Monthly Archives: August 2011

Investment in Vineyards is a Good Idea!

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After I finished school and before I started college (and my Halo BB site of course) I decided that a trip to Europe would be exactly what I needed before I settled down to several more years of studying and exams and then of course the lovely world of a 9-5 job. So before reality settled into my life forever I decided that heading away for a few months during my last true summer of youthful freedom would be an excellent idea – regardless of what other people thought. What really surprised me during my travels through France were the number of French vineyards for sale right across the country. I travelled by train a lot and while I was brushing up on my pretty rusty French I noticed that there’s a healthy supply and demand for these in France.

Now buying a French vineyard isn’t cheap and it isn’t straightforward but it is entirely possible. For me it put the thought into my head of an investment that I could seriously consider for later in life, if I came into money, made my fortune or just plain old won the lottery. Like I said vineyards aren’t cheap – most of the entry level ones are several hundred thousand Euros – but they are something that you can plan towards as you get older. Or maybe even split the investment between a few friends and share both the cost and the running of the place and get a holiday home included for the same price?

So that whole idea created the right buzz for my trip because I’ve always been a bit of a dreamer and the idea of owning my own vineyard has appealed to me ever since that European summer. And if you take the time to pay these places a visit I’m sure it’ll appeal to you too.

Man there’s nothing worse than your gaming being interrupted by something cropping up in your home or apartment

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Any hardcore gamer knows that they just want to be in the zone for the game when they’re playing. Zero distractions, zero noise except from the game and ideally zero people around to bug you or ruin your day off and that valuable gaming time you’ve been looking forward to. So when I noticed that I had a water leak in my room I was totally bummed out for several reasons and the biggest one was that my stupidly expensive gaming rig was in the same room and there’s no way I wanted even moisture anywhere near it never mind a full blown act-of-God type of flood scenario. So I knew it was time to call in a company that specialized in leak detection to sort this out for me.

I’d spent a long time building up the cash to actually buy this rig so the idea of coming home to find it soaked and totally fried wasn’t something that appealed to me – I know you know what I mean. It’s funny how attached you can become to a piece of computer hardware but when you’ve worked hard to get the cash to buy it and spent time customizing it then you don’t want anything stupid like a water leak ruining your buzz right?

So like a good nerd I just called somebody in to fix the problem for me. I do games and nerd like stuff. I don’t do crawling around in attic spaces looking for leaks and then trying to fix them. It’s not me and it’s probably not you either – it’s who we are. We’re gamers and that’s what we’re really good at and we can kick your ass online while eating some kinda snack. We just don’t do DIY stuff right?

The Home Of Halo Fans

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Every so often a game comes along that changes the gaming landscape. It changes how people view video games, how they play them and it also affects the companies creating them – when the bar gets raised they need to pay attention to the change in the gaming current around the world. Halo was just such a game and to be fair nobody expected Microsoft to pull off the coup they did by releasing the original Xbox with Halo as their lead title – after all Microsoft made Operating Systems and Office software and that was it right?

Halo changed all that and created the type of avid fan base that had never really been seen before. The Quake series of games had enjoyed a very strong following for several years but the following that Halo developed went above and beyond that – the Master Chief was going to become more iconic than anyone in Bungie probably ever thought possible. The range of Halo toys and even costumes tells you how popular this game is with the public….I don’t ever remember a Quake costume do you? (Btw I really, really want the Deluxe Master Chief costume. Really).

So that’s why the original HaloBB forum was setup in the first place – to promote the original Halo game and of course Halo 2, Halo 3: ODST, Halo Reach and the upcoming Halo 4 game too of course. We aimed to be a home for everything Halo for fans from all over the world and to grow a community that loved “Noble Team” and Spartans as much as the rest of us. We wanted to keep Halo as fresh as the very first time you played it way back in the early days of the original Xbox.

We also wanted to customize the phpBB forum script as much as we could to provide as user friendly an experience as possible for our forum members and of course to have the best phpBB tweaks that were out there so we used the phpbbhacks website a whole lot over the years to make this forum the place that it was.