Lunch at “Ramsays

As most of you know already I went to the UK in March for a week on holiday with my girlfriend Gloria. I decided to book a lunch at Gordon Ramsay’s first restaurant, the “Ramsay” in South Kensington. It’s a 3 Michelin star restaurant and neither me nor Gloria have ever been to any kind of upper class restaurant like this one.

This will be a precise tale of what went on that day and I hope to remember everything that happened.

We arrived 20 minutes early so we decided to have a walk near the Thames. We were both well dressed for the occasion. Maybe too much even. We saw people at the restaurant that looked like pimps with open shirts and chest hair poking out but that was an exception.

As the booking comes closer and closer my stomach starts to clench up with tension… I know it’s weird right… but having never been to anything so “upper class” you start asking yourself some questions like, which fork do I use first, how should I sit or how do I ask where the toilet is.

We enter the restaurant. It’s pretty small, probably 8-9 tables. A woman greets us and asks us our reservation name. I hear “reservation number” so I fumble for an answer and tell her I didn’t have a number only to realize a second later that she asked for my name. Well that started out well.

She takes my coat and my bag. She takes Gloria’s coat but not the bag. Never take a woman’s bag !

She walks us to the table. It’s a pretty small round table and I make Gloria sit and the waitress makes me sit. I was now in a psychedelic trance of stress mixed with what the f. and revising in my head what I would say to the sommelier (I didn’t want to buy wine because it would’ve raped my pockets).

So in walks the sommelier. You can tell they’re sommeliers because they have a golden brooch depicting grapes on their jackets. He asks us if we would like to see the wine list. I decline saying we won’t have any wine. He asks us if it’s a problem with alcohol used in the menu but I confirm that it’s not a problem and that we just didn’t want wine today. He then asks us if we would like a special kind of non-alcoholic grape juice to give us that “wine aftertaste” without the alcohol. I ask Gloria and she says no. He then proceeds to explain (everything off by heart) about 50 different fruit juices they had. There were juices that ranged from exotic to home made. We ordered 2 home-made orange juices to start off with and a bottle of fizzy water. The orange juice he brings is actually really tasty and you can really taste the freshness.

Another waiter arrives and asks us “Who is hosting the table?”. I answer “I am”. He jokes about who is in command between me and Gloria so I joke back that usually she is but today she’s letting me be in control. I receive the menu with the prices and she gets a clean menu with no prices. There’s a Prestige Menu (£120 minimum per person), the A la Carte Menu (£90 minimum per head) and the Lunch Menu (£45 per head). He starts explaining all the three menus completely, what the specials are and some dish that has been on the menu since day 1.

We already know what menu we’ll be ordering from.

Here is what I ordered:

Starter: Salad of Szechuan pork, tiger prawn, chargrilled, pickled and marinated vegetables, Asian herbs, daikon dressing

Main Course: Shin of Angus beef braised in red wine served ‘en croûte’ with confit potatoes and mushrooms à la crème, parmesan emulsion

Dessert: Pear tarte Tatin with walnut ice cream and shaved Colston Bassett

And Gloria ordered:

Starter: Quail and wild mushroom Pithivier with endive, celeriac and toasted walnuts salad

Main Course: Roasted fillet of halibut sustainably farmed in the Shetland islands with pommes boulangère and bourguignon garnish

Dessert: Banana parfait, peanut butter mousse and bitter chocolate sandwich with caramelized bananas

The sommelier brings us the bottle of fizzy water and I notice that while he serves it to Gloria he turns the bottle so that she can see the label. He then serves me and turns the label again towards me. It’s obviously something that he would do with the wine but it was a nice touch.

I decide I need the loo. I sit up and a waiter shows me the way without me even asking. There were about 20 little properly rolled hand towels all lined up on top of the sink with soap and moisturizer. The toilet was very clean and the toilet paper had its last square sticking out and folded into an arrow shape. I soon realized every time someone went into the toilet and used the toilet paper someone came in and had to re-fold the toilet paper into an arrow shape. Made me chuckle.

I wash my hands and then dry them with the towel. I had to throw it into a bin. Something quite unnatural but I would’ve hoped they would come in and put it somewhere else later and so they did… I checked.

I go back to the table and the waitress sits me down. I found it pretty ridiculous that a woman waitress would help me sit down but that’s how it is.

I tell Gloria I’d show her the way to the toilet but a waiter interrupts me and shows her the way.

While Gloria was in the toilet the waiter brings in a pre-starter. It is a normal plate with a minute battered ball of something in the middle… NOTHING else on it. He then proceeds to fill the rest of the plate with some kind of soup from a gravy bowl. I’m sorry if I don’t know what it was but he explained everything off by heart and I truly can’t remember all the stuff he said to me. He then put one of those “chef-plate-covers” you know the ones they use to keep the food warm, on Gloria’s battered mini-ball and told me he’d keep the soup in the kitchen to keep it warm why we waited for the “Madame”.

I patiently waited for Gloria and as soon as she came out of the toilet I could hear the waiters whispering “LA MADAME, LA MADAME” and running off to get the soup. She sat down and served her soup with the mini-ball. It was obviously quite divine.

This is when we realize the waiter might actually be Italian. We noticed because while he was explaining the mini-ball dish he said RICOTTA in a very Italian accent. We didn’t say anything.

Another waiter comes to the table with a silver tray of different types of bread for us to choose. There was potato bread, sesame bread, wholemeal bread and many other types. We heard the table next to us ask if they made the bread at the restaurant. They said they have a bakery that bakes it for the restaurant with a specific recipe. Every time our bread plate was empty he would run up to the table to see if we wanted more. The same happened when our glass was nearly empty. The sommelier would run to our table to fill the glasses full again.

In the end, the only thing we touched was our cutlery and our glass. Everything else was taken care of.

