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[unpopularity of writing contests]

Welcome.

The American Girl Scouts have decided, as for means of collecting money, to publish a book of their own. Now, as a member o our society YOU have been chosen to write an entry that will then take part in a larger scale contest throughout the continent!!!

Taking part is not obligatory, but everyone who enters will receive a price and of course, the winners will be in the book: "AGS - Cookies and Cooties" and will receive a free edition of this collection.

This year the theme is, regardless of the heading, unpopularity of writing contests.

You will write an essay or a short story, whatever you like the best, at around 200-500 words (normal private school essay lenght).

The text must be uploaded as .doc, .odt, .txt or .rtf and presented with a header and the writer's name under it.

So to make a long story short, write about why writing competitions often just tend to die out, especially here at AGS. And the essays will be voted by a board that is chosen from within the ranks of AGS. That means basically everyone who wants to because we're not picky.

The entry must be public no later than the first day next month, which gives you a lot of time to work on it, and most importantly, have fun with it!

PS: on an important note, the contestants are allowed several entries! But remember, two as good entries might steal each others votes!


EDIT:
Lack of Participation: Why
Death of a Contest
The Year Nobody Came
http://www.iamnotfredrich.com/wcnst.doc

Hiya. I was playing with the idea of selling everything except for my guitar, my sleeping bag and the tent and basically taking off. I'd be taking the first plane out of the country, and basically finding a place somewhere in this God forbidden world where I'd play my guitar, then move on. Buying food as time passes and perhaps even looking for a job, hitch hiking around the country or into another. I wouldn't consider it an impossible option.

But a problem arises. People might actually want to persuade me not to do it. So of course, the best way to do this would in all quietness and rather quickly. Would you happen to know a way of selling a whole house empty and getting a nice price for what ever I have, say, a table, a computer, a bed, a bookshelf full of books plus a vinyl player and a wide variety of cds and vinyls, all that stuff? I wonder, are there people in this world that are willing to buy the whole house empty?

Hi there. I was thinking. There hasn't been much discussion on the music area froma fanboy point of view in a long time, if you know what I mean. My girlfriend just got back from a music festival and is headed this way. We're going to one two weeks from now, I've payed 85€ for 2 days at Ruisrock already.

First day, that's 4th, I'll be seeing at least Porcupine Tree and Nightwish. Porcupine Tree for me is worth the whole 85 € so I wouldn't mind leaving then. But if Nightwish plays after them, I must just go and see what they're like nowadays.

The second day then is all about local Finnish bands. I don't expect any of you to know them, aside fromt he Finns here Well, first, there's Herra Ylppö & Ihmiset, which I didn't even know of until my gf told me they're supposed to be good. Right after that we've got Scandinavian Music Group or SMG. Right after that I'll probably be seeing Opeth Though I'm not such a big fan. They have their good sides. And last but not least there's Von Hertzen Brothers. Of course there's plenty more, but these are the ones I really want to see. Opeth comes from Sweden, but the rest are Finnish, yeah.

I'm not sure if I'll get drawn into some others later this summer. I saw, that Björk is coming here too, on 10th of July, but I'm afraid I'm attending a local fest here in Tampere then, plus, it's a bit too expensive for my taste. I really hate being busy and poor. But still, the summer's full of opportunities, I'll just have to pick the best ones. What about you?

Hiya. So I did eventually buy that mouse. But now I've got a problem. To be completely honest, I'm not sure if it's the mouse, or what, but when I tried playing for example The Settlers 1, the mouse moves around as if the game was running slow. It just jumps from one place to another, and is basically impossible to get to the place you want it. the game only updates the position when it's stopped.

I know it's a dos game, and dosbox has some real problems running it. Well, not big, but it claims that "PCM sound hardware not found". I don't really know what this means, but, I just doubleclick on the settlers.bat, and it runs ok on its own, though not the mouse. Sound hardware? I don't see why it should need any PCM if it works fine with sounds by just doubleclicking. And here's the thing, it works completely fine on my girlfriend's computer. I wouldn't mind dosbox, but the mouse cursor is out of my control.

