Tiny Pirate

I’ve just treated myself to a lovely new digital camera. A Cannon S3 PowerShot. My older digital camera was looking very long in the tooth, with no zoom, low res images and generally poor quality (especially indoors). This camera, however, is perfect! The price was good, the image quality is excellent and it’s brim-full of options. It has a great zoom, great optics, and I don’t know how else it could be improved. Expect to see my flickr sidebar widget update a lot as I go out and use it!

Me and my lady, Laura, have started a blog on food in Wellington. We both enjoy eating out and we both have strong opinions about the range of great, and not-so-great restaurants in Wellington. Also, Laura loves to take pictures of her dinners! Yes, it’s a strange habit, but I figured, why not put it to good use! Hence, a blog about food. You can go read our blog at Foodgasmic Wellington! I hope you enjoy it.

Few things annoy me more than bad web site design. I want to give people money, I want to buy their products, but if I can’t research the product on your website or I can chuck it in a shopping cart and order it, chances are I will never bother spending money with you and will be annoyed your web site for wasting my time. And then I’ll blog about it because I’m angsty.

Harvey Norman New Zealand – A terrible website that tells you to download their catalog or you can flip through a scanned pop-up copy that does not even show enough detail to read the text of the ad! There’s no online ordering facility at all. Completely and utterly awful.

Overclockers – A nice company based in New Zealand offering good computer gear. Shame about the website. Red on black text? Hello, MySpace want their 13 year olds back! At least the shopping cart works I guess.

Reading Cinemas – For a long time this site was completely broken in Firefox and IE. You could simply not get film listings or times to display. Now, they’ve repaired it (took a couple of months) and have a great scheme where you can sign up for ‘rewards’ in return for most of your personal information. Hmm. What makes this dubious offer worse is that when you do sign up, they send a confirmation email which includes your login and password in plain text! Now, I don’t use the same password for everything, but I do use the same password for ‘junky’ things like signing up to crappy websites. It’s good to know any bored admin can access mail logs on the many servers between here and Reading and check out my password too!

ASB Bank – Their login page involve a simple one-step login process. In the UK many banks moved to a two-step process involving a user name and password as well as a drop down asking you to select a letter from your user name. This step was designed to defeat key-loggers, which are heavily used by East European criminal gangs in particular. No such sophistication for New Zealand banking customers.

Looks like I got l33t hax0red the other day, well, all of my host, Neosurge did. All fixed now, back to the joyous fun of TinyPirate!

Thanks to the awesome work of Johan the Second Life games wiki is back up at http://www.gameslavewiki.com/. Johan will be managing it from now on as he’s technical enough to do a good job, which I’m not. Redirects from the old URL will be available shortly. Meanwhile, book this beautiful new link! Note, the version Johan has recovered from my crash might be a bit out of date and some pages might be missing. Please help out and bring the wiki back up to speed.

Word on the street is that Sony is well behind on getting final dev kits and controllers out to their developers, despite what some Sony staff are saying. Even worse, their middleware developer, Naughty Dog, is still hiring people to work on the software developers are supposed to be using to build games. Poor Sony, since the PS3 price announcement I can’t think of a single piece of good news to come out about the PS3.

The other day I saw Sympathy for Lady Vengeance, a simply fantastic Korean film. It turned up in a local film festival and it was a real thrill compared to some of the poop that’s on everywhere else right now. At its heart, the movie is a stylish revenge story, and one that encourages the viewer to relish the revenge as much or even more than the protagonist does!

After mulling over the film a little, I am reminded of how much I love a good revenge story, yet it’s one that’s seldom touched on in Hollywood (or elsewhere?). Some examples come to mind, with Taxi Driver and Leon/The Professional as particular favourites, but perhaps the dubious morality of a good revenge story is a bit much for most people. Read the rest of this entry »

Not sure I have many active readers since I no longer post much about Second Life, but regardless, as you will see, I’ve updated hte blog somewhat and reinstated comments (with new spam-protection features!). Enjoy, I should be posting more often now.

It’s about time I blog some more. And update my flickr pictures too for that matter. Anyway, I think I’ll keep this baby updated a bit more, however I won’t be covering Second Life much. There’s one reason why, and that is that I just don’t play much any more! I find I tend to be a bit obsessive with SL, and that obsession manifests as a desire to be a fantastic coder, artist and builder in game, something I can’t hope to achieve. The result is my crappy builds and art tend to annoy me more than excite, especially when I know there are other fantastic. I end up hounding other people to do ‘my’ work and that is no good for anyone!

I plan on dropping in regularly, but for the good of everyone, I should keep my fingers out of that particular pie. So what will I blog about now? Mostly games I’m playing now, tech ideas and other bits and pieces I feel like discussing. Lets hope it’s interesting.

In a fit of madness I have joined the New Zealand Territorial Force, our army reserve! Today I passed my fitness test and two hours later I was swearing alleigance to the Queen and being congratulated. Oh dear, what have I got myself into? I blame it on a touch of brain cramp. Should be interesting I figure.

