bravo1102 wrote:

Lonnehart wrote:
If there's one thing I hate about buying things online… it's the WAIT! I guess there's a piece of my mind that's not willing to wait… It wants that graphics card here RIGHT NOW!!! How do I calm it down… or rip it out without dying? :)

You want it done yesterday, well, you better learn to wait until the day after tomorrow.

I got over it by getting everything sent with a tracking number. I check that number multiple times a day to ease my impatience. At least I know where my package is.

You've got it easy as an American, though! I'm always jealous of you guys getting your online shopping orders days after you order it. I've been waiting on an order for nearly three weeks now. -_-

(This is possibly the first worldiest problem ever though.)

HippieVan wrote:

bravo1102 wrote:

Lonnehart wrote:
If there's one thing I hate about buying things online… it's the WAIT! I guess there's a piece of my mind that's not willing to wait… It wants that graphics card here RIGHT NOW!!! How do I calm it down… or rip it out without dying? :)

You want it done yesterday, well, you better learn to wait until the day after tomorrow.

I got over it by getting everything sent with a tracking number. I check that number multiple times a day to ease my impatience. At least I know where my package is.

You've got it easy as an American, though! I'm always jealous of you guys getting your online shopping orders days after you order it. I've been waiting on an order for nearly three weeks now. -_-

(This is possibly the first worldiest problem ever though.)

We're going to need new frame of reference. I have mailed plenty of stuff and received stuff from the second and third world and there are all kinds of tracking numbers to and from the US. Really fun tracking a package across China then down to a port and into a container for transocean shipping.

Ozoneocean can speak to this because he ordered something for me from China and we were able to follow the package to my front door. And I know from model building sites that it works in the opposite direction. So what is first versus second or third world anymore?

I guess anything beyond pure survival is a first world problem? Anything past food, water and shelter? So a guy in Africa who is having trouble with his smartphone has a first world problem in the third world? (A lot of which has better WiFi than the US!)

Eek, we're becoming a one world global community! Help me president elect Trump I need some good old American xenophobia!

HippieVan wrote:

bravo1102 wrote:

Lonnehart wrote:
If there's one thing I hate about buying things online… it's the WAIT! I guess there's a piece of my mind that's not willing to wait… It wants that graphics card here RIGHT NOW!!! How do I calm it down… or rip it out without dying? :)

You want it done yesterday, well, you better learn to wait until the day after tomorrow.

I got over it by getting everything sent with a tracking number. I check that number multiple times a day to ease my impatience. At least I know where my package is.

You've got it easy as an American, though! I'm always jealous of you guys getting your online shopping orders days after you order it. I've been waiting on an order for nearly three weeks now. -_-

(This is possibly the first worldiest problem ever though.)

I get the same problem as you due to me living in a U.S. Territory (and a LOT if not MOST U.S businesses think we're a third world country). Some orders take a week. I had to wait for a laptop battery to get to me… for a month…

As for tracking numbers they don't help. Yes, the USPS tracker says it's only its way to its destination. The problem is the final destination (where the package is heading to) is the USPS hub here on Guam. And the package will be here on the 14th. And thanks to the way the local post office handles things it will sit there for a few days before I finally get it.

Hahaha, yess, your super heavy tank :)

Out of all the places I have bought things from around the planet, Canada is without exception BY FAR the very slowest postage service. They are the very worst, no one can compete.
I have had man things shipped from Canada so it's not a one off. they're the most expensive and the slowest.
Even the free postage from china, that they just chuck in a container with bulk orders to save money, is faster than Canada post.

And it's not just because Canada is far away either. Stuff from the USA in any state comes in half the time and half the cost, same from the UK. Even as far away as Slovenia and Turkey.

So I can understand Hippie's issue!

-Last thing I got from Canada was my pillbox hat. That took 7 weeks from postage to get to me. And that wasn't unusual.

I used to deal with a seller in Canada who actually made weekly trips to a PO box across the border to avoid dealing with the Canadian post office.

There's also customs. Canadian and UK customs can hold up things for little or no reason and not notify anybody. As a seller I once dealt with that too.

We should junk all the computers and all and just go back to biplanes and little old guys in the back of a general store with a visor cap…

And Fred Astaire driving a half track. (As in the old Christmas special Santa Claus is coming to town)

I once ordered a hat online for the cold Canadian winter in August and it did not arrive until the second week of December. I ended up having to buy another hat at full retail to keep my head from freezing.