Basically I tried to run every game of mine. Basically The Big Red Adventure works fine but has the same mouse problem and a couple of graphical errors. Legend of Kyrandia 1 & 2 work perfectly, and don't use Dosbox. Indiana Jones, last crusade needs the Dosbox, but works great, and then there's a bunch of different ones that go with different varioations. Of course, I'd be very happy with DosBox, or completely without it. I guess the latter isn't an option considering the age of these games, but DosBox seems pretty awful most of times.

You know, I should probably ask at the Dosbox forums, but I've learned, that I get much better answers much faster from here, so... I don't really know what to ask. I finally got a mouse, and it's no better than the tablet I used for 6 months, or maybe I just don't know what to do with the games. After all, i haven't really played anything for, what, 1,5 years now...

So summer's here \/ One top hot day after another. And it's time to dig out all the t-shirts from the closet.

So I realised, it's summer, I no longer need to study. All my friends are working and I have more than enough free time for myself. So I thought, hey, I might play MI 1-2 again, and I might just pick up BG2 again since I never finished it or even got that far. It seems as if gaming got boring for me, or perhaps too time consuming. Anyway, now I would have time. But, for the past, several months, I've only been using my Wacom pen as a mouse, giving headache to people trying to use my internet. My PS2 thing blew up at some point making my mouse unusable.

Then I took a long look in my wardrobe (I know What I Like) and it aint getting better along the years. My trousers are long and hot, and it's +25 degrees outside. I'd really need something shorter to show my hairy feet around. I was looking for some yesterday while clothshopping with my girlfriend, and realised they're pretty much the same pricerange as a USB mouse.

So the question is, will I ever enjoy playing BG2 or any early classics with long jeans on, or will I have to buy new clothes and try playing this stuff with a pen, which apparently doesn't work so well with DOSBox, haven't tried with BG2 yet though. Both are around 25 € and I haven't been paid yet, so that's pretty much all that I can put in for myself this month Vous recommendez? I'm in trouble again...

Hiya. I was wondering if anyone of you knew what this is. I scanned my computer again, yeah, it's been taken over by several viruses. Anyway, AVG lists something called  "NMBUKVEO.DLL" as a "Trojan horse generic10.AGVJ"

This object was moved to the Virus Vault to prevent access. But now everytime I start my computer, I get an error, a rundll which states, that "couldn't find C:\WINDOWS\System32\nmbukveo.dll .

Sure it can't find it, but why should it, if it's a virus. I tried googling the .dll, but it's listed nowhere, or I couldn't find it. And I tried googling the trojan horse generic10.AGVJ but can't find that either. What's going on?

The United states gives birth to appr. 4 million babies each year since the 90's. "As of 2007, the average birth rate for the whole world is 20.3 per year per 1000 total population, which for a world population of 6.6 billion comes to 134 million babies per year." Approximately 62 million people die each year. We all know where most of the people are born, and we know western countries bear less children than the third world countries due to same reasons why sexual diseases spread, and due to of course, cultural differences. Same places around the world are the heeps of the death toll too.

In a country like mine, the people are ageing. We're basically becoming extinct if we continue like this. The people rather build a career than a family. A lot of children were born after the war, and they're currently dropping like dead leaves. Basically in everyway, we're encouraged to breed. To provide the country with homebrew workers that'll make sure Finland stays the way it has been. Others point out the need of taking in immigrants more than what we do (which is very few), to make up the loss of population.

But as a globally orianted person as I am, I can't help but thinking all the overcrowding that is going on. And about how seflish it would seem to bring a child to this world. And this really puts me down, because locally, or nationally this would be a blessing, kind of, but globally, we'd be doing nothing good but bringing more mouths to feed, more resources directed to this place of ours and more wearing off the planet. Someone once told me there's no act that's more selfish than wanting to have a baby of your own, when the world's full of those you could take as your own and help, those a bit less fortunate.

