Kamikaze attack, a Wasp and Wordpress

Man its hot out thar! Temperatures were hitting 28c outdoors and 30c in my room this weekend.

It was so damn hot that on Friday, a rather large fly decided to try and cool off by doing a kamikaze run straight into my left eye and completely knocked me out during a lunchtime walk by the side of the lake near my workplace. It was lodged in my upper eyeball and I could feel the bugger moving around but could I get it out?! Could I heck… I ended up walking home partially blinded, crashing in to random people as a result. I had to take a different route home too - it would be too embarrasing walking through Harrow town. Suffice to say that I eventually removed it, but fark me did that hurt!

On another note I was woken up on Saturday morning by a strange buzzing sound. It turned out to be a flaming suicidal wasp who preferred my cool pillow to the rather hot air. Needless to say this took me by complete surprise and saw me crash off the bed. A few hours later I was working under my desk rerouting some cables, and guess who I bumped in to down there? The blasted wasp was back and sent me fleeing to the nearest air freshner can. Coupled with a lighter it would be toast! Sadly the bugger had vanished by the time I had returned…

Sunday saw me writing a review for a new toy that I have, when I decided to take a break and upgrade this blog to Wordpress 2.5.1 and the latest RC6 build of the superb K2 Wordpress theme. Wordpress installed smoothly enough but K2 RC6 has caused a few issues. Wordpress 2.5.1 works slightly differently now and reads CSS in a different way so it took some getting used to. Currently this blog fails to render properly in Internet Explorer 6 and 7 - I can’t fix this without further investigation in to this issue. It is fine in Firefox and Opera as expected though. All this faffing about with Wordpress meant that I failed to finish my review by Sunday night. Great I can’t even adjust to the new look dashboard…

I haven’t really written much on this blog lately so that is going to change from this point onwards. I’ll spend a lot more time tinkering around and adding new toys yay!

Tuesday April 29th March 2008

It is quite rare for me to claim that a certain title is the best I have ever played. That award goes to a single game from 2002 - Mafia. Through the years I’ve seen titles come and go, in which I have claimed to be superb and whilst they have been just that, the replayability wasn’t there - Condemned and Bioshock for instance.

The Grand Theft Auto series since GTA: Vice City has always had a place in my heart. It’s sucessor San Andreas was equally as good featuring a huge land mass, in which you could do virtually anything you wanted to. It quickly became my favourite game of the series. Well move over San Andreas, GTA IV just became my favourite GTA but also  my second favourite game of all time. Since it’s release Grand Theft Auto IV has ranked up some of the highest review marks I have seen since Gears of War on the 360. Although I do think the marking for IV was a little over the top in quite a few areas it is without doubt an outstanding accomplishment from Rockstar.

Liberty City, is based on New York City of course, in which we see Niko Bellic (a war veteran from Bosnia) arriving in search of the American Dream. Does he find it though? Buggered if I could find out since I encountered a nasty broken mission bug, which saw me not receiving a key phone call from some lawyers so I ended up restarting the game. Suffice to say it’s been a rather long Bank Holiday weekend making up for all that lost time but I have had a blast, which didn’t please my girlfriend…

Is the title any good? Well short of actually reviewing it I will state that "Yes it is outstanding, in many, many ways but that doesn’t mean it has no faults". It’s graphics are very controversial right now and I say this because the game is using a blur filter that makes commenting on the graphics rather hard. In some places the game looks incredible, whilst in other areas it looks completely poor as distant objects are blurred and dithered to an extent. The game features a lighting system that I rate as the best I have ever seen. I kid you not  - driving through Liberty City is an experience to behold mainly because the lighting is so perfect that everything looks just right and I won’t mention the dynamic shadows moving in relation to the sun…

Rockstar have created a living, breathing city in ways that cannot really be described. Even my mother who was watching me play earlier today stated that the city looked so real as I casually drove past all the neon-lit buildings amongst hundreds of yellow cabs.

I am still going through the game and I’m just 30% through it but I can see heaps of things to do afterwards and with the extra downloadable content arriving later in the year I just hope that extends the gameplay a bit more. Who knows? All I know is that I am hooked!

