Defragged's Blog

Why I shouldn't be allowed to dream

2005-08-31T12:30:00.000+01:00

So there I was, in a big field with loads of people in, with Jonathon Ross on a big stage announcing the surnames that would get tickets to a big music thing. The letters that he read out didn't actually spell any surname that existed, so everyone was quite angry. The reason for this was due to some upcoming nuclear holocaust, that was made out to be my fault, when in fact it obviously wasn't. I then had to escape to some weird tube train/submarine thing to play about with something that looked like a cooker, but I now realise was the nuclear reactor from the end of "The World is Not Enough" starring Pierce Brosnin. I then had to sort out everything that had gone wrong with the help of John Cleese, Jonathon Ross and that actor who plays the bad Bank Manager in the Nationwide adverts, who now realised that I had been framed.

Apparently, the reason people thought that all this was my fault was because the icons in my start menu on my PC kept jumping around.

There was also a bit where I was at Pizza Hut in there somewhere.

Driving Lesson #1

2005-08-02T15:24:00.000+01:00

Just come back from my first driving lesson. Much more fun than I was expecting. However, there are a few things I'd like to see addressed:

All arcade racing game manufacturers from now on must include a clutch pedal. Or alternatively, a little electric shock buzzer that gives you a jolt everytime you use your left foot to press the brake. Years of Ridge Racer and Initial D have tought me that left foot is brake, right foot is acceleration. So when the instructor tells me to press down on the brake, my left foot instintively goes down. My left foot is on the clutch. The engine stalls. Horribly.
Driving instructors should have the power to shoot people who get in my way, or behave inappropriately on the road. I held up a junction for a few minutes. A lot of very nice people had the patience to wait. One twat didn't, and MOUNTED THE PAVEMENT TO GO AROUND ME! See diagram:

Apart from that. Good fun.
Technorati Tags: driving, lesson, car, automobile, driver, car

More bad things...

2005-07-21T13:37:00.000+01:00

It's always interesting to see how the news agencies cover these things. In the last few minutes, the news programs are reporting on something that no-one really knows anything about:

BBC: Street cordened off.
Sky News: OMG NAIL BOMB!

More as it happens. Or at least, as I hear about it happening.

Technorati Tags: london, bomb, explosion, tube, nail, bbc, sky, news

Collaborative Poster: Giant Peach

2005-07-16T20:52:00.000+01:00

Collaborative Poster: Giant Peach
Originally uploaded by jbum.

Just found a mosaic of all the creative commons licensed photo's from the Squared Circle group.

3 of my photo's are in here. One of them I've found, (42,5) Can't find the other two though.

I wonder how much the poster will be?

Technorati Tags: flickr, photo, photograph, mosaic, poster, peach, picture, collaboration, creative commons

Final Fantasy Music on the UK iTunes store

2005-07-16T14:53:00.000+01:00

I had my doubts, but they've finally managed it. I can finally, legally, purchase the final fantasy soundtracks.

Yes.

Technorati Tags: final fantasy, soundtrack, game, music, ost, nobuo uematsu, iTunes

Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.

2005-07-16T13:04:00.000+01:00

After looking through my past purchases on Amazon.com, amazon told me that "You might be interested in sheepskin clothing".

Harsh.

High Game Radio

2005-07-12T19:56:00.000+01:00

After my visitor count goes through the roof, thanks to some kind of foreign newspaper that I've never heard of linking to here, as well as some blog quoting site that again, I've never heard of, it might be a good idea to pimp one of the creative endeavers that I'm involved in.

High Game Radio - A podcast about Gaming, Gadgets, Movies & Anime.

First episode got recorded sometime last week, although due to technical difficulties with our editing software, it still isn't available yet.

Don't know what podcasting is? Check Wikipedia's article on the subject. Or even mine.

Feed to subscribe to is feeds.feedburner.com/HighGameRadio

Technorati Tags: high game, radio, podcast, gaming, video, computer, games, anime, movies, gadgets

Blaire prepares to leave G8

2005-07-07T12:07:00.000+01:00

I'm actually quite surprised he's done this, letting the G8 continue without him, after Britain's effort before the event. Then agan, if he needs to respond to this, it's best to do it in London with the heads of police, security and that COBRA thing etcetera.

