From Major Nelson:

In addition to the list of new dashboard features that were announced today, there are a few more that were not included in the press release that I think may be of interest to some longtime blog readers. After the update, there will be two new choices in the account management section of the dashboard:
The ability to change the Windows LIVE ID associated with and Xbox LIVE account.
The description pretty much says it all, but choosing this option changes the Windows Live ID associated with your Xbox LIVE account. It will also transfer all your Microsoft points to the new Windows Live ID as well.

Hell yes! Now all I need to do is figure out which ports need to be opened for Messenger to connect directly to the Net instead of having to go through the proxy, and I can use it while I’m on Live! SWEET!

This is also a good thing for a few of my friends, such as Dynamo Matt and John Caboose – PARTY ON DEC 4TH IN MY PLACE!

Just after coming in from quite a long and eventful Wednesday – although, that’s something I thought I’d never have to say this semester….
Oooh, I still have some Pepsi left over from yesterday….. something else I never thought would happen…

Anyway, I don’t know how long this list will be, so I’ll start in list form, and if it can be expanded, I will.

• Woke up late for Logic exam (damn you Zero Hour Generals Challenge! – which ironically I only stopped when it crashed )
• Went to exam (9.25 ), and did it. Was out by 10.25. Not sure if I aced it, as my syntax might not have been great for propositional logic.
• Came back home, picked up computer and rest.
• Met Gav and Ian outside LG (computing building where LG01 is) – by then it was 11.05, so we ended up going into the lab rather than to Assembly Language.
• Got kicked out of LG01 by post-grads doing lab exam. Moved to LG25.
• Got e-mail with results of yesterday’s complete joke of a Haskell lab exam. Haven’t even opened the results file yet, but have been told that only 17 people got some marks
• Downloaded WinHugs! (the windows version of Hugs – the Haskell interface. Haskell is native to Linux, which is why this was needed!) – Probably won’t get much use out of it, though.
• Probability lecture……….was ignored.
• The “lab crew” went to Spar for stuff to attempt the Diet-Coke-Mentos rocket trick. Failed miserably as Softmints had to be substituted in, and Matt and Ian couldn’t get the cap on in time.
• Went to nuBar for some Scrabble with Oli, Moju and John. Missed Networks in the meantime. Lost after being stuck with Q, and giving away a great scoring opportunity when was down to last tile R (and the Q, but it was useless)
• Noticed there were some 360′s set up in Venue. Not run by E+S! (YAY!) Guitar Hero III featured. Would have stayed to try and nail some achievements, but the consoles were set to demo mode
• Up to Seminar Room for the ill-advertised Retro Gaming event. Took almost 45 minutes to get the retro consoles in. N64, Dreamcast, SNES, Gamecube (albeit on the Wii), and a few others were there
• Tried the N64 Goldeneye, which I’d read so much about as one of the best games of all time………I hate Legacy-style controls
• While searching for C&C sound effects, I found a Zero Hour mod that looks alright called Shockwave. Will install and try out later.
• Console Gaming carried on till about half 6 (Guitar Hero eventually arrived, as did Mario Strikers) – a lot later than normal!

And, now I’m back. And for those of you in suspense as to my Haskell lab exam mark? Well, here goes….

* opens Thunderbird *
* DCU Mail inbox *
* [Ca215] lab exam 1 – open *
* open link *
* search for me *

Yup, 0. 18 people scored some marks. 3 people scored 30, 6 scored 40, 1 scored 60, 4 scored 70, and 4 people got the full 100. Needless to say, there will still be pretty much a full class there (all those who scored less than 70, methinks) for the next lab exam next week, which is worth a maximum of 70.

And don’t bother wishing me luck, it won’t help in making the questions not contain material we haven’t covered.

Most gamers I know can be quite selfish, both in real life and online (XBL and/or PC). However, this story I’ve just read shows that there are a few out there who are quite the opposite:

How nice is Satanic Soul? (Dont answer that, as Im about too)

I know him in real life, we met in High School and became best friends and have never parted ways since, We look out for each other all the time.

6 months ago, My PC caught fire and had to be replaced… Unfortunatly I did not have the money, So I made the ultimate sacrafice for my girlfriend and sold my 360 to get a new one. Of course Satanic and most of the other TDF members were devestated but understood what I had done and why.

Its been cruel for me as Ive missed out on so many of my games that I have wanted badly… Mass Effect, Call Of Duty 4, Halo 3 ect. ect.

