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How was 2009? Well it was absolutely crap! It seems the closing months of 2008 were a teaser of what was to come…
I think the blog has probably suffered in 2009, not just because of Twitter but as it became a bit [more] of a receptacle for my ramblings about life, so what better way of starting 2010 than to ramble on about my life in 2009. Cheaper than a psychologist I suppose!
Work was a bit slow in 2009, the recession has had an effect on the company and we’ve had a couple of rounds of redundancies which doesn’t do much for morale. Plus our three year server replacement schedule which should have seen me rushed off my feet was postponed. In April our IT department grew to three people which made it a lot easier to focus on work without the constant interruptions of having to deal with support calls. The new person? She was a bit talkative but got us all chatting and joking around a lot more, but unfortunately due to job insecurity and a better job offer she decided to move on and left in October. The lack of major work probably been for the best as I’ve had a few months of being too pre-occupied with other things and unable to concentrate, I shudder to think what I’d have broken if I had been going round our offices replacing servers!
Fortunately there was plenty of escapism from the ‘real world’ at the Cinema. Star Trek was much better than I’d hoped and while Transformers 2 wasn’t great, Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince was brilliant and really looking forward to the last two, even if that means it’s the end. I have to say seeing them at the IMAX with a theatre full of fans really adds something to the experience. In December went to see “2012″ at the Bedford Cinema, seriously awful place now, completely run down, it ruined an already weak film. It says a lot when I’d rather spend nearly £60 and a 4hour round trip going to London BFI IMAX than pay £5 to see films in my home town! Have yet to see Avatar, wanted to see that at the IMAX in 3D but don’t think I’m going to get around to it.
Gaming in 2009 was pretty slow, almost no games I was interested in for most of the year. Fortunately the later half of 2009 saw Uncharted 2, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, and Left4Dead 2 released, all excellent games, L4D2 especially nearly caused me a heart attack a few weeks ago with the stress of one of the campaigns final missions! Plus thanks to some super Steam sales I’ve grabbed Red Faction: Guerilla, Batman Arkham Asylum, The Crysis Pack, and Mass Effect 1. Hopefully 2010 will bring a few more new games. Looking forward to Mass Effect 2, and Natural Selection 2 the sequel to one of my all time favourite multiplayer games.
 Beginning of August Kainz got me looking at Apple Macs again, my previous experience hadn’t been that great, but I decided to go for it anyway. I’ve already written a blog entry for my new Mac experience but as something of an update I’m still very happy with my purchase, I’ve been using it over Christmas and hardly turned my PC on except to play a few games. It does annoy me that while all the Apple stuff “just works” it can’t be bent or twisted to work the way I want it to work! Hopefully the new Apple iTablet/iSlate device coming out will either not interest me or be way too expensive, otherwise I’ll end up getting that to.
 Been a bit annoyed with myself regarding my photography, missed a couple of decent opportunities to go out and take some nice pictures. I have been out a few times this year and most recently went to Rutland Waters and the surrounding area, was a bit rainy but got some good pictures. Still not getting the quality I’d hoped for when I got the D450, I think I said it last year but I blame myself! Really need to read and practice more and spend time getting the shot right. Can’t really afford any nice new lenses but hope to get the so called ‘nifty fifty’ as apparently that is good value for money. Hoping to get a printer in 2010 so I can print a few out and put them up, need to perfect my post processing first though.
Ever since I was a kid, home was my haven, no matter what crap was going on outside of those 4 walls I’d could always go home and get away from it all, relax, and be myself. In 2009 that ended. I’d always thought my parents were chalk and cheese together but Christmas 2008 had been worse than normal, and in late February my dad walked out. Since then it’s been a case of keeping my head down, getting on with things, and trying not to upset anyone. Although I’m saving money it seems unlikely I’ll have enough to buy a place of my own any time soon, especially now house prices are back on the rise. Difficult to see how I should move on, but hopefully something shall reveal itself, I already won £6.10p on EuroMillions so the only way is up!!
So that’s my crap year. I’m not expecting much from 2010 either but hope that it will at least get back in to some kind of order that I can move on with in 2011!
 Mini review/observations of my MacBook Pro
Back in the old days I felt that having two PCs was the best way to go. A high-spec PC for my gaming habit and a low spec machine for general day to day web browsing, email, and general apps. That was in 2003 and by 2005 the low spec machine was becoming a painfully slow machine. By December 2005 I’d had 4 years of Windows XP and while it wasn’t unreliable or slow, I was bored of it! It’d still be another 2 years before Vista made an appearance.
