BinaryJam

Well as you may have read the xbox is dead again, like Shelley Long reappearing 3 times but without a pretty face just 3 red lights.  However there is good amongst the bad. 

Like the Wii.

The Wii is just great, for Xmas my boy got Super Mario Galaxy and I bought the Wife Guitar Hero III.  Both of these proving terrific fun.

SMG, is a joy to play, one of the first real games I have (I mean J has) for the Wii, not just a jump in party game which the Wii is so good at, but a proper story driven platformer, in 3d.  The colours are great the tunes are great its so easy to control. The wiimote is not abused but used intelligently and sparingly, something many developers for the Wii need to learn (Whilst I don’t own these games I have tried them, which is why I don’t own them !).

I bought Guitar Hero for S.  Our Childminder has it and she’s been driving me mad about it.  I bought it and had to put her off from getting it for herself before Christmas.  Having no xbox I got to play this instead, whilst she was out of the room!  After a couple of tries I managed to get to grips with it really quickly and stormed through all the songs on the easy level.

Unfortunately, S, is terrible at it.  Whether its because she is a real musician (keyboards/vocals) not lately but in her younger days was member of a band who got signed, but then it all fell apart due to internal struggles (putting it mildly).  Or perhaps its because of the impaired hearing she suffers from now, that she is absolutely rubbish.  Or maybe its because GH is nothing like playing an instrument and is more like a video game ?

Still for those who can play it, its great.

However now I try to play on the next level up I’m struggling for the exact same reasons I stopped learning the guitar and switched to keyboards, movement on my little finger is painful, the knuckle “jumps” making it impossible to play anything that requires its use.  So to me it’s not that different after all.

Perhaps I shall wait for “Keyboard Hero” - What do you mean there aren’t any !   

Well what a Christmas, I actually got some good presents this year and one of them was Halo 3, I held off buying it just in case I got it for xmas.

All ready to go and kids cleared away I turn on my 360 on Dec 26th ready to become master chief for a longer than cursory glance as I did on the 25th.

Guess what ?

3 lights of death.

AGAIN

ON CHRISTMAS, AGAIN

This is the 3rd Xbox 360 to die on me.  THE THIRD !!!!!

I know I will have to suffer the stinkin xbox support line to get it replaced, I was told last time it’s now guaranteed till 2009 as its a recon.  But I don’t want a Recon, ready to blow up again, tell me otherwise and I’ll stick 3 broken xboxes down your throat.  I want a new working, guaranteed not to break down ever again spangly new one.  But just try dealing or telling the support people that,  its “do you want it repaired or not, that’s the choice”, in a tone that is generally take it or bugger off.

So anyone thinking of buying a 360 ?

DON’T.

Xbox Live is cool, the price is right, the games are plentiful.  But how many Christmases do you need ruining by Microsoft and it’s piss poor build and poor component design, two is enough for me, that’s right the last ones died Xmas Day.  I suppose I was lucky for it to last till boxing day.

Get a PS3 or a Wii, at least you can be sure it will last longer than 1 year each.  Unless of course you want to buy my second hand one when it’s replaced with games.

XBOX 360 YOU SUCK, and your little support line too.

** Update :

Before anyone asks, my xbox has lots of space around it, lots and lots of it !!!

I already know one other person who is on his 4th Xbox and I just met another who is on his fifth !!!

**

I thought I’d raise the profile of this petition.  Now personally I’m not sure it’s the correct solution but it could be used to raise awareness of the issue. 

http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/fibretothehome/sign

Pass this link about if you agree with it, if you think an alternative is required then avoid creating another petition and diluting the subject and still sign it, there is no way the government is going to pay BT money to do what they should have started doing ages ago with all the profits off the back of our taxes, I’m ranting again.

Please sign it and e-mail your colleagues and families to do similar hopefully it can beat the road pricing petition in numbers and it just might wake ofcom up from its slumber.

This is extreme case modding for laptops, need more space on that company laptop ?  Hard drive broken and you want to replace it with something a lot bigger ? 

Then try this case modding tip from Ashleigh.  Get a lovely USB slimline external hard drive and sellotape it and the usb cable onto the surface of the laptop.

No messing about with glue and custom forming plastic one quick and easy application and you have storage to go.

Over the past years its really bugged me the effect of light pollution when small I could see loads of stars, now I see very few.  Last night I went to my friends to look at the remnants of Comet 17P Holmes through the scope.  We were a little late to the party, a large cloud of barely visible dust.

I was looking at the stars trying to find perseus, steve pointing out various things.

“Look over there at that group pleides”.

