For all the little people

Hello dear reader. If you’re reading this then you most probably arrived here via the ever wonderful Goblin’s blog. Rest assured that her trust in my blog to deliver the highest quality humour and shenanigans is well placed and as such your reading of this post will be most appreciated by myself.
I could regale you with perfect puns or witty jokes but I think that would be selling myself short. Rather ask Goblin for her impressions of my karaoke efforts at Singstar or my repeated attempts at accounting humour if you truly wish to partake in some gut busting laughter.
All that being said, let me extend my utmost thanks to Goblin and the rest of the SA blogosphere for trusting me with holding up the high standards of internet humour and blogging. Thank you and good night!

Listen up

With the weather being freezing down here in the Cape it’s the perfect weekend to stay inside with a hot cup of tea and your iPod at the ready for your listening pleasure. What better way to spend your cold evenings than under a warm blanket listening to some podcasts. That’s where I come in. I’m here to tell you about some of the best podcasts out there on the World Wide Web. Obviously as I predominantly write about games the majority of them will be focused on the gaming industry. Fear not though! There are a few that might just tickle your funny bone and get you addicted. So without further ado I present Terrance’s Top Picks:

Joystiq podcast – a hilarious and informative show revolving around gaming which even features a South African to add some dry wit and puns galore to a show that I listen to every week without fail.

Eurogamer.net podcast – The guys and girls at Eurogamer manage to bring a refreshingly British take on the games industry and like most of their articles they are chock a block full of British humor.

Giantbombcast – Jeff Gerstmann and co bring a far more relaxed (and long!) view on the latest happenings in the gaming world.

My Brother, My Brother & Me – The Brothers McElroy are here to answer your every question and serve as a humorous source of advice on life’s every day issues in the modren era.

Xbox 360 Fancast – Richard Mitchell & friends are also from Joystiq but focus only on the Xbox 30 and everything Microsoft. Don’t worry though, they’re not 100% Xb0ts just yet!

So there you have it. My picks of the best of the bunch. Feel free to give them a listen and if you’ve got any suggestions then post them in the comments section.

Extra time

No need to stress or worry that I’ve disappeared from the face of the earth folks. Yes, my blog my have been rather silent of late but that’s because of the World Cup that’s been going on here in South Africa. As a football fan I’m in heaven with three games a day and just haven’t had the time to post anything meaningful up. rest assured though that I’ve got a post in the works for next week that should be rather interesting for those of you who are David Lynch fans. So stayed tuned! ;)

PS: As an added bonus here are the photos and videos from the World Cup game I attended this past Monday:

Having a ball

I can’t believe that in just under two weeks I’ll be watching the greatest sporting event on earth in my very own country! If you don’t know that I’m talking about the 2010 FIFA World Cup then I pity your ignorance :P

I’ve always loved football (I refuse to call it soccer) ever since I was a small snot nosed boy and I’ve been following the fortunes of my favourite club and country ever since I can remember so of course when the World Cup rolls around every 4 years I’ll be found in front of my TV watching every single second of every game with bated breath.  I can still fondly remember staying up till 5 am to watch the final in 1994 when it was played in America and watching as as Italy lost the final with a missed penalty by Roberto Baggio.

Not only is this World Cup special to me for being held in my country of South Africa, but its also going to be memorable because on 14 June you’ll find me not in front of my TV watching Italy versus Paraguay but in the stands of Cape Town Stadium as I watch the game live. Its something that will only happen once in a life time if you’ll pardon the clichéd advertising phrase. I’m so excited to be standing there with thousands upon thousands of other football fans as we watch the current world champions take to the pitch and fight it out with Paraguay for 90 minutes.

So if you’re a fellow South African then let’s show the world what a wonderful and beautiful country we live in and let’s also welcome the beautiful game to our shores. I’m sure that we’re going to be in for a wonderful treat with a World Cup filled with drama, excitement and sadness that are the hallmarks of the greatest game.

Football, torches & boards

No need to worry my dear friends! I am still very much alive even though my blog posts have dried up to a thin trickle of updates over the past month. Unfortunately my world load has increased substantially with a busy month of bean counting and an extra busy month of freelance writing taking its toll on my free time. Hopefully next month will see me have a bit more time on my hands to regale you all with my wonderful tales and exploits.  To tide you over in the meantime though I’ve got three game reviews that came out which you might be interested in reading if you take a fancy to the noble art of gaming:
As usual, please leave a comment on the reviews and most of all, enjoy reading them! :)

Releasing the Lynx

Every six months Canonical sees fit to bless the geek universe with another brand spanking new version of the ever popular Ubuntu operating system and Linux distro and when 29  April 2010 came around the latest version, Lucid Lynx found its way on my home PC.
Okay so maybe it wasn’t as easy as I just made it out to be. First I had to wait several days as I was capped before I could even download it but luckily when May 1 came around I was on a nifty new uncapped account from MWEB.  The second problem came in with the FTP server I was downloading from. For some reason it would decide to pause my downloads every so often at random time intervals meaning that I would constantly have to pause and unpause it to make sure it was downloading so what should have been a relatively hassle free overnight download became a two-day marathon.
Once I managed to overcome all those hurdles though I finally got my hands on the latest iso and booted it up. The installation process is quick and hassle free and makes a mockery of all the usual Linux geek stereotypes and has reinforced Ubuntu as one of the easiest to use Linux distros available today.  Once the install is done you’re presented with a beautifully elegant desktop that has seen a complete redesign from top to bottom with a new darker theme and the shift of the window buttons to the top left which took some getting used to initially but now feels like second nature.
One of the main features of Ubuntu this time around is the inbuilt social applications which sees the Twitter/Identi.ca/Facebook client Gwibber more tightly integrated into Ubuntu itself with the ability to post a status update to all your social networks and change your IM status message through a single text input box on the taskbar.
If you’ve always wondered how to enter the world of Linux I can have no better suggestion than the latest version of Linux. Its stable, comes with a variety of default applications and has phenomenal levels of support and while it may occasionally break down on you it can easily be fixed most of the time with a simple Google search. So hop in and join the rest of us!

How to disappear completely

If anyone tried popping over to Counting Beans the past day or two you may have been greeted by the shocking sight of a http error saying that the site no longer existed. In the words of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: Don’t Panic. It was all due to the domain not having been renewed on time as a result of the hosting company forgetting to send the invoice to me on time.  Luckily some quick work by a Mr Ryan Lotter has led to the site coming back online in record time. So my most sincere thanks to Ryan for his help!

Alan Wake

As an added gaming bonus to my earlier Red Dead Redemption trailer I thought I’d post this rather spectacular trailer for the long-awaited Alan Wake. Several years in development from Remedy (of Max Payne fame) it seems as though this May will finally see the game hit store shelves and watching the trailer just shows you why gamers are still clamouring for it even after so many delays.

Oh yes, the mere mention of Lost, Stephen King and Twin Peaks when describing this game has me putting my money down for a pre-order right now!




Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 South Africa
This work by Terrance Brown is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 South Africa.