2 Things

1. The internet is jam packed with mentals.

On average 2-3 times a week I get an e-mail from a random asking for help with some type of techy (usually programming) problem.  I always reply with a solution or at worst point them in the right direction.  I am nice people.  Why then do 90% of them either not reply at all (a thank you would be nice) or even worse respond with a thousand fucking picky points about my reply?  For fucks sake if you know it all already why bother asking for help in the first place?  There's a whole fucking world of prick laden, know-it-all, gob shite forums out there for you to bother without sending me e-mails.

2. Eight straight days in the gym without a break is not good for you, my knees are proof.

Mad Skillz

All those crazy IT skillz and yet their website looks like a 10 year old knocked it up, more excellence from the IOM.

ps I bet £1 that some sort of government contract changes hands sooner rather than later, don't know why, just a gut feeling.

Aliens Colonial Marines Review

I went against all the reviews and bought this when it was on offer through Steam, glad I did.

It is a proper Marmite game.  If you are of the CoD generation then you'll be concerning yourself with the average graphics, limited weapons, non regenerating health (oh no, perish the thought) and dark visuals.  You will hate it.

If on the other hand you remember the earliest days of the FPS genre and/or you happen to think that Aliens is one of the best films ever made then you will forget all that other crap, you'll be far too excited at getting to walk around Hadley's Hope and defend the command centre.  At being able to be killed in a couple of seconds.  Of finding out what happened between Aliens and Alien 3.

There have been plenty of games over the years where people would argue that the graphics weren't important, this game in my opinion is one where a few gameplay issues are equally not important.  If you've got your Alien blu-ray boxed set in pride of place and you've even bought the AvP films then I would strongly suggest you fuck the reviews and pick up a copy of this on the cheap.

Never A Dull Day

A lot of my time in the past 6 months has been spent wondering whether or not I should go back to the world of normal employment and working for the man.  To be honest my health has been crap for a couple of years and I'm not sure how much of it is down to the stress of being a 1 man show...quite a lot if it I guess.  Then there's the money side of things, we're not poor but the biggest issue with working for yourself is the whole not knowing how much money you'll have from 1 month to the next, in some ways it inspires saving, in other ways it would be really nice to be able to blow some of that cash on completely pointless shit.  It can never happen, even in the good times I always had an unwritten rule that I would never spend more than a fraction of what I made in a month.  These days the fraction has got bigger but the principal is still there, never spend more than you earn, if that ever happens I'd have to seriously think about getting a job, 2 months of that and the choice is taken away from me, I get a job.

So July was a bit of a fucker then.  For the first time in nearly 7 years it looked like I was stuffed.  There are bad months and then there are "holly mother fucking shit how the fuck can so much stuff go wrong at the same time" types of month.  This type of thing in 2009-10 would have been been met with a meh shit happens reaction.  That type of month in 2013 is serious stress.  For 30 days I was convinced it was going to be my first ever negative month.  For the last 7 days my head has been churning weighing up the pro's and con's of going back into an office

Pro's

Regular Pay Cheque
Paid Holidays
Regular Hours
More Sociable
 
Con's

No More Fuck It I'm Going Out On The Boat Days
Travel
Interfering With My Gym Schedule
Having To Deal With Dickheads (Optional when working for yourself)
The Politics
No More Wearing Shorts To Work

 The more I think about the con's the more I can see where I might be going wrong with this whole running a business thing!  Anyhoo, July, it was shit.  I was shitting it.  For the last couple of weeks I've worked my ass off trying to get some things in place to save August.  Then yesterday I'm reminded why I started working for myself in the first place, because once upon a time I was actually quite good at things and when you're good enough at those sort of things (cryptic enough for you?) there's usually good money to be made.  The biggest problem is motivation and nothing motivates like desperation.  I tested something on the back of a brain fart a week ago, yesterday it made enough to cover July and most of Augusts out-goings.  I can now sit back on my lazy unmotivated ass and plan the next fishing trip.  Result. 

Perhaps I missed the biggest con of working in a normal office job, the never ending fucking dullness of it.  I once read a book called The Little Book Of Stress and it had something like get real get stressed on the cover, maybe they had a point?

The TT That Was

Our TT summed up in pictures:-

There was the racing as well, but with the best week of boat weather we've had in 7 years it was much easier to get the hell out of there and put the radio on.

TT 2013 Is Nearly Here

My favorite time of year on the island, when the place has some life about it and normal island life is forgotten about for 2 weeks.  Unfortunately it's also the time of year when the island's roads are turned into the motoring equivalent of a mental asylum.

With this in mind I had a brain wave yesterday to strap a 3D camera to the car and do a lap of the TT course before it gets too chaotic.  The plan was to upload it to YouTube because there are plenty of TT nerds out there who appreciate this sort of thing.  It was supposed to be a nice leisurely drive taking in all the scenery of the worlds most famous road racing circuit, leisurely it certainly was but as for scenic...not so much.  Not unless you count looking at the backs of HGV's.  Overall it took nearly an hour and a half to do the 37 and a bit miles, that's an average speed of somewhere around 25 mph!  Read it and weep speed freaks!  That is the reality of driving on the Isle of Man, even on what should have been a nice quiet Wednesday afternoon with people in work and kids in school.  For all but about 10-15 minutes of that I was stuck in a queue of traffic behind one thing or another, 3 HGV's, 1 tractor, lost count of cyclists and 1 old person who wasn't going to go above 25 mph in any circumstances as if his life depended on it.  All in there were about 3 safe opportunities to overtake in that 37 miles.  It took so long that just as it got interesting up on the Mountain the cameras battery gave up, that'll be sods law for you!

