Concerned-ish

As that rather long title up there says – Concerned-ish is approaching one year old! Now, you may not think so by looking at the archive, but on September 2nd, we’ll have been running for a year! Time flies, huh. Due to a server move we lost all the old posts, but there you go, it’s what happens when you don’t pay.

SO – In honour of Toast actually keeping stuff up for a year and not breaking it, we’re running a competition just in time for the holiday season (I mean Winter, not December). How would you fancy getting a Christmas present for your lovely wife/girlfriend/boyfriend/husband/pet hamster? Does 2kg (yes, I mean kilograms) of lovely Dairy Milk chocolate sound good? If it doesn’t, what the hell is wrong with you.

Entry is simple – we’ll run it in a raffle style event, which means you buy tickets, I pick a number, and depending what number you were, you may or may not win. The more tickets you buy* the more of a chance you have to win!

* -’Tickets’ is used metaphorically. You will not actually recieve a ticket. You will be entered into a database of numbers with your name next to it depending on how much and when your amount of tickets purchased. The grammar in the last sentence is inexcusable, I apologise.

TO ENTER:

1. Click the donate button at the side. People who have already donated are already assigned a ticket (Ubertoast is excluded from this draw).

2. For every $1 you send, you get a ticket. For example, sending $2 will get you two tickets, $10 will get ten tickets, etc…

3. Any un-rounded amounts will be considered donations. For example, sending $1.54 will result in you being given one ticket, and the 54 cents considered a gift. If the same person then sends another 46 cents, this will NOT be added to the total.

4. The drawing will take place at 8pm GMT, September 2nd. Winners will be notified and should then send their address in an e-mail. Failure to respond within 48 hours will result in a re-draw, and your tickets will be void.

So, what are you waiting for people? Get some of that lovely chocolate!

So, in an effort to get a little bit of cash together to put me through next Friday (I’m taking a lovely lady to the seaside for the day), I’ve recently taken to selling old crap on eBay. The latest item I’ve sold is an ASUS P5K motherboard I never got around to using.

So, I login this morning and get a bit pissed off that I havn’t been payed yet. Oh well, he has 4 days before I can get angry at him. Head downstairs for some coffee, watch Takeshi’s Castle and Star Trek Enterprise, come back up, and – oh, what’s this? A message from the buyer? Bemused, I open the message, and this is what I get:

“hi sir, please send me your contact number and address i would like to come and pick up.”

… oooh dear. Now, I’m not an expert on eBay procedures, but this makes me feel a little uncomfortable – firstly because I don’t particularly want strangers knowing where I live or how to contact me (I use my mobile number for a reason – I can block callers), and I don’t want to wait in for someone to come pick it up. Why do I have to inconvenience myself to save you a couple of quid, Mr. Buyer? What if I want to go out with friends, or go and get burgers? Surely, as the seller, I have the prerogative to decide how my items are delivered? Especially when “local pick-up” was NOT on the list of delivery methods?

You people are more experienced than me with eBay, most likely – am I right? Is the buyer allowed to back out of the deal because I said “no pickups”? Is he allowed to leave me negative feedback? Leave comments and let me know your opinions or any informations you might have.

Ah, hello Internets. First off, let me apologise for the very infrequent updates – lately, I’ve just wanted a rest after doing my GCSE exams, so I havn’t done much of anything. Including update this site. Sorry about that.

So yeah, I’ll start updating again. However, I have college coming up, so people who want to write here as well are more than welcome too – just register, login, and write. In the meantime, I’ll try and get the forums in a decent state, as well as Dominant Miscourse and the Podcast mini-site.

This is my entry to the Inspired By Images Of Eve Competition 2. More details and links to all entrants can be found at Starfleet Comms.

==========================

“Oh, for crying out loud…” the disgruntled man said, punching the console in front of him. “Stupid Gallente ships can never shield tank properly…” The man was Havelle Cridemotte, and he was the captain of one of only a thousand Gallente ships that hadn’t been built with capsuleers in mind.

“Sorry sir, my fault. The armor nanites are still running, they’re using all the power. I’ll shut them do-” began his engineer.

