Previously in Nick’s life:
- Mal bought Halo 3, and I finished it on his 360, scoring myself some achievements in the process. I’m pretty happy with my current gamerscore, since I don’t have a 360.
- I bought the Orange Box on Steam. I love steam. I get the games I would have bought anyway at FANTASTIC prices, thanks to the currently-great Aussie dollar, and also the warm feeling of having purchased software where most of the money went to the creators.
- Portal was the best game I’ve played in YEARS.
- I paid around AUD$15 for Vampire: Bloodlines on Steam as well. Great deal.
HL2 Episode 2 has been great, but I really, really hate the Hunters. Especially in the last big fight, there’s heaps of other stuff going on, and they’re taking away 1/3 of your health and armour in one salvo. And they are difficult to kill with your standard weapons… It seems you basically have to run them over with your car to kill them quickly. Unfortunately, my machine struggles with rendering car + everything else going on…
In a completely unrelated note, presented for your edification, intro sequences for the same cartoon.
Firstly, one you may be familiar with:
And next, one you probably haven’t seen before – the Japanese intro for the same show.
It seems to me that the Japanese one contains a much higher awesome quotient than the Western one. Plus, they somehow manage to make Jubilee look bad-ass. I wouldn’t have thought it was even possible.
So, I’m going to be minding Mal’s Xbox 360 this weekend, and he’s just bought Halo 3. I’m going to try and finish the Campaign, hopefully on Heroic or Legendary. I’ll post what I think when I’m done.
I also finished God of War II the other day. I’m really impressed with God of War overall – they’re entertaining games to play, although God Mode on GoW2 is a son-of-a-bitch at times. I don’t think I’m game to try Titan Mode, which is harder still…
So, I borrowed Shay’s axe from Mal last night for some shredding action at Marc’s place. I’m always surprised by how much having other people watching you makes you focus in that game. Oh, and a pro face off against a similar-level of skill player = AWE. SOME.
I learned a valuable lesson on configuring routers yesterday: Always assume it’s not going to work, no matter how much preparation you do. All you can do is mitigate the amount of time it takes you to figure out the inevitable problems by having as much reference material as possible easy to hand.
I didn’t have any reference material yesterday, so it took me six hours to find the two commands I needed to enter. I was tired.
Yes, I haven’t been posting a lot for a long, long time. I think that it’s to do with a lack of focus on exactly what I want to use this site for.
When I first started a blog using Blogger, back in 2000, there weren’t the easy social-networking style sites that exist today. Now, due to my penchant for signing up for stuff, I have this site, a LiveJournal, a Facebook, and a picasaweb for photos.
So I need to think about what the hell I’m using this site for. I’m not going to get rid of it – 7 odd years of history are not thrown away lightly. I am going to give it a redesign, get a bit of Web 2.0 action going on hopefully, and start using it more for howtos and so on for technical stuff, and try and keep life-update stuff to a minimum, or on other services.
Or you can view smaller albums at http://picasaweb.google.com/inocuo
- I started a new job, which is much better than my old one – I’ve discovered I’m not a manager, and so jobs with little to no management suit me down to the ground.
So I’ve had my birthday for the year, and it was a great one. The best for quite a while. Partly because it ended up effectively going for four days, buit also because I had lots of fun and got cool stuff from some great friends. Thanks to everyone involved in making it awesome.
So, I’m back from China, and it’s been long enough now that I’ve sort of assimilated what happened a little bit.
The Second World Traditional Wushu Championships was good overall:
My forms went well – I was particularly happy with the two-handed sword. No medals this time, though.
The events were fantastic. In particular, the opening ceremony was nothing short of astounding. It was in a stadium probably twice the size of Aussie Stadium, which was half full of stage and half full of people. We got to do the walk through the center thing like at the Olympics, and I can completely understand why the Olympic athletes come out of it on a huge high. It was AWESOME. After the walk, we were treated to an hour and a half of high production values craziness, with huge HK and Chinese stars and heaps of awesome wushu.
The next big event was the trip to the Shaolin temple – this was amazing. There were 15,000 people doing demonstrations along the 2-3km road between the bus park and the temple. Every type of style, and every type of crazy stunt you can think of, and all for the athletes. And the temple itself was completely awesome – I so have to rewatch the original Shaolin Temple movie now…
There were heaps more awesome things, but I can’t remember half of them off the top of my head. Ask me about it next time you see me!
Mal and Elspeth’s wedding tomorrow. Early congratulations to them both.
I’m off to China next Friday for the Second World Traditional Wushu Championships. Exciting and nerve-wracking. I’m in Zheng Zhou for a week, and we get some trips to things like the Shaolin Temple and stuff too. Wish me luck.
South America is almost all booked. Just tidying up a few last details, then we’re done, and we just need to survive Christmas and count down the days until we leave.
So, does anyone still read this blog? I’m kinda curious since I haven’t updated in forever.
So, if anyone actually still reads this blog, you’ll have noticed I haven’t updated in a while. As I mentioned last time, I started a new job, and that’s absorbed almost all my mental horsepower for the last couple of months.
inocuo.org has now moved to a new server, though. I’m hoping that I might be able to get creative and finally redesign again, although just posting more regularly would be a start.
The other thing that’s been burning a lot of my time is WoW. It’s endlessly absorbing. I haven’t even picked up the xbox controller for ages, and the PS2 is languishing in a box. The PSP only gets pulled out on the rare morning I’m not driving to work.
That’s the weirdest thing about the new job – driving to and from work means that the time I used to have to read and reflect is now gone, replaced with time to curse at stupid drivers and listen to stupid radio shows. It’s surprising how much difference this has made to my life in general.
