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Awesome thread idea, dude! Dude. I understand you're in a tough situation. Many of us have been there. But... this is a thread for accomplishments, feel good stories, etc. If you want a thread that is about your situation, and how crap it makes you feel, create it. But this isn't really the place. Don't rain on this parade. I recently found out that I'm moving to day shift after 6-1/2 years of night shift. That's really exciting for me. I'll get to sleep in the same bed as my wife more than 1 night a week. I'll get to be there at night and make my family feel safe. I'll feel better physically and emotionally. I'm very excited to move to days. The guy I'll be working with is a good dude too, so that's a bonus.

Flip side of the coin vs. the grinding gears thread I feel we need a positive story outlet. It might be misconstrued into a "cool story bro" brag post thread but I'm chill with it because I like hearing other peoples triumphs, any size, be them personal, professional, financial or otherwise. < That rhymes At times reading about others good fortune picks me up if I'm feeling down. Like Bees winning loot on scratchies. Thats awesome! I’ll start by sharing: last night I officially converted from oil to natural gas as my primary heating fossil fuel. I’ve been in my house 4 years last month and the rising cost of oil has shit hammered me into investing in an alternative. Our oil boiler, which did heat and hot water - I have radiator heat, was running well below 70% efficiency. I got a Rinnai combi unit that does both heat and hot water at 95% efficiency. Which is awesome because if we’re using hot water it will only fire up for what we use and then turn off; also it will burn at a lower percentage if we aren’t hard on the hot water. The old boiler burned at 100% every time it kicked on. My plumber was curious so I got my pay slips and calculated it cost me $4,800 in oil last year. I never let the tank get below 1/2 so sludge wouldn’t get sucked through the line, clog the filter and have me stinking like oil for 2 days because I had to do minor maintenance, but in the winter I was calling every month for deliveries. Now I don’t have to call anyone! Very excited and can’t wait to see what the savings will be!

Seems like no matter what you do, everyone else around you is going to take your money and you'll never be free. If you're cool with that, then by all means its your decision. At your age it is not your responsibility to take care of people who dont want to take care of themselves, and will never change. If you want a better life, you need to move out and move on. There are plenty of jobs that you could find that pay enough for you to take care of yourself in your own apartment. Maybe you need to move far away and make a life for yourself. It is YOUR life, after all.

I don't know if its much of a story, but I've increased my net worth by a fuzz over $200,000 since I started keeping track in '02. I grew up without much money and was completely ignorant as to how to handle it. At that time, I had owned three Camaros and a Corvette (one at a time, I traded "up" often), was about $36k in debt, and living off of the GI Bill and an entry level IT job. I was actually living off of credit, but too ignorant to realize (or possibly to depressed and drunk to care) the long term impact. For person reasons I think I've explained in the past, I wanted to hit the "reset" button and went overseas as a contractor. I was instantly making a lot more money and having a lot fewer temptations to spend. I realized that I now had surplus money and had no idea what to do with it. I decided I should educate myself and started with Ric Edelman's book, "The Truth About Money." That book fascinated me and lead me to "The Richest Man in Babylon." Both books contain the simple concept of "no matter what you make, someone is getting by on 10% less. Find out how, live like that, and invest that 10% in your future." So, I did. Because I seldom half ass get interested in anything, I continued to educate myself. I read more books, I took online classes, I subscribed to a few periodicals on personal finance, etc. This was the single most important thing I've done educationally speaking. Now some will doubtlessly say, well of course its easy to increase your net worth when you suddenly get a high paying job. is is easy to continue that when your pay is cut dramatically? Because that's what happens next. I contracted for two years, which let me put the lid on a lot of my debt and get some emergency savings put up. I came home with about $40k net worth, including the equity in a house that I put a reasonable down payment on, cash savings, and the starts of my investment funds. When I came back stateside I worked two part time jobs. My total income was less than $22k for the year, and I had a new wife and son. I still increased my net worth by $5k that year. After that year I got on the police department, which required a move to a new city. While the salary was reasonable (especially after the first two years), I couldn't sell my old house and it sat on the market for a year. Plus I had the expenses of moving. I reluctantly became a landlord. Today, not including my pension and 300 hours of accumulated time off the dept has to pay me for if I leave or retire, my net worth sits at around $165k. $8300 in ready cash, $66,000 in stocks, gov't bonds, and other investments, and $91,000 in equity in real estate. I have one property paid off, and two still with a mortgage. The only non-mortgage debt I have is my 2012 Dodge Ram truck loan at 1.39%, the first brand new vehicle I ever bought. Not bad for a single income household. Some of it has been skill and education, without that I couldn't have continued to be disciplined and invested, but I've also had some great luck. I've wasted money, I've made mistakes, but overall the past 10 years has been a success. At this point in my life, I could save more if I wanted to, but I've struck a nice balance between saving for the future and spending on today, but without the knowledge and discipline that would be a lot harder to do.