“Don’t bother. Just get us to the Jita stargate. The sooner we dump whatever this crap is we were asked to pick up, the better off we’ll be,” Havelle interrupted, punching a few buttons on his console to shut everything but the engines and shields down. A few seconds later, there was a faint hum, a clanking sound and finally a sonic boom as the ship glided at warp velocity best the pale, yellow sun of the system they were in, a beautiful blue plume refracting off their slipstream.

Havelle was startled by the voice that awoke him from the slumber he had slipped into over the twenty jump journey. Bolting upright, he went to grab the pistol he kept with him at all times, before calming down as he realised it was just the ships computer letting him know they’d been allowed to dock at the Jita IV, Moon IV Navy Assembly plant.

“Thank god… hurry up and get that guy on screen… what’s his name… oh, you know the one,” he said, slumping back, glaring at the shadowed image that flickered onto his screen. “We’ve done what you asked. Money. Now.” The figure behind the screen smirked.

“Well, it certainly looks as if the… cargo… is authentic. Tell me, which ship was it in?”

“It was in a god-damn Paladin. You didn’t tell me I’d be up against a Marauder, you bastard… I lost five good men and women to do this. So you’ll forgive me if I’m not too pleased with myself.” Havelle spat back at the man. The man bowed his head slightly.

“Thirty Million ISK has just been sent to your account. Quite acceptable, is it not?” the man said. Havelle growled before shutting off the screen, and slumping back in the chair.

“Get us out of here, back to Luminaire,” he said. He closed his eyes, ignoring the glances from the crew. “Should’ve been a miner…” he whispered to himself.

==========================

I approached this with enthusiasm – it’s a Valve game, and it was free. Was I disappointed? Yes.

You see, I don’t particularly like to play online much – hell, even with MMOs such as Star Trek Online, or EVE, I always tended to disable grouping functions and ignore everyone, to play on my own. Alien Swarm would appear to be the one game I can’t do this on.

Why? Simple – Valve ive you a ONE level long single player campaign, and that’s it. Now, call me bias, but unless I have to (say, for a job or something) if a game doesn’t have a good single player story, I won’t even bother with the online stuff. I’m sorry, but I can’t. I mean, sure, it’s free – but the 5GB harddrive space it took up for me could be used for something else.

On the brightside – the graphics are good, and it uses the Left 4 Dead Source engine, which is pretty well optimised and even runs fairly well on my laptop. But hey, it’s a free game – go try it for yourself.

And now, I’m tired, and there’s something I want to finish off.

OK then, I figured I should update everyone on where we are. with the site.

Dominant Miscourse

Currently, this is offline. There was a bug with something we put up, and we’re working on getting it fixed as soon as possible.

Podcasts

Due to parts of the site being broken, as well as some other issues with other hosts, podcasts are temporarily on hold until such a time when I’m not going “dontbreakdontbreakdontbreak” in my head whenever I upload something.

Evil Takeover Sponsorship Plans

I know for a fact there are some great sites out there, with great stuff on them, but using free webhosts which put people off and may not necesarily be visited. As part of our expansion plans, we intend to offer people not only hosting, but, should we deem them special and trustworthy enough, domain names, ad revenue sharing, etc. If anyone might be interested in this, e-mail ben@concerned-ish.com and we’ll discuss it.

And now, our new stuff that is already here, or is very close:

Uberchan

Because everyone loves funny pictures. Uberchan

URDSR

*Information Classified*

Game Servers

Now this is something that nay or may not go ahead. I’ve been exploring the possibility of hosting game servers, notbly Bad Company 2 and Team Fortress 2. However, at the moment, I don’t eel the site would benefit, because there isnt enough readers and most likely people have other servers they play on anyway. If there is enough demand for it, I’ll be more than happy to shell out for a VPS to host these servers on, as long as I know they’ll be used. Leave a comment if you want to vote support or request a game.

Writers

Not entirely sure how many people are interested, but public writing for the blog is still open. To write for us, all you have to do is register an account. Then, when you login, you’ll see a “posts” menu with “New Post” under it. Click this, write your post, tag it, and then Submit. Within a few days, I’ll read over it and approve it and it’ll be on the site for all to read!

That’s basically it for the site. Actual content coming later. Have fun.

Sorry about the no updates over the last week. Due to me becoming an almost-adult, I have had to go to college over the last two days so I can see what it’s like. Naturally, this has left me tired, so I couldn’t write. On the bright side, we’re not blocked there.