Though is the world actually giving back at us at this point? Over the past few years we've seen some heeps in the rates that indicate death. We had the Boxing day tsunami -04, which we all remember for taking care of 350 000 people. We had the New Orleans tornado a few years back, though it only killed ~1,5 thousand people it did wake some people up. Now I guess everyone's read about the happenings in Myanmar that have taken the lives of around 100 000 people so far, increasing. I thought this was worth considering but couldn't borther. Not until I heard about the earthquake in China which in 2 days has exceeded to killing tens of thousands of people. http://www.spiegel.de/panorama/0,1518,552782,00.html http://www.spiegel.de/panorama/0,1518,552839,00.html . Sorry about the language, I only read German news nowadays.

Then...

Everyday I see families pass me by on the street. Women carrying tiny babies in their hands and people smiling. It's spring I know. My sister is 23 and everyone keeps teasing her with the idea of having children, and she told me she hates the idea of having babyfever at this point, as she's one of those career oriented people. My brother's girlfriend has babyfever too. We tested it out, asked her if she would love to hold a baby in her hands for a while or to have one around. She was not as against this idea as my brother would have hoped, though I hope they're not getting one soon. Damn, I think I'm having one too. Though it's not the same here. I just feel, that during the winter I feel like strangling all the crying infants in the bus, while at this point they all just seem like cute little things running around and playing. What could be more perfect? Well, we're not having a baby just yet, my girlfriend doesn't want to stretch her.. well, you know, stomach. But the feeling is in the air. The pressure is in the air.

The pressure actually comes from two poles. First of all, the country needs us, but then, the world really doesn't. Or is it really so, that the world has decided to take back the births in Europe by killing some unfortunate? Because almost 200 000 casualties for the first 4 months of 2008 are quite a lot, and I don't see this number going down any time soon. We're basically killing ourselves with our politics and habits. The thing is just, we're killing everything off at the same time. You might think blowing yourself off would be all ok, but the rest that dies along might disagree. But having a baby and bringing it to this world? A lot of people think about it right now, as spring is clearly the season when most babies are put into making. I know love can cover up for the lack of global solidarity, but what about the feelings before having a baby? Should they be as contradictory as they are, and should it really be considered as selfish as it is at the moment? And is it just local nationalists speaking when they're saying countries like Finland need to have more babies of their own? Also, do you believe the world will cope as it is trying? Like a body defending against a virus that's taking over it.

I was so down last night. You see, summer coming and I have nothing, no money, no place in uni, and I realised I missed the date to apply, so it would have been 4 months spent studying, all in vain.

Though this morning I decided to call them, see if they'd accept me after the deadline, and they were really nice, basically I had applied through the internet, not knowing there was a form to be sent too, this only apperaed after I had done what I thought was necessary. So they tol me I could just fill in the form and scan it in and e-mail it, so basically now I'm open for university again. That was nice.

Even better was a couple of minutes after that I got a phone call. Basically they're willing to give me an opportunity on translating books from English to Finnish, under supervision of course. They say it's a small book first, due this christmas, so September-October would then be my payday. It's a bit late, but at least I've got something to do, boredom has beent he biggest problem for me during these 2 years.

So the book they're sending me is a new Dragon Lance one, 1st part of a new trilogy. I assume that might mean a bit more work too if the like what I've done. Might have to translate the 2 too. Of course it's just a part time thing alongside with my studies, but 1 book per year is just fine, pays the studies, it's about +3k in euros once it's ready, depending on the words. Though it might get me into some trouble with taxes But, at least I don't have to do porn anymore :d I'm quite happy at the moment!

U say Phunny words I reply and we all say phunny. here starts

Rock-a-by bee pajamas!

Ever feel like your instrument isn't what you need to express yourself? Do you ever hear music and wish you could play some other instrument because you want to compose similar music to/with it, but can't? Or that your lack of skills with other instruments restricts your creativity and that you don't want to play your instrument anymore?

