Flour Power

But by the look of things, and although the erradication is under way, the damned thing will be around until 2014.

Please, think of the kittens!

Do you want to get rid of those “Sponsored Links” on the right side of every email in Gmail? Well, now you can, without using any kind of ad-blocker thingy. Just add a few words to your email, and you’ll never see those ads again.

In his personal blog, Joe McKay shares his experience in blocking Gmail’s sponsored ads using words referencing tragic or catastrophic events as well as words from George Carlin‘s infamous list of seven words you can’t say on TV. Since Google bans those words from its ads, if there are enough of them in the email, no ads will be displayed (Joe found that there needs to be a ratio of one ad-blocking word for every 167 normal words).

But you can’t just litter every email with those kinds of words, can you? That’s where they smart guys at Lifehacker come in. They devised a signature that, while not offensive, effectively gets rid of the ads. And it’s also quite funny:

I enjoy the massacre of ads. This sentence will slaughter ads without a messy bloodbath.

Before:

After:

Neat, uh?

(via Lifehacker)

I’ve recently started my own rerun of the TV show How I Met Your Mother. It’s currently one of my favourite sitcoms, although I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned it here (shame on me!). And so, in the episode “The Limo”, from season 1, Barney Stinson presents his “Get Psyched Mix”, which consists of a compilation of songs that should get you pumped up:

(…) my own personal “Get Psyched Mix”. Now, people often think a good mix should rise and fall, but people are wrong. It should be ALL RISE, baby! Now prepare yourselves for an audio journey into the white hot center of adrenaline… Bam!

Here’s the list, thanks to the hard work of some guy at TV Squad with a hi-def TV, a DVR, and a lot of time in his hands:

1) I Wanna Rock – Twisted Sister
2) You Give Love A Bad Name – Bon Jovi
3) Lick It Up – KISS
4) Paradise City – Guns & Roses
5) Dancing With Myself — Billy Idol
6) Rock You Like A Hurricane – Scorpions
7) Panama - Van Halen
8) Talk Dirty To Me – Poison
9) Thunderstruck – AC/DC
10) Dr. Feelgood – Motley Crue
11) Round and Round - Ratt

I went one step further and created a Youtube playlist with the songs, so I can get psyched more easily. Here it is, Barney’s “Get Psyched Mix”, the TV version.

“TV version? Is there another one?” Yes, there is! After the episode the HIMYM writers Barney posted a completely different list in his blog:

1) You Give Love a Bad Name – Bon Jovi
2) The Humpty Dance – Digital Underground
3) Come Sail Away – Styx
4) Don’t Stop Believin’ – Journey
5) The Transformers Theme Song
6) You’re the Best Around – Joe Esposito
7) High Enough – Damn Yankees
8) Jessie’s Girl – Rick Springfield
9) Rock You Like a Hurricane – The Scorpions
10) Hip Hop Hooray – Naughty by Nature
11) Change of Heart – Tom Petty
12) Run Away – Slade

So, if one mix is not enough to the desired level of psyched-ness, here’s the Youtube playlist for this other list – Barney’s “Get Psyched Mix”, the blog version.

If I had to choose one, the TV mix would be my choice, and I would add “You’re the Best Around”, “Don’t Stop Believing” and “The Transformers Theme Song” from the blog mix to it.

What about you? Which one is your favourite?

I’m in the middle of a relapse. After more than 2 years away from the claws of World of Warcraft, I’m slipping into it again… I needed one game to test the new laptop’s graphics card and WoW was the only one I had around, so I had no choice. Yes, I could have gotten any other game and avoid the most addicting game on Earth (to me) but I’m just lazy. True, I don’t have nearly enough time to properly enjoy all it has to offer. Yes, I am aware that I can buy 3 pints of Guinness with the monthly subscription fee. Stop making questions!

Let’s forget about all the implications of going back to playing the game and focus on the post subject – the install process of WoW is something massive!

It starts with the installation of the game itself. That’s 5 CDs worth of stuff, which means changing the CD 4 times, and being there when the install program asks you to. That’s all fine, although it takes ages to complete each CD. The problems started when I got this error message about the setup process not being able to read some file on CD3, possibly due to scratches or dust on the CD. And what happens next? The whole installation fails! No chance to retry, no chance to clean the CD and continue from where the installation was forced to stop. So I had to do a brute-force uninstall, aka deleting the game folder, and restart the whole thing. Then when it asked for CD3, I carefully cleaned it before continuing, and spent the remaining installation time praying that nothing else would go wrong. It didn’t, and so I proceeded to install the first expansion – The Burning Crusade.

