GTA IV, depression and general stuff

I have an admission. I'm bored of GTA IV. I'm about 35% in and I'm finding it really hard going.

1) Missions are all the same crap, over and over again. Pick up some people who proceed to talk shite. Steal something/kill someone. Escape from police/gang while outnumbered and accompanied by stupid companions who usually get killed. Repeat. There are no side missions to speak of other than the racing, but with those you can usually tell in the first minute or so that either you will win incredibly easily, or be completely defeated.

2) The AI is hardly improved from the older games. It seems so at first and the police are better. But you watch it when people get into your car and it's just like GTA III all over again.

3) It locks up or gives the unreadable disk error on a regular basis. Not so bad when you're just playing around but if you're trying to do a mission, it is really annoying. The only other game that has done this on my 360 was Bioshock and it didn't do it anywhere near as much as GTA IV does.

4) Once you've made a few friends, they become a real annoyance. They constantly call you and want to go out and drink or play darts or whatever. If you don't answer, they start to hate you. It is really tedious. You can switch the phone off but then you miss things.

5) It's just not fun. Primarily because of the tedious, repetitive missions and the lack of anything to do outside of the missions.

Yes, it looks incredible, the cars drive great and the animation is good and the detail of the city is truly breathtaking. But the actual game content is GTA III all over again. It was good back then, but now, no. I expected much, much more from GTA IV but it feels like a step backwards from San Andreas. To be fair, I suppose I'll keep plugging away at it, but not with the same delight that Vice City and San Andreas brought me.

Also my Xbox Live subscription has expired - not bothered about renewing it to be honest.

No blog updates for a while, had a slightly strange few days where I was feeling very down. Didn't feel like doing anything or talking to anyone. Thursday evening was spent at an Indian meal with some people from work, which was pretty decent. I tend to judge Indian restaurance on their kormas - it's easy enough to make an average spicy dish but the milder ones need to have taste, and the korma I had was pretty good.

Saturday was spent watching the end of Doctor Who Series 3 and then lots of ancient Doctor Who on Youtube. I also sanded down the headstock of the Frankencaster and lacquered a new decal on, so it's now a Bitzer Partsocaster. I've never done this before but it came out OK. Still no pickup, annoyingly. I've discovered the wiring for two pickups is actually easier than the single pickup due to less capacitors and resistors...doh.

Spent most of the day at Rob and Em's playing Boom Blox on the Wii with Will, Vicky and Andy, also eating very nice burgers and trying out Andy's chocolate fountain.

Boom Blox is a simple game but very compelling, and good fun. The various multiplayer modes are excellent. I might actually buy it, which would make it my first Wii purchase since Mario Galaxy in November. Also had a look at the Spore creature creator on Will's MacBook. It looks great fun but I don't think I've got anything that will run it. I might look into selling my Toshiba laptop and some other stuff and getting one with a graphics card. There's nothing wrong with the Toshiba other than the crappy graphics chip though, so that's annoying.

I'm going to sell my DS and PSP. I don't use them any more. I think I'll see if I can get a Phat DS though, there's still some games I'd like to play and I think the Phat suits my hands better. After I built a working Phat DS from spare parts (which I gave to Steve and Kara), I looked into the possibility of creating a hybrid Phat DS with Lite screens, but the electronics are very different unfortunately.

Videos

Weird Al Yankovic - Angry White Boy Polka

I would post a link to another video but nobody else would like it. Or even care. Or read any of the other shit that I spew on here. There's probably a reason why my blog has twice the number of posts as anyone else's but if I think about it too much I'll depress myself.

Car snobbery

It dawned on me recently that my car is probably the oldest and shittest looking car when I park in any of the work sites. Sometimes this really bothers me and I wonder why I'm always resigned to driving crappy cars, especially if I end up parked next to something nice (the answer is my near retardation with finances). But then I remember that there's no point having a nice car because it would lose shitloads of value the instant I drove it up the track and it got scratched and covered in mud.