Most likely not exciting for you blokes at all, but here is my FUCK YEA!!!! Years ago the Dept of Education created the "90/10 rule" "The 90/10 rule requires for-profit colleges to get no more than 90% of their revenues from Title IV federal student aid." For years now at work, we have been asking the bean counters to let us run the numbers for this, but they wouldn't, it was to important for "IT" to get a hold of, and to screw up. There was also some moaning that SQL databases couldn't handle the # of equations involved in this and only Excel could accurately handle it. (Actual quote from the head Accountant, OMG I laughed so hard, in his face when he said it to me. So the Accounting department created this huge series of spreadsheets that pull data from our Financial Aid database (SQL), then they perform this huge series of really poorly written calculations against it, and let it chug along. A 3.2ghz quad core, 12gb Ramm system, with nothing on it but Office, takes about 36 hours for Excel to finish running and spit out the final answer. God help you, if you try to even move the mouse in that period of time as the whole thing could screw up. Figure this thing is parsing a grand total of 556732 payments and invoices, sorting them down into one record for every student for 40869 total records (Yes, these are actual number of records). Then it Codes each item to what type it is, and then tallies it all. From there it starts breaking things apart by Pell, Sub, Unsub, Credit Card, GAE, DANTES, Cash, Scholarship, etc... Super complex to say the least. About 3 weeks ago, I finally had enough of all the bitching about this report, and how hard it is. So I swiped a copy of all of it, and I started recreating it all in SQL. I finished it Wednesday, and presented it to the Presidents Council yesterday morning. While there, we all caught a change from the DoE that was missed and that I didn't know about. They asked me to correct the report and come back next week when the re-run was complete. I changed it on the spot, reran all the numbers, and had a new answer for them within 5 minutes. The accountants didnt' believe me that it could be run that fast, so I ran it again with them watching. And then again, and again, etc.... It only takes about 27 seconds (Depending on server load) for SQL to do what it took Excel 36+ hours. They were not happy with me to say the least. But my boss, and the CIO grabbed me for lunch and want to send me to DBA classes so I can be a proper SQL admin.

In my case I say it's my education which lead to my current job From 1982-1985 Achieved mu BSEE (engineering bachelor's in just over 2 years and graduated 1st in Class). From 1992-1994 MSEE (masters) + PhD This lead to Jobs with ATI (now AMD), Cisco systems and Intel and a pretty darn good living for me a my family. With this we were able to instill the importance of education to our kids. My son should be going to University next year and has been accepted (already) in Canada's top 5 University. my daughter is looking into engineer.

Saw this line posted on another forum ... 'Moyes spent 11 years trying to get Everton above Man UTD and now he's finally done it'.

This thread's parade, not anyone in particular. So, no, you wouldn't need to put down anyone's achievements. You just shit on the thread in general. This thread is meant for positive stories... you came in with an "poor me" story. That's raining on this thread's parade. But semantics aside... you get the point.

Okay it's only 1am here so no Insomnia yet But it's just a couple hours away. I have been this way since my late 20's...Insomnia like a SOB. I have SOOOO much trouble just shutting my mind down. I actually have read/studied about this and there are actually people that for whatever reason experience over active brain wave length and they seriously have issues "shutting their mind down"... I really think after decades of issues, that's me You guys all know I never pull any punches, I and 100% honest, and I am up front about my past with being a recovering alcoholic. Part of the reason I was a drinker in my 30's was because it helped me to get to sleep. Without it I laid in bed 2/3/4/5 hrs a night unable to sleep. I've noticed now the past year or two my Insomnia is getting worse again. Last thing I ever want to do is go back to drinking, even though that option has crossed my mind lately due to lack of sleep Anyone else ever deal with Insomnia or have any things you do to help?

Do it http://www.amazon.com/Mass-Effect-3-PC/dp/B004FYKWZU

I'm solely recruiting people for multiplayer, they can go back and play the campaign for ME1-3 when I've finished with them. xD

Sorry that came off as a bit harsh. What I meant was that breadcrumbs and shit will attract them, it's good practice to keep your house as clean as possible for many reasons, this being one of them. As for getting rid of them, fuck knows. You can kill them, but they'll breed faster than you can. If you've got an infestation, it'll take months and months of proper treatment to sort it out. This will cost a FUCKTONNE of money. If I were in your shoes, I'd clean the place up as much as I can, spend the cash you were going to spend on roaches on getting the damage your sister caused fixed (do it yourself, ask for advice here if you need it, holes in walls are easily fixed) and then get your landlord to sort it out. If he doesn't, take photos of your living conditions, show him the photos and tell him that you're going to send them to your council's health and wellbeing department and watch how quick it gets sorted. He can get into massive trouble for that. Don't tackle the cockroaches, that's a side effect of not being able to call your landlord. Solution: call your landlord. For this, you'll have to sort the damage first.

