When Professor and media researcher Roger Wallis left the stand yesterday, the court asked whether he wanted to be reimbursed for his appearance. “You are welcome to send some flowers to my wife,” he responded. In the hours that followed, many Pirate Bay supporters took this suggestion to hand. TorrentFreak
According to Wallis’s website, his wife has so far received 4100 euros worth of flowers. I guess that’s a double blow to the RIAA since that money could have been spent on it’s music. Heh.
On the right hand side of that site, it shows how many CD’s the current gifts amount to.
So Amazon Prime are the culprits of my overdraft woes. What kind of business practise is one which signs you up automatically to Amazon Prime after offering you a free delivery.
It wouldn’t be such a problem except for the fact my account was empty, to which a charge of £70 on top of the original £45 they charged me.
Lucky my dad decided to pay off the original charge of £45 so they stopped adding shit to my overdraft fee, otherwise I would have truly been up shit creak.
So I’ve been on the phone with Amazon, and they are going to refund all the money, which is fair enough.
This has been such a pain.
Okay, so recently I noticed I couldn’t access the Microsoft website. I thought it was downtime, so I left it a day, still wasn’t working did some googling and there was nothing about ms.com being down.
That was when it clicked that I could be a virus, Avast.com was down, AVG.com was down. Kapersky.com was down. So I had to get the newest versions of AVG and Ad-Aware from Download.com
After struggling to find this virus, having Firefox crash every time I googled any relevent subject Ad-Aware found something, removed it, and out of no where AVG appeared to remove the rest of the infection.
Now, today I’ve received an email saying that I’m £45 overdrawn, and because I don’t have an overdraft they are going to charge me £15 per day, and then £15 per month until I pay up. However, to my knowledge I’ve not used my debit card for at least 2 weeks, and apparently I tried to make “a series of purchases” on the 24th of February. I’m going down to the bank tomorrow to try and sort this mess out, hopefully these assholes don’t end up making me pay for this shit.
And to think I was happy when I got in today.
I forgot to mention that I think these two things are related.
Okay, so I’ve not posted in a couple of weeks.
What have I been up to you might wonder, in all honesty, I’ve been busy as hell during the weeks, and trying to relax at the weekends and haven’t found the time or any interesting content to write about. However it seems like about time I gave my input on something so I’ll start with some recent news articles.
The most annoying of all the news I’ve been reading is the mass coverage on “The Pirate Bay” trials that are currently ongoing. Fair enough it’s a big deal to pirates around the world, but honestly the ammount of press this trial is getting you would think that they murdered someone.
Also some of the quotes I’ve been reading from the courtroom make me feel ill.
“When did you meet [Gottfrid] for the first time IRL?” asked the Prosecutor. “We do not use the expression IRL,” said Peter, “We use AFK.” “IRL?” questioned the judge. “In Real Life,” the Prosecutor explained to the judge.
“We do not use that expression,” Peter noted. “Everything is in real life. We use AFK – Away From Keyboard.” “Well,” said Roswall. “It seems I am a little bit out of date.”
The fact that internet acronyms are being used in courtrooms is just stupid.
In a more heartening story, the EU are currently filing an anti-trust lawsuit against Micro$oft forcing them to bundle 3rd party web browsers with Windows.
Now, at first that sounds like an excellent plan, however if Microsoft opt’s to bundle several browsers with Windows when it ships, that’s going to be a pain uninstalling all those extra programs on a fresh install. However, if you get the option upon install if you want a different browser instead of Internet Explorer then I for one welcome the change. Microsoft get’s hit with antitrust lawsuit Mozilla join the fun Google want some action too
Okay with those out of the way, I have a few other things to talk about – http://www.l4d.com/, Wanted, and some news about me.
First off Left4Dead – I decided that I would take advantage of Valve’s half price weekend, as I was sceptical about the game being worth £30 and I was pleasantly surprised, for £13 I got a good few evenings of fun. The enjoyment of the game varies greatly based on Difficulty and the Skill of your team mates. I’ll tell you now playing Expert mode with a newbie on your team isn’t at all fun; let’s just say there were 38 friendly fire incidents by him, and the rest of the team had 2 each, perhaps just because he was frustrating to play with.
I think the best part about Left4Dead is the art style, it’s far less cartoony than Team Fortress 2, and all of the post processing makes the game look insanely gloomy and dim.
I found an article about the graphic style on the official blog.
From watching many playtests, we found players instinctively moved towards well-lit areas. Simplifying the lighting helped the gameplay (the player is drawn to the warm glow down the street, and not distracted by unnecessary light sources); the fiction (this entire city block’s been abandoned—something’s not right here); and the aesthetics (by simplifying the visual information, we’ve given a focal point for the eye to follow). Left4Dead Blog
There’s a nice gameplay video for you to enjoy.
Next up, I took some time to watch the film “Wanted” on Blu-Ray. Which contrary to my first thoughts was actually an alright film. Directed by Timur Bekmambetov of Nightwatch and Daywatch fame, and starring James McAvoy, Morgan Freeman and Angelina Jolie. Some of the action scenes were ridiculous but at the same time so cool you cannot fathom being as cool.
Possibly the best “transformation” of a character I’ve seen for a while. Look closely at the keys flying incase you missed the “hidden” message.
Lastly, I’d just like to say I’m pretty damn happy with how my Graphic’s project has turned out, and that I’ve got an interview at Bournemouth Arts Institute for next year.
