Category Archives: Life

A cup of vServer failures

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So, I had this plan to finally to rent me a vServer to do host some other stuff besides websites, speaking of TeamSpeak 3 and game servers. After some research on the net I’ve found a provider, that was offering a great deal. Enough space to store things, RAM sounded good and so on.

Normally, I’m used to order, chose my payment condition and that’s it. This very provider wanted to validate my personal data and sent me an email that I have to send them a copy of my ID. I scanned my ID, blurred the ID number so that one can only see the data actually needed to validate. I mean, I just wanted to rent a tiny vServer and do not want immigrate to the U.S.

The provider replied the other day and told that I should send them an ID with a clear to read ID number. They also advised me that I could mark my ID with a watermark declaring it a copy, as long as all the needed data can be read. “F§%& off!” Was one of my first thoughts. Like I said, I only wanted to rent a vServer didn’t want to get into rocket science or some ultra special rare membership.

After a short period I decided to finally cancel my order and put the vServer plans on hold for a while.

This thing called… what did you say?

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It’s been a while. After having almost a month of free time to waste on pure debauchery I’m finally back to the working class heroes with a regularly, fixed schedule. I feel much in my new company and I’m a thousand per cent certain that it was the right decision I’ve made. It’s a huge challenge, also a very interesting and intriguing challenge, but most importantly, no pack of Hyenas surrounding me bothering me with ideas and tasks of non-sense. Please understand that I’m not giving any further details on what I’m doing and so on, discretion is advised. Just feel informed with the fact that I like it where I’m at and I hopefully can be here for a while.

Once upon a time I had the will and lust to do some sports again but in the end I simply though “What the heck!

Well, I gained a massive amount of weight, especially on my free days, but I also have to admit that I’m not feeling very unwell. With this new job and the fact that I have to travel each day 120km I wanted to get a little bit more in comfort with ‘the new situation’ before starting this sporty thingy again. I also have to say, that I’m not in the mood to do any sports and I don’t want to force me to do anything I actually don’t want or like. Maybe my attitude on that is a completely different one tomorrow and I’m going to jog for like an hour.

Despite, I’d rather stick to gaming these days. I just started “Deus Ex: Human Revolution” and I’m also playing “Dead Island”. Both are great games in their genre BUT both are totally buggy or have several issues.

“Dead Island” is the game that has a lot of serious hardware related issues on my system. First of all, I use a 7.1 sound system on my gaming rig and I gain a lot of terrible, loud noises when I have the 7.1 speaker configuration turned on. I could fix by running in 5.1 mode only. The graphics are, let us say okay, but they stutter. This shouldn’t be an issue on my system due to the fact that the game runs at 180-200fps on maximum details at a resolution of 1920×1200. Hopefully they’ll fix this issue.

Another thing I don’t like, which is not hardware related, is the fact that you have a save point system and there’s no real indicator given when the game actually saves your progress. Terrible on a PC. Why no quick-save? Anyhow, the game itself looks promising and despite these issues I’ll continue playing and see what’s up next.

“Deus Ex: Human Revolution” is in my personal opinion the sequel the first “Deus Ex” deserved. It’s still far away from the class of it’s pre-predecessor, but it’s good and feels like “Deus Ex” and the developer does not go strictly mainstream as they were trying with “Deus Ex: Invisible War”, which was terrible game, if you ask me. I play “Deus Ex: Human Revolution” on highest difficulty level and I’m stuck at the first boss right now 😛 Anyhow, this game is definitely worth the play.

Time to waste

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Changes, man, changes! I’ve got two days left at work and then I’ll enter a longer period of free time. Almost the whole August is free. I’ve got a job offer that I finally couldn’t resist in a company that captured my entire sympathy within a couple of moments and that looks very promising. My new life starts on 1st September. In the meantime I’ll try to use my free time to get a little bit more time with photography and learn my new lenses. On the other hand I plan to get back to sports. As mentioned before, I’ve got a lot of free time and want to use it as useful as I possibly can.

I gained several pounds during the last few weeks and I want to get rid of them as soon as I can. The answer is simple, lots of sports is the solution. I’m really excited about this, because I never had a training period like this before. It’s just me and my free time without getting distracted by work issues or everything else that might bother you in daily life. Right now, my weight is something around 108kg and I want to push it down to at least 100kg. I personally think that this is possible within four weeks and a half.

