vometia

The EU has been getting into the habit of levying quite heavy fines at companies who refuse to comply; I'm not sure Valve would be well advised to play that game. I'd also be surprised if they abandoned the European market out of sheer petulance, though stranger things have happened.

I prefer going in person! Floyd are good, alongside Waters and Hawkwind on their better days, some of the most stunning things I've ever experienced.

Not going to happen since the EU is a much bigger market than the US (potentially, at least: not sure what the actual figures are in terms of buyers.) They'd be insane to walk away and say "well, ner, we just won't sell to you". That'd certainly strain relationships with the publishers who use Steam as a distribution platform. About time, though. The software publishing industry has for too long been acting as if it's somehow unique and special when it comes to not respecting consumer rights, and it's about time it was yanked into line with every other type of business.

Thank you, that's terribly kind of you. My main concern is that it might interfere with my upcoming hormone treatment, but things are looking positive at present. And of course the very best of wishes to you too! My thoughts are with you on your own journey. Strength be with you.

I don't really subscribe to the notion that illnesses exist as punishments; if anything, my diabetes may have been triggered by repeated attempts at dieting. The fact that it nearly killed me is a bit of a bummer.

Some have nice aspects, but overall I'd struggle to live somewhere like that. Except diabetes, sadly. Proof that the universe has a flawed design concept.

Truth. It certainly hates me too!

Back from my appointment at the clinic in London: stayed over there a couple of nights to try to avoid turning up late (which as it transpires was a good idea since I got lost!) and to mitigate the stress slightly. After waiting for more than a year it was always going to be an anti-climax, and indeed it was. At least I got my diagnosis, but I need two of them before they'll proceed, so I need to go back again at some point. <_< If anyone's remotely interested, the diagnosis is gender identity disorder, just in case anyone remembers my "previous self". Assuming nothing untoward happens, the next stage is hormone therapy. And chocolate. London's not a good place to be for the easily stressed. I'm now quite stressed.

Thanks for the birthday wishes, guys! I'll post some pictures of the sword at some point, but I have a trip to London to get out of the way first. Which involves going... outside.

Thanks very much! I have lots of chocolate to keep me occupied. :hehe:

Fancy! Mine was this one:

Shouldn't be a case of too many mods being loaded; more likely it's a conflict with one of the other mods. But until TES5Edit comes out, I wouldn't really know how to go about finding the culprit...

... gets up ... ... sees bizarre horse picture ... ... decides the world is a strange place and goes back to bed ...

I have a 3D print of my Xbox avatar, which is quite neat. Still had to be hand-painted from what I understand, though.

You have to admit, it would be nice to have so much money that you could splurge on that sort of thing without wincing!

More pictures are up on Rob's site here. Should be arriving tomorrow: I'm pretty excited, but I have to wait 'til my birthday! (It's a present from my girlfriend...)

Wow! I was wondering how on earth they justified that sort of price, but I have more of an idea now. I still think they're hideously expensive for what they are, but they do look seriously pretty awesome. I remember my grandfather owning an old mechanical typewriter with similar keys to some of them.

I don't think Unicomp made the later keyboards, did they? I know that IBM stopped using them after a certain point (PS/2 series?) which seemed to irk quite a lot of people.

I don't mind the looks myself, though they are rather workaday. I don't know why they don't do a normal black-on-black keyboard, though. I guess my old Microsoft Sidewinder looked a bit more "down with the kids, man", but it was horrible to use... I've since binned it due to the keys' coating peeling off and it generally not being very good.

Hmm. I've disabled and reenabled a number of mods without anything interesting happening, but it appears that disabling the one that runs a periodic pcb might have done the trick: it's too early to say for certain because the crash is extremely erratic, but it did seem to run for longer this time and only stopped because I was starting to get motion sickness and quit! The memory usage had crept up to about 1.5GB since there was no pcb being done, but I have a memory of pcb being problematic on Oblivion too: if you ran it at the wrong time (possibly the same time as it was loading another cell, though my memory is hazy) it would also ctd. Given that FO3 seems to be constantly loading stuff as you wander around, and I've now got even more of it with the BA Wasteland Restoration mod (lots of trees!) I guess the risk of pcb occurring at the same time as something being loaded into memory was quite high. That's the theory, anyway, but with no real supporting evidence that this has been my problem: now all I need is another unexpected ctd to demolish my theory!

About every six months I have a look to see if anybody has made one. I keep on being disappointed, but remain oddly optimistic. It's a shame Bethesda don't just release the file format specifications and say "do what you want with this". I think I may just need to accept that FO3 is very wobbly and press F5 frequently. Some people seem to be a lot better at that than I am.

It's looking that way. I was convinced it was as I think my Oblivion crashes were an out of memory problem (and I spent absolutely ages trying to hunt down an alternative cause!) but I'm guessing this is a mod doing something wonky. Found a few errors here and there using FO3Edit's checker, but it won't unearth some of the more subtle stuff like e.g. scripting problems (though I don't think FO3 is as crash prone as Oblivion when it comes to bad scripts, that was just an example.) What I still think is a memory management bug is the dead cell stuff that I've had with FO3 almost since its release, which is more annoying as it makes the area unusable for the remainder of the game unless I'm prepared to put in potentially hours trying to find and disable the offending reference, and hopefully the 4GB flag will alleviate that particular problem...