GF..... GG.... Nice One....

Well, I was just minding my own business, floating around popping some drone rats in a mission... (don't worry, I'm not that much of a pussy, the mission was in 0.2 sec).

Anyway, I'm just floating over to the last phase and a neutral comes into local... I don't like this, but this person has +4.0 security rating, and their bio and corp indicates they're a miner... But I take no precautions, I align for the planet closest my direction of travel, and I get out the ship scanner.

365 degrees, max range... scan scan scan.... Nothing... two minutes, three minutes... no probes, no sign, but they've not left local... I got wrecks everywhere... they're going to be scanned down...

Do I leave, and possibly have them scan them down to lay an ambush for me later, or do I stay and see what they drop on me?

Feck it, it's a battlecruiser, I got shed loads of them...

I stick around... Watching local....

Bing bing bing... three more into local....

Okay, all the same corp, they've clearly scanned me down. I wait, thank god all the rats are dead... my shield is refilling happily (I'm an armour tank though)... I have no ECM drones, just five lights and I have no ECCM... so if they jam me, I'm up shit creek.

Anyway, they're coming, I'm ready... and voila, here they are, one destroyer, two battlecruisers... the fourth, their scout, is still laying low. Anyway, I lock them and am happy to vaporize their destroyer in two hits of my Medium Beam laser II's.... I think he's a bit surprised too as I just see "Shit" typed in local.

But, now the two battlecruisers have me locked up, they're sending out ECM drones, but they're 45km away. I lock up all ten drones coming my way, and I set my drones on them and start to lock their ships up.

My shields are back down, but I'm concentrating on their left most ship, my drones have eaten through theirs and it looks like they're not launching any more. I have eaten into this target's shield and my first few perfect range salvo's are starting to bite into his armour.... so clearly this guy's not got Tactical Shield Manipulation up very high... but I have a feeling he's shield tanking, by the effects I can see around his ship when I put the camera on him... my armour is getting eaten into now though.

Suddenly their fourth man, the scout uncloaks above me, he's in a Falcon, and he starts to stick an ECM Jam cycle on me. But, with my sensor booster, it doesn't hit. So I lock him up, and cut my guns, leaving my drones on the guy far out... as I reset my camera though, happily he detonates and I see a lot of Russian looking text in local...

So, as I'm waiting to lock the falcon, sit-rep on my ship... I'm at about 70% armour, I'm getting hit with explosive missiles and autocannon fire from the enemy, and there's a falcon above me trying to jam me and firing the odd thunderbolt EM missile my way... I am not happy, I'm webbed, scrambled and still outnumbered... I'm also having heart palpitations with the adrenaline rush...

Anyway, I suddenly hit my groups of guns and missile launcher as one, and set my drones after the Falcon, amazingly I take it to half shields with a massive alpha strike of 2200 damage and then I take off whatever he was shield boosting that cycle with my missile. My drones arrive on him, and as my lasers chew into him I see him turning to warp off. I have no scrambler, so I'm going to let him go, but then just as his shields fail and my guns are ripping into him... his ECM jams me... I loose all targets.

One, two, three cycles this hits me for... my armour is down to 20%, my cap is up to 75% though, with just running my Damage Control II and Medium Armour Repper II... it's had time to catch its breath.

Anyway, suddenly my lock starts on the falcon again, and I press all my weapons again, the moment it locks it gives him all the lasers and fires off a missile... and he explodes in a coruscating cloud of pretty pretty pixels. My lock lands on the final battlecruiser, he's 4K from me, but pretty undamaged... can my tank make it?

He thinks it can't and he's bearing down on me now, I'm pulling 25m/sec speed with this guy, I zip my drones over and I switch to my shortest range tech II crystals (I had been using tech I gamma's to this point, I didn't get a chance to swap out, and forgot while I was jammed... I was busy screaming at the "bastard ECM whore").

Anyway, my lasers are going at him, this one looks like he's an armour tank too, so I take his shield off quick, but he's at 1K from me now, jiggling me...he still has me scrambled, so I can't go anywhere. But it seems he's made a fatal, over eager, mistake...he's gotten so close and it using longer range ammo, he's still hitting me, but he's not taking chunks of me.

His three friends, in their pods, leave the system... This guy is going to try to hold me, or kill me, by the time they get back in whatever they can get themselves back into in the next 3 minutes. I'm loosing this fight, I get a couple of unfavourable low damage hits in, and he's eating into my hull.

