Add this to facebook <click here>

Just a quick post mentioning something I should have done a long time ago and that is add some blog presence to my facebook profile.
It's quite funny that I added the BlogFriends application, a viral take on blog sharing, the premise being that other blog posts which I would be interested will be highlighted to me, prompting me to click, and vice versa with people potentially interested in my posts.
This works fine, and it showing a blog post made in the news feed is cool, I often check the facebook home page to check the news feed items of friends, whether that be status updates, new photo albums, one of the better things about facebook. Ok, so I must resist a rant about what is wrong with facebook and we all know what it is, and so do the 100+ invites I currently have - and that's probably too much of a clue. Anyways, no sooner had I added BlogFriends, that the developers go ahead and announce that they can no longer continue the project. Great, I think, is there an alternative facebook app out there. Now before I stumbled I checked out Widgetbox and there clever idea of taking a blog and making a widget out of it, which they cleverly called a blidget - pretty clever guys...
Whilst great in principle it seemed a bit clunky with the facebook integration, and at the end of the day it was nothing more than a list of post titles which can easily be pulled from the RSS feed and placed into a shiny box.
I had a look a few hours back, and a quick search later, and FlogBlog was offered to me. Yes, the dream of joining the Flogosphere and other bastardised terms await me.
It lists a number of recent blog posts on my profile which will click through to the blog thanks to a quick tinker with the settings. Not sure what will happen in response to a new post, if it adds a mention of this, along with title and linked up back to the blog itself then I will announce myself chuffed.
Yes, this has been a bit of a contrived post, a small milestone, this is post #50. Whilst that's great, it's not that many when considering the lifeline of the blog. I'm thinking of really getting the hammer down and working on developing a new positive habit, to go along with the others (more about that in a later post). Thinking a target of 10 posts a month should be achievable, that's approximately a post every 3 days. Like with new habits I've found it's all about little steps, so expect smaller bitesized posts to go along with the number of the themed posts which I have currently in the works.
Wow, that was actually much longer, enjoy and if you're coming from Facebook and have a blog of your own, then add the facebook app and I'll become an avid reader - I've been meaning to add some more links as I promised, so a set of links of blogs which I actually read on a regular basis would be a rather cool segment.
Take it easy.

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Insert Coin #2 Belated 360 Dash Upate, part 2

Hey ho, we're here again and this time we're continuing my extremely belated review of last year's xbox 360 dash update.

Last time I mentioned the fun I've had with the new codec support and how it has enriched my living room. This time, we're having a look at some of the other features that came with the latest dash update.
Obviously this isn't a comprehensive list of all the new changes, but gives an idea of what I consider to be the other important and/or cool changes, enjoy.

One of the notably immediate features is an increased speed when using the Guide button and all the friends, messages menus that are contained within etc. Now before the update, accessing the Guide was starting to get really painful, often faced with a surprising delay before responding. I was always convinced that it was a symptom of my 360 starting to show its age, I've had it for about one and a half years, and it was inevitable with the lousy reputation 360s have in terms of reliability. With the new update, accessing the guide was much faster, effectively instantaneous which is great. Now, it is possible on Windows machines to change a registry setting which is responsible for the millisecond delay between clicking on the Start Menu button, and then the menu actually appearing. Supposedly, sneaky IT people simply change this setting, and then demonstrate how much quicker the Start Menu comes up as proof that they have improved the speed of the PC. I am hoping that Microsoft have not done something as crafty as this. Although I'm sure they would not reveal how they have made the improvement, but hopefully it's not something as superficial as lowering the delay, or removing transition animations - stuff like that.

Another move which on the surface looks a little cheap trying to jump on the whole social networking bandwagon, is the Friends of Friends feature. I can be perfectly honest and say I took a quick look at some of my Live Friends' friends the first few days after the dash update, but have since not bothered. Apparently it is a work-around a limit of a maximum 100 possible Friends. Now, I have ~40, and to be honest, probably half of those should be pruned as I've befriended them back in my halo 2 days one eve, and never spoke to them/played with them again, mmm....

