http://www.theoldergamers.com/forum/blogs/thezee/ Online Gaming for Mature PC and Console Gamers en Thu, 23 May 2013 03:21:40 GMT vBulletin 60 http://www.theoldergamers.com/forum/images/misc/rss.jpg http://www.theoldergamers.com/forum/blogs/thezee/ http://www.theoldergamers.com/forum/blogs/thezee/150-nice-very-nice.html Fri, 26 Aug 2011 23:45:03 GMT Sitting here with my 2yr old daughter reclining on my knee. She's chomping through apple slices and watching Peppa Pig on one half of the screen while I'm browsing TOG on the other half.

Perfect Saturday morning. :-D

`Zee ]]> theZee http://www.theoldergamers.com/forum/blogs/thezee/150-nice-very-nice.html http://www.theoldergamers.com/forum/blogs/thezee/82-microsoft-evil.html Wed, 01 Sep 2010 03:57:59 GMT I know, not a revelation by any stretch but today I experienced it first-hand. How? I hear you asking. Well, it all started about four months ago... I know, not a revelation by any stretch but today I experienced it first-hand. How? I hear you asking. Well, it all started about four months ago when I bought an Xbox 360...

I was excited, shiny new Xbox all hooked up, ready to go and only needing an Xbox Live Gold account to finish it off. While US$10.95 sounds like a small sum, I have an understanding with my wife that I can only have one online subscription of any kind at one time. Seeing how I kicked WoW to the kerb a while back, and at the time had no other subscription based games vying for my wallet, I decided to go Gold. So I signed up and received a special deal of 1 month free with the purchase of one month subscription - nowhere during the sign-up process did it mention that this would be recurring with automatic renewal.

Moving along then, yesterday my wife mentioned that an Xbox Live payment showed up on our latest credit card statement, which surprised me, so I told her I'd look into it. Today I logged in to my Xbox account and after a bit of digging I found that my account was set for automatic monthly renewal! I never set it, I was never prompted to say Yay or Nay during sign-up, but I was pretty pissed off.

Anyway, I figured I'd better cancel the subscription and be done with it. Little did I know that what should be a straight forward exercise would turn into roughly 30 minutes of googling, 10 minutes of quietly seething and culminate in 1 hour on the phone with Xbox Live support. The reason for this being that contrary to my search results, the option to turn off monthly renewal doesn't exist, and cancelling your Xbox Live account has to be done over the phone! YES, OVER THE PHONE!

At this point I realised what I was dealing with, so armed with a crucifix, some holy water, 10 Hail Mary's and a dozen cloves of garlic(you never know) I called up Xbox support. As if to confirm my suspicion, at the beginning of my call the following recording played: “This call may be monitored and recorded, any personal information collected during this call may be stored or processed in any country where Microsoft operates. By proceeding with this call you agree." - evil indeed.

So 40 minutes later I finally got to speak with one of their reps, and when it was my turn to speak I promptly told the nice lady that Microsoft does not have my permission to use my personal details in any country they want and I do not accept their disclaimer followed by I would like to cancel my account now. She was nice enough, "I'm sorry sir, I will make a note of that....can you tell me why you'd like to cancel your account...yaddi yadda yadda...your subscription is now cancelled and renewal has been turned off". So I checked and told the nice lady that it still showed ON, she put me on hold and came back 5mins later and said it should be off now, I checked and it was.

All this because Microsoft, it is evil. ]]> theZee http://www.theoldergamers.com/forum/blogs/thezee/82-microsoft-evil.html http://www.theoldergamers.com/forum/blogs/thezee/69-time-flies.html Sat, 24 Apr 2010 03:33:44 GMT She's nine months old! :shock:

Yesterday I picked them up from the hospital and brought them home, and today I wake up to realise she's nearly 1! I can deny it all I want but she's like a mushroom after a summer rain.

