So folks, it’s that time of the year again. That time where I look back on a year gone by and… no lets not kid around here – 2010 was about as muted and silent as it could possibly be to tell the truth.

After my Encephalitis scare in 2009, I returned to work in March a slightly different person, more arrogant and fiery tempered than I previously was – a side effect that is commonly observed from those who have suffered from it. I had to take things easy at work and I think my peers realised that, much to my annoyance at first. Work itself was rather challenging throughout the year though.

The biggest upset arrived with our new Government’s Security Defence review. Given that Sonobuoys are just one of our mainstream products we develop, the cancellation of the MRA4 Nimrod and Harrier jump jets were a huge blow to us and to the RAF. For us it meant an entire department being shutdown as the sonobuoy that was manufactured there was mainly deployed by Nimrod aircraft in the first place. I was upset as I had done a lot of work in 2008 on that very product. For the UK in general, it had lost one of the most iconic military aircraft it has ever had – the Harrier. I grew up playing with Airfix models of that stunning piece of engineering and I will miss it a lot. Edit: Final Harrier Photos at www.fast-air.co.uk.

2011 looks to be the most challenging year yet for yours truly and my company. After much thinking and head-banging over this festive period I am not really sure if I want to be a part of it anymore.

2010 Gaming

Assassins Creed Series – I finally got around to playing Assassins Creed 2 and what a title this turned out to be. I loved the first AC but the sequel just pulled out all the stops and for an 8GB title it had a great deal of gameplay, that is if you did everything of course. It’s follow up – Assassins Creed: Brotherhood came out just weeks after I had finished AC2 and this was almost as impressive – essentially this was almost the same game, albeit set in Rome with improved combat and the ability to recruit fellow assassin’s who were rarely used on the whole. These two titles were easily the best gaming experiences I had in 2010 by far.

Mass Effect II – The huge storyline of Mass Effect continues, sadly without the same strengths. You once again recruit new squad mates, none of which are particularly interesting and then trot around the galaxy trying to work out who these walking bumblebee winged aliens are and why they are kidnapping us hoomans. The gameplay remains rather strong, however the weapons/armour selection had been toned down hugely. I also just couldn’t bring myself to care for any of my team towards the end of the game, whereas in the first game almost every character was treasured. The third and final Mass Effect will be without a doubt one of the largest selling titles of 2011.

Mafia II – This was probably the largest ‘balls-up’ I have seen since Daikatana. Mafia 1 still holds the title as the best PC game I have ever played, with its deep storyline, and superb characters. It borrowed elements from every mafia film around at the time – namely Godfather and Goodfellas. Mafia II was strictly the opposite in every area. A very poor un-engaging plot from the start, boring missions, and a game world, which despite being large was just stale and empty with very little to do. What really hurt the game was that it was very short, and within days of its release 2K Games announced all ‘new’ downloadable content for a hefty price….’new’? Pull the other one. Almost the worst title of the year for me.

Fallout: New Vegas – Its predecessor Fallout 3 was an incredible title. So much so that I even wrote short stories of my adventures from my first day when I ventured out into the wastelands of an atomic fallout. The length of the stories however got out of hand so I never released them onto this blog. I wish I could state the same for this game. New Vegas was one of the areas, which wasn’t hit by the bombs so it was well preserved. Sadly so was the use of the Fallout 3 engine, which is looking incredibly dated in this day and age.

Every building, every room interior all looked like a Fallout 3 interior and I found one particular room to be an exact cut & paste slop job ripped out of Fallout 3. What really killed the game was that it was incredibly buggy on release and every review also stated the same thing. Random crashes meant that it was very hard to get into the game let alone venture anywhere, and boring quests and hardly anything new meant that this was merely an overpriced expansion pack instead of a new game it was marketed as. Worst title of 2010 for me.

