From the category archives:
Humour
Humour
... then reverses into the neighbour's cat, causing untold grief to his long suffering neighbours ...
It's been a bit of a dry month for me in blog updates, or any updates really. The past couple of weeks in particular has been occupied by incredibly bad Dell service for my notebook.
So in lieu of inspiration for new content, here are some new reviews.
Civilization V - Gods and Kings
Surprisingly packed expansion. Religion makes a huge difference. Better diplomacy. Makes the game much longer overall. Better than first release.
Minecraft for Xbox
So I caved in to my kids. Not too bad actually. More accessible than PC version.Warning: major time sink.
Dwarf Fortress 0.34.11
The 2012 release keeps getting better. A surprisingly solid bugfix release. Clearing kill orders after completion is a definite win.
...
Matt takes his new review format out for a spin, forgets to take off the handbrake, does burnouts in the street, then inadvertently crashes into the neighbour's bins.
I occasionally get new games, and try to review them, but often don't get around to it. With this in mind, I wondered if it was the burden of writing so much about a given game, knowing that people will have their own differing views and opinions. There's also the challenge of knowing when to stop playing and write it - finish the game first, or get some way in and then write about the experience? And since I'm buying the games, I get the joy of reflecting upon the fact that I blew near $100 on a turkey, or that I don't get paid to review games.
So enough with that idea. I figure that most game reviews are far too long, and this kind of annoys me. I figure that if a game really is great, okay, maybe that justifies a long review, but the bulk of games just don't justify it. So I've decided to go with a new game review format, until I change my mind or get bored with the idea. I figure everything I think about a given game should fit into twenty words. Not "or less", and not "give or take a couple". ...
Derek "@ozdj" Jenkins shares his hilarious tale of impulse buying woe ...
Cross-posted from my blog, ClubDUH!
WARNING: Contains rude words tweeted in anger; adult concepts and immature computer hardware. Sharing a few hours of my life that I’ll never get back in the hope that I’ll save someone else from enduring the same saga.
It was shortly after 6pm on Thursday night and I was about to leave the office. I checked my mobile and was excited to find a new gadget, that I hadn’t heard of before, was available at Officeworks, here in Australia. Wh0o0o0o!
I immediately went googling and quicky found a video of the LG LSM-100 in action. Naturally, I tweeted my excitement at what I’d found:
“
Officeworks has these in stock for $129 – #WANT (even if I don’t quite have a use for one 9 days out of 10) — http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pt4LpLOx0j4
...
In which I roll back the curtains of time to unveil the origin of this much maligned and misunderstood phenomenon ...
As geeks1, we NEED the latest SpankySoft hardware. We CRAVE it. We’d sacrifice our first-born (or favourite pet) for it, and unsurprisingly, this is where the wife2 acceptance factor starts to emerge. As a rule, partners like to be involved in purchasing decisions, and they don’t often share the irrational ‘MUST HAVE’ gene that seems endemic to the geek population. Also, they tend to like the kids/pets/neighbours/rest of mankind.
So when the SpankyPhone 5 comes out, hailed by the company’s CEO as the greatest thing since frontal lobotomies, these lucky geeks who have access to sex suddenly find that they have to deal with a new factor beyond “I have money and I want it” – one that might actually prefer the lobotomy option. Congratulations. You’ve just run into the Wife Acceptance Factor.
The Wife Acceptance Factor, according to legend, emerged back in the dawn of time
On geek humour, why you don’t get it, and why that’s probably ok ...
Geeks are a funny bunch … in their own eyes at least. Wikipedia (at time of writing) defines geek as “a slang term, with different meanings ranging from "a computer expert or enthusiast" to "a carnival performer who performs sensationally morbid or disgusting acts", with a general pejorative meaning of "a peculiar or otherwise dislikable person, esp[ecially] one who is perceived to be overly intellectual".”
I actually wasn’t going to put a definition in, except that I found it funny … you probably didn’t, and that’s okay. Being a carnival performer who … ah, I mean IT professional … myself, I am both exposed to, and a participant in, geek culture and the associated humour. I’m even part of a geek group. In my experience, IT professionals will happily identify as geeks, and especially in preference to nerds. You could say that it’s lost the pejorative angle, at least in the minds of said geeks.
Information Tec ...
There are a whole bunch of people who really know what they're talking about throwing out a library of advice on how best to implement your plans for bringing the fast paced world of social networking into the enterprise for the benefit of your business.
If that's what you're after, my apologies - you got me instead.
{Cue intense blippy tech music, flashing lights and pan across cables stuck into stuff! Zing! Blinkety Blinkity Blinkety aaand fade...}
How to screw up your internal corporate social m ...
There are a whole bunch of people who really know what they're talking about throwing out a library of advice on how best to implement your plans for bringing the fast paced world of social networking into the enterprise for the benefit of your business.
If that's what you're after, my apologies - you got me instead.
