Newstocks

Apple TV

Picked up a 40GB Apple TV when I was in Atlanta.

It's a sweet little device, that lets you stream your iTunes audio and video content from your PC to your TV. We often buy episodes of TV shows from the iTunes store (usually when our DVR fails to record them for whatever reason, or we miss the start of a new series), so now we'll be able to watch them on the big screen in the comfort of the living room. It also makes it easy to play all our music on the living room stereo, and even internet radio too. There are a bunch of other nice features too, like the ability to browse photos from Flickr and videos from YouTube directly on the TV, and easy access to movie trailers.

Setting it up hasn't been plain sailing, however. When iTunes tried to sync the first episode of Heroes to the Apple TV, it crashed iTunes and blue-screened the PC. Not good. I had to work around this by disabling automatic synchronisation, and manually excluding Heroes from the list of TV shows to sync. I can live with this, but it's irritating.

The other problem was with Radiohead's In Rainbows. For some reason it synced the album metadata over OK, but when I tried to play any of the tracks on the Apple TV, I got an error message, even though they all played fine in iTunes. While trying to fix the problem, the Apple TV back-synced the album to iTunes, rendering the album unplayable there too. So I deleted it from iTunes and plugged my iPod in, expecting it to copy the album back into iTunes from the iPod. Instead it just deleted the content from the iPod. That was when I discovered I didn't have a backup of the album anywhere. In the end I had to download a new copy of the album from BitTorrent, import that into iTunes, then resync the Apple TV and my iPod.

The other issue is that video content doesn't play back properly on our 4:3 TV (it gets stretched vertically to fill the screen). I knew this would probably be a problem when I bought the Apple TV, however. The solution? A trip to M&M tomorrow morning to buy a large, flat-panel widescreen HDTV. I've been looking for an excuse to buy such a beast for a while, and I'm happy that the Apple TV has furnished me with one!

Atlanta

Last week we took a short trip to Atlanta.

It was my first time on an airplane with Aidan, and I hadn't been looking forward to it. Aidan's currently going through a stage where he likes to scream, especially if he's made to do anything he doesn't want to do, and I was dreading trying to entertain him for the three hour flight.

It actually turned out to be a lot easier than I was expecting. On the way out we were seated at a bulkhead, and the third seat in our row was unoccupied. That gave Aidan a lot more space to play in, and he only felt the need to race up and down the aisle a couple of times.

We met Mandy's parents in Atlanta, who flew in from a hardware trade show in Florida just an hour after our plane touched down. Together we took a cab to our hotel, a self-catering suite near the Lenox Square mall (better suited to a toddler than a regular hotel room).

We were only in Atlanta for three days, which really wasn't long enough. We spent two days shopping in and around the mall, and the other day visiting the Georgia aquarium. In addition, we managed to squeeze in breakfast with an old schoolfriend of mine whom I hadn't seen in years. I picked up an Apple TV in the Apple Store and a bunch of video games in Target, which I was amazed to discover had a better selection of PC games than the mall's specialist video game store.

Travelling with Aidan may have been easier than I was expecting, but the days were actually harder than I had anticipated. With so many new things to take in, Aidan was often tired and crabby in the afternoon and early evenings, even on those days when he did nap in his stroller. Dealing with that could get a little stressful.

On the flight back, we couldn't get the bulkhead. However, as soon as the plane took off, Aidan rolled over and fell asleep in my lap for an hour, which was a huge bonus. In addition, this time we were travelling with Mandy's parents, so we were able to share the burden of entertaining Aidan with them too.

All in all, it was a welcome break from Bermuda. Nevertheless, I'm still not keen to do much travelling with Aidan until he's a little older.

You can see more pictures from our trip here.

Gaming on a shoestring

In games, as in movies, you have the blockbusters and the arthouse titles. Most of the time, I just play the blockbusters: the likes of Bioshock, Portal, Crysis, Call of Duty 4 and so on. But in the last couple of days I've been enjoying a couple of considerably lower budget titles.