Another big change is the reworking of the Marketplace Blade. They've now split up the Video sections which go along with the movies which are now available, some even in HD so that's pretty cool, I am yet to purchase one, I don't know, I am always afraid I'm not getting my money's worth and with the non-tangible sensation of a digital download, that counts doubly. Included in the new marketplace is this introduction of the "twist" interface. Before the menus on marketplace with effectively a simple list, where you could scroll up/down and click through to reach lower menus, but now you can go sideways, OMG! It's not that revolutionary, but with the amount of content always increasing, it does make it a bit easier to navigate. Also incorporating the twist interface is the new Spotlight section. Again, this is quite useful, this just provides a very concise list of the new releases in each of the headings, movies, game demos, DLC content etc - I do find myself just having a quick check here if I have a spare moment it's good to see what new stuff has come out.

Speaking of which, another feature is that of "Inside Xbox". A new option on the Xbox Live Blade, thanks to moving both number of new messages and online friends onto the one option, again small changes to neaten up the interface. Now, Europe was getting screwed over compared to our American cousins as for us the Inside Xbox composed of Acey Bongos letting us know how we could spend our live points (whatever the online currency is called?!) on new Live arcade demos. America had the ability to watch streaming videos, some of which came from Major Nelson (a podcast of which I subscribe, it's pretty good actually and surprisingly neutral console-wise at times). Thankfully, that has changed over here, and I think it was around the time of the GDC that suddenly video content was being made available through Inside Xbox, including Major's Minute, which despite being tips/did-you-knows that most people already know, it's a very good start. Also, it has gone from a weekly update to pretty much a daily update - some days (like today), there's nothing there, but mostly there's something new to have a quick look at when I switch on the 360 after work.


I know, I know, this review-of-sorts is a bit late in coming, but it's here now and on the whole it is very good, some very nice changes indeed. '07 has been a very good year for the 360, there have been many contenders for Game-of-the-Year, most of which I have the please of owning, perhaps with the omission of The Orange Box (arg! don't hate me!).


Till next time folks, happy gaming, and to plagiarise the wonderful Consolevania - May you always hit a 1-UP.

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Sports Thoughts #1 F1 2008 Season Preview

Hey ho, a new post and a new themed post going on, there seems to be some kind of pattern forming... *rubs chin*
This is going to be the first in a series of posts loosely based in the field of sports. Half the battle seems to be coming up with a witty title that will survive the test of time.
EDIT: For now I've played the rhyme card and will go with the name 'Sports Thoughts'. It's a little lame but here's hoping that the pain will lessen give time.

This should have come about earlier as this weekend (15th & 16th March) marks the start of the 2008 Formula 1 World Championship. Yes, it's been four months since the end of the tightly contested 2007 championship which will hopefully be remembered for Hamilton's unbelievable rookie season and the closely fought race for the title with Raikkonnen emerging the winner at the very last race, and not all the stolen documents, spy scandal which reflected a lot of negative attention for the sport.
That should be all behind us and so we can emerge from the winter testing and look forward to what should be a very competitive championship with a number of drivers already backed to challenge for the title with a handful more with the ability (and car/team) to win races.
At the start of the F1 season it always seems customary to have a look at how the drivers have moved between the teams over the Winter break. The most notable of all is Alonso being kicked out of McLaren and returning to the team where he made his name, Renault. Renault struggled with the switch to bridgestones last year, and already Alonso is playing down his chances of even challenging for wins. I was a fan of Alonso during the Renault days, but his behaviour last year has not won him any friends, and whilst the inter-driver squabbling probably happens a lot more than we are exposed to, his outwardly public attitude was pretty shocking and only healped to endear Hamilton to the fans, well British ones anyway.
In terms of other driver movements, a few rookies are finally getting drives but it is very much status quo. The Ferrari line-up is unchanged, as is Honda's. With Alonso going to Renault, Heikki (sp) has gone the other way to McLaren. He also has the same amount of F1 experience, last year being his rookie season too although he should prove to be a more obedient servant for McLaren - they do hold the stance of treating their drivers equally, but the feeling very much is that Hamilton is their best shot for the title, although don't be suprised to see Heikki being a regular on the podium if the McLaren's are competitive.

