The End

I completed Saints Row 2 today. I'm not going to say anything about the ending or the missions because I know people may be going to play it, but it's been good fun. Not bad for a game I never expected to take seriously at all, and really only got for a laugh. But it grabbed me in a way that GTAIV never did, and gave me pretty much a solid months worth of good entertainment. There's still plenty of activities and diversions left to finish off, but it's a bit sad to not have any more missions to do. It is nice to have a solid purple map at last though.

The character creation definitely helps draw you in, as you're playing with a character that is completely your own. I also think that Stilwater is a lot better than Liberty City. It's not as detailed but there's a lot more in it to find, and I keep discovering new things. I got a completely random achievement as I was driving along. The Final Countdown started playing on the radio, accompanied by my character singing along, very badly. It was quite funny.

The first game never really appealed, although I do own a copy. Now I'm wondering if I just never gave it a chance. At the time of course, it was up against GTA San Andreas, and seemed like an inferior game. Then came the serious and boring GTAIV and now I'm wondering if I should have a go on it again. Unfortunately when I started playing Saints Row 2 properly, I read up on the plot details for the first game to get an idea of what leads into the sequel. Apparently though they've started work on Saints Row 3 so that's something to look forward to.

Google had a bit of a cockup today, where every single site was listed as malware in searches. I noticed this myself and thought it was a bit strange.

Went round to Rob and Em's with Andy this evening to sort out more details for the America trip. We have now sorted out a hotel in Boston, which is good, but still need to sort out what we're doing in the gap in the middle.

It's cold. I hope it's not going to snow.

Holiday again

I'm off on annual leave next week, again, which is nice. Basically I just had too much holiday left over after hardly using any in 2008, so I took this week off.

I slept terribly last night so work was spent in a tired confused state. I got most of my stuff sorted out before the holiday though so that was good. After that I came home and had a nice quiet Saints Row 2 fest again. Got quite a few missions done and I think I'm getting close to the end.

Badminton and Welsh

An average day in work. There was a rather fraught meeting in the morning though.

After work it was time to head to Rob and Em's for food before going to badminton. It was a very entertaining evening, although Rob and I played dreadfully, we ended up playing with Nan. She's a fluent Welsh speaker who helps Em out with her Welsh, so the matches and conversations in between usually end up turning into impromptu lessons. It's really quite entertaining. I'm always quite surprised at how much I can remember from my Welsh lessons in school. Shame that my GCSE years were gimped by stupid policies as I'm sure I could have done better in both Welsh and German if I'd had the chance.

The Vectra has a quirky fuel gauge. When you fill it up, the needle then drops quite drastically in the first 100 miles, but then the next 200 it doesn't drop as quickly. It keeps making me panic about how much fuel it's using but then it goes on for quite some time.

I'm on holiday next week, something I'd almost forgotten about until yesterday, so it was almost like a nice surprise. Hurrah.

An OS but no computer

I've said before about my attempts to get an IBM RS/6000 or Pseries capable of running AIX 5.3, so I could have something to practice my newly acquired l33t AIX skillz on. Sadly, the machines that have come up have either been too expensive, too large, crap, or very far away. However, I did find a media pack of AIX 5.3 on Ebay, with the latest technology level (Dec 2008), for £25. Given that AIX media is ludicrously difficult to get hold of, I snapped it up. So now I've got the operating system, just no machine to run it on. I wish I did as it's an interesting OS. Unix at heart but with its own twist on things.

Also ended up with a sat-nav. Being left alone in Bangor yesterday with no idea where anything was and a PC World with a sale on led to, well, you know. It's just a basic Tomtom One with UK and Ireland maps, but it works really well.

The eating well thing took a bit of a dive yesterday and today was going well until the late afternoon when myself and a colleague got into a discussion about Indian food. Sadly the idea didn't leave my head and I ended up with a takeaway. I went a bit over the top, not quite an atlas moment (Andy can explain) but it was getting there. Oh well.