So what does Satanic do… He scrimps and saves every penny he gets, goes out and buys himself an Elite & rather than trade in his old console for a store discount he picks me up a copy of Call Of Duty 4 and gift wraps his old console. Then he calls me into the lounge and tells me to open it… I was speechless when I saw this.

I would have much preffered the Elite but hey! Im not gonna complain. Ive got my 360 back and cant wait to get back online… Its been way to long

This just goes to prove that good things do happen to good people

I hope to see you on Xbox Live

Peace
TDF I Psychotic

It’s a really nice story, and although I don’t know the beneficiary very well, I hope he knows what a good friend Satanic (who I do know) is. Now to get a game he has on Live and get some kickass on!

Read the story in it’s original context here, where you can also leave comments if you are a member.

I still find it hard to believe it’s only been 2 weeks since I installed the WordPress.com Blog Stats here. And before those of you confused as to why there isn’t that bar on top of my site – it’s not hosted by WordPress.com. The plugin works kinda the same way as Akismet, if you have it – all you need is the WordPress.com API key, hence why the stats have their title.

Anyway, although I’ve been largely convinced that very few people read this blog, it kinda appears otherwise that there are days when the hits are huge, and a few days where there are sweet f-all. For example, on 16/11 there was 88 visits – the current peak – yet two days later, there were 3….

However, it also gives me handy lists of how people got here, whether it be via links, or by search engines. One really weird search result today is that someone came here after searching “you failed to open the floodgates in time”. Why on earth would searching that lead here? * searches*

Oh right, the Nevada Dam mission in R6V. See http://www.thechrisd.com/2007/04/12/super-achievement-whoring/
The other handy bit about the previous link is that it allows me to check if that plugin I installed to stop the site from pinging itself actually works. We shall see….

Anyway, I’ve been thinking about what else I can do to “use up” the remaining disk space and bandwidth I have. The first, kinda easy thing would be to one-click install PHPGedView and use that. Second would be to write a website that lets users upload their own images and videos for embedding around the net. Kinda like my own Mythica. Although I might not have THAT much bandwidth if enough people use it. But we shall see.

We all know that gamers don’t necessarily want to have to spend much money to fuel their hobby. Why else do we buy second-hand games, and wait for hardware price drops? Why else do we complain about having to pay for features which should be free?

Well, earlier today I received this message from one of my friends, and to me, this is just the ultimate way of not wanting to pay for services:

For those of you who don’t understand, he’s trying to get people to complain about his Gamertag, so that M$ will pay attention to the complaints and force him to change his ‘tag to something “less offensive” – now the fact that he couldn’t be bothered paying 800 MS Points is proof that he’s cheap and lazy.

Whether or not this works – well, we’ll have to see if his Gamertag changes in the near future….

Self-explanatory title perhaps?

Anyway, I’m not talking about my personal computer, or my web host’s server. No, instead I’m talking about whatever server Hyperiums is hosted on. Since they had a failure on Sunday that caused a nice little 24-hour downtime

Whatever the issue was, it seems that DG’s (the “god” of the game) got it sorted and the game is back up and running – although ticks are still yet to start up again. However, it has made me wonder – where exactly is the game hosted? Is it a private server? Or is he using a dedicated hosting service – or even a shared hosting service? It’s one of those thing that made me wonder.

PS: I know I had planned to get some more Baby Bear pictures from the Dunboyne house, but I don’t think I’ll be able to get them this time – too much family-related stuff going on to worry about teddy bear pictures.

I’m starting to get fed up, so I sent an e-mail to the IT support to try and get some assistance:

Dear IT Support,

Eighteen months ago I upgraded to Girlfriend 1.0 from Drinking Mates 4.2 which I’d used for years without any trouble. However, there are apparently conflicts between these two products and the only solution was to try and run Girlfriend 1.0 with the sound turned off.

To make matters worse, Girlfriend 1.0 is also incompatible with several other applications, such as Lads Night Out 3.1, Football 2 and Playboy 6.1.

Successive versions of Girlfriend proved no better. A shareware beta-programme, Party Girl 2.1, which I tried, had many bugs and left a virus in my system, forcing me to shut down completely for several weeks.

Eventually I tried to run Girlfriend 1.2 and Girlfriend 1.0 at the same time, only to discover that when these two systems detected each other they caused severe damage to my hardware.

Sensing a way out, I then upgraded to Fiancé 1.0 only to discover that this product soon had to be upgraded (at great cost) to Wife 1.0, which I reluctantly agreed to because, whilst Wife 1.0 tends to use up all my available resources, it does come bundled with FreeSex Plus and Cleanhouse 2000.

