No one is reading me!, Its a beautiful thing!

I have checked my blog stats and since I posted that SA has left VG, I haven’t had a single reader. That’s right not one!. And you know what, I’m bloody happy about it. When I originally started blogging, or as it was known back then “learning to write HTML code so I could write a website so I could put some shit in the web” there was never an anticipation of having actual readers.

What I was laughingly referring to as my website went through several iterations over the years, from my own personal one written when I was a student, to domainadmins.com written with a SQL back end and CSS. Eventually I moved on to this blog in the last year or so, because Google make it so much easier than I was ever able to code it myself. Plus its all backed up and available on Googles servers forever. In fact I wouldn’t be surprised if I’m dead and you are still reading through this 100 years on.

I first started to get actual regular readers when I was writing the EQ raiding blog for Southern Armada. People started to ask in game and through emails “when’s the next one going up?”. What freaked me out most was when a couple of people posted from over seas. One guy posted from an Internet cafe in Spain. He was an Aussie touring Europe and he had found the raiding blog and read it end to end. Apparently it cost him an absolute fortune to sit in the Cafe all day but he wanted to see what happened at the end. I don’t think I’ve ever been so complemented in my life!, someone actually paid real money, and money they couldn’t afford, to read my words!.

When SA moved to World of Warcraft I tried to keep up the blogging but for various reasons that I have discussed in depth elsewhere, I simply couldn’t find the commitment or the time. Again we moved, this time to Vanguard, I really enjoyed blogging Vanguard Raids, but again it came down to time availability. Its impossible to find enough time to be committed to actually play the games and raid as well, let alone spend the time to do all of that and spend 4-6 hours a week writing up an entertaining and reasonably intelligent blog.

I found it harder and harder to enjoy. We would have a good night in VG and get a good or particularly hard kill and I would get tells “This will be up on the blog tomorrow wont it!” which put all sorts of pressure on me. Now I don’t mind pressure, I work in a very high pressure kind of job, but the pressure was starting to intrude on the relaxation time. I was feeling like I couldn’t enjoy the game cause I wasn’t spending time on the blog. Then I started to get weeks behind with the raids and I felt even worse. The issue got so bad I stopped blogging and I stopped playing which pleased nobody, least of all me.

What I am getting around to in all of this, is that with no more readers, the pressure is off. I can update when I want, about what I want again. I may blog regularly about WAR, or not. If I can get an SA chapter going in WAR I will and I may even blog about it. Whether we do start a chapter or not will depend on how many regular SA members decide to give the game a go. There may be none, in which case I will be very sad and I will be looking for a Guild as a new home in WAR.

I will however wait for the inevitable collapse and shakedown. What usually happens is that the quick to organise “pre-release guilds”, in my experience usually fail spectacularly in a welter of recrimination and abuse.

I am trying to find a backup of my old website which had all the sigs that I ever made for anyone on display. I really hope I can find them cause some of them were really good and I would like to show them off again.

We are at the dawn of a new age

We are at the dawn of a new age.

Five years ago there was a term thrown around a lot by marketing people to describe those who were liable to pick up on new technology as soon as it arrived, that term was “early adopters” As with most things on the rapidly changing face of the web this term is already out of date. I believe there are so many emerging new fields that a blanket term like “early adopters” simply can’t be applied.

Look at the rapidly changing tech behind blogging. This is a field that 2 years ago didn’t exist. Blogging was something us geeks did in the privacy of our own homes, throwing ideas and concepts out into the virtual ether as fast as we could develop them. Fast forward 24 months and the parts of the ‘Net that deal with Blogs and Bloggers even has its own name, the blogosphere. Politicians take it seriously, News organizations discuss the death of the Newspaper and both the political sphere and professional News organizations are debating whether Bloggers are Journalists and should their activities be protected by law?. All this because a couple of Geeks liked to tell the world how they were feeling via the medium of HTML.

