Planning ahead
I was responding to a post over at MMO One Night a week recently when I realised that in a handful of years Little Troll is going to be interested in gaming and I will have to ensure that my day time games are more child friendly. I’m not completely sure I could give you a list at this time, time to get out the parental responsibility hat, of which I’m nervous as hell
However I was discussing with my wife the recent announcement by King’s Isle about their new MMO in development. Pirate 101 looks to be using the same model but with a pirate theme, what with it being all the rage at the moment. Of course it comes with the high number of safety features that if you have played Wizard 101 you will be familiar with.
I do hope that games like Wizard & Pirate 101 are still going strong and hopefully joined by a wider collection of titles as our child gets to the age where online gaming is something he wants to participate in.
I just hope they get Brian Blessed to voice one of the pirates 
World Book Night
This year I applied to be a giver as part of World Book Night, I was successful and today I picked up the 24 copies of Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch by Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman.
The aim is to distribute 1 million books between hospitals, prisons, care homes & communities and to ultimately share the joy of reading. Each year 25 books are chosen and “givers” are tasked with giving away 24 copies of their selected book to those who don’t regularly read.
Each book has a code that can be entered onto the WBN website and tracked, once finished and tracked readers are encouraged to give the the book to someone they think may enjoy it.
I have not long completed the task of writing the details into the first page of each book and they are all ready to be handed out. I’m a little freaked out as on paper 24 books sounded easy but now they are in my house I’m not so sure. But I remain hopeful that I can hand out all of them before the 23rd April which is when World Book Night is celebrated.
Pay peanuts, make Lemonade
I recently thought back to my early years on the internet, with my dial-up modem and charged by the minute tariff. Considering how flaky the system was it was a good day when you managed to connect and weren’t booted within 5 minutes.
As I sit here writing this post with my broadband connection that averages over 15MB Per Second, I can download a game 10 times bigger than the size of my hard drive of 12 years ago, in a ridiculously short amount of time.
Since Broadband arrived I’ve always tried to choose an internet service provider that offered packages that favoured my gaming habits, low latency, lower contention rate, little or no traffic shaping. Not an easy task as many of the smaller brands either folded or were bought by large companies, which meant customers where transferred over to new terms and networks.
After experiencing this with my ISP, I decided that I needed to choose an ISP that wasn’t all about bundling my phone-line or offering me 100GB download limit, but I could only really use the service early in the morning due to data throttling. Almost every day I hear of others people’s experiences and problems with their internet package, of course on closure inspection and I’m stunned by how many opt for the cheapest/Best-deal they could find.
My ISP is Zen, I have to admit they do may charge slightly higher prices that others and they may have traffic caps, but I’m more than happy to have those elements if it means the service I pay for is there when I need it. When I finally begun to experience the full ASDL2, I had a number of issues related to the quality of the phone cable in this area. Zen were very helpful and coordinated with BT to get the problems resolved as quickly as possible.
