herme3

First of all, I just wanna say AWESOME! That was a lucid dream. The girl that you were talking to was actually the girl you knew from high school. BUT, it was the girl as you remember her. The way she reacted or responded were all ways that your own mind would expect her to. I've been having lucid dreams for the past few months now and they are pretty fun. But in my experience there gets to be a point where you start questioning your real life, and getting confused if you're dreaming or not. That's not so fun. But there are ways to induce lucid dreams and ways to avoid them.

I was very interested in lucid dreams about a year ago. I attempted to have them for several months, but I was never able to have one. Isn't it interesting that I had one without even trying?

I knew you could control and interact with your surroundings in lucid dreams, but I've never heard of actually being able to have a normal conversation with someone in a dream.

I dreamed about a girl I like last night too. Nothing that strange about it at all.

Yes, but were you actually aware of the fact that you were dreaming? Could you actually have a conversation with her while you knew she was just part of your mind?

Last night I had a dream that I was going out on a date, which is something I’ve never done in real life. I was at a nice restaurant, and I walked towards a table where a beautiful girl wearing a nice dress was waiting for me. I realized the girl was my best friend from high school, who was also the only girl I had ever liked in my entire life. Once I saw who I was dating, I realized that it had to be a dream and there was no way this could possibly be real. I felt like I had woken up but I was still inside my dream. I had complete awareness of my surroundings, and had complete control over my actions. It was like I was conscious in my own dream.

Even stranger, I was actually able to talk to the girl. First, I told her, “This is all just a dream.” She looked confused for a moment and then she replied, “Maybe, I don’t know.” At this point, I was completely surprised at what was happening. I knew I was dreaming, and I was even having a regular conversation with someone who was being controlled by my own mind. Even though I knew I wasn’t actually talking to her, I told her a few things about college. She replied to everything like it was really her, and she had comprehended everything I said.

The waiter brought out food, and I continued to talk to the girl while we ate. It actually felt like a few hours had gone by. Then I told her, “I just can’t believe you are actually talking to me when you’re just part of my mind.” She smiled and said, “Yeah, it’s strange.” A few moments later, I woke up from this strange dream.

This is probably the strangest dream I ever had. I mean, it seemed so perfectly normal yet it was all a dream. I’ve heard of people being able to control their own dreams, but I’ve never heard of anything like this. Since the girl wasn’t really there, who was I having a conversation with? Was it my subconscious?

Rebiu, I'm really sorry to hear about your loss. Your post reminds me a little of the post I made yesterday. It sounds like you are feeling the exact same way I normally do. It just feels like your life is not important to anyone. I guess all of us feel that way sometimes, even though there are probably many people who care about us. We just don't realize it because it feels like something in our lives is missing.

Your advice to me was to enjoy the little things in life. I thought that was really good advice, and it's better than anything I could ever come up with. There are times when life itself seems pointless, but you just have to think about the little things that make you happy. For me it's listening to music, drinking coffee, sleeping, and playing video games. They might sound simple, but these little things sometimes keep me from going insane. Perhaps you should think about little things in life that make you happy, and then let them guide you through your life.

I would probably be the worst person to give you advice, but you know you can PM me whenever you need someone to talk to.

I was feeling really depressed when I made my last post, but I'm feeling much better today. What happened was I thought I was purchasing 3 domains that had recently expired. One of them had been appraised at $10,000 and the others were almost just as valuable. I actually paid for the domains, and thought I had them, but it turns out someone else had already bought them earlier. The domain registrar must have been having technical problems, and their system thought the domains were still available when I paid to register them.

Anyway, I have 3 domain credits on my account now, so I didn't lose my money. Still, I'm disappointed because I didn't get those domains worth thousands of dollars...

Don't be disappointed by a business failure when you're not even out of college. At this stage in life, you don't have much practical experience, knowledge, and credentials (not to insult you, btw). Wait for your graduation and start looking for an opportunity that would suit you, and you would enjoy doing. It doesn't matter if it's your own business or someone else's, as long as you're happy where you work.

