Much has been said about CoD:MW2 in the press regarding the gratuitous violence and a notorious level which sees an undercover US soldier forced to gun down many innocent civilians in a Russian airport.  I played the level and actually saw it as pointless as a game level despite being essential to the plot by fomenting hatred of the warmongering US.  You are forced to shoot people otherwise the terrorists smell a rat and kill you, if you shoot the terrorists they kill you and at the end of the level they kill you anyway.  A cut-scene would have worked just as well although it wouldn’t have sickened me as much and make me wonder for a second or two if our forces actually every need to do this type of thing.

What hasn’t been commented on is how hard as heck it is.  I’m on the third or forth level, which is set in Brazil, and I never get very far without being killed by some scumbag’s bullet.  The damage model is pretty hard so you only have to take two or three hits before the screen goes black and the game reloads.  Whilst I can get to cover, I get pinned down and immediately surrounded.  I’m all for realism but this is taking it a bit far.  Yes, I know that I’d be a bit pants in a fire-fight, but I don’t want to pay money for what is, after all, entertainment and have this demonstrated to me.

For Christmas, I was kindly given more computer games for my new system.  Something my old rig could never ever, ever, ever, ever play was Crysis so I was kindly given Crysis: Maximum Edition which gives you the original game plus the expansion and multiplayer in one little box set.  I have to say it’s impressive.  As well as looking gorgeous, the enemy AI seeks to flank me and surround me as well as searching for me under cover.  Realistic but not so hard that it makes me want to weep.

Turns out it’s a social networking fish bot (not to be confused with a phish bot) which randomly connects two AIM ID’s together and gives a spurious message to both to get the conversation flowing as well as much hilarity as one accuses the other of initiating the conversation.

After much confusion and then amusement, I had a lovely chat with my random person – a 26 year old film major from San Francisco who loves The Smiths and Joy Division – about everything from the current economic climate to the fact that we both love music from the decade we were born rather than stuff that is around now and how Americans get rather confused about how Britain, the UK, England, Scotland and Wales all fit together.

It was random and totally anonymous but ultimately harmless and rather fun. It also highlighted for me that the world isn’t as big as you sometimes may think and the internet can be brilliant and surprising.

More links:
The AIM FishBot Phenomenon
Got a random IM message?
AIM Fish (not Phish) bots
Project Upsteam Screen Names
The Missing Hat

It was without a doubt the most soul destroying experience I have ever had. It never felt like this the first time around, but then again I wasn’t supporting a wife and 3 kids in 1992. I felt every single piece of motivational spirit being sucked out of me by Doug, my employment advisor, as he explained that I should have come in sooner and my chances of getting a back dated claim were minimal (Well, I haven’t seen one approved in 20 years…. and that I had to come in every two weeks armed with details of every job I have looked at and applied for to get my money and, more importantly, get my mortgage insurance paying out.

Doug is a middle aged man with very large HotFuzz style aviator glasses as his normal spectacles; bouffant grey hair complete with side parting; a charcoal grey suit coupled with a black shirt which someone has obviously told him would be slimming (it isn’t) all topped off with the annoying habit of saying Yep every single time I open my mouth to speak without giving a crap what I am actually trying to say. This is called Waiting to Speak and is the antithesis of Listening and very frustrating for a guy who is trying to get actual information as to how he can get out of the deep hole he has found himself in. It took all my strength not to shout in his face that I wasn’t some Channel 4 documentary benefit scrounger and that I didn’t want to be there anymore than he did, but I just sat there and took it because what else could I do? Do I really blame him? I guess not. After all, would I be any less jaded if I had been doing the job as long as him and dealing with the people that he has to – good, bad and indifferent?

So I stood up at the end of the interview and walked past the hoodies waiting to get their money – money I’d been providing not long beforehand – and walked outside. I had a list of errands I wanted to run in town but my brain wouldn’t work. I couldn’t think what I needed to do and Jo was too busy with the kids to pick me up so I went into autopilot and walked the 20 minutes or so home in a funk, trying to find a positive thought somewhere in my head.

I’m fine now, of course, and I gather that many feel like this but why? Why do we feel so awful? Surely there is a better way? I certainly want a job even more than I did before as I want to spend as little time as possible in that place.
Every cloud, eh?

Yes, I did feel slightly bad for eating them and yes it was fairly disgusting but I would probably do it again especially as their death serves some sort of purpose rather than simply stopping them eating all Jo’s flowers.

As previously posted, we waited until their poo had turned orange as we only fed them carrots and water then we stopped feeding them about 24 hours before cooking time. I got a medium pan of water going on a rolling boil with a large kettle full of water ready to go as well. I washed them all with cold water and made sure that they all shrunk into their shells so were alive. I then dropped them into the water and kept it boiling for a good 15 minutes. I had to change the water about 3 times over. The first pan full turned bright green with a frothy scum on the top about an inch thick. The second pan was slightly less green with only a small amount of scum and the last pan had a bogeyish tinge to it but nothing else. After 15 minutes of cooking I drained the pan into a colander and doused with lots of cold water before using a thin meat skewer to take them out of their shells and dropped them onto some sea salt to help take off some of the slime that was still on them (or so I hoped!).

