For those of you interested I’ve posted my latest gaming review for the wonderful Fallout 3. Hop on over to Denouncer’s site to check it out:
Monthly Archive for November, 2008
Another day past and another ton of work done. I’ve ended up driving around Cape Town for most of today and visiting a lot of clients for work. Its actually one of my favourite aspects of my job strangely enough. Here I am, a shy introverted guy, and I seem to have some pretty good client relationship skills! Whatever next! I can also think of no better place to be than behind the wheel of a car on the open road in the beautiful Cape sunshine on a summer’s day with the radio on. Its like an early Christmas. 
I’ll have to put all thoughts of the festive season behind me for the duration of my Friday as I’ll have a LOT of work to make my way through before the end of my day. Once that’s out of the way I plan to relax for the remainder of my Friday evening by spending some time slaughtering the undead with Newlande and co in Left 4 Dead and reading a good book (currently The Toyminator by Robert Rankin). I’ll get down to working my way through my assignments as well before spending my Sunday at Craig’s place in Gordon’s Bay planning our upcoming holiday with Dean and Zania. All in all its a good end to me week.
This is going to be a bit of a short post as the first proper heat wave of the summer has hit us here in the Cape and trust my luck for this to be the day when my ceiling fan finally gives up the ghost. I can look forward to a night of lying in bed sweating to death. Yay! Thankfully though my week has really gotten better. I managed to have a great day even though I was swamped by work and with the weekend fast approaching and a visit to Craig to look forward to I’ve got a lot more goodness coming my way shortly. I’ve also finally started getting a bit more involved in the local blogging scene here and have become addicted to a few great blogs which you can find under my Blogroll in the sidebar. I’ve also started Twittering a bit more and adding some other bloggers out there. To those of you following me, thanks! I’ve also started getting a few more regular readers so I’m more motivated than ever to blog on a more regular basis. Hopefully those of you reading this won’t get too bored too soon. 
(And still no open source posts Craig!)
Bah! I thought my Monday was bad, but it seems as though Tuesday has come to take the crown of the worst day this week so far. I’ve got a lot of urgent work to do that just doesn’t seem to be getting finished and I’m feeling up to s**t of late even though I’ve been grabbing a solid 8 hours sleep every night so far. Thankfully I’ve managed to drag myself back home for some rest and recuperation. Hopefully tonight’s Champion’s League game between Manchester United and Villareal will provide me with some good news.
I think that this weekend I’m going to have to sit down and take a nice long, hard look at my professional career and map some sort of plan out for where I want to be in a few years time. I’ve become very interested in moving into IT of late so I want to look at my options in terms of studying towards that. I’d also be interested in doing some part time studies in fields that intrerest me more for myself than any sort of hope of getting work in those areas. I don’t believe that anthropology and languages have much call for employment in today’s economies
My qualification as a SAIPA member is also slowly approaching so I’ll have to somehow get back into the studying frame of mind for the qualification board exam which should be sometime next year during March or October. I’ve got some work assignments to do for it that I’ve seriously being neglecting for the past few months so I think that this weekend I should just seal myself away from the outside world in my room and get down to business and finish them off. At the same time my trusty old Mini has once again decided to break down on me so I’ll have to try and get my hands dirty in replacing the split pin connecting the gear lever to the gear linkage assembly. So it seems as though my upcoming weekend is already going to be busy and its only Tuesday!
On the gaming front, I’m hopefully going to be receiving a promo copy of Mortal Kombat vs DC to review for a local site during the course of this week. I’ve also got to find the time to get in some quality time with Fallout 3 to write up a review for that. Luckily I’ll be skipping the local release of Tomb Raider Underworld this coming Friday so there shouldn’t be too many gaming distractions for me. My one remaining game purchase for this month is the beautiful looking Prince of Persia game from Ubisoft on 5 December. Until then its Fallout 3, The Orange Box and FIFA 09 that will keep me busy.
So here’s hoping my week gets off to a better start from tomorrow. I certainly am looking forward to the December holidays like nothing else before. Of course I’ve also got the visit of my good friend Mark to look forward to, so December should be one helluva month for me!
Wow, now that Monday is finally over I can take a deep breath and try to remember what’s happened the past few days since I left work Friday afternoon. As I wrote in my previous post, I jumped into my pool for a well deserved and relaxing swim before heading back inside for some supper and a relatively quiet evening spent watching Casino Royale. I ended up playing some random games before hitting the sack.
