Future Thanks

Quite a while ago, PC Gamer ran a preview of a game that went by the name S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl
I was in WHSmiths today and see that its the cover game this month, so I came home and looked up the website...

It does look so very good. It is most likely going to be my Half Life 2 beating game.

So in advance of its alleged release date (May this year) I am going to thank GSC for their very awesome game and engine (yeah they wrote their own)

Ohh look what I just found! http://stalker.myexp.de/en/index.php Its got a count down to may.

Not a lot has happened today, I got my "2 ports USB 2.0 PCI Card + 3 ports Front Bay" today, only to remeber that because I have a funny (annoying) case, I can't actually mount the front bay. Doh!! Oh well its a good excuse for finally buying a new case.

Thats about it
Check out stalker, it looks so very good

Dave

Proof!

For those of you who are interested, today/nights link is to my test blog, its just an old blog I used to keep, just before I went off to uni. Now it is relegated to millions of republishes as I try to mold somthing nice.

I am quite pleased with it so far, I eventually will probably link to CSS (if I can)
There are a few images still to be created and to go up, and I have to decide where/how I am going to host a "links" page as proposed. I also have to decided on where exactly I want the text, padded? margined? floated? I dunno, but thats somthing I can do later.

I think overall I am on track for the start of semester release date that I had planned for, but who knows.

Eidos!

Todays thanks goes to Eidos. Them being the people that brought us Champ Manager 1 to about 7 billion and the polygon lady Lara Croft.

Many hours were spent playing Champ Man 2 - The German Leagues (and using the secret escape key when you lost matches)
Thankyou very much for the most excellent chance to play as a real footy manager, its just a shame that for me it got a bit too indepth, I found it quite hard to just sit down and play a few games without having to spend hours first understanding all the little things you could/needed to do.

And as for the tomb raider sets, jump-die-load game-jump-duck-die-load game-jump-duck-roll-die-load game-etc was bizzarly addictive.

Anyway, time for me to go
Dave out

How to get A-head in navigating

Yarr!! Avast!!
Yes Monkey Island (1 and 2) are one of the many reasons that Lucas Arts gets my many thanks.
Puzzle games galore, including Grim Fandango, wasted many hours of my life working out and then "performing" the necessary clicks to complete the games.

So thankyou Lucas Arts (and Mr Lucas himself for some film thingy he did once)

Now to other matters at hand. Its a baptism again tomorrow at my church, which is very cool. Yes we did have one three weeks ago, but we are have another one, which brings the 2005 total to 5!! Already! God rules.

Sadly there is no news on if and when my external hdd will arrive, and I for one am quite inpatient now. My desktop PC is seriously in need of a format and reinstall.

I say this seemingly everyday, but the new theme is coming along nicly now. I am very happy with it. Not long now I don't think before it gets "implemented" Just a few IE vs CSS snags which are quite annoying, but I think I know how to work around those.

Well thats about all for now, I might post again later tonight after my next "coding" session

Dave out (for now)

Westwood/Rockstar

Every so often blogger seems to crash on me while trying to publish a new post, it obviously did so yesterday and thus there wasn't anything up, so here goes...

"Westwood.

Command and Conqueror and C&C:Red Alert were both many hours of frustration and enjoyment for me in my younger years.
I remeber my big brother getting C&C in a bargain box set once and being hooked on it ever since. I got Red Alert almost as soon as it came out. Somtimes I wish I had an old win 98/dos box on which to play some of these games properly. Even with the Compatability mode in XP it doesn't play right.

What can I say? if you have never played any of the games i mention this week, you are missing out on some of the finest games ever, games that have set benchmarks in my life.

Well enough ramblings I got people to see and places to go

Dave"

Hurrar for postin it on a forum too so that I can just copy/paste

and in to todays...


Rockstar Games

where would we be without you?
probably sitting in big fields playing with bunny rabbits or somthing
instead we can run around big cities, stealing cars, preforming drive-bys generally killing people and working with the mafia.

so thankyou very much for the whole GTA series, and all the work you have done to prove computer games cause violence in children...even if your games have an 18+ rating on them


Right I'm off to run some people over and then maybe blow up some police cars, for fun

Dave *twitch* out

Thankyou ID software

Opps, just realised that I didn't post anything on here this morning (despite updating else where) so...

"Today we will be thanking ID Software for providing us with Wolfenstein 3D!
Probably the first game I every seriously played and completed.

