The Dorothy Eady always stuck with me. It’s fairly well documented.

After falling down the steps at home, she nearly died. When she came back to life, memories were unlocked of a prior life in Egypt in which she was a priestess in an egyptian temple. She would go on to have a very successful career working in Egyptian antiquities.

As for the really really weird shizz, anyones guess. I try not to just arbitrarily cut someone down, but it’s unlikely there would be proof of her having a conversation to an ancient diety.

I built a PC for my little sister in 2007. She was starting college and didn’t have a computer. It totaled 2805 and some change, custom built through Antares Digital (When you know, you Lili). These were all top of the line components (Asus M2N32-WS PRO, Amd athlon64 X2 AM2 5200, Corsair Memory). Not a cheapy system in its day.

Three nights before I was to deliver it to her, I completed all of the setup, had all the software ready to go, even setting up a custom theme for her (We were both metalheads). My folks said that she would need a printer/fax/copy/scanner as well, so last minute, I ended up buying an HP 5610 at target for 192 dollars.

The HP instructions didn’t say that if you connected the cable between the printer and the PC before you had installed the drivers, the printer would not mount as a device. In fact, it would never connect to that PC ever again. Apparently, it ruined the registry until you reformatted and reinstalled the OS.

To be fair, the manual did say to install the drivers first, then the cable, but this was not the norm back then and they didn’t really emphasize it in any way, nor did it mention that you were about to be FITA big time. Had to scramble to completely reformat the drive, reinstall all the software… Essentially, starting over from a blank slate and getting done in 2 days for delivery to her dorm on move in day. It did connect second time around.

I wrote them an angry letter regarding the poor deployment, but of course I never heard back from them. Never bought another HP for myself or anyone else ever again. I go out of my way to encourage people to not buy anything from HP. If I happen to be somewhere and see someone looking at an HP printer, I’ll just approach them, introduce myself, and tell them my story to discourage them from buying it.

Not sure, but I suspect rates just went up. I’m just a science geek from North Carolina that does refractory for a living, hence my interest.

I watched as the first home caught fire. It was brutal to watch it. I did read that it was not occupied. It does not appear on a lot of maps. The second home though that went up was occupied. This was someone’s home, someone’s place of solace. Children were raised here. Memories were rooted here. It was a total loss. I read that (3) homes in total were destroyed by fire due to the 100km southern fissure’s lava output, though I only saw (2). I am unsure about the third. I am unsure where the third one was.

Numerous other homes are going to be severely damaged though. Hot water is actually quite abundant I hear due to the geothermal power plant. The lavaflow from the 900km main fissure was mostly deflected by the berm away from Grindavik, but the berm untimately guided it to the pipeline. Geographically speaking and considering the timeframe they had to work in, I don’t think it could be helped.

I understand that hot water is a primary source of heat since it’s a cheap and abundant byproduct of the powerplant. It’s what you’re also bathing in at the Blue Lagoon Hot Springs. Now devoid of heat, I would suspect that many homes are now going to suffer damage from frozen/busted pipes.

My heart still goes out to the incredible people of Iceland. I’d like to think I could cope with an event like this, but I’m fairly certain I would puss out. Icelanders are far more metal than I.

A closer view of the initial damage. This could very well be the beginning of the end for Grindavik.

It noteworthy to mention that the town has been evacuated and the people are not in harms way, but this was likely someones home. My heart breaks for you folk.

A close up view frown Professor Shawn Willsey’s livestream showing just how close the southern fissure is to town. This was taken a few hours ago via ariel drone. The vent opened in real time while the drone was flying and observing the northern rift.

A few hours later, a structure in northern Grindavik closest to the southern fissure appears to have caught on fire.

If there is any good news to be found, the eruption appears to have lost a bit of its initial thunder.

Live coverage from an actual geologist Shawn Wilsey

A map plotting the 569 earthquakes (and still counting over the last 24 hours). These are mostly centered around the magma intrusion.

At 7:57am, the fissure opened. Whereas last time the fissure opened up far to the north and east of Grindavik, they were not so lucky this time. The fissure has now spread much more south in the Hagafell region. It seemed to me as though it erupted at the southern end of the fissure that erupted in December. At the time of this post (11:00am), magma is only a few hundred feet from the greenhouse and maybe a mile from Grindavik.

A considerable portion of the rift spread under the protective berm they created over the last few weeks. While the berm was effective (Think sandbags stacked up to stop flood waters, but with dirt and stone), It could only ever stop a certain amount of liquid flow. This spreading of the fissure effectively circumvented it’s protection for areas of the fissure inside the berm. The best case scenario now is that the southern end of the fissure ceases and cools before it can eject enough matter to overwhelm the town, which is now downhill.

Send hope that Grindavik and it’s populace are spared. This is close to a worst case scenario.

CDs are still king with me. 1,957 and still counting. I feel cheated if I don’t get to enjoy that romance of flipping through the liner notes while listening to the CD that first time. I rip the songs I like after a few days of listening to it. I suspect the day will come when MP3’s will not be free.

DVD’s too. Almost 1,400 of them as well.

I did have to let the cassette tapes go. I kept some of the rarer ones, but they weren’t meant to last 40 years and would not likely survive another rewind.

I think that ‘Star Trek - The Next Generation’ covered this very dilemma with (S2E18) Up The Long Ladder. In one hand you have stagnancy and in the other pure chaos. I don’t envy you for having to tackle issues like this because there is no perfect solution, but I would encourage you to find a balance. Balance is a prerequisite to longevity.

