Monday 30 November 2009

Why I Hate Dell

OK, so my Dell printer has been of great annoyance for quite a while. Ever since the last one got fried by the crazy electricity of Northernhay, things have not been simple. I phoned Dell got, got a new one delivered, and all that. But the last few months have been driven by a need for printer ink. After a fair bit of searching, I discovered that Dell will only let you buy printer ink directly from them. Which sucks. So, I bought a black ink cartridge, and when it arrived things were looking good.

But no.

The Dell printer wont work without a colour cartridge detected. Even tho' I have no desire to print in colour. And I can't use the old colour cartridge because, for complex reasons, I dont have it anymore.

*sigh*

So, unless someone knows of a workaround, I am gonna have to spend money on a colour ink cartidge. Which sucks.

More on FlashForward

So we have hit the midseason of FlashForward. Y’know, that show where everyone sees themselves exactly what they will be doing in 6 months and gets really worked up over what is going to happen.

Every time I watch, I see just how much this is a post-Lost show. By which, what I mean is that this show is doing everything possible to be like Lost. Mysterious characters with mysterious intentions. More questions than answers. Time-travel confused dialogue. British actors. But the problem is that Lost spent years building the mythos, whilst getting rid of all those viewers that were too retarded, or who couldn’t be bothered to pay attention. You don’t know what lies in the shadow of the statue? No worries, ‘cos Lost is no longer a show for you. The final season of Lost is a payoff for the hardcore. For people who have watched, and importantly, learned from, the show since the beginning. FlashForward does not have that. And so, it is trying to be the new Lost, but for everyone. And that makes it dumb itself down. And that sucks.

Anyway, there was no real point to this babbling stream of consciousness, ‘specially if you watch neither Lost or FlashForward. Having just watched the midseason finale, it seems I shall be a couple of weeks without FlashForward. But having watched a fair bit of it now, it seems to be a decent show. Oh, and by the way, Lost restarts in February.

Friday 27 November 2009

December = Exciting Movies

So, December looks like it will be pretty awesome for movies.

1. Sherlock Holmes - man, if this movies is half as good as it looks it will be so damn cool.

2. Avatar - That movie that Cameron has been making for about ten years about humans exploring a planet liven on by blue aliens.

3. Paranormal Activity - is this new horror movies. I have never been much of a fan of horror films, but the more I hear about this the more awesome it sounds. Of course, I am trying to avoid hearing too much, for fear of spoilerz...

Thursday 26 November 2009

SkiFree was so awesome.

Hopefullly everyone here will have played SkiFree. It was a free PC game from the early '90s, the aim of which was to ski down a mountain, avoiding obstacles. However, the most memorable thing about the game was the abominable snowman who would chase and eat you after your ski fun. No matter what you did, at the end of your run, this yeti would appear and eat you. He was innescapable. XKCD just did a comic about it.

Click the comic to embiggen.

Tuesday 24 November 2009

Paris Hitch-Hike

So, just came back after hitchhiking to Paris. For charity! The opportunity came about, and so I teamed up with Tom Baker to try and make it to Paris.

We started off at 9am on thrusday, with the weather helpfully not rainiing, and made our way to exeter services. We were there for quite a while until we found someone to give us our first hitch. It was a lady who worked for BP. She was driving back to swindon, so she was able to take us as far as swindon servies. We were not there for very long, as we quickly found a guy who was willing to take further down the road. He was, to be honest, quite strange. At one stage he was quietly praying while driving like a madman on the motorway. Then he pulled over to the hard shoulder, telling us how he knew a great spot to hitchhike from. He seemed very impressed that we were doing this for charity, and very enthused about getting us to a prime location. As he was fairly insitent he take us there, we decided to trust him. Turned out, his great place was a petrol station just stones throw from heathrow airport! It had not been part of our plan to get stuck inside london, and it took us quite a while to get back to plan, onto the M25. We were able to convince an off duty minicab driver to give us a lift, and he dropped us at some traffic lights next to a roundabout, which was another not so great spot. We were there for probably just over an hour, before we were picked up by an engineering consultant who had been working on the fuel economy project at heathrow. He was either incredibly well connected or loved to spin tall tales, as virtually every bridge or building we passed he knew the architect of. He said he had hitchhiked in his youth, and gave us a couple of tips. The most useful of which, was that when not at services the most important thing was to have a place where drivers could pull over after seeing you. Which made sense as soon as swe stopped to think about it. He dropped us in a far better spot, just by a laybuy on a road leading to the M25. The problem was we were running out of sunlight, and we were still there when it got dark. This was when things started to look bleakest, as the later it got, the slimmer our chances of getting a lift seemed. And we did not want to be stuck on the side of the road all night. But eventually a van driver pulled over. Not that he had seen us, he had pulled over in order to phone his wife, but since he was going the right way, he was willing to give us a lift. He was a pretty interesting bloke, as he had driven vans all around europe, and he dropped us at some services about 40miles from Dover. This was a far better place to be, as it not only had a place where we could buy some food, but also as we spotted some fellow exeter-paris hitchhikers. We tried our luck at the services petrol station for about an hour, and a buissnessman on his way home gave us a lift the final stretch to Dover.