Oh yeah, they also brought Doom and Quake into the scene too
Cheers for that"

Thats all for today, I fired up my Virtual Win 98 PC and had a quick roam on the demo of Wolf 3D again, oh the hours I spent playing this game. I can still get 100% on the first 3 levels on the hardest settings with ease. oh well

Briefly, I am making steaming progress with the new style, but the fact that IE and FF read CSS differently is flaming annoying!!! AUGH! (and yes I am using valid XHTML/CSS before you say anything)

Happy Winter-een-mas

Yes, like so many other people, I will be spending this week celebrating a new (ish) holiday.
This year, I plan to spend the week spreading the word about said holiday and thanking a different game company each day for a week.

Today I would like to thank Valve for their stunning contributions of the HalfLife series.


In other news my big brother has a blog in which he linked to me so its only fair that I link him back. Go read it, its more interesting than this one.

I am making more progress on the new style for the blog, and have kinda endeavoured to look into MySQL and PHP and other more complicated site thingys when I am finished.

Thats all for now, I am off to shoot zombies for a while in HL2
May post some more in the wee hours of tomorrow

Dave

Sunday Evening mumble

eeep! having watched this a few times now, it is even more believeable than before
As I sit here using Blogger and tell my friends on MSN to "Stop asking me stupid questions, go bother Google!!"
I realise that Google is slowly taking over my life.
Google Labs has become a place of interest and fun, seeing and testing what is up and coming.
Google Suggest has been my home page since it came out, and true it has one or two annoying quirks, I still love it.

In other news, Church was good today, was nice to be home and in my home church. It does feel a bit weird though, as there are hardly any people university age there at the moment, so I feel a little bit odd and left out. But its all good, Mark preached an ace sermon this evening all about Nehemiah 4.

Can you believe I actually WANT it to be term time at uni now. I want to just get back into the swing of things. (I may also want to see certain people but I don't think its wise to talk lots about it here, just a mention that there is a secret will drive anyone mad :) hehehe)

ouh! i am all sleepy. how nice
i think i will go to bed in a bit
G.night

1:28AM

Ok major update now, I have discovered my prime webcoding time is around 12-2 AM

I seem to make more progress or learn more about how CSS and XHTML work in that period than at any other time of day. Its quite disconcerting.
We have had a minor setback in the release of the new style/site in that I found the template I was using far too compliated and am now re-writting it. Not from scratch but going through it and trying to workout why certain lines are there.
I need to find a page on Blogger which explains its coding system to me, but it seems very similar to CityDesk and I really should go and buy this book by Eric Meyer as its very useful.

As for living arrangements for the next 2 weeks, I currently plan on staying here at my parents house, spending as little money as possible. However, this could all change if I can get engineerin work anywhere, I might go back to Cambridge or be trying to find floorspace in Reading or Londen.

As most people who know me now know, my sister is getting married (hurrar!) and the date is looking like its around the end of the summer. Now back many eons ago, when my brother got married, my mum made me grow my hair and have the classic "curtains" look. I wasn't too hot on the look and pretty much as soon as I could I shaved it back to a #3 all over and its pretty much stayed that way ever since. Until these last 4 months (well Sepember to Christmas) when it didn't get cut at all. True it was getting pretty long (by my standards) and not all that neat (due to it just growing with no "styling" going on) but it was getting close to a point when I could have gone into a stylist hair place thingy and asked them to do somthing with it. I reacon that I have around 6-7 months before my sisters wedding and plan to see if i can get my hair trimmed (neatened up) every few weeks, partly to encourage it to grow, partly to stay respectable, and to then get it made all funky at the last minute. If I like it, I guess it will stay. Whos up for bets on it all coming off again though?

Here is a short long list of things I can think of that I want/need/must do over the next two weeks:

• Check out "All Life is Here", a study guide on 1 Timothy from St Matthias Press, with a view to using it for the Christian Union small groups (not home groups cause one of them is held on campus in a room we book out)
• Visit friends who still live here at home
• Read some more of Terry Virgo's book "Gods Lavish Grace"
• Record some of the piano/guitar tunes I have created, or aleast get the basic ideas down for further ammusement.
• Get out my clarinet (shhhh don't tell my mum! I may have given up learning it properly but that doesn't mean that I don't want to play it. Just like the piano...)
• Order and Change the strings on Dad's 12-string guitar
• Sort out all my money and plan ahead as far as possible (because I am that bad with money, and having a plan/timetable makes me feel safe)
• Download some more free stuff from the MSDN-AA that my university signed up for (its so cool getting all this free Microsoft stuff!)
• Oh yeah, finish the coding for this site and make it with the interests of the next point which is to...
• ...seriously think about buying some hosting package and getting a domain name and starting to put some of my photos online
• take more photso
• stop making crazy lists of things to do
• fill in a form for a job that i can't actually have at the moment because I am not available on one of the 2 days I apparently "have" to work, but would still like the work/job as its playing with computers, fixing/upgrading/installing etc.
• learn to blog quicker (currently 2:05, I started this at 1:28)
• purchase an external HDD that I can use powered off the USB ports
• when the above is complete, format my desktop and reinstall XP (one of my favorite past times)
• try to convince more people to switch over to real and quick alternatives and therefore Windows Media Player Classic
• decide on whether I stick with Gaim or not (I like it a lot but it misses some features that MSN has such as webcamming)
• Purchase a wireless something, router or AP not sure yet, maybe even both for simplicity sake. Will rant another time on why I want/need both
• Solder lots of cables (well about 5) to maintain my cabling collection.
• Buy a Kensington Keylock for this laptop
• Finally sort out my printer -just a quick recap and update on the HP Printer/Scanner/Copier saga.

Bought a PSC 1315
Tempremental printing habbits
Eventually diagnosed by HP Online Support as Hardware Fault "call this number to get a replacement"
Turns out "this number" is HP Phone Support
Phone support doesn't talk to Email support
Eventually its agreed (again) that I need a replacement
"Yes it will be delievered on the 11th of Jan sir"
It didn't come
I ring HP
"Sorry Sir we meant the 19th"
Grrrr, could have let me know...
19th
It comes
Yay
It doesn't work!
Bummer
Different problem though
"Yes sir that is a hardware fault again, will send you a replacement for tuesday next week"
"but I am not going to be here then"
they send a replacement express and arrange for UPS to collect 2 printers (the duff ones) from me
UPS comes, but has orders to only take 1 printer
OK, someones messup there
printer #3 also faulty
AUGH!!!
ring HP at lunch on the Thursday
"OK will get our Customer Service team to call you this afternoon"
"sorry got an exam, will not be in, how about you ring first thing tomorrow"
"ok"
friday morning come
friday morning goes
i ring HP
do a shouty bit at them
someone calls me back within the hour
offers me brand new upgraded printer for my troubles
that should be arriving Monday
hopfully one sattisfied customer

Anyways, battery is about to die on this (after nearly 3 hours of use) so I will go to bed now and edit this in the morning
g.night/g.morning

Dave

Edit Sunday Evening:
This post was written in the small hours of today, but I didn't get round to posting them online untill now (they also needed a few changes, but it should be ok now)
Happy reading

Home again

Ho hum, I am back in Dunstable for a bit now, at least until some nice company decideds to give me a job...

Gonna have to find some projects to keep me busy

Erm thats all for now

Dave

Stylish!

Well! It would appear that my extreme funk style is nearly ready to be let loose out onto this edition of the blog!

Oh yeah, my exams are all done now! Hurrar! but it means that I have nothing to do for the next 2 weeks.
If there is anyone out there reading this who wants to give me some paid work, that would be great. In the mean time, I have written to a few companies to see if they will give me more work experience...watch this space.

Not much else to report, I am still thinking about getting a little graphics tablet, like the A6 Wacom ones and creating a sort of "webcomic" by a non-arty type.
*digs around for old paypal account*
soon I will be accepting donations via paypal (i think/hope) though probably not untill i introduce the new theme/site

Anyways enough for now, i am sleepy
Dave out

Um No Title

Ok so I was wondering why I am keeping this blog as I am pretty sure that nobody else reads it, (partly as I havn't told anyone about it) and I couldn't think of a good reason.

Most people have a theme to what they write about, be it book reviews, interesting things that happen in their life, personal projects/pet topics etc.

Anyway I realised that this blog has no point to it at the moment, but I am hoping that is because I am just blatantly no doing anything with my life. I am in a kinda limbo between exams and terms (or "semesters" as my uni calls them)

Can't think of much interesting stuff to write at the moment so I will leave it at that
Poss will do a bit more later tonight

Dave out

W-Lan!

46 wireless networks between my house and joes house!

17 were open for me to use

I dunno if I should laugh or cry

Anyhoos back to revision, got an exam tomorrow at 1:30, all about MIDI


dave out

Lossy vs. Lossless

Yo-ho-um, I am looking to re-create my music collection on my laptop, and I feel that it would be nice to use a good quality ripper with good settings for the whole lot.



