bordagen

No, your eyes haven’t gone silly and no, I haven’t had a life changing epiphany concerning my sexuality.

Since it is the most shallow of holidays, for today I have made my blog pink and cutesy and valentine-sy. Why? Because with StyleCatcher it makes it very simple to change styles at the drop of a hat.

So for the next 24-hours (or so) you’ll have this eyesore to stare at and read.

Happy Valentines Day, Liz.

As I sit here before bedtime reading other peoples blogs and enjoying a bit of ‘Led before bed’ (being of the Zepplin variety) courtesy of Planet Rock I am reminded of a little blog I used to have that used to updated semi-frequently. I have been neglecting my blog for a while now. This is meainly because the only thing I’d have to blog about is work and that is a very touchy subject to blog about since it could be constrewed as lible if it isn’t in the favour of the company. As for out of work, money has been tight so nothing really there, but I’ll try my best.

As you might have read or seen, like the rest of the country we did have some snow (and no, it wasn’t acid snow being in Middlesbrough) but it didn’t really last very long. I think we had about a half inch. Nowhere near as much as other places in the country, and nowhere near enough to make a decent snowman.

I got myself a new graphics card. Twice the RAM and a whole chipset generation up from my FX5200, but for some reason Vista has given it an Index score of 2.2 which is quite strange seeing as before with my old card in, my Index score was 3.1. Very strange and something I must look in to. I’ve change the size of my AGP arpeture in the BIOS from 64MB to 128MB, but I haven’t yet redone the test to see if it has had an effect on my Index rating.

In World of Warcraft, due to lack of people online in the guild, myself and Liz have moved guilds to a MUCH bigger one. Hopefully now that will allow us to advance further in the game and run more instances. TIme will tell.

[UPDATE] I performed another Index Rating test on my system and it still came out as 2.2. This is odd, although there is a definate improvement in my games performance. On a side note, I have just downloaded and installed Windows DreamScape which allows me to play MPEG2 and WMV files as a desktop image. I dread to think what depravity is going to come from this when the 12-year old 1337h4xxorz get wind of it…

After many a delay, the Crackdown demo is finally live on the XBLM!

Somehow, this game managed to slip under my RADAR for months until I read about it on a web comic’s commentary. How did I miss this one?! The game revolves around you in a GTA kind of environment – except you play an ‘Agent’ whose job it is to tackle crime – by any means necessary. This can include throwing bins, cars and even bodies at the hooligans around the city, blowing things up and mindlessly throwing grenades at them. As you progress thoughout the game, you collect powerups which increase your abilities (strength, agility, firearms, explosives to name bu a few) which can grow to insane levels allowing you to – and pardon me the cliche – lead tall buildings in a single bound.

I’ve just been playing the demo and, despite a few bugs in the demo, leaves me wanting to give RenderWare Criterion (creators of the Burnout series – happy now, Dan?) my money in exchange for this marvellous game. But with this coming out, Fuzion Frenzy 2 on the horizon and, you know, rent and the ever-growing list of bills and payments I need to make I don’t know how I’m going to get the cash together to get this game. I’m sure I’ll find something for a rainy day though… I hope.

Yes, a fairly obvious title for the rest of the post. It’s not really mine either – I was looking around digg.com and found the following article. Sadly, the main site where the article was held is ‘Unavailable’, so I found it on Google’s cache for you to read.

Well this weekend was very eventful.
Here is a quick list (hail the bullet points) of the busy weekend I’ve had.

Friday

• Had to visit the doctors on the morning for a review appointment concerning my recent wheeziness and general breathing issues. After three weeks of using a peak flow meter to monitor my breathing patterns morning, noon and night, it turns out that I am asthmatic. I have a preventative ‘Turbohaler’ for the morning and night and a reliver for whenever I feel out of breath and my passages need opening up.
• On the evening, went down to York to stay at Liz’s parents to prepare for Saturday’s car-related funtivites.

Saturday

• At 10am, by insurance clicked in to action enabling fun later on in the day. I don’t feel any different.
• Around midday, we went of to Fulford so that I could get myself a car form a nice lady who agreed to sell her ‘baby’ (please note – not a real baby for all you human rights activists out there. That’s what eBay is for). I am now the proud owner of a Citreon Saxo. We were going to come back to ‘Boro on that evening, but after a little run around the block where Liz’s parents live, we agreed that since I would be doing the driving back, more practice would be better as I was a bit rusty after not driving since August when I passed my test. Soon afterwards though my rust wore off as I got used to the strange clutch positioning.
• Update: You can see a picture of ‘her’ over on Liz’s blog

Sunday

• With Liz’s dad, we went over the car with a fine toothed comb making sure that it would indeed get us back to Middlesbrough. After a couple of hours of that and getting ready, we finally set off to find the A19 and the road home. Didn’t take us too long to get back and it wasn’t nearly as bad as I thought it was going to be. Still getting used to the clutch again as some shifts were a bit jumpy which I apologised for.

All in all, good and productive weekend. Don’t know why I hadn’t done this sooner!

Coming soon – more memes, courtesy of Neil.