Saturday, February 09, 2008

Sounds like

Do you think predlets toy sounds like the chorus of "I love it when you call" by the feeling?

Friday, February 08, 2008

Rockstar - Nickelback

This song has been going through my head and coming out of my headphones all week.
Its ripe for a spoof too. Rockstar -> eightbar or Avatar etc.

I am not sure I will have the talent I need to build the song I want but I will see what happens. For now just imagine it says I want to be an eightbar

misleading message or what?


misleading message or what?, originally uploaded by epredator.

I decided to bite the bullet and upgrade the 20gb drive to the 120gb drive on the xbox360. Stupidly expensive relatively speaking, but thats proprietary hardward for you!
The drive contans everything, all you paid for content, all you games saves all your profile and achievement information. If it goes wrong thats a few years lost and a few pounds worth of xbox live arcade titles downloaded and payed for.
So after 1hour of transferring this is result.
It says Successful, but the next line says apart from the bits that were not!
The drive seems ok, the games seem to be there, content etc, but if something has gone I wont know until I hit it an miss.
Not a great feeling.
The transfer is 1 way and apparently deletes all the stuff due to DRM on the smaller drive.
A bit lacking in customer service I think?
Though not as bad as poor Aidy who moved to ireland and the xbox live will not transfer his country becuase of all these region lockout insanity.

Tuesday, February 05, 2008

Aliens Vs Predator Requiem - hmmmmm

I finally got to see AVP-R. Now clearly representing myself online wherever possible as epredator and with predator avatars I feel I have some sort of vested interest in the mainstream use of what has become part of me.
I should add I used the predator handle way before the original predator movie. It was a coding thing, killing bugs etc. When the film came along whilst an Arnie vehicle it was the predator and the hint at a hunting race that seemed to resonate.
In both predator and predator 2 the Yautja (as us geeks refer to them) are honourble hunters. Seeking to challenge themselves against worth opponents and not praying on the weak. e.g unarmed or pregnant women. It is about the challenge of the hunt and done with some degree of meaning. Strength and compassion. A few of the traits that I took to.
The comics tend to have this too, the hunter race and their respect for others with courage.
When we get to Aliens Vs Predator the back story has always been that the Aliens (effectively a vicious virus that seeks to take over and replicate) were used as a right of passage by the Predator race. A great tie in to the franchises.
So in the first AVP we had a Yautja dealing with a nest of Aliens and an Alien Queen. During the fight he comes to see a hunter's attitude and honour in the one remaining human caught in the alien frenzy. It was not a great film, but had something of interest and extra insights into the tech and lifes of the Yautja.
The new AVP-R sees a predator alien cross occur. A mini queen alien with the strength and power of both a predator and alien, born of the hero from the previous AVP impregnated by a face hugger and exploding into life on the ship.
This part was interesting, the predator ship crashing and landing on earth with its face huggers farmed and in a jar.
The crash landing leds to Aliens on earth, and descends quickly into a massive destruction of all human life in a small town. The vicious and unforgiving nature of the aliens is actully quite shocking.
This is where I actually felt a bit challenged and saying to myself there was not need for that. A youg kid at the start getting facehugged and chest burst was really not what I wanted to see. Let alone the scenes later in the maternit ward of the hospital. Yuk!
Some of this may be being a parent now and having a different set of sensitivities, but I am usually open to movies causing some shock.
Now we get to the Yautja. In this film he/she is a clean up predator. The aim is to both remove the infection and also remove all trace. They are like Harvey Kietel in Pulp Fiction, a fine upstanding member of society, but will do anything to get things sorted. *** Update having just looked at the wikipedia entries it seems the predator in the movie is called "Wolf" the same as Winston Wolf in pulp fiction :-)
I found lots of the predator tracking and new weapons pretty good, some nice cool ideas and just like James Bond, gadgets. He was fully aware of the PredAlien. He also seemed to be pretty flawed in targetting some of the Aliens. This seemed odd, so maybe he was not a cleanup agent but an opportunist who was sitting on his sofa and decided to give the hunt a go, but that did not really seem the case.
I was not too happy he killed the first human to see him, he was not a threat as such and it seemed to lack honour. However after that he used the humans a bit as bait, needs must. An generally fought a massive battle against the spawning aliens.
In general though, if this was the only predator film we woudl not have any inkling of this strong honour bond.
The film ends with some sort of here comes some more questions though and also shows that humans can be as calculating as Aliens and can work without individual honour but following orders for the greater good.
So all in all, aside from the permanent darkness in the movie which means many of the effects are lost or cheap and hidden, it was not too bad.
I hope my inspirational Yautja do not descend into hack and slashers, though clearly it takes all sorts.
This epred will continue to work out there with honour and strength, but with a hint of malice and the ability to just cut to the fight when needed :-)

Yay for pancakes

It was shrove tuesday. Mrs Epred-in-Law came and did her thing in our kitchen. The predlets loved it. Proper flipping and everything

Monday, February 04, 2008

PSP and PS3 remote play and Skype or not

Here is some more of the PSP remote play at work. The basic premise is that the PSP can, whenever attached to any network reach and turn on a paired PS3 anywhere in the world. This is also useful in the home when your predlets are watching kids tv but you want to get at some of the content.
Here though is a film I created on the PS3 on boxing day. Using the eye toy camera and eye create (a video editing/capture application) it has a load of effects in this case it was the time lapse of some present unwrapping.
So the movie is created on the PS3 and then streaming to the PSP.

Even better now though some of the playstation network titles are PSP compatible. i.e. You download a version of an old classic like PS wipeout, the game that started the next gen revolution way back. You can play this in full on your PS3 screen, or you can have the play streamed to the PSP. At least I think it is streamed. In some respects you cant tell if its an emulator on the PSP that loads the data from the PS3 or the PS3 rendering and sending. Given the main desktop and videos are streamed as images I think we can guess :-)
PSP remote play
It is also a pity that everything does not work like this, after all if its just streaming images then why not have a go at anything, like PS3 Home
Come on Sony!
PSP remote play

Also I am rather dissapointed that having got the latest PSP firmware to get ready for Skype on the PSP it turns out the Skype function will only work on the new thin and light PSP's not the original (and identical) regular fat PSP's. There is some basic messaging but not skype. Seems a bit odd really.
All we need now is wireless hotspots that are economic to use eveywhere.

Superbowl, Football? No this is football

Predlet 2.0 decided that now he is 1 and can walk he really should start practicing his football (known as soccer in some other parts of the world) skills.
So whilst the Superbowl was going to be kicking off follwed by lots of carrying of the ball in about 7 hours time he decided to have a kick about.
(I do like American Football and I am just sore I did not stay up and watch it this year :-(