kierandelaney.net

Burnout Paradise

Posted by Kieran - 31/03/08 at 01:03:29 pm

So I completed Burnout Paradise yesterday. Well when i say completed, I beat all the races and other events…. but I’m still only 70% of the way through! I’ve never played a game thats kept me so utterly engrossed before. Its the only game I’ve played pretty much for weeks, especially after i got fed up with the boring linear Resistance Fall of Man. Don’t get me wrong, RFoM is great in small doses, but once i completed it I’d had enough. There was nothing to pull me back, especially as the ridiculous difficulty curve of playing online meant I wasted quite a lot of time just getting repeatedly shot up.

Burnout’s different - i keep wanting to go back and redo the stunt runs. I want to own all of the roads. I want to destroy entire chunks of intersection.

The only annoying thing about the game is the once excellent soundtrack has began to get tired after hearing every song 6,000 times. Sony really need to pull it together and give us in game XMB so i can make some proper driving music playlists….

Anyway I found these maps which should help me edge ever closer to the magic 100%….

Smashes
Billboards
Superjumps

Wordpress 2.5

Posted by Kieran - 30/03/08 at 09:03:44 pm

Ok, so I upgraded the site to the next milestone 2.5 and we’ll see how that works out. I’m not really all that taken with the new dashboard but I fear change so i guess we’ll work that out.

The good news is simplelife and picturegrid still work - if only i had the time to go back and fix all the problems people have been having. I just realised three months ago i promised a new version of simplelife including full flickr support.

I’ll get on to that asap.

Heart Sick

Posted by Kieran - 28/03/08 at 01:03:44 pm

Started On: - 23rd March 2008
Finished On: - 28th March 2008

I’ll admit I was a little apprehensive before I read this book. Whilst I liked Silence Of The Lambs, I couldn’t really see the serial killer inside, serial killer outside dynamic being fresh or original… but i was utterly wrong.

I’ll go out on a limb and suggest this book is better than silence of the lambs - the sexual chemistry between Gretchen Lowell (the killer inside) and Archie (her surviving victim) twists things nicely, and their relationship is carefully built through a series of interleaving flashbacks that add to the story rather than contrive to “be different”.

A tensely plotted novel, each chapter adds intrigue, carefully layering the story up until the stinging climax, with all characters in some kind of mental anguish - nobody is perfect, everybody is damaged goods. Realistically painted every character is believable and by the end of the book I actually cared what happened to them, which doesn’t happen often.

The best testament to this novel is that the second has been finished and a third is in the works - these won’t be cash ins, these will be continuations to an engrossing, disturbing and genuinely terrifying story.

Religious Hypocrites Are The Best Hypocrites

Posted by Kieran - 26/03/08 at 12:03:40 pm

Man, I just love people who preach one thing whilst doing another. Take the current debate on stem cell research between the government and the catholic church. Essentially they are against creating and destroying something smaller than the full stop at the end of this sentance because…. well I don’t really know. They claim its to “protect life” but the whole purpose of this bill is to allow scientists the oppurtunities to find cures for diseases such as parkinsons and cancer.

For example this article details:

A potential cure for Parkinson’s disease has come a significant step closer today with a study showing that it is possible to treat the degenerative brain disorder with cells derived from cloned embryos – a development condemned by the Roman Catholic Church.

Dr Kieran Breen (nice to see he spells it correctly) adds:

“Stem cell therapy offers great hope for repairing the brain in people with Parkinson’s. It may ultimately offer a cure, allowing people to lead a life that is free from the symptoms of Parkinson’s.”

So why would you try and stop that? Why would you try and remove the one hope people have of escaping the shackles of this dreadful disease? I wonder what kind of God would be happy with his loyal subjects and cardinals campaigning to condemn others to a death sentance?

Finding a cure for Parkinsons, or Cancer or any other disease would be a modern miracle - not like something that may or may not have happened 2000 years ago in a much altered badly translated book about a dusty place know one can really pinpoint. A miracle with real tangible proof. Something that would benefit hundreds of thousands, millions even - not just the few people who happen to need a crutch to get through life. But then I guess only Catholics are allowed miracles.

Its not the first time they’ve been against Science. Galileo was threatened with death by Catholics when he claimed the earth was not the center of the universe. People were horribly tortured and put to death by Catholics for suggesting the earth wasn’t flat. Even today it continues, with the spread of African Catholicism condemming the continent to over population and helping to spread AIDS wide and far - all because of a morbid irrational fear of a little piece of rubber.

