• Monday, August 29th, 2005
Well the weekend was almost as crappy as the last one but Sunday night made up for it. Finally watched the last few episodes of Mahoromatic. The last episode or two just sucked, there is no denying it. Thankfully there was the Summer Special to watch straight after it which was vastly more entertaining.
I’d been checking up on PSP games releases to see what game I’d like to pick up when the PSP comes out here this week. I found that anything I’d consider decent won’t be out in time for the release. Now before, any Nintendo DS fans point and laugh, I’d like to add that to me the current local lineup for that handheld is even more dire than that of the PSP will be upon release and the DS state of affairs looks even more sad because it’s had months to get this right and still hasn’t managed it in my book. It seems Monaco (The local Nintendo people) are doing their best to kill the DS in NZ much like they did with the Gamecube. So, anyway, getting back on topic, I ordered Tenchu Shinobi Taizen from Lik Sang a few days ago. Looking forward to it arriving now. What’s annoying though is that there’s a good 6-7 RPGs out on this thing in Japan already…come on Sony, at least get one of them ported!
I’ve been too busy to get up to much, I really should put in for some holidays now that things have finally slowed down a little at work. It feels like that same damn cold might be creeping back on me again. I think I’ve perhaps been pushing myself too hard. If it gets worse tomorrow I’m taking a sick day.
Current Mood: 
moody
Current Music: Zapp & Roger - More Bounce To The Ounce
• Friday, August 26th, 2005
It seems SEGA may actually be working on Shenmue 3 and are planning to bring it to one or more next generation consoles! I sure hope this doesn’t turn out to be a false rumor. These games may not be everyone’s cup of tea but there’s certainly been a huge gap in the market during their absence and they have yet to be matched in many ways. I’m trying to hold back my excitiement but even the thought of this excites me much more than any upcoming game news for a long time.
Current Mood: 
hopeful
Current Music: Gary Numan - Telekon - Telekon
• Tuesday, August 23rd, 2005
Rest in peace Robert Moog
Current Mood: Respectful
Current Music: Gary Numan - I Dream of Wires - Telekon
• Sunday, August 21st, 2005
I was just going to post some comment about still being sick but then I noticed I never mentioned it here in the first place. Yes, I got sick last weekend after my nephew came to visit and I caught it off him. The whole week it was just getting better and better each day. I’d been planning to go out clubbing with Liz, (libbybun) and many others on Saturday night/Sunday morning and was really looking forward to it. It isn’t normally something I really enjoy these days but it’s been so long since I’ve done it that it would have been a nice change and a bit of fun. Friday night though I could feel my cold going a little downhill again and Saturday morning was just horrible. It did get better later in the day but not enough. I tossed up loading up with medicine and just going anyway but considering the labels said “Do not mix with alcohol”…
Needless to say I’m not happy about missing out of the one thing I’d been looking forward to all week. :-/ It really does seem in recent times that everytime sometime or something good I’m looking forward to arrives, it goes wrong and things stuff up. It seems my PSP buying plans have gone with same way too with Central Park going into receivership. I’m just glad I never paid them more than the minimum amount.
On an unreleated note, I’d like to ponder the lack of decent LCDs. I made some new years predicitions and one was that sometime year we’d finally see some high quality yet fast LCD monitors worth buying. I don’t care about being right or not, I just want to get one of these things. It really seemed things were going well at the time with great promise shown with monitors such as Samsung’s 172X and press releases promising greatness to come. Here we are though many months later and little has changed. The standard size has increased two inchs to 19″ but unfortunately that’s the best thing I have to say. Yes the response times have improved (entirely ignoring the manufacturer’s worthless specs) but with the single exception of the Viewsonic VP191-B, sustained 60FPS is still not an option and the colour reproduction of LCDs is actually getting worse. Samsung’s 913 range, LG’s L1980Q, Hyundai’s L19T and Benq’s FP937S are all top of their class and yet they are all terrible at colour reproduction. Phillips isn’t even in the game with their cost cutting focus and Viewsonic seems to be pushing speed at the expense of quality with their Overdrive technology (i.e. VX924). If I was buying today, I’d probably go with a Viewsonic VP191-B but it’s still lacking in so many ways. *sigh*…I hope my CRT keeps on ticking a while longer.
