Yes this blog has been ignored for far too long now in favour of Twitter but I don’t plan on leaving it in the dust just yet. I have some ideas for 2010 that could bring this place back to to life!

Today I took the time to do something I had been dreading for some time. Upgrading this blog from WordPress 2.6 to the latest 2.8.5 version was always going to be a major pain in the you know what. The upgrade went moderately well and only my sidebar took the most damage. At the moment I can’t get WP Quotes to read from the quotes engine properly and I have only just managed to get FlickrRSS working properly. Anyway, enough of that! Back to Forza Motorsports 3!

<–hurhur

Ok, admit it. How many of you lot have begun ignoring your blogs in favour of Twitter? Since returning to the fast growing service in February 2009 I am pretty much guilty of this as I have indeed ignored this blog, something I never thought I would do.

I suppose it is a multitude of things though. Yes Twitter is to blame, but aside from that I have been focusing on my working life pretty much 100% since the year began. I had enough distractions towards the end of 2008 and wanted to start the year fresh – and have done. So, work goes incredibly well. Too well infact and I am almost struggling to cope with some of the things now bestowed onto me.

I think Mr.Wud stated what I’ve had on my mind for a while now. I have noticed that a lot of bloggers since moving to Twitter have just let their blogs slowly gather dust, as it were. Blogging takes some thought, time and planning in some cases before one publishes a post. Twittering is limited to 140 characters a ‘tweet’ (message) so you can jibber-jabber about anything without a care in the world.

Does that mean my blog is pretty much stagnant i.e dead? Well no. I’ve put a lot of work into it, but time is precious, and after coming home from a long day at work I pretty much crash out on the bed/sofa. Twittering on the move is simple and quick, blogging isn’t so and that is my problem right there. I will continue to add reviews, and thoughts that cannot be twittered though but I predict things will be rather quiet for the most part.

Anyway, I’m pretty much looking forward to this summer. I had plans to visit Australia, NSW this April-May as I understand the weather isn’t hot at this time of the year. Heat=baad, Cold/Rain = Good. However as usual, those plans have gone tits up thanks to my parents who don’t want to go.

This summer see’s the arrival of the third iteration of Apple’s iPhone (the plodphone). I am excited as hell, even more-so with the new OS 3.0 that will be launched alongside it. My current Jailbroken iPhone is such a strong part of my everyday life that it’s hard as hell to live without it. I just can’t wait for the next version.

Windows 7 Release Candidate (Build 7100) was leaked onto the interwebs just a week ago and my, it is good enough to ship retail in it’s current state. I’ve presently got it sitting on my Samsung NC10 netbook and it quite literally flies in comparison to XP SP3, that was on there. I await soundcard drivers for my Auzentech Meridian er soundcard so I can install the RC release on my main desktop rig though. Oh, and we can now uninstall that heap of gobshite known as Internets Explorer!! How cool is that?

I had written a ‘short’ story over the past few months based on the Fallout universe and my adventures since discovering the game late during December 2008. However it has ballooned to such a size that I’ve no idea how to get it onto the blog! It was about my adventures in the game basically with a nice bit of fiction about my lone quest to get to Rivet City, and then to find ‘Dad’. Most people who know me know that I can pretty much sprout A4 paragraphs in minutes, so trust me – it is large!

Hmm, I gotta get out more!

Doomed?

In a word, I am hugely impressed! I loathed WordPress 2.6.x and all it’s incarnations. It was a pain to navigate, clunky and just felt so delicate that I was afraid to even tweak my heavily modded K2 theme. Normally every WordPress upgrade ends up breaking my theme and I spend weeks re-writing sections of it. After the RC1 installation, much to my surprise everything was perfect and I cannot see anything out of place anywhere.

The new Administration panels are a joy to use and uncluttered, yet compact. Discussions are much easier to see at a glance on the dashboard thanks to the new comment features – you can now directly reply to a users comments and your comment will be updated in realtime beneath it. The whole overhaul is a breath of fresh air compared to version 2.6, which I regard as the poorest release of WordPress I have seen. I now await the full release on December 10th. Have that date on your calendar folks!

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, Safari 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!

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!

I wubs u wp!

This blog has been sitting on WordPress 2.1.3 for quite sometime now as the latest WP releases just wouldn’t work right with my modded K2 theme. However I have just upgraded from 2.1.3 to 2.2.2 with hardly any side effects, which is a tad odd but great at the same time.

