I look flabby around the waist which I HATE SO MUCH, I plan to vacation in Turkey this summer and have to tone up before then!

A work friend (who is very fat and needs to loose weight) suggested I try a fast weight loss program called Fat Loss for Idiots that she told me she is using to loose weight FAST with their dieting program!

Apparently she’s been using the weight loss program diet advice for 4 weeks and on average has lost 6lbs a week without feeling hungry (she says it’s not a starvation diet). That’s 24lbs or almost 2 stone (if I remember the conversion correctly).

My friend must be 10 stone to 15 stone over weight, so I honestly didn’t notice the 2 stone weight loss until she told me about it, (she’s been on about 50 diets since I met her) though for just a month on the weight loss program 2 stone is very good rate of weight loss. If she continues at this rate it will only take 5 months to lose 10 stone (which would make her my normal sort of body weight).

Anyway, back to my fat ass which naturally is my main concern

I signed up for the weight loss program 2 weeks ago and followed the diet directions (mostly, they are easy to follow ) and have lost 8lbs so far!

I’ve not felt hungry all the time on their diet like I normally do on what could be called fad diets, there’s been a few times where I’d have killed for a cream bun, but because I don’t feel starved all the time I’ve been able to stave off those cravings easily so far and mostly stick to the diet.

I’d say this is a natural/safe way to loose weight fast, there’s no weird foods to eat, like only eat tofu or something

I’d be very happy to loose 1 stone, (which I think will be easy to achieve) though would be great if I could loose 2 and a 1/2 stone, so wish me luck.

You can find the easy weight loss program at the Fat Loss for Idiots website.

If you sign up for the program and loose weight (or don’t) please post a comment below, would love to hear how others are are doing trying to loose weight. I’ll add to this in a few weeks time to let my readers know how I’m getting on.

Call me a fool. Please.

As you might have guessed I fell utterly, deeply in love with the World of Warcraft. Any time not spent researching (generally in the wee hours of the morning) was spent exploring and leveling in the amazing world that the guys at Blizzard have created.

Everything about this game is phenomenal: the quests, raids, the scenery (early in the game other players routinely said things like, “Wow, this game is beautiful”), the interface, and even the music. Sometimes I would go into a building owned by the Alliance merely to admire a certain theme in World of Warcraft.

I even made good friends: I found people both from my own area and the Chicago area who were in to the game of WOW. We’ve exchanged e-mails so we can meet up. I’m also interested in keeping up relations with my readers (and thus people who are interested in the same things that I am).

The other day while playing WOW, everyone decided to abandon the normal leveling quests and start huge raids on enemy lands. The sad thing is that the servers went down a couple of time for maintenance, talk about bad timing.

In my own raid group, we had got together two raiding parties amounting to almost 80 players, intending to storm Kalimdor as we had done earlier in the week. The first time, we made it to the very heart of Durotar (one of the main enemy areas) before being slaughtered by high-level NPC guards.

Unfortunately, just as the massive army that we had made today arrived at the gates of the Barrens, the World of Warcraft server shutdown message came on!

Everyone cried out “Apocalypse NOW” and “At least we’ll die together” and all kinds of other silly things. It was great. But that was not the end. A few hours later, the server was back up, and this time the guys at Blizzard had tossed some impossibly difficult enemies at the gates of Stormwind (capital of the humans) and everyone tried to take them out. Unfortunately, I don’t think that even with all of our combined efforts that a single one of those guys were destroyed..

Get the World of Warcraft game.

The hype is justified.

Update: I’ve been playing this online game for what feels like years now and the World of Warcraft update Wrath of the Lich King that came out late last year (January 2009 now) took the game to new heights. When the other addon The Burning Crusade that gave us the Outlands was released we leveled our level 60 characters to level 70 to open new raids culminating in the Black Temple, the same was true with the Wrath of the Lich King we had to level to 80 fast if we wanted to be the firstto complete the new 25 man raids!

