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Big Brother – First Housemate out

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bigbro_steph.jpgLast night Big Brother’s Stephaine was voted off the show in what was a kinda dull eviction and sort of surprise.

I can only guess that again the female vote of jealousy struck, something thats been happening quite a lot on Big Brother. Where all females every seem to vote out all the good looking female housemates in some kinda jealous rage.

Not to say that Stephaine didnt have this coming her sulking bitching and moaning over the wedding task was childish and stupid and probably cost her spot in the house.

Games

WoW Fatigue and Age of Conan-First Impressions

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Thought i would try it out for the 30days to see if its a “WoW beater”. All ive heard about are Bugs,Bugs and more bugs. But ive been impressed with the graphics and videos ive seen and the sales alone of the game have been very good. I havnt read anything about the game except one article on an mmorpg site.

WoW Fatigue:
First i must explain that im totaly frustrated with WoW atm. The recent announcement i read on wowinsider.com about Season 4 and Season for Honour being put back possably to August was kinda the last straw. Well this is weird i had read that yesterday and now Blizzard have said June 24th is the start.

Its probably to late for me care anymore now, when you only play WoW for PvP your days are numbered really. Id had tried to get my frustrations known on the wowinsider.com site but of course i was kinda muted by the response. One of the repiles exclaimed “Wow is a PVE game” i quickly thanked that person for pointing that fact out.

One of the things about WoW and i guess any MMORPG (ive only played WoW so far so i cant speak for the other games in the genre) is the constant repetition. You do the same thing over and over and over again so many times that at the start you find it frustating but it you find it so much that it just wears you down and you forget that your the same thing again and again. Now this may not be a bad thing but after a while its time to stop. PVP is like that i normally try to do the daily quests on a few alts and log off quickly, thats about all i can take of WoW at the moment. Ive tried Arenas but i dont think there for me. Needless to say the chance to try out a new MMORPG in a new land with next-gen graphics was a tempting offer and thats where AoC comes in.

Age of Conan:

Character Creation:
Is great fun and very detailed, theres a tonne of options and settings you can use to create your own character and class. I spend quite a while picking mine and going through all the options.

Graphics & Sound:
First thing that strikes you is the graphics and sound they are amazing. The “water” effects are incredible, the water looks so real that you can almost reach out and touch it. “White-Sands Isle” is incredable a beautiful beech like island with tigers and panthers roaming round. “Tortage” is incredably detailed and must have taken a lot of time to create. Down by the docks the ships are quite amazing looking. Wandering around you will be awe-struck by the detail.

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High-Res Screenshot:

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Gameplay:
The game play is fairly straight-forward as your guided easily to the town of “Tortage” where you quests begin. The quest log and map are a little “cluttered” and confusing (compared to wow) but after a few mins you get used to it. You are guided along on your quests slowly and once you figure out how to read the map a handy orange arrow points you in your direction.

Combat:
Is straightforward with the keys 1,2,3 being your attacks you gain new abilities after each level which do more damage and you can find items of mobs you kill.

Bugs:
Yes there are bugs but they are minor ones and dont ruin the game play. A funny one i noticed was that in cut-scences the female characters boobs in the game “Twitch”.

Overall:
So far i like it,because its different and its unknown territory. However i must say ive only played it for one day and dont know too much about it but its quite good fun exploring and learning things. Is it a WoW beater? that remains to be seen a good competitor at least i think. Ive noticed a lot of WoW players fed up with Wow playing it. Of course whether we all come running back after a month or when WOTLK hits is another story.

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Big Brother 9 has Started

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Its started over here in the Uk and Ireland on channel 4 and it marks the start of summer on TV and so far its been quite good i must admit. The Fake wedding was a good idea and the house mates seem to be an interesting bunch of people. There is of course a good mix of people from an Albino to a blind person.

Of the girls Rachel is my favorite (shes got a few fans in the house too) shes beautiful,cute,smart and a genuine person. Shes my ideal woman.

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It seems channel4 have gone this for 2 “charlies” from last years BB. Both Alexandria and Sylvia are very irritating, arrogant and very very full of themselves. Alexendria seems to mope about with a scoul on her face about moan about anything. Her outburst at Mikey (the blind person) was out of order but thats what makes good TV and so far its quite good. How they can top the fake wedding i dont know will be interesting to see.

You can catch up with episodes on channel4’s excellent 4oD service.

