I’m not going to post the link here, because the entire thing is purely fabricated, maybe for comedic effect, but the point still stands is that what is written is libellous towards me.

I’m aware that I’ve never been the best people person during my life, it is something that I’ve had to work on since a young age, and only a few short years ago did I properly find out the cause and have it officially diagnosed. So there have been a few hiccups along the way with me trying to co-exist with the rest of society. But to read shit like that written up, particularly when it is grossly over-exaggerated, and written from the point of view of someone who is either not fully aware of my situation, or does not fully comprehend it, is practically insulting me.

What makes it even worse is the specific thanks given to that post by a few people I know from college, even more so those I thought I knew fairly well and were good friends with.

Pretty bloody glad I’m probably not going back there now, at least not this year.

The post that started it all is viewable on boards.ie here.

So apparently the timetable for the new Dunboyne rail link has been posted by Irish Rail.
Only the timetable shows that every single Dunboyne train serves Docklands and not Broombridge, Drumcondra or Connolly.

This is fucking retarded. I know a good few people who would be using the new train line who would want to go to Drumcondra as part of their commuting journey. This move by Irish Rail was made without any research or any consultation with people in the area to ensure a satisfactory service for the majority of it’s commuters.

See the timetable here.

An annoying thing that has been happening recently when I’ve been trying to watch streams on Justin.tv, is that the flash ad box on the top-right hand side of whoever’s channel page has been eating up CPU and thus causing the stream to lag to bits, as long as it is within the browser window.

For the moment I’ve been using Chrome’s inline editor/source browser thing to manually pad the stream and chat box so that I can see them without having to see the ad. It’s really annoying having to do this though.

I’m a firm believer in not using Adblock as I don’t think that websites that need to run ads to run deserve having their source of income taken away from them. However, I also believe that ads should not be intrusive and should not impact on a user’s experience, which these ads are clearly doing so.

G’wan Monty!!! Enough said really. Monty dominated at Watkins Glen, almost like he did at Indy for the past two years, but unlike those times, he comes out with the long-overdue win

I really just wish people who shut up about the fact his only two wins have been on the road courses. Have you not seen how many times he’s come second or third on an oval…?

Although a small part of me still kinda wished Marcos Ambrose could’ve won it…

First in the F1, Massa had his win robbed by his team, forcing him to pull over and let Alonso through.
Then in the NASCAR, Montoya had his win robbed from him when an invisibris caution occured, bunching the field up, dropping him down the order and then his car becoming way loose in traffic and hitting the wall.
And just now, the final straw, Castroneves had his win robbed from him by a very shit blocking call on a restart when he barley moved from his line on a fucking airport runway to make the first turn.

Motor sport officiating has gone to shit today, I can tell you that.

I mean, I really do like making these videos, not really because I’m specifically trying to get views and subscribers on YouTube, rather I just want to make them, even if only ten people decide to watch it, as long as even one of those people like it, I consider it a success.

Yay, for the Intensity Pro!

So now that I have my Intensity, I definitely think I’m going to be making way more console videos. It probably won’t eclipse the amount of PC videos I make, but there should still be a decent amount of them. The fun part is that even though I’m already recording and editing them at 720p, I still have the capability to turn them into 1080i if I really want to show off

After a very quiet Friday (which was the actual day itself), with just a trip down to the bar in TGI Friday’s in the Centre for some bar food, cocktails and watching the Dutch dump Brazil out of the World Cup; I met up with a few friends for most of the day on the Saturday, with some general hanging around and doing whatever came to mind. One thing of note was the odd trip to the Asian market grabbing some very cheap Pocky, which I unfortunately munched through rather damn quickly after getting him, seeing as it’s so damn addictive. I really need to make some plans to go get a crate of so of them and start stocking them up in the wardrobes before Eirtakon…

Speaking of that, I really need to go sort out my plans for Final Form Sora now that I have time – and money.

Dinner with family later on that night was a massive affair – sixteen of us in all squeezing into the restaurant part of Ho Wun here in Dunboyne. It was a great night, getting everybody together for a night out to celebrate not only me, but my aunt Paula as well (whose birthday was the day before mine!), before heading home for more drinks and cake. And unfortunately no dog seeing as a couple of my aunts have some issues with canines.

Felt great the next day after a great 24 hours prior to it – and maybe a little bit because of the “personal ATM” feeling I had in my wallet following it.