When the Burning Crusade was released a friend I’d met through WOW let me use a leveling ebook from Zygor Gaming Guides, it made leveling to level 70 so much easier so I bought a copy as well. I have many online WOW friends who play a similar amount of time as me that are still leveling their first level 80 character while I’ve got 3!

Highly recommended you buy the ebook for fast leveling to level 80.

Cya in game.

First up: Creative Writing for Game Design.

Then later tonight I have Graphics File Format and Data Compression Techniques.

Well, the writing class is going to be odd as hell, it’s with an English teacher who has some wonky ideas

And as for the graphics file format class…I swear, that teacher always turns CS classes into math classes

Up for today, I get Design and Analysis of Algorithms, Advanced Mechanics, and History of Film and Animation. I’m pissed off at the latter, since in addition to being a 3 hour class on Wednesdays, I also apparently have to go in every Friday and watch more films!

Anyone else starting up school, and/or are taking any interesting classes?

25 arrested in dollar-store ID theft ring

…

A three-month investigation of the Governor’s Fraudulent ID Task Force, “Operation Dollar Store” targeted 14 dollar-stores across the Valley suspected of selling cell phones activated with false identities to people who claimed they had no legal identification.

Authorities believe some of the phones,… were used to facilitate organized crime operations. Similar phones are widely used by … fake id manufacturers,…

…

It could be months before authorities determine which identities belonged to actual people.

“It’s impossible to tell, and that’s the frightening part,” Morrison said. “Some of these were real victims in the sense of identity theft and some were fraudulent names. It’s going to take a while to see who are the real victims.”

…

OK I can see that selling cell phones activated with a fake ID is a big problem, untraceable phones are important to those involved in crime. But what I don’t get is the comment-

Authorities believe some of the phones,… were used to facilitate organized crime operations. Similar phones are widely used by … fake id manufacturers…

Since when are cell phones important to fake id manufacturers? Most of them operate perfectly legally on the internet selling Fake IDs.

Why would a legitimate business need untraceable cell phones, am I missing something here?

Seems like the Governor’s Fraudulent ID Task Force is trying to give those who make fake IDs a bad name.

More about ID Cards.

SEGAMAT: Malaysians will soon get to have personalised registration number plates for their vehicles, by paying an extra fee.

“However, there are still some finer details which we need to look into before Malaysians can apply to have their own personalised registration number plates,” Transport Minister Datuk Seri Chan Kong Choy said here.

“We are also looking into the formats for the plate, whether to allow names, numbers or both,” he said after opening the Segamat Road Transport Department branch office here yesterday.

The Road Transport Department (JPJ) has submitted the proposal to the ministry for evaluation.

Imagine that, in Malaysia personalised car number plates are currently NOT available where in the west it’s the norm (at least I assume it’s the norm?)!

I wonder why they’ve never introduced them until now, would be interested in a comment if anyone knows the history of this?

So I get to the airport at around 8 and they say to me – we overbooked your flight would you mind taking a flight tomorrow morning?

I looked over and there was a family on stand by and I thought [I didnt want to split them up but darn it I am trying to get to a party tonight].

The airline staff saw that I was hesitant and said that in the morning I would fly 1st class, get a voucher for $400.00, and have hotel stay for the night at the airport hotel- so then I said SOLD!

Finally its morning and I OVER SLEPT!!!!! I high tail it down to the terminal area for boarding and they say there is a 30 minute cut off for boarding and luggage. The guy lets me pass but says that my luggage may not make it. I panic and tell him to do what he can.

I run to the security area, strip and show ID well wouldnt you know it that my DL is expired (cuz I just had a birthday and it didn’t come in the mail yet) this was not a problem the night before (mind you). I tell the main staff member the situation and they gave me a full body search.

At that time it was about 10-15 minutes before take off- and I was running like the family on home alone but I was not laughing. I made it to the gate and boarded while huffing and puffing.

