I have extracted James' bit from last night's documentary. Encoding the full programme is a job for overnight.
The excerpt is here:
Thursday, July 26, 2007
Monday, July 23, 2007
Friday = Me Day
Well last week was not the best, but still life moves onward. Having pulled my finger out job hunting, I decided to have a bit of a "Me Day" on Friday (last chance to have to some fun that requires spending money). I met up with an old friend (Tom) for lunch and whilst heading home got stranded, due to the local flooding which closed Shepherd's Bush down.
I decided to wait the water out in the cinema and went to see Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.
Having read the book a few years ago and finding it the worst of the 6 so far (purely because it was all over the shop) I wasn't holding out much hope of an improvement over Goblet of Fire (my favourite of the films), but I was pleasantly surprised. The book has been cut to ribbons and the plot that remains moves along quite fast and the action plays out well.
Not as good as GoF, but definitely worth a watch. 8/10.
After that I found that the water had receded enough for me to get home, which I duly did.
Given Serena's success on Wednesday and that we hadn't defrosted anything, I decided to order all of Serena's favourites from the local Chinese Takeaway. The food was great and arrived spot on 7 pm as requested. Unfortunately Serena got held up with a couple of major disasters at work and didn't get to eat hers until 10.30 pm!
Whilst waiting for Serena I watched Poseidon on Sky. I thought that would be awful, and it wasn't! Still only 6/10! The original is way, way better!
Friday, July 13, 2007
LOTRO – Monster Play
Last weekend Serena and I posted a rather unusual screenshot of our “ugly” characters. These characters form part of an interesting and very addictive part of LOTRO, called Monster Play.
Whilst you can Dual with other players, there is no true Player v Player combat (PvP) in LOTRO as all player characters are “Good”. However to make Levels 45-50 a bit more challenging for players, the monsters in the “Ettenmoors” zone include some controlled by players.
You can play as a Wolf, Spider, Orc, Uruk War Leader or Uruk Archer and you automatically start at Level 50! You need no equipment beyond food and potions (which you have to buy or quest for), and you start out classed as a “swarm” level character – i.e. weaker than a regular level 50 monster, giving heroes a bit of a chance! As a monster you get bullied from pillar to post by the local Elite bad guys and by completing quests (such as clearing out some pesky hobbit farmers) you earn destiny point (sort of like XP and money combined) which you can spend on improving your character. You can improve your combat abilities or improve your looks! i.e. All swarm level Orcs look the same (they just have different names – chosen by you), but if you spend destiny points you can change your physique, armour appearance etc (none of which makes you any harder to kill). If you choose to spend your destiny points on improving your skills you will slowly move from “swarm” to “normal” and finally to “signature” (a lower class of elite monster) and your icons will change colour accordingly (the game colour codes monsters based on how tough they are).
Your Monster character (you can have 5 per server – one of each type) keeps its skills from session to session, so if you choose to just play your Orc, you have the potential to produce a very nasty signature monster for hunting Elves and the other Free Peoples.
Here is a brief run down of how our first Monster play session ran.
Starting out in the roughest looking log fort you have ever seen and surrounded by trolls and some really angry Uruk leaders (like the War Tyrant in the pictured) we are quickly roped into food gathering – slug meat! After dispatching some particularly huge slugs we are then sent off on some scouting missions (designed to make you explore the map) which once completed grants you the ability to fast travel back to the starting fort and the “Servant of Angmar” title. You have to start that quest from scratch if you die though – failure is not an option! This makes it challenging as you have the potential to die a lot early on, especially if jumped by a Fellowship of level 50 players.
Next was a few quick missions to poison the local river, in an attempt to drive out the local hobbit farmers (they are the toughest farmers I have ever seen!) and gathering stones from troll statues (caused when the trolls got caught in the sun) to help reinforce the various forts.
Whilst doing the latter, we came across two men (players) and we ran away like girls whilst shouting for reinforcements! Reinforcements arrived and now grouped up with a Spider, a Wolf and a second Orc and War Leader, the men sensibly fled from us on their four foots (horses).
We decided there was strength in numbers, so we cleared out a pesky Free People guard post (collecting Elf Ears and Dwarf Feet trophies for our superiors) before moving on to the Elven lumber camp. There we managed to surprise a mixed group of men and elves and I killed my first Elf hunter (1st kill towards improving my PvP rank – which appears military style before your name). The rest fled. We pursued and I slowly closed in on a pesky dwarf minstrel as he ran before me. Suddenly he tripped on a bush and I was on him… A quick “hamstring” and he could only limp, but continued to retreat as I reigned down blows on him… ThenI was very suddenly dead!!! The dwarf had managed to retreat back to the safety of an Elf town and the local guards had turned me into a pin cushion! To make matters worse I never even spotted one! Damn those Elf scum!
With no more players to hunt we decided that more direct action was needed, so we invaded the local hobbit village and did a bit of pillaging (no rape though – their sheep were too ugly!).
Having clocked up 2,000 destiny points we decided to go back to hand in our trophies. The first four skills are 500 points each at tier 1, so Uthak and Athalak both trained up in all four, ready for their next session! We are now better armoured and better armed (but disappointingly still classed as swarm).
What surprised me the most about Monster play was how much fun it was being bad (or rather how much fun Serena had being bad!). Because you die a lot you don’t get the same emotional attachment for your character and you actually have a small inner cheer when you are killed by a “good” player. However the inner cheer became a roar when I nailed the Elf! I even laughed when I was massacred by the Elven guards, as it felt completely right! It all comes back to the atmosphere of the game being well balanced!
There are a few other things to note:
Your destiny points are global, so if you spend a while earning loads, you can create a new monster and spend them on him straight away. You can also spend destiny points on your normal player character, but they only give temporary improvements (such as helping you run faster or gain bonus XP). Some player character quests and achievements also grant a destiny point rewards which you can use on your monsters!
Finally, there is one more twist in the pipeline for LOTRO called “session play”.
The idea behind session play is for those times when you want to do something completely different. You will get given a “character” that will disappear when you log out and that character will have a mission. Completing the mission will grant destiny points for your pool and possibly unique items for your other characters to use (to be decided).
The main difference though is what those characters are… For example, you may be a Chicken! The mind boggles!
Whilst you can Dual with other players, there is no true Player v Player combat (PvP) in LOTRO as all player characters are “Good”. However to make Levels 45-50 a bit more challenging for players, the monsters in the “Ettenmoors” zone include some controlled by players.
You can play as a Wolf, Spider, Orc, Uruk War Leader or Uruk Archer and you automatically start at Level 50! You need no equipment beyond food and potions (which you have to buy or quest for), and you start out classed as a “swarm” level character – i.e. weaker than a regular level 50 monster, giving heroes a bit of a chance! As a monster you get bullied from pillar to post by the local Elite bad guys and by completing quests (such as clearing out some pesky hobbit farmers) you earn destiny point (sort of like XP and money combined) which you can spend on improving your character. You can improve your combat abilities or improve your looks! i.e. All swarm level Orcs look the same (they just have different names – chosen by you), but if you spend destiny points you can change your physique, armour appearance etc (none of which makes you any harder to kill). If you choose to spend your destiny points on improving your skills you will slowly move from “swarm” to “normal” and finally to “signature” (a lower class of elite monster) and your icons will change colour accordingly (the game colour codes monsters based on how tough they are).
Your Monster character (you can have 5 per server – one of each type) keeps its skills from session to session, so if you choose to just play your Orc, you have the potential to produce a very nasty signature monster for hunting Elves and the other Free Peoples.
Here is a brief run down of how our first Monster play session ran.
Starting out in the roughest looking log fort you have ever seen and surrounded by trolls and some really angry Uruk leaders (like the War Tyrant in the pictured) we are quickly roped into food gathering – slug meat! After dispatching some particularly huge slugs we are then sent off on some scouting missions (designed to make you explore the map) which once completed grants you the ability to fast travel back to the starting fort and the “Servant of Angmar” title. You have to start that quest from scratch if you die though – failure is not an option! This makes it challenging as you have the potential to die a lot early on, especially if jumped by a Fellowship of level 50 players.
Next was a few quick missions to poison the local river, in an attempt to drive out the local hobbit farmers (they are the toughest farmers I have ever seen!) and gathering stones from troll statues (caused when the trolls got caught in the sun) to help reinforce the various forts.
Whilst doing the latter, we came across two men (players) and we ran away like girls whilst shouting for reinforcements! Reinforcements arrived and now grouped up with a Spider, a Wolf and a second Orc and War Leader, the men sensibly fled from us on their four foots (horses).
We decided there was strength in numbers, so we cleared out a pesky Free People guard post (collecting Elf Ears and Dwarf Feet trophies for our superiors) before moving on to the Elven lumber camp. There we managed to surprise a mixed group of men and elves and I killed my first Elf hunter (1st kill towards improving my PvP rank – which appears military style before your name). The rest fled. We pursued and I slowly closed in on a pesky dwarf minstrel as he ran before me. Suddenly he tripped on a bush and I was on him… A quick “hamstring” and he could only limp, but continued to retreat as I reigned down blows on him… Then
With no more players to hunt we decided that more direct action was needed, so we invaded the local hobbit village and did a bit of pillaging (no rape though – their sheep were too ugly!).
Having clocked up 2,000 destiny points we decided to go back to hand in our trophies. The first four skills are 500 points each at tier 1, so Uthak and Athalak both trained up in all four, ready for their next session! We are now better armoured and better armed (but disappointingly still classed as swarm).
What surprised me the most about Monster play was how much fun it was being bad (or rather how much fun Serena had being bad!). Because you die a lot you don’t get the same emotional attachment for your character and you actually have a small inner cheer when you are killed by a “good” player. However the inner cheer became a roar when I nailed the Elf! I even laughed when I was massacred by the Elven guards, as it felt completely right! It all comes back to the atmosphere of the game being well balanced!
There are a few other things to note:
Your destiny points are global, so if you spend a while earning loads, you can create a new monster and spend them on him straight away. You can also spend destiny points on your normal player character, but they only give temporary improvements (such as helping you run faster or gain bonus XP). Some player character quests and achievements also grant a destiny point rewards which you can use on your monsters!
Finally, there is one more twist in the pipeline for LOTRO called “session play”.
The idea behind session play is for those times when you want to do something completely different. You will get given a “character” that will disappear when you log out and that character will have a mission. Completing the mission will grant destiny points for your pool and possibly unique items for your other characters to use (to be decided).
The main difference though is what those characters are… For example, you may be a Chicken! The mind boggles!
Wednesday, July 11, 2007
LOTRO – Crafting and Gathering
Serena and I have managed a couple of good sessions recently on LOTRO and I think we will be cancelling our WoW subscriptions in favour of LOTRO.
If any of you do decide to come and check LOTRO out we are playing on the [EN] Gilrain server.
I created a Hobbit Burglar called Fleur and she is now level 11. She made it to 10 without dying, earning the title “The Undefeated” and then promptly died! I hope that I can keep one of my characters alive right the way through to earn the top level title in that set!
Anyway, Fleur has restored the Shire postal service and is the bane of wolves. She has also started a sideline in wolf-hide leather armour, although the crafting market in LOTRO is dead.
Crafting & Gathering
Each can character can pick a single crafting vocation. This grants them one or two gathering skills and one or two crafting skills – three skills total. Generally one of the gathering skills will support one of the crafting skills (e.g. Prospecting and Metalsmith) and the third skill will be unsupported (so you are reliant on someone else’s components or you can harvest resources that you don’t need).
There are three gathering skills (Prospecting for Ore, Forester for Wood and Farming for Food) of which the first two work in the standard fashion for an MMO, and the latter is pretty unique. Each gives you the ability to track the relevant “node”, with farmers getting the ability to track wild plants. To harvest a node you need the relevant skill and tool, however anyone can harvest wild plants and that doesn’t require a tool (but only farmers can track the nodes).
Farmers can plant seeds in fields and harvest the crop (takes about 10 seconds to grow). The harvest will produce two qualities of food items, one of which the farmer can recycle into seeds and the other which they can combine into a bushel of- for use by a cook. e.g. You buy 5 Yellow Onion seeds, some water and some fertiliser from the local supplier. You plant a “Field of Yellow Onions”. You harvest the field and get 3 poor Yellow Onions and 3 Moderate Yellow Onions. The former you convert to 3 Yellow Onion Seeds and the latter you combine into a Bushel of Yellow Onions, which cooks can make into soup. Each refinement step gives you crafting XP and you progress up the skill tree as normal.
Once you get to certain level of crafting skill you unlock the next tier of recipes (some are given free and some need to be bought). You now have two XP bars for crafting – one for each tier. If you continue making the Tier 1 onions then you progress towards Tier 1 mastery, and an improved chance of getting a critical success (for farming this means a bumper harvest). If you make Tier 2 cabbages then you progress towards unlocking Tier 3 etc. Each Tier unlocked gives you a new title, e.g. Apprentice Farmer for unlocking Tier 2.
You only gain Crafting XP by processing your harvested items; you don’t get XP from actually harvesting. Harvesting never fails (unless interrupted) and the yield will vary depending on luck (I don’t seem to be getting a higher yield at higher skill levels).