I made my girlfriend play me some of her own songs. She's been studying the piano for several years, classical and others. And hearing her intro, chord progression and singing made me feel extremely proud that I'm the one she loves. But at the same time I wished I would have done all that, not her. I told her I wish I was as good.

She told me I was better than her. I'm self-taught, guitarist, I know the theory, I know the styles, I'm faster than her, I've composed a lot, I sing at times. But still she sounds so much better, with piano. And I thought if only I could play some piano too. The thing is, I have an electric guitar and a classical/spanish guitar here. And I've been longing for a acoustic steel guitar that I could use to play rythm, to actually compose songs, not just classical pieces and riffs. At the moment I'm supposed to record something, but I listen to people play the guitar and watch videos, and the music is not something I want to do. I want to make songs. The world's ffull of singer-songwriters, but fingerpicking of fast shredding doesn't really make a song.

I've been composing for both guitar and piano for some time now, but listening to her songs... they really don't need a guitar to make them sound really good. But my songs, they need drums, a piano, a bass and a guitar. Just because single notes on a solo sound like sh*t to me. A few years back a developed the style of always playing chords and melody at the same time, and most people can't play my songs because of that. It's not about rythm or melody, it's both. And this seems a lot easier on a piano. But I really want to make a song I could you know, play by taking the guitar into my hands and start ramming and singing. That or do as she does. I feel really in a block right now. And I'm in between of learning piano, which would be almost impossible, OR buying an acoustic guitar that I could ram about. But I have no money for one

I've begun disliking my electric guitar really. Everything I try to play with it sounds like something that's supposed to fill empty spaces in a song that doesn't really need guitar. I'm not sure what I want from you, but compassion or will to read through this, but perhaps you could say something to this, if you've ever had similar experiences with instruments or anything...

-Tuomas--

Hiya, though I'd ask you something.

So recently I've been thinking of finally getting me one of those mp3 players. I just wanted to know, what are your experiences with them? My father though i was implying to my birthday that I should get one, but I'd rather buy it myself in order to get something decent, not the cheapest.

Well checking some out at the store, I kind of found myself liking the Creative Labs Zen stone plus, plus because it has a small screen, the other doesn't. Also, the more developed version has a speaker, which to me seems useless. Has anyone tried this, and if so, can you really recommend it? I'd need to hear them myself really to make judgements on how it sounds, what the shuffle is like (really random or just fake), if the microphone is any good, and so on. These are basically what matters to me. here's the one I'm talking about: [/url=pushclicktaptickpunchkickninjastick]http://uk.europe.creative.com/products/product.asp?category=213&subcategory=214&product=16696[/url] I personally loved the small size of it, could well hide it. I don't want one that takes as much space as my phone.

Also, I don't know if I really want to pay as much as for an IPod, as they seem pretty expensive, require the hideous iTunes and some strange format, and also come with lots of useless abilities.

I reckon if one is able to play mp3 with 320kb/s it's not that bad, most my tracks usually are around 256kbps. It says signla to noise is up to 90dB and channel separation up to 60dB. I reckon, at least it would be better than my old walkman

Anyway, if you have some knowledge, recommendations, any, I'd really appreciate it if you were to write them here. Though this might not be something I'm going for today, still someday this spring if everything goes as planned.

Being, that today was the first day of the annual international film festival here in my city, Tampere and I couldn't go, I thought I'd share some of the feelings with you. I discovered this on the newspaper, adn it's something, I think, will be interesting and useful for everyone, even though most of these are in Finnish. Perhaps if not as enlightening as they might be, still to wake up thoughts and opinions. Basically i could tell a lot more, but it'd better that I copied the introduction text fromt he site itself. After all, they know a lot more than I do:

REEL TIME film festival was founded by Tampere Solid Waste Management in 2005. It is an environmental education project in which movies are used as a medium for young people to express their opinions about consumerism. The target group is junior high school students, and approximately 600 young people from the Tampere region have taken part during the last two years. Basic information about consumerism and its environmental effects is shared with students, with the principal aim of providing environmental education, and not merely making a movie, which nonetheless has had a strong effect in motivating young people to become actively involved in the project.

