Right, first off, this isn’t one of my usual posts. It’s not one of my sarcastic/critical/mindless postings, but something that I’ve been thinking about posting for a while as a cautionary tale. It will also contain some details of my life before becoming the Psychotic Monkey and will give a little insight as to how I’ve turned out today.

When I was younger (about 12) I went to a secondary school (as most 12 year olds do). Whilst there in Year 1(Year 7 they call it nowadays), everyone was offered the chance to take extra-curricular music lessons in an instrument of their choice. Lots of us signed up across various different instruments, everything from the flute to the drums. Me, I went for the drums (as they sounded fun and a bit more practical than a wind or brass instrument).

So in a throwback to the past (here), I need to use a quote from part one in this series… “So in the roller-coaster world that comes with being a Newcastle United fan, there are some things you think will never happen, but secretly hope that they do.” Today is another one of those days. As always happens with stories which surface on April 1st, you have to wonder who has dreamt them up. But it seems that Alan Shearer is coming home. It appears that Mike Ashley has managed to pull of a coup to equal that of the signing of Kevin Keegan. He’s now managed to convince Alan Shearer to come back and try and dig us out of the hole that we’re in.

No seriously. Ok, not the ex-leper bit, but the sparing a shekel bit. I’ve decided that I’d jump on the bandwagon of asking for money via the internet, but with me there is no catch, and I will deliver on what I promise… No really I will. Send me some money and, if I reach my target, then I’ll prove it to you.

It’s not often you see gaming mentioned on the pages of the BBC News website, and even rarer that said games aren’t something to do with either Halo or World of Warcraft! However, cue the story of deception, lying and theft in Eve Online (here). It appears that, in a move which has outraged some players, and left others applauding loudly, large sums of money have been stolen by certain players from the corporations that they were members of. In one case, all the assets of the corporation, along with even the name, have been taken by one disgruntled director, and transferred to the corporation that he has joined. All fun and games you’d think. But some people disagree.

So I’ve been trying to install some software on a copy of Vista Enterprise here at Monkey Inc. Problem is, with some software, whenever I try an install, I get an error 1327, invalid drive m:/. Seems some install programs don’t like the fact that I have a mapped m drive onto a central file store. A search of the knowledge base at MSDN didn’t do anything in terms of resolving this, however a quick Google did.

So I know we’re into February already, but I figured last year was so good when it comes to gaming that I should come up with some kind of list for what made my Game of the Year list. You know, the games that really made 2008 the best so far in terms of games. Now before any of you go off at me for what’s in the list, this is my opinion. This is what kept me busy and happy game-wise last year. This is a list of what games made 2008 enjoyable for me. Most of them were released last year, but not all of them, they just happen to be the ones I was playing!

So with NXE came the opportunity to install games from the disc to the Hard Drive, making for a much quieter, and in most cases faster, gaming experience. But with limited space, how do you know what to install to maximise your hard drive space? Well fortunately help is at hand. Those clever people over at Kotaku have posted a list of the install footprints of a lot of games that are currently available. Head over to the list here, but to give you a taster, a few of the games I’m currently playing weigh in at the following:

So NXE has been launched on the waiting world, and it seems to have gone pretty smoothly. Sure it’s not perfect (there have been some teething problems), but it’s pretty good. As for me, I have downloaded the NXE update, and was very impressed at the speed at which it came down and installed itself. I’ve even watched the intro video twice! (sad I know).

One thing I’ve not done yet is to set up my avatar. However those smart people over at Microsoft have already published details of how you can use your avatar outside of your XBox, and have provided a handy URL to get a png version of your in-game personage. If you browse across to

Saw this a while back on one of my favourite amusing blogs, Neatorama.com (Image after the jump). At last a job advert with some honesty in it. I mean, let’s face it. Flipping burgers ain’t exactly the career goal of many people right? So it’s great to find somewhere so honest that:

1. They’re called Murder Burger
2. You don’t need experience as they’ll teach you everything you need to know
3. They know you’re going to bugger something up along the way and are ready for that!

Brilliant, so where do I apply? Oh, New Zealand. Not sure how I’ll sell this one to Mrs. Monkey….

With more and more reports of birds of prey being killed with the use of illegal poisons, I thought it time to publicise a campaign which I feel is worthwhile. The RSPB is running a campaign for members of the public to sign a pledge that they want the killing of birds of prey to stop. The campaign homepage is here and I’d ask anyone reading this to sign up to it. You don’t have to be a member of the RSPB to sign up. It’s not often I feel strongly enough to post a link to a campaign, but having been fortunate enough to do some falconry myself, and to see just how powerful yet graceful these birds are, I felt that this was one that was worth posting about.