screw u xbox live

Microsoft really knows how to rub some people up the wrong way. This week, my friend Brick got first hand experience of how ridiculous their online gaming system (Xbox Live) runs.

Quick introduction to Xbox Live: When you connect your Xbox to the internet, you register your gamertag (nickname). This gives you a gamercard (like an account id) showing your gamerscore (how many points you earned playing different games). There is two types of memberships; Silver and Gold.
A Silver Account is free and allows you to chat with friends, download content from the marketplace. A Gold Acount allows you to do all that plus play games online with other people and friends. Currently the price for 12 month Gold Membership is €59.99 in Ireland and Europe. However in the United States, this is only $49.99 (~€40)

1. When Brick was in the States he signed up for a free Silver Account. He created his gamertag and built up a gamerscore playing games. When we returned to Ireland he transferred his account over to his own Xbox 360 and continued to play and earn point on his gamertag.
2. This week he decided that it was time to get a Gold Account so he could play with his boyfriends friends online. But since he signed up with a US account, it would not be possible for him to pay for it unless he has a US credit card billing address.
   
3. He rang Microsoft at Xbox Live to change his account to an Irish one so he could pay for Gold Membership.
4. He was told: no. It was impossible. They didn't even want to listen to his problem or reason for the request. 
5. The only way he could pay for a Gold Account was to registered a new gamertag. He would loose his gamerscore, stats, friends list and current gamertag (which he was quite attached to).
6. So Microsoft were refusing to accept €59.99 off him, right there.
7. A little bit annoyed at them he ploughed on with the online payment system on the Xbox, hoping they wouldn't notice that the billing address for the credit card wasn't in the US.
8. After his second payment attempt his phone rang. It was his bank wondering about the suspicious activity on his account. He explained his problem to the nice lady on the phone and she turned off all security for his credit card. He then put through the order, this time it was manually authorised, billing his credit card the US amount for a US 12 month Gold Membership, about €40!

So Microsoft wouldn't take the whole €59.99 off him when they had the chance. Instead he ended up paying two thirds that, and next year won't even think about getting in touch with Microsoft when renewing his account! They will keep losing about €20 a year all because they wouldn't play nice on the phone and accommodate him by changing his address!

How To Ruin Xbox Live For Everyone Else

Note on US accounts: There is more free downloadable content in the marketplace than you can get on an Irish account. Brick can access this straight away, but there is no reason why you can't sign up for a free Silver US account and avail of the free stuff. Most of my friends have two accounts!

cork lan sponsorship

Any Cork or National based companies out there interested in sponsoring Cork LAN?

Sponsorship can range from:

• Name of the event - include your company name in the event name.
  
• Competition sponsorship - "The your company challenge!"
• Food Sponsorship - "Today’s meal is brought to you by your company!"
  
• Area for your company at your event - show demo's, answer questions, get your product out there.
  
• T-Shirt sponsorship - Logo of your company on the event’s T-Shirt. We are still looking for Staff T-Shirts, or we can sell CorkLAN ones with your logo on it.
• Banners Placement - Put up banners of your company around the room during the event.
  
• WebSite Placement - Your company logo/banner on the Cork LAN website.
  

Sponsorship can range from one or many of these! We are very interest in competition sponsorship as it is easy to donate prizes, and everyone loves winning stuff!

So if you are interested in even donating a spot prize anything in value from €10 up, please contact us on events@corklan.com and we can organise something!

Thanks and please pass this onto anyone you might know who is willing to help out a new type of event in Cork!

cork lan

With just about two weeks to go, I suppose it is time I mentioned Cork LAN.

Another boring Saturday?

So what is there to do on your average Saturday Night? Go to the Pub, go to the cinema, go to a club or go drinking in a field. That pretty much sums up for your average Cork person. Now here is an option to do something else, something different, and the only reason it is going to fail is because people in Cork don’t like the idea of not going out and including one of more of the above mentioned activities.

Cork LAN is a Local Area Network Party, held for the first time in Cork. We are unaware of any big publicly available LAN parties available in Cork before, so we are gonna claim that this is the first! (Feel free to let us know, and then explain why we weren’t told about it!)

What is it?
A Local Area Network party or LAN party is where a group of people come to one place and hook up their all their computers together and play games and the like. This has also spread over to the gaming consoles with the new network ready machines and online play. A LAN party is a chance for all these people to get together and play games, hang out and have fun.