Day off

I took the day off work as I had to drop my Mum off to an eye appointment and take her to Bangor to start the new module for her course. Normally she can drive herself but not after the eye drops and things.

Did a mission in Saints Row 2 which was going pretty much as usual until the final cutscene, which was rather awful. It was one of the few moments in the game so far which really freaked me out and for once it wasn't because of something your character does, although he then does have to do something unpleasant. Bleh.

A busy but fun weekend

Yesterday was the wedding of a guy I used to work with at my last place. I went with a bunch of people who I'm still in touch with after we all got made redundant. The venue for the reception had to be changed at the last minute as the original place went bankrupt two weeks ago, and they luckily managed to get into this place.

It was a good day of usual wedding stuff, a reception, speeches, a really decent meal and a whole lot of drinks. Then back to Amy and Huw's in her brother's Discovery so we could all crash out there. After that, up early in the morning for bacon butties and then off to my Dad's to meet up with him and my cousin. All good fun.

Also spent some time watching Doctor Who series 4, which is so far quite decent. I'm not convinced by Catherine Tate yet though.

Played some more Saints Row 2, this time it was a mission which was one of those ones that drove me completely insane, bouncing up and down with rage and hurling obscenities at the screen. Then I realised that instead of making myself and my idiotic homies run past millions of people with guns, it would be far easier just to steal one of the cars the enemies were using and drive past and over them. It worked very well. The AI isn't too bad in the game but your homies still have a worrying tendency to throw themselves in front of enemy fire and get too close to exploding cars. I also found some new shops. One did many piercings, which was fun and then I found a shop that specialised in leather and bondage gear. The comedic possibilities of this are endless.

Eating bad = bad

The day was going OK until someone mentioned the C word. Not that one. So we all ended up getting chips for lunch. It was pretty good too although it ended up causing the usual rather bloated feeling and general atmosphere of guilt all afternoon. After that I really had to take the dog for a walk, which was reaasonably uneventful.

Glad it's the weekend. Going to a wedding tomorrow and then my Dad's on Sunday, so that should be fun.

Eating better = good

I've been eating much better this week. Not quite up to the point of taking in lunch to work but instead finding healthy things. So far it's been various soups from a place in Ruthin, which come with a home made roll. Very nice indeed. Also picked up some fruit to go with it. I've also walked the dog each night except for tonight, when I played badminton. Not sure if it's psychological or not but I already feel better.

Bah computers

Computers can be infuriating sometimes. The 2gb DIMM for the HP turned up today so I popped it in. Had a look in the BIOS and the memory was reported as 512mb, shortly before the display garbled. I checked it was seated properly and tried again with the same result.

I thought it was faulty memory until I realised that the Inspiron 9400 takes the same RAM, so I tested it in that. It worked perfectly. I read up on it and it looks like the HP can be picky about RAM. So I put one of the 9400s 1gb DIMMs back in, leaving the 9400 with 3gb RAM and the HP with 1gb again.

Oh well.

Windows done right?

Windows 7 is proving to be quite interesting. I've got it on a VM and the HP 2133. The HP is a very lowly machine when it comes to CPU power, and the VIA chip is most likely outperformed by the 1.3ghz Pentium M in my four year old Latitude D400.

However, Windows 7 runs pretty well on it. It's the first OS I've installed on the HP so I haven't really got anything to compare it with, but it seems to run about as well as XP would on the hardware. I'm sure upping it to 2gb RAM will help improve performance more. If I get bored enough I might see if I can make it dual boot with Linux too.

Did a mission in Saints Row 2 where your character involuntarily gets trashed on drugs and you have to survive a massive gun battle with your screen all warped and distorted. The cut scenes for this one were really funny too.

Odd to think that Barack Obama is finally the president. I just hope he can sort out the sorry mess that Bush left him.

Also watched a film called Primer which is a total headfuck about time travel. I'm going to have to watch it again because I've got no idea what happened in it.

Things

Work wasn't too bad today after the holiday. I did have an unusually large amount of e-mails after a week off, but nothing too catastrophic.