On the other hand, I've found it's quite a relief not giving a sod about scratches or dents. So long as it drives well, and the panels are approximately the right shape and the doors and windows open and close properly, I've decided it doesn't matter too much what it looks like. Especially as I've discovered the AX must have been in a crash once as the bumper, bonnet, offside wing, door and headlights are from a white older model and have been resprayed in an almost but not quite right shade of red.

I was thinking that if I ever did modify a car, it would be more fun to keep it looking shed-like but upgrade the mechanicals so it drove and handled really well, like a stealth thing. I think people do this already and call them 'sleepers'.

Woohoo, soldering

Got a new soldering iron for a mere £8.50 today and some new solder for 85p. It revealed just how shit my old iron was. Solder melts in an instant, attaches to anything I want, and basically it works really well. I was able to complete the wiring for the Telecaster (other than the pickup) and resolder some joints I wasn't sure about, with no problems at all. Hurrah.

Just waiting for the pickup to arrive. Once it arrives I can finish the wiring, put some strings on it, and see if the damn thing works. I hope it does. The wire I used was some cloth covered wire I had lying around which looks nice and vintage but is a bit of a pain to strip.

If it does work and actually play, I'll take the Squier logo off and put one of these on it:

Looks close enough to a Fender logo but not. If I was building a copy of a Jazz copy I could put his interpretation of the logo - a Fecker Jizz Bass. Hmm. Or perhaps it could be a Fecker Testicaster. Not keen on that either...

Spent some time GIMPing an image of a Telecaster which would have two bass strings and then two dual course octave strings. The idea being that you'd have bass and other sounds on the same thing. No idea if it would work in reality but it was fun doing it. It would probably be easier to use a short-scale bass in reality.

Slow-worm and soldering

While walking the dog, we came across this enormous slow-worm in the middle of the road. It was easily a foot long. I wasn't sure if it was dead until it blinked, which is one way of telling them apart from snakes. It looked really glossy and healthy and was a really nice deep brown. It stayed patiently while I took some pictures and then I gave it a prod and it slithered away across the road, which was good as I didn't want it to get run over. The hound didn't quite know what to make of it and just stared at it with pricked ears. Having just read about them, this could have been a pregnant female.

Most of the bits arrived for the Frankencaster today, everything except the pickup. I started to put them together only to find that the potentiometers wouldn't fit into the control plate as the holes were too small. The pots I got were real Fender parts so whoever made the control plate cocked that up rather. I had to file out the holes so the controls could be mounted. I then spent quite a bit of time soldering the various wires and resistors and capacitors in. This is the wiring diagram I am using, which is for the Esquire (the original single pickup version of the Telecaster).

How I hate soldering. It never seems to attach to the terminals like it should and the diagram said to solder wires and things to the body of the pots, but it never sticks for me. I don't know why. I was cut short when the end of the soldering iron I was using unexpectedly broke off, so I'll have to find a new one now. I should also get some new solder as perhaps the stuff I am using is just crap. It's also very old I think. I was a bit concerned when the control plate almost didn't fit back in as the 3-way switch is so deep. It did go in after I tweaked a few things. I'm not sure how well the crappy soldering will hold up to be honest once it's all together though. If it does turn out to be crappy solder I can redo it with good stuff though.

Busy day

My hopes for a peaceful Monday were dashed the instant I entered the building. I quickly received a call that there was a loud noise coming from the server room and the door was hot to the touch, which pointed to air conditioning failure. Nobody had been able to get in because it's kept locked so I had to leg it and get the key.

Upon opening the door, the caretaker and I were almost bowled over by the heat and the sound of screaming fans as the servers tried to cope with the sauna-like conditions. The air conditioning had failed. So we spent the next few minutes opening the window and stealing a load of desk fans from various desks to provide some airflow. Eventually the room cooled down a bit and the fans began to spin back down. Amazingly none of the servers had crashed. The air conditioning was fixed by lunchtime and the room returned to it's usual tranquil calm.

