I've recently been playing on an old Atari ST game called LARN. It's a Roguelike game from the middle of the eighties (oh the memories). A Roguelike game is basically a 2D dungeon crawler that puts a lot of emphasis on character levelling and the use of randomness. Examples of Roguelike games are Dungeon Hack, LARN, Fatal Labyrinth and of course Rogue.

Here's a little game play video I made a while back of LARN. The game can't compete with todays RPGs in graphics or sound but in game play and sheer playability it'll blow them out of the water.

I seriously feel old now, it's my Birthday and the big thirty is looming large.

I celerbrated in style in the pub last night and I now feel very hung over, I guess it's this age thing.

Anyway Happy Birthday to me!

Well it's done i've written a formal letter to the HR manager telling him that I would not be signing the new contract as it unduly punishes long serving members of staff.

We'll just have to see what happens next but from what I hear a lot of people aren't signing it.

I heard a great piece of gossip from one of our other business sites. The MD/CEO had a meeting with everyone and tried to threaten/coerce them into signing the contract. This person said it was important to the business, you know the usual crap but the staff weren't having any of it and the MD/CEO starting swearing and stormed off.

Can you really blame anyone for sticking up for themselves when a company comes in and tries to take things away from you without giving anything back?!

Can you also blame people for sticking up for themselves when an MD comes to have a meeting with you to discuss you losing money when the MD/CEO turns up in an Aston Martin DB9, that's a £120,000+ ($238,735+) sports car?!? We want to save money but I can drive a car like that, what a slap in the face.

The deadline for our signed contracts is looming large (Friday) and i've not decided whether to sign it or not.

If I sign it I lose the ability to gain an extra three days holiday and I lose sick pay for the first three days. There's also some vagueness on the two working hours clauses as well.

If I don't sign it then they can legally assume that i've resigned, they could then offer me the job again with the new contract. I suppose there's a chance they'll try to renegotiate the terms but then again they might not.

What to do, what to do!

It's the last time I buy Maxell DVD-Rs ever!

I just tried using a 50 spindle pack I brought in the tail end of last year and out of the 50 only 1 disk worked!

I accept that they'll be a couple of dodgy disks that's just the way it is but 49 of them!?!?!?!

When burning I kept getting a power calibration error or a couldn't read TOC. I know it's not Nero 6 because CDBurnerXP (freeware burning software, pretty cool one as well) displayed the same error message. I also know it's not the drive because i've got some really old Maxell disks and they burn fine so that leaves only the disks.

Anyone interested in CDBurnerXP check out their website.

http://cdburnerxp.se/home

I just got a call from a market research company on behalf of BT (British Telecom). That in itself isn't really that unusual for me because I get lots of market research companies from all over the world ringing me. For example Paris, Warsaw (Poland) etc etc.

The thing I find annoying and down right unacceptable is BT decided to pass my details on to a third party company with out my permission and then never even notified me.

Who do these big companies think they are? Can anyone be sure of where their personal data ends up? or whether it's even safe?