BB9 Official Site

Music

I-Tunes Sucks, admit it!

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itunes-button-logo-300×300.jpgI hate I-Tunes and i hate buying music from itunes not becausei could get ir for free if i looked hard enough i want my music that i pay for in the Mp3 format and without DRM protection which music you buy from I-Tunes has. Usually the music you buy is in the (.m4p) format, a protected Mp4 file. Which means you cant use it on anything other than I-Tunes and your I-pod.

MP4-Protected I-Tunes Music Format:
This sucks make no mistake about it, i have an I-pod and its great but i hate I-Tunes and i hate music that you buy thats got DRM (Digital Rights Management). However there is a few ways around this if your determined to get the music you bought on your other Mp3 player which doesnt support M4P. I recently went about finding out how i could do this as i wanted to use the music i bought from itunes in my own music library software which only plays Mp3 files. This method is quite messy and very frustating to do but it does the job.

Basically it involves “Burning” a Audio Cd in I-Tunes to a virtual CD-Burner which then converts the Audio tracks to Mp3 sounds complicted and it is slightly. The software is called “NoteBurner” and its quite good at what it does.

M4A – Unprotected I-tunes Music Format:
If the music you bought has this format then you can use some software to convert the music to mp3 quite easilily, check out “m4a-to-mp3-converter” from maniactools.com

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Mafia Nicknames

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946asopranos-posters.jpgWas reading an article on a cool blog i found by accident about mafia nicknames.

US and Italian authorities launched a massive operation against the New York and Sicilian Mafia Thursday, arresting more than 80 suspects in a sweep described as a major blow against organized crime.

Prosecutors in New York unveiled a 170-page indictment against 62 individuals detailing murder, racketeering, loan sharking, conspiracy, drugs and extortion charges for crimes going back as far as the 1970s.

The sweep netted 61 alleged members of three of the five families that run the Mafia in New York — the Gambino, Genovese, and Bonanno families.

Among those facing charges were top Gambino leaders including acting boss John D’Amico, also known as “Jackie the Nose,” acting underboss Domenico “The Greaseball” Cefalu and consigliere Joseph “Miserable” Corozzo

“Jackie the Nose” is such a funny name i cant get my head around that one. So i did a quick google and i found some more, none of them beat “jackie the Nose”
http://www.geocities.com/TelevisionCity/set/1173/nickn.html

Willie Alderman “Ice Pick”
Anthony Joseph Accardo “Joe Batters, Big Tuna”
Johnny Masiello “Gentleman”
John Gotti “The Dapper Don”,”The Teflon Don”,”Mr. Untouchable”
Giussepe Masseria “Joe the Boss”
Anthony Casso “Gas Pipe”
Phillip Cestaro “Philly Broadway”
Vincent Gigante “The Chin”
Michael Coppola “Trigger Mike”
Anthony Corallo “Tony Ducks”
Michael Falciano “The Falcon”
Carmine Fatico “Charlie Wags”
Ralphie Galione “Wigs”
Joseph Gioelli “Joe Jelly”
Frank Guidice “Frankie the Beard”

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Windows Vista-Is just more trouble than its worth!

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windows_vista_logo.pngI have been running Vista now for about one month and although there was problems from the start, for example All USB devices wouldnt work on PC while of course on Windows Xp they worked no problem i was beginning to like it.

About 95% of the programs i use regularly run fine on Vista but any piece of hardware you have thats old may not work at all on vista as i found out. Vista lacks alot of support for certain drivers and devices and probably will for a long time.

It looks nice and seems to run a little bet better than Xp and of course it has DirectX 10. Now it was the Directx 10 part that got me interested being a huge PC Gamer and owning a few Dx 10 Games like; Crysis,Flight Simulator 10, Assasins Creed and Halo2. With the exception of Halo 2 which looks so dated for a game thats Dx10 only and came out in 2007. While DX 10 is the next big thing unfortunately its just not really worth the hassle of Vista at the moment.

Windows Vista is fine if all you want to do with it is play Dx10 games anything else and your asking for trouble. Apart from the inital USB problem after a few Windows Updates everything was running fine and USB was working again. The real problem with Vista as i painfully found out is that any software that uses drivers to run will probably have problems.

