Fighting Ninja Turtles

The front, smaller projector is my Chinon SP-330 and the rear is the new Elmo ST-800. Now I can run most feature films without an intermission!

1. Ministry of Sound - The Annual 2006
2. The Killers - Hot Fuss
3. One Planet - Global Chillout
4. Greenday - American Idiot
5. Fleetwood Mac - Greatest Hits
6. The Greencards - Weather and Water — Recommend
7. Dave Matthews Band - Listener Supported — Live
8. Ministry of Sound - Chillout Sessions 8

Lately I’ve been using eBay more than what I normally do to mainly get rid of junk that has accumulated around the house and purchase more junk in place of the old.

I have found more recently that eBay takes a long time to load pages which isn’t helpful if you like to bid on an item in the last two minutes of the action ending.

Obviously eBay is one of the most popular nay only auction site around however eBay as a company doesn’t act in the best interests of customers. The site is slow, it uses outdated, invalid html code and probably has one of the poorest navigation structures that I have ever seen on a web site.

Earlier on this month, I received an invoice for the latest lot auction fees on eBay. This was the first time I had to pay the fees and so began the search of the online payment system. This is where it gets interesting. The Australian eBay web site has a “Pay” button which appears on every page of the web site when you are logged in. Was the the elusive payment system? No! I almost repaid for an item that I had purchased and paid for few days earlier.

After a fruitless search of the help system I asked a friend who practically buys everything down to bread and milk on eBay showed me the procedure seller account > ebay auctions > pay > pay for auction.

My point is if eBay wants people to pay for their auctions, why don’t the put the function in a prominent position?

eBay is marketed to novice end users of computers and the internet. However over the years the design of the system has changed into a mishmash of poorly named functions, an unhelpful help system and a slow, bloated design.

Hopefully more people will wake up and realize that this monolith is beginning to crumble and it will be a very timely end to this beast.

The other day while at the local EB Games I could not resist picking up the new “The Movies” game. I’ve been waiting for the game to come out for a while and I cannot help but feel a little disappointed.

The movies is built on the same engine as ‘Tycoon’ games (Railway, Theme park, Roller-coaster) and I have always felt the the navigation and control of the games has always been very clunky. The best example of this is when deleting or moving a building:

You have to select a builder and drag them over to the building and place them over either the move or delete icon there is a three second pause. You have to click again to confirm the change. That is just too slow considering its a process that you might want to do three or four times in a row.

The mouse itself become a very important part of the game and the game only works -properly- when you have a scroll-wheel style mouse. To navigate around the studio, you have to click the scroll wheel button to move and Zooming if via the wheel itself. Personally, I prefer to use the arrow keys as that is a more standard way of navigation.

There are very limited/ nonstandard keyboard controls which I find is totally unacceptable for a simulation game.

Perhaps the primary upshot of it is that it is a very realistic simulation game and while I haven’t had a chance to create my own movie using the custom script maker I’m sure that the limitation of the game controls will become a minor issue for me.

I have already worked out a basic script for my stars, the sets and costumes. Can’t wait for my own movie premiere!