After each course the waiter would clean the table from breadcrumbs with a special kind of knife. He’d scrape them off onto his little cleaning plate.

It was interesting to see how the food would come up to the table. Me and Gloria ordered different things but they always came at the same exact time. A waiter would come out of the kitchen with the plates on a silver tray. He would wait at the entrance of the dining hall for the table waiter. He would then proceed to finish the plates with the last touches and say “Let’s go!”. They would both then proceed to the table and serve us the food.

The Schuezan pork with the prawns was really good. It was a cold salad kind of plate where you could mix and match pork and prawns with some vegetable to give you a different type of taste each time. Gloria’s Quail was excellent too. Presentation was amazing. There was a small quail leg on a potato puré all really well decorated. Mine was simple enough.

The main course was excellent too. My angus shin came and I didn’t know what to do with it. It was a plate with a cylindrical column made of french pastry with a wafer sitting on top. The wafer had the Ramsay restaurant logo on it. I realized that the only way to eat this would be to destroy it. I broke into it. It was laid out in layers all topped with daikon dressing (not that I know what that is). There was a layer with potato, then minced angus shin then potato, then angus shin and then spinach. It was really something amazing. Never had anything so well designed and tasty at the same time.

Gloria had the halibut. I had a taste of it and it was really nice. It was topped with a wonderful sauce made with tomatoes and bacon too which sounds weird but she says the combination was really good.

Time for desserts. I had the pear tarte tatin. I’ve always been a fan of Apple tarte tatins so I knew what I was getting. It was very good. It was served warm with some vanilla ice-cream. Gloria had the banana dessert but she said it was nothing exceptional.

We then met the Maitre D Jean-Claude Breton. I knew him already from his appearances on various Gordon Ramsay’s TV shows so it was pretty nice to see that he’s really down to earth. He chatted with us to see how everything was going, where we were from, what we’d be visiting. He also complimented us for having beaten the French rugby team in the six nations the week before. Here’s Jean-Claude:

After our desserts he brought us some chocolate balls stuck on a metal frame that looked like a small tree. The chocolate was pinned to the tree branches. We ordered 2 Espresso’s to end our lunch.

While drinking the coffee (excellent, which is rare in England), we see a waiter coming towards us with a fuming container. It was sending out smoke like it was on fire. It reminded me of those incense diffusers used in churches. He set it on the table and the Maitre D’ explained to us that it had balls of strawberry ice-cream inside with liquid ice that made the smoke come out but that it was totally safe to pick up with our fingers.

The lunch ended with the cheque and with €155 less in my pocket. N.B. The coffee came to £5 each. The orange juice came to £5 each.

All in all we loved it. We came out of the restaurant happy and full. We thought we would get out of the restaurant and go to McDonalds or something to fill our stomachs but it was really surprising how much we ate (not to mention how WELL we ate).

Definetly something I would recommend doing if you want to experience something different.

o/

Huge Goat

I went back home this weekend and was greeted by my dad and my dog. We decided to take the dog for a stroll and my father told me he’d show me this goat he saw in the countryside… I was in for quite a surprise!

It looks like it's stuffed...

But it isn't!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Pirate or Gentleman?

I’ve always thought myself to be a modern day pirate. I’ve downloaded and hacked(in the sense of using hacks not creating them) my fair share of hardware/software during my life but in these last few years I’ve felt somewhat conflicted with what I had been doing.

My “Pirating career” started with my Playstation 1. I was a very nerdy kid and I had quite the videogame addiction so obviously my parents limited my gaming time and only bought me a few games a year. I was about 14 at the time and had no kind of revenue apart from the occasional birthday party or personal celebration in which my grandma would give me a few thousand lira (games used to cost around 50-100 thousand Lira at the time).

This scarcity of videogames led me to become very well read in the videogame sector. I read reviews on magazines and spoke to my friends to see what games they were playing and which ones they liked, only to ponder at which game would be my next choice to communicate to my parents so that they could buy it for me. I was probably more “in the know” than most videogame writers were at the time – maybe an exaggeration but… I was 13 years old!

This kind of tactic always landed me games like Final Fantasy VII, Metal Gear Solid and Gran Turismo. Not too shabby a tactic after all!

A year later news came through about this new kind of hack. One could “Chip” your Playstation so that you could play ripped games. I never even knew that was possible! Internet had just become mainstream in those years but only privileged people with fast ISDN 128K connections could even ponder downloading or even uploading ripped copies of videogames like they do nowadays. This meant the whole copying and selling of ripped Playstation games was something much more personal and always involved a middle man. I’d compare it to buying drugs.

I remember I had a friend who directed me towards this tiny Electrical Repairs Shop near the town in which I lived at the time. I would never even call the guy up. I’d always have to ride my scooter (an orange Aprilia SR 50cc. I loved that thing.) to his shop and give him the list of videogames I wanted.

If they were common requests he would remove the metal foot-cover from one of his display stacks only to reveal an enormous amount of copied CD’s only to take out the one I wanted. It really was a drug dealer kind of relationship. If it was an uncommon request you would have to come back after a few days so he had time to contact his people to find an original copy of the game do rip.

You couldn’t speak on the phone, his products were hidden inside a hole in his display rack, and none of this had to happen while he had usual customers. He even used to stop making copies when he felt the “heat was on him” or when other CD rippers in the area had been caught and fined.

He used to make me pay 5,000Lira for each game. I was amazed at the new horizon that opened up in front of me for such a cheap price. I didn’t have to decide on which 3 videogames I would buy a year… I could actually try them out without even reading reviews and make my own mind up about them. This is when I really learned to appreciate what videogames could offer and it changed the way I’d look at videogames and other media entertainment forever.