You would not have enjoyed holiday dinners at my house. While my parents were good people, you can’t pick your relatives. We had the infamous Uncle Tom and Aunt Janet, who would swallow anything and everything you had in the bathroom medicine cabinet, even if it landed them in the emergency room later. And Grandma, a devout catholic that spent every Sunday at church learning how to love thy neighbor, who would go on long cuss ridden tirades insulting and slurring on minorities. And then there was Uncle Pete, who was thrown out of Bob Evans on Easter Sunday for announcing to the entire dining room that ‘He could puke better than this sausage gravy’. I do actually miss Uncle Pete. He did have a hell of a way of getting his point across, and that sausage gravy was totally bunk.

While thinking about it all still raises my blood pressure even 40 years later, those moments brought their behaviors from my subconscious to my conscious where I could take notice of it. It did empower me to actively NOT be like that. I saw first-hand several of my future potential selves and chose to take a higher road. I find a bit of comfort in that. I wonder if I wasn’t exposed to those behaviors from a third person perspective, would I have been able to avoid them.

Oh, and sorry about dropping that bomb the other day. I was in a rare mood. I removed it as you rightfully requested of me. In my defense, I used the word appropriately, but I totally understand.

You seem like a decent enough fellow. Best of luck.

I use Brave Browser (with Ublock Origin and AdBlock) and rarely have any issues. I do have Freetube downloaded, installed and ready to go for when they escalate their game (and they will). For certain other applications, a youtube downloader can be quite handy.

Ads truly are the most annoying, counterproductive and least creative way of putting yourself out there. Even worse, they can never seem to match an ad with the content it gets forced upon, and this serves only to train people to associate their brand with uselessness and irrelevance. Even if you have a product that is good, you’ve just presented yourself as an obstructing pair of clown shoes and that becomes your first and long-lasting impression. When the time comes that they may need it, most people will not remember your product from that ad, only that your brand is a pair of clown shoes.

The simple truth is, if you have a good product, you do not need advertising. You only need advertising if you have a bad product and you are worried that negative word of mouth will spread faster than you can dupe your share of people into buying it.

Edit: Replaced a word that may be taken as a slur.

At that time, no one knew what was going to happen. They didn’t want to chance it so they upgraded nearly everyone.

Whatever the reason, it made my decade. I experienced no problems at all on any of my machines.

In my old party days circa 2000, I had a nice party house in the hood. The neighborhood wasn’t all that great, but it was a nice big house for cheap rent. Lots of rooms and space. I was young and had more knowledge of computers than money, and this meant I could bus to work instead of driving and paying to park.

I worked at a large engineering company. They upgraded their computers for the Y2K bug. This left them with an extraordinary amount of old PC’s they had to actually pay to dispose of properly. To save money, they yanked the hard drives and raffled them off to the employees. We’re talking nearly 400 PCs. 386’s, 486’s and even some (then highly coveted) 486-dx2’s.

A few people that won just gave me their PC. They didn’t want it since it wasn’t usable without a hard drive but knew I did. I cashed in a few favors here and there to get a few of those choice 486-dx2’s from those that won them where I could. In all, I made (6) pretty decent Dell PC’s and set them up in various rooms in the house. I also had my cadd workstation and my roommate had his PC as well. I put Windows 98SE, VNC and Twisted Metal 2 on each.

I lan’d together all (8) PC’s into a home network using a partial reel of CAT6 cable that I got from another friend in exchange for devising and assembling his wife a new PC for her birthday. He was in the IBEW and the cable was scrap surplus from construction at a major airport. He gave me some speaker wire as well. In hindsight, it was for a public address system and was not the best for musical range but it did work. I borrowed a crimper and helped myself to some RJ45 connectors from our IT department. I ran the lan cables to network the PC’s. I placed a speaker in every room and wired them into the home stereo. Mono, but I only had so many speakers. I then converted my workstation to more of a home theater, running a video out to the TV. PC audio was outputted to the home stereo as auxiliary.

It made for a kick ass home theater system for the year 2000. In it’s day, it was pretty hip. We had some great multiplayer games for years to come and nearly everyone had their own room to play in. TM2 was really neat in that it could take up to 8 players.

VNC gave you control over any computer from any computer. You could watch a movie on the Home Theater in any room you want to, or all of em even. Kick on winamp with milkdrop and just jam out. Put on ‘The cat sitter’ and get the cat all riled up. Ahh, good times.

In all, and not accounting for any time spent or software licenses, I may have invested 30 dollars for a new corded drill (which I still have today). Beer was probably the highest total expenditure for the project. There were some wire coat hangers that got away fishing the wires through the walls that are probably still there.

Also, I totally agree with you on Chrono Trigger. It has another title set in that same world that can be tricky to find called Chrono Cross. I personally think Trigger was the better of the two titles but Cross is play worthy.

Farewell sir. Thanks for all the laughs.

Kevin Pollack’s fantastic story about torturing Alan Arkin. Skip to 1:30 if you want to hear his answering machine prank.

Not exactly text based, but the old sierra style games are still a blast to play. Leisure Suit Larry, Maniac Mansion, Thimbleweed Park. They sure don’t need many resources to play.

Yeah, Call of Cthulu was my favorite out of most of the tabletop games. You need a good Storyteller, which I was lucky to have once.