Blog

The thoughts, opinions, happenings, and just plain ramblings of a seemingly boring person.

Trudging Along & Dry Gaming Season Approaching

Trudging along through life at the moment, it's the veritable roller-coaster.

I'll start off by saying that i'm p'oed at stupid One (TV channel) showing Nascar over the baseball on Saturday mornings now. I'd just gotten used to waking up and seeing a live ball game on Saturday mornings, just for them to now show three hours of cars literally going around in a circle. Maybe it's just me, but I fail to see the spectacle in that. F1 I can get into, but Nascar? And it looks like from next week they're prioritising the NFL over basbeball too. Ah … Read more →

Loving the Baseball & Ways to Fight Video Game Piracy

I really haven't been that much of a fan of the new free-to-air sports channel, One, until these past few weeks. I wasn't really interested in anything other than the poker shows before then.

However recently they've started showing live baseball from the States and I'm loving it. I have no idea why I like watching professional baseball so much, some might say it is the American equivalent of Cricket (which I generally despise watching). I guess I like the plays, the banter, the way a single inning can turn a game, and generally the length isn't anywhere near as … Read more →

Suspending Reality: Entertaining Visitors

I've had one of the most busiest, but also one of the most enjoyable weekends I've had in a long long time. Most of the weekend was taken up by catching up with a friend from the USA which I met at UQ six years ago, who very awesomely made a side trip up to Brisbane to visit us whilst she was in the country on business.

It was just the reality suspension I needed after a tough week and-a-bit. The visit was also well-timed with a winter heat-wave. We're in the middle month of winter here in the southern … Read more →

My Favourite Old-Time Cartoon Characters

Marvin the MartianI can't remember how we actually got onto the topic, but last night me and Des were discussing our favourite of the old-time cartoon characters (think original Warner Brothers and Disney characters).

Here are mine:
Out of the Warner Bros. characters, my favourite is definitely Marvin the Martian. A close runner up to him from the WB characters is Daffy Duck, with an honourable mention going to Wile E. Coyote. By the looks of those choices, it seems i'm attracted to 'losers' of the WB bunch :S.

Out of the Disney characters, my favourites are Goofy and … Read more →

Lotsa Football & Obese Royalties

Fat PrincessEntering the month of August usually sees the English Premier League start up again. Whilst we're still a week and a half away from that, I have myself been playing a lot of football.

We've continued playing in the mixed futsal on Friday night (last Friday the females did awesomely well as we won 8-1), and of course I am still playing indoor on Sunday.

Recently on the PS3, the highly anticipated downloadable game Fat Princess has been released. The concept behind this game is great: it's basically an RTS in which two teams have to try to rescue their … Read more →

Marvel At My Prophecy: SWTFU Now Coming to PC

Force Unleashed now on PC?!Just under a year ago I wrote this blog entry about my rage at LucasArts for not releasing Star Wars: The Force Unleashed on the PC, whilst releasing it on every other current and past platform known to mankind. In that article I said this:

Don't be surprised if in 12 months down the track, after they've made all their initial release and hype money off the console versions, they will release a PC version of the game to try to squeeze what they can out of the PC market at that time.

Turns out I was 100% correct. … Read more →

Long Weekend, Futsal & Indoor

We've just finished a long weekend here, as Despina had an RDO today (Monday) and i took today off with her. It's good that we've had today off, because we've had a busy and exhausting weekend.

Friday night started with Futsal, as me and Des are playing together once again in a mixed competition, however this time we're playing with other members of my extended family, which makes things even more interesting.

The game on Friday night was an extremely strange one. Nearly every person on the court made at least one comical error each to gift the opposing team … Read more →

Victory! Soul Communications Coughs Up

Regular readers might recall my situation of leaving my previous mobile phone company (Soul/TPG) and expecting incorrect 'early termination' fees for a phone contract that I had actually served out.

Well since that previous post, they did in fact charge me those fees, and I ended up having to go back to the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman (TIO) to make yet another complaint about the incompetent idiots.

After months of posturing and back-and-forths between me, the TIO, and Soul, today I received a full refund of the charges in question (about $120 worth). Take that you lying *insert expletives here*.

In … Read more →

Geek News: Gmail Finally Out of Beta & Google OS

Gmail out of betaIt was a pretty big geek news day today, with most of the headlines coming from Google. Early this morning Australian time Google announced that they have finally taken Gmail, and a host of other of their online services (eg Google Docs etc), out of their now previous seemingly perpetual beta. I touched on this a few years ago when I thought that Gmail had outgrown the 'beta' tag. It's going to be a bit weird seeing the Gmail logo now without the 'beta' attached to it.

The other big Google announcement today was their official confirmation of what many … Read more →

Firefox 3.5

Firefox 3.5 and personasThe start of the financial year has also seen the release of Firefox 3.5. Just like the 1.5 release all those years ago, this x.5 release sees a few relatively minor additions and improvements to the trusty fox.

Other than general speed increases, the main new features of the browser are a 'Private Browsing' mode similar to those already implemented in IE and Chrome, as well as tab 'tearing' similar to the behaviour in Chrome.

So all in all it is a solid step forward and keeps pace with the good new features that have made their way into … Read more →