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Welcome to the Odd Angry Shot. This is the place that puts news opinions out there! Saturday 19 January 2002 Well HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!! I know it is a bit late but things have been happening around here and there has been much instability. The new site design is coming along nicely and should eventually feature some interactive stuff as well, such as a message board and the like, but I will let you know about that as time progresses. Over the last couple of weeks I have bought a new car, done some much needed renovations on "Oddsvilla" (the trusty abode of Odd), and just recently lost my job! The rest of the time I have been just plain slack and the news at the moment has been a bit slow for what I am interested in. While I redo the site style and structure, I will maintain a presence here as people are starting to wonder what happened to me. The reconstructions are taking longer that expected so don't worry if you visit one day and it will be all changed! So that's all for the moment, but I will be back later today with much more of an update. Cheers, Odd. Sunday 30 December 2001 Well here is a very short update for the site. I haven't updated recently for two reasons. 1. I am still working on the new version of the site! 2. Bloody Tel$tra and its 3 Gb cap! I have run over my usage limit (on the 18th in fact) and refuse to give those blood sucking leeches any extra money. I have also complained as they have incorrectly calculated my usage and added free site usage to my billable usage. An investigation is underway but I doubt that they will even attempt to resolve it in my favour! So This is just to wish you all a very Merry Christmas (even though it is past) and a very Happy and Safe New Year and I hope to see you all come back and visit me very often next year! It will be worth it I think! Enjoy! Wednesday 12 December 2001 Well, I'm back again! Still having trouble with this Tel$tra billing thing and the overwhelmingly useless "Useless Meter"! The good thing is that it is giving me some time to work out a cool new design for the site. Things are going well and the new format should allow me to update a lot more quickly as I am setting up templates using Dream Weaver to speed up page creation. Not a lot of new stuff is happening at the moment in the computer industry. Australia is still waiting for a lot of the latest games that the rest of the world already has. Along with the current classification scandal for certain games that were withdrawn from sale in the free land of Oz, we wait as usual! So for the next week or so the updates will be a little slow but hopefully I will have a shiny new format for you to look at! Anyway, I must go and work on the layout now! Cheers! Friday 7 December 2001 Wow, I don't think I have ever had this much trouble getting a computer up and running before! Well this is just a quick note to let you all see that I have not forgotten my promise to update more regularly. My new beast is DOA, or at least the chip is. My sparkling new Athlon 1400 has burnt out, and I hadn't even got the thing going properly yet even! No overclocking, not even a full install of windows to it's name. Darndest thing I ever saw! There was no evidence of heat damage to the top of the chip, but after the damn thing not booting up, we pulled it out and found a burn mark on the QA sticker underneath the chip. It was also swollen like a balloon. Anyway, thanks to SoMOnE who took it home to his computer and tried it out there with his HSF combo and the same thing happened, well didn't happen! So the conclusion is that it over heated in a strange way and should be covered by warranty. Now comes the long wait to get a new chip. I really hope GameDude Computers in Brisbane are better than their reputation in dealing with warranty work! Anyway, so the old system is back in action again so I can now update on a regular basis again! So now to bed as I have to work in the morning! G'night All! Tuesday 4 December 2001 Well here we are. A couple of days later. You can thank Tel$tra for the tardiness! At present they are the root of all that is evil in the on-line world! I hate them with a passion! Their new USELESS meter is just that! They can't maintain their service without it crashing or becoming excruciatingly slow on a very regular basis. I would have thought that the new cap would have dramatically reduced the load on the network, but they still manage to stuff it up and have it crash. But, like the HitchHikers Guide to the Galaxy, the service status page has on it (assuming you can get to view it!), in large friendly letters, "Don't Panic - We are aware of the problem and are addressing it!" Anyway, enough of this griping! On with the show! It seems that the "silly season" is becoming, well...., sillier! The idiots that populate our road networks are out in force. All those that should fail their driving tests but miraculously passed, are out there making the roads unsafe for all (including small furry animals and