I moved!!

I moved from another blog host so below are my last previous few posts.

Email - How many Addresses do you have?
(30th Sep, 2008 at 12:02 PM)

I have 5.

One is specifically used to register for stuff on the WWW, that way i know all the spam will end up in there and i really dont care. Email has made our lives easier but at the same time its frustrated us to the point of recreating the Jonestown massacre. I wonder how many more people would have paid the ultimate price if Jim Jones had Inboxes full of spam every time he logged on.

No matter how hard you try to protect yourself eventually you will one day check your email and see that dreadded net note telling you that your impotent and need Viagra ASAP, or informing you that theres a breakthru in penis pumps and in the same breath explaining to you how to recover the fortune left to you by a Nigerian prince thats your long lost uncle.

Straight away you start asking yourself "Where did i slip up? Where did i mistakenly enter this email address? Im doomed".....Im willing to go out on a limb here and say that every one of you has at least 2 email addresses thats bombarded with spam. My mail client has had more rules created than the World Health Organisation.

Ive created this entry because this morning i logged into my Gmail account that i created over 4 years ago for the first time in over 2 years.

Gmail was the Brainchild of Google and offers 7gb of storage space to its users. In the beginning you could only get a Gmail address by being invited by another user but now its open beta and open to the public. I thought why not ill grab one, it will come in useful one day.

So here i am thinking i might start using that Gmail account to store files online. After 20 mins of trying to remember my password i log in...only to be hit in the face by a message saying i have over 2000 unread emails and over 4000 emails in my spam folder.

My first thought: " Am i going to read them all"?

Second thought : " How many people know this email Address"?

Then: "Who are all these people"??????

I had Emails from people i had never heard of which is the usual case with spam but the thing that struck me as odd was the amount of people the spammers had me confused with.The C in ctucker had become cris, craig, charlie, charlene etc etc etc. Spammers really just dont discriminate.

So now im slowly culling them down - sure i could delete them all in one hit but im glad i didnt. So far ive won over 400 million dollars in lotteries and have found im the hier to the throne in 4 countries.To any of you that have sent mail to tux@tuxinthecloud.com, ill get back to you shortly....

Log on and Switch off, Online gaming Rocks

(25th Sep, 2008 at 12:33 PM)

I play Online games.

With that one line your now thinking that im a nerd, have no life or friends and have seen every episode of Dr Who ever made. Online Gaming is one of those things you either get or you dont, there is no in between.

Well guess what, im not alone. Online gamers range from 15 to 90. Work in industries from butchershops to Multimillion corporates. Some are mums, dads, and prolly one of your best friendsComputer games not only help drive technology and hardware sales but provide enough revenue to the companies that make them to make some countries budgets look like my 1980 tuck shop bill.

Its estimated that Blizzard Entertainments fourth released game set in the fantasy Warcraft universe, World of Warcraft , has almost 11 million subscribers and according to http://www.firingsquad.com/ , Vivendi Games (Which Blizzard is a division of ) made 1.51 billion dollars in 2007, up over 26 percent from the prior year.

WoW holds about a 60 percent share of the of the massively multiplayer online game market but its safe to say that the Makers of Everquest etc make a good living from Games.Not everyone however wants to dress up like a troll and stab things, or gather Fish for Matsy Rollingpin, some like to dress like futuristic gladiators and shoot each other in the head with Railguns, or fill a screen up with coloured blocks that drop at an ever increasing rate till your brain cant decide what to do, whatever your taste theres a game for it.

Gaming is like a drug. My first taste of this Online gaming malarkey was when i connected my Pentium III to a server hosting a game called Quake II. I ran around for an hour and couldnt hit a fugging thing, the players on the server were moving 100 times faster than me and i spent most of my time respawning after getting a BFG in the face. I started to think that all these people are on crack, i need to either start running around like im on crack or go back to solitaire. Within the week i was spending more time with my railgun than my wife. After 2 weeks i was racking up 20 or so kills a match and within the month i had bought a new modem, a new video and soundcard and was constantly tweaking my config file to lower my ping by 2, hopefully that would mean the difference between life or death. I was Hooked for life.

It wasnt until i bought a little game called Everquest 2 that i realised how addictive Gaming can be. I kept saying to myself " im not paying $70 for a game and then pay $20 a month to play it. What can it possibly offer me for that much money?"I didnt take me long to realise what this Massively Multiplayer Gaming was all about and what it did have to offer.

It wasnt just about sitting at home wasting spotty school kids with a shotgun and trying to get 20 kills before anyone else, it was about imersing yourslf in something and being able to be something or someone your not. It was about joining a guild and getting to know people that just like you had logged on to switch off reality for a bit. It was about gamers from around the world logging into a game and being right there with you, helping you even tho some were millions of miles away. It was all about the community.

