Anatomy of a console rumour

Anyone who follows gaming sites has probably read their fair share of stinker rumours recently. I’ve amalgamated a few of the recent ones into a generic format below and included a few links to the stupidest ones.

First the general structure:

My [ friend’s | father’s | mum’s ] [ friend | father | mum ] works at [ Nintendo | Sony | Adobe | Electronics Boutique | Microsoft | unrelated graphics card manufacturer ] and they said that the new [ PS3 | Revolution | PSP | Nintendo DS | stupidly large Microsoft handheld ] is going to have [ implausible 3D projection technology | dual analog joysticks | an internal HDD | flash memory | touch sensitivity ]. This will undoubtably make it a [ PS3 | Revolution | PSP | Nintendo DS | Xbox360 ] killer !!!

Sincerely yours,

[ l337 | MS | SoNy | Nintendo ] [ fanboi | grrl | Gamer | H4x0r ]

BTW: [DS | Xbox360 | PSP] [ rocks | sucks ] !!!

And now an example:

My friend’s dad works at Nintendo and they said that the new Revolution is going to have implausible 3D projection technology. This will undoubtably make it a PS3 killer !!!

Sincerely yours,

NintendoGamer

BTW: PSP sucks !!!

On a serious note though, what is so implausible and funny about a “mom” working at Nintendo? I had hoped we’d be over that sort of gender stereotyping by now. 🙁

Complete Singstar Rocks! tracklist

The complete Singstar Rocks! tracklist has been posted over at PAL Gaming Network Australia (It’s a good site for Australia specific gaming news).

Well, they may have posted the entire tracklist and they may have done it first, but I’ll be the one to only post the new bit of information that really matters:

  • The Scorpions – “Wind of Change”

“Take me to the magic of the moment. On a glory night…”

Hot! Hot! Hot!

It’s been uncomfortably hot the last few days, but most people I know work in an air-conditioned office (or have air-conditioning at home) and can’t really empathise. Well, damn you all!

We’re waiting on a an air-conditioning unit we bought on eBay and it’s taking its sweet time getting here. The eBay page was fairly informative, but I poked around the internet searching for more details. That’s when I found this:

Behold the plastic wood-grain! The logical conclusion to any industrial design question! Bask in its magnificence! Needless to say, we immediately contacted the seller to see if we could get it in “Luxourious burlwood”! However, they don’t have that style and it looks like we’ll have to be happy with standard silver.

We’re not quite sure exactly if this sort of cooler works very well, but the specifications look good and we will find out soon enough. Actually not soon enough! We want it now!

Downtime

Although completely unrelated to the recent onetwenty downtime, I’ve had fairly intermittent internet access since my last post.

Most of the problems have been with the telephone line itself. We’ve had quite a bit of crosstalk and the ADSL has been unable to synchronise. I called amcom and (after waiting on hold for 20 minutes) spoke to someone who clearly knew their stuff and was very helpful.

We found that phone calls made with our landline came up with caller ID from some unknown number, so we called Telstra and they sent someone over. After they fixed that problem, the crosstalk remained and they sent somone over again.

It all seems to be working now and I’ve pretty happy with the service from Telstra and very happy with amcom. They even called back today to confirm that our problems are resolved, and the 8Mb/1Mb connection with static IP at no extra charge is great! It’s definitely much better than our previous experience with iiNet and Telstra.