Every day I get home from work and she's doing something else I hadn't seen her do before. When we play, she climbs all over me, crawls everywhere and tries to eat everything!...shoes, rug, couch or toys, nothing escapes her. Feeding her is the funniest thing to watch, she love bread, cheese and water. She demolishes buttered-vegemite toast like the kids on the adds and smacks her lips with every bite, she's absolutely adorable :D

Have I mentioned she talks!? She's got mama, dada and HEY! pat down. Her first word was mama, and to be honest I was happy about it because my wife is at home all day caring for her. Although she hasn't said anything about it, I think it meant a lot to her. I get my fair share as well, probably more-so, apparently when I leave for work in the morning and she wakes up and starts playing...she's mumbles dada over and over under her breath :D

So it's been nine months and time flies, she's got my wife's mannerisms, personality and temperament - God help me - only thing I seem to have contributed is my looks and my playfulness - and you know what, I'll happily settle for that.

I'll sign off with this pic emailed to me by my wife when I was at work:



I did say she was the cutest thing ever, right? :grin: ]]> theZee http://www.theoldergamers.com/forum/blogs/thezee/69-time-flies.html http://www.theoldergamers.com/forum/blogs/thezee/45-time-love.html Tue, 13 Oct 2009 05:04:28 GMT For the past few months my work has been quite busy and due to the travel time to and fro work, I leave when the sun is up and get home. This means I... For the past few months my work has been quite busy and due to the travel time to and fro work, I leave when the sun is up and get home. This means I get home just in time to bath my daughter and spend 10-15mins with her before she feeds and goes to sleep. If I'm lucky, when I wake up in the morning, she wakes up at the same time and I get maybe 5mins with her.
During the weekend, I've been trying to relax as much as I can after a long week and I've been taking quite a bit of time away from my wife and the little one to do this. I would still venture out and spend some time with her when she was awake but overall, not that much....and I was OK with it, content to let my wife do the caring and being with her more than me.

This past weekend I have had the chance to really spend quite a few hours each day on Sunday and Monday with her and it was amazing. She is cute, she is lovely and she is absolutely gorgeous. I've stumbled across a little thing that makes her laugh and giggle when ever I do it and it's very special.

What's I'm trying to say is this. Regardless of whether I'm tired or want to spend time by myself, I have discovered that spending time with my daughter trumps all that and I will gladly give it all up for her. Having spent the time with her and bonding with her during the past two days is the best thing I could have done!

At the risk of sounding patronising, my advice is: though you might be busy, or tired or just plain ol grumpy! take the time and invest in your children, you will not regret it :) ]]> theZee http://www.theoldergamers.com/forum/blogs/thezee/45-time-love.html http://www.theoldergamers.com/forum/blogs/thezee/38-got-sportsmanship.html Mon, 28 Sep 2009 00:50:46 GMT *_The Setting_* I play Call of Duty 4 as my main game, and I play in two squads, Wotan in the GameArena Ladder and Zeus in the CyberGamer Ladder.... The Setting
I play Call of Duty 4 as my main game, and I play in two squads, Wotan in the GameArena Ladder and Zeus in the CyberGamer Ladder. Last night I played in a CG ladder match with Zeus in which we were defending our spot on the ladder. The challenger was evo. a clan that we scrim against on a somewhat regular basis - they win more than they lose against us.

CG Ladder is Search & Destroy style, with 5 players on each team, where one team has to plant the bomb and the other defends. When you die you wait until next round to re-spawn. Winner is first to win 13 or if defending you only need to win 12 rounds to draw and keep your spot.

The Story
The match was great, things came together really well for us with great team communication and strong tactics that we fine tuned during the week leading up to the match. Even the bullet hit registration was good for the night -this is a very big issue with COD4 due to some bad net code- and we were all thankful for that.

