Synchronous

A kinda... lightish red

2006-10-23T10:15:00.000+02:00

I just saw this news post on the Nintendo site, and it made me think of Waynne =)

"Pretty in Pink - A new colour of DS Lite joins the range, and we’ve got a brand new microsite to show off all its pretty features"

C'mon, you know you want one ;)

Lunchables

2006-10-13T13:58:00.000+02:00

The suggestion this morning by Hannes that we go through to Kalkies for fish and chips at lunch was initially met by skepticism from me. A Kalk Bay harbour fish and chips place sounded really dodgy, and I was not disappointed on that front when we did finally arrive there. The food was really excellent, albeit a little oily. "I don't think I've had this much oil in one sitting in a long time" was BB's comment, and had me thinking of stories of kiddies drinking from the sunflower oil bottles. Loei was lucky enough to be hit on by the waitress when she slapped his arse and said "No bums on the table!". I think that means she likes you, buddy. Blushing like a schoolgirl only makes them more interested. As we were finishing up, the guy at the table next to use really drove home how high-class an establishment it was by pouring himself a glass of wine from the papsak he had brought along. No corkage, I guess, if there's no cork.

But really, an excellent outing, for an excellent Friday.

Changes (not like Tupac)

2006-10-04T10:51:00.000+02:00

It really is starting to get to summer now. Dubious mornings followed by pretty hot days are forcing me to wear my zipoffs more often than not. Not that I'm complaining, even tho I have always preferred winter to summer.

Work has got me writing documentation again, albeit for a short while and interspersed with coding. It does make for a nice change, and at least this lot is low stress.

Julie left for Jozi this week Monday. The weekend was largely taken up by goodbye events for her, starting with drinks at the Planet bar in the Mount Nelson on Saturday evening. It's a really nice place, albeit rather expensive. A nice occasional outing place for pretending to be civilized. Sunday morning saw me fetching Julie for CT station where she put her car on the train, since Al has done something to his car. He wasn't specific and mumbled a bit, so I'm not sure what, but he was driving it the next day, so who knows. Breakfast at the B&B in Harfield was the reward for the lift. Sunday lunch was at Montebello off Newlands Avenue, which was enjoyable despite the slightly slow service. The burger I had was really good, especially after I scraped off most of the FLAMING hot home-made chutney.

It looks like Al is leaving Cape Town for a while. He's not exactly sure when, but it will probably be sometime this month (edit: actually it seems end of November is more likely). Our Thursday D&D game will be poorer for it (read: non-existent). Also, Lucas might get Greg to take his room... we will have to see how that goes ;) At least that way I won't be missing out on lengthy lectures about The War ^_^

[WoW]
60 is definitely the place to be. There is so much more content available to me now, and so many divers think to do. I was kicked out of my PvP guild (Happy Tree Friends, the one with the pink tabard) at lvl59 cos they were doing a massive cleanup, and now I have joined Disabled, a pretty decent PvE guild. I've run Zul'Gurub twice, and will probably run it again tonight.

I have three pieces of my Feralheart set, which was quite a damn mission to upgrade to from the three Wildheart pieces I bought. I still need to do a couple of instances over and over and over to get what I want for it.
[/WoW]

Chibineko

2006-09-06T16:11:00.000+02:00

My first few days back at work have been very documentation-filled. As was mostly expected, although I have done even less coding than I thought, which was not much to start off with. I’m used to documentation, having done a bunch of it for ISO purposes at a previous company, but the OB format I am still getting used to. Thank goodness Chelle is one of our primary document producers ^_^ I just ask her when I get stuck with something.

Kieran joined our Tuesday Shadowrun game last night. Finally, I get another magic user to talk to! The smelly Troll Adept totally doesn’t count. And complete bonus that she is a young Japanese lady =) Also, Kieran might be just what we need to get some actual roleplaying done, rather than constantly having Yancke going off on a tangent. He promised to stab anyone who went off-track with Chelle’s letter opener. He ended up having to stab himself 3 times, and only threatening anyone else once. That once was also James, the DM. And he still tries to claim it’s not him that’s the disruptive influence.

[WoW]
I hit lvl 52 yesterday, amongst much celebration and spending of gold on talents. In the process, I also managed to farm sufficient [Glowing Scorpid Blood] to get my [Darkmoon Faire Storage Box], finally! While killing the Scorpok Stingers, I also dropped a [Journeyman’s Backpack], another 14-slot container. And when I finally found a rogue to open the lockboxes I had been hoarding, I found ANOTHER! Fantastic! Now all of my bags that I carry around are 14 slots, and one of my 4 bank bags too. The other three are 12 slots. The next bank slot will cost me 50g =/ Not sure if that is worth it juuust yet.

Looking at the other Darkmoon Faire rewards, I see one of the epic Necklaces gives +22 to all healing (amongst a bunch of other fantastic stat upgrades). Now, it takes 1200 tickets (which I estimate at 6000 Scorpoks), I have to be lvl55 to even do the handin for it (so 3 lvls away), and I can only wear it at lvl60. So, is it worth it? Or should I farm for a [Darkmoon Faire Storage Box] for my other characters rather? I think I will start off with farming for the boxes first, since I can do the amulet in 2 months time, when the Faire next comes to Mulgore. 2 months is a long way away tho…

PvP rewards are looking very tasty too. I’ve got the [Scout’s Tabard] and the [Insignia of the Horde] already, next up the cape, then the pauldrons. Sp many things to do, so little time! My guild, Happy Tree Friends, is a PvP guild after all, so I should do my best there. Of course, hitting 60 and doing premades with them would be ideal, so maybe I should just grind. If I get bored of Hippogryphs and Scorpoks for the Faire, there is always Argent Dawn or Timbermaw rep to grind.
[/WoW]

zomg 3 in a row!

2006-09-03T13:09:00.000+02:00

I am now back from PE, and not too mentally scarred by the double 8 hour car trip with Yancke, or by meeting Yancke's family. However, some things about Yancke make a lot more sense... his entire family is mad! As Lucas said, 'Well it looks like Yancke turned out pretty all right after all, all things considered'. Or something like that, I paraphrase for humorous effect. His mom was actually really cool, I enjoyed chatting to her =) Dad and bro were not terribly chatty, so I didn't get too much of a feel for them.

Colleen's party on the Saturday was a liiitle bit of a mixed bag. The beginning was terrible, with these retarded metalheads heckling and laughing from the sidelines as Lucas, Si and myself danced. It picked up a lot as the night progressed, and soon enough a large portion of the 100-strong crowd were dancing at various points =) Sadly, the metalheads made the floor a couple of times when the other DJ was playing (you guessed it) metal, making the whole experience unpleasant for everyone. Well, whatever, they suck and I probably never have to see them ever again. Which makes me happy. With any luck, they will not want to come back for the next party, since there was very little thrash metal played, despite their constant requests for some 'motherfucking thrash, like Lamb of God'.

There was not much to do during the day with Colleen at work and Yancke supposed
to be writing an essay (but actually playing AI DotA mostly), so I had to entertain myself. I ended up watching a lot of movies, including Hoodwinked (such potential, but crap), Shaun of the Dead (awesome), Sky High (amusing but blatantly Disney), Aeon Flux (pretty, but not good), Cassanova (very funny, I like Heath) and Lord of War (fantastic, and not disturbing at all - this might make me a bad or insensitive person). What can I say, the video store near to Colleen's (very very nice) house in Walmer was having a 2 for 1 special =) I also went to the game arcades in both Greenacres and Walmer malls, and got in some Metal Slug 5 & 6, and clocked House of the Dead III, using about 12 or 13 credits. Half an hour of awesome gameplay for R13? Totally worth it.

So all in all, a pretty awesome trip =) It would have been much better were Colleen on holiday or if I had more friends with me, but I am still very glad I went =D It was very cool chatting to Colleen again after so long of nothing but GChat convos.

However, getting back to my WoW character was pretty fantastic too. However, the realms have been FUCKED on and off since I got back. Not good, they better fucking give us a free day for this shit. What, are Blizz too poor to afford decent hardwire? Or hire people rather than monkies to run the show? Grates my tits.

After a long long DotA hiatus, I finally pitched at a lan on Friday night. The rust on my play took quite a while to abate slightly, but I had a really good time, and so will make a bigger effort in future. At one point, the DotA clanmembers who were there wanted to run a practise team match against the rest of us, 'just a quick game for practise, it won't even count and will be over quickly'. They sucked SOOOOO badly, it was fantastic. We (the n00bs) all played fantastically, and despite them still winning, we made them bleed every step of the way. Not what they were expecting =) Yancke, in his inimitable way, told them that if they played like that at the tournament next weekend, they were FUCKED. We laughed, quietly, on the inside =) Such satisfaction.

Another gaming hiatus was broken today, with Beth and Garrick coming over to play Soul Calibur. That I am thankfully not rusty at =) Or if I am, everyone else is just as rusty. Oo, I am looking forward to the Tekken tournament at schpatcon =) That will 0wn.

Yay! US public holiday tomorrow, which I am taking =) So, WoW until late tonight, sleep tomorrow.

Destroying arguments since whenever

2006-08-22T15:25:00.000+02:00

I just had to repost this from Firegolem's blog, especially after reading Zenstar's post about the Crazy at Stones. Classic =)

The more things change, the more they stay the same

2006-08-21T15:12:00.000+02:00

Reading through my last two blog posts, it seems to be a crazy mirror of what has been going on. DotA has been completely superceded by WoW, but the amount I play has certainly not decreased. Every day. It is unbelievably good.

Also, I mention that Colleen was coming down to CT in March. Next week, I am going up to visit her =) My first trip to PE, and my first roadtrip ever where I will be a licensed driver. Yancke was making vague noises about joining me for the trip up to visit his family, but that was a while ago and I'm sure he's forgotten. I shall have to remind him, a halving of the petrol bill will be most welcome. Icon has left an unpleasant dent in my pocket.

Dragonfire was this weekend, and proved most enjoyable. The Shelagh was down, which was fantastic, and it was a lot of fun playing with her again. She is an exceedingly accomplished roleplayer. Robyn also came down, but not to attend the con at all. She rocked up on Saturday for a teeeeny amount of time, and then her and her b/f bailed to go do touristy things. Meh. Sed, Si, Ada and myself were invited to her parents' place for dinner that evening, which was a very pleasant evening of catching up with Robs, and Sed as well who I haven't seen for aeons.

In further parallels (this time from the second to last post), I was quite sick last week, for three days. Crap, cos I felt like shit. Cool, cos I got to play WoW all day =)

Other events since the last time I posted including getting and losing a girlfriend, my grandfather dying, passing one of my MCSD exams (SQL), a work paintball event and Waynne's bachelor party.

Oh, and anyone who has an active blog that cares, please let people know that I am posting again. I don't want to spam everyone with emails or IMs or whatever. Viral information spread is better, and cooler-sounding.

I will be adding a WoW section to all of my posts, at the end so those not interested can skip. They will be appropriately labelled. Also, no complaints if there appear a plethora of posts that contain solely WoW content =P

[WoW]
My main, Grothar, has just run Uldaman for the last time ^_^ The 2h mace I wanted off Archaedas, the end boss, just dropped. [Rockpounder] is mine at last! Whee! Now on to ZF, and maybe Mara again, actually killing the princess this time, unlike my first abortive run thru it.

My tailoring alt, Kaeljin the troll shammy, has just twinked his tailoring up to 150, and now needs to be level 20 before he can upgrade his tailoring max, so he'll need to be speed-levelled at some point.

Then in a shock move, Gus at work has just deleted his 60 hunter and 47 lock, citing his complete addiction to the game as the reason. He will be missed =( With all my other stupid friends playing Alliance, thus robbing me of the opportunity for easy party play (thanks guys), I am now more or less all alone on the Horde side of Haomarush. My horde friends include Tai at 56, Sed at 24 and some other guys at work hanging around 20-something. Ah well, I guess it's solo play until I can level up to 60 and start instancing with my guildies. Gus did manage to wangle me into his guild just before he left, so that's pretty cool at least =)

Well, I guess I'll just have to wait for Chelle and Alex to organise ADSL and WoW to get some decent party action in. Until then, enjoy the Alliance, mofos. We'll be coming for you someday.
[/WoW]

.A

2006-03-15T15:01:00.000+02:00

This last week has been crazily DotA filled. I think I've played close on 15 games, an average of 2 per day. Crazy shit! I am getting to learn the recipes and builds a lot better tho, and I'm also teaching Al and Claire how to play. Well, last night Lucas was tutoring her, and it was proving to be a slightly frustrating experience ;) We pulled through in the end tho, so all good. Perhaps we should start upgrading the AI to Insane (we've been playing on Normal). I am really enjoying Shadelzare Silkwood, the Vengeful Spirit. Nether Swap + Magic Missile is fantastic ^_^

The car is still all good, if a little expensive. Really, nothing is gonna compare to an R128 monthly train ticket, but the convenience is totally worth it.

Colleen's coming down this weekend, which should be cool =) It'll be good to see her again ^_^

And that's it for the post. Nothing else interesting has been happening.

Cool or crap?

2006-03-08T18:11:00.000+02:00

Firstly, my apologies to anyone who heard via the grapevine, or just have not heard at all, but Candice and I broke up about... oh, two and a half weeks ago. I just... wasn't really up to talking about it.

In happier news, I have a car to call my very own ^_^ A 1988 Toyota Corolla 1.6GL automatic. Driving an automatic is perhaps the laziest thing I have ever done in my life, and that should tell you something. I feel that it's roughly equivalent to phoning your mom from your cellphone to come home and pass you the TV remote cos you can't quiiiiite reach it. Yeah, something like that. Anyway, it's fantastic being free =)

Details promise to generate too long a post for my current posting stamina, so here are the highlight:

Richard's car was broken into while I was borrowing it. It turned out as an expensive fix due to complications
Power has been fucking us around at work. Getting Richard's car fixed and my new automobile sorted out has been fucking me around even more than others
I was sick for the last two days. Crap, cos I was feeling like shit. Cool, cos I got to play Soul Calibur 3 all day (when I wasn't sleeping)

So, as you can see, it's been a pretty damn mixed bag the last two and a half weeks. I'm still pondering whether it's been more crap than cool, or vice versa. I'll let you know when I decide.

