James Galvin

Vin just pointed out that the Cobra-Daa video from 1999 is now on You Tube. Cobra was a volatile Scottish Quake player. Daa was an annoying young Irish Quake player who brought out the worst in people, and liked to wind up Cobra. This is Cobra’s attempt at intimidating Daa:

I was at the WCG Ireland LAN yesterday attending the BYOC area, mainly to play a bit of Quake 3. After suffering so long on ISDN and unplayable Clearwire broadband, I was delighted to hear of a free LAN just five minutes from my house. It was refreshing to see all friendly faces running the thing - BioHazard/MindPhuck/Legion/PPC, etc., are all oldschool LAN organisers who know the Irish gaming scene very well. No power cuts, no problems with IP addresses, no ping issues… to say the LAN ran smoothly would be a huge understatement.

When I arrived at the Digital Hub I was given a bag of free stuff and a nice smoothie, ushered to my seat by a guy who carried my PC. I was then directed to SECURE parking out the back (incidentally, three more cars broken into underneath my apartment block the day after my own stereo was stolen). There was a tuck shop, a rest area with comfortable couches and bean bags, top of the range console corners with great chairs and TVs, computer doctors on site, and loads of help from staff. You’d think you were in a different country. Myself and Spaceman each bought a can of coke at the shop, and were informed that we had just won free spot prizes… I was given an xbox 360 game. This was most definitely a Carlsberg LAN.

There were a handful of reporters wandering about, I posted the Sunday Tribune’s article here, and no doubt there will be some more reviews popping up in the other papers. One thing that struck me as a bit odd were these two women from Millenium People recruitment who were going around with leaflets offering gamers their “dream job” as an MMORPG games master or team leader, etc. CV farmers perhaps?

Theres a review of the WCG qualifiers from a Counter Strike perspective over on cs-ireland.com. Even though its years since I’ve touched that game, it is nice to see a bit of life breathed back into the once-vibrant clan scene. Eight teams turned up for the qualifiers, although there were really only two possible contenders from the start… Wink and suiGeneris, who fought it out in the final with sG coming from the lower bracket to win twice for the trophy. I didn’t follow any of the other competitions, although I kept an eye on Starcraft where Bunny lost out in the final to some guy I never heard of.

I don’t know how strong Ireland’s representation at the World Cyber Games in Monza, Italy, this year will be, but the most important thing is that we are there. For too long we have had no representation while the likes of Mongolia and Qatar were present. Here is the group draw:

	Estonia
	Hungary
	Japan
	Finland
	Ireland
	Moldova
	Switzerland

Last night somebody robbed my car stereo from the secure underground parking facility. God bless Cork Street. Apparently this is just one of several cars that have been broken into in the past few weeks. Its turning into a playground for the local scumbags, who have their own personal car-stereo farm in which they can work all night in privacy. They took my really nice Alpine headunit which plays just about every format going, along with my CDs (except for Jack L, which they didn’t seem to want), and a couple of other bits and pieces.

I’m not too annoyed because its my own fault for neglecting to detach the front-panel in the car, and it provides a perfect opportunity to start making a car computer (as soon as I move out of this place). I think the only real loser here is poor oul Jack L.

I just forked out €15 for a three month subscription to Transgaming’s Cedega - the portability product that allows you to run Windows games seamlessly on Linux. As much as I hate to say it, it was money well spent. After hours of recompiling several different versions of Wine, and troubleshooting minor bits and pieces that made some of the newer games just barely unplayable, I decided that it is just too much effort and the time that Cedega would save me is worth more than €5 per month. In other words, spurred on by a blast of nostalgia, I needed a fix of World of Warcraft immediately. Cedega did exactly what it said on the tin, and it surpassed my expectations by running Civilization 4 flawlessly. I’m told that there is even support for Oblivion and Age of Empires III… if only I had the inclination to find the CDs.

Unfortunately, WoW is just as boring as when I quit playing it over a year ago… only this time around my few buddies in-game are all gone (except for Spaceman). My once-buzzing guild was empty bar one other member… and he was 8 months idle. I’ll try to give it a few hours here and there but I don’t think I’ll ever reach level 60.

Situated halfway between Blarney and Mallow, on the back road, the little Cork village of Bweeng doesn’t have much to offer. Its still a few years off meriting a Wikipedia entry, and currently its claim to fame is a comical name, and the close proximity to Stuake (pronounced Stwick). If you haven’t heard of Bweeng (pronounced Bwing, as in “stwick bwing”) its because theres nothing there to attract your attention. Unless, like me, you live in Donoughmore.

Damien has raised the curtain on Eircom’s Schrödinger’s Cat - their elusive fixed wireless service which names Bweeng as one of its alleged high sites. I spent the past two years in Donoughmore (north of Blarney) up on top of my roof, plotting line of sight to every mast in the greater Cork area. 18 minutes outside of Cork City, at a height of 180m, a 15 foot pole gave me clear line of sight to just about everywhere. I defied physics by associating with access points as far west as Bandon, and south at Farmer’s Cross, but I was just too far out for any ISP to cover me. My plight led to encounters with other technology refugees seeking any form of terrestrial broadband in Donoughmore, willing to pay whatever it took. And now we are told that somewhere just a few miles away, on a hill in Bweeng, Eircom looked down upon us, silently sniggering as we scurried about with ladders and binoculars and ordinance survey maps and 20 foot poles and 30 foot poles, meeting with ISPs, and group broadband schemes, and amateur initiatives to no avail.

