This weekend we ended up mainly watching movies and me playing the newly released (newly released in Australia anyway) Super Smash Bros. Brawl. It's quite pathetic that this massive Nintendo game was released in Japan and the USA back in January and March respectively, but it's only been released in Europe and here now. Very, very poor form Nintendo.

I've played through the individual 'Subspace Emissary' missions in the game, and also a few games online. I was excited to play as Sonic, but once he was unlocked i didn't really fancy him too much in the game. He's … Read more →

We've just come home from a stirring game of indoor. Before the game we were 6th with only 6 points separating the top six teams. Today we played the second team, next week we play the 3rd team, and the week after that we play 1st team.

So playing the top 3 teams in three weeks could decide if we make the finals or not. The team we played today wiped the floor with us in the trials at the start of the season, but today we edged them out in a nail-biter.

We were losing 1-2 at half-time, but … Read more →

Yesterday finally saw the release of Firefox 3. It's been a while since Firefox 2 was released (over a year and a half now), so this has been a long time in coming.

Whilst 3.0 is definitely a significant improvement over 2, i don't really see that it's one and a half year's worth of improvement.

In terms of themes, like the release of 2.0, I initially strongly resisted the new theme. I only had to put up with it because the author of my previously used theme, Winestripe (the 1.5 theme that I had used for 2.0), hasn't … Read more →

Every now and then I stumble upon a website or online service that I think: "damn that was a simple idea, i wish i had thought of that", and consequently ponder the potential money that some other guy on the far side of the world is making off such an idea.

Sometimes that 'something' is a useful service, an idea, or something that is just so plain silly that it's guaranteed lots of people will find interesting or amusing that you can make a killing off advertising revenue.

That 'something' today was GraphJam.

The idea is pretty simple: let … Read more →

I know this entry is a bit late because the show started on the weekend, but the next major footballing tournament is upon us: the European Championships ( aka Euro 2008 ).

Sometimes i do feel a bit sorry for top-flight European players. After playing club football every week from late August until the end of May, every two years they don't get much of a holiday because they have to play in either the World Cup or the Euros.

Then i think about the hideous amounts of money they earn, and the feeling quickly goes away.

I actually like … Read more →

It's been an interesting week for me and my mobile. It started about a week ago when the battery life of the thing plummeted. Usually the battery lasts about a week, but literally overnight the battery started lasting only about a day, which needless to say sucks serious amounts of acidic battery discharge.

Acidic discharge would have explained the shorter life, but there wasn't anything that obvious as for a reason for the sudden change. I even updated the phone firmware from Nokia to see if that would fix the issue, but for about three days nothing seemed to … Read more →

Yesterday was a very football-centric day. I played indoor in the morning, which we convincingly won. We've been placed in division 4 (one up from last season), and we were previously the 7th out of 8. We beat the 2nd placed team yesterday, so this season might not be all doom and gloom for us.

That night we went and saw the World Cup Qualification match between Australia and Iraq at Suncorp Stadium. It was so good being in stadium of almost 50,000 people watching a football match (see the photo right), as it is something that is quite rare … Read more →

Recently i've been trying to get into Team Fortress 2. It came as part of The Orange Box (a compilation of some fantastic games (some old, most new) from Valve) which I bought last year.

I had played through everything in that except for just briefly touching Team Fortress 2 (TF2). Other than Portal, TF2 was probably the most critically acclaimed title in the set, and also one of the most heralded multiplayer games of last year.

It's quite strange that I haven't really played it till now, but I guess i've been more focused on Unreal … Read more →

In the past few weeks I have finally returned to have another go at playing Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. I had bought the game a while ago, but i never ended up playing beyond the first 1/2 hour after discovering that you had to eat and exercise as part of the game (something that you never had to do in previous GTAs, and something that I loathed).

After getting around that with some cheats, after a few weeks play I finally finished the game last night. Now I just have to wait until (hopefully) they release GTA4 … Read more →

Last night we finally received our copies of the newly released Orthodox Study Bible, complete with Old and New Testaments. This book has felt like ages in coming (I think when i first heard of its development, it was slated for a 2005 release), but the end product is worth it and kudos to all who worked on it.

I am a little surprised at the thinness of the Bible; i was expecting it to be much much bigger. It seems they managed to trim the size down by making each page the thickness of exactly 3 atoms. I … Read more →