Fans all over the world had to wait quite some time but now it's almost done. The first reviews are up (1UP, Game­Spy, Game­Zone, IGN, Under­GroundOn­line, …) and God of War II: Divine Ret­ri­bu­tion is set to be released on March 13th. I'm gonna pick it up then and take some days off just to play the game. I've done enough work lately so I can't be blamed for doing so. Cory Bar­log sat down with the guys from Game­In­former to answer some ques­tions regard­ing the devel­op­ment of the sequel. It's an inter­est­ing read you shouldn't miss. What's left to do apart from com­pil­ing a check­list of what to buy when lock­ing myself up? Telling my friends that they shouldn't try to reach me? No, I won't go that far … I think. I'm so excited I can't stand all the wait­ing. Accord­ing to the reviews there's much to love, a lot to won­der and vir­tu­ally noth­ing to hate. I'm already dri­ving my room­mate mad

I have to con­fess, I don’t care much about art, espe­cially paint­ings. There are some kind of paint­ings I really like, though. Since I don’t know what I’m talk­ing about I’ll call it con­tem­po­rary art but I’m gonna hang one of these pic­tures on my bed­room wall, that’s for sure. I like the look of most of them. Just because of that I’d like to intro­duce a project to you, a very good friend of mine has been work­ing on for some time now. It’s almost fin­ished and it it – as you may have guessed – about art. Obvi­ously, ART WORLD PROJECT is going to be a full suc­cess if you can believe the news posted there.

Usu­ally, I’m not one to write about stuff I don’t under­stand well enough. In this case, I’ll make an excep­tion since there is more to it than meets the eye. There’s a char­ity project going on in the back­ground with the goal of donat­ing all net prof­its to child aid pro­grams around the world. Strong argu­ments claim that Glob­al­iza­tion ben­e­fits those with more finan­cial lever­age at the expense of the poor. It’s the usual prob­lem – the rich get richer while the poor get ever poorer. With this char­ity project they will con­tribute to bet­ter liv­ing con­di­tions and bet­ter edu­ca­tion for poor chil­dren. I wish them all the best.

Yes­ter­day I upgraded my router (Linksys WRT54GS) soft­ware to Hyper­WRT Thi­bor 15c because the last upgrade was made in Q1 2006. Addi­tion­ally, I changed from my ISP’s DNS servers to the OpenDNS ser­vice which proved to be a wise deci­sion. Accord­ing to the web­site, OpenDNS is safer, faster, and smarter. The inte­grated phish­ing pro­tec­tion and the spell check­ing func­tion seem to work quite nicely as pre­lim­i­nary tests indi­cate. Even so, I can live with­out these func­tions so they’re to be con­sid­ered a nice-to-have. What’s impor­tant though, is the fact that my inter­net con­nec­tion really became faster as far as the resolv­ing of domain names is concerned.

But that’s still not the best thing. No, the good news is that this ser­vice is free! If you’re a heavy user – brows­ing mul­ti­ple sites in dif­fer­ent tabs – you should give it a try. I’m sure it’s worth the few min­utes you need to spare in order to change the IP addresses of your des­ig­nated DNS servers.

Right now, I’m very busy which proves to be quite unfor­tu­nate. I’ve got so many things to do and so lit­tle time. Lucky me, there’s enough spare time – actu­ally, I’m just hav­ing a break – to write about Jim Carrey’s newest movie: The Num­ber 23. I’ve seen the trailer a few months ago and when a work­ing col­league for­warded a mail con­cern­ing this movie I real­ized that I didn’t write about it here. Fast as I am in rec­ti­fy­ing my fail­ings, here we go.

In numerol­ogy, 23 has a spe­cial mean­ing. Of course, if you’ve ever heard of the Illu­mi­nati you should already know some­thing about this num­ber because it is their sacred num­ber. If you didn’t, invoke the search engine of your choice and dig it up. Although some stud­ies have shown that the num­ber 23 doesn’t appear more often in the media than other num­bers we seem to see this issue dif­fer­ently. Wher­ever we look, there is the 23 and it’s unholy brother the 5. This mir­a­cle is called selec­tive per­cep­tion and can lead to apophe­nia, as we will undoubt­edly see in the movie. I think that’s inter­est­ing stuff nobody should miss, because it con­cerns us all in our daily lives. Last but not least, I like Jim Car­rey

Stay tuned, it’s com­ing to a the­ater near you on Feb­ru­ary 23 (hmm, coin­ci­dence? . In the mean­time, watch the trailer on Yahoo! Movies or Apple trail­ers; the lat­ter one hav­ing HD con­tent avail­able. For fur­ther infor­ma­tion, check out IMDB or the offi­cial site.