Besides this stands my second ego, the gamer. I’ve got so many games that I haven’t already that deserve a play through that I’ll jump on these, too. My fave at the moment is the absolutely brilliant “DiRT 3”. One of the best racing games for years and as addictive as the all time classic “Colin McRae Rally 2.0”

“Colin McRae Rally 2.0” sucked hours and hours of my weekends and free time and there wasn’t a single moment where I got bored. “DiRT 3” is actually the same, very motivating and entertaining for every single moment. The only thing that bothers me a little are the DLCs. I bought Monte Carlo and Japan, but they could have made into the final retail game, too. These two DLCs cost me around 15 Euros and you have to keep in your mind, that you can get a great budget title for that money, too. Hopefully, this rip off will have an end in the near future.

Finally, and I hope the weather god is good to me. I’ll go out in my town and probably Berlin and do some photos. I’ve got this new fish eye lens that deserves a little more attention. Anyhow, I wanted to go out for pictures for such a long time, but I felt really exhausted and stressed by nearly everything over the last few weeks that I actually haven’t found the time and intention to do so.

Whatever the case, a new job starts on September and I’ve got a lot of free time in the meantime. I’ll try to use it to recharge and to get back into shape. I’ll keep you informed.

What’s happening…?

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A short update of what happened and is actually happening right now. First of, I was off to the countryside, the forest to be exact and got a little rest. I’ve been there with my parents and my grand-mother and it was a weekend with simply doing nothing. I took the time to take some pictures of some flowers and the nearby lake. And I also tried to clean my tent, with tiny success.

On the next weekend I’ll be off for a small festival that is going on pretty nearby and I’m going to see bands like Sodom, Vader and the Excrementory Grindfuckers. I haven’t been to a festival for years now and I’m totally longing for that. It’s a very small festival, but my experience tells, this is going to be one hell of a show. Maybe, but just maybe, I’ll do some headbanging. It also depends on my level of alcohol consumption.

Games, I play Tropico 3 and some Crysis 1+2. More Crysis 1 because of the summer I feel more like jungle jungle than city jungle. One side effect of Tropico 3 is, that the music in this game is very intriguing and as soon as my girl-friend enters the room it affects me to dance some merenge or salsa or whatever these latin american dances are called like. Embarrassing, but hey… I’m also a little ashamed that the three year old Crysis 1 still manages it, to bring my system down on its knees. Kudos for that Crytek.

There’ll be some bigger changes in my life coming in September, approved subscribers will get some details on this particular situation in another private post.

The game of the week is off and missing, I know. As soon as I got little bit more into indie gaming again, I’ll give another recommendation.

 

PS: I’m looking for some nice headphones at the moment and I focused several models made by AKG, anything you would recommend? Or maybe a totally different manufacturer?

The games, the jobs, the moves

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Haven’t wrote a while for quite some reasons. First of all nothing special actually happened. Secondly, too much happened that I haven’t found time for writing.

For those of you interested in my impressions according several games I have to apologize, I seriously have such a lack of time over last days that there wasn’t any gaming worth writing about. I can tell you that I played a lot DiRT 3 and I started playing Crysis 2, since the release of patch 1.9, including DX11 and HiRes textures and all this kind of stuff. These are AAA titles and I’m still not sure if I should write about games that get reviewed on every other single website.

I also started playing Duke Nukem Forever and all I can say till now, it’s a giant disappointment. I will, yes, I promise, I will give an impressions review on this particular title because the Duke is a phenomenon that simply deserves a review or just a gaming field report.

Another important thing that was going on, I’m still stuck between enemy lines. I’ve recently got an offer for a company that looks pretty promising according that point potential and development. As far as I know, it’s a network infrastructure that is pretty basic right now, that wants to grow to something, I actually do not know. Anyhow, it should get bigger and better and I shall be the man for it.

On the other side, there’s this job in this advanced technical college that wasn’t approved till now, but I also was not rejected till now. It’s another job that is very promising, also differs from what I’m doing at the moment and simply interests me very much. It’s more an operator job in some multimedia stuff, things I’ve recently done a lot, because I did some internet streaming and had to do some video editing, too (even though I hate this creative things).