Eircom FWA is, of course, a scam. I see several locations on their list of wireless base stations that are known as black spots, with no broadband available which isn’t backhauled via satellite. But it must be a valid product, it is listed on broadband.gov.ie… although when searching by location it does not appear to be on offer anywhere. The installation cost of €605 must put it up among the most expensive in the world. Just to compare it with a few other fixed wireless providers who operate in the Cork area:

The Insanely High Installation Fee
How can Eircom justify charging 500% of the average installation cost? The customer premise equipment for fixed wireless broadband is often very expensive, and each unit could be worth a few hundred euro. Combined with the manual installation costs, fixed wireless installation is not trivial. So what does every other wireless ISP in the world do? They claw back any loss on the install by specifying a minimum contract period (6 or 12 months in Ireland), and they reclaim their gear off your chimney when you quit the service. There is NO justification for the astronomical install fee that Eircom proposes, especially when coupled with the high monthly rental.

The Ridiculously Low Upload Rate
64k - on par with ISDN, and in practice not so much better than dial-up. There are 340 different Irish broadband products listed on broadband.gov.ie, with costs ranging as low as.. er.. free. Out of these 340 products, excluding a couple of low-end satellite services, Eircom FWA is the only one that insults us with an upload speed as low as 64k. I remember a few years ago there was a Croatian ISP which offered 64k upload on their broadband. These days, the very idea is a joke. Even your local group broadband schemes and small local operators can muster more bandwidth than that, at a far lower monthly cost.

The Scam
In general, fixed wireless has some major advantages over satellite. For starters, is far cheaper to install, and the low latency facilitates VOIP and gaming. But the tiny upload in Eircom FWA is a bottleneck which prevents both VOIP and gaming, and the crazy installation fee speaks for itself. Eircom only want this product to exist on paper. They have deliberately made it so unreasonable that nobody would be mad enough to apply, even if it was on offer. Milo Minderbinder would be proud. Damien says they are squatting the spectrum - this makes sense to me, although I would love to know more about this - what frequencies they’re sitting on, who (aside from the customer) is losing out, what Eircom hope to gain in the long run. Whatever the case, it is very wrong if they use this phantom product to gain kudos off the government for extended rural coverage. My guess is that Bweeng national school is sitting on an expensive, bulky, slow, limiting satellite connection, just like every other school in the area, while the locals continue to spend a fortune on slow ISDN.

I’ll be keeping an eye on this… with all the pressure that has been put on the government lately, this is a great opportunity to highlight dodgy dealings and a rip-off of the highest order. The funny thing is, believe it or not, I would consider signing up for it… anything is better than ISDN

I have seen some really dumb movies in the past few weeks. First there was a story about a Mexican monk that wanted to be a wrestler. And it was enjoyable. Next up, I went to see the stupidest motherfucking movie of all motherfucking time. I thought it was great. Most recently, an office team-building weekend in Eastern Europe went horribly wrong, resulting in a guy having to stuff part of a leg into a fridge. Even that was entertaining. I’m not difficult to please - and even after these films with ridiculous plots I left the cinema with a smile on my face. So I cannot understand why it is that, with an amazing storyline and such great material to work with, the Wicker Man has failed so miserably.

Before you say it is my own fault for having high expectations, understand that I did not expect this to come within a million miles of the original. I acknowledge that the atmosphere of the 1973 release could never be reproduced, and the presence of Edward Woodward and Christopher Lee could not be equalled. Nonetheless, this is such a great story that even in a severely butchered form I still expected a quality film.

For anyone who doesn’t know, this is a romantic comedy, where Nicholas Cage stars as a policeman who visits an island and dresses up as a bear. A horror story unfolds another level, as a great classic is horribly burnt alive. I tried to forget that the original ever existed, but some lame tributes only served as a reminder that this was trespassing on hallowed ground with a bulldozer. The gripping themes which drove the original were not visited this time around, which meant the film had very little direction except as a disoriented unthriller. It is scripted and acted like a bad video game, and I am glad that I finally have proof of what I wanted to say all along but was never allowed: Nicholas Cage is a one-trick pony who fools people into mistaking his same old thing for good acting. He is suited to some parts, but was so unconvincing in the Wicker Man (spoiler):that when they finally decided to burn him to death I was delighted. The credits roll to the sound of a scream from Nicholas Cage: “AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGHHHHHH”. To misquote Meatball: he took the words right out of my mouth.

What were they thinking with those two blind women and their robot talk? What was Mountain Girl doing there? There is not a single good thing about this film, and for the first time in as long as I can remember, I nearly walked out after 40 minutes. It wasn’t even “so bad its funny”, it was just bad and boring. Without a doubt, this was the worst remake since Sylvester Stallone starred in Get Carter. 0.5/10.