So, what’s left in the summer? Well, finding a damn Blackmagic Intensity Pro somewhere in this country would be a great start, as I want to get into streaming my 360 online and maybe doing a Let’s Play of something on it – specifically Naughty Bear, which I was given on my birthday itself and I haven’t yet played it because I want to LP it blind if I can…

It’s also a case of the fact that very little seems to help alleviate the effects. Daily doses of Zirtek don’t seem to do much, but without it my nose’d be snivelling and running like a tap, and I’d be practically unable to open my eyes. The accompanying unrelated really annoying chesty cough isn’t helping procedures either.

Anyway, Friday and Saturday. That’s all I’m looking forward to. I just want to get to those two days already – and preferably not be suffering from this crap! If that means it pisses down like a monsoon, then so be it!

Despite the fact that my sister’s father kind of fills the father role (despite not having to), I still wouldn’t consider him my proper father.

That’s really all I have to say about that. Now, back to making the bear popular.

So, after buying Modern Warfare 2 yesterday evening in GAME in Blanch for €35 (not the €25 I definitely remember it being a little while ago – but at least it’s not €60 on Steam), I sat down last night for a long session of it. And by long, I mean really, really, really, really, really long. Like, started at midnight last night, ended… about twenty minutes ago, long.

The main plan for the night was to attempt to complete as much of the campaign on Veteran as possible to earn maximum Gamerscore from the game. That last until about 7am. The campaign, although it is incredibly diverse, thrilling and entertaining, was way short. Thankfully Veteran difficulty this time wasn’t as painstakingly cruel as MW1 with the infinite respawning enemies and allies that would rather just sit there while YOU kill them all, and so progressed at a nice steady pace filled with waiting for health to regenerate and retrying certain parts over and over.

Veteran is no more of a challenge than Hardened was in the original. Which is probably better.

So after the entire Veteran completion, off I went again on Recruit to pick up all 45 pieces of intel. Cue 9am, and I have quite a large chunk of Gamerscore gleamed from the game from everything not-Special Ops. That can wait for some other time, or not be done at all.

So, I decided I may as well have gone onto multiplayer, since there was nothing else left to do. Now after my foray into MW2 multiplayer during the Steam free weekend, I wasn’t getting my hopes up on how this would work out. The changing of controls from 360 controller to keyboard and mouse didn’t go so well, plus I felt as if my reflexes weren’t as sharp and that everyone else had massive huge scripts helping them out.

Cue the first game in Mercenary Team Deathmatch.

I come out 18-6, absolutely decimating a team of several-times-already-prestiged noobs. However, overall my team lost because of the noobs on my team having significantly worse K/D ratios.

Oh boy, I’m home again

Not to brag, but I was pretty good at the original Modern Warfare a while ago, so that does transfer over to 2 a good bit. With that in mind, I then proceeded to play another 13 games. All 13, I won. I only had to get off because it was daylight, I was hungry, and the dog needed attention.

So far after what was only 1h 43m of playtime (apparently), I’m a Level 16 Staff Sergeant, with a win/loss record of 13-1, and a K/D ratio of just under 1.8.

Oh, did I also mention that one game where I went 27-4? Oh and the one other game where I managed to get a pretty decent kill-streak of 12, which included actually being able to legitimately call in a Stealth Bomber that I didn’t get from a Care Package for once?

Dead chuffed, I am

As such, cue the impromptu ”here’s my guess” post!

Being the nice person I am, I’ve taken the liberty of hiding my answers by disguising them the same colour as the background (or at least the background when this was written!), to avoid anyone who’s come straight to this post from being spoilered.

1. Portal
2. Bioshock 2
3. Donkey Kong
4. God of War
5. -
6. Sonic
7. Dead Space
8. Pacman
9. -
10. Half-Life
11. Pokémon
12. -
13. -
14. Halo
15. Final Fantasy (specifically VII)
16. Megaman
17. Fallout
18. -
19. Street Fighter
20. Assassins Creed
21. Frogger
22. -
23. Gears of War
24. -
25. Left 4 Dead
26. -
27. Oblivion
28. Duck Hunt
29. Mario
30. -
31. Zelda
32. Excite Bike
33. -
34. Mario Kart
35. -
36. Castlevania
37. Metroid
38. -
39. -
40. Team Fortress 2

So, how do you fare?

Found on The Oatmeal.