RBS

2006-02-02T16:39:00.000+02:00

This past week I've been working on a project for a client that we really want to get as a long-term, recurring customer. It's been quite stressful and insanely busy, but a lot of fun nonetheless =) I've moved desks in the office to a much more fun section than the one I was sitting in, and I'm really enjoying working with the people I am on this project. A step up, definitely =)

Tuesday roleplaying was once again non-existant, with James arriving an hour and a half late. As usual, we sat around and talked rubbish for a long time. Here's hoping for a better session tonight =)

Last night was my first hockey match of the summer league season. Boy, did I feel it. I had a lot of fun even though we lost 4-0, and I made a couple of nice passes, intercepts and runs, so I'm happy with my performance. My fitness level leaves a lot to be desired, but that will improve with time.

And now I must bid you Sayonara, for I must away to a meeting.

It's a small world after all

2006-01-30T17:40:00.000+02:00

I ran into a friend of mine from a while back at Cavendish last weekend, and this weekend we hung out for most of Saturday. She came back to my place to pick up some movie CDs, and it turns out that her boyfriend is an ex-flatmate of Alastair's. Weird stuff, Cape Town is a very small place. I like when I can bring random friends of mine home, and all my housemates can talk to her about people they both know ^_^

Friday night was Lucas' semi-abortive attempt at organising a work outing to Obs. The only work people who joined us turned out to be CLAWmembers as well, so it might just as well have been a CLAW outing.

On Sunday Alastair and I went out to the new Woolworths on Durban road (near the Red Cross) to grab some lunch. On the way out, we popped into the video store there (a Vee's), and they had... Soul Calibur 3 ^_^ We couldn't not rent it, so rent it we did =) We then went straightaway to fetch Candice so she could join in the crazed SC3 playing. A very enjoyable game, and Al seems keen to buy them. Everything looks fantastic, especially the arenas. Abyss' level has a massive comet streaming past in the background, it looks like something out of a movie. Beautiful!

Tonight I think I will catch up on my Dark Chronicle playing, since I haven't played in a while. Also, I must finish up reading Naruto and Abhorsen. Yay ^_^

Ha ha bonk

2006-01-23T16:00:00.000+02:00

After an unexpectedly long break in my internet access, I am finally back and blogging. I've been at Openbox for just over a week now, and it is fantastic but far busier than Synergy. Finding the time to blog, forum, game and read webcomics has become a lot harder, especially with me generally being so busy in the evenings. I was originally intending on staying pretty late every day to get my fixxxxx, but instead I have been arriving at work later. Such are the joys and perils of flexitime. Hopefully we will get a wireless net connection at home in the near future.

In gaming news, I have been playing a hell of a lot of Dark Chronicle on the playstation. I've racked up 35 hours of play time on Al's memory card so far, and this unnerves me. I have thus purchased my very own card, to ensure my peace of mind (and so that I can play elsewhere if I so desire, or Al does something inconsiderate like removing his PS). This also means that I can play the Soul Calibur 2 single player missions myself, from the beginning. I don't really see myself gaming on the PC anytime soon.

Ada's party was on Friday night, and a generally fun time seemed to have been had by all. Candice was dead tired and so went home earlyish (but was totally lounging on me up until that point, so that was alright ^_^). Afterwards, Al decided that it was time to edumacate Lucas, Claire and myself about the 'joys' of whiskey. Of course, he fed us a shot of tequila and three (in my case) or 4 (for everyone else) shots of Vodka to get us to agree. I did learn a fair amount about whiskey. Sadly, I still feel that it tastes disgusting.

Saturday started off as an errands day, but those were soon done and it morphed into a visit-Candice-at-work day, followed by a further morph into a play-Dark-Chronicle-all-day day.

Candice is collecting the Naruto manga at the moment (4/26, or so she found out the other day) and is finding it hilariously funny. When I discovered that Neil had 161 episodes of the anime, I of course picked them all up from him. Sunday was the day we discovered just how truly hilarious it is. I bent the legs on Lucas' stool while falling off it laughing. Yes, it's funny, trust me. The storyline is about Naruto, a 13 year old ninja in training with a mission to be the best ninja ever in Leaf Village. It follows his adventures with his team, Sasuke and Sakura, two fellow Genins, and Kakashi, a Jounin and their teacher. If you like comedy, then come speak to me about acquiring Naruto.

After all the Naruto watching, Al, Candice and I went out to dinner at Borusso's in Kenilworth (I only found out today that there is one in Claremont as well). It really was very good, and thanks to Al for that ^_^ Then we went back home and watched more Naruto.

<_<

>_>

What!!

Hwaorang is teh shit

2005-12-19T14:34:00.000+02:00

Schpatcon was pretty damn fun. Starting off with poker was alright, just far too large (especially at a long thin table like that). 5 people really is the optimal table size. I pretty much looked after the Tekken for the whole of Saturday. It was great seeing people like Robyn and Adam again, and I must organise something for my leave with them and the others. The foosball was fun, but I can't help thinking that Patrick pulled organiser's rank to snag Lucas as a teammate, ensuring him a piggybacked win. Seanbob was, sadly, atrocious in defence ;)

For the second Sunday in a row, I went to my parents and had a roast leg of lamb on the Weber, again cooked and prepared by Matthew. Again, it was quite fantastic =) Candice's band practise was cancelled for her until John can organise some piano scores, so I was invited over for... a roast leg of lamb! Hectic. Very tasty as well =) Then I went home and sat on the internet until 2am. Bad!

Three and a half

2005-12-14T13:23:00.000+02:00

Moyo was, no surprises, fantastic. The food was brilliant and super-abundant, really tasty. I went in waves, all red meat, then all seafood, then all chicken. Then all dessert obviously =) Can't miss out on that. I skipped the vegetables and starch, since that's just a waste of valuable stomach space. Some of the performers were very good, others were just irritating. It was pretty cool getting to chat to my work colleagues in a far more relaxed (and drunken) environment than we usually do, I got to know a couple of them a lot better. It's a pity that I'm only here for another 3.5 days.

omg! 3.5 days! How fantastic =) Then I'm on holiday for ages. Which is good, since there are 5 friends of mine down from various parts of the world that I would like to get a chance to see and do something with, and December is very busy. It will also give me a good chance to get all my Xmas shopping finished (and started, for that matter).

Last night we playested Schpat's Deadlands module, for Schpatcon this Saturday. It was a lot of fun, but a little unpolished. Hopefully our suggestions will serve to buff it up sufficiently =)

Benders

2005-12-12T15:27:00.000+02:00

In the end, I did get to see Jim, once semi-properly and the other time in passing. The first (and proper) time was on Friafternoon when Julie opened a bottle of champagne to celebrate the end of her time at Old Mutual, and her imminent departure for frosty London. After that it was through to Chelle's bday thinger at One Ring, catching a ride with Candice on the way (well, with Lesley really, but it amounts to the same thing). She was very tired tho, and only barely made it to seeing Chelle in before she crashed and I walked her home. The rest of the evening was fun but largely uneventful, until 3am found Al, Lucas, Claire and myself at Gotham. Albert walked in with the largest goose-egg I have ever seen on a man's chin, and a nice split in his skin just below lip. His story kept wobbling around, to the point where I'm not actually sure what the story is (or what to believe - it is Albert after all). Anyway, Al took him under his wing to sort him out, which is great cos I was fucking exhausted and just wanted to go home to sleep. Just as I was drifting off, I heard Al come back - with Albert. Fuck that, I thought, and went to sleep (timestamp: 4:30am). When I woke up at 10ish, they were still awake in the lounge, chatting. Albert was a little surprised to see me (he is a little slow, especially after being knocked in the head), and they offered me a whiskey for breakfast. There followed a slightly awkward period of chatting to Al and Albert, after which I went to shower. Oh, and the awkwardness was not particularly helped by Albert's random friend being passed out at the time on the beanbag. I just ignored him. When Al decided to go to sleep, I decided to get the hell out of there and headed off for the SCA Yule event.

The Yule event was a large amount of fun. The combat was not quite as it usually was, with combatants randomly drawing weapons rather than selecting their favourite favourite. This led to some... 'interesting' matchups. Such as the matchups where one fighter gets his Purple Caramel One With The Nut, and the other That Disgusting Orange One That Nobody Wants. If you like the orange one, then you are weird and lose all rights to comment on this blog. The food was great, very tasty and lots of it. The real amusement for the evening, though, was the Gift Game at the end. Tracy (amongst others) kindly donated extra presents to the pot, allowing me to play. Much Thievery Incorporated later, everyone was left clutching a present possessively. We were definitely the disruptive corner, and we ended up laughing a lot. Sometimes too loudly, and we would attract someone who would wander over and snatch something from one of us. Very sad. In the end, I got a fantastic goblet, Candice got the sheepskin-wrapped present she was after (books, so all good) and Lucas got some Sekanjabin. Alison ended up with the mate of the goblet that I had, after a tip-off by the goblet wrappers themselves, Sidrianna. They were very cunningly wrapped, and were not goblet-like in anyway.

Thereafter, Dave and I decided to join Lucas at a going-away party for one of his work colleagues at Oblivion (where we once again saw Jim, as he, Waynne and Jean were leaving for the evening - I swear they should all look into retirement villages, they are in Pinelands already after all). Dave ended up having a protracted and awkward conversation with Richard. It was painful to watch. I did meet Nikki and Cailey tho, who seemed quite nice (despite Richard's constant warnings about them).

Sunday was handyman day, filled with chipping polyfilla off from the cornicing and then replacing it with fresh. Not especially productive, but Lucas' place is that small bit closer to inhabitable. I was fetched that afternoon to go off for a leg of lamb at my parents, in honour of my little brother's 15th birthday. He did the lamb himself, and it was damn fine. At about 9pm I headed back home, just in time to catch Episode 3 with Candice, Lesley and Al. Shame, Candice was just about asleep when I got there, and things didn't improve as the movie progressed.

Now I sit here in an almost empty office. Most other people have gone home to get ready for the Synergy Xmas dinner at Moyo tonight. Sadly, the 2h30 between finishing and leaving for Moyo are insufficient for me to get anywhere approaching home and back. I just brought some pants in my bag. Close enough. I am very excited, since I have never been and I've heard that it is fucking fantastic. And buffet, so I had a small breakfast and no lunch. I shall tell you all about it tomorrow ^_^ Yum!

Leisure hours

2005-12-08T14:05:00.000+02:00

After taking a very fucking long time to get back to me, the CEO of the company I work for (he's in the US) finally emails me saying that my last day at Synergy will be the 20th December. The rest of December will be taken out of my leave, but I will still have a few days owing, which will be paid out. This is excellent news, for not only will I have a crazy amount of holiday time over the Xmas period, I will also not actually lose out on too much cash, if you take into account that there are public holidays along the way, and OpenBox is a pay rise anyway. Rock on =) This is great, since there are so many people coming down to Cape Town over the festive season, now I'll actually get a chance to see them and do stuff. I might go get my bike learners as well, if the Traffic Dept are open at all.

Obsfest was last weekend, and it was crazy. It's the fullest I've seen Obs ever (including previous Obsfests), and there were more stalls than there have been too. We met up with a couple of people there and sort of wandered around, then went through to Gotham for the end of the evening. Nothing amazing, but fun nonetheless.

Last night, Waynne's roleplaying group had a dinner event in honour of Jim, since he is down for a week for week. It turns out that (according to Jean) I was supposed to be invited, but I just... kinda wasn't. I hope Jim can make Chelle's bday event on Friday, since my weekend is totally booked (mostly with helping Lucas paint the new place) and otherwise I just won't get to see him =/

The shark tank

2005-12-01T13:23:00.000+02:00

I got the job at OpenBox =) Many months have passed since my interviews with Richard, and I was very skeptical about the promises of 'getting back to me' at some point 'when there was a better fit'. I got a phone call, and coffee was arranged at Cavendish last night, and we sat and chatted a bit. It all obviously went down quite well, since I have an offer letter in my inbox this morning, which I will be signing and giving to Chelle tonight to ferry along. My current boss was very understanding and very congratulatory, so that's pretty cool, although my US boss has not yet found out. He'll prolly be less understanding, but he's the one I don't like, so whatever. Very exciting, although I'm sure it will be a lot of stress as well.

So, see you guys on the 16th ^_^

Events

2005-11-28T15:35:00.000+02:00

Saturday was large expent helping Julie prepare for the opening of Naga that evening, withmuch skewering perpetrated by both Al and myself (Al was the primary culprit, I just aided and abetted on a few fruitsticks). The opening itself was great, and Jo and Steve have some very appealing merchandise in their store, albeit a little on the pricey side according to rumours. It turns out that they would like Candice to work there part time, since they seem to be complete retail n00bs =) Best of luck to them, though, I think their shop is a perfect fit in the heart of town. Oh, and the food was divine. I was particularly fond of the satays, and the chocolate cigars were a total hit.

Lucas' birthday happened to be on the self same day, so a short walk from Candice's (after a lift from Helen and Richard) found me outside The One Ring. Which was closed. At 10:30pm. I went next door to Gotham to see what it was like, and was pleasantly surprised by my short exposure. It's definitely a place that I'd like to check out some more, so I guess that's where I'll be this Friday =) I do so enjoy wearing boardshorts to Goth clubs ^_^ It makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside.

Sunday was a retail therapy day, for Julie at least. Ever since my idle talk last weekend about wanting to acquire an mp3 player, she has been dead keen on buying one of her own. Al and I went with her to Cavendish (since she is slightly less than tech-savvy, by her own admission), and we picked up a dinky little Yepp player, including an FM tuner! Perfect. She seems very happy, and quite excited about it. Tonight, I will be showing Al how to rip CDs to mp3 so that he can help her on Tuesday.

After the shopping trip, we picked up Candice and went back home for a small spot of Soul Calibur 2, followed by a braai. As usual, it was an almost exclulsively chicken affair, with a small dollop of lamb thrown in for spice. All the food was excellent, but by about 9:30 everyone was looking very bombed. A mass exodus followed very shortly thereafter, including Al and Julie running off to their respective beds. This left me to my own devices, mwahahahhaa!!! So I played some Guilty Gear XX, read some Batman and then went to sleep. Yeah, exciting =)

Zubbles

2005-11-24T15:17:00.000+02:00

Check this article out. It's all about this dude's mad obsession with coloured bubbles, and inevitable success. Very cool, both on a chemical and a toy level =) I wonder when we can expect to see these in SA.

Wanted: Porn actress

2005-11-22T11:54:00.000+02:00

My coworker, who is helping her friend find a new PA job, showed me this advert this morning:

SECRETARY/PA Confident, well spoken and presentable person required to assist successful entrepreneur. Female required in terms of EE targets of company. Candidate must be open-minded and completely comfortable with exposure to nudity. Comfortable working hours. Salary R5000 pm.