I arrive in Vegas, get my baggage and meet with friends who were nice enough to pick me up. We went straight to the convention center which was packed!

For the rest of the day we checked out what CES had to offer and also did some work interviewing people. After that was over we arrived at the big azz home that was rented for us and relaxed a bit. CES has gadgets upon gadgets but it was the floor with the cars that got me revved up. They were so hawt and all kinds of tricked out.

Basically for the part of the week that CES was going on it was work by day and party by night. We went to Ziff Davis Party, MTV/Microsoft Party & WITI/PMS Party all of which were a blast. Especially the hot tub *wink wink*- what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.

Nah it wasn’t too crazy but it was so much fun hanging with my girls again.

Perhaps, an even better question, is if gamers prefer gameplay or graphics in their games? I believe there have been several releases that have allowed gamers to provide an answer to this very question. My analysis of Half-Life 2 and also an outsider’s impression of World of Warcraft (WoW) are below.

Let’s start with Half-Life 2

Here, we have a game that has been in development for a very long time and followed by a long release delay. Even though, it has nice features and one of the best single-player stories I’ve seen in a long time, the engine and it’s features have become quite dated now. Even if it did release last year, FarCry’s graphics and other features put it to shame.

Regardless, if I were to pick between FarCry or Half-Life 2, I would have to go with Half-Life 2 for sure. Why? Because the gameplay and story was just more fun to play. I really felt like I was a character in a movie, which had a decent story and held on to it. One of the worst things we see many games do, is that they start out with a nice story and then they take it off on some other mutant or psycho tangent.

So, score one for gameplay. FarCry had better graphics, but Half-Life 2’s gameplay will bring me back.

Now, let’s look at World of Warcraft and EverQuest 2

Both MMORPG games released close together. I had the chance to really play EverQuest 2 and learn it’s gameplay and graphics, but I denied a chance to play WoW after a failed attempt to get into the open beta (thanks GameSpy for the lame exclusives you had on World of Warcraft). Most of my arguments against WoW is really with it’s low-poly graphics engine. Although, there are many out there that would argue against me in order to defend WoW, they end up admitting the same conclusion in the end.

With EverQuest 2, my biggest complaint was with the gameplay. It just wouldn’t cut it at all as a single player and fails even more as an MMO, IMO anyway. It did have some nice graphics, which didn’t look low-poly, no matter how small the creatures were. But, it lacked the feeling of being a unique character and the missions and combat system within the stagnant environment really drags the gameplay down to a waste of money.

So, if I was really interested in playing one of these, I would most likely get my money and enjoyment out of World of Warcraft, over the waste of time in EverQuest 2. I think the middle-road MMORPG that offers a blend of both, will be the upcoming Guild Wars. But, more on this in the future.

To summarize then, for me, I would go for gameplay over graphics. But, there is a point where I draw the line with graphics. Since, I only have limited time to play (with work and family requiring time), I can be pretty selective. But, there are many others out there in the same boat.

This means that game developers really should take a break and analyze what gamers are really looking for in a game. As the next generation games are now a here generation, it’s time to look forward to another evolution to where game developers get with it, and start providing the right mix of features and deliver what gamers really want. Hopefully, in the process, we’ll see a shakeout in the industry where the copy-cats and wannabes fade off, leaving the real game developers that have the gamer in mind, rather than profits. Somewhere in the future, a game is coming to where we don’t have to make a choice between gameplay or graphics.

Until then, I’ll keep my eye out for the first game to satisfy all of the categories that would make a great game.

BTW, what would you choose?
Gameplay or Graphics?

Ok, I managed to finish Half Life 2 a few days ago and had time to digest the whole experience, now let’s do final comparison between these 2 games.

In the first round, FarCry totally dominated Half Life 2 on the graphical enhanced features like water and heat distortions. Althought FarCry had a nice physics engine, you could tell that it wasn’t fine tuned and released kind of sloppy. This was evident in watching how dead bodies would be all limp and sliding down slopes (no matter how steep or not it was).

