Dec 312010
 

I think I’ve said this many a time, I’ve never had a good new years eve. It’s always been either me being sick or tired or not actually having a good time. I think most of it has to do with the fact that we try so hard to make this one night of the year super awesome fun.

But this year I think I’m playing it super low key…just going to a friends down the road for a drink and chillage…so hopefully this will break the trend.

I also just finished Gears of War2 yesterday (having taken a work at home day). It was a pretty good finish, quite easy last level compared to what came on the way to the last level. Now I just have to wait another 2 years or so for the next one to be released and drop into the bargain range. There’s also still Skibi’s Castle to conquer….respect.

In a stream of consciousness post, I upgraded my phone’s OS last night from an ancient Android 1.5 to a custom ROM posted by guys who finally bothered to root and mod the shitty Motorola Backflip, based on the only slightly out of date Android 2.1. I swear this is the last phone I buy from Motorola. I actually quite like their Blur service, which backs up all the contacts up automatically, but they make their phone so anti-upgrading in terms of building lock down on top of lock down even though they still ship an out of date OS without any intention to release upgrades themselves to people outside US. Fortunately the modders have put together a pretty good ROM as well being l33t enough to bypass their lockdown. The process was anything but painless though. If not for some persistence and searching, the phone would be either a brick by now, or still running 1.5. Basically it’s too hard and an arduous for your normal consumer to do, which is what I guess Motorola is aiming for, so they can sell another phone with a newer OS as an upgrade.

Finally, happy new year everyone. May we sigh less in 2011 with big wins ahead.

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Dec 172010
 

I’ve been watching a bit of Community

Community logo

It is a great show and very funny. At least the first season that I’ve watched is anyway.

The main point I want to get across though is that the show actively promotes lower expectations by showing how liberating and happy that can make people feel. For example, in the show the star high school quarterback was crippled with expectations and ended up deliberately injuring himself so he didn’t have to face the final game. Then in community college where noone cared he was free to just play and enjoy the game again. Basically much of the show is about not caring about expectations anymore because noone expects much from community college students and that one shouldn’t beat themselves up so much if they don’t achieve everything they set out to.

Just enjoying the journey, chilling with friends, having heaps of fun and doing stupid shit is pretty good too. Well that is my take from the series. As I think about work and how infinite it is, I often think why we push ourselves to do even more stuff at or for work. It’s not like there’s a finite amount and once you push yourself to get it all done in extra time, then you can relax and do all the things you were holding off on doing. Work is the ultimate time sink, the more you put in, the more it takes. There will always be work to do at work. No matter how much effort or time you put into it. So why not do all those other things you wanted to do for yourself when you can? Do a good job at work, for whatever definition of “good” you want to use, then leave and do the shit that really matters to you. In the end the people who get ahead in life are either truly doing what they like and/or extremely gifted anyway and/or manipulative psychopaths and/or super charming or hot.
So let’s all be a community and not worry about killing ourselves for European handmade faucets or luxury cars made from unobtanium. Time you spend doing that is time you miss out doing better stuff, like upgrading to KDE4.6 or playing soccer or whatever floats your boat.

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Dec 152010
 

I’ve been playing another game I bought from Good Old Games, Serious Sam: First Encounter. In fact I finished it already. It’s really fun, huge amount of enemies to kill with lots of ammo around to do the shooting with.

My sigh is that the other game I’ve been playing, Ted Murphy Pandora Directive, had all the saved games deleted by accident. So I have to start from the beginning again, after spending so much time exploring the game and solving things. It’s truly a sigh. I really want to see the story line played out. Looks like over Xmas, I have something else to do.

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Jul 212010
 

Here’s a great clip from the Daily Show. 8 separate Presidents, 8 separate pledges and lofty rhetoric. So we’ll probably still be talking about this in another 50 years time.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c
An Energy-Independent Future
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Tea Party

??????

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Jul 132010
 

Season 4 of the Guild premieres tonight. Here’s a preview.

<a href="http://www.bing.com/videos/browse?mkt=en-us&#038;from=&#038;vid=1038bcb9-8604-490f-8617-e397587e4a32&#038;from=en-us" target="_new" title="&#39;The Guild&#39; Season 4 Trailer">Video: &#39;The Guild&#39; Season 4 Trailer</a>

Hehehehe…the wait is over.

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