I was bombarded with calls all day long, everything from a blue-screening PC to misplaced phone numbers to a laser printer with a hole in it, causing me to dash around like a demented bluebottle all day long.

It was a relief to come home and take the dog for a walk. Other than that watched some more Doctor Who and things.

A VERY windy day

It was unbelievably windy this morning. I had a weekend task from work, to drive around the village and see what the GPRS coverage was like from my laptop with a 3G data card. This was made hard by huge chunks of tree in the road, and at one point when I was getting out of the car to move one, the door was suddenly ripped out of my hand and bent right back, putting a massive dent in it. Great. It was also blowing the power lines so hard that the electricity kept flickering off and on, causing problems with computers and things. It did calm down eventually but then it rained for the rest of the day, so no dog walk unfortunately.

There was an interesting moment this evening when the wind farm was caught in the sunset so that the turbines shone bright gold against a background of grey cloud. It was made slightly surreal because all the turbines were shut down.

Wedding

Today was the wedding of a woman I used to work with called Amy. There's a few of us who have kept in touch which is nice and we meet up every now and again for Chinese food and video games. I remember how she'd talk about the upcoming wedding in the office, and we'd mock because it was five years off. It seems unbelievable that the wedding actually happened today. Fortunately it all went off perfectly.

The weather was absolute shite this morning but by the time everyone got to the church, it was actually not too bad. The ceremony went off without a hitch although the vicar spouted some rather strange stuff at one point. Churches bother me.

I came home and started watching Doctor Who Series 3 until it was time to head back to the evening do. It was your typical evening do with lots of drink, food and a questionable DJ. The two extended families get on fine and it was basically a good laugh all round. Amy's brother Martin came out with outrageous scatalogical humour which is normal but it gets worse when he's drunk. Fortunately the other people I used to work with were there so we formed a little huddle with people we knew and watched as various family members gyrated unsteadily on the dance floor.

Also met a guy with the same name as me which is very unusual. Annoyingly he was also rather like me in appearance but with all the bad aspects removed, ie, no excess flab, no glasses, perfect skin, no grey or disappearing hair. DoubleL v2, new and improved.

Tired now, it's pretty late.

Frankencaster

The Frankencaster

I put this together this evening. I had decided a while ago to put humbuckers in my £15 Squier Strat to stop it buzzing. But the humbucker pickguard I bought didn't fit properly. I didn't feel like putting it back together and wondered what to do. The other thing I didn't like about it was the tremolo because it made it really hard to keep in tune, and I wondered about blocking it so it didn't move.

Then I remembered the metallic blue Telecaster body I bought a long time ago. Some investigation showed the Strat neck fitted but the holes in the body were too narrowly spaced. After attacking them with a drill, I found the neck bolted on fine, although there is a gap because Strat necks are rounded at the end and Telecaster necks are square. Also the headstocks are different so it looks unusual.

All the black hardware I bought for the quilted maple body fitted near enough, and so it should work fine. Not all the screw holes for the pickguard line up but that isn't a major issue. The reason it has a single string on it is because I was using it to make sure everything lined up. I think the blue and black go together pretty well.

I managed to find someone in work to buy my Xbox so I've put that towards the remaining parts I need - a pickup, controls, various screws and an output jack. I've only gone for one pickup at the moment even though it has space for two, as I'm still not too good at the wiring side.

Double neck bass...

...with one string per neck. It's silly but I really like it. It was actually made by a guy called Jens Ritter who makes insanely expensive, beautifully crafted basses. I remember hearing about it being made but this is the first time I've seen a picture of it.

In other news, the weather was ultra crappy today, wind and rain all day long. It was payday today so I celebrated by having a nacho chicken wrap from Morrisons - I've started to try and eat more sensibly so this was a departure from the rest of the week.