Shortly after this upgrade however I then discovered that Wife 1.0 can be very unstable and costly to run. For example, any mistakes I made were automatically stored in Wife 1.0′s memory and could not be deleted. They then resurfaced months later when I had forgotten about them.

Wife 1.0 also has an automatic Diary Explorer and E-mail porn filter, and can, without warning, launch Photostrop and Whingezip! These latter products have no help files and I have to try and guess what the problem is myself.

Additional costly problems are that Wife 1.0 needs updating regularly, requiring Shoe Shop Browser for new attachments and also Hairstyle Express which needs to be reinstalled every other week. Wife 1.0 also spawns unwelcome child processing that also drains my resources.

It also conflicted with some of the new games I wanted to try, stating that they are an illegal operation.

When Wife 1.0 attaches itself to my Audi TT programme it often crashes or runs the system dry. Wife 1.0 also has a rather annoying pop-up called Mother-in-Law, which can’t be turned off.

Recently I’ve attempted to try Mistress 2001, but there could be problems: a friend has alerted me to the fact that if Wife 1.0 detects the presence of Mistress 2001 it tends to delete all my MS Money files before un-installing itself.

Please can you help me.

The response?

Turn gay or get used to it.

We all know that Thunderbird (on it’s own) can be used for two things: e-mail and feed reading. Although I rarely have to respond to e-mails, I do end up doing a lot of reading.

Anyway, going through the latest batch of feed items – right now just casually reading. See TriXie has another Gamer Spotlight. You know I kinda wish that I could be interviewed by TriXie, although whether they’d see me as someone worth interviewing it another thing entirely. I may not have a flashy community website (anymore), but I’m still a decent community member – one thing that you CAN’T say about other Irish gamers.

Anyway, alright it’s another random guy who owns a community site – quick pop over to see. Alright, it’s something, I’m not going head over heels about it, but then again I don’t really go head over heels for most stuff. Although this one post is interesting: http://www.360sync.com/2007/11/16/the-xbox-message-trick-2/
I went over to Xbox.com to have a look – 4275 messages. Wow, I’m suprised how I’ve managed to go through so many even with my lack of 360 ownership. Maybe I can blame all those “Halo 2 messages” from back in the Halo 2 prime days….

The rest of the feeds don’t really have too much to show – the usual double reporting of Xbox.com stuff, more F1 news that is repeated almost to death, and Jimmie Johnson taking pole for Homestead….

Anyway, after a little bit of searching on the Thunderbird support forum, I’ve finally managed to rid myself of those rogue feed folders that just would not disappear! Now I just hope all the feeds still work now that I’ve put them all into the one RSS “account”, to save having a bunch of them up near the top of the list, and a bunch right down the bottom.
Pity it took to manually removing/editing files – never nice to have to do that.

Yup, I’m back from the society’s day-long Man U trip. 4-0. What else can I say?

Well, in fairness there is a lot I can say, but I’m not going to be going into it right now, since right now the mot important thing is SLEEPING! I probably got a total of about 4 hours sleep on the bus broken up over the 24 hours. It was impossible to sleep on the ferry, given there was a bar

Anyway, I’m going to go sleep, and once I wake up (probably about half 1, going to meeting with Learning Support – don’t ask), I’ll post about the trip.

UPDATE: OK, I’m up now.

Before you start reading, I would like to define “we” as the group of us that were together – Gordon (society chair), his cousin, me, Liam (big guy, has been to Old Trafford many times before) and a few others (yes, I have forgotten names already!)

Read the rest of this post…

Right, so I will admit that today I had rather a long R6V gaming session.

Alright, so it was 11 hours in length. But the main thing that was bugging me about it the whole time was the fact that even thought I spent 11 hours playing (and winning) a load of T-Hunts, I still only managed to get up 5 bars and get up to Captain.

Yes, while I acknowledge that Captain is a good thing (MG36, Spas 12 and Desert Eagle people!), getting there is the hard part. It’s crazy that the achievement for completing the game on Realistic nets you 100GS, yet getting to Elite only nets you 40GS (alright, so you do get another 25 on the way for getting to Private 1st Class and Second Lieutenant…, but you can get 180 on the way to getting to R6V Legend!)

It’s just a little “off-balance”. I know it gives people incentives to keep playing the game online, but shouldn’t the DLC cover for that?

So anyway, I’ve just calculated how much further I need to go for Elite, and apparently, I still have another 678 T-Hunts to do… Therefore, in all over those 11 hours I spent today, I won about 70 T-Hunts. So I have another 110 hours to go – and that’s only if I win the majority of them like I did today, with a real kick-ass team

Anyone for R6V T-Hunts then?