Moving… Again…

Did you notice that I hadn’t been posting for over 2 weeks? That’s actually pretty bad, so I think I’ll have to apologize for that. But anyway, in the meantime I’ve been working on something new and as of today, my new domainname has been registered and activated and almost all is set and ready to go.

From now on I’ll continue what I’ve been doing here over there (that made sense, didn’t it?), so I’d say you update your bookmarks and change zhooibaal.wordpress.com into www.pingwing.us!

I didn’t write my own template for my custom wordpress installation and I also didn’t write any plugins for it, but I did take some time to customize it too my needs. I altered the menubar a little, added a script to randomly pick a header image and I’ve been playing around with the code of a script (lightbox) that is integrated in the fGallery plugin, which has also been altered to work with the theme I chose, which all gives it just that extra touch to be seperated from the large pack of custom wordpress isntallations.

In the meantime, not really much happened except for the fact that I’ve had my very first ever live gig with my own band last weekend of which I will post a full report soon on my new site and I’m also working on a fully updated videogameslist as well as a fully updated hardware list. The only thing that is currently still missing is a page for my PC’s…

Anyway, go take a look, I’ll grab back to this blog if something might go wrong over at my host… Which doesn’t seem to be that reliable… Which I found out about after making the payment…

Anyway, to get an impression on what it looks like before you rush over there, here’s a shot:

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Do you know…?

Here’s a question: “do you know the feeling you can get when a movie hits you where it almost hurts?”

There is no need to answer this question, it’s not in need of a answer, but if you haven’t there is seriously something you should consider doing:
go see “The Butterfly Effect”

No, I’m not advertising for this movie, but if you haven’t seen it, you can’t know what I’m talking about and you should simply go see it.

Back to the normal things of the day. It was just another day at school, nothing special. After our only class today I decided to go shopping with a classmate and another one joined in. I wanted to go and get myself a trackball. Then what do I need a trackball for? I have several mice lying around… Well, I want a trackball to take with me when I have my laptop with me (yes, still the BenQ POS, but this one actually seems to be doing really well afterall) and a trackball requires considerbly less space than a mouse does and it doesn’t make you hands go numb after a while which the touchpad does…
Anyway, we ended up going to the Mediamarkt in Heerlen (NL) and there we found out they didn’t have any and so we ended up browsing through the DVDs and there I found 2 most interesting titles:

• Zombie Nation
• The Butterfly Effect

Zombie Nation is actually a compilation of 3 classic zombie flicks:

1. City of the Living Dead
2. Tombs of the Blinddead
3. Dawn of the Dead

We all know Dawn of the Dead by the legendary George A. Romero, but I haven’t ever seen the other 2, but I don’t think they need any explaination. It’s the other one I want to talk about.

The Butterlfly Effect

The Butterfly Effect is a chaos theory. It is said that a flapping butterfly can initiate a chainreaction of events that will utlimately be the cause of a hurricane on the other side of the world. So something really small can cause disaster and that is what this movie is all about.
Evan Tremore is a young and seemingly normal guy who suffered from serious blackouts during his youth. He simply lost parts of his memory. At some point he and his mother move out of town and then the story skips 7 years.
In case you didn’t notice, I’m going into any details here.
7 years later he’s a student living in a dormhouse together with his roommate Thumper (it’s his nickname, don’t know the guys real name, in the movie that is). When they both go out, Evan picks up this girl who at some point finds his journals he’s been writing from his 7th year of life and she urges him to read her a bit from it and at that moment, when he starts reading, everthing blurs up and he passes out and you get to see what he’s dreaming. He’s actually dreaming a part of his youth where he blacked out. When he wakes up his new found girlfriend is obviously worried and he just walks out the room.
Later on he’ll find out that he can actually influence these “dreams” as they go and whatever he does in these dreams turns out to be real, so he’s actually going back in time with all his knowledge and he’s changing history.
That’s about all you need to know about the background story and it may seem to be not really interesting, but I can tell you this; this movie is so gripping, it’s the only movie I’ve ever seen that I couldn’t stop a tear from dripping out of my eyes. It’s drama how drama is supposed to be. It’s extreme surealistic, but the character of Evan seems so real that he simply drags you into his mind, you feel what he’s feeling, you see what he sees and you think what he’s thinking, yet you still don’t know what his next move will be.
I can’t describe how good this movie is except for the fact that it’s the only really good movie that Ashton Kutcher ever starred in and even that doesn’t give the movie enough credit. It’s utterly brilliant, that’s the only description possible, everything else is degrading. Whenever you hit the pause button on your remote to go to the bathroom, or to get yourself a drink or whatever makes you feel sorry for not being able to continue watching at that very moment; it’s really that good. Everything seems perfect in this movie, the acting, the setting, the story, the characters, everything and the situation just keeps going from bad to worse. But I’m allready saying too much, I won’t give away any more of the plot for those who haven’t yet seen this movie. And to those people: I command you all to either rent, buy, download, do whatever it takes to get this movie and watch it, you won’t regret it.