How dodgy is that? Everyone I've shown it to has been of the opinion that he is a porn director, and I tend to agree. What people don't agree on is whether this is a legit advert for a secretary, or a covert talent search. Discuss.

Batman Begins, now that I have finally seen it, has dislodged the first two Batman movies (the Tim Burton ones) from their spot on the top of the franchise, where they were trampling the other filth that comprises the full set. The complement of excellent actors are all great picks for their respective role, with Cillian Murphy being especially creepy as Scarecrow. Katie Holmes makes a good Lois Lane-style Rachel Dawes in a girl next door kind of way. I guess that's why she was so suited to her role in Dawson's Creek. So many great scenes, especially the hallucinogen-induced nightmares. Nightmare Batman is especially scary, but Scarecrow on a Nightmare (haha) is pretty good as well.

House of Flying Daggers is very similar to Hero, so if you liked the one make sure you catch the other. It's not as consistently beautiful as Hero, but it does have some very pretty scenes. The bamboo forest fight scenes are particularly great, and employ the same technique of colour saturation that Hero made liberal use of.

I had all but forgotten that the Arderne Gardens even existed. Candice suggested taking a walk down to them rather than hanging around in Cavendish waiting for our movie to start on Sunday. She does spend far too much time in Cav anyway, so a reluctance to waste any more time is perfectly understandable. I'm glad we did, because it was really tranquil sitting in a heavily wooded area, unable to see any buildings, right in the middle of Claremont. Even traffic noises were extremely muffled (and Sunday at 11am is never all that hectic anyway). Pleasant =)

Does a troll shit in the woods?

2005-11-18T11:53:00.000+02:00

Connor awoke with a start. Glancing at the night sky he saw that it was scant few hours since they had made camp a distance from the raided troll burrow. Noises, of men and horses, from the direction of the river and Caledonian border were what had roused him, and he sat up for a better listen. The Caledonians were obviously crossing the river into the Elven lands, intending to take much the same shortcut as Connor and his friends were currently on. A sudden shuffling and snuffling just outside the camp circle riveted Connor's attention on the dark woods in that direction. "Shhhh," he warned the others. "What is it?" asked Frankie. An indistinct but monstrous shape shambled past in the moonlight, and a growing fear gripped Connor's innards. "Trolls" hissed Connor, stilling Henry's drawn bow. "We'll all die if you attack them, and running isn't really an option. They know we're here anyway." A loud sniffing was followed by a pair of yellow headlamp eyes turned to survey the camp, and Connor indicated the wind. It was gently breezing over the camp towards the eyes. The gaze held for a moment longer, then turned away. The shuffling continued, dying away slowly as the trolls walked on. Connor took a deep breath, it felt like the first in ages, and glanced around the camp. Everyone seemed to be relaxing. "Close call. Let's not upset these ones."

The trolls went on to trounce the Caledonians we heard crossing the river, and we continued on. A run-in with the elves turned out less than pleasantly thanks to Henry and, to a lesser extent, Dante. We managed to cross the river to the Caledonian side with their help (and 'don't let the door hit your ass' attitude), where we ambushed a barge team and hijacked the barge. Sadly, none of us can actually pilot a barge, so it was very hit and miss, with the biggest hit being the impact with another Caledonian barge as we passed it. A short, brutal combat later we changed onto the new barge, which turned out to have Mark soldiers and civilians, tortured and in boxes, on board. Of particular interest was a King's Guard by the name of Reno, who was privy to some very interesting intel about activities in Ratchet. Since we are heading in that direction anyway, and acting on this information would fall within the activities dictated us at the start of the action, we are accompanying him. On the way, we were greeted by a message left tied to a planted lance, from some enemy agents who seemed to be taking a particular interest in us specifically. No need for stealth anymore, at least.

By this point, Chelle was falling asleep, so we called it. Looks like the action is hotting up!

Waynne and Alex whipped out their Nintendo DSs (with Nintendogs) almost as soon as the game ended, and set them to Bark mode, so they could wirelessly play with each other's virtual dogs. Al wanted to go and offered to lift Candice (since Waynne, her usual lift, was a lost cause at this point). He ended up dropping himself off at home and letting me return the Candice, who by this point was also fairly tired.

And then Al and I chatted until 2am. So I am a little less focussed today than I usually am. Tough ;) It's Friday! Excellent... *plots*

Playin' a role

2005-11-17T12:36:00.000+02:00

Waynne's Wednesday game was cancelled last night due to Waynne (and OpenBox in general) being heinously overworked and (specifically in Waynne's case) underprepared. Al offered to lend me his car again while he worked on his Thursday game and how to introduce Candice's new character. I ended up going to Candice's place for dinner, where her sister made a tomato and olive pasta dish, which was very nice despite my irrational fear of olives. Those I just kind of got through as quicky as possible =)

After that we went through to my place. Al chatted to Candice for a bit about roleplaying (or at least, I hope about roleplaying - I was kicked out of the room and told to go make tea, and the door was closed... hroom...), so I chatted to Julie a bit. She had been at the wine bottle, since she had just received extremely good news - she has today off!

Eventually we ended up playing Tekken, at Candice's insistence. She wants to learn Julia properly, apparently (Julia being the Native American fighter - 'Spirits, give me strength', all that). Al joined in a bit as well, and Julie brought us some Jago to try, which is this Vodka cream liquer drink that she won at some work cocktail tasting function at the Arabella. It is very nice, although it does taste a bit 'farmyardy' as Julie puts it. I like almost all cream liquers though.

Just as we were leaving to drop Candice back off at home, Anusha returned. She didn't even attempt to park in the driveway, and looked very grumpy when she walked past. She has seemed very grumpy for quite a while now. Grumpy face!

As Patrick says, I too am looking forward to roleplaying tonight ^_^ I have had a total drought for the last age, thanks to some of our number going overseas unexpectedly. No names mentioned.

Correction

2005-11-16T11:58:00.000+02:00

So, I've been called upon to make a correction on my last blog post. Apparently 'hate' was too strong a word for Julie's opinion of Madagascar. She claims that she actually did enjoy it. I am unconvinced ;) But anyway.

I went to dinner at my parents' on Monday night, and my little brother Matthew turned out to be the one doing the cooking. He made chicken breasts wrapped in bacon with pasta, and it was really delicious. My brother was there for a little while with his new girlfriend, who apparently works at Korbitech. I forget her name >_> We did only meet for 2 seconds while they were on their way out, so I don't feel so bad.

Last night Candice came over to sort out a new character for Al's Thursday D&D game. PCGen is a great great program, but it can be tricky to use. Candice had an overly-complex character concept, which we eventually simplified after much discussion and wangling. It look a long time, but we did eventually get it all sorted out. Now, for the integration. Let's hope it's non-fatal. Al kindly let me drive his car to fetch and carry Candice (read: got me to do the heavy lifting). Not complaining tho, although Candice would have been happy just meeting me on the train at Obs and walking down from Newlands station. This way, we got to get Nandos on the way =) And what a mission that was! Unbeknownst to us, the Nandos in Rondebosch is closed for renovations at the moment, so we had to trek to Cavendish.

In Magic news, it seems that the Izzet guild is specially created for Jim. It's the Blue/Red guild in Ravnica (and will be released with Guildpact, the next set in the block), and it's symbol is a dragon. Sounds like fun =)

Mandragora

2005-11-14T14:57:00.000+02:00

This weekend was very movie-filled. I started off with HP2 on Friday night as a follow-up to the book again. This time, the movie was far further away from the book in terms of deleted scenes and word changes, and far fewer incidents when the lines synched completely between the two. The surround-sound system is really cool, especially when nobody else is home =)

On Saturday Candice and I met up in Cavendish for a milkshake and something to eat at M&B, followed by Corpse Bride. It was loads of fun, and I'd advise any Tim Burton fan to give it a watch, especially if you liked the Nightmare Before Christmas. Looking over the other movies that Tim Burton has done reveals a lot of movies that I really enjoyed, chief amongst them being Beetlejuice for that blast from the past goodness, and Sleepy Hollow for a more recent flavour. The two initial Batman movies (the good ones - I haven't seen Begins yet) are his too.

Sunday I spent a portion of the day playing Soul Calibur 2, continuing with Al's Weapon Master save, as the single-player, questy portion of the game is called. Julie got hold of it ages back, though, and has completed the primary quest and any of the easier side missions, so only the insane ones are left. Insanely difficult. I did manage to clear out a few stages, and was rewarded with the gold to purchase a new costume for Astaroth, and the thrill of opening up an entirely new section on the map. This I can only surmise would be even more difficult than the mission that was necessary to open said area, but I didn't get a chance to try it out, cos Candice arrived just then and we switched to Tekken, which she knows much better.

We took turns playing Tekken (all 4 of us, even Julie joined in for one match against Candice) until dinner was ready, a very nice Woolworths chicken breast roll roasted in the oven. Alastair suggested getting a pair of movies for the evening, which was greeted with general approval, and so we wombled on down to Mr Video to peruse their selection (a selection that lacks The Nightmare Before Christmas, I feel compelled to point out - a glaring oversight). We ended up settling on Madagascar and Kingdom of Heaven, through Al's patented 'How about these two? Great, let's go' method of party consensus. Madagascar was very funny and I laughed, a lot. Especially during a scene where the lion is chasing the zebra, and it shifts to slow-mo and the music changes to the National Geographic theme music. Hilarious! KoH we had all seen already, and I was a bit mystified as to why Al had been so exceedingly keen on it, until I remembered that the History channel (in front of which Alastair lives at the moment) is having a special feature on the Crusades. Oh. Right. Julie hated Madagascar, by the way, so if your movie tastes are closer to Julie's than to mine, don't waste your time =)

After KoH (midway through which Julie had retired, so we really should have switched movies), everyone was a bit tired, and Al went to bed while I took Candice home, in Julie's car. I felt exceedingly bad since I was forced to wake Anusha to move her car, which she proceeded to park and leave outside. So, not only did I wake her up at 11pm on a Sunday night, but I then proceeded to deprive her of secure parking. Bleak =/

Got back and Al and I chatted for a bit, about *stuff*. TM. Yar, and then I didn't sleep very well, and now I'm really tired =/

In gaming news: FFXII, check out the review of the demo.

Current Song: Incubus - Drive

What to watch

2005-11-11T16:54:00.000+02:00

I finished the Philosopher's Stone the other day, and watched the movie on Wednesday night. It was cool seeing exactly how many of the lines were taken directly from the book, and I always enjoy seeing what they cut and why. I'm almost finished with the Chamber of Secrets now too, which means I must get hold of it in movie form as well. I'm not too sure if I'm going to wait for the 4th movie before rereading the Goblet of Fire or not, who knows how long it will take to get to us here.

Well, my email about Corpse Bride on Thursday was a total damp squib. Three people replied, saying that they had seen it already, and that it was quite enjoyable. Fine then. Since nobody else seems interested, Candice and I are going to go see it on Saturday. I should probably watch The Nightmare Before Christmas sometime before then...

Black and White has totally lost its appeal for me. It was fun for a while, but now seems like far too much effort. Oh well. I guess I'll be watching all those movies I've been meaning to for such a long time =) And there are a lot of them.

Black and White and Slow all over

2005-11-09T11:38:00.000+02:00

I started playing B&W2 last night, off Al's copy. Quite a fun game although not my ideal genre. The city building aspect is always quite fun, and I'm making a real effort to be good. I finished the first proper (non-training) mission on 74% good, which I thought was pretty, well, great =D I can see it getting harder to be peaceful later on, but, never underestimate the power of a lot of archers on a wall! Siege engines is all I have to worry about there, really, and Al showed me how effective a single rock can be. Sadly, the game claims to require 512Mb of RAM, and I am sitting on a lowly 128Mb, so it's a very laggy experience at times. What suffers the most is the load times, as it shunts everything from the HDD to RAM, and then runs out of RAM and starts shunting stuff from RAM back to the HDD in the form of swap space. Well, it's still quite fun and I'm enjoying it.

You gotta fight

2005-11-08T15:23:00.000+02:00

I got all my important KoL items back the other day, which is quite a relief =) Now I can go back to having them sit in my inventory, unused. I don't know how I would have survived otherwise... >_>

I've just finished reading Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, which I enjoyed. Rather sad at the end, and I'm curious to see how she handles the (alleged) last book. Personally, I wouldn't be too sad if it transformed into a massive series of books, but then it would quite possibly lose its cohesiveness, which is part of the appeal.

The Guy Fawkes party, organised by Jean, was a total success =) The burning man was brilliant, especially when the (incendiary) shirt burnt away and the flawing straw-maggots were visible on the inside. He was very reminiscent (to me at least) of some pyre zombie. Jean was being a total party pooper, and wouldn't let us light the firework that had the 50m warning, or the 50 rocket-pack one. I totally wanted to make like a Jenner and stalk around the grounds with my LRM pack. Okay, not really, but it looked cool, if a little crushed. Crushed fireworks... safety first! Candice ended up having quite a few of my Smirnoff Storms (which were quite nice, actually), and I ended up driving her and Julie (who was also quite sozzled) home (Al went home early).

We started watching Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex on Saturday afternoon. It's got a very modern-day western crime/detective TV series feel to it, like CSI or Homicide, since each episode is usually pretty separate from the rest. It's quite cool, but nothing like GitS the movie. Kinda like the way GitS II: Man-Machine Interface (the second graphic novel) is nothing like the first one.

I've just come across a very innovative No-CD crack system, while looking for cracks/keygens for Black and White 2. All it is is a stripped-down CD image, that you mount with Daemon Tools or Alcohol 120%, and it contains just enough information to fool the game into thinking that the correct disk is in the drive. DTools or Alcohol has already taken care of all the SecuROM emulation, so why go to the extra trouble of fixing an exe =) This will also mean that the game is perfectly patchable. Go team! Arrr!

EDIT: A 'great' little late-breaking news item I came across, it seems that Anne Rice has found Jesus, and has now written a book about the boy Jesus as he travels across Egypt. She is quoted as saying something along the lines of 'Give Jesus a chance, he's also a supernatural force, an outcast', obviously likening him to her previous subject matter of vampires and the like. Funny/Scary stuff.

What's with these homies dissing my girl

2005-11-03T14:54:00.000+02:00

It seems that I am falling back into my accustomed update pattern; to whit, hardly ever updating. However, this more or less reflects the excitement level of my life at the moment. I'm playing a lot of Dungeon Siege 2 and not a lot else, what with Moonflake being in NY and all of my roleplaying games thus currently on hold.