Some crafting needs mob dropped items rather than harvested items, of which the most obvious is Tailoring. This requires heavily on Hides, which anyone can loot from nearly every ”Beast” they kill (about 50% drop rate). Hides are then processed by Foresters for use in Light and Medium armours. Hides are also used by other crafters, such as for the construction of weapon hilts, shield covers and metal armour padding and currently it seems to vary randomly between the professions as to whether the recipe needs “boiled” (processed) leather or hides. At Tier 1 you need 20 Light Hides to make one piece of Medium Armour (20 Light Hides processed to 10 Light Boiled Leather; 2 Light Boiled Leather to make 1 Light Leather Pad; 2 LBL to make 1 Light Leather Strap; and finally 2 LBL + 2 LLP + 2 LLS to make a piece of armour. The Forrester gets 10 x 6 XP and the Tailor gets 5 x 8 XP). At level 11 I can farm Level 6 wolves for hides, and it takes me 10-15 minutes to get 20 light hides for one piece of armour. So to deliberately farm enough hides for a full set of Tier 1 medium armour would take Fleur about 60-90 minutes and would grant about 3,000 adventure XP, 360 Tier 1 Foresting XP and 240 Tier 1 Tailoring XP. That would unlock Tier 2 on both Foresting and Tailoring, and give a small step towards mastery. It would also yield about 10-20 silver worth of vendor trash loot and cause about 10 silver worth of equipment damage! (However I already have 3 quest loot items that are better than the armour I can make at Tier 1, so the exercise wouldn’t happen).
There is no player market for the goods you can craft though. Not at the low levels anyway. Quest rewards so far have pretty much covered off most of the equipment upgrades I need, and they are either clearly better or only slightly worse than the items I can craft – especially where weapons are concerned. There is one exception. I made Serena’s archer a bow. That bow is away ahead of anything we have found either in a shop or as quest loot. I made a second and tried to sell it on the Auction House and it failed to sell though… Most people make their own. Also money is very tight! At level 10 I got four new skills with a total cost to buy of nearly 40 silver. I had 20 silver in my pockets! Fortunately I had masses of untreated rowan (Tier 1 wood) which sells to vendor for 40 copper (1 silver = 100 copper) per branch, and I could afford my upgrades at the expense of my crafting.
If any of you do decide to come and check LOTRO out we are playing on the [EN] Gilrain server.
I created a Hobbit Burglar called Fleur and she is now level 11. She made it to 10 without dying, earning the title “The Undefeated” and then promptly died! I hope that I can keep one of my characters alive right the way through to earn the top level title in that set!
Anyway, Fleur has restored the Shire postal service and is the bane of wolves. She has also started a sideline in wolf-hide leather armour, although the crafting market in LOTRO is dead.
Crafting & Gathering
Each can character can pick a single crafting vocation. This grants them one or two gathering skills and one or two crafting skills – three skills total. Generally one of the gathering skills will support one of the crafting skills (e.g. Prospecting and Metalsmith) and the third skill will be unsupported (so you are reliant on someone else’s components or you can harvest resources that you don’t need).
There are three gathering skills (Prospecting for Ore, Forester for Wood and Farming for Food) of which the first two work in the standard fashion for an MMO, and the latter is pretty unique. Each gives you the ability to track the relevant “node”, with farmers getting the ability to track wild plants. To harvest a node you need the relevant skill and tool, however anyone can harvest wild plants and that doesn’t require a tool (but only farmers can track the nodes).
Farmers can plant seeds in fields and harvest the crop (takes about 10 seconds to grow). The harvest will produce two qualities of food items, one of which the farmer can recycle into seeds and the other which they can combine into a bushel of
Once you get to certain level of crafting skill you unlock the next tier of recipes (some are given free and some need to be bought). You now have two XP bars for crafting – one for each tier. If you continue making the Tier 1 onions then you progress towards Tier 1 mastery, and an improved chance of getting a critical success (for farming this means a bumper harvest). If you make Tier 2 cabbages then you progress towards unlocking Tier 3 etc. Each Tier unlocked gives you a new title, e.g. Apprentice Farmer for unlocking Tier 2.
You only gain Crafting XP by processing your harvested items; you don’t get XP from actually harvesting. Harvesting never fails (unless interrupted) and the yield will vary depending on luck (I don’t seem to be getting a higher yield at higher skill levels).
Some crafting needs mob dropped items rather than harvested items, of which the most obvious is Tailoring. This requires heavily on Hides, which anyone can loot from nearly every ”Beast” they kill (about 50% drop rate). Hides are then processed by Foresters for use in Light and Medium armours. Hides are also used by other crafters, such as for the construction of weapon hilts, shield covers and metal armour padding and currently it seems to vary randomly between the professions as to whether the recipe needs “boiled” (processed) leather or hides. At Tier 1 you need 20 Light Hides to make one piece of Medium Armour (20 Light Hides processed to 10 Light Boiled Leather; 2 Light Boiled Leather to make 1 Light Leather Pad; 2 LBL to make 1 Light Leather Strap; and finally 2 LBL + 2 LLP + 2 LLS to make a piece of armour. The Forrester gets 10 x 6 XP and the Tailor gets 5 x 8 XP). At level 11 I can farm Level 6 wolves for hides, and it takes me 10-15 minutes to get 20 light hides for one piece of armour. So to deliberately farm enough hides for a full set of Tier 1 medium armour would take Fleur about 60-90 minutes and would grant about 3,000 adventure XP, 360 Tier 1 Foresting XP and 240 Tier 1 Tailoring XP. That would unlock Tier 2 on both Foresting and Tailoring, and give a small step towards mastery. It would also yield about 10-20 silver worth of vendor trash loot and cause about 10 silver worth of equipment damage! (However I already have 3 quest loot items that are better than the armour I can make at Tier 1, so the exercise wouldn’t happen).
There is no player market for the goods you can craft though. Not at the low levels anyway. Quest rewards so far have pretty much covered off most of the equipment upgrades I need, and they are either clearly better or only slightly worse than the items I can craft – especially where weapons are concerned. There is one exception. I made Serena’s archer a bow. That bow is away ahead of anything we have found either in a shop or as quest loot. I made a second and tried to sell it on the Auction House and it failed to sell though… Most people make their own. Also money is very tight! At level 10 I got four new skills with a total cost to buy of nearly 40 silver. I had 20 silver in my pockets! Fortunately I had masses of untreated rowan (Tier 1 wood) which sells to vendor for 40 copper (1 silver = 100 copper) per branch, and I could afford my upgrades at the expense of my crafting.
Tuesday, July 10, 2007
Facebook - more comments
Jase and I have finally succumbed to signing up for Facebook (as you can see from his previous post). It's mainly populated by folk at least a decade younger than us, but since a lot of our friends and family are rubbish at keeping in touch except electronically I (at least) figured it was time to add another way to communicate with them.
Actually, since joining it's been quite hilarious as I have been catching up all manner of old friends and acquaintances whom I'd lost contact with. So I would encourage those of you who haven't yet signed on to check it out, as it is fun (but be warned; it will also eat up your spare time if you get into it...perfect for slackers everywhere!)
OK, see you all in cyberspace!
Actually, since joining it's been quite hilarious as I have been catching up all manner of old friends and acquaintances whom I'd lost contact with. So I would encourage those of you who haven't yet signed on to check it out, as it is fun (but be warned; it will also eat up your spare time if you get into it...perfect for slackers everywhere!)
OK, see you all in cyberspace!
Monday, July 09, 2007
Coming soon...
A change in our home email addresses...
I feel a need to control spam better and our blueyonder domain is under threat, so I will be sorting out new email addresses for the Ayers household over the next week or so.
I suspect in my case this will include ditching my current hotmail address, which is 99.9% spam and 0.1% something important that I miss!
I feel a need to control spam better and our blueyonder domain is under threat, so I will be sorting out new email addresses for the Ayers household over the next week or so.
I suspect in my case this will include ditching my current hotmail address, which is 99.9% spam and 0.1% something important that I miss!
Quick Update
Serena and I finally got round to updating our Facebook entries and sent out a load of invites to any of you who may be interested in social networking!
I found an old friend (Lisa) and have linked her blog... like Serena and I she is enjoying parenthood!
I also found a few people I can't say I really want to get in touch with... I will just ignore them if they try and contact me!
As previously quoted in my tag line... technology let me down again! Serena's Mum's PC has died. Good and proper death too (sounds like a hard disk failure). I have 3 choices...
1/ A trip to Edinburgh.
2/ Find a random repairer for them.
3/ Buy Maggie & Peter a laptop and worry about the old machine later.
I think the last option is favourite at the moment since they come down to see Lauren very frequently! It doesn't need to be high spec as they are purely interested in Email and Web access. I don't think there will be much on Maggie's old machine that needed saving a I backed up her photos to CD just before Easter and her home email was mainly spam! Probably just a few lost email addresses.
I found an old friend (Lisa) and have linked her blog... like Serena and I she is enjoying parenthood!
I also found a few people I can't say I really want to get in touch with... I will just ignore them if they try and contact me!
As previously quoted in my tag line... technology let me down again! Serena's Mum's PC has died. Good and proper death too (sounds like a hard disk failure). I have 3 choices...
1/ A trip to Edinburgh.
2/ Find a random repairer for them.
3/ Buy Maggie & Peter a laptop and worry about the old machine later.
I think the last option is favourite at the moment since they come down to see Lauren very frequently! It doesn't need to be high spec as they are purely interested in Email and Web access. I don't think there will be much on Maggie's old machine that needed saving a I backed up her photos to CD just before Easter and her home email was mainly spam! Probably just a few lost email addresses.
Sunday, July 08, 2007
LOTRO - Letting off Steam
Meet the Uglees!
Serena's the one on the right (if you can't tell!).
One tasty elf player already under our belts!
Friday, July 06, 2007
LOTRO - A Screenshot
Here is my Burglar Fleur standing in a field of Daisies!
This was taken in Normal detail.
Thursday, July 05, 2007
Quiz Contestant?
Hidden away in the comments below, Gareth and I have agreed to share an interest in appearing on a TV quiz. If you fancy joining us then let me know?
At the moment the BBC are not recruiting any Quiz Teams but are looking for individuals to appear as follows:
BBC1's Saturday night quiz 1 VERSUS 100 is back! Are you a Quiz Whizz? Are you ready to pit your wits against others to win big money? THEN WE WANT YOU! For more details email: 1v100-3@endemoluk.com
Do you have an uncanny ability to read people? Are you intuitive and enthusiastic? Would you like to appear on a brand new game show and be in with a chance of winning a big cash prize?
If you answered "yes" and are over 18 then call: 09011 133 344 Or email your name and contact details to: identity@bbc.co.uk
Talent TV are seeking people who fall into any one of the following categories to take part in the next National IQ Test on August 27.
Former reality show contestant; Surname of Robinson; Surname of Wallace; Removal Man; Surgeon; Clairvoyant.
If you fit into any of the above categories and would like to represent your group on television, you can download an application form from the Talent TV website.
A general email address for contestants enquiries for BBC ONLY entertainment programmes is: entertainmentcontestants@bbc.co.uk.
At the moment the BBC are not recruiting any Quiz Teams but are looking for individuals to appear as follows:
BBC1's Saturday night quiz 1 VERSUS 100 is back! Are you a Quiz Whizz? Are you ready to pit your wits against others to win big money? THEN WE WANT YOU! For more details email: 1v100-3@endemoluk.com
Do you have an uncanny ability to read people? Are you intuitive and enthusiastic? Would you like to appear on a brand new game show and be in with a chance of winning a big cash prize?
If you answered "yes" and are over 18 then call: 09011 133 344 Or email your name and contact details to: identity@bbc.co.uk
Talent TV are seeking people who fall into any one of the following categories to take part in the next National IQ Test on August 27.
Former reality show contestant; Surname of Robinson; Surname of Wallace; Removal Man; Surgeon; Clairvoyant.
If you fit into any of the above categories and would like to represent your group on television, you can download an application form from the Talent TV website.
A general email address for contestants enquiries for BBC ONLY entertainment programmes is: entertainmentcontestants@bbc.co.uk.
Wednesday, July 04, 2007
MMOs - Why Me?
NB I have typed this up in Word first and have just hit 3 pages of Arial 12… I hope you have time for a bit of a read!
Massive Multiplayer Online Games (MMOs) seem to split the gaming community in three. You either love them, hate them or don’t understand them.
For those who fall into the latter category I thought I would have a stab at explaining what appeals so much about MMOs to me.
To address this I need to travel back in time to the 1980s and give you my perspective on the evolution of the MMO!
At school James and I both owned Atari STs and he introduced me to a game called Dungeon Master. Since the concept of multiplayer gaming didn’t really exist at that time (outside of sports/beat-em up games), we used to play together, with me on the mouse and him on the keyboard, in a kind of shared control co-op style! Hence the game took on a social aspect.
Around the same time a game called Gauntlet appeared in the arcades which was the first true multiplayer roleplaying computer game (in my eyes). Four people got to stand shoulder to shoulder playing a Wizard, Elf, Valkyrie and Warrior and if they didn’t cooperate they were going to waste their hard earned pennies! If you gave me the choice of one old style arcade game to have in my “Games Room” I would still pick a Gauntlet II machine (with Starblade a close second).
The concept of competitive multiplayer gaming (i.e. Death Match) on the PC appeared in the early 90s and really took off with Doom. Doom went on to be the baseline for all games of this ilk from Quake to Half Life to Battlefield 1942.
However in the background to all of this fragtastic revolution a silent group of computer nerds were mudding!
Multi User Dungeons (MUDs) were text based games which evolved out of the really old text based roleplaying games like “The Hobbit” that existed on the BBC Model B and similar platforms. They were the first persistent world games where people could interact either cooperatively or uncooperatively! I’ll never forget the first time that I killed a “Beastly Fido”! MUDs weren’t the first MMOs though, as they missed out on the first M (Massive). You played MUDs over a Unix based Telnet client which for me meant staring at a green screen dumb terminal in the basement of Appleton Tower. MUDding was good fun and if you could find like minded people who had similar free time to you then the social aspect was also there – Nick, Serena and I used to MUD on Tuesday nights and do AD&D roleplaying on Friday nights (to which James and Balint were also invited). The AD&D was still more fun than the MUDding though as the effort of reading the small text and typing to survive took the edge off the gaming experience.
Roll forward a few more years (we now have the Internet in a form that you might recognise) and Baldur’s Gate was released on the PC. This followed a game called Diablo which had started to get a cult following as being a possible “online RPG” but it was so badly hacked by cheaters that it was a waste of time in my book.
