After a major struggle trying to download the closed beta (all of the download sources were getting hammered) I have finally got the Battlefield Bad Company 2 closed beta installed. Wish I could say what I thought about the game because right now I’m getting flashbacks of the XBLA release of Battlefield 1943 last summer.

Like Battlefield 1943 you cannot get into a game at the moment possibly due to load. And there’s also a notice that’s gone up from EA telling us not to use the server browser for now. The reason being that it crashes you to desktop, eep! But their workaround ‘use the Play Now’ button is also not getting me much further.

I think I may be calling it a night soon, haha!

I reinstated the old router and now my latency readings look normal. There’s still the odd spike here and there but it’s not bad enough to affect audio playback and doesn’t occur on every webpage.

If you encounter similar problems the checker can be downloaded from here.

Over the last few days when using itunes there will be some severe crackling occurring in the audio whenever I load a webpage. At first I thought it was an issue with the soundcard driver so I uninstalled the drivers and re-installed them to see how it went. At first it seemed ok, but the crackle eventually made it’s way back.

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Remember these? I’ve got another prescription from them, once again I needed to come home from work and get a Doctor’s appointment due to another urinary tract issue resulting in abdominal pains on the left side.

I made it to my appointment at 11:30 and found myself in the waiting room for an hour and a quarter, during this time the pain was getting pretty intense to the point that I didn’t know whether to sit or stand because I just could get comfortable. (Last time this happened I couldn’t keep still, I eventually had to try to go to bed.) The annoying part was that roughly 2-3 minutes before the Doctor called me in all of the pain stopped dead. I explained all of this to her and now I’ve got more antibiotics and I’ll be sent a Hospital letter to get my kidneys scanned. The Doctor reckons I’ve got a stone or two that keep moving.

But we’ll see…

Ok, I’m a few days late in posting this but who cares! I ordered myself a Fujifilm Finepix S2000 HD camera a week ago on Thursday from Amazon. I selected first class as my delivery option and got an estimated delivery date of the 16th January. The following day I got an email saying it was dispatched, but on the 16th it didn’t arrive. The same went for the 18th, 19th and well you know how it goes.

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For those of you who don’t play Modern Warfare 2 – you achieve 50-100 points for each of your kills, which add to your XP which in turn helps you rank up to earn various guns, perks and game modes. In the video posted below this guy was invited to an XP boosting match, so everyone in the game was cheating already. This guy in particular had an exploit in place that means anyone who kills him gets upto minus 5 million XP each time, affectively reducing their rank back to Private.

This is for the Xbox 360, I haven’t seen it happening on the PC version myself but apparently they’ve fixed it for the PC first with the 360 and PS3 patches in the works now.

Check it out, this if the first webpage I have come across where its’ had a problem with me having the Adblock Firefox plugin installed. Screenshot below:

At first I thought “hmm, I’ll disable it once just for this page” but no it continued to have a hissy fit about Adblock being installed. It was at this point where I decided that the website could go and fuck itself. I am not being dictated to by some twerp on the Internet about what software I have installed on my PC. And to be honest, if this happens again, I’ll go elsewhere for what I’m looking for.

The page was probably packed with enough ads to kill my PC anyway.

Dammit, I thought we were done with snow for the year but no it made another appearance today as we experienced light snow showers throughout the morning and early afternoon. Because it was a little sprinkle and formed ice on the road it meant all cars were travelling at 2 m/ph and natually no buses were running. Due to the latter it meant I had to embark on yet another uphill walk to work. Whoo.

Anyway, enjoy my pic of the frozen lagoon at the rear of Conquest Hospital that I took earlier today.

I haven’t been very good at keeping this thing up to date this year so far. This is mainly because all of my entries would’ve comprised of ‘Snow, snow, snow, snooow, god fucking dammit when will this snow go away?’. Yeah, I usually love snow but we’ve had so much of the stuff that it has sickened me of it somewhat. It’s even worse when you’re waiting for £120-ish worth of Internet Orders, which won’t come through because the Royal Mail and other couriers have come to a stand still.

Anyway it looks like we’re gradually going back to normality, after a week’s worth of shorter days due to the weather I am now back to working 9 – 5. What a nice start to the year especially when your permanent contract kicked in! I’ve also already got nine and a half days worth of holiday booked off *squee*. I had 66 hours to claim before the 31st March, so I’m taking a couple of long weekends between the end of the month and March.

One of them covers Aliens Vs Predator’s release and the other will allow me some quality time with Battlefield: Bad Company 2, this of course is assuming their release dates stick!

It’s official, at the time of writing this entry I have spent more time asleep than awake this decade! I watched a bit of The Speedgamers New Year playthrough of New Super Mario Bros Wii until 1:30 then I went for a lie down, I didn’t wake up until 5am. I sat at the PC for a while until 5:30/5:45 and then went back to bed again, not rising until midday. w00t!

Anyway, what did I do for New Years Eve? Not a lot really. I installed my Bluray drive (breaking one of the cold cathodes in the process) and hooked it up to the TV using a HDMI cable. So far the results have been pretty damn amazing, I used Rambo as my test disk.

Sarah came down just before 9 and we watched a bit of TV. The IT Crowd was on along with The 100 Most Annoying People of 2009 (AGAIN! – it’s been shown nightly on BBC3 for some time now) then I hooked up the Wii to the TV and we played New Super Mario Bros Wii for the first time. It’s a pretty good game, it’s taken all of the really good parts of Super Mario Bros, Super Mario Bros 3, Super Mario World and the original Yoshi’s Island and mashed them together to make something that is truly brillaint. A good game to end the decade playing and to start the new one with!

PS: It snowed overnight again, awesome!