Relaxing flash games

The motion of the ocean, the birds twittering, watching a small waterfall, having a great tea with a shisha(water pipe). All these can calm a person down through all his senses. But we are living in a jungle of cement, steal, glass and silicon mostly. So in my case I definitely need some things that can give me a bit relaxation from time to time. The next games usually calm me down and give me a new perspective of life in a few seconds. All of them have the basic idea in common. A simple game principle, an almost empty screen, with just a few objects of interest and a perfect calm music in the background:

Auditorium
Creator: cipher prime studios
This is a game I found today. The idea of the game is to change the direction/color of the light in the direction of the (?) objects, so they make sound.
http://www.playauditorium.com/
The handling of the game is easy though it takes a few seconds to figure it out.

Music Catch
Creator: reflexive.com
You need to catch as many signs as possible. The yellow ones give you a multiplicator of your points and the red ones take the multiplicators away and the purple ones work as a huge vacuum cleaner :) The blue tiles are points. Basically you don't need to play at all the music in the background is exquisite! :)
http://www.reflexive.com/index.php?PAGE=WebGamePlay&WGID=94

Update:
Music catch continues with:
Music Catch 2
Creator: reflexive.com
The principe is the same, new music pieces, and some small visual updates
http://www.reflexive.com/index.php?PAGE=WebGamePlay&WGID=182


Boomshine
Creator: k2xl.com
Just click a spot and watch the points expand. If you touched enough points you get to the next level. Very pleasing continuous music. This is the oldest game of these three, before the fancy animations could be used. In general this can be seen as an evolution of this kind of games :)
http://www.k2xl.com/games/boomshine/

X-mas dinner in Banska Bystrica

I had a wonderful Friday last week. After the AIESEC conference called Highway I decided to go to Banska Bystrica. A good cover reason was to bring back the badge of a person :P The only think left was a good timing. And I got to know that on the 12. December they are organizing a x-mas dinner. Definitely a good opportunity to meet the people.

So I arrived at the dorms at midnight after my dance classes and a few beers. Looked up on the internet, if by chance I got some information on how to get to the places at Banska Bystrica, as I had no idea were I will sleep, or meet the other people... So I got a small map, from which I tried to figure out were to go... Nice start, reminds me of the way how things are done in... AIESEC? :)

So after I woke up at 7:10 caught the bus at 9:30 arrived at 13:00, I was more then happy to get the wrong direction for 10 minutes... but after that everything went smooth. I put down my stuff at the dorms, and we went to the AIESEC BB office. I was never there before, but heard it was pretty big. Well not as big as the CUs office in 2004, but much bigger then it is now :P

I was a bit afraid how the people there will treat me. I knew 2-3 people from the LC, and most of them just left when I arrived. So I introduced myself quickly with the belief, that I will forget all the names as soon as I hear the last one... And it happened that way :P So I started a few random conversations with the people around me and it was fine, except of the fact that this is a beautiful LC, I really quickly realized how friendly the people are. They decided to make in the first hour or so just random postcards, so I was painting in my random style...
I will maybe upload some pictures. As I can't paint, I use to make easy drawings and connect them... You'll see you'll understand.
Except of that I was watching old slovak fairytales, and in this atmosphere I got the feeling of being 4-5 years old and waiting for Jesus to bring the presents (in these parts of the world it is the little Jesus who brings the x-mas presents :) ). Once my grandfather asked me if I have seen the leg of a little angel just flying out of the window, as we stepped into the room with the x-mas tree. I believed I saw a small white figure just disappearing - most propably the curtains - and I believe till now that it was the leg of an angel... Nice memories.

Anyway, we continued with some games, a small visit at the x-mas markets and then going back to the dormitories, having a tea, some more games then the x-mas dinner (with traditional kapustnica) and a small award giving ceremony. Then we left to have a party till 4 am.

What to add, there is not much I could write down, as my feelings from happiness come from the people around me, who were so friendly and open, that I felt from the first seconds like I would know them for ages. It filled me with joy :)

Except of that from the x-mas dinner I met a lot of old friends I haven't been talking to for a while. I realized again, that I need a few more topics of interest/specialization, what I could study and influences people in general. In the last days I was studying some social network services (facebook, linkedin etc.), and seems pretty interesting where these technologies are leading us.

