To celebrate the imminent release of Fallout 3 I thought it might be prudent to post two links to retrospectives covering the history of the franchise. With a decade seperating the release of Fallout 3 from those of its bretheren, many gamers are surely a bit uncertain of the universe that Black Isle Studios first created with Fallout. So without further ado:
Monthly Archive for October, 2008
I mentioned earlier how we’d finally gotten around to fixing the pool here at my house and I thought that it might be time to post a quick photo of how it looks currently. We haven’t had a chance to really fix the sun damage to the pool surface, but luckily it seems to have been confined to the sides of the pool and is very minimal. One other thing that still needs attention is the ph of the pool as we’re currently struggling to get it just right. Enough chatter, here’s the promised pic:
So this coming week will see me a bit busy what with the end of month approaching which means all my clients’ work and VAT returns have to be done before this coming Friday. Throw in assignments which I’ve been slacking off on and I’m looking at a real packed week. Thankfully I have two bright spots ahead of me with my Fable 2 CE hopefully being available on Tuesday and the imminent release of Fallout 3 on Friday promising me a fun weekend of relaxation ahead. I’m also hoping to catch Max Payne in the cinema as I didn’t get around to it this past weekend.
What I did manage to accomplish this weekend was to get my friend Dean to purchase a Xbox 360 and a copy of Gears of War for himself. Hopefully he gets hours of enjoyment from certainly one of the most awesome games to have graced the console. Apologies Zania for the screams of locusts in their death throes as Dean gleefully chainsaws them Hopefully it won’t distract you from your studies too much! 
I also managed to get some game time in and finally finished The Darkness. It turned out to be a real great game and a lot of fun to boot. I certainly enjoyed every minute of it and will certainly get around to playing through it a second time to get some achievements that eluded me on my first playthrough. I’ve also managed to finish off the single player campaign in Battlefield: Bad Company. Unfortunately this no where near as fun as The Darkness and pales in comparison to other military FPS games such as COD4. Thankfully it was quite short though. My next project before Fable 2 and Fallout 3 manage to suck all my gaming time away is to try and get some good progress in Stranglehold. Its relatively short and easy so I shouldn’t have too many issues there.
So as you can see, I’ve got a bit of a packed week ahead of me. Hopefully I’ll manage to get through the week with no major hassles. I’ll certainly be stressed out come Friday as its Newlande’s huge doctoral seminar which she will be presenting to determine whether she can get her degree upon completion of her thesis. So all the best Newlande and I’ll be hoping for the best!
Now that the server issues have been sorted out for the developers at Pidgin they can finally release the next version of their ever popular multi-IM network client, Pidgin 2.5.2 to the masses. This is more of a bug fix so don’t expect any major new features. The official list of changes is as follows:
- libpurple
- Fixed a crash on removing a custom buddy icon on a buddy.
- Fixed a crash caused by certain self-signed SSL certificates.
- Enable a number of strong ciphers which were previously disabled when using NSS. (Thanks to Marcus Trautwig.)
- Pidgin
- The status selector now saves your message when changing status.
- Fix a case where a conversation window could close unexpectedly.
- A mute sounds option has been added to the preferences window to help with discoverability. CTRL+S is no longer bound to mute.
- Added ability to change the color of visited links (using the theme control plugin, or setting the color in ~/.gtkrc-2.0)
- Fix a crash occuring when a custom smiley is deleted and re-added and used in an open conversation after being re-added.
- Finch
- A new ‘Nested Grouping’ option in the ‘Grouping’ plugin. Group hierarchies are defined by the ‘/’ character in the group names.
- A bug was fixed where some key-bindings wouldn’t work with some TERMs (e.g. xterm-color, screen-linux etc.)
- MSN
- Operations (such as moving to a new group) on contacts that were added in the same session should now complete correctly, and not cause synchronization errors at next login.
- Minor fixes to login process during a server transfer.
- Restored the “Has You” feature to the MSN protocol tooltips.
- ADL 205/214/etc errors should no longer prevent login.
- XMPP
- Sending and receiving custom smileys using the specification in XEP-0231 (bits of binary) and XHTML-IM
- Yahoo
- Only send a Ping once every hour. This prevents the account from being disconnected from the server periodically.
Grab the download from the link in my sidebar and happy IM chatting!
Curse my bad luck! Just as I was looking forward to entering the world of Albion in Fable 2 I received the happy news that South African customs has not yet released the game. So this means that there are a lot of peeved South Africans out there who were looking forward to a weekend filled with swords and debauchery. What’s doubly strange is that the standard edition of the game is not delayed, merely the collectors edition. Several gamers have decided to rather swap their orders to the standard version in the meantime and then trade the game in next month for one of the other big hitters.
I’m also being frustrated on the Fallout 3 front as I have still received no reply from BT Games with regards to a query I had regarding the use of credit owing to me on the order for the collectors edition. With the game’s release date fast approaching time is running out for me to place my order. so hopefully BT Games can get their stuff sorted out before then and mail me back as soon as possible.
Ah well, I suppose I’ll have to be content with playing FIFA 09 and The Darkness this weekend then 
Well contrary to my earlier posts proclaiming my desire to buy the new PES and pre-ordering Fallout 3, after today I’ve reneged on both promises and ended up purchasing FIFA 09 and changing my Fallout 3 pre-order to Fable 2.
Thankfully it would appear that my decision to buy FIFA above my perennial favourite, PES, has already borne dividends after PES received a less than glowing review from Eurogamer. Hopefully I can look forward to a year of great footy action in the rejuvenated FIFA franchise.
As for my Fallout 3 pre-order, I’ve started seeing one or two early reviews (not very trustworthy mind you) that are less than enthusiastic about Bethseda’s portrayal of the Fallout world and several fellow gamers have also expressed their scepticism of the game. So far now I’m rather going to go with the sure bet in Fable 2 which is looking all sorts of good right now. Thankfully the collector’s edition of Fable 2 has also dropped in price and is well worth it.
Mozilla has just released beta 1 of the next milestone for Firefox, version 3.1. Some of the significant changes included in this next release of Firefox 3 per the milestone announcement:
New features and changes in this milestone that require feedback include:
- Web standards improvements in the Gecko layout engine
- Added support for CSS 2.1 and CSS 3 properties
- A new tab-switching shortcut that shows previews of the tab you’re switching to
- Improved control over the Smart Location Bar using special characters to restrict your search
- Support for new web technologies such as the <video> and <audio> elements, the W3C Geolocation API, JavaScript query selectors, web worker threads, SVG transforms and offline applications.
Click here to download the beta if you want to give it a go.
Well would you believe it, miracles do happen. These past two days have seen a remarkable transformation occur to our once dry and barren swimming pool. Now if you step into our back yard you will be greeted by the most amazing sight, a pool containing actual pool water. Most of my friends know that my pool has been empty due to a black algae attack for the past 10 years or so and that there have been numerous promises of fixing it up. Thankfully it has now actually come to fruition and the pristine waters are ready and inviting for this coming summer heatwave.
(Just don’t look at the actual gunnite surface which still looks hideous.)
Pool pictured is not author's own.
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