With Saturday dawning I got up at 6am and dressed for my weekly squash session with Ryan. Unfortunately he wasn’t feel all to kosher for it so we only managed to get in 30 minutes or so. Needless to say even in his sick state he pummelled me mercilessly. After this I had to rush home and pack my Xbox up in preparation for my trip through to Table View to visit Stu. We were planning to get our hands dirty in Gears 2’s campaign mode and catch the new Bond movie, Quantum of Solace, but before this I made a stop at BT Games and picked up my brand new copy of Left 4 Dead. Finally arriving at Stu’s place I managed to grab a gander at Mirror’s Edge and was suitably impressed before moving on to Gears 2. After an hour or two we quickly made tracks to Bayside where we were suitably enthralled by Bond’s antics after which we grabbed some lunch. returning to Stu’s place we got in a good 3 hours of Gears and made it more than two thirds of the way through before I decided to call it a night and drive all the way back to Bellville.My Saturday night didn’t end there though as upon arriving home I was roped into a Left 4 Dead session with Denouncer and Newlande where I was thrown into the deep end of the Zombie Apocalypse. We all had a good 3 hours of mercilessly shooting before I finally succumbed to the lure of my bed. Thus ended my Saturday.
Sunday was supposed to be relatively quiet for the most part but I ended up going through to Ryan’s place to jam some FIFA 09 with him on his 40″ Bravia and give Dean his freshly minted copy of Alone in the Dark for his upcoming birthday. So after a nice chat with Dean and Zania and earning some achievements in FIFA 09 due to some help from Ryan I made my way back home only to once again be roped into another Left 4 Dead session which was only interrupted for a brief dinner and shower before playing it some more till just before 10pm. Thankfully I could call it quits relatively early before hitting the bed in preparation for a long and hectic Monday.
Well I’ve just had my first swim of the year and the first swim in my pool for nearly 15 years or so by my reckoning and boy does it ever feel good
Its great to finally be able to just whip off my work clothes and go for a dip in the pool to let all the day’s worries wash away. I’ve had one long and hectic week so I was more than glad to be able to relax for 40 minutes or so just floating in the water. I can see that this summer is not going to consist of me sitting indoors sweating in the infamous hot Cape summers. Now just to organise that pool party
Yep, that’s supposed to be up there. Or at least it should look like me. I’ve never been that creative as you might be able to tell from my fumblings at creating my likeness with my new Xbox avatar that is part of the New Xbox Experience (NXE). NXE brings a complete redesign to the Xbox’s dashboard as well as introducing the avatars that replace the old Gamercard profile pics. So far I’m loving it. My only gripe is that my LCD’s native resolution gives me a letterbox effect :S
Edit: If the avatar isn’t showing then its more than likely that Microsoft’s servers are being overloaded.
With the recent release of Ubuntu 8.10, Intrepid Ibex, I had to once again go through the whole hassle of installing a new version of Ubuntu on my desktop here at home and solve some irritating bugs. Its become a matter of second nature to me to set up my system with the minimum of fuss. So imagine my surprise in finding that I was greeted with one old bug and one new bug.
Its seems as though there has been a regression in the Nvidia drivers shipped with the Ibex release meaning users who have Compiz Fusion enable and the Human theme active suffer from a titlebar corruption bug that blanks out the titlebars of all their windows and becomes more than a bit irritating after a while. More worrying though has been a shutdown/restart bug that would make my machine spend 5 minutes querying my router before finally deciding to switch off. Thankfully this has somehow solved itself so I’m more than a bit happy with my Ubuntu installation at the present moment.
I think one of the main reasons that Linux hasn’t yet managed to enter the mainstream market for your average suers is that small bugs like these still manage to creep through the net and really give a bad impression to users. I fully realise that the developers can’t be expected to fix everything and that in some cases they are working for free but this is an issue that must be addressed. I certainly know that your average user won’t have the patience I had and the interest in actually diagnosing and finding these problems. Little Suzy and Johnny just want an OS that works out of the box with the minimum of fuss and problems. Ubuntu is also one of the easiest Linux distributions out there so its a bit worrying that most people’s first taste of Linux might turn them off the OS immediately. Kudos to the developers and user community though. The problems discussed above have been quickly and effectively triaged and solved. One thing that Linux has over and above Windows is a passionate user community that is both helpful and informative beyond measure.
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