As mentioned recently, i've spent a fair bit of time playing BC2. I'm really enjoying it, and we've even gone to the trouble of setting up a TeamSpeak server in order to get around the buggy in game audio.

Although i've been critical of the whole ranking and weapon-unlock multiplayer progression previously, i actually don't mind it now in BC2 now that i've gotten out of the bottom ranks.

In addition to BC2, i've spent a fair time of time gaming on the PC recently. I've bought Episodes from Liberty City which is the standalone expansion to GTA4, and added to that is the debut of Season 3 of Sam & Max and the new Left 4 Dead 2 campaign, neither of which which I haven't gotten around to yet.

It's all made a very good start of the year gaming-wise, and I haven't even gotten everything I was planning to: I haven't got Supreme Commander 2 mainly because of objections I have to how they've 'dumbed-down' the gameplay (i'll probably pick it up as a bargain-bin/import when everything else settles down).

The other big gaming news is the release of the Steam 2010 UI Update. This is the first big interface change that i've experienced since I started using Steam a few years ago, and honestly i think they've really screwed the pooch here.

The rendering of text is generally a big issue in the program, with their use of DirectWrite looking absolutely shocking on my system. I'm currently forced to run the exe with a switch that disables DirectWrite. The other main grip is the size of the text. It doesn't seem to respect any Windows-set DPI settings, so all the text seems really tiny. Again, i've manually edited a CSS file that the program use to bump up the size of the text.

Finally is something that is really out of any basic user-interface-101 course. They've got a light grey text colour on a darker grey background. The first rule of good UI is pretty much to have a decent contrast between text colour and background colour, and for me the Steam implementation is on the other side of the fence of acceptable contrast.

Here's hoping they fixed these pretty obvious issues, and really, these are the sort of things that should have been knocked out in the beta that's been running for the past few months.

In the past week we've gone and seen another two movies: She's Out of My League and Kick-Ass. I really enjoyed both of them, but the former more than the later.

Somewhat disturbingly, I could actually relate to a lot of the stuff in em>She's Out of My League (I still reckon i punched above my weight in landing my wife ), and generally i loved the humour.

Kick-Ass was also good, I found the anti-stereotypical take on the super-hero thing awesome. I loved the line: "With no power comes no responsibility."

I also somewhat stupidly went and saw the North-London derby game in the city on Thursday morning before work, and of course the first derby game that I actually go and see in public is the first time Spurs beat Arsenal in over 10 years.

With Man Utd winning last night and Chelsea losing, it makes for a very interesting end to the Premier League season coming up. Although mathematically Arsenal still have a chance, the odds of them being able to win it are small indeed.

A big 'Christ Has Risen!' to everybody!

So another Easter has come and gone, this one really felt as though it came and went really quickly. It's really good having the Western Easter coincide with the Orthodox one, the public holidays make it so much easier.

The past couple of weeks has seen some IT action home. The new Dell laptop we got recently started having problems and wasn't booting. After some of my own professional diagnosis, it turned out the Seagate hard disk in the computer had failed. Not happy at all for a 3-month old laptop, but it is a Seagate drive. I'm a Western Digital fan and never had one of their drives fail on me.

I contacted Dell and they sent me out a new drive, which ironically was a Western Digital drive. I had a little chuckle at that. I managed to get most of the data off the failed drive, but the Windows install wasn't recoverable which meant I had to do a fresh install on the new drive.

Today we went and saw How to Train Your Dragon and absolutely loved it. It's probably the best Dreamworks-animated film i've seen and definitely challenges anything that Pixar have done both visually and generally. The 3D was awesome, and I loved the designs of the dragons, especially the titular one. I'm looking for some maquettes/statues to get, but it doesn't look like there are any at the moment, hopefully they'll announce some soon.