Decided to order a 2gb DIMM for the HP. It works reasonably well with 1gb but I'm sure that 2gb will help and RAM is so cheap these days it's worth doing. Apparently replacing the hard drive with an SSD can also make it run better and cooler but they are still not that cheap. The rugged aspect of the SSD is also a good point but it does have the motion activated hard drive parking sensor that seems to be quite common these days. I forgot that was there until I picked it up too suddenly and the hard drive activity light went red.

Gang warfare

So after playing Saint's Row 2 for quite some time without doing many missions, I finally got tired of the activities and decided to give the missions a go. From my brief experience with the first game, I wasn't expecting much, but I was pleasantly surprised. The missions are mainly the usual driving and shooting affairs you'd expect in a game like this but there's quite a few which make you do other things.

The cut-scenes and dialogue are also quite good and build up the plot nicely. Having your character speak in a sarcastic cockney accent also makes it all much more bearable and entertaining than if it was being spoken in the usual gangsta speak. There's also a dreadful fascination with seeing just how horrible the main characters actually are. Unlike Nico from GTAIV, the character you play has no morals, and never agonises over the things he has done.

Back to work tomorrow. Bah. Oh well, it's been a good holiday.

Holidays are coming

Yesterday was a reasonably quiet day other than having a clean up and getting rid of some old crap. In the evening it was off to Mold for a nice Chinese with people from work as someone was leaving. It was a good meal all round as it was the Imperial Chequer, which I've never had a bad meal at.

Today was spent faffing about with computers and another session of Saint's Row 2. It's worked out quite well that I've done loads of the activies than any actual missions as I now have shedloads of respect, a laser sighted rapid fire pistol with infinite ammo, infinite sprint, reduced notoriety from one gang and my health regenerates three times faster than normal. So when I actually start to do the missions, it should be quite helpful.

This evening was spent at Andy's with him, Rob and Em. The idea was that we would get hold of Steve and Kara on Skype and discuss aspects of the trip to the USA in April. However, the only working machine I had with Skype was the HP 2133 with Windows 7, so I was dubious as to whether it would work. So we tested it with Will and his MacBook using full-screen video. It worked really well, so much so it was like Will had been encased in tiny laptop case and was sitting in the room with us, especially when we left the laptop sitting on the sofa as we ate chilli.

The call to Steve and Kara worked perfectly, and we had a good chat about hotels and things. The logistics got a bit complicated at one point and there's some sort of festival going on in DC at the time we're there which means hotel prices go up. However, with Rob's brother Phil giving us expert guidance, we did end up booking a car. We ended up going with Avis and have got a people carrier, which should work out nicely. The cost for that type of vehicle was the same as a Lincoln Town Car, but practicality won out over prestige.

It's always exciting to have booked something concrete for a holiday. It feels more real now, somehow.

A few things

Well, it's been an interesting holiday so far.

Tuesday was spent round at my Dad's as my brother had come over from Berlin. I haven't seen him in a while so that was good. Spent the day catching up and setting up a few things on his nice new Thinkpad laptop. This was complicated slightly by the German version of Windows XP, but we got it sorted out.

Wednesday was spent trying out the monitor I bought for my Xbox 360. It's a Dell S2309W, which is a 23" monitor. The difference is that it has true 16:9 ratio and the full HD resolution of 1920x1080. It was also cheap at £155. The 360 looks pretty decent on it, which is good. I tried out all the games on it to see how they looked and it was fine. DVDs look good on it too as the 360 does a good job of upscaling them.

Today was spent on a photography trip with Will. I picked him up and we headed off to Snowdonia and the surrounding area to see what we could find to take pictures off. We started out at Betws Y Coed before heading off to find suitably nice places, and eventually ended up at Blaenau Ffestiniog. Now, I'd heard all the things people say about this place but I thought they might be exaggerated. Oh no, it's awful. The town might be OK if it wasn't surrounded by bleak oppressive hills, and the huge piles of mining waste. We had a look at the station which was quite interesting with the narrow gauge tracks alongside the main line.