We got to Dover about 1am, and managed to get some sleep while waiting for the ticket office to re-open the next morning. We woke early for the first ferry across the channel, but it turned out to be incredibly hard to find a lift whilst on the ferry. There were about 6 pairs of us hitchers, all trying to head to Paris, and there just weren't enough people heading that way. So we arrived at Calais with those fair few other hitchers from Exeter, and found another bunch of people who had been in Calais overnight. Turns out Calais is one of the most depressing places on earth. One pair who had gone into town to look for a lift had been shooed back to the port, being told it was not safe. Then it started to rain, and so we decided to get the train to Paris with our felow hitchhikers. It was about 6pm by the time we got to Paris, and we had to make it to our meeting point, which was the Eiffel Tower, in order to meet up with even more exeter hitchikers. By the time we had found that, we then had to turn about and try to find our way to the hotel, which turned out to be harder than we had first thought. But we managed it, and were able to get to our room and get some sleep.

Saturday was spent wandering around the centre of paris. Saw the Arche de Triumph, walked along looking at some of the shops, and went up the the Eiffel Tower. Then, in the evening, we went out to a parisian nightclub, which was good fun, but we were there for a long time, as we needed to wait it out until the metro re-opened so we could get the subway back to the hotel. So it was morning before we made it back to the hotel. After waking on sunday, we went to get some food, before making it onto the coach for the long ride back to Exeter. Slept a bit during that, and made it home on monday. Took a couple of days to recover the sleep that students requier, and now things are settling pretty much back to normal.

Paris was great fun, and hitchhiking turned out to be a pretty awesome experience. Win!

Tuesday 10 November 2009

Searching for Call of Duty

So, I dunno if you have heard, but there is this new videogame out. There has been a bit of fanfare for the new Call of Duty game, Modern Warfare 2. Seems that when you make a sequel to one of the best selling games of all time you want people to know it is coming.

"11.10.09" they chanted, confusing everyone in Britain with their Americanised date stamp, and so I looked forwards to November 10th. So when I found I had 6000 words of essay to give in on the same day I was slightly disheartened. But no problem, I thought, I shall just get my work out of the way, ahead of time.

Turns out that was not the case. Instead of running down to my local videogame retailer for the midnight launch, which I have long awaited, and running home to be one of the first people to play this game, I was stuck, my face lit by the glow of my laptop in a cold house, trying to find intelligible things to say about the 1911 National Health Insurance Act. So I missed out on being one of the first person to play.

But, don't you know, being the first to play had already been broken. Online retailers shipped the game last wednesday, so as not to lose face if customers received the game late I expect, but this meant people were already playing this game last weekend. At the same time, supermarket retailers responded by slashing their prices and selling the game at a loss. From the RRP of £55, you can find the game for as low as £25, if you are willing to sink as low as to shop at ASDA.

But I had pre-ordered this in GAME months ago, in anticipation of a midnight launch. And being the loyal customer I am, I was going to stick to my pre-order and get my double reward points, buying the game for the not unreasonable £45. So I walked into Exeter high street only to find that the GAME store had closed down! And reopened at a new location! A location they seemed to want to keep secret, giving only the toughest of riddle-esque clues as to its location. I kid you not people.

So I had to go and find the new GAME store. This led to a rather uneventful 15 minutes as I stumbled about the Princesshay shopping district, suffering from the cold and hunger, while I tried to find the new location of the Exeter branch of GAME.

But, success! I found it! I was done. There, in the front shelf for all to see, where millions of copies of Call of Duty. So I ran to the desk, and presented my pre-order receipt to the cashier. Who turned aorund, and took a mint condition copy of Call of Duty down from the shelf behind her. She scanned it, I had money in hand... and then she looked at me, and asked if I was over 18.

I was slightly startled. I have not been asked my age when buying a videogame for.... well, since I had braces and was still choosing which GCSEs to study. So I produced my university ID. And was told that just would not do. I remained calm, and logical, like Spock. I asked if she could check the birthdate on my GAME loyalty card. That would not do. Hmm... if I was Spock that Vulcan Nerve Pinch would be useful about now. I offered to show her the birthdate on my debit card. That would not do. It had to be a driving licence. Which I had left, in my drawer, at home. And so I was forced to leave GAME without Call of Duty.

Now, I can understand why they would do this. They don't want to get into trouble for selling little Timmy a videogame with some shooty bits. But I am not little Timmy. I am 6 foot 2. I hadn't shaved this morning, so have stubble under my chin. And so I left, feeling... what is that word that means the opposite of happy?

So I left, a solitary tear trickling down my eye. I gave into hunger. I had not eaten lunch yet, so I stumbled towards the nearby sandwich shop. Then I stumbled homewards, to the internet, to rage against this injustice. Thinking of how, if the world was a better place, I would be skipping home to get shot at in a computer simulation. This is all just not fair...