A Rambling Geek

The End

After much consideration I’ve decided to withdraw from the one a day challenge. Currently I’m nearing 2 weeks behind and I do not want to just churn out posts to catch up. I’m certainly pleased with my progress so far but think it’s time to concentrate on getting good quality entries up and not short/filler ones because it’s late in the day and I’ve not done met today’s challenge.

Rest assured any readers out there that I will continue to post and there are some days where you’ll get 2, maybe more posts for the price of 1.

Om Nom Nom (8/52)

Love (7/52)

Shocking Refereeing

Being a Liverpool suporter I’m not a fan of Manchester United so sat down to watch the Carling Cup final hoping for a Villa win. Sadly that was not to be and not for Villa’s lack of trying, they were cheated out of the game by a referee clearly biased towards Manchester united. Agbonlahor was through on goal when he was brought down by Vidic who personally received NO punishement from the Referee. There is some debate as to whether it should have been red or yellow but for him to receive nothing is just outragous. My understanding is that if a player is denied a goal scoring opportunity then their team is awarded a penalty and the offending player is sent off. So for at least 85 minutes Manchester United should have been down to 10 men, or at least vidic on a yellow.

However the story just gets better as shortly after that, Owen is brought down by Villa defender Collins, who you can guess what happened to him, yes a yellow card. Stuart Downing makes a late challenge on Evra and yet again is given a yellow card. So currently that is 0 cards to United and 2 for Aston Villa. Carrick tackles Emile Heskey and brings him down to the floor but gets away with a warning. It almost seemed as though Phil Dowd was evening out the penalty that Villa got by not booking any Manchester United players. Another united player Rafael was cautioned by the referee twice but never received a card. Finally after 41 minutes Dowd decide to book a united player so that should have been by my count at least 5 yellow cards with 2 possible red cards compared to Villa’s 2 yellows. To rub salt into the wounds Vidic was finally booked just after the hour mark for a challenge on Ashley Young and the Villa fans gave a sarcastic cheer for Dowd when he gave the booking. The Manchester United fans would argue that sending Vidic off so early would have “changed the game” well tough! That’s his fault for bringing Agbonlahor down in the first place, regardless of whether it’s a cup final or not the rules are rules! For me the most amsuing outcome of this game was Graham Poll telling everyone who would listen that Phil Dowd was right, it wasn’t a red card. This is coming from a man who gave the same player, 3 yellow cards in a World Cup match, like most people, I just ignored what he had to say.

It seems it was a similar situation in our game against Blackburn Rovers which thankfully we won 2-1. From what I could hear on the radio we were battered and I mean litteraly by an inferior team who knew they couldn’t beat us using skill so decided to injur as many of our players as they could. Rafa did get the last laugh though, during the press conference he had this to say about Sam Aladyce “I think he is a model for all the managers all around the world. He is a model, the style of football, his behaviours, everything is perfect for the kids. I am sure Barcelona will be thinking about copying this style.”

Pizza & Video games

On Saturday night I went to see my good friend DaveyPitch as our other halves were on a night out. What better way to spend an evening than with a great mate, pizza and video games! Turns out we didn’t get much video game playing done as we ended up watching part of the Teneriffe vs Real Madrid game on Sky Sports while Little Big Planet was downloading nearly 500Mb of updates. I’d been debating about what to eat as there is a good selection of takeaways near Davey’s and a curry was calling my name but I finally settled on pizza. When I was younger I didn’t like pizzas because I wouldn’t eat tomato based sauces but would eat ketchup and soup, strange I know. Anyway back onto the subject of toppings!

What are your favourite toppings? This time I went for a spicy meat special which consistsed of cheese, tomato, pepperoni, ham, spicy beef, spicy chicken, salami and peppers. It was fantastic and took me back to my uni days where every Saturday my group of friends would get together for a film, pizza and beer. Back then I’d have a four seasons  which had cheese, tomato, pepperoni, salami, ham, peppers and mushrooms. It was my favourite Pizza and I’m yet to find somewhere that can equal it, though the spicy meat special came close, but I had just too much going on. One topping I’m not fussed on is minced beef even if it’s spicy. I just don’t see how it fits in with the whole pizza idea, then again the same thing could be said for anchovies, yuck. More often than not I’d probably stick with the simple and some would say boring pepperoni. However if we go to Pizza hut I have to have the Super Supreme it is the best pizza on the menu.