Crossing the border for packages makes sense. It was much faster to drive down to Watertown, NY, weekly than to wait for mail to arrive in Ottawa, Canada.

Heh… I wish I could drive all the way to the mainland U.S. to pick up a package. Imagine the roadtrip, 90% of which will be looking at the beautiful Pacific Ocean, enjoying the sunsets, weathering the super typhoons/hurricanes…

On second thought maybe I should just be as patient as I possibly can and just wait for the package to arrive… hopefully undamaged…

bravo1102 wrote:
I guess anything beyond pure survival is a first world problem? Anything past food, water and shelter? So a guy in Africa who is having trouble with his smartphone has a first world problem in the third world? (A lot of which has better WiFi than the US!)

Eek, we're becoming a one world global community! Help me president elect Trump I need some good old American xenophobia!

I…okay. That escalated quickly. I actually meant to refer to myself with the “first world problem” comment. I have money to throw around on more eyeshadows that I definitely don't need, and then complain about how long they take to get to me. Pretty silly.

ozoneocean wrote:
Hahaha, yess, your super heavy tank :)

Out of all the places I have bought things from around the planet, Canada is without exception BY FAR the very slowest postage service. They are the very worst, no one can compete.
I have had man things shipped from Canada so it's not a one off. they're the most expensive and the slowest.
Even the free postage from china, that they just chuck in a container with bulk orders to save money, is faster than Canada post.

And it's not just because Canada is far away either. Stuff from the USA in any state comes in half the time and half the cost, same from the UK. Even as far away as Slovenia and Turkey.

So I can understand Hippie's issue!

-Last thing I got from Canada was my pillbox hat. That took 7 weeks from postage to get to me. And that wasn't unusual.

Yeeeeeep. I genuinely don't know why Canada Post is so terrible. We seem to have just decided that we're okay with it. It's actually cheaper for me to send the same package to someone in the US or UK than it is to send it to someone in the next province over. And customs is completely unpredictable - most orders come in with no problem whatsoever, but every so often an order will get looked over and it'll have an incredible fee owing on it, like 1/3 of the cost of the actual products.

HippieVan wrote:

bravo1102 wrote:
I guess anything beyond pure survival is a first world problem? Anything past food, water and shelter? So a guy in Africa who is having trouble with his smartphone has a first world problem in the third world? (A lot of which has better WiFi than the US!)

Eek, we're becoming a one world global community! Help me president elect Trump I need some good old American xenophobia!

I…okay. That escalated quickly. I actually meant to refer to myself with the “first world problem” comment. I have money to throw around on more eyeshadows

Without a sarcastic delivery and rolling eyes my joke falls flat. I was being facetious. But then life is a banquet and most people are starving to death because they didn't read the sign saying it's self serve.

It really has become one big world where anybody with Internet access can search and find anything and have 30 shades of eye shadow and a 60 inch TV mailed to their hut in Botswana.

And now I'm worried. One shipping option I took was to have the graphics card wrapped up in an Amazon.com box. According to a coworker she ordered something from Amazon and had it wrapped in such a box, but when she got it the thing had been opened and the box had holes in it…

I wonder what whoever is looking into the box will think when they see a pot of Vegemite inside…

https://www.amazon.com/Vegemite-Pot-950g-Made-Australia/dp/B00HYUSEXO/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1478911844&sr=8-1-spons&keywords=vegemite&smid=A3L6TC6HVCYFVE&th=1

Obviously not sure if this is where you heard that story originally, but Oliver Sacks' book An Anthropologist on Mars has at least one chapter about that.

Ooh, I don't think I've read that, but it's on my list now!

I'm antsy about ordering things online because I've had too many packages disappear since I've moved here =( Someone tells me they're sending me something and I never get it and they have to resend it if they can.

Well, that was a fun night of earthquakes. No damage to our house, and the kids get a day off school, and the wife a day (or more) off work. Her workplace has taken quite a bit of damage. The cats are a bit freaked, and the aftershocks are coming in swarms, but we got off lightly. A lack of sleep and the need to boil drinking water being the most pressing problems in our house at least.

