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Birthday party

We had Aidan's second birthday party at granny and pop's house this afternoon.

We were a bit worried that Hurricane Kyle was going to put a real damper on things, as it passed a couple of hundred miles to our west at 11am this morning. Happily, however, there were just a couple of brief showers and a good time was had by all.

The highlight of the afternoon for many of the kids was when pop drove them around the yard in a big cart hitched up to his mower!

Thanks to everyone who came and helped Aidan celebrate. Pictures can be found here.

And you think Bush is dumb?

Seriously, what the hell was John McCain smoking when he picked Sarah Palin as his VP?

So either the Republicans win and we get this clueless idiot a stone's throw from being the leader of the most powerful nation on Earth, or the Democrats win and Bermuda's international business sector comes under attack.

What an awesome choice.

Happy birthday, Aidan!

It's Aidan's second birthday today. God, how time flies.

He's finally old enough to start appreciating what's going on, and is now much more excited about presents than he used to be. He's better at getting the paper off too, although he still needs a bit of help with the ones that have been stuck up well.

Happily, however, he's not so excited that he just wants to tear open one after another, barely glancing at the contents of each. In fact we almost have the opposite problem - after opening his first present this morning (a Mickey Mouse tricycle) he just wanted to play with that and we had to physically carry him back to the present pile to get him to open some more!

Nothing special planned for him today, but we're having a birthday party on Saturday afternoon at granny's house. Should be a lot of fun.

Top 10 games

I've just put together a list of my top 10 PC games of all time, for the PC Gamer Readers' Top 100. These are not necessarily the games which I consider the most innovative or worthy, but simply the games that I've had the most fun playing.

In reverse order, they are:

10. Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords - I would have missed this game had it not received an amazingly high score in PC Gamer. A variant of Bejewelled, with unremarkable graphics, I found its simple and unlikely pairing of puzzle gameplay and RPG mechanics incredibly addictive.

9. Call of Duty 4 - Possibly one of the most cinematic games that I've played. The modern theatre was also a refreshing change from the overdone World War II setting of the previous titles.

8. Rainbow Six Vegas - I feel guilty about including what, on the face of it, is such an ordinary shooter in my top 10. But truth is, I hugely enjoyed it. It really captured a sense of vulnerability (take a couple of bullets and you're dead), making the use of cover absolutely essential to success.

7. Half-Life - To be honest, I've grown a little tired of the Half-Life series over the years and I almost wasn't going to include any of the games in the list. While Half-Life 2 and Episodes 1 and 2 have all been good, worthy games, for some reason that I can't quite put my finger on, they never really grabbed me. But Half-Life was the first game I played on the first PC I owned, back in 2000, and thinking back on it, it was really enjoyable. The introductory title sequence as you ride the monorail into the Black Mesa facility remains one of the highlights of PC gaming.

6. Baldur's Gate II: Shadows of Amn - It's been 8 years since I played this classic role-playing game based on the AD&D ruleset, and my memories of it are admittedly fuzzy. But it was a huge game, and I played all the way through to the end of it, so I must have been having a good time. With a first-class plot and extensive dialogue options it remains the benchmark for single-player RPGs today.

5. Sacrifice - This creative blend of real-time strategy and first person perspective was a gem of a game that looked great and was hugely fun to play. "Your manahoars are dying!"

4. Doom - The first PC game that I played, I discovered it during the time that I was working in Hong Kong. After the working day was over, my friend and colleague JJ and I would sit together at a desk and take turns playing. The PC didn't have a soundcard, so we had to make our own sound effects, but that didn't matter.

3. World of Warcraft - Although I've tired of this game now, I played it for 10 times longer than any other (around 1,073 hours, over a three year period). For me it peaked before Burning Crusade came out, when Blackrock Mountain was the hub of activity and before the Old World became a ghost town. Exploring the vast world for the first time was a real thrill and remains one of the highlights of my gaming life.

2. Far Cry - Choosing your path through the huge, open landscapes was enormous fun, and even the appearance of the mutants didn't spoil it for me. The recent Crysis recaptured some of this feeling, but didn't have quite the same wow factor.

1. Battlefield 2 - Without doubt, the most addictive and fun game I've ever played. I returned to it "just for a quick half hour game" the other week and didn't end up going to bed until 2am.

Honourable mentions, in no particular order: Painkiller, Company of Heroes, Prince of Persia, Civilization IV, Indigo Prophecy (aka Fahrenheit), Warcraft III, Deus Ex, Rome Total War.

Apple support sucks

Last week I purchased and downloaded an HD version of an episode of Dexter from the iTunes store.

When you buy an HD copy of a TV episode, Apple throw in the SD version for free. Apparently this is because the latter will play on your iPod, but the former will not. Both versions appeared to download fine, both are listed in iTunes, but iTunes (and I) cannot find the file for the HD version. And although I can play back the SD version on the PC, it will not sync to my Apple TV.

So a week ago I reported the problem using the iTunes store's "Report a Problem" button. Having heard nothing a week later (not even an acknowledgement that they received my message), a couple of nights ago I also used the email form on their website to report the issue. I've still had no response.

This sucks. The free HD episode of Heroes that I also downloaded had a similar problem. I was all set to start buying most of the TV shows we watch from iTunes in HD, but now I'm worried that I'll have similar problems next time.

The last time I had to report a problem on iTunes (just a few weeks ago, in fact) it took almost a week to get a refund, but I did at least get an almost immediate acknowledgement that my complaint had been received. What happened to Apple support between then and now?

Looks like I'm just going to have to download this episode from BitTorrent instead and watch it on the PS3. In hindsight, it would have been much easier had I just avoided iTunes and bought Dexter on DVD instead.