Technorati Tags: london, explosion, explosions, tony, blaire, england, prime, minister, G8, summit, , emergency, terrorist, terrorism

Bad things in London

2005-07-07T11:14:00.000+01:00

BBC News cover the event.
Radio 5 Live seems to be covering the event the best. What I've heard so far from 5 Live, News 24, ITN and random strangers on IRC:

Small explosions on the Tube network. Power surges blames. Not sure if anyone took that seriously. Power surges don't cause explosions as far as I'm aware.
Tube network closed. Makes sense.
Bus explodes. Apparently no fatalities, but an eye witness claims that this is unlikely. This is when people decide it isn't power surges.
Reports come in of explosions on actual underground trains. No officially reported fatalities, but a BBC news cameraman claims he's seen at least one death in the tube network.
Zone 1 (Extreme inner city London) bus network closed.
Mobile phone networks get saturated in that area. Unusable.
Public told not to travel unless neccessary (duh).
"Swindon and Brighton railway stations evacuated because of security incidents."
"20 people supposedly dead." (Reported while I was writing this) EDIT: DLTQ.org seems to have picked up on this quote. Official figure's remain at "At Least 2" according to the BBC. Although I can't remember where I heard the 20 figure from, it seems more like speculation than any hard fact. I'll update once I know the truth. EDIT: Sky News says 45 fatalities. This is much worse than I thought.

There's an interview with someone on the radio atm who says that it's quite likely that the underground stuff was unrelated to the overground stuff. Doubtful in my opinion, but certainly interesting.

Technorati Tags: london, tube, bus, transport, explosion, network, bomb, power, surge, terrorist, terrorism, news, report, story

Not a cruise

2005-06-12T17:09:00.000+01:00

Not a cruise
Originally uploaded by Defragged.

I've just come back from my mini-cruise in Southampton, where I saw
many beautiful things. However, because I'm a gimp, I forgot to take my
camera. Meaning that it spent the weekend in a cupboard somewhere in
the Midlands looking at this, while I spent the weekend watching lots of other people
with cameras looking smug.

Microsoft Teach Us L33t

2005-02-18T19:47:00.000Z

Well, just to make sure parent's can truly keep track of what's their kid's get up to, indeed, it must be terrifying to read through a child's chat-log's to be greeted by "1 mµ$7 r3m3mb3r 70 r3n3w m¥ £1br4r¥ b00|{$, 4$ 17 w0µ£Ð b3 ƒ00£1$h 70 b3 ƒ1n3Ð, wh1£$7 m3r3£¥ 7r¥1n9 70 br04Ð3n m¥ h0r120n$", Microsoft have released this guide to leet speak, containing such advice as

Numbers are often used as letters. The term "leet" could be written as "1337," with "1" replacing the letter L, "3" posing as a backwards letter E, and "7" resembling the letter T. "0" (zero) will typically replace the letter "O."

and

Rules of grammar are rarely obeyed. Many leetspeekers will capitalize every letter except for vowels (LiKe THiS) and otherwise reject conventional English style and grammar.

Er, perhaps someone should tell Microsoft that that isn't restricted to 1337 hacksaws anymore.

Technorati Tags: l33t, speak, 1337, microsoft, guide, safety, patronise, parents, children

What OS are you?

2005-02-06T22:01:00.000Z

You are Linux. You’re not as well known as the others, but you have a devoted following bordering on the fanatical, and with your penguin suit and GNU helmet, you will someday bring Microsoft toppling down.

Technorati Tags: operating, system, quiz, manga, os, anime, apple, linux, windows, mac

"The Distinctive Dyers and Dry Cleaners"

2005-01-15T10:43:00.000Z

This was a billboard that sprung up on a main road near to where I live. A few days ago, this was a modern billboard, I think it was advertising cars. Yesterday, someone began taking the old billboard down to replace it with a new one, unveiling this 1950/60's advert for a dry cleaners. I took this picture now, as by tomorrow it'll be gone.

I also want to see if these technorati things work :P

Technorati Tags: coseley, billboard, banner, advert, old, 60's, sixties, 1960, dry, cleaners, dyers, antique, nostalgia

2005 Firework

2005-01-01T14:16:00.000Z

2005 Firework
Originally uploaded by Defragged.

Happy 2005!

God's Dandruff

2004-11-18T18:35:00.000Z

God's Dandruff
Originally uploaded by Defragged.

It's snowing! Snowing! SNOWING! SNOW! YEAH!

Serious HL2 discussion abounds.

2004-11-15T20:22:00.000Z

It's finally clicked!

2004-11-07T16:59:00.000Z

How can you click help, IF YOU CAN'T CHARGE THE MOUSE'S BATTERY?

Rats!

2004-10-22T23:26:00.000+01:00

"Brain in jar flies plane!"

Easyjet costs lowered further! Perhaps.

