STUPID

Why, why, WHY is the Xbox 360 music player so crippled?! You can't skip back and forth within a track, which is completely stupid. How utterly pointless.

Back with a vengeance

So, after a few months away, I'm back in Liberty City with a vengeance. Both in GTA IV: The Lost and Damned, and now in Chinatown Wars on the DS. The Lost and Damned feels better than the main GTAIV storyline, which I still can't be arsed with, and Chinatown Wars has the same map but looks and feels like a cross between GTA 2 and III.

I think Saints Row and GTA can co-exist quite happily. They used some idea from Saints Row in GTAIV and Saints Row 2 used some ideas from GTAIV, so if the franchises keep going and feeding from each other, both can benefit. GTA for the more serious stuff and Saints Row for the ludicrous over the top action.

With all the shovelware crap on the DS, it's easy to forget that it's a capable little system. Probably the most impressive game I saw on it before I sold my DS Lite was Metroid Prime Hunters. But GTA comes quite close. It has it's own look and feel, and somehow feels more 'right' than the PSP games. One thing that has become clear is that the Phat DS is far superior to the Lite. It's bigger, easier to hold, and it has a far superior D-pad that actually lets you hit diagnonals. I just wish there was some way to retrofit a Phat DS with Lite screens.

I actually tried to cook something this evening, a sort of pasta bake thing that came out unexpectedly well. It had a cheese topping made from the wonderful caramelised onion cheddar that Morrisons is selling at the moment.

Many things

Friday evening was spent at an Indian with a load of people from work for a couple of people's birthdays. It was a good evening with 14 of us there and the meal was pretty good. Someone along the line though the bill got cocked up which caused a certain amount of hassle.

Saturday consisted of watching some rugby round at Andy's and having a go on the new GTA:Chinatown Wars on the DS. It's actually really quite good. I've ordered my own copy and now I just need a DS to play it on. I'm certain I want one of the old Phat ones as the Lite cramps my hand and I can't afford the DSi. After that it was time to meet up with some old work colleagues from my last place for an evening of food and Wii. As always we ended up with far too much food and things. I always enjoy the Wii in this kind of situation as this is where it works but it sucks for ordinary gaming sessions.

Today was spent cleaning out my Mum's car (the first time she's ever asked me to do anything for Mother's day) which was quite a lot of work. I jetwashed the outside in town, got some special gunk to clean the brake dust from the alloys and hoovered the inside to clean out all the dog hair, mud, soil and leaves that seemed to have accumulated. It looks quite nice now. This was followed by an epic session of listening to the Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy radio show. I haven't heard it for years and when I last heard it, it was taped off the radio. Listening to it in proper stereo on a decent sound system is really cool. Also, we never had the eighth episode on tape so it was the first time I heard that one.

The phone development is an E90. I read a lot of good stuff so I picked one up. It's more of a business phone than the N93 so it's quite different, and lacks the games and multimedia features. But it has basically the same features as the N93 with the bonus of the internal screen and keyboard, and GPS. So far it's been pretty good. Mine is brown, or Mocha, as Nokia calls it. It actually looks quite nice though.



This is the E90 with the original 9000 Communicator released way back in 1996, which is an absolute monster. This one does actually work but isn't charged at the moment.

I hate the way everything hassles you to update in Windows. You get all these wretched popups all the damn time at the bottom right.

So very tired...

Work has been rather busy this week and I think its that making me so tired. That and waking up too early and those annoying little fears and worries that gibber at you in the night and seem so much worse when you're lying awake in the dark. The other night I had to get up and reassure myself that my passport was still safe and where I had last left it.

Not much else to report really. It's been an odd couple weeks for some reason.

There has been a development on the phone front. Details forthcoming...

Urm

It's huge, red, triangular and has three strings. There's nothing more to say.

Much too nice to be in an office

It's been a fairly strange week. It's been annoying trying to keep the computer room from melting down each day after the air conditioning failed, this time in a way that meant it's been a week now. Bah. Other than that it's been fairly average other than the stunning weather taunting us from outside the office. At least it meant the evening dog walks were very nice.

In other news it was payday today, the last one before the (hopefully) epic trip to the USA that I'll be embarking upon with Andy, Rob and Em in April. Shame the exchange rate is so poor at the moment - when I last went it was about 1.92. Oh well.