Thanks Cap'n. I guess I shouldn't worry so much about starting my business or career until after college. I should probably wait until I gain more knowledge about running a business, then I will have a better chance at being successful.

Try Mutual Funds and remember its all about long term investment.

I've tried getting into some different investment programs, but they all ended up being scams and stealing my money. I think it might be a good idea to invest in web site domains. I'll buy some domains when they expire, and then sell them at online auctions. At least I won't have to worry about some company stealing my money.

The only thing I have giving my life meaning right now is my job. No girlfriend and pretty much no friends.

Wow. It sounds like our lives are very similar.

You're in college and you can't make friends? A dorm is a ready-made social network. Aren't you surrounded by people with similar interests?

I don't live in a dorm because I live close to the college. I just go to my classes, and then I go home or to work.

Your workplace is a great place to network too. Where do you work anyway, and why can't you make friends there?

I've been working in a small room with old and broken computers everywhere. My job is to repair the computers and get them ready for other employees. I really enjoy my job, and I have a lot of fun fixing computers. However, I can't really make friends there like I did in high school. I work in the room by myself, so I don't usually have conversations with other employees. Also, even though the employees who work with the company are very friendly, nobody is anywhere close to my age.

I would seriously recommend that you look for a similar church where you are. They will not force you to believe or do anything you don't want to do - they will make you welcome and invite you into their community. Why not give it a try?

I actually attend a small community church with my family. However, we only meet on Sundays, and my family isolates me from everyone else. Now, I don't mean that my family is purposely trying to isolate me. In fact, they keep telling me that I should make more friends. However, it's difficult to meet anyone when I'm only sitting with relatives, and then leave the same time they do. It is definitely not like high school, when I had the chance to go sit with other students and talk with them about similar interests.

I'm not really sure how to begin this post...

I thought I was purchasing something worth thousands of dollars, but I just realized that I'm not going to get it. I guess I could have written a long and angry post about it, but I don't think anyone here would benefit from hearing me ramble about something that doesn't affect them.

Besides, I should be used to it by now. No matter what I try to do, everything just fails. Nothing ever works out for me, and I just end up losing my money. I'd like to think that I could be someone successful, but I just keep falling for scams. I've tried to start several online companies throughout my entire life, but all of them failed.

I go to college and work at a job, but my life is just so empty. I want my life to have a purpose. If I owned a company and could be a business leader, maybe I would feel more important to this world. Instead, I'm just nobody. I go to college, and then go to work, but then there is just emptiness. There is just an empty gap where other people have friends, and the feeling of being accepted. Without it, I could never mean anything to this world.

I'm sick of looking at this world from the other side. It's like everyone else is living their lives, and I'm just observing them. People communicate feelings of happiness with each other, and I just watch them. Some people are famous leaders, and others look at them with respect. However, nobody thinks of me as a friend or a leader. I seem to have absolutely no purpose.

I tried to make friends back when I was in high school. I actually made a friend, and I was able to talk to her everyday. But, now I've graduated from high school and we never talk to each other anymore. I never realized how important her friendship was to me until now. Anyway, I've now realized that the whole concept of making friends is pointless for me. As soon as I have a close friend, I'm going to leave college and lose that friend. I don't think it's worth going through the pain of losing a close friend again.

I'm just not sure what to do with my life anymore. It feels so empty and pointless now...

Anyway, I apologize for writing this post. It has no point, and I have no idea why I'm submitting it.

Couldn't it be simple enough to just have it base the widths of everything off of some formula' date=' so you just calculate the base value for the formula using their screen resolution, and then calculate the size for things as you go?

 

i.e. to make something 10% width, you just do

width = .1 * baseWidth

(perhaps with rounding)[/quote']

 

That might work, but I've never tried it before. I've manually set the location, width, and height of each object. For example, one size might be "5, 10". I know how to set an object to take up a certain percentage of the screen, but I don't know if they would all be positioned correctly.

Isn't it simple enough in Visual Basic to detect the user's screen resolution and adapt the program's interface dynamically to fit?