“What that blurry group of stuff over there”.

“What!!?!?”.

“Hang on, this might help a bit”, puts glasses on.

“Oh my god, its full of stars!!!!”.

I hate wearing my glasses, I’m short-sighted, not a lot, but enough that I need them to drive, just about, some days I pass the test others I don’t. 

Stars being on essentially an infinity focus, I never really thought I needed glasses it’s not like I can see them any better is it ?

Wrong. Again.

All of a sudden Orion consists of more than seven stars, I can see the sword and the other bits clearly.  Pleides now looks like a collection of small stars in the shape of a shopping cart icon, all I saw was, well nowt really.

Many a time I would try and point things out to J and he would get confused, now I know why, he was seeing five times as many stars in the sky as I was.

Duh!

Going to get new glasses.

(see part one of tales of a dufus here ).

It’s been barely a month since I moved the blog and hosted it on ASO.  Some may have noticed a slight disruption in service yesterday.  ASO managed to louse up the DNS entry for my domain and pointed it at a friend of mine’s instead, hence all the car stuff that appeared in the feed.

They fixed the problem as fast as DNS TTL would allow and things are back to normal now.

Thing’s go wrong sometimes, it’s when they do you learn how good the support is of the service your buying and I can say I’m reasonably pleased.  I’m not so pleased they loused it up in the first place a little more care could have been applied, a few processes observed perhaps.  But hopefully things are back to normal.

Now the tours over and it’s nearing the P.G.P. (primary gifting period).  I though I’d mention that I was lucky enough to be bought tickets to see Bill Bailey (of buzzcocks, black books, etc, fame) for my birthday. 

It was a really good show and well worth the, quite pricey, tickets paid to see him.  But after the show it was quite evident why the ticket price was high for, what I would call a “just below headliner comedian”, no offence, pot/kettle.  The reason must be to pay for the law suits he’s likely to get from, not mentioning any names, a large supermarket chain, (taps backside, chink chink) and auto-rescue company not to mention Swiss bank. 

I’m sure that taking the logo of said rescue company and super imposing the fiery flames of hell constitutes some kind of trademark infringement, albeit a very funny one.

You can’t see the live show now, but the visual set-up was something to be believed, five large screens placed next to each other, polyptych style, reminiscent of Bosch’s Garden of Earthly delights, certainly the hell component appeared later in the show.  This screen arrangement formed a large cinema style aspect that projected Bill and other video elements for the show on the screen and it was used to excellent effect.

The best part of it and what makes Bill a unique comedian is the songs. He has a knack of composing some of the funniest piss-take songs about goths.  The “snowflake on the eye of a deer” song had me rolling in hysterics first time I heard it and I was lucky enough to hear it again live and now the “Emo” song about a self-harming young lad who works in a coffee shop again, excellent. 

I will agree with some others that whilst enjoyable it didn’t have the energy of earlier shows (admittedly I had only seen on TV) but being there made up for a lot.

The worst part of the experience was, and this was nothing to do with Bill, was the dreadful acoustics of the NIA.  The echo of Bill’s voice bounced off the rear wall almost  half a second later so being sat in the middle I copped for equal amounts of live and echo.  It’s because of this I would desperately try to avoid the NIA for anything like this again.  If I have to travel a bit then so be it. 

Still I will probably buy the DVD and I would recommend it to anyone else, when it comes out.  You will be humming the shop song every time you visit I guarantee it.

Ok, Ok, so it’s old news.  But now I have control over my blog I can add things like google analytics. It has a great map function and from that I can see where my traffic is coming from. 

What this does show is I have a reader in India and I’d just like to say.

“Hi Guarav, how’s things back in Bangalore, how did you tech-ed pitch go and send me your contact details”.

So you can’t get better targeted blog postings than that all triggered by Analytics.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7114642.stm

In a wonderful piece of incite Ofcom have announced they have no vision.

“We need significant evidence that such a network is required and I don’t think it exists yet”

Really ?

The reason you cannot see why a network is required is that currently any business model that requires a high speed network is constrained by our existing infrastructure.  Are you just blinded by the sheer cost of putting in fibre? Yes it’s expensive but, the network is as important an infrastructure as our roads and rail.  It needs a strong kick to send it where the country needs, and Ofcom, as usual, are fumbling with the ball.

But if you really need a reason, 

“First company to offer me fast broadband at the right price get’s my business.”

So, Oi Virgin, take the hint, if BT won’t cable, get your ar*e in gear and lay some more wires damn you, I’ll switch in a heartbeat.

And someone kick the dullards at Ofcom.