Silearth
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I'm like that bad penny that keeps turning up. Had a lot of changes in my life and those changes have brought and my family from California to Minnesota. Always wanted to visit Canada and now I'm so close.
I've been doing mostly casual gaming lately and wouldn't mind some RPG goodness. I suddenly remembered this site and here I am again.
Think I'll stick around this time.
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God, this has always been my favorite part of this forum. I can slip in quietly and see new pictures of everyone. Not sure when I was here last.
I was looking through my things and found my old copy of Scared Gold....
Not much into gaming these days, unless you count Candy Crush.
But, since this is a picture thread.... Now I'll warn you; I don't have many current pictures that haven't been twisted in some way. But here is one, I believe I took it in December when I was making cookies for my kids.
[url-http://s167.photobucket.com/user/hlmichel/media/CookieTime.png.html]
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I started feeling the itch a week ago. It's been months since I played.
I installed Sacred Gold and downloaded some level 100 toons--kind of wish I had saved my guys from when they shut down the closed servers.
Well I guess you can't go home again. It bored me to tears.
Next I installed Sacred 2, thinking that my shotgun seraphim or my big axe warrior would satisfy my craving. Well I can't get online. Thought I had just forgotten my password or something. I tried to reset it and got an error or something.
Have they closed the Sacred 2 closed servers?
I've been doing the main quest in single player. Today marked the first time I have ever completed the Blind Guardian quest. That was pretty cool.
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Welcome back Sil! They two pix are great, are you using photoshop to finish off the photos? How did you get the good color difference tween the women in the back and you in the foreground.
lol, get in the front of the pic more often, yer a great ham!
gogo
I can't afford Photoshop. I am using Two Corel products, Aftershot pro and Paintshop pro X4. I always shoot with single point focus, spot metering and pretty wide aperatures. I don't really like group photography so I am trying to single out one person in the group, letting the others get underexposed or overexposed.
That shot also had some digital magic done to it that I have saved as a preset called 'The Henry Way'
Thank's for the warm welcome.
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hmm, I looked and looked, and looked... even tween all those words... no new pic!
gogo
Wow, it's amazing that after all this time, there have been no new pictures. The last shots are mine, but allow me to post two more.
I'm usually behind the camera, but saw the women still standing around after taking a group shot. Adjusted my settings and handed the camera to my wife, telling her to wait for me to point.
A parody of an add from my work.
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200-1000 photos a day and needing days to find the good ones. I think this is still the reason I have no digital camera. I have only old analog ones, the ones with 12 pictures (6*9cm) on a film are my favourites. Just do a negative, lay it on photo paper, light for a while,fix, wash, dry and you have same size photos as the negative is: 6*9cm. Only thing I dislike yet: scanning to make a negative digital is a bit troublesome. Most scanners do just the normal 24*36millimetre negatives.
Not to mention that no digital camera can beat an anolog one in low light conditions yet. Have to correct me, you have to pay around 10000 euro for a digital one to do it. Photo-shooting a kid in a room with just 2 candles, no flash light, no noise, so you have the chance to get several shots without noticing, and the resolution, whow...
Nice shot. You are correct, it's still hard for digital to match film but it is getting close. I could get results similar with a D3X, but I'd have to sell a couple of my kids.
The good vs the bad shots I am referring to are not due to light, though. Sometimes people do strange things right as the shutter opens. My wife never stops talking and her mouth is open for the majority of pictures.
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Well it's been some time since I stopped by. My entire gaming world has become facebook games....lol. I recently started an online Healthcare IT course in preperation for changes in healthcare--it's supposed to give me a leg up on upcoming positions....we'll see....
The photography thing has really taken off. Bought myself a flash unit and remote triggers. I've become one of the official event photographers for my church. Every time I pull out the camera it take from 200 to 1000 photos, taking anywhere from 8 hours to 3 days to sort through them, discarding the bad and processing the good. I have sold a handful of pictures--I'm just about the art and let the wife handle that part of it.
I gave up auto mode and the program modes on the camera for full manual a couple of months ago. To make a long story short, I am so busy now, but I love it!
I did reinstall Sacred 2 on my box about 4 months ago and the poor thing just couldn't handle it any longer. I would consider upgrading, but the computer has taken a backseat to photography and is now just a tool I use to process my photos.
I do miss this site and will start to hang around more.
Oh, funny thing happened to me last month. Got a package in the mail from some marketing company. The wife thought it was school materials. I opened the package and there was a letter from Microsoft, thanking me for taking part in their survey and allowing them to monitor my computer usage. I'm sure I signed up for something with them, but it was so long ago that I forgot. Anyway, in the box was a brand new copy of Office 2010!
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Happy Birthday.
I hope it was a great one!
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Got a new toy for my birthday, the Nikon D3000. Still trying to get the hang of this thing, so here are some new pictures.
