Blog

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

Gaming Season 2011-2012 Begins: BF3 Beta

Categories Gaming

So another Gaming Season is upon us; the time of year that mega game companies seek to part parents and elder geeks with their money, and cash in on Christmas/holiday-related TV babysitting and bought love.

In looking through this season's upcoming launches that I am interested in, i'd say it's a comfortable mix: not too overloaded, but not overly lean either.

Battlefield 3 - October 25
Sonic Generations - November 3
COD: MW3 - November 8
Zelda: Skyward Sword - November 24
Mass Effect 3 - March 6

I'm really looking forward to Zelda, but the headline game has to … Read more →

Star Wars on Blu-Ray

Categories Geekery, Movies

Star Wars Blu-ray set coversThis week the complete set of Star Wars movies was finally released on blu-ray. Like the eventual release of the original trilogy on DVD all those years ago, I was of course quite excited.

As is usual with each new release, George Lucas had included a lot of mostly unobjectionable minor changes that might make a little sense, some ones that are completely unnecessary, but also at least one major change that has people scratching their heads in frustration and millions of geeks posting on forums their fury on how their childhood has been ruined (see the 'Han Shot … Read more →

10 Years On: My Experience of September 11 2001

Categories Life

CNN Screen Grab of Breaking News on September 11It's a bit hard to believe that it's been 10 years since the world-changing event that was September 11 2001. I thought it might be suitable to blog the interesting moments of how I spent that day, which in Australia largely unfolded on Wednesday the 12th of September.

As an 18 year old in my first year of uni at UQ, I had gone to bed pretty early on the Tuesday night, as I had an early 8am morning lecture the next day. I woke up early on Wednesday the 12th of September, went downstairs to have breakfast, and I … Read more →

Rant: Why Wash the Colours Away?

Categories Geekery, Internet, Rants

iTunes left menu interface comparison, new washed out version 10 colours on the left, the previous version on the rightIn terms of computer and application interfaces (either hardware or software) I'm pretty critical of a lot of 'fashion' or 'trendy' changes that have absolutely no practical improvement, and especially those that are in my opinion completely unpractical.

Years ago I criticised Apple's fashion of white that permeated to most other technology manufacturers and into society in general.

Now it seems there is a general shift to washing away colours from program interfaces. One thing we were taught in interface design at uni (although that was a while ago), is that in addition to logically and easily shaped and recognisable … Read more →

The Movie Year

Categories Movies

This year Despina and I are making a habit of going out to dinner and a movie at least once a week (providing there is at least something palatable to watch).

We've kept it up pretty well, so far we have seen 20 movies, the majority of which at the cinemas. It's easily the most i've seen at the cinemas in a calendar year, and we're really enjoying doing it. There have been a lot of average or 'just good' movies we've seen, a few 'really good' ones, and only a couple of terrible ones. I'd like to think the … Read more →

VMware Geekness, EPL, Cowboys and Aliens

Categories Football, Geekery, Technology

VMware PlayerOther than for work, I've been playing around with virtual machines for quite a while. I use them mainly to test out operating systems that I am interested in, notably on this blog the release candidates for the previous two Windows releases. I also use them to try software and other stuff that might be dodgy so I don't expose my 'real' computer to threats.

I've been using VMware Workstation which is VMware's flagship and somewhat-costly product for workstation testing and trialling. However, I didn't know that sometime recently that VMware opened up their free 'Player' software to include a … Read more →

Illness Update Part 3

Categories Life

It's been almost a year since I have posted an update on my illness (see part 1 and part 2), and the main reason for the long update interval is that there has been a lot of confusion, especially around the beginning of the year, as to a solid diagnosis.

Other than the surgery earlier this year to remove a loosely related infection, and another ERCP shortly before that, I have thankfully managed to stay out of hospital this year.

In the last 'update', I said that I had probably been misdiagnosed in terms of originally being thought to … Read more →

Mass emails & Canon purchases

Categories Geekery, Internet, Movies, Technology

In the past week I organised for the inaugural Bribie e-newsletter to be sent out using a professional email service. I ended up using MailChimp, which, other than the very amusing images of monkeys delivering mail, is also a fantastic service for this kind of thing as they provide a free service for less than 2000 subscribers and a monthly send limit of 12000 emails.

You can see the online version of the newsletter here, and if you are interested in getting put on the list, you can sign up here.

It was an interesting experience; since … Read more →

Internode Pricing Woes & Construction Begins…

Categories Geekery, Internet, Life

Recently it's been very disappointing to see my ISP, Internode, revising it's Naked ADSL plans in a very downwards direction. The price-point that I'm on now ($60/month) fetched me 70GB of quota when i signed up just over a year ago, then later last year moved up to 150GB for the same price. Now they're making users on that plan pay an extra $10/month to keep the same quota, or take up the new plan at the same $60 price-point which only includes a measly 30GB of quota.

Partly the reasons given for this almost unprecedented decrease in value is … Read more →

Google+ starts to take shape

Categories Geekery, Internet, Technology

Google+ LogoIn the past few weeks Google has unveiled a decent competitor in the social networking market to Facebook. Following their rather weak previous attempt in the form of Buzz well-over a year ago, it seems Google have finally thrown a bit of weight and money into developing a decent Facebook competitor.

At the moment the service is what Google calls a limited 'field trial', which for me begs the question: has Google dropped the term 'beta' for describing these types of pre-release versions? Maybe keeping Gmail in a state of perpetual beta for years means the term had lost it's … Read more →