Mai Me Arai

I got an email about BarCamp Bangkok for Drupal last week and after making some enquiries I tried registering today only to discover that I am too late. Actually, I can’t remember if I registered or not so I’ll have to email them to check.

So I’m back to using Drupal again and in the time since I last used it Drupal 6 has been released. Unfortunately some really important modules, namely CCK (Content Construction Kit) and Views, haven’t been updated yet so the new site I’m working on will be on Drupal 5.7.

It’s actually kinda funny that I’m sticking with 5.7 considering that the last sites I did (using Drupal 4.7) I didn’t use either CCK or Views, mainly because I didn’t know what they were for at the time. The result of that work turned out pretty basic obviously, but it still looked good to me (and that’s the important opinion).

IE 7 was also just coming out when I was finishing the last sites, so now that it’s everywhere I’m loving the ability to use transparent PNG’s. I was trying to tell Oui how nice the new site is looking but he didn’t understand my explanations of what I’ve done.

The built-in contact module, which I’m using for the site-wide contact form, has a really weird feature where if a users group isn’t permitted to access the contact form they won’t even see the menu item I made to it on the primary links. I’m still trying to work out if this is a good feature or not because it took me ages to realise that it was the group permissions causing the menu item to not appear, whereas if it had appeared but given an access denied error when clicked I would have known straight away.

As I didn’t get into the beta everything I know is based only what I’ve heard. I’m not going to talk about the technical problems, because I haven’t actually played it. So far just one thing about the game has caught my attention and that is the ability to take the game and make it into a single-player experience. What I mean is to play in your own instanced version of the world that noone else can access. This is also the part of the game where the interesting stuff happens, the real game.

Excuse me, but isn’t the idea of an MMO to interact with others? If you wanted to play a single-player game wouldn’t you do it offline? Let’s not forget that you’re also paying to play the game too - A SINGLE PLAYER GAME THAT YOU PAY A MONTHLY FEE TO PLAY!?

Incredible.

I bought some new roll-on deodorant on the weekend. Nivea Deodorant for Men Whitening.

When did it become important for your underarms to be white? Who’s going to see them?

For the last few nights Oui has been bugging me to eat at Sha-bu-shi and I finally relented last night. Early this morning a certain person, also known as not me, was throwing up in the toilet.

Me: I hope you don’t want to eat there again.
Him: Urrrggghhhh

A few months ago Oui and I were at the Maneeya Centre branch of SCB opening some joint accounts and while they were processing the paperwork something really weird happened.

Sitting on the divider between the woman attending to us and her right neighbour was a bell very similar to the one pictured below and randomly while we were there one of them would ring it. This happened a number of times and I couldn’t see anything that might be triggering it.

You can ring my beeeeeeeeeeeell…

Completely random events such as this are actually not so uncommon in Bangkok, but you can usually determine why something seemingly random occurs. In this case the staff serving us would ring it even while they were in the midst of talking to us! It was very disconcerting and I really wanted to know why they were ringing it but Oui wouldn’t ask them for me.

The reason I bring it up now is because I was in that particular branch again this morning and I heard it ring. If their staff could speak english I might know why…

Oui decided to pick up the WoW reigns yet again and we’re playing our druids once more. We’ve managed to get to lvl 50 so it looks like we’ll be going to outlands soon.

I created a pally toon to encourage Oui to play his pally and of course also chose the female dwarf. Watching her bits move as I run about the place is an interesting experience, the front view being interestingly worse than the rear.

I haven’t taken my pally into the guild yet because I’m not too sure about the name. Kakadu, Uluru, Boomerang and Kangaroo were all taken (had to match Oui’s Didgeridoo), so I settled on Platypus. If someone says they’re insulted by the name I can’t really argue with the connotations, though they’re not deliberate at all.

It started with:

I’ve also just gotten into the beta and can log into the site perfectly, but the game is a no-go.

Edit: I live in Thailand where Hellgate london is routed to some servers in Singapore or Malaysia (don’t know and don’t care which). The company that manages this is Infocomm Asia Holdings (yes, I thought Infocomm where long dead too) and their management of the Hellgate service in this region is incredibly woeful, so I truly hope the reason I can’t log in is not because I’m blocked. I get better performance connecting to US servers than to the ones provided by IAH.

Oh, and someone wake me up when IAH manages to patch up our version of Hellgate to V1. Yes, they are that crap (I don’t know why we cannot have version parity).

Then someone responded:

We are on the same boat… too bad, they had block off us all to access into the US server, although like you, I wish to play in US server too, but there is always a restriction in business.

Anyhow, looking at the bright side, IAh lose to Asiasoft to publish the game in SEA, so might not be as bad as could be. The question now is WHEN?

And I finished up with a nice:

This is not good news. The fact that IAH won’t be managing isn’t very reassuring as it just means some other inept group of people will be crap at running things some time in the unforeseeable future.

For future reference, how about Flagship (or whatever they’re calling themselves for this project) put a tiny little note on their site mentioning that if you’re in asia you don’t have a hope in hell of getting to play the game any time soon and that you’d be better off cultivating a herd of bufallo than downloading the software in terms of time wasted.

EDIT: Just saw the message on the front page (I’m not asian so didn’t read it) and see it’s being handed to Hanbitsoft as Hellgate London was. Please just shoot me now.

I was so excited to get an email today informing me that I could finally get in on the Mythos beta. The hype surrounding this is pretty huge and I quickly registered and spent 2 hours downloading the client. After installation I tried to log in and was given a message saying my username and password are incorrect despite the fact that they work perfectly on the Mythos website. Thinking that there must be a problem I went to the Mythos forums and it was slowly revealed that anyone playing from asia, whether they’re asian or not, won’t be getting into the US or EU Mythos - ever.

Flagship, in their infinite stupidity, have yet again handed off asian operations to some inept company and segragated all the users in that region just as they did with Hellgate London. You might recall my post about how competently IAH are fucking that one up.

After posting an irate message on the boards I noticed a message on the front page that mentioned something about asian players, clicked it for more detail, and lo and behold it was a message about this very thing. In typically marketing fashion their attempts to make something shit sound not so much like the shit it is actually obfuscated the message.

Let me make this clear - THIS IS SHIT. Any excitement I had over this game is well and truly gone.

What an exciting day it is today!

New content has been released for Lord of the Rings Online. It comprises of an entirely new zone which apparently has an environment effect where you can’t stay out in the cold too long or you’ll die. Items can delay the effect or you can visit a campfire to warm up again, but they say that your frozen state will be a visible effect on your character too.

It’s all too exciting for me as I’ve long wished for more than just the graphical effect when WoW introduced weather. In fact I’ve always thought the WoW weather wasn’t extreme enough. It should have been able to get much, much worse to the point where it affected gameplay to be cool.

Anyway, did I mention the new content also adds fishing to LotRO? If I didn’t play WoW the fact might be exciting but… well… it ain’t.

Another exciting thing that’s new today, at least I noticed it today, is a new episode of The Guild (if you don’t knwo what this is I truly pity you).

I was excited to hear that Thai customs would be moving to a paperless system (ie electronic), in the hope that everything would move quicker. Instead it now takes twice as long to get anything done.