If you have any friends who say they don't mind the load times of a PSP, go ahead and point them to this little YouTube link.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gH3dc7IZVPc

There's something wrong with our water, it smells like an old sock... it stinks.. it has this salty feeling to it. Heck I fel unsafe just TASTING it and spitting it out.

Maybe something died in the water reservoir but you'd need something pretty big to make the whole tank stink I think.

So I went over to a Dopod user group gathering on Saturday to talk to other Dopod users and also mee tup with the technical service people to see if I can get some questions answered.

Unfortunately the attituide of those techincal service people was exactly what I expected as demonstrated by the following scenarios.

• One of the users where having a problem with his 838 was not synching with the desktop, on a quick check of his device something was amiss. His Inbox app wasn't working properly. His Remove Programs applet was completely screwed up and wans't displaying ANYTHING installed on the device, which wasn't normal at all. I asked him what was the last thing he did before he couldn't sync, he said he went to one of the PDA shops and they helpfully installed a few apps for him. Aaaaa... the follies of piracy... I told him that it would seem that something they installed must have screwed up his 838, and the only thing I could think of now is to hard reset the device. But he didn't feel like it, well I too also don't like the idea but I told him if he asked those tech support ppl that were present they would just tell him to hard reset. So he goes and tells the tech support person about his problem and without skipping a beat tech support says.. "Have you tried hard reseting yet?"
• Another user was having a little problem with Outlook which I didn't catch, the only thing which I caught was tech support saying "Have you tried reinstalling Outlook?"
• When users pressed tech support about new features, tech support person turned marketing and said "Microsoft will release second edition then you'll have to upgrade to a new device probably!"

With this incident I'm never ever gonna believe ANYTHING these distrbutors say about their products again, the last time was the Sagem marketing person saying O2 was not coming to market with the XDA Mini and that O2 has given up the Malaysian market.

Well... O2 HAS quit the Malaysian market officially (Now there's only a distribution channel via SiS) BUT... they did release the Mini to great success.

So one of my friends delivered today and it was kinda an emergency delivery. So the interesting thing to learn about the incident was.

• Cesareans costs a lot of money
• There's an extra surcharge for operations on weekends.. Guess the peak rate thing is well and alive in the private medical industry.
• There's an extra surcharge for paging the doctor back to do the operation... as much as I understand that you need money to live but this just creeps me out a little.

Just gives you something to think about...

Well, on a whim I decided that hey.. I should go down and join in the festivities of the Singapore 360 launch. So I've already booked my AirAsia ticket which hopefully the flight won't be delayed. But I'm just worried about how the heck am I supposed to get back from Singapore to JB on the next day.

*shrug*

The net, and DVDs have allowed us to take a step back through history to see old movies that we've watched as kids and watching them again will tell you one of the following things.

• The movie is ageless, and you enjoy it just as much as you did when you were young.
• You realised that they just don't make movies like this anymore.
• You realise that the above fact is a GOOD thing!

Right now I'm rewatching The Wizard and... if you've never heard of it before just picture a video game advertisment the length of a movie and you'll pretty much got the idea what's it about.

So I got the Xbox 360 about a month ago, and have been spending quite some time with it. The one thing that really makes the Xbox 360 experience different from gaming on other consoles is really the Xbox Live experience.

With the centralized XBox Live network you can see when your friends came online, what are they playing, and they are one button press away from multiplayer goodness. Also with every game comes the notions of achievements, basically a centralized  storage of what you've acheived in the game. ie. Completed what difficulty levels, find 100% secrets. To see an example of this look at the gamer card on the right column of my page. With this system once again you're fighting for bragging rights to show that you're better than your friends!

Now if I was younger, and still as crazy as I am today I guess I definetly would go and try doing stuff like this.

People always say "The customer is always right" and thus in the software business we usually just keep saying yes no matter how crazy or stupid the feature is. But of course there's also another saying that "The customer is never satisfied!" which basically means no matter how good your system is the customer always find fault in it... Usually to try and negotiate for a lower price or what not.

In a classic example of customer's asking for features that really don't make sense, when the first Portable Video Devices where released ie. Creative Zen PMC, Archos PMP, etc. etc. Based on the feedback I saw on the support forums, other than PERFECT internet download video playback the most requested feature is... The ability to HIDE files from being directly browsed to on the device.

I still remember one of the post a guy made "Yeah I'd like the feature to hide files, wouldn't want people to think I have a music taste of a 5 year old girl when iI hand them the device to play around with!" Hiding the fact that you have bad music taste?? I don't think so, more like hiding Prawn0 I believe! ;)

There's a whole set of webcasts on MSDN now that teaches the basics of game programming in C#, you can find them here.

http://www.microsoft.com/events/series/msdnvideodev.mspx

I always emphasized that there's no better way to learn programming than to learn it by doing game programing, why? Simple concepts that you need to make a game include

• Object oriented design
• Data structure design
• Finite State Machine concept

and much more. If anyone can come to terms with making a simple game, even one such as Space Invaders that person basically already has the foundation of becoming a good programmer. ;)

We play games to have a good time... relax... unwind... basically to drop our stress levels down and get some good old hand eye coordination exercise happening. But to some people gaming becomes a chore, instead of having fun when playing a game they feeling and attituide towards the act of gaming becomes an act of work. Something in their daily schedule that they need to do so that they feel complete for the day.

This is definetly NOT how you should look at gaming, if ever you feel that a game is a chore just stop! Let it go, and stop! Don't waste your time and attention on something that should be giving you fun and relaxation!

As I was looking over some stuff at a video game shop, this guy comes up and asks the shopkeeper to let him test Dirge Of Cerebus, the game loads up, the guy sees that it's in Japanese and goes Wah how to play like that arr? But the menu options were english so he picks trainning mode, at which point the training mission loads and before it began there's a whole load of tutorial screens which the guy couldn't skip and he just keeps going Aiyo, why talk so much one... Graphic not nice one geh... Then when he finally has control he goes How to play arr?? Then he somehow he manages to navigate the pause menu properly to quit back to the main menu, and selected Start Game instead. Then as per typical Final Fantasy style a video cutscene plays, the quality of the video is pretty up to Advent Children levels and the guy goes Wah look at the nice graphics!!!

I didn't bother to stick around to see what was his response after the game dropped back to game engine mode, with such a disregard for whatever it is he should be doing why does he even bother playing the game anyway since he doesn't even stop to try and read the tutorial messages, complained over graphics and turned glassy eyed over prerendered cut scenes..

So.. let's see now... it's been so long since my last real blog post. Have I gotten lazy, hell yeah!!! Work just hit critical point somewhere in the back and I just had to sort out some stuff of my own as well. But now let me try to do something productive with this blog and start posting usable information and tips about the stuff that I live for, like my code... and my games!!! ;)

Oh no, not again??!?! Well this time this should be final already, I finally decided to just use someone else's Blog engine instead of working on my own cause I just don't have much time to work on one myself anymore. Since already I'm bogged with work, if I need to work on creating important infrastructure like a Blog engine I definetly won't have time for what's really important...

Writing little code widgets!

So I decided to just go with DasBlog since it is quite widely used and has enough features that I require, I just don't want to have to go through yet ANOTHER reboot!! :P