Half Life 2 definately flaunts its physics engine by designing the whole gameplay experience around the use of the new gravity gun. You get this pretty early in the game and is used throughout the rest of the game. You’ll even get to see the “ragdoll” physics toward the end of the game. This is where you can see Half Life 2’s engine start to shine.

If playing isn’t enough to notice the physics changes, just start looking around through the new Hammer editor and the new model viewer. You’ll quickly see how physics has become very integrated and in a realistic way too.

Half Life 2 introduced various implementations of NPC co-op throughout the game, which really added to the experience and was one of my favorite parts. Well, maybe until a few skirmishes with your rebel squad. They had the worst aim and most of the time, my 4 NPC squad would only provide 20-40% support. They often got in my way, especially when a grenade was tossed my direction and they’re just standing there blocking the escape doorway. I was always happy when they all died. That’s just how bad they were. But, the game was designed so that more would join up with you along the way. I was real tempted to take them out myself.

Now, I know LucasArts is working on a game called Squad Commander, which puts you in command of a clone army squad and you’re able to designate where each soldier should go. I’ve seen screenshots and a nice video on it, and Half Life 2 only gives you a taste of NPC co-op mode. Squad Commander will do a full implementation of this, as the whole game is really designed for it.

FarCry really didn’t have much of a co-op feature, so there isn’t a whole lot to compare with it. FarCry did offer a really huge map (level) size though. It was large enough to fit an entire island in a single level. It provided for some pretty far distances, horizontally, more than any other game so far, including Half Life 2 .

Now, Half Life 2 has definately increased their map size quite a bit. In the game, you really felt this in a more vertical way. FarCry did this in a more horizontal way. Regardless, Half Life 2 really shows it off toward the end of the game and is enough to make you go “wow” and just enjoy the experience.

I have to say, that the storyline and the fun gameplay in Half Life 2 definately beats all other FPS games I’ve played. Valve actually had a good story and enough content to keep it moving smoothly all the way through. You didn’t find yourself eventually fighting a ton of mutants (e.g. FarCry, RtCW), nor did you find yourself in an alternate realm either (e.g. Half Life 1). It was really like playing a character in a sci-fi movie.

Another cool element Half Life 2 provided, was in the various puzzles you had to solve in order to proceed with the game. This wasn’t your typical FPS, where you just run through the entire game with guns ablazing and fragging everything in site along the way. No, you’ll definately need to exercise some problem solving.

One last feature that deserves some credit, is in the updated NPC models and their more lively faces. These new NPC characters are probably as realistic as you’re going to find for awhile. IMO, they even pwn those found in EverQuest II. You just look at the facial expressions, there are plenty that you see. I mean, you’ll see many different facial expressions on the major characters. Everything from feeling surprised to showing concern. You’ll see it in the cheeks, nose, mouth, chin, eyebrows, and even the 2 diagonal wrinkles between the eyebrows on the forehead in times of anger and concern. The mouths move perfectly with the voices too.

So, overall, I’d say that even without the features it failed to deliver in round 1, Half Life 2 definately comes out ahead of FarCry (and every other FPS game out there so far). Sure, the engine is a little dated for some of the graphical features, but it seems that only Valve can deliver quality gameplay and storyline that will definately allow you to totally emerse yourself into the game as if you were really there.

It’s definately worth the $50. I can’t say a whole lot for the Silver and Gold offers on Steam, which you really are just paying Valve again for the games we played with and own with Half Life 1.

There’s my take on the game, please share your experiences here after you’ve had your chance to experience it.

Reasons not to go to work today:

1. It is rainy outside.
2. My apartment is dry and warm.
3. I have an old friend staying with me.
4. She is not planning on getting up until 10:00.
5. The manager of our office took everyone out for dinner last night.
6. Then I stayed up late talking with my friend.
7. I slept on the couch.
8. It’s tough to get a good night’s sleep on the couch.
9. I am tired.
10. Very tired.

