Ho Ho Ho....

In the words of Shakin' Stevens - MERRY CHRISTMAS EVERYONE!

To be honest, I'm not a very merry person at Christmas, but as I write this, I'm watching Kieran playing with all the great presents that he got, and I think back to this very day 20 years ago - Yep, Christmas 1987 - the best Christmas I ever had......

Why was it so great..... Because it was when I got my Commodore 64, the best present I have ever had in all of my 30 Christmases. It was the one present I got the most enjoyment out of (and I still do, 20 years later!!). I don't know if it is just me, but Christmas just isn't the same now that I am older, but I think to myself that Kieran has still got all this enjoyment, and excitement to come, and it's nice to know that I'll be able to share it with him and see him happy opening his presents over the coming years.

Well, the excitement of Kieran opening his presents has now finished. We are now off to spend the rest of Christmas and Boxing Day at Michelle's hotel... Ho Hum.

Catch you later!

BARGAIN ALERT!!

To anyone who is reading this and is interested - I am currently selling the complete collection of Star Trek Deep Space Nine VHS videos over on ebay for an amazing price of just £55!! Thats 101 video tapes - over £1000 worth of videos (at a cost of about £0.50 per tape).

BARGAIN!!!!!!!!!!!

Ok ok... before I start sounding desperate, these videos are in really good condition and deserve a new home. Every single episode of all 7 seasons of the hit show Deep Space Nine AND the first season of Enterprise thrown in free!!! Seasons 1,2 and 3 have been watched three times whereas season 4,5,6 and 7 have only been watched twice.

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&rd=1&item=320197302288&ssPageName=STRK:MESE:IT&ih=011

I want to eat your braiiiinnns.

Dan over at http://www.0ddness.co.uk/ did this, and since I love anything 'zombie' related, I thought I'd try it out - What would be my chances of surviving a zombie outbreak? (chance would be a fine thing!!!!!! Bring it on!)

64%

And this is the best one - I took the 'How much of a geek I am?' test, and I managed to score 105%!!!!!! Just getting a score I shouldn't really be able to get has got to be geeky enough - (Honest, I swear I didn't cheat!). I think I found a bug in the code somewhere because for one of the questions, it asked me for the answer twice.

105% Geek

Baa, Humbug

Apologies for the lack of updates lately. This has been down to me not having any 'me' time. Why?? I've been busy with work, putting together a special video for the school which will be entered into a national competition (I've done it for the past two years and both entries came 2nd place in the whole country!)

Anyway, as you can see from the picture, we have decided to put our Christmas tree up, much to the delight of Kieran. I've never been a festive person - infact, I cant stand this time of year. For me, its a very depressing period (not forgetting to mention how much I feel Christmas has become more commercialized). Infact, if it wasn't for Kieran, I doubt I'd even bother with it. I mean, if there is something that myself or Michelle wants to get during the year, we will get it - we wont wait until Christmas - I mean, whats the point?

Still, it's all about Kieran. Thats what I keep saying to myself. Its important that he enjoys it, and that has a great time! We've already done the Christmas shopping, and I think Kieran is going to be pleasantly surprised with what he gets on the 25th.

OH CRAP!!!!!!! Don't forget to backup

As a Network Manager, I am always telling the teachers and staff at school to make regular backups of the work they bring into school from home on a USB flash drive. Well, I should listen to my own advice because one of the worst things possible happened last week - 1 of 3 hard-drives in my home computer packed up, causing me to lose over 20Gb of MP3's, and over 10Gb of pictures (including personal pictures such as our Wedding day, honeymoon, and Kieran's birth pictures).

Fortunatly I did backup my music collection in July on one of the servers at the school, so I have only lost a couple of albums (which I am sure can be downloaded again if I can be bothered to look for them), but the pictures are a different story. After frantically searching through all my old backup DVD's in our bedroom, Michelle did find a backup that I made in mid 2006. Thankfully, I was able to restore the Wedding, Honeymoon and Kieran pictures, but it does mean that I have lost all pictures that I took between July 2006 and November 2007 - including last Christmas, and Kieran's 2nd birthday photos. Bugger!

Suffice to say, I am now backing all my data up - The original copies on my desktop PC, one backup on an external drive used only for backup purposes, and a copy on each of my 2 laptops.

So there you go.... A message to everyone - REMEMBER TO BACKUP YOUR VALUABLE DATA.

Unfinished Business

I've been going through my harddrive these past couple of days deleting old stuff that has basically been using up valuable megabytes, and I found a couple of things that I thought I would share with you :- A couple of unfinished games that I'd been working on.....

In an attempt to get back into game design, a couple of years ago I started work on a remake of an old Commodore Plus 4 game called "Treasure Island". I got quite far in the actual development of the game (the entire map, the sprites, tiles, collisions, enemies, coding), but for some reason I just gave up - actually, I think it was when we had Kieran, and I just didn't have the time to work on it.

Well, I figured I'd upload the game AS IT IS for all of you to see. I doubt anyone will find it interesting except those who perhaps had the original game. You can wander around the entire island, and a few baddies are present at the start of the game (including some big blue trigger objects that would be invisible in the finished game but are visible in this release for debugging purposes). I WILL finish it oneday as I got so far with it and it would seem such a waste not to complete it. One of the many things that I liked about my remake was that the landscape is completely made up from tiles, therefore it would be extremely easy to make different island layouts (perhaps even include an Island Level Editor at some point) - but in this version you just get the map that was in the original game. Anyway, enough of my waffling on about it..... Take a look at the screenshots below to compare my version with the original, and when you are ready CLICK HERE to download Treasure Island

And when you've finished that one, try out another game that I started but never got round to finishing....

"LANDER". Yep, its such an original idea this one.... Guide your spaceship across a rocky landscape and land it softly on the landing pad. (Hmmmmm, why hasn't anyone else thought of that one?) It was my attempt at recreating a typical 'Mastertronic" style 1.99 game from the 80's (remember those?)

Again.. don't expect a finished game....... I was working on this one about the same time as Treasure Island, and stopped work on it because I just didnt have the time to spend developing it. The first level is easy, but I'd like to see anyone try and finish the second level!!!!!!!!!!!!!

You can download it .