This ran smoothly with no errors, although it again took ages to install the contents of only 3 CDs. They must have some crazy encryption and/or compressing on those files for it to take so long. I don’t know. Anyway, so far there were 8 CDs worth of game data, which amounts to something like 5.6GB.

It was time for the second and last expansion – Wrath of the Lich King – and I didn’t have a physical copy of it. It is available for download from Blizzard, though, and I proceeded to do it. And that’s when I saw the size of it – 5GB! 5 fricking Gigabytes! That’s almost as much as the game plus the first expansion combined. Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate the fact that a lot of new stuff comes out in an expansion, and that besides that Blizzard issues patches and corrects issues constantly, and those add up to a lot of stuff that gets included in the expansion release. But it just seems too much… Couldn’t they have stripped some stuff out, like videos and that crap, from the downloadable version? Anyway, there was nothing I could do besides waiting for a few hours for it to install. At least the download speed was pretty decent.

4 hours later the expansion was installed and I thought I would be playing soon. The game was only released last November, so there shouldn’t be too many updates to install, right?

Wrong! After some downloads to update the updater program (cool, uh?), I got presented with a 600+MB download for some patch. OK, on second thought maybe 600MB is not that much for 9 months of updates, although with the slower download rate this would require 2 more hours to complete the download. All I had to do was wait and it would be all done. Right?

Wrong! After this update was installed, another one started. Around 60MB this time. And then another one – 41MB. Followed by yet another one – 56MB. And just when I was starting to get desperate, a 880MB monster showed up! That takes the total to about 1.5GB of patches and updates since November. Doesn’t it sound a bit mad? I can’t help thinking that there must be some fundamental flaw in the game design that prevents it from having more modular updates. And even if that isn’t the case, why not pack the whole thing into a big download in order not to keep the users on their toes to start playing, only to present another download window when they think they’ll start playing soon?

In total, the installation about 10 hours from start to finish, not including the dirty CD incident. 10 hours! A bit too much, no? And to think I’ll have to do it all over again when I install the final version of Windows 7… I wonder if it’s possible to just copy the files over? Or if an upgrade from the RC is safe…

Anyway, WoW is now running fine, apparently. Well, at least the game main screen loads OK, because I didn’t have time to actually play it. By the time all the updates were installed, it was time to go to sleep. I don’t even know if I will be able to test it today, because Blizzard might have released some big ass patch overnight…

So if I don’t show up for a while again, you’ll know that I’ve been imprisoned by the World…

…

… of Warcraft.

UPDATE: Oh wait! Apparently there’s more. 447MB! Jeez…

Yeah, I know it’s been a while since my last post. And it has been even longer since I did any proper post about the life here in Galway. I think the last ones were during the Volvo Ocean Race. But don’t you think that nothing has happened since then! It’s just that… well, instead of being lame and saying I didn’t have time to post, I’ll do a quick summary of what has been happening.

So, in reverse chronological order:

This last week was the “back to work” week. To start off nicely, I had a great 16-hour trip back to Galway (including a 7-hour wait at Madrid airport) which left me completely messed up for the rest of the week. And getting back to work after 1 week out also meant extra stuff to do and not even a bit of time to wander around the interwebs. Aw, c’mon, don’t give me that look. Everyone surfs around the Internet while at work…

The week before that was spent in Portugal. The 6-month INOV Contacto internship had ended and I so I took 1 week off to go back to my home country. Plans had been made to spend most of the time visiting friends and that’s what I did. Going to the beach and finally get some proper sunlight was also part of the plan, but with all the other stuff happening there wasn’t a whole lot of time for that. And there was also the not so nice part of taking care of paperwork. Anyway, it was a great week, and I wish I could have stayed longer.

Two weeks before leaving I had a friend coming over to visit. And as a good host I showed him the best that Galway has to offer. That means a lot of pubs. That also means going out from Monday to Friday (he left on Saturday). During that week we also visited Dublin, and more importantly, I finally went to the Guinness Storehouse. I got to see how the stuff is made, tasted the best pint in the world (right at the brewery, you can’t get any better than that!), and learned how to pour a pint of Guinness correctly. Also had a chance to show him that tag rugby is a lot of fun and not to be mocked with. All in all, I think I convinced him to come back one of these days, and that means it was a great week (the best bit was definitely the Irish breakfast…).

And going all the way back to June, 3 friends came to visit, during the last weekend of the Volvo Ocean Race. Listened to some concerts that were happening outside while confortably sitting down in the living room, watched the Portuguese national soccer team pulling one of those last-minute goals against Albania for the World Cup Qualifiers, and went out to enjoy the Galway nightlife and one of the most important aspects of Irish culture – the pubs.

And now that this has been taken care of, blogging will resume it’s natural rhythm.

Stay tuned!