After that we drove around and found a nice place with a river. It looked really nice but there was something in it that led to some rather unpleasant looking foam build up. Very odd. After that we headed back to Betws for a hot chocolate and then I dropped Will off before heading to my sister's place. I spent the evening there catching up with her and family before heading back.

I have to admit that I've been looking for another tiny laptop. The Eee is OK but I've never got on with the keyboard and recently the Ubuntu install has been spewing out I/O errors when it tries to access the SSD. Not sure if it's software or hardware. I've been meaning to try reinstalling the original Xandros OS and see if that helps. Also I think the battery may be dead.

So I've ended up with a HP Mini Note 2133 which has just been replaced with the Atom based 2140, so that they are blowing out the 2133 cheap. These are a business orientated laptop that is only a bit bigger than the Eee but has a very large keyboard and a higher resolution screen (1280x768).

It arrived today. So far it's very nice. The CPU is a 1.2ghz Via C7-M which despite being having a higher clock speed than the Eee 900mhz Celeron , offers somewhat lesser performance. Reports vary on it though. Physically though it's a world away from the Eee. The case is aluminium and feels very solid, and the screen and keyboard are amazing. Unlike the Eee, this has a standard 2.5" hard drive with 120gb space, but it could be swapped out with a SATA SSD. The default operating system is Novell SuSE Linux. I've never got on with it to be honest and I'll probably replace it with Ubuntu, or perhaps XP. Reports are that the Windows 7 beta works well on this machine too so that might be an intriguing possibility.

Busy weekend

This was the weekend of Jane and Wes's wedding, so it's been a busy but fun weekend.

Friday consisted of travelling down to Maidstone in Kent through London with Andy, Rob, Em and Rob's Mum. Things looked like they were going wrong when we got to Crewe and our train was cancelled. After a couple of minutes of confusion, we found ourselves on a different train that went to London but stopped a lot more than the one we should have travelled on. This slight problem was offset by the fact the train was brand new, quiet, comfortable and almost completely empty, so we had loads of space to lie around. After making our way through the Underground to the Maidstone train, we arrived at the hotel at about the same time as Ed, Will and Kat who had driven down. While the familes of the bride and groom had a meal, we set off to a place called the White Rabbit which was recommended for food. It was decent too.

The hotel was really pretty nice, even if as Kat said, it started out looking palacial, but as you went further in, it became more and more like a Travelodge. However, this isn't necessarily a bad thing, and the rooms were fine.

Saturday morning consisted of a stroll in the frozen fields near the hotel, before heading into town in search of lunch and alcohol, to sustain us before the wedding lunch. After that it was time to get into decent clothes and attend the wedding. The ceremony itself was reasonably straightforward. I always think it works better when it's not in a church as it's more about the couple and the commitment they are making instead of the guff about it being God's special thing.

The meal was held shortly afterward which was excellent. Everyone was on film themed tables and it just all worked out really well. The food was very tasty and the speeches proceeded with the usual mix of hilarity and seriousness. After that was the evening disco which was the usual arrangement, with the added bonus of a dancing Stormtrooper. The day was basically spot on from beginning to end and everyone had a great time, especially the bride and groom.

This place had a rather early checkout time of 10:00am so after breakfast we got a train to London and headed to the Travelodge there, parting ways with Rob and his Mum on the Underground at King's Cross. We had to pay £10 to check in early to leave our bags in one of the rooms, but it was worth it to be able to get back out into the city without them. The evening then consisted of a wander round the Tower of London and Tower Bridge, a big meal at Belgos (with plenty of schnapps) and then another wander round Regent Street and Soho. While everything was closed, it was nice to see the streets without the usual hordes of people. We had intended to go on the Eye but it was closed for maintenance. Bah. That's about the fourth time I've been to London and not gone on it.

