I am seeing no reason to remain in NZ.  Everyone should take their kids here, Aus or Dubai.  There is no incentive to work in NZ at all.  Bugger this place.

A few of the games I have been playing lately are Arma 2 and one I bought today Call of Juarez the Cartel which i have yet to play.  Arma 2 is pretty stunning game for realism.  Some of the graphics are pretty incredible.  I will try to post some videos of gameplay later.

I have been in NZ 2 years now.  I began in an area called Nelson, which I quickly escaped from.  The rental property was more akin to an asylum, with constant fights between tenants and Police regularly at the premises up to 3 times a day.  There were all kind of problems, mainly drugs.  It was needless to say, not a nice place at all, even the security guard who was on duty was trying to leave to go back to trucking.  Definatly one of the worst places I have ever experienced.  Nothing good there at all.

I moved on to the Wellington area and met a Maori woman off the internet and have been together 2 years.  Wellington is a slight improvement but not much.  It's still ran by the local mafia who like mostly drinking all your money with the false promise of a job at the end...  Kids have little or no respect for adults.  I have several times seen young kids stealing shopping trolleys, things like this, with no discipline from parents.  People here like to use all your stuff, like computers, phones, motorbike, car whatever.  It is similar to living in Shetland, where my house is yours type setup. The only real good thing about NZ is the weather, however your average Kiwi doesn't make use of it at all and likely lives off fish 'n chups and a satellite tv connection.  Recently the NZQA walked off the job, so there is no governing certification body here at all.  In other words, certs gained in this country are invalid.  Indeed a teacher here was recently arrested for child offences.  Also there was a large dispute over the teaching pay system, with some employees not being paid in months whilst others were overpaid, with debt collectors now chasing them for money.  Average wise, most people are unemployed, with no regular satisfactory income which is why a large majority of young kiwis emigrate to Australia in the hope of better wages (which i have been there, indeed wages are slightly better but not by leaps and bounds.)  All the oil work in New Plymouth dried up in the 80's with no driving industry to replace it.  Otherwise it's a relatively safe place.

So as this week has been a game playing fest.  I have posted a few others here which run fluid.
The first is a recording of driving game called GRID which came out about 2007.  I don't think there are many better driving games than this out just now.  Indeed Gran Turismo on the PSX is the better game, but on the PC this is about as good as it gets.  Check these graphics out running on built in GMA3000, incredible...
The other posting is of John Daleys Prostroke golf, which is a great game also.  It's only competitor is Tiger Woods 12.  Both games are about equal in actual "fun" factor, if you are into golf at all...

The other game I have been playing is a Beta version of Tiger Woods 12.  Also playing John Daly's Prostroke golf which is probably the better game, but a bit buggy in places. 
Here's a small video of the Beta, unless it's already out yet, who knows, but it's pretty much the same as the old version, which is a good thing really...

So have pretty much been playing Flight Sim X over the last week and tweaked the graphics.  They say that if you get over 10fpx with FSX you are doing well.  Mine average about 20, fluctuating from 10 to 50, giving a pretty fluid simulation.  I run a I3 Dual Core at 2.3Ghz with 4GB of ram.  The graphics is the built in HD3000 solution and I am constantly amazed by this GMA chipset.  It runs pretty much you throw at it, so long as you spend a while tweaking.  There are parts of FSX that you really wouldn't be able to tell the difference of it being a real video.  Check out some of the flights I have done over the last week or so.

After months of sitting around getting angry because the painters haven't arrived yet, things are slowly progressing.
We finally got the painting approved and work can commence now. 
During watching small episodes of TV it appears there is a film here being launched tonight or tommorow.  I can't say i'm impressed with the disease it will spread, although i'm sure it is well produced.  I tend to steer well clear of launches due to the intense hype generated. 
The international situation doesn't seem to improve any.
Kids now looking for jobs when there are none, adults looking for work when there is none, teachers not getting paid, people not doing their jobs.
Only today did i get a proper quote for getting the bins emptied on a weekly cycle...
Anyways, not a lot else to piece together for now.  The UK weather has went haywire again, due to everyone's selfishness and reliance on petrol.  The same thing will happen in NZ like it did in Aus, but we might hold out a few months longer, who knows.  My opinion is at the world rate of fuel consumption it's possible that we will get maybe 3 or 4 months completely clear of bad weather, then it will probably reach here too causing localised flooding.  Best to grab these films before they are all soaked to bits and unwatchable.

A while back, while staying dangerously close to a dam in Australia, I briefly recollect having a notion for some reason or other that an earthquake was destined for the area known as Baja in the US.  How, I pieced this together exactly I do not recall, probably from local media and a basic understanding of some of the recent "natural" tradgedies that have happened over the last few years.  To cut a long story short that brief piece of insight seemed to be correct judging by another newsreport i saw yesterday.  I am glad that there was no real damadge.  There are currently several areas on the globe on high alert for this type of activity, but really, the main news companies seem to be fairly accurate on reporting it. 

One good thing I noticed on the news today, is that for once, scientists are in agreement about the fact that extreme weather patterns are now considered to be the norm and not the exception in many areas of the world.  This doesn't really make life any easier knowing this.  The only thing i can think that may curb the problem, is rations on carbon emissions, but implementing this, would prove difficult.

