26 - Vote Yes or No on the Seanad? Hmmm, here is some help on deciding.

There was a debate in NUIG a few days ago.

http://www.mixcloud.com/LiteraryAndDebating/seanad-debate-september-2013-nui-galway/

25 - Sunday and 3kliksphilip creativity rant.

Today I worked on my counter strike global offensive map for a while. So there I was for ages making a wall, painting it, moving little bits and pieces here and there. Putting a window here, a fake door there. I really am putting alot of hours into it. Sometimes I realize that I am whittling away my life in a fake work that hardly anyone will ever even play maybe. 

Then I remember the advice of a person whom I follow on YouTube, 3kliksphilip. 

http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmu9PVIZBk-ZCi-Sk2F2utA

This guys makes counter strike maps too and I have been following him for ages, years in fact. He has brilliant rants sometimes and one of them was about how when you're doing something you're interested in that you can loose heart at some point in it because you begin to see that you're alone in this big crazy computer generated world instead of interacting with the real one.

So that's where I was. Asking myself what I was doing since it was coming up to 2am and I had to be getting up for work in a few hours. Then I remembered Philips rant, please do click here to see the rant, it is well worth it. I saved my map. Started Counter Strike Global Offensive and ran said map. And you know what...

It is looking good :)

24 - Steam and the living room

So in case you do not know all about Steam and the Living Room here it is. Basically Valve, the company that made the Half Life series, Portal and Left 4 Dead series has a piece of software named Steam. Steam is the distribution software that is used by gamers to download all the games and gaming tools that they need.

Now Valve want more people to have access to their games so they are releasing an operating system named SteamOS. It is basically a variation of Linux that is tailored towards Valve games. On Friday, yesterday, Valve released the controller that would be used to play the future games from Steam and current games persumably. It is amazing looking. Look at the image below...

SteamOS, Steam, Valve, Contoller

No sticks, tons of buttons, a little screen. The pad is called a haptic controller. Read up a little more here on the BBC website - link below:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-24304272

23 - Friday

I was speaking to a person who has grandparents that fought in World War II. One of them was in the Home Guard and the other was a Desert Rat! Damn he might have met the famous Monty! I really have to talk more to this guy, I wonder if his grandparents are still alive? What must it all have been like?

22 - Facebook....

Ok.. there are 7.023 billion people on Earth as of 2012. Now, Facebook have 1.15 billion users. Now sure alot of those users will be second accounts and stuff but still that is alot of the Earths population using Facebook.

So...      7.023 / 1.15 = 6.11 is the same as 1 in 6 people on Earth having a Facebook account. Wow. 

Facebook vs (renren == China)

Now China has its own version of Facebook... well that is not technically correct, it is not there version of Facebook, more their equivlant of Facebook called renren, click here to check it out http://renren.com/. It is kind of confusing how many users it has, they announced in a pre-IPO in 2011 that they had 160 million users, but updated that statement then later on in the year to say that they had "a total of 31 million active monthly users", Now this number might have grown hugely in the last year but I can't find more information on it easily. The amount of users that renren has is not my point here, my point is that around 1 in 6 use Facebook, or at least will soon and!

... they are not even allowed into China!

21 - Second Steam announcement.

The second of three announcements were made by Valve today. It is regarding "Steam Machines". These are the boxes that SteamOS will run in your living room as they envision. They are first going to release their own Steam Machine and then other manufacturers can make their own Steam Machines. A steam machine is basically a computer that will have to meet some basic specs as determined by Valve and run SteamOS. So basically as soon as SteamOS comes out I will be scrubbing some machine I have here at home and turning my PC into a Linux Valve gaming machine.

Interestingly I read an article today where a head in nVidia said that the reason that they do not have their chipset in the xboxOne or the PS4 is because they did not want the bother. They are focusing on new technology and innovation and they said that never again will consoles be better than PCs in the way that in the 90's that consoles were better than PCs.

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/7.829212-Nvidia-Console-Graphics-Will-Never-Again-Outpace-PCs

I noticed that myself when I got what essentially an office computer, but a good one so it had plenty of RAM, a good quick Intel Quad Core processor and I added a smashing graphics card. What did I end up with? A gaming rig that is simply faster and better at the moment than either the PS4 or the Xbox One. And they haven't even been released yet!

So yes, it is something that I realised a while ago. Do not buy a console, buy a PC, it is as simple as that. Cheaper in the long run, games are prettier even in the short run, with a much more hugely massive games library to choose from.

And the best thing to me about a PC over a Console, and it is the one thing that I will not ever forgive their decaying corpses for... a keyboard. If I am at my games console all day I eventually need to type something, I need to get up and go to my computer, turn on my computer, while I am there and I have finished typing my email that only took 2 minutes on the keyboard, I might as well play some Steam games, after all I did just get a humble bundle for 5 dollars, and for that 5 dollars I have received something like 7 games. Yeah, it will be a while before I get back to the sub par graphics of the console on the TV... I am going to play my literally hundreds of hours of virtually free entertainment here on my PC...

