Category: General

I can only imagine the work involved from the Fluendo guys to get and keep the GUADEC streaming going, and it’s been mostly awesome… but sadly today I’ve missed pretty much everything of interest to me because of connection failures or (as is the case right now, as I’m watching Goodbye GUADEC) video but no audio.

Ah well, good job anyway guys… hopefully I’ll be able to pick up some of it in the archives, and I’ll just have to bully the rest of the gossip out of Gman and yippi when they stop off here on their way back home next week…

Since it seems to be the thing to do at the moment, here’s my South Park Studio lookie-likie…

Having not been able to play Burnout 3 online for weeks (“Unable to open communications to other players”), and never having managed a full game of FIFA 2004 (disconnected after the first few minutes, on the rare occasions I got a connection to another player in the first place), I spent the last couple of evenings looking into why my connection to EA’s flaky-at-best-anyway servers was so poor. I disabled firewalls, opened every port going, put the PS2 in the DMZ, all to no avail. The only thing that ever worked for EA games (while other games were working just fine) was running a wire from the PS2 straight into my modem, bypassing the router altogether– and having splashed out for a wireless bridge, I didn’t want to do that.

I think I’ve hit on the solution eventually, though. I chanced upon a couple of posts like this one yesterday that said some people were having to turn off UPnP support in their router to have Xbox Live games work. Since it was about the only thing I hadn’t tried, I investigated… and it turns out my router had UPnP turned on, but my DSL modem had it turned off. So I turned them both off.

Result 1: A happy evening of online car crashing. (Most of the time; there are still some players I just can’t ping, resulting in a disconnect.)

Result 2: France 2 Brazil 0. Arse. Maybe I should stick with PES after all.

I know Macca‘s a bit irritating, but this headline on IOL’s homepage today seems a bit extreme even for Gerry Adams:

Hmm. Since I was given a gmail invite before Christmas, I’ve used it to send precisely one email, to a work colleague. Nonetheless, I checked my account this evening out of curiosity, and I’ve already accumulated 36 items in my Spam folder– still, at least it was all correctly identified I suppose…

Burns Night tonight (never quite sure why he doesn’t merit a whole day)… have yet to find a butcher in Dublin that will do us a haggis, but fortunately Marks & Spencers do a fine substitute.

Back at work again today after an extended holiday break.

Tuesday 21st: Christmas Lunch for the Desktop Group at Sun
Ireland. Normally this would have developed into an all-nighter,
but this time I had to scoot off early to get to a gig– The Thrills were playing at The Point.

Christmas Eve: We consumed the mulled wine that I’d bought in Lidl because
it was easier to buy something than find a security guard to let me out
through the alarmed “I haven’t shoplifted anything honest” gate.

Christmas Day: Breakfast in bed, opened some pressies, coffee,
opened some more pressies, dinner, opened the rest of our
pressies. Remarkably (given that I’ve never really seen it snow
properly in Dublin in the four years I’ve lived here), we had what
would have qualified as a white Christmas in the UK, by dint of three
fairly heavy snow showers. Apparently though, there has to be
half an inch lying at Dublin Airport or something before you can
collect your winnings from the bookies over here– good job I’m not a betting
man.

Boxing Day: Still trying to get used to it being called St.Stephen’s Day here.

Monday: Scooted off to the shops to buy a network adapter for our PS2,
for which I’d specifically been given some dosh by Julie’s parents. Got one for the requisite amount in Game, with a copy of TM:B Online right there in the box– no namby-pamby coupon-sending for me!

Hogmanay: We saw in the New Year at the Portmarnock Hotel,
who were doing a dinner (or masked ball, but that sounded too scary)
and accommodation package. While I’m not sure the price tag was
entirely justified, it wasn’t any more over the odds than any other
(mostly mankier) hotels were charging, the food was
excellent, and it’s always nice to get a night off the washing-up.

New Year’s Day: Drove back home down the coast road, at exactly the same time as a mini-tornado hit land. We had to pull off the road momentarily, but almost as soon as we did it had passed again.

Last night: My first real blast at online gaming, with a few sessions of SSX 3, TOCA 2 and Burnout 3. Have a stunning 100% online win record (2/2) at SSX, but am going to need rather more practice at the others…

	Finally got a few minutes to blog about our trip to Prague a couple of weeks ago, mostly to visit the Christmas markets. Didn’t actually do a lot of Christmas shopping– Julie bullied me into finishing most of that months ago– but we hadn’t been before and it’s always come highly recommended. We were staying at the Hotel Josef, which aside from not having a restaurant (although the bar food was an adequate alternative) pretty much lived up to its 4-star status. We arrived on the early evening of Mikuláš Day, so the Old Town Square (left, a 5 minute stroll from the hotel) was packed with angels, devils, and coach parties from Yorkshire waiting on the Christmas tree to be illuminated. Wary of another tree-collapsing incident, this year’s was by all accounts a shorter affair, but impressive enough nonetheless.
We took the plunge on our first full day by doing a six-hour tour1 of the city, which included a boat trip on the Vltava River (whose name, apparently, is derived from the Celtic words vlt, meaing “wild”, and va, meaning water– we were everywhere in those days), a tram ride up to the castle (right), and a leisurely walk back down across the Charles Bridge and into the city again. Anyone who lasted the full six hours also got free tickets to their ghost walk later in the evening (rounded off with a free beer). Needless to say we partook of that too, before heading back to the hotel via a very satisfying dinner at Lary Fary. If we ever go back there, we might be brave enough to try the kebabs, served as they are on something that looks like it was borrowed from the Museum of Medieval Torture up the road. 1 Not actually this one, but pretty similar.
	Our second full day saw us wandering up to the other main Christmas market on Wenceslas Square, stopping to reminisce in C&A on the way there (they closed down in the UK a few years ago), and to wonder why we don’t get Tesco stores this big over here on the way back. Having been thwarted in our attempt the previous day, this time we managed to visit the obscenely baroque St Nicholas’ Church on Lesser Town Square, en route back to the hotel to scrub up for dinner.
Tonight we plumped for the Hotel ÄŒerný Slon (Black Elephant), where we got huge portions for ridiculously little money, spoiled only slightly by some loud English git on the table next to us who was apparently a world expert on everything from wine-making to internal physiology. (Unfortunately, that’s not him above). On our last morning we headed up the astronomical clock tower for a bird’s eye view of the Old Town Square, followed by some obligatory souvenir shopping, more svaÅ™ene vino and a pastry from the market. A couple of hot chocolates in a café on the way back to the hotel, and that was the end of our trip. Never did quite make it into Caffrey’s (right) to sample their Irn Bru though…

If you get a PS2 demo disc in the post from Sony this Christmas, take out your memory card first…

Hmmm… not entirely sure what freakiness caused large numbers of my old blog entries to turn up on Planet GNOME today… perhaps it was one of those solar flares that’s caused the aurora borealis to be visible in Ireland recently…