Tag Archives: Domain

Lab Rats

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For almost a year and half I’ve been playing this augmented multiplayer reality game with players from all over the world -about 7 million- set on a location-based map of the area you live in, basically a map of the whole world. So if you’d go to other countries in real life you would be seeing that environment on the map in the game. I won’t go into details but what it comes down to is the fact that you need to capture, build, and/or defend areas among other goals.

Although I’ve been playing it for a while already, I still have mixed feelings about the game as it brings out emotions in people that can have a serious effect in real life. Some tend to become overly protective about ‘their’ area, others become even aggressive. People use different tactics all the time which makes it a constantly changing psychological battle. It’s interesting -in a twisted way- to see how one responds and either retaliate or change tactics altogether.

At times I get fed up with the game, not the game itself but mostly a certain type of people who take things way too seriously. I get tired of the politics that are going around -just like in real life by the way- where you have dictators, followers, protestors, sheep and the common idiots in general. I often wonder what the makers of this game had in mind when they developed it and I honestly believe that we’re all basically lab rats playing in the maze that’s called our world.

I’m ‘almost’ at the highest level of this game and I’m not sure what I’ll do the moment I reach it, I’m taking my time in doing so because I’m not in a rush. In the meantime I keep thinking about what’s going on in the backend. Are they collecting data on us, are they watching human behaviour whilst under stress or in victory? Are we manipulated by the rules they come up with? Or are we blissfully ignorant and willingly participating in a worldwide psychological examination?

I wonder what will happen when their intentions will be out in the open one day… It sounds like a bad science fiction movie some how. A mixture of data rebels, network surfers, whistleblowers, a matrix, domination and a few scientists who track each and every move you make in real life watching your GPS location and collecting data on who you interact with and how. I’m sure there will be uproar if the truth comes out about what they do with all the collected intel.

Call me paranoid ;)

Murphy Has It Coming

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I feel I’ve been wasting my time lately with all sorts of things that seem to pop up out of nowhere. I had one bad issue after another over the last three weeks. First of all my computer died and as you can imagine I was not happy about it because I have invested quite some money on extra hardware and software to upgrade it and keep it running smooth. It was still the perfect computer to me until it unexpectedly gave up on me one day while I was busy studying and working.

I heard this loud tick, my monitor went black and I could hear the fan slowly coming to a halt. I knew straight away that it was the power supply so I did some research online and found out, it had been a hardware issue waiting to happen. Apple knew about this since they released this computer, they’ve managed to sell faulty products for three years… Of course I checked to see if there was a repair program, there was, but it closed in January this year and knowing Apple I shouldn’t expect extras…

I did call though… and on top of all the crap, I had to deal with an extremely annoying person, who kept telling me that I didn’t register that computer with Apple. She had that tone in her voice like she was almost accusing me of stealing the piece of hardware. Later, after I’d spoken with a really nice person at the Apple dealer who’d explained to me how to check my registry, I found out that I was indeed registered. It only confirmed the fact that I’d been trying to have a conversation with a right cow.

I’m still thinking about making an official complaint, it was something the manager at the Apple store mentioned to me. It just doesn’t sit well with me and I don’t wish to be treated like that especially not by a company that has become extremely arrogant over the years. To be honest, I was so pissed off, I was ready to swap to PC… that should tell you something *wink*… It’s solved for now, I’m using my good old Powerbook: it doesn’t have enough power to do anything else besides email and internet.

But it works until the proper stuff is in. Of course it took me ages to transfer most of my files to one of my removable HDs. Lucky me I could borrow some gadget from my brother to connect a harddisk through USB to another computer to transfer stuff but I still need to find a case to put these old harddisks in so I can continue to use them. Something like this would be awesome… Anyway… when I finally had setup a proper work space I found out that my business domain had been hacked *bring it on!*

So I’m still cleaning up the mess… I had to delete websites and reinstall them, it’s the kind of stuff you don’t want to do when there are more urgent issues to deal with. I’m supposed to study the next couple of months to update my webdesign knowledge. I started reading some O’Reilly books on CSS, Drupal, Flash, CMS, SEO etc. and it has come to a grinding halt ever since I ran into these horrid problems. On top of that -since I haven’t got a start date yet with the new employer- I still have to apply for jobs.

I actually received a phone call last week from the owner of an architectural design agency who wanted to meet me and have a chat. I’d applied for a job the week prior to his phone call but the job was no longer available. He said he was impressed with my CV though and invited me to meet up with them. I’ll have to visit them this Thursday and in a way I’m really looking forward to this. I know they use Drupal to build websites while they’re also in need of Drupal freelancers: 1+1=2? *wink*

We’ll see… for now I have plenty of work to catch up on so if you wonder why I’m quiet again that is your answer. So if you will excuse me, I have someone called Murphy to deal with, I think I’m going to pwn him…