Feb 26

Lockerz.com, what I think about it

Posted on by

This morning Lockerz.com had a couple of Membership Appreciation Redemptions. I bought one ticket for a wave so I would be somewhat sure to either get myself a Wii or PSP for free. It turns out I spent 100 ptz for nothing as their site couldn’t handle the generated traffic. All of the decent prizes were gone before the pages would load decently for me.

Too bad, I’m probably not going to spend any more points on those ‘private’ redemptions since there’s just too many people online at the same time and chances of getting anything is actually more slim than the public redemptions. If you got something in any of the 3 waves, congratulations.

While I was waiting for the redemption to start I had Twitter open with a search on ‘Lockerz’ to see what other people were saying, it’s funny how there’s a bunch of people who are just utterly stupid. They scold at Lockerz and whine about not being able to get anything. I don’t get them, what did they expect? If there are thousands of people waiting to grab free stuff you just have to be real lucky to get something. Each wave Lockerz has maybe 10-30 items of each prize, so do the math and you’ll see chances of getting something in a redemption where the exact date and hour are given are very very low.

A few friends of mine and myself do wonder how Lockerz manages to pay for all those things, there’s no advertisements on the site and you don’t have to pay anything. I’m pretty sure they’ve already given away prizes worth more than thousands of dollars in total. Let’s see what the public redemption brings.

Update: Apparently Lockerz had a lot of bots trying to get stuff in the third wave. They’ve refunded everyone who participated in the third wave but didn’t get any prize. Maybe I will do another member redemption afterall..

Feb 23

Nacht van het Examen: Voorrondes

Posted on by

Deze ochtend om 0:00 zijn de voorrondes van “De Nacht van het Examen” begonnen. Ik zat eigenlijk te wachten op de mail die ze zogezegd gingen sturen zodra de vraag online stond (die is blijkbaar maar anderhalf uur later bij mij toegekomen). Een geluk dat ik dus de pagina eens vernieuwde. Ik vraag mij af hoeveel mensen er naar de site van het Examen gesurfd hebben om middernacht, het laden duurde verschrikkelijk lang en volgens mij zaten we niet ver af van een onbedoelde DDOS aanval.

Nu ja, ik heb m’n punten toch binnengehaald, de vraag was gemakkelijk en hopelijk zijn de volgende ook zo. Hoe meer punten hoe beter maar hoe krijg je punten? Op het moment van schrijven hebben er een heleboel mensen 410 en een paar 420 punten, hoe komen die daaraan? Als je de vraag onmiddelijk beantwoordt krijg je 200 punten (+de 100 van de voorinschrijving) en maximaal nog eens 100 punten als je 10 mensen spamt met een uitnodiging.

Mijn vraag? Hoe komt het dat er mensen zijn met meer dan 400 punten? Kan iemand daar een zinning antwoord op geven? Ik maak mij nu nog geen zorgen om er uit te liggen in de voorrondes, als het elke dag zo goed gaat zien ze mij binnenkort wel in de Kinepolis.

Feb 19

The Windows 7 experience

Posted on by

It’s been a while since I’ve posted things here. I installed Windows 7 a few weeks ago and I think it’s “OK”, nothing more really. If I was forced to downgrade to Windows XP I wouldn’t mind.

The reason for this? Well, for some reason my laptop has the somewhat known “black screen timeout on boot” glitch. I’ve read you can fix this easily by changing your solid background to something else (a wallpaper for example), I have wallpaper.. didn’t fix it. Another solution is making sure you’ve got the latest video drivers, let me tell you: Asus does not have drivers for Vista nor 7 for my laptop (Asus A7Jc) which I bought in 2006 so I’m stuck with the Windows Update drivers as I can’t be bothered to install custom drivers such as the omega ones.

Another weird thing is I got this invisible window in the middle of my desktop, which is on top all the time. It doesn’t show up on the taskbar or task manager. Even weirder is that it disappears after a while but I also found that “clicking” on the invisible window and hitting ALT+F4 does the trick as well.

Windows 7 is great and I’m confident that I’ll stick to this OS for a long time but there are still some applications who do not run correctly such as Ultramon and Dscaler. It took me a while to make Dscaler work but luckily once it did, I didn’t get any errors anymore.

Then last night Windows Live Messenger started to act weird (I’ve got MSGplus Live installed), I got disconnected from the internet for a second and after that every single time I logged on to WLM the client crashed. I could only guess why it was working one moment and the next it refused to do anything decent. In the end I think some Windows Update broke “contacts on desktop”, after uninstalling and reinstalling MsgPlus Live the crashes were gone.

Now, you might think I don’t have anything positive to say but I’m pretty sure stuff like the above could benefit anyone who has these errors so they can get a quick and simple solution as I tried to look for them on the internet but failed to find anything that worked.

All in all, visually Windows 7 is a huge step forward. You can see that the Redmond folks worked hard to make W7 an easy to use operating system.