He starts to laugh, he actually types into local "Ransom 25mill".

He's trying to ransom me... I just cost them a Thrasher, a Cyclone and a Falcon. I'm only flying a fat pigeon... Sorry, I mean a Prophecy. And he wants 25 mill... LOL!

I'm into this for the giggle now, I see he's turning to warp out... my ship is spewing fire and smoke out the back... So I play him... I pull in my drones, cut firing and say "okay".... and he stops firing!!!

I get a cycle of repair into my armour... and I start to move towards him... I need to work fast to keep him interested, so I throw him 25 isk, then type "Sorry, missed naughts"... the nubwit actually replies "s'kay, happens". I've not dropped my lock, and I'm crawling at 25m/sec towards him. And suddenly I bump him... he was aligning to warp out.... his ship must be in a bad way. My cap is good, my armour repper now has two cycles in... and I hit the "Overheat Wrack" on my guns, and let them loose, my drones are out and on him, he's bumped off alignment, unable to warp out, he just manages to type "no" into local and BOOOM!

He's dead, he's actually so pissed off, or got such a bad PC/connection that I get to lock his pod and pop it... I have his corps now.... I lost about 45% of my armour though, hence the fire in the image above.

HUAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

I love PVP like this in Eve, I was so sure I was dead, but it turned out they were useless noobs. Or overconfident drunks.

After looting their ships, I had a bunch of tech II armour hardeners, a bunch of guns, ammo and cap booster chargers... the covert ops cloak on the falcon popped though... that would have been nice.

I received a PM from the last guy in the fight "GF". Is all it said.

Eve, Eve and more Eve

All this week, I've been bitting and bobbing in Eve. I've moved a few ships around, I scared the hell out of two Russian noobs in low-sec by uncloaking my falcon on top of them (they were being lary about my not being able to find them, when they had opened a Militia mission, which has a system wide beacon).


One thing that has always struck, and will probably always strike, me is the quality of the look and feel of Eve. I mean, the new Tranquility Engine is spankingly beautiful, even when docked (as you can see with one of my Amarrian Assault Ships above).

I mean, I started playing in 2005, and the engine back then looked light years a-head of anything else around it [no pun intended]... I've seen the highs and the lows of life on the edge, I've been a pirate and I've spend a fair amount of time in Empire making myself fat and rich.

I'm doing well though, I usually end up falling into a stupor of mining asteroids, something I find very relaxing, but totally mind numbing... sometimes you want mind numbing, sometimes you want raw materials, but other times you want a thrill.

So, I've been preparing to re-join my militia's. I have a fleet (and I mean a fleet) of tech 1 cruisers, battlecruisers and battleships sat in a certain location, I have a POS Tower sat ready for deployment as a strong point, and I have a carrier for support while I plan my secret attack behind the enemy lines...


I have also though been developing a rather healthy interest in trade, something; as I've said before; I never took an interest in before.

My running tally to far is 108 million ISk from a 1 million ISK investment, in three weeks.

Sometimes markets are tough, and I'm getting tired of having to perform WoW style 0.01 ISK undercuts, on other orders out there.

What I'm going to be looking at next weekend (since I've just finished the planetary interaction skills to level 4) is ... yes planetary interaction, I kind of gave it away then didn't I... anyway, yes. Planetary interaction. I watched the CCP Tutorials, and as a graduate of the Eve-University I've enjoyed watching their video guides on YouTube... they're not overly detailed... I remember how detailed my Eve-Video's were for the University.

My Videos: I, II, III

Carriers....

Well, despite the hiatus caused by the downtime problems with Eve (they moved the universe... apparently... and it's database was not connecting.... wierd, sounds like my life... *cough*)... yes despite this delay in being able to play... I've finally finished Gallente Carriers V...

A level 5 skill, I'm sure you'll all agree, is always something to be proud of... but Carriers is a x14 skill... even with maxed out learning and +4 implants it took 42 days... I've been doing the training on it on and off, it's been the end of the training queue for a little under six months in total, so basically I've paid for six months of training and hopefully invested 42 days of it wisely.

Next is Fighters V... another 38 days....

Shaken... but not Stirred....

Well, I just heard an Earth quake hit Canada... lets see if Darren over at CommenSenseGamer got all shook up...

