theres a lovely public ctf server run by jolt. great dos ping, lovely routing... and is empty for about 23 hours a day. its run by a crowd of muppet admins who insist that it can't be used for clan matches, so its obviously better that it doesn't get used at all. their logic behind this is, if you want to play on a jolt server, you can pay for one. well i know i would never consider paying for a server if i didn't even know how it performed in game. what better way to let people see how good your service is than let people try it out for an hour while its empty? i wouldn't think twice about paying for a jolt server if it meant dealing with the admins that run the public server. ts were playing a clanbase open cup match there once... anyone who has experience in clanbase can know the hassle of organising a game and finding a fair server. midway through the game, some wanker of an admin joins the server and specs for a min before booting the lot of them. wouldn't even wait 10mins for the game to finish... thats really good business, i bet they sell a lot of servers that way.

compare it to lcgaming public q3 server - another nice low-pinging server. and they're sound out, its run by iceman i think, who is very friendly and has a positive attitude to q3 ctf. they also rent clan servers, but allow you to use their public server for clan games if its empty. unfortunately, we'll never get to see how good that server is either since its always stuck on a queer map like x3waerfctf3 or something and nobody can connect. but at least if we really did want to play there, an admin would change the map for us.

the reason i brought this up, is because we had a praccy vs france today in ctf. isdn connects have been a nightmare lately, and almost any server we've played on has been giving orange+ ping in fights consistently. it was the french captain that suggested jolt public ctf server (which was empty as a limerick library as usual). for this game, we had 4 players on isdn, and for once we weren't seeing any orange in fights. finding a good server for isdn is really a lottery; some days barrysworld will be great, while savage and lsr server will be terrible, other days savage is grand and barrysworld is giving 200 pings in fights. there is no way to tell how it is going to turn out. so i was delighted that we'd be able to have a fair game vs france, since i had been expecting the usual lagfest. of course, once we're all on the server and ready to play, a sad, bitter 3vil`spirit joins up trying to cause trouble.

this is english 17-year old who has irish grand parents and thinks that makes him eligible to play for the irish team in clanbase. his only contact with irish q3 was when an all-isdn lagged fh beat his clan 3vil in savage, and they whinged about how they would have owned us on cp5, and dared us to play their first team. and this guy would have been captain of the irish squad (there is a cb rule saying "captains must have the nationality and be residents of their team's country. the supervisor can make an exception if there is no candidate who meets these requirements.") of course, when he joined the server today i thought he was only joking when he said it was a public server and we weren't supposed to be playing on it. but of course he runs off like a little girl to get an admin to kick us. and the admin isn't very bright, so he decides not to take the diplomatic approach and ask politely for us all to leave, instead he just boots us off (you could say for no reason since we had broken no rules - nobody had been told they couldn't play, and there was no reason to kick us off). it just means we have to waste time getting a new server, and end up with a typically unplayable isdn flooded game. gg jolt, nice to see you're supporting the uk and european q3 scene so well. they're even worse than the new breed of thick 17 year old british netgay q3 players with lame attitudes like spirit and dozens of other uk players, mostly confined to just a couple of clans thankfully.

in other news, garaí today discovered the largest illegal dump in ireland a few miles outside of blessington; it is commonly known as ballymore eustace.