Presented on the site you'll see the best films of 2006 and then from last year when the topic was, as common nowadays, "Global warming". This is precisely what I'm after. I'm kind of an art/psychology freak, so this interests me to see what these youngsters in my country are on about.

Enjoy ^_^

EDIT: oh yes, silly me. The link: http://www.arirannisto.fi/reeltime/

I haven't been this annoyed about everything since God knows when. They made me wake up at 8 am which was hard especially after a restless night. All that just to ask me to the hospital, interview for 1 hour to realise something's wrong with me, yet nothing really is. A few days earlier my girlfriend had her birthday, so I was there too. In fact, we usually come to my place after clubbing, and again. Two of her friends came along because they live so far away and it was night. The other one fel asleep in my guest mattress and the other one fell asleep in her own puke on my bed. Me and my girlfriend had to sleep on a peabag, which means 4 hours of bad sleep and a hurting neck/back/legs/arms/head/effing penis and liver and what ever one can imagine. I was so bloody frustrated, but i can't really tell them to go since there's no trains and apparently none of them had money.

Now they owe me 20 euros for paying their rides home which they had drank the other night while i still thought I was having fun. after I was just dead tired and mad at them, but couldn't let it show. I'm just so tired. Today I was gonig to borrow my grandpa's car to drive to my girl because she forgot her wollet at my place, but my dad had already taken the car to take his bloody cat to the vet. We agreed to do it later.

so i went home from the hospital quite pleased that I might not have epilepsy and decided to take a nap. Only after 20 minutes my sis calls and asks how I'm doing and if I want to go to granny's with her the next day. I agreed, and went back to bed. Then my bloody granpa called and told me I could get the car when it was too late. I said I'd rather not. Then the worst thing happened which really got me furious.

My friend decided he needs memory to his computer so we went to buy one of those things. He needs me there because he doesn't kow what he's doing. And all the time I was there it was all ok, we had a cup of coffee, a huge one, and then tried if the computer would run better. It was getting awfully late and I was bloody hungry. And he was showing pictures of his belioved fu**ing car, which I as a consept really despise, being a bicycle/public transport person. And He then asked if I wanted to get some food and go to my place to try some photoshopping to his car images to see what it looks like tuned up. I spent the whole bloody 3 hours tuning his fucking renault which needed to loose handles, antennas, get speedstripes on the roof, darkened windows. And I am so tired! I couldn't figure out photoshop because of it. And he kept telling me to do this and that and this and that, and I told him I didn't know how to, and he just didn't realise that the layers of the image are separate and all that. And when we were kind of done I tried relaxing with Vulture's Eye which is an isometric roguelike, an apparently awfully sucky version of nethack actually. I just fucking spat on my face. I should never have even tried getting back to playing games. I was completely happy these past 3 years without any gaming experience, and now that I try, even ToME won't cooperate with me.

And trying to set up the setup in the setups I just got so bloody frustreated of this shit they call music that I have 40 gigs worth on my computer, most of it ILLEGALLY aquired. I can't find anything to listen to. It's all annoying. The movie on the telly makes me want to jump out the window and CSI on the other channel is just plain crap.

It's like the tv people thought we were all mainstream retards that actually could watch stuff like Heroes without deep inner pain and the desire to cut our eyes out. They want to please, as everyone does, but they end up hated allover the world. And most of all I despise the Candid Camera show which makes me want to kill everyone around. Tonight i almost slammed my keyboard through my screen because of the stupid games. My crapload of a computer takes 15 minutes to open bloody opera and maxthon doesn't work and winamp gets stuck and mIRC makes a horrible noise when connected and MSN has been down the whole day with error this and error that. And immediately the fuckhead that windows is lets me know that it wants to upgrade! Why can't you just breed on your own time!

