One of the worst things about living and working in London is the commute, its annoying but its part of life in the city. But for something that was built a hundred years ago and was never supposed to deal with the number of people it does today, it could be a lot worse. I’m sure i could find something to moan about that but todays moan will be about something else, locking the South Eastern train toilets in the evening.

South Eastern who already take the piss (no pun intended) with the delays, cancellations and massive price hikes. I’m sure that the new ’simplified’ ticketing system will somehow make it more expensive aswell. But the problem i have is even though i have paid an extortionate amount of money to travel freely around London I find the toilets locked on the way home. Now its not the end of the world i know but if I have a pint or two after work then I’m pretty sure even if go just before i leave the pub at some point on the 40 min home journey I’ll want to go again. You have to pay at the station (and they are locked any way unless supervised), I’m sorry haven’t I paid you enough, and the toilets are locked on the train.

They do have a reason for this, it’s so that people can’t use drugs in the toilet. Well it works wonders because i have caught a number of people up to suspicious activities in there a number of times and thats on the commute home at 6. Now they have said that you cannot drink on the trains either, sorry but you can buy alcohol on long distance rail journeys, so I take it that a new mayor wouldn’t just introduce a ‘LAW’ like this just to ‘make his mark’.

With police or transport workers supposed to be enforcing this surely they can also keep the druggies off the train and we can have our toilets back.  I hate the way that our society always cater for the lowest common denominator, in this case the druggie, and bring the rest of us down.  TV seems to be leading the way with reality TV and TV talent shows, i will admit that I have enjoyed some series of BB in the past.  Since free view started with UKHistory being on all day every day the BBC and Channel 4 and the rest haven’t really bothered with many documentary’s that are not shock docs.  When was the last Simon Schama documentary broadcast on terestrial TV cause it used to be on loads.

Any way I’ve begun waffling and moved well away from the main point but what the hell I’m the only one who is probably gonna read it.

Image via Wikipedia

I thought of something else to write about (moan about), GTA IV. Easily the most anticipated game to come out in the last few years, it smashed all sales records. Now I don’t have a problem with the game, its great, I completed it in a couple of days, but I have had a few problems with the disk.

After shopping around when it came out (didn’t pre order) I luckily found it as someone hadn’t collected their copy. Now I’m not a massive supporter of piracy but I feel were getting a bit of a ruff deal. If you preorder you would pay extra, I’m sorry are you not guaranteeing the shop your money. They talk about how they can only produce so many disks for release day (just enough for the preorders though), now i’m not going to claim to be an expert but i’m sure thats bull all they need to do is press some CD’s. Nintendo are well known for keeping demand high by releasing small quantities of their products at a time, but they do it with the hardware (wii board and the console itself) and some how that just seems a little bit less raw.

This is all standard economic way of making the most out of the product and why not they have slaved over it for the last three years and produced something great. But this time they want the money too much, if they were a music artist then they would have well and truely sold out. The first thing which annoyed me was that leaving my disk paused for 2 hours, 2 days after I bought it rendered the disk unreadable, at this point I hadnt even removed it from my X-box since I got it home. The disk was scratched to shit so I can only guess that the laser caused the scratch, this doesn’t happen with any of my other games so I reckon they’ve been cutting CD costs. I got the disk skimmed and it worked again but its started happening again, so there will be another trip down Game shortly.

They have also removed a lot of the violence: People never seem to die properly, they get up after a period of time and try and stagger off. You can’t really lock on to them in this state ( but you can bring them down with a free aimed shot). They have also removed planes, I am assuming that is in relation to the world trade center attacks but San Andreas had them in and that was after 9/11, so this is a bit of an excuse. There are loads more examples which I wont list here.

Now I have been a massive fan of GTA since getting the Demo of GTA 1 of the front of a magazine all those years ago. Now don’t get me wrong you couldn’t stop me from getting the next one (another 4 years) and I am sure it will be great but I hope now Rockstar have become one of the big boys in the game industry they don’t follow EA down the corporate route and ruin the experience, especially since EA made an offer for them earlier in the year.

Related articles

• GTA game ‘to break sales records’ [via Zemanta]
• Take-Two: ‘Grand Theft Auto’ Maker Says No to EA Buyout [via Zemanta]

I work in social media and its great being in such a fast paced environment and at the forefront of new things, I just hope it carries on that way.

Since it exploded a few years ago most of the press has been negative (or financial) and current trends seem to indicate the market leader has started to falter, what I want to know is what will be the next big thing. With the adoption of second life as a virtual campus at San Jose and others, and the progress of social networking i’m sure it will be a fusing of the two in some new and cleaver way with people being able to attend meetings and lectures and the info being fed through to your business facebook.

Any way i can waffle for ages but I may need to have a think before I put down any more words on the subject.