Tell the whole world what you are doing

Tell the whole world what you are doing

 

I am new to Xbox Live. Only got it last week. Keep that info in the back of your mind when you read this.  

I was playing Pac-man on my Xbox when I received a text message – “Dude you suck”. Puzzled, I strike back with this clever reply – “huh?” In return I got, “Pac-man is for losers”. Shit. Apparently other people can see what you are doing on your Xbox, I did not know that. If only I was doing something manly like watching porn or something, but I got caught red handed playing Pac-man. Embarrassing. 

Turns out, Xbox Live is even more intrusive than Facebook. You can fine tune your privacy settings but by default people can see everything. They can see what games you have been playing and they can actually see how you are faring with the game.  

From now on only manly hard-core games like Gears of War and Batman for me! 



Gonna miss you Boom Boom Rockets!

Apple is watching you...

Apple is watching you...

Apple patents software that will punish you if you do not watch their advertisements...

I don’t like watching TV. Too many advertisements. It is none stop, but I can understand that. The money the advertisers spend, gives me the opportunity to watch the program for free. (Kind of free, anyway).

 

So the deal is, I watch advertisements and in return, I don’t have to pay every time I watch South Park. So I think it is fair to say that when I pay to watch something I don’t have to watch advertisements or at least get the option to not skip the adds.

 

The other day I bought the Sin City dvd. I have seen the movie years ago and really loved it so now I want to see it again. Problem is when you play the dvd, it starts out with about 20 minutes of unskippable advertisements. Clicking the menu buttons does nothing, you shall watch all 20 minutes of uninteresting shit.

 

Luckily, I can decide that in 20 minutes from now, I might feel like watching Sin City so I can put the dvd in, go make some popcorn, come back later and enjoy the movie.

 

Of course, somewhere in the world, someone is sitting, thinking that shit is unacceptable. How dare they not watch the things they don’t want to watch! I shall MAKE them watch. (Reminds me of a scene in Sin City).

 

The person is not Lex Luther but Steve Jobs from Apple. He has filed a patent for a program that measures your response to an advertisement and if your response is not what Steve wanted, that program will shut down your device till you respond.

 

The idea is, until you watch their ad, you can’t listen to music on your iPod or make calls from your iPhone.

Wow, are we behind or what?

Google, the number one company on the internet, might one day become the internet.

They are aiming to create a 1-gigabit-per-second network. This network will be a 100 times faster than any other network in the USA.

 

The plans are still hazy and more of a dream than a reality but Google intends to construct a test network for 50 000 to 500 000 users.

 

If this goes from dream to reality, anybody in South Africa with a website that hoped to compete internationally can kiss their dreams goodbye.

 

Now would be a really great time for Telkom to wake the hell up or soon we are going to be so far behind that catching up will be a nightmare.

Do some more good

Do some more good

Last week I wrote about how you can donate some of your computer’s time to help fight cancer. 

This week I would like to point you at some other sites where you can do some good.

A company called the GreaterGood Network has a collection of sites, each dedicated to a certain charity.

Some of them are:

World Hunger site

Breast Cancer

Child Health

Rainforest

Animal Rescue

Basically all you have to do is go to the website and click a button. Once you have clicked on the button, money will be given to a charity.

Now the first thing that comes to mind is – this is too good to be true. It is too easy.

 I poked around the internet to find out if this GreaterGood Network is a legitimate company. It turns out that they are owned by CharityUSA a registered charity in America and that the money they make for the sites they operate does go to charity.

 However there is a dispute as to how much of it is going to charity. CharityUSA says a lot goes to charity, other people say they don’t give as much as they claim to give.

 So even if you have a problem with how they have been giving, a percentage of your clicks will go to charity.

 Also – by clicking on this article 10c gets donated to a good cause! When it comes to deciding how many times to click on this article there is no right or wrong answer, but I would like to suggest six thousand and forty three times.

Out source your good deed of the day

Out source your good deed of the day

 

Does your computer stand idle sometimes? Want to give something to the community?

There is an easy way to help - http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org 

 

World Community Grid is a grid computing project. What that means is, it is a worldwide network of computers working together to solve a problem. You download a small application from their website and install it on your computer. When your computer is idle it will request data from WCG servers and do some computations on the data and send the results back to them.

Millions of people worldwide have joined and are working together. To give you an idea how powerful this project is – the research they have done so far would have taken one computer 40 000 years to complete.

Currently they are working on Muscular Dystrophy, Cancer, Aids and Influenza research. There are also research into human DNA and a project that analyze proteins strains to enable farmers to grow more nutritious rice.

 
It is really a worthwhile cause to join. Think about it. Your computer is doing your good deed of the day; you are free to be your bad self.

I envy cavemen, I really do

I envy cavemen, really I do

The cavemen had such nice lives. They lived in caves, ate fungus they scraped of walls, they got eaten by tigers and dinosaurs and they never had to deal with ABSA. 

 

Last year I got life insurance from ABSA but then cancelled it during the cool off period. They said cool but they can only refund the money next year – fair enough.

 

Now, this is next year and the time has come to refund my money. Last week a representative for ABSA called and confirmed I want to cancel the insurance and I confirmed. This week instead of refunding my money they took another year's worth of life insurance off my account. I called ABSA and explained my situation and they said they will investigate. ~ A moment ago an ABSA rep called me – he has heard I am interested in getting life insurance from ABSA.

Review:Resident Evil 5

Review:Resident Evil 5

[Eds Note: Recently a very controversial demo for Resident Evil 5 has been released. Some people got a bit pissed off about the demo, saying that it was racist because the game is set in Africa and some of the zombies are – black. Black zombies in Africa. The makers of the game, Capcom says that the original Resident Evil featured a virus that originated in Africa. So this game just brings the series full circle, with a team going to Africa to investigate the virus. Regardless some people think that this is another example of the Western world exploiting Africa.]


To review the game we got an expert on the subject of the West exploiting Africa, paranoid President Robert Mugabe of the nation Zimbabwe.


Review: Resident Evil 5 by Bob Mugabe.
I am not amused. This entire thing runs like a training video. Training people to take me out. Its Tony Blair. Well its not gonna work Tony. Do hear me Tony! Its not working. I am on too you.

[Robert seems to be under the impression Tony Blair is still prime minister of Britain. –Ed][Whatever. –Bob]

As for the game itself. The game is stupid.
Graphics – stupid.
Sound – stupid.
Game play – stupid. Not that I played the game, I refuse to play something this stupid.

Fuck you very much.
Bob.