Red Dead Redemption – Western themed sandbox game from the masters of the genre – Rockstar (Grand Theft Auto series). This title managed to grab of a huge number of awards all over the place this year. Quite how this was achieved I haven’t a clue because beyond the very good storyline, there is little else to do much alike Mafia II for the most part. It has yet another lovely world to venture around in and yet nothing compels you to actually do just that. Call of Juarez 1 was far better.

Supreme Commander 2 – (Sorry about this…) For the love of all that is bloody holy, what the fuck went wrong here Chris Taylor? You went from the most brilliant RTS known to mankind into a shitstink of a game, with utterly shite unit models with no detail whatsoever. The battlefield zoomed out even partially makes units look like un-identifiable blobs of fucking vegetables. You made Experimental units completely useless and you created a completely different game. Yet you hired one of the most talented AI developers to produce AI for the game but where is it? I see none of the AI traits that I saw in Forged Alliance. If I wasn’t so hyped for Mafia II in 2010, this would be the worst title for me.

An Apple A Day…

Bought an iPhone 4 in mid-2010 to replace my ancient iPhone 3G. The new model is a gorgeous work of art, and its operating system continues to be the one OS that all the others are judged against. 2011 will be a tough year for Apple, but Google’s Android with its fragmented arse-end should hopefully get itself sorted at some point. I’ve always kept a close eye on Android but even right now it just isn’t enough. HTC phones may have the better hardware in places but at the end of the day, it’s the user experience governed by the OS that matters and iOS is getting stronger with each release much to my surprise. That’s not to say work is still needed (Lockscreen Apple fs). It’ll be interesting to see how well Windows Mobile 7 matures this year as I find that more promising in the long run than Android.

I had long resisted the urge to purchase an iPad, deciding to wait for the second revision due in April 2011 instead. That urge crumbled in August/September when I purchased a 32GB 3G/Wifi model. I had good reasons to buy one though – my parents, who are technophobes love my iPhone 3/4. It is the first device that they feel confident using as I have mentioned many times. This is a common trend too as even young children pick up the simple skills to use the devices with startling ease so it is a great learning tool.

My parents can browse the web with Safari, use multi-touch gestures to bring up a huge collection of photos and they can use the TVGuide app to instantly see what is on the box, instead of having to use the newspaper with its small print. Best of all, it isn’t a bulky, unreliable beast like your average Windows based laptop with its poor battery life. They can’t break anything on the iPad due to its simplicity, and yet I can move them onto more advanced apps as their knowledge grows. They are slowly moving into the digital world. Must get them to dump the VHS recorder in 2011…

Another good use is for business trips, as its large 10″ screen and huge battery life means that my colleagues and I can use SatNav without getting lost in Gloucestershire, being chased by farmer Joe on his tractor followed by his herd of sheep. In addition being stuck on the bus as frequently as I am means I can just pull the device out and freely browse the web. If anyone looks like they’re about to grab it – the hard aluminium back makes a nice hooman bashing tool.

Twitter and Blog Stuffs

Twitter continues to be my driving force for getting through a working day. I know some amazing people on the network and continue to meet strange and amazing folk all the time. I have to say that without the existence of Twitter I’d have really struggled through 2010 as I wouldn’t have anyone to keep my brain alive after a long days work.

Aside from keeping up to date with friends, there is no better tool in obtaining realtime information on current events happening in our world today. On the negative side of things Twitter is to blame for the lack of updates on this blog!

Have a good 2011 peeps!

Some 8hrs after joining, Twitter is down...

About twelve hours ago, Microsoft founder Bill Gates joined Twitter. I am somewhat happy to say that I was amongst his first 1000 followers!

An hour after following him I went over to check his profile and he had 23,000 followers, expanding to 55,000 just half an hour later! Word of Mr.Gates arrival spread like wildfire thanks to the twitter trends, and as I type this the following day having just woken up – Twitter has been down for a full hour! Has the worlds most popular and richest man brought Twitter to it’s knee’s just by joining?