The first is Audiosurf, a sort of driving game where the track is generated from any of the music you have on your computer (DRM-protected purchases from the iTunes store excepted, annoyingly). The aim is to hit coloured blocks on the track and score as highly as you can. It doesn't sound like much, but there's several different game modes, and it's a lot of fun. The high score tables are online, so you can compare your paltry scores with those racked up by everyone else. Available for only $9.95 from Steam.

Even Mandy loves it and insisted that we buy a second copy for her laptop. It's the first game of mine that she's taken an interest in since Unreal Tournament 2003!

The second game is Space Hulk, a faithful reproduction of an old Games Workshop board game I used to play when I was a kid. It only runs at a resolution of 640x480, so I had to drop the resolution on my monitor so I didn't need a magnifying glass to play. But despite that, it's still an enjoyable turn-based strategy game which made me feel very nostalgic. And best of all, it's free.

Leaving Azeroth

I've just cancelled my subscription to World of Warcraft.

Truth is, I'm bored of WoW now. I've been playing since the beginning of 2005, however, the longest I have played any game, and there's just not enough to hold my interest any more. I don't participate in raiding because I'm not prepared to give the commitment that requires, and I've done so much PvP that that just isn't fun anymore. Running the 5 man instances is still fun, but it's difficult to find a group for them these days.

As I paid three months in advance, I can actually keep playing until April 16 (so the server transfer won't be a complete waste of money). And even after that, since all characters are retained indefinitely, I can return to the game at any time and pick up where I left off. I don't think that's going to happen, however.

Time for something new.

Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles

Just watched the pilot episode of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles.

I wasn't going to bother with this series, pegging it as a lame attempt to squeeze some extra cash out of the Terminator franchise. However, some positive reviews persuaded me to give it a go.

Overall, it was fine. But I couldn't help feeling that we'd seen it all before. The "come with me if you want to live line" made me laugh, but it felt like the show was trying a little too hard to be self-referential.

I'll give the series a bit longer, but I really hope that the writers take it in some fresh directions. The Terminator movies were enjoyable (I even enjoyed T3), but that doesn't mean turning them into a TV series is a good idea. George Lucas, are you listening?

STALKER

I've just finished playing STALKER, a "first-person survival horror shooter" set in the Zone of Alienation around Chernobyl.

It's been out for about a year now, but I only got part-way through the game last year before I lost interest. Having visited Pripyat, the ghost town near the reactor, in Call of Duty 4 last month, I was inspired to return to STALKER and try to finish it off.

The game's real strength is its mythology, and the creepy, desolate atmosphere that it creates. The Zone is a wasteland of run-down buildings, strange anomalies and aggressive, mutated wildlife, and it's fun to explore. Many of the locations, notably Chernobyl itself, have been closely reproduced from their real-life counterparts, and knowing that really added to my enjoyment of the game.

While most of the enemies you fight are human, not all are. While exploring an abandoned research facility, a couple of hours into the game, I ran into my first mutants. It was a genuinely scary experience. One creature had some kind of telepathic attack that seemed to pull me towards it; the first time I ran into it, I had no idea what was going on, or how to fight it. It was a refreshingly different experience. A similar disorienting effect occurred later in the game while I was exploring another abandoned lab, and ran into some really bizarre anomlies and a poltergeist. STALKER conveys the weirdness of its Zone extremely well.

The game isn't without its problems, however. There are clipping problems galore, and getting around can be tedious. The Zone is large, yet there is no means of rapidly moving from one place to another. When the missions required me to backtrack a long way, I wouldn't bother unless it was essential for me to proceed.

Because of that, I ended up missing a large, important chunk of the game, even though I didn't realise it at the time. About 2/3 of the way through the game I got a mission to go and talk to someone back in the starting area. It seemed important, however I already had a mission to find a monolith inside the Chernobyl sarcophagus, which I assumed was the main quest line. So I didn't bother with the other mission.