You're right, and that's a good idea. I'll have to consider it for the next version, but I think it would require a lot of programming. Although SurfTabs might look simple, there are actually around 250 different objects in the design of the interface. I believe adapting the program for each screen resolution would require an if...then statement for each object. I'm not sure if it would be worth it if only 10% of my visitors have 800*600 and an even smaller percent of my visitors actually download the program. In fact, Dak is probably the only SurfTabs user with a 800*600 resolution.

It takes just as much energy to split water into hydrogen as you'd get from recombining hydrogen into oxygen again.

The web site http://waterpoweredcar.com claims that using water to create hydrogen can already power a car, but I have a feeling that you are much more intelligent than the author of that web site. He thinks that secret government agents go around murdering people who attempt to invent water powered cars.

unless your talking about a car that you fill up with water, and then it's own on-board solar cells hydrolise the water and top-up its hydrogen tank...

Exactly. Do you think this would be physically impossible, or do you think the technology just needs to improve? For example, computers were once really expensive but now many people can afford them because technology has improved.

my screen can handle 1k*8c, but I like being able to see stuff on my pc easily from a reasonable distance ( i sit further back than most people do) without squinting, and i like being able to use the PC for ages without my eyes hurting.

If you don't already have one, I would recommend that you use a LCD monitor. I also use my computers for long periods of time, and my eyes will not hurt nearly as bad if I'm using a LCD monitor no matter what the screen resolution is.

is it actually that hard to design a screen that works in both? i've never had any trouble, but i'm not exactly a leet web-designer. i thought that using %s for width meant that the display automatically fit your resolution.

All of my web sites should display perfectly with a 800*600 resolution. However, creating Visual Basic programs with different resolutions is more difficult. Perhaps I am doing something wrong, but everything appears too small in 1024*768 if I create the program to work with 800*600. I also have much less space to work with, and can't add as many features to the interface.

Where do you get the electric current? You're just using hydrogen as another method of storing the energy you got somehow or another earlier. Most often, it would be fossil fuels->electricity->electrolysis (splitting water)->fuel cells, and that wouldn't be all that much more efficient than the current system, if at all.

How much of an electric current would be necessary? Could you obtain the energy for the current from a simple solar panel? The current would only need to extract the hydrogen from the water, it would not need to power the car itself. The hydrogen would power the car using the fuel cell technology.

According to http://www.howstuffworks.com/fuel-cell.htm the problem is not how to power the car with hydrogen, but instead obtaining the hydrogen required to power the car. Since water is such an abundant resource, wouldn't it be easy to just use the hydrogen that is contained within the water molecules?

The reason is chemical. It is easy to combust oil, to release the energy in it's chemical bonds. How do you do this efficently with H2O?

Read: http://www.howstuffworks.com/fuel-cell.htm

It sounds like the technology is available to power cars with hydrogen, but there is simply a lack of pure hydrogen. However, a science professor told me pure hydrogen can be extracted easily by running an electric current through water.

I've read that the technology exists to power a car with hydrogen fuel cells. I've even heard that successful prototypes have been created. Scientists claim that the problem with selling these vehicles to the public would be a lack of hydrogen, but I'm not sure how this could be a problem. Can't you just take water, and extract the hydrogen by using an electric current?

Why are we unable to power our cars with water? Is the technology just not ready yet, or is it physically impossible? Or, does it simply have to do with political reasons? I'm sure the government would lose a lot of tax money if everybody stopped purchasing oil.

Many people use old hardware. Something around 20% of people still use 800x600 (http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp)[/url'].

I have an old computer that was manufactured way back in 1998. I've never upgraded the graphics card or monitor, and it works just fine with 1024*768 resolution.

The big question here is: If you're just clicking a link and then switching tabs rapidly, how are you benefiting that site in the traffic exchange? It's not like you're paying attention to its content.

You do have a good point. I admit that I don't always look at every web site that is loaded in the traffic exchanges. Since most traffic exchange users already rapidly switch between tabs using Firefox, I suppose many people are not looking at my web sites either.

