Journals

A month has passed since I migrated. It only took two weeks for Malta to feel like home. It is even more beautiful than I remember. And so warm. I cannot believe I wasted one third of thirty years being cold and depressed in Sweden.

I started a new job. Colleagues are nice. They like to go out for drinks... maybe a bit too often. I should be careful.

I found a friend to go hiking with and I reunited with some nice people I met when I visited last winter. And I found someone to celebrate Christmas with.

I brought only one game with me, a chessboard, and I have already enjoyed some great games. Still... I think I will build a PC soon I miss the people I love that I left behind. I promised I will always come back to see them during summers, but I might go and see a couple of them before that. Still. Life feels good right now.

Winter hasn't even started and I am already sick and tired of it. There are so many things I want to do and people I want to talk to, and smile to, but I can't find the energy. The day ends before you even realize it has started! IS SOME SUNSHINE EVERY NOW AND THEN TOO MUCH TO ASK FOR??!! At least it's not as bad as a couple of years ago when my city had a total of two hours of sunshine in all of November because of clouds. I envy the bears - they are geniuses to sleep through it all.

I have always wanted to escape our Winter but haven't had the opportunity. I'll have to suffer Winter this year, too, but at least a milder version down in Croatia in December and Malta in January and February. They see more sun in the darkest month than I do in March or September, and I really look forward to seeing new places, though I think Christmas will feel lonely. Perhaps I should set my sight on NZ and Australia next year? What a dream to have summer twice a year!

(~0b11101000) & 0xFF

My latest project:
There was a screenshot here once

It's a low-power, silent, home server. It will serve my website and a couple of game servers. It's running FreeBSD and lighttpd. I put it together using these parts:
[list][li]Motherboard/CPU/GPU: Asus E35M1-I Deluxe - It's a Mini-ITX motherboard with an integrated dual-core AMD E-350 APU (CPU and GPU in one) running at 1.6 GHz. It's low-power and made for passive cooling. Has features (which are useless to me) like USB 3.0, 802.11n WiFi and Bluetooth 3.0. Built-in SATA 3.0 controller.[/li]
[li]2x4GB Kingston HyperX DDR3 1333MHz RAM - This as much and as fast memory as the motherboard supports.[/li]
[li]Antec ISK300-65 Mini-ITX case - Case with room for 2 2.5" drives and a slim optical drive and comes with a 65W fan-less power supply[/li]
[li]OCZ Vertex 3 Series SATA III 2,5" SSD - 120GB Max Iops - Max read 550MB/s write 500MB/s[/li]
[li]2x Enermax CLUSTER UCCL8 80mm case fan - These turned out to be louder than claimed in reviews, so I'm ordering new fans to replace these. Because the computer is extremely low-power I can run these at minimum speed.[/li][/list]

Nintendo 64 shopping spree! If you notice a 0.1 spam decrease it's because I'm playing
Star Wars Shadows of the Empire
Star Wars Rogue Squadron
Quake
007 The World Is Not Enough
Lylat Wars (Star Fox 64)
1080 Snowboarding
Extreme G
Body Harvest
Wipeout 64
Hybrid Heaven
Perfect Dark

This with a Rumble Pak, Expansion Pak (hooray, better graphics!), Controller Pak (about time I got one, can't save progress without one in several of the games I have) and a new controller (yellow).

I used to play Extreme-G 2 as a kid, the multi-player modes were great, I owned my brother at tank mode. Star Wars Shadows of the Empire is worth getting just for the first level (Hoth). The flying is really fun. The rest is pretty boring.

Can barely wait for it to arrive.

I'm neunzehn Jahre alt. I don't throw big birthday parties so what'll happen later today (which an hour ago would be referred to as tomorrow) is, my oldest sister and her kids are coming over for coffee and hopefully there'll be presents and some sort of cake.

Welcome back!
This is your 10000th login.

In 31 years, I'll reach 100 000 logins and there will be free ice cream (cloudberry and chocolate) for everyone.

5 mods that people need to start making
in response to a previous journal by Urby

Different Genre Mod
A great majority of Half-Life mods are FPSs. There are a few exceptions like HL Rally, Bumpercars, Flat-Life and International Online Soccer. Those were all great. I'd like to see a Half-Life rail shooter or flight simulator (with the Apache and the Osprey). Maybe a role-playing mod in the same style as Deus Ex and KotOR, but that'd require good voice acting.

The Oddworld cross over mod
With Gordon as Abe, scientists as Mudokon workers and G-Man as Glukkons.

The Deathmatch Mod
Mindless killing FTW. Regular HLDM doesn't do it since you have to reload your weapons, the maps are too large and the crossbow is too effective.

The Social Networking Mod
So you can add people you find in games to your Facebook friends list and Twitter about how much fun you're having. Don't worry, I am only joking.

Did I say 5 mods? I lied.

1) View my profile
2) Wait 8 seconds
3) Press F5
4) Look at my avatar
5) Comment

Today, my friend Ant and I successfully took control of TWHL. News post coming soon. Say goodbye to Penguinboy.

Dreamhack's over and I've woken up after a day's sleep. It was fun. Besides playing I listened to a number of lectures on topics such as Internet security, game development education, Soundation, making money on the web, and Josef Fares talking about a game he's designing. I also got to sit in the driver's seat of a Stridsfordon 9040C tank and talked to some of the recruitment officers from the Swedish army. When there were 8 hours left my graphics card's fan decided to die. Don't buy Asus. I'm now using a broken Nvidia 7800 and 800x600px resolution. Dreamhack broke its own world record, with 12 754 computers on the same LAN party. I was surprised at how good vegetarian food there was.

It's my eighteenth cakeday today. My first present was a bike, not a super fancy one but as long as it works I'm happy.

Joined: 23rd October 2007 (730 days ago) (2 years ago)
This is your 5000th login.

LOL prejudice
Edit: There were 4 screenshots here before Imageshack removed them... I think they showed Google Search's suggestions when I typed "Why are Asian/British/American/Swedish" and one was why are Americans afraid of dragons or something I'm sure it was hilarious

Yesterday I ate my sister's puff pastry.

No, seriously, I'm thinking of buying a Nintendo DS. My PSP is broken and the DS have some fun games. That's why I'm now asking TWHL DS players: is it worth the money?