I’d seen Macs before and had dismissed them as over expensive, but now there was the MacMini on the market, it was exactly what I wanted, a small low spec machine for general day to day work, this is what it was being marketed as! So after a 30min play around with one in the local PC World I hit the Apple website and plonked down £565 on a 1.42Ghz PowerPC MacMini with 1Gb of RAM and an 80Gb HDD. I was pretty impressed with the hardware, however as it was an alien OS to me (OS X Tiger at the time) I think I struggled to get on with it. This was in the dark days, before FireFox had really caught on and a lot of websites still used WMV and IE6 compatibility. This caused the little MacMini a lot of problems, any time some intensive Flash kicked in or I wanted to play a WMV file the fans would crank up to maximum and it would grind to a halt. After about 18 months I got sick of it and went back to a single Windows PC just in time for Vista, vowing never to return to a Mac…
Continue reading Back to Mac
Haven’t updates here for ages, getting a very bad habit!
Life:
Not much going on at all to be honest. Trying to save money, though I do have a little holiday booked in the next few weeks. Works been a bit depressing lately, had two rounds of redundancies cost cutting measures which has killed morale. Plus the woman who came to work in IT with me and boss six months ago has had a better/more secure offer and left us last week, I think she’d been a pretty positive influence on us both so it’s a real shame that she’s left. House prices are going up again, so the house hunt continues to be something of a long running unfunny joke.
Winter setting in now, temperatures dropping and we are still holding out on putting the heating on, got a hoody I now wear at home with the hood up, but haven’t had to resort to the two pairs of socks… yet!
Photography:
 Not had much chance to take pictures, camera bag has been sitting in the corner of my room looking dusty and unloved. Did manage to go out to Whipsnade zoo a few weeks ago, haven’t been to a zoo in years so was pretty interesting, went during the week so very few people around which was even better! Took about 140 photos and whittled them down to about 20 which I tweaked a little. Photos are here, as well as Picasa and Flickr (I’ve not decided which service I prefer yet!), still not entirely happy with all my shots, really need to practice more and pay attention to the settings when taking the photos.
Films:
 After seeing Star Trek at the IMAX earlier in the year, I went back again with my dad to see it. Since then I’ve returned to the IMAX to see Transformers 2 and Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince.
Transformers 2; wasn’t as good as the first, impressive effects, but I wasn’t a fan of the in-the-action camera work, even on the IMAX screen!
Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince, probably the best Harry Potter film so far, the opening 10 minutes were in 3D so we all sat with stupid glasses on. I was surprised how good the 3D looked but was disappointed it only lasted the first 10mins. Wished they had shown Dumbledores funeral but beyond that was impressed and look forward to seeing The Deathly Hallows part 1 next year!
Now waiting for all of the above to come out on BluRay.
Other films I’ve seen in the last few months: Terminator Salvation = meh, nothing special at all. How to Lose Friends & Alienate people = It has Simon Pegg and Megan Fox in it, what could go wrong?! Very funny, loved it. Knowing = really enjoyed this to, bit weird but good mystery film. Seven Pounds = didn’t like it, thought the ‘twist’ was pretty obvious from the very beginning. The International = enjoyable action/thriller. X-Men origins: Wolverine = meh, same as Terminator Salvation, no surprise Star Trek beat both of these at the box office.
Gaming:
It’s been a very quiet summer for gaming this year. I got Killzone 2 for the PS3, hated that, really should have cancelled my pre-order when I didn’t like the demo. Played Prototype for the PC, was enjoyable enough but pretty much a throwaway once it’s done. Played through the DLC for Fallout 3, that was fun but I’d agree with the developers that the DLC has reached it’s natural conclusion. Looking forward to Fallout 4 whenever that turns up. Ghostbusters, great game really sticks to the films spirit (pardon the pun). Also ran through Half Life 2, and Episode 1 & 2 again, as good as always. Even played through Call of Duty 4 again.
Needed the distraction this weekend so plonked down £39 for Uncharted 2 for the PS3, a truly excellent game which shows other PS3 developers programming on the PS3 can be done properly. No 15 minute game cache installation, no load times between levels. Beautiful graphics and level architecture, excellent 5.1 sound, an awesome soundtrack, and great story & voice acting. I think I’d definitely put it up there in my top 10 single player experiences.