Sony Ericsson PC Suite
For example i recently was given a Sony Ericsson k800 phone and the software to transfer files to it works perfectly under windows Xp but with Vista it was a nightmare to get it to work. I managed to track down the lastest version of the “Sony Ericsson PC Suite 3.2” and even though it claims to support vista i had many problems getting it to work. In the end i did and it just doest work as well as it does under XP but thats to be expected.

Peerguardian 2
A popular Bit-torrent tool to stop certain IP addresses being able to see what your downloading does not work on Vista yet and again there is a Vista version but after many restarts and fiddling around it still wont work.

Now while both arnt critical applications they really show how bad Vista support is. Sure Vista SP1 is about and it may or may not fix the problems i had but i cant help but wonder if its worth the bother and it really isnt. Even a program im still developing in visual basic 6 which works fine on Windows 98-Xp has problems in vista at the moment im trying to track them all down and fix them even though they are little problems its still the same old story.

Windows Vista Stability is quite good, i havnt had any major crashes or “Blue Screens” i had at the start when i installed vista but everything is fine now. But using Vista seems to be like the using Windows Xp x64 (the 64 bit version) not many do and the support and compatabilty is bad.

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First Post, and blog number 3!

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Been meaning to make a proper blog for months, having 2 blogs already (video and WoW) blogs i thought i better make a proper one!. Anyway gonna post my thoughts on stuff and hopefully if anyone is outthere they will find this blog.

My video blog contains all the best videos i find on the net from everything to World of Warcraft, Music Videos, Movie clips and weird Japanese game shows. Thats just about everything. You can find it here:
http://videos.irishbloke.net

The other Blog is just where i keep my World of Warcraft tips and addons etc its nothing special but i try to keep quick links to the wow forums for different specs. So its quite Usefull for finding something really fast.
http://wow.irishbloke.net

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Lisbon Treaty and Ireland-Scared to Vote No?

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I dont know where to start with this one but it seems as if were being steamrolled into voting yes for it depsite most of the population including myslef not knowing what the hell its about. In a nutshell it wants to give more power to Brussles and take away Irelands say in matters of the EU. Of course its a lot more complicated than that and in the next 2 weeks im going to see what its about.

What makes me angry is the way the ordinary person who hasnt a clue is being made to fear a no vote. Posters are up everywhere and most politicians are telling us to vote “YES”. they dont say why other than it “would be bad for ireland if we voted no” Well the Dutch and French did in 2005. Its like a parent telling its children “not to put your hand in the fire” the child has no idea why not to so wonders why.

According to Wikipedia the central changes are as follows;

with a 2½ year term replacing the
low-key President-in-Office.

created by merging the External
Relations Commissioner with the
CFSP High Representative.

from 2000 made legally binding.

increasing the EU’s competence
to sign treaties.

officially from the EU Council.
Legislative meetings of the EU
Council to be held in public.

to less than one commissioner per
country. Nationalites would rotate
regardless of country size.

by extending codecision with the
Councils to more areas of policy.

by removing the Nice Treaty
limitation to 27 Member States.

to new areas of policy in the
European Council and the
EU Council, from 2014 on.

  • Common defence foreseen

in that the ESDP leads to a
common defence when the
European Council decides to.

  • National parliaments engaged

by expanding scrutiny-time of
legislation and enabling them to
jointly compell the Commission
to review or wihdraw legislation.

  • Mutual solidarity obliged

if a member state is object of a
terrorist attack or the victim of a
natural or man-made disaster.

  • Citizens’ initiatives

to be considered by the
Commission if signed by
1 mill. citizens.

explicitly stated as an objective.

 

by removing the Nice Treaty
limitation to 27 Member States.

Even most of that is quite unclear but there are few key issues that raise an eyebrow. As if the EU isnt big enough already with the Eastern European countries joining they want to enlarge europe even more? I cant see why this a good thing other than to create some kinda of “United States of Europe”. The EU already is trying to pass laws over its countries some of which interfere with the constitution of those countries.

to less than one commissioner per
country. Nationalites would rotate
regardless of country size.

They want to Reduce each countries EU Commissioner to “less than one commissioner per country” all i can see with this is that they want to reduce a countries say in the EU Parliment again how can this be a good thing?

Games

Microsoft Halo 2: Windows Vista and Windows Xp, Whats Microsofts Game?

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Recently Microsoft released Halo 2 for the PC after 3 years since its original x-Box Release which to to many gamers was greeted with a lukewarm response, why you might ask.