I have a feeling Mr.Gates will amass the largest follower count we have yet to see on the service and it’s great to see him online. “Hello World” indeed.
Bring on the Faaaaaail Whaaaaaaaale!

Update from Twitter: We are experiencing an outage due to an extremely high number of whales.  Our on-call team is working on a fix.
Update: (5:18a): We are recovering from this incident. A sudden failure coupled with problems in switching to a backup system produced a high number of errors for around 90 minutes. This made the site largely inaccessible. No data was lost or compromised during this outage.

2009 saw me pretty much ignore this blog in favour of Twitter. By now most of you have some idea as to what Twitter is, and I must say that I am addicted to the service being a heavy user. It has been another great year for Twitter growth. Everyone is talking about it, both positively and negatively – and whilst both topic’s are relevant, the negativity revolving the stereotypical usage of the service ignores one important trait – everyone uses the service in a different way.

Of course this is reinforced by the fact that the very premise of Twitter changed in 2009. The service used to ask you one simple question “What are you doing?”. In 2009 this changed to “What’s happening?”, as users began using the service for different end purposes. Twitter for me became a replacement from bloated (see MSN/WLM) Instant Messaging Clients. In addition I use it to find out what is happening around me – in my town of Harrow for instance, especially with the unreliable public transport.

This blog was created as a way to air my thoughts, which worked fine for sometime. As life progressed onwards so did my ‘time’. It takes time to compose and lay out a blog post, whereas on Twitter you can just mindlessly type out your thoughts – just be prepared for feedback from others. Oh by the way, the iPhone was made for Twittering!

2009 was to become my most challenging year at work yet. Organisational changes meant that I had more responsibility at work and I have to admit that I struggled to ‘balance the plates’ as it were. On many occasions I found that I had to ignore my own job in order to lend support to other departments, mostly because we were short of staff.

Our company has it’s lease expire sometime in 2011 so obviously we will be moving to areas unknown at present. Given that a vast proportion of our workforce consists of ladies in their 60′s, it is fair to say that they won’t be following the company should they move to a far off location. As for myself I’ll stick with the company and will be around to train new staff until I can ascertain travel requirements.

2009 was a year in which I became….an APPLE TART. Yeah baby! Ok so I had already owned an iPod Touch, and presently own a jailbroken iPhone 3G, which I am incredibly fond of as it forms a central part of my day to day life. On the other side of things I have been using the RC (Release Candidate) release of Windows 7 for quite sometime, well before it’s October 22nd launch and I wasn’t really happy for reasons I’ll not expand on (it’s better this way).

After doing a heap of research OSX seemed perfect for me. So I purchased a £750 refurb Macbook Pro from Apple’s Online store. Instead what I got was a Macbook, even though the OS (Operating System) and receipt state Macbook Pro. After much head scratching and reading of the MacRumours forums it turned out I had a rare Macbook Hybrid. For the money I had paid I had been gifted a higher spec machine, with an extra 2GB of RAM and a backlit keyboard, the latter of which isn’t a Macbook feature.

Mac OSX was a breath of fresh air. Having grown up around Windows from it’s very first incarnation, OSX was just so damn slick that I fell in love with the OS inside a week. It is just a beautfiul OS to use on a daily basis. No faffing about with stupid application installers, you just drag and drop install. Applications are all self contained so they don’t scatter dependent files all over the place – it just works!… (famous last words I’m sure) I now use my Macbook more than I do my monster overclocked dual core 3.7ghz PC, hooked upto 10 TB of data. I already have plans to buy an iMac but have no desk space for one just yet.

2009 was a key year for Mobile Phones. Apple pretty much scared the living shit out of phone manufacturers by releasing the first iPhone back in 2007.  They followed up with the 3G a year later, and in 2009 released the 3Gs…a speed bumped version of the 3G in the same body…with very little new features. By bringing out the first iPhone Apple were a good 3yrs ahead of the competition, however towards the end of 2009 the competition have caught up and surpassed Apple’s current model in terms of hardware anyway.