Current Mood: annoyed
Current Music: Muse - Showbiz - Hullabaloo Soundtrack
• Wednesday, August 17th, 2005
Gained a level in World of Warcraft yesterday and most of another today. Found a cool Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children wallpaper of Tifa Lockheart. Got confused as to the weeks and found today was actually payday. Yes, in my little bubble of existance, all is well…well, other than being sick. Roll on Saturday!
Current Mood: Crusing
Current Music: Nobuo Uetemasu/Rikki - Suteki da ne? - Final Fantasy X OST
• Sunday, August 14th, 2005
I’m feeling very worn and weary tonight. Things aren’t really going that well for me at the moment and while I’ve been making the best of things, everything seems to be taking so much effort. I guess my main problem is that I’m just tired. Work is not letting up yet, I have yet another unexpected deadline looming at the end of this week and I’m probably going to have to put in yet more overtime to get it done. I burnt out with work last year and I really feel things are heading that way again. It’s not that I don’t enjoy my job, but I don’t like being taken advantage of and I don’t like their implications that I just have to put up with things. I know I could get another job tomorrow at any number of local firms and even some large global corporations if I was willing to sell my soul and throw away my lifestyle. I don’t mind putting in some extra effort to help people out of a tight patch but I will not be a brainless workhorse sacrificed for a few extra bucks on the balance sheet.
I’m off to play World of Warcraft…haven’t touched it for ages. I need to let out some of this frustration.
• Friday, August 12th, 2005
Well my “Mighty Mouse” arrived yesterday. I didn’t get to spend that much time trying it out but I’ve taken it to work today and have some comments I have not seen made elsewhere. In terms of using it as a Windows mouse, the scroll ball only functions as a vertical wheel in Windows. Hopefully someone will create a driver enabling full use of the wheel but for now, you can’t. The side buttons also also appear to be dead wood in Windows but I personally don’t think they’re that useful anyway and have them disabled on my Mac. The scroll ball on MacOS X is brilliant. It’s everything I’d have expected and just works really well.
Side by side with a standard Microsoft wheel mouse optical
One unexpected thing for me is that as there is physically only one button on the mouse, it took some getting used to as a two button mouse. It does initially feel quite odd to click on the left side only to feel it moving under your right finger. I know it won’t take me long to adjust but it is a little disconcerting at first. One minor annoyance is that the disc on the bottom of past Mac mice to change the button tension has been removed on this mouse.
Height compared with the MS mouse
Overall I like this mouse quite a lot. It does not have the huge lump in the middle like so many mice out there and is not for people with small hands. The scroll ball alone makes for great usability (although less so on Windows). Certainly it’s not perfect but personally it’s now my preferred mouse of choice.
Changing subjects but still staying with Apple, word has come out today that the protection system used on the developer build of for MacOS X on Intel has been broken. I had seen a few days ago that this was going to be possible very soon and really, it was inevitable it would happen. Now people are talking of installing it on their AMD boxes, mass copying the OS and just generally doing what they can with it. Personally, I could not be more happy to see this outcome. Not so much because I want to see MacOS X for Intel opened up for mass piracy (quite the opposite actually) but because it will make Apple think again about this whole debacle.
If they don’t think about it to hard, they’ll just add an extra layer of protection and hope the inevitable does not happen again. No system is unbreakable though and if they start going down this path then they might as well just give up now because they’re fighting a losing battle. Yes, they could get Intel to make custom x86 CPUs which are required to run MacOS X but in time this too would be defeated and Apple would be no better off than if they had IBM develop custom PowerPC CPUs.
What I’d really like to see happen is a real long shot. I would not expect things to turn out this way but hey, I’m speculating so what the hell. In my opinion todays events should be an indicator to Apple that if they want to keep making money off computer hardware, they need to drop these ridiculous ideas of x86 migration right now. I don’t think Steve Job’s ego will let this happen but this is exactly the same thing he tried to tell the music industry when Apple’s fairplay music encryption was cracked some time ago. If the x86 migration goes ahead, the hardware locks will be broken and the slow decline of the Mac platform will begin. To me the only sensible option is to put a bullet in the x86 plans and recommit to PowerPC. Unfortunately things don’t seem to be that simple.