Back to “early adopters” and the evolution of gaming. Currently we are eagerly awaiting what is generally accepted as being the 3rd generation of the Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game. 3rd generation?, in Europe that’s barely time to claim you have started a successful business, in genetics you haven’t even started to see any sort of true variation, even in the development of something as new as the automobile, the third generation would only put us in the 1930’s. As gamers and game developers we are only just beginning to explore the very edges of the massive virtual worlds that well eventually explode out of the development studios.

Men like Raph Koster, Peter Garriot (Lord British) and Brad McQuaid (Aradune) we will some day look back on as contributing to the foundations of the worlds of the future, both virtual and RL. Thanks to the efforts of these men and others like them in the last 5 years we have experienced an evolution of the English language the like of which hasn’t been seen since the Angles ran into the Saxons a thousand years ago. The Leet of hackers became multiplayer FPS jargon, became MMO speak and has moved into the world as TXT language. The makers of games like Quake and Half-life forced a massive and rapid evolution of 3D video cards, the MMO makers took the expanded graphics capabilities and ran with them to create worlds that became more and more immersive.

People said there was no more space in the MMO market for another player, that the MMO genre was a limited one, there were even articles about the death of Massively Multiplayer gaming and then came Blizzard and the World of Warcraft. In the space of one day Blizzard blew all previous business models out of the water when they claimed a sell through of 600,000 units in the first 24 hours. A year earlier nobody would ever have believed that such a thing was possible. Within a year they were claiming 2,000,000 players in the Western world and talking about another 2,500,000 in China, within 3 years they are talking in terms of 10 million players.

Suddenly the MMO wasn’t just an American phenomenon, the bulk of the cash flow was coming from outside the continental USA, people all over the world, mothers, fathers, grandparents, bankers, mechanics were switching on to this new thing called massively multiplayer and they were having an absolute blast. Those of us who had already played through Ultima On-line and Everquest watched this sudden eruption of new players with a wary eye. Would they stay?, would they change the genre? would all the carefully built social norms we had evolved from our previous gaming experiences disappear?.

The answer to all of these questions appears to be Yes. They have stayed, the genre is changing and so are the social models we had evolved. And yet we are only just starting, even Blizzards massive player base of a claimed 10 million accounts is minuscule compare to the largest selling games of all time. Biggest selling game of all time is Super Mario Brothers with sales of 40.24 million boxes. Final Fantasy (series) 32,000,000 Gran Turismo 17,000,000 Legend of Zelda (series) 36,000,000 The Sims (series) 100,000,000

More information can be found at: http://www.video-games-survey.com/software.htm and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best_selling_video_games

Suddenly we are talking about serious money. When you consider the current business model of buy and then pay to play, executives at companies like Sony and Microsoft look at game sales like that and probably start to dribble. Imagine everyone who purchased Halo and Halo 2 signing up to pay Microsoft 10US$ a month to play on-line. The growth and decade long dominance of Sony as a player in the world of electronics was started with the Walkman but was continued with the Playstation. Its only in the last few years with the emergence of Microsoft into the console market that a true competition has evolved, something which is all good for gamers.

Once the big boys start playing, things tend to get moving fast, competition brings development (second only to war) throw the gaming toys into the mix with the world of the on-line warrior; fighting to keep the corporations out of your hard drive and TV, the fighters for digital freedom and open source , the communities of players itching to get their hands on the tools to modify gaming platforms and take them to places the original engineers simply could never have conceived of. Mix all of that into the emergence of broad band, into a world were data and money moves faster than anyone would have believed a decade ago.

The world wide web, once a place for freaks to download porn and share small programs they had written with their friends, has now broken into the homes and businesses of everyman, the modern business world would virtually collapse without the ability to push huge amounts of data around across international boundaries at high speeds. When all of those things come together in the heads of people who are programmers, bean counters, hardware and network engineers, artists and writers, all of whom are fundamentally Gamers, the future is unleashed. Give these teams access to faster CPU and GPU’s, more and faster RAM and FSB, bigger and faster drive space and the bandwidth to push all this data around and the possibilities of what can be done with this tech become limitless.