Longest Song Title Evar

2004-10-16T13:45:00.000+01:00

As heard on Gaming FM

Metal Gear Solid 2 Substance Limieted Sound Track Ultimate Sorter Edition - 'Metal Gear Solid' Main Theme (Skateboarding Remix)

"No, YOU don't seem to understand"

2004-10-14T20:41:00.001+01:00

"So you've seen Lain then?"
"Yeah, some of it."
"Isn't it great when it turns out she's [spoiler]"
"SOME OF IT! LIKE THE FIRST DISC!"
"Oh."
"ARGH!"

"Enter the Nerd Chamber Gorden!"

2004-10-13T18:08:00.000+01:00

"Right, when he comes back, we must all quote from Half-Life to him"
"Ok"
"Sure"
"Here he is"
"Hello"
"Catch me later I'll buy you a beer!"
"You... didn't just do what I think you did, did you?"
"Don't piss me off Gorden"
"Oh my God!"
"Shouldn't you have been in the test chamber half an hour ago?"
"AAAAARRRRGGGHHHHH!

Finally

2004-09-29T19:39:00.000+01:00

Found a freeware NTFS resizer.

Woo!

Videogame Outsourcing

2004-09-25T11:00:00.000+01:00

Apparently the Orc Actors guild isn't too happy about this.

blugraf

2004-09-19T13:55:00.000+01:00

blugraf
Originally uploaded by chomi.

A lovely graffiti mural in Montreal, photographed by Chomi

BKOOOM!

2004-09-04T20:09:00.000+01:00

(+Defragged) My CPU's currently running at a toasty 72 degrees
(+Defragged) which is worrying
(+Mattz) O_O
(+BiG_aL) AHHH
(+Mattz) dude
(+BiG_aL) fuck man turn it off

Why I need to keep an eye on my CPU temperature.

5am Window View

2004-08-30T17:09:00.000+01:00

5am Window View
Originally uploaded by Defragged.

This is in no way a chance for me to test Flickr's 'post to blog' functionality.

Even computers hate me!

2004-08-30T16:37:00.000+01:00

What a putrid waste of a puny penis you are! You should face legal action for your attempt to impersonate a man, you ridiculous little mascara face-painted Jerk-In-The-Box. You couldn't get a date if you bought them dried in a tin, you under-medicated, rump-ruptured chronic self-abuser. You're the kind of greasy, giggling, girly gombeen who buys STDs from a viral lab just to make it look like you get laid. Average looking, my ass. You're uglier than the south-facing end of north-bound mule with a ruptured ulcerated fly-covered rump. All left-wingers are chronic alcoholics who molest small animals, masturbate behind bushes, and wear fish-net tights while singing Elton John songs. You four-eyed, cerebrally-deluded, Einstein-impersonating, pseudo-intellectual nerdturd with a head full of misfiring synapses. Did your mother leave you in the dryer too long when you were a kid, you little tap-dancing Leprechaun in a pink wig? Be careful you don't bump your head on the door handle on the way out. If you turned sideways and stuck out your tongue, people would think you're a zipper, you emaciated fuck. I bet you have to take your salary to the bank because it's too small to go by itself, you pathetic ne'er-do-well. I love that suit you're wearing. You never throw anything away, do you? Now, my little ankle-humping hermit, do me a favour and get your clubfoot stook on a busy train track.

Courtesy of InsultMonger.com

t3h beesteh bOIz r SHEET!

2004-08-13T14:09:00.000+01:00

(+_Max) bah the black eyed peas are shit
(+Defragged) I like them
• +Defragged runs
• +Mattz stabs Defragged in the face
• +Mattz pillages his corpse
• +Garrett joins in

Why I don't like talking about music...

2004-08-13T11:45:00.000+01:00

There SHOULD be a computer here!
Posted by Hello

NO YOU FOOL!

2004-08-11T15:25:00.000+01:00

This is why I shouldn't be allowed to buy PC Components:

(+Defragged) Right, you've all convinced me to switch sides. Name a good 6800GT
(+NE) defragged: cheapest
(+NE) and/or with best software package
(+Defragged) Leadtech Winfast?
(+NE) no
(+Peopls) NO!
(+Peopls) DO NOT FUCKING GET A LEADTEK!
(+Pedge) NO!
(+Peopls) THEY SUCK GIGANTIC DONKEY COCK!
(+NE) Sam always moan about leateks dodgy TV Out
(+Defragged) Thank god I have you guys

Paint-ful

2004-07-29T15:46:00.000+01:00

The person who painted the wall of this entire 3 storey building clearly had a lot of time on his hands. And paint.
Posted by Hello

Electric Direction-Giving Boogaloo!

