LAN party at my place, sort of.

On the weekend, I invited my partner's brothers around for a LAN session. She was not too impressed that I was re-inforcing a bad habit (in her opinion). I bought them both a copy of Team Fortress 2 on Steam. It almost didn't happen when I tried to buy two copies (too fast I guess) as the bank declined my purchase of the second one. Sylvia came to the rescue with her Visa and it was all on.

I brought home two test laptops from work which have pretty decent graphics cards. It was one of those moments when you get a "home truth" shaken out of you. The "home truth" in this case was my assumption that laptops never had good 3D games performance (I remember when laptops had monochrome displays after all) unless you had a Alienware one. So congratulations universe... you have suprised me again!

I added up their stats afterwards, we got in a solid 9 hours. Sunny played the engineer mainly, and Sheng sniped away after getting sick of spies killing him (he figured out the spies rarely ventured up to where the snipers hide out).

So here are some lessons learned (which makes this an educational exercise I guess):
- Everyone loves TF2 once they have a go at it (Sunny was worried that he would just get pwned the whole time like in Counter Strike).
- Wi-fi will always cause problems when you try gaming over it (even with only one client using the AP)
- Sheng learned not to play music over team speak (I told him: No, you aren't the first person to think of it. Yes, it is annoying for others on the server. No, it doesn't come through clearly. Yes, we will get banned from the server if you keep doing it.)
- Everyone loves to tell the engineer to what to do but no-one loves to hang around protecting the engineer while he builds.

My mac is now even cooler

Accelerometer = Lightsaber

The latest phones from Sony Ericsson and Nokia are coming with built in accelerometers. And I have noticed the inevitable application for this technology is lightsaber simulators!

First there was the Mac Lightsaber tool, then the Wiimote lightsaber, and now I have just tried a Symbian app on the Nokia 95 8GB. (Get it here.)

I am yet to see one for the Sony Ericsson's, but given the sensor is part of the Java API's for this phone, it is only a matter of time.

I love cube, and it loves me

My kind of movies are coming again

It seems there is this cycle in holywood where they only make my kind of movies once every few years. The rest of the time is filled with lame-o crap. During this time I only seem to watch political documentaries.

But it seems things are coming up Neil! I just saw "Across the Universe" on the weekend and it was awesome! Next month "I am Legend" will be released. Then the month after is some monster flick by JJ Abrams, which is unnamed as yet.

I cannot wait to go spend $50 at the cinemas. :-/

Best snack ever.

I discovered these recently at the bakery across the road and I don't know what they are called, but they are great. They have a sausage wrapped in pastry with sweet chilli sauce and cheese and pack in more than $2.40 worth of awesome.

Daylight saving

Has landed recently... and it does my head in.

Firstly, even with all the latest updates etc... some of the test laptops and machines at work still manage to screw it up and have the wrong time. And given my job, half the phones I test will screw it up too.

Secondly... I still don't understand the point of having daylight savings this time of the year! Why do we want to have more daylight in the half of the year that already has plenty of daylight and is hot too? It makes much more sense to me to conserve this daylight for winter.

The problem with socialised health care

I think socialised medicine has been crippled by the actions over the last few decades by the politicians.

I think the biggest problem is the cost of new cutting-edge medicines and technology. Any budget for socialised medicine must cater for the astronomical costs for the latest cancer and heart disease treatments, the current killers in our world. These medicines cost so much because they are protected by patents held by the drug companies that developed them; and fair enough as long as they are not exploiting their position, as the research costs a lot and involves a lot of trial and error. But what happened to government funding for research? If there had been sustained government funding of medical research, a lot of these breakthrough drugs would have been developed in public institutions without profit being the motivation. The motivation would have been keeping people healthy and contributing to the economy and paying taxes which funds more research and so on.

That said... I don't have a clue how to fix this problem.

Cube food

The green man now has a garden!

R2D2 cam

I did this by hanging the K850i (which I use for blogging) from Artoo's storage compartment. Hence the funny angle...

My own robot

What more could a geek want?

Now that I have a tie...

I better get some respect!

USB hub of doom

My package arrived from think geek...

Plus an extra suprise! Along with the package was an R2D2 Interactive Droid, which I guess has come from my brother or mum, as I sent them an email with a link to the ThinkGeek site and the item in question as a Christmas wish. I guess Christmas came early this year!!!

*my mum got it for me, thanks mum!!!