Baldur’s Gate was a simple principal - AD&D brought to a PC. You had a party of up to six characters and in theory you could either play all six yourself of hook up with a few friends and they could take command of some of your henchmen.
Those of you that remember Windows 95 may recall that it wasn’t exactly the king when it came to networking and so these multiplayer sessions usually turned into a bit of a mess as people disconnected and reconnected at regular intervals. Having said that, the greatest LAN party I ever threw saw six PCs setup around our living room with a different person controlling one character each. Pradeep was on hand by this stage to troubleshoot networking problems (he taught me a lot) and so we completed the spin off from BG “Tales of the Sword Coast” in one fun gaming session. Finally multiplayer gaming was approaching a level where it rivalled pen and paper roleplaying.
Now roll forward a few more months… Nick came to visit and brought round the install disks for a game called EverQuest (EQ). I let him install it as he had been going on about it for weeks on email… Unfortunately the game needed to patch itself after the install, which was a several megabyte download. We are still in the days of 28k modems, so that took most of the afternoon – we went to the cinema! That night he showed me round Qeynos and I was blown away by the 3D environments of this persistent world, full of strange likeminded gamers from round the planet.
Since Nick had two accounts he loaned me one and I played a bit of EQ over the next few weeks. I can’t say I got on very well with the game – it was almost too complicated – you couldn’t save (something alien to most RPG gamers – but it really makes you care about your character in the same way that we really cared about our AD&D characters) and by myself this meant that it was just no fun.
Nick and I agreed to meet up online and we played together – suddenly things were fun again. I didn’t feel lost as I had someone more experience there to help out and we could chat about other things whilst we casually thinned out the Gnoll population in Blackburrow.
Roll forward again. I had just upgraded my 56k modem to a ½ meg broadband connection and the speed was just ridiculously fast. Pradeep was living with us and also playing EQ. Soon Alex also joined us in EQ (James came and went) and along with Bob and Jackie (two Americans Nick had met online) the six of us would spend long weekends glued to our monitors and slowly ridding the world of Norrath of evil.
That was both the high point and low point of MMOs for me. When you get six likeminded people together in a group in an MMO and have time to play both regularly and for at least a couple of hours straight each time then the game is extremely rewarding. Of course that is where the downside comes in – that reward is very addictive. Nick was clearly hooked and both Pradeep and I became addicted too. This was not good – all three of us suffered because of this addiction and it took Pradeep and I a long time to realise and beat it.
Roll forward again. Serena and I are married, we have been to Australia, Pradeep and I are pretty much “clean” in that our addiction to EQ is under control (the need has gone) and the second generation of MMOs start to appear. Star Wars Galaxies comes and after reservations about a Sci-Fi MMO both Serena and I are spellbound by it – EQ is forgotten (almost). Over time SWG is seriously killed off by Lucasarts and EQ2 appears – we all jump ship and to be honest feel let down by EQ2 – some of the magic is gone.
At this stage Serena and I decided that MMOs were just too demanding on our lives, so we cancelled all our subscriptions and returned to doing other things. We still played games together – that was a habit that was too hard to break. BG had been followed by BG2 and a pair of Icewind Dale games, straight from the same mold. They were dutifully dispatched to the “Done” tray as Serena and I Duo’d them (and occasionally Trio’d with Pradeep). Next was Neverwinter Nights (NWN), which took the BG game and threw vastly improved graphics at it – again that got the LAN party treatment and was assigned a big “Done”.
Now this is where I hit a problem. Serena was generally more busy than me (she also sleeps a lot more than me), so I was often left to entertain myself. EQ had spoiled me – I missed the social interaction that went along with the gaming experience. Sure games like Morrowind and Oblivion were astoundingly pretty and had the style of gameplay I liked, but I was still playing alone. I would occasionally jump online with whatever online shooter was flavour of the month, but again there was no real connection with my team mates, as a game lasted no more than 10 – 15 minutes.
Hence I was seduced into World of Warcraft (WoW). Alex was already there and so I knew a fair amount about the game and finally I felt like I had come home. WoW is much more straight forward than EQ ever was (EQ had a massive learning curve that put most people off) and is structured in such a way that both hard core and casual gamers can get gratification from it at a level that keeps them interested. Graphically WoW is also a bit different from the other MMOs. Blizzard haven’t tried to be high end on the pretty, pretty front and in doing so have allowed gamers with less than top whack PCs to still get the most out of their systems and enjoy the full WoW experience.
WoW isn’t perfect though. If you have time to play regularly then you can find a good guild and the social aspect is there for you on a plate. If your playing times are more irregular then you are stuck with the companionship of strangers whose short term goals happen to match yours. As you would expect this can be a real hit and miss affair. You could get a 12 year old with no social skills or a 40 year old with no social skills! (Yes there are plenty of 30 somethings with social skills out there too).
So what now? WoW is fun, but the slightly cartoony graphics have prevented me getting too emotive with the game. I reckon LOTRO looks much nicer (which comes at a price as far as your PCs specs are concerned) and from my brief introduction I am already getting drawn into the storyline a lot more and care for my local community! I still miss the social aspects of MMOs from the old days – it is just not feasible for me to commit the time needed to play regularly with anybody though, so I am stuck with the companionship of strangers.
If you analyse the cost of an MMO (as most people object to paying a monthly subscription) I reckon Serena and I together spend about £300 a year on them – that covers off two subscriptions and two copies of an expansion pack or new game. Apart from a few highlights there aren’t really many other games that we buy, so at the most out collective spend is about £200 each on games. I reckon that compared to console games that works out pretty good value for money!
So why do I still do it? MMOs are designed to provide variety – I can play with Serena, I can play with Strangers, I can play by myself, I can fight, I can craft, I can explore, I can sit and chat, I can fight against the computer or I can pit my wits / “leet skills” against other players! – all in one game. OK so I can’t leap into my spaceship to check on my Spacefuel factories (but that is whole different genre) and I both understand and accept that! I can’t keep buying the latest game and play it through anymore. I just haven’t got the time (I only finished Half Life 2 a couple of months ago). I would rather invest my time (and money) into one game that keeps growing and evolving.
A Challenge. (Not really!)
Gareth – describe what you want to get out of a computer game and how much time you have to get that and I’ll try and tell you whether you will get that from an MMO or another type of game.
Massive Multiplayer Online Games (MMOs) seem to split the gaming community in three. You either love them, hate them or don’t understand them.
For those who fall into the latter category I thought I would have a stab at explaining what appeals so much about MMOs to me.
To address this I need to travel back in time to the 1980s and give you my perspective on the evolution of the MMO!
At school James and I both owned Atari STs and he introduced me to a game called Dungeon Master. Since the concept of multiplayer gaming didn’t really exist at that time (outside of sports/beat-em up games), we used to play together, with me on the mouse and him on the keyboard, in a kind of shared control co-op style! Hence the game took on a social aspect.
Around the same time a game called Gauntlet appeared in the arcades which was the first true multiplayer roleplaying computer game (in my eyes). Four people got to stand shoulder to shoulder playing a Wizard, Elf, Valkyrie and Warrior and if they didn’t cooperate they were going to waste their hard earned pennies! If you gave me the choice of one old style arcade game to have in my “Games Room” I would still pick a Gauntlet II machine (with Starblade a close second).
The concept of competitive multiplayer gaming (i.e. Death Match) on the PC appeared in the early 90s and really took off with Doom. Doom went on to be the baseline for all games of this ilk from Quake to Half Life to Battlefield 1942.
However in the background to all of this fragtastic revolution a silent group of computer nerds were mudding!
Multi User Dungeons (MUDs) were text based games which evolved out of the really old text based roleplaying games like “The Hobbit” that existed on the BBC Model B and similar platforms. They were the first persistent world games where people could interact either cooperatively or uncooperatively! I’ll never forget the first time that I killed a “Beastly Fido”! MUDs weren’t the first MMOs though, as they missed out on the first M (Massive). You played MUDs over a Unix based Telnet client which for me meant staring at a green screen dumb terminal in the basement of Appleton Tower. MUDding was good fun and if you could find like minded people who had similar free time to you then the social aspect was also there – Nick, Serena and I used to MUD on Tuesday nights and do AD&D roleplaying on Friday nights (to which James and Balint were also invited). The AD&D was still more fun than the MUDding though as the effort of reading the small text and typing to survive took the edge off the gaming experience.
Roll forward a few more years (we now have the Internet in a form that you might recognise) and Baldur’s Gate was released on the PC. This followed a game called Diablo which had started to get a cult following as being a possible “online RPG” but it was so badly hacked by cheaters that it was a waste of time in my book.
Baldur’s Gate was a simple principal - AD&D brought to a PC. You had a party of up to six characters and in theory you could either play all six yourself of hook up with a few friends and they could take command of some of your henchmen.
Those of you that remember Windows 95 may recall that it wasn’t exactly the king when it came to networking and so these multiplayer sessions usually turned into a bit of a mess as people disconnected and reconnected at regular intervals. Having said that, the greatest LAN party I ever threw saw six PCs setup around our living room with a different person controlling one character each. Pradeep was on hand by this stage to troubleshoot networking problems (he taught me a lot) and so we completed the spin off from BG “Tales of the Sword Coast” in one fun gaming session. Finally multiplayer gaming was approaching a level where it rivalled pen and paper roleplaying.
Now roll forward a few more months… Nick came to visit and brought round the install disks for a game called EverQuest (EQ). I let him install it as he had been going on about it for weeks on email… Unfortunately the game needed to patch itself after the install, which was a several megabyte download. We are still in the days of 28k modems, so that took most of the afternoon – we went to the cinema! That night he showed me round Qeynos and I was blown away by the 3D environments of this persistent world, full of strange likeminded gamers from round the planet.
Since Nick had two accounts he loaned me one and I played a bit of EQ over the next few weeks. I can’t say I got on very well with the game – it was almost too complicated – you couldn’t save (something alien to most RPG gamers – but it really makes you care about your character in the same way that we really cared about our AD&D characters) and by myself this meant that it was just no fun.
Nick and I agreed to meet up online and we played together – suddenly things were fun again. I didn’t feel lost as I had someone more experience there to help out and we could chat about other things whilst we casually thinned out the Gnoll population in Blackburrow.
Roll forward again. I had just upgraded my 56k modem to a ½ meg broadband connection and the speed was just ridiculously fast. Pradeep was living with us and also playing EQ. Soon Alex also joined us in EQ (James came and went) and along with Bob and Jackie (two Americans Nick had met online) the six of us would spend long weekends glued to our monitors and slowly ridding the world of Norrath of evil.
That was both the high point and low point of MMOs for me. When you get six likeminded people together in a group in an MMO and have time to play both regularly and for at least a couple of hours straight each time then the game is extremely rewarding. Of course that is where the downside comes in – that reward is very addictive. Nick was clearly hooked and both Pradeep and I became addicted too. This was not good – all three of us suffered because of this addiction and it took Pradeep and I a long time to realise and beat it.
Roll forward again. Serena and I are married, we have been to Australia, Pradeep and I are pretty much “clean” in that our addiction to EQ is under control (the need has gone) and the second generation of MMOs start to appear. Star Wars Galaxies comes and after reservations about a Sci-Fi MMO both Serena and I are spellbound by it – EQ is forgotten (almost). Over time SWG is seriously killed off by Lucasarts and EQ2 appears – we all jump ship and to be honest feel let down by EQ2 – some of the magic is gone.
At this stage Serena and I decided that MMOs were just too demanding on our lives, so we cancelled all our subscriptions and returned to doing other things. We still played games together – that was a habit that was too hard to break. BG had been followed by BG2 and a pair of Icewind Dale games, straight from the same mold. They were dutifully dispatched to the “Done” tray as Serena and I Duo’d them (and occasionally Trio’d with Pradeep). Next was Neverwinter Nights (NWN), which took the BG game and threw vastly improved graphics at it – again that got the LAN party treatment and was assigned a big “Done”.
Now this is where I hit a problem. Serena was generally more busy than me (she also sleeps a lot more than me), so I was often left to entertain myself. EQ had spoiled me – I missed the social interaction that went along with the gaming experience. Sure games like Morrowind and Oblivion were astoundingly pretty and had the style of gameplay I liked, but I was still playing alone. I would occasionally jump online with whatever online shooter was flavour of the month, but again there was no real connection with my team mates, as a game lasted no more than 10 – 15 minutes.
Hence I was seduced into World of Warcraft (WoW). Alex was already there and so I knew a fair amount about the game and finally I felt like I had come home. WoW is much more straight forward than EQ ever was (EQ had a massive learning curve that put most people off) and is structured in such a way that both hard core and casual gamers can get gratification from it at a level that keeps them interested. Graphically WoW is also a bit different from the other MMOs. Blizzard haven’t tried to be high end on the pretty, pretty front and in doing so have allowed gamers with less than top whack PCs to still get the most out of their systems and enjoy the full WoW experience.
WoW isn’t perfect though. If you have time to play regularly then you can find a good guild and the social aspect is there for you on a plate. If your playing times are more irregular then you are stuck with the companionship of strangers whose short term goals happen to match yours. As you would expect this can be a real hit and miss affair. You could get a 12 year old with no social skills or a 40 year old with no social skills! (Yes there are plenty of 30 somethings with social skills out there too).
So what now? WoW is fun, but the slightly cartoony graphics have prevented me getting too emotive with the game. I reckon LOTRO looks much nicer (which comes at a price as far as your PCs specs are concerned) and from my brief introduction I am already getting drawn into the storyline a lot more and care for my local community! I still miss the social aspects of MMOs from the old days – it is just not feasible for me to commit the time needed to play regularly with anybody though, so I am stuck with the companionship of strangers.