2004-07-28T13:33:00.000+01:00

"Yeah, turn right mate, it's just round the corner"
Posted by Hello

Slightly more seriously though, these people were breakdancing to the '2001: A Space Odysee' Theme!

Y'arr

2004-07-28T11:54:00.000+01:00

No movie-piracy going on in Spain at all...
Posted by Hello

Fire Entrance

2004-07-28T11:52:00.000+01:00

This was the sign near to my hotel room door. I'm still unsure as to what it meant, and frankly, it scares me. Possible candidates are: "No-Fire Exit" and "Warning: This room may burst into flames at any time"
Posted by Hello

w00t! Sun!

2004-07-13T12:11:00.000+01:00

Well, I'm off on holiday in a few hours. Hopefully I'll be able to get online from the hotel. If I can, I'll try to keep this updated, and post some of the more interesting photos I'll (hopefully) take (thank you imgspot).

Bye [Waves]

I fought the penguin, and won!

2004-06-13T17:56:00.000+01:00

Yay! \o/

Finally got my Printer/Scanner/Memory-Card-Reader/Toasted-Cheese-Sandwhich-Maker to work under Linux!

Thank you HPOJ!
Thank you HPIJS!

Now to get the modem working...

Poke Squelch BZZT "Argh!" Scrape Scrape

2004-05-21T15:31:00.000+01:00

I'fe juss has a fillang puss in wan off mie uppar teef. Consequentleh Ay thound like Ay haff a mouf ful off wassps. It was quite painful too, as fillings go. Hey, it's gone!

Welcome to "If Life Was As Simple As A Webcomic" by Richard Lewis. This is a comic about Jesus living in the 21st century. If you are religious, especially Christian or any other religion placing high emphasis on the prophet known as Jesus, I suggest not reading this webcomic as it will probably offend you.

Don't ask me, I'm just the messenger.

If only I could come up with crazy ideas like that. Like something with monkeys, that CAN TALK! With a flying bicycle. And a policeman named Crazy James! This is going to be ace! MUHAHAHAHA!

Gah!

2004-05-12T19:12:00.000+01:00

Everytime I try and move the stupid thing it leaves a {a} tag open, making everything else on the page below the "Recent Posts" thing become a link to something else.
/me explodes.

Stupid Standards

2004-05-12T18:50:00.000+01:00

The joy of choosing a standards compatiable template is that it should work in any browser. Of course traditionally, most sites instead go for IE compatiablility and leave it at that. Today, I discovered that the little linkeh sidebar I added at the bottom right of this page actually breaks IE, but works fine on Firefox, Opera, Safari and bog standard Netscape.

After a bit of fiddling, I found that it was due to that stupidly wide .gif from Wikipedia spilling into the sidebar, forcing the rest of the stuff down. After a swift commenting away of the offending image (stuff the load times) and it was fixed. Woo!

Damn that was lazy.

Oooh, just noticed I need to move the "I Power Blogger" (nice new-age re-jigging of the old theme) button down a bit. I wonder what that'll break.

With a space for titles too!

2004-05-11T19:03:00.000+01:00

Ooh... It's all curvy, full of stuff on all sides and fully CSS compliant! Yes, it's the theme I've just picked for my blog that I can't quite remember the name of. [thinks] aha! Snapshot! I suppose now the space where my words go is much larger I now have to write a reasonable amount of stuff to avoid looking like a slacker. [counts] 63 words, pfft!

2004-05-11T14:03:00.000+01:00

Bah, the new fancy commenting system doesn't work. At all. Look's like I'll have to change the template as the current robot one isn't available any more. Seems CSS doesn't have a robot class built in. Shame...

2004-05-10T20:41:00.000+01:00

Ooh.. Ooh... That's me that is! Me! Right at the top!

In other news... Ooh, new blogger.com

2004-04-07T14:23:00.000+01:00

The BBC's description of UT2004:
"For the uninitiated, it is a futuristic combat game in which teams of cyber punk-style warriors battle it out across post-modern, dystopian landscapes and Blade Runner-esque interiors with suitably impressive weaponry and heavy armament."

I think they're aiming for the BBC 4 audience with that one...

2004-02-01T17:22:00.000Z

http://www.m-void.co.uk/random.php?Index=nadja_paper.jpg

This shot was taken from the anime Ashita no Nadja which is set in 1904. However, if you look very closely at the top left of the paper, you'll see the headline reads "Clarke in battle over top-up fees". Amazing.