Seamless, immersive living worlds become a reality. Gaming goes beyond simply being a “Game” and becomes a way of life. I think we will look back in 20 years and from our comfortable force feedback seats, wearing our 3D display cups over our eyes and we will remember that there was a time Before Warcraft (BW) and time Post Warcraft (PW) and that the time Post Warcraft evolved in ways we couldn’t even begin to imagine as we sat in front of our desktop monitors and read actual text on a 2D flat screen.

We will come to a time where we are always on-line in our virtual worlds from our personal mobile networks. Software will flow from us like expelled breath, businesses will fight wars across binary battlefields of data and people once regarded as freaks and geeks, people who once proudly wore the tag “Gamer” will stride across the digital medium as Warriors and Wizards of the new reality, only now they will be working for countries, intelligence agencies and Corporations.

We are at the Dawn of a new age…

And the awards go to…!

The credits for my new looking blog go to Btemplates for the Banner Image. The image comes from a blog template called ITAdvance. The actual blog layout and color scheme comes from a template called Batman The Dark Knight at Blogspot Template. Normally I like to do my own coding and would spend the time to learn layouts and how the templates where all constructed. I spent a couple of hours trying to make my existing template look pretty and improve the layout, but when I looked at the creative work of those who are already making free templates and distributing via the web i gave up. I just don’t have time anymore and I’m just never going to be that talented, so I turned to the two sets of very kind folks I have named above. All creative art and layout credit goes to them, the ravings are my fault. I may have made one or two little changes in layout.

I have also re-developed a curious little hobby completely outside of MMO’s and computers. I have started to collect wine. I blame this obsession on one of the people who has had a massive influence in my life even though he doesn’t know it, a chef I worked with called Richard Genn. Richard is a Kiwi of Chinese heritage and one of the best Chef’s I ever had the honor to work with. Richard’s two true passions in life, were wine and food and putting the two together. I worked with Richard during a year long stint at Veranda Bar and Grill in Auckland’s Parnell restaurant district. Richard was the co-owner and head chef.

I loved working with Richard. For the first time in my hospitality career I learned that food could not only be good, it could be great. That the right wines when paired with food could be mind blowing. Richard introduced me to the world of wines by allowing me to taste into his collection. Richard had one of the finest collections of wine in NZ at the time, so I was able to taste things that otherwise I would never ever have been able to drink. I had 2 bottles of 1973 Henschke “Hill of Grace” Museum Release at various points. I was able to drink Dry River Pinot, Coldstream Hills Chardonnay, bin 389, Grange, Spanish wines, Grand Cru vintages, reserves of almost everything. I learned from Richard about the great regions, the great wines, the great wine makers. Richard would show up, put a glass of wine in front of me and challenge me with it, if I got it right or close, he would then pair it with a meal to show me the connection. If I was his wine student, Braden in the kitchen was his food student and together they worked magic.

Richard taught me to love wine, to appreciate it and to understand its complexities and beauties. Before Richard wine was wine, after Richard, wine had depth and structure, I fell in love with the delicate flower that was a great Pinot Noir, I tussled with the great Australian Syrahs and I was extremely surprised by the chocolate complexity of great Spanish wines. It’s not often you can point to a single person and know the influence they had on your life.

Unfortunately, due to a run-in with Richards ex-wife and an unfounded accusation of theft by a drunk, I was forced to walk out of the VBG. I didn’t miss Richards partner one bit, but I have always regretted the way I was forced out of Richards life. I tried to talk to Richard a few years later but I definitely got the feeling that I wasn’t welcome, so I never tried to contact him again. I don’t know where Richard is now, Ive actually tried to look him up on the web, but for a world class chef, very little seems to have been written about him. I truly wish him well and would hope I could have a conversation with him again one day, maybe even re-ignite a stifled friendship.

