After finding a permanent blood donation place near where I work, Julia and I finally got round to giving blood again on Tuesday. And unless you have a very good reason not to, you should too.
There’s more info in my previous post about donating blood.
I knew it would happen eventually. Once I got an income it was only going to be a matter of time before I found a massively multiplayer online game to play.
EVE Online is such a game. It’s in space, has a single persistent universe (i.e. all players are in the same world - no sharding), has a completely player run economy, has the record for most number of simultaneous players (over 25,000) and is tremendously fun. And now I have an income, the monthly fee of 14.99€ is looking very affordable.
And now could be the best time to join. The a big update is coming over the next year (starting at the end of the month and ending in 2007) called “Kali”. The big part (which won’t be added until towards the end of the updating) is factional warfare. As with most of these games you choose a race for your character to be in. Generally the race itself doesn’t make that much of a difference. There are role-playing elements that are different (different style of missions (think quests) for example) but other than your base attributes it’s not a big factor. If the factional warfare system is done well that could all change.
Anyway, go play now.
EVE, online games, MMORPG, MMOPG
Since I got MCE working I’ve been watching TV on a one day delay - that way I don’t have to actually remember when things are on. One such show was ECW One Night Stand, which has definitely been the best “WWE” pay-per-view* in a long time. And 90% of the reason was the fans who just never shut up. The funniest example was the Cena/RVD match. After a whole match of the fans tearing Cena apart, he manages a good move that I haven’t seen him do before. The crowds response? “You still suck”.
For a complete review check out Online Onslaught.
Greg Egan is a “hard sci-fi” author. Hard sci-fi is a vague term referring to science fiction with a strong founding in complicated, plausible (if not real) science. He released a few really good novels that deal with several recurring themes including people living entirely as software (and the interactions between such people and those with bodies) some of the issues surrounding duplicating people if they exist as software and some exotic possibilities for life (some not even based on the idea of particle interaction).
That last part is mainly what is expressed in Schild’s Ladder - life existing based on the myriad of possible interactions between different quantum theories that are found to exist in what is originally thought to be a super-stable vacuum. Sounds confusing (and in points it is) but for anyone interested in technical mind bending sci-fi, it’s a must read.
Then go read Diaspora, another book of his following similar themes.
Google Mail (no longer Gmail) has a confusing feature.
I recently got a Google Mail account to test out Google Talk. Since I was already logged into my Google account it asked if I wanted my new email account to be part of it. I said yes. Then I couldn’t log into my Google Account for anything else. The problem is they’ve decided my new Google Mail email address is my primary address and that’s what I need to use to log in.
Ah well.
Julia is going to America next year on an exchange and she needs a student visa obviously (a J-1 if you’re interested). So we had a nice trip to London to the US Embassy this week.
The first problem we faced was finding it. Using Google Maps gives different results depending on whether you use the address or the postcode. I figured the address was right since it at least showed a road with the right name.
Speaking of the road, it’s blocked off. The whole road in front of the embassy is completely blocked to traffic and has armed police patrolling it. For various reasons we needed to find a bank so Julia asked one of the police officers. Somehow feels like misusing resource - asking someone with a gun that big for directions.
Then once Julia was in (I couldn’t get in without an appointment) there was a three hour wait. But they said yes. Even the page full of Arabic in her passport (following a recent trip to the United Arab Emirates) didn’t worry them.
Sky+ and Multiroom were installed this morning and everything works great :)
First I have to say the actual installation was done well and the engineer guy wasn’t even phased by the idea of connecting up to a computer instead of a TV. He did point out that they don’t supply an S-Video cable (which came with the TV card).
Anyway MCE is talking to my Sky box fine. The only niggle is that the IR transmitter is a little in the way (it’s picky about placement - get it wrong and it doesn’t always change channel). There may be a solution though. You can buy a cable that connects from the IR unit (the box that contains the IR receiver and that the IR blaster is connected to) directly to the Sky box. This works in exactly the same way as Sky’s own remote IR receiver. The device was actually originally created to allow TiVo boxes to control Sky boxes.
I saw an advert for Bulldog Broadband today on the London Underground. In large letters it offers 16 MB broadband for £9.75 a month plus telephone line rental of £10.50 a month - “cheaper than TalkTalk”. That price is indeed less than TalkTalk, but what you pay isn’t. That price only applies for the first three months, after that it’s £14.75 a month. Not only that but you only have a 1 gigbyte/month download limit, that’s about 34 Mb a day.
Surely this is a more strenuous claim than TalkTalk’s “free boadband” and they were stopped from broadcasting that one on TV?
We are long time Sky customers and recently ordered Sky Multiroom so I could connect Sky up to my new Media Center PC. On Thursday they sent us two new viewing cards. I knew we’d need a new one but I didn’t expect two - I just figured that the change in our subscription meant the old one needed changing. Except on Friday they sent us another one. So now we have four, our old one and the three new ones.
This could lead to an interesting possibility since we actually have a spare Sky box. So we’ll have three Sky boxes (two normal and one Sky+) and three new cards. That’s a total of four signals required - exactly the amount that a single minidish can handle. Unfortunately after looking around the Sky site I found out that you need a separate multiroom subscription for each additional box. So why did they send us three new cards?
Some adverts for loans appeared recently, probably because I mentioned an interesting deal from Lloyd’s TSB.
So I wondered if I could make more appear by mentioning things likes loans, finance and mortgages. Just mentioning loans once isn’t going to do it so I should mention loans a few times. A stray mention of debt management might also help.
Of course my demographic isn’t really geared towards finance topics like loans or money lending. So just think of this as an experiment.