2004-01-29T12:11:00.000Z

Blogger's just deleted the post I've been writing for the past half-hour. Wonderful.
EDIT: Found it!

2004-01-07T18:32:00.000Z

Let them sing it for you is an interesting idea. You type in a few sentances, paragraphs, or just words if you're lazy, and this will sing those words back to you with each word taken from a different song. By your favourite artists probably.

Although it's much more fun just to guess the artist. In fact, I'll give a jelly bean* to the first person who can post a comment with the title and artist of the songs that these words come from.

My, How, Right, Happy, Again

Just copy and paste them into the box on the site.

*The jelly bean thing was a lie.

EDIT: I recognise even more now, try "These" and "Life"

2004-01-07T15:24:00.000Z

Now this

is a good idea. It's the Web Fire Escape. You stick it on your website so anyone browsing at work clicks that link and is redirected to a page more suited to a work environment. And not some lame blog.

2003-12-09T18:04:00.000Z

Now this has cheered me up no end.

I wonder how many people read the article before that warning was placed there, and thought they were reading about a tennis player.

And how many people though that the borg were real.

2003-11-11T13:50:00.000Z

Strange... all the lights in the room I'm sitting in have just gone out.

Even stranger, is why someone would care. People do fill their blogs with a load of crap don't they?

2003-11-10T17:12:00.000Z

Alright, on the count of three, WTF??! This is what happens when you spend all of a computing lesson when you should be learning about arrays and prime numbers GoogleFighting & Google Whacking.

2003-10-28T19:58:00.000Z

BlogShares looks quite interesting. It's a new online browser based game... er... thing where players trade in a valuable commodity. Blogs. That's right! If you own a popular blog then cash in on... er... virtual cash!

It doesn't sound quite as exciting now.

2003-10-10T15:40:00.000+01:00

hmm, according to theotaku.com, I am

What NERV Child Are You?.
This is scary, expecially considering that according to the same site:

Who's Your Anime Girlfriend?

Update
It just get's better and better! Now it's just downright insulting me!:

What Anime Art Style Are You?

2003-10-07T20:09:00.000+01:00

It's funny, since Blogger's purchase by Moogle, more and more ads for COMPETING blog services are appearing on the Google adwords at the top of the page.

2003-10-07T19:45:00.000+01:00

Who on earth is Andrew Sullivan? And why do links to his site appear in the ad banner? And more importantly, why did my browser crash when I right-clicked the link?

Uh-oh... "Site description: Advocates gay rights as well as conservatism. Includes a daily column, interviews, book reviews, and..."

2003-10-06T19:03:00.000+01:00

A popular argument in the PC vs. Consoles debate is usability. With consoles you just stick the disk in and play. With PC's you have to spend ages installing and messing around with settings for hours and hours until you finally reach the point where you can play the game.

I know just as well as you do that's bull. It takes a few minutes at the most to get a game installed and 9 times out of 10 there aren't any problems. Of course, sometimes you come across software that just doesn't want to work.

Take the new Worms 3D demo for example. I unzipped the file and opened up the folder to be greeted by a bunch of .cmd files. I've never come across these before, and they weren't associated with any programs. I was about to give up when I noticed a clue. READ ME FIRST.txt. Now I was getting somewhere.

"Double click run.cmd to play Worms 3D". Drat. I opened up the files in notepad to see if I could make any sense of it. It looked like a bunch of DOS commands, so, I tried my luck and renamed it "Run.bat". Success! The game window opens and I wait. Then a critical error appears and I'm stuck. Something about regserv. I knew this was something to do with registering dll's (the name was a clue), so I decided to save it the bother and copied the dll's into the windows directory myself, changing the references to them in the .bat to point to there new home in the windows directory.

Success! The game loads, I watch the intro movie and the main menu appears. Easy. Feeling quite chuffed I hit 'Play'. "Loading". Just a short wait until some wriggly goodness ("And in the game too" yells the crowd).

Thatbloodydllthing.exe has caused an error and will be shut down. Then my PC locks up. I give up and delete the folder. Then wipe it with PGP for good measure.

2003-10-05T19:47:00.000+01:00

I've just noticed that the ads at the top of the page change depending on the content of this page. Let's try and confuse it:

[Removed: Why? I confused it too much...]

2003-10-05T13:12:00.000+01:00

Well, now I've actually decided to use my DeviantArt account for something, here's a HomeWorld 2 wallpaper I made: 800x600.

