I thought we were supposed to head into spring right now, instead I get hail dropping down on my head, and in my face. And when I'm looking out the window right now it's snow drizzling onto the street. Snow! We didn't even have snow in the winter!! Mighty strange weather this is. Thank god I'm inside already, riding through hail alone was bad enough.
To summarize: I can't wait for summer. Up yours winter.
It's silly how I occassionally think of interesting topics to discuss on my blog, with pro's and no's all clearly thought up and out, yet when I get to my PC ready for some speedtyping it's all gone. Like M&M's in the sun. Where's that wireless brain-hyve network when you need it?
Guess I'm gonna go grab that shower now and thrust hot water where no sane reader should have an interest in. Ice begone!
Tuesday March 04, 2008 -- #21
Gameplay may be dwarfed by graphics in games these days, but they sure do squeeze some moody visuals from the latest tech.
Thursday February 28, 2008 -- #20
Cartoons! With a capitool C. Of cheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeesey. Of course they were rad back then. Dope. Phat. Just friggin cool. Now it's just good old nostalgia. Enjoy the sweetness that is an age kids these days just don't know like we did, and never will.
Shame it's missing a few like Deniis The Menace, Thundercats and many many more (where are Transformers and GI Joe?).
Sunday February 10, 2008 -- #19
Deary me! Deary little old me! Time has gradually gone by and I haven't done anything to my, already heavily underused, blog all the while! Well fck me sideways.
So, what's been going on? I'll tell you what's been going on...
I've passed the written test for my drivers license. And it was about time! Driving is taking up a lot of my mental health right now. I literally hate getting in the car with granma "I'll tell you how to drive" tutor, and fear the time when my practical exam will show up. However, I'm not supposed to succumb to the dread of it all, and I will pass! I will!! I'm not a complete spack, and judging by the way a lot of people are driving, complete spacks are passing their tests left and right.
Beyond that, my mental state is deteriorating even further by another little hobby of mine, which is school (college/uni/whatever). I still have an internship coming up, but before I can start that I have to get some much needed points on my record. To get those points I need to hand in assignments, and to hand them in I need to get in contact with the powers that are. Unfortunately, the powers that are don't use the communication-tool that is. They do have, official, e-mail addresses, but that doesn't stop them from completely ignoring it so it seems. I've mailed them time and time again to set up some sort of schedule along which I can work, but to no avail. To be frank though, I have been cutting corners with the deadlines before... but that's what being a student is supposed to be about right? So it isn't my fault.
Apart from school and the driving exam I've been working the odd 24 hours a week, which has been killing my sleep and rest. So even after my last few entries a month or 2 back, I am still in the shit. Fo shizzle. I hope to stop my current job within the next 3 weeks, when I am supposed to have found an internship (for 4 months). Before I can start that however, I have to make, and hand in, at least 2 assignments. I have handed in 2 already, but I'm not sure they have received them, or are even giving them a look over. So that's a total of 4 assignments waiting for "their" blessing.
Once I get school sorted, I am half way back to normality. And with normality comes more... sex? Gaming? Randomingly shooting people in the park? Nay, it will come with other more creative nags and stressballs. I fear my life is already over just when I think I'm about to start.
No no, I won't let my first entry in a while end like this, for not all is gloom. Me and Daan (gf!) are still way cool together, I am losely keeping up with the latest movies (and seeing them) and gaming does make its (much unhealthy) appearance now and then. In fact, I have decided to go out of my Nintendo-clogged-mind and buy a Playstation3. Yup, insanity ensues. I have decided to buy 1 when I have finished my dirving term, which is when I must have my school back in order. No fun unti the job is done. Amen!
So while my little life is still going through a rollercoaster ride, or meatgrinder ride more like, it isn't all bad. It can still get far worse...
Oh and Apparat - The Walls is the bees knees. The bees fcking knees man. Godlike music.
Sunday February 10, 2008 -- #18
Time flies or does it flow, like a river? Things seem to calm down a bit after a hectic 2/3 weeks, the painter is finished, the floor has been placed and we're finally moving some things back to their original place. It's still a pigsty, but with some good effort and will the house should look decent enough when christmas (and hopefully some snow) arrives. School is going a bit shit, I still hate the driving lessons and I'm not playing as much GTA:San Andreas as the doctor ordered, but it's not all that bad anymore.
Hopefully I can finish 2007 in a good way and make 2008 the year we, me and gf, (finally) sort out the house, I get my drivers license and degree, and me and Daan live happily ever after with only the dark wonders of monthly paychecks to worry about. Fcuk school.
