Trukz is a text based trucking simulation game where you create your driver, buy yourself a truck, then earn money by hauling loads to and from various cities around the USA, Canada, Mexico, and Central America.

Read more and play at:

http://www.trukz.com

There has been a bit of “you’re going to lose” “no, you are!” type conversations which never seemed to go anywhere so instead I started making things up. Ever heard of the EGC? I haven’t (although it may exist), but I created the European Games Championship where I actually got to the regional finals a few years ago playing Starcraft (a different RTS game). This got him a little worried and I keep mentioning that playing against the computer is vastly different from playing against a real life human over t’internet which I have been doing for many, many years.

Something in my favour is that WorkTommy has been having a hard time getting ready for the challenge. He got his phone line in but it was a later date than he thought (cue “Oh delaying tactics eh? Need more practise?” comments); he couldn’t get broadband until he’d had the phone line activated (more delays); couldn’t get broadband until he’d had the phone line activated for 10 days (uh huh) and despite that 10 fay being up last Sunday, he’s still not phoned the ISP to get broadband - he really is delaying and possibly getting scared, honest.

I’ve even started being nice to him: “Look WorkTommy, all these delays. If the thought of the challenge is getting to you, let’s forget about it. Being a quitter is fine if the alternative is getting stressed out over the whole thing.”

I think I’m winning the psychological battle but maybe I should get in a little practise before the matches…

We chose Red Alert 2 as the game of choice. I’m not exactly sure how that game choice came about, possibly because the RTS genre is a pretty good choice for a one on one challenge and is a genre we’re both familiar with and enjoy. In order to make things interesting we decided to make the challenge a bet. After thinking about things for a while I came up with a forfeit (because money bets are silly, far better to embarass someone...) - the loser of the challenge has to wear a T-Shirt with the winner’s face on it and the words “Winner is my hero!” on it (where winner is the name of the winner, obviously).

I remember one of my friends linking a place that took graphic files from you and stuck it on a T-Shirt and mailed it out to you but have no idea where the place is, or any similar ones are. Anyone got any ideas?

Soon: Part #2 - My Practise

The World Cup and Big Brother were both brief distractions but the lack of TV Drama caused me to catch up with a few things via ScreenSelect:

The West Wing
Now finished in the US but not something I’ve ever watched before. US political drama doesn’t really sound like it’s my thing but after a recommend from a friend (*wave Lucy*) I decided to stick it on my screenselect list and gave it a go… and it’s bloody brilliant. It’s a ‘typical’ US drama in that it’s got a great ensemble cast with each episode dealing with a specific thing as well as the real lives of the characters and little story arcs. What I really like about it is the humour; it’s not played for laughs but sometimes it seems as though it’s the funniest shows on TV.

Made a slight error with my screenselect list though. Each disk I got had four episodes on until I got to disk 3 which had three episodes and some extra features. I assumed it meant the first season was just a half season much like season one of Buffy. So I stuck season two on screenselect instantly. Some texts from Lucy said the last episode of season one was fantastic, so I watched and waited ... and then it ended. It wasn’t that great, just seemed like a normal episode ... and then I checked and found out season one had 22 episodes not the 11 I presumed. I guess the DVDs are 4 4 3 4 4 3. Screenselect does a nice thing where it sends series in episode order but unfortunately there doesn’t seem a check in place to make sure you get them season order so I’ve been getting some of season two before I’ve had all the disks for season one all because I’m a bit of a numpty.

Curb Your Enthusiasm
Saw the interview between Ricky Gervais and Larry David a few months ago and because of that I decided to stick CYE on my list. Each episode is essentially about situations snowballing due to something Larry says or does. Very funny and contains swearing which is always funny.

Arrested Development
No idea where I first heard about his but heard it wasa very underrated comedy which was due to be cancelled after 3 seasons. “Level-headed son Michael Bluth takes over family affairs after his father is imprisoned. But the rest of his spoiled, dysfunctional family are making his job unbearable”. Very funny show!

It is the Summer and there are still some shows on the air so my ... erm ... trips to the US still go ahead so I can catch Monk and Psych both similar shows, light hearted detective shows. Monk’s in its fifth season now and Psych has just started.

Huzzah, TV is great!

For the last couple of days he’s been having a bet with WorkCarol. Everytime he swears he has to give her £1. Being the kind of friend I am, I’ve been snitching on him and also trying to get him to swear at each and every opportunity. Today I made him swear, actually without trying, we were talking rubbish as per usual and something slipped out of his mouth. He blamed me! Me! He claims that when I keep insulting him, it gets him angry and the swearing comes out.

In a rather stupid gesture I said that if he was doing the no swearing thing, I would promise not to insult anyone and to not be sarcastic at all for the day ... the whole day. Can you imagine how terrible that was?

