Yea, it’s only been about a month or two since I ditched Bravenet and signed up with GoDaddy – but I’ve already switched off from them. But I think I’ve definitely found a kick-ass host – DreamHost.

Alright, so they normally charge about the same that I was paying for over at Bravenet, and had I gone by that alone, I’d have stuck on GoDaddy not paying a penny and using fancy styling to have the website cover up the ad bar at the top of the page (which is why those of you who viewed my site in IE had two scrollbars, one active and one greyed out).

Except that my mate Adam pointed out a special offer they had – since it’s their 10th anniversary they are giving away a promotional code that gave me $110.10 off the normal fee! I paid €6.25 for a year’s hosting with 500GB space and 5TB bandwidth a month

Now that’s a fucking deal!

And if you hurry, you can still get the deal as well – I thought it had expired since whenever I go to the homepage it no longer shows, but it does for my IE tab – so if you want a super host, sign up and enter in the promo code 101010 for $110 off!

It appears that even having your own e-mail address on your own domain, really doesn’t prevent you from receiving the odd spam message or two. What makes you think I’d be interested in lists of US doctors, or cheap Viagra?

And also, what makes you think that I’d want to try and get extra traffic and higher ranks on Google? It’s a frigging blog for crying out loud! It’s not like everyone NEEDS to know about it and read it!

Well at least I still receive a lot of relevant e-mail, such as tickets available for the Dynamo Kiev match at Old Trafford, from Man U Soc – or the opportunity to work at a disability conference for a day for €100 from Anne. E-mails like that I like

E-mails like this, I don’t like

Dear Website Owner,

If I could get you five times the RELEVANT traffic at a substantially reduced cost would you be interested? National Positions can place your website on top of the Natural Listings on Google, Yahoo and MSN. Our Search Engine Optimization team delivers more top rankings than anyone else and we can prove it. We do not use “link farms” or “black hat” methods that Google and the other search engines frown upon and can use to de-list or ban your site. The techniques are proprietary, involving some valuable closely held trade secrets. Our prices are less than half of what other companies charge.

I would be happy to send you a proposal using the top search phrases for your area of expertise. Please contact me at your convenience so I can start saving you some money. Please do not hesitate to email or call me if you would like further information.

Sincerely,
Neal Stone
Executive Vice President

And the main reason why can be found here – just scroll down a bit and click “Show Entire Gaming History”.

The main reason would be that there’s a lot of gaming going on in my spare time. And with a helpful black box next to me with 233GB decimal (250GB binary), there’s plenty of room for more. That is if I had more. Oh wait, I do…

Of course, it could be better if any of them could be played online. But the only thing standing in the way of me and that is CSD and the DCU proxy. It might seem so innocent, but it is actually a pain in the fucking ass, mainly cos it means that I have to set up my Firefox to go through it, my Thunderbird to send e-mails through it, and that I have to resort to single-player PC and 360 games, because it blocks them.

Yes, I really don’t like it. Sometime tomorrow, I’ll be going down to CSD and finding out what the god-damn story is with my connection. And when I can expect to be able to play the likes of Rainbow 6 Vegas, Trackmania Nations, and Counter-Strike (once I get it to either work in the case of source, or get it to stop giving me a stop error in the case of 1.6 or Condition Zero) online!

Oh, and one more thing I ask of you – remind me to pick up a mouse from home when I go there tomorrow night. It’s really difficult to play using a TouchPad. It really is. It’s very difficult to use one when you’re too used to a good old-fashioned mouse. It doesn’t even have to be of gaming quality. Just as long as it connects to a USB port and moves my cursor around.

Today is the day when I can finally rid myself of 99% of my old Windows Live ID, and old Windows Live Hotmail account. The other 1%, unfortunately, is taken up by the fact that I can’t yet change the Windows Live ID associated with my Gamertag. Till M$ get off their asses and allow people to change it, I’m stuck with it.

Anyway, one thing that I had to do before dumping my old Windows Live ID is downloading all the old e-mails from it. Kinda hard when there’s no “export” button.

