Blog

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

Tweets for 2012

Categories Geekery, Internet

Twitter2012I was thinking it might be good to have a new annual entry at the end of each year which lists all my tweets for the year. My Twitter account hasn't been given access to the new backup/export/archive feature, so all the external links contained in the tweets below are Twitter's 't.co' URL shortened ones.

  • Unfortunately I have have been moved over to the new @Gmail look 🙁 Twas good while it lasted classic look! Jan 04, 2012
  • @LiaParadissis You can buy the 3D bluray and watch it over my place if you want 😉 Jan 07, 2012
  • @LiaParadissis Hopefully
… Read more →

The Best and Worst of 2012

Categories Gaming, Movies, Rants

Like last year's 'Best and Worst' post, this year has been a bit lean gaming-wise. Finishing off building our house and moving in in the first quarter, and planning and taking holidays in the latter half of the year go someway to explaining it, and the aging console generation might too,  but I'm beginning to fear that I might be moving away from gaming.

Also continuing on from last year, we saw a lot of movies. My count is 32 released in this calendar year.

Anywho, here is my critical wrap of 2012.

Movies
(see here for a … Read more →

Boxing Day Movies: Les Mis & The Hobbit

Categories Movies

The Hobbit - An Unexpected JourneyThis year there were three Boxing Day movie releases that we really wanted to see: Wreck-It Ralph, Les Misérables, and The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. Thanks to advance screenings, we got to see two of them even before Christmas Eve.

On Friday we saw Wreck-It Ralph, and on Sunday we saw Les Mis. After recently seeing the West End theatre performance of Les Mis when we were in London, the movie left me feeling a little flat. Russell Crowe was definitely the weak link in the singing department (especially compared to the powerful voice … Read more →

Wreck-It Ralph: The ‘Proper’ Pixar Movie of the Year?

Categories Gaming, Geekery, Movies

Wreck-It Ralph

Tonight we went and saw an 'advance' screening of Wreck-It Ralph. I put 'advance' in quotes because it was released in the U.S. a month and a half ago, so a screening five days before the Australian release is hardly 'advance' in today's connected world. Insert here my usual disgust of these archaic practises and so forth.

In short, the movie was fantastic.

Following the disappointment of this year's Disney/Pixar release that was the well below-par Brave, this movie as a purely Disney release hit more of the Pixar heights in all aspects. I'm not sure if Disney … Read more →

Is Google Becoming Evil? Free Google Apps No More

Categories Internet, Rants, Technology

Google Apps Not FreeI'm a big Google user; and by that, I don't just mean that I use their search engine.

Over the years, I've increasingly centred my online life around the company's products: I use Gmail for email, Google Calendar is now my organiser, I have an Android phone that syncs to both, and recently I also used Google Docs (now 'Drive') for collaborative docs and spreadsheeting during the house construction, and so on.

But in considering all that, probably the single product that I've voluntarily advertised, espoused, and assisted friends and family in terms of setting them up with, is Google … Read more →

Getting Back Into (receiving) Pwnage

Categories Gaming, Life

Pretty much since we moved out of the unit and into the 'intermediate' house, I haven't really played many games online.  There was a variety of reasons for that: the house was small and hot, I was busy and exhausted from building the 'final' house, other health reasons, etc. This year overall has probably been the leanest gaming-wise for a long, long time:  I've really only played Mass Effect 3 and Max Payne 3 on the PC, nothing on the Wii, and only Sonic the Hedgehog 4: Episode II on the PS3.

I'm not really sure why it's been … Read more →

Skyfall: A Decent Bond Film

Categories Movies

SkyfallOn Friday night we saw the latest Bond film, Skyfall, at a ridiculously crowded late session. We had originally planned on seeing it when we were in London right after it was released in UK on the 26th October, but I was too unwell at the time. By the way, it's still shocking that for a movie of this magnitude that the Australian release date is a month later than the UK, and two weeks after the US. In an internet connected world, it's just not acceptable any more.

Anywho, some might recall my earlier opinions on Casino Royal… Read more →

Disney Buys Lucasfilm

Categories Geekery, Movies

Star Wars DisneyThis is kind of old news now, but nevertheless it's going to be 'current' for the next few years.

Whilst we were in Hong Kong at the end of October, news broke that Disney had reached a deal with George Lucas to acquire Lucasfilm and all its subsidiaries and intellectual property for the sum of around $4 billion. I had to check multiple websites and multiple sources to make sure it wasn't some kind of huge practical joke.

Although $4 billion sounds like a lot of money, when you look at what Disney is acquiring it doesn't seem all that … Read more →

Return of the Space-Sim?

Categories Gaming

Star CitizenStarting while I was overseas, and now gathering pace in the past few days, is the buzz surrounding the latest crowd-funded mega-hyped game. You may recall my initial foray into crowd-funding with the Kickstarter campaign for Planetary Annihilation, well now a project has come along for a long-lost genre that I am even more psyched about than my love for Total Annihilation successors: space-simulators (space-sims for short).

Going back half a decade (!), I have previously detailed my love of PC-based space-sims and my despair their disappearance along with the joystick, and my attempts at re-capturing those vintage … Read more →

Cannon Upgrades: SSD Goodness

Categories Geekery, Technology

Intel SSD 330 SeriesIn the past few days I have upgraded the trusty old Cannon with an SSD (Solid State Drive).

Our main desktop computer (The Cannon) was getting pretty slow under all the bloat that had accumulated over the past almost-three years, so I thought a change was in order. If I were to follow tradition, the three year mark is usually when I would start looking at putting together a brand new build, especially with a new version of Windows coming out, but The Cannon build has aged really well over that time.

It's probably due to the fact … Read more →