Give us a beat here guy... you all still there?

Supreme Commander

Supreme Commander... yeah... I feel like I missed the band wagon completely on this title, but I'm happy to say that I found it now.

It seems the game has evolved a lot over time, having read the fan site wiki about the game. I have however started off with the original title, referred to as "Vanilla SupCom".

This version has a different veteran mode (a way for your units to be powered up by scoring kills) than later titles, which is apparently harder to achieve [meaning it is a more worthwhile thing IMO, an actual challenge].

The AI is good, I'm a bit of a sucker for fleet/ship battles in RTS games, as such I'm really happy about the variety of units, ocean going, ground based and flying in this game.

It really seems like a rich world, and there are a lot of varieties to strategy in the game, both winning and loosing.

I've so far only played skirmish games, I'm trying to get to grips with everything. Especially the view camera.

The game has vastly higher numbers of positive points to negative, so far, positives are the variety, the challenge of the AI, the resource balancing. They're really intuitive to get to grips with, but with such great swathes of head room so you can experiment with strategy.

The negatives so far are based around my styles of play, first off there's a bug in the mouse... if you have the game full screen on one screen, and say a movie playing full screen on the other (if you're lucky enough to have more than one monitor that is) then as you move the mouse cursor to the edges of the screen; which would scroll the map around; it works find where you physically end your desktop, but that one side which is lined up to the second monitor... the game just lets you mouse float off in that direction and you can't scroll in that direction easily.

This was such a pain in the arse that I ended up playing movies on my laptop and setting my desktop not to extend on to my second monitor while playing (which really is a nod to hod nice this game is, I was willing to change my system settings just to continue to play).

Other bugs also revolve around the camera, I found the zooming out and in a bit strange at first, and the fact you can scroll the mini map in and out just as easily, though a great feature to include, was a big jarring. But once I got my head around it everything was fine.

The next problem was also related to my play style, I often only get a chance to play games late at night, or when my wife is in bed... this basically means on headphones or simply with my speakers off. The net result was I was no idea attacks off screen were going on.

Let me explain that a bit more clearly, there are three (or four - depending on your point of view) of technology in Supreme Commander, you have to upgrade your buildings through the game to get to the different technology levels. Anyway, at the lower technology levels (1 & 2) the attacks your units and buildings can carry out
are somewhat less powerful than attacks at the higher tiers. The higher tiers cause screen shake/earth shakes with their powerful attacks, so with the sound off you know that something is going on... but the lower ones, you're meant to hear a sound and know they're going on. I can't hear this sound.

This is something which begs the question, how would a hearing impaired person deal with this? I at least have managed to rig up some of my electronic wizardry to let me mix the PC and laptop and radio together to let me wear one pair of head phones while hearing multiple sound sources...

All in all though, minor niggles against a great game.

I can see the expansion sets out there for the original game, however, I'm tempted (having read about how they gimp the original) to skip them and go straight to Supreme Commander 2 later next month...

Anyway, this is the second in my RTS fest of 2010. I've not really covered it here, but I really got deeply back into the Total War Series. I've finally managed to conquer the whole world on the hardest AI settings in MTWII, so I've retired from that game (after originally hating it upon it's release - it's not my favourite in the series overall - with Rome Total War a close second).

And as for the rest of today, I'm now going to depart my place of work, and go watch England play Football... England v Solvenia.... "Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori".

Retro Avenue

I'm going all retro today, I've just received a whole bunch of games bought with some money I got for my Birthday, thank you Paul!... I have....

SimCity 4 Deluxe Edition, this is really retro, this game itself was released in the early naughties, so it's got to be nearly 7 or 8 years old. But I loved the original SimCity on my Atary ST :) I've fired this puppy up and have a play already. I enjoyed flying a plane around, I loved how even touching a car to another resulted not in a tiny fender bender, but your car exploding like water being thrown into hot fat... and of course I was thrilled to be able to wipe my city from the face of pangea with ligthtening, fire, earth quake, robot attacks, UFO's and alsorts of nasties.

Supreme Commander, I've heard so much about how good Gas Powered games are, and this title did receive a "Must Buy" and better ratings when it came out... So I'm holding that one to play last.

