So, the latest game by Introversion Software was released yesterday! And as the title suggests it’s called Defcon the aim of the game is fairly simple, nuke the hell out of your opponent and try to kill more of his population than he kills of yours and so on. And after playing the demo yesterday it’s a lot of fun! I would have normally preordered it but I’m skint right now so I’m going to buy it at a later stage, probably some time next week.

Another interesting fact is, that #defcon on irc.uplinkcorp.net probably reached 100 people last night, which is awesome considering that it usually is a third of that or less.

I’m also hopefully going to go to the Defcon release party on monday, so that should be fun! Gonna have to watch how much I drink though as I have classes the next day.

Despite having lived in London as long as I have lived in Germany fairly soon, well next (that’d be the one after this coming february for you simpletons out there) february but still! I still have a tremendous ability to get lost, so gather round children, for uncle Ebola has a story to tell, of adventures involving dragons and many a fair maiden!

So I was supposed to get to Imperial College by 8.50 in order to attend a lecture on spectroscopy methods, the Biology one looked interesting as well, but it had a roleplay element to it. Now, I like roleplaying as much as the next guy, but not when it involves contaminated food! Still, makes you wonder if there were any moderately attractive girls there…

Anyway the point is, I get on the Bus which the tfl website told me to do, and instead of getting to where I wanted to get to, I not only get stuck in traffic for half an hour in an area I don’t know, I also ride the bus to the last stop. I did that because I’m stupid and had no real idea about where the bloody thing was going, I kept expecting it to turn right and at least pass somewhere close to Imperial College, which it didn’t. Now by the time I got out of that Bus, I was already too late for the morning session, so I thought I’d go home, grab a spot of lunch, shower and then make my way back to Imperial College in time for the afternoon session, and this is where the real adventure begins!

So I get off at the last stop, after getting a funny look from the Bus driver for being the last person off the Bus, I started playing Zelda while stuck in traffic, I then try to make my way to the tube station, so I ask a girl for directions after trying to catch up with her for at least 2 or 3 minutes, why is it that girls always walk so fast? Not as if they have anything important to do (yay I’m going to get flamed for this). I asked her for directions, which turned out to be completely useless, so I continued along King’s Road until I saw some security guard type guy who gave me proper directions to the tube station, lucky me.

After following his directions I saw a Bus which I know goes past my house, and almost got on it before realising that it was going in the wrong direction, I could have ended up in Putney! Now that would have been really annoying, I’d have looked out the window while hatching evil schemes before ending up in an even stranger part of town! And I really don’t like South London, guess I would have known by the time the bus crossed the river, not even I’m that oblivious to my surroundings.

So after that error, I continued to follow the directions I was given, eventually finding a Bus which did go in the right direction towards where I live, which meant that I didn’t have to take the tube and saved 70p yay! I then finally got home, but sadly by the time I got home it would have been impossible for me to make it to the afternoon session, which means out I missed out on a really exciting day, and I’m rather annoyed with that. I’m also not quite sure what we had to do as our chemistry homework, because the way I wrote it down suggests that we were supposed to do something we’ve already done. I guess I’ll ask tomorrow while appologising for not showing up to the lecture, Mr Rooke, my chemistry teacher, is a nice man and I’m sure he’ll understand.

…And I just lost the wireless connections again, so it’s time for me to either try to get a new DHCP lease or to unload the kernel module, reload it and hope I’ll get a lease then, joy. Still it is better than doing something silly like rebooting! And it only took 20 minutes to resolve itself! May have kileld our old broadband router in the meantime, yay! That’s 50 quid in 2004 money down the drain if it did :/

With a little luck I should have broadband again on the 29th after several months of waiting, and two ISPs not delivering on their promises. Thanks to BT I should have my own connection shortly, as well as a wireless router I may not use, depending on how I can configure it. I should also get one of their pretty wireless phones, pretty pretty phone… (more…)

On the Bus home from school on Friday I got talking to someone who is in a few classes with me, and I started playing with Linux on his DS, which wasn’t all that impressive really as it was fairly lacking.

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I went to Teddington studios with a couple of friends yesterday because we had tickets to go see Bremner, Bird and Fortune, something we’ve been looking forward to for a while. We arrived on time, and saw a big queue outside the studio, and thought everything was fine, obviously they hadn’t started yet with so many people outside, and doors were only just supposed to open and surely they wouldn’t be giving out more places than they have available, right? Wrong. Or so it seems judging from last night.

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I run getaids.be together with a friend of mine, have done for close to a year, and in that time we haven’t really bothered to clean it up. There has been a lot of cheating going on due to the way the thing was coded by him, and I’m going to get rid of the worst offenders, mainly because they have a ridiculous amount of referrals after mebedding their code, forum signatures and the like, and I really don’t see why I should let them continue if they’re not going to have an honest stab at it.

Secondly, I have deleted a large amount of people trying to submit getaids.be email addresses, again I don’t want any of that, a lot of them were attempts at SQL injection so completely worthless.

Thirdly, a surprising amount of people seem to think that their emails would be given to thrid parties to spam them, I don’t  do that, neither does Cow. We have no interest in doing so, and we’d be too lazy to do it even if we wanted to.

So my stuff from ThinkGeek came today, which is nice, sadly I had to pay around £23 import duty, you’d think with Blair supposedly being Bush’s lapdog we wouldn’t have to pay import duty on stuff! Considering what I bought was only around $100 excluding shipping.

Anyway, I now have all the stuff I bought for my birthday, which is rather nice, a travel mug, bag, some gum and a linux fish! The Linux fish is like a Jesus fish, only with Linux written in it and it’s a shark! So I stuck it to one of my monitors, I’ll probably end up buying another one or taking this one off when/if I get around to buying a laptop, which will obviously run some kind of Linux!

My GP2X likes to eat through batteries (something I should have considered earlier) so once I get some money I’ll get me some rechargeable batteries and an AC adapter. I also want to look into running a bluetooth dongle off it to see if I can get it to work and what I can do with it.

That’s more or less it really, working on my University application right now.

So, I’m 19 today which means I’m going to get a bunch of relatives I’ve not spoken to in a year call me to congratulate me on having survived as long as I have!

After that I get to eat cake and probably drink the bottle of wine my mother got me, which means we’ll end up sharing that and I always end up with less than she does, oh well at least I won’t turn into some kind of alcoholic that way.

My GP2X came yesterday which is cool, although I tried watching Farscape on it and it stuttered a bit, so I’m gonna see how it works with other videos, it’s probably a RAM thing or the butchered port of Mplayer that comes with it, so I’m going to replace it and see what effect that has. I’ll also need to see why the god damned SDL libraries don’t feel like installing on it, so I may end up asking on IRC, I think there’s a GP2X channel on EFNet. Other than that the GP2X is pretty cool, but sadly lacking wifi which is something I’ll have to look into fixing, but a handheld Linux based console thingy is extremely cool, even if it still has a few kinks which will hopefully be sorted out by the next firmware update.

That’s about it really, Svip’s comic is pretty funny today so check out The Weirdo.

I really hate how this theme turns titles into all caps :<

My VNV Nation ticket came today, so I’m happy, as well as some AVRs I bought so now I’ll need to put together something to program it or buy one, probably just cobble one together, had a look at the circuit and it’s not too complex. I’m also going to buy a GP2X in the next few days hopefully so that should be fun to play around with, customise it and see what I can do with it.

Looks like clustering MSN TV boxes might be a cheaper alternative, and also one drawing a lot less power, but I haven’t been able to find any in the UK. I could just buy them in the US and have them shipped over but that would probably incur huge custom charges which would doom the project!