If you analyse the cost of an MMO (as most people object to paying a monthly subscription) I reckon Serena and I together spend about £300 a year on them – that covers off two subscriptions and two copies of an expansion pack or new game. Apart from a few highlights there aren’t really many other games that we buy, so at the most out collective spend is about £200 each on games. I reckon that compared to console games that works out pretty good value for money!
So why do I still do it? MMOs are designed to provide variety – I can play with Serena, I can play with Strangers, I can play by myself, I can fight, I can craft, I can explore, I can sit and chat, I can fight against the computer or I can pit my wits / “leet skills” against other players! – all in one game. OK so I can’t leap into my spaceship to check on my Spacefuel factories (but that is whole different genre) and I both understand and accept that! I can’t keep buying the latest game and play it through anymore. I just haven’t got the time (I only finished Half Life 2 a couple of months ago). I would rather invest my time (and money) into one game that keeps growing and evolving.
A Challenge. (Not really!)
Gareth – describe what you want to get out of a computer game and how much time you have to get that and I’ll try and tell you whether you will get that from an MMO or another type of game.
I've got a Bad Feeling about this...
I haven't blogged about "Last of the Time Lords" yet, but this news article couldn't wait!
Tuesday, July 03, 2007
Eight Percent
If you approximate the odds of winning "something" on the regular lottery to 1 in 50 then I am Mister 8%!
Why? I have played the same numbers every Saturday for the last two and a half years and have won nothing! That has an 8% probability of occurring.
If I don't win anything by the end of the year the odds will have dropped to 4.3% cumulative, although the true odds of that happening are actually about 60%!
Oh - I started watching Deal or No Deal again recently, in the run up to their 500th programme. The 500th programme was a let down as the Lady on it was the unluckiest person alive!
Last night the Guy dealt at £20,000 and ended up having the £250k in his box. Serena would have dealt at £75k and I reckoned that if I had the progression of boxes he had had, then I would have gone "F#ck it!" and actually won the £250k. I really need to get on that programme!
Why? I have played the same numbers every Saturday for the last two and a half years and have won nothing! That has an 8% probability of occurring.
If I don't win anything by the end of the year the odds will have dropped to 4.3% cumulative, although the true odds of that happening are actually about 60%!
Oh - I started watching Deal or No Deal again recently, in the run up to their 500th programme. The 500th programme was a let down as the Lady on it was the unluckiest person alive!
Last night the Guy dealt at £20,000 and ended up having the £250k in his box. Serena would have dealt at £75k and I reckoned that if I had the progression of boxes he had had, then I would have gone "F#ck it!" and actually won the £250k. I really need to get on that programme!
Monday, July 02, 2007
Lord of the Rings Online – Part 1: The Basics
Well Serena and I have solo characters at level 8 and two duos at level 6, so we are fully versed in the tutorial levels of LOTRO.
The tutorial is in two parts:
The first is solo only and guides you through the basics of movement, looting and combat. It is very scripted and involves heroes/villains you will know from the books/films. You finish that at level 2.
Then you are in one of a pair of a small instances with other players of your own race (Man and Hobbit share one and Dwarf and Elf the other). You get about 10 quests to complete and by the end things have generally gone horribly wrong! What I mean is that these instances are set in the past and despite your best efforts things go badly and everything goes to hell! You are then transported to the present day and are in with the full gamut of characters from about Lev 6 upwards. The tutorial has no tradeskilling, no guilds and there is no real need to group up.
The quicker amongst you will note that I said we had two Duos of characters. After getting LOTRO up and running on our main PC and being pleasantly surprised by the performance we got out of it, I did an install on our laptop. The game was playable on low detail and an executive decision was taken that it was more fun to play two characters together than peering over each others’ shoulders. Hence another £27 was spent in Woolworths on Saturday morning. (The game comes with the first month’s subscription free).
Graphics:
Very nice on Normal (not so nice on Low) and I look forward to cranking them up to Highest on a new PC. The look and feel falls back to a lot of the LotR art done down the last twenty odd years but the fantasy artists Howe and Lee. The hero characters don’t look like their film actors, but Hobbits, Dwarves and Elves follow the look and feel established in the movies. The backdrops are very well created and my only gripe is that the trees don’t fade out quite enough when you are running through the forest. Like in NWN2 you can run into a point where you get very dodgy camera angles and have to blunder around a bit before you can see your character again.
Spell and Combat effects are modest so far, but then again we don’t have any characters that can obliterate an encroaching Uruk hoard quite yet!
Audio:
Our sound setup is really bad at the moment so I won’t comment on the music and environmental audio at the present. So far there has been no bad voice acting or annoying characters (yet).
Basic Concepts:
XP is XP, except that it works in a DnD fashion rather than a WoW fashion. By that I mean the XP number doesn’t reset to zero when you level. So far about 75% of my XP has come from quests.
Health is called Morale – i.e. you don’t die in combat but are cowed and forced to retreat back to town. Special events can reduce your morale – like the presence of a Ring Wraith causing Dread, or the presence of Gandalf causing Hope. “Nukes” as a concept are therefore seen as things that reduce your morale, like fear, and “Heals” are acts that bolster your courage.
Mana is called Power. All classes use power for their special abilities.
Both Morale and Power regenerate fairly quickly out of combat.
Characters also build up renown by completing Deeds. These open up special abilities or Titles. E.g. if you make it to level five without dying you get the title of “The Wary”. Completing all the Quests in an area will give you the title of “Protector of ” etc. Special abilities are things like bonus hit points or regen.
Character Classes:
The game has seven classes which don’t quite fit the mould of other games, so I will break down the six that we have tried out (and a bit on the seventh).
Guardian – This is your bog standard Tank class. Good agro management. Good Defence. Poor Damage output. Your highest damaging attack comes from your shield bashes (certainly at level 6). Designed around sword / mace / axe and shield style of combat.
Champion – another fighter class, but this time you are focussed on damage output over defence. No much in the way of agro holding and not much in the way of multi-target attacks either. Designed around Dual-wielding or big Two-handed weapons.
Archer – the manual describes this as the “nuker” class. They are the high damage dealers. They can melee, but have crap defence – they fight like Legolas in the movies with short blades (dual wield comes at a higher level). The archers attacks become stronger the longer they have been stationary in combat, so in a group with a good tank they are lethal, whereas solo they need to rely on traps to immobilise their target. They don’t do well against multiple targets.
Lore-master – an odd mix. They can nuke a bit, they get pets and they get debuffs that look like they will grow into a proper crowd control line of spells. Kind of like the original EQ Enchanter class. However they are also quite good fighting with their staves! They can heal as well, however this is at the expense of their own health so it is not a long-term role for them.
Minstrel – a jack of all trades, they get buffs, proper heals, nukes and can melee a bit as well. I suppose that makes them the equivalent of a priest class. I expected them to be really weak solo, but Serena has had no problems with hers at all.
Captain – a really unique class that can only really be compared to Squad Leader in SWG. They can melee fairly well, but they also get event specific effects that can heal the party, damage all enemies, help everyone retreat from combat etc. They seem to be pretty group oriented as far as abilities are concerned.
Burglar – not tried this one yet, but looks like a fairly generic thief class. Probably quite hard to solo.
OK – got to fly so more to come soon.
The tutorial is in two parts:
The first is solo only and guides you through the basics of movement, looting and combat. It is very scripted and involves heroes/villains you will know from the books/films. You finish that at level 2.
Then you are in one of a pair of a small instances with other players of your own race (Man and Hobbit share one and Dwarf and Elf the other). You get about 10 quests to complete and by the end things have generally gone horribly wrong! What I mean is that these instances are set in the past and despite your best efforts things go badly and everything goes to hell! You are then transported to the present day and are in with the full gamut of characters from about Lev 6 upwards. The tutorial has no tradeskilling, no guilds and there is no real need to group up.
The quicker amongst you will note that I said we had two Duos of characters. After getting LOTRO up and running on our main PC and being pleasantly surprised by the performance we got out of it, I did an install on our laptop. The game was playable on low detail and an executive decision was taken that it was more fun to play two characters together than peering over each others’ shoulders. Hence another £27 was spent in Woolworths on Saturday morning. (The game comes with the first month’s subscription free).
Graphics:
Very nice on Normal (not so nice on Low) and I look forward to cranking them up to Highest on a new PC. The look and feel falls back to a lot of the LotR art done down the last twenty odd years but the fantasy artists Howe and Lee. The hero characters don’t look like their film actors, but Hobbits, Dwarves and Elves follow the look and feel established in the movies. The backdrops are very well created and my only gripe is that the trees don’t fade out quite enough when you are running through the forest. Like in NWN2 you can run into a point where you get very dodgy camera angles and have to blunder around a bit before you can see your character again.
Spell and Combat effects are modest so far, but then again we don’t have any characters that can obliterate an encroaching Uruk hoard quite yet!
Audio:
Our sound setup is really bad at the moment so I won’t comment on the music and environmental audio at the present. So far there has been no bad voice acting or annoying characters (yet).
Basic Concepts:
XP is XP, except that it works in a DnD fashion rather than a WoW fashion. By that I mean the XP number doesn’t reset to zero when you level. So far about 75% of my XP has come from quests.
Health is called Morale – i.e. you don’t die in combat but are cowed and forced to retreat back to town. Special events can reduce your morale – like the presence of a Ring Wraith causing Dread, or the presence of Gandalf causing Hope. “Nukes” as a concept are therefore seen as things that reduce your morale, like fear, and “Heals” are acts that bolster your courage.
Mana is called Power. All classes use power for their special abilities.
Both Morale and Power regenerate fairly quickly out of combat.
Characters also build up renown by completing Deeds. These open up special abilities or Titles. E.g. if you make it to level five without dying you get the title of “The Wary”. Completing all the Quests in an area will give you the title of “Protector of ” etc. Special abilities are things like bonus hit points or regen.
Character Classes:
The game has seven classes which don’t quite fit the mould of other games, so I will break down the six that we have tried out (and a bit on the seventh).
Guardian – This is your bog standard Tank class. Good agro management. Good Defence. Poor Damage output. Your highest damaging attack comes from your shield bashes (certainly at level 6). Designed around sword / mace / axe and shield style of combat.
Champion – another fighter class, but this time you are focussed on damage output over defence. No much in the way of agro holding and not much in the way of multi-target attacks either. Designed around Dual-wielding or big Two-handed weapons.
Archer – the manual describes this as the “nuker” class. They are the high damage dealers. They can melee, but have crap defence – they fight like Legolas in the movies with short blades (dual wield comes at a higher level). The archers attacks become stronger the longer they have been stationary in combat, so in a group with a good tank they are lethal, whereas solo they need to rely on traps to immobilise their target. They don’t do well against multiple targets.
Lore-master – an odd mix. They can nuke a bit, they get pets and they get debuffs that look like they will grow into a proper crowd control line of spells. Kind of like the original EQ Enchanter class. However they are also quite good fighting with their staves! They can heal as well, however this is at the expense of their own health so it is not a long-term role for them.
Minstrel – a jack of all trades, they get buffs, proper heals, nukes and can melee a bit as well. I suppose that makes them the equivalent of a priest class. I expected them to be really weak solo, but Serena has had no problems with hers at all.
Captain – a really unique class that can only really be compared to Squad Leader in SWG. They can melee fairly well, but they also get event specific effects that can heal the party, damage all enemies, help everyone retreat from combat etc. They seem to be pretty group oriented as far as abilities are concerned.
Burglar – not tried this one yet, but looks like a fairly generic thief class. Probably quite hard to solo.
OK – got to fly so more to come soon.
That's me told!
I had to do a bit of family duty last night and wasn't back home from playing taxi until 22:45. Sunday night is the only time that you may be pushed to find a parking space near our house, and as feared my space was gone and there was nothing in sight in either direction. Just next to us is a small cul-de-sac called Westvale Mews, which is so small it isn't even named on Google Maps! They have a little parking bay with 12 spaces, of which 2 were occupied when I got there. I decided that I was unlikely to piss anyone off by parking there overnight and so I duely did so.
How wrong could I be?
This morning I found my car had aquired a note! I reproduce it here for your information (with spelling/punctuation as written):
According to my local council the Mews parking bays are included on the controlled parking zone that I pay £45 per year to allow me to park near my house (map attached):
How wrong could I be?
This morning I found my car had aquired a note! I reproduce it here for your information (with spelling/punctuation as written):
PLz do not PARK in this BAY We all PAY 4 Bays in Mews. and you put me out hving your car here. If you get Towed out as we have CLAMPING. Its down to you Thank you.Well I consider this very un-neighbourly, given that there was only one extra car parked there at 7.30 this morning.
According to my local council the Mews parking bays are included on the controlled parking zone that I pay £45 per year to allow me to park near my house (map attached):
I can't see any signs that indicate that it is a private car park and I am certain that the cars that I saw parked there, regularly park in front of my house!
There is no mention of clamping on any signs. (Although I am pretty certain that private clamping schemes are technically illegal and you can sue for criminal damage to your car).
In fact the only visible sign is one that states "Strictly No Ball Games".
I could jump to the conclusion that my car was caught playing a spot of tennis whilst I slept?
So the question is how did I respond?
Did I:
(a) Leave a snotty note on the window of the car that wasn't parked there when I arrived last night - also failing to sign it / indicate my house number?
(b) Position a nail behind said car's wheel, so that reversing resulted in a visit to the local KwikFit?
(c) Accidentally run my key down the side of said car?
(d) Do nothing apart from fume all the way to work?
Sunday, July 01, 2007
In the News
My countdown at the top of the blog has been heralding the arrival of the no smoking laws in England. Now that it is here though, the news is dominated by other stories.
The thought that the two London car bombs were placed - one to cause fear and one to hit the crowd as it flees - is sickening to me.
Yet it was clear that those party-goers out in London were refusing to be scared away.
