Sean Doyle

For those unaware, I received an amazing windfall in an Xbox 360 last Christmas. True story, I actually got it through my work's secret santa, and yes I thought there was a $10 limit as well. :)

So since then I've been heavily into the console gaming, largely because the couch is a far more comfy solution for when enjoying a game as opposed to hunched over a computer desk. It's also far more casual in its approach, in that I can pause anytime and not require hours of commitment to see progress (Hi WoW!).

I've also been following a few gaming blogs recently, and subsequently have been getting excited about games releases. Some new ones coming out / already out I really want:

• Batman - Arkham Asylum: Looks fantastic, and literally everyone is going nuts for this one. Gotta say it looks like fun but fairly involved.
  
• Halo 3:ODST: Firefight mode looks way cool, however I will need to be online when my friends are (which isn't happening much lately). I might try expanding my list a tad...
  
• Forza 3: Looks like Gran Tourismo for the Xbox, but with better graphics and less fucking around under the hood, which I appreciate to a degree but I'm not a mechanic...

Of course, I promised myself I wouldn't buy any more games until I finish half of the ones I already have (namely BioShock at the moment, which is just made of awesome).

For a while now I've been going back through my Blizzard back catalogue and I've been lamenting at the fact my Warcraft 3 CD is busted - won't install at all. The MPQ data file was borked, and no amount of cleaning or fixing helped any. In the end I tossed it believing that I would have to buy it again (which at $20-$30 bucks didn't worry me much) until I saw the new Battle.net which allows you to download the client fresh from Blizzard....if you have the CD key, which I lost!

At any rate, I bought the game from the Blizzard store and it added the new CD key to my battle.net account, and I was able to download the game in its entirety. I love the new battle.net, and I'm glad services like Steam and Xbox live have a great digital delivery system that allows you to download as much as you like - hey, you bought it right?

So I'm not happily burning through the ROC campaign and reliving my Uni days :).

Now I have a livejournal client for the blackberry. Very cool.
Now, to stop playing around and get back to work.

I've wanted to say it. For months. But I haven't.

Not for fear of being ridiculed, but rather that I haven't really wanted to talk politics since the last election. Maybe I OD'ed on it before. Or maybe because after (seemingly) everyone was so happy with the result I thought it best to just sit on my opinion.

But thats it. I've had it.

Rudd is fucking useless. I'm all for IDEAS to help people buy their first home, especially since I want to. But come on - don't PROMISE you can do something which, unless you take it ALL on yourself, you CANNOT deliver.

And his "price of living" slash grocery prices changes? Commission a report saying nothing can be done. Love it!

What about carbon trading? Yeah thats cool - here, emitters have to pay license fees, but we'll help them get them through one of subsidies. Drivers have to pay MORE for fuel, but we'll lower the excise so they aren't worse off. The end result? Price of electricity goes up, driving stays the same, and we go right on polluting.

I mean, it was better that he had ideas. It was better that he wanted do to something. But isn't it so empty when in the end he does nothing under the guise of doing everything?

U-s-e-l-e-s-s.

There. I said it.

Yeah, I would apologise for not posting here in the last few months, but really I would have to be sorry first :).

Essentially I haven't had the time to post lengthy narratives on my recent goings on. I've tried to use things like Twitter (and to a lesser extent Plurk) to try and get my internet social fix.

So if you're on either of those, look me up (seandoyle on both). I'm not nuking the journal or anything, but I don't see myself typing more than this in the next few months at least.

Taken from news.com.au:

Mr McNamara said another problem developing rapidly in the troubled market was the large stock of unsold inventory, creating a bottleneck.

The situation reflected the large number of people originally encouraged into the market by government initiatives such as the First Home Buyers grant.

"A lot of first-home buyers were encouraged into the market and took out loans whose repayment schedules were far larger than they could reasonably pay," he said.

