Now here is something that was rather unexpected on a Sunday morning, an April morning of all things. I woke up at 8am to find my room brighter than normal. Upon looking through my window, the houses and everything were all fluffly white with snow! Tons of the stuff! Snowball fights ahoy as my mother, father and girlfriend got pelted with the stuff!
Archive for the 'Babble' Category
Being hit by the ‘Wake up call bug’…
Lately Vista x32 has been acting like the bitch queen from hell on my PC, there is just no reasoning with it at all because it does what it wants regardless of your needs. When the OS (Operating System) works it is a dream to use but when it doesn’t it becomes rather irritating. To the point where I’m actually thinking about the damn thing even though I’m at the dinner table with my girlfriend - in a resteraunt. She’s thinking about future things and I’m thinking about how to get more speed out of the OS…
Over the weekend I decided to reinstall Vista in preparation for Service Pack 1 due later this month. At the same time I decided to dedicate a hard disk to XP and dual boot between the two OS’s, mainly so I could play older games, which don’t like Vista. Upon installing XP, the setup utility would crash after it had pre-loaded some XP bits on to my system, this was rather puzzling. I performed a full chkdsk /f which took a solid 2hrs, much to my annoyance.
<–Cloverfield Monster!? YA RLY
I’ve gone and done it again. The moment something bloody exciting happens, yours truly sleeps right through it without a wink. Last time it was Buncefield, and now an Earthquake that measured a colossal 5.2 on the Richter scale last night at around 01:00 GMT. I crashed out on my bed at around 22:30 because I was so tired, and then woke up at 05:00 only to see the BBC News readers on TV going crazy about something that had happened in Lincolnshire, North East England. Then up popped a map with a bullseye on the ‘danger’ zone and immediately my thoughts were "Oh noes! Bomb!". Bomb indeed…
So I resumed my early morning duties of checking a few forums, as well as blogs. One of these forums was Overclockers UK, where I’ve hung around for a fair number of years now. Sure enough there was a bigarse thread there about the quake. Even funnier was the picture just below of many users all rushing to the forum to find out what had happened.
Its hilarious when you think about it - if a bomb or major accident etc happens the first thing half of us do is rush off to the interwebs! Balls to contacting loved ones to see if they’re OK, just post on forums instead! It’s amazing how reliant we are of the Internet now. At this point I thought I’d phone my lovely girlfriend who will have definitely been awoken by this event. Instead I got an earful of abuse for waking her up! Charming!
It’s that time of the year again folks!
Time to give florists extra business. So break out those Tesco’s Valentines Cards, grab some flowers and show your loved one just how much they mean to you by printing out one of these gorgeously crafted cards.
So what have I gone and done? Well I’ve gone and bought a USB Moo Moo cow for Deena and I. "A what?" I hear you ask. Well it’s a bit hard to really describe properly. Check this YouTube vid to see how it works. 
Moomoo is a USB-enabled cow that lives on your desk, and is somehow attached to software that lets it communicate with a second Moomoo cow. If you push a button on Moomoo, its companion (ideally located in close proximity to your special someone) will moo at them and start glowing.
<—Spam, yum yum yum
Allo! No I haven’t died. I’ve just been rather busy both at home and at work. So to get myself back into blogging I have decided to reply to one of those utterly dumb spam emails that tend to occupy ones inbox. These normally get deleted on sight…so here goes.
1. Was 2007 a good year for you?
Yes. Got promoted twice at work, and have a great girlfriend with a fantastic ****. Aside from that things were ‘quiet’.
2. What was your best moment of the year?
Possibly going to Australia. It was a business trip but I had always wanted to go there. What little I did see of the place I really loved, and everyone loved my British accent! Aside from that it was my close friends Rene and Raj having a little baby sprog daughter.
3. What was your least favourite moment of the year?
Having to prepare to head off to Australia. I haven’t felt that nervous and uneasy in a long time as I hadn’t been on a plane in a long time. That was just one of my reasons anyway.
Tonight I managed to finish watching the first three episodes of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles - A continuation of The Terminator trilogy now serialised by the Fox network. As I watched this a few thoughts came storming in to my head as I saw one of the CGI Terminators in Episode 3. I cast my mind back to 1991 when Terminator 2 came out.