We spent today having a look at the Apple and Nokia stores, followed by a tour of Hamley's. The last time I went in there was when I was about 10, and it's not really changed. After that we had a look at St Paul's Cathedral, which I have to admit was very impressive. We walked up to the top which was a bit of a workout, and had a look from the gallery at the bottom of the dome. It was rather wet and cold though so we didn't stay up there long. This was followed by another wander across the Millenium Bridge to a tube station and back up to Euston to get the train home.

So I'm now exceptionally tired after all that walking and travelling, but at least the train journey was quick. There was a slight delay due to a signal failure but it only added 15 minutes to the journey.

The holiday begins

Work was fine today. I got rid of all my helpdesk calls and critical jobs so I could start my holiday with a clear conscience.

The evening was spent packing for the trip to Kent tomorrow for Jane and Wes's wedding, before another SR2 session with Will. This time we experimented with pimping cars, before going on the rampage in a reinforced armoured car painted pink with gigantic alloy wheels and nitrous. It was rather fun. Then some hilarious drive by shootings on tiny motorbikes and a fist fight on the roof of the tallest building which ended when I punched Will so hard that he flew off the side to what should have been his certain death except he landed in an ornamental poot a foot deep.

Smelly me

Well the water supply finally froze up last night so I wasn't able to have a shower this morning. To flush the toilet I had to go out with a bucket and find some water in a spring which amazingly hadn't frozen over.

Mad day in work. As I'm off this Friday and next week I was trying to sort out my jobs and things but the helpdesk went crazy with calls, so I was hurtling around like a mad thing. Good thing the day was quite mild so the car parks and things were better.

Saint's Row 2 is still taking up a lot of my gaming time. I've done a couple of the missions but still mostly fooling around with the activities. The insurance fraud one is good fun and when complete, gives you infinite sprint which is very handy. One thing I noticed in the missions I did is that the character you play is a complete sociopath. He/she/it (all are possible in the character creator) shows no remorse whatsoever for all the violence and killing that takes place. Even CJ out of San Andreas had some qualms about it, and Nico out of GTAIV was a big wuss at heart. But in a way that's part of the completely over the top nature of the game.

I have found however the fun of mutating your character into a hideous alien type creature and replaying the cut-scenes. Especially the one where a woman says 'You look great. Did you do something with your hair?' to the bug-eyed jowly obese monstrosity of indeterminate gender sitting on her couch.

Ice cold

Yesterday and today have been rather cold so there's been sheets of ice all over the place. It's made getting to work tricky and the car parks in the various offices have been lethal. Very annoying. I've had two close shaves, one where a woman in a Ka slid out of a junction in front of me and nearly sliding into a gate when leaving a site.

This evening was spent putting some new flatwound strings on the modified bass. They are a really light gauge, so it's really easy to play and sounds good as well. After that it was a Saint's Row 2 marathon with Will. We found that low gravity, super explosions and satchel charges could be a intriguing combination, while playing with miniguns, flamethrowers, a pimp cane shotgun and all the other fun weapons that GTAIV didn't have.

I actually did a couple of missions in the game, which are quite fun. The combat system actually works really well and is quite forgiving.

Various things

One of the things I've decided to to this year is to get back into the reasonable diet and exercise thing I had going back in 2007. I'm not calling it a new year resolution as that would inevitably lead to failure. It was going OK until I went to my Dad's today and had fish and chips for lunch, but I went for a walk with the dog when I got home. I'd forgotten how nice it was to go out in the bracing cold and come back to a nice warm house.


Spent some time with my Dad working on my latest bass modification. This time it was installing a new neck on my original Squier bass. It had a fretless neck from one of my other Squiers but I didn't like it very much, so I found a nice neck with a maple fingerboard on Ebay. It went on OK but I had problems fitting the machine heads, which my Dad gave me a hand with. This has now been done and it plays nicely and sounds quite decent with the flatwound strings from when it was a fretless. Sadly the G-string snapped (ooh-er) when I was tuning it. I've also got a giant Gibson style humbucker I want to put in it but it involves complicated things like making a cavity for it which I don't have the tools for.

Hello 2009

Well that was a fun evening of food, drink and good conversation. 2008 was a strange year.