The funny part about the Community is at times they can be very fickle. Take MMOs, for a while back you either played EQ2 or WoW. Each were sworn enemies to each other and because of that i first heard the term Fanboy, someone that will defend their game no matter what.Now in my eyes to each their own. If you play something thats fun then play it. Dont be worried that the game you like has less people playing it then any other, if its fun go hard.

There are however the fanboys of other games that will bag your chosen game till you want to shoot them in the face (head over to the Age of Conan forums for a taste of this). Its funny really because it seems they spend more time dissing your chosen game than actually playing their own.

Each time a new MMO is released the buzz can be heard from space. Players will leave the games they have played for years to be part of the New Community leaving their old one behind. I liken it to when you were at school and all of a sudden your best friend gets a girlfriend and suddenly you feel all alone.

Problem is with so much competiton you need to get your Billion dollar game into the market ASAP and some developers may cut corners etc to meet deadlines. The new game thats released has suddenly turned the buzz into a thunderous scream of disappointment. As i said the communities can be very fickle and to promise so much and to not deliver can make or break a company overnight.

As far as online games are concerned, theres a new kid in town. Warhammer Online has finally gone live. The screaming has stopped and the buzz is back, for now at least. Did i get moist at the thought of being one of the buzzing millions to flock to their servers? No. Will i? Prolly not, ill be too busy collecting fish for Matsy Rolling pin quietly screaming about my sojourn into Age of Conan. May it rest in Peace.I really hope War! is a success. With the last few MMO's promising the world but offer not a lot the gaming industry and we gamers will benefit from another big player in the market.

+ =

AFL Grand final time - Hooray

(23rd Sep, 2008 at 2:21 PM)

The AFL Grand Final is on Saturday and once again every Melbournian will think that the day rates up there with the birth of Christ. Unfortunately being a follower of AFL for over 35 years and having recently denounced it as a game that doesnt project itself onto the screen as it does live, id have to say the Melbournians have got it wrong.

AFL is a great sport to watch live but watch it on TV and it turns into hours of commentators dribbling into ther cups. Its not the messiah, its just a very naughty boy.

Problem is try buying a ticket to the Grand Final.... but dont rush out just yet, once you have done the math taking into consideration the amount of seats in the ground, the paltry number of tickets that actually go on sale to the public and the amount of bogans you would have to push your way thru to get to your seat thats are already being inhabited by something that resembles a family of throwbacks from a Kath and Kim casting session that you now have to argue with till 3 quarter time just to sit in the seats you sold your grandmothers corpse to buy, you will realise that if you cant get tickets you might as well take the kids out mushrooming, its just as much fun ...except the arguments youll be having is with the rest of the family that are complaining that you have stopped to go fishing at the only spot on the Hawksbury that has a rather large dog shit very near where you have placed your hot chips.

I guess a lot of sports are like that, not really the same unless your there. Problem is that most times it will cost you your only remaining bollock to buy tickets, grab your kids that shitty memorabilia and purchase hot food that resembles that item thats sitting at said fishing spot.To old Joe average with his 2.4 kids and his award wage job, a Grand Final ticket is as far away as the next Collingwood premiership.

Think ill go mushrooming this weekend.

V

So, What do you use it for?

(19th Sep, 2008 at 12:13 PM)

The internet - Possibly the most misused and greatest man made invention to never see its full potential. The Internet basically came into mainstream use in the 1990's altho it had existed decades before it was the 90s where it took off, growing in popularity by 100 percent each year, and it was CERN that unvieled the new World Wide Web project in 1991 which was really the basis for what we have now.

Its hard to believe that some kids never new the world without the internet. They think that getting music is free, and anything you want can be downloaded, theres a whole generation that dont know what a record looks like.

This all brings me to my main question, What do you use the internet for? The net has so much potential its ridiculous, Wikipedia can give you information about almost everything and everyone in seconds. Granted 20 percent of the shit on there is incorrect however it will give you the gist of what something is all about and who did what. Google is taking over the universe with images, maps, news, videos etc and creating a portal for use to do all our computing in The Cloud and lets not forget Microsoft. Id like to know how many houses in the western world have a microsoft product or brand in their house.

The Net can be used for so much more than just downloading copyright material and watching Youporn and the great thing is every day we find more and more things to use the WWW for. The planet has become a very small place and thats courtesy of the internet. Its only a matter of time until the internet as we know it today will be obsolete, replaced by an even faster network with 100 times the capacity and potential for growth that what we have now.

Its up to us as a society to realise its what this will mean to the human race and make it work for us. I just hope that by then Apple and Microsoft can play nicely together.

Cant we just get along?