The title says it all. I played the Lost Planet 2 Multiplayer Demo on Saturday and now I get a prize for my efforts.
Pics or it didn't... oh, wait.
It’s strange, all the games I played ended in a draw, but I did activate quite a few data posts and get a few kills. I’m not saying that I don’t deserve it, it’s just that it took me by surprise, seeing I’ve never won anything from any prize draw… ever (this being the exception). No, this is not a Nigerian scam.
Well, what is the prize anyway? According to the above link, I get either a Lost Planet 2 t-shirt, or a salamander figurine. Either way, I’m happy.
I now understand why the repair service was so quick; they sent me a new console. It’s the same model (premium, B) but with quieter fans and a different optical tray that opens a lot faster and is much, much quieter. It’s nice that they included a free one month XBox Live! membership card, but they messed up with my licence transfers. Re-downloading my stuff, as it says here, did not remedy my situation. I checked the licence transfer process page and all 311 of my licences were still assigned to my old console. Oh joy. It took about five minutes to transfer the licences and re-download the content keys (the web download history page is a godsend). All in all, things could have been much worse.
Just checked my repair status for my XBox 360. I only sent it off last Wednesday, but they’ve skipped phases 2 (received) and 3 (repaired/replaced) on the repair status list; phase 4 means it’s being returned. Damn, they do work fast at Frankfurt. Continue reading ‘XBox 360 repaired, returning soon.’
I just took this exam on Monday under the impression that it was related to this specification, the one that I have been taught and was learning for six months. I feel cheated. Hell, we may as well have been doing this paper instead.
It seems that many other candidates share my sentiments.
The plot thickens. And it thickens some more. As far as I know, this is the first time there has been such student outrage over an examination, but we have Facebook to thank for that; although my school is probably going to send a piece of their mind in the form of a letter or two to AQA headquarters (don’t quote me on that).
This pretty much sums up the general feeling towards the exam:
The exam was a huge joke. Where the hell were genetics, respiration and photosynthesis?
There was not much content related to the actual specification on the paper yet we did get something that was explicitly stated not to be on the paper (according to the specification), and that was a question on the
Spearman rank correlation. Yes, some old folks out there and university students may claim that we are whining but who cares what they think? After all, this is a new specification, so what do they know? These are our futures AQA is screwing with, I expect at least a free re-sit. Lowering the grade boundaries i.e. normalizing won’t do much if universities know the paper was a dud.
Damn you shrews!
…and it only took me 5 hours.
Prologue
The upgrade was from a ECS HT 2000 (AMD690GM-M2) to a ASUS A8N-SLI.
The ECS was okay, however:
- It had a fairly standard Phoenix BIOS which did the job well, but didn’t have all the ASUS extras (AI N.O.S comes to mind) and the BIOS layout which I missed sorely from my broken-down A8V-E Deluxe.
- The onboard sound was more or less broken, leading to a purchase of a Soundblaster LIVE value.
Continue reading ‘Motherboard upgrade complete…’
I watched Cameron’s Avatar today and it is without a doubt the most visually pleasing film ever to have graced the big screen. The actors filled their roles well but the cigar goes to the visual studios responsible for conceiving the hyper-realistic imagining of Pandora; I guess the effects had to be great, considering every 240th of a second took 50 hours to produce, totalling into that (estimated) budget of $300-500m. It has achieved what special effects are meant to do, to immerse you and to be unintrusive and not emphasise the effects, just as in District 9. Although I’m not too fond of the poorly-implemented concept of 3D viewing, I unfortunately didn’t get to see it in 3D as the technology has improved (so I’ve heard) from the vision destroying red/green glasses of yesteryear. Now they make you wear photophobia inducing spectacles. Nice
Continue reading ‘Avatar’
