Running Again

Completed day 5 in a continuous series of runs. It was not as hot as yesterday, and I had a drink with me. Run at shotover tonight, well thats the plan.....

lunch

I listened to "Scouting for Girls", "Heartbeat". Thanks matthieu, that all sounds very positive. I had a baguette with bri and bacon, that was not so good.

And a cookie, that was not so good either.

so lunch was not so good.

Matthieu and christine ran round burgess field, well done. I wont get to run until tomorrow morning on therunning machine.

http://open.spotify.com/track/1QNFYOBCpo8Pl6CYNGLFQz

spotify:track:1QNFYOBCpo8Pl6CYNGLFQz

Pictures in the blog

Doesnt seem so easy to put pictures in the blog.

From NorthernIreland

Breakfast at the hilton

Fruit covered in natural yoghurt and added honey.

I was a happy man.

From NorthernIreland

This was the tea and cafe inthe room

Red Nose Day

Today is Red Nose Day. I wore a red t-shirt and a red jumper . I donated a total of £1.15 to Comic Relief. My form teacher gave my form class a class detention because we were talking too much in registration. Three people in my class did a sponsored silence and 2 of them had broken it by break, thanks to my class. 2 Pairs of people tied their feet or hands together and stayed like this all of the school day.

First lesson we had drama, kind of boring and the teacher had no Red Nose Day spirit. Second lesson was IT in which our teacher said "if you donate to Comic Relief I will let you have a fun lesson". In Music we listened to pieces of music about trains and then made our own. At lunch, I played football. In science we looked at what electromagnet are used for in everyday life. In history we looked at The Tennis Court Oath, to do with the french revolution.

After school I went to my drum lesson. When I got back I looked at the OxFringe program and only saw one thing that looked interesting. OxFringe is sponsored by The Midlands co-operative which is awesome which means something good that I dont really know what.

S.W.A.T. film review

S.W.A.T. is an very, very, very good film. It is an action film about a S.W.A.T. team and like all action films it is set in LA(Los Angeles, United States). This is a very good film, it is better than James Bond, Mission Impossible, etc, anyway what I'm trying to say it is an awesome film.
It is directed by Clark Johnson and was released in 2003
One of the main characters is played by Samuel L. Jackson, he plays Sgt Hondo(his nickname) who is the leader of the S.W.A.T. team. He plays this role very well and it is nice to see Samuel L. J playing when he was a bit younger. Another of the main characters is Jim Street played by Colin Farrell, he is kind of the big main character as he is the most seen character in the whole film.

The film starts with Street and his partner helping to stop a hostage situation, his partner shoots a hostage by mistake but to help the hostage, he gets fired. Street gets demoted to cleaning boots and repairing guns. Sgt Hondo is commanded to contsruct another S.W.A.T. team. Street is his driver and eventually Hondo asks him to join the team. Street grudgingly accepts.
The team qualify to become a proper S.W.A.T. team. The team eventually are set a big challenge in which they shoot lots of bad guys and cool stuff like that.

I really think you should watch this film if you like action films or even it is just an awesome film.
It doesnt seem to out of date as it was released in 2003. I would give it 10/10.
Here are some links that might interest you.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0257076/
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Samuel-Jackson-Farrell-Michelle-Rodrigues/dp/B0000UI2RS/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=dvd&qid=1236795273&sr=8-1
http://www.lovefilm.com/product/20305-SWAT.html

Prince of Egypt

I watched this film in religous studies in school. It is about the story of Moses with a bit of a tweak. At the start it says
"this is a biblical story that can be found in the bible" duh!. Of course it is in the bible anyway also
"James Bond is a biblical character that can be found in the bible in Timothy 3:14." James Bond is probably more realistic than the bible and a lot better read(or watch)
Right onto the actual film, well it is a film about Moses, I already said and how he grows up in Egypt as Pharoah's son, then he runs away after killing a bad guy. There are some bits in the film where I am pretty sure they wouldn't be in the bible.
I would advise this as a film for kids under the age of 10 to watch as it is educationl ish and child friendly.
6/10

Office Space film review

Office Space is meant to be a comedy about a guy who goes to work at a place called Initech and he gets bored of his job. He therefor tries to get fired. I wont tell you what happens next because it would spoil the film. It isnt laugh out loud comedy, it makes you smile from time to time.