However, there have been many cases where I've made purchases from web sites I've seen in traffic exchanges. If a web site's title catches my attention, I will often read through the web site before clicking the next link. If the web site is interesting, I will add it to my favorites and come back later. That's why I try to create a good title on all of my web sites.

I can't see the right side of the tabs, cos of the screen res.

Why don't you use 1024*768? Years ago, I used 800*600 and I couldn't believe how much I was missing. I realized that many web pages are designed for 1024*768 and I was often missing some of the pictures and content of the web pages. Unless you have a really small monitor, or difficulty with your eyes, I'm not sure why anyone would want to have 800*600 anymore.

i can't think of a single occasion where i would either need or want this to happen.

Trust me, many traffic exchange users are going to love this feature. I'm sure there will be other people who will find this feature useful, depending on how they use the web. Of course, there are many times when users would not want the tabs to automatically rotate. That is why I have the feature turned off by default.

And what does that let you achieve but get a higher number on your hit counter?

It's great advertising. Thousands of different people can see your web site each day, and they can add it to their favorites if they find it interesting. I've successfully sold products and services on web sites, and the only advertising I did was on traffic exchanges. Usually you need to pay for advertising, but traffic exchanges are usually free services.

There was once an investment program that made over $50 million from advertising on various traffic exchanges. They ended up being a scam and everyone lost their money, but it proves how powerful traffic exchange advertising can be.

And locking out everybody from the browser if your website is down or hacked. Perfect. They might even be able to hack into it, replace the key file, and exploit some sort of buffer overflow in your code, exploiting everybody using it at once.

If the locking feature is unable to connect to the web site, it will display a separate error message that asks the user to check their Internet connection. The message also says SurfTabs.com might be having technical difficulties, and you should try to start the program again later. It will only redirect to an update page if I replace the key file with a lock file.

Show me an example of pop-ups that get through Firefox.

I used Firefox with traffic exchanges before I created SurfTabs, and I've seen many pop-ups get through the blocker. I even see a few pop-ups get past SurfTabs, but not nearly as many.

i open a site in tab1, open a site in tab2, click a link in tab2, and remain in tab2

Did you click the "On" button where it says, "Automatically Switch Tabs"? It is located to the right of all the tabs.

it's also not displaying properly in 800*600 res.

Only about 10% of my web site's visitors have a 800*600 res. Therefore, I designed SurfTabs to work with 1024*768.

the popup blocker failed this popup test.

The pop-up window displayed by the test is embedded into the web site. You should not see it after you go to another web site.

When thinking about it logically instead of mathematically, negative numbers do not seem to physically exist. I can't think of any examples where negative numbers exist in the physical world. As the article states, you have never seen a negative number of geese.

Negative numbers seem to be the absence of a positive number. It is like a number that should be there, but is missing. For example, if you write a check when you don't have enough money to pay for it. The amount of money in your bank account will be a negative number, but it isn't a real amount of money. It simply represents the amount of money that you should have, but is not there.

No... This has nothing to do with opening a new tab!

Let me try to explain it differently. Imagine you have Google open in Tab1 and MSN open in Tab2. When you click on a link on Google, it will automatically switch to MSN. After you click on a link in MSN it will automatically switch back to Google.

Now, let me explain how a traffic exchange works. You click on a button on the top toolbar of the traffic exchange and then a web site will load in a frame below the toolbar. The toolbar's timer will count down for about 15 seconds and then the button will appear again. You can now click the button to load another web site. Each time you do this, other users of that traffic exchange will see your own web site.

Most traffic exchange users use Firefox, and have multiple traffic exchanges running in separate tabs. It is a real pain to click on each tab to switch between traffic exchanges. Since you are just clicking buttons, it would be much easier if the tabs rotate by themselves. That is the reason why I created SurfTabs.

For a while, SurfTabs was designed to be a tool only for traffic exchange users. That's why I never spent very much time on the graphic interface. However, I've been thinking that the "Automatically Switch Tabs" feature might be useful to other people who want to perform multiple tasks. That's why I decided to release it to the public.

He's written a dodgy (and quite ugly) front end to an existing browser.