2003-09-23T19:53:00.000+01:00

Just tried setting up my mail account to work with Mailkey, thinking I'd cash in on their "free account" giveaway. Mailkey is a service that aims to stop spam by asking people who send you email to verify that they're not dirty rotten spammers by asking senders to stick a short code in the Subject header the first time they contact you.

To speed up the process, I imported my Outlook Express address book into mailkey, so far so good. Then I find out that everyone in my address book - friends, family, distant relatives, website admins, writers, people on my MSN Messenger contact list who I don't actually know a "Defragged has just added you to his 'Accepted senders' list! Click here to find out more about mailkey!" email.

IT'S AN ANTI-SPAM SERVICE THAT SPAM'S YOUR ENTIRE ADDRESSBOOK!

2003-09-19T19:40:00.000+01:00

SUsE Linux has finally arrived, and it's turned out to be much more reliable than any of the "Free" distro's (and I mean free as in cash, not speech). I suppose that's what you'd expect though. Overall I'm impressed. It offers many of the features that Microsoft make you upgrade to XP professional to get...

This is starting to look like a really crap review. I'm going to stop now.

Can't think of anything to write now...

2003-07-16T11:41:00.000+01:00

I've been messing about with Knoppix, a Linux distribution that runs straight from CD, for a few hours now and it's pretty damn impressive. Unfortunately, whilst resizing my C: partition to accomodate a new 5GB Linux partition and 128MB swap partition, I managed to completely erase my Windows registry, stoping most of my apps from working. And of course, scanreg.exe is loaded from a registry entry, meaning that it hasn't been keeping backups so I'm just gonna have to reformat and start over.

In other news, I'm back from the dentist to have a filling. And my mouth is kiling me.

2003-07-10T15:22:00.000+01:00

Thought for the Day
Is it possible to be stupidly intelligent?

2003-07-05T19:02:00.000+01:00

Well, here's an interesting distributing computing program I've come across: Grub. Ratehr than using your spare CPU cycles to fight Aids, Cancer and Smallpox, or searching for aliens (which we'd probably just blow out of the sky anyway), this uses your spare bandwidth to help crawl every site on the the internet, EVERY DAY! (although the reasons for this are unclear, I'll assume that it's to create a huge search engine). It's not perfect. If, like me, you tend to use up most of your 56K line downloading huge files and run Grub at the same time, the sites you crawl time out before they can respond, leading to a lot of 404's being reported incorrectly, which kicks you off the project. Although it's really meant for use as a screensaver. And scores extra points forhaving a cute little worm animation showing you it's status.

Other News
The Cassandra Project: Bloody Great
Wristwatch with inbuilt 256MB Flash Memory: This is so cool! A normal sized wristwatch with 256MB of storage inside. It connects to your PC through a USB cable which discreetly fits inside the strap.
Google Toolbar 2.0: The new release adds a pop-up blocker, Webform auto-filler and BlogThis! support.
Advance Wars: The reason my posts are so rushed.

2003-07-03T15:37:00.000+01:00

Fileplanet hates me. It's the only way I can explain whats been happening to me. As previously mentioned, The Cassandra Project has been released and, like any self-respecting games-person, I tried to. Here's everything that happened to me:

11:30AM - Start to download the file from Fileplanet, and for the first time ever, NO QUEUE!. Have to stop after 10mins though due to phone call. That I understand. That's just dumb-luck.

12:30PM - I start the download, apparently it should take 2 hours. After 1hr30mins though Explorer.exe goes, taking all of my windows and apps with it Except one. The file download. Phew. Then, 10mins later, kernel32 goes, taking my entire PC with it.

12:31PM - Shouted and screamed mostly.

12:35PM -Had to come off the internet again, due to another phone call.

2:00PM - After a reccomendation from 'Subjective Effect' at TTLG.com to use Opera, I do so. I then notice that it comes with a download manager, which I use. With about 10 minutes to go, I have to come off the internet again. No worries, Opera will let me continue surely.

4:00PM - Try to restart the download, only to find that after pressing 'Resume', the file is reported as complete. I thought this was odd, but opened the file anyway.

Cassandra.exe is corrupt. PLease try downloading again.

3:01PM - Punched monitor.

3:01.7PM - Screamed in pain.

4:45PM - After trying download again, with 15mins left I leave to get a newspaper, happy in the knowledge that Cassandra will be waiting for me when I get home.

4:55PM - Nothing! The download window dissapeared for no reason while I was away, Cassandra.exe was nowhere to be found! Not even an error message left to mock me!