Perhaps the real problem is that people today are being guided by an organisation with an appaling human rights record that was started before the world was a sphere and that has no relevence in todays society.

Catholicism certainly shouldn’t be trying to dictate my chances of a cure should I be struck down by Parkinsons.

Aligning Images With Wordpress

Posted by Kieran - 25/03/08 at 08:03:14 am

Its been a while since I geeked up. I’ve been working the equivelent of one and a half full time jobs, and accidently bought a playstation 3 so geekness (unless it involves burnout chains 8 long) has taken the back seat (see I’m so enraptured by Burnout Paradise on our 46″ HD screen that I’m even talking through driving analogies!)…

So yeah - Picturegrid and SimpleLife are still in development, I made some changes this morning in fact!

It occured to me that my book entries looked a bit ugly - book cover, dates and review. Simple and plain, but a bit naff…. What if I could align the book cover and have it float inside the text? It got me thinking about some other posts where the image is small enough to float inside a paragrah of text….

Turns out its easy, if you’re happy editing the css of your theme….

Firstly you have to set up the right and left “styles” - the margin and padding help keep everything tidy, whilst the display: inline tag makes the text flow around it.

img.right { padding: 4px; margin: 0 0 2px 7px; display: inline; }
img.left { padding: 4px; margin: 0 7px 2px 0; display: inline; }

You’ll also need to be using the following somewhere in your themes css….. now you could put the float tags inside the img.left/right styles but then they’d only be available for images aligned left and right. Set seperately, you’ll be able to quickly set anything to the left or right (although text won’t float around it).

.right { float: right; }
.left { float: left; }

So I guess there are plenty of examples now throughout my blog… all you need to do is insert the image tag with class=”left”.

<img src="animage.jpg" title="Yada" alt="Yada" class="left" />

For example this image is floating on the right - i used class=”right” so that it floats lovely and inline with the text floating all around it. Its quite a simple little fix that improves the layout of a post dramatically, which I’ll probably use on nearly every image i post - obvious exceptions are big images, or special images or image which plain just don’t fit inside text.

The Wasp Factory

Posted by Kieran - 18/03/08 at 01:03:47 pm

Started On: - 10th March 2008
Finished On: - 16th March 2008

This is one of the best modern horror novels I’ve read in some time - given that this is a debut, its all the more stunning for its realisation of isolation and parental manipulation however subtle. The more I read, the more I became engrossed - such is the power and emotiveness of the writing that you begin to root for the protaganist Frank, who by his own admission (repeated in the blurb) has killed three people by the age of 17.

The quality of the writing is excellent at all times, and not once does the story appear tired or fall on standard horror cliches. Instead a series of inventive set pieces add to the gently disturbing sense of claustrophobia and angst experienced by Frank building up to a crescendo at the end of the book.

The Intruders

Posted by Kieran - 10/03/08 at 08:03:35 am

Started On: 25th Feb 2008
Finished On: 9th March 2008

This book is teaming with ideas. Like a few recent thrillers, it doesn’t try too hard to give you all the answers or explain away things that aren’t really important to the story. It is what it is, it happens, deal with it. You only ever know what the lead character knows helping add to the tension as the character crashes wildly from one discovery to the next, in a permemnt state of confusion.

There are a few flaws - some things that we really should have had explained are missing - and if i was the lead character i don’t think i’d be satisfied with the answers i had.

However the writing is fast and tight and the action scenes detailed and pacey.

This is a well written book, and an intelligent book. All too often in fiction the answers are spelled out across the page - but not here - this book though uses its secrecy to its advantage. A little more polish towards the end and this would have been excellent.

Getting Connected To Dead

Posted by Kieran - 04/03/08 at 01:03:38 pm

Sometimes I wish I had a warrant card and was a fully paid up member of the filth - I’d spend all day cruising the roads looking to take down muppets swerving with reckless abandon between lanes, cutting people up and braking far too late all because they’re yapping away on their mobile phones, hand glued to ear.

I’d also ruthlessly pursue all those with bluetooth earpieces, because they look like dickwads.

In ASDA last week we saw a guy noisily concluding a business deal whilst buying smoked salmon. Obviously he was trying to give over a sense of importance. I mean no one else in their right mind would be screaming down their bluedick ear piece concluding a sale in the middle of a supermarket. Unfortuately he just came across as a dickhead, mainly because he’d just sold 20 cases of sunglasses to a chain of £1 shops. BIG BUSINESS!