SurfTabs has over 4,000 lines of code that I typed myself. It is much more than just a front end to an existing browser. Some of the features are hidden deep within the code, and not visible from the interface. For example, I can instantly lock all copies of a specific version of SurfTabs by simply removing the key file from my web site. Users will be redirected to a page where they can download the newest version. If I activate it, the lock can't be bypassed even if the user has blocked access to my web site with an external firewall. Although almost all browsers support automatic updates, I doubt any of them have a lock feature. The lock feature is great for protecting users from severe security flaws.

I used my lock feature back when I offered a more complex version of SurfTabs. This version sold for $5.00 but I offered a free trial. With most antivirus programs, and other programs that offer free trials, there are ways to bypass the security and use the program after the free trial period. With SurfTabs, I locked them from my web site and nobody could bypass the lock. If the user tried to block my web site, SurfTabs simply would not run because it would not find the key file. Are there any other programs with this security feature?

Also, SurfTabs is much better at blocking pop-ups than other browsers. There are pop-ups that can bypass Internet Explorer, and even Firefox, but SurfTabs blocks almost all of them. Can you find a pop-up blocker better than the one I built into SurfTabs?

In Firefox, if you want to open a link in a new tab, middle click it.

I wasn't talking about opening a link in a new tab. I was talking about rotating between tabs that are already open. Everyone is comparing SurfTabs to existing browsers. However, as far as I know, there are not any existing browsers that have an automatic switching feature. That is why I call SurfTabs "revolutionary".

It switched me to blank tabs.

Really? The only time it should do that is if you only have one tab open. Perhaps I made a mistake somewhere in the code. What OS are you using?

No, I do not use traffic exchanges, because I'd rather get genuine users to visit my web sites, not somebody trying to visit dozens at a time.

Actually, some of the more popular ones are really good. I can get thousands of hits each day, and around 90% of the visitors are unique. There are only a few large ones out there, and the rest will just keep sending the same visitors.

Ah. So it switches me to a blank tab when I click on a link. Doesn't seem to be particularly helpful, given that when I do try to accomplish multiple tasks, being switched to a blank tab makes things generally slower.

Actually, it won't switch to a blank tab. If the next tab is blank, it will switch back to tab1. It will only switch to the next tab if a web site is loaded there. One example where this would be useful is if you are trying to use multiple traffic exchanges, where you get visitors to your own web site by visiting the web sites of the other members of that exchange. If you are automatically switching tabs, you only need to make half the clicks. With Firefox, you need to switch to the next tab and then click on the exchange toolbar. Are you familiar with traffic exchanges?

I can't even tell what SurfTabs does, because the user interface happens to be rather pathetic. There's very little indication of which tabs are currently in use, which you are currently using, and what the hell is in each tab - they just say "Tab 1," "Tab 2," etc.. Why don't you use the native tab control instead of buttons in a line?

I suppose the interface could use a little work. Perhaps I should use the web site's title as the label for each tab.

If what you are intending is that Firefox will open links to external websites in new tabs, and take you to that tab immediately, simply check "Select new tabs opened from links" and "Open links from other applications in: a new tab in the most recent window"

What I mean is that SurfTabs can switch to the next tab every time that you click on a new link. Just open a few web sites in different tabs, and turn on the "Automatically Switch Tabs" feature. Click around on different links and you will understand what I'm talking about. When you are just browsing around the Internet, you probably won't want to use this feature. However, it would be useful if you are trying to accomplish multiple tasks at the same time, especially if you have a slower connection.

I checked "Select new tabs opened from links" but I can't get it to work.

Are you sure it does the same thing SurfTabs does?

You can set Firefox to do that quite easily.

Really? Can you please tell me how to do that?

Erm... how exactly is it a revolution? Firefox and others can easily switch to the next tab when you click on a link.

SurfTabs does it automatically. If you click on a link on a web site, it can switch to the next tab. You don't have to click on the tab on the browser.

I just created a new web browser. Please visit http://www.surftabs.com and let me know what you think. I think this browser will be very useful to some people, especially if you do many tasks at the same time.