Dungeon Siege 2 is fantastically suited to me. So many aspects of the gameplay appeal to me, where they might not to other less collection-orientated people. Getting sets is fairly easy (but not trivially so), and a lot of fun. I have found the game to be pretty easy, although that might be due to a lucky build choice for my various characters. I am therefore playing with further constraints, those constraints being 'what I feel like doing' (rather than me usual 'what is most optimal'). To this end, my fighter uses two-handed weapons exclusively (although the skill tree encourages you to choose either 1 or 2 handedness, not both, with 1 handed eventually upgrading to dual-wield). My ranger uses crossbows exclusively despite bows being a perfectly valid pick for her. And I will always wear set items, until a better set comes along and replaces my old one. Playing like this is a lot more fun (and less effort) than playing optimally, and I'm still not having much trouble. We'll see how it goes when I complete the game in normal, and try again on Veteran (the Nightmare-equivalent difficulty setting). I am hoping that they let you carry your party over, and that you just need to do all the quests again, otherwise I will uninstall the game and never look at it again. The ability to have a 5th party member is not worth levelling everyone up from scratch again.

Last weekend I housesat Helen and Richard's place in Little Mowbray. It was quite a blasts having the place to myself (it's very nice) and the use of Richard's car. I made good use of this and picked up Waynne and my Magic cards from Outers, and Waynne came over to play for a bit on Saturday. It turns out that one of my brother's friends lives directly opposite, so I had a bit of a chat with him.

This is a warning to anyone with a Sony copy protected CD that they are wanting to put into a PC at any point. Make damn sure that autoplay is off, or you run the risk of fucking the machine royally. Thanks to Bast for bringing it to my attention in the first place (due to a warning email from her company IT dept), and then of course to Thrall for posting details on the PCF forum. This is what makes me support piracy more and more. Not that I wasn't a pirate beforehand. Arrr!

I never mentioned it at the time, but KoL had a disastrous database crash a week or so ago. And by 'crash' I mean 'the sysadmin dropped all the tables'. Yeah. Special. And, his backup procedures were insufficient. And by 'insufficient' I mean 'about half the stuff was last backup up on the 6th of September'. And yes, this happened at the end of October, almost two months later. My in-game worth has dropped to probably about 20% of what it was before the crash, and if I wasn't playing a particular game mode that made most of my items irrellevant, I would be a lot more upset than I am. As it is, I am confident that I will get all my important stuff back (if for no other reason than I know a lot of the high-ups personally), it will just take a while. I can't imagine how people who are playing a different game mode which would have allowed them access to their missing stuff must feel. The sysadmin was very clever, however, and quickly added a lot of new content, which I think will go a long way to stemming the tide of people leaving.

Current Song: Weezer - Buddy Holly. Doesn't that just bring back memories of Windows 95?
(Why do they gotta front?)

Spam of the day

2005-10-27T10:11:00.000+02:00

Todays post is inspired by some of the funniest spam I have ever received. Check this out:

Topic: "If you think your penis looks like a sponge,"
Body excerpts:
"With our Viagra Soft Tabs you can crack nuts with your penis."
"With our new Viagra Soft Tabs you will be able to open a bottle of beer with your penis."

Topic: "If you think your penis is good only for visiting the bathroom, Maxaman guarantees that you can use it for more pleasant purposes."
Body excerpts:
"You st1l] want your ne1ghbor’s wife but you think y0u are t0o old for this. Maxaman will make you think the opposite."
"You think you are not powerful enough to screw an expensive experienced hore. Maxaman will make HER pay for sex with you."

Topic: "With our Super Viagra you can use your penis as a drill."
Body excerpts:
"Fortunately, you just cured prost@te cancer and now you are having troubles with your erections."

Topic: "Are you tired of staring at Playboy trying to cause erection?"
Body excerpts:
"With our Generik Viagra you can screw a horse."

Who writes this crap?

Confessions of a dangerous mind

2005-10-26T13:11:00.000+02:00

UPDATED with points 15 through 22

Since posts containing unknown tid-bits about oneself seems to be all the rage, I decided that I would compile one as well. Sans the tagging, since that's just lame.

1) I have zero respect for the law, and rules in general. I'll as soon break a law as look at it. What I do have a healthy respect for is my own personal code, which I do largely stick to.
2) I don't regret anything I have ever done. I haven't always done good or right things, and things might have turned out better had I not done some things, but all in all I am happy where I am, and so there is nothing I wish I hadn't done. Life is a learning experience, nothing is truly wasted.
3) I too have occasional irrational fear of the dark outbreaks. My biggest weapon against it is rationalization, and I have become better at that through the years, so it has become less of a scary thing.
4) I earned the nickname of 'Glue' from my first girlfriend's friends, since I hung around her so goddamn much. We were at the same school. And yes, this was at Westerford, so high school at that.
5) I once got back together with an ex girlfriend purely because she was hot. We were together for a couple of months more, and then it ended, for good this time. It later turned out that her reasons for getting back together were much the same.
6) I once read James and the Giant Peach out loud to my middle brother, in one sitting. We must have been about 10 & 9 at the time.
7) My brother and I used to fill the bathroom basin with water and then take out the ink-soaked sponge center of koki pens and throw them in one at a time, to see the water change colours.
8) I once won a cake at after-school care, a big yellow bus cake. We put it on the kitchen table, went to put my bag in my room, and when we came back it was on the floor with Sebastian, our labrador, wolfing up great big mouthfuls of it.
9) I once picked up a chick in church. During a sermon. This is the same girl as point 4 (but not point 5).
10) The first time I ever kissed a girl was in a cellar. And this was long before either 4 or 5.
11) In junior school, I used to always get cheese and chutney sandwiches. I would eat these by taking them apart, licking the chutney off the cheese, eating the bread, and then eating the cheese.
12) I'm pretty universally nice to people to their faces. This is not always true when they are not around. I don't see this as being two-faced, I see this as being pleasant to people, even when I don't like them. Also, were they to ever ask me outright if I liked them, I wouldn't lie. Probably.
13) I have cybered once or twice. It was fun.
14) Montezuma's Revenge on a friend's PC was what first introduced me to computers.

That's all I can think of for now.
UPDATE:

15) Sebastian, from 8) fame, used to jump over our 6ft fence and go wandering. We eventually caught him doing it. He would jump up, manage to hook his front legs over the top of the fence (no mean feat in and of itself), and than haul himself over. He was not a small dog, it was an impressive sight.
16) I once decided to go on a trip on my BMX, without telling my mom. I took Sebastian and we went off. My mom caught up with me as I was cycling over Landsdowne bridge (heading towards the wrong side of the tracks, for those unfamiliar with Cape Town). She spanked me with a belt for that. I never did it again.
17) My (female) cousin and I once showed each other our private parts, in a back room at my grandparents' house. I think we were about 5 at the time.
18) I have absolutely zero memory of my biological father.
19) I used to beat my brother up a lot. I once swung a cricket bat at him, overhanded, but fortunately for him (and me) it connected with the door frame above me. I also once threw a tennis ball at him, and he ducked and I broke a window.
20) A guy at junior school once took my moonbag, hid it and wouldn't tell me where it was. I took the blade off my pencil sharpener and slashed his palm (not badly) with it.
21) To this day, I can still not ollie properly. And not because of lack of trying.
22) My mom used to mash cauliflower in with my brother's mashed potatoes. He used to laugh at me because he was getting so much more mash than I was. I just smiled and carried on eating. It was a good feeling, the very definition of smug.

Jacques Coustroll

2005-10-18T12:35:00.000+02:00

Thursday night's roleplaying was more arse than class. The group as a whole were fairly upset with Henri, not because he managed to blow up the most important item of the quest and started a war between us and the devils, no, although I could imagine someone would feel justified being upset about that. We were upset because he failed to listen to the advice of the magic users and thus caused this whole disaster. His magic item priveledges have been revoked until further notice. And now we prepare for battle, and I decide if I even want to be involved in this one. Mary, I fear, will outright refuse to get involved, cutting our numbers down to 5 vs however fucking many. Or 4, if I bail too. This not getting involved would, of course, rely on me being sure that they wouldn't attack the camp after wiping out the remaining 4. Oh, the burden of responsibilities.

Friday I was feeling quite ill all day, and went straight home and to bed. I ended up waking up multiple times during the night in pain, not so much fun. Saturday was similarly a write-off, although I did manage to rouse myself to watch MTV for a short while. What a waste. By the evening I was feeling mostly better, although still not hungry at all, so I played WoW while Julie entertained her dinner guests.

Candice and I finished watching X on Sunday. It ended in a completely different style to what I was expecting, and how I remember the movie. I enjoyed the series, but I found the end to be a little... anticlimactic.

Al decided to have a little braai-up that evening, so Candice hung around and we got some ribs and rolls and sundry paraphernalia. Thankfully my tummy was all cheered up by this point, if a little shrunken from the extended lack of sustenance, so I was able to pretty much fully enjoy myself.

Tekken was the order of the evening thereafter, despite Al gunning for Soul Calibur. Candice has never played SC, so, poor form I felt. Candice agreed ;) I'm having fun playing Combot, and I'm getting a lot better at identifying characters, not from their starting poses, which I don't know well at all, but from a few seconds of playing. Combot works very stupidly in Tekken4 tho, since it's the same character for all the rounds of the combat, and in the mirror match it is just that - both Combots select the same character. How retarded =/ I preferred Mokujin, where it was someone different each round, and there were no mirror matches. Candice is getting pretty good with Julia, and can pick you out of the air with alarming regularity. Even more alarmingly, she ducks a large percentage of high attacks and then punches you in the balls. How unladylike!

In WoW news, we last left our intrepid Troll explorer in Northshire Abbey, deep within the enemy stronghold! Eventually I just decided to head west, then swim north until I hit the undercity, where I knew friendly graveyards would abound. It is the undead homeland, after all. I jammed a pencil in my keyboard and read Appleseed while my disembodied self ran and swam its way to safety. I managed to gain an entire level just discovering new lands, having exploded in Stormwind shortly after lvl5, and finally dragging my broken self into the graveyard at Brill by lvl6. I ran around Brill and the Undercity for a while, spending all my silver on apparently useless poison skills before deciding to hearthstone back to my home continent.

When I did arrive back, I discovered that it was not in fact Bounty Bay where I had found the portal that fateful night, but in fact Ratchet, which is a neutral town on the Horde continent. Why does a neutral town so close to the horde starting point contain such a dangerous and potentially game-shattering artefact? The same reason there are lvlFUCK glassweb spiders a short skip and jump from the graveyard in said Valley of Trials, I suppose.

From Ratchet, you are still far from safety. I attempted to Sneak my way across The Barrens, which worked for a short while. It seems that Sneak doesn't make you invisible, like the graphical representation implies, it merely shortens the range at which aggro mobs will gank you. Sadly, The Barrens is chock full of gankers, and once one spotted me, he called all his buddies over, so I rolled into the Valley once again in a see-through state.

Once I was back on familiar territory, things progressed much more smoothly. Al joined somewhere around here, by teleporting his DM-enabled account over (easier than swimming, but much much softer). We battled around for ages, completing quests along the way. Some fairly hardcore, I feel. Eventually we both teleported to Mulgore, where I have been mopping up some of the low level Tauren quests, and Al has been practising skinning. With little luck, I think =)

No roleplaying tonight since Alex is sick, sad =( It does leave room for more WoW tho ;)

The Misadventures of Shitman

2005-10-13T13:06:00.000+02:00

I started my Troll rogue on WoW last night. It was a very... interesting... experience. Let me explain.

A Troll rogue, to start off with, is not the hardiest of characters, and it seems that the Barrens (and in general the area around the Valley of Trials) is particularly harsh. Far harsher than the Night Elf or Human areas, that's for certain. So I'm having a fair amount of trouble anyway, and then from nowhere this aggro Vile Minion comes bounding over and fireballs me. He's only lvl3, and I'm lvl3, so I'm all what the hey, it should be okay. Right? Wrong. He soundly beats me, and sends me packing. I was a bit damaged going into that last fight (aggro creeps are such a pain), so I decide to try it again. Nope, no luck. So I wander off to do something else for a bit.

Wandering off to the next town (I either rape or get raped by everything in this area) proves not to be any use, since everything around there would be (and is once, thanks again to aggro) a total beating. Even the quests show up in various shades of red or orange! So I head back to the Valley to grind for a while. I eventually grind up to a point where I can take down one Vile Minion, and am having fun doing so. That is, of course, until I manage to trigger a second one while fighting the first. Gang rape time! Of course, they are not content with this, and bring 2 spiders with them as well. One is only (only! Ha!) lvl8, and looks a bit like a black widow. The other is a fair amount bigger (bigger, say, than my fucking character) and is showing up as lvlFUCK (skull and crossbones for the uninitiated). Needless to say, I was not long for that particular world, and was almost instantly sent back to my graveyard. I decided to explore that area as a ghost a bit more, see exactly what I would be up against. It seems the Glass-web spider (the big one) was the worst monster up in those parts, but boy was it a doozy!

So, time to pick a different direction again. I remember a new area that I opened a while back that I should be able to survive by now, and head off in that direction. Sadly, while taking a close look at the sea, I fell in. From a cliff. In my flailings, I managed to attract the sweet ministrations of a giant blue lobster thing. Let's just say that lobster was not the special of the day in that particular restaurant. Surprisingly, my ghost never appeared this time, I was just left there as a crumpled heap (that gives you some idea of how bad it was... even my ghost was too scared to show up), so I had to log off and back on to respawn. This had surprising ramifications...

When I logged back on, I found myself inexplicable tranported to Booty Bay, an area that turns out to be on the southernmost tip of Lordaeron. Which is the Alliance continent. Thankfully for me, it is full of neutral creeps, and they were even quite happy giving me quests and whatnot. Down at the docks, however, I found what would prove to be my undoing: a portal to Stormwind.

To understand my next actions, you must understand that I had not yet fully realised that I was on another continent entirely, the enemy continent, and that Stormwind was the capital city of said enemy continent. I thought only that this portal thing was something that I had never come across before, and gosh darn it I was going to give it a bash! So in a hopped.

I would say the other side was carnage, but it was not. The interaction between myself and the inhabitants on the far side was of such a short duration that I was not even a witness to it myself. By the time my client decided to display events, I was already an ethereal entity standing over my mangled remains. The mounted hero in front of me was still standing at his rest position, as if he had never even moved. It appeared as if his disapproving gaze falling on me with the full brunt of his fury had proven sufficient to strike me down where I stood.

