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As some of you might have noticed, my real life has taken precedence over my blogging the last half year. Ever after having started my current job, it’s been a long process to adjust to a new life with new working hours and a totally different job than what I was used to. For those of you that have been with me for quite a while, know that I used to work as a bartender in a sports pub and worked the really odd hours. But at least at that time, my work was close to home and I had way more free time than I have now. Today, I work the usual nine to five scheme, and pretty happy about that. But seeing as my new job is quite a distance from home, I’m using roughly three hours of every day getting back and forth to work. And let’s face it, more often than not I work more than my assigned eight hours. So on most days, I’m way from home for no less than twelve hours. Many people like to jump into the couch and turn on the telly when they got home, but I need to do something, something that makes me interact and get my load off, something to preoccupy me. And for this, I have gaming.
I’ve been a game server administrator for the The Oldboys Insurgency servers for quite some time now, a game which is immensely fun and addictive. It’s a free game mod, made using the Half Life Source Engine. It’s actively developed by a whole range of volunteers from all over the world. I used to be a beta tester for the game back in the day, but because of time constraints I was never able to put in the hours I felt needed to do my part, so I stepped down. As with any game server, we have an ever growing community that thrives and prospers with new and old players joining in for a bit of fun every day, 365 days a year. This is what we like to do when we get the chance, and for many it’s a sort of therapy and for some it’s nothing but sheer fun. We all have different motives to play, but that’s the beauty of games, they forfil some many different things.
Personally I have been playing games since I was a little kid, ever since I got my first computer, the old classic C64 by Commodore. I’ve seen the game industry work itself out of the boys room all around the world to become a multi million industry. In many ways, games just keep on getting better and better. The graphics get more and more realistic, the artificial intelligence is starting to get to a level where it actually half way feels like you’re playing against a human being and the story lines are on the same level, if not better than those found in most major blockbuster movies.
But the thing about most games, is that they aren’t free. You have to pay for the pleasure of sitting down in a universe different than the reality you are in, you gotta put hard cash on the table for that time where you can leave your worries behind and just be someone or something else. And as the saying goes, money doesn’t grow on trees, so we don’t want to pay through the teeth for the games we want to play. As a consumer, you are never interested in paying more than you should, and nor should you! Without you and me, and everyone else, there wouldn’t be a games industry. We pay for the games, we play the games, we make the wheels turn.
But recently, my favourite distributor of games, Steam owned by Valve did something that really pisses me off. Over the last few months, they have had the option for the end users in Europe to choose whether or not to pay in euros or dollars. Of course, with the going exchange rates, most Europeans has opted for the cheapest alternative, the dollar. But now, Valve is forcing everyone in Europe to pay in euros. From a business point of view I can surely understand their motives for doing so, but as a consumer I just feel betrayed, I feel ripped off and last but not least; I feel discriminated!
Why the hell should I have to pay more for the exact same product than my brothers and sisters in say the USA? The product is the same, distributed through the same channels, with the same cost to the distributor. Nothing has changed in the market that justifies this change, with this rather drastic measure and increase in retail price. I’ll be damned if I’m going to pay more to get what I want, just because some big pocketed marketing and finance department wants to stack up their bank accounts. Currently, there’s a rather long list of games that I want to buy on Steam, but seeing as I’m being discriminated for being European, those purchases can just wait. They won’t be seeing any purchases from me any time soon!
Why Valve, are you doing this? Don’t you know that this is a stupid move on your behalf? Don’t you know that you’ve pissed off thousand of users that are questioning your business methods? Don’t you realise that the increased profits you thought you would get from this new price scheme actually end up losing you money? When you piss of the end user, the players that actually buy and play your games, and they go off somewhere else to buy your games, that you are losing money, and losing money fast? In case you haven’t noticed, there’s a financial crisis going on, which means that your average consumer will go to lengths finding the best price. But you actually go the other way, you increase your prices in times of despair, making sure that people don’t buy your products!
This is an outrage and damned shame! Don’t you see the ramifications? Don’t you see that not only will this lose you money short and long term, and also lose you customers, but it also might end up with people losing their jobs as the game houses don’t get the money they so desperately need to continue with that they are doing?
I beg you Valve, reconsider your latest actions and do the right thing! Do yourself and us as gamers a big favour, let us pay the same price as everyone else! Don’t be money greedy bastards, don’t be that monster that steals the lollipop from the kid on the corner! Be nice, play nice and everyone will be happy!
If you are like me, disgruntled by the actions of Valve and want to voice your views, frustration and outrage, please head over to http://steamunpowered.eu/ and do the right thing! Just do it! ™
We all know that major corporations at time are really hard to deal with being your average common man. That when you try to take on a company of big size to get something fixed, or just a comment on something is a task that seems a bit like climbing Mount Everest. This is something a guy named Adrian found out lately, when his Playstation 3 needed service. So what was the problem you ask?
