Sarah in plane on way to melbourne

Sarah in plane on way to melbourne

Originally uploaded by Ashley Bartlett.

Testing a post. This is my baby in a beautiful photo. She hates it, i think it is gorgeous.

Was going for a sort of foreground, background split section. The colour turned out pretty cool too.

That wierd christmas tradition involving photocopiers

Not a big fan of just doing a post for links, but this was just too hilarious to pass up. The Inquirer site has gone on to say that Canon has said that their Technicians have said (ok i’ll stop there) christmas cheer brings pain to photocopiers in the workplace.

Go here to see what I mean.

Why I should spend more time Gaming.

The simple answer, the more practice I get, the more money i could earn. In the last several years thanks mostly to The World Cyber Games (aussie link), professional gaming is becoming a possibility as a valid career. The only caveat? Like any sport you need to be really good.
Cyber Gaming has even picked up the interest of the Sydney Morning Herald (Australian Newspaper) with the following two articles being printed recently:

Cyber Games triumph for Australia
Australians on target at Cyber Games

In the second SMH article they say that the winnings from this years World Cyber Games are higher than that of an Asian pro golf tournament.

As games evolve, and developers are putting some serious money into developing them, that the games will increasingly have more functionality to help in real life tournaments. Currently most games have tournament rules that state specific server configuration, maps that can be used and the number of players per side. Some modifications for games go as far as to fine tune the elements of the game for tournament play (e.g. Quake 3).

Already Valve have included HalflifeTV which is a system designed to give an overview of the players on the map and also so that gaming can become a spectator sport.

With Massive Multiplayer Online Games (MMO) becoming hugely popular, especially the recent World of Warcraft (WoW), the revenue a developer can make on a game is higher than that of a blockbuster movie. Of course with MMO style games there are ongoing development and service costs, the 3 million subscriber base each paying $15US permonth there is a beautiful profit to be made.

As of course with any industry, the MMO games are much more financially challenging as you need to build a userbase which requires stealing other games customers. Over the years, the original game Ultima Online was a good game, then came EverQuest which took MMO games to a whole new level, and now World of Warcraft has taken over and is dominating an industry. Even me, who has avoided these style of games for so long has an account. But my article on MMO’s is for another day.

Synchronised blogging

The issue at hand, is it possible to have two blogs update seperately, but also have some content synchronised? The content is not going to be on the same server or the same database.

My reasons for wanting to do this is because one blog is personal, where the other is more of something where I want to link interesting thoughts and links from. The reason for this is to maintain a more public blog, that i don’t mind being discovered, and another more personal blog. Comments and such don’t need to be synchronised, but hey, why not?
As an idea in my head, it could be possible with a wordpress plugin submitting the form data to another plugin that is configured to receive the data from a specific website. Maybe not even to a plugin but just using my wordpress account. Unfortuantely I have 0 time in which to do this in.

Who am I at Yahoo?

Well, today I tried to sign up for the FlickR service to see what it is all about. Well, it looks like all the common variants of usernames that are usually available are taken. Even with random numbers. This is interesting because i did not realise there were so many Ashley Bartlett’s in the world. Doing a search with Yahoo! for my name yeilded only a handful of exact matchs. I know this is not the best way of checking, but why not.

What i would like to know is, why am i not allowed full stops ‘.’ in my name? This would significantly increase my chances of getting a yahoo identity that i want, so i can more easily get access to their services. Fortunately I have a nice gmail address.

I will continue my endeavours to find a valid yahoo identity, could it be whoisashley, or ashley20051121, maybe even thisisstupid698311?

[Edit:] Well, it looks like i finally got ashleyisannoyed. This will forever re-enforce my turmoil with finding a yahooID. As an afterthought, this is probably the same with hotmail, or even gmail now.

Gaming in Australia hits newspaper

Well, this is the first time i have ever seen something like this in an Australian newspaper. It details how some Ausralians are doing in the World Cyber Games. The article was published on the Sydney Morning Herald (SMH) website, and you can see it here.

So does this mean that gamers are getting somewhere in the world of international recognition? I don’t think so yet. But defiantely an interesting step. Might have to work on my Quake 4 and Battlefield 2 skills so i can get a mention in the paper.

AMD challenges Intel to a good old fashioned Duel.

The ultimate in corporate bickery. AMD is trying to push Intel’s buttons, by proposing and old fashioned duel. 20 paces, 6 shooters only, bring your best man to the Coralle. I also highly suggest viewing the top 10 reasons why Intel will not participate, it’s so funny i can hardly believe AMD actually put it up.

Intel has 40 days to accept.

Hey alex.

I’m testing my blog.

Here is my test from my first use of Flock

Does using this interface mean i’m flocking instead of blogging? I’m not sure, but I cannot wait to see where flock goes. Especially considering it works with wordpress out of the box. And by out of the box, i mean out of the developer pre-release version.

I guess all i can do now, is click publish and see where this ends up.