I also filled up my car as the needle was down in the red and the mileometer was up to 399 miles since the last fill up. In fact it was so low that the warning light came on as I went round a bend. I wasn't actually sure if it worked so that' s good to know. Diesel is £1.31 in Morrisons and for the first time ever it cost more than £40 to fill up the AX. Madness. I've said this so many times now, but I'm so glad I got rid of the Discovery when I did.

I found an IBM JS20 Blade server on Ebay today. It is a POWER based blade which can run AIX. Normally they go for £2000 or so but this one (and 7 more) had a starting bit of £60. It didn't have any memory but that isn't expensive. It sold for £60 in the end as well. Insane. It's a shame that they only work in a Bladecenter chassis, which are huge, heavy, hot, noisy and expensive.

Had a brief play with FreeNAS on a VMmare box his evening. Actually seems quite good. Also Firefox 3 seems pretty decent.

Currently reading Desperation by Stephen King, which is quite odd. It's very long and though I've read it before, I can't remember any of it at all for some reason.

Writing for the sake of it

Not much to say really.

Here is another strange German music video, this time by Tanzwut. Quite good.

Powered up the old Xbox today for the first time since I got the 360. I didn't have the Xbox all that long really before I got the 360, but I had quite a bit of fun with it. I played quite a lot of Half-Life 2, made lots of maps and had multiplayer fun in Far Cry Instincts: Evolution, and painted a Jaguar E-type purple in Forza Motorsport.

I've decided to sell it as I'll probably never use it again and it's quite big and takes up room. I suppose I could mod it to run Linux but quite frankly I'm bored of trying to run Linux on every single piece of hardware I get my hands on. Not that original Xboxes seem to have any value at all but hopefully with five games and a good SCART cable, it should sell.

Met the greyhound woman on the walk today. I last encountered her a long time ago. She has two greyhounds, one black and one white and brown. The black one is really friendly and does the leaning thing whenever he sees you. The white one on the other hand is timid, and takes a while to get used to people.

Firefox 3

Don't forget to download Firefox 3 tomorrow! (June 17th)

Stan Winston RIP

Stan Winston, creator of many special effects in Aliens, Terminator, Jurassic Park, etc has died. I first heard of him when I read the Making of Jurassic Park and was seriously impressed by the various work he has done.

A weird dream

It was really weird. I was looking into a big mirror except it wasn't a mirror, it was a screen. The image was generated by computer. If I moved too quickly I could see myself as a monster, before the image updated to show my normal face. It was really disturbing. Close up it looked like the face of the Cloverfield monster combined with a Predator.

Odd indeed.

Pork & Beans

It's been a long time since I listened to any Weezer stuff, after my copy of the Blue album cracked and the Green one vanished. This is a decent track and the internet meme video is great.

Recap

Ted: "Dougal, fantastic news!"
Dougal: "You're getting married."
Ted stares at Dougal in disbelief.

Father Ted is genius.

Recap of the last couple of days:

Friday evening was a pub crawl with everyone in St Asaph. I was late as shortly after I left I heard a strange slapping noise from the left front wheel. Turned out the tyre was falling apart and the right one looked a bit past it as well. Both of them looked to be remoulds. Went back home and changed the wheel after some hassle. Eventually made it. It was a fairly short pub crawl as it was only four pubs in total.

Saturday morning was expensive, got a pair of new front tyres. After that, picked up Andy and we headed to the BBQ at Em's parents. Lots of drinks, food, general hilarity and experiments with fire. They've got a stove that caused some chaos as occasionally varnished or laminated wood was put in it, causing sparks and hideous smoke. We headed back to Rob and Em's in the early hours and crashed out.

A fried breakfast revived everyone this morning.

Random and incoherant, feeling a bit tired.

The Shuttlecock Has Landed

Busy and frustrating day in work.

