My graphics card just went FUBAR after only one and a half years of not so intensive use (in fact I used this PC more for working than for gaming and when I played it was usually older stuff). I already had overheating issues a while ago but I cleaned the PC, everything worked fine then. Recently the card got rather loud again and showed performance issues with games that even my old graphics card should have been able to handle perfectly so I took it apart, removed all the dirt, reapplied the cooling compound and voila, it was as good as new - in fact the cooling seemed to be more efficient than when I first got the PC (with an idle temperature of 32° and the fan speed at 25%). But today it suddenly went VROOOOOM and got toasted. To make it funnier, that happened when I took a short break to play some Mass Effect, a game that already made my old GeForce overheat but didn't cause any trouble with my Radeon that I had between the two GeForce cards.

Well, thank God I have a spare graphics card from my old PC so I should be able to get my current project done. I don't know when I'll be really able to afford a decent new graphics card, though. :/
Oh man, now I feel bad for posting trouble with a graphics card right after that story (actually I got kinda ninja'd). It's nothing next to a sick pet. I wish your cat the best.

I hate when I've to be honest with a friend because he's beign an ass and probably lose the friendship in the process.

Which kind of reminds me of one day last winter when everything seemed to go wrong and yet not. I was cycling in the city centre and decided to pop into a shop to restock on beer. Slow down, turn to exit the road and hop onto the kerb. Bike goes apeshit, spins 180 degrees. I somehow ended up on the kerb, though, which was good because I had been followed by a bus that slid past with all wheels locked. Whoops. I just pretended that I had planned to do that all along, got my beers and only did one one-eighty on the two-mile journey home. On the last corner, I hit the only slick of black ice in town, flipping the bike entirely; miraculously, the bike, the beers and I were all completely alright save for some ruined handlebar tape that costs like two cents a metre. Walked the last 100 metres home, discovered that I had lost my keys. So there I was, with heavy shopping, a chain lock that I can't wiggle out of wrapped around my waist (the spare keys were inside, so pretty useless), and missing a keyring that had the keys not only to my bike lock and apartment, but my brother's and (now ex-)girlfriend's apartments as well. I backtracked all the way to the shop and back a few times; amazingly, I did find the keys eventually, fifteen centimetres from a "puddle" three metres wide, four metres long and ten centimetres deep.

I wasn't entirely sure if I should have been pissed off or grateful for what had happened during that day.

Uh, don't you live at work? Or work at home? Whichever... heh

I do now but I didn't always.

Gotcha. And yeah, black ice... <shudder>

Was a bit iffy yesterday - rainy, temperature in that "may or may not freeze" range. Wife was griping about the drive home - "Everyone was going so SLOOOOW!" She has a bad case of Subris, thinking that putting a Texas-girl with little snow experience behind the wheel of a Subaru makes her the unstoppable winter force to be reckoned with. And then I remind her of the time she put her car into a snow bank - with a little bit of cosmetic damage to go with it - because she was going too fast on an off-ramp. "No, I wasn't." Did you see a bunch of other cars piled up in the same spot? "No." Then it was you, and you were going too fast.

You winter people are lucky. I am still going between air conditioning and heat here. I am just ready for it to stay below 50F, so I can leave the AC off for the winter. Not to mention mornings deciding if I need to wear a jacket.
The only draw backs are having to get up five minutes early to defrost the windows in my car and getting home from work in the dark.
Snowfall here is lucky to get to 3 inches two or three times during the winter, but black ice is universal. Came close to wrecking in large pile up at the bottom of a hill when I lived in San Antonio due to black ice.

I got 314 inches of snow last year.

If I lived near you I would have to save up all my vacation and sick leave for the winter.

I hope you made 100 snow pies.

I have to confess I love it so that post doesn't really belong in this thread. :D

Dating sucks. There have been a few years since I last experienced the first date until recently but I remember them as being fun, now every one is like mentally battling a female L from Death Note.

I think maybe because I'm older now and I'm looking into a relationship as more of a long term thing, finding someone who will eventually capture the spiders for me rather than just going out and having fun. I'm thinking I need to change my approach because this just isn't working out.

If every date with a girl for you is like a battle then you should look elsewhere for dates, man... You should not have to change and you are who you are. Just look elsewhere, like you are doing some shopping. :) Sometimes, people simply aren't compatible with the people in their city, state etc.

Yeah. I hear you, and I agree. Like I said I think the issue is my approach. I've gone the best part of a decade just falling in and out of relationships and now that I'm actually 100% single again and actively trying to find someone compatible, I find that I'm still trapped in the mindset from when I was younger and just looking for fun, which I'm now finding leads to nothing but stress.

I was talking to a friend last night who suggested to just let it happen, which is advice I've given to other people over the years, and also was at one point my own mantra but now I don't know. Self reflection is at least taking the stress off. I think maybe I need more time single to gather my thoughts.

I have had a lot of car problems this year and now another minor one is re-showing it's ugly head.
My tire keeps going flat...lose a couple PSI every day. Had the tire remounted do to the same problem in July 2012. The rim is corroding and the tire is losing the bead because of it. Well the remounting lasted a little more than a year, so perhaps I will see if I will have the same luck. Not looking forward to getting a new rim, and if that one is corroding the other three can not be far behind.
Have maybe a year more life out of my tires...so it looks like next year I will be dropping a lot of cash on new tires and rims. Sometimes I envy you Big City living mass transit people.