I agree these women are very lucky to have you as a neighbor. As for the problem of family, the kids love to turn a blind eye because otherwise it would mean they'd have to get involved and be responsible. It might put a dent in their lifestyle and require work and comittment. I'm living this scenario which is a surprising repeat of the situation my parents were in when I was growing up. My grandfather lived with us most of the year, spending part of the winter in the south. His care and shelter fell to my parents. My uncle and aunts were hands off never as much as inviting him to dinner much less spending the night or driving him to daily cancer treatments - my mom (with 4 kids to care for) did that. My SIL and BIL are totally clueless to what happens on a daily basis when living with an octagenarian. Even a healthy person can drive you nuts! We've had to call 9-1-1 several times for medical emergencies and they've as much as said we overreacted. What a crock since one of the incidents involved a gangrenous gall bladder! I'm always defending my actions and trying to point out the difficulties of living with a strong willed, contentious person. They don't want to hear it and they certainly don't want her at their house for more than two days. (She's been here for 14 years). I feel very, very alone in dealing with this woman, constantly defending my actions and attempting to garner some understanding of the toll it takes on me. Linda C and others here at the GP have seen her in action. An incident in my kitchen during one of the get-togethers summed it up pretty well. The jig is up in a couple years when we retire and move out of state. This ought to be pretty funny as everyone assumes she can pay big bucks to live in a fancy assisted living place. HA - the jokes on them. Thanks for listening and allowing me to go on and on.

I had been programming in C for several years before I learned C++. I'm not sure whether the C was a help or a hindrance in learning C++. I had also taken a class that I think was called Data Structures and the professor required us to use object oriented programming for all of our assignments. He didn't care what language we used as long as we hadn't programmed in it before and as long as it was OO. Many of the C programmers in both of those classes had a lot of trouble grasping the OO concepts. In my opinion, your first goal should be to learn OO without worrying about a specific language, then apply it to C++ or java. Java is pretty similar to C++ but it enforces more of the OO and doesn't allow you to do unsafe things (like write to invalid memory locations). C is a function based language, and you can actually write a C++ program without using an OO features, but that kind of defeats the purpose. What compiler are you planning to use? There are a lot of good free compilers these days. What other languages did you consider and why did you decide on C++? The reason I'm asking is that I think there may be other languages that would be easier to use and there are some that probably have wizards to help you get up and running quickly.

There is no sense here. Lives lost and ruined because of thoughtless, careless stupidity. Seeing the FB page makes it worse. I have been feeling horrible this week because of an incident that happened a couple years ago. My son had a girlfriend about 15 years ago. They were rather serious but she called it off. After that, she seemed to get involved with a different sort of crowd. She did get a very good job and comes from a very nice family who love her dearly. Once she started hanging with this more "party hardy" crowd, she began drinking. I guess it got out of control and she got a couple DUIs. Then, she was drinking and got in an awful accident, her fault. The young man driving the other car died. She has been in jail since then, waiting for her sentencing. She was just sentenced to another three years in jail. I do believe she deserves to serve the time, but my heart breaks for her and her family. She started out as a nice, funny girl from a good family, with a college degree and a bright future. I looked for her FB page and sadly it is public and shows her at parties and on vacation enjoying herself. There is nothing really offensive, but if I were the family of the man who died, I would be furious, seeing her living her life. She will be about 44 when she gets out of prison. She has plenty of life to live that her victim never will. My heart breaks for all involved in this senseless loss of life. Thank God your friend's daughter was spared, but how sad that she will now be motherless all her life.

Wow,,, This is the type of project that I love to play with. I have no doubt that one could get a few descent snapshots with a simple point & shoot camera, but to do justice and fully capture and preserve the true intimate details one needs a bit more sophisticated camera and take a number of pictures that could be put in a remembrance album. Photographing that mirrored wall presents a number of very unique problems. First off, how do we photograph the wall without ending up with a picture of ourselves holding the camera? As was mentioned above, the solution here is to shoot a picture of the wall from an angle, preferably using a wide angle lens so you can get the whole wall in one shot. (later we will follow by taking individual shots of the panels that have notes written on them). Generally a bedroom has an overhead light and that should provide more than adequate lighting while keeping the scene in its most natural mood, however, make sure you adjust the cameras "WB" (white balance) for incandescent lighting unless of course it has florescent lighting or a CFL bulb in which case you would adjust the WB for florescent lighting. (an alternative here would e to use a CFL filter on the lens, but most digital cameras have adjustable white balance). In order to preserve maximum resolution I would strongly suggest using a tripod and keep the ISO as low as possible, preferably at ISO 100 or ISO 200. For the overall shot I would set the f-stop to f-11 or f-16 to maintain maximum depth of field. (Keep in mind that the camera will be seeing the reflected image in the mirror so the overall focal distance will be equal to the distance from the camera to the wall plus the distance from that wall to the adjacent wall being reflected and the desired depth of field will be equal to the distance from the mirrored wall to the reflected adjacent wall. When using a camera on a tripod far too often we introduce shake into the picture merely from the action of pressing the shutter button. Back in the days of film cameras we overcame that by using a cable release or the self timer. With modern cameras we have a number of options here. Nearly all cameras today have a built in self timer or time delay feature. Most DSLR's allow the use of a s small inexpensive IF (infra red) remote. In addition, most DSLR's have an auxiliary input jack where you can plug in a 3 or 5ft remote shutter release cable or an electronic wireless remote that will allow you to be upwards of 100 meters from the camera. Previously it was suggested that you could set up some form of blind to conceal the camera from the reflected image. If you have an Infra Red or electronic wireless remote the camera could be set up on a table top tripod on a dresser or table on the opposite side of the room and triggered remotely, and the camera would merely look like a small room accent in the final picture. Preserving the writing on the individual mirrors can prove to be a real challenge. The problem you will encounter is that while focusing you will be seeing the reflected image in the mirror. There are a couple tricks you can try here. 1. Take a "post it" note or a small piece of paper and draw and X on it with a magic marker, then stick it on the individual mirror and focus on the X. Once you have the focus set, you can remove the note and take the shot. In this manner you can be certain you are focused on the actual mirror front, not the reflected image from across the room and you will be sure to get the writing that you want to preserve. 2. Set the camera on a tripod at a slight angle, then hang a sheet of white or colored poster paper where it will reflect in the mirror. That will make the background in the mirror a solid color rather than a reflection of the adjacent wall thus making the writing on the mirror stand out. If your camera has automatic B&W or Sepia filters you may also want to take a few shots in that mode to see if the writing stands out better. As was mentioned above, I would also use a polarizing filter for all the shots. One of the key factors in any photo assignment is take plenty of shots. You can always delete the ones you don't need, but you can never replace the one you didn't take. Back in the days of film it got a bit expensive and time consuming to shoot a dozen rolls of film a day, but in this day of erasable memory cards and rechargeable batters who cares if you shoot 100 frames, providing you get the one shot your really looking for? Taking this project to the next level. Once you have all the shots of the mirrors, I would try to find a nice portrait type photo, such as a school yearbook photo and use that as the cover page for an album, then put the pictures of his training area in the book and close out with a couple shots of him in his wrestling outfit, and preferably an action shot from a match showing the end result of the mirrored wall.