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…