The Lost and Damned is interesting. It feels new because it starts off in the 3rd island in the main GTA IV storyline, which I never made it to. I did a mission last night which had a very satisfying gunfight. It was difficult to adjust from the Saints Row 2 method of simply charging in, wildly spraying bullets from the infinite ammo rifle, but once I got used to the cover system again, it was good fun. Especially after Will gave me hints on how to get headshots easily.

IBM is apparently in negotiation to buy Sun Microsystems, could be an interesting turn of events if that happened.

Realism...fun?

Well, having just played the Lost and Damned for a little while and dying repeatedly, I completely forgot about the difference in Saints Row and GTAIV. You sort of get used to being some ubermensch who is able to take multiple bullet and stab wounds, regenerate his health and survive any fall, sprint for miles without stopping and teleport out of water. I can see that it's going to take some adjustment to the GTAIV mindset again.

On the plus side it looks good and the bikes work well, as promised.

Edit: I think I've got the hang of it again. Also I just won a race by smashing the the leaders of the race off their bikes with a baseball bat.

A great weekend

Yesterday was pretty good. Didn't do much in the morning, just slobbed around a bit and then it was time to head over to Rob and Em's for the rugby. I managed to provoke a huge tirade of abuse from Rob by waving a piece of cheese with caramelised onion in it, which Morrisons are doing at the moment. It's really, really nice. I also had carrot sticks and a tub of humous with caramelised onion and roast garlic. Although Rob wasn't able to help, there were plenty of volunteers to help and the cheese disappeared alarmingly rapidly.

The rugby itself wasn't particularly inspiring. The Wales game provoked many groans of dismay and the one after was mostly ignored. This was followed by a rather amazing batch of chilli and home made rolls and then lots of conversation and hilarity and all sorts of stuff.

Today has been busy in a good way. Took the car to town to wash it, got some better headlight bulbs for it, and worked out how to route the cable to hook the iPod shuffle up and while I was in town, threw away some crap I don't need. After that, walked the dog, and watched the Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy movie, which isn't great but does have some good bits. This evening downloaded the Lost and Damned expansion for GTA IV after having a go on Duke Nukem 3D on the 360, which seems a lot harder than I remember.

Crushed in defeat

It really has been one of those weeks. I wasn't really looking forward to badminton, but I went anyway. It was a good evening although I ended up playing with the same guy almost all evening. Unfortunately both of us were having an off night and weren't playing well at all. At least it was good exercise and we found our lack of ability more entertaining than anything else.

Beat It, the metal version. I rather like this, but then again you could probably make a metal version of Barbie Girl and I'd like it. Well, maybe not.

Second Life is about to have a major crackdown on adult content, moving it to a special zone and making people pay to access it. This will undoubtedly be the thing that kills it as that's pretty much all it's good for, at least if your thing is watching avatars have badly animated glitchy sex with organs that usually...urm...don't 'mesh' very well.

Tired. But in a good way.

The fun fun things

A week of meh.

If you ever watched Star Trek TNG, take a look at these. They are pretty funny and a few are quite, quite brilliant.

Shuffle jumps the shark

Apple has finally broken the iPod Shuffle, irretrievably. They've removed all the buttons and moved them onto the headphone cable and then put in a speech synthesiser that tells you what is playing. The epic fail part is that the remote is built into the cable so you can't use it with anything else.

Frustration and boredom

It was another stressful day in work. It just was one of those.

Came home and had a nice quiet geeky evening not doing much. Fiddled around with an old laptop that has a bootable CD of a prototype Linux distribution that was designed to be used without a screen. It has built in speech synthesis and is quite interesting.

In a bit of a weird place at the moment, for reasons I won't go into. Not sure what to do.

Bah.

One of THOSE Mondays

Work was rather stressful and annoying, unusually so for a Monday. This wasn't helped by one of the AIX boxes running out of space in /tmp, bringing everything to a grinding halt. The main Unix guy wasn't in so I had to sort it out and it was a right pain. Also of all the boxes, this was the most critical. It turned out to be corruption that took seconds to fix, but it was shutting down everything that was running that was a pain.

I came home in that furious rage mood with a hair trigger temper, so I took the dog out for a walk which really calmed me down and by the time I got back, I was cold and wet but reasonably cheerful again.


Found this cute but unwelcome visitor running around the bathtub, so I persuaded him to run into a pint glass so I could take him far away into the field and let him go. They are really quite sweet little things, I just wish they'd stay outside.

Nothing comes close

Took this by accident and it looks quite nice.