First we have Alexander
Then Abigail
Alicia in the pool at the hotel
And Alanna, who told me she wants to be a model
Alexander again. Not sure what he was throwing, but he did not know I was back there.
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Those pix came out great, that car in the background in your first one black and white is beautiful. Have you been bitten by the family tree bug? I remember seeing an ad for a kind of family tree service on Facebook.
gogo
I've been into it on and off for years, but I got serious only recently. When we were going through my mother's stuff we found a packet of documents belonging to my grandfather. There was a receipt for his marriage to my grandmother, his discharge papers from world war 2 among other things.
Seeing that really sparked my interest.
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Thank you guys.
You are all right, being able to be there, talk to her.... Even though she could not carry on a conversation, she was able to let me know that she was aware that I was there.
We also had two of the kids with us. She went so peacefully that it was not traumatic for them.
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I've got a few pictures to share-one new one and a few old ones. Been working on the family tree at ancestry.com.
Of course this is me....
Here I am again. I believe this is early 70's
That's me on the right and my older sister in the middle. And our dog, Georgia.
Me and my younger sister....
A later shot of my younger sister. Not sure when this was taken. She passed away in 1990--three days after Christmas
My mother, right out of highschool
And again at her wedding.....
And finally, me after my mother's memorial service.
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After my mother's heart attack and botched triple bypass, she has been pretty much confined to a wheelchair. The past 6 months had been bad, as she started to get weaker. She fell in the bathroom one day and never got better.
She got stuck in a vicious circle of going to the ER, being shipped to another hospital for a week and then being sent home. Her friend would drive her home and she wouldn't have the strength to get out of the car. Back to ER she would go to start the process again.
She was eventually placed in a board and care to wait for medi-cal to get approved so that she could enter a more permanent facility. All the while she slipped further and further into depression.
She became verbally abusive to the staff and would not eat or take meds. My aunt, who lives much closer to her facility than us, called us to warn that the facility was looking to kick her out--they were looking for a family member to drive down and pick her up. My aunt told us that she could not do it and so was not picking up the phone.
Things got bad on our end and the wife was getting ill. We got caught up in our own problems.
One day, we checked our messages and there was a recording from the facility. My wife told me what my aunt had said, but I told her to call them back. They told me that my mother would not survive the night and that I should get there as soon as possible. They had been trying to reach my aunt to tell her, but she was avoiding their calls.
We drove the 100+ miles and made it in time to talk to her. She died within the hour. But at least I was able to talk to her. She couldn't open her eyes or even move her lips, but she could form words in the back of her throat.
Mom died on February 27. More than a month ago, but it is still new to me.
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My suggestion is get yourself a decent Seagate or WD (1TB drives are going for $70-80). While you have your system open, use a can of compressed air and blast out all the bunnies. Send the current drive in under warranty and then use it as a secondary drive once it's back (might make a good option for your page file or your browser cache).
Oh, is your current drive size still in active production? I returned a drive for buddy and he got a freebie upgrade from 200MB to 250MB because that's what they had in stock. (Also, the drive you get back might very well not be the drive you send it; but it will be freshly refurbed and generally have a revised warranty period on it. I can say nothing but good things about Seagate's warranty program.)
This might also be a time to review your cooling fans. Are they making any noise they shouldn't? Easy to add a fan or two to your order for just a small increase in shipping cost. (Or specifially search for items w/ free shipping on Newegg like I do
)My current harddrive is a seagate barracuda. Good idea on the RMA. I RMA'd a WD drive years ago and ended up with a larger drive in return (I think I may still have that one)
As for cooling fans, I replaced two of them last year because the bearings were going out. Couldn't find anything but sleeve bearing fans. I was more than willing to put out a bit of extra cash for dual ball bearing fans even if it meant loosing the lighted fans.
I tend to clean out my case once a week. Got a real dust problem.
Now, a couple of days ago, my computer stopped booting altogether. It would blue screen and then restart. I ran Seatools for DOS and it could do nothing for me. On a whim, I pulled out my video card and the slot cooler and restarted the system.
Windows booted right away. I ran Seatools and it found two more damaged sectors(think I have a total of seven now).
The system is running very smoothly now. I am still replacing the hard drive, though. And I am thinking about the powersupply as well. I currently have a
"RAIDMAX HYBRID 2 RX-530SS 530W ATX12V V2.2/ EPS12V SLI Ready CrossFire Ready Modular LED Power Supply". I didn't think that I was putting much strain on it with my config.
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My first impression: It's a knock off of War of the Worlds, Independence Day or any of the other plethora of alien invasion flicks. Is it any good? I dunno.
I was thinking Independence Day. It does look cool, though.
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It still feels like yesterday--the day my boxes arrived at my front door and I built my rig. But my my baby is starting to show her age.
