Mini-review: Cursed Winds

Staying with my piratical theme:

Cursed Winds

Mini-review: Treasure of Cutlass Reef

This is kinda just a placeholder until I actually have time to write a bit of text.

But for lunch today I was playing -

Treasure of Cutlass Reef

IE6 = grr

Since I'm in the mood for blogging and this mood seldom takes me...I thought I'd actually spam my blog to make it look like I use it. :)

Been getting very annoyed at IE6 this week with it's inability to conform to web standards. I know that it can do pretty much anything, but it's very frustrating to have that being the only browser that your code doesn't work on.

This is, of course, compounded by my employer's move to a Vista dev environment. GAH! Vista vehemently refuses to run IE6. Previously we'd managed to get round the problem by using IE6 standalone on XP but that doesn't work on Vista.

The solution appears to be some kind of uber VM box that our dev team can log into remotely and use our dev tools in lots of different enviroments at once. The catch being that our SysAdmin team don't have time to do that so as a temporary stopgap we're getting a couple of on machine VMware enviroments. Unfortunately, that's also going to take time and we've got things to do and websites to launch in the meantime (without proper testing in IE6).

So...this will be fixed...it just isn't fixed now. Another side effect of a management structure which doesn't think through the ramifications of it's decrees as it doesn't, at the end of the day (to use management speak), actually know what we do or how we go about doing it.

Xbox 360 woes

I'm pretty sure that this is one of the most talked about subjects on the internet yet I still feel the need to voice my opinion on this wonderful piece of hardware.

So, yeah. For the second time in its history my 360 which stands in a nice clear area on it's own, on a flat wooden desk in the shade under a window so it gets lots of lovely cold air has stopped working as it should. The 'orrible freezing bug has reared its ugly head once more.

It's not like that is anything special it happens to everyone after a length of time...but it's mostly the fact that this is exactly the same problem I had fixed last year that is really getting me grumping.

There is clearly something wrong with electronic hardware which turns itself into a puddle of molten metal and plastic on a regular basis.

The first time round my 360 was still under warranty so it was all dealt with and it left me with a nice happy glow inside to realise that MS were a nice company that knew they'd released a product with a few faults. I give them the benefit of the doubt on this one.

The fact that it's happened again and this time I actually have to pay £55 for the privilege of having it fixed...AGAIN is really hacking me off. It's clearly duff. Why am I having to pay for this? I was actually considering (to the point of checking prices on Amazon) just going ahead and buying a new Jasper core version in order to prevent this problem happening again. At this rate, over the next three years I'll have spent as much on repairs as I would on getting a nice shiny new one with HDMI output and something bigger than the woeful HDD that comes as standard on the Premium version.

So all in all, feeling a bit meh about that at the moment.

Welcome, one and all

Well, here is another go at me having a blog, though I must admit that it might just be a shameless attempt for me to have a go at playing with a bit of web designer stuff out in the big bad world of the internet.