And yet, I sit here at my desk, noticing that there aren’t many others here. Maybe they made a list of reasons not to go to work while they were walking to the elevator and decided to go back home. Not that I considered that. Much.

If I had decided to turn around, I would have headed to Chicago Midway Airport Parking, parked my car for the day (short term parking of course) and spent the day in the airport pretending to be a passanger from, no going to some Exotic Travel Location. Can’t think of anything exotic now, just Jamaca comes to mind

Identity theft occurs when someone acquires key pieces of your personal information with the intent to commit fraud. Most commonly, they use this information to open new credit accounts and run up huge debts. However, this is not the only use of stolen personal information. It can also be used by someone looking to immigrate illegally, carry out terrorist activities, assume a new identity, or even to blackmail you or someone in your sphere of relationships.

How does a thief gain access to your identity?

While most people believe their greatest exposure to theft is through the Internet, experts say your mailbox (where thieves can obtain account statements, new checks and credit offers) and your garbage are the easiest ways criminals can access your personal information. The theft of your purse or wallet is also common. And then there’s those situations in which you willingly give out information over the phone (to someone who calls with a great offer) or over the Internet in response to a fraudulent email (commonly referred to as “phishing”).

Once a thief has your information, he generally has weeks (even months) before you become aware that there’s a problem. In fact, it may not become evident until you suddenly start receiving bills for revolving accounts you never set up, in towns you never visited, for items you never purchased. By this time, your credit report has become peppered with new accounts that you had no idea existed.

Once that happens, it’s a nightmare trying to undo the damage.

However, there are ways to be proactive and protect yourself. For instance, most credit card companies offer services that will monitor your account for unusual activity, notify you immediately if there’s a problem, and protect you from the fraudulent charges. The three leading credit reporting agencies in the United States: Equifax, TransUnion, and Experian, each offer monitoring services as well (although that’s all they do … monitor and inform).

There are other ways you can help minimize your potential risk as well:

Never share your banking information, particularly your personal password, with anyone unless you initiated the contact or you personally know the person you’re dealing with. Legitimate banks and other businesses will not call or email you requesting your personal account information. When you receive a request for your account information (whether it’s a bank account, a credit card account, or even a PayPal or eBay account), red flags should go up.

Always guard your PIN (personal identification number) at ATMs.

Sadly, you shouldn’t leave outgoing mail in your home mailbox for pickup. Either take the mail to the post office or drop it off at a secure postal mailbox.

Never carry your Social Security card in your wallet. If you have to carry credit cards in your purse or wallet, as most of us do, keep them to a minimum. Preferably a single card.

Never use your credit card on the Internet unless you’re initiating the purchase and it’s done through a secure connection. You can quickly identify a secure connection by checking for “https” in the URL or the lock icon in the corner of the screen.

Keep a list of your credit card and bank account numbers in a secure location, such as a locked safe or a safety deposit box.

Always shred personal documents. This includes all those credit card offers you receive in the mail, old account statements, billing statements, credit card statements, etc. And use a double-cut shredder to be on the safe side. You can pick one up at nearly any office supply store for under $40.00.

Keep track of your bank and credit card statements. Make sure they arrive every month and monitor them for any unusual activity. If a bill doesn’t show up, it can be an indication that someone has set up a change of address without your knowledge.

Order a credit report from all three agencies (Equifax, TransUnion, and Experian) twice per year, review them, and compare them carefully. If you discover any fraudulent entries immediately contact each agency, explain the situation and follow the proper procedures to correct the problem.

Identity theft is on the rise throughout the United States, but that doesn’t mean it has to happen to you. Take a few diligent precautions and your chances of never becoming a victim increase dramatically.

Want to check your credit report for free? Learn exactly how to get yours here: The Quickest, Easiest Way To Obtain A Free Credit Report