Gareth Hughes Blog

This game is massively addictive, absolutely love it. In other news, I'm off to Canada in July, yay.

Buy this game.

I gave in and bought a 3DS which turns out is pretty damn good. The 3D is way better than I expected and it didn't take me very long to get used to it. That said, the first use did screw up my vision for a few hours afterwards. The only issue now is the terrible launch titles. The only game out of the lineup that I actually wanted was Lego Star Wars which is pretty damn good.

I'm looking forward to Ocarina of Time which should be released in the next few months. The entire thing should be improved a lot when Nintendo release the update that adds a browser and store.

The other gadget I've bought recently is the Amazon Kindle which is also awesome and great for the gym.

I've not done much in the way of programming lately outside of work, other than the small changes I recently made to this site. Although I recently had a bit of time which I used to play with Tapestry which is ...interesting. I'm not convinced but may knock something together when my workload drops a little. 

This is probably going to be mostly about gaming I think. Recently stopped playing World of Warcraft for long enough to play Dragon Age 2, I'm about 30 hours in now and it's fantastic. It's not reached the peaks of Mass Effect 2 through but it's pretty damn good.

My biggest problem with it is the number of side quests, they seem to have gone for quantity over quality, there are loads of them but none are very long. Generally a very good game though.

PAX happened recently and they showed us a new SWTOR trailer and some new gameplay footage, I have to say this game looks amazing. There are a lot of WoW like things to it but it doesn't look to be a complete clone which is rare. I'm really looking forward to it. 

I've been playing WoW again since the Cataclysm launch and while I enjoyed the content Blizzard seem to have really dropped the ball as far as the end game content is concerned. The 10 main raiding just doesn't seem to work. There's far too many 10 man guilds and most of them seem to struggle to get enough players online to actually do anything. 

In other news I've just updated this site, I've switched to typekit, changed the font, made a few style tweaks (I suck I know) and removed the separate picture page. 

That' s about it.

A couple of weeks ago I somehow managed to knock hot chocolate over my laptop, phone and keyboard. This has so far cost me £70 for a new laptop keyboard from dell, £20 on the phone with dell because I had to use my mobile to call them and £30 for a keyboard replacement for my desktop pc. I'm just waiting for my iPhone to go too and complete the set. 

In other news I've had to replace my bikes brakes and it has a puncture. Shit really needs to stop breaking.

Anyway, I replaced my broken Microsoft Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000 with a Microsoft Arc Keyboard and I've recently started using a Apple Magic Trackpad, it's not all that magic in windows but I get the basics (scroll, tap to click, double tap to right click).  The combination of the two seems to be really good for my dodgey wrists, I don't have to move my hands all over the place as the keyboard is pretty small. One of the biggest problems with the Natural 4000 is that the mouse is very far away from the normal typing position.

It's also quite pretty, which is the most important bit.

I've been doing some freelance SVG + JavaScript work too lately which has been quite interesting. Trying to map data onto a visual representation of a shop floor. Quite a challenge. We're using google gears which I'm not overly impressed with, jQuery and jQuery svg.