For a start Microsoft decided to “Stab in the back” its own customers the Windows XP PC Gamer by releasing it as a Windows Vista Only game. Now “So what?” you might ask. For a start Microsoft Told that Halo2 was a “Too-complicated” for Windows Xp this was way back when it was first announced for the PC and that it would use DirectX 10 which only Windows Vista Supports. Now its easy to understand why Microsoft would do this;

1)They wanna make Vista the new big thing and force PC Gamers to upgrade to it which in turn boosts Hardware sales and makes everyone in the PC Hardware market happy.
2)They wanna make money from selling Copies of Vista even though its got many problems with drivers and performance for PC Games

The Lies:
The above all is fair enough until about a few weeks into June a “Warez” Group called “Razer1911″ released a “Loader” for Halo 2 Windows XP which worked allowing the installation and play of Halo2 only in its Single Player Form at the moment. Not only this but the Game runs much faster in Windows Xp than Windows Vista.

This was the proof that people had been wating for and suspecting that Microsoft Lied about Halo2 needing Vista to run. Not only this but Halo2 is a Directx 9 game it has NO Directx 10 (Windows Vista) features. This is not the first game either in the same “Boat”. “ShadowRun” another Vista “Exclusive” also can run in Windows XP. Its no secret that Windows Vista is not selling in the numbers Microsoft wants and this “Force-Feeding” method by Microsoft on Windows Vista is not going to work. Both these games in question are very “Average” games.

Halo 2:Not so good
Graphics Dated
Looks very dated, its graphics are just way outta date against the current state of PC Games like “Stalker,Quake4,Armed Assault,Prey,Half Life 2 etc”.

Multiplayer Servers?
Multiplayer is non existant at the moment as not many people have this game and Windows Vista. Multiplayer doesnt work at the moment with Windows XP which is a huge shame really. Halo 1 was one of the best Multiplayer games on the PC ive ever played, it was fun easy to get into and the maps and game modes were very good. In short it was worth buying Halo 1 just for the muliplayer.

The Vista Halo 2 Experience:
Windows Live
I purchased Halo 2 and shunned downloading it from the usual torrent sites so i could play the great Multiplayer part of it that i loved about Halo 1. I had alot of problems with the game especially the “Windows LIVE” feature/service that Halo2 and Windows Vista use. I had trouble signing in and registering my Product Key between the annoying Browser windows that keep putting you out the game so you can sign into “Windows Live” something that will have you cursing every having bought the game after 10 mins. I found this to be a hugly dissapointing and terrable let down in comparison to how easy it was to get a Halo 1 Game going.

Performance
My Graphics card is still a good one and can run games good with hight graphics options. When i first installed it, it was unplayable and i couldnt figure it out i had up-to-date Graphic Card drivers. After a few hours of endless head scratching and cursing i freed up some disk space on the Vista Hard Drive and updated the Sound card drivers and this fixed the problem. But the game seems to run badly in comparison to running it on Windows XP.

Lies VS The PC community
I really hope that Halo2 flops as its NOT worth
the price
the upgrade to vista
the hassle
the time.

Force Feeding
If Microsoft want to sell Vista to the PC Gamer “Force Feeding” is not the way to do it and Halo2 is not a game worth getting Vista for. Hopefully Halo 2 will be able to work in Multiplayer Mode under Windows XP until then i wont be playing it and as much as id love to i cant get a refund on it. So im stuck with the game and all its problems. The single player game is about as entertaining as watching paint dry when there are so many other great games out there.

Windows Vista Games:
No doubt Microsoft shot themselves in the foot with this game and implemented a lame Vista check before the game will run. Of Course there are some great “Vista” only games coming soon and these games look like being worth the upgrade and hassle unfortunately Halo 2 isnt.

Windows XP & Halo2
The Single Player:
works up to a point i believe where “Activation” is needed which doest work under Xp even when you have purchased copy of the game.

Multiplayer:
Almost works but wont let you connect to any games for some reason it gives the message “Unable to join Party at the moment, please try again.”
So no Halo 2 Multiplayer on Windows XP yet and probably never once Microsoft release a patch to “Fix” the game running on Windows XP. Ill keep any progress i make posted in here.

Halo 2 Windows XP Loader:
Which will run the game in windows XP, dont expect 100% compatabilty or trouble free gaming but at least it works.