Andy McDandy Vent Page

Shortly after my recent post giving my personal thoughts of some Facebook games a post was made to check out another game, GreenSpace.  Make note of no spacing between the two words because if you do a search inside of Facebook with a space, you will get a game of same name but in a non-English language.

First I want to explain the system I use most.  It is a Acer Aspire 1690 laptop which came out in the days of Windows XP.  Operating system installed is Ubuntu 11.10 which is one of the most popular Linux distributions.

Now on to the game.

On my laptop, most flash games run slower than on my desktop and GreenSpace was no exception, in fact it appeared to be much slower than other flash games.  When you start the game you are presented with the YouTube opening video of the game, to skip over this simply click on the “Play” tab along the top.

After the video you are asked a few questions like your name then the game walk through begins.  Remember me saying that flash games run slower on my laptop, well the locked in 5 minute walk through took close to 20 minutes and was extremely painful to endure so if your system is slow, you have been warned.

The animations are well done and I do really like this game however it would be nice to turn off some of the animations like the different animations that occur when clearing the various items, this would help those with slower systems.  With the extreme slowness of this particular game, I would much prefer to play a standalone copy that did not require logging in to Facebook until game exit when changes made are uploaded.  Not having a constant connection to the game server could help speed up the game.  It would be great to get my favorite Facebook games in a download format through such services as Desura and Steam, would even pay for such option.

With the slowness aside, this does appear to be a good game to play but for me, I won’t be playing it everyday like the other games just because of the extreme slowness that I experienced.  If a banner was ever available for people to use on their site, I would definitely add it to the top of this blog site.  I am all about advertising products I like so anyone from GreenSpace reading this, if you ever get a nice banner ad created for people to use, please let me know.

Hello all,

It’s been awhile since my last post so I thought I would comment on some great games I have become addicted to on Facebook…Thanks mom!

The first game is Double Down Casino.  This game has 4 types of games but I only do the slots.  There is numerous different slot machines to choose from, all having a different theme and costing different amounts to play.  My favourites is the haunted house and the fireworks.  Everyday you visit you spin for more money which is nice for those who don’t know when to stop and end up broke.

The next game or should I say games since these all have some kind of tie-in with each other like getting to a certain level will unlock a prize in another game.  These games are created by Wooga and they are: Happy Hospital, Monster World, Diamond Dash and Bubble Island.  Great games so check them out.

For those who like scrabble, check out Words with Friends.  I have been sucked in to many games against family and friends over the past couple of weeks now and don’t worry if you are not good at making words because there is a site called http://scrabblefinder.com that will take your inputted letters and create any and all words.  If you get a blank tile, input a ? and the word generator will try all letters of the alphabet with the other letters you have.

Last but not least is Slotomania.  A nice slots game with close to 24 different slot games and you get new coins to claim every 4 hours.

Well check them out and if you are looking to play any of the above games with me, my profile is http://facebook.com/ilovebowling

Take care.

Yesterday I posted a small mention of heading to Niagara and my intention was to keep adding to the post through out the day from my Blackberry but unfortunately my Blackberry didn’t charge over night and therefore I had to turn off my cell to help save battery life until I could find a place to charge it.

Around 6:40am, my friend arrived to pick me up with my bicycle and we headed over to the Oshawa GO station.  When we arrived at around 6:50am there was no GO Transit employee selling tickets.  One person mentioned this to the GO Transit Security Officer who was there.  The officer appeared surprised and after a few minutes got in his car and left, never to be seen again.  My friend spoke to the VIA ticket person and was told that if no one shows up just to get on the GO train anyways but both my friend and I felt that would be wrong so at 7:20 when a GO bus came in to the station, he and I went over and asked the lady if we could purchase our tickets from her to which she kindly agreed.  I must say that I wish I had gotten her name so I could mention it to GO Transit because of all the GO bus drivers I have dealt with, this women was probably the most friendliest one in a very long time.

7:24am my friend and I got our tickets from the bus driver and we proceeded to grab our belongings from the van and went on to the train.  We chose the handicap car since there is no bar preventing bicycles from easily getting on and off the train but when the conductor came on board, he told us we could not be there.  He was not very friendly either, more bit of a grouch but what I don’t get is I have NEVER EVER seen anyone in a wheelchair get on the train of all the times that I have taken the GO since the wheelchair ramps were first brought out.  If GO Transit doesn’t mind people bringing bicycles on to the train in the other cars then they need to remove that damn middle bar in the door way to make it easier for bicycles to get on and off.  Leaving the bar in place is basically telling cyclists that we are not welcome on the train and that we should use our own car to take our bicycle to where we plan to bike ride.