When?
In two weeks, on Saturday the 11th of October there will be such a party happening in the Cork International Airport Hotel. Doors open early at 10am, but show up whenever you want on the Saturday. We will be kicked out of the room the following morning at 10 making it a 24 hour event!

Open to all!
This is not just for die hard gamers either. We will have Wii’s and Rockband and Guitar Hero too for the casual gamer!

Why not give it a try?
So the main things to take from this post are if you’re into hanging out, playing games, have a free evening and want something different to do, come along and bring a telly, Xbox and a few games! It doesn’t take that much to pack them into the car, we have do it many many times! Bring a group, it's always more fun with friends!

Check out the website for more information and register your interest to get €5 off!
http://www.CorkLAN.com/

saint patrick's day

It's Today! Why?

The date of the feast is occasionally moved by church authorities when March 17th falls during Holy Week. This year Holy week starts on the 16th of March, thus the feast be celebrated today on the 15th. Next time March 17th falls during Holy Week is in 2160.

So now you know! Happy Saint Patrick's Day!

In other news, I've been here for 3 years now! There will be cake.

the game

RULE 1: You are playing The Game.
RULE 2: Whenever you think about The Game, you lose.
RULE 3: Loss must be announced.

The objective of The Game is to forget that it exists.

P.S. I lost.

weewar

Anyone up for a Wee War?

This is a online, round based strategy game. Each game can be played with everyone having to move within 5 minutes or 3 days. There can be up to 6 people in a game! Quite interesting concept and addictive!

Head over to the website and if you need an invitation, I can send you one. Just leave a comment or send me a message!

Then you can play a game with me or add me to one of yours!

My user name: ablaze

blogger hacks

As everyone is aware I use Blogger to blog. I use them because back in the day, I needed a service provider to host my blog and because of the great work Google did with search and other services like Gmail I decided to give them a shot.

With their major update they have successfully put my urges for moving at bay with all their new features. But I came across this article that shows a plug in you can get for WordPress. It picks up if you are viewing the website/blog from a PSP, DS or a Wii and reformats the page to fit! Pretty ingenious! Its a pitty Google won't open their Blogger software to allow developer plug ins, instead we have to rely on hacks! I have found a few sites with these hacks for blogger, so have a look at the current news from these hack sites for blogger:


I think I will be holding off on a WordPress install for a while tho. At least until I get home and get me a proper computer!

wii fitness

I did it!

I got my Wii Sports, Wii Fitness age down to 20! The perfect Score! And here is the proof:

wii'ing

So we have had the Wii for the last 2 weeks, and it's Brilliant! Here is a photo of Taidy getting really really excited about getting his own Nunchuk and Wiimote!We have a total of 90 Mii's, who take many forms from Friends at home to Famous people and complete members of bands! A detailed list will be posted here when I'm in the mood!

The best game by far is Wii Sports! The free game that comes with it. I'm a Professional in Tennis and Bowling and on my there with Golf and Baseball. Boxing is just too energetic for me so it will be the last one I go for!

Every night at mid-night we do out fitness, where we are given 3 random training levels and have to do out best at them. Then the Wii calculates our age! I've been between 22 and 35 mostly!

The other games we have are Red Steel and Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz. Haven't really gotten into them yet, as most of our time is spent getting out skill level up on Wii Sports!

If you have a Wii and would like to see some of our Mii's, our console address is: 6429936395951829 or send an email to our console at w6429936395951829[at]wii.com

a week

Holy Moley! It's been a week since I updated this Blog. What a busy week!

We got a Wii! I walked into the shop on Wednesday last to check what time they are open at (because we were going to get up early for Thursday to get one if they had one) and they said they had 6 in stock! So I took one! It's class! Wii Sports is soo much fun and we have been making Mii's of our friends and some Famous ones as well! This has been taking up a lot of time the past week!

I've been working my ass off! Worked every day last week, but I had Thursday off to head up the mountain for a bit of Skiing! I didn't mind working my ass off because there is so much to learn in the shop!! So this week have 3 days off, and mostly evenings for the rest of the days, so there is LOADS of time for the slopes!

Yesterday I went to the dentist. I had a sore gum at the back of my mouth between my teeth. So I needed someone to check it out! It's a real fancy place, LCD's on the ceiling! I left the place $76 down, 3 prescriptions in my pocket for about $35 and a appointment for next Monday for a $570 operation to remove my left wisdom teeth. Oh joy!