So if anything does look out of place or broken, please give me a shout as I’ve yet to notice anything wrong. As a matter of fact the upgrade went surprisingly smoothly as it used to! Taken from www.wordpress.org

As these releases include only security and minor bugfixes they should not cause any plugin or theme compatibility issues, so you have no good excuse not to upgrade.

More Site Updates

Kainzy.org is back from a few days of downtime after moving to Vidahost.com. I’ve upgraded WordPress to the latest release (v2.1 codenamed Ella), and at the same time I’m fine tuning the latest version of the lovely K2 theme. Everything has gone extremely smoothly and I’ve only got just one mis-behaving plugin at the moment giving me some grief.

I finish work this week!

At work right now at present, I find myself just counting the hours, and days that go by. I’m constantly staring at the calendar sitting on my desk. Lately I’ve been very reserved and quiet at work. I’m sick of working, travelling etc and I just want to get away from it all. Don’t get me wrong here, I love my job and have one of the most enjoyable jobs anyone could have but lately as the year comes to a close, I just want out. I’m not alone either from my scant observations of my colleagues. Everyone seems to be taking extended breaks, extended loo breaks, and just generally walking around wasting time, just to make the day progress that little bit quicker. Sadly we have another week of work left and break up on the 22nd Dec, so they’ve got another 4 days of boredom to kill. It doesn’t help by the fact that my mates up North in Manchester and Coventry all broke up from work on the 8th of December. It’s my favourite time of the year though, Winter and Christmas is here so there’s nothing that can get me down.

Anyway, the second of four parties was this week. I didn’t want to go to this one, which was at the Royal Spice in London, but went anyway. It was dull, and the moment the drinks started flowing, everyone was kicking back the wine, champers, beer, cider and wotnot like there was no tomorrow. Not too sure what else happened at the party because I was totally wasted like everyone else. I am, however unclear about a few things though:

• How the hell did I manage to bus it all the way home? I looked at the London Bus map earlier and apparently it would take 9 bus changes to reach home from the restaurant we were at. I do recall switching buses on more then a few occasions but how? I was totally wasted after leaving my colleagues.
• I seem to have two packets of cigarettes and a lighter in my coat pocket – I don’t smoke!
• My inner coat pocket seems to contain the restaurant’s menu
• My black shirt is heavily ripped near the lower buttons?!

So if anyone saw a seriously drunk asian guy, with spikey hair, wearing a long black coat on the 140, 282, H14 (that’s all I can remember) buses on Friday night, then I apologise for my actions if I’d done anything stupid! This weekend I really wanted to upload two more reviews, but have drastically run out of time. Instead I ended up fixing some broken parts of the blog after trying to customise the comments forms. Ended up wasting two hours on that, so my reviews on WWE Smackdown and Full Auto have been delayed by a bit. In addition I’ve also been tidying up some existing reviews because of some new fixes I did to the Lightbox plugin that handles the way images are displayed – if anyone spots anything weird, please get in touch using the Contact form on this blog. Ta muchly!

She cannae take anymore!

While I’ve been beavering away in the background of this blog fixing errors and minor bugs here and there, after upgrading the K2 theme, I can’t help but notice a colossal increase in traffic heading my way. These hits are definitely not coming from search engine bots as I’ve blocked most of the more annoying spider bots out there. Most of it seems to be coming from the Xbox 360 Reviews that I’ve been doing lately and I’m quite frankly stunned at the responses some of these reviews have had. I’d just like to say thank you.

The monthly hit rates for November hit 17,891, while October was 5,452. The previous record was 9,991 set in February 2006. The Gears of War review has attracted just over 3000 hits, and the 360 Wireless Headset write up has had 2800. Due to such a large increase in traffic (and I’ve not even started churning out the reviews yet) I can predict things will get a lot busier as I add more reviews. Guess I need to contact my good hosts JSW Freelance and upgrade my current package over the coming weeks. 17k of visitors may not sound much compared to most blogs out there, but for an average blog like this one it’s a lot in my opinion

I’ve also had a lot of emails from readers asking why they can’t comment on my reviews. Well here’s the answer to that – I’m not exactly sure. The K2 theme as I understand it supports Page Comments, and I have ‘Allow Comments’ ticked on the pages I write my reviews on, so I don’t understand why commenting just doesn’t work. I’ve looked at the code and it seems fine too. I am looking into this though but I doubt I can fix it, as it is well beyond me. For now, your best bet is to post a comment on the main review related snippet I’ll post whenever I upload a couple of games reviews.