once you have more money, you have more options. Better gear for fights with monsters with good rewards, the ability to pursie higher levels, or you might get into mechanting.

Not an option. Also, many cats couldn't be less interested in killing mice. We do have a neighbors cat which likes to prowl around our yard though.