I survived the day, barely. It was hell!

Work

Well I’m still in my job. lots of people have left, lots of the management have left but the place is still open. A few weeks ago we even had a motivational speech because more people were being made redundant and we had to “pull together and work as a team” and all that kind of rubbish. Unfortunately since then they suddenly found out that they got more orders and we now have more work - back to similar levels as before - but now with less staff because they were all made redundant ... erm ... sneaky gits.

New Phone

Finally got around to choosing and ordering a new phone, the Nokia N80 which is very, very gadgetty. Still wading through the 7 or so manuals that came with it and getting to grips with it.

One of the first things that I didn’t like with it is the alarm system. I use my phone as my alarm clock and with my old phone I could set an alarm which went off on particular days of the week, so I could set my workday alarm and not worry about it going off at silly o’clock on a Saturday morning. With the new phone I could only set an alarm so I’d need to remember to switch it off for the weekend. However, a quick look online and I found an alarm application which allows me to set various alarms and one of the settings is to allow the alarm for certain days. A quick download and install and my phone now works like my old one, now that’s gadgetty!

The phone call was a shock but not as big a shock as what came next. Alistair said he didn’t know how to put it so came out with it, as will I. Neil (another member of the group) was flying home from Hong Kong where he’d been doing some engineering malarkey. On the flight he had a massive heart attack and died.

To say the news was a shock is an understatement, I’m not sure what I said after the news, just rendered me speechless.

The memories that spring to mind when thinking about Neil involve various James Bond shenanigans: secret taping of conversations of old men; travelling far and wide to get to street mentioned in secret tapes; delivering secret messages (love letters...) to contacts (girlie Neil liked); fleeing the scene when foreign agents (girlie’s parents) arrived and spending all day trying to find each other because we scattered in panic.

The group of six are now down to a group of four, one third of us no longer around. That’s a scary thought.

• Pewari‘s site has a redesign and I don’t want to be left out
• The old site had some broken (even though it’s not been touched) javascript which meant the menu didn’t work, an unfinished design is better than a broken one?
• The CSS Reboot happened May 1st and although today is the 7th, I can feel like a late bandwagon jumper
• UNless this is actually live, I have the feeling I’ll never get around to finishing it, already I’m itching for another redesign

The redesign changes the content as well as the layout. In my (current) opinion the focus of the website should be the blog which is why I now favour a single column layout with one blog per page. Everything else which was available (or rather weasn’t because the javascript was broken) is still available (or will be when I get around to it).

Things still to do:

• My image gallery page (I really need to take some more photos...) which isn’t linked to but is available. It needs layout changing to match rest of site.
• Links, again they are around but not linked to. I just need to think about how I’m going to do what I want to do.
• Tidying up, small changes here and there, testing in IE7 beta 2 and that kinda stuff

Today I like lists…

Actually I lied about linking things because this blog isn’t about interviews at all, oh no, it’s about presentations. The original conversation about presentations did start with interviews so there is some logic here. What do I care anyway, this is my blog, my rules ... my rules that I can break as and when I wish.

Two particular presentations sum up my “bad luck” when it comes to these things. I hate doing them anyway but when this kind of stuff happens…

The first presentation was actually part of a college course where I was doing a marketing module. The idea behind it (I’m going back years so not 100% sure) was to research a random European country in the aim of launching a particular product. A report had to be made and a presentation done. The reports were done and handed in and then we had a random pulling names of the hat to determine the order of the presentations.

The presentations started and after the first couple I was feeling a little more confident with mine. As my turn approached I was getting a little nervous but was sure I was be at least as good as the people before me… and then up went the guy just before me.

“Hi my name is Mike Wiśniewski, I’m originally from Poland which was the country I had to research and I recently came back from there...” bugger!

Second presentation instance was work related. The first part of my working day was a brief 15 minute or so team meeting (this followed the 30 minute or so manager’s meeting) discussing previous results, current issues and rubbish motivational speeches (although that was just my manager with those I think, they really were bad). In what was either a moment of laziness or a “team building” exercise, my manager decided that we’d all take turns doing the team meeting and I was first. “Oh well, I can get it out of the way” I thought.

It came time to do my little presentation, I had everything I needed and was ready to go and get it done. Everyone gathered around and then I was asked to halt for a second… as the head of the entire site came and decided to listen in. Confidence gone, babbling began but I got it out of the way and was happy I could sit back and watch everyone else struggle with doing theirs… interestingly enough it never happened again! Victimisation!

And there endeth my luck with presentations blog.

