This Geek

Two colleagues and I were promoted last April, but we were told that our salary increases would only take effect 6 months later, as a kind of “probation” to see how we fit into our new roles koffbullshitkoff.

October payslips come round, we check them in anticipation. No increase. Wtf?

We check with our boss. Apparently there was a stuff up notifying HR, but we would definitely receive our increases, with back-pay to October, in the November pay run.

We get our payslips. Still no increase. Fuck. Our boss is on leave. Double fuck. We check with the guy who is standing in for our boss. He says he will check with our CIO to see what the problem is. Anyway, he gets back to us with the message that the CIO would come speak to us directly.
Uh oh. Not good.

This was the 23rd. By the Friday (the 26th), we had still not had a visit from our CIO. We decided to take it up with our boss, who was due back on the 29th. He would at least find out what the fuck was going on.

He did. He told us today that the CEO had denied all increases across the board. Meaning everyone in the entire company would be denied increases, despite promises made by their line heads. Lovely.

I’m really thrilled about this. We’ve been willing to work at 2am on a Sunday, and get called out for stupid standby calls at 1am just to be thanked like this?

I’ve a good mind to send the CEO an email:

Dear Sir,

On behalf of your staff who were due increases:

Usually we like to have dinner before we go back to your room. Is it ok for me to straighten up and pull up my pants, cuz boy my ass is sore.

With love,
Your staff

Admittedly, the graphics are brilliant (on my 6800 at least), however the install process is NOT worth the agony. I sure as shit will not buy another game that uses so-called “Steam”.

If any of your buddies are looking to buy the game, warn them.

The install process is AGONY, especially if you only have a modem. — I’m not sure that my 64k ISDN would have been much better, if it had been working.

So you have your nice DVD-sized box (If you didn’t buy the collector’s edition). I took the one with the face of that scary looking dude on it. Open the box… Just a crappy little cardboard tray with 5 CDs in paper sleeves, and 1 crappy “reference card”. Hmm. Another useless box, like the Doom 3 box, that can’t be stored with my other regular DVD-case games.

Install off 5x CDs takes awhile… bout half an hour(+?) or so. First it installs the “Steam” client, and then it installs the game proper.

Ready to play the game? Nope!

Steam updates itself. This took about half an hour (analogue connection at “48k”).

Ready to play? Nope!

Steam “decrypts” Half-life 2. This took a long time. But then it also said something about downloading content for “Codename: Gordon” - which really made me happy, considering I was connected at 48k(!), and had already been connected for around 2 hours (Note to self: Don’t mess around with other stuff in Steam while bored). Set Codename:Gordon to Never update. It didn’t stop the download. Killed Steam (had to kill the task as well), and restarted it. Half-life 2 properties shows that it has 99% updated.

Check Steam monitor. No updates in progress. Right, how the hell do I force an update? Can’t find any info. Screw it. Launch game.

Please wait… Half-life 2 will be ready in…. 86 minutes.

Wha-fuck?

More waiting. Eventually the wait time dropped… until it showed ready. I cancelled the launch. Stuff that. I wanted to see if so-called “Offline” mode worked. I disconnected the modem, and then quit Steam.

Relaunch Steam, and after awhile, it bitched about not being able to connect. Do you want to go offline? Yes, damnit.

Finally. Launch Half-life 2. It runs. About fucking time.

One thing I can say, is that I’ve definitely been put off Steam. Reading various form posts reaffirms my conviction. I will NOT buy another Steam game. (I probably will, but right at this point, I will not! I won’t! So there!)

I’m not fucking impressed.

It’s taken me 2 hours to install Half-life 2. First, you get the install from 5 cds. Then “Steam” launches, and spends half an hour updating itself — thanks to my shitty connection.

Once it’s done that, it spends god knows how fucking long, “decrypting” Half-life 2 game files. Now, literally, 2 hours later (I’ve been online 2 hours and 10 minutes now), I click on “Launch Half-life 2″, and it starts off by telling me that it will launch in about 82 minutes… which has dropped down to about 10 minutes now. The motherfucker is busy updating.

This is the LAST so-called “Steam” game I’m ever gonna buy, so long as I live here.

Valve, you fucking suck!!

So I run out and buy Half-life 2 this afternoon. Get home, all ready to play it, only to discover, to my horror, that it requires an internet connection to install(!). Fucking bastards. What the fuck for??

Now normally, I wouldn’t be too bothered about this… but I think our telco exchange got nailed by lightning last Thursday, because I haven’t been able to make a digital connection (ISDN) since then. Using an analogue modem has been really flaky as well. It’s the first time in 2 days that I’ve been able to establish a connection, shitty as it is, and the fucking telco has been really slack about fixing the damn problem. I’m pretty damn pissed off.

It really annoys me that a game now requires an internet connection in order to function. This ain’t America folks. We just don’t have the fucking infrastructure for that! — Well we do, but there is one telco here, and it has a monopoly, so it charges the earth for phone calls and especially data connections. Check out Hellkom.

So my question is, why isn’t there an alternate means of activating this game? Why no phone numbers? What the fuck is wrong with you people? You think everywhere is the same as the USA? Kiss my ass. Unfortunately some of us have the misfortune of living in a shithole backwater (Or should I say shitwater backhole?).

When my computer blew up a couple of months back (motherboard blew), I decided to switch back to Intel from AMD, and see how the P4 processors were compared to the Athlon XP’s. While I was about it, I upgraded my GeForce MX440 to a GeForce FX5600.

While I was happy with the performance of the mobo & cpu, I was less than impressed with the new video card. Its performance was only marginally better than the MX440 had been. Boohoo. What a waste of money.

Anyway, after bemoaning my video card purchase for several months (ok, it’s been almost a year), I broke down and bought myself a GeForce 6800.

blink blink

HOLY FUCK!

I get a woody every time I fire up a game. I’m currently playing Tribes Vengeance. It’s the first time I’ve ever been able to play games at 1280×1024 with nearly all the settings on maximum. Shit, even with the FX5600, I was only able to play decently at 800×600.

I think I’m definitely gonna give Thief: Deadly Shadows another go. See it in its full glory.

I’m still getting comment-spammed to death. You guys haven’t seen it because I’ve set moderation on the comments, so I get emailed and have to approve the comments before they are posted to the server. So I get comment-spammed via email

Anyway, I have added an auth code image for when you post a comment.

You are required to enter the code in the image before the server will accept your comment.

This should hopefully stop those fucking comment spambots from attacking my site.

I’m going to leave the comment moderation switched on for awhile, just to see if this is effective. If it proves to work, I’ll allow automatic posting of comments, so you will see them immediately, instead of having to wait for me to approve them.

I forgot to mention…

If you ever feel the inclination to access this site via wap, you can use http://www.midnightreign.org/wp-wap.php

It ain’t pretty, but it works.