I have a customer who owes me nearly $4,000 for parts and service from February 2012. I made the mistake of subcontracting under a fellow technician (who was also my boss at one time). He was invoiced at a discount, he marked it up to the rate being charged to the customer for the rest of the job, customer paid him, and instead of paying me (and still making a good profit) he spent it to move his family to another town. Last year I sent him a birthday card for the unpaid invoice, and will likely do so again this year.

I'm counting that money as gone at this point.

After that job he took a full-time position at another company and had that place contract me for some parts and service. I'm not horribly upset about the $4k because the later work and parts sales from that company generated income that I likely would never have seen if he didn't take that job, since he was the reason they bought the machine that needed the later work and parts.

Still aggravating...

Well, I mean online stores. :) Most brick and mortar stores have only generic 300-500€ cheapo laptops, and maybe some overpriced and underpowered HP laptop costing 2000€ just because it has "incredible Beats&Boobs Audio System". As if I'd care, I usually use headphones or external speakers anyway.

Yeah, 4k bucks, that's a sum I'd get worked up for

As a proud Scotsman I can tell you this for certain. The Scots and the Welsh would be happy if England just sank.

Edit: Just incase have any Welsh reading this. Awright ya sheep shaggin bastards, Hows it going?

Have you reminded your friends. I know my memory is shit and whenever I borrow from a friend I tell them to remind me if I haven't paid them back in x amount of days. I never understood why it is so impolite to remind a friend about their debt.
I like the advertisement, so I know which laptop to avoid. Speakers with the bass raised too high is a negative for me.

It's uh, yeah. There are some work-related things I could use it for, to be sure. Expensive lesson.

We had that problem here last Tuesday. All offices, schools, etc. were let out at the same time, took people 3-4x as long to get home. You would think that wouldn't happen in areas where it snows every winter, but nope!

Hahah, good one. But Scotland and Wales are connected to the English landmass, so if it sank, it would take both down with it. :P

Have you seen the uk news lately?

Large areas of england are currently flooded and under over 6" of water, in scotland the rivers are a bit higher than normal. In wales the flood defenses got a pounding.

Ok so im understating some bits.

I guess I should have worded that a little better. Leave it to you to catch my poorly worded post and knock it out of the park with a humorous reply.

With CaMoron & Co at the helm it won't be long :P

dman is fucking cold over here

This weekend it will be too warm here. :( It is supposed to go near or even above 0 Celsius on weekend, meaning awful watery snow (slush?) everywhere, sleet coming from the sky and such.

Who can like a fake winter like that? This current -7 => -10 Celsius was about perfect. Damn mild air currents coming from the south!

Think of it as payment for a lesson. The lesson is never to borrow to those people again. :)

Is there just a general "chat about whatever" topic on here somewhere? If there is I can't find it so this thread will do.

I don't do this so much anymore but recently I decided, hey, I'm going to check out one of those "abandonware" titles on my personal wishlist that doesn't look to have a chance of being re-released anytime soon. The game? John Saul's Blackstone Chronicles, an adventure game with what I've read has a good story and a great atmosphere of psychological horror. I've been on a kind of horror kick as of late (horror games are weird in how I'm of two minds about them tugging at each other constantly - on one hand, they FASCINATE me like no other, I WANT to play and experience something unnerving, disturbing, what-have-you, on the other hand, the experience is often very stressful and at some point I become too afraid to play any longer, or, afraid to play a game to begin with - it's not that common, but I do hesitate to touch something that I read has nasty jump scares, chase sequences, and/or high levels of resource management) and everything I've read about this game sounded up my alley. So I went on my merry way to abandonia and... what, they won't allow any links to the game there? Because... something to do with Legend Entertainment who have been defunct for a long time now? I... don't get it. At all. NOBODY is selling the fucking thing, nothing on that site is technically "legal" to begin with, why is this game so damn special? But... fine, I'll just look elsewhere. Nope! Nada! I never thought finding a download of a somewhat well-known old PC game that has been out of print for years now would be so difficult. Torrent sites, only ones I found had at the most one seeder, no leechers, but it still wouldn't even make it to the "download" phase. Seems there is little interest in this game on that front. Other torrent sites just have the books for download (I don't know how good the books themselves are, but in this case I just want to play the damn game adaptation, the books can wait later). One site I found had the game for download, and all seemed well, it was downloading quickly and I was happy... but the file for the second disc was corrupt. And the site looks to be inactive so that ain't going to be fixed anytime soon. The "best," and I really mean it when I put that word in quotes, I found was a site that REALLY means it when it says "slow download speed." I guess I have to pay for a subscription or something if I want fast speeds? But I thought the slow would suffice, usually they do, under an hour or two at most, and that's usually for significantly large files. Not here! It's a little over a 1 GB download and it's downloading at around 4 kb a second, give or take ever-so-minuscule drops or rises in speed. Says "3 days left." I am certainly not keeping my computer on for that long!

Games this hard to find to download should be reserved for like obscure X68000 mecha action games with gratuitous hentai inserted (there is actually one such game that meets this description, I can't think of the name though), not for an acclaimed PC adventure gaming cult classic. I am tempted to pay for the subscription but... I really don't want to. I just hope GOG gets a hold of this game some day, but any old game licensed from another property, be it a book or movie, are so damn difficult to renew, and really costly too to bring back once the license is expired and no longer interested in working with anyone without a significant sum. Though if we could strike a deal with friggin' Harlan Ellison to re-release I Have No Mouth... then I have slightly more hope. NIGHT DIIIIIVE! (someone needs to build a Night Dive spotlight near their headquarters like they have for Batman)

I think you may be referring to Metal & Lace. Remember seeing that one on abandonware sites ever since I first discovered one on the web.

And well, the big difference between John Saul's Blackstone Chronicles and all the other obscure oldies is probably the license. I presume the party sending out cease and desist letters to abandonware sites may not be the developer nor rightsholder of the game but whoever represents John Saul.