The way I appreciate videogames and films is that I tend to love the films and videogames that I’ve never heard before more. Don’t get me wrong… if a game is shit… it’s probably still going to be shit. But I think that reading up on videogames… reading other people’s reviews and points of view about a videogame or film influences you in such a way that you will end up thinking the same exact thing the reviewers thought when they wrote the review even if you don’t want to. If you read a lot about the game you’re playing, you’re inevitably going to be influenced by what you read and it won’t be the same experience you could’ve had by playing the game or film without any prior knowledge about it.

To return on topic, I was having a great time pirating my Playstation game until the whole thing reversed on me. The ripped CD’s were, without my knowledge, making the Playstation CD drive laser work overtime. This resulted in having to flip the Playstation upside down or on its side so that the lens was closer to the piratedCDs so that they were easier to read and inevitably, my Playstation broke.

It was a sad day for 16 year old Riqz. I managed to repair it in the end, sold it (kept my favourite games and sold the rest) and I bought a Playstation 2. I promised myself I’d never again modify the hardware of my home consoles because it would probably break them. I returned to a fairly steady 5-6 games a year now but at least my PS2 was in pristine state (still works today) and I knew that I was giving money to the people who actually made the game I loved. This ensured that the game developers somehow knew that I bought the game and hopefully they would work on something new thanks to my contribution.

My break from pirating didn’t last too long. While I never chipped my PS2 I also was the proud owner of a Gameboy Advance. I fell prey of the handheld addiction and I kept on wanting more. I heard there was this new thing… flash cards. I didn’t know it was something that already existed back on the NES and SNES etc (even if in smaller quantities and much bootleggery). I spent something like 150,000 Lira to buy this 256K flash cart into which I could put about 5-6 normal sized GBA roms.

Internet had improved since the 90s and even if I was on a crappy 56K modem connection I could still download the GBA roms, being only a few megabytes each. It cut out the middle man that I once had with the Playstation and I didn’t have to spend a single dime to get what I wanted. That 150,000 Lira investment was quite fruitful after all. I think I also made a total count of how many games I had downloaded, and how much I would’ve spent if I had bought all of them instead. It was quite scary. I probably had downloaded 200 games or so in a year. They used to cost about 50,000 Lira each. That’s 10,000,000 Lira. That would’ve been around €5,100 at the time. Something a 17-18 year old could only dream about. What was different from the Playstation incident? Well the hardware wasn’t modified and the handheld still exists and works today. I was sure it wasn’t going to break and I was sure I was doing the right thing because games were stupidly overpriced.

I won’t bore you with my future pirate endeavors which involve a PSP with Custom Firmware, an Xbox360 with flashed dvd-drive (and a subsequent xbox live ban), a DS with a flash cart etc. Those are stories for another day.

The point of this story is to introduce the way I feel about Pirated games now. I have become quite the videogame collector having had videogames since I was a child. The whole act of buying a game with a case that has art drawn on it, with an instruction booklet and a printed DVD or cart, is something you don’t get with pirated games. I love to show off my collection of videogames starting from the Atari all the way up to PS3s and Xbox360s. That too is something I can’t do with pirated games. I love to know that I’m showing the game developer that I love their game by buying it.

Having a job now that I’ve grown up helps of course. I don’t have to ask anyone to give me money to buy videogames. It’s one of my passions and if I want a game I buy it. It’s different from when I was 13 and had no money at all.

To be honest, I couldn’t live without my hacked PSP that lets me play Sega CD games or Sega Mega Drive games on the go. But I also feel that buying a game is better than pirating it…sometimes. It’s a topic that baffles me because I can’t seem to decide which side I’m on. I guess the recent videogame price drop is helping towards the good cause, but stuff like SONY suing Geohotz for hacking their system only adds to the bad cause.

Maybe a balanced diet is what I should keep on having.

What do you guys think about Pirated games?

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The day Riqz lost £5

Hello everyone. This is just a short post today, and is a lesson about never ever challenging a slightly drunken Englishman to a dare in a pub. Some time ago, I was in a pub. I bet you didn’t see that coming did you, quite the twist in the story already. I can’t say it was for the ambience or for the taste of the fine wines, it was mainly because Weatherspoons is a chain of pubs which usually does the cheapest beer on the High Street. I’m classy like that, but let’s get to the £5.

Myself and Riqz would therefore often go to this pub, with or without the company of some other friends. The people we’d go with would usually vary, because I suspect they often had better things to do than be seen with me. I digress. How did Riqz lose £5 I didn’t hear you cry.

Now I don’t know if you get tartare sauce in Italy. However, in the UK it’s eaten a lot with fish. It’s basically vinegar mixed with an indeterminate amount of vegetables which turns into some sort of foul smelling gloopy mess, which if you go and Google it, will look like white sick. It’s lovely, seriously. I can’t help it I don’t work for the British Food Council (if such a place exists) so I can’t describe food in a loving way. However, such was my cunning that I was pretending it was vile.

Riqz was by now becoming well versed in British culture, for example he had significantly lowered his expectations of girls and was even beginning to find some of the female patronage of Weatherspoons attractive. God bless the power of beer eh?

Oh right, yeah the £5. So we were sitting in the pub, and basically Riqz bet I couldn’t eat a whole pot of tartare sauce, but I so did. I won £5. It’s not much of an anecdote, but what’ya gonna do?

The lesson here kids is never assume that the person sitting opposite you doesn’t like vinegar based condiments. Sometimes they do, and the crafty ones will deny it to profit from it.

The colour Red, PSP’s and Tablets

A few weeks ago I went to the post office to pay a bill and I found it real funny how this woman’s hair was exactly the same colour of her Jacket.

So yeah that was interesting. Especially trying to take a picture in a crammed post-office making me look like some kind of perv.

I also managed to film my turtles doing a kind of mating dance ritual. Experts tell me it’s either something a male does to a female to attract her or it’s something a male does to another male before they kill each other. Since they are both still alive and well, I’m hoping it’s the first hypothesis.