8:00PM - Tried a different mirror. Worked perfectly.

2003-07-02T11:46:00.000+01:00

Although it's probably bad form to post a link to something taken directly from someone elses weblog, I'm going to do it anyway. This deserves it.

Anyway, the first episode of The Cassandra Project has been released! (fireworks and huge brass band can be heard in the distance) The Cassandra Project is a single-player mod for Deus-Ex with the involvement of Kieron Gillen, of PC Gamer UK and HIT fame, and a crack team of Deus-Ex modding people.

Get it from:
Fileplanet (24.1MB)

2003-06-30T20:03:00.000+01:00

Nothing at all of any relevence to anything has happened today, so I'll just start writing any old nonsense. Perhaps about Instant Messaging clients. Yes...

The Instant Messaging Rant

As everybody is probably aware, MSN Messenger 6.0 was 'leaked' out from Microsoft HQ a few weeks ago, probably by a crack team of secret agents under fire from jumpsuited henchmen. After this it spread throughout the internet like wildfire, and was promptly removed from each by Microsoft. I found a copy of the file, linked to by a forum, on a hastily set up FTP server. After using it since, I can honestly say that Messenger 6.0 is going to change many peoples IM app.

Which leads quite badly onto my main point, what do people want from an IM app? Now, my favoured app has been ICQ since I started using the internet 4 or 5 years ago. At the time, it was probably the most popular IM app around, especialy with gaming clands and the like. It's still my favourite simply because it offers much more than any other instant messaging app I've used. It's slightly harder than other apps to get your head around though.

Which is why it's not so popular now.

Now, the internet is swarming with relative newbies, no bad thing of course, who need a way to keep in touch with their friends. They'll pick the app which all their friends use. This is the reason I have to use MSN Messenger. Even though MSN Messenger is perfectly good at what it does, chances are the only reason MSN was chosen as there IM app of choice was that there default homepage was, and still is, msn.co.uk. These are the same people who are unaware that they have 10 e-mail addresses with 10MB of space free with their ISP, and instead use hotmail accounts. (I'll admit that this is fairly hypocritical of me, as I have foregone my ISP e-mail/webhosting e.t.c. for third party services, however in my defence, I'll say that my ISP's provided services are, in all honesty, crap)

But the real problems occur when you have contacts on different IM's, as I do. My 'real-life' friends are on MSN, my gaming buddies are on ICQ, my families on AIM. This means running 3 different applications at the same time, draining vitally important resources which I could use for other things, like quake. One way around this is to run one of the IM apps that can communicate with different networks. Trillian is a great example of one of these. It lets you talk to people on MSN Messenger, ICQ, Yahoo!, AIM (most of the time) and IRC (I think). Perfect. At the moment this is the best solution for me. However the subtle differences between the way each network handles different tasks often makes things more complicated, for me at least. (Just so you know, I haven't actually used Trillian for over a year, so my memories of it may be a little hazy).

So what do I do? At the moment, I use MSN as my primary messenger, I run ICQ whenever my system has enough resources and Y! and AIM if I ever have to meet people who use them. And with MSN 6.0's, relatively, unique features will probably make it even more popular.

Which is no bad thing :-)

Get Trillian Here!

2003-06-29T17:04:00.000+01:00

In one of the greatest merchandising ideas the world has ever seen, I've just realised that GoogleStore sells 'I'm Feeling Lucky' boxer shorts. Absolute brilliance!

2003-06-28T17:12:00.000+01:00

Whilst on my travels of far and wide, (the local town centre), I saw an interesting sign outside a 'Beauty' shop: Natural Ear Piercing! Now, this might just be because of my limited knowlege of beauty products, but I wasn't aware that there was such thing as unnatural ear piercing.

2003-06-28T12:09:00.000+01:00

Well last night was good fun. The evening started off ok after eating my tea and, rather importantly, a huge quantity of peanuts. After this, I went to the cinema to see Bruce Almighty with some friends. The film was 'Ok' (an opinion I've held of any film I've seen during the past two years), however there was one thing that probably limited my enjoyment of the film.

I was sick.
Exorcist sick.
4 times.
Over a period of two hours.

Luckily though, I planned ahead with my improvised sickbag taken from the Pick'n'Mix stand!

On a less disgusting note, before I saw the film I popped into the Bowling alley to have a quick go on the DDR Euromix 2 machine. I managed a great, and awful game. The awful game was my vain attempt to get myself onto the hi-score screen playing the 5-stage nonstop course 'Normal 2' I think. I did crap! The thirs song of the stage was this horribly slow 70 BPM track that was only rated 5 feet. And I failed it! NAARGH!

