Brisbane Guide

Yay! I've had the good fortune of having one of my photos included in an online Brisbane guide. It's for an article on Chinese New Year and you can see it here. It's of a snapshot of Alison's red layer cake that we made for CNY this year.



Not really the best photo in my opinion but what the hey. No I won't be rolling in royalties from this sadly.

Looking for buried treasure

Eager to make use of our most recent purchase, I convinced Alison to come along for a quick walk to try our hand at Geocaching. I selected a simple multicache near our place so we wouldn't have to drive anywhere and with clues and GPS in hand we set off on our adventure.

For those too lazy to click on the link here are the clues we had to follow to find the cache. The whole idea is you get to each point and figure out the next GPS coordinates to walk to based on the answer to the question.

At the coordinates listed above you will find a sign explaining the history of the area and of Moolabin Creek. You will find these signs along the way and they provide a great insight into what was here before the houses arrived.

1 - In order to find waypoint 2 you need to know:
How high is Mt Cootha? = AAB
How high is Toohey Mt? = CAB
Waypoint 2 = S27 31.(A+B)AC and E153 01.B(B-C)(A+B+C+1)

2 - How many metres can the squirrel glider glide up to? = BD
Waypoint 3 = S27 31.(A+B+C)DC and E153 01.(B+C)BB

3 - How many trees on your left along the pathway are there? Starting at the coordinates and ending just before the yellow barriers = E
Waypoint 4 = S27 31.EA(E-B) and E153 01.(E-C)(B-C)C

4 - How many stations are there? (go on give them a go .....) FG = answer multiplied by 3
Waypoint 5 = S27 F1.EGE and E153 DC.(G+A)(G+C)G

5 - What does "Moolabin" mean in the local Aboriginal language? H = number of letters in the answer.
Waypoint 6 = S27 FA.DFD and E153 01.(H+C)FG

6 - How many million years ago does the geological formation date from? XXX-YYY
The cache can be found at: S27 FA.(XXX-229) and E153 DC.(YYY+699)

We found the first park easily enough and followed the clues quickly from point to point while checking out the local houses for sale. As Alsie pointed out I think this would be a great way to check out suburbs we'd like to move to in the future. The only clue we briefly stumbled on was number 3 as we were looking for an information plaque.

Arriving at the final coordinates we had some trouble actually finding the cache as there was fresh and damp mulch all over the area. A little persistence on my part (call it plain stubbornness if you will) and I eventually found a little red lunchbox partially buried at the base of a tree.



We signed the logbook and checked off our very first cache find. Hopefully the first of many.

Now to find Carmen Sandiego

Over the past few years my embarrassing lack of geographic knowledge and awareness has been the cause of much disappointment and aggravation in our household. Coupled with my inability to identify the business end of a road map and you have prime ingredients for a navigational nightmare. This is especially true when I don't have my loving and somewhat patient wife to pass driving duties to so I'm desperately in need of assistance.

In the interest of saving money for Christmas, Alison offered to buy me half a GPS as my present. With the same spirit of frugality in mind I decided to purchase the remaining half as her gift. I'm so thoughtful.

We picked up a Garmin Nuvi 250 at our local GPS store and have been fiddling with it for most of the day. Initial tests have proven promising thus far and the unit seems more than up to the task of directing even the most oblivious of drivers (moi). I'm particularly impressed with how it quickly recalculates the route when I miss three turns in a row. ^_^;

I'm also keen on dabbling in Geocaching even if the salesperson didn't think it would be the best model for the job. Sounds like a heap of fun.

Death in the family

I think we probably had a feeling this was going to happen for some time. One of our fish has slipped off to the Deep Blue this morning which drops our aquatic population to four. It's a sad day and a short memorial service was held this morning before burying Mr Sashimi among the parsley. He shall be sorely missed.



He's the orange one hiding at the back. We shall make a concerted effort to ensure that the others do not follow suit.