Here’s the video with some bonus Muse song in the background:

This month I’ve also been very excited about the new PSP2 which was announced by Sony. So excited I decided to finish off some old PSP games in my collection. That includes God of War: Ghost of Sparta, Riviera, Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker, Little Big Planet, Final Fantasy Crisis Core, GTA Chinatown Wars and the list goes on way too much. I’d rather link you my (shameful) complete backlog of videogames: http://www.backloggery.com/riqz

The new psp is a gamer’s dream in theory. I mean, big screen, DUAL ANALOG STICKS, front and rear capacitive screens, quad core cpu, mic, front and rear cameras, Wi-Fi, 3G. Hopefully they won’t be concentrating on simple PS3 ports like they showed at their conference. Crossing my fingers for this one.

Moving on to other news I’m also going to be visiting the UK again in March with my girlfriend Gloria. I’ll be meeting Bludgenous (our new co-author), Brodos and the gang, hopefully Harlow, Matthew, Ruth and all the Uni gang.

I’ll also be bringing Gloria to the Ramsay Restaurant in Chelsea to get all my money ripped out of my wallet. So much so that I had a nightmare with Gordon in which I was supposed to cook some Italian food for him and failing miserably only to be told to fuck off and stick that shitty food up my arse.

Xoom

iPad

This month’s dilemma concerns tablets. I’ve decided I want to buy a tablet this year and sell my netbook. I’ve been pretty sure about buying an iPad2 until a few days ago. Seeing the new Motorola Xoom has really made me think about what I’d like to buy. Spending around €800 for a tablet really brings on a few questions and the Xoom is definetly looking avantguarde compared to the current iPad.

The Xoom is really looking good sporting Android 3.0. It’s really looking like a great OS. The real question is…Will it have a great battery? I really want these batteries to last a long time and for now… only the iPad has that kind of thing with 10+hours of battery life in its shell.

I’m going to wait out and see what Apple present at their upcoming keynote and then make up my mind.

Lettera al Comune di Budoia

Sorry for all non-italian speaking readers but it’s quite an important post for me. It’s a letter sent to the Budoia Town hall. The town in which my parents will live their retirement not to mention where my father was born. They want to keep creating housing estates by cementifying the countryside.

Ciao a tutti,

ho ricevuto le e-mail di aggiornamento alle riunioni a cui sono mancato causa la mia partenza.

Anche se da lontano, vorrei far arrivare la mia voce che è anche quella di un cittadino nato a S. Lucia e che fra poco verrà ad abitarvi stabilmente. Sono inorridito all’idea della potenziale colata di cemento che potrebbe ricoprire tutto il lato sud-est di S. Lucia. Di scempi ne ho già visti tanti nel mondo. Cerchiamo di essere più propositivi verso l’ambiente e verso il futuro pensando anche ai ns. figli ed eventuali nipoti. Non roviniamo per favore quel poco che ci circonda. Vogliamo togliere veramente tutti i prati per far colare il cemento? Allora ribattezziamo anche il paese, lo chiamerei “S. Lucia del cemento” o la via Gluck di S. Lucia o qualcosa di simile .
Bisogna combattere l’ idea di cementificazione selvaggia che ha portato sul lastrico intere nazioni (vds. ultime Portogallo e Spagna non appena è scoppiata la bolla immobiliare).

Le motivazioni per non edificare ulteriormente a S. Lucia sono note e validissime come già rilevato durante le precedenti riunioni:
1) Se vogliamo recuperare il centro storico occorre incentivare tale recupero e non aprire ad ulteriori aree fabbricabili che creerebbero solo dei quartieri dormitorio. Ed è qui il punto centrale su cui bisogna insistere con i ns. amministratori.
2) L’attuale popolazione del comune di Budoia di ca 2500 persone è più che sufficiente al territorio e se vogliamo lasciarla incrementare fino a ca 3000 persone basta l’incentivazione al recupero del centro storico prima che questi ne diventi invece un ghetto a causa delle continue costruzioni periferiche. So che non è facile recepire incentivi ma è questa la strada da percorrere.

Per quanto riguarda l’eventuale utilizzo per cave di amianto etc oppure di inceneritori, non scherziamo per favore. Mi auguro proprio che affiori un po’ di buon senso in tutti i cittadini ed anche alle nostre amministrazioni comunali, provinciali e regionali e che concordino unanimemente che ciò può essere fatto soltanto in zone molto isolate e lontanissime da quartieri abitativi allo scopo di evitare eventuali e inevitabili inquinamenti.

Occorrono delle motivazioni più valide per salvaguardare il ns. territorio? Non mi sembra, è già stato saccheggiato sufficientemente da renderlo irriconoscibile a chi ci viene periodicamente.

Infine, riguardo al progetto per creare una piazza a S. Lucia, appoggio pienamente l’idea dello studio da parte di neo architetti prospettata con l’Università di Sassari. Personalmente offro già la mia disponibilità ad ospitarne uno (a partire da settembre prossimo), magari straniero visto che io e mia moglie ce la caviamo con l’inglese ed anche con qualche altra lingua.

Mi auguro, pure se assente, che la mia voce venga riportata alle prossime riunioni. Per favore non cancelliamo già ora con le nostre mani il futuro.

Un caro saluto a tutti.

Bludgenous has connected

Hello there!

The eagle eyed among you will notice that I’ve been kindly invited to co-author this blog. This is just a little in the way of an introductory post while I settle in here, admiring the wallpaper and putting my feet up by the fire. So, gather round, gather round and I’ll tell you a story of utter tedium which is my life.

I’m from London and I’ve known Riqz for over 6 years now, having met early on at university. The first time I met Riqz was in the first couple of weeks at university as he was friends with another Italian chap whom I was living with in halls. We bonded (in a heterosexual, manly way, I hasten to add) over beer, our seemingly perpetual inability to successfully converse successfully with ladies and the fact that his new Nokia phone was able to play the original Game Boy Super Mario Bros. This last point was particularly important, as despite being in our first weeks at university and being surrounded by a plethora of beautiful, and frankly horny, young ladies, we spent some time in the pub remembering where the mushroom power up was and which pipes had the secret coin filled chambers in them. This kind of behaviour would eventually lead to a dramatic increase in gaming time, but that’s a story for another day.

