kylebees

Jason, that is awesome. I love hearing about things like that. I actually work with a girl whose Husband won $1 Million dollars on a scratch off. I actually use to work with him years ago. Good people to have it happen to.

May as well tell you guys about my wife's lotto experience the other day.
My wife has a dream the night before she played the numbers. She dreamed I had a 101 degree temperature and wasn't feeling well.
The next morning she saw that one of her Facebook friends kids had a 101 degree temperature, Sooooooooo as you might guess she played the pick three.
101 came out exactly. We won over 600 bills because she played it straight and boxed.
Now if I can get her dreaming the mega millions numbers we'd be set.

I'm not even joking, I won another $500 this morning on the same exact scratch off ticket as the last one!!! I feel like the big winner is coming though!!!!
 
And Mike, it's great to hear about your triumphant return to night driving!! I'm really happy for you.

Well, I recently put this in my PPR, but it made me so excited I want to contribute it to this thread. 
 
Background: When I was 16, I got into a bad car accident (not my fault) which in the end made me an epileptic. Because of that, I wasn't able to drive anymore, doctors orders. It gradually got worse and I ended up having a temporal lobectomy done (which was all documented in my PPR on the MW2forum). I had some seizures through the healing process of the surgery, but I haven't had a seizure since. So now onto my happy story!
 
Just this past Friday night, for the first time since I was 16 years old (the night of my accident), I actually got the courage up to drive at night. I drove for about an hour with my relative and it made me really happy. For the first time, I wasn't scared of the lights and even though I was really tense the whole time, it made me feel at peace. Needless to say, I can't wait until my next nighttime outing. 

My Step Daughter put a pair of Dr Martin's boots on Ebay the other day,  simply because she never wore them and she wanted to try and make some money to fund a new lens for her camera.
 
She paid £120 originally, she sold them for £265!!! Needless to say she's happy, which as a usually grumpy teenager is a BIG bonus!

Ok, I'm proud of myself on this one.  We had guests over yesterday and after everything was done I put my son to bed.  He's 8 and big into zombies and monsters and whatnot, but lately he's scared himself and started wanting a night light on again.  Last night he asked if I would sleep in his room with him, so I talked with him and had him tell me exactly what he was afraid of.  It was mostly the imaginary monsters, with a little bit of old house noises and an odd shadow on his wall.  We fixed the shadow issue by moving some stuff around, explained the house noises and the imaginary nature of monsters.  I could tell this helped a little, and even though he accepted it was imaginary, he was still scared.
 
So, imaginary guardians to combat imaginary monsters.  I told him that if the bad guys are imaginary, then imaginary good guys could protect him.  He agreed to this concept.  I took a bunch of his stuffed toys and put them in the bed with him.  We talked about the fighting prowess of the various species (shark, dragon, bear, etc.)  The chicken ended up being a lookout.  Santa and the Cat in the Hat were the captains.  I told him he was now the general of a stuffed animal army, and not only was he excited about the "game", he was ready to go to sleep by himself.
 
He's in there explaining his defense to his mom now.

To be perfectly honest, I win now because I fucked up so dramatically early on but eventually learned from it.  I've worked hard, but I've also had some lucky breaks and God, whatever that may encompass, has smiled on me at some pivotal moments.
 
Tiger's wrong.  I did give up. For about three years, give or take.  I just didn't stay there. 
 
I typed out a bunch of stuff, and then realized that it didn't matter and it didn't fit this thread.  So, instead, just let me tell you a story Wayne Carter, a teacher who influenced me greatly in high school, once told me.
 
A traveling salesman approaches an old farmer on his porch.  The saleman hears a dog whimpering and moaning, and as he steps on the porch he sees a hound pup laying on the porch near the old farmer's rocking chair.  He ignores the pup and starts talking to farmer about his wares, but the dogs moaning and whimpering grow and grow.  The farmer never mentions the dog or pays any mind to the sounds, but the salesman has finally had enough.
 
The salesman asks, "what's wrong with your dog, mister?"
The farmer replies, "he's laying on a tack."
The salesman mulls this over and says, "well, why doesn't he move off of it?"
The farmer replies, "I guess he hasn't experienced enough pain yet."
 
That's it.  No moral was given.  In the brashness of youth I thought the lesson was "stop bitching and moaning, fix the problem."  I still think that's part of it.  The other part took me some years and experience to truly grasp.  How much pain will you put up with because the surroundings are familiar?  Because its the status quo, because its the easiest course of action, because its all you know up to that point and you aren't willing to expand your horizons or upset the routine?  Probably more than you think.  Once you adapt your worldview its no longer about complain or fix it.  Its discovering what the tacks are, if they are big enough to make you move, and what moving entails.  Some tacks you'll live with.  Some you won't.  How much pain will it take you to move?

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. 

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.

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. 

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.

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!
 

As is always the case. Haha

Looks like a KKK beauty contest!!!

EUROGAMER 2013
 
Well, that was good!!
 
Met up with Dave Cator at London Liverpool Street and travelled to Earls Court quite quickly, getting there about 10 minutes after opening to be met by a queue of approx 2 - 3,000 people! but it moved through fairly quickly
 
No sign of Rich, Cal and the others with all day tickets and a quick call revels they're waiting on bacon sarnies
 
Earls Court is a big place and it quickly developed into a big place full of queues!
 