The great game was the one where I picked 3 random tracks that I'd never done before, passed them all and managed to pass my first 9-footer, Hypnotic Crisis. Yay!

And the ShoutOuts are apparently 'Closed for Maintenence'.

And Blogger V2.0, or whatever it's called is a vast improvement on Bloggers previous version. Nice one! Although now the site isn't actually publishing now, so you can't read this yet, although I have a feeling that's more to do with blogspot.com than blogger.

2003-06-27T18:03:00.000+01:00

During todays Richard & Judy (I know, sad), there was an interesting article about a new cult set up by Danny Wallace, (of 'Are You Dave Gormon?' fame, amongst other things...). The cults priciple belief is that every Friday, now know as Good Friday, you must perform a good deed and generally be nice to people. To join, simply send a passport sized photo to Danny Wallace, whatever his address may be. Anyway, now I'm off to the cinema to see Bruce Almighty. Should be interesting.

2003-06-25T00:17:00.000+01:00

And I'm finally back from seeing Bon Jovi in concert. I use 'saw' in the loosest possible terms. We didn't actually go to the concert itself. We were standing on the wall of an adjacent car-park around 500 metres away. The tiny little singing man in the distance might not actually have been Bon Jovi. I hadn't so much as heard of them until 6pm this evening, let alone know what they looked like. It wasn't half bad either.

2003-06-24T13:08:00.000+01:00

Or maybe the whole surname thing is meant as some higher power's (insert your favoured religion/deity here) way of telling me something. This isn't that important! The fact that you are so bothered by this whole thing proves that you, need a hobby! Or perhaps not...

2003-06-23T20:15:00.000+01:00

Now the shoutouts are back, I can't open my bcentral account to get my fastcounter. I login with .net passport: Your .net passport does not have a bcentral account linked with it. So when I follow the instructions to link the accounts, I am told that they are already linked. To make matters worse, I've forgotton the password to my bcentral account anyway.

As well as that, I'm currently in an MSN IM conversation with someone. He says that he knows someone with my surname, who went to the same primary school as me, in the same year as me, and I can't remember this person for the life of me. Now, my surname isn't the most common of names, and I'm sure I'd remember someone with my name. It seems life gets stranger every day...

In other news, the hayfevers gone. Yay!
And the backaches have returned. Argh!

2003-06-23T14:52:00.000+01:00

And now the shoutouts have disapeared. Is that how you spell disapeared? [Opens Word and checks] Apparently it's "Disappear". Double P's will be the death of me.

2003-06-23T14:35:00.000+01:00

Right, I need something to fill the time. As I'm starting AS level computing in 2 months, it might be worth getting a headstart. Things to do include:

Learn some sort of programming language. My tutor recomended DarkBasic, but I don't think the £60 would be worth spending and my demo ran out long ago.
Get a decent website up and running. This means getting a decent design package and actually learning how to design stuff. (I have all the artistry and design skills of a cucumber.) I suppose I sould tie this in with 1. and learn ASP or PHP. I'd rather learn ASP (I'm a Microsoft kid :-) ), but most MS ASP tools require XP or 2000 to run properly and I'm stuck with ME. Although I do have an unused 180-day trial of XP Professional knocking around upstairs if I can be bothered finding it.
Work out how to get to my college. This might seem very obvious, but I haven't even done this yet!
Get a job. Working on it :-) Not sure where to go though. Nowhere I'm interested in actually has any vacancies, although I'm planning to send applications off to them all anyway and hope my enthusiasm shines through. Will it heck!

2003-06-23T13:20:00.000+01:00

I'm not sure why I'm posting here, I never update the blog and no-one reads it. I actually forgot that it existed, but now I seem to have a lot of free time on my hands so I may as well do something with it. That free time that I have is because my exams are now over and I never have to go back to school ever again. Usually I'd put a 'Yay!' or something after that, but right now I'm just filled with boredom. Apparently I ought to look for a job... Yes, that may work.

2003-03-02T19:15:00.000Z

And the table's don't seem to work properly in Mozilla. Usually I'd ignore it and say "no-one uses Mozilla", except I use it. Which is a problem.
Anyway, it's worth giving Mozilla a try as a browser. Unless you want this page to work properly.

2003-03-02T19:10:00.000Z

Yay! It works!

2003-03-02T18:46:00.000Z

Why is my name showing up as 'Mark'? I didn't put that as my nickname did I? Hopefully this template edit should sort it out.