Now then I’m not quite sure where I’m going to take these blog posts at present, however I’m sure there will be no small part in reminiscing about some of our finer moments whilst at university as they were indeed the best days of my life. Now if that sounds terribly self-indulgent, well it kind of is, because that’s what blogs are for right? Seriously though, I hope to make it an amusing read for you all as a lot of the shenanigans were tragically funny, in no small part due to my ineptitude in coping with modern life and generally being a bit of a tit. I’ll probably jump about chronologically, writing stories and anecdotes as and when I remember them. I’ll also pepper it with my more recent experiences of generally not understanding people, because the general public are an ongoing mystery to me. Oh, and plenty of rants about public transport too.

We’ll see how it goes, as I’m sure I know many of you the readership already, and if I don’t know you, then you can listen to the ever-so-slightly unhinged commentary from a vaguely eccentric Englishman.

I felt the need to add an image to the blog, and I’m not really creative in that way, so here’s a picture of a bee on a flower I took in my garden last summer. Lovely. Irrelevant loveliness.

The Amazon Kindle 3G Review

A few months ago I bought one of those new Amazon Kindle e-book readers everyone’s raving about… Well ok… Not everyone.

The Kindle 3G

I always had my eye on these new e-ink e-book readers but they used to cost quite a few pounds so I never really ended up buying one.

Recently, maybe thanks to the whole new tablet market, the kindle price got slashed and I bought one for something like 180 dollars shipping included. If you live in Italy, like me, there’s no way to buy one from amazon.co.uk or .de or .fr or .it as it will automatically redirect you to the american amazon.com website.

Upon receiving the kindle it came in a simple but sturdy amazon box with a simple leaflet explaining how to start it up. First thing i did was try to take of the thin sheet of plastic these kind of gadgets have on the screen when they are new… you know that thin plastic layer on your new phone’s screen or on your new iPod. To my dismay it was a trap!

There was no screen protector. What looked like a FAKELY written phrase (you know the fake screen printed on a thin sheet of plastic to act as an Ikea-style product demo) saying “please attach your kindle to a pc usb port to charge it” wasn’t fake at all. This was my first ever experience with E-ink technology. I was truly amazed.

The new Kindle screen looks like paper. Absolutely no distinction. It has no backlight it has amazing contrast… Damn this thing is like…MAGIC.

I bought the 6″ screen Wi-Fi version (i don’t see why anyone in the world would buy a 3G data plan version) which is the size of a normal paperback book page. I quickly pop it on my pc (immediately recognized by Windows 7) and register it to my amazon account. I am then given a list of free un-copyrighted books that I can download. Such old classics as Treasure Island, Sherlock Holmes, The Mysterious Island and many others. I immediately downloaded Treasure Island to try it out.

The feeling the Kindle gives you is just what you would feel reading a book but better. There’s no screen glare that you can have with iPhones or iPads and the Kindle is very light so it won’t strain your hands while reading in bed like a book usually does to me. Another plus is that there’s no more of that easy page/hard page while reading on your side. Depending on what side i’m lying on there’s an easy page (where the side of the book rests on the bed) and a hard page (when you have to hold the whole book up to read the other page with your hand turning into a Dr.Zoidberg claw), making me toss and turn in bed like a maniac. Glad that’s gone…

Amazon offers an amazing variety of e-books so you’re going to find pretty much everything you want, except more obscure books. Nonetheless it has accepted any e-book format i’ve been throwing at it including .azw (obviously), .epub, .mobi and .pdf so you can buy an e-book from anywhere else on the internet and pop it on your kindle by dragging and dropping through the usb cable. If your e-book is unsupported you can send it to your kindle email and it will be converted into a usable format and sent automatically to your Kindle.

Speaking of transfering e-books to the kindle, Amazon does a great job with what they call “Whispernet”. When you buy an e- book off amazon.com it will ask you where you want it sent. You can send it to your registered kindle, your iPhone, your Android phone or even your Kindle app on your PC. By simply connecting your Kindle to your Wi-Fi network you can sync all your items with a push of a button. Not only does it sync all your books, it also syncs all your highlights, popular highlights by other people and what page you were on last time you read the book so that you can pick right up from where you left if you want to read from your iphone or from another PC.

One of the nicest perks you get on the Kindle (and on most ebook readers for that matter) is that you can move your cursor right next to a word you don’t know and it will give you a quick definition on the internal dictionary and if that’s not enough it’ll let you search it on google, wikipedia or anywhere else you want on the internet. I’ve never been the kind of guy to pick up a dictionary while reading so this is a great addition.

There are a few drawbacks to the Kindle and I believe it isn’t just a Kindle problem… With a paperback book you can buy it and read it. The best thing about paperback books is that if you like them you can tell other people about it and do something that used to be regarded as granted… LEND IT.  Unfortunately Amazon and many other e-book retailers have put DRM protection on all of the e-books they sell. This is absolute bullcrap because I wanted to lend an e-book i bought to my mother recently and realised the only way was to make her buy it again for her kindle… Which to me sounds stupid. I know this DRM crap is all about stopping pirates but come on!

Apparently Amazon is working on a “Lending” option for e-books but they still haven’t enabled it for European users.

I also noticed that the price of e-books is variable. Most of the ones i’ve seen cost more than their paperback brother. Some people say other books cost more than their e-book version. Nonetheless I’ve always paid something more for my e-book than I would have paid for my paperback which does piss me off a bit.

The Kindle is a great e-book reader then… yes… but unfortunately for me, it’s quite a nightmare for manga afficionados.