Alarm bells are ringing for Apple now, and in 2010 they will face incredible competition on all fronts. Apple’s success with their AppStore has also been their downfall, they just cannot control the sheer number of apps being submitted, and a great deal of poor/untasteful apps have been approved and removed from the store giving the AppStore a rather poor reputation with both developers and customers. Couple this with Apple’s dictatorship like stance over developing apps mean that this can only hurt them more.

June 2010 will see them launch the next iPhone – I can see the obvious larger storage capacity, faster CPU being present and an AMOLED (vastly vibrant/low power) display, which is long overdue. I just hope we get a half decent camera as 2-3mp is just laughable in 2009.

Mobile OS’s will be the highlight of 2010 as iPhone’s Mobile OSX goes head to head against Google’s Android OS, Palm’s WebOS and the somewhat antiquated but hardened Windows Mobile OS from Microsoft. Mobile applications will dominate 2010 and they will be powered by either of these systems.

2009 saw yours truly spend a month and a half out of work, with Post-Infectious Encephalitis. Whilst at work during October I had picked up a nasty cold that just wouldn’t go away, even with three courses of Antibiotics. I thought nothing of it and carried on working despite the fact that I was getting progressively worse.

On a random day towards the end of October I had gone into work in a rather dazed state, but assumed it was the cold messing me about. I was struggling to string a single sentence together when talking to colleagues, and had begun stammering badly. I suddenly realised something was wrong when I was operating some high pressure test equipment and almost performed a dreadful mistake that could have endangered my colleagues not to mention myself – however I stopped myself before any of that could happen. My actions were horribly clouded at this point and thinking methodologically was impossible.

I took some time off work and had some check-ups. A Computerized Tomography (CT) scan revealed that I had Encephalitis, the Post-Infectious type. In other words – inflamed brain tissue after one’s immune system mistakenly attacks the brain instead of a viral/flu infection. In my case I had inflamed tissue at the rear of my brain.

The following month saw me having sheer head pains, which were enough to bring me to my knees half the time, as well as an aversion to bright light, dizzy spells, and random anger bouts. I confined myself to my house after almost blacking out whilst shopping, only leaving to visit the corner-shop/doctor/hospital. Sleeping at night was a bastard and a half. I’d have major head pains and would have to wait to sleep until my body caved in from tiredness, often at 3am ffs.

Only a few work colleagues know, as well as my friend Ayesha who has spent this Christmas with me…as well as eating the contents of my fridge. It would crush my parents if they actually knew about all this.

Visiting hospitals, and having injections – things that I hate had now become a weekly thing for me. I remember being shattered when I was told that recovery couldn’t be measured in weeks but months, many months. My workplace has been quite good about it and told me to get better first. The thing is, where do you I go from here? How do you return to work knowing that you could be clobbered at any time by what resembles a nuclear strike within your head?

So this has been my 2009 in a nutshell. I wouldn’t at all put it down as a bad year but I do hope 2010 will treat me better! Now excuse me whilst I go off in search of PIE…MINCE PIE.

Back in July 2008 I decided to try out a little known application for the iPhone by the name of Twinkle, developed by Tapulous. I was instantly hooked as it used the geo-location functionality of the phone to let you know when people are nearby. You could search for users within a specific kilometer radius around you and chat to them, in addition you could enlarge or shrink that search radius to suit. Seeing other twitter users who were within range of you and chatting away was horribly addictive.

Twinkle was basically a superb (and still is) location aware chat client that allows you to upload photos to your Twitter account as well as update your status. Addictiveness knows no boundaries and I was pretty much ‘Twinkling’ on the way to work whilst on the bus, as well as doing the same whilst in the office at work and then on the way home. I’d be constantly ‘chatting’ to complete strangers via 140 character long messages, similar to SMS texts if you will.

