Online Movements

I’ve been a runner for a long time (I posted a while ago about it – I’ll try to dig up a link to the post), so it’s always frustrating when I can’t run for whatever reason. This is especially true during the summer months when I like nothing more than to go on a good long run in the countryside to get fit and relax at the same time.

I’m fairly injury prone – I think most runners are due to the fact that it’s a sport which naturally causes a lot of stress on the joints – so I’ve had my fair share of minor injuries. I’ve managed to stay flexible and regularly stretch though which I think has helped me avoid any big problems, although I always feel a bit nervous talking about it because I know lots of people who’ve had to stop running because of injuries!

It doesn’t stop me getting niggling injuries though. This time it’s a calf strain – nothing major but I know I need to give it a couple of weeks to heal. Luckily I’ve got a very good physio who I visit whenever I have a sign of trouble. That helps me to avoid the long term problems too I think. It’s much better to go and see a physio early on rather than wait until something gets really bad and much more difficult to fix. Once the injury heals I’ll do a post about my latest running routes.

I don’t know about anyone else but I always seem to have a lot of problems with printers. I’m generally pretty good at getting everything to work on the computer, but I have a major problem with printers because they always seem to break down far before they should. Maybe it’s something I’m doing, although it does seem that a lot of people have issues with their printers.

For example, I only bought a printer about two months ago and I spent quite a lot of money on making sure that I got one that was good quality. Yesterday I went to print something and found that it wasn’t working. I went on a few forums and found it that the problem was something to do with an older driver – even though the printer had been working fine up until then – so I went to the manufacturers website and tried to find the driver section. This was surprisingly difficult to do, but I eventually found it and downloaded the drivers.

Once the drivers were installed I still got the same error message! I went back onto the forum and asked again what I should do, and so far no one has come up with an answer. I’ve tried finding the help desk but I can never get through, and I’m sure they’d just tell me to do the basic stuff that I’ve already tried. It’s very frustrating, am I the only one with these sorts of problems?

I’m a big fan of video games but I’m getting more and more disheartened by the number of “blockbuster” games that are actually very poor quality. Games like Call of Duty are just rehashed old games – often with a single improved feature – that sell like mad, when great games that try to be different such as Mount and Blade don’t sell anywhere near as well.

I guess this is a similar thing that music and film have gone through. Once genres of games become very popular they become money making machines, allowing developers to make unimaginative and boring games yet still have them sell loads of copies.

There is hope though. Many consoles (Xbox and PS3 included) have “arcade” sections of their online stores where indie developers can make games and sell them for cheap prices. This allows small developers to make a game and then easily distribute it. This has been going on for a while on PCs – Minecraft is probably the best example – but having the stores on consoles opens up a whole new market. Indie games tend to be more innovative than the big games in stores too.

I’m not saying that all big name games are bad though. RPGs like Oblivion were very popular and also amazing games. I just find it unbelievable that people buy new versions of games like Call of Duty every year when there are a huge number of good and completely different games ready to be bought for a much lower price.