And for the end a short story about how easy it is to get away from BB, too... I have spent a bit more money, then I anticipated, so at the end when I got to the bus station, I had a good timing - the bus just arrived, but I didn't had enough money... Thank god I had food vouchers and a friendly guy (now he's friendly, during the negociations he didn't like the idea :)), who gave me money for the food vocheurs. :)

And another party on Saturday night! Had to sleep a lot before that! :) I'm very sorry, that I didn't had my camera with me = no pictures :(

PS: the picture with the angel and the moon was taken from this site

Technical stuff

I got a new notebook one month ago. Extremely happy with it despite the huge amount of frustration it brought...

It just happened, that I got my book, one day before AIESEC Slovakias national conference. So it was a perfect timing, and I could take a lot of different stuff from the conference because of this - music, pictures, etc. This is definitely one thing on the bright side, I need to learn to complain less :)

Before all the bitching I need to say that I'm quite satisfied with my notebook after one month of usage. It looks stylish :) Is fast, quiet, doesn't overheat, I got used to the keyboard very quickly. It seems it definitely fits my needs for 15000Skk - 500Eur (+ 2000Skk for OS). What is a bit more expensive that the cheapest brands I had heard many complains about (Acer and ASUS).

So the TECHNICAL difficulties with my HP Compaq 6735s with 32bit Vista Home Basic (if someone would google this post):
1. Sound problems: during the hole first month I had problems with the sound. Approximately every minute once the speakers were making a strange noise, like if someone would touch a microphone. Even if I didn't do anything on the machine. It happened pretty sporadically. In the 4th week it was almost unbearable, and then it simply stopped, and the sound is now clear (as clear it might be from the speakers of a notebook :))
Possible solution:
Maybe the system downloaded some updates, and it solved the problem.
Update:
As I see that the problem appeared again, I discovered that it comes only when the WiFi and Bluetooth are activated. I plan to reinstall the whole system with Win XP and Win 7 (dual system). I will see if the drivers were properly installed or if the problems still occur.

2. Change of brightness of the screen without an apparent reason.
After the sound was working fine, something new had to appear... After thinking about the problem a bit and remembering, that by pulling out the power cord the brightness usually changes. By following this lead I discovered that the system without notifying me switches between the power plans (Control Panel -> Power Option). It usually changes my original option to a higher one.
So first, in this case what do you do to feel comfortable - change all power option to the same settings. During this I noticed, that in my own settings the processor works on a maximum of 70%. So I figured, that when the system had to run to many programs, it automatically switches to a different power option, so the PC didn't get clumsy. I didn't find any online reference about this, but it sounds reasonable... and is pretty annoying when your screen starts to blink back on you...
This would also explain why sometimes my PC has on the same amount of battery different amount of expected battery life.

I can't really decide if this is a good or a bad feature. When I use my notebook as a normal desk PC it is definitely a good approach, but when I'm on the road and need to have a long battery life more then speed then I don't want this option. The thing that bothers me is, that I don't have control about this feature, only if I set all the power plans on the same settings... Though maybe more expensive versions of Vista don't have such problems... Maybe

3. No OS CD came with the notebook
People told me and it is usually the mindset of the people I would say in these parts of the world, that if it didn't come packed, then the people don't miss it.
As I was working for 5 months in Dell on technical support for german speaking countries, I knew, that the CD/DVD belonged to me. So I called the technical hotline of HP, got redirected to the Czech Republic - the language is similar, anyway - after 10 minutes and 3 coworkers I got my answer: Even though I didn't buy my laptop through HP I'm entitled to have the media, they directed me to a website, were I should add some details about the product I bought, send some copies of the receipt and an address where they should send it and I will get what I want. They assured me more then once, when I asked, that this transaction won't cost me anything. Although on the site it says something about 250Czk (around 10Euros) for postal taxes... We will see what happens... I remember some similar experience in Dell, and if the media was asked for afterwards, they had to pay the postal cost, though they could choose during the reservation if they want a media or not, what I couldn't in this case...
I will know the answer next year :P

That's all now, I already look forward for the hours spent copying my data to a diffenrent hard disk, when I will reinstall my windows and create some new partitions for the new OSs and data. I like to format my harddisk and reinstall my stuff once every 3/4 year, and partitions are a blessing for that work! :)

Láska = Love (in Slovak)

This is a small video I found last week on one of biggest Slovakian newspapers webpage. I miss this poetic way of expression from my daily life, though I would prefer it in Hungarian, this little video made me dream... As I think of myself as a romantic pessimist the topic fits me well...

The video is in my eyes made in high quality, the texts and audio is very harmonic. Good job... hope they've got the rights to publish such a masterpiece :P