"Rising mortgage rates are bound to force many to sell. Buyer confidence is low, and there's much more stock on the market. Real estate agents find themselves with all this stock, but nowhere near the buyer inquiry they need to sell them."

Economics 101:
Q: What happens when supply is high and demand is low?
A: The price comes down to meet demand.

Most of the time I'm talking out of my #$@%. The odd occasion though, I do happen to be right...

I normally pride myself on my tech projects, but they always seem to end out badly. I recently embarked on a little home project to outfit myself with a nice media centre setup with bugger all in the way of serious money. This has involved:

1. A linux home server that would not only store all my media but also provide a home SSH / MYSQL / Code development base
2. A modded xbox with XBMC installed on it
3. A wireless network to stream all the data together between media centre, 2 laptops and the server itself.

I've sourced some 2nd hand disks from a friend at work, and attempted to setup a nice 900GB RAID 5 array using Linux, but I do believe that after 1 hard disk failure and some major crashing from the old POS that I bought close to 5 years ago now the idea of a linux server is officially dead. Any alternative is going to cost me serious bucks, which lets be honest, I should have invested at the start as opposed to this 2nd hand piecemeal shit. In the end I should have just bitten the bullet, saved the money up and bought a nice big NAS solution that did exactly that, consumed 1/3 the power and did everything I wanted straight away. A couple of brand new hard disks and I would have been in business.

Now I have bits and pieces of hardware, and have potentially lost my entire movie collection (not to mention my file backups) as a result.

So yeah, trying hard not to bring out the old fists of rage right now.

PS - sorry for the lack of update recently, like you can see I have been a tad preoccupied.

http://www.joystiq.com/2008/02/27/ps3-head-tracking-only-needs-camera/

As my work mate said:

sony > nintendo

Anyone who knows me would know that I'm crazy about a particular dip that you'll find in any respectable deli - Basil and Fetta. Its a combination of....yeah, Basil and Fetta cheese that is awesome on some crunchy bread or watercrackers.

I have started up my herb garden again, only this time on a much larger scale. I'm happy to say my herbs are going gangbusters, especially the basil, which is now about 50cm high out of the pot and provides with more basil leaves than I know what to do with. I also had seedlings of Oregano, Dill, Parsley, Thyme and also Mint and Rosemary in pots. Unfortunately I forgot to poke holes in the bottom of the metal pots I used for the 2 latter, and although the Mint is fine with it the Rosemary is now completely dead. RIP poor Tuscan Blue.

However the rest of them are also to the point now where I can harvest. So I've been trolling websites looking for a good recipe for Basil, and I found a pesto recipe on the ABC website. When I dug up the food processor, combined all the ingredients and had a taste, it wasn't too bad, however I found it oily and lacking substance.

Then I thought - I wonder if its as simple as adding plain fetta cheese to pesto for the all awesome basil and fetta dip. I'm hear today, gentle readers, to tell you that yes, it is that fucking simple. I made a simple pesto recipe which involved 3 cups of fresh basil and added about 200g of low fat Fetta cheese and voila - Basil and Fetta dip. It tasted awesome.

I have pictures of it all, they will be coming soon. But gotta say, very proud of myself.

So....freaking...



COOL

My apologies for my lack of blogging content of late.

I'd say I've been preoccupied but the fact of the matter is I don't have a whole lot to blog about lately. So, instead, I thought I would ramble about other things that have happened recently that I might comment on. You know, because its my blog, and your supposed to put opinions in it.

• Apple released a new laptop and I realised I'm not the blind macboy I used to be. Yeah it looks cool, but seriously you can grab laptops with similar weight, dimensions and screen size with twice the hard drive, more memory and more CPU for about $600 less cash. Buying apple products has become like buying Gucci or other fashion labels - the $600 is for the Apple logo embedded on the back of the screen. Excuse me while I don't drop to my knees and bow.
  
