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.