Overall then it was a fairly shit experience.  The footage was for the most part useless, I wasted petrol going nowhere quick and then there was the cunt over the Mountain.  I was happily following a visiting biker who was doing 60ish (fast enough), I don't think they were sure where they were going so I was happy to give them some room.  Not so the twat behind me who decided he must get past.  So when I slowed down to give the bike in front time to turn right onto a side road the idiot behind decided he was going for it, totally oblivious to the bike slowly turning right across his path.  Having been watching this bell-end in the mirror for a minute I could almost guess what he was going to do so I just had enough time to slam on the anchors and let him back onto the left side of the road in front of me before he hit the bike.  I did get a nice nod and wave from the passenger on the bike who probably needed some new knickers, welcome to the Isle of Man mate! And the carnage hasn't even started yet.

=====

And so it begins...took all of 1 day:-

http://www.iomtoday.co.im/news/isle-of-man-news/hunt-for-car-after-biker-is-hurt-1-5712605 

and to keep up to date with the fun and games

Isle of Man Police Facebook Page

Iron Man 3

Thought it was OK, a bit long for one of these types of film and also quite surprisingly lacking in action.  Iron Man seemed to spend most of the film moping around feeling sorry for himself for no apparant reason.  Would I go to the cinema to watch it again? No.  Will I buy the Blu-Ray? Possibly, if only to watch it in 2D because the 3D brought nothing to the party except a pain above my ears where the cheapo glasses dug into my fat head.

In other Iron Man news me giving up the gym didn't last very long, but it is on its last chance now, if I'm not cut by the end of the month I'm definitely packing it in.

The End Of An Era

Father time has caught up with me and it's time to face facts, I'm getting old.  For all my adult life I've been a member of one gym or another but on Friday I decided to finally call it a day after the worst set of results I've ever seen.

Since January I've been working my ass off, pyramid sets, ascending drop sets, an intense cardio regime, in short about 2 hours a day of serious gym time...the results of this, absolutely fuck all.  Body weight the same, body fat percentage the same, lean muscle the same.  Yes I can lift a little more but I'm not here to compete in worlds strongest man, the idea was trim and tone and that's what I geared towards, burning an extra 6-7000 calories a week should more than do that.  In my early 20's this sort of regime would have had drastic results in 6-8 weeks, now I might as well as sat on the sofa and ate pie for all the difference it's made.  So to the gym I say fuck you, it's been fun but from now on I'll save the 35 quid a month, 14 hours a week, cheers.   

Fucking Sky

Got rid of it 5 months ago, haven't missed it one bit. 

Every week they phone up asking us to "Come Back To Sky", 2-3 times a week we get an exlcusive "Come Back To Sky" offer through the post.  I got fed up today and phoned them up to say stop it, they wanted my account password, I don't have an account I cancelled it?  They can't change my contact preferences without having my account password, I don't have an account I explained again. 

Except I do.  When you take out a Sky subscription for one of their services they assign you a Sky ID and it is never deleted.  If you sign up for an online account you can see that THEY can see all your details and it is impossible to have this account removed.  You can never ever actually leave Sky, they will just hold on to your details as long as your account is left open, an account you can't close.  Fuckers.  Nice to see the Data Protection Act doing it's job heh?  Somebody should really have a word with them about what information they are allowed to retain and for how long.

Want To Earn More And Work Less?

Nope this isn't some scammy "get rich quick" internet marketing system, it's actual real life shit.  How would you like to cut down your hours by about 10%, earn considerably more and gain a whole raft of benefits you could only dream about including a final salary pension?  Not only that but you also get to forget about the company you work for going bust, the pressures of working in a commercial environment, "late" salary payments because of a bad month and needing to ass kiss clients because you need the business!

As an exclusive bonus to this once in a lifetime offer I'm also throwing in the opportunity to have your breakfast during working time and extra days off for having your lunch at your desk....I like to call it the flexi-time meal bonus.

Your only obligation is to turn up, not upset anybody and if you can  try and look at least a little busy that would be nice.

For further details please check out page 11 of this document. **HURRY** This opportunity will only be available for as long as the population of the Isle of Man are happy to fund the inbred old boys club currently running the show.

(Un)Interesting Observation

I've signed up again with e-bay, it'll only be a matter of time before the account is hacked and all sorts of hassle goes down but in the meantime I needed a few electronics bits that I could only find on there.  One expensive (£120) comes from the USA with paid ($20) postage.  Once cheap (£11) comes from China with free postage.  Both packages are about the same size and posted on the same day.

Bit surprised then to find out that the Chinese parcel gets here a whole 5 days before the American one.  What does this tell us?  Not a lot, except perhaps not to be so dubious of ordering stuff from China, which opens up a whole new world of purchasing obscure crap.

Far Cry 3 Review

If Far Cry 2 had a very simple child that was initially fun to play with but very soon the limited simplicity became very, very boring then that would be Far Cry 3.  In short they have taken everything away that made Far Cry, then Far Cry 2 challenging (and fun for more than a few hours) and left you with a-n-other CoD mongathon.  I loved it for a couple of hours but now having forced myself through the whole game (the child analogy stops here) it's heading straight for the swapsie pile at Game.

I could say the same about Mass Effect 3 but I'll save that for a different but equally fucking hilarious post.