Some of the things you read on the internet are just so funny, you have to post them. Yes, it’s another sex related post, but it is on the gadgety side of things. Just…

So there I was reading UK:Resistance which then sent you onto this story about “Onacups”. The guy who wrote the wasn’t going to be juvanile about this, but there are some cases where you just have to be! I mean come on, the “deep throat” cup! That’s one I’m just got to buy! Gem gets about halfway down and she starts to choke!*

There are 4 other types of cup too, but I’m going to let you read the story for yourselves. Oh, apparently, Japanese men have little shlongs. *snigger*

*This is by no means meant to be a bragging post about the size of my willy. Honest**
**But it is big though***
***Either that and Gem has a small mouth and been leading me on a bit by making me feel a bit better about the actual size of it

I really hope not but I fear the worst may be happening!!

Fifa Street has personaly always been a bit of a chavvy excuse for a football game, with it’s flamboyant arcade-y style play, ott skills etc. the whole package symbolised the whole vibe that EA have been, and still are going for.  That ‘yoof-culture’ crap that tends to be spouted over by the Daily Mail when they have something to bitch about being wrong with civilisation.

As such, I’ve generally dismissed the previous two games as just being a cheap footy game, even after trying both of them out.

A few days ago, a demo of Fifa Street 3 appeared on the Marketplace.  Being a bit of a demo whore (well come on, it’s about an hours play time for free!) I grabbed a copy of it.  Once I got past trying to work out why the players looked like over-sized wobble head dolls, really feckin’ weird, I settled into my first game.

And got suitably hammered by the AI opposition.  No great surprise there, but then I found myself playing it again. A defeat again, but by a smaller margin. A third play through brings victory by two goals, and a better understanding of just how you’re supposed to play it.

Entertainment over I thought, but no, there I was pressing Start again.  Oh crap, I’m enjoying it!

I never thought I would do this, but I’m going to recommend that if you’re reading this and have a means to try out the game, go do it.  Imagine Mario Strikers, without the lava, and superkicks, and, well, Mario and company, in a playground or disused basketball court.  Then add in some of the msot well known names in football at the moment, and there you go.

Whilst I’m on recommendations, go try out Boogie Bunnies on Xbox Live Arcade too.  Stupidly similar puzzle concept, but very addictive play, and it has two player co-op and versus over Live.  Just look past the ridiculously cute rabbit-type things that’ll make your eyes bleed with their…cuteness.

Back-story since my last post; Still no word about this network investingation. I was told I would get a call back on Monday afternoon. Guess what? I never got it! What a shocker!

So when I got home from work, I had a very long phone call with a woman called Dawn at o2, went through the whole story again and told her that my direct debit has been cancelled and I’ll be cancelling the contract, with no charges to me etc etc. Something surprised my though during this phone call. Dawn was actually a very nice person, was very understanding and in an even bigger shocker, she was helpful too! So much so that she also gave me a solution to the problem!

She basically said that o2 would drag this out for weeks and weeks before the issue would be sorted. All that the network investigation would confirm is the amount of data that was downloaded, and that I would have to send my phone off to them for a thourough check-up. If there was nothing wrong with the phone, then I would have no choice but to pay the £1,000 bill and be well and truly stuffed up the shitter.

Dawn then pointed out that the best thing to do would be to put a charge on my acount of around £30 which gives me a download limit of 30gb for GPRS usage. This would be a one-off charge that she would back-date to before the downloads started. This will then credit the grand showing on my account and all will be sorted.
All she needed to do was get the department head to approve it.
5 minutes of being on hold and she returns.

The plan has been approved! She fills in the form while I’m on the phone to her and she also emails me a confirmation that she has sent the form to the powers that be. In a few days, I should see a credit on my account. I thanked Dawn so much, I actually threatened to find out where she worked and give her a big sloppy kiss!

There’s a lesson here kids. If you have a problem with something, don’t go in all guns blazing. Be polite, don;t get stroppy and if you do manage to let a few swear words slip through (like I did!) then apologise for it! You’ll find things get done easier and quicker that way!

Moving on, yesterday I logged into the o2 website and checked the “recent charges” part and there we have it! The credit has been applied! I am now a happy chappie! So when the bill arrives from o2, I’ll take it to the store, pay it, and get the direct debit re-instated. But take note, when the contract is up, it will be cancelled and I’ll be onto pay as you go. No more all-singing-all-dancing phones.

For now anyway…

I’ve come to the conclusion today that I need to stop buying new games. Period!

Fact is that at the moment, I’m just not finding enough time to devote attention to playing through and enjoying the ones I’ve got, never mind playing on Live (damn you Call of Duty 4 and your addictively good multiplayer!!!).  This realisation came about when I ordered three games during the January sales, namely The Godfather, Conan, and Stranglehold.  Games I wouldn’t pay full price for, but seeing as I got all three for around £50 altogether, not bad really.

I happily placed my orders, then next time I switched the 360 on, the pile of unfinished games sitting right next to it stared at me.  They actually did stare, quite unnerving it was too; you’d be amazed how menacing a DVD case can look in the wrong light!

In that pile is Assasain’s Creed, which I’ve only managed to get about a third of the way through; Lego Star Wars Complete Saga in which not even Episode One is finished; Half Life 2: Episode 2, the surface of which has only been scratched; skate., Oh Christ, skate! One of the best skateboard games ever with tons left to do and unlock; Smackdown Vs RAW 2007; the Wii is also waiting for Super Mario Galaxy and Resi Evil 4 to be completed.