• Wedding planning is hard work. Theres about a million things to think of and neither of us has thought of them before. Its heaps of fun though, I go all warm and fuzzy thinking about it. But you don't want to hear about that.
  
• I have a rough list of things that I will never be able to afford that I want to buy, and its still a modestly sized LCD HD TV.
  
• I also have plans to source an old Xbox and make me one of these. I think I can get a hold of one pretty cheaply, and from there I can mod it and install the software. It sounds pretty cool - I can stream a lot of things to it over the network, once I find out the best method of pairing it to my WPA2 home wireless.
  
• Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers. Apparently.
  
• Suncorp are a very slack organisation and if you value your money you'll stay away from them. Away I say!
  
• Mytips is steaming ahead, soon I'll be able to upload the latest release to its new home soon. I still haven't tested it with Internet Explorer though - damn that fracking browser. Football is coming soon!! Weeee!
  
• Work is stable, considering they did some things that boosted my morale. I still have my eyes set firmly in working abroad, if only in a different city. I would like a nice change of scenery. I honestly don't know though whats going to happen. Definately nothing until after the wedding.
  
• Apparently radio announcers have such little thought to their programming that they can get rid of it when a celebrity dies suddenly. They spoke about Heath Ledger's death almost constantly for an hour, dribbling details out like it was "breaking news" when it was all posted on the web an hour ago and they just kept people hanging. I liked the guy personally, I thought he was a good actor, and The Dark Knight should be a w e s o m e, but it made me think - commercial radio talk nothing but shit don't they?
  
• I wanna see Juno. I wanna see it now. Why am I not seeing it now?
  
• I really really need to go back to bed.

So there ya go. Don't say I'm dead somewhere, I can still spit out random gibberish. Just like a radio announcer...

My mac is officially a piece of shit. Ever since I installed leopard it crashes almost as many times as it boots. Sometimes it doesnt boot at all. I'm fucking sick of it.

Its going back to next byte next week. But I know exactly what will happen - we cant find anything wrong with it. Well thats just fine, just watch me never buy your fucked up products again. I'm the only fucking person on the planet who has this many problems, but just because its rare doesn't mean I'm not going to walk away like the irate customer I am.

There. Done. Said. Moving on now.

Been using Ubuntu on my work laptop for the past month now and I love it to bits. Even dispite the fact that, with the dual screens setup I've made, my video card is incapable of the nifty compiz 3D effects natively supported in Gutsy. But dual screens! I can now use my neato little script to autodetect displays I plug in, resize the desktop resolution all without restarting GDM. Very impressive. Also the fact that a lot of neat apps like Pidgin come with it without the need to install my own custom revision.

Oncall again this weekend, but thankfully for the last time this year and roughly 3 weeks into January. It will be the biggest oncall break I've had since returning from Europe. Its been a real struggle lately at work, very busy and its not letting up as all the pending work gets squeezed through the cracks before Christmas kicks in proper.

You might have noticed no election speak on my blog. Thats the way its staying. Nothing to do with my stance, how I voted or my reaction to the result - I'm just sick of talking politics.

Oh yeah. WoW's patching died with the laptop. I now need to reinstall the entire fucking game. Not bloody likely.

So yeah. Tired, bored, working late nights, etc. Living the fucking dream.

Being a horrible friend sucks. It leaves this sort of guilty feeling in your stomach, but only slightly, kind of gnawing at you from the inside. Ok so its not that bad, but I do feel a little guilty to all those who are emailing / calling / IMing and I keep forgetting to get back to them. Its the unfortunate truth that the silly season has landed and I think I'm busy for the next 4-5 weeks with a lot of stuff.

Trying to keep up with work and everything in between is another full time job these days. But enough of my yapping - just know that I'm not trying to ignore anyone. Sorry all :(.

Tee hee.

Poll #1075445 Sean's Portable Gaming Solution
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 4

What portable game platform should I invest in?

Why?

