First off, a proper introduction to the housemates, and the house!

Brian Chen – Oversize jaw, and no sense of dress sense whatsoever. Was a Townie before he went to college with Chris.

Shanna Wong – Tomboy, and the freak of the household as neither her needs nor her aspiration decay…..
At least this makes her the perfect homecare and friend-maker slave.

Chris Daly – Me. ‘Nuff said.

Jessie Anderson – Neat freak, the other of the original Townies that moved in with Chris.

The outside view of the Hoh-Cham Greek House. Motherlode is nice

It probably would have made more sense to start this as soon as I started playing The Sims 2, but the thought didn’t come to me until recently…..

Anyway, I hope to put up a series of posts about what I’ve “accomplished” in my sessions of The Sims 2. Currently, my version of the game has all expansions up to Pets (I would have Seasons, but I gave that to Avy ), just in case some of the stuff that happens seems odd to you.

Anyway, before I start writing these posts, maybe a little “story so far” would be in order:

• Started off in Pleasanview. Seemed the most “normal” of the three to play on.
• Made the primary family I’d play – consisting of teen Chris (i.e. me), and his dog Baby Bear (he’s better off as a dog than a cat, right?)
• Also made a father, John – as sent him off to Suicide Point as soon as they moved in.
  1 – To kill him off because I didn’t want to play with a parent around.
  2 – Because my real father left me and my mom when I was only 3, and he’s dead to me, so this is practically the same thing.
  John died a classic death – a pool with no ladder.
• Chris went through his Teen years. Baby Bear went through some of his Adult years.
• Chris moved to college (Academie le Tour) with some other friends from the neighbourhood.
• Chris went through1 year of college.
• After a nice injection of cash (*cough* motherlode *cough*), they moved into the Chancellor’s Hacienda and transformed it into the Hoh-Cham Greek House.
• Another year went by, with a new household member.

This brings us to the current situation:

Chris is currently in the first semester of his Junior Year. He is studying Philosophy since it is the one that has most emphasis on Cooking skill, of which Chris has 8 points. His Lifetime Want is to own 5 Top Level Businesses, so restaurants and fresh food stores will be the businesses of choice. He has a shitload of Aspiration points which will be saved up for Elixirs and Kibbles of Life.

Right, off to the game to continue the story! I’ll take snapshots and possibly videos (might not get them at first, since I’ll only upload them if I can get the FlowPlayer FLV player to work right, if it does then woohoo!)

For those of you who like Baby Bear, you’re in for a little treat – as there are now new pictures of the Baby Bear Family available on the “new” second page!

In fairness, I just split it with the Wordpress <!–newpage–> tag, mainly since it was getting very long to be worth scrolling down that far. Plus the named anchor tags were causing an unwanted line break, that wouldn’t go away for some reason…..

So, to see the new Baby Bear Family pics, head over to the Baby Bear Family page 2!

UPDATE (22:29): Seems my host are having some issues with the stuff.thechrisd.com sub-domain, so the new images aren’t showing properly….. All the old images should still show, since I have them running from the main domain.

UPDATE (23:24): OK, I went over to GoDaddy and cancelled the stuff.thechrisd.com sub-domain over there just in case it was interfering with the one on DreamHost. Within 5 minutes the domain started to show a load of Apache installation files
Within another 15 minutes, it was working again and the stuff.thechrisd.com index once again wonders why you bothered to visit and re-directs you to the blog

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 payed €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!

And if you are too late, you can still get a mini-discount courtesy of me – just go to http://www.dreamhost.com/r.cgi?362528/signup|WOBBUFFET and get one year’s hosting for $100

I just have to share this collection of poilce jokes, provided by Bezzer of Tx¹:
(Thread can be found here)

The Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD), The FBI, and the CIA are all trying to prove that they are the best at apprehending criminals. The President decides to give them a test. He releases a rabbit into a forest and each of them has to catch it.

The CIA goes in. They place animal informants throughout the forest. They question all plant and mineral witnesses. After three months of extensive investigations they conclude that rabbits do not exist.