And I'm so tired! So tired of those nice girls that are friends to my girlfriend and to me. Sometimes people should just realise that they are NOT needed or wanted around. When you want to snuggle or just smile for a while. Perhaps to eat or even have a conversation! ARGGH! I need a cup of tea! A job! A time machine to take me 1 month further in time when I'm not forced to be alone again! I want to punch some crap-jerk in the face! And I wish Peter Funt was here I'd just push his detestable retard face in a toaster and make it look human again and then rip his skin off and hang bricks onto his balls. I just want that person to suffer! I want him to suffer! I can't stan his face! Why must everyone be a freaking retard in this world?!!?! And must it really be so that all things that mean something are made by people that don't mean anything to anyone? I just want to smash my head to the wall until it bleeds. Maybe letting out blood will help. I think I'm off to sleep, though at the moment I'm too furious to sleep. I could just yell, but there's no-one to yell to!

Oh, did I mention? My roommate is a fucking retard! I mean, what kind of an asshoel thinks that milk cartons will disappear if you leave them empty on the table! Imagine the smell when he was gone for christmas, and left a milk carton on the table just because it had gone bad. Never even thought of throwing it out. And there it was the whole break! I came home and the expiring date was due over a month ago! I mean what the fuck do people like him have in their heads? The guy smells, dresses up like a freak and smells and smells and oh my god I hate living here with him! I think i'm going to cry now. I feel like it. Did I mention how much I hate my friends? I'll do that next time. Well, I guess I got this off my chest. For what it's worth.

Hi there, hope I'm not annoying anyone. But I was listening to this awesome album again, Moonmadness by camel, and started looking at the album cover art. Here, check it out.



I always thought it was someone staring at the sun, but when you look at it closely, it's pretty disproportioned to be just one person, unless in a weird position. Anyway, I'm confused. What does the image say to you?

Hi there. I wasn't sure if I should post this to critics lounge, but I thought, since it's not open for most to C&C and the main point is not to get them. All I really want is that, some who have read more French than the 2 courses I have, would perhaps check if it's totally awful, or most importantly full of errors. I know my grammar isn't the best there is, but anyway. The point is, I wrote a song, a 3/4 waltz and wrote something from my mind. It might sound very naive and all, and I know that, so don't be afraid of telling my to throw it away After all, it's only a song, and I've got so many more waiting! So here it is doe a spellcheck:

http://www.2dadventure.com/ags/tu_es_mon_favori_tout_le_monde.doc

Cheers

I wrote a short story a while ago. I finally got it uploaded at greatwriting.co.uk So I'm pasting the link here too in case someone would be kind enough to comment on it. The last chapter pretty much explains the whole story, but as a glue to the beginning, it's all from my thoughts or as they were at the moment, and basically what follows after the first chapter is what I think of when I read the first one through again. This was done mostly past midnight, and I think it shows. I was going to finish it, but lost the grip at some point. But let the art explain itself, right? Have a go if you will:

http://www.greatwriting.co.uk/content/view/12524/

Hi there people.

I started thinking a few days ago; sending stuff to the copyright agency is one thing, but as I kind of made some deals with some people about composing optional music for their albums, and have been meddling with midi keyboards, I heard they need them in full scores and playable. Now there are a lot of ways, but Sibelius as a program seems the most acceptable one for commercial use. Or so they told me. i was thinking; having used Sonar 6 this far, and frankly, I can't even use it, it's too complicated, is Sibelius really as good as they say it is, is is it worth the purchase. And if you would know, do I need some range of specific hardware for making it really work on my computer. For writing scores, I'd love to have a good program, all these tabbing programs people give me are horrible at it, and I'm tired of writing with my pen, as all the errors are much harder to fix.

So does anyone have some experiences with this program, and/or different versions of it, and what do you think of it? I know there are quite a few professional musicians here, and some who do it for fun, so I'd really appreciate some advice on this.