Manga on the Kindle

Not because you can’t read them… not at all… but because of the tedious convertion you have to go through. I haven’t found any legitimate source to BUY e-manga. Not the ones I like anyway so I had to go and find illegal scans. After downloading the scans you have to convert them into something kindle-friendly with a program called Mangle (Manga+Kindle aaaaah) which isn’t really always 100% perfection. It sometimes mixes up page numbers and you end up having to delete all your converted images and start again. I have officially given up on converting manga scans for the Kindle. Too much time and not much reward. You can read this if you are interested.

The Kindle has some other minor and hidden features such as an experimental (but very good) internet browser, a minesweeper game, a text-to-speech reader and an automatic Twitter/Facebook updater (sends your highlights to your feed).

Oh I nearly forgot!! The kindle also sports a pair of speakers from which you can hear your text-to-speach voice, mp3′s and audiobooks. A nice addition even though you have to watch your space as the Kindle has 3Gygabytes of internal space which isn’t expandable.

One small tip. Don’t buy an original amazon.com leather case. Apparently they’ve been making Kindles freeze without any explanation. Not to mention they cost like £30-£50. I ended up making my own carry case for the kindle by carving an old Diary:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I can definetly reccomend a Kindle if you are an avid reader and interested in new technology/gadgets.

o/

Best Videogames of 2010

2010 Has passed in quite a breeze and there comes a time when one thinks back to what made the year a special one.

In this post (and probably the next few posts) I’m going to list the best stuff I’ve seen/played/done/experienced and explain why I think it’s worth your time.

Best Videogames of 2010

Let’s start with what I love most. The videogame market per se (and by that I mean retail videogames) hasn’t been very extraordinary in 2010 but some games outshined others. Here are my top 10 videogames of 2010.

This list is based on what I had most fun playing this year.

10 – Call of Duty: Black Ops – Xbox 360, PS3, PC

The Call of Duty Franchise is already at the pinnacle of the 1st person shooter genre.

You would think this top-selling blockbuster game would be higher on the top 10 chart but I didn’t like the single player at all.

The story is cliché, the AI is so embarrassingly 1992-programmed that even Pac Man CE seems to do better in that area.

It has some very good parts though. Piloting a Helicopter, or infiltrating Vietcong bases killing them in their sleep was worth the effort.

I included Black Ops mostly because I had fun playing multiplayer with friends over xbox live.

On the other hand, I do hope the whole 1st person shooter genre renovates itself in the next installment (I wish there wasn’t another iteration in 2011) because personally I think the Call of Duty franchise is getting very boring indeed.

9 – Need for Speed Hot Pursuit – Xbox360, PS3

I felt like I needed to include a racing game in the list.

Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit has gone back to the origins with the first need for speed games. I remember how cool it used to be to play “Cops and Robbers” in the older games on the PC and this new game has brought that all rushing back with a hint of novelty that makes it a whole new, great experience.

You can either race as a Bandit, increasing your wanted level by escaping from police capture or you can play the cop, increasing your rank by catching baddies! The gameplay is simple and arcadey and that’s what I was looking for this year. I was pretty tired of the old driving simulators. Forza Motorsport 3 and the endless wait for Gran Turismo 5 didn’t really do it for me.

8 – Sonic 4: Episode 1 – XBLA

People hate it a lot, others hate it less.

I actually liked this modern take on the classic Hedgehog. You might say I’m a little bit of a fanboy (playing Sonic on my Sega Master System II and Game Gear), but I actually really enjoyed it this time. After endless shitware Sonic games, finally something playable! The levels looked great, sonic controls pretty well (even though some people say he is too floaty), the lock-on feature is awesome and the Sonic avatar costume you can unlock makes it worth playing!

Only a few downsides to this one. It cost me 1400 Microsoft Points and considering its length it wasn’t worth all that money. The cost of the next episode will determine if I’ll buy it or not.

Oh and the music… OH THE HORROR! Play this one on mute!

7 – Game Dev Story – iPhone

This little gem for the iPhone made my battery run out very quickly for a few weeks or so. The idea seems really stupid and uninteresting until you actually start playing it.

You impersonate the founder of a game developing company and you start by hiring some coders to make your games. It’s similar to what an imaginary Game Dev Tycoon would be. You can buy licences to develop for consoles with silly parodic names such as the Playstatus instead of the Playstation and so on.

You can choose what kind of game to develop and what genre it will be.

Your aim is to sell as many games as you can and in the end you will also be able to develop a console.

It’s hard to believe such a great game could come out of this idea but I urge you to try it out to see for yourselves. I wasted more than a few weeks on this one.. Ask my girlfriend! A true gem of 2010.

6 – Kirby’s Epic Yarn – Wii

Speaking about my girlfriend… Kirby’s Epic Yarn wouldn’t even be on this list if it wasn’t for her. This has been my “sit on the couch with my girlfriend and play together” game of 2010.

Kirby’s Epic Yarn graphics are incredibly innovative. Everything is made of yarn and you can move the whole background by unzipping it or pulling a well placed string. Your co-op characters will sometime merge together creating a truck or train and sometimes even a huge mech that shoots missiles. These parts of the game are really exciting and really need you to cooperate with your partner to get to the end of the level safely.

Death doesn’t exist in Kirby’s Epic Yarn. Instead you are faced with humiliation… a gamers’ worst nightmare. The score of the level depends on how many Beads (Bijoux for Gloria) you can collect. By falling into pits and getting hit by enemies you lose most of your beads. And the humiliation comes when you finish a level without any beads at all. This formula is kind of new and it works pretty well with the game as it makes you want to keep those beads to end the level well and removes the frustration that dying might give.

On the negative side we couldn’t care less about personalizing our virtual kirby-home with the stuff we collected (Animal Crossing Style), some of the storytelling was way too childish (and also weird sexual references like Yin Yarn putting stuff into his weirdly placed sock), and playing alone with no-one to help you can be quite boring.