When I finally made it to the monolith, I got a perplexing cutscene and the game ended. Baffled, I stared open-mouthed at the screen. Your main objective, given to you at the start of the game, was to kill someone called Strelok. All through the game I had been uncovering clues as to Strelok's whereabouts. Now I realised that the game had ended, and yet I still had no idea who Strelok was.

Now I was wondering what the hell was going on again, but this time it wasn't in a good way. So it was onto Google to find out what I'd missed.

It turned out that the game has multiple endings, and that to get to the "proper" one, I should have done that mission that I skipped. If I had, I would have discovered who Strelok was, and would have found my way into a whole other section of the game within the reactor. Fortunately, thanks to a clipping bug I was able to force my way through the locked door in the reactor that lead to this final section, and play it out. But I was left feeling mildly irritated that the game had allowed my to have such an unsatisfying ending intially. I guess that's the price you pay for a free-form, open world, rather than a game that's on rails.

As a result of the game, I've taken an interest in the real-life Chernobyl and its exclusion zone. It's fascinating to check it out on Google Earth, along with Pripyat and its ferris wheel. The BBC's Horizon program did a documentary on Chernobyl in 1996 and I intend to watch that too. It's spooky to think that there's now a 19-mile wide exclusion zone around the reactor that's almost devoid of human life.

It's amazing that it took someone as long as it did to turn such a mysterious place into a setting for a game.

Bitch, and ye shall receive

A couple of months back, I complained about having to enter the cents when making a withdrawal from an HSBC ATM. Since you can only withdraw dollars, this unnecessarily increased the number of buttons you had to push to withdraw cash. Type A personality that I am, I found this very annoying.

This lunchtime I went to withdraw some cash to discover - glory, hallelujah! - that this has finally been fixed. Now you just have to enter the dollars.

I nearly withdrew $9000 as a result, but I'm not complaining.

Older

Celebrated my 36th birthday on Saturday. So I'm now officially closer to 40 than to 30. Awesome.

The highlight of the day was Mandy's present to me: a long weekend in New York in April. Highlights of the trip will include a night at the opera (to see La Boheme at the Met) and a night on Broadway (to see David Hyde-Pierce of Frasier fame in the show Curtains). Since I've never been to Broadway and haven't seen a full-scale opera in years, I'm really looking forward to it. Since Aidan isn't particularly excited about theatre or opera just yet, however, he'll be staying with granny.

In the evening we went to Bistro J for dinner - the first time either of us had been there. We really enjoyed it. It's a small, cosy place, with the (admittedly limited) menu chalked up on a board on the wall. The food was good and the service was friendly; we'll definitely be going back.

Changing servers

Last night I changed the server that my main World of Warcraft character plays on, moving from Kil'Jaeden to Skullcrusher.

One of my friends made the move a month or two back, citing problems with lag on Kil'Jaeden. I hadn't found it too bad, and was reticent to pay the $25 moving fee, so I initially decided to stay put.

Last night, however, I begrudgingly decided to fork out the cash and move. The final straw was another unsatisfying evening fighting nothing but premades in the battlegrounds, with the 1 hour+ wait times to get into the Alterac Valley (AV) battleground being an additional factor.

Despite Blizzard saying on their website that realm transfers can take several days to go through, mine only took about an hour. I didn't have much time to explore my new home last night, but I did discover:

• You sometimes have to queue to log on to the server itself. Last night I only had to wait a couple of seconds, but I understand that at peak times it can be longer than that. That's a result of the server having a high population, but the flip side is that at least it should be easier to find groups.


• Latency wasn't much better than it was on Kil'Jaeden, which was a bit disappointing. Skullcrusher is an east coast server, whereas Kil'Jaeden is a west coast one, so I was expecting to see some improvement.


• The queue for AV was less than a minute. Hurrah!


• The people I played AV with were retards. Boo! I knew it didn't look good when the first thing one of them said in chat was not to attempt to capture the StoneHearth graveyard. When I asked why, I was called a noob. On my old server, I hadn't lost a game in AV for months. That was because we always moved up the map slowly, capturing all the objectives (including the graveyard) as we went. Instead, these idiots just pushed straight for the enemy general, not bothering to capture any of the graveyards or towers along the way. Surprise, surprise, we lost. I really hope that game wasn't representative of what I have to look forward to in AV from now on. Mind you, even if it is, the greatly reduced queue times may still mean that I can farm honour faster in there than I would on my old server.