I don’t know if Richard would be happy to know this or not, but I still have a thirst for great wines. I put the obsession down for a while as I simply didn’t have the income to support it. But since moving to Australia I have picked it up again. I am still very much a learner again and I don’t have the advantage of Richards incredible knowledge and refined palate to aid me anymore, but I am starting to build up my collection. I am using an online tool called Cellar Tracker to keep track of my wines and I am looking at professional storage for what I am showing you below.

I still have a yen for Reds, particularly Pinot and Shiraz but I am trying to expand and open my palate to Semillion (The Hunter Valleys strength) and Chardonnay. I don’t think I will ever love Sauvignon Blanc but I’m willing to try. My next purchase will be a case of D’Arenberg “The Laughing Magpie” Shiraz/Viognier 2006 and a half Case of Dry River “The Lovat” 2008 Gewurztraminer.

If anyone knows Richard or where he is, please say hi from me and tell him I will always have great memories of him and that he has inspired at least one person to follow his road towards Wine.

Dry Wines White Australia

New South Wales, Chardonnay
2006 Scarborough Chardonnay Blue Label (Australia, New South Wales, Hunter Valley)
2006 Scarborough Chardonnay Yellow Label (Australia, New South Wales, Hunter Valley)

New South Wales, Riesling
2007 David Hook Wines Riesling The Gorge (Australia, New South Wales, Hunter Valley)

New South Wales, Sémillon
2004 David Hook Wines Sémillon Pothana (Australia, New South Wales, Hunter Valley)
2007 Scarborough Sémillon White Label (Australia, New South Wales, Hunter Valley)
2003 Tranquil Vale Sémillon (Australia, New South Wales, Hunter Valley, Lower Hunter Valley)

New South Wales, Viognier
2006 David Hook Wines Viognier The Gorge (Australia, New South Wales, Hunter Valley)

Red Australia

New South Wales, Merlot-Syrah Blend
2005 Tranquil Vale (Australia, New South Wales, Hunter Valley, Lower Hunter Valley)

New South Wales, Pinot Noir
2005 Scarborough Pinot Noir (Australia, New South Wales, Hunter Valley)

New South Wales, Syrah
N.V. David Hook Wines Shiraz Pothana Belford Hunter Valley (Australia, New South Wales, Hunter Valley) – 1.5L
2005 David Hook Wines Shiraz Pothana Hunter Valley (Australia, New South Wales, Hunter Valley)
2006 David Hook Wines Shiraz The Gorge Hunter Valley (Australia, New South Wales, Hunter Valley)
2003 De Bortoli Shiraz (Australia, New South Wales, Hunter Valley)
2005 De Bortoli Shiraz (Australia, New South Wales, Hunter Valley)
2006 Hungerford Hill Shiraz – Viognier Orange (Australia, New South Wales, Central Ranges, Orange)
2003 Scarborough Shiraz (Australia, New South Wales, Hunter Valley)
South Australia, Cabernet Sauvignon
2005 Hungerford Hill Cabernet Sauvignon Coonawarra / McLaren Vale (Australia, South Australia, Coonawarra / McLaren Vale)

South Australia, Cabernet-Shiraz Blend
2004 Penfolds Bin 389 (Australia, South Australia)
2005 Penfolds Bin 389 (Australia, South Australia)

South Australia, Syrah
2006 d’Arenberg The Laughing Magpie Shiraz-Viognier (Australia, South Australia, Fleurieu, McLaren Vale)

Victoria, Merlot
2006 Snow Road Merlot (Australia, Victoria, North East, King Valley)

Victoria, Syrah
2005 Chrismont Shiraz (Australia, Victoria, North East, King Valley)

Sweet/Dessert Wines
White Australia New South Wales, Sémillon
2006 Pokolbin TAFE Sémillon (Australia, New South Wales, Hunter Valley, Pokolbin) – 375ml
2006 Scarborough Sémillon Late Harvest (Australia, New South Wales, Hunter Valley) – 375ml
2007 Scarborough Sémillon Late Harvest (Australia, New South Wales, Hunter Valley) – 375ml

New South Wales, White Blend
2006 Tranquil Vale The Old Luskie (Australia, New South Wales, Hunter Valley, Lower Hunter Valley) – 375ml

A new look…

As you may have noticed there is a slightly new look here. This is actually a cut and paste of the work of 3 different blogsters and I will be crediting them with links as soon as possible. Unfortunately I am sitting here freezing my ass off and I wont be doing it tonight.

