Ady Carters' Rubbish Ramblings

Live Messenger = Greedy

2006-06-22T17:00:00.000Z

Thats a rare low for it, normally its stuck at 99%, all the betas of Live Messenger were fine, but the final release seems to want to devour my CPU, making it almost impossible to do anything else with my system.

If this is Microsofts vision of the future you can count me out.

Pre-Emption

2006-04-30T12:18:00.000Z

Just in case I get a C&D letter, I thought I should add my own bollocks legal jargon to this page. Thereby making it an "offense" for anyone to view this site, obviously if you dont bother me then I wont bother you :D

Interestingly my bollocks has a better chance of standing up in court than a C&D

Oh No! I've been banned!

2006-04-29T22:23:00.000Z

I cant go on living I've been banned from Shockertoys.com!

Except for the ban was so inpet a confused two year old could get round it, as the above screen shot shows (click the thumbnail for a larger version of the image) , you can see both my local time, and their server time. Its a good job I'm too nice to do anything nasty in return.

The curious thing is why have I been banned? Perhaps my fictional toy company cut a little too close to home...

Flufflette Promo Posters

2006-04-29T09:17:00.000Z

Look for my web "marketing" campaign soon!

Play with my Wii

2006-04-27T17:45:00.000Z

http://revolution.nintendo.com/

Its official, Nintendo is nuts.

Wii is pronounced We just like Wee

Awesome.

Link Dump

2006-04-25T12:11:00.000Z

More for my benefit than yours (Windows Live Bookmarks etc is hit and miss when travelling) here is a big pile of sites I read frequently, have a gander you mught find some interesting stuff:

MSN Web Messenger
Episodes of Lost (season 2) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Sledgewebs Lost Stuff
Rei deen1313s Blog
Major Nelson
UK Tax Calc
LOST -- The TailSection
Minimates Central Forum
She-Thing!
Fwooshnet
BBC NEWS | Technology
Invision Power Board 2.0 Basic CSS Guide
Action-Figure
Minimate Headquarters
MSTechToday
LonghornBlogs.com
Art Asylum Community
KIRB.NET - Play to live. Live to play.
Shortpacked! -- A webcomic about toys by David Willis
Outpost Gallifrey
Penny Arcade!
NEWSARAMA.COM
Millarworld.tv Forums

Uhmmm Enjoy...

First Flufflette Prototype!

2006-04-25T10:23:00.000Z

How can you not want to buy it?

I'm Going To Start A Toy Company

2006-04-25T10:11:00.000Z

Heres my plan:

I'm going to create an action figure line based on pocket fluff, Im going to glue it together in the shape of home made characters called Flufflettes.

Im going to get some work experience kid to make me a web site on which Im going to recruit hundreds of socially inept morons.

Using my vast army of morons I'm going to spam every single website in the world with talk about how great Flufflettes really are.

Im then going to announce that I'll be doing Flufflettes licensed on various properties, so that I can spam fan sites about those properties.

Im then going to announce I tie up between Flufflettes and Lego, wherein I will be producing Flufflettes complete with construction kits.

I also plan to sue anyone who says a bad word about my Flufflettes.

All the time I'm not actually going to release a single product, I'm just going to keep posting pictures of what the Flufflettes will look like when they come out.

Have Achivement Points Changed The Way You Play?

2006-04-07T10:29:00.000Z

I was playing Burnout 3 last night and my better half commented that I was playing the same race relentlessly, despite already getting a gold medal and perfect rank in it. She thought I was just nuts.

The reason I was doing it was all down to the fact I figured it was probably the best track to get 3 revenge takedowns on, which would grant me a new ahievement and therefor add to my gamerscore.

It then sank in, since I got the 360 I've been trying not to complete games, but instead to get achivements and raise my gamerscore....

Has anyone else started doing this or do I just have some kind of OCD?

Why so many morons?

2006-04-07T10:26:00.000Z

Do you have to have an IQ below that of a sparrow in order to play on Xbox Live? Pretty much every "quick match" I've joined on Halo 2 or Burnout Takedown has been full of complete morons.

Not the type of moron you can ignore either, the type who shout abuse at you constantly and totally ruin the gaming experience.

So if your not a moron, let me know your Gamertag so I can play with people slightly more intelligent than whatever is growing in my coffee cup.

I Love Microsoft

2006-04-04T11:47:00.000Z

Odd, that's a statement I never thought I would make, but its true.

I recently bought myself a shiny new Media Center PC and an Xbox 360, both totally unrelated, spur of the moment purchases.

Once I got everything wired into my router my PC proudly announced that a 360 was connected and did I want to share media...

Then I suddenly remembered someone once telling me that the 360 can do all kind of magic if communicated to a Media Center PC, and it can. Its amazing.

Basically it can stream all my music, movies and downloaded TV shows direct to my TV.

Im in awe, its probably the most useful thing in the world ever. (it may not sound like much but the amount of time I spend burning DVDs of Lost and such it really, really, really makes my life easier)

So if you have a spare pile of cash, go treat yourself.