I'll be glad when in 6 months most of this crap will be over. Unfortunately that will require some doing and not just sitting on my arse waiting :/
Wednesday December 05, 2007 -- #17
I thought about making good use of the current dollar-euro exchange by getting GTA:SanAndreas and a graphic novel - my eye fell on Flight - from amazon.com. Unfortunately, for whatever clunky reason, when I came to the check-out I was billed the most expensive shipping method, with a shipping amount actually exceeding the price of the products put together! And I'm pretty sure Playboy's miss March herself isn't bringing my stuff over. So why the expensive shipping amount? Apparently amazon just doesn't accept another, cheaper, shipping method to be picked for the international shipping of GTA:SanAndreas. *stumped* What in hells name can be the reason for that? I just can't fathom a logical reason, perhaps because there isn't one. So instead of ordering the stuff through amazon, and saving myself some money, I just went into a local store and bought GTA, no graphical flying for me yet :(
In retrospect I'm really glad I decided to use my birthday money for the PC hardware upgrades, because a) the new graphics card seems spinkily good, games don't crash anymore (my old Radeon was probably the reason for that) and look (slightly) better and b) the Xbox360 pad is great for PC gaming, GTA and VirtuaTennis are so much nicer and better to play, I'll probably even get PES and NHL for the PC too, screw consoles! Of the few games that I often used to play, Half-Life2 was 1 of the games I was hoping to really improve with the coming of a new GPU and added memory beef, but it doesn't look half as mind shattering better as I had hoped. The changes compared to my old setup is that I am now playing in a higher res (12something*1024), use DX9 instead of 8 and I have bloom, AA4x and other trinkets turned on. But the pie doesn't taste all that much sweeter yet, fudge I say. I hope CS:S will look the bizz, can't wait to go knock some heads online again, it's been too long. Just too damn long.
Wednesday November 28, 2007 -- #16
Wednesday, good shiny wednesday, how I love thee! Most of the week I'm busy with something, be it work or school, but wednesday is the day I can sit back and enjoy all the goodness a student deserves. You see, monday, tuesday and friday are spend painting odd looking metal objects. I arrive at work around 7am and I'm not released from prison until 4pm, along with the other cattle. After that I just eat my dinner, watch a little teevee, check my e-mail and play just the littlest of games before heading off to bed again before another workday. Wednesday and thursday were looking to be fully fledged schooldays for a while, but it has turned out a little differently. I thought there would be a course waiting for me on weds, but the teachers seem to think elsewise. I suppose. For some reason they just can't be bothered to answer my e-mails, so I don't know when exactly I'm supposed to show up. That in itself is dangerous, I need to pass those courses, so I need to follow them. On the other hand of course, I love a little free playing time. Whatever the reason, the result is that I'm free on wednesday, fine by me. Thursday's busy with driving lessons (makes me a nervous wreck) and a little course at school at the very end of the day. In between it's just waiting to go to school and not feeling like doing anything important or not-so important. So that's what my week looks like right now, work work free school and 1 more work to finish the week. I think you'll agree that I completely deserve my nice quiet wednesdays. For now anyway.
It seems like the current months will see a whole slew of (possible) decent movies hitting the wall. I went to Apple.com to have a little look and sweet cherrypie with cream on top, movie galore!! Cloverfield, Beowulf, The Mist, I Am Legend, The Golden Compass, Slipstream, No Country For Old Men, Atonement, There Will Be Blood and of course The Dark Knight
...
I'm gonna have to find me some fellow moviegoers. And a bag of gold.
Wednesday November 21, 2007 -- #15
Last week has been pretty busy for me. Like I already, quickly, mentioned my sister got a new house, her first house even, where a lot of painting had to be done, so I spend most of last weekend there painting walls. And after the weekend I went back to painting at work again, but afterwards I stopped by my sister again to continue some more painting there. So you could say, in short, that I've been busy with a lot of painting last week. Back at home there _ALSO_ was some painting to be done, but we didn't feel up to it (quite a lot of work had to be done), so my mum found a willing victim for that. Our neighbour knew of a "man" who does this sort of freelance work, he's already retired from full-time working so he's got loads of time and he's cheaper than other painters, my mum took a little chance with him, but it seems to be working out alright so far.
I really hated last week though, even if I don't hate the painting work that much I do hate having to wear old crummy clothes all the time which aren't very comfortable and I feel dirty all the time no matter how many showers I take, paint on my hands, in my hair and who knows where... who wants to know really. I am in paint fumes and "filth" at work, then at my sisters and to top it off my home is reeking of the stuff as well. Blegh. Luckily my PC has been working as normal last week, so when I had the chance I ran upstairs and played some tennis there. I haven't had time to start a movie download yet (need to configure eMule) and I've barely had time to read from The Stand, so no updates there. This weekend has seen most of my time sucked up by Daan's (GF) birthday so I haven't been able to do much at home, but that's ok, pie makes Mike a happy boy! Luckily I've also brought my notebook so I can play a lot of GTA:ViceCity here. Love that game, despite the dodgy flying controls.