Well, Adrian got his Playstation 3 as a Christmas gift, and for this reason he never got a receipt to go with it. So when he called Sony to have his Playstation 3 serviced, they of course asked his receipt, as to where he told them he had none as he got it for Christmas and the ones that bought it to him had lost their receipt. But there was a way to prove that his unit was still under warranty, as the sticker on the back that tells when the unit was manufactured clearly said that it was made “July 2007″.
This was not proof good enough for Sony, who still refused to accept the unit for repairs. Adrian was at a loss for what to do next, so he of course resorted to what many people do in this time and age; the internet. He was instructed to have the people that bought the unit to get their credit card company to deal with the matter, as they have much more weight in dealing with such a matters. Fair enough, but I find it hugely disturbing that companies fail to see the logic in such cases. When the customer can prove without the shadow of a doubt that a unit is still under warranty, the company should accept that proof. Yes, I know the rules are there for a reason, but for godness sake use your head and common sense!
Sony, I sincerely hope that you get this issue sorted you big brute!
The other day, a XBox 360 user by the name of Grant was banned from using XBox Live after his gamer tag “theGAYERgamer” was reported as being offensive by fellow gamers. Grant of course was somewhat stunned about this decision, so he tried to get in contact with Microsoft XBox Live customer support to inquire on the matter. There he got in contact with a customer representative by the name of Roxy, who could tell Grant that the greater XBox community found his tag offensive, but she herself admitted that she didn’t find it offensive.
We all know from online gaming that we at times find offensive and downright abusive players, and most games and servers has the ability to filter these elements out. If a player is offensive over voice comms, many games gives you the ability to mute the player in question. If a player continues to be abusive, most servers have server administrators that take the necessary steps to get rid of the unwanted elements. Unfortunately, there will always be disturbing elements as long as you have human players. Humans are per definition self destructive and abusive, but not everyone. And then comes the question of tolerance.
In the civilized world that we live in, being gay has become socially acceptable. People don’t look down upon gay people and frown upon their existence, at least not most people. When I look at a gamer tag like “theGAYERgamer”, I assume that the person behind the tag meant to be humorous and not offensive. Would people find tags like “theHAPPYgamer”, ‘”theHETROgamer”, “theSADgamer” or “theLONELYgamer” offensive? I rerckon not, and I find it sad that people have to be so petty as to report tags like ‘theGAYERgamer’. Seriously, don’t you people have better things to do?
I’ve seen far worse gamer tags than that, that are both discriminative, racist and offensive that are allowed and which are still allowed to use XBox Live. This is just plain stupid, let Grant play! And people, get a life! Remember, it’s only a game!
If you’re anything like me, you may have asked yourself the question; “How do I make my Wordpress blog available for users with a mobile phone?”. Well, I did after I visited my blog with my mobile phone. Okay, it still looked good but was no where near mobile phone friendly. The sheer size of the blog, all the extraneous content, heavy images etc made the blog rather hard to load. And lets face it, size matters when it comes to mobile phones. Not only because of the screen size on most phones devices, but also the fact that surfing using a mobile tends to be quite expensive.
Here many of you may think that making your blog accessible for mobile phones is a hard, rather long winded task. But fear not, it’s actually very very easy thanks to the work of Alex King. Alex King is an excellent Wordpress plugin developer, who has developed quite a few plugins, many of whom I use on this blog. The plugin in question is the excellent Wordpress Mobile Edition. With this nifty plugin, you will have your blog available for mobile phones in a matter of minutes, saving both you and the readers of your blog precious bandwidth.
To get this plugin installed, just follow these simple steps. SSH into your account, and go to your plugins folder, which should be in ~/path/to/wordpress/wp-content/plugins/.
wget http://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/wordpress-mobile-edition.2.1.1.zip
unzip wordpress-mobile-edition.2.1.1.zip
rm wordpress-mobile-edition.2.1.1.zip Then go to your blog’s admin plugins page, and enable the plugin there. If everything goes according to plan, your plugin should now be activated. What next you might ask yourself? Haha, I hate to disappoint you but that’s it. Nothing more to be done, as no configuration is needed. Now all you have to do is fire up your mobile phone browser, and point it to your blog. You should now get a nice bandwidth friendly version of your blog. Enjoy!
Ah man, what a wonderful day. Not only has the sun been out the last few days, with a crystal clear blue sky, but it’s been rather warm as well. At the most today, we had a whooping 28 degrees Celsius, which is quite respectable for this time of the year. During summer, we usually average in at around 32 degrees, but that’s come late June, the start of July. And what isn’t better than to be able to work outside under the warm spring sky?
My parents needed some help with getting their terrace fixed, as the old boards were starting to rot and break. This is of course far from aesthetically pleasing to the eye, but even worse, it’s far from safe. I’d hate to see my parents fall through the boards and seriously hurt themselves. And by coincidence, the boards we needed were on sale so there was no time to lose. So after having ordered 300 metres of new board and picking it up yesterday, we started the initial work today. Getting the old boards up proved a bit harder than we expected, but we got a technique going after a while. And when we started to get the first boards up, we really saw that it was due time to replace them.