Games to look forward to in the next few months. Got Left4Dead 2 for PC pre-ordered, Modern Warfare 2 for PC. Assassins Creed 2 and Mass Effect 2 coming along later. Will probably wait for the reviews of BioShock 2 as it’s not being made entirely by the same team. Jury is still out on Max Payne 3, could go either way at the moment.
Not much else to report really, feeling miserable at the moment so hope that hasn’t reflected in my writing, that and the fact I typed it all up at 2:30am of a Monday morning!
I’ve been absent from my blog for quite a while now, mostly down to Twitter where I can moan in short bursts. I therefore thought it might be a good idea to do an update with all the things I have (or haven’t) done since the last update.
Star Trek @ IMAX
On Thursday 7th May I travelled in to London to go to the BFI IMAX to see a film I’d been waiting years to go and see - Star Trek! I’d reserved my tickets back at the beginning of April and it was lucky I did, the showing at 3pm I attended was sold out, even the rubbish seats in the front corners were sold.
I’d never been to an IMAX before but I was sure that I didn’t want to see it at the Bedford Cineworld fleapit. Walking in to the IMAX auditorium not only was there no coca-cola sloshed up the screen or popcorn stuck to it, it was bloody huge! The seat I’d booked (K19) was perfect dead centre, the screen occupied my total field of vision. This was the 2nd showing of the film (the previous being at midnight) and the place was packed with Sci-Fi fans discussions about Fringe, Lost, Cloverfield, BSG, DS9, Voyager, TNG, and Babylon 5 were banded about like Britains Got Talent and Big Brother are in the ‘real’ world!
After a few trailers (annoyingly no Transformers 2 trailer) the film started. Amazing film, looked and sounded great, the storyline was good and the new actors bought the old characters back to life, lots of in-jokes for the trek fans but still fresh for everyone else to enjoy. I did have a couple of complaints, I wasn’t fond of the music, mostly down to preferring the cinematic Star Trek theme rather than the TOS wailing theme. Also wasn’t fond of Scottys ‘tube trip’, or the new Engineering. Overall though, I really enjoyed it, so much so I’m paying to go in to London again and see it on June 8th.
I’m also rather in love with the IMAX Experience, and would consider going back to see Transformers 2 and Harry Potter, so long as they don’t fall during School Summer holidays!
Photos
 Haven’t really had chance recently to go through them properly but have been out and about to take a few photos. Still getting mixed results, I really need to ask on a forum what I’m doing wrong! I’ve uploaded the latest sets of photos to my Blog gallery and to Picasa. Also want to get a small portable tripod as lots of my photos are still betting blurred because I can’t hold it still, just don’t want some massive 4kg thing that will be awkward to carry around.
Gaming
It’s been a quiet few months on the gaming scene, nothing new has come out that really caught my interest. Been playing some Left 4 Dead and Team Fortress 2 again, both have recently had content additions. I was more than a little disappointed that L4D didn’t introduce any new campaigns only one proper new map and a bunch of modified ones for the Survival game mode. Survival does exactly what it says on the tin, you have to survive against unlimited attacks of zombies, and assorted monsters, it is fun for a quick game and you aren’t stuck playing a campaign for two hours. Team Fortress 2 update has been interesting, some new weapons and maps, not sure about the time release weapon upgrades but we will see.
Also been playing a lot of Supreme Commander/Forged Alliance with friends online, a tough challenge with some games lasting three hours! Only issue we’ve had is the rather inconsistant AI, several games the AI seems to simply give up or get stuck. Could do with more decent maps as well.
With E3 just finished I’m definately looking forward to Modern Warfare 2, Left 4 Dead 2, Alan Wake, and Supreme Commander 2. I was a little disapointed that there was no mention of Half Life: Episode 3 but I’m still hoping for a release in November this year! Also Unknown Worldshave finally officially announced Natural Selection 2 which I’ve already pre-ordered, loved the original Half Life mod.
Home
After my last entry life has continued much the same, only now I’m getting daily alerts from Rightmove.co.uk about houses I can’t afford or mobile homes I don’t want!
That’s about it for now, hopefully the next blog post won’t be so delayed. Off to play Supreme Commander Forged Alliance now, I’m getting moaned at for delaying the game!
Well my predictions for 2009 were accurate, it’s only March and things have already gone to shit. Dads moved out. Probably going to have to sell the house and find somewhere of my own, not enough savings, and as I’ve already found out before I can’t really afford to live on my own with my wage anyway. That’s not to mention the first sweep of redundances at work last week, so will I even have a job in 6-12 months? Just great, still there is that new Star Trek film to look forward to, right?!
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January 11th, 2010 | Category: 