I wandered about aimlessly for a little while in the city, half-heartedly looking for a graveyard. I decided that any potential burial grounds would be havily guarded by more mounted ass-rapers with fancy decorations around their level indicators (which would invariably be the much-dreaded Jolly Roger), so I moved out looking for adventure (and whatever came my way). The terrain looked vaguely familiar, and I finally recognised it as being near to the Human starting point when I wandered into a town called Goldshire. Fond memories of being gang-banged by wolves came flooding unbidden into my Trollish brain from nowhere, and I instinctively turned towards the graveyard, hoping that in such a low-level area, only low-level guardians would reside, giving me a chance to resurrect and run for long enough to activate my hearth stone for a flashy getaway. While the guardians were, as predicted, fairly low level, I was not counting on the 75% reduction to stats, damage and, more importantly, armour, that a resurrection without your body curses you with. Let's just say that I decided to call it a night there after a few attempts. At some other point I will try make my ethereal way back to a neutral graveyard, but that is a misadventure for another day.

Taken, yet again

2005-10-12T14:04:00.000+02:00

On Monday night I went off to Robyn's for dinner. I hadn't seen her family for ages, and had mostly forgotten how mad they all are. Her mom more in a mom kind of way, but her brother and father are both weird ;) Gareth was playing Battle for Middle Earth, the LotR RTS game, most of the time, and it was very pretty. A bit gimmicky in places, so I am unconvinced, and it also looks like it would eat my machine alive. Dinner was lasagne, and damn tasty at that =) A following of strawberries and ice cream was most welcome too. Robyn and I retired to her room and chatted for ages again. A good evening =)

While we did actually get a modicum of roleplaying done last night, it was severely truncated due to Patrick convincing Yancke to go home and do his varsity project. Which he did. Then we played poker again. I won the first game quite convincingly, and quickly due to our silly time period on the blind increase (15 minutes), so we played another one. This one went extremely long, so eventually when James and I were left, we started doing all-ins again. A silly end, but overall it was fun, and James had already bought back in early on, so I wasn't exactly feeling threatened. I finally crawled into bed close to 2pm. Not the side of the night I wanted to go to bed on, and I'm still feeling rather bombed from the weekend. Tonight I'll be doing some laundry, playing some WoW and going to bed early.

The Kingdom of Loathing had a very funny holiday event yesterday. Monday was Columbus Day in the states, where they celebrate some feat performed by Chris to do with his ships and finding something, I don't know or care exactly. So, on Tuesday KoL had an NPC called 'Cristobal Colon' (colonist presumably), who was handing out free comfy blankets to random people, and even selling some for really cheap. Mysteriously, anyone who came into contact with these blankets started coughing, and even some who didn't. Really hilarious stuff =) The description for the blanket reads as follows, see if you can catch all 4 disease references: "Although it is a bit measly in size (it would fit in quite a small box), it will be no less influential in keeping you warm at night. Have you spoken to your mother lately? You should call her, eh?"

Not as planned

2005-10-10T16:27:00.000+02:00

As the title implies, this weekend didn't go exactly as planned. Observe:

Friday night we went to go watch Sin City at Cavendish. Dinner at Simply Asia was fantastic, they make a really good green curry and Waynne and Al's seafood something looked amazing too. We were going to the late show, so we ran into a ton of people who had just come out, Sed included, who gave us a mixed report and said something about some crap beforehand. That crap beforehand was, as Alex mentioned, the anti baby-rape video. It was long, and crap, and boring, and really didn't do anything to improve the anti-rape message. Anybody who didn't give a fuck before still doesn't give a fuck. Those who were outraged, are still outraged. Well done, all you've done is stolen a whack of my time.

The main attraction was the most insanely true to the source movie I have ever seen, especially based on a comic book. The imagery and lighting exactly paralleled the comics, and I urge anybody who hasn't read them to do so, purely so that you can appreciate just how exact it is. The stories themselves (since there were 4 disparate stories stitched together to create a feature-length picture) were each individually great, but the actual bridging seemed a little sparse with only incidental crossovers. This is presumably since there is little to no connection between said stories in the comics. They chose the most tense and gripping section to end the movie on, and for about the last 20 minutes I was on the edge of my seat and totally tensed up. When it did finally finish, thankfully not as I feared, I felt drained, but in a good way. This was without a doubt the most intense movie experience I have ever had.

So, yeah. I enjoyed it ^_^

Saturday was yet another LAN day, this time with the hacked WoW LAN server. It was a lot of fun, but the continual crashes and error messages got to be really irritating after a while. I enjoy rogues. Candice rocked up a little later (well, Al went to fetch her) so that we could watch Final Fantasy: Advent Children, but alas, bereft as I am of my Composite video cabling, I was powerless to transmit to the TV. Sadly, RCA cabling appears not to have the same effect as Composite, despite both my GFX card supporting RCA out and the TV supporting RCA in. Allegedly. Instead, Candice and I ended up playing Tekken while the rest of the boys carried on with WoW. They hadn't seemed all that interested in FF:AC anyway, and weren't too disappointed by the 'bad' news. We had to split the handicaps 150/100 to get a decent game in, but we did get some cool games =) Candice is quite good at picking me out of the air when I do some flying leap attack, like I do with Hwoarang quite a lot. It was fun =) When she left, I picked up WoW again and played catchup with the rest of them. Not in terms of level, since when my client crashed the server had left me logged in and I had been gaining all of the party XP along the way, but just in terms of quests completed. Some of them were not so easy alone and with crappy equipment =)

On Sunday Candice came back over so that we could finally watch FF:AC, on the PC this time. Good for 2 people, not so much for 5. I used Al's monitor, since he was out at paintball, and wow. My monitor is so super crappily shit. I knew that, of course, but watching something as amazing and detailed as FF:AC on another monitor really drives it home. The movie itself was good, with very stylish fight scenes and very realistic animation, but even having played half the game was not enough to keep up with the storyline, it seems. There were quite a couple of points where I was unsure who people were, or what was going on, but Candice seemed mostly to keep up. There is a shorter animation, a prequel of sorts, that covers the events of the game. I must get hold of that and see if it helps explain things better.

That evening, Al and I played a 1v1 DotA game, each of use picking any hero from the corresponding tavern on each side. I ended up with Lina Inverse (yes, a shameless anime reference) and he got Terrorblade. I was totally expecting him to pick a Str hero, but Ag it was. I ended up PWNTing him horribly, from quite early on. He just needs to pay a bit more attention, and play a tighter game. Oh, and learn item builds =) There are some basics that you go for. For example, don't get the low-level Str item for the Ag hero, get the corresponding Ag item. Oh well, it'll all come together with a bit of practise =)

Oh, and if you haven't taken a look already, Sixminutes, my WoW plague informant, has posted a massive comment on my previous blog post with some more plague information. If you're interested, check it out.

In the news today

2005-10-07T15:20:00.000+02:00

Well, there were just so many articles that I though I had to make a whole new blog post around it.

Firstly, the one I emailed to Waynne and Alex since it meshed so nicely with a discussion we were having at roleplaying last night about region-encoded DVDs. PS2 Mod Chips Legal In Australia.

Then, in some viral news, First PSP Trojan Reported, and the coverage of it on 1up.

An erotic MMO targetting female players? You better believe it.

And finally, a streaming audio (sadly) commentary on the recent viral outbreak in WoW. Nothing amazing or new, but a pretty interesting listen anyway. It buffered every minute or so on my work ADSL connection, so not really something for dialup users.

Also, I've just spoken to a boyfriend of a KoL friend who plays WoW (Sixminutes on Elune), and was around for the plague. It went down like this:
In Zul'Gruub there is a mob called Hakkar who casts a debuff called Corrupted Blood, which deals ~200-300 damage every 2 seconds for 3-6 seconds. It is transmissible to nearby allies, but only when you lose the buff. So, either die or time runs out. It was never meant to leave the area, but Blizzard missed some method of leaving, presumably the hearthstone (which lets you teleport back to your home town once every hour). Once in town, it can spread to NPCs, but when the NPCs aren't involved in combat, they regenerate faster than Corrupted Blood deals damage. So, if there are NPCs withing infection range of each other, Corrupted Blood will hang around forever. Any hapless n00b who happens to be within infection range when it times out on the NPCs will be infected, probably die, and then hand the debuff back to the NPC. For safe keeping. Other tricks for transporting the disease (rather than just sentry-warding it) involving two players bouncing it between each other while riding around, or a single player with a hardcore pet, and bouncing it back and forth between them. Apparently staying alive is far from trivial, but also far from impossible for higher levels. This dude I was speaking to has approximately 3000 HP at 60th level. Two of those running around can grief a lot of n00bs.

Well, hope that was enlightening ^_^ It certainly was for me.

Krakaboom

2005-10-07T12:26:00.000+02:00

Connor spent just about the entirety of last night's game in eagle form. Very handy in terms of mobility and support casting, not so great in terms of actual damage-dealing potential. It will also be exceedingly good in getting-the-fuck-away potential, when it eventually gets there. Into the water and crocodile, here I come! We seem to actually be doing fairly alright so far, although we are rather hemmed in. Seems we were right to conserve our spells for getting out. I think Al is a bit pissed off that we toasted everyone he threw at us in 2 or 3 rounds, tops. Now he's making some big guns to come for us. The rogues are useless when it comes to disarming traps. Their school of trap disarming is more along the lines of set it off, then dodge. Effective, I suppose, unless you're up against sentry traps, that are at least partially designed to warn the trap owners (HINT: we are up against sentry traps).

Waynne has organised dinner and Sin City tonight, which I am looking forward to. Then tomorrow we were supposed to get our Magic box and play, but that looks like it's not gonna happen. Alex has the WoW lan server tho, so we might give that a bash. Tekken/SC was also suggested. Then we're prolly gonna watch Final Fantasy: Advent Children in the evening. sounds like fun!

Poker money

2005-10-05T13:33:00.000+02:00

Last night's poker was largely a lot of fun. Only largely, since Yancke was being a bit of an arse about things, like us saying 'Don't put your hand down there, otherwise we don't know if you've folded', followed by him saying 'pffft, it won't be a problem', followed by Alex inadvertently picking up his hand and putting it with the discards while dealing. And then burning cards on top of it in some order, and then Yancke wondering where his hand went. So, in future listen to us, Yancke. It may seem like a little thing to you, but it really isn't all that difficult to comply with and makes for less fuckups later on. It's all about avoiding the shit. And then the insane doubling at the end was very silly, and I was totally lucky to end up winning =) By rights, Chelle should have cleaned up going in, but once I won the initial 3 times to make it even, it was, well, even ;) I like my luck, I am a lucky motherfucker. Good thing I did win in the end, though, since I forgot to draw money for taxi fare this morning. So there I was, sitting in the back of the taxi as it leaves town, reaching for my wallet and thinking 'oh my fucking god...', closely followed by relief =) I'm not particularly keen to stop a taxi and get out, saying I have no money on me, especially from right at the deepest part. I would not have been especially popular.

In cool movie news, it seems that Peter Jackson (along with WETA, the special effects people) will be working on the Halo movie. I'm guessing it will be pretty good =)

Weekly update rollup

2005-10-04T13:10:00.000+02:00

It's been awhile since my last post. So, a quick recap of older things first:

I have (obviously) finished moving into Julie's place, and I'm pretty much settled in. A bunch of things (primarily computer randomnesses and my games and cards) are still boxes strewn around the room, but everything else is in cupboards and set up. The bed is still a little wobbly since I only had my leatherman's pliers to put it back together again rather than a proper spanner, and I should probably do something about that before it breaks. It seems sturdy enough tho.

D&D on Thursday was our grand break-in to the castle. We got about halfway through, and haven't actually done anything serious yet.

Friday night a bunch of us went out to Stones in Obs. Pool was fun, but Conrad is a pool demon. Kicked all of us except Al, who managed to pull a black-ball defeat on him the once. Afterwards we played a little foosball on the crappy table there, but decided it was too crappy and went missioning to find another. The One Ring had live bands playing, so no foosball there, and Cool Runnings put all their foosball tables in the dingiest, most unlit areas they can find. No joy. We did stop off at the schwarma place on your wanderings, which actually make very tasty food! The lady overfilled mine like a mad thing, about which I did not complain =) The chips were sadly lacking in awesomeness, and I would advise against them in future.

8:00 was my wakeup time on Saturday, since Claus and Neil were fetching me at 8:30 for a lan in Plumstead. 90% CS:S, sadly. At least it was :S and not 1.6, otherwise I might jusst have left then and there. We did get one game of DotA in, which was thoroughly frustrating thanks to Yancke's overeagerness to waltz in and get raped. Dave was more than happy to oblige. Sick fucks.

I got home at 5am to grab a couple of hours sleep before Waynne came to fetch me for the Ravnica prerelease. It went very well, with an attendance of 86 people. The cool thing about that is that with more people, you get more prizes to hand out. I ended up coming 18th and receiving 1 booster as a prize (and a spot prize of an awesome shiny Skyhunter Legionnaire), and Waynne came 6th and received 5 boosters. Pretty damn awesome all round! That evening I stayed up too late watching TV and chatting with Al, and so was more or less bombed for Monday. *shrug*

Monday evening, Robyn and I went out to Panchos for dinner. Same great food, same crap service! The waiter kept forgetting things, and finally brought the wrong food (beef nachos instead of chicken). Idiot. Catching up and chatting with Robyn was really awesome after such a long time of seriously restricted interaction (I'm really bad at staying in touch in general), and she was really out of the loop in terms of babies, marriages and dissapearances. We sat at the table talking until the waiter politely asked us if we would be okay with him fetching the bill since they were closing. We said that was alright =)

Al and I were intending to get a little 1v1 DotA action on when I got back, but it was a little too late for that. Al yakked about Paintball for a while, and I ended up going to bed too late again =) Not that the convo wasn't interesting, it's just that Al has to get up far later than I do. I think I will in future just say 'tell me tomorrow' ;)

whine rant bitch

2005-09-27T10:56:00.000+02:00

Colleen's party on Friday night was largely a success, in spite of clashes with various other events (Land of the Dead and Philip's band doing a gig). There was an insane amount of food (some of which is still knocking around), and I think everyone had a good time. Someone managed to erase all of the pictures on Colleen's camera. We're not pointing any fingers, but all of the pics that Dave Sharpe took are there but nothing before that, he was falling-down drunk, and Julie said he was pushing loads of buttons and didn't seem to know what he was doing. Okay, so maybe we are pointing fingers a little. We can't be sure, but the evidence seems to suggest... Colleen was unbelievably upset, since a large part of the motivation for the party was to get a whole bunch of pictures of all of her friends before she leaves for PE. I really think Dave would do well to steer clear of Colleen until she leaves.