The third candidate is my current company. It’s for sure that I’m not leaving without asking for a price to keep me in. And you can bet your mother that I’m going to be expensive, I mean, reeeaally expensive. I’ve taught myself so much during the last 5-6 years and I got skills in so many different areas that I want to get paid for this and receive the graditute I deserve. I decided to stay in my company, if none of the current opportunities fits my requirements in any way. I waited for such a long time to get a new job opportunity, I still have some breath left to wait a little bit more in the case that nothing gets rolling.

That’s the status for now. Plan for the weekend is to help out on a move of some friends of mine. I’m not uber excited about that, but hey, sometimes you help friends, you know?

A little exception

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Today’s the first day of my recently started training period where I decided to stay in bed instead of hitting the to road to the gym. Actually, I was really tired and additionally will I meet up with a couple of friends this very evening to watch a movie at the cinema. It would be a waste of money getting there and just falling asleep only because I forced myself to get up too early.

I want to keep a little comfort for myself and I don’t want to get to a point where I start hating sports just because I can’t find time for anything else. Or I’m too exhausting to do anything else. I’m glad to be a person who’s totally fine with six hours of sleep per day (or night) and I don’t want to bend it to the limits too much. There’s still my gaming hobby. Photography plays a big role, too. And of course do I want to meet up with some friends even during the week. Not to forget my girl also deserves a lot of time.

Well, anyhow, I just wanted to mention that this is not going to be the end of the road and I’ll stick to my sports plan, but you sometimes have to make some exceptions. I assure you that you’ll find me in the gym tomorrow morning training my ass off once again.

The mystical cat report

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Hello out there, it’s been a while since my last update on what’s going so far. First of all, fitness is still existing and starts kicking ass again. I cannot deny that I had some serious difficulty to get back on the track, but with this week, everything seems to be on a satisfying level. My stamina feels like it was the day I let the whole fitness thing fade away, for say, it’s still on a high level. For my circumstances. Actually, I still have like 15kg of weight too much on my bones, but like I said, I’m not facing any serious trouble during training. I’m running solid 30 minutes on the treadmill followed by 30-40 minutes on the cross-trainer.

I decided to take no prisoners and I also increased the weight on many exercise machines. I’m doing very well with this and I’m making a lot of progress in this particular area of my training. Besides losing weight is gaining muscles one of my main goals for now. I know, it sounds weird, losing weight and gaining muscle mass on the other side but according to the serious amount of overweight at the moment a goal that can be reached. Like losing at least 15kg of fat and getting like 5-6kg of muscle mass.

What else happened? Well, I got a little bit more into photo editing and developing of RAW pictures. I’m not making great progress but it finally is some progress to be found. I also joined a couple of new groups on deviant Art to get a little bit more feedback on my works. And of course a few eyes more watching my stuff. I’m also looking for a new camera, not for now but for the end of this year. I’m thinking about buying a Canon 7D, this camera got all the features I want and is not that expensive as the Canon 5D MarkII. At least, it would be a total waste of money according to the fact that photography is just a hobby mine. It’s like 1,500 bucks that ring on the bill, but I’m sure it’s totally worth it.

Gaming, another passion of mine. If the days has like 36 hours I would definitely play some games, but currently I don’t really have time to play some more story based games. I play a lot of “Bad Company 2” these days, for like one hour a day. There are still some games in queue that I need to play. There are plenty of games, as there are “Medal of Honor”, it can’t be more worth than “Homefront”. The “Dead Space” games, I started “Dead Space 1” several times, but never managed to finish or do any larger progress. Several LEGO games are waiting and so on. Most importantly, “Portal 2” is hopefully in my mailbox these days and I’ll definitely play this game as soon as possible.

Last game I played through was “Homefront” which was a kind of disappointing. Weird performance issues. Weird story and pace of the game. I can’t say that I didn’t like it, but, well, I don’t know. They whole concept was promising but the presentation was a big and epic fail on the whole line. I instantly switched back to my beloved “Borderlands” after finishing the four hour campaign. I barely had any interest in the multi player mode.