(Its worth noting that it all works perfectly too, and I set it up in about 2 minutes, nice work MS)

Live Messenger and Techno-Loyalty

2005-12-19T18:08:00.000Z

Wow, look at this... I’m actually posting on my blog.

I'm one of the people lucky enough to be involved in the Windows Live Messenger Closed Beta, and I love it, I've done some playing and you may have already read some comments on my use of shared folders. I must say I love them. Their main use for me is backing up files, as you're probably aware if you're reading this blog I'm an admin over at the Art Asylum Forums, one of the admin duties is to back up the board, which is easy enough and I have a hard disk full of copies of the board database. But what happens if I'm not around and someone else needs to restore it? Well now thanks to the joys of Shared Folders in Live Messenger I can automatically sync my backups with Brandon so that both of us have access to the latest copies. How cool is that? As soon as he signs into messenger his "local" copy is automatically upgraded to match the one in our shared folder!!

The coolness doesn’t end there either, take a look at all the new features. Yup, these plenty of them, one of the highlights along with Shared Folders is the ability to rename your contacts! I don’t know about you but I have several people on my buddy list who relentlessly change their display names and pictures, I may be slow but I find it hard to keep track of who’s who. Now I can just override their crazy names with sensible ones so I always know who I'm talking to!

What’s this rambling over Live Messenger got to do Techno-Loyalty? Well I've been talking to various people about Live Messenger and a few people have stated they couldn’t care less as they use Yahoo or Google services and are staying with them. When I ask them why they just say they prefer that particular provider.

This raised an interesting concept to me. Do people become loyal to a particular tech company? Personally I'm a bit of a feature whore. I go where I get the best service. My mail is Gmail, my Browser is Firefox, My search engine is Google, my "live.com" style page is the customised Google and my IM program is Live Messenger (and before that MSN).

Admittedly its sometimes a pain and I would love cross communication between services but this is just the suite I find that works for me. Are you the same or are you loyal to a paticular company?

Not Dead...

2005-11-03T11:33:00.000Z

I'm sorrry, I know updates have been few and far between lately...
well in fact there havent been any at all..

Sorry!

Its just been a hectic couple of weeks really, nothing exciting just
tons of work related stuff to do.

A Seller to Avoid

2005-10-06T21:50:00.000Z

Ebay is great, and I love it, however make sure you never, ever buy from Killercollectibles80,
if you want to know why, look no further than this thread, seriously, how shite is that for customer relations...

Fuckwit

NTL seals $6bn Telewest takeover

2005-10-06T12:37:00.000Z

Great, now even more people can be inflicted with a shite non working
service and the worlds crappiest call centers.

Sky must be one happy company, their two inept competitors just became
one very large, very inept competitor.

Save Jeeves?

2005-10-06T12:35:00.000Z

Check out http://savejeeves.blogspot.com/ (apologies for non
functioning like, this update is coming via my phone that dislikes
HTML)

It seems Ask Jeeves want to ditch their Butler mascot and a bunch of
people aren't happy about it.

Personally I couldn't care less, seen as Ask has to be the worst
search engine out there, I don't think its ever been particularly
helpful in finding what I've wanted, so rather than go through some
huge re branding exercise hows about they make their search engine (or
find engine as it likes to be called) better...

They DEFINATELY don't make them like they used to....

2005-10-04T16:57:00.000Z

I'm on a bit of a Transformers kick at the moment, and Transformers Comics are one of the few things where we Brits outdid the Americans, they got 80 issues, we got 350(ish), we got a prequel story to the movie and all sorts of goodness...

Nothing however beats the Time Wars story arc, if you have never read it you are REALLY missing out, I mean it.

Its available at Amazon for a damn good price, so I emplore you to go pick up a copy, My favourite toy retailers Stuckakid currently have an offer on World Smallest Optimus Prime, he's only $2 go get one of those while you're at it, its pure G1 style replica goodness, and you can't loose the bloody fists this time round!

Is this OCD?

2005-10-04T14:31:00.000Z

I was just writing a technical guide, to system I've written, in MS
Word, understandably it was full of techie acronyms, variable names
and so forth, whenever Word underlined one of these words as a
spelling error I added it to the dictionary so that my document would
contain no spelling errors....

My co-workers mocked me for this...

Am I crazy?

Not Jailed Yet...

2005-10-04T14:20:00.000Z

Well they've been quiet for a couple of days, and no one has found any
bodies....

So I guess I've got away with it.

In totally unrelated news Nic Cage has called his son Kal-El, like
that kids not gonna get bullied, he shoulda called him Zod, so when he
gets picked on he can at least lay the bullies out and demand that
they "KNEEL BEFORE ZOD"

At Her Majestys' Pleasure

2005-10-02T21:30:00.000Z

If no one hears from me for a while, it’s because I’ll be in prison, my next door neighbours are pricks. They play shite music stupidly loud all day despite the fact they know I have a 20 month old daughter who needs sleep, I wouldn’t mind too much if it was at least decent music, I can only take “Ibiza Dance Mayhem XXL 2006 Rewind Bo! Edition” so many times…

The only solution is to kill them…

I’ll let you know how it goes.