At about 11 (I think?) a bunch of us went through to The One Ring for the zombie afterparty. Well done to all the zombie winners, the shirts really are very cool. Also, I really really love Foosball. We should go play more often. Dave was a severe handicap to anyone whose team he was on, since he could actually not even focus, and I'm not exaggerating. He was being irritating and grabbing the wrong ends of the opponents' rods at one point, but wisely stopped when Al threatened him with physical violence.

Very rudely, I thought, the bouncer dude threw us all out when he wanted to go to sleep. I mean, honestly. Al, Waynne, Lucas, Claire and myself went through to Cornerhouse at that point since we were all too tired or drunk to know any better. It was terrible, as usual ;) Fun!

11am the next morning saw me at Al's place ready to LAN. Dave arrived a little later, still drunk apparently (here's me not being surprised), followed shortly by Conrad, Yancke and Adrian. Waynne also made a shortish appearance, timing it quite nicely with the party that Adrian was going to, so he got to play with us for a while. The entire time, Dave was just dropping bombs, either in the room we were goddamn playing in, or in the bathroom. You'd think this would be better, except that it wafts. And the toilet is effectively off limits for an hour. Thank fuck I had just put deodorant on, so I could pull my shirt over my mouth and nose and breathe mostly unimpeded.

Jesus fuck, Dave and Yancke can whine like whores. One starts, and then each has to have the last word. Has to. I'm also sick of people whining about being unable to use the game interface. Watch the minimap! Bind your hero to group 1! Push 1 before every command you issue! Communicate! Use the in-game messages! In the last game of the evening, Adrian and I really showed people how it all works. Yes, I had a pretty good hero, but not a broken one unless you let me run away with it. Adrian's hero was mediocre at best. Yes, the stun was pretty cool. The dragon mage and the quillboar are perfectly decent heroes. The myrmidon wasn't, I'll admit that right now ;) Communication was key, and we were typing messages to each other all the time. It was handy that Adrian could feed me item information, but really I didn't play it any differently to any other Agility hero I usually play, apart from late-game items. Boots, 2x Wraith Band (change these to Null Talismans for casting heroes, my skills were all passive), followed by Butterfly. And by the time I got Butterfly, I was already ahead of the opposing heroes. The Stygian Desolator was just extra overkill.

Oh, and Oopman better steer clear. When trying to get UT2004 working as a break from DotA, we discovered all these weird versioning anomalies. The only thing that's changed since last we all played together is Adam installing ChaosUT on our boxes, without our fucking permission. That's an ejection-from-LAN grade offense, and is part of the reason why we just don't invite him anymore.

I was really looking forward to the Ravnica prerelease on Sunday, and even managed to drag myself out of bed in time for it after the LAN. Sadly, and with zero warning, it was cancelled. Some shit about customs problems. Jesus, people, sort your shit out. You're a fucking business that sells Magic cards. Surely you can organise getting Magic cards? Apparently not. Anyway, sleep was an acceptable substitute.

Sunday evening was an awesome TV movie evening, with MIB on e being followed by Chicken Run on SABC something. All good =)

My american co-workers have apparently not lost any of their retardedness. They proved this amply yesterday afternoon, and followed up with some emails for me this morning to cement their mental acumen firmly in the lower echelons. Them: 'Uh, your new file is not being included in the project, Jason.' Me: 'Did you update the project file which, SURPRISE! updates the list of files being included in the project? No? DIDN'T FUCKING THINK SO!' Cockpunches all around, seriously.

Things are starting to come together re: my move to Julie and Al's place. I moved my chair and a few more boxes in last night and helped J&A move shit out of the room, and vaguely decided how I would arrange things. After that, Al and I threw down in a couple of matches of Soul Calibur. Sore thumbs! I really need some more practise, I just don't know critical things like recovery times, strike ranges and speeds of attacks. Also, I need to get out of the habit of instinctually kicking. A good button to press in Tekken is not always a good button to press in SC. I learnt that the hard way. We played most of our matches as Charade, which is their version of Combot/Mokujin. Good practise for learning all the characters.

Patient Zero

2005-09-23T12:36:00.000+02:00

Connor and Baldur were involved in their first real combat last night, not counting the one against the flying demons. I'm not including that one since, if the demons had actually been interesting in fighting us, we would all be dead. No questions asked. So now we have these potential allies in the devils, which I think is a pretty swell idea, so long as we treat them with circumspection. You never really trust a powerful ally, you trust that they will follow their own motivations, so just make sure that you both want the same thing for as long as possible. Plus dealing with Lawful creatures is much more reliable than dealing with Chaotics. Not safer, just more reliable.

I really love the way MMOs generate complex behaviour from a simple system. Have a look at this article about a virtual plague in WoW. It seems that a bug in a spell effect from a high level area causes it to be transmitted by proximity. Unfortunately for the rest of the populace, the spell effect is fairly long-lasting, and deals damage over a period of time, kind of like a poison effect in a game like Diablo. Unlike Diablo's poison, it can kill you. So, some level 75 character bumps into you, coughs an apology and moves on. You stare in horror at your status bar, and drop down dead. Not a pleasant experience, I would imagine. According to the article, pretty much anyone below level 50 is going to be instagibbed like this. Harsh! Extremely cool though. This reminds me of one of the other MMOs who implemented some boosting drug of sorts, complete with addiction and side effects and withdrawals. MMOs are such a cool place to model real-world scenarios, and it adds a badass element of realism to the games.

Microsoft are working on an all-new interface design for the next version of Office. It sounds quite cool, although the article is lacking a bit on details. I am busy downloading the video of the interface, but it's 600Mb large, so it's taking a while. It's probably not even going to be worth it.

I've been reading some more of The 10k Commotion, and it really is a great web comic. Great art style, cool characters, and it's set at a DDR competition. What other web comic can boast that!

Simon introduced me to a puzzler called Professor Fizzwizzle on Wednesday night when we were playing board games at his place. It's very polished and loads of fun, although the demo levels are excessively easy, except for the advanced levels which are excessively impossible. Give it a bash =)

A minor victory

2005-09-22T14:46:00.002+02:00

Some of you may remember the email I posted a while back from (that dude) at (that gym). I'll link to it anyway, so that you can have a look at it again if you want. Today, I get the following from him. Now, despite being spammed twice by him with exactly the same content, I really feel that this is a marked improvement over his last attempt. I give him a gold star for Most Improved.

Greetings.

Please find the "attachment" below that has space for 5 names and numbers
of
anyone you can think of that'll benefit from using our facilities. Please
complete the form and either forward it back to me or fax it to the fax
number
given below. Any of your staff members wishing to join (that gym) through Discovery Vitality, should please contact me on my contact
details listed below.

Thanks for your effort and interest in this regard.

Kind Regards...

(personal info removed)

Sadly, he still had a pdf attached, but at least this time he did say that we could fax it back. Although I feel that there is little need to say 'fax it to the fax number' or 'contact me on my contact details'. It's a little redundant.

Innovation

2005-09-22T13:56:00.000+02:00

I've just read a very insightful and coherent discussion of the new Revolution controller and the probably motivations behind it, over here. It includes an interesting insight into Nintendo's business model. Give it a read =) I can totally imagine playing a Harry Potter (or any wizard game, really) and waving the controller around like a wand. Or a lightsaber. Awesome!

In other news, the sale of the place in Rosebank to Lucas' dad has gone through, so everything looks to be on track =)

Tech for the Tech God

2005-09-20T11:32:00.000+02:00

Colleen experienced a mad influx of tech yesterday, since she got her iPod from France as well as the PC. It's very shiny and very white, and it integrates nicely with iTunes, which is pretty cool. iTunes is actually pretty spanky, it does all sorts of cool things automatically like sorting your music collection (but only if you want it to), normalizing the tracks, and coverting all your crappy WMA files to AAC files. Battle of the proprietary formats! Winamp does play AAC, so that's fine, and I really hate WMA. Putting the PC together with Colleen was a little stressful, since it's the first time I've done a 939 pin installation, or a SATA installation, so I didn't exactly know what was going on, but we got it done eventually. Still need to do all the software and the OS, which will take ages =/

Also, I now have a confirmed place to stay =) Julie's renting me her spare room (previously Alastair's study) for a much cheaper price than Roo was going for, so I'm moving in there this weekend or early next week. How convenient that there's a LAN at Al's, my PC will already be there! Now, just to work out how to get the bed there...

Mexicana

2005-09-19T14:55:00.000+02:00

Friday night saw me double-booked for dinner. One was my gran and so super early, and the other was Waynne and Jean at the Fat Cactus. I went to my gran, and she stuffed us as usual. My prediction of Spag Bol did not come to pass, as she instead just fed us Woolworths chicken pies. Very yummy, with chicken gravy and some veg and whatnot, followed by pecan nut pie, canned fruit and custard-in-a-box. Then I headed off to the Fat Cactus, not even late. Shame, grannies have bedtimes yoo, y'know ;) The food there was awesome. It was a set menu, and Jean said she would be extremely disappointed if I didn't eat, so I took one for the team. Well, for Jean. Not that I regretted it =) Stuffed to the max, and a little beyond, but it was so damn delicious. Jo Legutko was there, and it was very cool to see her again despite not getting much time to chat or catch up (we were on opposite ends of the table, and the place was a bit loud anyway). She invited me to dinner on Tuesday along with Julie and Candice, which is very convenient since Alex has just cancelled the game in lieu of tests and whatnot. Bah, tests!

Saturday night was mexican again, seems like there's a bit of a theme going on. Chelle invited Schpat, Yancke and myself around for dinner and zombie movies in preparation of Patrick's zombie party, costume ideas and all that. I hadn't seen either of the movies we watched, so that was all good. The production quality on the remake was obviously much higher, but the sheer cool of the mall-camping one was overriding. They should remake that one next (if they haven't already, what do I know). Afterwards Patrick and Alex and I hung around outside and chatted for ages, as is our wont, and we got to the topic of where I was gonna stay. They both expressed horror at the amount Roo would charge me, and said that they wouldn't charge that much to help a friend out. But that's the point, really. Roo's renting his room out primarily, and helping a friend out second. I have no problem with this, since it is a fair price for the room. Alex said I should ask Chelle if I could camp out in their spare room for 2 months, but I'd really rather not put people out. Roo's is excellently positioned (I'd walk to town and get both exercise and save money), and he has DSL. Oh, the sweet sweet siren call of always-on internet. DSTV is of no interest to me, of course, since I hardly watch any TV, and it really does pale in comparison to the entertainment to be found online. Of all kinds.

On Sunday Colleen and I went through to Cavendish to go bag shopping. This was for Colleen primarily, since she hated her then-bag's strap, but I ended up picking up a cool new bag for myself, since my old conference bag is looking way the worse for wear. It's a cool canvas bag with a couple of pockets on the front with magnetic clasps. Much better than velcro, which goes all manky after a while. Later on we discovered that one of the zips on Colleen's bag is broken, and she doesn't really have all that much time available to take it back or whatever. Look's like I'll be doing that next weekend sometime, while she's at Genadendal for the SCA meet. In between the Ravnica prerelease and the LAN Al was looking at organising. Sure... Oo, Ravnica! So tasty, with its dualland replacements. And it's all eastern european flavoured. It's the new Magic expansion, for those that don't know me or didn't work that out ;)

After that I stopped by at Yancke's place to see what he was up to. Predictably he was still asleep (he had lanned the night before, apparently it was all assey, I mean, Counterstrikey). We went through to Die Kasteel to watch Dave lay down some Chaos smackdown. He came somewhere in the top 10. Very funny thing I noticed at the sign-in form at the military checkpoint was someone (not Dave) who filled in the 'Company' column (it was a military checkpoint, after all) with 'Chaos'. I had a good chuckle at that =)

Afterwards we came back to my place to do some Winston drafting with my old Onslaught / Legions / Scourge cards, and I got pwnt horribly both times. Good times. While this was going on, Waynne and Jim were online and signing up for MTGO accounts, so hopefully I can get some online games in against them =) Since Waynne never ever comes to any paper magic evenings, and I've pretty much stopped inviting him now. Hell, stopped having them, largely, other than spur of the moment drafts.

Today has been a very uneventful day at work. I went to the bank and Woolworths to change my addresses to my parents address, but the bank has other ideas. FICA policy and all. Y'see, I can't get my address changed without proof of residence, and I can't get proof of residence without staying there. So, sucks to be anyone moving out of some place before the end of the month, you will miss one correspondence. Good thing I couldn't care less about it, but irritating nonetheless. Woolworths of course is unburdened by such asinine considerations, and was a breeze.

All the bits for Colleen's new PC have arrived at work today, so we shall be assembling them this evening. Coolness =) Plus, Colleen will be coming to fetch me, so yay lift home! I don't think an entire PC worth of components would survive a taxi ride home, nope nope. Hmmm, LCD...

No job, but maybe a place to stay

2005-09-16T12:22:00.000+02:00

Got a phonecall from Richard Hartley last night just before roleplaying saying that I didn't get the OpenBox job. Some story about how my profile doesn't match up with what they need right now. Not that that really means anything. He said that they might be interested in a few months time, but hey, we'll see I guess. Not gonna hold my breath. He also said that if I decided at some point that I wanted to leave my current job, I should give him a call so that he could have a second look to see if they wanted me. Ah well. Whatever.

Lucas is making an offer on a 3 bedroomed flat in Rosebank soon, which is pretty damn convenient. Occupation is only in December, which is not terrific, but Roo offered me his spare room for 2k per month, which is a pretty fair deal. ADSL, DSTV, maid included. A bit above my price range, but I'm sure I can stick it for 2 months, assuming Lucas does get the Rosebank place. Lucas, please let me know as soon as you know anything, so I can get the ball rolling in terms of interim places and so on. Oh, and the 3 bedrooms are important since Al is keen on moving in with us, now that him and Julie have broken up. Man, end of an era. Colleen and I break up. Waynne and Jean get engaged. Julie and Al break up. Weirdness and crazy signs.

