TheArtfulGroper

Funny enough, there is a super bright object in the sky here so I wanted to find out what it was. Turns out it's Jupiter! !

Oh and on the flip side, Al nailed it with the taxes back here. There are so many new taxes now my payslip has one paid to me line and about 5 lines of things being taken off me.

This is fantastic. Bringing back all the memories of exactly what I went through. I was trying to buy a car, get an apartment, open a bank account and get a drivers license all at the same time.
For the car and apartment, credit score was important. So the bank (well credit union) recommended I take a loan for the car, pay it off for a month or two then clear it if I wanted. Seemed silly but they were able to give me a credit card after that. Which I was then told to use and set it to pay off in full.

The cars were mostly gigantic and the apartments were tiny. Both could have been measured in square foot. Getting my drivers license was hilarious. In New Mexico there is a private company who handle drivers license stuff. They allowed us to pay 200 dollars and convert our Irish license directly to an American one, which I then handed in in Boston and got a Massachusetts license. New Mexico and Ireland are not a similar driving experience so I'm not sure why that was allowed. Ultimately I never took a driving test there.

The Irish thing worked in Boston but not in New Mexico. I actually spoke to someone in a shop who had never heard of Ireland. Genuinely bemused, with their head tilted just shaking going "No, never heard of it." Didn't realise St. Patricks day or Leprechauns were related to a place.

Boston was the opposite. Grumpy bank tellers or public workers suddenly brightened when they heard the accent, everything from getting your car tested to getting an arrest warrant quashed was much easier than it should have been.

How's the internet speed? Mine was good but pricey, I think I had 50mb for about 120/month. But that was nearly 10 years ago.

Sounds about right. I think if you had other people using it multiplayer it would increase the longevity.
Final form could have some kind of eye tracking for menu control and a forward facing camera you could quickly switch to if you needed to interact with the real world without dismantling the headset.

Does the DK1 have earphones?

Yeah they've said the control box is gone and you now have a regular USB and HDMI going straight to the headset.



And for people like you who's friends go into a rutting, animalistic frenzy the minute you put the headset on they have added a splash guard.

I took over from a guy running the network in a college. He had been there for about 30 years and was quite set in his ways. His idea of a passdown was leaving the keys with the porter and a stinking smoke stained office filled with his hand written notes.

I spent the first year getting to know the network, Novell server and Windows 2000 machines. By the end of it I still hadn't figured out his quirky scripts and I hated Novell server.

I tried to convince the principal that we were hindering learning by teaching people to use this technology. And that we could be more efficient if it didn't take 10 minutes to log in every time. But no dice. What ended up working was telling her we'd all get viruses if we kept using the current system.

Scrapped the entire thing and started fresh, it felt very good to shutdown those servers.

Yeah nice image of a guy laughing, wrapped in cables and your expensive headset in pieces beside him. I suppose it's more the like the lan parties of old. Hulking equipment to a central place and everyone is reasonably controlled and there more for the gaming than the drinking.

That looks amazing, unfortunately can't listen to sound in work. Did you grow your hair long again?

VR is the Wii party game of the future! Did you do through the setup process for each of them? Do you think it would have improved the one burping guys experience?

So you have a crappy piece of copper coming in to the building that gives .5 up. Besides paying more for less contention, is there anything else we can do?




Are you on the unlimited fibre? Why are they only giving you 30 down? I pay 70 euro's for tv and internet with unlimited 120 down.

I was working in an office in Merrion Square and their only option is DSL, I was getting 10Mb down and 0.4Mb up. It was horrendous. They are using SIP phones and it kept dropping calls. So I grabbed one of the 4G dongles and tried it out. A whopping 25 down and 15 up, which I was very happy with. Unfortunately they NAT the 4G connections and block a lot of the ports (including SIP) so it didn't work out for us in the end.
I'm back to DSL now in the hope that something better becomes available.

That does sound nuts. I like the idea of no context billboards up around the place, just your face on it. Simply because he can.
At least he'd be technology focused. What are internet options like there? I've found it an odd mix here. In one area you are struggling with pricey, slow DSL and half a mile away you've got affordable 100Mb cable.

I read today that Kim Dotcom is angling to be the next King of New Zealand. How do Kiwi's feel about him?