All well and good, I don’t actually mind hearing about his little stories but there is a little problem. After the initial telling of the story, we’ll meet up later at lunch time, sit down to eat and then he’ll start a conversation again about the same bloody thing. There are usually other people around but the conversation is always directed to me. The story usually starts a little differently but before you know it, you realise you’re listening to the exact same thing you heard earlier.

There lies the dilemma. Do you say “Hang on WorkGaz, you’ve already told me this”, possibly upsetting him (especially since it’ll be a daily thing) or let him get on with it, knowing that some of the people around, it might be the first time they’ve heard it? I usually go with the latter but I’m not exactly sure if it’s the right thing to do.

Opinions and thoughts?

...since then we had a troubleshooter type manager come in and then a ‘real’ management type. After fullfilling orders and the like, we went back onto the one shift system at the beginning of this year. Since then the amount of losses we’re making have lessened but we’re still making a loss. With rumours flying around, there was a big meeting last week. After work we were all called into a meeting to be given the news.

I hate these things because instead of just coming out with “we’re doing x and y”, they have to save face, give rubbish about market conditions and generally take way too much time announcing the actual announcement. I have to admit, part of the reason for me not liking it on this particular day is that I’d be missing the start of Monk. So the announcement went ahead, blah blah, market conditions (told you), we’re closing one of the departments, there will be redundancies, meetings with all staff over next few weeks, blah blah. The department being shut isn’t one I’m part of so it won’t actually affect me (yet, there will no doubt come a time soon though...). After the announcement we had to wait longer until we were given letters which had the exact same details as the announcement - which again doesn’t affect me directly. Just stop with the bloody announcements and give me the letter the following day, in work time, not Monk time!

So, in summary, I still have a job for the moment.

The channel 4 show Space Cadets was a reality TV show whereby members of the public were trained as astronauts and fooled into thinking they were sent into space. I think the same thing happened to us, except we were made to believe we went to Spain instead.

We thought the plane flew across England, over the English Channel, over France and onto Spain; actually the plane flew over England, flew over the English Channel but turned around, flying back over England again. A special place on the coast was converted to a Spanish looking town and actors were hired to help convince us. It was the little details they forgot about that convinced me we were still in England. The main one being the fact that for a huge part of the weekend it was raining - we were in Blackpool not Malaga! The water wasn’t the Mediterranean but the Irish Sea! The second little detail was that they forgot to change all of the number plates, some were still showing English plates.

Where ever we were, it was great but we should all be reminded that things aren’t always what they seem - you have to keep your senses!

Okay, 90% of the time I want a new mobile phone but this time I really want one because things have changed a lot in the mobile phone world over the last year or so and my phone (SonyEricsson k700i) is looking a little old - part of the reason is them releasing a newer version just after I got the k700i as an upgrade, so it feels older than it perhaps should.

As regular readers will know, the main reason for the mobile phone is for text messages. However, some extra bits and pieces would be nice:

1. Camera would be nice - I don’t take many photos, certainly not enough to warrant a digital camera (obviously I have one I don’t use already), but a nice 2mp camera would be nice.
2. Music Player - an area which has seen huge improvements over the last year or so. I do have an mp3 player but phones have reached a point where one is good enough for me to dispense with the mp3 player and just carry around one device.
3. Large Screen - the screen I have at the moment is large enough for 99% of the time but sometimes the phone is used to browse t’internet and a large screen is obviously better for that.

Other things which I may be looking for are 3G compatability (I’m not sure why but hey, why not) and design wise I’ve been wanting a flip phone. The reason I’ve been thinking of flip phones is that I’ve seen them used in far too many of the TV shows I’ve watched over the last few months and they have the cool “look I’m on the phone, you can tell because it’s open!” thing going on.

The problem I’m facing now - with phones offering more than before - is that I cannot find a phone to do everything I want it to. They all do some of what I want but not all and that’s really annoying . I’ve mainly been looking at SonyEricsson phones because they are the ones making the progress with music phones at the moment and I’ve used their phones before and like the interface. The phone of theirs which fits most of my needs is the SE w900i but the main ‘problem’ with it is that it uses SonyEricsson’s swivel design which I find annoying and seems ‘wrong’ to me. My natural handling of the phone would cause it to be upside down when it’s swivelled open. It is something I could get used to I guess but not sure I want to risk it.

The w900i was exclusive to Vodafone in the UK for a few months in the UK and since I’m not eligible for an upgrade for a few months anyway, I decided to wait. Then SonyEriccson released details of a new phone, one which sounded perfect, the w950i. Has a touch screen (now that’s sexy and cool!), 4GB of memory for music, 3G, large screen, not flip but looks sexy anyway. Oooh I want one! And and and ... oh no camera ... wtf? Gaah! So I’m still no closer in deciding…