Anyways, I'll cut to the chase. Score was 12-10 in our favour so at this stage we had effectively won the match and kept our spot on the ladder. This is the second last round, only one guys left on the other team and I have the bomb. I thought he was just outside the building coming from their spawn side so I faked the plant -planting makes a very distinct sounds- thinking to flush him out, and quickly moved to cover the doorway I thought he would be coming from. Lo and behold I hear and see gunfire coming from behind me, so I quickly turned, lined him up, fired and killed him.
Start of last round, first thing that we see in global chat is a question as to why I glitched. We asked what they were on about...yadda yadda yadda...we win the last round to make the score 14-10, GG's all around and we leave the server. A few mins later I receive a message from the other team captain saying they were thinking of disputing the match result because I used a glitch spot. Not having any idea what he was talking about I asked him what he meant and as it turns out, the spot where I backed up into to get a clear shot at the doorway has a small wall protrusion which you can normally hide behind and the glitch is that bullets won't penetrate it.
I will illustrate what I mean, I'm the blue dot and the enemy is red:


I told him I did not know about it and even if I had, there was nothing for me to gain but everything to lose by using it since we had already won the match and glitching is punishable by forfeit, so it was up to him if they still wanted to dispute.
They did dispute, and we still won the match but with a revised score of 13-11 because the admin declared that one round forfeit.

At the time, I was fine with them disputing, but having had some time to think about I've come to realise they were just cut because they lost to us and would do go as far as disputing something even after we had already won the match. personally I think it was petty and bad sportsmanship.

The Question:
In the COD4 community, mainly in the CG ladder we seem to get a bit of grief with other teams disputing when we win. I'm curious to know if any other divisions experience this in competitive ladders.

~Z ]]> theZee http://www.theoldergamers.com/forum/blogs/thezee/38-got-sportsmanship.html http://www.theoldergamers.com/forum/blogs/thezee/36-secret.html Tue, 15 Sep 2009 22:44:35 GMT I think I have found out why people have more than one child and why they can cope with caring for a baby....it's the smiles! :D

Fort the past 3 weeks now, she has gotten increasingly animated in the mornings when she wakes up and in the evening before her usual bath time. The smiles and cooing noises she makes are just amazingly sweet and funny and they make everything worth it. I can't really express the love I feel for her at these times and the overwhelming feelings of completeness and blessing for my little family.

I could keep going, but I think this picture says it all:
]]> theZee http://www.theoldergamers.com/forum/blogs/thezee/36-secret.html http://www.theoldergamers.com/forum/blogs/thezee/28-so-starts.html Tue, 01 Sep 2009 03:42:51 GMT Hi all,

Some of you might know that I recently became a dad :D and ever since then I've been meaning to start a rolling blog to record this adventure. I think I'm doing this more for my benefit rather than anything else and I'm hoping I can stick with it so that later on I can look back and read through the blogs and see just how much things have changed.

So this is seven week later and this is my first blog. It's amazing to think that only a very short while ago my little Bridgette arrived into this world - thankfully perfectly healthy and perfectly perfect! Since then it's been interesting to say the least, sleepless nights, lots of poo and wee feature prominently during this time.

Looking back over the past weeks, I think I've identified a number of stages that I went through. Like the "Scared Out of my Mind" stage, which went along the lines of OMG!! there's this extremely fragile being I need to take care of now and I'm scared to break it!! OMGOMG!! which thankfully I was able to hide from my wife quite well. This was followed closely by the "Hey this isn't so bad, I can do this" stage, where I started to think and believe that I am capable of doing it.

Now, out of all the stages I can recall, my least favourite was the "Everyone feel free to give the new parents advice! even if you were not asked for it" I understand people want to help, but just because you used a certain settling technique and it worked great doesn't necessarily mean it automatically applies to my baby! oh and did I ask for your opinion!"...Ahem.

OK, so I apologise for my mini-rant above, it seems there's a couple of things that I feel strongly about and writing the blog is giving an avenue to vent.

I think I've given the impression that it's been a very long and hellish couple of weeks, which to be honest is very far from the truth. The past seven weeks have been amazing. The company I work for is great, I have 10 days of paternal leave available to me on short notice, of which I used seven right after she was born, and it was probably the best thing ever having the opportunity to be with my wife and my baby 100 % right after birth. Our closest friends have been very supportive and the community midwives that visited us at home were a Godsend.

I will end on this: Being a dad and a husband give me more joy than anything else and I'm very excited about what the future holds, because right now everything is as it should be.

PS. I promise future blogs will be shorter and if you have read the entire blog, wow and thank you :)

~Z ]]> theZee http://www.theoldergamers.com/forum/blogs/thezee/28-so-starts.html