Southern Armada has left Vanguard as you may have guessed. I still think its the best game no one ever played but, probably unsurprisingly, I feel deeply betrayed by both the game and its makers. I think the new guys have done really well to get VG to where it is and in 12-18 months its really going to be superb, but I wont be there.

Currently I’m in EVE, I’m playing a little bit of WoW. Oddly enough I’m really enjoying the current run through WoW. I have a regular group Sundays and Wednesdays and we are playing through the classic content and just taking our time with it. Its actually a lot of fun to not be blasting through content as fast as I can just to reach ‘raid’ level.

I have also been seriously looking at WAR the soon to be released Warhammer MMO from Mythic Entertainment. I have never been a big fan of PvP ever since the days of getting repeatedly ganked by 12 year olds in the early days of UO. Two reasons really, there has never been a game (apart from EVE and Lineage2) where PvP actually mattered. In most mainstream games, EQ, WoW are the two main ones I am thinking of, there is no real point to PvP. Its simply something that has been thrown in to keep a certain portion of the populace happy. WoW definitely has done PvP better than EQ ever did and EVE and L2 have proved that you can provide meaningful PvP in a mostly controlled fashion.

Now the chaps who are making WAR are the same people who really introduced structured PvP to MMO gaming. Mythic Entertainment built a little game called “Dark Age of Camelot” (still around by the way) which encouraged players to PvP in a structured way using an architecture which they called Realm vs Realm (RvR). The idea was that you would join a side and battle other sides for control of points throughout the world. Even in DAOC there was no early point to the RvR apart from the glory of owning a control point, little by little they added in reasons to fight with buffs and gear which could be gained from PvP in the world.

WAR uses the same RvR structure but has taken the lessons learned by Mythic as well as incorporating the Iron Grip(tm) that Games Workshop maintains over their IP and built a game where PvP and RvR matters, where every single thing that you do contributes in some fashion to the war effort and the 25 years of Warhammer history and backstory is honored. They have built a game where you are introduced to PvP right from the start instead of racing to the top levels and finding ‘Oh now is when I start to PvP‘. Its not out yet and the NDA hasn’t lifted so all this is pure speculation, but from what I am seeing so far in the various public utterances of fans and Mythic is that the game is fun!.

WAR won IGN best game of E3 2008, Gamespy top ten game of E3 2008, Voodoo Extreme best game of E3 2008 so it seems like its not complete crap and what the devs are telling us is true.

The proof is of course, in the playing.

Say Goodbye to New Zealand (Part 2)

Well its almost over.
We are only 6 days from flying out. As of 4Pm AEST I will officially be a Sydney resident. To be quite honest getting to Sydney has been the hard part, actually being in Sydney and having to find a place to live/work etc is going to be the easy bit. We have both been working enormously hard to get ready to move. If all we had to do was move our stuff to Sydney we would have been easily done in a week or so. However because we own our own house and we are planning on renting it out we have to finish the 2 major projects we started on the house before Jicki was offered the job in Sydney.

Suddenly instead of having 6 months to finish these projects we have only had 6 weeks. On top of both of those we discovered the fence was rotten down one side and large sections had to be replaced. So over the last few weeks we have:

Lifted 2000 bricks from the walkway at the back of our house. Leveled off the walkway so that it makes 3 steps down, dug-in and edged with railway sleepers, dug out several cubic meters of clay. Laid Scoria and sand to provide a bedding, relaid all the bricks.

Dug out 5 fence posts which were rotten, replaced the posts with new uprights, concreted them all in, replaced 10 meters of fence boards which were rotten. Relaid all the earth and planted new flowers.