Moving away from the drivers, it's time to make some season-long predictions in that old-timely fashion. Pre-season testing is a rough indicator of the expected performance over the year. Considering that, the Ferraris must be the favourite, and despite me not being a Fan of Kimi (although his drinking habits are legendary!), I expect him to win his second title, with Ferrari collecting the constructors. That being said, I expect (and hope to the point of getting on my knees and praying) it to a very competitive season, with numerous drivers winning races. I think the season will pan out with Ferrari and McLaren fighting it out for the wins, whilst BMW will be lurking if the top 2 have reliability issues. I expect Renault to end up behind BMW, I'm sceptical that they can realistically challenge as the third best team out there.

Now F1 is probably the only sport I follow where they change the rules pretty much ever year. The current form of qualifying is my opinion pretty darn awesome, although its "fuel-burn" phase did come under criticism. That has been noted and cut from 20 minutes to 15 minutes which should hopefully allow the phase to match the previous 2 sessions for spectacle.
Technical changes notably include the banning of traction control and engine breaking. Also the electronics have now been standardised, with all the teams using the same unit. There have been mixed thoughts about the banning of traction control, but I hold the opinion that fast drivers will always be fast, and ultimately the better drivers should be able to adopt quicker. Hopefully this will allow Jenson to have a good season with his renowned smoothness behind the wheel, although the Honda '08 car doesn't seem to have the speed - they've cured the woeful handling of the '07 car but that won't be very useful if it's very tardy.

The opener is again in Austrailia and has proved to be a great season opener in recent times. The teams aren't sure exactly how competitive they will be when compared to each other, but do expect the familiar names to be heading up the timesheets before this weekend's race.
Now all I have to do is break up my sleep pattern so I'll be able to watch the coverage live and not have it ruined by ITV's heavy editing for reruns and the habit of passing the coverage onto their digital channels which for those out there which don't have at least freeview (there's not many but people will be affected), they will miss out. It does make me worry how much importance is tied to ITV's coverage if it constantly has to make way for Rugby etc. That being said my predictions for the race itself and I'm gonna go with a Raikkonnen win as much as it pains me.

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Oops I did it again!

Enough of the Britney reference, that girl is literally crazy. Anyways, just a quick post to say that I've been fiddling again, and I've introduced the other sidebar which I've been thinking of doing.
Not sure what's gonna go on there, it's basically a method of making the page look a little less daunting, i.e. not huge masses of scrolling, which was one of the motivations behind the post summaries and the "read more" links.
I've chucked up a few links for now, but will expand on that eventually. I'm thinking of sticking on a Digg widget of all the stories I've dugg, and I hope that a stumbleUpon widget is available now, rather than just the button through to my page, which is a bit crap.

Anyways, more of the themed posts are a-coming. The idea is that I develop the habit with older posts and then once I've found the groove I can keep them flying out. I've already started jotting some notes down during my lunch hour. In fact, Insert Coin #1 was written almost entirely at work. Can you feel the professionalism, mmm...

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Insert Coin #1 Belated 360 dash update review, part 1

Hey, so here we are. About to embark on the first of several new "themed" posts which will hopefully be very cool and very long-running.
This one is the video games-themed post as hopefully was suggested by the title. I'm not sure on the name as of yet, so it is very much open to change. I saw the phrase "1UP yours" used for a gaming blog, damn that's a pretty pr0 name.
Anyways, enough of the jibber jabber, down to business, and as mentioned before I'm going to sing the praises of the latest dashboard update for the 360 and my belief that it's taken a large positive step towards the "entertainment machine" and the mandatory addition to any living room setup. I think a lot of the initial themed posts will be catchup type affairs, and then it's onto the new, fresh and downright exciting stuff, yippee!

EDIT:After writing this out in full, and then reading it back, the post has turned into an informal guide on setting up video playback with the new codecs. I've gone through it again, and added some particular facts which are not immediately obvious when starting this venture. Enjoy!