11:53pm – 2 Thunderbird extensions later, and the e-mail is starting to download. 1625 messages to go. Holy fuck.
00:03am – 693 done… Although right now it’s going back WAY into the depths…..
00:09am – 1031… At least we’ve broken into 4 figures.
00:20am – Finally, all 1625 e-mails downloaded.

Now to sort out which ones are supposed to be in my DCU e-mail account…

Alright, so it was 11am on a Wednesday. Which meant Assembly Language Programming with… Ray Walshe…
I’m not gonna say much about him.

Anyway, it started like a normal lecture. But there were a few weird things about this room which made me question whether of not it was haunted:

• When we decided that Ray probably might not show up, we’re almost out the door when he suddenly arrives, as if he’s been waiting outside for someone to try and skip out…
• Then once Ray was about to start the lecture, the projector wouldn’t start…
• And finally, the fact that he said “No laptops” even though we could have read the notes online…

So either it’s haunted as causes Ray Walshe to be, well Ray Walshe. Or he just hates laptops and instead prefers D6′s

http://www.addictinggames.com/stormthehouse.html

We all know that there are games out there that can be addiciting. Hence the site addictinggames.com. They have plenty of VERY addicitng games.

This one, Storm the House, I had tried to play before but had to give up ‘cos was in an Internet Café paying rip-off rates, and it wasn’t worth the cash. Now that I’m not paying rip-off rates – well let’s just say we got pretty far.

About 4-5 hours, and 63 levels later – the game ends. I guess my mouse-clicking finger wasn’t fast enough to kill all the tanks…

Here’s what the state of battle was like at the start of Day 63 – note the 475 round clip. No matter how fast I clicked (too bad there wasn’t an auto-fire option), I never managed to use it all up in the space of 1 round. Heck, I never even managed to get 400 off…

Storm the House - Day 63

Well, it’s been 24 hours since I received my new laptop. I’ve been on the Net and chatted more in the past 24 hours than I have in the past 2 weeks. And in total I’ve used Rebrick for… 10 minutes. Yea, it’ll take a while to get used to it.

The really good thing about having this new laptop, is the fact I had something to distract me from the alcohol-fuelled party that took place in the apartment last night. I understand that students like to drink, but I think last night was a little too much….

Anyway, 1 day left until the weekend! All that’s left is to do my best not to nod off during Assembly Language (Ray Walshe is actually a lot nicer in 2nd year than in 1st year), and Networks (the guy’s paranoid about e-mail!) Oh, and I need to do that Probability exercise sometime during the weekend. Someone give me a nudge (WLM-speaking, not literally) around 3am on Monday morning to remind me to get it done…

Clubs and Socs days – 2 days of complete mayhem in the Hub. Hence, why I try to get it over with as soon as possible, and then just hang out with Games Soc all day. Especially when they want to use my wired 360 controllers for fear that if they used the wireless ones, they’d be stolen. Fair enough.

So this year, it seems that I’ll be joining GamesSoc (duh), SVP (Laura made everyone in the house join), Film Soc (was right next to GamesSoc, so convinced me), and the Man Utd Soc (need I explain? ) – 3 more than last year! And of course, there’s still the second day tomorrow, so there might be more.

Anyway, whilst standing at the GamesSoc table for practically the entire day, they eventually stuck on Halo 3. What followed afterwards is kinda hard to describe, other than this way: they got fucking pwned. Whether it was on High Ground with the sniper, Guardian with the Gravity Hammer, or Narrows with the rockets – they got owned bad. Maybe I should try and cut down on the H3, especially at console events, give someone else a chance to be the star to kill everyone.

NOTE: I’m not trying to say everyone else is bad. Gavin (Console Ents) is quite good at it himself, I just had the Gravity Hammer

Hopefully in about 2 hours, I’ll be in the NuBar with the guys who created the Man U Soc watching what should be a trouncing on Roma. Of course after the 7-1 drubbing of them, they might be trying to get back with a vengeance, so I hope Kuszczak is ready just in case…