It’s floating away

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There’s this strange, weird phenomenon I’ve recently discovered in my life. Everytime I start something with a special goal in a creative matter, it’s no longer coming to an end. When I was younger, like years ago, I finished so many art projects like solo album (which was more a compilation of some tunes of mine). I did some nice stuff with the band I once had and so on. Nowadays everything gets a start and right after beginning the whole thing is stuck or abandoned. I was working on my second solo album and it didn’t make any progress. I wanted to dig a little deeper into the Adobe Lightroom/Photoshop workflow to improve my exposure with these tools. I wanted to do much more photography and it stucked as well. I feel more and more as if time is slipping away. Actually, time is always floating away and barely able to grab, but why do I have this immense lack of time? Probably because I’m working too much. Work is wasting like eight and a half hour a day and it feels like an eternity or two till it’s over, so one reason for this time lack seems to be my daily work. For the love of God, I can’t quit because I need the financial income. Damn it.

time

Sleep might be a reason but I cut down the time for daily sleep to something around five to six hours, which has to be enough. Sleep is for the weak, never forget that. One thing that was sucking time like a blood-thirsty vampire during the last month was the need for technical maintenance on my PCs. Changes to another operating system. Service pack crashes. Raid crashes. Hardware exchanges. All this cost a lot of time and most the invested time was wasted, because it mostly led to another maintenance or repair. Right now, I finishing working on my PCs so that I can go by and work with them instead of on them. PC number four is still in queue, but it’ll stay there for a while because I simply don’t have the delight to build up another machine that wastes time.

I actually forgot what I wanted to say in this particular post, because I’m pretty tired and exhausted today and today’s gym session will be horrible I guess. Anyhow, I’ll continue unveiling the time killers in my life and hopefully get back to more creativity or other kind of ways to spent my rare free time.

Left 4 Unknown

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Hardware geeks always suffer from that angst that they do not have the latest and most modern technology at home, same for me. But thanks to Valve software do I now know that my system is too bleeding edge to be known. Take a look at these screenshots

1. Valve announced that my system is a kind of “too new”

2. Here’s my answer to Valve. Of course, did I sent them a record of this “issue”

That’s why I don’t like someone elses kids

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The last couple of days gave me once again some moments of enlightenment and awareness. But let’s go waaayyy back to the past where I was a little kid and let us say for example my parents took me to some of their friends or acquaintances. It mainly followed this one schema, the little kid version of mine appeared there with one or two small toy cars or some Lego and I used to be quiet and polite and played with my toys where I didn’t disturb anyone. Until today do I expect this same behaviour from someone elses children, but correct me if I’m wrong or simply call me the intollerant old-fashioned, days seem to have changed. Nowadays the kids ain’t got respect for anything and I mean ANYthing. I don’t have any children and till now I don’t want any either and so it comes that my whole flat wasn’t made “kids safe” and there’s barely any entertainment for kids, too though. What happens when children appear in my flat is now pretty predictable, they simply get bored, because for some reasons kids today are not very foresighted or in some cases their parents. They don’t bring their own toys, nothing to engage or bother themselves and this is where the wish for total destruction comes into play.

These kids start to complain and yell about everything. Some shit takes too long. Some shit tastes not good. Some shit is like boring. They start to touch and grab everything. Turn electronic devices off that were on and vice versa. They start to do some kind of a dance on my living room table. They want to drink and eat all kinds of shit and in some cases I look into the eyes of a mother filled up with question marks asking me why I do not have this stuff. Maybe it’s because I don’t have any children and I do not f#§%ing care? Sometimes pregancy seems to kill brain cells though.

Let’s get it this way, when I visit one of my friends I know how they live, what food and drinks they got at home and all this kind of things. If I go by and visit someone I would enter their flat, find me a seat and try to be a nice visitor and don’t wander around touching and grapping everything. And that’s a standard since I started to think. If I visit them and they don’t have the drinks or the food that I want to drink or eat I simply bring it with or just let it be – period. I am so glad that my parents brought me up so well. My conclusion for the future is the following, I’ll kick these bloody kids and their f#§%ing genitors out of my flat until they’ve learned how to behave well in someone elses home and property and gained some respect. Until then, I try to fix some of my ripped posters, continue cleaning the carpet, try to find the batteries for my remote controls and buy me a rabies infected doberman…