ASHLEY RATCLIFFE

Website: www.hbfrun.com.au

I took part in this 14km event in Perth today, being Sunday 23rd Mat 2010. This was the first time this event had been held and I’m proud to be a part of it. It is very rare I get to participate in something when it’s created. The course was excellent and the event overall was well planned.

I hadn’t done much training in the build up to it, so I was a little worried about the long distance where I usually up to 10km or 12km normally. In the week before, I had done some intervals training which involved speed work and around a 10km run the following day. So my preparation was sparse. When it comes to these races, I usually do it if I say I will do it.

The day before the race, I figured out when to leave home to get there in time and decided to get some new running gear. I had mostly old stuff and nothing that was suitable for cold weather. There was potential for some decent rainfall, so I believed it would be worth it. I got all of my stuff ready the night before. I’m up at 5am on Sunday and only got a few hours sleep, but I felt OK in the morning. I had breakfast and left the house about 5:40am. I parked up at my parents and walked down to the train station, which got me into Perth about 6:30am. They provided buses to get runners to the WACA where the start and finish was. Everyone lined up at the start from 7:30am onwards and we were off at 8am.

The first part took us towards Riverside Drive along the river and we headed east on Riverside Drive all the way to the end up to the Mitchell Freeway. That contributed to a few kilometers of the 14km. Getting onto the Mitchell Freeway was not as bad as I expected. I had thought it might be tough hill or a climb upwards, but it was a steady slope which was easy to tackle. Following the freeway, we got to the Northbridge Tunnel which is part of the Graham Farmer Freeway.

The Northbridge Tunnel is roughly 1.6km long and runs under a small part of Perth. It was quite an experience to run though it rather than driving through. The only downside is that if your not at the front of the race, it gets a bit hot from those already who have run through it. Coming out of the tunnel took us to a very long stretch of the Graham Farmer Freeway which took us to the other side of Perth and across the Swan River. Once over the river, we done small loop over a bridge and eventually coming off the freeway and onto a pathway which led us down the side of the Swan River towards Burswood. This was also a very long straight stretch of path which felt like it took a while to get through.

The last part  of the course is simply going back over the Swan River via two bridges and heading into the WACA to finish. The actual course ended up being an extra 500 meters, so we actually ran 14.5km, but it was worth it. I finished the event with a time of just under 1 hour and 30 minutes, official time is yet to be published.

A course map can be found here.

I feel that the worse part of the day was collecting my bag and belongings after the race. They had kept them secure and a bag drop off area, but the helpful volunteers either randomly shouted out numbers of bags or got your number and went looking. With as many as a couple of  hundred of people getting their bags at a time, this actually took about half an hour for myself. That is a lot of standing around in the cold after a race, and is not good for stiff legs and muscles (even after stretching and warming down). I’m happy that it didn’t rain at this time.

There is no doubt the event was a success overall that raised nearly $220 000 for 6 charities. An excellent day and I’m very happy I did it.

I’m going through a 4 day weekend at the moment, so I’ve still got some time to play some Just Cause 2 again and record some footage. I am very thankful the game has the option to upload videos direct to YouTube. For some reason, the xBox 360 version does not! I found myself at the casino today. I realized there was a waterfall there, and decided to try it. So I approached the casino, went to the back, had a look at the odds, and jumped in. A good result in the end, here is the video.

Shortly after, I had a bit of a fight with the military folks on the boats and came back into the bottom of the waterfall. I thought I’ll challenge gravity and go up the waterfall. The result, was not so good this time.

A friend of mine started a project some time ago. It is called The CGN which stands for The Cinematic Gaming Network. His objective along with other people if they wish, is to make a walk through for games where the game is played realistically but the video is made as entertaining as possible. He also has a YouTube Channel for CGN. Whilst he has worked on a PC game so far, I have researched into recording gaming footage from my PS3.

Having never done this before, I decided to look a few ways of doing this and some YouTube videos were thrown my way. The downside of those is that they were very old, and there wasn’t much new content that could be found easily, or the solutions were a tad expensive. The most common method I found used the composite TV connection (Red/White/Yellow cables) which is of a low resolution resulting in a low resolution. I needed a higher quality for the videos on CGN.

I looked into recording from HDMI since that is what I use these days with a full HD TV. Rather quickly, I found it wasn’t possible due to HDCP being used to protect the HDMI signal. Even further, there wasn’t any devices or hardware which would do this. That option was a no go. I then went onto looking into recording a component TV connection (Red/Blue/Green cables). This seemed like it would work, but the hard part was finding a suitable way of doing this. Eventually, I came across the option of a PCI card for my computer which supports component input. I ended getting a Leadtek PxDVR3200H and it installed just fine and hassle free.

So, here is the setup I tried. Using component, I connected the PS3 to the computer and using a 19″ LCD screen with VGA output. I was successful in getting an image to the computer screen, but when going through the PS3′s display setup, I could only get standard PAL resolution. I wasn’t sure why this is. Considering the monitor is averagely old, nothing great, I thought i might be that. So I decided to test with VGA output from my computer to my 42″ LCD full HD TV. I got the same result. I am facing the problem of a low quality image and a low resolution, which I don’t want to record in. I haven’t got around this yet, and I am thinking this might be related to using a VGA output connection, or it might be related to the video of the computer, being a Leadtek 7950GT.

I am of course, going to be looking further into this shortly. If anyone has any suggestions in the mean time, please feel free to leave a comment here

I’ve been playing for quite some time now, between working days. I’ve generally noticed that a string of missions I’ve done for two of the factions are pretty much identical but in a different location. They are a specific type of mission which is too take over a symbolic location. Once taken over, the influence for the particular faction expands around it, and new missions become available.  These new missions are also very similar to each other and usually gone along the lines of assassination, collecting something and returning it to a location. I haven’t done a lot of them, and I hope they do differ a bit more from each other.

Nevertheless, Just Cause 2 is still fun to play. I’ve been taking over lots of military bases and upgrading my available weapons.

I found today, during an Ular mission, that one of the small islands on the map has been based around World War II, Japan, and the Bermuda Triangle. The story goes that any plane or boat that goes near it is never heard of again. In this case, they are quite right. I had to fly a plane over to the island and it was taken down by an electromagnetic pulse generator. I dived out of the falling plane, and landed on the island. The electromagnetic pulse generator was made during World War II by the Japanese and there are still 100 year old Japanese men guarding the area thinking the war continues on, but it had stopped a long time ago. Compared to what had been played before this mission, it was very different to come across this which I like. It added just a bit more detail to the story and game.

I’ve had Just Cause 2 on the PS3 for a few days now, and in summary, I love it. There is a lot to do in the game which I am yet to see, and on such a huge map. It almost feels like it has been scaled down from real life scale. Besides completing a lot of missions and completing settlements by finding all the items in there and blowing up government property, I’ve found a few interesting military vehicles that just add to the fun. I found a military jet armed with twin machine guns and rockets. I thought it was cool and recorded a video of it as shown below:

It’s a nice jet and a pleasure to fly. Only a little while after I found (with the help of my cousin) a bigger and better military jet. I’ll endeavor to get some decent footage of this jet and a large carrier as well. I think there is a lot more to come from game.