Harry's Blog

Some of you may not be aware that this is not my only blog. I also run another site that tinkers with the subject of videogames away from my official capacity of a professional games journalist/editor.

I've not mentioned it much lately because there's little going on there. Jack Thompson Thinks He's Jesus continues to be a very popular feature with over 20,000 views now - but there's precious little new content on there.

But just now I've posted my initial thoughts on Irrational Games' Xbox 360 game Bioshock. This is a release that shows that the medium really can give rise to works of art. From the beauty of the city of Rapture to the unsettling Little Sisters, Bioshock is a joy to behold so far.

So take a look at my first impressions of Bioshock at Grumpy Gamer.

It's rather interesting looking at the site stats and seeing how people have arrived here via search engines.

The most popular search seems to be for my name and seeing as there aren't many of them in the world I'm guessing most folks who look have found what they are looking for.

Though it's odd so many people are searching for me, I get about four a five of those a day. But what other things are folks looking for at the moment?

For the last week or so I've been tinkering with a new project - creating a new website for someone else.

I've been investigating various pieces of software for the project and settled on one that seems to suit the project just fine.

And today I've been using that software to put a little demo together to see if the organization would like to use the site.

Yes just like every other dull media twunt these days I've got a Facebook profile.

So if you want to share dull digital information and join my friends list I guess you'll find my profile right here.

Bill Door and I have been having a good laugh enjoying a particular blog we recently discovered. Now I know that by their very nature blogs are narcissistic, but some times you come across someone so clueless of their big-headed insanity that you can't help but become completely hooked.

Of the site we're enjoying BD just said, "His blog is brilliant, his egomania comes across really well."

No we're not going to link to it. For now this is a guilty pleasure for two friends having an absolute hoot following the life of someone who really does believe that he is the centre of the universe.

Fantastic typo in a story about Kylie Minogue (open in a new window) over at BBC Online today. No doubt it'll be fixed soon, so here are a couple of screen grabs, as you can see, the mistake was made twice.

Looks like I grabbed that just in time, the BBC has fixed it.

If we're talking sub-fetishes, then messing around with Flight Simulators is my dirty little gaming secret. This is one of those realms where many a pale gamer fears to tread, these dungeons are just too dark. The world of Flight Sims is pretty weird too, the most popular websites dedicated to the genre seem to be stuck resolutely in 1995, with designs aimed at 50-year-old geezers in the Midwest who are still using Netscape 1.0 on their Pentium M.

It's these old guys that make Flight Simming unusual. Many of the them are real pilots or at least guys whose interesting in simming comes from their love of flying and aircraft rather than their interest in games. In fact you will often read their scoffing posts at the very idea that something like Microsoft Flight Sim could appear on something so evil as an Xbox 360.

To them then, Flight Simming is a hobby set apart from gaming, the two don't come together in their mind. Instead these are guys who set themselves up as virtual airline pilots and are strict with themselves about setting goals in their flights. They'd rather set up a transatlantic flight from London to New York and set an alarm to get up and perform the landing, rather than simply just set up the landing phase of the flight.

But I'm waffling here and what I really wanted to address was the kind of flaming and arguments you get on Flight Sim message boards. Every time Microsoft releases a new version of Flight Simulator the same thing happens. One bunch of old guys says they aren't interested and the last version was best (even though they did this when that version was released). Another set complains that they'll need a new computer to run the new version, which is unfair as their 386 runs Flight Simulator 98 just fine thank you.

I miss Jodie, my old Ford Siera Ghia 2.0, we had lots of good times together. Alas she went to the great scrap heap in the sky in 2003. But it is comforting to know her spirit lives on via the power of Google Earth.

Back at the beginning of 2006 I found the car in Google Earth, parked up in the Pennines where I had gone for a walk. That dated the image to 2002. You can read that post here.

If you follow that Google Earth link in that old post you'll now find that the carpark is empty. It seems that Google has updated the images with some swanky high resolution stuff. But it's not particularly new, as I discovered when viewing the old family home.

Because what should I see parked out front of my dad's house? What's that? Why look, it's little old Jodie herself.

Interesting story over at The Times today about several groups condemning the PC strategy game Left Behind: Eternal Forces for inciting religious hatred.

Some Muslims have called for a ban, but that isn't going to happen and is really not a great idea. While I really dislike anything to do with Tim LaHaya and Jerry Jenkins right-wing nonsense I equally dislike groups trying to limit free speech and person freedom.

The fact is that Eternal Forces is going to sink without a trace over here. Why? Because the game isn't actually any good.

It's all too easy to forget, when faced with the shrill sound of America's right-wing Christians, that there are many of the faith across the pond who actually believe in Jesus' message rather than a doctrine of hate and bigotry.