See what the NY Times had to say about GTA IV
Rockstar’s Dan Houser speaks about GTA IV
Think I’m excited? Check Oz gal Kitteh out!

Gerrof my godamn lawn!

Recently I installed some custom night lights our back garden. You know the passive infrared type that detects body heat movement and switches on a lamp for a few minutes blinding you as you walk past some random house on a street. Well not being a DIY person, despite the fact that I am an engineer I went a bit overboard and bought the brightest, most powerful light one could have purchased. Not the cleverest of moves as I soon found out.

Of course now the entire neighbourhood hates us because our garden looks like an aircraft runway at night thanks to bloody cats who love running around triggering the lighting. If it’s not cats then its frogs, and if its not frogs then its a flamin hedgehog who seems to have cloaking technology because I’m buggered if I can find him after I run out into the garden searching for the wee beast that triggered the lights. Well I think it’s a hedgehog anyway.

So guaranteed by the time I am just dozing off to sleep at midnight, my bedroom is lit up like a Christmas tree for about 4 minutes as my bedroom overlooks the garden. The room is already lit up bright blue by a PC, which is switched 24/7 and armed with 3 blue neon strobe lights and no less than 5 blue illuminated hard drive caddies at the front so I tend to sleep in blue lit room. When the garden floodlights get triggered I instantly wake up thinking its 4am, and time to get ready for work!

Of course the answer is simple - turn down the brightness on the lamp, or lower its activated duration so it stays on for say 30 seconds. Now I could do this….if the damn unit wasn’t pre-programmed with it’s own settings to ‘ease installation’. Buggery. Now I’ll really have the neighbours coming at me with pitchforks tomorrow.

Silence from Creative after customer revolt

Picture the following scenario. Imagine if you had gone out and purchased a Creative Labs Soundblaster of some kind, there’s loads of them around but the most popular ones would be their Audigy and XFI series cards. Now imagine smiling when you saw that ‘Vista Compatible’ logo on the box, meaning that the card would work on Microsoft Vista. So you purchase it, take it home and install it into your PC. You would then either:

• Install the drivers from the included CD
• OR simply get and install the latest drivers from the Creative website

You would now have a fully working card right? You should be able to use all its capabilities given that it is ‘Vista Compatible’. What would you do if you found out that it wasn’t really ‘Vista Compatible’ ? This is what thousands of creative soundcard owners have been asking themselves for years now. Creative’s soundcard drivers have always been laughably poor, even back when I used them on my Audigy 2 in Windows XP, but it turns out that their new XFI drivers are just as bad. There are no decent working drivers in Vista at present I am led to believe. Because the Creative ‘Soundblaster’ moniker is such a powerful one - your average joe public just assumes that the product adds high quality sound to your PC, and will then go out and purchase one without knowing all this.

A driver modder known as Daniel_K decided to come up with his own modified drivers that restored functionality to these cards - everyone was happy, well except for Creative. One would think that they’d embrace his skills and maybe hire him, but instead they decided to do him for copyright issues! Daniel_K was warned on the Creative forums to cease activity, and what then followed was a backlash that I have never seen before. The forums were filled with thousands of unhappy gamers/soundblaster owners ranting and mocking Creative for ignorance. For a corporate company as big as Creative, they should be able to afford driver engineers to develop the best drivers possible but no. Instead they just rehash and rebox card after card to make even more money - and it works.

Since Windows Vista arrived on the scene, driver vendors have struggled to come up with decent functionality with their drivers as they have to work with new API’s they aren’t used to. As I have stated in the past, Creative were one of those companies that ended up admitting that their Audigy 2 and XFI drivers were poor in the first place. Nebula Electronics who made the once extremely popular Nebula TV Tuners have all but gone silent on customers with regards to their Vista drivers since the release of the operating system in 2007. Despite it having the best TV software around, I have stopped using mine, and so has PR because they are just incomplete and flaky in Vista for well over a year now. Even their forums have dried up with no Nebula feedback.