I mean… look at his sock!

Definitely a game one should own just for its innovation and co-op fun.

5 – Red Dead Redemption – Xbox360, PS3

I love westerns… and I love sandbox games… therefore I love Red Dead Redemption.

I actually had good and bad times with this game but pushing through and finishing it paid off in the end.

The game is what you’d expect from Rockstar. A GTA-similar open world-ish game with a Western theme.

Missions are mostly cool and horse riding really looks and feels amazing. The good nature of John Marston (the main character) makes for a nice change instead of the usual GTA bad boy.

The animations are so amazing in Red Dead that for the first time in videogame history I actually felt like crying when my horse got shot and died or when shooting an enemy’s horse by mistake and killing it.

I did get bored halfway through the Mexico campaing but I pushed on and the ending was truly worth it. Buy this game and finish it and you’ll know what I mean.

4 – Enslaved – Xbox 360

Enslaved… I wish I could put you at number one…but I can’t.

I have said, more than once, that Enslaved was my game of the year 2010, and I still want to believe it. So why is it sitting at number 4?

Enslaved has proved that proper acting can make or break a game… at least that’s what I wish it did. There’s a book (Extra Lives) that speaks about this thoroughly…and it seems that gamers don’t care enough about acting in videogames as they should, but that’s a topic for another day.

The acting portrayed by the characters in this game is so good it deserves an Oscar. Facial expressions, tone and especially EYE and eybrow expressions were all incredible and really made the story in this game a joy to experience.

In reality, other than the AMAZING acting there’s a good game underneath it all. I underline good and not great… It has a simple combat mechanic and the game could have done a lot more in the customization sphere of things.

You are Monkey, a very agile – Prince of Persia mixed with Goku – kind of guy and your weapon is infact an extendible Staff (just like Goku in DBZ, not to mention a floating cloud to roam around in). The first part of the game is one of the best I’ve seen in a while and I won’t ruin any of the story for you because it’s worth going into this one with no preconceptions.

I can’t bring myself to say anything else about it because you absolutely need to buy it and see for yourself. Game developers should learn from Enslaved and use that kind of acting to improve the whole videogame market.

3 Limbo – XBLA

Another XBLA game in my list… now you’re realizing why I mentioned a bad year for retail videogames in the beginning of this post.

Limbo is something you experience rarely in videogames, especially in modern videogames. Limbo’s gameplay is NEW and novelty is something new gamers don’t seem to care about. We are always fed iteration after iteration of the same type of game until the franchise is too milked to sell anymore.

Limbo is an amazing achievement, and a game that is different in how it makes you feel.

You are a child who wakes up in this black and white shadowy world inhabited by monster spiders and man eating shadow hounds.

The game is a solid mix between platforming, adventure, and strong puzzle gametypes and it delivers all of them perfectly.

The ending is something you hope to be prepared for but it really hits you hard. It personally left me open mouthed for a minute or so.

This game is ART.

An easy buy for 800 Microsoft points.

2 – Mass Effect 2 – Xbox360, PC

I have to admit… I only played this recently…and am still playing it. All of this because after having played Mass Effect 1 I knew how much time I’d spend being sucked into Mass Effect 2.

I decided not to import my previous character from ME1 because I wanted to start from scratch and create a female character with different stats.

Here she is (I tried to make her resemble to my girlfriend but to her say, I failed miserably).

Mass Effect 2 is just what you would expect but better. The story is amazing, gameplay is better than ME1, characters are well developed and they make you want to get to know them and help them in their own personal subquests.

You know an RPG game is good when you WANT to do the side-quests before continuing on your path with the main story.

Also: 2nd best start scene of 2010 (after enslaved ofcourse).

There’s little to add except to say this game is near perfect on every level.

The only downside it has is that it’ll suck up so many hours of your life you want to plan ahead for it, reason why I only got to it in January 2011, exactly one year after its release. SHAME ON ME!

1 – Super Meatboy – XBLA, PSN, PC, Mac

Man oh man… another XBLA game in the list and NUMBER 1 too!

Super Meatboy, just saying it makes me shiver with various emotions that include love, hatred, rage, fear and frustration.

Super Meatboy started as a small flash game created by 2 people that I personally never played. It got then converted and improved into an XBLA game and BOOM!… mega success.

It’s a simple 2D platformer that takes from all the best platformers ever made and merges them into a game that not only will amaze you, but it will make your hands hurt like with old school hardened games.

All you can do is jump and move left and right to reach your girlfriend in each of the hundreds of levels. Yet it ends up burying itself right in your heart as one of the best games ever made.

The sheer happiness you receive after completing a level you were trying for the past 4 hours after dying 600 times is something I hadn’t felt since reaching the second castle in Alex Kidd in Miracle World on the Sega Master System II.

You can see some of my videos trying some of the most frustrating levels in Super meatboy right here:

I did complete them later off-camera.

So that completes my top 10 videogames of 2010.

Here are some Best of the Rest that didn’t make the top 10:

Donkey Kong Country Returns – Wii

A great reboot of the saga that deserves to be bought

Super Mario Galaxy 2 – Wii

Great game but it’s just more of the same

Pac-Man Championship Edition DX – Various

Having missed the CE version I decided to buy the DX version and I couldn’t believe how I could still be enjoying Pac-Man after so many years.

Hope you enjoyed the list and obviously I want everyone to have their say!

o/

You Know What Grinds My Gears?

It’s been a while and I feel like I need to vent some of my repressed anger issues. I have a lot of little things that really annoy me. This will be a mega-rant post.