Current Mood: calm
Current Music: Witches - There She Is! - Broomstick
• Tuesday, August 09th, 2005
I really think I must be getting more positive about life again. I mean things have sucked for me over the last few days (and even moreso for half a dozen of my friends, something that matters a lot to me) but somehow I feel like I am more my old self again and I’m much more optimistic than I have been for a long time. I feel more able to best the bad things that happen in life which is something I’ve always been good at doing until last year. I don’t really know quite what it is, but I like feeling this way once again.
I worked 12.5 hours today at work on top of doing some work every day since the weekend before last. I know I’ve been saying this a lot recently but I am so looking forward to a holiday. At the very least though the workload should be a lot lighter after today.
Tomorrow could be a big day for me. I don’t know for sure yet. I guess I’ll see…. ^_^
Current Mood: Very tired
Current Music: Björk - Violently Happy - Debut
• Thursday, August 04th, 2005
I’ve had an interesting few days. Quite a lot has been happening although not much I really want to talk about here. Things have been going quite well and I’ve probably had the longest sustained good mood I’ve had this year. Hopefully I can keep it up.
I’ve got a growing list of anime to watch with a freind from work next chance I get. I’ve been avoiding watching any of it beforehand as I don’t want to spoil the fun. I know it’s going to be good, looking forward to it. Must resist, must resist!
I ordered Apple’s new “Mighty Mouse” as soon as it showed up on their online store on Wednesday. I’ve wanted a mouse with a trackball on top of it for so long now. I have a friend who speculates with me about upcoming innovations, trends, fads and anything else related to the computer industry. A number of our ideas have materialised as real products and to me, this mouse is an example of it. I mean it makes soooooo much sense. I can’t believe other mouse manufacturers let Apple get away being the first out with this after their many years of pushing very basic mice. I guess it’s payback for all the years of one-button mockery. Amusingly though, the so called “Mighty Mouse” is as much at home being a single button mouse as it is a multibutton one since it has no physical button divide between the left and right button like every other mouse out there. To me that is the real stroke of genius here, they moved the choice of a one or two button mouse into the software. Now they just need to ship these things standard with every Mac they sell.
I’m going to be hosting some sites for other people from my US hosting account so I’m currently setting up some upload and file management tools there. I’ve been doing it in between typing this post. Going quite well so far and I think I’m not far from having it up and running. If any of you are reading this, you’ll hear from me soon with details. 
Current Mood: 
tired
Current Music: Evanescence - Even in Death - Origin
• Monday, August 01st, 2005
One thing that really seems to hurt a lot of friendships is idle gossip. I know people have gossipped about me in the past and probably still do (if they care enough to do so). I even know the nature of some of the said gossip, I mean it’s perfectly commonplace for gossip to make it back to the ears of the subject. Now while I know without a doubt how false much of the gossip about me is, it’s not something that really bothers me. People talk about people to others and they always will. It is an annoyance when the same gossip goes around and people start believing it just because so many people are saying it but it’s inevitably going to happen.
In my case I feel I’ve often inadvertantly created gossip about myself by mistake. I’ve always been willing to laugh at myself and for a long time never really minded acting the fool just to garner a few laughs. There may be a few people who know me today thinking “Hey, you’re not like that at all” but it is largely why I am the way I am now. I’ve also probably not done enough at times to correct the misnformation around but I don’t assume the world revolves around me either and that others would care enough to notice.
When it comes down to it, I am a complex person. People have often been surprised how accepting and understanding I am when telling me something that they believe would shock or surprise me. I have also been told at times how I was “growing up” when my ideas were the same as they had been for a long time. People can only know you based on the side you show to them. I honestly believe this is true with most people and I try to give people the benefit of the doubt. People often don’t seem to do that with me, but hey…what can I do?
There are a number of things that only one or two people know about me and many would probably not believe even if they were told (In fact I even know this to be the case at times too). It’s kind of amusing how the two dimensional percieved version of you can be more believable than the person you really are. Not that I’m going to get into details here…
Current Mood: 
mischievous
Current Music: For once I'm not actually listening to something