One such coalition of Christians has clearly had enough of Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins' Left Behind series and specifically the new game based on the franchise.

I've built a few PCs in my time but never quite got to grips with the various complicated settings for memory. Fiddling with the bios settings to try to get non-working memory to work is hardly my strong point.

At the weekend I picked up some cheap PC3200 (400Mhz DDR) memory for my PC. That meant I would have three sticks of 512MB. Now all you regular system builders will know that's not an ideal figure as three sticks stops the memory working in dual channel mode.

I don't normally do game stuff here now I've got the other site, but as this relates to the gallery I thought it was worth posting here.

Microsoft has now completed the website for Project Gotham Racing 3 uploads, which means we can now upload our photos from the game from our Xbox 360.

Here are my first five artistic endeavours with the game's photo mode. And you can check out how to upload your own images from the game right here.

Right now I should be fast asleep. But I'm not. Why? Because I'm reinstalling Windows for the second time in 24 hours.

I thought I'd got my poor dead computer working again by this evening and all seemed well. But then it decided it didn't want to boot again. I think the problem lies with one of the hard disks reaching the end of its life. Thankfully I have another hard disk.

You may remember I recently discussed how L was looking after me and trying to make my work environment a lot safer for me. That meant a new keyboard that's really improved my posture while working.

The other issue was the height of my keyboard. It was way too low. I tried it on my desk rather than the sliding shelf, but moving the CRT monitor to the side really didn't work for me. After two days of neck ache I had to return to having the keyboard low again.

My beloved fiancée L, bless her cotton socks, has got a new job working in the Health & Safety department of a construction company. This means she is now looking over our flat as a deathtrap and my work area especially as a source of RSI related mutilation.

I’ve got one of those Microsoft Natural Keyboard Pros, I’ve had it for a few years and I love the split keyboard design. I find it very comfortable to type on. But the Health & Safety nazi says it isn’t good enough. She’s probably right, although it’s comfortable to type on the splayed design of the main alphabet keys means I do tend to hunch my shoulders n.

What a surprise, it’s actually rather good. I’ve been running the latest public beta build for the last couple of days and I’m rather impressed, not just with the strong security, but also with the layout of the controls.

It’s certainly a less fussy browser and at first it almost seems like a lot of functionality has been taken away, however this is just because the interface has been streamlined. More importantly the security options that the browser defaults to really should stop inexperienced users from messing up their machine.

Good mate and co-blogger Alex aka Bill Door, has updated his own website this week. He's replaced the hard coded pages with the same blog sofrware this site runs on. He's gone for a different style though and very fetching it looks too. So head on over to GroovyGeezer.com to have a gander.

Now here's an interesting site I came across (ahem!) when reading The Register today. WhollyLove is a remarkably tasteful British website selling sexy products such as lingerie, vibrators, massage oil and the like. Nothing unusual there you might say, but the big difference about this particular website is that it is run by, and aimed at, Christians.

The secular opinion is often that Christians have a very negative view of sex and sexuality. That's not wholly true view, there's a booming business these days in Christian books about sex, many of which go into some depth in explaining what exactly a married couple can get up to (pretty much anything it seems). Okay, it's part of the great US Christian money making scheme that tries to fleece the sort of folks that would buy anything with "Christian" on the packaging over something that doesn't. But yes there are now Christian sex manuals and the like. Believe me, it's not all Puritanism and sitting on penitence spikes anymore.

Could this lonely image of a Peninne parking spot for walkers show me sat in my car in the Summer of 2002? It looks like I've been captured by Google Earth.

I used to have a metallic green 2.0 Ford Sierra Ghia. It was a lovely car, I bought it from a friend in 2002 and it had hardly been run in. For a 20 year old car it was immaculate and I loved the car dearly. Alas I ran it into the ground as I had an 80 mile round trip to work every day. Eventually it had to be scrapped, but not before it had given me over 30,000 miles of happy motoring. One of the things I used to love to do when I had the car was drive up into the Pennines and go walking. I took the following photo when on one of these rambles in 2002.

If you're considering ever investing in a NetGear WG111T USB wireless adapter let me just give you one word of advice, don't do it. Really, the thing is an absolute piece of junk. The NetGear forum is full of disgruntled customers wondering why the little wireless dongle doesn't work as advertised.

Firstly the manual bears no resemblance to the way it works, apparently there should be a solid light when connected. Well that doesn't happen, it flashes on and off in a very distracting manner all the time. But more seriously is that it is prone to very frequent disconnections from the wireless network. And you can't reconnect, something happens to the damn thing that requires you to reboot the PC.