Behind all of this was Twitter. In its simplest form, it is a website where you can broadcast short messages up to 140 characters max – to anyone who has signed up to receive them (known as a follower). In turn you can also become a ‘follower’ to other twitters. Your followers for instance could be say ten of your best friends or if you’re a well known celebrity like Stephen Fry, 190,539 crazed fans. Twitter started off fast and is gaining momentum and a frightening pace. Balls to Myspace and the Facebook’s of today, they’re nothing by comparison.

Twitter went mainstream fairly recently on February 5th 2009 when a US Airbus Flight 1549 hit some birds and lost power in both engines. The plane slammed into New York’s Hudson River, with everyone on board surviving. The most incredible thing was that there was a person on-board the flight using Twitter as his prime means of reaching the outside world. How he managed to remain calm and type away amongst the turbulence is another thing altogether.

As far as the UK is concerned Twitter is everywhere over here. Two celebrities have helped its popularity soar over the recent months. Stephen Fry as well as BBC presenter Jonathan Ross who was recently suspended for various reasons I shall not bother getting into. The tabloids got wind of Mr.Ross utilising Twitter to talk to his fans and Twitter received a great deal of national press coverage. As for Mr.Fry, well he got stuck in a lift and decided to ‘tweet’ some photos of himself in the lift with various strangers. In Ross’s first chat show following his suspension Fry discussed Twitter with Ross and that was enough to get the thing even more publicity.

The premise of Twitter is as described by the website.
"Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?”

With that statement in mind, you may think that this is another Facebook – it isn’t in the slightest, it is so much more. Everyone uses the service in their own unique way. You could add your latest tweet as "I’m taking a dump", or simply "I’m at a Phil Collins concert" (with an attached photo of the stage area. You could use it to keep in touch with friends because its usage is so much more flexible than plain old SMS texts in that a complete stranger can see what you’re talking to your friends about and simply join in the conversation.

I had a great time during my lunch hour a week ago chatting to a guy in Darwin, Australia because he had seen a screen shot of my jailbroken iPhone 3G that I had uploaded and wanted to do similar things with his phone.

Twitter is far from a fad, it is what you want it to be. In the right hands it can be a time killer, a news source, a business tool, a way to keep in touch with distant or even close friends – whatever you wish. There are a lot of people out there who will simply follow the trend of criticising yet another internet phenomenon without actually trying it.

1. Try it! – Before you bash the thing, give it a shot. Sit back and search for friends or celebs and generally see what people are doing.

2. You don’t have to use the website – There are heaps of programs out there that making Twittering easy. They’ll either sit at the side of your screen and appear with a single click, or you could see if you can get one of the many Twitter style apps for your phone. There are quite a few on the Apple iPhone platform. I use Tweetie for twittering and I use it 90% of the time. Other Twitter applications consist of TweetDeck , Twitterfeed , Twhirl and Twitterific .

3. Confused? – Don’t be. I still get confused about certain things and I have been using it solidly for a couple of weeks now. You aren’t alone so don’t be afraid to simply put out a tweet saying "How does <insert feature> work?".

4. Use it however you like – I use Twitter to publish my little daily thoughts, odd moments during the day when only a photo can express things or I will comment on blog articles published by friends. My overall goal is for my Twitter feed to detail my blog activities and just general day to day ramblings.

5. Twitter on Mobile Phones – If you have a suitable powerful smartphone, then look for Twitter applications on it. The iPhone 3G excels in this area with its GPS functionality enabling you to search for other users around you and so forth. Tweetie , Twitterfon and Twitterific are the most popular applications for the iPhone. All mid-high end phones in 2009 should have applications that utilise Twitter in some form. Don’t ignore them!

Finally I have a bone to pick with someone. See back in July 2008 when I first discovered Twinkle, I was MOCKED by my good mate PR who said things like "Oh if I want to chat to people I pick up the HOUSE PHONE" and so forth. So it highly amuses me that he was HE who just recently signed up to the service and then I followed suit and re-signed up myself!

So for those unfortunate souls who wish to follow me, my Twitter ID is Kainz_UK.