My vote card arrived the other day. Amongst other things, it reminded me that the last day to register if I wanted to make a postal vote was two days earlier and that if I had already arranged to make a postal vote, I could cheerfully ignore the card.

It's no wonder this system is so open to abuse.

Anyway, assuming someone hasn't snagged my vote already, I'll be heading down on the 5^th to vote - though I'm still not sure who for.

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Or just a terrible phone-cam pic...

I got my brother an iRiver 1GB player for his birthday. He immediately started calling it an iPod, though whether because of iRiver or because iPod is well on it's way to diluting it's trademark I don't know...

Monday's Test

You will be graded.

Rio finally understood the issue with my broken Karma. Well... after a second go where they managed to get the model right, but not quite the problem. We eventually sorted that out and they said:

If the player is still in warranty we suggest you return the player to the point of purchase for a repair.

I think it's out of warranty - in any case, I can't find the receipt.

Rio have stopped selling the Karma but haven't yet come out with the rumoured replacement (the Chroma, due late 2005). I'm only aware of iRiver's range of players supporting Ogg-encoded tracks, but it seems they don't support gapless playback. The ubiquitous iPod doesn't do gapless either, nor play Ogg without some hacking. Plus, I hear it's sound reproduction is poor compared to the stuff from Rio or iRiver.

So... looks like an opportunity to open up the Karma and stick in an 80GB a 40gb drive

“It is clear to us that we [Everquest II] have many loyal and honest players who simply don't have the time to take multiple characters through the game's higher levels of play and want a sanctioned, secure means to broaden their play experience. Increasingly, our customer service department has had to bear the brunt of futily attempting to assist these players when they are cheated by unsecure transactions.”

Translation: Our game is too much of a grind for most people, but they likes the high quality elf pr0n so much. They're buying this shit anyway, so we might as well cut ourselves a slice.

Mythic Rips Into SOE Over Auction Site

They must be preparing for the finals of the Extreme Washing event...

There's a big server move afoot at work; we're ditching our overcharging colo hosts for a new bunch who charge a lot less. We are, temporarily at least, leaving one server behind to pretend to be the others and display a “we've moved” message.

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My Rio Karma took a dive, so I emailed Rio support with a description of the problem:

I'm having some trouble with my Rio Karma. When I switch it on, it displays the “Rio Karma” logo, but before the progress bar below it appears, there's a click and it switches off. If I try and flash the firmware/reformat, the reformatter reports the upgrade failed and the device isn't working.

The email had the subject “Dead Rio Karma”.

They replied back suggesting that I reset my Rio Carbon then flash the firmware. The link they supplied was to the firmware for the Rio Cali, Chiba, Fuse and Nitrus range of players.

“In the end, the more people that use and understand what "ajax" means, the better off you'll be as a programmer.”

A Whole Lotta Nothing: Note to geeks: look beyond the end of your nose

It means a football club in Holland or a household cleaning product.

Hope that helps all my fellow programmers.

And gives it 5/10...

“Tr1n1ty scratched at her itchy natural-fibre jumper, "Fancy an extended sex scene clumsily juxtaposed with a dance-scene full of grinding hippies?"”

Eurogamer.net - The Matrix Online

NASA - Ready for Launch

There's an area of London called Limehouse. They're building some new houses there... and the name they've chosen for the estate is Tequila Wharf...

(specially for Casper)

The Silly Sleeping Pose Olympics: Solos page!

So Prince Charles married Camilla yesterday. It was, in order to keep up appearances on the Church of England's side, a civil ceremony followed by CofE blessing; the usual compromise the Church uses to get around it's rule on not re-marrying adulterers. Problems still remain over Chuck's impending title of “Defender of the Faith” and status nominal head of the CofE when Brenda releases her limpet-like grip on the throne. Of course, the Church has in the past had every monarch as such, so Charles is small beer in the adultery and monogamy stakes. Besides, it's pretty rich of a Church formed as the result of Henry VII's need/desire for another wife to require their leader to be pure as the driven snow.

Hindsight is always 20-20 but perhaps if they'd been less strict about the whole divorcee thing 30 years ago, Charles could have married a divorced Camilla then rather than dragging Diana in and tupping Camilla behind her back, thus causing the adultery in the first place.

On an impulse, I picked up Red Ninja: End of Honour, Stolen and Star Wars: Republic Commando.

Republic Commando crashes just after the splash screen and this review of Red Ninja is so spot on - that is the point I ejected the disk and gave up. The camera control is appalling - it's as if once they were able to get it to do up-skirt shots of the heroine, they gave up.

“The level designs are especially bad, and are another big experience-killer. For example, there's one area where you have to use a blowgun to assassinate a rival government type. He's surrounded by guards, and if one spots you, it's game over. Figuring out how to get a clear shot is incredibly frustrating, and you're often called out when it seems impossible that anyone could've seen you. If you persevere, you immediately take on an incredibly cheap boss who splits into multiple shadow forms after you've done some damage. It's hard to imagine anyone working through both of those scenarios and maintaining a desire to play the game further.”

Red Ninja: End of Honor Review - Xbox - Yahoo! Games Domain

Stolen seems a lot better, though C&VG weren't too keen on it, listing camera issues again as a problem.

Boing Boing: Jamster sued over claims that free ringtones weren't

I get the mail for the “unattended” email address at work that passwords for new accounts are sent from. Even so, it still get some mail from people who weren't reading properly. Here's a rough breakdown of the types:

• 2 requests to join someone's friends netowrk
• 1 note of praise
• 5 thank yous
• 4 questions
• 4 complaints
• 1 suggestion we take a quiz to find out more about someone
• 2 out-of-the-office autoreplys
• 2 your message is being held in a spam-filter-queue until you click this link
• 1 your message has been flat out filtered

Penny Arcade covered some of the basics of Shadow Hearts: Covenant (for the PS2) which has, finally, been released over here. Bri recommended it as well, so I pre-ordered on Amazon based on such quality reviewers.

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beans linked to Mattt linking to Wired's review of The Matrix Online. It is double-plus ungood.

MxO launches 15^th of this month over here... and I still have it on the Amazon pre-order list. Wonder if I should cancel, or see if it's really as bad as they say.

There's apparently some fuss going on in Sweden over attempts to bring their copyright laws (which have thus far facilitated such sites as The Pirate Bay) into line with the other countries under the thumb of the RIAA and it's international fraternity.

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There's a video for Bloc Party's Banquet.

(I just steal these from Fimoculous.com so you might as well go there anyway to see the others he found...)