We arrived at Union and transferred on to the Niagara bound train.  This train has two cars (should have been three going by the number of people with bicycles) where there is bike racks on the lower level and guess what…no middle bar in the doorway…if they can remove the middle bar on these cars then surely it can be done on the regular cars.

The train ride was quite pleasant and I now have an idea of some other areas I would like to bike around but not sure if I would take the GO unless they make it easier for cyclists to get their bicycle on and off the Lakeshore train.  In fact, I as well as other cyclists I spoke to, feel that the Lakeshore train on the weekends should have at least 1 car with the bike racks since most cyclists will travel by Train during this time.  I was also trying to get a group of friends together for this trip and if we did, we would either have to split everyone up amongst the train cars since the only area for the bikes can only hold 2 bicycles or everyone on one car with our bicycles blocking the seats and/or isle way which is not being respectful to other riders.

Shortly after 11am we arrived at the Niagara Falls train station and boy was I disappointed.  I would have thought that a station in a high attraction area like Niagara Falls would have a much more elaborate looking station.  Surely VIA and GO Transit could work together with Niagara Falls Casino, Marineland and other tourist attractions in the area to generate enough funds to improve the station.  One thing the station does need is some kind of shelter over the platform because if I was one of those people I saw using a walker and it happened to be raining when we arrived, they would have been completely soaked by the time they got to the actual station.  Why on earth the train stops so far away from the station is beyond me.

As we were leaving the train there was some nice people handing out maps for the area, this was great for someone like myself who has never been to the area.

My friend and I biked south along the Niagara Falls Parkway making short stops along the way so I could snap a few pictures before my cell phone completely dies.  Check out the photos below.  The Niagara Falls Parkway path is very long with no stores, water fountains or roadside vendors to purchase fluids from so if you decided to venture along this path South of the attraction area, make sure to pack plenty of extra bottles of fluids to drink.  I am surprised that along this very long route, Niagara wouldn’t have at least water fountains every couple km for people to refill their water bottles.  If the homes along this path are not on city water, the fountains could still get the water from the Niagara river right there with a filter system inside each fountain.

After riding along the parkway I was starting to feel extremely exhausted, mostly due to the problem just stated of no where to purchase more fluids so my friend and I decided to bike West along Sherk Rd. over to Sodom Rd then ventured North to Lyons Creek Rd where thankfully there was a chip truck selling bottle water.

After getting some water in to me, we ventured West again along Lyons Creek Rd to Stanley Avenue and proceeded North to McLeod Rd.  During this time I wished I had bought 4 or 5 bottles of water at the chip truck.  Had to make one stop along the way to take a 5-10 minute break to rest my back and knees which were really starting to hurt.

Once arriving at McLeod Rd, we proceeded West again to Drummond Rd and took another break at the 7 Eleven where I purchased two Gatorade2 950ml drinks for $4.  I drank almost both of them I was so thirsty.  After a 10 minute break we then went North up Drummond Rd to Lundys Lane and stopped at McDonalds so my friend could eat.  I was going to eat but after drinking all that Gatorade, I didn’t feel like eating anything so I just had a large Coke and boy was that refreshing.  We also managed to get a table that had an outlet so I could charge up my phone which was almost dead.

We stayed at McDonalds for at least 40 minutes then proceeded back to the train station.  We went East along Lundys Lane to Stanley Avenue, North up Stanley to Morrison since there was construction signs of Bridge Street being closed and proceeded East to Victoria then North to Bridge and East to the train station.

Arrived at the station around 6:30pm where we stayed until the train left at 7:20pm.  The total distance was 42km and that consist of both riding and walking.  Last night I was sure that I would be in extreme pain from this long ride but to my surprise my knee pain is at it’s usual level.  My lower back is hurting a bit more than usual but no where near as I was expecting.  My shoulders are much more stiff than usual and poor me, I don’t have a women in my life to give me a nice shoulder massage.

Well there you go, that was my day trip to Niagara Falls.  Will I go again, you bet but unless GO Transit changes their way and either add a bicycle car to the weekend Lakeshore trains or remove that damn middle bar in the doorway, I may actually look at driving to Niagara with my bike instead which would not only mean a loss of my $50 but also that of every friend I happen to gather up for the next trip.

It is around 7:40am and I am now on the GO train waiting to depart Oshawa to Union where I will transfer to the Niagara bound train and do some bike riding and picture taking with this new Blackberry 9300.

Hello everyone, I knows it’s been some time since my last post but no fear, I have a lot of post ideas in mind to do and today it is my personal opinion between iPhone and Blackberry Curve.