Completely stripped the all the paint from the wood in the front entrance way. This is 100 years of multiple layers of mostly lead based paint on 4 door frames, kick plates and front door. If you are ever looking to restore wood in a home I can heartily recommend Coopers Wood Restoration System. Well worth the phone call and our entrance looks absolutely fantastic. Its still hard work to do the stripping but you will come up with a finish that will blow you away and best of all, no sanding.

Cleaned all the walls, repainted, removed the doors and had them dipped, we were going to hand strip them as well but we simply ran out of time. To do a decent job is about 6-8 hours per side and we just didn’t have the spare time unfortunately. Its taken me about another 2 hours to do a really bad job fixing all the damage to the doors from the strippers. I have to oil and hang the doors and replace the locks that were removed tonight.

Cleaned, de-moulded and painted the front steps.

Organized to actually have our stuff shipped to Sydney. Gave away LOTS of stuff to friends, family and in some cases passing strangers. Sold my Motorcycle (Sob) and did lots of research on living in NSW, figured out how to pay our mortgage from another country (sort of), organized a rental agent to manage and rent our place, quit my job and after nearly 8 years that was a very hard thing to do, made sure I have some form of contact number or email address for all my friends and family, tidied all the gardens, fixed and sold my PC, went on a 4 day holiday, spent a weekend in Sydney on a research trip, thanks to Kez for driving us around all day!, researched the next bike I will buy in Sydney, unless I can get a full license, if so I will buy this beast, oh and we are both still working full time.

So its been a hell of a couple of weeks I can tell you.

What I am looking forward to is being in the same time zone as the rest of Southern Armada. Being able to log on and join up into groups, being able to go along to SA drinks in Sydney. I’m looking forward to a new Job, new things to learn. I really wanted to try and stay within APN as I have very much enjoyed my time here but APN don’t have any technical services in Sydney, they are all based north of Brisbane. I interviewed for a job yesterday that I really really want. Its interesting and would give me a very good foothold into a section of the IT industry that I have long held an interest in.

Ah well, the night we get to Sydney we are going to go out to Dinner and get very drunk!.

So farewell to New Zealand for the next couple of years and Hello to Sydney!

Im back

Well the original plan was that I had started this blog and would continue with it. Then a friend of mine asked me to help with and contribute to http://www.domain-admins.com so everything I had planned for this blog I then moved to that site.

A couple of weeks ago the ISP that was hosting the Domain-Admins.com site got hacked (or so they claim) and we lost 2 years worth of work. Now thats not too bad, I can understand someone being malicious, it is after all what I spend my working day guarding against. What is absolutely unacceptable was that they had absolutely no backups.

How the hell, in an IT company who’s entire existance depends on the safety and integrity of its data can you NOT have backups?. It absolutely boggles my mind.

So if I can get any of the data back and oh god I hope I can, I will be updating this blog rather than domain-admins.com. I will upload all of the old stuff here.

Off to try and see if I can save any of my data.

Intro

I’ve done this the better part of all my life, writing that is. When I was a kid I would carry a note book around and a smooth writing ink pen with me everywhere. I was famous for it at school. Bullies would avoid me in case I “wrote about them”. I’m not sure why that would have been a threat worthy of granting immunity from bullies but it was.

So anyway, the basics. Male, 35, of European descent, born in South Africa, traveled to New Zealand when I was 5 and grew up there. I spent most of my working life in the hospitality industry running bars and restaurants, usually for a pittance and with the added bonus of getting no respect for being extremely good at my job.

So I decided to go back to school and study for a computer qualification. I graduated in 2000 and I’ve been working at the New Zealand Herald as a systems administrator ever since.

I’ve been a Geek all my life but its only recently that I have ‘come out’ so to speak and found the confidence to express my love for all things Geek. So this is my first post, one of many. I know I will move on and move up and I have in the past lost a lot of things like diaries and PDA’s. This gives me a third party method of keeping all my random bullshit in one place.