Multiplayer gaming

Having now played a fair number of games both multiplayer and single playaer, I can happily say that multiplayer is the way of the future. rahaeli has been saying that three person gaming sessions are great and she's got a very good point, it turns gaming from a lonesome (if frequently fantastic) experience, into a shared experience, whereby not only do are you enjoying the game more because you're kicking the ass of someone you know (or possibly having your ass kicked, should you be a wuss), but it gives you experiences in common with the other person and it's something to bond over.

Two examples that spring quickly to mind are Mario Kart (which was kinda fun single player, but an absolute riot with 4 of us clustered around the N64) and Serious Sam, which was an ok diversion by itself, but massively good fun when played by me and Joe (although we didn't play it more than a few times, so it obviously didn't have much replayability).

I've also been a lot of Counter-Strike which is massively enhanced by the fact that you're shooting real people, who do real, unpredictable, things and learn from mistakes (your and theirs) and yesterday I played Wolfenstein online for the first time, which was a pretty fantastic experience. I can happily say that I've now learnt two important tips for World War 2 combat:
1) Don't set someone on fire with your flamethrower and then walk into them.
2) Rocket launchers are not close quarter weapons.

Annotations

Let it be known that shoud someone wish to buy me this CD I'd be happy to offer them my first born child as soon as I have one to get rid of.

Vernor Vinge is one of my fave Sci-Fi writers, mostly for Fire upon the Deep, A Deepness in the Sky and Marooned in Realtime (although he also invented cyberspace in "True Names"). My favourite of his books in Fire upon the Deep and it was made available on CD (along with all the other nominees for the 93 Hugo awards). What was special about it was that it came with all of his annotations concerning the writing of the book and its background.

Sadly, the CD is out of print and will not be reprinted due to copyright issues (there's too many people to ever make it worthwhile). The annotations may well be reprinted at some point, but that's not certain.

Every so often someone makes one of the CDs available, and in this case someone has just found a small pile of them and put them on Ebay (all profits to the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

If it wasn't for my extreme poverty at the moment, I'd soooo be bidding for this. Hopefully someday more will become available when I have more money.

Alas.

Stuck in the weblog with you

I'm in work this weekend and next, because these servers are being installed.

However, most of the time there's not a lot I can do because the installation expert is actually setting them up. So I've got to be here, but my time is mostly my own. Oh, and there's no users about to get in the way and annoy me. And I get 4 days off later in lieu, which is nice. So, in the end, I'm actually pretty much in favour of this.

But as I'm here with bugger all to do, and a free brain, expect more updates than normal.

Why Livejournal?

I've kept a kind of journal before. I downloaded Radio Userland because it allowed me toconstantly get up to date news headlines from any news site that I wanted(and it was fantastic for that). But it did far more than that, it was also a web server in its own right, and included the facility of publishing a weblog (either individual entires of ones based on news stories).

If you take a look at the remains you can see that the problem was that it tended to inspire notes entirely based around news stories - not a lot of use really for anything other than my thoughts about current news.

So when I moved computer and reinstalled Radio I didn't carry on with the journal. Until recently, when Joe showed me Livejournal and I felt my old writing urge come back (I used to write a lot, more on that some other time). And I decided it was well worth the $10 to for a trial run at it. And it's been so much fun I suspect I'll be here for a long time.

Anyway, Radio version 8 has just come out and it looks fantastic and does all sorts of cool stuff, and I was tossing up whether to do my journal entirely internally again, or carry on with Livejournal. And, in the end, what sold it to me was that Livejournal has a community. I've found interesting people here and they've found me, and this just in the first month. I haven't made deep friends yet, but I definitely get the feeling that I could given time.

So Livejournal stays. And I'll need a different reason to justify spending $40 on Radio.

End of the Day of No Work

So....

I sat about the office waiting for the upgrade guy to do the upgrade. I read some mail, read some newsgroups, wrote some journal entries and generally lazed.

Erin arrived back in the country at 13:00, so I phoned her a couple of times to make sure she was getting back in one piece (she was tired beyond belief, but she made it back eventually), and to be honest I'd rather have been back in Stirling with her. But what the heck, we were getting this upgrade done, weren't we?

Actually, no. After about 3 hours of fun because we had two network cards in the machine, we finally got the Exchange 5.5 mailboxes copied across to the new machine, so that we could upgrade it to Exchange 2000 without losing the old server.

Unfortunately, at this point we discovered that the old machine had been running Exchange 5.5 Enterprise, not Exchange 5.5 Standard. The difference between the two is a little bit more scalability and about £5000. And you can't downgrade from Enterprise to Standard. And you can't copy the files from a machine running Enterprise onto a machine running Standard. And we only bought Exchange 2000 Standard.

After a brief conflab, where we decided that we could just install Exchange 2000 Enterprise and that when MS found out they'd probably only kill one of the three of us as an example, leaving the others of us merely penniless and starving, we decided to try a few roundabout things - like borrowing Exchange 5.5 Standard from someone else, moving everything across, or other more technical solutions that I won't bore you with here.

Upshot, at 5:10, I left for the evening, leaving Graham and John (the upgrade guy) trying to think of a new solution. Graham's gonna call me at 10:30 tomorrow morning and tell me if they got anywhere. If they have, I go in to actually get stuff done. Otherwise, it's another week down before we get started on this upgrade that was supposed to happen last weekend.

Oh, and now Erin is lying snoring in the bed to my left, and I (having done nothing today) am not tired enough to sleep, so I'm idly surfing and typing up Livejournals.

Fantastic.