Following that the car bomb in Glasgow showed me too obvious things. Firstly people in Scotland clearly saw themselves as being out of the firing line as far as terrorism was concerned and secondly, now that they are in the firing line they are even more bloody minded about not being affected by it.
The fact that members of the Glasgow public assisted a policeman in arresting one of the two "bombers" is a credit to the Scottish people, given that the stereotypical "Weegie" is portrayed as being a police hater.
Having worked in Glasgow for a number of years, none of this surprises me though. Apart from Yorkshiremen I don't think I have come across a collective of people who are more bloody minded that the west coasters of Scotland!
Friday, June 29, 2007
Just Checking...
Does everyone remember Gordon Brown being around for more than 18 months? :P
Doctor Who supremo Russell T Davies has spoken about his reinvention of classic villain The Master for the current series. Speaking to Radio Times, Davies said: "John Simm's incarnation of The Doctor's nemesis is thoroughly contemporary. Previous Masters seemed to appear on a whim, merely to thwart The Doctor with a throaty cackle."
Referring to the character disguising himself as politician Harold Saxon, Davies added: "The moment I thought of having an evil Prime Minister, I thought, 'That's the key to it!' How much fun would The Master have in that role?"
Ignorance
Is it OK to be ignorant?
Of course it is - with one caveat...
Never be afraid to ask questions if you really want/need to know the answer.
Despite rumours to the contrary there ARE stupid questions, but in my book they are the ones asked by people who need to look like they are interested or need to be political - i.e. the motive for asking is not to gain knowledge.
In a comment somewhere below James claims to be ignorant of all the technological mumbo jumbo that I talk about (where PC innards are concerned). That is all well and good given that he doesn't need to know how they work nor has the inclination to go out there and build one, however I reckon that in today's PC Gaming age, all serious gamers should be interested in getting the best gaming experience from their hardware.
With that in mind here is a link to one of my favourite nerdy sites on the net. There are loads of guides on there written in fairly straight forward English that tell you how to get the best out of what you have got (including the awesome Windows Tweaking Guide) and also a few more idiots guides about what the different technologies do.
The guides on optimising Oblivion and Neverwinter Nights 2 are also really good reads and made a massive difference to us when we used them to optimise our games. I just need a LOTRO tweaking guide now! (The game looks fairly good on my system, but it would be nice to squeeze a bit more out of it!)
Of course it is - with one caveat...
Never be afraid to ask questions if you really want/need to know the answer.
Despite rumours to the contrary there ARE stupid questions, but in my book they are the ones asked by people who need to look like they are interested or need to be political - i.e. the motive for asking is not to gain knowledge.
In a comment somewhere below James claims to be ignorant of all the technological mumbo jumbo that I talk about (where PC innards are concerned). That is all well and good given that he doesn't need to know how they work nor has the inclination to go out there and build one, however I reckon that in today's PC Gaming age, all serious gamers should be interested in getting the best gaming experience from their hardware.
With that in mind here is a link to one of my favourite nerdy sites on the net. There are loads of guides on there written in fairly straight forward English that tell you how to get the best out of what you have got (including the awesome Windows Tweaking Guide) and also a few more idiots guides about what the different technologies do.
The guides on optimising Oblivion and Neverwinter Nights 2 are also really good reads and made a massive difference to us when we used them to optimise our games. I just need a LOTRO tweaking guide now! (The game looks fairly good on my system, but it would be nice to squeeze a bit more out of it!)
Thursday, June 28, 2007
Prezzies
This post serves two purposes...
Firstly - you may remember that I spent a good while winding up Gareth (or maybe Gillian) about Gareth's birthday present - some artwork for his house.
Now Gareth didn't blog anything about this art, so I thought I would briefly mention that it was well received by both parties and that I stuck to my ground by providing both images of lesbians and of animals in unnatural positions! I'll let Gareth clarify how I managed to do that AND not alienate him or Gillian!!!!!
Secondly - What do you buy your daughter for her second birthday? I think that her grandparents are covering off the safe option of a tricycle, and we have more books and soft-toys than we really know what to do with! She already has a farm, a piano and a fairy tree house, so I am rather short on ideas!
I did wander aimlessly round both Toys R Us and a very good toy shop in Kingston and I have no ideas! I feel I want to get her some technology, put preferably not something that plays "The Yellow Rose of Texas" and "Baa Baa Black Sheep" at loud volumes.
DRUMS are BANNED!
I'll continue my research at lunchtime, but ideas are requested!
PS Budgets do not permit me to buy her a laptop, nor can I justify the two proposed PC builds as being her present either!
PPS One of Lauren's favourite pastimes is watching videos of herself on the PC! When I hook our laptop up to our LCD Telly, she will sit for ages watching herself on loop - dancing, sliding, paddling and eating!
PPPS Her other favourite pastime is climbing up onto the PC desk and trying to get the PC to show her videos by hammering the keyboard or mouse repeatedly!
Firstly - you may remember that I spent a good while winding up Gareth (or maybe Gillian) about Gareth's birthday present - some artwork for his house.
Now Gareth didn't blog anything about this art, so I thought I would briefly mention that it was well received by both parties and that I stuck to my ground by providing both images of lesbians and of animals in unnatural positions! I'll let Gareth clarify how I managed to do that AND not alienate him or Gillian!!!!!
Secondly - What do you buy your daughter for her second birthday? I think that her grandparents are covering off the safe option of a tricycle, and we have more books and soft-toys than we really know what to do with! She already has a farm, a piano and a fairy tree house, so I am rather short on ideas!
I did wander aimlessly round both Toys R Us and a very good toy shop in Kingston and I have no ideas! I feel I want to get her some technology, put preferably not something that plays "The Yellow Rose of Texas" and "Baa Baa Black Sheep" at loud volumes.
DRUMS are BANNED!
I'll continue my research at lunchtime, but ideas are requested!
PS Budgets do not permit me to buy her a laptop, nor can I justify the two proposed PC builds as being her present either!
PPS One of Lauren's favourite pastimes is watching videos of herself on the PC! When I hook our laptop up to our LCD Telly, she will sit for ages watching herself on loop - dancing, sliding, paddling and eating!
PPPS Her other favourite pastime is climbing up onto the PC desk and trying to get the PC to show her videos by hammering the keyboard or mouse repeatedly!
Wednesday, June 27, 2007
Subtlety
Following my little exercise for the Media Centre PC, it turns out that Serena has been speccing out an upgrade to our primary gaming PC (reasons to follow). An off-hand comment yesterday made me laugh - "we can do a pretty quick and dirty upgrade for £400". That triggered a bit of a debate and it turned out the the £400 "quick and dirty" was really an £1,100 build a new machine and using the existing one as a server!
I laugh because I was worried about thinking about spending £800 on a new machine, whilst all along Serena had ideas slightly higher up the food chain! We now have rough specs for £2,000 worth of PC kit! The only question remaining is "when" (can we afford to put it on the credit card)!
Serena tries to be subtle at times and she is either too subtle (in that I don't notice) or is a bit too unsubtle so that I notice straight away! I much prefer the latter as it causes less arguments.
Anyway she has been talking about a particular computer game for a while now, "look what a good write up it got", leaving various magazine articles open on that particular page or websites open in the same fashion!
When I asked whether we should buy the game she informed me of the cheapest website to buy it from! (BlahDVD - never heard of them before).
Once ordered I had a quick look at the required specs for the game and realised that our laptop wouldn't go near it and our main PC would struggle to display much beyond the lower graphical settings. When I informed Serena, that was when the £400 quick and dirty comment popped out!
There are times when I wonder who is the bigger nerd in our house! The only difference being I am well out of the closet!
PS The game is question is "Lord of the Rings Online - Shadows of Angmar".
PPS Here is what £1,100 buys you:
I laugh because I was worried about thinking about spending £800 on a new machine, whilst all along Serena had ideas slightly higher up the food chain! We now have rough specs for £2,000 worth of PC kit! The only question remaining is "when" (can we afford to put it on the credit card)!
Serena tries to be subtle at times and she is either too subtle (in that I don't notice) or is a bit too unsubtle so that I notice straight away! I much prefer the latter as it causes less arguments.
Anyway she has been talking about a particular computer game for a while now, "look what a good write up it got", leaving various magazine articles open on that particular page or websites open in the same fashion!
When I asked whether we should buy the game she informed me of the cheapest website to buy it from! (BlahDVD - never heard of them before).
Once ordered I had a quick look at the required specs for the game and realised that our laptop wouldn't go near it and our main PC would struggle to display much beyond the lower graphical settings. When I informed Serena, that was when the £400 quick and dirty comment popped out!
There are times when I wonder who is the bigger nerd in our house! The only difference being I am well out of the closet!
PS The game is question is "Lord of the Rings Online - Shadows of Angmar".
PPS Here is what £1,100 buys you:
- Case (TBD)
- Power supply (650 W one with good voltage stability)
- Motherboard (TBD - but there is a good ASUS one with build in WiFi that Serena has spotted)
- Processor (Intel Core 2 Duo - at least a 6420)
- Heatsink (the Freezer one that allows good overclocking)
- Video Card (Pre-overclocked 8800 GTS 640 MB)
- RAM (2 x 2 GB)
- Hard Disks (2 of the Spinpoints as seen in the Media Centre)
- Sound Card (X-Fi Gamer Edition)
- OS (Windows Vista Home Edition)
- Keyboard and Mouse (Logitech Gamer Set)
I have the feeling that this could be quite noisy, so the case will need to be well soundproofed!
Tuesday, June 26, 2007
Move over Gareth
It has be said that I don't post about music and musicians very much. I am no expert nor music nerd! (No offence intended to anyone - I am happy being a Sci-Fi / PC Nerd).
Something did strike me recently that I though I should blog about and then I promptly forgot until now.
I have seen a few "Pop star" interviews on TV recently, followed by supposed live performances of the latest single. Most of them fade into obscurity as they are generally an average guest and sound like they are miming later on. Two have stood out though.
1/ Pete Docherty. The news always portrays him as a complete arse. I am afraid that his interview confirmed it, even though the interviewer (Johnathon Ross) was clearly a fan. Later when he performed acoustically I thought he was terrible! I am not surprised that his band got fed up with him and parted company. Clearly his lifestyle is compromising his ability to perform musically.
2/ Iggy Pop. I always thought he was another one that looked like his lifestyle had killed both his personality and talent. How wrong could I be! His interview with his Stooges (?) band mates was entertaining and informative. Then his live performance in the studio was excellent. He has clearly suffered from lifestyle abuse but he also clearly loves to perform. He got some bad press at Glastonbury for his enthusiasm in causing the stage invasion, but I reckon he just got carried away in the moment! My opinion of him has completely changed!
Something did strike me recently that I though I should blog about and then I promptly forgot until now.
I have seen a few "Pop star" interviews on TV recently, followed by supposed live performances of the latest single. Most of them fade into obscurity as they are generally an average guest and sound like they are miming later on. Two have stood out though.
1/ Pete Docherty. The news always portrays him as a complete arse. I am afraid that his interview confirmed it, even though the interviewer (Johnathon Ross) was clearly a fan. Later when he performed acoustically I thought he was terrible! I am not surprised that his band got fed up with him and parted company. Clearly his lifestyle is compromising his ability to perform musically.
2/ Iggy Pop. I always thought he was another one that looked like his lifestyle had killed both his personality and talent. How wrong could I be! His interview with his Stooges (?) band mates was entertaining and informative. Then his live performance in the studio was excellent. He has clearly suffered from lifestyle abuse but he also clearly loves to perform. He got some bad press at Glastonbury for his enthusiasm in causing the stage invasion, but I reckon he just got carried away in the moment! My opinion of him has completely changed!
Monday, June 25, 2007
Blink and you'll have Nightmares!
Clearly too much Dr Who for me yesterday! Not so much nightmares as very weird dreams about being chased!
The scarecrows and the weeping angels are absolutley brilliant as far as malevolant baddies go in my book! It is a shame that the scarecrows were poorly used in the Family of Blood episode.
My hat goes off to Stephen Moffitt though. He clearly is in his element writing for Dr Who.
The three-parter (of which we are 2/3 of the way through) started really well, with Jack back and the strange world at the end of time. I loved DJ as Prof Yana and was only slightly disappointed that he chose to regen! As previously stated John Simms was brilliant. I love a good Ham and Cheese role! (Pun intended!)
What worries me is that the plotline for this trilogy is a bit too abstract and I haven't got a clue as to what is going on and where Martha is going! Some hints would have been nice! So far it isn't as good as the Age of Steel or Ghosts two-parters from Series Two.
The scarecrows and the weeping angels are absolutley brilliant as far as malevolant baddies go in my book! It is a shame that the scarecrows were poorly used in the Family of Blood episode.
My hat goes off to Stephen Moffitt though. He clearly is in his element writing for Dr Who.
The three-parter (of which we are 2/3 of the way through) started really well, with Jack back and the strange world at the end of time. I loved DJ as Prof Yana and was only slightly disappointed that he chose to regen! As previously stated John Simms was brilliant. I love a good Ham and Cheese role! (Pun intended!)
What worries me is that the plotline for this trilogy is a bit too abstract and I haven't got a clue as to what is going on and where Martha is going! Some hints would have been nice! So far it isn't as good as the Age of Steel or Ghosts two-parters from Series Two.
Sunday, June 24, 2007
The Sound of Drums
After a swift catch-up weekend and a re-record of this week's episode following the thunderstorm we are now up to speed and hanging on the cliff!
Blink was great! Those Angels are going to haunt Serena's dreams for days. Poor Lauren got a fright too when I paused the episode and it just happened to be the first time you see their fangs. She ran to Mama for a hug! :(
I LOVE John Sims as the Master! I reckon it took him 0.2 seconds to accept that job when the phone rang!
Anyway, more tomorrow I am sure!
Saturday, June 23, 2007
Nooooooooooooooo!