How long does the detached/flat feeling last? If you had two are there any good multiplayer games? I'm picturing old reliable BF1942 but with that thing on your head and a controller in your hands.
Do you feel like you'd like to get the DK2 after trying that? Or do you think the novelty will wear off?
I'll have to check out the video again later when I'm not supposed to be teaching a class.

So two days and you're over the motion sickness? Do you still get a surreal feeling when you take it off?
I had no sound when I checked out Evelyn's video. What did she think of it?

Forgetting all the Facebook stuff, seeing that video gave me that giddy "teenager-in-the-virgin-megastore" gaming feeling that I've not had in a long time.

When I read FB had bought Oculus my first thought was the plan for the rift is dead as we know it. The only upside is absolutely astounding levels of cash to make some amazing piece of VR equipment. However it's final form is now dedicated to furthering the cause of Facebook. So essentially it's not something I can ever see myself using.

The Oculus guys absolutely sold out and went back on everything they'd said about remaining independent. But two billion dollars. 2 Billion. It's an insane amount of money and these guys aren't hard headed CEO's used to these sort of figures.

The only thing is, the DK1 exists and if the DK2 is just an improvement over that then at least something came out of it.

Firstly, I'm jealous of you getting to try that thing out. The nausea sounds like a mood killer. Apparently they have done a lot of work on DK2 to combat that, plus you get the higher resolution screens.
I like the sound of the Sony one, but they tend to make things over proprietary. I can't see it being on anything other than the PS4 and considering the PS4 struggles to push 90 FPS at a decent resolution I think the DK2 might be the best option for the next few years.
What do you think Facebook are going to do with it? They usually go for someone with high user numbers and lots of data to mine. I'm not sure where they are going with this. The whole Facebook phone thing didn't exactly go anywhere. The one thing is, you'd think some more advanced product will come relatively soon with this kind of money behind it.

Have you tried anything else? Did you give Outerra a whirl? Keep on laughin' and vomitin'

Hey lad's, looks like you've been having fun. Sorry I've not gotten on but college started back last week. I am free this Friday and Saturday night so I plan on getting on. I found this video of a couple of jerkwads getting shot up (through reddit, you might have seen it).

I happened to catch a glimpse of the start of that little seductive dance from a different angle:

Sweet, do the zombies show up?

Yeah my main problem has been with the controls, I haven't played it consistently enough to get familiar with it. Things like being stuck walking have killed me a few times. The only thing that seemed to fix it was changing servers.

I've been trying to get into it, but as Al pointed out earlier, there are some flaws. I definitely think this mod's strenghts are when you are playing with a friend. So far my solo adventure this evening hasn't gone well.
I spent about 2 hours sneaking around and walking a lot. I managed to snag some decent stuff and I took no risks around zombies, moving slowing, waiting for them to pass and all that.
Then I see a gun sitting in a toilet, so I click to grab it... but instead I close the door on my legs and snap them like dry twigs. The enjoyment of this game is from the tension, I did not feel any tension going to grab the gun as I didn't expect to mortally injure myself in the process.
When I had no blood and broken legs I also felt no tension, I was essentially dead. So I haven't had much of a rush so far.
But rather than giving up I decide to go for a crawl, intermittently fainting and generally not getting anywhere fast.
Finally another player jogs up, shoots me and presumably loots my cautious corpse.
I decided to go again and the reason I have the time to write about my adventures is because I'm hiding out from a couple of zombies on top of a mobile phone tower.
I'll update that if anything else happens.
Jurys out for me, so far no more or less fun than most other multiplayers I've tried out.

I just posted in your pc thread, but I'll repeat here. I bought a laptop sans optical drive and have never needed it. You can make a bootable USB from your old pc and install windows that way. Nothing messy, simple software and a few clicks. Windows installs faster off USB, about 20 minutes start to finish!
You can also multiboot Ubuntu, windows, virus scanner anything you like using Yumi. I have 32gb stick I carry around and it's been endlessly handy.

Or you could use your old pc, a 4 gig memory stick and win2flash. It's how I do all my installs and win 7 installs faster from a USB stick!

How is the new machine working out? Have you got it fired up yet?