Recently I read an article entitled The Death of the Joystick. I have to say that it greatly saddened me, as i was an avid flight/space-simulator gamer in the mid to late-1990s.

Our main joystick at home was the Microsoft 3D Pro, and for all intents and purposes it is/was a fantastic joystick. To this day it has never died, and I only use past tense because Microsoft have stopped updating its drivers, and computers have mostly stopped using the old serial and 'game' ports that the joystick used.

I remember wasting many hours using that joystick playing all … Read more →

Let's start with something definitely not interesting: Saturday night's FA Cup final between Man Utd and Chelski. What a dour match. That has to rate up there as one of the most boring football matches that I have seen in my entire life.

Indoor on Sunday was pretty bad too: we lost 4-0 against a pretty good team. It's the first time that I can remember us playing a match and not scoring a goal.

Anywho, to the interesting parts. The past weekend around here was an oestrogen-free zone. Despina went down south for the weekend, which left me here … Read more →

It's that time of year again kids! Time for another rant!

In Australia we are experiencing a significant increase in the spread and use of the drug crystal methamphetamine; an illegal drug commonly referred to as 'crystal meth' or more commonly here on the streets as 'ice', due to it's crystallised appearance.

Frankly i don't care much for the drug, or for the people that deal or use it, but what continually aggravates me about this is the media, and more recently the government as well, constantly referring to the drug by it's street name of 'ice'.

Even the American … Read more →

I know this is going to sound a little stuck-up and unrealistic, but why do things have to go wrong? Currently we're in the middle of sorting out a lot of little and annoying inconveniences that tend to come at you in life.

Now I know that they are totally insignificant in the grand scheme of things, but it still has the effect of slowly eroding your enjoyment of time, especially the little spare time that we manage to afford ourselves in this increasingly 'busy' culture.

What are some of these little things going wrong? The little car accident mentioned … Read more →

Went back to work today after having Monday off for the Labor Day public holiday here in Queensland. After installing everything on the new computer Friday night, I had to configure it all again, which took most of Saturday. I also played through a fair bit of Call of Duty 2 to make sure that the gaming side of things was working fine ;).

That night we went to Church, and afterwards went to Dominos at West End for dinner. It turned out to be a pretty action-packed dinner as a high-school dance that was being held in a hall … Read more →

Last Friday I finally got all the parts for assembling my new computer. I had originally decided to pay a store to build the machine for me, but because I couldn't get all the parts that I wanted from the one place, it meant that I really had to build it myself.

Last Friday myself and the supervisor from work put together all the parts to form the new computer, myself learning a lot of things along the way. See the new album in the Gallery for some pics. In the end I had my assembled dream: a relatively powerful … Read more →

Yesterday our family celebrated the final wedding of the Costi kids, my older brother (the eldest sibling) getting married yesterday.

It was another great wedding, i'm very happy for the both of them. It's common knowledge that my brother has never really gotten on well with myself or my sister, and surprisingly last night in his speech (i'm not sure how of it was affected by alcohol ;)), he actually apologised to the both us for himself over the years. That surprised me a lot to say the least.

So that's the last wedding for my parents: they've married off … Read more →

I haven't blogged much lately, i've been preoccupied with a great many things.

The rest of last week nothing much really happened that I can remember, so it mustn't have been too exciting. Over the last week I've mainly been concerned with watching processor prices, and trying to order them (how sad).

The Intel price drop did happen on Friday, but to my disappointment after contacting the store that I was going to buy my custom-built computer off, they didn't have a lot of the components that i was wanting in stock, and that it would be a few weeks … Read more →

Waiting blows. I have come to realise over the years that I am generally a very impatient person. If i know I want something, I generally want to get it as soon as possible. It's worse waiting for something that you don't know when you are going to get it.

Waiting for the expected price-cuts on various items needed for me to build my new computer mentioned in the previous entry is not really bringing out the best of me. In fact it's like a drug addiction that I need a fix for.

I don't really like situation, and i … Read more →

I've mentioned previously that I was going to wait to much later this year to buy a new computer.

Several things have happened in the past week which has accelerated those plans. I am currently very very itchy to get the new computer.

The first thing that happened was that, just out of curiosity's sake, I tallied the cost of all the parts that I would like in the computer, and surprisingly found that it actually sat within my anticipated budget (albeit pushing the very top range of said budget).

Secondly, on Wednesday night I spent a few hours troubleshooting … Read more →