Today’s topic is food. As anyone who’s spoken to me around the time I eat or go to get a coffee knows, I rather like bacon and other fattening foods, and quite enjoy sweet coffee. By sweet, I mean the equivalent of 4 spoons of it…. ish. Naturally, this isn’t all that healthy. What gets to me is the fact that I’ve been eating like this for years now – and it’s only now starting to make me visibly fat and hugely increase my blood pressure (it was high anyway, but now bending my wrist causes huge veins).  Of course, this means I have a problem. Either I eat healthier and less and run away from rabid dogs every morning, or I have a heart attack at some point in a Physics lesson next year.

The problem here is, obviously – I prefer the company of my computers. Now sure, there is, as with everyone, a special lady in my life (kind of, anyway), but before anyone goes “chicks liek muscles lol”, I’d just like to point out that not every girl is that vain, and I’d like to think that she isn’t. So – this leaves me with the issue of motivation. Other than the whole dying thing, why should I take time out from college work, and my tech support work (forgot to mention – in the process of starting to work for myself doing local computer repairs, more on that in another post) to excercise? I hate exercise anyway, so… I do quite a bit of walking, it should be enough, right?

I suppose, when it comes down to it, I have some work to do, whether I like it or not. Damn bacon. So now, a challenge – you people are, I presume, slightly healthier than me. If you can suggest foods which are tasty (did I mention I’m a fussy eater?) AND healthy, and I actually LIKE them, you win a prize (no really). COMMENCE.

Summer’s here. That season where it gets unbearably hot, insects start swarming around, ants bite your feet while you’re having a barbecue, and your shirt turns yellow from sweat. But more annoying is when you spend money to buy games, and then find out that your computer that was working perfectly yesterday can no longer handle them due to the heat.

Even as I type this, I see patches of sweat evaporating from the keys I just hit – that should give you an indication of how hot it is. But that’s nothing compared to my PC right now. My processor is running at an average of 60-ish degrees Celcius. My GPU at 75. Now the GPU is fine, they can apprantly go up to 140C before it goes “ohnoes” and shuts itself down. CPUs… not so much. The recommended average for these things is 40C. Meaning I’m going far too high.

Now, I’ve not even overclocked this thing, it’s at stock speeds. The cooler is the stock one, granted, but I do have 2 extra fans in there to suck cool air in / blow hot air out. Now, a friend of mine, known only as “Kireas” (I forgot his actual name… oops) has told me to a) Get a new cooler and b) Undervolt/Underclock the CPU. And here lies the problem.

Last time I had an overheating CPU, I did buy a new cooler. But the damage was done – the CPU still crapped out whenever I started doing important stuff anyway. So, I bought the one I have now. If I buy a new cooler – how do I know it’s still not going to happen? I need a new CPU. Which brings us to ANOTHER problem. I’m using an old chipset on my motherboard, 975X. Intel, Socket 775. Now… this chipset only supports up to 1066MHz FSBs. Which they don’t make anymore. Meaning I need a new motherboard and processor. And, most likely, new RAM. Coming to a minimum of £400, for a rig I deem “acceptable”. Motherboard about £70… CPU £150… RAM £60. … OK, that’s £270, but still – I am a 16 year old who has no job (nowhere seems to want you unless you have 3 years of experience in the line of work, which obviously, is impossible if you can’t actually get a job in that line of work. That, and the garden centre is too far). As you can no doubt see, this means I have an issue. Furthermore, we need another £30 or so on there to compensate for the obviously inadequate cooling I currently have.

So in a nutshell – FFFFFFFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU-

In other words, ladies and gents – Enigmatic Beavers is back. On our brand spanking, shiny new podcast site!

For the record, EB isn’t the only podcast that will be up there – favorites such as Alpha Version, among others, will be up there too. In the meantime, go go go!

OK, so – I honestly didn’t realise that it’s been over a year since Swine Flu was declared a pandemic. Time flies, huh? So, thinking “Oh, we’ll be fine” I go to check the WHO (that’s World Health Organisation, for those who don’t know) and find… we’re still at threat level six. Which is the highest pandemic alert there is.

One year on, and swine flu is still rampant. Wow. This must be some virus. And it’s only now they’re saying the worst may have passed… emphasis on the “may”. Am I really the only person who hasn’t come down with Swine Flu at all?

Because otherwise, what the hell shut up already it’s over.