Metrorail Cape Town prices going up in April 2010

The Metrorail prices in Cape Town are going up in April 2010. This is probably because of the electricity price increase from Eskom.

Comments about the movie: How to train your dragon

Last night I went to the local cinema to watch the movie called "How to train your dragon". It was for me better than I had anticipated. The movie was not quite like all those other computer rendered "talker" movies where there is always one evil person plotting against the underling hero of the movie. This movie was for a change about the survival of the entire village. The story was as a result different and in my opinion and bit better than the usual "talker" movies. The characters were also recognisable by how they looked to get an idea of their personality. A lot of the area and flight scenes really looked beautiful. This one is a movie that I would want to have in my DVD collection.

Mixed comments about the new Command and Conquer 4 game

I have started on the new Command and Conquer 4 (C&C4) game shortly after it came out and have the following comments:

1. The game is a little bit unstable and crashes occasionally, especially when accessing the menu items too shortly after the main menu has appeared for the first time.

2. Always having to be on the internet is an annoyance because of connection lost during a solo mission does not allow continuing and ends up with having to replay the mission. This was particularly annoying on the last Nod mission. An offline mode for playing the game on a LAN would be great, especially when there is no internet connection nearby. The fact that some people consider a disconnect as cheating is stupid. I understand why they don't like it if someone disconnects after getting annoyed, but they would never know if it was just a bad connection.

3. Some of the missions are yet again impossible odds and having to be everywhere at the same time. How some of the missions are supposed to be completed in Medium or Hard difficulty is beyond me. Many of them can be done on Medium difficulty, but not all. i am not a hardcore gamer who plays games every days for at least six hours or more.

4. The multiplayer is not bad actually because there is no long base building, the action starts immediately. It is more about micromanagement now. The players in multiplayer stay in the game instead of whoever is eliminated first has to watch for the next 30 minutes to one hour until the game is done.

Windows 7 network neighborhood PCs not showing

Recently I have been at a LAN where only one PC was consistently showing on the list of computers instead of all six. All but one PC on the network were running various incarnations of Windows 7. Some were home edition, some were Enterprise edition and some were Professional. Some editions of Windows 7 were 64 bit. One of the 64 bit PCs was always showing in the network.

Last weekend I went to my weekly LAN where I meet with friends to talk rubbish and play network games like the previous bigger LAN where I went to.

At this weekly LAN we investigated the matter and found that Windows 7 Network Sharing Center has a setting far down on the list which is not set by default and that was preventing computers from showing on the network. It was somewhere below the 128 bit encryption. The public settings did not help, this setting had to be used as well. This setting has nothing to do with the homegroup. Once I am on my home PC again, I will check what exactly it was called and will ad a mention here.

Steam update getting killed by internet cap stops gaming

A friend of mine had the bad luck yesterday (Sunday, 14 March 2010) that his monthly international internet banwidth usage cap was used up while the Steam game client was doing updates. Steam was refusing to start properly because it wanted to finish the update. This meant that he could not play any games in Steam. No software is made to handle partial updates like this and be happy about it. Either it is a matter of being offline or a matter of being online and not some inbetween state. The matter was resolved by him having to take his PC to me to use my internet connection for teh remaining 2MB. Telkom used to throttle the international internet traffic down to about 800 bytes persecond, but not anymore.

A visit to Mike's nightclub

The visit to my local gym was rather late last night. The gym normally has music playing at all times. A lot of those songs would also be ideal for a nightclub. At that hour there are only very few lost souls still training. Mike is the person who happens to be weekdays at the reception desk. Because of electricity saving, he has to switch off most lights from a certain time onwards, which makes the place look even more like a nightclub. All that is missing are strobe lights and lasers.

LAN computer gaming session in Kuilrivier

This last weekend was one of those infamous LAN gaming sessinos in Kuilsrivier again. We were six people for a change. It is difficult to get more than six people to show up due to various issues and excuses. The purpose of these sessions is to play computer games for fun. Often we end up having a braai as well.

We ended up playing Need for Speed Shift, Unreal Tournament 3 (UT3) and Call of Duty - World at War. There were several issues because Need for Speed is buggy as every version. World at War was a similar issue. Someone have UT3 dying during a game. I have doubts that the heat outside had much to do with this. Overall it was a fun weekend.

Google chart tools

Lately I have been eying the chart tools that Google has on the code website. I am considering using those charts to see if visualising bookings for selected date ranges will be useful. I cannot find exactly the chart that I am looking for, but there are similar charts that might be useful. Getting time to play around with this is another matter.