Right, so onto the dash update. This obviously requires a Windows PC/laptop and Windows Media Player (I know, that part's a bit shite, sorry!). The new version of winamp (not sure on the exact no.), the one that comes with the Bento skin also offered the Winamp Remote application that allows media sharing throuigh browsers and devices such as the 360. My initial thoughts were "great! I don't have to use that bloated assbrick Media Player! Where do I sign?!" Setup was pretty easy, just selected which folders I wanted to share and I was away. A quick run downstairs, and pretty much immediately the 360 recognised there was a connection to a PC with media sharing going on. I tried out an episode, and whilst the sound was coming through ok, the video unfortunately was screwed. It was green a lot of the time and skewed to the right.

Now, specific codec support has come in the update (good guide here) so it suggested to me that the video was encoded with something else. I tried reencoding with some divx tools and checked GSpot (which is a rather cool codec analyser app: it tells you what codecs have been used on a particular video ), and that all seemed ok, but again no luck.

I finally bit the bullet and gave Windows Media Player a try. Now, fortunately Media Player 11 has all the required media sharing built-in, and there's no need to convert videos into wmv and use extra apps like I've done in the past. The 360 is auto-detected and again it's a simple case of selecting the folders to be shared and then scanning them into the library. You do not have to have Media Player running for the sharing to work, but a fairly memory-hogging service will be added to the services list, but if you have a reasonably good PC it shouldn't cause a bother.

With that setup, I can select a video from one of the shared folders and have it playing through the 360 onto my awesome HDTV . This ultimately leads to a much more comfortable viewing experience, and much better if friends are round, we're not all clambering around a laptop screen. Also, my existing video collection that has been burnt to DVD will also play provided they have been encoded in one of the supported codecs. Unfortunately for data discs, they appear under the description "Mixed Media Disc" in the play Disc button on the main blades but can only be properl accessed by going into Videos on the Media Blade, a minor inconvenience I know, but other than that very good.

Another downside with the Winamp Remote app along with the lack of viable playback, was all the time required for the 360 to buffer. I can't tell you how frustrating it was watching the buffering bar for a number of minutes, only to have the video incorrectly decoded in all it's green glory - huzzah! With Media Player, there is no buffering at all, there is normally a slight pause before the video starts, but once it starts it will remain uninterrupted for the duration - pretty damn awesome.

Now, my current setup is a number of videos shared on my external hard drive. It's not made obvious but videos need to be placed onto a FAT32 partition. I guess that's to get round the security implications of using NTFS. That is fine to a point, but it does put an upper limit to the size of the partition I can create on my external hard drive. EDIT: I have both partitions on my hard drive and video from both works equally fine provided it's been encoded with the right codecs (see below), which is a good thing cos my FAT32 partition was starting to get a little full, so boyah to that...

I have yet to purchase a proper media remote for the 360, but there's probably not much point. Videos can be manipulated pretty easily with a standard controller. We have the left and right triggers to rewind and fast forward respectively, and the bumpers allow the video to be chapter skip, even if there are no chapters set up, pretty cool. There's the info bar letting you know the time played/remaining and you can also change the screen size, so if you're faced with a video with a low native resolution, you can always stretch it to letterbox/fullscreen, although if the quality is quite poor then it does look rather blocky when viewed on a large TV, I can testify to that.

Thanks to the shiny TV, HD content looks amazing. The Diggnation podcast which I now subscribe to is distributed in HD quicktime (no doubt Kevin Rose's influence there, he is a self-confessed mac fanboy), and that looks awesome.

A point to note, my good friend Will has brought to my attention that video streaming is not capable over a wireless connection. I have not tested this myself and am not in the frame of mind to purchase technology only to find out it doesn't work, kinda defeats the point. That is a downer, I was looking to moving my network to wireless, purchasing the 360 network bridge and beign able to relax in the comfort that the possibility of tripping on a cable to my doom would not happen. I'm sure it's a technical issue with how wireless networks work, and the bandwidth that is available. It's a small price to pay, so I'm happy to make do for now.


So, if you were to find me signed in to Xbox Live, there's a very good chance that if my status reads that I'm watching a video, it'll no doubt be a vid streaming from my PC upstairs. I'm finding myself spending maybe 50/50 playing games and watching streaming videos. All I can say is well done Microsoft for putting in the codec support in the dash update, I'm sure the echoes of praise can be heard far and wide over the Internet, and I'm adding my voice to the mix. A master stroke!