So this is what Hell feels like

I was planning on taking a break from World of Warcraft to try something else in the PC-RPG genre for a change so for the past few weeks I'd been following the release of Hellgate: London with much interest. The game seemed to have all the elements for a fun dungeon romp; an experienced and successful team that gave us the original Diablo, a cliche but workable premise of a demonic apocalypse set in the future as an excuse to provide both magic sword wieldy characters and gun toting hard asses, and of course the promise of much multiplayer action with a blend of FPS twitch play and RPG loot hoarding.

Watching the following trailer had me salivating at the thought of roaming the randomised streets of London burning, slashing and shooting the waves of hell spawn.



Sadly, a pretty trailer does not a good game make.

Thankfully I didn't have any of the problems registering for my account that seemed to be plaguing others. I rolled up an Engineer and entered a zombie infested side street. Flicking through the menus immediately highlighted a few dubious design decisions. The skill tree seemed oddly bland, the chat window toggled between obtrusive or invisible with nothing in between, and a quest text window which had a 20 word limit and forced you to click through each abbreviated page while the undead chewed on your extremities.

The winning menu for flawed implementation in my opinion however has to be the inventory screen and it's probably just my anal-retentiveness coming to the surface here. I've gotten used to having each item take up single slots regardless of their 'size'. It's not like having a gun take up 3x2 slots in your bag is any more realistic than a stack of twenty zombie hearts which take up one slot. Fine, I can still deal with bigger items. What I can't understand is why they didn't include the SORT button they had in Diablo 2 ten years ago. Playing inventory Tetris in my bags just so I can pick up one more rune inscribed sword I want to sell back in town does not sound like a feature I'd expect to see in a 2007 game.

Killing a few zombies and soldiering on I was soon treated a soporific story line presented in tear inducing disjointedness thanks to the aforementioned quest menu. It's a crying shame too as the basic storyline seemed to have some potential. To make matters worse, any narrative satisfaction you might glean from the main quest line is immediately squashed by the banality of the side quests. In fact, completing side quests often feels like an exercise in serendipitous slaughter as they fall unapologetically into the tried and true categories of "Kill X monsters", "Kill monsters for X items" and "Press X glowy things while you're out there killing monsters". Given that you're more than likely going to be shooting/slashing/burning everything in sight when out in the wild in the interest of self preservation, completing these goals is often unintentional and devoid of any sense of accomplishment.

That said, the combat engine itself is actually the game's saving grace. Killing monsters is undeniably fun which it should be and configuring your weapons, armour and skills to test your setup out on the mobs gives you a glimpse of what the game could have been like. The formula definitely works but once again fails prey to sub-par execution. The Engineer I rolled makes use of drones and bots for assistance, but the game offers no control over them. Entering a room results in the activation of every mob as your drone wanders off and unabashedly shoots at anything it feels like. The graphics engine while pretty in most cases also has lackluster presentation with some skills. Shoddy particle effects on leveling up, ugly HUD like skills used to mark mobs and a myriad of clipping issues result in an experience that sometimes feels like you're just playing a well developed MOD for Half Life.

The lure of multiplayer combat has not been especially strong either. A crappy chat window aside, there's no means to look for other players on the same quests. Not that you really need to as the game scales all the randomised levels to the number of players. Since all the levels are instanced there's no chance of meeting another player while prowling the streets. Chat bubbles over player heads are also missing so visiting Stations/Towns (which are also instanced) feels far from the social hubs they're supposed to be. While you can see other players walking around town there's little to suggest what they're doing unless you have the chat window obscuring half your screen and compare the floating names against what people are saying. I certainly can't see myself teaming up with anyone in the game that I don't already know in real life which is a shame as I've made lots of friends playing other MMORPGs like WoW and Guildwars.

To top it all off I've had about five system crashes in the past two days. The last of which was the proverbial straw on what had been a lame camel to begin with. I haven't uninstalled the game yet and still hope that Flagship Studios can salvage what must have been a labour of love.

It's back to WoW for PC gaming for me. Aside from that Alsie and I are both really enjoying Zack and Wiki on the Wii and look forward to the impending release of Guitar Hero 3 this week. Rock on!