A State of Trance 2009

Just got my hands on the mixed tracks of ASOT 2009, and I must say they are as impressive as usual. For those who don’t know what ASOT is, it is a famous trance radio series hosted by Armin van Buuren. Every year Armin releases an album according to the year number, and selects numerous top tracks to be mixed together into one long trance mix.

This year’s ASOT has really nice tracks in my opinion. Honestly I’m not a totally hardcore trance junkie, there are certain styles of trance which don’t appeal to me as much, however I have found the tracks of 2009 really easy to get into. From personal experience in trying to get other people to listen to trance, the more melodic types of trance are easier to get into, such as ones with more predominant keyboard effects, as opposed to let’s say a predominant drum and bass beat.

If you aren’t such an often listener of trance but don’t mind a bit from time to time, this is one album you should really try out. Do remember that when listening to trance, you gotta listen all the way, not the first 30 seconds of it and say it’s boring cuz that would only be the intro beats! However how you get your hands on this will be up to you =P but do give this album a try! Anyways, here’s one of the tracks I really like included in ASOT 2009: Faces by Andy Moor & Ashley Wallbridge feat. Meighan Nealon:

If your firefox 3.5 has problems loading pages….

Being a long time user of firefox, I was excited seeing the new 3.5 come out, claiming its faster and all. However after upgrading, it seemed that from time to time pages would suddenly load as “server not found”, yet if I refresh once or twice the page will load properly again. After much investigation I believe I found the reason why it was doing this, for me at least, so if you have a similar problem give this fix a try:

First, open firefox and type about:config. This loads up the firefox configuration settings for more advanced purposes. Now right click somewhere on the screen where all the settings are, and click new, and boolean. For the name of this preference, type network.dns.disablePrefetch, and then set the value to TRUE. You should end up with a line in your settings looking like this:

click to enlarge

What this essentially does is disable a feature known as DNS prefetching introduced in firefox 3.5. In simple english what it does is obtain information before a user actually navigates to a page, in order to speed up browsing. Firefox 3 already had a similar function of prefetching, however because of the way this prefetching works (resolves and caches DNS lookups) it seems to cause problems for certain types of routers and computer setups.

Well after doing this, I haven’t encountered any server not found errors for healthy pages yet, so hopefully this will work for you too if you have a similar problem!

Resident Evil 5 – Personal Thoughts

I’m pretty much almost through with the game, missing one last achievement: complete the game on professional, which I’m more than halfway through already.

But overall, Re5 was surprisingly more entertaining than I expected after playing through it. It’s one of those games that you can’t fully enjoy unless you own the game yourself, allowing you to play through it at your own pace.

I won’t go too far into details about the game as there are plenty of good reviews out there for the game, but I’ll just insert some personal thoughts and opinions on the game. Firstly, the game almost looks like an upgrade from re4, better graphics, better inventory system, etc. Essentially though this has transformed the game into an action game, with pretty much zero horror to me, which strays from the traditional style of resident evil,  it’s still very fun to play with. There’s a larger variety of weapons compared to Re4, as well as much more melee attacks, which I though was a very useful and nice addition. The usual “RE” style tactics and strategies apply, such as tossing flashes on parasite type enemies, special ways to kill enemies faster, as well as a lot of new tactics created from the new types of enemies and weapons, which makes the game more than just a no-brainer action game. The game is also very partner work based, allowing for co-op action to be a lot of fun if you have someone to play with. And this also presents the one main bad point of this game I can think of

In my opinion, the AI partner can be quite a pain, especially on professional, and can give you some frustrating times. You can get the AI staring at an enemy not shooting, or running straight into an enemy swinging an axe, which in professional is quite the game over unless you’re right next to the AI to save her, though in professional I doubt you wanna get hit anyways. In other words, you better be a good aim and fast reaction player to get rid of enemies first before the AI starts being an idiot.

But if you’re just in for a bit of fun and action, and you don’t have a human partner, don’t let the AI turn you off. The game is still very enjoyable. The achievements also seem to be very “gamer friendly”, in other words they aren’t hard to achieve at all. In fact i probably got 45/50 of them through just my first run through of the game without purposely noticing how to achieve them. Bottom line is, give this game a try if you can get your hands on it, you won’t regret it.

Some updates and recommendations

Firstly, congratulations to my friend on transferring to his own domain, http://www.davieslim.com. I highly recommend his blog for lots of drama recommendations, in fact most of the ones he recommend I watch myself too, and I also highly agree they are very watchable.

And I would also like to recommend the anime to watch for the season that started recently around a month ago, well at least it’s pretty much what I’m watching:

• Bakemonogatari
• Canaan
• Needless
• Umineko no naku koro ni

I might edit the post later with some links to their synopses, but you can always visit a site like anidb and search the name to get a quick synopsis of the anime itself, just don’t believe in their ratings, they never apply until you try the anime yourself.

In other news, I’ve occupied myself with Resident Evil 5 for the past week or so, it’s been fun, I’ve gotten up to 47/50 achievements, and I may post some things about it up later on. There’s also tonnes of games to look forward to as the fall season for game approaches, which I may also mention in a later post.

P.S. I am looking for someone with a camera that can record to a pretty reasonable quality, so I can post up some performances of tricks. Anyone offering to help?

Book reading and recommendation

Somehow, due to the rather under-performing anime season in my opinion this time, I’ve been left with less stuff to watch and ended up with some excess free time. I’ve decided to go back and finish reading some of my suspense/action books I never finished, or even started. After thinking about this, I decided to suggest an author for everyone to try out.

I know in this age young people are getting more into watching stuff rather than reading from a book, however there is one author I would really like to recommend. It’s pretty much any book by Matthew Reilly, an Australian author. His books are all action and it’s seriously nonstop suspense, get started and you won’t be putting the book down. I started reading his books when I was 12, starting off with ice station, which is what I would recommend for the first read. From then on to anyone I’ve introduced his books to, and they gave a chance to read it, all agreed that his books were awesome. Only thing is, some of the military facts are slightly twisted and stunts in his books go beyond the realism factor, but hey, it all works out as one crazy action thriller story.

Trust me on this one, all you who don’t read books that much, give this book a chance, I’m sure you have the time to read a bit every day. It will not disappoint. And those of you who know me personally, feel free to borrow the book from me if you want.