Thankfully, I upgraded from my first e-mail, which was a Hotmail account back in 2007, to my own domain. Yes, I have been massively computer literate for that long

So my plan for Eirtakon in October this year is to go as Sora from Kingdom Hearts 2. But not just in his plain self, I’m going to go as him in one of his “Drive Forms” – basically alternate coloured costumes. However, I can’t pick which one, so I’m asking for a little help with this

All five of his Drive Forms can be found here: http://www.finalfantasyworld.co.uk/khextreme/kh2/kh2_drivemode.php

There are the three more basic options in the Valor, Wisdom and Master forms.

However, there’s also the more complicated choices in his Final form, and finally the biggie – his Anti form.

Any ideas what you think would go well? I’m not going to say what one(s) I think would work best until a bit further down just in case it influences your decision

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Right, this should be far enough.

While I would love to try Anti form, it’d be too much work, especially with the all-black might mean the character is unrecognisable!

Personally, the two I’m thinking of doing one of are firstly Final form, and if that doesn’t work out Wisdom form.

Either way, I seriously hope I can get this sorted for October. It might seem like ages away but it’s closing in really fast

I know I’m probably going to get shunned for this but… *SQUEE*

No. All right then.

I hate exams.

While most of my friends and family would consider me to be an intelligent person, I am absolutely horrendous when it comes to doing exams. Why? Well, whatever the subject matter is, I tend to learn better by actively doing it and gradually figuring things out by myself, and being judged based on how I’m actively applying it to something in real life that is of use. Emphasis on the “of use”, as I find that assignments aren’t really of great use as generally whatever it is that you’re doing for them you won’t end up doing in real life, and as such is wasted just so you can be given a number showing what one person in particular thinks how good you are.

It reminds me of the second semester in first year (however long ago it was that I actually did that…) when there was the Web Design module. After having already managed to pick up some rudimentary HTML, PHP and SQL from playing around in the backend of things like WordPress and forum software – I absolutely blitzed that module completely. However, I’d say that if I were to have to learn it from scratch in that module and be examined on it afterwards in a test, I’d probably have had no chance.

Also, studying is never one of those things I’ve been able to do properly. Most of the time it’s just read in through the eyes, and almost straight out the back of my head. People used to tell me to take my notes and condense them down, highlighting key parts – I ended up with practically my entire set of notes on that subject highlighted…

Hopefully all this crap will be over soon. Maybe it is time to seriously consider a change of course to something I’m probably better suited to and isn’t as massively “cram and regurgitate” heavy as what Computer Applications currently is.

Now I really hate the annoying YouTube “10 minute” time limit – which is actually more of an 11 minute limit – because it means anyone with longer videos either has to edit them down to that length, or split them into parts. What makes it even more annoying is the way that partners have no time limits, yet it’s practically impossible to become one. And even more annoying is the fact that old Director account from back in 2006 still have unlimited time uploads because of the grandfather clause from back then – and if I had known this back in 2006 I would have tried getting it…

So either way, to avoid too much fancy editing and whatnot, I just decided to take the circa 160 minutes of footage and split it at every eleven minute mark, before spending the entire day rendering them before uploading them. The results are seen in this video below:

Seriously, fuck that. I edit them to the exact frame (and yes, I had the quantize to frames setting on, so it really was to the exact damn frame!) and YouTube’s processing thinks it’s 11:01, and rejects the video for that. Go fuck right off…

I really wish that I could just pack up and move to another video sharing service, but the problems with other places are also prevalent. Vimeo doesn’t allow gaming videos and has upload limits I’d surpass in a single video unless you pay them, for example. Plus, I’d have to re-establish myself there, even though I already have a bunch-load of subscribers, comments and views on YouTube.

I wish the engineers or admins behind the scenes would actually get up off their asses, look into the community and take note that many people wouldn’t mind being burdened by stupid restrictions such as these. Sure they upped the file size limit to 2GB, but I’d never use that in 11 minutes even if I tried. Recording on my camcorder at full 1080p with maxed settings – I still get over two hours of footage onto my 16GB card, which is about 15 minutes for two gigs.