And right now, a game I loved when I played it on my 486SX-50mhz PC way back in the day... Command and Conquer... I loved C&C and Red Alert... I played them until my eyes bled. But they took a real hiatus for me when, as a student, I struggled to scrape together £35 to go buy Tiberian Sun when it came out... and the thing crashed more than an old ZX80! It was a buggy piece of crap. And I was so heart broken.

At the time of this bebarcle with Tiberian Sun the internet was in it's infancy, I didn't have access to "patches", infact I never realised there might be patches out there... I was firmly of the position that software should be right straight out the box [an ideology sadly lacking today].

So, anyway, right now I'm watching the combined installer for "Command and Conquer: The First Decade" install right now... I've just laboriously typed in the six different activation codes for each title I'm going to play... and I'm waiting with baited breath.

More later...

Nintendo 3DS

I've seen a few of the articles comming out of Nintendo about the new "3DS" hand held, however, I've waited with baited breath for what anyone at E3 (which started yesterday) has to say about it... the first informed voice amongst the crowd to shout up is the venerable Jeff Green, here's an exert from his blog over at EA.com about the 3DS.

So today was the first day of the actual show itself, and Samantha and I did what any self-respecting gamer would do at the start of this show: We beelined to the Nintendo booth to check out the Nintendo 3DS. And even though we got to the line before the show was officially open, thanks to our nifty Exhibitor badges, we still had to wait 2 hours in line before getting our grubby paws on the new handheld. I've already tweeted my instant infatuation with the device, but if you missed it, to sum up: It was freakin' amazing. And I'm saying this as mostly a 3D naysayer and skeptic. I see 3D movies as a fad that need to die sooner rather than later, and I have no interest--none-in a 3D television set. So I was not predisposed to like Nintendo's new device. But, quite simply, it blew me away. Mostly, I think, because it doesn't require glasses at all, which makes it some kind of MAGIC FAERIE DEVICE with technology I couldn't begin to understand. Also, the depth of field and clarity of the screen just really made a difference with the gameplay---it actually looked like you were playing in a 3D space, rather than just having things tacked on to the "front" of the image. I could go on and on about it, and probably will some other day, but for now I can tell you that I walked in skeptical, but
walked out knowing that I was going to buy this DAY FREAKIN' ONE

So, sounds like a smash hit... you can catch the rest of this blog here.

Deus Ex

I've been having a little look around the net today, and stumbled over this advert for a game franchise name I know well, Deus Ex.

I loved the original game, it pushed so many bounds at the time it was great, but it was also ome of those fabled titles which aged very quickly, the original title being born out of the height of the Voodoo class graphics chip era, and dying down within about six months.

But, at the time, I loved it, I remember even throwing a four day sicky from work to play it.... yes, I was that irresponsible back then, but I was a young & foolish lad.

Anyway, I saw the new title and took a look, the CGI in the promo is impressive, I saw some mythology reference to Icarus and the city scape game me a real Bladerunner feel.

I was also surprised to see the Eidos name being used, albeit by the Montreal studio, not the UK one. I'm sure this title will hit the consoles before the PC, but I'll certainly be keeping my eye out for it.

F....F.....Fighter Bombers.....Drooollll

It's been a long time in Eve since I've seen a new Drone skill to pick up, my main is Gallente, and if you know anything about that, it means I know a lot about using combat and utility drones.... the kill in question is "Fighter Bombers".... yes, sounds cool....

They appear to be a set of drones, clearly for carrier pilots, and these drones fire missiles.

I don't know what they entered the game, I don't know how they've been received, I'm going to go read up about them now.

But this innovation on CCP's start tells me something very interesting, the reason (from way back in the mists of time) as to why drones don't fire missiles was that they would exponentially increase the number of objects being tracked and kill the cluster they were used in. So, seeing these drones available, and clearly not so new... that must mean there's been real differences made to the Server Cluster... not before time :)

Ice Mining

I just ran across this link from Massively, and I had to just stop and go... ahem...

I like mining... I like ice... and yes you do make massive amounts of money from it, but honestly, you'd be better running a few level 4 missions and selling the gear you get from it to buy star base fuels rather then mining for them.

And I have run very long, very tedious, ice mining operations.

Trading Places...

So, I've been a citizen of New Eden; the world within this world that is Eve-Online's back drop; for over six years. I've seen the good days and the bad, I've seen the highs and lows of alliances, deep dark null sec space and the bright lights of the big cities 'Empire' space. I'm a double graduate of the venerable Eve University corporation. I've fought in Privateer wars. I've mined. I've run seemingly never ending cycles of Research. Basically I've tried my hand at everything.