Next I chopped up far more cloves of garlic than I should have and added this to a small omelette pan we have with a large knob of butter. When the house stunk of garlic I dropped the snails into the pan and sautéed until I’d effectively cooked off the small amount of slime that was still coming off the little buggers. Note that I didn’t try to chop off the snail’s hybrid pancreas–liver thingy nor did I chop them up. I figured that I eat whelks, winkles, mussels etc. as is so I would do the same with these.

Whilst all this was going on I made a lovely, simple mushroom risotto to go with the snails and so poured in the cooked snails, garlic and butter into the risotto pan at the same time as the parmigiana. According to Jo it was very delicious albeit very garlicky.

Finally, here are some links that I found helpful during my research with the first 3 links being very helpful:

• Cooking with Richard: English Snails 4 – Snails with pancetta, sage, lemon and rocket
• SFGate: Eating Your Garden Snails
• YouTube.com: Gordon Ramsay – Picking and cooking snails
• mattbites.com: A Snail’s Pace
• Blogjam.com: Garden Snail Risotto
• eHow: How to Cook Snails
• guardian.co.uk: Shell shock
• BBC Food: Heston Blumenthal – Snail Porridge

Yes. Had me confused for a moment there too.

Turns out someone has purchased a domain called ginger-ninja.net which is obviously almost identical to my own domain gingerninja.net. Not only that, but this individual is also using the site to sell medical items of a somewhat dubious nature. I’ll give you a taster:

Buy Cheap Viagra, Discount Viagra, Kamagra jelly, Kamagra, Apcalis and many more erectile dysfunction treatment solutions by Ginger Ninja!

Does that really sound like something I would do?

You’d think that after 21 years as my best mate, Kev would have known better than to ask. But, I said to myself, maybe Kev had only my best interests at heart? Afterall, a hacker can still get in and takeover a website if the admin has been rather silly with their security procedures. Maybe Kev was simply ensuring that it wasn’t my site and to ensure that I didn’t have a major problem. It doesn’t hurt to ask afterall and he’d me doing me a favour if that is the case.

And then it hit me. There is also always the possibility that Kev was looking for some assistance with his upcoming wedding and was hoping I could supply him with something to keep his ….morale… up on his wedding night? I’m not sure but I really do wonder if supplying little blue pills is above and beyond the call of duty for a Best Man.

This morning I turn on GN-01 and, again, she takes a good twenty minutes to boot up. So I check the eventvwr and what do I see? Two weird entries, one for {F4524160-9145-49C9-8810-46CBC1EA0021} and one for KService.exe which has failed to load several times over. So I search the registry and discover that they are the same thing. I don’t recognise the name or the self-named directory it is sitting in. It isn’t in my Add/Remove Programs listing and I don’t recognise publisher, Kontiki, listed in the apps properties.

Like all good geeks I hit Google and what do I find? It’s peer-to-peer sharing service which most consider malware and Sky Anytime has apparantly installed it. As the Sky service is more than a little bit poo, I decided to uninstall it and see if that resolved the problem. Windows uninstalled the Sky Anytime application but not the KService itself, so with a bit more searching I found some references to KClean.exe at PC Doctor (where I downloaded a copy), the Sky website & AskJack at the Guardian and used that to clean up after KService, followed up with ensuring that it was gone by following the the manual instructions on Geoff’s Blog and checking references to the CLSID and KService.exe itself in my registry. The only thing that hadn’t been changed was the Service actually disabled, it was still set to Automatic, and the files deleted. Those done I rebooted to see what would happen and after several hours of chkdsk running again, boot-up time has once again been reduced to one minute or less.

ET:QW looks simply gorgeous on my new card and I can only imagine how much better it would be under DX10. It took me a little while to get into it though and is very much a Quake co-operative death match type of game rather than a facelift of the much loved (well, by me, anyway) Wolfenstein – Enemy Territory. Don’t get me wrong. It isn’t that I hate it, it just isn’t totally what I expected.

Bioshock was another surprise. I was expecting a poop-’em-up in much the same vein as F.E.A.R was and started the game expecting to be scared out of my mind. What I got instead was an introduction on the scale of TV’s Lost and a totally absorbing and purely gorgeous experience. The little touches in this game such as context sensitive help and minimalist HUD coupled with the effects when you activate the Incendiary plasmid, which is reminiscent of the nuclear power in TV’s Heroes, all combine to make this a truly wonderful experience. And that was just on the demo! Cannot wait to get the full game.

It was only after I had been clicking for a while that it dawned on me.

This is a dating application.

All these people are going to know who I am and expect…..something!

Oh, pants!

Then it also dawned on me that they will also see

1. what I look like and
2. that I am married.