Back to Creative though. I am a huge admirer of them and their products, well mainly their portable music and peripherals rather than their soundcards, which I have stated have always been top notch build and spec wise, but useless driver wise. They started the whole thing off, they brought music to the very early PC’s, just simple beeps from a soundchip embedded on a bit of PCB back in early 1987. It all went pear shaped as they branched out and kept rehashing soundcards to keep a foothold on the market. However the tide has changed, and they are suffering.

Built in sound capabilities on PC motherboards have already reached the point where they require little system resources and sound superb. Other soundcard manufacturers have been rising over the past year and are building far superior products. Auzentech, Asus, Razer to name a few, and they all work fine in Vista. There is no doubt that Creative are about to feel a backlash that they’re not used to. Lately they have failed to deliver a good sucessor to the Creative Zen Vision:M - their once flagship audio player. They have now seemingly focused on developing peripherals for the Apple iPod - their very own competitors. If this wasn’t enough to be concerned about, I would also be concerned about this, not that it means much to the company as a whole.

Yesterday, Creative via one of their forum moderators stated that they have listened to the feedback (feedback? you sure?) and decided to work with Daniel_K in supporting their driver development programme. Is this a case of way too little, too late? To be truthful, I hope he tells them to shove it. I truly respect, and admire what you’ve done Mr.K. I gave up on Creative cards a long time ago and have never had an XFI so I have no idea how bad it’s drivers were, but poor Creative drivers was why I went out and bought an Auzentech Meridian, a truly awesome bit of kit. Good luck with Creative.

You can read Daniel_K’s full story Here.
Full Creative/Daniel_K story Here.

Clocks go back 1 Hour

1 Hour less sleep…what tart came up with this idea then eh? I already get 4 Hours of sleep time and now that’s going to be cut short! Ta! I suppose the lovely ladies roaming our town centres in short skirts and low cut tops are a positive factor in all this.

I mean, look! It’s already 22:31 and that’s my bedtime! Bring the darkness back for the love of god! This is not typical British weather…

It’s that time of the month again

Wordpress 2.5 arrived rather quietly overnight last night so it’s time to look into upgrading this blog again. For those who aren’t clued up on how big a upgrade this is take a look-see at the Screencast and the screenshots of the new dashboard interface.

A list of 2.5 compatibile plugins can be found Here. So next weekend I shall attempt to upgrade this blog, with possibly disastrous results. I may need to move to the latest K2 build at the same time I predict. Hoorah!

Since the new year I’ve gone back an old love of mine - weight training and generally keeping fit, which also involves me being a pain in the arse to everyone around me because I can’t help but be concerned about friends when they’re gorging on big macs or a softe bloody kebab after a night out. Dishing out advice is beginning to become a bad habit. I’ve been working out intensely and have made good gains with the sad result that I now need bigger clothes! Good for me, bad for my wallet.

In other news my plan to slowly give up console gaming is working, although with Condemned 2 and Grand Theft Auto: IV around the corner I have no idea how long that will last. On the whole I am gaming less, and as a result I have more time for other stuff - neat! That is one thing I said I’d do in 2008.

With the Easter holidays coming up I face a particularly lonely one without my other half. My girlfriend Deena is buggering off with her parents to Sweden to see her relations. Balls! It doesn’t quite help that we’re becoming more and more separated lately either. Even though she is at present sitting nearby hogging my TV by playing Boom Boom Rocket on my 360, we hardly see much of each other lately due to work commitments. It’s only on weekends that we actually do see each other now, and we all know how fast those weekends just fly by.

How do normal couples get past this stage in a relationship I wonder? I mean early relationships start off all hot and fun, but a year down the road when you start to settle down you begin thinking about your future together. At the age of 32 I still don’t know where I’m headed in my personal life - is that wrong? According to friends and colleagues it is perfectly normal as most got hitched in their mid 30’s! Oh noes!

We’re taking two holidays come April and June this year, maybe that will help us catch up on lost moments, who knows? So if anyone has any interesting suggestions as to where we could sod off to for a week or two then feel free to er suggest. (does that even remotely make sense?)