Whats that?

At least you can sit back and relax on the couch! Boyeee! Haven't you heard anything I have said about how good Steam is? Steam has the Big Picture which enables better gaming on a big screen TV. Of course they have had it now for a while so it is nothing new... I guess Microsoft would have been screaming off the roof tops if they came up with some innovative new concept... lets listen....

Yeah nothing, not a peep. Just the sound of a dying concept, the sound of confused marketing people back tracking every sentence they just spoke for the last few months until at last they have said nothing, the sound of confused developers whom are not allowed by Microsoft to develop but with bloated tools that the sleeping giant burped out years ago... and then the sound of silence.

20 - Indian Summer and SteamOS

Hello there world. Beautiful day today. Seriously nice. They say it is an Indian Summer. We drove to the beach in Tuismean down a long winding road where I eventually came across a car that paused in front of me. So I reversed around 150 meters until I found a place where I could pull in. I didn't mind doing it at all really because some people do not feel as confident as I do reversing. I mention this because when I finally reached the point where I came across this car in the first place I realised that around 5 meters behind her was a huge place to pull in! :) But again, I did not mind, I just wonder what kind of misery some people go through when they do have to reverse and hate doing it.

Túisméan Lake.. beautiful if not a bit eery!

Enough about all that however. Did you hear what Valve have announced. All the gaming that we have ever known was really on a console or on a PC. Like an IBM compatible to be more exact. Apple have always had games on its operating system and today Apple have more games than ever but lets face it, the huge majority of games are on the Windows PC if they are not on Console, with an honorable mention to Linux of course which has a healthy body of games (again Apples OS is really a Linux distro).

SteamOS from Valve. 

All that is definately about to change however with the announcement yesterday from Valve that they are about to release SteamOS. That is an operating system from Valve that is specifically made to play game and it is running Linux and is free to download.

Suck it down all the rest of everyone else, free to use! Free. There will be simply loads more to say on this in times to come and eventually everyone will be talking about it, but if you want to be ahead of the curve pay attention now, I believe it is going to be amazing for games.

More on this fantastical here http://www.theverge.com/2013/9/23/4762370/steam-box-os

19 - Apples cool finger print scanner can be hacked.

First off for the whole story read this article here.

http://www.ccc.de/en/updates/2013/ccc-breaks-apple-touchid

Basically, there is a way to recreate your fingerprint. The document says how to do it by scanning in your fingerprint and printing it using thick toner etc etc.

*****

In other news.. I was told about this great site if you are into watching the latest from America via torrents or if you simply want to find out whats going on regarding your favorite program.

http://eztv.it/countdown/

18 - New water reservoir in Carraroe.

We visited the new reservoir today. I took a few photos.. its cool. It is really big, I would imagine it holds alot of water. Water we are drawing from some other lake a few miles back the road after we Springfield (from the Simpsons) style poisoned our own lake! :)

Beautiful view from the reservoir. 

Sophie to scale the whole thing up...

We really shouldn't be up here I guess but since we were, good time for a family photo.

Apart from everything else, it was a fantastic day. The weather was so nice Linda and the kids went swimming later on. 

The many expressions of Mr Chin

17 - chickens, cute zombie...

Hello there everyone. Hope you are doing well. Over the last while I have taken a photo or two. Here are some of them. I'm really too tired to say anything inspirational :)

Oh Lord.... please tell me! Why are these chickens crossing the road?!?

new little bridge near the Spanish Arch Galway

AHHHHH cute zombie attack!

Galway city bay... Spanish Arch.

16 - Zombies Walk

On Friday the 20th September Galway city center was invaded with a hoard of zombies. Warning the following pictures might be disturbing....

See Zombies aren't scary

Eekk.. maybe they are. 

Good to see the summer hasn't changed Richard from what I remember him as. 

15 - Gotta find something to rite about...

There really isn't a whole lot going on in my life in a way apart from family stuff and work. Both things which I do not really want to spend a whole lot of time talking about online here on the blog. I have to find something that I am interested in and write about that. I know that there are some thing that I could write about but I do not know how many people would find them all that interesting.

Hmm, at least it is an interesting angle to take on the whole blog issue.

14 - Oculus Rift

Have you heard about the Oculus Rift? It is a visor that you fit over your head that sits in front of your face over your eyes. They are virtual reality glasses. Man, they are amazing. It is amazing rather.

Oculus Rift - Tomrrows Virtual Reality, Today!