The film was made in 1999 and is set around just before this time. Peter Gibbons who is the main character is played by Ron Livingston and I think he acted the part very well. All of the acting seemed to be good and I would like to point out Stephen Root played a very good part for Milton Waddams who is a tubby Initech empoyee who mumbles a lot and no one really ever listens to him.

Overall it is an ok film, it isnt bad but neither is it wonderful. I might say a lot of films are ok, well that is ok because if a film is good enough to be on DVD or in cinema, then it is bound to be okish depending on what type of film you like and dislike. It is a good friday night film to ust sit down and watch, because it is comedy with a quite simple plot.

The blog isnt dead

The blog isn't dead. I know this might not be true and I may never post to this again but I will say this anyway.

This morning I am up at this early hour(6am) to get ready to depart for the national inter-counties cross-country race in Nottingham. I will hopefully see Mo Farah run. When I get back I will try to meet up with the local OxClean team and help my community by cleaning up my already clean streets.

I may get back to publishing film reviews but, I don't know whether I will again. This blog will not die.
Matthieu

Goodbye all

For all of you who followed this blog, I have created a new one on Wordpress because it's a bit better, plus no-one else posted to this blog so I thought I might as well get an individual one.

My new blog is here:
http://claagnut.wordpress.com/

I also hereby resign from the Blogger service on my Google account. Long it has served.

The Blogger blog is dead, long live Blogger!

2nd snow day

It's just been announced on the school website that we're going to get all of today off as well.

Which is a good time for be to be editing yesterday's footage. I've noticed that MoviePlus has an annoying tendency to just crash if it's asked to deal with several video sources of different types. ie. I try to get it to decompress a batch (yes, a batch) of .divx files and it just crashes. decompressing the files individually works fine though. Oh, and if I use my normal tactic of doing many things at once on the computer, it decides to give up. Interestingly enough, under the reason for error, it blames DivX Inc.

Oh and in the DivX decompressor settings you can tell it to force a 'film' effect which means that film looks more like, film. As in photographic film that you put on a little reel. It makes it look a bit less sharp and digital, more artisty and stuff. 

MoviePlus doesn't let me use the DivX decompressor to decompress DivX files (I use FFDShow). However, in the DivX player, it's decompressed in real time and the resolution/aspect ratio/colour is all preserved.

Here's what we did yesterday:

Snow day

This morning it snowed lots and I went around with my friends and built a snowman and a igloo which got up to about shin height before we gave up. We had fun. This is the BBC weather forecast for tomorrow:

It should snow tonight. And then, I'll get Friday off and have a basically extended weekend!

Movie Night, Red Alert 3.

I have been prompted by someone at school that it's been a while since a movie night was held. Of course I would pull for this movie night to be held at my house seeing as I have a projector, sofas, social standing that comes with being that guy who everyone goes round to his house and has a good time. Also, I would get to pull first dibs on films watched. That along with the awful casual mini-games supplied at occasions like this (see previous postings). My friend has recently passed his birthday (16 years). Seeing as it's a significant milestone I would expect a rather more extravagant party than most years. We'll have to see, but it'll leave room for one of my movie nights for sure. So under the assumption that I would hold a movie night, these would be the films I currently consider as definitely worth watching:

• Dune. Everyone I talked to seemed to have heard of the book or the film, but nobody had actually read or seen it. Strange. It is a totally kick-ass sci-fi film though
• Tenacious D in the Pick of Destiny. It would totally satisfy those immature ones among us who revel in simple toilet humour. I do occasionaly chuckle at those types of jokes. I mean I watched all three futurama films. If I think it's funny I laugh. Damn them who do not laugh. I'm referring mostly to parents here.
• Full Metal Alchemist: the Conqueror of Shamballa. As I already demonstrated with my parents it's impossible to understand without having watched at least 60% of the FMA saga beforehand. I did find myself writing in History that Edward Elrich had prevented the Munich Beer Hall Putsch by calling upon his powers of Alchemy.
• This could be easily substituted for FMA because it's of the same Anime-Sci-Fi theme: Casshern.