Upstairs in the 18+ are we started of with Battlefield 4 (queue time approx 1 hour) played on XBones - amazing even on those gimpy XB controllers!! well worth the wait to play one battle and I think this will be on my Crimbo wish list if not earlier. Queue wait was also livened by being lucky enough to catch a BF4 T-shirt being lobbed out randomly to the hordes
 
Still no sign of the rest of the "all dayers"
 
Back down stairs to CoD Ghosts (QT just under an hour). This was not quite so impressive and also played on the dreaded XBone. This time I couldn't figure out how to start the bloody game and the alloted time was for a TDM so, with a couple of guys on the otherside who knew what they were doing it was all over very quickly. From what I saw and the action I managed to get I think that Ghosts is probably run and gun and BF4 is more a thinking man's game
 
Still no sign of the guys with all day tickets (they're waiting for Tam to get out of the shower) so we stopped for a pizza then on to the Sony PS4 (QT about 40 mins to get into the area) to try out the next gen console
 
CELEBITY ALERT!!! - spotted Jason Bradbury from The Gadget Show in the PS4 area
 
Once you got into the PS4 area you're given two tickets to try different games and each one was valid for about 6 different games. Reasonably good idea to keep the waiting times down so we decided first of all to try DriveClub. Stunning graphics especially when compared to the PS3 drive game (Gran Tourismo 6) being shown outside of the area. All I can say are my memories are correct and I can confirm I am worse at driving games than FPS but it gave me a good laugh
 
The we queued for another FPS, Backlight I think which was letting you play a complete round of the game but my legs were shot so it was "Dave, gimme your bag. You queue for a go " and I sat on the floor. 10 minutes later Mister C had done the maths and had worked out with 6-7 people in front of him taking 8-10 minutes to complete a go on the game.....naah!
 
Still no sign of the others so we go for a wander around the smaller stands which were quite interesting and the retro area bringing back early computing memories - Doom anyone? Loads of the old machines as well
 
Then, just before 5.00.....text "We're here and getting our wristbands!"  then "we're at the bar" (naturally!   )
 
and so we have....
 
 

Cal, Tam, Jenna and Rich
 
 

 
Rich Euan and Stretch
 
 

 
Dylan, Kyla (Diddum's better half) and Rich......anyone spotted Rich's plan yet?
 
 

 
Dave C, Dave (Didds) and....Rich
 
 
Having taken refreshments and worked out who was who we gave them the low down on what we'd seen etc and the agreement was "try BF4" which was upstairs.....in the over 18 section. We tried but withou age ID it was no go for Dylan so while the others went off he and I wandered around the main hall and got a photo opportunity for him
 

 
I can't for the life of me work out why he wanted his picture taken with this young lady!!
 
Reunited with the others we mooch around the rest of the show, Didds buys a graphics card, we mooch, Didds pre-orders BF4 to get some free stuff then at 6.55 the PA gives out that the gig is over and please leave. So what shall we do?......
 
You got it!!
 

 
Dave and Rich in an intense debate, about Lego I think
 
 

 
Apparently Jenna was the only one to remain sober the previous evening
 
 

 
Someone comments that Euan and Dylan look like they're from the same family rather than Dylan and Tam being brothers. They didn't think much of this for some reason......
 
 

 
...but it all ended amicably!!
 
And so it ended, the first real Forum Meet-Up and we found out that we're all a pretty likeable bunch who seem to get along well. This is obviously sanitised sober version from the show. What went on back at Diddums flat I just don't know and will wait to see the photos which they'll hopefully post when they eventually wake up!
 
We gotta do it again!!

Nice to hear you got home safe Dave, even better to have finally met you!
 
 
Sorry we were so late, last night was rather hardcore and tonight's looking to be the same!

Safely on the train home. Nice to meet guys and put faces to names and voices. Really nice bunch of people who are probably getting hammered again as I post this!
I'll post the sober pictures later

U jelly bro?
Eurogamer was awesome, loads of free shit and cool games. Bought a GTX 770 too, can't wait to rock that baby. Last night was awesome too, I hit the sack at 4:30 and the rest at 6. Hungover as fuck, getting drunk again, all good. Plumber's Crack is cool, Euan is a closet weirdo, Cal is fucking shy, Rich is Rich. I'll post the stories and photos whenever I stop being drunk or hungover.
Tam needs to learn how to use a knife and fork.

More pics, more pics, more pics!!!!!!!!!!!

Fucking A. I just got all teary eyed seeing this!!!
 
Damn Stretch, you're one tall bitch!!!
 
Cal, you're sexy as ever!!!
 
Richj, I'm a bit disappointed. Isn't there suppose to be a spliff somewhere? You know you're sexy too.
 
Lastly, there's Dave. I have watched your vids and seen pictures of you before but I have never told you how much you look like an old friend of mine. I hope that some day we have the chance to meet in person!! Have one for me!!!

Sorry man.  I quit playing Words with Friends with everyone.  It's been running like absolute shit lately on my phone.  I dread even opening the app.  I know it's going to take foreeeeever each time.  I'm getting a new phone in December, so I'll re-download it and play it again then.  Sorry man, nothing personal, just my shit phone.

Stretch, Cal, Rich, The Man!

pussy

Get it nice and wet first, actually you could probably get in and out without them noticing anyway.

Y'know what?
 
I'm just wrapping up my night shift so I'm tired and emo, but I can't help but think how awesome it is that we've come this far. This is truly amazing. Had you asked me three years ago if I could ever see this happen, I would've laughed and shrugged it off, and yet here we are today, people travelling hundreds, if not thousands of miles by planes, trains and automobiles to meet up for a good time. Strangers, from the internet. People that have never met before. Think abotu that for a moment.
 
I hate tooting my own horn, but Clive, you can suck my balls. This wasn't all me, but I like to think that I played a fairly large role by saving this awesome community to begin with. This was all Dave's idea and a cracking one at that, so Dave, thanks for this. Thanks to those of you who have paid / helped pay for tickets for others, and thanks to those of you who are coming down, this is going to be an epic weekend and one I have looked forward to for a very long time.
 
I wish you all a safe journey, drive safely, wear your seatbelts, and don't do anything stupid.
 
See you all tonight.