So tonight, I played a game called Limbo which is a tiny game only about 90 megs.  Really this game is stunning.  It came out in 2010 apparently.  It is all in black and white and plays like something that was released on the demoscene.  It has bags of character and was released on xbox also.  For such a small file it is a great game and very artistic.  I keep going back to it and can't wait for the sequel to be released.

A few weeks have passed now, and I have been playing games on the laptop with the newest Deus Ex Human Revolution which runs ok, but pushes this machine to the limit.  It is pretty good, whether i'll manage to complete it is another story as i keep going back to GTA San Andreas despite it being released in 2005, that game is huge, like absolute massive of a game.  I have not completed it yet and am on mission 67 of 100.  They reckon it clocks in at 45 to 50 hours of gameplay, which would sound correct.  Some missions are a dog, and i have skipped past them, but the majority are worth playing through.  I tried the new GTA, but it really is not as good as San Andreas.  I might come back to it, but to finish SA first would be a good step.

So after a few weeks of tinkering around with my new laptop, a few things I can say.  The onboard intel HD3000 graphics chip is actually quite a capable mid range gaming chip compared to some of the older gma chips that came onboard with earlier laptops.  The processor speed of 2.3ghz dual core along with the HD3000 graphics make it quite a capable gaming laptop.  Some other titles I have been playing flawlessly are the epic racing game called Grid, which thankfully a friend let me borrow an analog controller to do it justice.  Along with Half Life 2, Call of Duty 5 etc, GTA San Andreas runs full with everything ramped.  I would like to try Crysis on it and some of the newer titles.  I would estimate these would probably run at 20fps and probably still be playable on this computer.  The samsung laptop is turning out to be better than i thought.  I tried converting a 1 hour film to .mkv format which took roughly 30minutes, which is an improvement on the hour it took on my previous laptop.

Another title i have been playing recently is called Grid.  It's pretty hard on the keyboard and really warrants buying a joypad but it's a great game nonetheless and still playable.

Well after months of playing games that i got left behind at the time, titles like Half Life 2, Doom 3, Call of Duty 4 etc, these are all superb games. I think the best if probably Half Life 2, but that's no surprise. The call of duty series is just awesome and really has came a long way.

The news these days has me busting my hump. I'm reading that some teachers in the US have been raping kids in some kind of organised scheme between them, with that particular school now being shut down. Similarly one in Aus has had other staff quitting over a porn scandal involving a student and teacher. I find it distressing. When i went to school, none of this crap ever went on, it seems to be something about Labor governments these things tend to happen, the only last time I ever heard about anything like this was at least 10 years ago.

From a brief look at the local free rag paper, i picked up on a few things that have me a little annoyed. Primarily, the recycling situation here. When i was doing my bin job, i noticed many households were binning extreme amounts of waste on a daily basis, with indeed, a good few overfills. Often building waste or beer bottles were the cause, with extremely heavy loads. The paper informs me that indeed, the council abandoned bin collection from schools and centres as of May last year due to these facilities outputting more than the allowed quotas in unmanagable levels. This caused private companies to take over the job. It is pretty sad.

Not a great deal to report over here just now. There was a huge load of demonstrations recently that basically had no impact at all against the global giant corporations. I can see and have a limited amount of sympathy for the protesters, but it usually and did as usual end up in arrests etc. Fortunatly I take no part in these occurances, but it is distressing at the frequency these are occuring nowadays. I have been following three marine incidents in the media recently which no doubt will be under intense scrutiny of the authorities, namely one in Italy, one here and another one in Italy. Various other worldwide tension I can see in Ukraine, and Maldives and Syria. Greece is also not in that great shape just now, i'm led to believe with mass strikes. I'm not entirely sure what to make of it all, just that keep your neighbourhood safe, by just being a good human.

Interesting times in NZ and Aus just now. Despite seeing a tv broadcast that polled 97% against Chinese ownership of the farms here, it transpires that the prime minister here has basically approved the transition... Incidentally the pm here is actually a bank manager, so this is no great surprise. What else to say, other than a media report showed the Aus pm being ushered out of a building by the authorities due to a gathering of angry Aboriginals that stormed the premises. The weather over here is very windy. Some speculation today over buildings collapsing in Rio De Janiero, which is probably due to lack of investment as usual. Terrible floods in Fiji causing untold havok for the communities there. Also, I understand Queensland has been drenched with floods again. The only other thing of interest was that the airport road was closed today for reasons I don't know, nor are really that interested in.

It was a quiet New Years down here in Wellington, very organised and relaxed atmosphere. I'm guessing a lot of people from here had a quiet night in. I read about terrible storms in Scandinavia and Finland which is preying on my mind.

After months of pricking around not being able to get out of the bit for one reason or another the picture is clearer and uglier than I ever imagined. From studying various sources of information, mostly internet, it continues to show me the worst in people from all angles. The twin towers attack footage i recently viewed made me realise a few things. All I can see that happened from a military perspective is that once that occured, a new government was formed. The recent withdrawl of personnel from the middle east is another sign of power changing hands yet again. This modern day society is the worst place ever to have existed. Peeler is very unhappy these days.