Wasting bandwidth since 1996

Well who’d have thought it – I actually had a go of the Wii!

Twilight Princess is exactly what you’d expect it to be – it’s a work of pure unadulterated genius. It feels like more of a direct follow-up to Ocarina of Time than to Wind Waker, but also has quite a dark feel to it. I’m only about five hours in – just reached the forest temple – but so far the beauty and the variety has been outstanding.

The Wii control scheme is an absolute joy. Sure, the Wii remote gestures don’t map exactly to the sword motions on screen, but it just seems to work much more intuitively – slashing, stabbing and swiping to perform various attacks.

It was nice to see the return of Epona too – having a mad gallop around is lots of fun. Of course, being in the first dungeon still I haven’t had a chance to let fly on Hyrule Field, but I’m sure that’ll come sooner or later.

I’m getting a little lazy about updates, aren’t I? The fact is – I’m not sure where this myth about the laid-back Aussie lifestyle comes from – I’ve been run off my feet for weeks.

I start a new job on Wednesday, doing Network Support for a company in the Upper Hunter. Looking forward to starting – they seem like a nice bunch of clued up people. For once, the interview was actually quite fun with a rapid-fire geeky question and answer session which had me scratching my head at more than one point (what port *does* DHCP run on?? – I guess a quick peek in /etc/services wouldn’t go amiss).

The weather is hotting up – considerably so. We organised a second air conditioner to cover the back half of the house, so hopefully that will – if not make it fridge cool – take the edge of the heat. It does get a little sticky indoors when it’s in the 40s outside.

We have a tradition – on Friday nights we all sit down as a family and watch a movie together. Tonight was the first telly night in our new home and it was lovely (Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone). It’s nice to get back to a sense of normality after the chaos of the past few months.

It’s gone all quiet, hasn’t it? It’s not cos we’ve not been doing anything – oh no, we’ve been as busy as busy beavers we have. Frankly – I’m knackered! I’m still applying for jobs left right and center and it’s only a matter of time before I wear the beggars down and force them to give me a job just to get me to stop nagging at them.

The launch of the Wii came and went without ceremony. The kids have been playing it non stop but other than a quick go on Rayman and Zelda, I’ve not looked at it – just too many other things to think about right now. Got an ADSL connection in, though, and managed to find a provider with decent european links so I’m getting yellow latency timings to the Euro-WoW servers, rather than red ones, so I can at least have a go with Trollbert from time to time.

One thing that’s a bit strange though – must be something to do with being upsides down. The days seem to be missing about eight hours here. We’re up at 6:30 and before we know it it’s 8pm. Of course, we still have so much to organise that we’re kept busy all day, but it’s strange nonetheless.

However – here I am – we’re all still alive, still having fun, and still being driven nuts by cackling birds.

Well, the latency to the European servers from Australia is just dreadful, so I’ve opened an account on the US servers. Latency to the US isn’t much better, but at least the latency indicator is yellow rather than red.

So anyway, I rerolled Trollbert on an Oceania server – I had always wished I’d rolled him on a PvP server rather than PvE, so this seemed like the opportunity. I’m not sure of the wisdom of the decision though – PvP with a yellow lag indicator doesn’t bode well, but we’ll see. Either way, it’s good to be re-acquainted with Trolly, even though he is mark II.