I thought I'd just make a blog to get that darn quest, but talk about stuff I've been doing as well.
 

Movies

Games

Ok, so recently I made some moderate size changes to my computer layout. Firstly, I rented AC2, which I loved, but probably won't get round to actually buying the game to finish, and it had some handling issues (inFamous has a far better climbing mechanic). But in order to play it non-stop, I finally got round to moving my PS3 from the family tv to my pc monitor. It worked well, hooked it up with a HDMI cable, 24' screen = awesomness. It was all well and good, until it failed on me.
 
Basically the PS3 decided to switch to normal tv output ( red, yellow white), for no apparent reason, and for an equally inexplicable reason, my Ps3 couldn't auto detect shit. What it took was moving the family tv into my room, hooking up the two cords, changing to hdmi and then realising that all along it was the brand new HDMI cord which was busted. Hells yeah.
 
Thankfully, I had two cables, and was back up and running in a jiffy (it took me half the day to figure out what the issue was). But in order to change the cables I had to completely unhook my screen (the inputs are impossibly angled). No problem right? Not quite... You see my monitor has a usb output, several actually, and I naturally had to unhook these, when I reattached them, my Dlink wireless usb adapter (which quite literally took me a day to figure out how the fuck to work...plug and play my ase) decided to do what it did when I first installed it, and fuck up. This time however, I didn't bother getting it to work. Today I went in and bought a pci wireless card and have just installed it. It was actually quicker to install than the usb, but doesn't quite have the speed.
 
So, that's some of my frustration....
 
PS: Never, ever, buy a usb wireless adapter.

 Ok, this is kind of a long tale, so I'll break it up a bit.
 
Initial Party
So I arrive at about 8 ish, there's a few people there, sitting in deck chairs or standing around on my mate's girlfriend's lawn,  people aren't really mingling, so I just head off to my group (of which there are actually few of) and just chill for a while. Then at about 8:30, a bunch of my friends turn up from predrinks, and they literally double the size of the party. Now things are starting to hit off a bit, thanks to some enterprising from a friend, girls we don't know are begginning to mingle, and it looks set to be an ok, if not a solid night.
 
The Fight
Fight is a bit of an over exaggeration, but you have to understand the context, the two guys who 'fought' are basically in love with each other, they are the best of mates, so it kinda shocked us when they fought. One was really, really, trashed from predrinks, and is talking about going home, not ten minutes after he arrived, to which his friend (Blake, I'll get to him later) says "Oh you're weak!" (Blake is a real party guy), so the drunk guy slaps him, and Blake tells him to stop, he hits him again, and again blake tells him to stop, then he punches Blake in the stomach, and when he tries to go for another hit, Blake catches it and shoves him off, but because he's so drunk, he goes down. Down into a crowd of people. Including his girlfriend. Anyway, he goes home a short while later.
 
It starts fucking raining
So yeah, starts to rain, and about 40 people are crammed onto a small patio where the speakers are. People started thinking "shit...is this going to go away?" but then Blake puts on "I got a feeling" and next thing you know there are tons of people out in the rain, half the guys are shirtless, and everyone else is dancing like crazy under that patio. Suddenly this party is REALLY good, (incidently we had a strobe, and strobe+rain = awesome.)
 
The DJ gets bottled
This is what made the night CRAZY. Basically the music cuts out all of a sudden, and so the DJ (Tim, who is also a good friend) goes to fix it with me. We couldn't really get it to work, and I go inside for a sec, as I come out I look to where Tim is still fixing the music, and what it looked like was two girls having a fight, and Tim trying to break them up. By teh time I walk over they've both left and Tim is again fixing the music. He's fine and is talking about the music. Then I look on the table and there's a shirt with a LOT of blood on it, I think it's from earlier in the night when a guy walked into a pole. Then when the mum comes over and asks about the music, Tim turns to her and says "yeah I think it's a fuse" and then I see he's bleeding. A lot. One side of his face is covered in blood from his temple. And me and the mum are like SHIT, and get him tissues, I was wiping his face down and saying he should got to the bathroom, and then he says "I'm not bleeding..." That was the first indication something was wrong. He starts to move inside, and people are asking what happened and he stops to explain, and then bam, he drops. Me and a mate caught him and dragged him inside, I go outside and try to explain to people what happened (I'd worked out earlier that he'd at least been hit), when I go back inside they were moving to the floor of the laundry, the dad has him in his arms and he's fitting. After that the parents start moving people on, out to the clubs as planned, I walk out the front and there's the girl who bottled him, who's asking what happened, I'm like; "Tim is unconcious and having seizures"
I run back in to see Blake heading out, moving people on, and I tell him she's out front. He straight up storms out out to the front and yells "Where the fuck is Anthea!?" and someone points down the road, and he bolts after her. I thought he was going to smash her so I'm bolting after him while he's yelling "ANTHEA" down the street at her. Turns out he was just going to get her side of the story, albeit agressively, then another guy is running down the street yelling to Blake, and Blake just says to her "Get out of here or you're gonna get smashed" The other guy comes up and says they're resucitating Tim. Me and Blake bolt back to the house and one of our friend's girlfriends is sitting on one of the tables trembling in shock, and she says "It's ok, he stopped breathing a few times but there's a trained guy with him" After a while it's just about 5 of us out the front waiting for the ambulance to arrive. Finally it does and he comes out on a stretcher, thankfully he's concious, as he's leaving he says "All this coz I said she was fat"
 