How come we get a thunderstorm that knocks out our Sky DURING Dr Who!
If there is another tomorrow during the BBC3 repeat I may cry!
Friday, June 22, 2007
£30! and a Question
I forgot to include a DVI to HDMI cable on my media centre's list of needs...
They're £30! I must check my little man on EBay to see if he does them any cheaper, as that seems a bit steep to me! I have the rest of the cables I need already.
Question: What should I do with my subtitle / banner area thingummy?
There is clearly no-one even remotely famous round here - I have gotten so desperate for an update that I even check out sporty looking cars when I drive past them to see if there is a celeb inside!!!!
I did think about changing it to Celebrity Look-a-like of the Week, but didn't fancy trying to get a convincing photo on my phone's 2 mega-pixel camera!!!!
I want it to be something that changes frequently... I may just steal my Live Messenger comment theme, which is my variation on "Jesse's Diets" from the Fast Show.
They're £30! I must check my little man on EBay to see if he does them any cheaper, as that seems a bit steep to me! I have the rest of the cables I need already.
Question: What should I do with my subtitle / banner area thingummy?
There is clearly no-one even remotely famous round here - I have gotten so desperate for an update that I even check out sporty looking cars when I drive past them to see if there is a celeb inside!!!!
I did think about changing it to Celebrity Look-a-like of the Week, but didn't fancy trying to get a convincing photo on my phone's 2 mega-pixel camera!!!!
I want it to be something that changes frequently... I may just steal my Live Messenger comment theme, which is my variation on "Jesse's Diets" from the Fast Show.
Thursday, June 21, 2007
Damn - Missed it!
Yesterday Ebuyer were selling Vista Home Premium for £40 + Free Delivery.
At the time I though this was an error but did nothing about it.
I mentioned it to Serena and she said I should grab a copy whilst it is cheap (RRP £68) so I went back this morning to find the price restored to £68.
ARSE!
At least I got a tax rebate of £300 this pay check (emergency tax codes and all that), which will help clear the holiday credit card bill and help me save the money (now £850) for the Media Centre.
PS I really want to get the snazzy MS Media Centre 7000 keyboard/mouse, but £85 is a bit steep! Maybe for Christmas! I can't seem to buy the 8000 in the UK yet but that is very snazzy too - I suspect that we are talking £160 for that one though (when you compare it to the Logitech equivalent).
At the time I though this was an error but did nothing about it.
I mentioned it to Serena and she said I should grab a copy whilst it is cheap (RRP £68) so I went back this morning to find the price restored to £68.
ARSE!
At least I got a tax rebate of £300 this pay check (emergency tax codes and all that), which will help clear the holiday credit card bill and help me save the money (now £850) for the Media Centre.
PS I really want to get the snazzy MS Media Centre 7000 keyboard/mouse, but £85 is a bit steep! Maybe for Christmas! I can't seem to buy the 8000 in the UK yet but that is very snazzy too - I suspect that we are talking £160 for that one though (when you compare it to the Logitech equivalent).
Wednesday, June 20, 2007
Ideas Above My Budget!
I just had my first stab at speccing out the PC listed below.
In a word "OUCH"!
I then cut back on some of the silly components and got the price down to only £1,000!
Next I took a few executive decisions around quality and performance and got the price down to a Gnat's Whisker over £800. I now feel that I am working in the correct ball-park! I could go lower but then I would be seriously compromising the lifespan of the project.
The £800 system looks like this:
In a word "OUCH"!
I then cut back on some of the silly components and got the price down to only £1,000!
Next I took a few executive decisions around quality and performance and got the price down to a Gnat's Whisker over £800. I now feel that I am working in the correct ball-park! I could go lower but then I would be seriously compromising the lifespan of the project.
The £800 system looks like this:
- Antec Fusion Media Centre Case
- Foxconn G9657MA - 8EKRS2H Motherboard (has very good on-board sound)
- Intel Core2 Duo E6420 Processor
- 2 x 1 GB EBuyer Value DDR2 PC2-6400 RAM (made by Corsair)
- 2 x Samsung Spinpoint T166 HDJ01LJ 500 GB Hard Disks
- 8800GTS 320 MB Graphics (ASUS branded)
- Panasonic DVD-RW
- Netgear Wireless LAN Card
- Windows Vista Home Premium Edition
- Wireless Keyboard and Mouse
Now I just need to save up enough money (as Serena would kill me if I put this on my Mastercard so soon after our holiday)!
Monday, June 18, 2007
New Project
After much reading and pontificating I am starting a new project (home not work).
We are planning on moving house sometime in the next year so that we can be closer to both Serena's and my work, and we could do with at least one more bedroom if not two with the forthcoming family expansion.
Because of the planned move I am not buying any of the technology I would like until I see what space I have to set it all up in. The items on hold include a new gaming PC or Laptop, Amp and Speakers for the TV / DVD and Sky HD.
However I am going to go ahead and start speccing up a media centre. Budgets are still tight so soon after a holiday, so I don't expect to place any orders for a couple of months but this is one part of our home setup I want to get up and running sooner rather than later.
My initials thoughts fall along these lines:
- Antec Fusion Media Centre Case.
- Core2 Duo Processor.
- 2 GB RAM (Single DDR2 SIMM so I can double up later).
- 2 Hard Disks - One fast for OS and Apps (likely to be a 10k Raptor) and One Big for Media (~500 GB as these are best value atm). I'll add a second media drive later as the case has space.
- A MicroATX motherboard - undecided atm as I need to see what is out there.
- A Video Card - undecided atm but must be HDCP compliant on the the video output - doesn't need to be an HDMI output though (DVI is fine) and I am not intending to blow a huge amount on this component as we are not talking high end gaming rig.
- Creative X-Fi soundcard - for hooking up to an Amp in the future.
- Wireless LAN if not onboard on the MoBo.
- Bluetooth (could be rear USB dongle).
- InfraRed - want this for a remote control - need to do more research on this though.
- DVD RW (replace with HD drive in future).
- Wireless Media Centre Keyboard and Mouse.
- Windows Vista Ultimate Edition.
I'll run ideas for each component past you on here and once it is up and running I'll show off here as well! Feel free to interject at any stage as advice on anything listed is more that welcome.
Sunday, June 17, 2007
Tuesday, June 05, 2007
Friday, June 01, 2007
Sad News
It has been announced that Season 4 of Battlestar Galactica will be the last.
Whether there will be spin-offs like Babylon 5 remains to be seen, but the two execs have decided to end the main series on their terms.
I also saw that Eidos managed to get together all the old Lara Croft models for a bit of publicity for the new (crap) LC Game. Which is your favourite?
Whether there will be spin-offs like Babylon 5 remains to be seen, but the two execs have decided to end the main series on their terms.
I also saw that Eidos managed to get together all the old Lara Croft models for a bit of publicity for the new (crap) LC Game. Which is your favourite?
Thursday, May 31, 2007
Feelings of Guilt
My friend Sheena applied for the job that I am now doing. Obviously she didn't get it, despite being interviewed the day before me. At the time I felt really guilty about it as she has two small kids and lives just up the road from where I now work.
Today she rang out of the blue to say that she got another job just up the road from here. Ironically it is another job that I applied for, and turned down the interview when I accepted this role.
We had a nice lunch today and my feelings of guilt melted away!
Now I just need to work out how guilty I would feel if I stuck a £300 piece of technology* on my credit card... or perhaps more accurately how guilty Serena would make me feel!
* In Scotland this item sounds really small!
Today she rang out of the blue to say that she got another job just up the road from here. Ironically it is another job that I applied for, and turned down the interview when I accepted this role.
We had a nice lunch today and my feelings of guilt melted away!
Now I just need to work out how guilty I would feel if I stuck a £300 piece of technology* on my credit card... or perhaps more accurately how guilty Serena would make me feel!
* In Scotland this item sounds really small!
More Birthday Greetings
So today is my Mum's Birthday & is also Julian's Birthday.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY MUM AND JULES!
I'll be polite to them and not mention any ages!
HAPPY BIRTHDAY MUM AND JULES!
I'll be polite to them and not mention any ages!
Wednesday, May 30, 2007
An Early "Happy Birthday"!
Since the whole family are upping sticks and heading off to Barcelona next week, I need to get a few pieces of admin out of the way over the next few days.
Firstly "Happy Birthday Gareth"! I know I am a couple of weeks early, but I'll be away and I would have missed it!
I have spent literally minutes agonising over your present and decided that I could prove GK wrong about one of her earlier comments...
Hence, you have some "Art" for your house heading your way! I expect it up on the walls when I next visit!
To help you get the theme here are a few of the items I rejected when selecting as I didn't think they were "arty" enough!
Kiss
Kiss 2
ZG2
Teamwork
Bottoms Up
I won't give any hints as to what I did choose in the end! I just wish I could be there when you open them, especially if you wait to do it with GK!
Firstly "Happy Birthday Gareth"! I know I am a couple of weeks early, but I'll be away and I would have missed it!
I have spent literally minutes agonising over your present and decided that I could prove GK wrong about one of her earlier comments...
Hence, you have some "Art" for your house heading your way! I expect it up on the walls when I next visit!
To help you get the theme here are a few of the items I rejected when selecting as I didn't think they were "arty" enough!
Kiss
Kiss 2
ZG2
Teamwork
Bottoms Up
I won't give any hints as to what I did choose in the end! I just wish I could be there when you open them, especially if you wait to do it with GK!
The Agony of Choice
I needed some reading material this morning, so I went to buy the Star Wars anniversary edition of Empire magazine. To celebrate the the 30 years they have done 30 commemorative covers showing different Star Wars characters.
Talk about an Agony of Choice! Who do I pick? Who does that mean I reject?
The newsagent had about 12 copies and that gave me about 10 cover choices (No Han, Luke or Vader), however my choice was an easy one to make in the end...
Cover #6. "Size Matters Not!"
Talk about an Agony of Choice! Who do I pick? Who does that mean I reject?
The newsagent had about 12 copies and that gave me about 10 cover choices (No Han, Luke or Vader), however my choice was an easy one to make in the end...
Cover #6. "Size Matters Not!"
Tuesday, May 29, 2007
Scared!
This weekend's Dr Who was quite scary! The classic "monster at the window" moment made me jump!
I am struggling to remember something so this is thrown out to the wider audience...
Two things grabbed me in the episode:
First was the scarecrows... Wurzle Gummage aside, what Kids TV show had scary scarecrows in it? The ones on Dr Who really reminded me of something and there was a real creepiness to the memory that it twanged. Maybe it was "The Moondial"?
Second was the image of the little girl with the balloon. Serena reckons that that is an homage to a classic horror film. I think I know what she means, but I cannot place that memory either!
I am struggling to remember something so this is thrown out to the wider audience...
Two things grabbed me in the episode:
First was the scarecrows... Wurzle Gummage aside, what Kids TV show had scary scarecrows in it? The ones on Dr Who really reminded me of something and there was a real creepiness to the memory that it twanged. Maybe it was "The Moondial"?
Second was the image of the little girl with the balloon. Serena reckons that that is an homage to a classic horror film. I think I know what she means, but I cannot place that memory either!
Thursday, May 24, 2007
How Wude!
Star Wars is 30 years old this week and neither Gareth nor I have rambled on about it yet! Nor did we do the usual "Happy Star Wars Day" back on May 4th.
Either we are unwell or our nerdiness is subsiding!
I once had a conversation with Hubert (Serena's not so little anymore brother) about Star Wars and what it meant to "my generation". He told me that The Matrix trilogy defined his generation in a similar manner. Somehow I don't see the new Spiderman films being used in a similar fashion!
I have to laugh about Gareth's love of Star Wars, given that I am just that little bit older than him and actually saw Star Wars at the cinema when it first came out in 1977. I'd love to say that it should give me the moral high ground on any discussions we have, but when it comes to Star Wars he is a much bigger nerd than I am (and I never saw Episodes 5 and 6 in the cinema until the remastered versions came out in the late 90s).
I recently bought the Lord of the Rings and Star Wars DVD Trivial Pursuit games... Next time Gareth is down I'll have to take him on at the latter! I'll keep it shrink wrapped so I can't be accused of cheating! I am currently undefeated at the Lord of the Rings one (although Rena gives me a close fight most times), but then my LOTR nerdiness knows no bounds!
Either we are unwell or our nerdiness is subsiding!
I once had a conversation with Hubert (Serena's not so little anymore brother) about Star Wars and what it meant to "my generation". He told me that The Matrix trilogy defined his generation in a similar manner. Somehow I don't see the new Spiderman films being used in a similar fashion!
I have to laugh about Gareth's love of Star Wars, given that I am just that little bit older than him and actually saw Star Wars at the cinema when it first came out in 1977. I'd love to say that it should give me the moral high ground on any discussions we have, but when it comes to Star Wars he is a much bigger nerd than I am (and I never saw Episodes 5 and 6 in the cinema until the remastered versions came out in the late 90s).
I recently bought the Lord of the Rings and Star Wars DVD Trivial Pursuit games... Next time Gareth is down I'll have to take him on at the latter! I'll keep it shrink wrapped so I can't be accused of cheating! I am currently undefeated at the Lord of the Rings one (although Rena gives me a close fight most times), but then my LOTR nerdiness knows no bounds!
Tuesday, May 22, 2007
Scary Food
Jase and I try to get to the Farmers' Market in Chiswick every other week (and sometimes every week) to buy what we feel to be fresh food. However, we do some food shopping at our local supermarkets because it is so convenient.
I'm sure that some supermarkets are better than others and some branches are worse than others, but this news article really shocked me:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/6676345.stm
Be wary of scary food out there! I think the important thing to take away from this is not to buy from the "fresh meat" counter...
I'm sure that some supermarkets are better than others and some branches are worse than others, but this news article really shocked me:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/6676345.stm
Be wary of scary food out there! I think the important thing to take away from this is not to buy from the "fresh meat" counter...