Thanks in advance
-Tuomas--

Yeah hi. Sorry to bother you again, and I know this isn't prbably the best place for this topic, but I just wanted to ask a few questions:

Do you use this program/have you used it?
Why?
How do you feel about it?
Do you trust it?
Have you had problems recently, like trojans/spyware?

This because before christmas my computer go infected, and yeah, there were trojans allover. I have yet to find a solution how to remove them etc. Well, I thought I had it messed up, but now it seems quite a few people are suffering from these same trojans in their system32 folder that cannot be removed because they're being used by explorer.exe. Every .dll seems to have a different name, yet when you search them, google links almost always to an antiVir troubleshooting forum with a similar situation as mine, or ours, and mostly with no real solution to it. AntiVir seems to be the only one to recognise them. Could it be, that the problem is not a trojan, but a failure in the anti-virus program? Or is this just an epidemy going through computers all over the place?

Hi hello.

I'm not quite sure how, but my computer has been severely infected by a lot of annoying viruses, well, trojans actually. Some guys at #AGS know the situation, but I thought I'd ask for help here. You see, the problem is this: I've got Avira AntiVir installed as the primary virus protection. Every now and then it pops up warning me that some program has tried to access certain files that it finds dangerous. These include such as jkkkkif.dll and ddcca.dll both in the windows/system32 folder. I tried googling for them, but learned nothing new.

Now what comes to removing these files, I tried Spybot S&D, which didn't find any of them. I tried AdAware, which also doesn't recognise them. I downloaded AVG and Windows Defender, yet neither of these react in any way. However everytime while going through files they try to access these certain files plus some more that I have, AntiVir alerts. I'm currently running Luke Filewalker, the antiVir scanner which in several hours loooks through my whole HD. Last night it did find in fact 4 copies of these two harmful files. So getting a detection it asks if I want to either quarantine, rename, ignore or delete them. Basically I move them all to quarantine for the program to delete them afterwards. However, the deleting mission is more tricky than supposed. It appears all these files are in use somehow, and thusly cannot be deleted manually or through the program. You know how it goes. So AntiVir suggests deleting them on the next startup, which I thought would solve everything. Well, as far as I know, it didn't. Nothing happened, and they're still here.

I was wondering if actually starting windows in safe mode would let me delete them, as most of the programs aren't running, and perhaps the files wouldn't be either. I don't know if there's something wrong with my boot sequence, but I hammered F8 to get to the selection menu. However, the arrow keys aren't working there, so I can't access safe mode, and I really don't know any other way of starting windows in it. I thought ask for advice here first and then go to resource control and end every possible program and after that try to remove them manually. We'll see, but I really need your help!

Something special? Something thoughtful? Something usual, something soft, something hard, something refreshing, a computer game, a board game? A kiss on the cheek or two on the lips, perhaps just a hug? Or, nothing at all...

Christmas shopping starts earlier and earlier every year, and the stores and markets fill with people shopping. Merchandise is on sale before and right after the christmas, and the official christmas time sales start only a week after the last summer sales. So I think this isn't too soon as it is, 2-3 weeks to christmas is nowhere near the time of relaxing but anticipation and pressure and spending money.

Well, coming to this age I've noticed, that it's no longer, and hasn't been for a while, that important to get a certain amount of presents every year. In fact, it seems, the older you get, the less you get presents. However, they seem to be more useful to you than before. Take this shirt I've been wearing the whole year and compare it to what my brother did with her transformer action figure. Well, he did play, and he certainly has the right to do it. But I start thinking; what do I want to give people this christmas? And I know, no-one can really be expecting anything. Everyone knows I'm a poor student. But I've decided, no matter what, to get something special to my girlfriend since it is our first christmas together. Don't tell her, but I've been looking for a teddy with a zipper in the back so that I could put something nice there... Having trouble finding one though.

Last year I bought several presents. This year just one. But the joy of giving is still there, and the look on that someone's face when they open the present. Even if it's just a potato... (don't ask). Anyway; What is it, that you are going to make your loved ones happy with at this, the best time of the year, in exactly 2 weeks?