Fingers crossed that the move will still work out to be a net positive. If nothing else, at least I can group with my friend once again.

Jobs for life

I've deliberately avoided writing about politics here so far. This is not A Limey In Bermuda, nor its successor.

But this is too much. I can't believe that the BIU are suggesting that the Government has no right to fire a drunken ferry pilot who crashed into a dock, and are threatening a transport strike unless they get their way. He had an accident while driving a public vehicle with 60 passengers on it with more than twice the legal limit of alcohol in his blood, for Christ's sake. And he was found guilty in court. Of course it's a frakking sackable offense. The Government has no obligation whatsoever to give him another job. Sheesh, talk about an entitlement mentality.

I can't believe that some members of the public are actually supporting the BIU too. Symptomatic of the tolerance for drunk driving in this country, I'd say.

Thank God that the Government seem to be standing up to the Union this time. It's long overdue.

UPDATE: I take back my complimentary comment about the Government. It seems the BIU's bullying has caused them to wimp out, after all. Pathetic.

Premade vs PUG != fun

Last night I was playing some more battlegrounds in World of Warcraft, in an attempt to grind enough honour to buy myself the epic PVP crossbow. But almost every time, our pick-up group or "PUG" (a group of individuals without any connection to each other) found ourselves up against a premade (a group of players who join the battleground as a unit and generally exhibit considerably more coordination and discipline). Needless to say, we lost every match - heavily. In several hours of playing, I couldn't even get my daily quest (requiring a win in the Eye of the Storm battleground) done.

A fight between a premade and a PUG is no fun at all for those in the PUG. To ensure fairness, and a fun time for all, Blizzard need to change the battlegrounds so that premades only fight other premades and PUGs only fight other PUGs.

Have I Got News For You

One of the things that I miss most about the UK is the TV show Have I Got News For You.

So why oh why oh why don't the BBC make every episode available for download online? I'd probably be willing to pay $5 per episode, I enjoy the show that much.

In fact, why don't the BBC make all of their shows available online for a small fee? How hard could it be?

The broken windows theory of parenting

Our house always used to be a pretty organised place.

I'm a neat freak, who can't stand clutter, and Mandy feels the same way about dirt. So between us, we usually had no problem keeping the house clean and tidy.

Then Aidan came along, however, and the place hasn't been the same since.

The funny thing is, it's not just Aidan's books and toys that are now cluttering the place up. I've started leaving my own crap lying around too. Subconsciously, I seem to be thinking, "well, the place is a mess anyway, so what difference does another item make?". As for cleaning - well, it's well known that parenting and cleaning are mutually exclusive activities.

So that's our house these days: dirty and untidy. Without doubt one of the most difficult realities of parenting to get used to.

Things that piss me off #63

People who stand in the "1-10 items" line at the supermarket, and then put 16 items down on the conveyor. And cashiers who ring their stuff through anyway, instead of giving them a ticking off and sending them to another line.

Grrr.

Lost

Just watched the first episode of the new season of Lost.

Season three ended with several very strong episodes, and I'm hoping that season four will keep up the quality. If the first episode was anything to go by, it will. I was a bit concerned when I first heard that Lost will have two more seasons after this, as I didn't think the story was deep enough to keep going for that long. But now I'm beginning to think that maybe they can pull it off without it seeming like they're dragging it out.

My only concern is the effect that the Writers' Guild of America strike is going to have on the show. There were supposed to be sixteen episodes this season, but because of the strike, only eight will air. I'm not clear whether they will now comprise the whole season, or whether the remaining episodes will be filmed and aired later. The writers' strike destroyed the second series of Heroes (although to be honest, I don't think it would have been very good even if it had had its full complement of episodes), and I'm hoping the same fate won't befall Lost.