getting old [shedir]

Frankly it sucks a cheesy big one. Out with my non wifed mates on Sunday, 8 pints and a goldie and I'm feeling the effects. They're still going strong.

Utter shite. Out of practice I guess but still not fair. Then my 20 mins for a bus home, 20 on it, 20 walking from end of run to house. The cold air had me utterly pished by the time I got home.

Where can I apply to go back to my early 20s? Where I could handle the bevy all day and night, feeling shit hot the next morning. bah.

It Must Be True [spiro]

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Help with Heli's [spiro]

IÂ’ve been playing Battlefield 1942 since it came out and still love it to pieces. From defending a base in the Conquest mode to driving flat out across the desert with a spitfire up your arse in CTF, this game rocks.
Then you add the Desert Combat Mod and things really get interesting. I play generally as Anti Armour class and to be honest even assault troops donÂ’t really stand a chance, the RPG is a 1 shot kill on all but the most heavily armoured vehicles and infantry donÂ’t stand a chance. The stinger against helicopters is a waste, needing 2 hits to kill, against infantry; itÂ’s a railgun with 100% damage.
Having been killed by helicopters on a regular basis in DC I decided that itÂ’s about time to learn how to fly them. I mean, how hard can it beÂ…..
Well, bloody hard is the answer, rudder, collective and stick to control as well as remembering that it doesnÂ’t respond like a Jet. Taking off is easy, probably easier than fixed wings, you simply raise the collective and up you go. Flight dynamics depending on whether you are hovering or flying forward at speed differ greatly and once out of control its incredible hard to get it back under control.
The mouse keyboard combo just isnÂ’t doing it for me in this situation, I have for a long time believed that they are more than adequate for the job and when flying fixed wings that is true. But I canÂ’t get the hang of choppers and its pissing me off, so I buy the www.logitech.com Wingman Extreme Digital 3D. joystick, its by no way the most expensive on the market but it has everything I need from it.
Spending a few minutes setting up the stick so the collective is on axis 3 (throttle) pitch on axis 1 and roll on axis 2 I practice flying and IÂ’m still having a problem, I have to use the keyboard for the rudder control. This doesnÂ’t sound to bad until youÂ’ve tried flying them, if you rudder left, you rotate left on the rotor axis, but to stop you need to rudder right. So the instance arrives when you need to call for back up or call in a spotting, do you take your fingers off the rudder controls and risk crashing ?
A lot of the people playing DC will not call in sightings if they are flying, theyÂ’ll just try to kill the target. Not a problem if they succeed but if they fail then none of his team will know that there is a threat approaching. So I stuck the rudder control on axis 2 of the joystick, this puts total control of the chopper in my right hand leaving my left to call in sightings and check the map etc.
The difference is remarkable, I can now fly for long periods of time with out crashing and can (most of the time) get from A to B with no problems, hitting targets will come with time. Landing and hovering is more of a miracle than anything else. I have managed once to hover on the spot long enough to capture a base, chuffed to hell I promptly crashed but who cares.
The addition of a joystick has improved my enjoyment of this already amazing game, I would recommend it to anyone.

Root her! [slim]

Got me netgear wireless adsl router thingy at last! Bought it from dabs in the end as I was buying another bunch of stuff that was more expensive on ebuyer, or just not available. Ebuyer.com is still the chepest for these babies though if you're after one.
Anyhow, I'm really fucking impressed. Its very easy to set up, add your user name and password, and off it goes working. I'm also impressed with the firewall features, you can create services, add rules, add rules by schedule which is fucking impressive, allow only certain ip's access to rules, which is top for me coming into my home pc from work. Love the way you can get it to mail you the firewall logs periodically too. There's also a site blocker thingy, which might be handy later on with my kids going online. Teh interweb does seem faster too, which I think is because my old gateway was really a bit shit. You can also get it to sort out your dnydns client too, which saves fucking around with a client app on one of your pc's, top!
I've not tried the wireless range on it yet, and that's the one thing that folks do bleat about this router, but apart from that I@m very chuffed so far. Luberly bit of kit.

Borderline [spiny]