Badminton was good, didn't win any games and screwed up a lot of shots but had a good time. I think what I need to learn now is to anticipate where to be on the court, something I find hard. Best moment was landing a shuttle perfectly on a beam. By our reckoning, Em and I should have automatically won by default for this move but sadly the other team didn't agree. Good thing the shuttle was knackered anyway. I had to do some post processing on the image, using the despeckle feature of the GIMP to make it look a bit better.

Burnt toast

Evacuation in work caused by burnt toast. Again. Other than that it was a fairly ordinary day. Cut my hair this evening, a bit of a pain and always itchy afterwards.

Went back into Second Life. I found a beach which existed solely to allow people to stand around looking pretty, or bonk if they wanted to. When you walk into the middle of the beautiful crowd looking like this...
...it causes a certain amount of dismay and confusion. I just stood there as the conversation erupted. Some people laughed, some were offended, some told me quite seriously that I was missing the point of the place and disturbingly one person sent me a private message with offers of naughty things.

Perhaps the saddest thing I found today was a fake Starfleet Academy where you could sign up and work your way up the ranks so you can board a fake starship. At that point I looked normal and was wearing a toga which someone randomly gave me.

Worst book ever. For some reason I want to read it.

Fecking Ubuntu updates broke VMware Server again. Really bloody annoying, having to reconfigure it and build the module for the new kernel. I don't know why this version of Ubuntu does this as the old one was fine. Perhaps it's time to try VirtualBox instead.

Meh

A very Meh day. The only thing worth mentioning was randomly seeing a fire engine in an unlikely place on a field while walking the dog. As I watched it started to come back down and I saw a farmer who I vaguely know by sight. Inquiries showed that there was a gorse fire they were trying to keep under control due to wind. They took it up the road to a hydrant and refilled it while I was there.

I didn't realise that a full size two wheel drive fire engine would be so capable at going over a field, it was quite steep after all.

Fire engines are great in GTA, they are fast and handle well for their size and are nearly unstoppable. Also you can spray pedestrians with water.

Phatty phatty boom boom

Work was OK, got a lot done. My attempts to have a healthy lunch were thwarted slightly by being offered a choc-ice while fixing someone's distorted printing, and chocolate in celebration of someone having won something on the lottery. Also had a slightly bizarre moment when two of the AIX machines sent error messages about fibre channel connection failures. Obviously this was serious until I looked at the date the errors occurred - May 10th. Quite why it suddenly triggered an alert now, I don't know.

Took the dog for a walk which for some reason was a real struggle. I don't think I slept very well last night and I woke up this morning feeling more tired than when I went to bed.

The beta version of Firefox 3 is pissing me off, when you right click it sometimes instantly randomly selects something from the contextual menu. Also it did that thing where it makes the graphics card have a spasm and throws one of the monitors off, necessitating a reboot. Hopefully the final version will be better.

New 3G iPhone. It'll be $199 in the USA, noticably there are no prices on the UK store but it'll probably be another case of swapping the $ for a £. I know a few people who were intrigued by old one but didn't want to shell out for it. If only Apple sold it unlocked.

Image is from a nightmarish week not so long ago when I had six BlackBerrys to set up at once. It was like they were breeding or something.

Interesting thing I picked up last week in the delicatessen - Sweet Garlic Pickle. It's got quite a kick but it's really nice. Goes very well with cold salady meals.

Currently listening to Antikörper (Antibodies) by Eisbrecher. Not as good as the first album but does have some outstanding tracks on it. Vergissmeinicht (Forget me not) is my favourite one on it.

A lazy day

Will and I went to the car boot. It was a warm day so it was quite large, but it was the usual load of crap. There was one item which was interesting, a fairly high-end 16-port network switch, but it was only 10mb so I didn't bother with it.

After that finished off the first series of Torchwood. I rather liked it but as Rob put it, when it's good, it's very good, but when it's bad, it's very very bad. Heard mixed things about the second series, so that remains to be seen.