Computer had been freezing up randomly until one day it stayed that way with random blips where I could get in a mouse click or two.
I noticed that the drive activity light was lit constantly the entire time. Suspecting hard drive issues I checked the warranty. I was still covered but I would have to send it out before I got the replacement. They recommended downloading Seatools.
To make a long story short, Seatools repaired my drive(more like marked the bad sectors and recovered the data to another part of the drive) Everything was fine.
Had the same issues today, but luckily, there was only one bad sector on the drive. Wow, is two years the going rate for a hard drive these days?
But I did have my eyes on a terabyte model.......
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Well I've been searching the net since 6:00 AM. Using the advanced search to limit responses to this past month showed me that Netgear claims to be close to completing the drivers.
I did manage to get some unsigned drivers to work and I am typing this from my wireless connection. The only problem--not an issue for me, but for the wife--is that I may have to F8 and choose to disable signed driver enforcement every time I start the computer.
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Well the end of this saga is that the card just stopped working. I returned it to Bestbuy and replaced it with a MIMO G card from Netgear for an additional $20.00. Native windows 7 drivers for this one so setup was a breeze. And there were even updated drivers on windows update.
And I have a much faster connection.
Would you believe that this card is still going strong, while my router took a dive? No problem, was toying with the Idea of moving up.
Replaced the old router with a Belkin N600. Sharing my connection with two laptops, two DSI's and a PSP 3000 and loving the fact that I can set the router so that I get the majority of the bandwidth.
And even though I am still using a G card to connect, my connection is great.
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I haven't been around much lately, but it doesn't mean that I don't love you guys. Been a bit busy and haven't really felt the urge to play Sacred 2. Been spending my time playing facebook games.
Recently took a long overdue vacation. Some of the Wife's family was visiting from Indonesia and they wanted to see some snow. They took my son and headed off to Colorado while we stayed at home with the three girls. That was on December 27, Monday. By Wednesday, we packed up the van and drove to Williams, AZ to ride the Polar Express with the group from Colorado.
Well, they got stuck in the snow and never quite made it. We nearly had an accident when I drove through a snow drift and my brakes gave out.
We hung out, took some pictures and whatnot, making our way for our next destination: Laughlin. Some time during the evening, our missing party made it to Williams. Polar Express was closed and we already changed our reservation to the following day. The snow had increased substantially and it took them 12 hours to reach us--it took us about an hour and a half to make the same drive.
The next day we did a bit of sight-seeing and made our way for our final destination....Sin city...Las Vegas.
Didn't know quite what to expect; new years in Las Vegas. Not really my cup of tea any time of the year. Let's just say, that it was interesting. There were fights and arrests...someone died that night.
Funny thing happened the next day. We were considering the drive home and everyone wanted to see the stratosphere. While my son, sister-in-law and my wife's two young cousins rode the rides, the rest of us walked the shops. I came across a place selling g-strings and pasties. In the doorway, they had one made of candy.
I sat there, staring at the display until my wife came along. As we laughed, we didn't notice my 7 year old walk up. I stopped her just as she was leaning in for a taste. It was candy after all.
I do have some bad news. I've been a bad boy. It seems that I have gained back 40 of the 60 pounds that I lost. And a painful bout of sciatica has put an end to my stair running and afternoon walks for a while. So I have had to unpack my bigboy pants until I find the will power to drop the weight again.
That's what I've been up to lately. I hope that everyone had a great holiday season.
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Happy Thanksgiving to all.
Doing something different this year; in place of the family dinner, we are celebrating with people for whom Thanksgiving has no meaning and so have never tasted turkey and stuffing.
It will be a potluck with mostly Indonesian dishes, but I am providing the stuffed bird.
No pies until tomorrow, though.
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That's impressive. Not worth spending that much on though, sheesh.
Who has their PC and TV in the same room anyway?
My computer is in my bed room and connected to my monitor via digital cable and my HDTV via HDMI. It's great for watching netflix in the room. We also have the spare computer attached to the larger screen in the living room for the same reason.
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I haven't even followed the links yet, but I have to say that #2 is stunning.
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I've often toyed with the idea of a drawing tablet. I was surprised to see the price of this one--much lower than I expected..... Perhaps next year will find one attached to my computer.
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Man, I miss S1 something awful. I wish I hadn't deleted all my toons when I heard the news about the loss of the closed servers.
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I am on Facebook every day. I mostly play the kiddy games, as does the wife. We also use it to keep in touch with family around the world.
![http://s167.photobucket.com/user/hlmichel/media/CookieTime.png.html]](http://s167.photobucket.com/user/hlmichel/media/CookieTime.png.html%5D){kind=link}
Back after a long break
in The Daily Grind: Real life right here!
Posted
I do have more pictures--and the photoshopped ones just continued to get crazier.