Monday, May 21, 2007
We have the Technology!
I have gotten so used to having webmail, that I never really explored "other options" as far as checking my email when away from home.
Since Combined have blocked webmail on their internet servers I have finally been forced to review other options.
Friday afternoon had me on the phone to Orange and I now have my phone configured for GPRS and my ancient Dell PDA configured to use a Bluetooth modem. I can now download the headers to my PDA via my mobile and delete all your spam / choose what I want to read / knock out a few replies that I don't want to go via work.
Next step is for me to configure our laptop to do the same and work out how to use the same process when abroad.
Since Combined have blocked webmail on their internet servers I have finally been forced to review other options.
Friday afternoon had me on the phone to Orange and I now have my phone configured for GPRS and my ancient Dell PDA configured to use a Bluetooth modem. I can now download the headers to my PDA via my mobile and delete all your spam / choose what I want to read / knock out a few replies that I don't want to go via work.
Next step is for me to configure our laptop to do the same and work out how to use the same process when abroad.
Monday, May 14, 2007
Friday, May 11, 2007
Endless Waiting...
I have been waiting for something since 12.30 pm.
If it doesn't get here by 5.30 pm I am going to be well p'd off!
I just feel like the afternoon has been a complete waste of time.
Thursday, May 10, 2007
One for the Girls
Here is a quick nod to all you laydeez out there.
Given that you are reading my blog then you must be a bit nerdy, so this site is definitely for you... It just won an award for the best UK Technology Blog.
Tuesday, May 08, 2007
Movie Roundup
Time again for another round up of a few of the movies I have been watching recently.
Sunshine
Credible Sci-Fi Triller, but completely loses the plot towards the end. My nuclear physics may be a bit rusty but I was still going "Eh?" a bit too much!
Underworld Evolution
Kate Beckinsale is still a very sexy vampire, but again the plot of this film is just rubbish. I am glad I waited to see it on Sky as it wasn't worth paying good money to see.
Saw
I watched the first 15 minutes on Sky+ and then deleted it. I could tell this wasn't going to be up my street at all!
Snakes on a Plane
Brilliant - completely cheesy and plotless. A perfect way to unwind whilst studying for my exams!
Slither
Not as good as the hype at the time suggested. I loved Nathan Fillion though, as he plays a similar character to that in Firefly. A bit more tense than SoaP, but still good plain cheesy fun.
Mission Impossible III
Complete waste of time. I still think the first one was far and away the best and the rest were just poorly conceived. Both sequals were only worth watching for their female content!
And now for the big finale....
Spiderman 3
Hmmmm... This is a toughy. The film tries to do too many things. It feels like Sam Raimi was trying to do an Action Film, a Comedy Film and a Romantic Drama, but only had budget for 150 minutes of cinema time, so he squeezed out something that missed on all three.
The action is OK and the CG is vastly improved, so that Spidey no longer is obviously fake, however the action is too fast, so that everything becomes a blur. I miss the old days of slow-mo kung fu!
The comedy bits are straight "set pieces" which look a bit like they were penned by a separate writer. They do work and they are funny, but I am not convinced that they fit into the film very well.
The romance is awful! If I were MJ I would have kicked Spidey in the nads quite early on and told him to F#CK OFF!
As a bit of a comic book fan, I did enjoy the film over-all, but I don't think it is as good as numbers 1 and 2.
Sunshine
Credible Sci-Fi Triller, but completely loses the plot towards the end. My nuclear physics may be a bit rusty but I was still going "Eh?" a bit too much!
Underworld Evolution
Kate Beckinsale is still a very sexy vampire, but again the plot of this film is just rubbish. I am glad I waited to see it on Sky as it wasn't worth paying good money to see.
Saw
I watched the first 15 minutes on Sky+ and then deleted it. I could tell this wasn't going to be up my street at all!
Snakes on a Plane
Brilliant - completely cheesy and plotless. A perfect way to unwind whilst studying for my exams!
Slither
Not as good as the hype at the time suggested. I loved Nathan Fillion though, as he plays a similar character to that in Firefly. A bit more tense than SoaP, but still good plain cheesy fun.
Mission Impossible III
Complete waste of time. I still think the first one was far and away the best and the rest were just poorly conceived. Both sequals were only worth watching for their female content!
And now for the big finale....
Spiderman 3
Hmmmm... This is a toughy. The film tries to do too many things. It feels like Sam Raimi was trying to do an Action Film, a Comedy Film and a Romantic Drama, but only had budget for 150 minutes of cinema time, so he squeezed out something that missed on all three.
The action is OK and the CG is vastly improved, so that Spidey no longer is obviously fake, however the action is too fast, so that everything becomes a blur. I miss the old days of slow-mo kung fu!
The comedy bits are straight "set pieces" which look a bit like they were penned by a separate writer. They do work and they are funny, but I am not convinced that they fit into the film very well.
The romance is awful! If I were MJ I would have kicked Spidey in the nads quite early on and told him to F#CK OFF!
As a bit of a comic book fan, I did enjoy the film over-all, but I don't think it is as good as numbers 1 and 2.
Thursday, May 03, 2007
Jobsworth...
My first day signing on today...
I got there early and checked their computers for jobs, as per my Job Seekers Agreement. As per my online searches on the Job Centre website there was nothing close to being applicable.
I decided to take a seat and handed in my signing on book, which was then taken to the relevant desk. The girl sat there looked at it, looked at the clock and did nothing... for 20 minutes. I handed in my book at 10 am, my time slot is 10.20 to 10.30. For 20 minutes she sat there looking bored and did nothing whilst I sat there looking bored doing nothing!
At 10.20 she called me over, we had a quick chat to prove I was seeking work and I signed my form. At 10.23 I was heading out the door.
What a waste of bloody time!
Wednesday, May 02, 2007
Ups and Downs
It's been a rollercoaster day today.
I was in high spirits this morning after taking Lauren to nursery and then shortly before lunchtime I got a call to say that I had been knocked back by Ernst and Young. I was disappointed by the feedback so I may give the interviewer a ring and ask for a bit more info on that.
I was due to meet an old friend for lunch, and I was really down for the whole drive over to her place.
Chatting with her cheered me up and I have also received some good feedback from the BarCap interview. They have asked to delay decision making until Tuesday next week, but wanted to let me know that I came across really well and they thought I was a good fit for the role.
I've applied for a few more jobs and have been drinking iced coffee down by the riverside most of the afternoon - I'll probably be scarlet tomorrow!
Monday, April 30, 2007
Blood in my Shoe
Both interviews went well - more on that in a sec...
I am in serious pain though. New shoes -> Blister -> Popped Blister.
So badly popped in fact that the inside of my shoe has a little red stain where the blood seeped though my sock and soaked into the leather.
Interview 1 at BarCap in Canary Wharf went really well - I think I have all the skills they are looking for. Shame I think the job is really narrowly focused and would get boring very quickly. I have fed that back to the agent though, as it may just be the manager's poor representation of the role. I reckon it is a job I could have done a few years ago, so it feels like a step sideways (and slightly backwards) rather than forwards.
Interview 2 at Ernst & Young was really friendly. I can't say that I like Lambeth that well, but I thought the team dynamic was right up my street and that the seniority of the role is exactly where I want to place myself in the market. I feel I represented myself very well.
I doubt I will hear much for a couple of days on either though as both seemed early on in their recruitment process.
Best Laxative Known to Man!
I have two interviews today...
These are the first face to face interviews I have had, where I don't know the interviewers, for over seven years.
I am bricking it right now!
I have just ironed my shirt, having polished my shoes earlier.
Transit time to Canary Wharf is a little over an hour, so I am leaving myself two hours!
I then have an hour to get back to Waterloo for the second interview, however that is only a 15 minute journey, so that should be OK.
My initial preferences lean towards the first job, but we'll have to see how I feel tonight!
If only the forecast was for cold weather... I will probably be soaked come the second interview!
Wednesday, April 25, 2007
New Banner
I finally decided what to do with the banner at the top of this blog.
It will now detail my celebrity spot of the week.
I won't be backing this up with photos, as that is just plain annoying both to them and to me.
Serena did try and take a photo of JD yesterday when we spotted him in Chiswick, but she ballsed it up!
It will now detail my celebrity spot of the week.
I won't be backing this up with photos, as that is just plain annoying both to them and to me.
Serena did try and take a photo of JD yesterday when we spotted him in Chiswick, but she ballsed it up!
Monday, April 23, 2007
No Sweat
Apart from one acronym that I didn't recognise until it was expanded, I thought the GE Money interview went well. Blooming Six-Sigma speak!
I have a Six-Sigma mini-guide somewhere round this house, so I must dig it out if they invite me for the next round!
Exams over... Time to Sign-on!
I reckon I passed the big exam on Friday. All the questions I didn't want to come up, came up, however I had prepared hard for that scenario and would be very disappointed if I failed. Still, I have to wait 6-8 weeks for the marking to be done!
Down to the Job Centre today and signed on for the first time in my life.
I am appalled by that lack of evidence you need to provide as proof that you are seeking employment! I just need to fill in a log of what I do, so I could write down complete bullshit and still get my dole money! That isn't right!
Anyway I have a 1st round interview with GE Money this afternoon. Just a quick 15 minutes with HR on the phone to prove I am who I say I am! I'm not convinced that I want this particular job though as it is in Watford!
No news on the Computer Games company job though!
Thursday, April 19, 2007
More Photos
Three pictures showing the glorious weather and Bournemouth Beach.
A view from my hotel window showing a local "attraction" which is a balloon that just goes up and down giving you panoramic views over the bay and town.
A view from my hotel window showing a local "attraction" which is a balloon that just goes up and down giving you panoramic views over the bay and town.
Losing the Will to Live
The little red light came on around 3 pm today as my Brain went "DING" as it was full!
The two hours of exam revision from that point on were a bit torturous!
I am not scared of tomorrow's exam any more, it is down to technique rather than knowledge and you only need 50% to pass. There is no negative marking and you can theoretically get >100% as a question listed as being worth 10 marks could have 12 marks available on the marking scheme!!!!
As long as I read the question I can guarentee to get 60-75% on any question (it's when you don't answer the correct question that you are in trouble!).
There are a few questions which are complete bread and butter - I can pretty much guarantee 90% on one of those, as they are just too easy! (Really!) I reckon there is only about a 33% chance of one of those coming up though.
Curry night was fun, I didn't drink too much and was in bed by midnight. The Geordie did sleep in though and turned up looking green about 30 mins late!
I have a few more photos for you that will go in another post.
The two hours of exam revision from that point on were a bit torturous!
I am not scared of tomorrow's exam any more, it is down to technique rather than knowledge and you only need 50% to pass. There is no negative marking and you can theoretically get >100% as a question listed as being worth 10 marks could have 12 marks available on the marking scheme!!!!
As long as I read the question I can guarentee to get 60-75% on any question (it's when you don't answer the correct question that you are in trouble!).
There are a few questions which are complete bread and butter - I can pretty much guarantee 90% on one of those, as they are just too easy! (Really!) I reckon there is only about a 33% chance of one of those coming up though.
Curry night was fun, I didn't drink too much and was in bed by midnight. The Geordie did sleep in though and turned up looking green about 30 mins late!
I have a few more photos for you that will go in another post.
Wednesday, April 18, 2007
Curry Night
Well I passed the multiple choice paper with a cool 92%, which means I can update my CV to say "Prince2 Qualified", even if it is only to Foundation level.
I am a heck of a lot less scared of Friday's Practitioner exam now as well.
Whilst waiting for our results, a few of us were sat in the bar having a beer and complaining about the food in the hotel. Since the Ex-pat living in Portugal said he had to have a Curry before going back to Lisbon, we have decided that tonight is Curry Night and bugger the free food at the hotel!
I don't expect it to be too late a finish though... After all we are all professionals! If only the other two Curry-chasers weren't a Geordie and a guy who works at Lords Cricket ground, then I wouldn't be worried!
I am a heck of a lot less scared of Friday's Practitioner exam now as well.
Whilst waiting for our results, a few of us were sat in the bar having a beer and complaining about the food in the hotel. Since the Ex-pat living in Portugal said he had to have a Curry before going back to Lisbon, we have decided that tonight is Curry Night and bugger the free food at the hotel!
I don't expect it to be too late a finish though... After all we are all professionals! If only the other two Curry-chasers weren't a Geordie and a guy who works at Lords Cricket ground, then I wouldn't be worried!
Tuesday, April 17, 2007
Day 2
Two days down and I just aced my mock exam, so I feel a hell of a lot more relaxed tonight.
Tonight I sat discussing the finer points of football with a Sunderland fan and an ex-pat living in Lisbon, which meant we had a very entertaining dinner after I admitted to supporting Newcastle!
Beyond that I have found a local Blockbuster and have bought 3 DVDs from their bargain bin, since there is bugger all to do in the hotel apart from drink or dance with the crumblies...
Tonight is Line Dancing, so they are all bedecked in Rhinestones and are wearing stetsons! I kid you not! I almost feel I am at a Kylie concert!
Whilst on my walk I came across this retirement home, whose signage made me laugh!
Tonight I sat discussing the finer points of football with a Sunderland fan and an ex-pat living in Lisbon, which meant we had a very entertaining dinner after I admitted to supporting Newcastle!
Beyond that I have found a local Blockbuster and have bought 3 DVDs from their bargain bin, since there is bugger all to do in the hotel apart from drink or dance with the crumblies...
Tonight is Line Dancing, so they are all bedecked in Rhinestones and are wearing stetsons! I kid you not! I almost feel I am at a Kylie concert!
Whilst on my walk I came across this retirement home, whose signage made me laugh!
Monday, April 16, 2007
End of Day One
So that is the first day of the course out of the way.
I have done my first hour of home work and have 30 mins of practice questions to do once I have finished blogging.