The Red Alert 3 expansion pack now has a trailer (that link is likely to expire soon). It wasn't difficult to predict that there was going to be an expansion pack seeing as it's EA and that's what they do, just look at what they did to Command and Conquer 3. Three comments to make about the trailer: There's a new actor playing one of the American Faction Generals who is the same person who played Gretchen in Prison Break Season 4. I'm not going to get over that. At the end of the trailer there's that russian guy who shouts at the start of Hell March. That's awesome. Just skip to the end to see what I mean. The new character's name sounds about as silly as just calling someone 'Yuri' and then giving them a whole new faction based around the fact that they can do wierd stuff using their psychic rays. Oh, wait! That's what they just did. Did anyone see that obscure reference to Red Alert 2: Yuri's revenge? Plus one to me! The new character is called Yuriko, that's such a giveaway. Another point about the Red Alert series in general, is that I now fully understand the satirical, semi-cheesy view of the cold war. The whole point is that nobody is right and the game is just there to enjoy the strategic battles which took place. I have decided to scorn those who look upon Command and Conquer as not a true strategy game. It may have somewhat departed from realism, but it sticks by it's beginning design principles of quick decisions and simplistic combat. There's no faffing about looking at wind speed and stuff, it's just common sense that a big gun on a wall will defend better than a big gun in the middle of a field.

Matchstick has been hassling me for the last couple of weeks to save my gains from my new job for something later on. I have amassed £140-ish pound and earlier on he came into my room and said 'can you spare £30 for Mirror's edge and Xbox LIVE Gold?'. I know we discussed it earlier, but still, save away for a rainy day, then buy a Zune.

it's all broken

This morning the rest of the family are out running. I tried to get my videos shell folder in my user folder to show up on the start menu. Apparently there's no way to do this as the only way I found was to show my personal folder as a list. This doesn't include the Games folder which doesn't seem to be part of the file explorer and exists as it's own application. In relation to that, I tried to get the Rainbow Six 2 disk added to Steam. Which failed because it has to be a game which is compatible with Steamworks. Unreal Tournament 3 uses Steamworks and can be added to Steam, Rainbow Six 2 uses the Unreal Engine 3. It's just an observation but it would be nice for someone to fix this sometime because you can buy Rainbow Six 2 on Steam and I don't like putting a disk in every time I want to play, especially if the disk is scratched and the only way a computer will recognise it is in a Blu-Ray drive. I think that's because Blu-Ray drives have greater precision and can see past the scratches. I'm no expert but it's something like that. Anyway, I put the Videos folder in the folder:C:\Users\MyUserName\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu

That didn't work, which was quite predictable. I deleted the folder in the start menu and for unknown reason this meant that it deleted itself from my user folder. It was too big to fit in the Recycle Bin so it just got erased.

I downloaded some recovery software and realised that it gets steadily harder to recover whatever you've lost because every time you do something on the computer it gets recorded on the Hard Drive and soon all your precious data is lost under layers of useless data.

I managed to recover: Some episodes of Full Metal Panic!, the IT crowd series 3 (missing episode 4), Some game captures of Team Fortress 2, a bunch of uncoded camcorder videos.

I lost: All 3 futurama movies, various little video projects I had working, some feature length-films which I had already seen.

The biggest loss is that of my little video projects because now I have to start over from scratch.

Yesterday, me and matchstick re-did the face on my Vegas 2 character. I played for about 10 minutes and got these awesome screen grabs:

Actually that's the only screen grab that allows me to upload. I'll put more up when the internet's not being such a pain.

UPDATE: Here are the rest.

Things work!

