Well I am a great fan of Rock and Metal music as you probably know, even though I do not like POP Music these days, the 80’s was different as POP Music was also based on Musicianship and not just making money. Michael Jackson has worked with some of my Guitar Heroes so I take this moment to recognise what a great act he was. My favorite song is probably ‘Beat It’ as it featured Eddie Van Halen. Other notable Musicians that worked with him who I look up to are: Slash & Steve Lukather. It is a very sad time at the moment, he had 50 dates booked for London shows. It will be interesting to see what the outcome of the postmortem is in the next few days.

R.I.P. Michael Jackson (1958 – 2009)

Well back bowling in Yeovil this week and oh dear, I am thinking about quitting bowling here all together after the fun summer league to be quite honest. After having such a great time in Branksome after just 3 games there I was back to the crappest lanes in the country! It was presentation night and money was given out to everyone in the league, then we had a quick game of 9 pin no tap, which means if you get 9 pins it gives you a strike. Anyway my first game all the strikes I had were proper strikes and I had the highest score of everyone playing in that game, then the lanes went way down hill as per usual, my ball was coming back covered in oil in the middle of the second game. I managed a 590 series over 3 games but am not really enjoying bowling here whatsoever.

One thing they put too much oil down, secondly the machine puts the oil way too far back so there is no back end (because the same old story the machines been broke for 3 years). I’m pretty sure managerial staff of Bowlplex could quite easily see the difference in lanes between Branksome and Yeovil, you could tell quite easily why Branksome is the better place to play for hook bowlers. The back end is 2x what it is in Yeovil. I am still deciding whether to play or not after the summer league as things are really starting to annoy me in Yeovil, nothing is ever sorted out or reported as no-ones allowed their views and everything has to go through the secretary which he doesn’t report any complaints, even though every league player in their own right is a paying customer to Bowlplex. Each person pays £375 per league per season to play, it’s not like it’s a mess about thing where you pay £1 a week (like skittles).

Well I went down to Branksome Poole and bowled for the first time in over a year down there, they have totally refitted the whole place out. The lanes were brilliant, the dry area on the back end was 2x what it is in Yeovil, I bowled from the left side right across to the right edge and the ball was hooking into the pocket really nice. First time bowling there and I adjusted to the lanes quite easily, no forcing the ball or anything and I had a average of 180 scratch over 3 games. I reckon bowling there weekly I could have a 200+ average easy.

Well as you may know I used to play World of Warcraft and have played it on and off since it’s release. I was thinking last week why the hell do Blizzard charge so much to play the game now, it’s been out for nearly 6 years now and they are still charging £9 a month, they have a subscriber base of 8million in Europe alone and have sold over 2 billion copies of the game! Got me thinking as to why I quit just after Wotlk. I played Wotlk which is the latest expansion pack and got to level 80, I then got fully geared out and was one of the best geared players in Europe. I then got done over by my guild who said I could not raid… down to them being a dictatorship and jealousy. The whole WoW thing really annoyed me at this point that I had no option but to quit, even tho I was offered a spot in one of the best Guilds on the server at the time.

I quit paying for (and refuse to pay for) RPG games now, there is no way that the development costs for Wotlk were billions, going on the basis of subscribers now there’s what 35million subscribers worldwide at the same rate of £9 a month, so Blizzard have a turnover of £315 million a month from this one game alone. In my view they should lower the cost by at least half, that way I am sure they will get twice the amount of people playing as the game is now nearly 6 years old and is slightly out dated. Each expansion comes out once a year and Raid areas are added through out the year, but running costs, staff costs and development costs surely come nowhere near the £3.8 billion yearly turnover!

Online gaming is getting too much like POP Music at the moment, games companies are making billions where the money can be put to a lot better use, even Microsoft are giving away billions to charities now. If the cost is lowered there will be more people paying and a lot better community all around, although server costs would be more they would probably still be making near enough the same as they are at the moment. Within the 6 year period Blizzard would have turned over £22.7 billion from wow alone.

Well it’s the end of the bowling leagues this week, final game tomorrow night and I think Bowlplex had better sort the lanes out quickly before everyone quits. At the moment there doesn’t look to be enough people to run any of the leagues next season. The summer league is short compared to last year also. I played a blind game again last week, which is another thing which has annoyed me so much this season, every other week the person I’m supposed to be playing doesn’t even turn up and I play no-one which = no competitiveness at all… people aren’t turning up because the lanes are that bad. One guy started playing here this season from Bristol, he obviously looked at the league averages and thought he could win the league easy, realised how crap the lanes are and said he won’t play in any leagues here again. Also last week in practice, threw the first ball down and the lane broke down… Then the lanes were breaking down constantly all night, the pins don’t even line up on at least 4 out of 8 of the league lanes, had public chucking balls down when the arm was down and they didn’t get thrown out or anything.

Well Thursday I had to play someone who thinks he is brilliant, yet he still can’t hook bowl properly and he’s been bowling for 45 years. He hates losing which people like that you just love to beat at all costs. I won 6-2 and he moaned all through, I don’t know how he plays for my towns team to be honest, he drops the ball in hope that it will hook lol! The lanes were still totally rubbish as per usual with Yeovil Bowlplex.

Well there are only 3 weeks left of the singles league and it’s coming up to making a decision whether to play next season or not, there will probably be a 9 pin no tap summer league anyway which will be ok I guess and I will probably bowl in that for a bit of a laugh more so than anything. Last night I didn’t play too bad, I hit over my average (or should I say Yeovil average?) on every game, I managed a 8-0 win both on scratch and handicap. Don’t know why but I seemed a lot more relaxed with bowling last night so seemed to bowl better although there were a lot of splits which shouldn’t have been, but that’s Yeovil lanes for you. The oil was pretty in consistent still and they don’t seem that bothered that they will most probably be losing all the leagues after the summer… along with £25k a year guaranteed turnover, oiling machines been broke for nearly two years now.

Well I have just finished a couple of pages on fish keeping and my fish tank setups. Quite boring but hey, if you want have a look. There are two pages, one for Fresh Cold Water and the other for Tropical Water. I am planning on setting up a marine tank soon!

Fish Keeping

I have just added a Reptiles page to the site which has some information on why I chose the Lizards that I did and what my plans are for the future! Check it out!

Reptiles

Well I thought it was about time that I wrote some up to date tech pages. I have just added a page called Windows Security which is basically a guide on how to make Windows Vista and XP secure from a fresh install. There are links to the software which I use and a lot of useful information on keeping your Windows installs secure.

Windows Security