I’ve been working on getting fit recently. Partly because I plan to join the NZ Army reserves (called the Territorial Force here), and partly for good health. I’m pleased to say that I’ve had a new best run time today! I do a 5km series on Tuesday nights and today my split time (2.4km/1.5m actually) was 10:38. My full time was 24:38. In all I cut 55 seconds off my run time two weeks ago so I’m pretty pleased! Running is kinda fun when you get in to it, and while you’re not doing it, and not just before of course. Other than that, it’s a right laugh!

Been feeling the gamer itch recently. I’ve enjoyed The Movies, but needing to coerce friends into doing voices for one’s movies (you really want to make the effort and do a voiced film I think) is tricky! Worse, there are now so many many movies being posted to their community site it’s highly likely one’s brilliant effort will sink without a trace.

Meanwhile, I’m playing Morrowind, a $10 purchase, which is a nice game, especially with Desslock’s lovely walkthrough from GameSpot. Couldn’t live without the tips he provides!

However, I’ve still got the itch. Which is why I went and purchased the Call of Cthulhu 6th Edition Rulebook. I’m keen to organise some games, but where to find some players!

My new current obsession is The Movies, an interesting game out from Lionhead. Half the game a tycoon-style studio management thing, the other half is making machinima using the tools they give you. There are some pretty fun films out already and I’m sure we’ll see many more!

Going to get back into doing a wee bit more blogging. Might fidlde with the site too. In terms of gaming. Well, with a download limit here in New Zealand I can’t really effectively play Second Life. It’s also become nearly impossible to develop DarkLife with Mark as he’s 12 hours away and we’re both too busy to be up at crazy hours of the night. So, for this reason I’m waiting for The Movies, playing some Navy Field and still enjoying Battlefield 2. Hmm. More interesting posts as I get myself better organised.

rant on I have a bit of a thing for a good web game. Right now, Urban Dead is really rocking my world, but I’ve tried a fair-few of the more well known ones in my time. I like the short 5 minute distraction they can be, the multiplayeryness of them and the (sometimes) elegant design. But one thing constantly annoys me about them. What I hear you ask? Well, a complete lack of info on what the bloody hell the game is and how it works! For example, I followed a link to Evolution 5 and am instantly presented with a completely uninspiring page. Clicking on the Evolution Guide link doesn’t give you anything else to go on either, launching straight into discussion of menus and whatnot.

How hard would it be to place three or four sentences at the top of the page describing the game? It’s an incredibly basic thing to do but MOST web games fail to do it. And how about a screenshot! I know, revolutionary idea here! Sure, your game might be all text but I’d like to see how it looks and if it’s likely to fit my particular tastes (I like web games with maps, like Urban Dead. Just a personal thing).

Maybe I’m missing something. Maybe people don’t want new customers? But please, if you’re in any way involved in these games, look at your web site with fresh eyes and help us become interested! rant off

It’s been a while since I posted last, and that’s because my new life in Wellington is keeping me quite busy. I’ve picked up dancing again and I’ve been quite busy with work. Of course, I still game, but I’m not playing much Second Life right now. Why? Well, I find my skills aren’t keeping pace with the rest of the players and so for any task I can immediately think of half a dozen people I know who could do it better! As I’ve never been one to club or party in SL that leaves me without much to do in-game.

I have, however, tried to keep my hand in. So far I co-concepted a game design for the SL Game Design competition and it’s being built right now. I’m also still involved with Dark Life which has pretty much been running itself for a while. There may be some news on that in time. Unfortunately, the downside of being back in New Zealand is that the time zone really sucks for organising a group effort with people from overseas! Ahh well, we’ll see what happens.

Mount and Blade is an amazing little independent roleplaying game being developed in Turkey. It’s got the usual roleplaying bits and pieces along with a fantastic combat system which sees you charging around on horseback lancing enemies and slashing down foes, all this along side a massive private army you can hire and manage. Very good! Go try the demo.

Switch ISPs and now back on standard ADSL. It’s nice and quick so I should be a bit more active about the worlds. Keep an eye out for the Pirate!

Moved to Wellington and have been working in my new job for a few weeks and all my stuff is finally down here. Got a nice flat to live in and I have it all to myself which means I can keep it as clean or unclean as I want! Right now it looks beautiful and I’ve even been accused of being a metrosexual. I don’t think that’s a good thing.

The bad news is I’m on a wireless CDMA-based internet service (I don’t need or want a phone line and all the overhead that goes with it) and the connection is very very slow. Slower than 56k most of the time. This is only because I have terrible coverage right where I am. I’m not entirely sure why, but it’s probably just bad luck with where the base stations are, oh well! But anyway, this clearly is bad news for any playing of Second Life. Not sure how it will go in the future. If anything changes I’ll let folks know.

This week I’m going to be busy packing for a move to Wellington and a new job. I’ll be fairly unplugged for a while after the move so I won’t be around much to update my blog, play games and so on. Should be fun though!