I took the non-working Rainbow Six CD from one computer and installed it using my magical Blu-Ray drive. And it works, fools. I wonder if it's possible to add Rainbow Six CD edition to Steam and then run it within Steam. I haven't tried but I will. In the install settings I clicked French (Canadian) for a laugh seeing as it was made in Montreal. And as I have already proudly said, I visited the studios where it was made. Now I can't seem to change it. I'm happy with it though. It's funny. Another funny thing is what it did to my face when I tried to use it on my character:

School Assembly

Our new deputy-head-teacher gave his first assembly this week. And it was actually worth listening to as he is a good speaker. It should be a requirement for people who want to stand up and take an assembly at school that they actually prepare properly. But, I'll be honest right now, that wasn't the only reason I thought his talk was good, he talked about change and reform and he slipped in the fact that  about %80 of schoolchildren of our age play computer games and that about %70 of teachers have never played a computer game. I know that my form tutor owns a PlayStation but he never really talks about it much, it pleases me to know that there's someone high up in my local school hierarchy who actually understands virtual worlds. Of course this guy might just be trying to make good first impressions and that he might turn out to be just one of those narrow-minded old fools who pretends to understand young people. However, as first impressions made, they were pretty good.

Other teachers when they take assemblies talk about general good morals. In primary school we were read out stories from the Bible. I used to think it was liberating that I only had to go through Assemblies once a week. That was 4 years ago and I predicted a change in Assemblies from general talks about why we should be behaving better, doing better schoolwork, patronising rubbish about 'the world outside of school'. To a meeting at which essential information about the running of the school would be issued. The management has a chance once a week to address us face-to-face and instead of informing us about useful stuff we should know about the school which is relevant to us now, they try to instill in us a sense of right and wrong. It was heartening to see that for once a teacher had actually bothered to prepare an introduction speech which students are actually interested in listening to. There's the possibility that if no headteacher is found in interviews that the new deputy would be elevated to head-teacher rank. If we had the chance to vote, I would vote for him.

A new deputy head has arrived at the school and I think he's a good guy.

At lunchtime I attended an introductory session in Government and Politics at A-Level. It was quite dis-heartening a first because the only other person who arrived was a pretentious git who I had been trying to avoid for a while, naturally he thinks that climate change is a lie and that all Muslims are terrorists. Bit of a wanker really. Anyway, after a while a few other people came along. Surprisingly most of them were rather proudly socialist, which I hadn't really anticipated, all of course barring the pretentious one, and this other boy who seemed to have no opinion on the matter (then why is he wanting to study Politick?). My American friend happily pointed out to me what a bunch of fools our parliament is as we were being shown film of 'Prime Minister's Questions'. The whole house was acting like angry schoolchildren with the portly speaker in the middle helplessly protesting 'order, ORDER!'.

It should be fun next year.

Synergy

I just downloaded Synergy mod for Half-life 2 and played for about half-an-hour. It lets you play co-operatively with your friends. I never got the chance to play the co-op Half-Life campaign becuase everyone was too interested in playing specially built co-op maps which come along with the mod and kind-of tie in with the Half-Life 2 storyline in the sense that you're a group of resistance fighters taking over a city controlled by Combine soldiers. Still, it departs no further than the original Half-Life expansions detailing in greater detail the events which occured at Black Mesa. And it supports the fan-made single-player levels which bring greater depth to the overall story. Actually, it supports a fair bit but I can't find the entire list just yet.

I want to get Half-Life 2 on another computer so that I can play it co-operatively with someone else at home. Thing is that whenever I ask for the parent's credit card and my reason is to buy another copy of Half-Life 2 (of which I already own one copy) it's just a no-brainer for them. And I have an unfortunate reputation for throwing money at things on small impulses and chances that it might turn out to be really fantastic. And I already bought a set of games this month (just after I got my laptop, Multiwinia, all that). However, it would help with the Source SDK becuase it's not totally happy with me pre-loading the Half-Life 2 map and model files without actually having permission to run the game. Oh well, as part of my noble effort to get parents to experience this brilliant medium, I shall tonight sit down with them and get them to experience a little bit of the Half-Life 2 (single-player) story.