The N93 has been the best phone I've had for a long time, and I can't find anything that comes close to replacing it. There's things like the N95 but I don't like sliders. The E90 Communicator is really nice but is big and I don't really need all the stuff it can do. The only non Nokia I might consider is an iPhone, but they are so expensive and locked to O2.

The only thing I've found that could feasibly replace it is the N93i, which is just a slightly shrunken version of the same phone. Sadly, these are still remarkably expensive for some reason. Truth be told, my N93 is still working perfectly, it's just getting more and more worn-in, so I can't really justify replacing it anyway.

A fun weekend

Yesterday was quite a long day but fun. In the morning I went over to my Dad's to see how the new house was shaping up and to see my cousin who had come down. We spent the morning picking up some things from Homebase for the house and picked up some fish and chips for lunch, which was good.

After that I headed over to Rob's and before heading into town with him and Will in search of Futurama. Annoyingly we couldn't get the third of the four movies, only the last one. It was pretty decent to be fair. This was followed by meeting Andy and heading into Rhyl to The Best Curry House in Wales 2009. It's near the sea front in Rhyl and couldn't be more out of place. It was nice though and the food was good, although it was a little pricey. OK, well, very pricey. We walked out to find wind and horizontal rain, so when we got back to Rob's house, we were all only wet on one side, which was annoying. The drive home was not fun, once past Denbigh, it was very difficult to see anything past the driving rain.

Today has been a stupid mix of wind, snow and sun. I took the dog for a nice run in the field, but didn't trust the weather to go out for the whole walk. Spent some time removing the 16gb SSD from the Eee, which is faulty, and installed Ubuntu on the internal 4gb one, which works fine. It only leaves 1.4gb free though. I thought about using an SD card as the /home partition but it didn't want to do it so I left it like that. At least it works to a degree now. After that, did some more missions on Saints Row and finally got some points to get the full version of Rez HD.

Shattered

It's been one of those weeks. Today wasn't too bad but there were still some moments of stress.

Badminton was OK this evening. Played twice with someone who is exceptionally good and has this mysterious ability to teleport around the court and extend arms like tentacles to reach the most improbable shots. This really highlighted my lack of ability to get around the court and in the process of trying to improve this, my knee started giving some warning twinges. Bah. It would certainly help if I was a stone or two lighter, that's for sure.

Really, really tired now.

Yay food

It's been a busy couple of days in work. Came back from two days off to a lot going on. Today was my Unix day which involved laying a new fibre connection for a new tape drive that's going in soon. All good fun.

It was the annual badminton meal this evening, which was at a different place which hasn't been open that long. I must have driven past it dozens of times but never noticed it. The food was excellent though and reasonably priced.

Before that, did a couple more missions on Saints Row. It's proving harder going than the sequel, although I discovered that there are a lot more character customisation options than it looks like at first, so I was able to make him look a lot more like my character in the second one, which is nice.

Losing weight

One reason to lose weight, when you have a bass strapped on and it sort of rests uncomfortably on top of your stomach so you have to shift it to the side.

Damn it.

The Offspring is one of those bands where you know pretty much what you're getting when you get one of their albums. The new one is OK though.

Holidays = nice

I had yesterday and today off as annual leave. Mainly because last year I pretty much didn't take any holidays at all and I had a lot to use up. It worked out OK though as yesterday my Mum had a a hospital appointment, and today my Dad and his wife moved house.

Yesterday was a fairly uninspiring day, didn't really do all that much, just slobbed around and watched a couple of DVDs. Also did something that I've been meaning to do and watch the bit in the first Star Trek movie where two people die in a transporter accident. I was quite young when I saw that for the first time and it absolutely traumatised me. The distorted and agonised screams emanating from the blurry misshapen form caught in the beam was utterly horrific for some reason. It wasn't as bad this time around, but it still wasn't very nice. I once glanced at that section from the novelisation and that was even worse, going into graphic detail about organs pumping outside the body and things. There have been worse and more graphic accidents since, mind you.

Today was helping out my Dad and his wife move. They had some very efficient removal people so the morning was standing around a lot before loading some stuff into my car and heading over to the new house. It's not as far to drive from home, so that's good. I spent much of the afternoon unpacking the kitchen stuff and attempting to work out just how the 40" plasma connected to all the various boxes. Lunch consisted of sandwiches from Sainsbury's and the evening meal was a quick takeaway from a nearby Pizza Hut. I never realised just how well caramelised onion worked on a pizza before, but it does. Mind you I've had caramelised onion in basically every way possible since I found out it existed a couple of years ago.

Meh

A very unspectacular day.