I can't decide! There are titles on either side that I like, although on that score the PSP games look better. The PSP screen is aweosme yet the controls on the DS look cool and it is the cheaper option.

Either that or I carry around a paperbook in the case that I'm out somewhere and bored :)

Normally when I've scraped the bottom of the bookmarks barrel of things to read when bored, I know I'm having a slow day. However recently when I've had nothing to do I have been dreaming about the many gadgets gizmos and, well lets face it, boys toys I want to buy. I guess its sort of the carrot I'm dangling in front of me to help keep me motivated about getting out of debt. By saving money, I can spend money. Something like that.

Firstly of course is the new PC I sorely need. I don't have one - I have a work laptop which basically is slaved to the proxy and network settings of work, because changing them causes too much hassle (believe me, its a pain) and my apple powerbook which is becoming more and more inadequate for my computing needs. I want a nice kickass PC with 22" of LCD panel, 500 gb of storage, oodles of memory and CPU and a beefy video card that will play nice games at insane framerates.

Secondly I want a new Linux server. This won't need more than onboard graphics and a basic CPU, but I want to setup at MINIMUM 1TB of storage. The geek in me wants to buy 4 disks and Raid 10 them, but that just screams of wasteful. Most likely I'll buy 3 (or 5 :D) 500GB disks and put them in a Raid 5 array. I'll also use it to convert video to iPod format while I work / sleep, use it for my web playground and setup my own mail server. I'm such a geek.

I think that would tide me over until I pay off the last of my debt, the personal loan. I told myself that when I finish paying that off, I will reward myself by saving a few grand and buying a new LCD / Plasma TV with a Mac Mini media centre. A PS3 or Xbox 360 would be nice but it depends on what I can do with it in terms of a media centre - a Mac Mini I KNOW can do everything. But it would be nice to get a nextgen console in the next year or two.

Ahh, to dream.

My mind usually strays over to my journal when I think about the last time I updated it. Should I post random facts about my day to day life, or should I only post to it when something significant happens? I suppose if it was the latter I wouldn't really have a need for this thing :).

Work has been increasingly busy of late. Due to the high turnover the people who are sticking around are the people who end up picking up the slack. You would expect this, however it seems that new starters are becoming hard to find and the gap being left isn't being filled very quickly. It concerns me a lot right now, especially considering the opportunities someone like me has access to. At the present time however I'm content to stay the course and see how things turn out. Theres been enough change in my life for the time being.

Speaking of which, my Lancer is now a thing of the past, replaced with more debt and a 2003 Toyota Corolla hatch. Although I dreaded the switch to automatic I must admit I'm loving it. Carpets are the last thing outstanding in a busy 2 months for us, and I'm getting quite sick and tired of the standard response I keep getting from the agency. If nothing comes of this next week I'm going to have to push things to the next level. Which is going to suck.

Aside from that everything else kinda ploughs along. I wish I had a final list of photos from Europe to post but really we haven't finished going through the pile yet. Thats my main task for this week - post the photos. Hopefully I'm successful.

Hehe:

http://www.ctrlaltdel-online.com/comics/20070917.jpg

Ooooooo

http://www.apple.com/imac/

Aahhhhh

Translation: I want one

Oh man....

http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,22190113-2,00.html

I like a day off too, but seriously, I think I'd rather go to work than have a day off for Steve Irwin. I liked the guy, but I hardly see him in the same light as say Vietnam / WW1/2 veterans.

Thats marketing disguised heavily as sentimental hooey, which I can't stand sometimes....

Yes I am still alive
Yes I am back - most of you know that already :)
Yes I will eventually post about the last few days of my trip.

True story is - the web-based journal posting thingy ate it when I finished it and after it cost me about 4 pounds. I was not happy, to the point where I have put off trying to repost it from memory.

In the meantime, its my birthday, I got some really cool new toons, today will involve pints of beer, and next week Sarah gets back.

Life is still good.