Bottom line is: Half-Life 2 remains the most fantastic game ever made. Synergy mod just made it even more fantastic. Parents will play and appreciate games or, if not, they'll understand just a little bit.

Tokyo Babylon

I just finished reading Tokyo Babylon volume 6. As far as I can tell, someone was stabbed in the eye and will go blind soon, but they're a vet and can get a blind dog anyway. The victim's friend feels unhappy that he didn't get stabbed, which makes no sense. The attacker only stabbed him because she was in an unstable mental state so it's okay and she doesn't go to jail. Also, the attacker's son got an organ transplant and one or two characters in the book can speak to birds becuase they made a bet with a man under a cherry tree.

It takes some skill to twist such a demented and bizarre story in just one small manga. I'm taking it right out of context becuase I didn't read any of the other books in the series but at least it's all artistic and stuff.

No DivX here :(

I found out that the DivX web player can only play files which are actually hosted up on the internet somewhere. I would be fine with this if it didn't mean that A. We have to keep one computer on all the time to be serving up content to the web and it uses up electricity and therefore money B. I'm not sure how many people would try watching it but I'm not willing to risk our bandwidth, I've already tried setting up a TF2 dedicated server and then took it down about ten minutes later, internets cost money and C. Because I'm not so excited about my video that I'm going to write a HTML file, put it in the right directory and make sure everything works, because it was a test after all, and the test was a resounding success, go me. Except for the fact that the only place you can see my video is on Facebook. If you're not my friend on Facebook then sit down comfortably and imagine sittting in the back of a canoe on the river. Imagination is much better than actual video and I'm sure it comes in High Definition. Apart from that, I've been getting a lot of people coming up to me at school and saying stuff like 'I saw your video review of Left4Dead on Facebook, can you do another one?'. And therefore I might go do another video review, thing, depends.

I spent loads of time tonight on Faceposer. I'm doing well, but I'm using the SiN Episodes: Emergence version and I can't find where the sound files for the game are. I'll be switching to the 'actual' Half-Life faceposer soon as I've got a plan to download Half-Life 2 onto my laptop and play co-op using the Synergy mod. This would actually be the most awesome thing in the entire universe ever, however when I told Peter he just said he didn't like Half-Life very much, despite the fact that he's never played it. Screw him, I'll coerce one of my friends or Matchstick to play with me.

Speaking of which, I went around to a friend's house the other day to celebrate 'after-mock success' or something like that. It degraded into one of those sad Wii ads where two girls are jumping up and down with Wiimotes going 'gaming is sooo fun' while playing some shitty mini-game. Although after a while I did get to play COD5 co-op. On the Wii. And I was told by the guy next to me that 'Call of Duty looks like really bad and unimaginative drivel at first but' apparently 'it grows on you and you appreciate it a lot more'. I played it enough to confirm my prejudices and I still don't recommend it.

Matchstick exchanged Halo 3 for Quantum of Solace earlier in the week. Seeing as I've been mean and negative about almost every game I've played this week, I'll carry on by saying that Quantum of Solace is mediocre. It has no real strength. It is most certainly not the 'spiritual successor to goldeneye'. Whoever wrote that must have been under the influence of drugs/alcohol/excessive media hype at the time. If you really want a good spying game, get any one of the Spliter Cell games before the Double-Agent one. If you don't care how much spying is involved and just want to do a James Bond thing, check out the Goldeneye: Source mod for Half-Life. Gameplay is a bad version of Rainbow Six: Vegas's cover-shoot-capture objective style (you'd understand if you'd played it). Except that in Quantum of Solace all emphasis on strategy and realism is thrown to the wind because HE'S JAMES BOND. It had 'fun moments', a bucket load of quick-time events, and it got me 250 gamerscore. I would mention that at times the quick-time events are a 'good' thing. But that's a whole long detailed story and nobody wants to hear it. So thus concludes my rant: You can't watch my video; I went to a party; Quantum of Solace: the Videogame, is mediocre.