College has been going along, I feel I'm hardly doing as much stuff as I should and that worries me, butI'll get back to that after weekend. Am really fed up with my study. Drains my powerrrrrrrrrrrrs.
Sunday November 18, 2007 -- #14
Late last night after some handywork done at my sisters (new place), I found myself booting up my PC, ready for a renewed attack on my little no-desktop-boot problem. Like I said in my last post I thought, suspected, it had something to do with my power supply. I just figured it wasn't up to the task of feeding everything and let my video card sort itself out. But that didn't make sense as I started thinking about it, why would Windows boot up just fine sometimes, and not at all at other times. And why weren't there any problems with the initial start-up of my PC, it never failed me to show the normal start-up procedures or BIOS. I just didn't get it. And then out of the blue, just out of the dear damn clear shiny blue, I decided to give the directX diagnostic tool a whirl, and lo and behold, there she was. Dxdiag showed a lot of problems with the Direct3D tests, in fact it gave me more than just problems, it gave me error codes, and with error codes I can work! So I fed the Google machine the data and there she was, a forumthread, and don't I love a good thread. The problem in this thread seemed just like mine, because whenever I did get into Windows fine it just wouldn't start VirtuaTennis3, but kick back to Windows, so that's why I turned to dxdiag in the first place and that's why I thought this gentleman had the exact same problem as moi! And he found a sollution!!!!!!EXCLAMATION MARKS GALORE!!!!!!!!!!
Never did I suspect the latest ATI catalyst drivers to be the perp. Never. After some uninstalling and looking around for older versions I ended up with drivers 2 "generations" old, from august/ june. At first they didn't seem to solve the problem, Windows started fine, but dxdiag still had problems running the tests and still no tennis for little ole'me. Today however, after yet another painting session, I turned my computer on again and ran the test... and there he was: No-Errorman. And what a hero it is. Whatever the reason, whatever the cause and whatever the shizzle, it all seems to work fine now, perhaps my system just needed some rest and decided today that it would accept the drivers and stop fussing about. Brilliant. So I played VT3 with the X360 gamepad, and I'm digging it greatly. It's so much nicer than having to use a keyboard for moving around on my notebook, I think the PC will provide an excellent console substitute as long as I don't have a Wii or PS3 yet.
Once my financial situation gets a bit on the up and up again (after an expensive last week) I want to get a new powersupply, motherboard and processor (64bit perhaps) for some decent money and have my system ready for TeamFortress2 and others. It probably won't run Crysis, but that's not what I'm after. I just can't afford a spinky new top of the line system atm, so I'll make do with what I can afford.
After that I'm gonna go stuff the hog full of noise resistant material and see if I can turn the vibrations down, it's making wee bit too much noise right now. I'd like a little less purr and humm when I'm trying to sleep. But I'm content with what works right now, really content. Lets try HL2 in directX 9 mode shall we?
Sunday November 11, 2007 -- #13
I'm back! Yes I am. Back from a real state of happiness right into a state of panic and paintfrenzy. I spend the best part of last week swimming, watching some TV and fattening up, yummy for cakes dipped in warm gushing chocolate, and boy did I love it. Me and my sweet spouse ended up back home from Center Parcs yesterday evening after a little visit to a zoo/safari parc on the ride home. I didn't know the head of a full grown tiger was that large and, mostly because of it, terrifying, even with a thick piece of glass between us it seemed... hungry for me. Not much else to report, apart from me being really shit at bowling and mini-golf, Children Of Men is still a decent movie and "all you can eat buffets" are really really crap for deserts, once you get to the deser buffer side it's pretty much all over and I don't have a space to spare.
I got my share of comics again, after a long time of not getting anything. I got TPB's #3 and #4 of The Walking Dead, manga's #12 and #13 of LoneWolf And Cub and I finally got my smudgy little mittens on The Dark Knight Returns. /me is happy and spoiled Haven't gotten around to actually reading them yet, as I am knee, nay waistdeep, into The Stand. I hope to have that finished within a week and get into the graphic side of things.
Still have problems with my PC of course, I think my power supply isn't up to what is needed now, with the addition of a speedier (read: power hungrier) videocard, extra HardDisk and a writer/burner drive. That probably causes a problem with my video card, which sometimes doesn't feel like giving home when the Windows desktop is supposed to hit the screen.
At least I hope that's it, else I'm completely in the dark.
Saturday November 10, 2007 -- #12