Operation hide from fuckers
After we knew he was ok we started walking back to a friend's (Tom, who also caught Tim and who's girlfriend was in shock). We pick up a few other people who had been waiting up the street who had planned to stay at Tom's, and after Tim we just don't want them too, (they were younger than us and we didn't really know them to well) me, Blake, Tom and his girlfriend end up walking way ahead of them, hoping to lose them. Unfortuantely one of the guys with them (who is a friend, but acting like a douche, hugging and flirting with a chick while her boyfriend is right there) knows where Tom lives. We reach Tom's way ahead of them, unfortunately his sister has gone out clubbing, so Blake and Tom walk around to jump the fence (it takes them half an hour before they get over it), meanwhile his girlfriend is paranoid about the others arriving and so me and her are hiding behind a wall. Finally they get in, but only to the garage, when they find out his sister has locked the door to the house. After wondering what to do, shouting through the roll-a-door, they get a ladder in the shed, and climb up onto a balcony. At this point the rest arrive, and the girlfriend, ever paranoid, dives behind the car. As they get closer, she grabs me and is like "Into the neighbors!" and crawls through a hedge (which is wet from the rain) I follow her, and we both end up crouched behind a wall. Finally she decides to go out after Blake and Tom let the others in, upon which we find the house is filled with alchohol left over from his sister's pre-party. Then she returns home, and we meet Epic Dave.
 
Epic Dave
Not much happened for a while, we took off our wet clothes, Me in just boxers, Blake in boxers and a shirt (not his) while Tom and his girlfriend were wearing matching shorts and she was (hilariously) in a too big singlet with a beer brand on it. We just sat and played Mario Kart on the Wii while Tom's sister's ensemble continued to drink, then the younger guys leave along with douche, who is still trying to get with this girl despite her boyfriend being right there. Then Epic Dave comes out. To be fair we've met Dave before, but not Epic Dave. Dave is quite a large man, who was also shirtless, lots of chest hair, unshaved, and with wild black curls. He comes out to us, drunk as can be, and his mate says Dave has something to ask us,
 Dave then yells "Are you happy?"  we reply yes, and the he says "If your happy, then you just need to shake someone's hand and you're good to go!" and then shakes my hand. Then he totters upstairs, stopping to give us the devils horns yelling "YEEAAH!" Later he returns to play Wii for a sec, that rainbow raceway incidently, whereupon he drives off the edge in the same place about 50 times, while his girlfriend is yelling at him to drink some water, which he repeatedly refuses, until she hands it to Tom, Dave then snatches it from Tom, roaring "GIVE ME MORE BOOZE!!" and skulls this huge bottle of water, somehow having the same reaction you would drinking a strong drink. Then returns to the kitchen. We play Wii for a little longer before we can hear Dave talking, and from the one liners he had been spewing earlier, it was too funny to ignore. We sat behind a wall so as to not disturb his various tirades, cackling in laughter. Here are some excerpts;
 
Talking to his friend, he says "It's just you, me, Alana, Caitlyn and Jal" 
To which his friend replies "What about Sarah(Dave's girlfriend)?"
Dave just looks at him, and whispers, deadly serious, "..Jal."
 
Now somehow he was under the impression the world was going to end in the morning, and was saying "It isn't a book, it isn't a movie, it's the truth. Come with me"
We had no idea what he was talking about, and then says "If you don't go with me, I will go alone, and noone will know how many died" It was reaching Lord of the rings level of epic.
Finally he was taken outside, and after a while Tom went out to see what was happening, and Dave grabs him, pulls him closer, and whispers "Make sure they go in the morning, for then the battle will come"
 
So that was about it, me and Blake crashed on the floor outside Tom's bedroom while he and his girl had sex, downstairs Epic Dave and girlfriend were sleeping in the living room, (at some point Epic dave had spewed). We woke up this morning and went home. Our clothes were still wet, I have blood on my good shirt from Tim and Blake has lost his shirt and has someone elses. All up, it was a good night. 
 
Where did we spend Midnight in all the chaos? Out the front of the party, while Tim was being loaded into the ambulance.

 Cloud Computing, for those of you who don't know, is using an external data storage for all your files and media, that can be accessed remotely, either by your computer, possibly your games console, your phone or any other media device. The advantage is that, provided you have the money, you have virtually unlimited space, as server farms would be constructed to house this data, and constantly expanded. Using advanced Wi-Fi or other wireless connections, you simply turn on your device, link into your set of data, and away you go, no need for bulky hard disks. Furthermore the same data can be accessed by different devices, so no need to copy a song from PC to Ipod, it'll just access your data.
 
For gaming, this basically means that if you want a game, you don't go to a store and buy a disk, then install it, you buy from the internet and it'll appear in your data. Quite possibly it'll only save your particular information to the data, so you literally just buy the game and your good to go, no need to install whatsoever. 
 
My problem with Cloud Computing is that your data is not physically kept by you. While data farms would be protected by huge amounts of both electronic and physical security, the fact remains your documents, movies etc, are not physically held by you. This leads to all kinds of privacy, copyright and ownership issues. Also is the question of who would have access to this material? Would the Government? The CIA? The companies that run the server farms themselves? God forbid, Corporations? The advantage of current hard drives is that while the data contained is in virtual form, it is also physically owned by you, and assuming it's not connected to the internet, you control who has access to it.
 
While Cloud Computing is still only in the realm of prototypes and theory, we still don't have fast enough or well covered Wi-Fi, these questions are still valid, as many technologies being developed today are designed with Cloud Computing in mind.

Massive fan of the 'ol Duke Nukem 3D, still have it too. But I don't think they'll ever bring it out, if they do, it simply won't have the old 'Shootin aliens, bangin chicks' feel to it, an old classic arcade like that can't compete with games like that these days.