Borderline. The club in Londinium - that's where I was on Friday night - as correctly spotted by Am on a recent blog. Haven't had time to blog a report it until now. Anyway here's the spill:
On Saturday morning my ears were still ringing. That's how loud the amps were in the basement pub that is 'The Borderline', London somewhere east of my roman town home of Corinium (thats Cirencester history fans).
I was there for a rare chance to see the man-mountain that is Popa Chubby. I'm a big fan of the Blues-with-a-New-York-Twist he belts out. After posting to the ml about it and recieving no response (Am I in your kill file mat?;)) I figured I'd just hook up with a few country mice & hit the smoke. So an early afternoon off work me & the lads rolled into town in Phil's capacious ford galaxy. A vehicle that was designed to carry beer if ever I saw one.
After short taxi ride & we arrived at the Borderline, a basement pub with a bag of atmosphere. Olde pub style oak beams, whitewashed walls, low ceiling. After ordering the first round I picked myself up off the floor (how can you live in a town that charges *that* much for beer?;)) and kicked back to listen to the support band. The band were actually not half bad. They were about 99% bad :) A drummer who couldn't keep time and a singer somewhere south of apalling. Shrug.
9pm sees a recording come over the PA. It's what I can only describe as a tune that resembles the chipmunks on acid playing country & western. For entrance music Popa sure has a sense of humour :) The big man himself follows shortly. My, he IS big. I hate to say this but he looks like he could even eat Am under the table. The guitar looks like a botempti toy slung over his gargantuan frame. Any illusion about the toy/guitar theory is quickly dispelled as he belts out the first number.
From memory, this was 'Daddy Played The Guitar And Mommy Was A Disco Queen', the qualification there is because this was the start of over a two hour set, played virtually non stop. Not a weak song or bum note in the whole 7200 seconds. This man 0wned the small audience crammed into the basement of the borderline for the duration. He took the blues, mixed in some hendrix, stevie-ray, gary moore, & buddy guy influences stirred it up & rammed it down our throats. He may have as well shouted 'THIS IS THE BLUES MOTHERFUCKERS! THIS IS HOW WE DO IT IN NY CITY!!!'. In fact I'm not entirely sure he didn't :) Popped into the mix was a cover of Hendrix's 'Hey Joe', which one of my friends described as the second best live version he'd ever heard. Now he's been around a while and knows his stuff. I didn't ask but I think he meant Hendrix's version.
Without a weak song in the set, it's difficult to pick highlights. It's one of the best blues (or non blues infact) gig's I've been to. The live extensions to the songs blended effortlessly without becoming weary tacked on guitar solos and highlighting just how short some other performers like Robert Cray can fall (technically brilliant but what's the point if you you can't tell your show from the cd?). At one point he even took over drumming duties proving he was no slouch there either. Biggest laugh of the evening was had mid song when he missed a chorus so the audience could chip in. As usual the first response was a bit weak, to which he retorted 'What are you? FRENCH!?' heh.
OK, here's the deal. For some of you London lot I'd recommend jumping on the chunnel & checking out one of the dates in nothern France

Radiohead rock Glastonbury! [lurks]

Glastonbury 2003 seemed to go down very nicely this year. Superb line-up. It stayed sunny for more or less the whole thing and the BBC pulled out some nice coverage given the extra air-time they have due to BBC 3. In fact, the BBC, went a little bit mad on the coverage. At least on the web.
Our lads Floyd and Houmous were out there who no doubt will regale us with the war stories shortly. Unfortunately the BBC's television coverage was kind of haphazard. It was excellent when they decided to film something but they made some distinctly odd decisions about what to film and what not to film and the presenters on BBC 3 were so amateur it was painful.
I missed The Music and White Stripes which I really wanted to see. However the BBC did cover the vast bulk of the Saturday night headliner, Radiohead. Although they put it on BBC3, then BBC2 and then back onto BBC3. Didn't show any of the 3 songs in the 2 encores initially but did show the last song from the second encore on the following day.
The performance was stonking and the BBC really excelled. The mixing of the crowd noise in was immaculate, I've heard a *lot* worse live albums than the excellent job they did. I captured the whole thing of satellite and then glued it together to make one big video of the entire gig apart from the encores.
As a bazillion clue-free Radiohead fans bleated about xvid codecs, bittorrent and the fact it was big and they couldn't get it in their modems etc etc - I put up just an mp3 of the entire gig sans the encores. Today I redid all the audio, splitting into tracks with fades, fixed some glitches and then encoded with lame's superb preset standard mode with full id3 tags to make a proper live album.
All this shit is on Bytemonsoon;

• Video: My 800MB xvid monster rip of the Radiohead concert sans encore.
• Video: Some other guy's rip of the second encore song, Street spirit.
• Audio: My initial average quality one-big-mp3 of the gig sans encore.
• Audio: My ninja high-bitrate 'live album' with tracks, id3 tags and encore.

Can't say fairer. You'd wanna get in now before the Torrents go away. They're all very well seeded at the moment.
So Floyd/Houmous, what was it like in person eh?

Spiny spotted in da smoke [am]

Spotted this in Eurogamer Max Payne 2 thread;
spiny 28-Jun-03 17:25:39 Looking forward to this one - gonna play it listening to this guy. Blues NY style. Saw him last night at the Borderline,London. Blew me away.
Is this our own Mr Norman? In da big smoke? Blowing up no-I-can't-come-that-far-for-beer alibi?
I think the people should be told!