My gaming time has (rightfully so) been cut dramatically since the arrival of little Ben, and to be honest this does sound a bit pathetic considering that my son is ever so slightly more important than anything else.  But then I don’t go out on the town anymore, I don’t smoke, maybe watch the occasional DVD or film with the lady.  Gaming is my main past time and the thing I draw most enjoyment from as entertainment in my free time, so I still like to indulge when I can.

And I’ve just added three more games on top of that!  Am I frickin’ mad?

Yes, I can imagine you all nodding away right now in agreement with that last question, but then this isn’t unique to me.  The last few years has I believe, seen an increase in the amount of desirable titles being released within a certain amount of time which brings us game players (I hate the word ‘gamers’, sounds a bit too MTV-generated-label for me) into the age old predicament of which games we choose.  Especially when you’re talking £40/$60 a pop, depending on which side of the pond you’re on.

I suppose the solution is a simple choice of quit gaming altogether (highly unlikely), bite the bullet and sell off those games that I just know I’m not going to get around to playing through properly, or stop buying new ones until I’ve got through the ones I have (we’ll have PS24/7 and Xbox720 by then!).

I wonder what the best price online is for Burnout Paradise right now?…

…Damn it, I’m doing it again!!!

Or am I about to get rodgered up the shitter by o2? I dunno.

Following on from this post about my GPRS charges last week, I decided to give them a call on Monday to see how things were going on the report that they had raised on the usage. No news yet. Still takes about a week to sort out. Or so they say. So I gave them a couple more days to get on with it.

I call them this morning, and I get a miserable woman called Rosie at their end. SO I explained what I’m chasing up, and guess what? Still no news! But she did send an email to the technical chappie to give me a call and let me know where he’s up to. That was about 9:15 this morning. It’s now 10:35 and still no call from him. I have a feeling that this is going to go on for ages.

I’ll give them until tomorrow, then I’m going to call them up again. If I still don;t get anymore news from them, I’m going to cancel the direct debit I have, and then I’m sure that they’ll

A/ Give me the answers that I want
or
B/ Send me to court for non-payment of £1,019.40

I also got an email from BT the other day saying that I went 15gb over my monthly usage. But being that they’re so kind, they wont charge me on this occasion. But next time they’ll charge me 30p per gb over the norm. That’ll teach me for downloading demos, games and movies from Xbox Live!

So far, technology-wise, and a few personal bits, 2008 has been a bit shit. I’m hoping that it can only get better, but that would be tempting fate, wouldn’t it…

You may now officially stick your phone and your contract and especially, your GPRS charges up your shitter.

Lots of love

Paul Sunter

Sorry, you’ll want a story to go with this won’t you! Well here goes…

Yesterday while sitting at my desk, doing the usual worky stuff (browsing the internet) I received a text message from o2. “You have gone over your normal monthly charge by £233″. W…T…F I exclaimed in quite a load manner, as you’d imagine. Obviously a phone call to o2 had to be made.

“Well sir, it turns out that on the 30th December, you downloaded 92mb worth of data on your mobile phone”. OK. This doesn’t make sense. The last time GPRS was used was on the 20th December when we had a power cut at work, and the phone was definatly not used on the 30th December. After asking what was downloaded…”we don’t know sir. We don’t have that information to hand” Helpful. Is there any way I can see what has been downloaded on my phone from here? “No sir. I don’t think anyone here knows how to use an XDA Orbit. Best you go to your nearest o2 store and ask them”. Oh for fucks sake.

Here’s a hint. o2 Customer service are about as useful as a chocolate frying pan. Don’t bother even thinking about ringing them.
So off I trot to the o2 store in Blackburn. Luckily, they were a lot more helpful than the *insert foreign country* person that I spoke to on the phone yesterday. They were very helpful infact. Umm, too helpful possibly.

“Umm, sir, your phone has now downloaded over 350mb of data and your bill is now currently over 1,000 pounds”. If you’re under 18, I would look away now. Actually, and surprisingly, I was quite calm about the situation! It was a funny reaction when I told Gem, when she’d trotted back from browsing in Next. Now I would deffinatly look away if you’re under 18…

FUCK OFF she shouted quite loudly! It was quite an amusing moment!

It turns out that my phone has been (apparently) downloading data without my knowlege. The bloke in the store had a root through my phone to see if anything was stored. It’d have a job though considering there isn’y even enough space to store 100mb, let alone 300mb! It “may” be a fault with the phone. If so, I won’t have to pay the bill. If it isn’t the phone though, I really can’t be paying over a grand for something that I have’t done!

A report is currently being done at o2 to see exactly what’s happening, but that’s going to take around 5 days. Cue much ringing of said company and chasing up!

Updates on this subject will be forthcoming!

No, really! According to a news peice on Sky News, some bloke called David Levy has penned a book called “Love and Sex with Robots: The Evolution of Human-Robot Relationships”, were he reckons that we’ll all be doing the dirty with robots by the year 2050. Even in 2006, a chappie called Henrik Christensen thinks we’ll all be “doing” robots in the even closer future. Like 5 years!

Apparently, ugly and fat people (i.e. me) will be so lonely and depressed that even real-life prostitutes won’t even want to take their money. Either that or “ladies of the night” won’t be around any more. So the only way for them to “get it on” will be to go and grab themselves a robot. With holes. Or sticky out bits. Depending on your preferences, obviously.

Now I’m going to go out on a limb here and assume that these robots ain’t going to look like that Caprica 6 Cylon from Battlestar Galactica. Yeah, that’s one robot I’d like to stick my…err…flash drive in her…umm…USB port. Or something. I mean, if you take that Honda robot that’s doing the rounds at the moment and try and make hot sticky love to it, you’re going to get chaffed. A lot…

Sorry, but it’s just one of those wierd things that you have to post about. And this is a site about tech stuff…

I think I may have just gone overboard!