Life Outside PLT1

Events: Auckland Lantern and Hamilton Food, Wine and Jazz Festival 2010

Read Jawyei’s blog entry on Auckland Lantern and Hamilton Food, Wine and Jazz Festival 2010at http://jawyei.blogspot.com/

Gaming: Neverwinter Nights 2

Read Jawyei’s blog entry on Neverwinter Nights 2 at http://jawyei.blogspot.com/

Movies: Sherlock Holmes

Read Jawyei’s review at http://jawyei.blogspot.com/

Movies: Avatar

Read Jawyei’s review at http://jawyei.blogspot.com/

Movies: Surrogates

Went and saw Surrogates Tuesday (10/11/2009) evening with Alex Mason and Steve Biggins. Was looking forward to this movie as people of my outlook then to be people sitting on a comfy chair typing into a computer and being something more than their real life selves can be. Or maybe that’s just me. I can, however, say that this movie’s premise would appeal to all your WoW players out there and anyone that ever has ever donned an avatar persona. The trailer to the movie can be seen here.

Pros:
Interesting premise of exploring people’s fears of going outside
Properly paced story
Decent action

Cons:
Story was interesting but predictable and fell short
Continue reading Movies: Surrogates…

Gaming: World of Goo

World of Goo, developed by 2D Boy is a physic based game involving goo balls which you interconnect to reach a pipe. Essentially it is a puzzle game with that will test how well you know how things lean and what clever constructs you can build with these balls to reach the suction pipe. Yeah that’s right.

Pros:
Interesting gaming design
Colourful cartoony visuals
Un-intrusive music
Simple controls

Cons:
Game seems short
No save replay
Continue reading Gaming: World of Goo…

Events: Armageddon 2009

Armageddon 2009. A gathering of pulp culture - whatever that means - has happened again. This year they shifted the venue from the Aotea Centre in central Auckland to a bigger venue at Greenlane event centre. The rumour I heard was that the Aotea was over flowing with people that they needed a bigger place to contain all the fan boys/girls. This indicated to me that Armageddon has finally got better and it is finally time for me to return to the event that has disappointed me after years and years. Continue reading Events: Armageddon 2009…

Gaming: Golden Axe Warrior on Sega Master System

No, not the side scroller of fame but the birds eye, top down, action adventure version that maybe a lot of people haven’t heard of released in 1991 called Golden Axe Warrior. A simple way to explain it is, it looks like the original Legend of Zelda on the Nintendo Entertainment System. In fact, I have read from places it was Sega’s way of competing with the NES at the time. If you put a play the games side by side you can see they are nearly identical.

Pros:
Quite colourful and good use of colour.
Music match mood of game.
Easy to pick up and play.

Cons:
Repetitive.
Lack of world map.
Frustrating secrets.
Unimaginative monsters.
Continue reading Gaming: Golden Axe Warrior on Sega Master System…

My new Pelikan

My latest (and 2nd to last for now) pen arrived today. It is a German made Pelikan M400 Tortoise with a Medium Nib. I picked it up from Trademe for $113 including shipping.

The M400 (like all of the Souverän Range) is a piston filler and as such holds a lot of ink. The medium nib, which writes a fine medium line, is a dry writer compared to my other pens. That been said by no means does it not lay down enough ink. The nib is smooth, the smoothest of my collection and the pen is very comfortable in my hands.

Overall I am extremely pleased with my purchase, especially I didn’t really mean to win the auction. I know  it sounds stupid but I placed my bid thinking that I would be out bid. I am now very pleased that I wasn’t!

P.S. If anyone is wanting to get into the fabulous world of fountain pens, I recomend the $45 Lamy Safari (I have an Al-Star which is the metal version).

My God, its full of arse! (Yet more reasons why Vista will chew your soul up and spit it out)

Like a bad daytime television hardsell, microsoft pushes vista. “BUT WAIT THERES MORE”… reasons to not bother.

1) 95% of existing PC’s cannot run vista. The counter argument to this runs something like “oh sure, but new computers will be able to handle it”. Freakin’ Lies: new computers will require about 2GB RAM and a high end GFX card to run Aero (not ripping of Aqua, oh no). You know what that means… the end of cheap PCs. if you want a GameBox, buy a GameBox, but what if i want a spare machine to read email / browse the web / host my porn? It shouldn’t need that much grunt for simple tasks. The argument worsens, what the hell IS vista doing to need all that power? Considered as an OS, all it should be doing is providing normal kernel functions, like process control / hardware abstraction / file management. Microkernels might not be the best idea, but is vista that monolithic that it needs all that just to manage the low level stuff? Considered as an integrated lifestyle solution (sales pitch), when you look at Tiger or KDE or windows with 3rd party apps, they don’t need nearly as much resources.

