Alfreido's Blog

As with migrating to another OS (and one that was only technically released today, mind you), you’re bound to have a fair share of problems and annoyances trying to restore your computer to almost the same state it was before. If you click ‘Read more’, you can view some of those problems and annoyances… or not.

I saw the first 4 episodes of 24 Season 6, I’m fairly certain that just those 4 episodes beats any other entire series of 24. You heard me right. If it can hold the same momentum throughout the series, I think this will be the pinnacle of 24 greatness.

Also in my binge download spree (I upgraded to a 40gb plan on Internode, I used to be on 20gb, hence the massive download mania), I downloaded the first 4 episodes of Prison Break Season 2 (I might add, both these shows have not been aired in Australia yet). While it didn’t top the excitement of 24, I was equally engrossed in them, and can’t wait to get the rest of the series.

Back to work next week…
But wait, there’s more…

Hope everyone had a good Christmas. I got meself some nice shirts, a couple of new games for the Wii, a load of cash and a striptease mug. When hot water is inside the mug, the clothes on the ladies in this picture on the side of the mug go blank, and then… yeah.

Well, I won’t tell you how, but I have managed to get the new Windows, Windows Vista, on my computer, and I shall give you my first impressions. Basically, it jumped at me as Windows XP in an eye-popping but expensive costume. It looks good, but really doesn’t offer too much more over the previous Windows version, and next to nothing over what other OS’s such as Apple OS X and Linux already provide.

It runs fairly well, not much of a speed increase over Windows XP, but that possibly could be because I didn’t wipe my hard drives when I installed this, I just installed it onto my second hard drive so I could still boot into Windows XP if I have to. All my stuff is still there.

I haven’t as yet tested any games on it, but I’ll give it a go after writing this blog, so you’ll have to wait for another entry before I talk about them.

Well let’s see, new features… the new gadgets system seems to be Microsoft’s monolopizing answer to Yahoo Gadgets which was becoming quite popular at one stage. At least it’s open for other developers to work on. The new Media Centre is fairly streamlined and sexy, giving a central place to listen to your media which is good, although I’ll still probably prefer using playlists for Windows Media Player and Winamp and the like.

I’ll post more later when I think about it, but I say wait until developers start forcing you to upgrade to Vista before actually buying Vista.

Have a good new years, don’t get too smashed.

Got my Nintendo Wii today, it looks a lot sexier than I thought it would be. White = pro.

Zelda looks epic, I shall be un-contactable for a few weeks.

I had a chat to a couple of former Wikipedia Administrators the other day, and I found out some startling similarities between all the Wikipedia Administrators that are currently “employed” to clean up Wikipedia these days. They did not want me to release names because apparently being banned from administrating Wikipedia is one step up from committing ritual suicide to a Celine Dion tune. They needed to keep their dignity, so I allowed them that. Anyways, forget Wikipedia’s ‘official’ guideline to becoming an administrator, I give you the unofficial 10 requirements to becoming a Wikipedia Administrator:

1. You must have reprogrammed your F1 key to automatically edit the article you are looking at. You must have also reprogrammed your F2 key to add ‘{{afd}}’ to any article, therefore setting it up for deletion.

2. You must have had straight A’s during Year 12 TEE. While intelligence is not a prerequisite for editing on Wikipedia (if it was, it would probably stop about 99% of the people visiting the site from editing), having straight A’s means that people cannot play the ‘I got better marks than you so I am right’ card when you edit or delete their article.

3. You must have skipped going to leavers in Year 12, with all the chicks and all the booze, to make sure that Wikipedia was as graffiti-free as possible.

4. Your parents must still be paying for your internet connection. And your food. And your frequent doctor trips due to radiation poisoning from your 20-year old monitor.

5. You are not allowed to have relationships of any kind. Girlfriends/boyfriends distract you from keeping spam on Wikipedia to a low, you have already learned this when you went out to see a movie with your partner, only to come back and find that your user-page has been overwritten by the 1,293,211 people whose articles you destroyed.

6. You must live no further than 100 metres from your nearest library. Since you’ve always gotta verify sources for all information on Wikipedia, you must make at least 20 trips to the library each day, constantly swapping the 12-book limit that is imposed on your account. You must always get furious at the staff when they ring the bell to signal the library’s closing time, since you still have another 250 books to hire out and review sources.

7. You must have your mobile phone set up so that when you must leave the house (which makes you shudder at the thought), you can easily view Wikipedia from your mobile. And make changes to Wikipedia. And destroy Wikipedia’s articles.

8. You must have a life-size poster of Jimmy Wales, the creator of Wikipedia, on your wall. You must also remember to clean the white stains on his legs every week as well.

9. When your friends tell you some things which are happening in the world today, you must always immediately ask them to cite their sources.

10. You must have the ‘Recent changes’ page on auto-refresh every 20 seconds, so you can make sure to clean up any spam from users before someone else does and steals your job.

An older-aged friend of mine, Phil, died last night from a heart attack. He was not that old either. Just part of some divine plan to kill off all the good people slowly and leave only assholes.

RIP Phil. The Thomson’s will miss you.

Went and saw World Trade Center on Friday night, and while it was a good movie, I don’t think it was as good as all the hype and controversy surrounding it made it look like. Of course, this would’ve been huge over in America, because up until United 93, the only movies made about September 11 was those damn awful conspiracy movies (I’ve seen a couple, they’re like Michael Moore documentaries, bend the truth in order to make it look like a conspiracy). I also expected this movie to have more of a voice, considering it was directed by Oliver Stone, who made the king of conspiracy movies, JFK. Alas, it was only a simple story of human courage, with no political motivation whatsoever. I guess Stone was just playing it safe…

I bought myself a Sony CD/MP3 deck on Saturday, and my father and I spent all Sunday trying to wire the bloody thing up. We took all morning removing the dash from my Hyundai Excel LS only to find that we only needed to remove 4 screws on the middle dash to be able to take the old radio out. So yeah, we did a lot more work than we had to. But it’s worth it, I can now play CDs in my car, instead of casettes

Gamestah was mentioned on ABC2′s new gaming show, Good Game, last night. Ej and Bob got to do a shoutcast of a huge match between the hosts and Australia’s best Counter-strike: Source team. Needless to say, it was a laugh and a half. Word is we get a full interview later in the series as well.

Check out the vids here. Click the last video in the list for the Gamestah shoutcast video.

Gotta love the hoops you have to jump through when you work in government schemes. For those of you not in the know, I work as an office clerk in Perth at a respectable health company (website design is my hobby for the moment). I was signed up under CDEP, a government scheme to basically ‘work for the dole’. I didn’t care much about the money at the time, I just needed a cash flow to keep up with all my spending on various things (mostly booze ). Now it appears that I have to sign up to a Job Seeker Network. Basically, they want me to look for a job while I am currently in one. I tell you… if the Australian government had a brain, Australia’s economy might actually go up.

I’ve been driving heaps as of late. 29th September is the day of reckoning. My driving exam. I’ll be doing it in my car, looking forward to it but at the same time, worried because the test will more than likely take place in the city, where everything is so hectic. Well, I guess if I pass, I’ve passed under the worst conditions and should be proud…

Gamestah.com is down. Has been for nearly 2 days. We may be contracted to Ausgamers, but I’m sure there is something in there about Ausgamers having to provide a decent service.