It’s a miracle

Liverpool really pulled it out of the bag on Thursday night with a 3-1 win over Unirea. I was very nervous going into the match especially after our shaky win last week but with goals from Stevie G, Ryan Babel & Mascherano we secured the win. When Unirea scored the opening goal I thought that was it for us, that is how much confidence I have in my team but good old Javier came through and managed to put us back in the driving seat. Despite the win and us through to the last 16, the biggest plus point for me was Ryan Babel getting on the score sheet. The lad needs the manager to show alot more confidence in him and start him especially with Torres coming back from injury. It constantly amazes me that Lucas and Kuyt never ever miss matches and Ryan only gets 10 minutes here and there. He’s a striker for heavens sake, play him in that position, give him 6 consecutive starts to prove once and for all if he’s got the “kwality” to play for LFC.

We face Blackburn Rovers tomorrow at 3pm and it is AGAIN a must win game as we need to keep the pressure on Manchester City. Hopefully Chelsea can do us a favour and beat them so they still only have their game in hand but we’ll be 2 points in front.

Heavy Rain has arrived!

This arrived in the post today at work! I’ll hopefully get some time with it tomorrow, if not Monday will be play day!

WPTouch

I’ve been trying to find a decent mobile plugin/theme for my blog for some time. There has been numerous installs of different things but nothing seemed to work correctly or give me what I wanted. However I noticed my good friend DaveyPitch had the WPTouch theme installed on his blog, but his is hosted on wordpress.com so I figured it was something only available on that site. After some googling though I found the homepage and decided to have a crack at getting the plugin/theme installed.

It was an absolute breeze to get this installed and running, as all I needed to do was upload it to the server and activate the plugin. That’s it! Your blog will then look cracking on any Apple, Android, WebOS, etc phone and will save you, my readers precious bandwidth. So if you have a wordpress blog and haven’t installed WPTouch then go do it now.

It’s the Internet’s fault!

I saw a news article on Granada Tonight yesterday which made me laugh. It seems a 15 year old girl organised a small gathering of friends on Facebook while her parents were away at a wedding. Alarm bells started ringing in my ears the second the reported mentioned Facebook. As you can imagine the house got trashed, stuff got stolen and the family were very upset.

Now that is a terrible situation but what I found funny was the father’s comment that the blame didn’t solely lie with his daughter but Facebook too. Who in their right mind has the cheek to blame Facebook? They weren’t to know how the party was going to end? Surely his daughter heard how other parties ended, which were advertised on social networking sites. It’s her fault for organising the party and that is the end of it. I’m betting the girl had a mobile phone so why didn’t she just organise stuff through that or heck even send an email.

It really annoys me when people blame the Internet for their situation when it had  nothing to do with it. All his stuff will be covered under their insurance policy so the laptops, wii, xbox, etc will all get replaced. Hopefully they’ll realise not to advertise parties in the future but I wouldn’t be surprised if the Daily Mail gets hold of this story and we see the headline “Facebook trashes family home!”

Voice Acting and Accents

As you know I’m currently playing the Saboteur and while the actual game is good fun and not that repetitive unlike other sandbox titles, I just can’t get past the horrible accent of the main character Sean Devlin. I’ll try and find a YouTube video to demonstrate the atrocity, but it is on a par with David Boreanaz’s attempts at an Irish accent when we saw the character Liam. What is confusing is all the other accents seem to be really well done done so I don’t know why they skimped on the most important character in the game.

The guy responsible for Sean is an actor called Robin Atkin Downes who according to his Wikipedia entry is English and is a seasoned professional for video games. Are you telling me there were no Irish voice actors available when Pandemic made the game? Skylar, Veronique and most of the other female characters are done by American actresses who also have appeared in lots of games and have nailed the accents. Normally I’d just let this go but what grates the most is they actually got a Scottish chap, Graham McTavish to voice Wilcox. So if they went through that much effort surely they could have got someone better to do Sean. I wonder if I’ve been spoilt by characters like Marcus Fenix, Niko Bellic, Soap McTavish and Captain Price who are shining examples of how voice acting should be done.

There is a theory going round that this was a design choice so gamers could understand what the character is saying. To be fair it has an air of truth to it because if you hear someone like Patrick Kielty, even a British person like myself can struggle with some of the stuff he says, especially if he starts talking fast. However if they didn’t make Sean from Nothern Ireland and made him from the south they’d have much better choice of accents like comedians Ed Byrne and Dara Ó Briain. Then again this point is moot because the game has subtitles which the player can use if they can’t understand what is being said. When playing GTA IV I had to turn subtitles on because I had no idea what Little Jacob or Badman were saying and I’d prefer to make the sacrifice of having to read text on the screen rather than wince every time the man character opens his mouth.

Here is an example of Sean’s accent;

I’ve managed to find a clip of Patrick Kielty on YouTube so you can hear his accent and then compare it to Southern Irish with Dara Ó Briain and Ed Byrne. Ed and Dara are discussing what happened when Dara went to Ed’s house drunk.