I'll admit it. I'm sorry, very very sorry for the remarks I made to an old friend about a certain PC game, I'm ashamed to say it, but the past 4 weeks of my miserable existence have been taken up with this particular game, a game of particular rarity as it's a computer game that I can actually play on my puny PC with other people still actually playing it too... The game? Well, I'll let the screenshots speak for themselves. As always, click the thumbnails for a nice, larger view, thumbnails in no particular chronological order...


I think it was the evening of the 24th of December last year, I had nothing to do and was idly browsing the Xfire website, I had exhausted all my free games on Steam and seemed to be the only person in BF2, even Solitaire was starting to wear thin. I needed something to play. I then noticed the Xfire ranking of the top games played that day, as usual World of Warcraft was in the number 1 position, having been there for the past 4 or 5 years. "What the Hell", I thought, I'd install the free 10-day trial from trywarcraft.com, see how utterly shit this virgin-fest of a game was and then uninstall it in a fit of rage. Simples.


The first thing I had to do after downloading the tiny (although surprisingly efficient) 'streaming' game client was to login and create a new character on my newly assigned realm - Nagrand(EU). Not particularly impressed, I opted for a human rogue simply because the other characters looked unrealistic, I preferred to be a human, and I am quite a rogue after all. My first experience of the World of Warcraft began in the pleasant surroundings of Northshire Abbey, set in the green and fertile forests of Elwynn. The first thing that struck me was the fact that the game was actually in true 3rd (and as I'd discover some time later) 1st person 3D, for some reason I expected an isometric view filled with meaningless icons and lines of confusing statistical data, how wrong I was, in fact I was thinking just how bloody nice everything looked - and sounded; the chattering of a river could be heard over to the east, the tweeting of birds in the trees to the south. I was impressed. But enough gawping I thought, time to actually start my first quest.

Oh yeah. Happy new year.

Been beavering away on HWDN today. I'm currently completely re-working the underlying code, making it much simpler and a lot lighter. I'm also adding support for jQuery and adding Fancybox, so you can view blog images in a nice little popup div (try clicking the image below).

HWDN will also be going social, I'll be adding links to my YouTube, Twitter, Xfire and Facebook accounts and hopefully incorporating social links to quickly post links to blogs, very exciting stuff! I'm also finally getting round to creating page links, in short the new HWDN is going to be awesome.

In BF2 I have finally become an officer and gained my butter bar (2nd Lieutenant), in less than 15,000 points' time I'll be a 1st Lieutenant, but that is some way away yet!


Also, get well soon to RtK who is currently ill, recover soon buddy, the festive season and new year are fast approaching!

Last Friday I bought a new laptop, a top of the range Acer Aspire from PC World with all the trimmings, 4GB RAM, Wi-Fi, DVD rewriter, 64 bit CPU, built-in webcam and Windows Vista, imagine my heartbreak however after gleefully running Windows Update and seeing this after rebooting:


It turned out not only were my updates not configured correctly, but they had ruined my Windows installation completely! The next reboot failed completely, showing only a black screen and the filename 'drmmgrtn.dll'. Close to tears, I contemplated taking her back to PC World, but then I had an idea.... using Acer's recovery program I reverted to a clean install of Windows, this time I decided to run two little commands with UAC (User Account Control) turned OFF:


Boom! Windows downloads the new updates, I rebooted and no more incorrectly configured updates, now running Windows Vista SP2 quite nicely, so if you have bought a laptop from PC World and had this same problem, try my solution, it may just save you some tears and wasted hours talking to one of those 'Tech Guys'.

In other news, I learned tonight I have a new freelance job coming up which I am pretty excited about, also apologies for neglecting my duties at EAF, I've just been so busy with moving rooms, buying laptops and having pig flu, still have my sights set firmly on getting to 2nd Lieutenant by Christmas, though!!!! Right, no time for BF2, need to start work, laters!

Fuck, it's been too long! Ok first of all, it's damn good to see an email from AgentArmstrong, what a blast from the past, going to mail him back in a bit!


Last week (Tuesday 29th September I think), I went with RtK to Satan's Hollow in Manchester for the first time, bloody nice place I have to say, nice decor, liked the free bar between 10 and 11 and the place was absolutely packed-out with lovely dyed-hair, blacked-eyed little boozed-up studenty emo sluts, in fact slut-wise, it had Jilly's Rockworld trumped, I did however feel old, out of place and inadequate. I just don't think the Manchester rock or student club scene is for me, or perhaps I'm not for it, it would be nice to one day go out and not come back with a virus, I have been quite ill for the past few days, (at my worst on Thursday and Friday) but I've recovered fully now, I had what was thought to be swine flu, although I'm not totally convinced, anyway this leads me onto tonight's rant, I have been given my ration of Tamiflu, from what I heard it was a ration, but what happens if I get full-blown actual pig flu? You see, it's times like these I start to see some sense in Glenn Beck's anti-NHS rants... I am ill, I get free rationed pills, great. But, if I get ill again, does that mean I don't get any more Tamiflu? Something that can be taken from you is not a right. Anyway, I could be completely wrong about this, I'm beginning to sound like Daniel Hannan here. I just don't want to get ill again, so I can get a fucking job and start making changes around here damnit!

In other news... I now have a much larger bedroom and now have a fully dedicated office/den area in the loft which I hope to furnish with new PC stuff and a new plasma TV, it's going to be awesome. Ohh yeah, RtK aka Fishmeister is to make a triumphant return to Battlefield 2 under a brand new account. Watch this space for more info..

I'm almost done uploading 'Andrew Marr's History of Modern Britain', if you're into British history, I definitely think you should head over to the HellwrathUK YouTube Channel and check it out. I'm off to watch TV in my new bedroom. I need a new laptop so I can do these updates from bed really. Gonna overhaul HWDN soon you know, ohh also exciting new project nearly done (Weeify). Right - bed!