Besides that, nothing else is happening here in Whistler. Were off to see Casino Royale tonight, because at the Village8 cinema Tuesday night is the cheap night! YAY!

wii

We just rang (at 10pm) the local video/dvd/game rental/retail shop here in Whistler. Asking what the situation with the new Nintendo Wii is tomorrow (as it goes on sale tomorrow!) The lady at the end of the phone told me some things I didn't want to hear.

1. They are starting to sell the Wii at mid-night
2. There is already a queue outside the shop
3. They have a limited amount of Wiis to sell
4. The number of people in the queue already outnumber the amount of units they have
5. They are unsure when they will be getting another shipment in
6. Next possible date is Thursday 2 weeks the 30th of November

I did not like that news. No Wii for us and we were looking forward to it soo much!

The funny thing is that we were in the Village earlier this evening and were going to pop into see if there was a queue in case we needed to join it. But we thought sure there will be LOADS, first thing in the morning will be loads of time to queue up and get one. We were so wrong!

halloween

So this year I finally got off my ass and got dressed up as the Video Game Character I look regularly look like; Gordon Freeman.

As it is kinda hard to construct an environmental suit from scratch, I decided that I'd go as lab coat wearing Gordon. People have made environmental suits before, but its far too much work, especially considering I'm off to Canada the next day!

• For the lab coat, Eric lent me his. Thanks Guy!
• The Crowbar was easy. There is a Superman toy with a bendable crowbar and that shouldn't cause a problem in getting into the club.
• I wore a black and orange jumper, to stick with Mr. Freeman's Colours!
• The lambda (λ) symbol and the I.D. Card were printed off and laminated at home
• Finally the glasses are those cheap ones Department of Social Welfare Glasses thanks to Conor!

Some other Pictures from Halloween:

Ian as Sam Fisher and Simon as a Cereal Killer

Mezer and the Boy Wonder

Sandy as Sandy

Eric as Ken and Footsie as Ryu from Street Fighter!

no playstation 3 for christmas

Burn on Sony!!

Score another one for Microsoft!

finished the game

Mike and Foley spent about an hour playing The House of the Dead III and they finished it!

Watch the Video!

hee hee hee

Look at what we found in game! (Don't remember what game it was... BA i think...)

And the Video!

inside my box

I opened up my Xbox today. Just wanted to see how it works inside! You can see in the center left of that picture that there is a blue chip. Well that shouldn't be there...

20 lives

Over the past few weeks I've been playing Nokias new Game, 20 Lives. Basically you play as someone each day for 20 days and if you successfully pass a life, you get entered into a draw to win prizes. Its pretty easy and all the lives interact. I have failed 1 of the 16 lives I've played so far, with 4 more to play. The problem is this year is that i've gotten bored with it. I have to force myself to log on every day.

I've played the NokiaGame every year and I've won things some times as well. Nokia goodies and phones. Its a pretty sweet deal, and usualy the game is pretty good and gets your hooked for the 2 weeks or so that it runs! It has also got me hooked on Nokia phones.

The final is on the 12th/13th October. Will keep you posted if I win anything!

games

This is a complete list of PlayStation 2 games that my Cousin has! Not too bad! Pitty it's a PS2 tho!

connecting xbox to pc

Ok, I forgot how to do it, but eventually remembered/found out how to do it.
This is how to connect your PC to your Xbox.

For my PC I used:
IP address: 192.168.0.2
Subnet Mask: 255.255.255.0

For my Xbox:
I used an Avalaunch dashboard, and doubled checked the setting in Evox.
DCHP: Disabled
IP address: 192.168.0.3
Gateway: 0.0.0.0
DNS1: 0.0.0.0
DNS2: 0.0.0.0
Proxy: Enabled
Port: 8080
Username: xbox
Password: xbox

And in the FTP program on the PC I used:
IP Address: 192.168.0.3
Site: Xbox
Username: xbox
Password: xbox

EASY!

gamecon

So Easter weekend myself, Conor and Footsie headed up to Dublin, with the car full of XBOX's, TV's and food for 24 hours of gaming!!
It was from 9am on Saturday morning until 10am on Easter Sunday Morning!! There were guys on PC's on one side of the room and on XBOX's on the other side. It was all linked up to one huge network and it was CLASS!!
There was also competitions and prizes, but were way too bad to win anything... altho we did win out first game of Halo2... 100 to 1! No lie!
Besides that, i'm up to nothing this week, my exams finished last Thurday, and i start work next Monday! Looking forward to it i must say...