One deep dark looming gravity well which thus far as eluded me however is trading...

Yes, I know, saying that in Eve is akin to flopping your nuts into the mouth of a crocodile and hoping it doesn't bite. My trouble this week is... Yep, that old croc has bit down, and bit down hard.

I'm worth quite a lot of ISK in the game, so I've portioned out an amount of my cash, and started to trade. I put aside 10,000,000 ISK for this experiment. Basically pocket change [sorry to all your folks out there who dabble, or have dabbled with Eve and you think that's a lot, but when, like me, you've made over 3 billion in cash alone you don't think of 10 mill as anything but shrapnel in your pocket].

Anyway, I was careful with this money, I went out in the world from my general HQ and I had a read of the market details of a few different kinds of things. I soon realised a fair few things. The first thing that struck me was you have to choose to trade in items which are going to cost less than the amount of Escrow you're willing to fork out. Skills help with this, but initially with absolutely no skills you have to stump out 100% of the escrow for the items you're going to try to buy.

Let me just take a moment to explain, if you want to buy in Eve, say you are after 10 armour repair units, and they are being sold for 9,000 ISK each, and you decide you're going to offer people more to sell them to you, then you put up your buy order for 10 x 10,000 ISK, this means 100,000 ISK is going to go into escrow, this money leaves your account immediately, and sits in the ether of the game. And as people buy off of you, that escrow is released to them and you receive the items.

Skills and standings help you lower the amount of cash you have to fork out for escrow, but basically when you put up a buy order, until it is complete, ends or you cancel it, the cash is out of your hands.

Now, this price, offering more than the other people buying is the basic premise of the acquisitions side of Trading. But you also have to take three other important things into account. First of all, how much profit are you going to make from your items when you try to sell them back to the population? Well, lets continue the item above, you've finally got all 10 of your armour repair units, you paid 100,000 ISK for them. But your wallet is actually a little bit further into the red!!!!

ZOMG THIEVES!.... No, not thieves, but another kind of low-life. Brokers. Whenever you work with the markets in the game, you are going to meet, and grind against “Brokers”, these virtual entities are behind every transaction in New Eden. They initially take a flat 1% fee for listing your buy orders. So for your order of 100,000 ISK, it actually cost you 101,000 ISK. This % they tack on top of buy order costs can be reduced with standing & skills. However, you need to take it into account.

So, each of your items you have now cost 10,100 ISK. You need to sell that for more than that amount to make a profit.. right? Wrong. Whenever you sell an item, you pay an amount of “Sales Tax”. Again, skills and standing with the station you are selling in, can reduce this taxation. However, it never goes away.

The best way to see what % sales tax you're going to get, it to sell something to one of your own alt characters (your account has three character slots, so sell it to Joe Bloggs you create on one of your spare slots).

Once you've done that you know what % broker fee to add onto your units, and you know what over head of % sales tax you're going to have.

Don't do the rookie mistake here of simply doing COST + FEE + TAX + AMOUNT I WANT = SALE PRICE. I see so many traders jumping in and doing this and then being confused by their not making a lot of profit.

The Sales Tax is a %, it scales up as you raise your Sale Price... so raising it to take the Sales Tax into account is not the way to go. The best ways to fix it up are to hit the Trade Skills section and train them up some.

Anyway, together the Brokers Fee and the Sales Tax we'll consider to be your overheads. As you grow more bold in your trades you might start to add other over heads, but those I'll go over in a future post. So, right now, you might be looking at your market screen wondering what to buy...

What you need to do is have planned is a lot of patience, a pen and paper also help, because you need to go through the myriad of items on the market to find something with a large enough margin between the buy cost and the potential sale price. You need to pick something with a large margin, but also something which will turn over, something people will sell, and something people will buy.

To find the right item might take sometime. You might need to get to know the items a lot better than you already do. CCP include a lovely item comparer tool, to let you see the differences between the different names versions of items and the vanilla Tech 1 etc. Use this tool, it will let you find out what the better items are.