I think that I am doing OK, and that it is all sinking in. My first exam in on Wednesday afternoon and I should be OK for that one! It's the Friday morning exam that is scary!
My co-delegates are a very diverse bunch, from the NHS manager who I met propping up the bar last night, to the fuzzy cheeked teenager who is filling in for someone who has gone off sick!
I am one of the younger delegates, but not by much and we all seem to have families or at the very least a partner. There is definitely no "lad" culture trying to force everyone into the bar for a late night "session".
I went for a walk after breakfast as we didn't start until 9.30 am and found the local convenience store. I bought some more post-it notes, as my supply of ones I pinched from NAB were starting to run low! I also bought myself a decent pen for the exam on Friday, as I neglected to bring one with me (decent that is). I am not certain how my wrist will cope with a 3 hour written exam! I am rather more used to typing things nowadays!
Lunch was quite nice, buffet style, with samosas, deep fried prawns, satays and the like, and I took a quick stroll down to the cliff tops (not to consider suicide) to clear my brain a little.
These photos show the mill-pond sea quite nicely - it is a real shame that I was stuck indoors all day.
Finally, Lauren needn't worry about Daddy not having any company when he takes a bath - the hotel have provided "friends"!
I have done my first hour of home work and have 30 mins of practice questions to do once I have finished blogging.
I think that I am doing OK, and that it is all sinking in. My first exam in on Wednesday afternoon and I should be OK for that one! It's the Friday morning exam that is scary!
My co-delegates are a very diverse bunch, from the NHS manager who I met propping up the bar last night, to the fuzzy cheeked teenager who is filling in for someone who has gone off sick!
I am one of the younger delegates, but not by much and we all seem to have families or at the very least a partner. There is definitely no "lad" culture trying to force everyone into the bar for a late night "session".
I went for a walk after breakfast as we didn't start until 9.30 am and found the local convenience store. I bought some more post-it notes, as my supply of ones I pinched from NAB were starting to run low! I also bought myself a decent pen for the exam on Friday, as I neglected to bring one with me (decent that is). I am not certain how my wrist will cope with a 3 hour written exam! I am rather more used to typing things nowadays!
Lunch was quite nice, buffet style, with samosas, deep fried prawns, satays and the like, and I took a quick stroll down to the cliff tops (not to consider suicide) to clear my brain a little.
These photos show the mill-pond sea quite nicely - it is a real shame that I was stuck indoors all day.
Finally, Lauren needn't worry about Daddy not having any company when he takes a bath - the hotel have provided "friends"!
Sunday, April 15, 2007
Saga Central
My first night in Bournemouth for the Prince2 course that I have shelled out for and I feel young! In fact I feel like I should be in bed by now!
The Wessex Hotel has two types of clients on a Sunday night....
1/ Mid 30s people eating by themselves and looking round wondering whether the other saddo's are here for the same course.
2/ A mixture of wrinklies in the 70+ category wondering whether their dentures and colesterol medication can cope with the Chef's Turkey Roast!
I went down for dinner at 7.30 pm and the place was heaving with the more mature clientel, who all shuffled out around 8.00 pm leaving the restaurant to the "solos".
I quickly finished my salty French Onion Soup, my "£5 extra" Sirloin Steak and my "serve yourself" Apple Strudel and waddled out into the lobby to find a couple of the solos had started chatting about the course, so I introduced myself and we had a bit of a blather.
The wrinklies had all retired to the ballroom and were circling the floor in a stately fashion.
Anyway I have worked out the BT OpenZone and forked out for 5 days access so I will try and Blog each night I am here.
Piccies for Lauren and Mama to follow.
The Wessex Hotel has two types of clients on a Sunday night....
1/ Mid 30s people eating by themselves and looking round wondering whether the other saddo's are here for the same course.
2/ A mixture of wrinklies in the 70+ category wondering whether their dentures and colesterol medication can cope with the Chef's Turkey Roast!
I went down for dinner at 7.30 pm and the place was heaving with the more mature clientel, who all shuffled out around 8.00 pm leaving the restaurant to the "solos".
I quickly finished my salty French Onion Soup, my "£5 extra" Sirloin Steak and my "serve yourself" Apple Strudel and waddled out into the lobby to find a couple of the solos had started chatting about the course, so I introduced myself and we had a bit of a blather.
The wrinklies had all retired to the ballroom and were circling the floor in a stately fashion.
Anyway I have worked out the BT OpenZone and forked out for 5 days access so I will try and Blog each night I am here.
Piccies for Lauren and Mama to follow.
James is a Poo!
James - I have texted you and emailed you to get Sally's address so I can post this prezzie to you both!
I am now away for a week so you will have to wait!
Sally - give him a good thump for me!!!!
PS Your Mum gave me Sally's home number but there was no answer, so don't say I didn't try!!!!!
Saturday, April 14, 2007
Sqeak!!!
Aaaargh!!
Further forays into the house by the mice were spotted today by both of us. We've figured out that they are coming from a gap at the back of the fireplace in the study, so Jase has plugged it with copious quantities of tin foil (we figured that this material would be both fire proof and chew resistant).
We will need to see if this makes any difference, but obviously there may be other access points into the house. However, of the four mice who have ventured into the house, all either emerged from there or ran to there to escape, so hopefully this will be a temporary stop gap.
Once in the house they head straight for the sofas or the kitchen. Much like the humans then!
Further forays into the house by the mice were spotted today by both of us. We've figured out that they are coming from a gap at the back of the fireplace in the study, so Jase has plugged it with copious quantities of tin foil (we figured that this material would be both fire proof and chew resistant).
We will need to see if this makes any difference, but obviously there may be other access points into the house. However, of the four mice who have ventured into the house, all either emerged from there or ran to there to escape, so hopefully this will be a temporary stop gap.
Once in the house they head straight for the sofas or the kitchen. Much like the humans then!
You Little Beauty!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Silver Birch
33/1
£20 Each Way Bet
£432.50 Returned!
My heart is still racing!
Grand National Day
A lot of you probably don't know this, but I actually enjoy a flutter on the ponies every now and again. I only bet on big races or if we are actually there and I always set myself a limit so I never go over. Winnings are never re-bet either.
In general I am "lucky", raking in £220 on last year's National and over HK$2,000 when we went a couple of years back.
This is the first time I have decided to publish my bets before the race though, so you can see how I get on!
Jasie's Picks:
7. Numbersixvalverde - Last Year's winner, which scooped me a big prize. I reckon that you should not break a winning combo!
30. Silver Birch - Good odds for an improving horse.
Rena's Pick:
25. Longshanks - Hammer of the Scots! Jockey called Dobbin!
Lauren's Pick:
5. Thisthatandtother - She likes "Dis" and "Dat" at the moment, so seemed appropriate.
Jasie's Eachway Longshot:
10. Cloudy Bays - Black and White stripes for the Zebra in all of us!
Friday, April 13, 2007
Friday 13!
I just realised it's Friday the 13th today.
Clearly unlucky for mice!
I have been put forward for a role at a very large computer games company.... I hope there are fringe benefits! I can't say too much but it is "in the game"!
Clearly unlucky for mice!
I have been put forward for a role at a very large computer games company.... I hope there are fringe benefits! I can't say too much but it is "in the game"!
I am not Paranoid!
For once!
This morning I thought I saw something move out of the corner of my eye.... Nothing there.
This afternoon I had the same feeling but this time I got lucky!
Rentokil are coming to make certain this is a one off incident and the lady or gent pictured is very lucky I wasn't in a bad mood, since our neighbour's cat looked hungry! I released him into the wild half a street away from our house - it can annoy someone else!
This morning I thought I saw something move out of the corner of my eye.... Nothing there.
This afternoon I had the same feeling but this time I got lucky!
Rentokil are coming to make certain this is a one off incident and the lady or gent pictured is very lucky I wasn't in a bad mood, since our neighbour's cat looked hungry! I released him into the wild half a street away from our house - it can annoy someone else!
Tuesday, April 10, 2007
Sunday, April 08, 2007
Not Half Bard!
Last night's Doctor Who was excellent. Set in 1599 and involving Shakespeare it was exceptionally well written and despite the topic absolutely triumphed in not being corny.
It's funny I am a big fan of drama that spoofs or tributes to Shakespeare, with my favourites both coming from the pen of Tom Stoppard - Shakespeare in Love and Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead.
I hope the writing of this season of Doctor Who continues to be this good.
It's funny I am a big fan of drama that spoofs or tributes to Shakespeare, with my favourites both coming from the pen of Tom Stoppard - Shakespeare in Love and Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead.
I hope the writing of this season of Doctor Who continues to be this good.
Friday, March 30, 2007
Spring TV Choice
Ahhh, the BBC has rolled out its new Spring TV schedule for Saturday nights...
Plenty for Serena and I with the new series of Dr Who and a new "find someone to be in our muscial" show.
I even liked the new lottery show despite being utterly gutted about not reading about the London audition for it! All that free time on my hands and I missed a TV Quiz Audition 2 miles from my house!
The "Catch-Up" show for the quiz clashes with our trip to Barcelona in June, so I can't even do that one! Maybe I should look at Deal or No Deal?
PS If James or Sally could drop me a note of which BSG episodes they have missed I will encode them to disc with the subtitles and pop them in the post.
Back Home
After a week in Edinburgh we are back home.
We had fun and I know Serena will blog and post photos at great length.
It was great to see Gareth in the flesh (as opposed to on my Screen Saver - don't ask!) and we hit it lucky with the weather for most of the stay, which is always a bonus in Edinburgh!
Friday, March 16, 2007
Thursday, March 15, 2007
Back from first set of travels
Well we enjoyed a nice long weekend in York, which will get some serious blog treatment on the family blog soon.
Breakfast with Bill AGAIN today! Isn't he lucky!
Friday, March 09, 2007
Pleasant Change
Yesterday was refreshing.
I met up with an agent in the morning and didn't leave the session thinking she was a complete prick. In fact she gave me some REALLY good advice and we had a constructive chat about the market place. Fingers crossed as always.
Since I was meeting her in a posh hotel, I thought I had better get reasonably well dressed up, so I had a shave, pulled out a smart pair of trousers, wore a shirt and even pulled out my "sports jacket".
I have to say I have missed being dressed up smart! It was really nice to not feel scruffy! I need to do that more often.
Although, walking the length of Oxford St in that geer turned our to be rather warmer than I expected for a March morning.
Sunday, March 04, 2007
Hot Fuzz
Friday and a gamut of really annoying bullshitters (agents) drove me from the house to the cinema. It was a toss up between Blood Diamond and Hot Fuzz.
Well I decided that "comedy" over "gritty" was what I needed so I settled down in the Vue Acton (a generic Vue cinema clone) and sat back for what I assumed would be a load of pants.
Oh how wrong could I be.
This film is silly. This film is daft. This film was exactly what I needed!
I laughed for the whole two hours. This is way better than Shaun of the Dead.
GO AND SEE THIS FILM! (If you are a guy)
I put that caveat at the end as some girls just won't get it as it is sooooo daft! Others will love it just like I did.
Back to the Beginning
One of the original purposes of this blog was to share my movie reviews with a wider audience and to have an archive of them. Clearly I haven't done this for a while, mainly because Lauren has prevented us from hitting the cinema.
Anyway I have been using my boredom filled moments to catchup on a few films on Sky Movies that I missed last year, so here are some short reviews.
Stealth: Popcorn special for the boys (blue bikinis rule). Beyond that it is crap. 5/10
Revolver: Eh? I don't get it! Enjoyable film but far too clever for me! 6/10
Red Eye: Absolute rubbish! 3/10
Croupier: Finally something worth watching! Excellent cast and a great yarn! 7/10
Changing Lanes: Ben Affleck and Samuel L Jackson wasted on a terrible plot about nasty people! 5/10
The Libertine: Under-rated Johnny Depp film. Weird but enjoyable! 7/10
Chronicles of Narnia: A hell of a lot better than I expected. Something for the kiddies though. 7/10
One more to come, but that gets it's own post.
Friday, March 02, 2007
Tuesday, February 27, 2007
Breakfast with Bill
We went out for our weekly breakfast trip to Balans in Chiswick. I was commenting to Serena that I was fed up of London as I didn't seem to spot any celebrities any more (real or fake ones)!
Of course London decided that this wouldn't do, so we arrived at Balans and found Bill Bailey breakfasting with his family! He looked pretty rough, but I suspect that is "normal" for him!
Best Freeby Ever!
We're back from Edinburgh and had a bit of fun with British Midland on the way up.
They "lost" our car seat in transit from London and so we complained. I filled out the lost luggage forms and mentioned that we were concerned about how we were going to get Lauren to Maggie and Peter's house.
The girl smiled and pulled out a car seat for us (brand new - still in it's packaging). I told her thanks and asked if we just drop it off on our return leg or give it to the courier who would deliver our lost luggage the next day? She told us that car seat regulations were such that it couldn't be reused, so we could keep it!
That means we have been able to leave one with Maggie and Peter so we don't need to lug it up to Edinburgh again!
Wednesday, February 21, 2007
Monday, February 19, 2007
Why so quiet????
I honestly cannot think of anything that has happened recently or that has grabbed my attention on the news that I thought - let's chat about that!
Yes I am being a bit apathetic, but then I am a bit p'd off with not finding a job which I put down to a combination of arsehole agents and a quiet market!
So mainly I have been spending heaps of quality time with Lauren and keeping Serena sane (see her post).
I do read your blogs, and I have even dropped the odd comment in here and there, but generally it is a "quiet news month"!
Yes I am being a bit apathetic, but then I am a bit p'd off with not finding a job which I put down to a combination of arsehole agents and a quiet market!
So mainly I have been spending heaps of quality time with Lauren and keeping Serena sane (see her post).
I do read your blogs, and I have even dropped the odd comment in here and there, but generally it is a "quiet news month"!
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