{Cue intense blippy tech music, flashing lights and pan across cables stuck into stuff! Zing! Blinkety Blinkity Blinkety aaand fade...}
How to screw up your internal corporate social media network for the enterprise... thingy
Trial it via a straw poll
Specifically, a handful of Execs who;
are (probably) entrenched in an email dependancy culture so deeply embedded you could suck the words 'reply all' right out of their bone marrow
don't get why everybody else's emails don't get 'real time' responses in the first place
are more legally gagged than anyone else in the company, ergo are unlikely to break out into ...
You don't get to 500 million friends without making a few enemies...
This is a cross-post from http://molkstvtalk.com - my latest venture (follow me on twitter @molkstvtalk if your interested).
If you're reading this via some internet-based method, chances are you have either a Twitter account or Facebook account or both (at least). Social media is the now big thing, and anybody hoping it will run off to a dark corner to pass away is sorely underestimating how large portions of citizens of the Earth interact, share messages, look at photos, and tend their online farms & herds of cattle.
The Social Network is a film based on the rise of Facebook explicitly, set against a backdrop of two separate depositions agains creator Mark Zuckerberg, chronicling his rise from super-geeky Harvard IT student to majority shareholder in the largest social media franchise, currently valued (conservitavely, I might add) at $25 Billion US dollars. That's 9 zeros, people. Billion.
Having David Fincher as director (Fight Club, Se7en ...
What? What is there to argue about? We elected them, surely our politicians know what's best for us?!
It hit me last night like a bolt of lightening: The proposed internet filter is a good thing.
Far too many Australians are at risk of accessing inappropriate data when browsing online. Far too few households take their internet security seriously. Far too many children are wasting valuable cyber-bullying time having to close pop-up windows, encouraging them to get involved in Chat Roulette and the like.
Knowing the filter is coming, even that there are trials of some of what the filter will do, helps me sleep at night. Friends, any kind of internet filter that will ensure I can not/will not be able to access information deemed to be inappropriate by a faceless group of hand-picked individuals who will protect my every click-through by blacklisting websites known to contain offensive material is a good thing. As a voting adult, I elect my officials to make these decisions on my behalf. I elect them to determine that twogirl ...
Welcome to your new career in IT! Ready for a fulfilling role massaging fragile egos, never getting frustrated and always being the bad guy? Excellent!
I don't know anyone in the IT industry whose driver for career in IT stemmed from a passion for customer service. In general, I find that most IT pros started up in IT because, well, they like IT. It's interesting. The hitherto-unknown industry expectation for unparalleled customer service came as a rude shock to most:
"But, I work with computers...why do I have to be nice to people as well?"
Of course, it's not so black and white, and as we progress throughout our careers customer service skills are acquired along with the ability to fudge figures, lie to, um I mean "creatively inform" management, deliver presentations, put together business cases and tender for work. Sometimes we even work with computers too.
But back to customer service. Sometimes, just sometimes mind you, it feels like we're banging our heads against the proverbial brick wall. How many different ways can you explain copy-and-paste to a user bef ...
I did something stupid - deleted myself!
Hi,
This is my first blog post, so be gentle on me :) Yes it's a long one... hopefully someone does read this to the end.
So the title of this is a bit of a giveaway. I admit it, I did something I really should have double checked before doing. Sit down in front of the glow of your computer screen, and read a tale of sorrow, pain, and frustration... all caused by a small oversight.
It was a sunny morning, or so the desktop widget told me (for I have no windows in my office.. no not Windows, I do have that). As my Windows 7 testing progressed, I decided it was time to clean up AD a little. I moved all my shiny new GPO's into the root of the domain, and set them to apply to Windows 7 computers only. Rather safe, nobody would get any wacky new settings. So it was also time to clean up that Windows 7 OU I'd created to do some testing. I had a look, and there were 2 users listed. My boss, and a test account. I moved both accounts into a general 'IT' OU, and being the good Sys A ...
I know piracy is wrong and hurts software developers, but I was excited by the prospect of trying the next version of System Center Configuration Manager (aka ConfigMgr or SCCM)! I've certainly learnt my lesson from this, and hopefully have some valuable insights to share with you all on what's obviously a way-not-ready-for-primetime version of Microsoft's awesome configuration management product!
I was fortunate enough to get my hands on a pirated copy of the next version of Microsoft's System Center Configuration Manager (ConfigMgr) by answering a spam email offering the "latest appzzzz for cheap". I knew it was legit by the number of z's and happily coughed up the USD$24.95 for "Configmgr vNext".
I've been a big fan of ConfigMgr since SMS 2003 days, and was eager to get my hands dirty with this version. Little did I know what a trial this would turn out to be!
I was initially very impressed by the time it took to deliver- only 72 hours before I had a knock at the door! This version promised to totally change the way people looked at configuration management ... and it has certainly done that. Imagine my surprise to discover that Microsoft seem to have done away with the hardware/software concept, and gone for a physical human. I'm not sure if this is maybe just an alpha, but there are certainly changes done by the people who pirated him. As an examp ...