If you have not played the rift it is really difficult to describe how cool it is. The first time I fit on the visor I was begun in a Star Trek style holodeck. There was a life sized manican in front of me and a car to the left of me. My first reaction was to reach out and touch something. It is real 3D.

Real 3D.

The coolest thing is that more and more games companies are making their games work on the rift. Valve games, Unreal engine games, Minecraft. When it comes out... I am getting it. It should be out next year.

13 - Valve, Steam and the death of Internet Explorer.

Fantastic software company Valve is going to make an open source console using linux! This is good news because Valve make brilliant games, Half Life series, Counter Strike series, Portal series, Left 4 Dead series. Also the whole world is waiting for Half Life 3, which is probably being made for the console.

Vales games on Steam... unlimited fun. 

Guys this is really interesting. This is a page which show the statistics of which browser is being used per month. However it goes back all the way to 2002.

Death of a salesman. 

It is quite interesting to see the steady decline of Internet Explorer and the rapid growth in popularity for Google's Chrome. In all honesty it is Microsofts own fault. They had years and years to ensure that they were ahead of the curve but they kept on making their own versions of all the software that the rest of the world was using. And how are they now... soon to be dead I think. The sad thing is, when Internet Explorer does die, nobody will even care?

Do you still use Internet Explorer? Why?

http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp

12 - hmmm did I forget something?

Sometimes when you are writing a blog and especially a blog a day blog it is really easy to forget to enter the days entry between the hours of 1 minute past midnight and midnight! But these things will happen.

11 - American Horror Story

I have watched every moment of Breaking Bad up to date on Netflix as you may know and it's a pain when you can't talk to people about it. Now some people haven't seen it because they just haven't gotten around to it but they do intend to. They're okay. But there are some people who say that they will not watch it only because it's a popular programme. Come on! Or it's not their genre. Not acceptable! So anyway one friend was like this and I know he might be reading this. .. You know who you are! So we made a deal,  if he watched the first 3 episodes of Breaking Bad that I would watch the series of his choice American Horror Story. I am really glad I did. AHS is really good. Alot better than I thought it would be,  well season 1 is anyway. So I hope he's enjoying Breaking Bad as much as I'm enjoying the blood, guts and gore of... The American Horror Story!

10 - Counter Strike Global Offensive map I am working on.

So my test worked of writing the blog on my phone. What went wrong for me was that for you to send the stuff that you write you have to first click a button that exits where you have just been writing and then you have to publish the text using another action. Kinda obvious now, but it wasn't when I was looking at the blogger app for the first time in the car when I was writing my blog.

Anyway.. back to the title of the blog. For those of you that do not know there is a computer game available on xbox, PC, Macs, Playstation 3? Anyway a few platforms... but I am making a map that I will be playing on the PC. I do not know if my map will work cross platform, nor do I care. This is going to be a map for my mates and I will throw it up on FPSBanana.com opps, just remembered they renamed themselves http://gamebanana.com/.

Anyway here are some images of the early map... don't worry the finished version will look better :)

Counter Strike Global Offensive - CS:GO. Outside one house

Counter Strike Global Offensive - CS:GO. Inside another house

Counter Strike Global Offensive - CS:GO. Birdeye view of a corner of the map.

9 - This is a test.

I just downloaded a Blogger app onto my phone and that's what I would love to write many of my blog entries on. So two days ago I wrote a nice long piece on this app, there is a "DONE" button that implies should be pressed when your finished writing. I passed the done button and all the text I had written disappeared.

So this is the test. Of you're reading this the test worked. I'd your not reading this then my resulting rage will be unknown to you.

8 - Number Game

Numbers numbers numbers....

You gotta love numbers. Everything in the world can be explained by numbers. Everything from how I am feeling to the amount of breaths that I will take for the rest of my life could be explained if all the data were at hand. That's what I find so interesting about maths and numbers. Now with that said I am no mathematician, far from it I remember getting 9% in a maths exam once. But then also, I remember when I went to college and I began to think "outside the box" and suddenly a raft of maths that we were doing in leaving cert maths suddenly made sense to me. Too late of course, I had my exams done by then, but I really strongly believe that more people are mathematically inclined than they would expect.

You pick a big number from the top row of blanks, then smaller numbers from the bottom row. Press play - if you get stuck you can show the solution.

It is with all this in mind that I say that you should have a look at the site below. Do not beat yourself up if you cannot get the solution, I would just like you to think in terms of maths for a little. Then when you are finished maybe take a look at the world around you... you can understand more than you think. There is no magic to the world except to magic that is your mind.

http://nrich.maths.org/6499

7 - Breaking Bad.

