I’ve just treated myself to a lovely new digital camera. A Cannon S3 PowerShot. My older digital camera was looking very long in the tooth, with no zoom, low res images and generally poor quality (especially indoors). This camera, however, is perfect! The price was good, the image quality is excellent and it’s brim-full of options. It has a great zoom, great optics, and I don’t know how else it could be improved. Expect to see my flickr sidebar widget update a lot as I go out and use it!

Me and my lady, Laura, have started a blog on food in Wellington. We both enjoy eating out and we both have strong opinions about the range of great, and not-so-great restaurants in Wellington. Also, Laura loves to take pictures of her dinners! Yes, it’s a strange habit, but I figured, why not put it to good use! Hence, a blog about food. You can go read our blog at Foodgasmic Wellington! I hope you enjoy it.

Few things annoy me more than bad web site design. I want to give people money, I want to buy their products, but if I can’t research the product on your website or I can chuck it in a shopping cart and order it, chances are I will never bother spending money with you and will be annoyed your web site for wasting my time. And then I’ll blog about it because I’m angsty.

Harvey Norman New Zealand – A terrible website that tells you to download their catalog or you can flip through a scanned pop-up copy that does not even show enough detail to read the text of the ad! There’s no online ordering facility at all. Completely and utterly awful.

Overclockers – A nice company based in New Zealand offering good computer gear. Shame about the website. Red on black text? Hello, MySpace want their 13 year olds back! At least the shopping cart works I guess.

Reading Cinemas – For a long time this site was completely broken in Firefox and IE. You could simply not get film listings or times to display. Now, they’ve repaired it (took a couple of months) and have a great scheme where you can sign up for ‘rewards’ in return for most of your personal information. Hmm. What makes this dubious offer worse is that when you do sign up, they send a confirmation email which includes your login and password in plain text! Now, I don’t use the same password for everything, but I do use the same password for ‘junky’ things like signing up to crappy websites. It’s good to know any bored admin can access mail logs on the many servers between here and Reading and check out my password too!

ASB Bank – Their login page involve a simple one-step login process. In the UK many banks moved to a two-step process involving a user name and password as well as a drop down asking you to select a letter from your user name. This step was designed to defeat key-loggers, which are heavily used by East European criminal gangs in particular. No such sophistication for New Zealand banking customers.

Looks like I got l33t hax0red the other day, well, all of my host, Neosurge did. All fixed now, back to the joyous fun of TinyPirate!

Thanks to the awesome work of Johan the Second Life games wiki is back up at http://www.gameslavewiki.com/. Johan will be managing it from now on as he’s technical enough to do a good job, which I’m not. Redirects from the old URL will be available shortly. Meanwhile, book this beautiful new link! Note, the version Johan has recovered from my crash might be a bit out of date and some pages might be missing. Please help out and bring the wiki back up to speed.

Word on the street is that Sony is well behind on getting final dev kits and controllers out to their developers, despite what some Sony staff are saying. Even worse, their middleware developer, Naughty Dog, is still hiring people to work on the software developers are supposed to be using to build games. Poor Sony, since the PS3 price announcement I can’t think of a single piece of good news to come out about the PS3.

The other day I saw Sympathy for Lady Vengeance, a simply fantastic Korean film. It turned up in a local film festival and it was a real thrill compared to some of the poop that’s on everywhere else right now. At its heart, the movie is a stylish revenge story, and one that encourages the viewer to relish the revenge as much or even more than the protagonist does!

After mulling over the film a little, I am reminded of how much I love a good revenge story, yet it’s one that’s seldom touched on in Hollywood (or elsewhere?). Some examples come to mind, with Taxi Driver and Leon/The Professional as particular favourites, but perhaps the dubious morality of a good revenge story is a bit much for most people. (more…)

Not sure I have many active readers since I no longer post much about Second Life, but regardless, as you will see, I’ve updated hte blog somewhat and reinstated comments (with new spam-protection features!). Enjoy, I should be posting more often now.

It’s about time I blog some more. And update my flickr pictures too for that matter. Anyway, I think I’ll keep this baby updated a bit more, however I won’t be covering Second Life much. There’s one reason why, and that is that I just don’t play much any more! I find I tend to be a bit obsessive with SL, and that obsession manifests as a desire to be a fantastic coder, artist and builder in game, something I can’t hope to achieve. The result is my crappy builds and art tend to annoy me more than excite, especially when I know there are other fantastic. I end up hounding other people to do ‘my’ work and that is no good for anyone!

I plan on dropping in regularly, but for the good of everyone, I should keep my fingers out of that particular pie. So what will I blog about now? Mostly games I’m playing now, tech ideas and other bits and pieces I feel like discussing. Lets hope it’s interesting.

In a fit of madness I have joined the New Zealand Territorial Force, our army reserve! Today I passed my fitness test and two hours later I was swearing alleigance to the Queen and being congratulated. Oh dear, what have I got myself into? I blame it on a touch of brain cramp. Should be interesting I figure.