Damage reduction is crazy if you don't have the appropriate foil to it. Hint: we didn't. I don't even know how many of the party are good-aligned, and I know I'm not hellishly keen on getting my weapon consecrated, or whatever it is you need to do. However, with neither myself nor Baldur able to do any damage whatsoever except on a crit, it may be the only option we have. Alternatively, I might just stock up on Bull's Strength spells and healing and play buffbot for subsequent encounters with these things. We have also just levelled, although I haven't gone through the rigmarole yet (damn PHB hoggers *shakes fist*), so I should see what further options that gives me.

Kingdom of Loathing is going extremely slowly. A whole bunch of new trophies have been discovered that I am working towards, but it is fucking my overall ascension strategy up onetime. Ah well, at least I will have the trophies =)

Crafting an email

2005-09-15T15:35:00.003+02:00

So I get this today in my inbox:
Referral drive!!!

Gooday.

(Spacing below is preserved as in the initial letter)
I'm on a referral drive for new members to join (that gym) through
Discovery
Vitality. Attached below I've included a referral form with space for 5
names
and numbers of working collueges, friends or family members you can think
of
that would benefit from using our facilities.
Please complete it and forward it back to me via e-mail(e-mail address
given
below).
Your effort and assistance in this regard would be greatly appreciated.

Kind Regards...

(Personal details removed at the 4-years-later request of the crafter)

(followed by a WHOLE BUNCH of blank lines)

(followed by a pdf attachment. That we should fill in and email back)

I replied:
Good god, where to start

Don't use multiple exclamation marks, especially in the title. It just makes you look like an idiot. In fact, don't use any exclamation marks in the title at all.

In a corporate mailing, try to get the spelling right. 'Gooday' and 'collueges' just don't make a good impression. Either run it through Word's spellchecker or get a colleague to read it first.

The spacing and linebreaks in your message are very weird. I don't want to scroll down for two pages before I get to the attachment. This I am suspecting might be something software related rather than you pressing Enter thousands of times (I hope).

Attaching a form for us to fill in and email back is all well and good, and is likely to get the most responses. However, the attechment then needs to be in some sort of writable format, such as .doc, or just inline in the email text. A .pdf is not writable.

Hope this helps you on your next foray into the world of email marketing
Jason

A Blank Title (not really)

2005-09-14T14:56:00.000+02:00

Pets really make it difficult to find a place to rent =/ More places should be pet friendly, dammit. Also, more estate agents should have websites with decent content, screw this 'No image available', 'No contact number available' bullshit.

Yancke really needs to learn when to shut the fuck up. I've been spending a lot of time with him lately as regular readers of my blog will have noticed, and I've been having fun, but damn the boy steamrollers when he's talking. It doesn't matter if you started talking a while back, or if you stopped to let someone else finish, once he starts he doesn't stop until he's had his say. And he wonders why Conrad and I double team to override him when we have the chance. Lovely boy though. I'll have to punch him in the cock sometime.

Despite distraction and side tracks, which I am perfectly okay with so long as they are contained and don't spill out all over the DM while he is explaining important stuff, the session last night was great fun. Especially the bit where Vitto went all crazy-loco on Jimmy's ass. I was just about to step in to break it up, I swear. If I had instead of Cat, there might have been one less broken wrist, since I actually know the technique for disarming. Well, the more finesse technique rather than Cat's 'hit wrist until break, then weapon drop' cudgel of a technique. Not that I really care how broken Vitto is, mind you, and he's definitely safer to be around now that he's a crip. I should probably stop calling him that. I like my face as is, thanks. And now we get to lie to the general populace of our group about the reason for stopping, since I'm sure that even under the strange circumstances we find ourselves in, people will be mistrustful of ex-cultists and magic. Especially when said magic has the possibility (probability?) of getting out of control and eating us all. Meh, lies. Whatever =)

When Colleen ships on out to PE I'll be inheriting the current PC. To this end, I've just placed an order with work for the PC that Colleen is getting as a replacement. It's really nice, far nicer than the one here. An Athlon64 3000+ 939 pin on an NForce3 chipset mobo with an 80Gb SATA drive, 512Mb memory and, the kicker, a Samsung 17" TFT display. Very nice stuff, if you ask me. The 939 pin part is important, since it will let her upgrade to one of the new dual-core Athlon64s that are coming out at some point if she wants to.

Wednesday roleplaying has been cancelled indefinitely by Dave and replaced with a gaming evening tonight, despite him getting all testy with me for cancelling last week. Except now he can't makes the gaming either. Now I must decide if I feel like gaming, and try organise some more people, or if I feel like wasting away at home. Packing another box, maybe, although there's no rush since I'll only be visiting my parents again next week sometime.

I installed FireFox 1.5beta1 the other day. It seems pretty the same, albeit a little less stable and with (now) broken extensions, since they still need to be updated by the authors. But hey, I'm willing to undertake a little more strain if it helps the FFox guys out (since I send crash reports when it does crash). Oh, and flash and java and similar plugins are all broken too. So, don't 'upgrade' unless you're prepared for that =)

Wow, this day has gone really quickly. It's 3pm already. Rocking =) Let me go email some people about some games...

Edit: Also, nice to know that you can make a blog post without setting a title, it just leaves it blank.

Movin' on up

2005-09-12T14:27:00.000+02:00

I've really cut this finding a place to stay malarkey quite fine. And by fine I mean I'll probably have to crash at my parents for a little bit, unless I am insanely lucky. Or suddenly grow another R2k salary from my ass, since there is an expensive (but nice) place desperate for someone to move in. I'm going to start moving my random unused (or rarely used) crap to my parents' place, use that as a midway point for moving. Even if I do manage to avoid moving there, it will still be much more convenient having a central depot. Well, pretty-fucking-out-of-the-way depot, but a depot nonetheless.

Friday night's Pancho's outing was very enjoyable. It was a little loud, the next door tables were a little close and the food took an age to arrive, but damn was it good when it got there =) Dave Sharpe arrived a little bit late, and so ordered separately just after our order had been taken. His single plate of nachos arrived before any of the rest of the food showed up =`( We had to sit there and drool, it was very sad. Damn enchilada eaters! Take so long to prepare. Afterwards, Yancke and Conrad and I swung past d@vid's place to pick him up, since he had bailed at the last minute on Pancho's. By last minute, I mean we arrived at his house and he said that he had already eaten. He was reading in bed when we got there for the second time, and Yancke found his boxers hilarious for some reason. Don't ask me. We went back to Y&C's and watched Chris Rock - Bigger and Blacker (I think) - some parts were just wrong, but largely it was funny. It broke d@vid on many an occasion.

On Saturday, we lanned again. I won't bore you with the details. One of the guys, Adrian, did grab Chuzzle from me and was hooked. Damn, I love being a PopCap pusher ^_^ I should get a t-shirt, or at least a badge.

On Sunday Yancke and I went to Stadium on Main to go watch Dave's wargaming, but by the time we got there him and Jon had left already. Mark Pitterman was still there, and we chatted to him for a little bit. There was also this freaky old dude called David as well (freakily enough) who was hanging around being annoying. He asked Yancke for some McDee's chips, with which he foolishly obliged, and then proceeded to ask for a bite of his burger. I vacated to the far end of the table and left Yancke to his self-made doom. Don't make eye contact! And certainly don't feed the freaks! Damn boy, what were you thinking. Anyway, Yancke eventually escaped with me inside Wizards where we found Verolin talking to some American roleplayer called Rick. Apparently he's just arrived in Cape Town and is looking for a group to join. He heard about CLAW and went to Ian for help, but apparently all they did was bring him along to one of Garrick's sessions, where he was stuck in a corner and ignored for 4 hours. Fun! Also, way to include new roleplayers. Rick made the unfortunate mistake of telling us that he was looking for a group to join just as this David freak was following us inside, when he promptly informed Rick that he was looking to start a D&D game on Sundays there in the shopping center. Rick would be his first victim, I mean player. Yancke also gave Rick his phone number (it was like a gay pickup bar in there with the number of guys swapping numbers) and said he'd try hook him up. With a roleplaying group, that is, and an old Werewolf sourcebook that he was looking for. After that, the conversation just went downhill and I took to wandering aimlessly around the shop rather than participating, until Yancke noticed and we left.

Simon, Ada and Yancke came over that evening to play some Gang of Four, which is very cool if almost an exact replica of Presidents and Arseholes (the card game). And yes, I realize Go4 is based on some ancient chinese or hong kong game or something, but it's the one I played second. Good fun.

Corruption, or just retarded people? Hard to say

2005-09-09T12:37:00.000+02:00

On Wednesday night I went to dinner with my parents, and they regaled me with the most remarkable story about my dad's British passport (with extra details added after the fact included in the story below). You see, my parents are due to go to Mauritius on Monday morning at 5am so that my dad can be at some actuarial conference to talk or somesuch, I'm not sure on the details. His passport was supposed to be ready in July when him and my little brother went on the Orange River, but it wasn't and so he temporarily got his old one back for that. Now, he's been phoning intermittently between then and now, but there has always been some delay or other. For the last month, his secretary has been phoning every single day, and been getting responses ranging from 'It's being done as we speak' to 'Oh, it's about to be done, I'll make sure it's in the overnight courier today' to 'It's in the courier bag right now, you'll have it tomorrow.' Needless to say, none of these prophetic words came to pass. My dad decides that only a face to face confrontation will be able to solve anything, so he flies up to Pretoria on Friday night. I can think of quite a lot of things I would rather be doing with the cost of a flight and a day in Pretoria. Or not a day in Pretoria, as my preference would be. So he apparently talks to some person quite high-up in the British consulate (how high up was not made apparent), and this man has never heard of any of the names that my dad gives him, and the numbers are now miraculously fax numbers or the number of the Archives section. Who needless to say should not be dealing directly with customers, especially in the area of passport submissions. Dodgy. This man tells my dad that he will do everything he can to get the passport done, and that he should come back at lunchtime. He does so, and is told that they can't print the passport, because of a Telkom problem. Out of their hands. My immediate thought it what the fuck Telkom have to do with printers? But it might require authorization from the UK or whatever, so maybe. There is a slight possibility, that's as much as I am willing to concede. My dad, ever the optimist, has decided to stay the night in Pretoria in a Holiday Inn across the road from the consulate in the hopes that Telkom (or whatever) sort their shit out. I'm not holding my breath.

I've just phoned my mom, and apparently Telkom arrived at the consulate at 10am this morning to try sort it out, so it looks like the man might in fact have been speaking the truth. However, once he gets the passport, he still needs to go to the Department of Home Affairs (closing time 3:30pm) to get his permanent residence stamped into it or South Africa has no obligation to let him back into the country. Personally I would go with or without, since I'm sure Old Mutual can arrange to get him back if he gets deported to London. My mom says she will let me know what happens, so I in turn will let you know =) *holds thumbs*

Yesterday I had my second interview with OpenBox, a technical one this time. I think it went pretty well, despite having a few questions where I didn't know the answer. There were also a couple of times where I knew the concept but not the terminology, and also once or twice where he was fishing for a specific answer and had to lead me to it, but hey whatever. I think I gave a fair representation of myself, and I think the interviewer (whose name I now forget) got a fair view of me and my skill level. Apparently they might only make a decision as late as the middle of next month, so I'll have to wait I guess. Our current development cycle is running to a close at the moment, so a decision anytime between now and next month should see me in a quiet period, which is good. I hate leaving people in the lurch like some of our other developers have, with stunts like 'I know you're in the middle of development on this version, and I know I'm the only person who has worked on this feature, and I know I've been on maternity leave for the last 2 months, but I'm not coming back. Thanks for the work experience, though.' Actual story, not the actual words. I am making those up.

After the interview, by which time I was actually a bit shaky, Chelle and I headed off to roleplaying and the first real set of interactions between Connor and the rest of the party. Last week's 'Hi, how's it going' followed by was less than satisfactory. There still seems to be a fair amount about druids that I need to look up, and a lot of Wild Shape templates I need to copy down for easy reference. I think I'll just bring a whole bunch of blank character sheets along and fill them out for each Shape I'm likely to use. Leopard was awesome, as was Eagle, and I'm really looking forward to getting access to Large creature for some giant crocodile action. Tasty! Baldur, my bear, spent the session frolicking in the woods, since he is a little less than sneaky. Hell, I'm a little less than sneaky in Human form. The mage isn't much better, I did notice. Also, PSA: Try not to attract the attention of flying demons and devils while you are in eagle form. It sould prove to be a little too much excitement for one day.

And at last, it is Friday. This week has felt like an eternity, and I have no idea why. There is a LAN on this Saturday, but I've been lanning so much recently I don't know if I am keen on it. It is at least limited to 2am, so no 17 hour marathon this time. Apparently a couple of OpenBox employees are going, so it might be a good opportunity to get to know some of my future-potential work mates.

EDIT: My mom just SMSed me to let me know that my dad finally got the passport, looks like it was a Telkom problem (well blow me down), so Mauritius is once again on =) Awesome.

Well it sounds plausible...

2005-09-07T17:21:00.000+02:00

Haha, I got my wish last night and there was no roleplaying to be seen within 100 yards of our 'roleplaying' venue. What did happen was a lot of debating, discussing and arguing, most of which was a lot of fun. A lot of time was spend explaining Energy/Force to Schapt in light of his Poopsicle SchpatDope post, and then he whipped out a printout of a webpage of some dude trying to disprove the EK = 1/2mv^2 formula for kinetic energy. Chelle and I were both skeptical, but had a look anyway. We found a hell of a lot of stuff wrong with his work, and that was only in the preliminary, where he was talking about open systems as if they were closed systems and nonlinear systems as though they were linear. The real Coop de Gracey for me was when he started talking about conservation of momentum and energy across two different systems. My mind boggles. The problem was that Patrick, who didn't know any better, assumed that this was the correct usage of the term. Even after I told him it was incorrect, he still kept using it like that. 'Patrick, that's not right.' 'Yes yes, I know, but you know what I mean.' 'That's not the point, Patrick. The more you say it to yourself, the more convinced you will become that it is correct.' Gah, I could feel the misinformation spreading as I sat there and watched.

Anyway, I think it's all sorted out now. I hope ;) And now, it is time to go home, and then to dinner with my parents.

Optimus Prime

2005-09-06T14:16:00.000+02:00

I was foiled in my stuffed butternut plan last night. Woolworths Rondebosch were sold out, and Claremont was closed by the time I got home. So instead I got a butternut and feta quiche, which was very nice. The caramelised onions were a little weird, being so sweet, and I agree with Colleen that just because butternut is a type of pumpkin doesn't mean it automatically goes with cinnamon, but despite all that it was really good.