Gunwallace wrote:
Well, that was a fun night of earthquakes. No damage to our house, and the kids get a day off school, and the wife a day (or more) off work. Her workplace has taken quite a bit of damage. The cats are a bit freaked, and the aftershocks are coming in swarms, but we got off lightly. A lack of sleep and the need to boil drinking water being the most pressing problems in our house at least.

Yikes! It's nice to know your family is safe! I hope your community made it out okay (sans the building damage and damaged utilities).

At least my package is now on island. I'll be checking the post office in a few hours…

@Gunwallace-
I saw the New Zealand earthquake on the news and hoped that your family made it out okay. I remember when the whole Christchurch earthquake happened around the beginning of 2011.

Boiling water is bothersome, but it is an important step to reducing the risk of getting sick.

So THAT'S why there's no Gunwallace musical theme this week! XD

Stay safe man.

Jeez this graphics card is massive. It's thick enough to take up two upgrade slots, and it's heavy as well. Thankfully it fit inside my case with room to spare. Driver issues aside it performs as expected. The fans are off most of the time unless I'm gaming, and it's got this LED logo that I set to “breathe” and matches the red lighting in my case (it fades between bright and dim). And it came in a week early to boot. :)

I wish I had the time and money to build a new monster machine like that lonne :(

I keep intending to with my old giant Dell XPS tower but I never quite get around to it. It's still on Vista and crashes all the time. I use it as my media centrer pretty much because of the great sound-card and speakers and it's hooked up to a big screen.

BUT, I think I might spend my money on a newer Samsung Note tablet… maybe the pro model. Those are cheap now and they're amazing light weight screen tablets. Way better value than a Cintiq any day- or even a Microsoft Surface.

And I am taking notes because my laptop will need replacement eventually. I am so glad I held off putting Windows 10 on it. My PC has Windows 10 and I hate it. Between the operating system and the anti virus software the thing is a freaking snail compared to my laptop running 7. Outside of cropping I cannot do any Photoshop on my PC because the computer will stop cold and I have to wait for it to catch up.

@Lonnehart: I know what you mean about the graphics card. I had to build an additional support in my case just to keep the weight of my card from stressing out my PCI slot and causing my screen to go black. All of the modern rendering engines for 3D modeling software offload their processing calls to the graphics card, so I have no choice but to install a really beefy one. When I am rendering, the fans are pretty much screaming all the time. Ideally, I should get something like an Nvidia Tesla, but those are preposterously expensive.

ozoneocean wrote:
I wish I had the time and money to build a new monster machine like that lonne :(

I keep intending to with my old giant Dell XPS tower but I never quite get around to it. It's still on Vista and crashes all the time. I use it as my media centrer pretty much because of the great sound-card and speakers and it's hooked up to a big screen.

BUT, I think I might spend my money on a newer Samsung Note tablet… maybe the pro model. Those are cheap now and they're amazing light weight screen tablets. Way better value than a Cintiq any day- or even a Microsoft Surface.

Well, the card WAS a budget card at $219 on Amazon. That was before resellers bought Amazon's stock of the cards before reselling it at an even higher price (taking advantage of the fact there's not a lot of them around). Seems to happen every time a new video card is put out. As for Amazon, I suggest looking around for computer parts and upgrading as you need. I know that saves me money in the long run (I just upgrade here and there, not the whole machine). Heck… I'm still using my mid-tower case from nearly a decade ago.

My machine isn't really that much of a beast. Well… compared to the more expensive rigs touting the newest i7 Intel processors, 32GB memory, Solid State Drives with Terrabytes of storage and NVidia 1080 graphics cards…

I used to spend around 5K on my machines…
NO WAY I would spend that now! It was never worth it.

I am tossing up between a powerful but fairly inexpensive home built rig and a powerful ultrabook…
It's tricky. The last computer I bough was a Samsung series 9 ultrabook and it has bee simply excellent. Still runs beautifully (but I need a reliable backup).
So the thing IS, given that experience and the fact that I don't game, I could be happy with another ultrabook- they take up less space, use less power, are portable, look nice, are physically cool and don't contribute to heating up my house during the long summers…
The disadvantage is they are harder to upgrade and you pay more for the form factor than their performance.

Heh… I wish I had $3700 U.S. to blow on a machine all at once. Though to be honest my own machine cost less than $1500 (all performance but budget parts). I know the Intels and Nvidias perform better as far as gaming goss, but I'm satisfied as long as the machine does the job well.