So around 1 month ago I did a stupid thing, I hopped in to my little pool with my iPhone in my swim trunk deep pocket and well the phone died.  I tried for a month to find someone who could fix it but everyone I took it to said it could not be repaired.  Recently a promotional event was taking place with my wireless provider Fido where I won $10 in Fido dollars which I used towards a new Blackberry Curve 9300 3G.  The Blackberry was cheaper than getting another iPhone by around $100 even with my $59 Fido dollars that I had already accumulated over the past year.

The iPhone was the 3G 8GB model and I enjoyed it very much, mainly because of the enormous amount of apps available.  I also loved the nice large touch screen however I did have some problems with the phone.  One was some apps crashing due to not enough memory.  Another was choppiness when switching through the menus and running the apps.  The touchscreen when typing was also a pain at times since my fingers are bigger than the width of the touch screen keyboard.

Now as for the Blackberry that I just received a couple of days ago, it is certainly different.  I have never had a phone that has a small little sensor button for scrolling through the menus.  At times I find it annoying but I am getting more and more use to it.  The lack of apps that I had over on iPhone is somewhat disappointing but I am sure in time those missing apps will eventually arrive for the Blackberry.

I did have to do some manual setup in order for two apps to work, Battle.net Mobile Authenticator and The Weather Network Weather Eye.  I had to venture in to SETUP -> OPTIONS -> DEVICE -> ADVANCED SYSTEM SETTINGS -> TCP IP and put check mark in to the two APN setting boxes as well as input internet.fido.ca in the APN field.  With that, both the above apps would not work for me.

The keypad on the blackberry is a little small for my liking given the size of my fingers but being able to feel the keys does allow me to type a little faster since there is no more worry about also hitting another key like I usually did on the iPhone.  The auto on/off feature on the Blackberry is very nice.  I have mine set to auto turn off around the time I go to bed and to turn back on around the usual time I get up.

There is one thing I would like to see added to the Blackberry and that is a constant num-lock on feature because I hate having to press the alt button to type each number when inputting a message that contains multiple numbers in a row.

When it come to charging, both come with a wall outlet device that the USB cable can be plugged in to, unfortunately Apple did it right when they put the USB plug on top of the device where as the one for the Blackberry, the plug is on the side which could interfere with other power cords depending on your power bar.

Overall I think I am liking the Blackberry more than I did the iPhone but both phones have their strengths and weaknesses.  One weakness they both share is neither of them have a native Linux desktop software.

Last night my cousin and I went to see Video Games Live in Toronto at Massey Hall.  This was a first concert type event he had been to and was my first time inside of a performance theatre.  I almost didn’t go because I had no one to go with but my cousin agreed to go with me and I think he was happy he did.

Now there was a pre-show but we did not make it in time to experience it and the cheap seats were all taken so we had to take the more expensive floor seats, something that both of us couldn’t really afford, more so myself but my cousin was nice enough to cover the difference for me as a belated birthday gift.

The seats we got were right next to the sound mixer guy which was both cool and also annoying.  The annoying part was the little lights over the board for the gentleman to see his dials and buttons but I did my best to avoid capturing those lights in my photos and videos on my iPhone 3G.

They had a costume competition where a little girl dressed as Luigi won.  During the pre-show, they apparently had a Guitar Hero competition where the winner came on stage later in the night and played the Van Halen song Jump on expert mode.  This guy did amazing, getting something like 240,000 points.

There was also a few singers on stage for different game songs that had lyrics, all the singers were great including the choir positioned behind the orchestra who were also fantastic.

As with any show there is a negative and the only negative I found was the seats themselves.  The seating at Massey Hall is definitely not meant for people with wide shoulders but at least the seats are padded and they swung back a little.  I didn’t expect them to swing so I thought I had broken it since I am a heavy person at 340lbs.

They had a gentleman play a Super Mario Medley on the piano with the first half of the medley being played blindfolded, it was truly amazing watching this guy.

Two people (guy and a girl) were picked out of the audience to play Frogger with the winner getting a prize pack.  The guy (age 30) didn’t know what Frogger was or how to play so it was funny to see him walk in to the vehicles and jump in to the water.  The girl who was younger knew Frogger and was of course the winner.  The guy also received a gift but it wasn’t mentioned what is was.

A draw was held right after intermission where the prices was, Microsoft motion sensor thing, PSP, 3DS and a PS3.  I didn’t enter because I had not clue where the entry box was.

There was a tribute to the people in Japan where the orchestra and the creator of the show played music to all the Mega Man games and they ended the show with the Portal song.

I hope they come back next year with new video game music like from Oil-Rush which has a few great musical pieces and hopefully they will include Oshawa as one of their stops while travelling across Ontario.  Plus hopefully one friend of mine who refuses to do anything fun suggested by someone else will get over his stubbornness and come along.