No joke, I am waiting for a hacked client to come out so we can play again. I really hope they update Battlefront with this Engine. //Oh, and give me a Hoth map!

Haha funny you should say that.. I picked up a hooker last night and after a blow job (she came miracously!) I paid for a quickie but he cops were looking for someone and she got too scared to do the job. But she took my money! Funniest part was when a friend of mine showed up when I stopped by the highway and he threw her out of the car

It's like a room full of Euans.

What I posted? Diseases roaches carry

Theres always Jordie as well, he might be down

Does anyone have friends playing? If so would they be interested in joining the crew?

We have 8 members and I believe when you do missions/whatever with crew members you get an extra 20% RP or cash, can't remember

Never played one or two. Got three only for multiplayer

Running on ultra with no issue. Game is gorgeous. I suck at driving, so I'm gonna need to practice that crap. Seems most of my deaths were due to someone in a tank. I guess I need to stay out of the street. Moment of glory that made it all worth it? I parachuted down to a lower building and took out two guys while doing it. DEATH FROM ABOVE MOTHERFUCKERS!!!!!!! There were a couple lag spikes, but nothing I cared about. Mostly I need to remap all the keys to my mouse. I'm okay with WASD movement, but the rest need to change. Especially run. The double-tap thingy doesn't work for me. Overall, I think think game is gonna be wicked once the full release comes out. If I can have a group of friends that play the same time I do, I will dump ridiculous hours into it.

Mkay, so on PC, my experience was awesome peppered by lag. My WiFi card is less than adequate at the moment so I'm sure that didn't help. I max the game out easily on ultra with everything turned on at 1080, but the lag is the killer. As stated above, it's to be expected and can be worked around. Battlelog is the worst piece of software ever developed, but I've been chiming that tune forever. The game itself, is brilliant. In the moments between the lagspikes it really is well sorted. The TTK seems significantly lower than BF3, the medkits are smaller, but I found camping to be a major issue. Obviously camping is the easiest tactic hence why it's in the game at the moment, but once people start catching on to it I'm pretty sure that campers will be in many a sniper's scopes. Most obvious is the top of buildings. I went up tons of elevators only to be greeted by some twat sitting on the rooftop prone, with his sights on the lift. I have no doubt that there is a sniper spot somewhere which is yet to be found, and if not, that DICE will implement one, as the campers sitting there are frankly ridiculous. I came out a lift at one point to be greeted by no less than four of them. I haven't ventured into vehicles yet, I drove an APC for a bit but the lag spikes meant I crashed quite a bit. The handling seemed alright but it needs work. This is most likely a lag issue. So far, I give it a 7/10. My feel towards the game is that it has the potential to be a solid 10, but at the moment it's let down by simple flaws and what can only be described as "bitches" - people who camp. If DICE manage to sort out the connection issues and give us a way to combat campers, this game ought to be awesome. I can't comment too much on vehicles yet so this score is based on direct combat. I have high hopes for this game.

I've always found that punching myself in the balls really hard takes my mind off insomnia. It won't help you sleep, but you won't be so worried about not sleeping any longer. In all seriousness, I seldom suffer from the inability to sleep. When I do its usually because some priority run has jacked my sleep schedule by keeping me on the clock well past my usual bed time. Melatonin has worked well for me with both shift issues and with jet lag. Adult "activities" also help. I quit drinking for a couple of years because I was having issues with quantity control, but now that I'm older I find I can drink as little as I want with no issues. You know you better than I know you and should make that decision carefully, but a glass of wine also helps me. It also often transitions into those adult activities, so win-win there. Again, no real claim of expertise here and I seldom have what would be termed insomnia.

And if you can get weather compensation controls.....happy days!

I'm working on a sh*tty spawn montage, give me a few days. x)

Fap fap fapping actually does help......

Please tell me I'm not the only one who saw *fap fap fap*

Sign up for social club so we can get you in the crew. You won't regret it at all

I'm getting GTA V on sunday when I get home. Maybe we can play a little during the week.

I'm making this to post all the crazy stunts and stuff I come up with Probably will post other stuff like personal tips and who knows what when the game goes online. Here are a couple of vids I've made so far

Not really, like I said before, the wife said she hated riding the crazy train and wouldn't buy anymore tickets. I am all for having a beard, but uh, if it comes down to me and the wife having fun, or shaving..... Pass the razor bitch!

Pretty much the closest you guys will get to a pic of me I cant figure out why it looks patchy on the side in this pic. It was hotter than satans anus outside that day, so maybe the heat and sweat had something to do with it. IDK oh well, this was taken about 2 months before I was told to shave it back, so in the end it wasn't much longer than what you see here.

Yeah yeah I'm old, but I'm listen this right now ... Freddie was the man!