2) MSSQL server 2005 does not run on vista. I am not joking. when they developed 2005, they just assumed it would run on vista. There goes Microsoft’s major business interest. Who is going to upgrade to Vista if you cant even keep your business data online? Thats just mad.

3) Third party apps are unstable or broken on vista. About a third of common Third party apps don’t run on vista.

4) Thecurity Thecurity Thecurity. Vista promises a more secure “experience”, but does so by disabling functionality. Also the anti Phishing tool (built into the core, not even a module) has already been caught blocking safe things. apparently you can buy certificates from MS, but they have a tiered scheme. The “green” certs are very expensive. “White” certs are meant for small enterprises, but the phishing filter pretty much ignores that.

5) DRM (Dirty Rotten Motherfuckers). DRM is built into the system. For those of you familiar with microsoft’s DRM, you’ll wail now; for those not, it allows you to disable playback for any number of conditions, number of plays, time, anything. Now, that might be fine, if I am informed that shelling out 25USD will get me 5 plays of “dirty lesbian sluts go wild with dildos” ill just not buy it. The question is: are they telling you? What happens when you think you own it? Note that at NO point are they required to tell you this. More importantly though, it makes for a very poor consumer experience, i do ask you all to join me in protest against buying media in such a way.

6) Remote Crippling. Lets say you pirate vista. You are a naughty thing. And the MS have the right to take that away from you. However, they can do so FOR NO REASON AT ALL WITHOUT PROOF. This is actually a complete disregard for due process, guilty until proven innocent. But what does this do? you can only boot into safe mode, and internet access is restricted. Nice, that’ll help contacting MS to clear this up. I claim you rape babies and now I’m locking you up, burden of proof is on you. Meanwhile you are in jail with murderers, ciao.

7) management controls. TOTALLY NEW LAYOUT! A dozen clicks to add a new user. Nothing like the old one. This means that your tech/ops departments are now flying blind. Fucking wonderful.

~INTERLUDE~

reinstalls and volume licensing. Apparently MS will “allow” reinstalls. How magnanimous, especially given that there are 50 million lines of code to go wrong and less backup support than Windows XP. Also, for volume licenses, you now have to either limit your number of installs or shell out for the hardware to manage the keys. Thats right, dedicated key management servers, that you pay for.

9) Image installs. This is supposed to help install third party apps with the system, but is actually a massive security hole. What it means is that if you get some malware on the install you want to clone, your entire organization is infected. Though apparently you cannot install kernel hooks (to prevent malware), but this is removes a major software component: no longer can your AVS watch the data for patterns, it cant get access at that level.

10) Seven different editions. So far there is no real information about upgrading your edition, and all the installs take hours. yayfun.

11) SMB2. Which is not compatible with SMB. But then, SMB was barely compatible with SMB.

12) Driver Signing. Great idea, but you have no choice to opt out if you don’t mind the risk. This is bad for industry, as smaller OEMs might not be able to pay MS for the privilege of having signed drivers. It also means that the time to get your hardware running will increase. Newer hardware will be released slower, as will new drivers. Also, if your hardware is not in the current set of supported items, ye be fucked. This is moving windows to a more integrated platform, much like apple or sun. That was one of the only things going for windows…

13) Porn. Vista is a 10G install. Think of all the porn you could have had for that space, bearing in mind that you can still using Linux or Mac OS to look at your impressive collection of fapping material.

14) Removal of support. Some protocols are no longer supported: IPX, Gopher, WebDAV, NetDDE and AppleTalk. And remember, you cant patch the kernel to support them. Also, Wordpad no longer opens .doc files: this is to make people use Office 2k7, which is vista targeted, increasing the cost AGAIN.

15) XML everywhere. I like XML, its cool. But now everything MS does is based on XML. EVERYTHING! Doesnt matter what it is, XML. Office documents: XML. System Settings: XML. XML even if a better option exists. I cant help but worry about the parser overhead for that…

Apologies to hackra, read his post too.

I’m going to go price Macs and download kubuntu for my acer.

+++TRANSMISSION E1898723(Vista has encountered a fatal error…