Shit, am I now turning into a movie critic? Nah…

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Ps.: I’ll post images of the covers of both DVDs later, now I’m tired, need to sleep.

10000 hits

Today this blog has passed the magical number of 10000 hits since it was started on Januari 25th this year.

Now it isn’t all that impressive for a site to reach 10000 hits in nearly 9 months, but from the 1 or 2 hits I got every day back then I now get about 40 to 50 hits every day, which isn’t all that bad for a blog that isn’t actually updated on a daily basis. If I would enter a story, like, every day I’m sure I would get more hits than I do now, but what do I blog about if I don’t have anything to blog about? Now there’s a good question… I’m not someone who’s just going to rant about nothing just for the sake of it… I will only rant with a reason about something that I think is interesting and not just about any junk I find on the web or in a store or wherever.

Anyway, now I’m allready at it, I found this awsome little gadget over in a webshop in Germany… It’s actually an awfully expensive webshop, but that to the side, these things aren’t very easy to find, so I’m willing to pay a little extra EURO for that.
And what is this all about then eh? Eh? EEEEEH!?

Well, about this:

Source: www.wikipedia.org

Even though the shipping costs are relatively high and I don’t want to recommend this webshop to anyone because it’s really expensive when it comes to classic gaming stuff I won’t actually place a link here and I won’t file this under Bargain Hunting (hehe). All I need to do now is transfer the money and I’ll receive it shortly I hope… If I’m not being screwed over badly, but I’ll wait a little with doing that, just to prevent what I just wrote and if anyone can point me to a place where I can get one of these for a price below €21,95 with some extra shipping costs I would gladly hear it and I’ll ofcourse give you credit for it on this very blog.

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FlatOut 2 review

As promised here, I wrote a full review of FlatOut 2 for you all to read. I might add some screenshots later, have fun.

I can only conclude that this game is f*cking awsome, go and buy it! Give the developers some credit.

You can read the review by clicking here, or by clicking on Reviews in the sidebar or by clicking FlatOut 2 (PC) in the sidebar under Reviews.

Oh yeah, it’s about 2936 words, which is equal to 16000 characters including spaces (13114 without spaces), 221 lines which comes down to 5 pages of A4 paper. MSWord counted that for me 😛

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Browzar

A new schoolyear has started and so did my new study course. As you could have read here I graduated from my previous school and now I’m going to Hogeschool Zuyd which is located in Heerlen (NL) to attend to the Network Infrastructure Design course which will last approximatly 3 years.

But as the title of this entry states, I’m not going to rant about school, I’m going to tell you about something a friend pointed me to and it’s called Browzar and the friend who pointed me to it has also been mentioned here before. It’s Frank from Gamesfm.nl. He’s the one I got my Sega Megadrive 2 and the Menacer from and he was also involved in the making of Uberfighter.

Let’s get to the point; Browzar is an internet browser and probably the pronounciating of Browzar will be the same as browser. But what’s so special about Browzar? Well, a few things:

• it’s tiny (264KB)
• it leaves no evidence of browsing
• it tracks no cookies
• it saves no temporary files
• You don’t need to install anything

And that’s about it. It’s very simple to use, you have you’re usuals address bar, a few browsing buttons like next, back and home. You can print the current page with the printer button and ofcourse you can stop a page from loading by pressing the stop button or reload the page by pushing the reload button. In addition to that there is a search field next to the address field to save you the trouble of first browsing to a searchengine page.
There are no configuration options available whatsoever, so you can just start it and use it without going through tons of dialog windows before it works. And despite it’s simplicity there is a help menu present. The options in the help menu will make the browser navigate to the Browzar website to the corresponding page you requested.
Thanks to it’s very small size it loads extremely fast and because there are hardly any options integrated, the process of loading stuff on a page is also very fast.
The fact that you don’t need to install it is particularly usefull if you want to use it on other pc’s than your own. Like at school they only have Internet Explorer, so I can use Browzar at school which I can store on my mobile harddrive or USB stick. Simply put the Browzar executable on it and it works. It has only 1 file, so you can’t forget any files it might need to work except for the executable.
And the last good thing about Browzar is that it automatically blocks all popups. Which can be disabled from the menu.

Browzar is available in 2 different styles; black:

And silver:

As you can see in the last screenshot, Browzar is available for more than just Windows. It is also available for Linux and Mac OS X.

My conclusion is that I really like Browzar and because of it’s limited featureset it can be well used to avoid several annoying things that are implemented on various sites, beit clean (read: legal) or dirty (read: illegal) sites.

As far as I’m concerned there is only one minor drawback attached to Browzar and that is the lack of a favorites feature. But such a feature would require Browzar to save something to a file, which is doesn’t do with anything, so that would compromise one of it’s most treasured features: the privacy. If you really want to have all your favorites with you, you could write a little HTML page which you open with browzar which contains links to all your favorite websites. Problem solved 😛

Thanks Frank!

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