Well the third Humble Bundle is now over and once again it has proven that the 1% market share value that so many Windows lovers love to quote is absolutely incorrect.

Linux buyers paid an average of 3x as much as Windows buyers and 2x as much as Mac buyers plus there were more Linux purchases than there were Mac by around 10%.  This proves Linux is an operating system game developers should support.

Now this third bundle was not as successful in sales as the first two with just over $900,000 earned BUT we must remember that three of the games most gamers already own.  If those three games were not already owned by gamers then this bundle may have performed just as well as the previous 2.

I was lucky to scrounge up some money so I could purchase the bundle, unfortunately it was only $8.00 instead of $20 like I would love to have paid.  Paying less than $20 to me is kind of an insult to the game developers.  I just hope that if there is a bundle #4 that it either be announced or start on the first of the month when I am doing my tight monthly budget.  I don’t mind lowering a bill payment for a Humble Bundle purchase.

The Humble Bundle is back for a third time in a year and is once again looking like a hot seller even though one game is still in development and the other is a project that was cancelled when the financial backer dropped out.

All but the cancelled project will have a native Windows, Mac and Linux port.  The cancelled project however only has a Windows port but does come with the source code for those smart enough to to know how to port the game over.

The three complete games in the bundle look pretty good graphics wise and although they are not really my kind of games, I would love to make a purchase just to help support Linux gaming, unfortunately like the previous two bundles, this deal is released mid month, a time when I usually never have any income because of being on welfare.  I have sent in my request to please start having these bundles run at the first of the month or at least get some kind of notice out on the first that a new bundle is coming so people like myself can budget for it.  I did receive a reply thanking me for the idea but something tells me it won’t happen.

Well back to the bundle.  The games included in this bundle are: Trine, Shadow-grounds, Shadow-grounds: Survivor, Splot (not yet released), Jack Claw (the discontinued project).  In less that 24 hours, bundle #3 has over 70,000 sales for a total revenue of over $367,000.  The average payment people are making for this bundle is as follow: Windows – $4.24, Mac – $6.10 and Linux – $11.88.  That’s right, for the third time Linux gamers are donating double that of Windows and Mac gamers proving once again that the demand for native Linux games does exist.

If you wish to take part in this third bundle deal, head over to http://www.humblebundle.com then scroll down the page where you can input any amount you wish and decide how you would like your money to be divided between the developers and the charities.

Well I went ahead and performed an upgrade on my laptop taking my Ubuntu 10.10 to 11.04 Beta 1.  Now normally doing upgrades for any operating system, whether it’s Windows or Linux is usually a BIG no no because of the problems that will usually occur during or after the upgrade; However this was not the case this time.

The upgrade went flawless with no hiccups at all during the upgrade process.  After the upgrade, the only thing I experienced was the Ubuntu Software Centre not displaying the list of programs for any of the categories I clicked on or programs I searched for.  This however fixed itself after I rebooted the laptop and performed an update.  The update simply updated extra components that I guess did not get done during the upgrade step.

The unity side menu is nice although I do find that if a program is maximised to full screen, I am unable to get the side menu to scroll back out from the side until I take the program out of full screen.  Other than that one minor issue, I feel the unity desktop kind of gives Ubuntu a little more professional/pleasing look.

There is more mouse clicks now that one must do when browsing through the programs list which can get annoying if you are in a rush and I don’t really like that the programs menu will disappear after so many seconds of no mouse activity but hopefully there is a setting someone to change that.  Another thing I am not that pleased about is browser slider.  With this new Ubuntu, the standard wide slide you see along the right of your browser on long web pages is replaced by a very thin line.  If you want to scroll down, you need to hover your mouse pointer over a section of that thin line and a scroll button will appear with two arrows for you to scroll up and down but like the Unity program menu, this can disappear on you when you don’t want it to.

Overall, I like what I see, I just hope that come April 28th when 11.04 is officially released, the two or three little problems mentioned will be fixed or have an option to be changed by the end user.  If you have a spare machine I would recommend installing 11.04 and give it a try yourself.

I saw Wrestlemania 27 at Cineplex this past Sunday and overall I really enjoyed it.  Snooki was a shock to most people I think of how quick she moved in the ring, it’s just too bad that match was one of the quickest matches of the night.  The only match that was quicker was the 8-man tag match.

The order of the matches was a shocker to everyone.  The first match was Edge vs Del Rio, would love to know why it wasn’t left until later.  The biggest disappointment of the night was the Sheamus vs Bryan match being turned in to a Dark Match leaving the PPV viewers without any footage.  I have not yet watched last night RAW so I hope they had the match again on RAW.