And people complain about the license fee!

Beauty, grace, danger, survival, etc (There are two videos on the page, both worth watching)

One seriously determined cat!

A meteorite falls in Utah.

The future of food… now…

Great stuff, and no rubbish to wade through to find it!

For anyone out there who enjoys a bit of “video gaming” why not check out my gaming alter ego’s (Rax / Raxous) “Gameography“, and see if we have any games in common in our back catalogs!

Please bear in mind that this is an ongoing project, not yet a complete list of the games that have influenced me!

So following the event, there have been a few places featuring it / us / me! ;

Team UK Story (Official Video – BioWare)  -/-  Team UK Story (Official Video – EA)

Official Dragon Age Website

Official Event Website

EA Games

GameSpot: (Video 1 (Alt)) (Video 2) (Original Advert)

Newb Review

FHM Magazine

Nuts Magazine

Twitter

Facebook

Anything else interesting turns up, I’ll post it here!

Below is a very small part of a poem I am working on for my book, it takes the form of  a simple traditional “folk” piece which will be recited by “common folk” in one of the earlier passages of the first chapter…

…

Upon the hills,
Deep in the seas
Amidst the clouds
Above the trees
Under the mount
Around the vale
Along the river
Swift and pale

With the fishes
Birds and beasts
In the famine
And the feasts
Part of all
For from it made
Are all things
Which do not fade

In the song
and whistled sound
In the wind
blown all around
We can sense
What can’t be seen
And so we know
What it must mean

…

Whilst not complete, this does impart a flavour of what I am trying to achieve within the introduction to the peoples featured in the book.

Some photos of me through the years to help you identify me from “back in the day!” (As an extra bonus most of them provide for a jolly good laugh at my expense! )

[Show as slideshow]

[View with PicLens]

Below are the commands to include in “Shutdown” & “Startup” batch files. These commands will fully shutdown / startup all Exchange 2003 services cleanly and in the correct order. These files are useful in a number of situations, particularly;

1. Pre server shutdown: Windows Server is not very good (OK, it’s terrible!) at managing these services effectively, to circumvent this run the “shutdown” batch file to conclusion before actually telling windows to shutdown / reboot.

2. Pre manual backup / mailstore defragmentation / logfile management etc: Again, once the “shutdown” script is run you are safe in the knowledge that the Exchange 2003 data files in question are not being used by the system.

3. Post error / bug: Following any error event / issue with Exchange 2003 it is often wise, in my experience, to fully shutdown and then re-start all Exchange services to ensure all services are working correctly and have been initialised in the correct sequence to avoid service-to-service communication / reliance problems.

The Scripts;

Shutdown; (E2K3-Shutdown.bat)
net stop “Microsoft Exchange Information Store” /y
net stop “Microsoft Exchange System Attendant” /y
net stop “Microsoft Exchange IMAP4″ /y
net stop “Microsoft Exchange Routing Engine” /y
net stop “Microsoft Exchange POP3″ /y
net stop “Microsoft Exchange Management” /y
cmd /k

Startup; (E2K3-Startup.bat)
net start “Microsoft Exchange Information Store”
net start “Microsoft Exchange System Attendant”
net start “Microsoft Exchange MTA Stacks”
net start “Microsoft Exchange IMAP4″
net start “Microsoft Exchange Routing Engine”
net start “Microsoft Exchange POP3″
net start “Microsoft Exchange Management”
cmd /k

A quick apology for the rather odd structure of the site at the moment, you see I’m merging a number of my “web presences” into this site, suffice to say, come back in a few days and things will be back to normal! (Hopefully!)

Yes, last week I represented the UK at the international, 24-hour, “Dragon Age: Origins Wardens’ Quest“!

(I even have evidence, click this link to EA UK website, to verify!)

This was not only a great honour, but also a great experience. I was equally nervous and excited leading up to the event and with good reason, the competition came from all over the globe and they were GOOD. All the teams really knew their stuff and this made for a tense and high quality competition.

After some 20 hours of hard gaming we came 5th (out of 10 team) having been eliminated in a double elimination whilst we were in 3rd position overall. Whilst we were sad to not stay in all the way to the final, we were pretty pleased we ended up in 3rd place at the point we were eliminated, not a bad show, specially as one of the 2 teams above us were “Team Bioware”, a team put together by the developers of the game!

Anyway the purpose of the event wasn’t just for me to have fun, it was to promote “Dragon Age: Origins” not that it needs much promoting, running as it is at 90% + rating on Metacritic! Suffice to say I personally guarantee that it is THE best roleplay game ever made, and I have played most of them! Do yourself a favour and buy it / play it / thank me later.

On the back of our success, we even took part in The GameSpot UK Podcast 29/10/09 , the podcast for the biggest game site in the UK! Which was again a real honour!

So a big thank you to everyone involved / supporting the event, particularily;

- The other 4 memembers of the team; Jack Payne, Chris Collins, Tom Wallis and Dan Sheridan (EA).
- All the members of the other teams, great competitors, great people!
- The event support crew; from the awesome BioWare techs to the top attentionseekers.tv team. Great job guys. Great job.
- An extra thank you to Dan / EA for making the experience such a great one! Wouldn’t have happened without you, so much love big guy!
- Everyone else from BioWare & EA who made the whole thing happen! Particularily;
- Jonathan Goddard (EA) who was also particularily awesome!
- Chris Priestly (BioWare) who was a real trooper, all the way.
- Also another huge thank you to Guy Cocker (GameSpot UK) for both supporting the team and letting us tag along on his most excellent podcast!