birds!). On a recent trip of some 50 kilometres, I was nearly run into on 3 separate occasions by fools who couldn't be bothered to look around them to see if there was actually someone else there. And no, I wasn't doing anything other than driving in an acceptable manner! One such fool was driving in the lane beside me, and had he turned his head would have seen my car in its entirety, and then suddenly decided that my lane was really THE place that he had to be! So, said stupid person, promptly starts to change lanes, and like the considerate driver that he was, indicates as his wheels cross over the line separating the lanes! I must say that I was not exactly amused by this show of consideration and was forced to communicate my displeasure by means of that useful tool located on the steering wheel. Yep, I hit the horn hard and fast! Such was his shock that he wasn't the only person on the road at the time, that he swerved violently to the left and nearly ran off the road. Now while I should have at least some remorse for scaring the crap out of him, I don't! If you do something it usually has quite foreseeable consequences. If you choose to ignore those consequences, well then, you must accept the blame for being bitten on the arse by them! I suppose the point of this little rant is to remind everyone that they call this time of the year the SILLY SEASON for a very good reason! Please take care out there in the real world! I would hate to hear that either of my devout readers had been hurt by stupidity. Drive more safely that you normally would, that way you might be able to avoid the fools entirely! Nuff said on that! Now here is an interesting twist to the US Government sanctioned holiday shopping spree! In protest at over consumerism people in the US may be stopping from shopping on the first day of the season! Now I know that this has now past but it was interesting enough to put in. Check this link out for more information on the topic! A while ago I reported on a story about a group of people who were trying to stop others viewing pornography by hijacking the websites and talking them to pages that "inform" them about the evils of pornography. Well in an interesting development, these same people have just had a huge loss in the courts with Playboy winning back a domain name that was registered to the the anti-porn group. You can read all about it here. Strange thing is, the group is headed by the daughter of the Hustler Magazine king, Larry Flynt! So much for his legacy being passed along! Well that catches me up on most of the news from my incredibly slack period! Hopefully my computer upgrade, which I will start tomorrow will go well and I will be able to update again tomorrow night. If not you will have to wait until Thursday for the next thrilling installment of the Odd Angry Shot! Cheers, and be safe! Sunday 2 December 2001 Well Mr Slackness is back but I do have a really good excuse this time! I didn't end up updating last week for two reasons. One being that I finally have the motherboard that I want and was playing with setting up the water cooling in it and trying to get it all working. I have found out lots about Windows XP this last week. Also along the 'tinkering' with computers line I was asked to fix several of my friends problems and that ended up taking a lot more time than I expected. Yes I know, I am studying to be a psychologist, but sometimes wind up doing more computing work that psych work. Strange, isn't it? The second reason was basically that I was being really slack and spending way too much time downloading in a mad dash to get as much stuff before the end of the month as I could. Australian Telstra ADSL users would probably appreciate that more than the rest of the world, but there will be a little more on that later in this post! So now that I have most of the shitty stuff out of the road, I can get back to updating more regularly. Now that Christmas is upon us once again, I will try to get some reviews, previews and concentrate a fair bit on game related stuff to help both my viewers who stayed with me during my slack time choose which games are good enough for them for the holiday season! There are quite a few titles coming out before the 25th, but sadly, many more that we were waiting for have been delayed until next year. Stay tuned and I will try to keep you all informed. The End of Freedom! It was a very sad day for Australian broadband users yesterday as we witnessed the demise of the Tel$tra "Freedom" plans for both cable and ADSL users! We now have a firm 3 Gb cap on our usage with any excess being charged at 18.7 cents per Megabyte! I find that offensive and ridiculous. That's the trouble with monopolies, they seem to think they can get away with anything! Fortunately, we may have a little bit more competition now after the ACCC decided that Tel$tras business practices for rebilling and access to the copper lines, was entirely restrictive and anti-competitive! Unfortunately in my area it will probably be a long time coming. Anyway, we have all now said