There are so many questions to be asked when picking a format to use, do I go lossy or lossless? what apps do I intent to use it on? what bit rates do i use?



Having a look round online to see what there was to use, I have decided that I will still use dB Poweramp. It does what I want and has a huge number of different codecs available.

Do I use mp3? mp4 or ogg? for my lossy format and do i use FLAC or Monkey Audio for my lossLESS format? Bearing in mind that I am firstly using this collection on my laptop which is limited in hdd space at the moment, it is going to be a lossy, but mp4 and ogg both seem to have better compression ratios to mp3.

More digging is required i think, plus audio tests.


Dave Out (for now)

Laptop woo!

Oh yes oh yay! My laptop hath come, I am home for a few days and I am a happy bunny.



So this is my first post on the new machine and ohh, I delcare it to be nicer to use than my desktop, and I am pretty happy with that.



I feel its my duty to let you guys know about all the handy software that I have spent the evening installing on here.



First up was Real Alternative and Quick Alternative (including Media Player Classic)
Between these three apps, you pretty much have most video and audio files covered (But you might want to install Winamp 5 anyway



Next is the internet browser of all time Firefox. If you are not using this then you are an idiot. Trust me on this on. Oh and while you are at it, you might want the following extentions for it, IE View, Nuke Anything and Image Zoom



Now for a long time I used MSN Messenger with MSN Plus, but today is the start of a trial run of Gaim, a "multi-protocol instant messaging (IM) client for Linux, BSD, MacOS X, and Windows". It seems to be quite good, so I am happy to stay with it for a while.



Finally for now, I use Sharp Reader for all the RSS/Atom feeds that I read. If anyone knows of a better aggregatior than this, ie one that also checks newsgroups like Outlook Express, please let me know. (You might wanna add my Atom feed)



I think that is all for now, more tomorrow maybees



Dave out

Frozen Bunnys

I just want to let you guys know (or at least remind myself) that Lem, of Bunny fame, has opened a forum. Check it out



Some day I will post up here a complete list of sites that I check each day. It must be close to about 30 different sites thoughout the week!



Well exams begin on Monday. The first being Geoff Sweet and Advanced Recording and Reproduction. Its such a crazy module, anything could be on the paper! Oh well, I just hope he is happy with my coursework I did.



Thats all for now folks

Dave

How annoying!

Well, I have gone and ordered my laptop and bits, but I am going to have to wait untill the 17th to get it!!



Annoyingly Dell will only ship to my billing address, so I will be heading home to collect it. Can't wait now, am kinda excited.



Went to tescos today with housemates and bought as much heavy stuff as i could store so that I don't have to do any heavy carrying for quite a while now :)



Gosh! I have run out of things to talk about now.



well maybe more later or tomorrow or somthing



Dave out

I'm feeling spendy

Well I am about to blow all my money on a laptop, a good old dell 510m.

The spec. is customised by me for me, so it should do everything i want it to :)

The bad news is, I will be living on a pittance for the next 5 months so that i can pay for it. Oh well



In other news, HP are finally going to swap out my printer, which is nice of them, and eventually i will be able to print from home



Urg, i don't feel so good so i am going to call it a night now



Dave out

Printer Issues!

Flipin' heck! what a saga.

i bought a HP all-in-one printer recently (well back at the start of October) and it has been seemingly tempromental. So i contact HP support via emails, very good service, replys within the hour everytime, and the guy there came to the conclusion that I needed to get it replaced and said to contact the shop I got it from about swap outs.

So, I get in touch with Ebuyer about gettting a returns number for it. This is the first time I have been dissapointed in Ebuyer but they took 2 weeks to tell me that HP are the people to speak to about replacements.

So I give HP a ring, ohh thats nice, HP support email and HP support phone don't talk to each other. So troubleshooting again over the phone, with this chap who was very helpful untill suddently he has a brainwave and realises that the PSC 1310 range of printers don't work with Office 2003. Woo! go HP! He then realises that this is a long phonecall and tells me to hang up and he rings me back! Woo go HP! (again)
He then explains that if I use certain drivers off the HP site it should work, but its a 300Mb download so I should go try it and if it doesn't work call back. so I am sitting here waiting for this download to come.



Well thats all for now, I am sure that over the next few days there will be some more exciting tech support stories to come.



Dave out

2005

Well here we are, 2005, and I have started another blogging session. Well this should be fun, I plan to code my own site and then fill in the gaps with blogger code. But for now I will just blo straight into here.


Thats all for now, I have to go get me a job or some work or do some work so somthing


Dave out