I have uploaded about 150 photos that I took at the Mercedes Benz Museum in Stuttgart to my flickr. They are not examples of fine photographic technique or anything of the sort, but they are a whole bunch of pictures of cars, trucks, buses etc.
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Its out. You can see it on eurogamer.tv. Looks fantastic in what little you do get to see. They’re returning the game to Liberty City, only this time it looks a hell of a lot closer to the real world New York City.
You can easily see the following New York landmarks in the trailer:
MetLife (PanAm) building - signposted “GetALife” in the trailer 
Chrysler building
Brooklyn bridge
Empire State building
Flatiron building
Statue of Liberty
Staten Island ferry terminal
Coney Island amusements
St Patrick’s Cathedral
Times Square
Landed in Dublin airport this morning in fairly heavy fog. Didn’t hear about the crazy carnage on the M7/M9 until I was on my way home. Boy am I glad it wasn’t affecting the southbound lanes!
I’ve stuck a few more photos up on my flickr.
I like this one:
Here you go, my photos from Auto Salon Singen - earlier than expected too, I had some spare time waiting about today.
I visted the famous-in-petrolhead-circles Auto-Salon Singen today. Wow.
I’ll have pictures up when I get back home next week. If you have a fetish for cars, this is the place to go. I didn’t see any Bugatti Veyrons or Ferrari Enzos, but I did see a whole bunch of other Ferraris, 2 Ford GT’s (one in the iconic Gulf Oil livery), 2 Lambo Diablos, 2 Gallardos, a variety of Aston Martins, a crowd of Porsches of various ages (including a 911 GT3 RS), a whole bunch of 1960’s Jaguar E-Types, a couple of racing Bentleys, Maybachs, Rollses, a Dodge Viper, Mercedes CLK-GTR & SLR, etc. You name it and they probably have it — as long as its not cheap.
They had no problem with letting the likes of me (ahem) into their showroom with a camera, so if you’re ever in the area (Southwest Germany - just over the Swiss border. The crossing I used was Thayngen, just outside Schaffhausen), its definately worth a visit.
By the way, it snowed here last night. A lot. So much so that I had serious difficulty getting my poxy little Fiat Idea 1.3JTD rental car up the ramp out of the hotel car park in Zurich. Making my way to the German border pretty much on ice skates was challenging, to say the least.
I also stopped at Rheinfall, on the Swiss side of the border. Impressive. I’ll put a few photos of that up next week too. I’m free on Sunday, so I plan to use that time to go to the Mercedes Benz museum in Stuttgart for some more car porn.
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I’m heading off to Switzerland/Germany for work again on Thursday, so its gonna be (even) quieter than usual around here for a while.
This is fucking brilliant. Its the opening scene from their film, “The Pick of Destiny”.
Notice Meatloaf and Dio!
“Dio can you hear me?
I am lost and so alone
I’m asking for your guidance
Would you come down from your throne?
I need the tight compadre that will teach me how to rock
My father thinks you’re evil but man, he can suck a cock”
Brilliant.
Because of these stupid threads on boards.ie:
“Stupid gay work” - 19 year old waste of oxygen that refers to everything as gay wants an excuse to not go to work.
“Help! Traffic Corps questions” - 17 year old daddy’s boy whines about being stopped by the Gardai in his new ‘07 L200 when he hasn’t got a full licence — despite the Garda letting him off with a warning. Duh.
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Long ass post, brace yourself.
Its been a while since I’ve used Linux, but it deserved another look since I’ve been enjoying Windows Vista so much in recent weeks. This also comes in handy in replacing the beta release of Vista that’s on my laptop, as it will expire sometime soon.
So off I went and downloaded the Ubuntu 6.10 x86 ISO from the uber-fast HEANet mirror, which easily maxed out my connection. I burned it using a nice piece of freeware on Vista called ImgBurn, from the same smart guy that brought us DVDDecryptor. I chose Ubuntu 6.10 as it is widely recognised as the best desktop Linux distribution.
Anyway, installation was pretty simple and quick, as I didn’t have to worry about partitioning or dual booting or anything since I was going to give Ubuntu my laptop’s entire hard disk to play with. Once installed I was able to reboot straight into the operating system. Then I encountered my first problem: Connecting to my WPA-secured wireless network.
Ubuntu’s GUI tools do not by default support configuring your wireless card to use WPA at all. I had to go googling on my other computer (running Vista) to find some arcane instructions on how to enable this by editing config files and farting about in the terminal. If I ever want to connect to a different WPA-protected network I will have to go through this again. Not pleasant.
Second problem: Screen resolution. Ubuntu does not support my laptop’s 1280×800 widescreen resolution out of the box. The highest available resolution available via the Gnome GUI is 1024×768. Time for some more painful xorg.conf editing and terminal torture.
The solution to the above problem involved changing from the default “nv” driver to nVidia’s proprietary driver that includes proper 3D acceleration. This was easy to install using Ubuntu’s package manager but required further xorg.conf editing to actually enable it and turn on 3D acceleration.
Next problem: Synaptics touchpad. I’ve experienced this one previously. The touchpad works from the off, but it behaves in an awkward fashion. You can’t change its sensitivity or scrolling behaviour. Cue some more xorg.conf editing and package installation!
After all of that my system was pretty much up and running in a state I could live with, so I decided to try out the current eye candy favourite touted by Linux fans, Beryl. Installation of this involved further xorg.conf hacking and adding of a repository to Synaptic.
Once Beryl was up and running it was very impressive indeed, particularly the fancy rotating cube gizmo you can use to select which desktop you want to use. It was great while it lasted.
Next time I booted the machine and logged in to gnome, the system just sat there unresponsive. This happened several times. In the end, I had to log into gnome in failsafe mode and disable beryl from running at startup. I guess it needs to mature some more. It does look very promising though.
In conclusion, Linux still isn’t ready for the desktop. End-users should not ever have to manually edit a configuration file, especially when the same thing is accomplished on other operating systems with the ol’ next-next-next-finish shuffle.
Sure, if a system can come completely configured and tailored to its hardware out of the box, it’ll be fairly usable for most users, but the above problems are hard to ignore. Of course, Linux (in most guises) is free, and Windows Vista will run you typically a couple of hundred euros, but I am a jammy git who got a free copy of Vista from Microsoft and am enjoying it lots.
I will keep Ubuntu on my laptop for the time being, and see if a few weeks of use now that it is all set up will change my opinion.
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Took this photo this evening from the bridge on the Ring Road in Kilkenny. I like it