The FBI goes in. After two weeks with no leads they burn the forest, killing everything in it, including the rabbit, and they make no apologies. The rabbit had it coming.

The LAPD goes in. They come out two hours later with a badly beaten bear. The bear is yelling: “Okay! Okay! I’m a rabbit! I’m a rabbit!”

A tourist asks a man in uniform, “Are you a policeman?”

“No, I am an undercover detective.”

“So why are you in uniform?”

“Today is my day off.”

A judge grew tired of seeing the same town drunk in front of his bench. One day the judge glared down at the man, who was still intoxicated, and thundered “It is the sentence of this court that you be taken from here to a place of execution and there hanged by the neck until DEAD.”

The drunk promptly fainted.

The court bailiff commenced to reviving the man, and looked up at the judge, at which time the judge shrugged and responded “I’ve always wanted to do that.”

A cop stops a man for running a stop sign and the subject gives the cop a lot of grief explaining that he did stop.

After several minutes, the cop explained to the gentleman that he didn’t stop, he just slowed down a little.

The gentleman said “Stop or slow down, what’s the difference?”.

The cop pulled the guy out of the car and hit him with a nightstick for about a minute and then said, “Would you like for me to stop or just slow down?”

A traffic Policeman recently stopped a woman for exceeding the posted speed limit. He asked the driver her name.

She said, “I’m Mrs. Chadivaler Zuminskagia Ragretumunga from the Republic of Uzbetikan visiting my daughter in Columbia.”

As she finished speaking the cop paused for a moment and then put away his summons book and pen, and said, “Well… OK… but don’t let me catch you speeding again.”

“The handcuffs are tight because they’re new. They’ll stretch out after you wear them awhile.”

“If you run, you’ll only go to jail tired.”

“So, you don’t know how fast you were going. I guess that means I can write anything I want on the ticket, huh?”

“Yes sir, you can talk to the shift supervisor, but I don’t think it will help. Oh, did I mention that I am the shift supervisor?”

“Warning! You want a warning? O.K., I’m warning you not to do that again or I’ll give you another ticket.”

“The answer to this last question will determine whether you are drunk or not. Was Mickey Mouse a cat or dog?”

“Yeah, we have a quota. Two more tickets and my wife gets a toaster oven.”

“Life’s tough, it’s tougher if you’re stupid.”

“No sir, we don’t have quotas anymore. We used to have quotas, but now we’re allowed to write as many tickets as we want.”

“Just how big were those two beers?”

“In God we trust, all others are suspects.”

A motorist was mailed a picture of his car speeding through an automated radar.

A $40 speeding ticket was included.

Being cute, he sent the police department a picture of $40.

The police responded with another mailed photo – of handcuffs.

A policeman had a perfect spot to watch for speeders, but was not getting many.

Then, he discovered the problem; a 10 year old boy was standing up the road with a hand painted sign which read, “SPEED TRAP AHEAD”.

The officer then found a young accomplice down the road with a sign painted “TIPS” and a bucket of change.

A defense attorney was cross-examining a police officer during a felony trial – it went like this:

Q: Officer, did you see my client fleeing the scene?

A: No sir, but I subsequently observed a person matching the description of the offender running several blocks away.

Q: Officer, who provided this description?

A: The officer who responded to the scene.

Q: A fellow officer provided the description of this so-called offender. Do you trust your fellow officers?

A: Yes sir, with my life.

Q: With your life? Let me ask you this then officer, do you have a locker room in the police station, a room where you change your clothes in preparation for your daily duties?

A: Yes sir, we do.

Q: And do you have a locker in that room?

A: Yes sir, I do.

Q: And do you have a lock on your locker?

A: Yes sir.

Q: Now why is it, officer, if you trust your fellow officers with your life, that you find it necessary to lock your locker in a room you share with those officers?

A: You see sir, we share the building with a court complex, and sometimes defense attorneys have been known to walk through that room.

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 suddenty 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…….