The rest of the day was spent alternating between the 360 and the amazing weather outside. I went and visited a tree I like, which has got a conveniently low branch and you can climb up and sit on it, which is nice.

Downloaded some game demos for the 360, some stupid racing game, a weird game called Warlords which is basically four player Breakout, a Castlevania game which I hated and the very odd Penny Arcade game.

You make me SICK

"Computer Freaks" - priceless.

This could be a really clever ironic joke. But it's not, which is really quite sad.

Creationism

A look at the Creation Museum.

Various things

Went to my Dad's house this morning for his birthday, which was good. After that, went down to meet Andy, Rob, Will and Vicky in the pub to watch the rugby. This was followed by a gentle pub crawl before heading back to Andy's in my car for a Chinese. All good.

Tired so not writing much.

Pancakes - PANCAKES!

Slow day in work, enlivened by the discovery at lunchtime of a new sweetshop in Ruthin. Lots of oldschool sweets and even a reasonably complete collection of Jelly Belly jellybeans. But, even better, they do pancakes with various fillings. Several of us tried it, most had pancakes and ice cream, but I was different and had one with chocolate spread and marshmallow. It was absolutely superb too.

Spent most of the evening watching more Torchwood. I'm up to about episode 8 and quite liking it so far. It can get a little silly sometimes but it's entertaining on the whole.

Ventured briefly back into Second Life and it is just as crappy as always.

Frankensteining, Badminton and a Strange Mist

Work has been OK. I created another Frankenstein laptop by stripping out the LCD from a broken Samsung laptop and installing it in a working Dell Latitude with a smashed screen. This involved about a million screws and a certain loss of sanity. I didn't expect the connections to be compatible but it actually worked. For some reason the inverter whines a little and today two lines appeared down the screen but it still goes OK. I then inflicted Windows Vista on the poor thing for testing purposes. Actually, the more I play with Vista, and get used to where things are in it, the more I tolerate it. I still think it takes up stupid amounts of RAM and hard drive space though.

Badminton was really good this evening. I haven't played for a while and at first I felt really out of practice, and certainly unfit. But once I got going, I had some good games. Unfortunately, becoming a grandmother hadn't mellowed She Who Gets My Back Up, and she was her usual self. But I must have been doing something right because she didn't do her usual grimaces of disgust and actually said I was playing well at one point.

Weird weather this evening, strange bouts of rain and when I came home there was weird mist everywhere. I took this picture with the N93 which didn't really come across all that well.

Talking of the N93 is still working well and despite me treating it like every phone I've ever had (badly), it's still holding together, even after having been used in camcorder mode while very drunk. I was convinced that the crazy hinge would fall apart but it seems fine so far. This is why I don't want a glossy 'fashion' phone because I view it as a tool and if it can't be shoved in and out of pockets and take the occasional knock, then it's pointless. I apply the same reasoning to iPods, I think they look much better scratched up a bit. It would be interesting to see how an iPhone would stand up to my treatment of phones.

Baby emu!

Awww!

A fat day and GTA

AIX day today which was fun. Spent some time trying to figure out why a couple of scripts wouldn't run. Someone brought Spanish sweets in which must have contained cocaine or something as they were very moreish.

Spent much of the evening playing GTA with Will. We did a number of ridiculous things like taking a drive across the city in airport baggage trucks, attempting a huge jump with the pair of us on a bike with flat tyres and other shenanigans. All good fun.

I hate Ricky Gervais

Why oh why did they pick him to be in GTA IV? Making jokes about cancer and AIDS is really funny, right? What a fucking arsehole.

Priceless comedy moment in GTA just now. I was about to grab someone out of a car when someone did it before me. The driver and the carjacker then engaged in a fist fight while I drove off in the unattended car.

Got a Freesat box. Seems pretty good and worked straight off the old Sky dish. It's a HD one too which may come in useful in the future.

WTF?

Amazon Recommends 'Demon Entrails'.