Wow, have you been watching Breaking Bad? You know what I am not going to say another thing other than to say that Yes, I too watch Breaking Bad. If you are reading this and have not yet seen breaking bad... I would strongly advise you look at it. People have told me that they are waiting for the whole thing to be finished before they watch it so they can see it all at once, feel free to start now then. If you watch it all in 2 weeks you will just about get to have the whole story before the last episode in a few weeks!

Breaking Bad... wow! So good. 

But what Breaking Bad has eluded us to is Netflix. We always knew about Netflix and the one month free and all that, but I think it is when we found out that Breaking Bad was on Netflix only a few hours after being shown in America that we were convinced.

6 - Played League of Legends yesterday.

I forgot to say yesterday. I played League of Legends for the first time. I have to admit too that I liked it. Maybe more than I liked Heros of Newearth or DOTA (Defense of the Ancients).

More on this later on this very day...

5 - Sunday!

Want to see something cool... yesterday, I forgot to say, we visited Petworld (http://www.petworlddirect.ie/section/PetworldGalwayTerryland). We went there because they have mercats. They were cool! Seriously, if you are in town and have some time DO take the time out to visit it. Below are some images of meercats basically because these Suricata suricatta kick totally kick ass. 

What else, I had something else to say. Oh yeah last night we had our first game of Game Of Thrones: The Board Game. It was brilliant. The game would have been better if people naturally respected our natural true heir to the Iron Throne Wallace Jones (in-joke: you had to be there). 

Winter is coming... Game of Thrones

What I find most interesting about the board game of Game Of Thrones is that it makes you feel for your position in the game. I was at a point when I was closely aligned to the person who was winning, or at least the strongest player (Wallace) and I felt safe and secure believing that I would not be attacked by him and since he was obviously the strongest and most dangerous person the rest of the players were picking away at him and little old me was safe and secure in his shadow. I was of course planning my own game and I was going to strike at Wallace eventually but we will never know what would really have happened as the game never finished. It wound on too long and we wrapped up some time past half three in the morning after playing for around 5 hours! :)

There is a school of thought that would say that Wallace might have won. Of course we will never know... yep never know.

4 - Another day another dead fish!

Many of my blog entries will be like this. Rushed. Today for example.. well now for example, I have to leave in a few moments and help setting up before I play Game of Thrones The Board Game. I have a good night planned ahead.

We were in town today with the kids. We being myself and Linda. So all of us saw The Smurfs 2. It was really nice. The occasion that is... Smurfs was like... hmm, 5.5/10. But Lucy love it and Sophie liked it. So good to show the kids. The Smurfs 1 is on Netflix.

Did I tell you we have Netflix? It is brilliant. When I heard about Netflix first I was thinking 'what why would anyone subscribe to that?' But here I am all these years later. With tons of choice of viewing and about 7 devices in the house that can view Netflix it has become a good idea after all. The clincher for me being that they show Breaking Bad a few hours after USA.

Oh yeah... my second algae eater died :(

Anyone.. must rush! I have a city to sack and a land to fell!

3 - Dead Fish

Man, I got 2 fish for my birthday. Algae eaters. One of them have died already. I choose that he died a happy death. There was so much algae in the tank that we could have easily sustained a hundred algae eaters for a month (or few). So basically I think he eat himself to death.

What else... not much really. I am looking forward to reading the rules of the Game of Thrones board game. We might be able to do play a game tomorrow night.

I have to go... I was meant to be at an appointment at 7:30pm... its now nearly 9:30. Douh! Totally forgot so I am leaving my first playing of Crysis 2 to go there.

2 - Not a bad old day outside.

So I spent alot of time looking at the blog that belong to my friends. They are:-

• http://irishrainphotography.com/irishrain/
• http://thedeibelcrew.wordpress.com/about/
• http://imslightlyodd.wordpress.com/
• http://thisgalsjourney.wordpress.com/

They are all impressive in their own way and it makes me realize that I have a long way to go in my blog before it is up to their quality.

Meanwhile these are some blackberries that were outside out the house. We've made around 12 jars of jam out of these. Most delicious jam....

...ever

1 - I'm doing it again!

Is this the second or the third time that I am aiming to do a "page a day for a year" challenge? Actually, is it definitely at least the third time I am trying it. The problem is that for like, 80 - 90 percent of the time the page a day challenge is fine. It is no problem to sit down and take out 3 - 5 minutes to write something down. It is the remainder of that percentage that is the pain. When you have had an exhausting day. When the laptop is in the car and you are in bed. There were so many things that popped up all the time that prevented you from your daily entry that eventually it would snowball and you would crash. Miss a day here, and there. Try to catch up with them by writing yesterdays blog entry right before you write the current ones. Well we will see what happens. 

So anyway - today is my birthday! I am 37. I got loads of presents! Pictures from the kids, food, games and utilities. Seriously - its like I was a child again. 

So. This is it. Day 1 done and 364 to go.