As I sit here and write this, I’ve gotten a slight sunburn on my shoulders and my nose look somewhat like Rudolf the reindeer’s nose. But it’s been a wonderful day, with pizza and beer out in the sun as a welcome break during the work.
When I went to Thailand earlier this year, I brought my old SLR camera with me and took quite a few pictures. But as it turned out, many of the pictures turned out bad as it turns out the camera house itself is somewhat faulty. The fact that camera house was broken was one thing, but all those ruined pictures was even more devastating. I’ve been on the lookout for a new camera house for some time, but haven’t really found anything to my liking nor price range.
But as luck turned, my father found an almost identical camera house at an online auction. So I’m now a proud owner of the Canon EOS 500. The previous owner said he had been gentle with it, but that was an understatement. The camera looked like it was brand spanking new, with only a few minor non noticeable scratches. I can’t wait to take this baby out for a spin. Now next on my list is to get a dSLR camera house and a couple of other lenses, and I’m all set. I already have a stock 28-80mm (3.5/5.6f) and a 100-300mm (5.6/6.7f) long range lens, which I can do fine with until I get my hands on more equipment.
This is one of those posts that I know will have a very limited audience. To the left, you see a block with random BOFH quotes, which I find rather amusing. I’ve always found them entertaining, and thought that they would make a nice addition to my blog as sheer entertainment for you guys. A while back, I found this great little plugin called XmasB quotes, that adds a widget to WordPress where it displays random quotes. The actual quotes are stored in the same MySQL database as Wordpress. But then comes the issue that I faced. There are well over 400 of those quotes, and manually copy and pasting all those quotes into the admin interface of XmasB was not an option that seemed tempting. Not one bit. Now how could I solve that?
Continue reading XmasB quotes and BOFH fortunes for Wordpress
Hello guys, I’m back again. This time with yet another host, yet another country, yet another layout. I seem to refresh myself whenever I get things back on its feet. This time my good friend Marc Kaldenhoff was kind enough to provide me with some excellent hosting space in Germany, on a decently beefed server. As some of you know, I’ve been unemployed for some time now, while I wait to land my next job. I’ve got a few really promising opportunities that I’ll get more feedback on within the not to distant future. But being out of a job also means that you tend to get a stoppage in income. This means that you have to prioritize what to spend money on and what not to. Unfortunately, my old server had to go as a result of this. This was not something I wanted to do, but was forced to.
During this time, I’m very happy that I was contacted by quite a few of my old time readers asking me what was going on and asking me if there was anything they could do to help me. I want to send a big thanks to you all for this offer, and that you took the time of your precious time to ask what was going on. It really meant a lot to me. And it also proved to me that I actually had readers just aching for more content. And there will be more content, one coming rather soon. In the process of this new move, I’ve gone over to using Google Apps as my e-mail provider. I’ll lead you through the steps of setting this up, and hope that you will find it useful.
I also want to send out a thanks to EditDNS for their great and free DNS service, a service that suits me just fine. Good availability, decent user interface and responsive. I used to use them as a back name server service, but after I had to take my old server offline, I’ve gone over to use them as primary name servers, which works just as great. Though, being the geek that I am, I somewhat miss editing the Bind zone files manually in a shell. But as long as it works, everything is fine isn’t it? 
If there’s anything you’d like to see on this site, please don’t hesitate contacting me with wishes on what you’d like to see. If I find the idea(s) worth writing about, I will do it. I’m always open for more ideas and to broaden my horizon.
Last but not least I want to thank you, my readers, for staying with me and for the fact that you keep coming back. I hope that you enjoy your stay and that I’ll see you frequently in my comments.
Cheers.
As most of you know, I went to Thailand about a week ago. Since then, I’ve enjoyed lots of the local beer brews as well as the more common known beer types. I’ve been on the beach, swimming around in water that holds a nice 29 degrees celsius. The temperature during the day is a good and warm 32 degrees celsius. All in all, I’m enjoying myself immensly.
Continue reading In Thailand living the sweet life
If you’re anything like me, you like to fire up a game every now and again. It’s a great way to relieve stress, as well as an excellent way to waste some time. But not only that, playing games can be both very entertaining, educating as well as highly social. There are many ways way people are attracted to playing games. The modern gaming industry is far away from the way the industry was in the early days of computing. Back in the good old days, a game could be made be a single person sitting in his bedroom on late nights burning the midnight oil. And that was in fact how most games were produced back then. That was before the gaming industry became a multi million dollar industry, where the money governed and the production line has become more and more similar to any given Hollywood production.
Continue reading Gamespot fires Jeff Gerstmann
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But recently, my favourite distributor of games, Steam owned by Valve did something that really pisses me off. Over the last few months, they have had the option for the end users in Europe to choose whether or not to pay in euros or dollars. Of course, with the going exchange rates, most Europeans has opted for the cheapest alternative, the dollar. But now, Valve is forcing everyone in Europe to pay in euros. From a business point of view I can surely understand their motives for doing so, but as a consumer I just feel betrayed, I feel ripped off and last but not least; I feel discriminated!