As an example, we'll think about 200mm Rail Guns. Why? No reason really, I'm just picking a name. The Tech 1 version of these I can see sell in my local mission hub for about 85,500 ISK each. But they can be bought for just shy of 34,000 ISK. That's a pretty good margin for a Tech 1 item. Clearly the potential margin of 51,500 ISK per item, is big enough to make this worth while, and a buy order for some of these can go up, but lets right click and “Show Info” on this item... It has a set of special named versions, using the compare tool list and turning on range and damage modifiers (which are the most important things for guns like these) and I can see that the named version “scout” class are the best named version... Checking the market price I can see a market opening.

In this station they sell for 1.2 million ISK, but just 5 jumps away they are selling for 30,000 ISK. That's a 1,170,000 ISK margin... for a bit of flying around, I can handle that! So I fly off to these slightly separated stations and place more buy orders for 30,001 ISK.... yes, WOW Auction hose style I slap down one extra silver.

Soon my wallet transactions tab is flashing away merrily as people sell their mission loot in bulk, I have vanilla Tech 1 200mm rail guns arrive in my central hub of trade. And I have the odd distant 'scout' gun appearing.

Spin forward two days, and I have 22 'scout' rail guns and 75 vanilla Tech 1... I gather these all up in one of my little cargo ships, and I head to my trade hub. There I throw the stacks of items up.

The price for sale of the vanilla Tech 1 has gone down a little, it's now 84,000 ISK. I start to sell mine for... drum roll please.... 83,999.99 ISK. Yes, not even a silver this time, it's a WOW bronze difference. I call this the “Mangy Wolf Pelt” margin.

The 'scout' guns however, I want to off load them quickly, and with their huge margin the potential sale price I can list can be attractively lower than the other items there. So, I undercut the nearest rival by 10,000 ISK.

The next morning dawns and I check my wallet, it's leaps up 35,000,000 ISK. From 10,000,000 it now reads over 45,000,000 ISK. All for a little paper trawling, a but of flying back and forth and a little careful statistic comparison.

This really appeals to me, it has all-sorts of cogs whirring in my head. I check what's left to sell, and I see that all the 'scout class are gone' but over 45 of the vanilla Tech 1 remain in my stock. The reason for this? Yep, you guessed it, someone undercut my Sale Price by 0.01 ISK. Modifying the sale order is a simple case of right clicking and setting a new value.

So, take this experience of mine at whatever value you can attribute to it, I'm now going to definitely put training time into my trade skills, and invest more of my cash into the market (there is in fact an amount of my ISK in escrow which would make Bill Gates think twice) lets see where this roller coaster might go.

Category C Gambling....

Why have I got a post title like that?

Well, some of you may now know, but I spend my days working for a company, writing the system software for gamling gaming machines... yes, I write one arm bandit software!

Today though, with a hard drive melt down, and a bad head on Friday, I'm about a day behind on my release schedule. So I've brought my work home with me... luckily, this does not mean I've carried a fruity machine box around with me, no, I've been the first victim... (cough) I mean user... of the Emulator, to let me pretend I have real fruit hardware sat here.

It's had numerous teething issues in the office, notably timing and performance issues. At work however, we have single core machines to run this on... so it's sharing time with the system software and the games, and despite my pointing out that things block one another from the CPU there's been no concurrent or threaded operation considerations taken into account with this software. It's brute force kind of program, which when given a CPU core maxes it out to 100% and sits there grinning.

At work, single core... kapput.

Here at home, I have a quad core, so using task manager, I've set the CPU affinity to my last core (core 4) and let it max that out, and then I've run the cabinet operating system on the first core (core 1).... and you know what, it runs sweet as a nut.

I just wished the author of this emulator had of listened when I said "You need to make it concurrent" about three months ago... I'm going to go in on Monday and have to point this out to someone, how I can do this politely I'm at a loss for... I might just be a beligerant bombastic bastard to everyone; because I've spent Friday night and Saturday working at home.

Anyway, at last I can now play "Category C" gambling games on my PC at home. lol.... if only my PC would suddenly start spitting out £1 coins...

Darwinism in Action

Just a quickie, I'll post a long message when I have something worth saying.... I've been up to three things over the last few says...

1. Having an e-mail row with Darren at Common Sense gamer... the outcome of which is... HE IS MY GOD....

2. Had my hard drive at work die on me, and the IT technician spend 5 hours recovering my last two weeks work...

3. I ran across this... and it really is just Darwinian Selection personified... good on google for providing the rest of us out here in the world with a disposal mechanism for these morons.