goodbye to unrestricted downloading and hello to restricted bandwidth! I shed a tear as I closed down Morpheus at the end of last month! After downloading nearly 25 Gb's in a mad frantic rush to get all the TV episodes that haven't been screened here in Australia yet, and probably won't be for another 2 years or more, I had to cool the modem down and stop, cold turkey! A sad day indeed! But the upside of it is, that I now have every episode of all the TV shows that I enjoy watching that I would have to wait forever for to see on local TV! And that will keep me busy for quite a while! Roll on the competition, and leave me alone while I watch the new stuff! Our resident Loon, Rob, has discovered a list of familiar books with subtly altered titles. Now as you can imagine this site is an American one and you can just guess what the theme of it is. Yes it is Taliban bashing at it's finest. The titles are quite funny so head on over to here and have a look. Now not having yet seen the Harry Potter movie, nor read any of the books (I still love the Tolkein stories!) I can't really comment on the validity of these claims. But it seems that the books and the movie have sparked claims of satan and devil worship amongst those ever vigilant conservative christian types! I really think that what they are on about is just a hang up from the days of the Spanish Inquisition and a willing return to the dark ages of censorship and strict idea regulation, but they are entitled to their opinions. Check out this Wired News article for the full story! I just found a link to this article here about a software company that has just licensed a copy protection scheme for use in the US market. Now that may not seem strange at all, until you realize that it has been using the system in game releases throughout the rest of the world for quite some time. Those of you who read this column regularly would know that I am no fan of the copyright crap that the big companies go on with. You would also know that I support the protection of intellectual property rights for all. So where does that leave me here? Well I am entirely confused. It seems that the US does not pirate software or make illegal copies and the rest of the world does! It also seems that only the fringe markets suffer copy protection, while the largest consumer market rattles on freely without restriction! Now this may be an isolated case but it really hammers home the perceptions of the US in relation to the rest of the world! Once again the US puts itself on the pedestal for all to see and then writes different rules for itself to abide by! Good on you guys! Keep it up. It is no wonder that with that attitude of recalcitrant superiority that the oppressed nations of the world use the only means they can to attack and free themselves from this indignity! Check out the article that started this rant here. I won't say anymore about this because I am way to disgusted at the double standards that we outside the US endure to protect their freedoms! Well, that's it for me today. I have to get some sleep now or I will crash into scrambled words and poor sentences! Enjoy and I will be back for more tomorrow! Cheers! Sunday 25 November 2001 Well, it seems like weekly updates are the thing at the moment! I have been a bit slack this week, so please forgive me. This is just a quick update before I go to bed, just to let you all know that I have recently had a large scare with the computer hard drive (and no recent backup!) which is why there was no update today. But I promise that I will remedy that tomorrow. Even though I will want to be working on my new beast, I will take the time out to update you on the happenings for the week. See you tomorrow!

ROCKHAMPTON SETI USERS We are aiming for 10,000 Work units by the end of January (Yeah I know it has changed!). If you would like to help us in our quest, click the above link and follow the instructions to set up SETI@home and join the team! Work Units Completed - 9150 Members - 14 Odd Angry Shot - 3171 DontTryThis@Home - 2439 Lothar_Wolf - 1580 Detae - 664 KiM - 321 SoMOnE - 211 Neanderthal - 205 robtheloon - 194 Amas - 147 lavatube - 86 The_Mystic_Goat - 60 Pahoehoe - 46 Tweety - 18 Saynoda Yoda - 8 Congrats must go to the following team members:- SoMOnE for passing Neanderthal KiM for cracking the 1 year of processing time And, Lothar_Wolf for passing 1500 WU's and somehow finding enough faster computers to really churn out the units while reducing his averages! Well done team on cracking the 9000 WU mark! Our Averages are coming down and we are beginning to average more units per day than we have been doing! Go team GO!!! We are averaging 27 WU's a day and have surpassed 10.75 years of processing time! Our average WU time is 10 hours 17 minutes, with the max time being 27h 51m (5) and the fastest being 4h 13m! (6). This site has been constructed with the grateful and generous assistance of the following people: DontTryThis@Home Rob the Loon Tim "PorkChop" Sullivan Amas KiM John M Trahley Cosmo Dallas The UK Petersons The Mystic Goat