Well OK, one major exception to this would have to be raw FRAPS footage. That eats up four gigs every two minutes or so…

But still, I’m rather pissed off at how I’ve lost an entire day rendering only for it to be made useless by a processing bug. Fuck this shit. Now I have to spend the entirety of today re-rendering everything, and I can’t play any games while doing so because Vegas takes up nearly all my CPU…

So it started off with Major Nelson doing another one of his free code giveaway puzzle things, which in this instance was a code disguised in the form of Xbox 360 lights set in such a way as they resembled semaphore flags.

Now the astute person will notice that this is a 31-signal code, which is longer than the 25-character codes used on Xbox Live. Out of those 31 signals, seven of them are “number” signals, meaning the next signal represents a number.

“But wait”, I hear you saying. “That makes 24 characters”. Right, there were only 24 characters posted, and there was quite a bit of debate over where the missing character was. Despite that, Major Nelson announced around 12:36am BST that the code had been won. I was sitting there on the Xbox.com “Redeem Code” page waiting to hear what the story was when I read that.

So after that I started checking the Twitter search for @majornelson, and I had a look at the profile of the person he said came up with the puzzle: Laura Massey. After a little bit of refreshing, I noticed Laura was replying to other people who had replied to her stating their confusion with the presence of only 24 characters. Eventually though, I noticed a reply of hers to someone, where she specifically mentioned “I forgot the G after the two 9′s”. (That tweet has since been deleted.)

I then decided to give it a whack, fully expecting to see that someone else had somehow managed to randomly suss it out.

Instead I got this:

Yea, you get what I mean.

Now I just need a damn working 360 so I can play in the Halo Reach Beta…

You may call be a Jimmie Johnson hater or something like that, but I was absolutely thrilled to see him crash out live as it happened. Why? Well, the guy is just too damn good. He seems to win every other damn race, and he makes the sport boring to watch. If we know JJ is going to win, why bother watching? While I’m not annoyed when someone other than Montoya wins (which is every damn race), I am annoyed when someone who was only won four championships because of NASCAR’s silly playoff system wins every other time.

It’s like when Schumacher was winning every race in Formula 1, it made the sport boring. Now though, after being gone for several years, he’s back and he’s shit. Now it’s fun again to watch a race with Schumi in it!

I just hope that a GIF of this crash turns up sooner or later…

Usually I don’t mind being under the weather, but what with recently been trying to make more gaming videos, and this massive coughing fit rendering me completely incapable of doing so, lest my commentary be broken off every minute or so as I feel yet another tickle in my throat.

Another reason for groaning is after noticing how packed up my calendar is looking over the next few months, which is likely to get worse as more things are arranged over the next few weeks. Especially all the few weeks leading from mid-June through July…
If you really want to, the public view of my calendar (encompassing college, gaming, and selected public events – but only showing my free/busy status of personal events) is viewable on the contact page. And then you too can groan with me…

At least you don’t have to see my view of my calendar, which also shows public holidays, Facebook events, Facebook birthdays, sporting events…

So, one of the things that keeps me on my toes, in a way, is the fact that I almost seem to be constantly changing my site around, be it a brief quick edit in the stylesheet, laying out a page differently, or attempting to overhaul the whole thing and failing miserably. In fact just as I’m writing this, I just changed my header to remove the dark green border from it and the banner image…

I am by no means a proper web designer, so usually I can’t really give a good point of view on how my site looks seeing as I’m the one who made it. Every day I go around and I see some sites and blogs that look really great – the only main issue is that they were made largely using a pre-made theme which they just applied. That’s where my site and those sites differ, seeing as I made my current look from the scraps that is the WordPress Classic theme.

However, there are some people who make sites for a living, and the stuff they create is generally of a very high standard and looks great. While I would love to be able to make a site like that, I have two main issues when it comes to that:

1. I really have no sense of colour. This green I forget what I picked it out from, but I only ever use the two shades of it, and everything else in greyscale. In fact, if it wasn’t for the green, everywhere would be in greyscale.
2. I can’t create images for shit. That means no image buttons, image separators, image background etc. The only things that I did make images for were the banner and those button-bars on the home and contact pages.

While I do hope that my skills will improve as I go along, I do need to aspire to something first…

Anyway, back to the point. You people probably know better than me on how well this site looks and in general how to make a site look good. So I’m asking you lot to critique this creation of mine. And don’t try to sugar-coat anything, tell it how it is. You think it looks shit and makes you want to puke? Say it.

Maybe then I’ll know what to look into changing, and eventually I might even stop playing around with it every other day…

*runs off to play around a bit more with the look*