I don't normally use laptops, so it's hard to know what I'm buying when looking at one. If I could, I'd drop money on this…


MSI GP72 Leopard Pro-694 17.3" GAMING LAPTOP NOTEBOOK

Or even better… THIS

XOTIC MSI GE72VR Apache Pro 009 - 17.3" Gaming Laptop


-edit- Finally figured out how to make links… except maybe sausage links (gonna have to look up Youtube for that)…

With those laptops, tTat's about as much as I'd like to pay…
Maybe even less.

Budget parts are a good way to go. More expensive parts have JUST the same chance of breaking. I know that OH too well. Even if you believed the Apple myth, hahaha, no matter what you pay your stuff WILL eventually break, sometimes sooner rather than later.

The only thing I prefer not to skimp on are hard drives.

You could go for a Solid State Drive. They don't wear out so easily… unless you're constantly writing large files to them.

Funny how that works. SSDs wear out when you write to them, but hard drives wear out when you READ from them (making them perfect for mass storage while you can use an SSD for programs you need to load into RAM fast)…

On Saturday I went to the lovely Victoria Hall in Fremantle to be part of the Great Gatsby night. I was dressed up to the 9's in my vintage white tie and tails that was actually FROM the 1920s.
My date did not show, but I got a few drinks in me, socialised and had fun anyway.
I won the Best Dressed award and took home free dance lessons and wine- BOTH of which I will be taking advantage off.

On the way home I decided to catch the train. Walking down the street I met and befriended many people, having some good conversations with slightly tipsy people on the tail ends of their nights out.

At the train station a man was surrounded by train police complaining loudly. He dodged buying his ticked and was going to get a fine. I offered to pay the $100 fine for him, but the police refused… Weirdos.

A nice guy and his wife were also on the platform and witnessed the event. I got to chatting with them and found out he's a musician for the West Australian Symphony Orchestra (WASO). He said they have a job going for a graphic designer…

I'm going to try applying for that ^_^
My current job is good, I have a LOT of freedom but I don't work enough hours… I find I need more and more money these days. I have a crap tonne of skills so I'm really confident in my abilities, and I would LOVE to work for the Orchestra.

@Oz- A Gatsby themed party sounds like so much fun. There were a lot of parties in the days of prohibition.

The local police department has started to use drones to chase after suspects. There was a low flying drone in my relatively safe neighborhood and then I heard it talking (not to me) “Come Out, this is the Police” or “stay indoors, we are chasing a suspect with a canine”. It made me think that they could use these drones to spy on people when they are in the bedroom or bathroom and having a drone right outside the window is not my idea of privacy.

I just saw Hacksaw Ridge in theaters. It was pretty violent and I needed to step outside a few times during the battle scenes.

I work in an area bounded by major highways and loaded with industry as well as several pipelines. I wish I just had drones to deal with. Colonial pipeline patrols with helicopters, the TV stations have helicopters, the police have helicopters…

Then where I live there are executive transports, medivacs and the Coast Guard. Army and Navy training flights also follow the coast. And they fly low so the whole house shakes. Drones are a lot less obtrusive.

But then I have been snuck up on by low flying light observation helicopter. He flew nape of the earth to mask his rotors. I was eating my mre and he popped up from behind the ridge in front of me. Close enough to see the color of the pilot's eyes.

And please no jokes about black helicopters. I am very good with recognizing helicopters by nomenclature and paint scheme. Ain't nothing I see in the sky i can't id. Used to be my job.

This is my favorite helicopter to jump out of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A%C3%A9rospatiale_Alouette_II

fallopiancrusader wrote:
This is my favorite helicopter to jump out of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A%C3%A9rospatiale_Alouette_II

Like the one in M.A.S.H ^_^
For the people who forget their chutes “Suicide is painless” XD

How many times have you jumped?

The actual M*A*S*H helicopter is the Bell H-13 Sioux which first flew in 1945! An earlier piston engined helicopter compared to the Alouette II which has a gas turbine engine and first flew 12 years later.

I've only flown in a Bell Jet Ranger and a Huey. But I don't jump out of them:-D

However, if you are ever over Central New Jersey, feel free to drop in and we'll do lunch.