Author: admin

Got to love this, with everyone running around yelling the sky is falling in, or in this case, the planets going to bake with global warming, New Scientist reports that there is a risk of a miniice age. Sometimes I wish people would actually start taking a serious look at history. I heard some idiot on the ABC the other day ranting about how this year in Australia was the hotest on record, and yet the conclusion was based on….wait for it….50 years of records!! Any ametuer scholar of history knows that Europe went through intense cold periods during the second mellinium, as well as other periods which were warmer. No one stops to think and ask whether the warming/ cooling phenomenon is just part of the earths natural changes, do they!

Well, finally, finally the 5 1/2 million WOW patches downloaded and late last night, after some serious blog work I logged in and set up my character. I’m apparently a night elve (or was it elf??). First impressions, compared to say Second Life, the customisation options for characters are very limited.

So off I went, there was a large mountain and roaming animals, and a whole lot of other players who had absolutely no idea what they were doing. I gathered this is where newbies must start. A number of people tried to get me to join their groupings (I’m not sure why). Eventually I found a quest, and once having got it had no idea how to actually find the creature I was to look for. By this stage it was getting late, and I was slaying things for the fun of it, all the while with no idea how to actually do the quest, until I realised one of the little blips on the mini-map was the target! One quest down, and I’m on level 2. Second quest was to slay a few animals, which I was still doing before heading off to bed.

More thoughts: very rich environment visually, and the graphics are way, way smooth compared to say Second Life. Nice background music as well. Getting the hang of the game though is a little weird, I’m guessing that its all about going on quests and what not, and building up your levels, so I’ll keep trying and see what happens. As a fan of CIV and SimCity style games (how many people can remember gems like A-Train and Transport Tycoon?) I’ve never really been into this style of gaming, which is why I suppose I want to keep going at it so I can finally understand what the appeal is to people. I’m thinking of it as a personal challenge, a be it one that also gives me some R&R as well.

A little tidbit: I bought World of Warcraft on Saturday, and thought to myself last night (Sunday) that I’d install it and have a go. Its now Monday night, and I’m still not playing it. Install with 5 CD’s took about 1 hour, then the 1st patch was about a 250mb download which took a bit over 2 hours. That was Sunday gone. Now its Monday night, I’m just finishing up a bit of b5media work and I think to myself “I’ll check out World of Warcraft”….and what do I find: more patches. One downloads and installs in a couple of minutes, which is fine, now I’m downloading another one which is ?? out of 22,000 odd I don’t know whats, but it looks like its going to take hours at this rate. Given I’ve already signed up I’m half tempted to take it back, 1 day in and I still cant play the thing because of all the patches that need to be downloaded. Its really, really bad.

Admission time here: as a kid I was a huge lego fan: I had an extensive lego railway and town, probably 10 sq metres of it atleast, and probably more, it actually took up a whole room in a house we once lived in. So as much as my son owns megablocks and lego, this sort of makes me sad, and yet happy at the same time, given that lego has lost the plot from what I can see. Read here. In the old days of lego you could build a town and buy a post office, a train station, hotel, etc, etc… today I don’t recognise lego, its Harry Potter and space stuff, none of the basic stuff from what I can see, and its all very, very complicated. The wonder of lego for me as a child was that I could get pieces to build a town of practical items. I could drive the cars around on the Lego Road maps (which all connected up) and on which you could put your lego buildings. It was magical, in a practical, real life sense. Today they’ve just seem to have lost the plot. One lego peice doesn’t fit with another in terms of theming any more. No wonder kids are buying megablocks.

This is leadership:

The Register: An extraordinary criticism of Tunisia?ɬ¢?¢‚Äö¬¨?¢‚Äû¬¢s approach to the Internet was fired at its president Zine Ben Ali at the opening ceremony of the World Summit in Tunis this morning.

Swiss president Samuel Schmid drew huge applause from the back of the room when he directly criticised Tunisia?ɬ¢?¢‚Äö¬¨?¢‚Äû¬¢s controlling Internet policies. “It is unsupportable that the UN still has members that imprison their own citizens because of what they have written on the Internet or in the press,” he said. “Everyone should be able to express their views freely.”

This is pretty cool: FlightAware. Saw it on Joi Ito’s blog, he says that he wishes it was international. What would they do for Western Australia though, you could probably track the domestic traffic with less than 10 dots, and this for a state bigger than Western Europe 🙂

One thing that really sh*ts me about the press is the lies they use, and the biggest lie of all is that there was no weapons of mass distruction in Iraq. Because folks, there was.

Here is a short list
0.77 metric tons of enriched uranium
1,500 gallons of chemical weapons agents
Chemical warheads containing cyclosarin (a nerve agent five times more deadly than sarin gas)
Over 1,000 radioactive materials in powdered form meant for dispersal over populated areas

And thats only part of the list. Don’t believe what you hear or read. WMD was found in Iraq, its just not popular to say so.

Apparently its Halloween, so my wife tells me as about 8 kids knocked on the door tonight here in Western Australia, which is all very well and good…except that it’s an American thing and I really have no interest in it. So the kids at the door didn’t get a lecture about the evils of stupid American traditions…because at the end of the day its really just an American thing that unfortunately has spread here as well…. they all got a CD case each, out of the box of 25 I bought off ebay about 6 months ago for about $2 a case (with shipping)….what can I say? it was cheap, which is why I bought it, even if I’ve only used 2 since, and now there are 8…. hang on another 4 ppl just knocked on the door whilst I was typing this, so that makes 12 kids who have brand new CD cases. Who needs lollies when you can store your CDs! I hope there aren’t too many more, I’m running out of cases 🙂