Well, having looked at the Steam Forums, there does appear to be a bug that they're in the process of fixing. Just a matter of being patient, I guess ... again ...

Figures Steam's bugs would be stuff like suspending accounts at random, and not giving you every game they've ever made or sold. :\

Since it was not your fault, Valve should compensate you with something. Seriously, that's just f***ed up..

Haha, Valve offering compensation? Don't be silly! :P

Yeah....how else would they keep Gabe fat with all the cake he needs to function if they gave people refunds and compensation? :\

But...but...

if you have been denied access to your account for something that Valve itself messed up, why wouldn't they need to compensate? You don't have access to your account, so you can't play your games...

or am I being too naive here?

Have a look at the graph here: http://store.steampowered.com/stats/

That dip at 16:23 represents about 1 million users being cut off at the same time; I was one of the unlucky ones.

You should really only do this if you actually want to reduce your capacity of hearing. It is one thing to lose a little hearing because you appreciate the beauty of music but something very different to lose it just for some go-to-sleep ritual. Try an apple or a glass of water instead.

To some, 1 million people became very lucky. ;)

:P

It was more of a "damn it, why won't my neighbor stop playing heavy bass music loudly at night" thing than a go-to-sleep ritual :)
I asked him to turn the volume down a couple of times, his response was pretty much a "yeah, well, fuck you" every time so I stopped bothering.

It's so darn hot in here, the fan is barely working (fixed with duct tape), we have no air conditioning and the damn rallys are coming to town, effectively making the city packed with people...

Life sucks...

This summer has gone pretty badly.

My laptop broke pretty much the instant my holiday began. It had broken down twice in two years and so I was expecting it to go again in about two months. Figures it gave up early.

I found a store that sold computer components and then found out that they would also knock it together for next to nothing. So I placed my order. The confirmation message told me it normally takes between three to five days for the goods to arrive; I decided that this meant things like mice or keyboards and other stuff that they didn't need to build before sending it to the customer, but I was still surprised that it took them around three weeks to send the damn thing. Turns out that when they say "in stock", they mean "we actually keep nothing in stock, but we can order them from the folks who import them, which usually takes a few days".

I should probably point out that the laptop broke down on Monday and I ordered the desktop on Wednesday. The Thursday was a holiday and most businesses let their employees have a long weekend by giving them the Friday off as well. So the thing arrived on Tuesday, three weekends later. I was pretty pissed off by then, but not nearly as much as when I discovered that it didn't work. I'm not stupid, I know how to install an OS and drivers and all that, but just to make sure, I called a friend who does this sort of thing all the time. A day later we had got nowhere, so I e-mailed the shop and asked if they would fix the P.O.S. for free, thank you very much. They had offered a warranty in case things go wrong with the build (such as the CPU fan coming off and breaking things). I hadn't bothered with it but, amazingly, the store understood that something must have been broken before the computer was in one piece. They offered to pay the postage and fix the computer for free. Mind you, it did take them two days to respond to my e-mail.

It took them another three weeks to fix whatever was wrong with it. Unbelievable. I could have bought a new computer from elsewhere by then. I never had any idea what was going on there, if anything, and I even told them I wanted my money back. The computer arrived about two days later. They had thrown in a 16GB memory stick as well, which was of little solace. I will never buy anything from them again.

To make matters worse, I managed to secure a job where having a computer of my own was absolutely necessary. The boss has been understanding, telling me I could start work whenever it suits me best, so that's fine. What isn't fine is that I have to pay my rent somehow. I hate asking anyone for money, but my parents bailed me out there; without them, I would have been royally screwed.

As a side note, my girlfriend has put on some weight. She doesn't seem to realise the impact it has had on her aesthetics, even though I have mentioned it a number of times in a number of ways, not all of them tactful.

My bed/computer room is covered in bugs. This happens every year. They just suddenly appear at night. First, nothing, then suddenly there are probably a hundred of these bugs visible at a time. Little winged devils that kind of look like ants, and they're a real pain in the ass to kill. I don't want to gas my bed room, so I'm picking them up one at a time and disposing of them with my fingers, because even stomping with flat hard bottomed shoes doesn't kill them, and the swatter has even less chances. I remember it took over 2 hours to get rid of 'em last year, and then suddenly a new batch appeared. Would vacuuming them kill 'em? I'm afraid that if I vacuum them, they'll just climb right out of the machine later.

I keep feeling like I was covered in bugs too, but the things seem to avoid me a bit, at least.

Sounds similar to what's going on in my parents' place. There are ants in the sauna, but the buggers are too few to cause any concern. And one night about a week ago it was suddenly festooned with the critters. Thankfully, most of them were gathered in certain spots or en route from one to another, so I took a can of Baygon and sprayed the shit out of them. And yes, some of them (half? A third?) were relatively big, winged queen-ants-to-be. Apparently, ants are so small that a tiny amount of the spray is sufficient to kill them without posing much of a threat to human health. However, judging from the piles of dead ant husks I find in the sprayed spots every evening, the stuff sticks to surfaces so well that it remains effective for well over a week.

I also found out a few places of unusually large ant concentrations in their garden. These turned out to be tunnel entrances, which I promptly flooded with malathion. I then ruined the entrances with a small spade; ants tend to mend their tunnels, so we'll be able to see if they recover.

If they recover, try putting out ant bait. If they take it (there are many kinds of ant bait, and you have to find the one your ants like), it will kill everything in the nest. Don't both spray and use ant bait; you want lots of healthy workers to take lots of bait back to the nests.

We get aphids. Some years, we get so many aphids that our roses are full of pinholes. But the fastest way to get rid of the aphids is not to kill the aphids. The fastest way is to kill the ants that protect and tend and transport and feed on the aphids. When the ants are gone, ladybugs will move in and make short work of the aphids.