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The perils of being young and medicated

Hey, I got pretty worked up over this so I felt I had to take a rage-dump here. (Note: rage-dump being a term of Futurama origin I believe).

For those not in the know, I require a fairly regular prescription. I'm not going to go into details. The usual response I would produce when asked what it's for, I would respond, "anti-depressants" and that usually stops the questions. I'm not actually prescribed them but for the purposes of the curious that is what I "take".

Right, setting-the-story and I've required a prescription for quite some time now, I believe I may have been around 13 when it first started, maybe younger. Anyways, back then my Mother would go to the doctors to hand in a repeat prescription. A few days later it would be ready to be picked up and off to the chemists to be ordered. Most likely, another day as my stuff would have to be ordered in (I'm special like that). Obviously as I got older, I started to take over, fine you're thinking. It was not a problem when I was at school, then college and then University and even my part-time job post University, because I would have time to visit the doctors/chemist to make these droppoffs/collections yada yada ya.

The problem has arisen thanks to myself being in fulltime employment now. This means that the doctors is only open Monday to Friday, and you've guessed it, the opening hours being those that I am at either work, or travelling to/from - i.e. no way I can physically get there on a normal working day. And so the fun begins...

The first nuisance was with having a prescription, it required me to book an appointment with the doctor when it came to registering. And when i finally sorted that out, the doctor didn't have a clue who I was or what I was prescribed. Literally there was a golden opportunity to score some meds, unfortunately I didn't have my fast-thinking head on (I rarely do these days it seems :s). I was also add that the doctor was super helpful explaining how easy it could be to make handing in and then collecting a repeat prescription. I'm not sure I'm into naming and shaming here and the legal ramifications of doing so. Expect a potential edit later.

With that mini-fiasco out of the way, the next step was setting up the collection service. Actually, this part was utterly painless. Thanks alrgely to this dear old lady who understood immediately my situation and sorted myself out no problem. The chemists are open on Saturdays thankfully so it's easy to pop down and pick up the rpescription. I've been given a phone number for the chemist to which I am to ring to authorise them to pick up my prescription.
The next step is what gets my blood boiling.

This is the first time I've used the service, so with any luck it'll be pretty streamlined after time. I've been advised to give the chemist a call to let them know when my prescription will be ready. I posted my repeat prescription through the surgery letterbox this morning and I was hoping to give them a call quickly just to find out when the prescription would be ready to collect. I thought I'd give their prescription number a call. Well guess what? The number is only available between 10am-12am and then 2pm-5pm. I had the pleasure of listening to a recording metion that thanks to demand the line would be only open druign those stated hours, and how I should not leave a message. I was pretty tempted. I'm sure I can't be the only one who would potentially ring during their lunch hour, I mean come on.
Frustrated I headed back to my work desk, noted the more general, appointments number and planned on giving that a call, it would only be a very brief call. I gave that a ring, and that's precisely what it did: ring and ring and ring and ring.
No luck there, clearly noone had the foresight of answering a phone joining the lunch period as people aren't gonna call then? don't be silly!...

Fortunately, I had to pop down the road laterthat afternon, so I could make the calls then, so hopefully that's all taken care of. We shall see come Saturday, when I come to pick up the prescription. It's never smooth sailing is it folks?

Just to reiterate my main point and a reminder of the title of this post, I can't be the only person in this situation, i.e in full-time employment and requiring a (semi-)regular prescription. The truth is how could I be, but it seems like choices have been made which make it very hard to use my local GP. Quite recently, GPs came under pressure thanks to a pay increase but fewer surgery hours, and add to that the fact that callouts have been greatly reduced. There was call to extend these hours and I am in complete favour of that. It doesn't have to be by much, perhaps one day in the week the surgery stays open till 8pm, or there is a Saturday morning surgery. Just something that makes visiting my GP easier. I guess I should be thankful that I don't work on Saturday too, or else I would be pretty much entirely screwed.

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