1) I hate Football, I hate football players and I hate football maniac-fans. The sport used to be good, the players used to love kicking the ball around. Now all I see is overpaid pseudo-legends that throw themselves on the ground without even being touched, holding their knees just to get a penalty. They actually think it’s a tactic. If I was their coach I’d sell them to some other team. I remember when I was small and I used to play football in a team. I was taught to always try my best to stay on my feet. You never know… you might miss a goal opportunity if you fall down.

2) I hate my allergies. I have had allergies for about 5 years now. Some kind of grass pollen. It makes my eyes water, my nose stuffy, and gives me light asthma. I stupidly mowed my lawn 2 weeks ago and I had one of the worst asthma attacks I’ve ever had since I was 10 years old. Stayed home a whole week and took heavy doses of Cortisone. I’m fine now but I guess I won’t be mowing the lawn anytime soon. Let the grass be freeee!

3) I hate when trains aren’t on time. I went to see my girlfriend in Trieste this weekend and on Sunday I had to take the 17.44 train. We ran to make it on time, only to be told the train doors weren’t working. This meant it took 30 minutes to change train and get on our way. I had to take a replacement bus to get home. I hate replacement buses too.

4) I hate LOST. With all my heart. I have watched it for 6 years every fecking week. I saw the latest episode a few weeks back and quarter of the way through I just had my jaw wide open…I just said “WHAT THE FUCK” to myself and turned it off. I tried finishing that episode but ended up turning the tv off again because it’s just not enjoyable at all anymore. Even the actors hate the show. You can see it in their faces. Jack just wishes he never started acting in this show, Kate has become ugly, there are 2 alternate realities, Locke is not Locke bah fuck it. They don’t deserve to be watched anymore. I don’t want to hear anything about lost for another…BILLION years. I doubt I’ll watch the finale. Here’s Jack thinking what I’m thinking:

5) I hate organizing holidays. I’ve been trying to organize my summer holidays (a week in the south of Italy), but I just can’t bring myself to sit down and find a decent bed and breakfast, call them, book a double room etc.

6) I hate going to the toilet at work, opening the booth, and smelling someone else’s shit at 8.30 in the morning. Who shits so early at work anyway? Word of warning… If you use public toilets often, always choose the booth with the most open door. People who take a shit are usually subconsciously ashamed and always close the door on their way out. That was a free tip, on the house.

7) I hate a messy dinner table. Sounds weird I know but after a few weeks my dinner table becomes home to a million pieces of paper, letters, crumbles of food, bags, receipts etc. I try not to make it happen but it always does. I cleaned it up yesterday and now my house looks less like a den and more like a house.

8 ) I hate my neighbor. I live in an apartment and the woman underneath mine is the most annoying person in the whole world. She’s probably a whore from what I gather. She has a Spanish accent, maybe Cuban but I’m not sure. She has a “smoking” kind of voice if you know what I mean and really high pitched. The Spanish accent doesn’t make it any better. I’ve heard her shout and fight with different male voices (hence the whore) and she has a very stupid small dog. On weekends and occasionally on Thursdays she plays (AND SINGS) raggaeton music. The ONLY fucking music genre I loathe. She also rambles on about how I throw shit in her garden when it’s obviously not true. Sometimes I have my window open and I can smell her smoking weed. Woman… you’re too old to be smoking that kind of shit. Stop it bitch.

9) I hate trying to lose a few Kilos. I’m trying to lose a few Kg because I had stopped training for 3-4 months. This involves a decent diet. No carbs at dinner. I hate no carbs at dinner. It means I can’t eat potatoes, I can’t eat pasta, no rice, no mashed potatoes, no polenta, no pizza… All I eat at dinner is Meat, vegetables and vegetable soup. No parmesan on that crap either. And I’m not losing any fucking weight.

10) I hate my watch repairman. I gave him 3 watches to repair last September 2009. He still hasn’t done them.

11) I hate having to go to sleep. It’s like fast-forwarding 5-6 hours of lifetime just to get to work.

12) I hate Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare 2. This image sums up multiplayer pretty well.

13) I hate smoking. I used to smoke. I’ve stopped since January 2009. I don’t know why this hate came upon me so hard but it’s crazy. I can’t stand the smell of people smoking close to me, I can’t stand how my clothes smell after I’ve spent time with a smoker, I hate how people say they’re addicted to the nicotine… we all really know they’re just addicted to the actual gesture of smoking. I hate cigarettes, I hate ashtrays, I feel like my lungs are being raped by other people’s smoke. Cigarettes should be erased from the face of the earth.

14) I hate people that just do stuff to get noticed.

15) Which brings me to how I hate Facebook. It’s unbearable. All I see is people that cry out “look at me”, “ask me why I wrote this”, “look at what I’m a fan of”, “look at what I just liked”, “look at my cleavage on this shot”, “look how clever I am by making this witty remark”, “look at how farmville is ruining my life”. I can’t stand it. Showing off is one of the things I hate the most.

16) I hate hating.

17) I hate not having a job in the videogaming industry. It was always a dream of mine. I still hope to fulfill it one day.

18) I hate the fact that if I do leave this job, I would leave all the benefits that come with it.

19) I hate that my Boss still hasn’t given me my yearly evaluation. Does it mean he’s scared to tell me how shit he thinks I am?

20) I hate travelling. I’ve travelled around the world most of my early life. Maybe that’s why I hate travelling so much. It’s not that I don’t like going to new places… it’s just that I hate what it takes to get there. Train rides, car journeys, airplanes, airports. Waste of time. Still hoping for instant teleportation soon.

21) I hate how new technology is already old when it is released. For example Iphone 2g,3g,3gs. Mostly why I don’t think I’m going to buy an Ipad.

22) I hate the Italian Government. All of it. They should’ve been on that plane that crashed in Poland with all their politicians instead.

23) I hate going to the toilet and seeing people playing Quake 3 Arena on their workstations…fucking IT department.

24) I hate waking up early in the morning to go to work. I also hate waking up late on weekends and miss the whole day.

Good god.. I think that’s enough.

0/