After that I was pretty wasted, so I played a little bit of Chuzzle and then went to bed. Of course, I played a bit of Tony Hawk on Alex's GBA before actually going to sleep, but it was still a decently early night.

Check this keyboard out. Each key is a full-colour LCD mini panel that you can completely customize. Obviously great for people who want to run other languages, or just other layouts like Dvorak, but it really shines in the games market. Check those Quake3 key bindings! Man, so awesome. I wants me one. Unfortunately, I am sure they will be 20zillion monies. I would love to see this as a direct competitor to the Z-Board, although I think the Optimus is far far cooler =) Perhaps less practical. Imagine taking your keyboard back because of dead pixels...

I've just signed up (again) for Adventure Quest, the flash RPG Alex linked to. It's one that I played a lot a while back, but it was really repetitive. I'll give it another bash now, see how it goes. From the tiny little bit I've played already, it seems much upgraded, but still the same basic repetitiveness. Unless there are a lot of cool quests later on. We'll see =)

I have another interview at OpenBox on Thursday, a technical one this time. Yikes! I wonder if I need to read up on something, or what. I'm not too sure what to expect, will it be language specific or more generally algorithmic? Guess I better do some prep anyway, just in case.

I don't know if I feel like roleplaying tonight. I'm in more of a fucking around mood, but I suppose it depends a lot on what other people are keen on. I'll bring Abduction anyway, just in case =)

omg teh DotA

2005-09-05T17:24:00.000+02:00

Okay, I am a massive geek, I have decided. Less geekery in the immediate future, that is my goal. Listen to this...

Friday night I was planning to go out, but instead we ended up hanging around at my place and playing Magic until 3am or something retarded. It wasn't even all that fun, it just kept us busy. Saturday I woke up late and did my KoL turns for the day. Then I went through to Yancke's place, where we lanned for 17 hours. As the title implies, there was a lot of DotA. Okay, why are all the good DotA players whiny bitches? Unless they're winning, of course. I couldn't give a fuck, so long as I have a modicum of fun while I'm losing. I get irritated with team mates, I admit, but that is at specific points, rather than whining the whole game long about what crap heroes our team got dealt in the random shuffle. That's the beauty of random, you don't have to win every time! You can relax and just try do your best with a crap hand. Anyway, the session was pretty damn fun anyway, and I left it wasted and feeling filthy. Shower time made it all a lot better, thank the pope. I then went to lie down for a bit, since I had a braai at Al's place to go to that evening. When Colleen woke me for the braai, sadly only about 45 minutes later, I was soo confused. I think I stared at her for like a minute blankly. Red Bull is king, btw. On the way to the braai I was honestly having trouble following the conversation (but apparently managed to hide it quite well, since Colleen had no idea how close to the edge I was), but after a red bull and some Coke, I was fine. Yay caffeine! Yay sugar! Amazingly enough there was actually some boerewors and sausage at the braai, something that hasn't happened in a very long time. They're usually dominated by chicken to the almost-exclusion of everything else, and while there was a strong chicken presence, it was by no means overwhelming. There was a definite guy-girl split in the conversation that night, with the guys talking almost exclusively amongst themselves and the girls doing the same thing.

Today at work I've actually managed to get a hell of a lot done. Admittedly that is on the strength of three coffees where I usually have none, but still good stuff. This evening will be a sleep evening tho. Although I kinda feel like cooking... maybe a Woolworths butternut or somesuch. Totally had enough of meat after last night, and not nearly enough of vegetables and salad after the last... oh, month =/

Yay tax returns! The company accounting firm just asked for my MedAid and Retirement Annuity proof of payments so they can sort SARS out, so looks like I will be getting stuff back from that. *holds thumbs* On a related financial note, I'll be getting $175 for last month's running of the Kingdom of Loathing fansite on ColdFront (linked on the right). A pretty damn decent whack of cash for not a lot of effort =) Sounds like a winner to me. Just a pity that PayPal doesn't work properly in SA, since that would be the most convenient way to transfer it. I definitely want to organise getting that through to ZAR at some point, rather than having it languishing idly in a frivolous PayPal account. That every month is a car, ffs! Or rent.

And now, it is hometime. That butternut, I think, will need to be augmented some of those vegges in cheese sauce that Schpat brought along to the last roleplaying session. Yup yup.

Violence

2005-09-02T12:46:00.000+02:00

Connor the druid and his bear Baldur were introduced to the group last night. Sarcastic motherfuckers is what they are ;) It was a fairly disruptive session, reminding me a lot of Alex's Tuesday game, and Al was getting rather upset. Also, it's the first time I've heard a group complaining about getting too much loot. There are a lot of +2 weapons and armour lying around, and a fair amount of magic items, some +3 amongst them. Ah! And I must submit my Faerie Fire / Fog Cloud question to Ask Zenstar.

After roleplaying, Alex, Schpat and I stood outside in the rain for ages discussing MMOs. I feel that a lot of Schpat's views about the communities in various of them stem from not having spent much (and certainly not enough) time in one. Admittedly I only know KoL personally, but I have been there for over a year now and have read a lot of things about various online communties and the way they work. For example, Penny Arcade and PvP are having a massive war on the DarkIron server in WoW. When they started it was basically a brand new server, then PA and PvP put out calls for fans to join the server on either the Alliance side for PA or the Horde side for PvP. Needless to say, thousands and thousands of fans did just that, to the point where there are several clans for each faction and the server is now one of the busiest. Regularly the two factions have massive run-ins as reported here, here, here and here, as well as loads of other posts if you're willing to sift through the archives some more. They seem to be having massive amounts of fun, with Gabe receiving loads of emails along the lines of "playing in a PA guild and battling the [PvP guild] Pandas has reignited [my] love of the game". I'm a PA reader, which is why all these links are to PA posts btw. Basically what I'm saying is that the community of a game is what you make of it, and your group of friends can be as large or small as you want to make it. Patrick was talking about how it would be nice if an MMO only had about 1000 or so people on it, so that you could know everyone.

What the fuck is up with New Orleans? I know people are desperate, but jesus people. Apparently the looting and rioting is so bad that the National Guard who already have the place under Martial Law are shooting to kill now. To kill. I heard this morning from a friend of mine in Ohio, which is a couple of states over, that there has been a fair amount of rape and attempted rape reported. Sorry, I don't give a fuck how desperate you are, rape is not on the list of things you need. There is no excuse for that. And that's supposedly a civilised nation.

I overheard some taxi drivers today talking about pirate taxis, obviously referring to unlicensed taxis (unlicensed for the route rather than necessarily an unlicensed vehicle). It conjured images of a taxi with all sorts of weird spikes drawing alongside another little taxi trying to desperately outrun it, followed by a boarding attempt and theft of the passengers. Funny =) On a related note, a few of the new larger taxis are starting to show up at the Cape Town rank. Good, I hope it catches on.

Bleed, motherfucker

2005-09-01T09:49:00.000+02:00

Last night's roleplaying game was cancelled due to lack of attendance by Mike, not that DAve let us know or anything. He claimed he sent SMSes, but he sounded very tired when I phoned him that afternoon, so he prolly forgot, or sent to the wrong person, or whatever. Anyway, so we went to Sidrianna's to play Vampire instead. Yancke got wind of this, and so came along and brought his L5R cards too. I had to stay at work to make up for the time off for Tuesday's interview, so I only got there at 8pm (ugh, taxiing home that late is a mission). Yancke was busy playing a demo L5R game with Dave while Si and Ada built vampire decks, and my god, the game went on forever. It's also really complex in terms of things you need to know before you start playing, whereas other card games try to limit the amount of prior knowledge you need, and add the complexity in the cards. Beer Money is not a good example of this ;) Anyway, it was a pretty successful vampire game for me when we did eventually got going. The play order was as follows: Dave (Toreador Anti), Simon (Gangrel), myself (Malk Anti), Ada (Tremere), Yancke (Malk Anti). Dave fucked Simon's vamps quite early, leaving me pretty unmolested and able to snack on Ada with little problem. She went to make us all hot chocolate ^_^ Then Yancke snacked on Dave, and I gobbled up Yancke shortly thereafter, despite him gaining 9 pool in one turn. Of course, on the turn after that, I bled him for 8, and after that it was curtains. Yay 2x Eyes of Chaos + Laptop + Enchanted Marionette =) Si made a voting error by diablerising one of my vamps and forgetting I had the edge, and so conceded after having one of his 2 remaining small vampires burnt. 4 of 5 possible victory points, not too shabby =) That left us at 2am, yikes!

Taxis this morning were a minor nightmare. Firstly arguments about which taxi people needed to get into, then major waits while they waited for it to fill up again after unloading people, followed by handoffs along the road ('Tableview, get into that one'). I did get to listen to some Xhosa dance music in the last taxi though, which was quite weird.

Tonight I get to start character creation for my druid-to-be =) Lions and tigers and bears, oh my!

If a programmer shits in the woods and nobody is there to see it, can they still call it code?

2005-08-31T09:53:00.000+02:00

Monday night I was supposed to just pick up my PC from Yancke and go home. Instead, I ended up staying there and playing more WC3, until 12. Dave happened to phone Yancke as well, and so he joined us for a bit (he used Conrad's monitor so that he wouldn't have to bring his. Having one less large item to lug around makes a difference). Some estate agent chick also came to look at the flat, since it looks like Colleen's dad wants more money that Lucas' dad is willing to pay. Oh well, Lucas and I had better start looking for an interim place to stay then, until Lucas can find some other place that he likes =)

Work yesterday was a bit of a nightmare. I had to untangle this mess that one of the other women on the Revelation team was attempting to pass off as code. I've ended up having to just about totally rewrite the whole thing. *looks at the long list of todo emails sent in the last 2 weeks* And they wonder why I am behind on other tasks.

Yesterday evening I had my interview with Richard over at OpenBox. Turns out I know one additional person there than we all thought, since I know Polly from hockey. Freaky shit. Mad thanks to Chelle for fetching me from Retreat station and taking me home afterwards (bouncy bouncy, rawr, or something). I thought the interview went pretty well, but damn, Richard asks some tricky questions. There was a fair amount of 'Um, let me think about that for a moment... weeellll... *stall*'. He seems like a nice guy tho, and they seems like nice offices.

Roleplaying last night was a bit of a mixed bag. We did get a fair amount of playing in, which was cool, but there were also quite a few distractions and sidetracking, which Alex got a bit frustrated with. And god damn! Once Yancke decides he's gonna talk, nothing will stop him, even if someone else was already talking. And then he bitches about distractions, of course. Oh, and yay for active armour (even if the protection is only slight) and temperature regulation suits ^_^ And yay for being bold enough to try it on. It ended quite late as well, and then I still had to sort out my laundry (since the bedding went in for a wash as well). Hey, I wonder if they wash pillows, and how much they charge for it. Some of mine could really use it, and I don't feel like handwashing them myself.

And now I'm off to do my KoL turns, and then continue unravelling this mess of 'code'. Wish me luck!

A lot of this in my future

2005-08-29T12:22:00.000+02:00

Yancke hosted a LAN session yesterday at his place, which was stupidly cramped. We played a lot of Warcraft 3 custom scenarios in the form of DotA, some pirates one, and also a tower-defense one. The directory we got off Waynne when he shipped DotA out to all of us is chock-full of other random maps which we would like to try out at some point. There was also some UT2004 action going on, but that proved to be a bit too stressful while we were playing Onslaught. Eventually we moved on to Invasion, which is always great, and we did pretty damn well on some of the levels. Dave's machine still crashes and burns on Tokara Forest for some reason, which could be a faulty gfx card or some driver issue. I was totally not in the mood for RTS, so we avoided Dawn of War and C&C:Generals (Zero Hour). It was 3am before the last die-hards packed up, but I managed to force-of-will myself out of bed this morning at the appointed time.

Hockey on Saturday (which btw was the reason we lanned on Sunday rather than the less ludicrous Saturday) was a disaster. We went 1-0 up, and then we just lost it. To the tune of 1-6 by the end. Terrible. Hopefully summer-league and indoor (when it eventually starts) will be less of a fuckup. I'm intending on playing indoor seriously, like going for trials and practises and everything, so I should probably start working on my fitness now. Indoor is hardcore. If you're not prepared, you die. So, less junk food and more exercise for me, I think. I wonder if this is enough motivation to coax me into the gym.

Saturday evening I went with Yancke to a friend of his birthday thingy at some place in Obs (under Stones, just by the left hand entrance opposite Armchair). Chilled evening of chatting and drinking, beat the hell out of staying at home and fucking around. Although, Zen Chuzzle is mighty persuasive...

My aunt and uncle (and their two kids) were down from Jozi last week, so I had dinner with the family on Friday. Was very pleasant, and their little girl Christine is totally adorable, and very polite. I was supposed to meet Al, Julie and Colleen at Oblivion afterwards, but by the time I was done they had moved on to Stones. As I was arriving, Julie was a little the worse for wear so Colleen took her home, and Al and I hung around and chatted for a bit, then went through to Gotham to see what was up. Alas, they were closed, and we ended up going to The One Ring to hang around until they closed up. Then we made our slightly-wobbly way home. Al was at the LAN on Sunday, so he obviously made it back okay =)

And after that, I now sit here trying to fix the mistakes my coworker in the states has made. And it is quite terrible, believe me. I might just have to refactor the whole page, but I hope not. Here's hoping...

Lazy lazy Friday

2005-08-26T15:11:00.000+02:00

It's Friday, and the boss is on holiday for a week. So not a lot is getting done by anyone, which is fine by me. I'm just lamming, messing around on the net. KoL turns have been done, an okay day, played a bit of POOM! (the flash game that Schpat recommended, not something gross like I'm sure you're all thinking).

For those not in the loop, there is a new Popcap game. Well, not exactly new, since it was originally by a game company called Sprout, but Popcap have taken it over. It's called Feeding Frenzy, and it's quite fun. Nowhere near as addictive as other Popcap games tho.

Er, and yes. It looks like I'll be joining Moonflake, Zenstar and Schpat's game. Paladin is looking very attractive, purely because it fits so perfectly with the song. And Zen, I can always prestige into Black Guard later on >:D Hmmm, discharge.

Speaking of joining, I have an interview at Moonflake's work, which, if I got the job, would bring the friend-&-coworker tally up to 6. Here's looking forward to that =)

In the beginning...

2005-08-26T14:57:00.000+02:00

Yay. Now I can post on Schpat's blog