For those who know their computer hardware, did you know that the transformation scenes for the Terminator 2’s evil T-1000 were done by the legends known as ILM - Industrial Light & Magic? Most people will be nodding their heads round about now. However did you know that the machines they used back then consisted of 40MHz Silicon Graphics workstations with 64MB of RAM? Just think about that for a moment and look at the power we have with today’s hardware…scary isn’t it?
Corp Por dude!
I read a interesting article today over at Halfmad.com, owned by my good old mate Phil aka MMO Addicted Tart. MMO’s also known as Massively Multiplayer Online games as most gamers know can be incredibly addictive. People often lose their lives in a virtual world that is inhabited by thousands upon thousands of players. The great thing about these games is that the world is still living and breathing even when you’re fast asleep. Players can engage in quests, develop their characters and before you know it, whole communities have developed.
Fuelling every MMO title is the game’s economy. You earn money in these games, and players often pay real life money for in game currency and before you know it, there are players with millions upon millions of hard currency even though they haven’t the knowledge about the features of their virtual world. I lost myself in possibly the best title of them all, the grand daddy known as Ultima Online. From 1998 to 2002 I played the game before realising that I was essentially wasting my time. During that time I became one of the wealthiest players on my shard (server) by working hard for my money as a warrior swordsman and as a trader.
However I never looked in to the dark side of this gaming habit. Players could ‘dupe’ (duplicate) gold using various in-game bugs and make millions in the process. This in-game currency could then be sold for real life money. It’s all rather geeky to be honest.
Phil at Halfmad.com is the chap who got me in to all this MMO gaming years ago, and our history in these games spans a huge amount of MMO’s. He recently returned to World of Warcraft - one of the more overrated, yet popular MMO’s in the world. However he never returned with the intentions to play the game. Check out his article, it’s certainly a big eye opener to any MMO addict out there.
Right. As a lot of readers already know, I have been slack on producing Xbox 360 game reviews. It mainly attributes to the fact that I just haven’t the time any more as I have mentioned a few times before. Researching and then writing about games is a lot more time consuming than most think.
I have a partially finished Assassin’s Creed review, and was hugely looking forward to writing about Mass Effect, which in my opinion is now the best game on the 360. For weeks now, I’ve been trying to find the time to write but have always been side tracked, so bugger it.. I will however, continue writing various hardware reviews after the new year when I go crazy on spending!
They be stealing meh mail!
So the Royal Mail postal workers are on strike once again over pay and job cuts. Who knows how long this will go on for, but there’s one obvious benefit to all of this. No Bills! That’s right, no sodding utility bills that appear just as I am about to go on a mad shopping spree!
However, it never works out that way does it?
After work last night, I had a client to visit who needed her PC looked at. This woman hadn’t somehow noticed that Internet Explorer had mysteriously grown another 10 toolbars and her web speed was equivalent to a 2400 baud modem powered desktop computer from 1989 however that is another story altogether.
Woo! I’m proud to announce that over the next day or so that we will have our own public TF2 server thanks to Jolt UK. ‘We’ referring to the old school Half Life DM/TFC/Quake/etc crew who I have known for utterly years - close to 10 years for a few of them. We have resided on channel #id on Quakenet for many years now.
With the TF2 Beta being a lot more robust than I originally expected, I thought to myself ‘We needs a server, our own, our preciouussses’. So I’ve gone out and gots us one! A 16 player public server will hopefully go live over the next few days and be open to all. It’ll be a good friendly place where hopefully old school TFC’ers can come and visit and have a blast.
We aren’t a clan, just a group of seasoned gamers who have ‘been there and done that’ in the past, so we just play for fun now as we have one of those things called ‘A LIFE’. Right, that’s the bollocks out of the way, now on to the rest of the details.
The server also will support Fortress Forever. Should we decide that TF2 isn’t progressing too well with regards to class balancing, we could end up switching over to that mod in future. Only time will tell.
Oh and lastly, www.halfmad.com has risen from the ashes, albeit in a slightly different form! It’s all bl00 and still run by me good mate Phil. He’s Scottish, bald and a bit of a loony but he has kindly put up a forum for our server. It isn’t finished yet, but shall be soon. In the meantime please feel free to register (that includes you goits in #id) and prepare for much TF2 discussions, rants, wines etc.
Update: 30th Sept: Not heard from Jolt just yet as it’s the weekend. Hopefully they’ll get some progress tomorrow, otherwise I’ll email them for info, as the money has gone out of my account
Update: 1st October: She’s alive! 195.149.21.186:27015
Update: 23rd October: Server moved to 213.208.119.65:27035