F**k you comment Spam

2005-10-01T18:06:00.000Z

There we go, now everyone has to enter a code word when posting a comment, you know, the kind where something like the word bobbins is all distorted as an image and you have to type in what it says....

Well now everyone that posts here has to do something similar, this inconvenience was brought to you by the morons that think spamming blogs with viagra and get rich quick schemes is a profitable way to market a product....

Freud would have a Field Day

2005-10-01T17:34:00.000Z

Minifigures.... I just cant get enough of them recently. While my collection did initially begin with the gods of all mini figure, the Mini Mate, I have recently expanded into other regions, one type I've only just come across are the Worlds Smallest Transformers.

Man these things rock. Identical to the Transformers I grew up with in every way, but one... their size; at just over an inch a piece these figues are a thing of beauty.

If you have an urge to pick any of these little fellas up, take a gander here

One Day If I'm Lucky!

2005-09-29T17:18:00.000Z

One day, If Im a very lucky person. I could be as widely known for dull tedious shite as this man!

Its good to have goals in life.

Google Goes Galactic

2005-09-29T10:45:00.000Z

Hmmm firstly god knows how this entry will look, last time I tried to
do a post via email it ended up white with white text :/ so this time
I'm doing it in plain text.

Google and Nasa have announced a new joint venture today, pretty cool IMO

You can read the full deatails here:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/4292458.stm
(Apologies for crappyness of link, like I said earlier this entry is
getting done via a plain text email.)

While I promising idea the closing comment from Scott Hubbard,
director of Nasa Ames Center got my back up:

"While our joint efforts will benefit both organisations, the real
winner will be the American public"

What about the rest of the bloody world? You gonna keep all these
advancements for yourselves?

Technology

2005-09-27T09:56:00.000Z

You know its kind of weird, despite the fact I have a very technology focused job I tend to avoid flashy gadgets and new ways of doing stuff...

Hence the ridiculous lateness of me deciding to have a blog. But I tell you what, I am pretty impressed with how easy it is to do, and even more so with how easy it is to update. I'm currently walking round town killing time and am writing this entry with a crappy old mobile phone (whether this entry makes it to the blog or not remains to be seen).

Another technology that I have been a late adopter to is RSS, only yesterday I decided that maybe I should play around with it, and I'm already a convert. It just makes life so much easier, if you've yet to take the plunge into syndicated sites I implore you to do so now.

More Villains than Hot Dinners

2005-09-27T07:30:00.000Z

Yet another villain related rumour has surfaced for Spider-Man 3, this time its apparently Venom and Sandman who are going to be causing shit for Peter, so that’s now Hobgoblin, Venom, Sandman, Green Goblin 2, Chameleon and Man Wolf that have supposedly been confirmed this week…

It’s probably all an elaborate ruse to hide the real plot… Spider-Man 3: Stiltman Strikes Back

Foot Long Meaty Goodness

2005-09-26T17:10:00.000Z

Most people who read this blog are probably in the USA, and as such won’t be in the least bit surprised by this…however its worth mentioning anyways (or as worth mentioning as anything on a blog)

In the space of 4 months my city has gone from having no Subways to having four. Slightly excessive IMO and if they keep opening them at this rate there is every chance that I will become a reverse Jared Fogle. Oddly we only have two Starbucks.

I guess York needs more fat people and less caffeine freaks.

Following the Crowd

2005-09-26T16:56:00.000Z

I was starting to feel left out, I know a lot of toy collectors and most of them have a plethora of test shots and prototypes, even my Girlfriend has a couple…

So safe in the knowledge that I stood bugger all chance of getting any Minimate prototypes I decided to start looking for some other Art Asylum products, amazingly I managed to track one down, I’m now the proud owner of a Tony Hawk Slam master 5-0 proto type…. Amusingly I have no interest in skating at all, but what the heck… Its amazing what brand loyalty does to you.

Attack of the Clones

2005-09-25T17:19:00.000Z

Theres no doubt about it, the government for years has been conduction illegal cloning experiments...

It would seem at somepoint they decided to clone me, and sent the resulting clone back in time, or I might be the clone, you never know.

Anyways my clone is named JL and lives in Chicago, he has the same interests and personality as me, heck today we even managed to bid on the same item at the same time on ebay.

Spooky.

My god you are ugly...

2005-09-25T17:12:00.000Z

Dear god, what the hell possesed Mega Bloks to create such an unholy beast? Things like this make me all the more amazed at the faliure of C3, but thats a whole other can of worms. On the plus side the Mega Bloks sets make great playsets for Minimates.

Welcome to my Blog

2005-09-25T17:09:00.000Z

Well, I figured I should have one....