Archive for June, 2006
Cranium
Tonight I got to play a board game called Cranium, where players move around the board by answering trivia questions, drawing pictures, acting or singing, or making sculptures. It sounds fun, with a wide variety of different challenges in front of you, but the reality is that it’s a badly designed and ill-thought idea punctuated with brief moments of entertainment.
To move around the board you roll a dice and then move your piece onto one of four colours, each denoting a type of question. As you reach each edge you land on a brain where you can pick what colour you want next, ultimately travelling down a slow or fast path depending on your success.
The problem lies in challenges which have both teams competing at the same time (you play as teams of two). In a charades or acting challenge, each team can clearly hear what the other is saying, meaning that if one of you has a completely useless partner acting out the item, you only need to wait until the other person has gotten almost the entire answer before blurting it yourself. Somewhat removing any skill from the proceedings and instead replacing it with random good fortune. The acting challenges are also suitable for any moron, where you have to act as a famous person that your partner must guess. This could be really good, except that you’re allowed to speak and say pretty much anything apart from people’s names. So when Homer Simpson comes up, your teammate is going to have to be a complete idiot not to get the right answer after you say just one word.
To make this extra confusing, many cards give the team a bonus if they get it correct. But with so many cards having this, and so many of them also being games where both teams take part at the same time, it’s not long before you’re so wrapped up in whose turn it is next that you just abandon the bonus scheme altogether, lest be faced with one team taking four shots in a row before they have to wait for the others to complete their six.
I must admit I was impressed that Jennifer knew her clouds, that’s not an area of knowledge many people can claim. Surely a career in weather forecast presenting must follow. Or perhaps just standing in the street trying to educate passers-by like some sort of loon, pointing at the sky and jumping up and down.
Verification
I mentioned my want to buy from Google Video last month. Shortly afterwards I actually managed to purchase the show I wanted simply by lying about my credit card billing address, going on the idea that perhaps they didn’t actually bother checking it during the card verification stage.
Well after all that, and the purchase of five other videos, all the shows I bought are now free due to Google putting an advert above the player instead. I’m not too peeved, each episode was hardly expensive, but I thought it worth mentioning simply because if you want to see some good interviews, now is the time to go search Google Video for Charlie Rose.
Electric
Like everyone else I get to deal with bills falling into the porch throughout each month, and in the last week I was graced with a new electricity bill. I don’t usually pay much attention to them, I pay them online and don’t usually even open the envelope. For whatever reason though I decided to take a look, and that’s when things started to go downhill. I looked at the estimated meter reading and then compared to that to the actual reading and they’re spectacularly different.
Now normally it would be a good idea to submit a new meter reading, pay it off (even though it’s going to be huge) and move on. But I’m about to move from one supplier to another, so instead I’m going to wait. And cross my fingers. And hope that they don’t ask for a final reading before I go.
I do my best to control my spending and start paying off my debts and then something like this comes along and bites me on the ass.
Priority
The news today was that Rockstar have been subpoenaed by the New York District Attorney to produce all documents related to the development of the Hot Coffee scene included within Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.
Hot Coffee, in case you didn’t know, is the name given to the hidden (and I stress hidden here, you couldn’t access it without some sort of hack/patch/crack/hardware code) scene in which two badly modelled and textured humans conduct a couple of sexual acts in a game already rated Mature (or 18, in the UK). It’s also seen by many American politicians and crazies (like Jack Thompson) as the most damaging piece of content ever produced, likely to turn children across the country into salivating maniacs (or parents, I guess).
Graham wrote an excellent article about this back when the beverage was originally discovered, which if you check the date you’ll see was back in August last year. Yes, after almost 11 months, people still think this is relevant. They’re living in a country where the president breaks the law on an almost daily basis, and the highest priority is deemed to be going after a few game developers who didn’t clean up after themselves.
Invention
Radio is a ridiculous invention.
Sometime millions of years ago, early humans, in-between hunting the wildlife, hitting each other over the head with clubs and indulging in carnal sex, discovered that hitting two rocks together made a sound. As time passed, they realised that depending on how many times you hit two rocks together, and the time you spent waiting between each hit, you could actually create a rather pleasing rhythm. I imagine there also came a time when the stretched out muscle of a sabre toothed tiger was plucked for the first time, causing hysteria as it’s resonating action was also found to be kind on the ears.
Being enterprising young creatures, with plenty of time on our hands, we would then spend countless hours fashioning replacements for these crude early noise producers. Inventing drums and guitars and banjos, vioins, violas, harps and the double bass, all so we could create more and more sound. Can you imagine the excitement when somebody realised that hollowing out a tree, putting small holes into it and then blowing in one end produced something they hadn’t heard before? Step forward the tuba, trombone, trumpet, piccolo, penny whistle, recorder, flute, clarinet and saxophone.
And remember, that’s how it all started, being entertained by noise. The human voice simply wasn’t enough, we needed to find ways to make louder and ever more creative noises, and decided it was a goal worth pursuing, even if that meant more important things, like proper sanitation, had to be put to one side.
Not a species to do things on our own, it probably wasn’t long after those first rocks were bashed together in a rhythmic pattern that two humans decided to bash at the same time. Then three. Then four. We would of course progress to eighty or more people playing in an orchestra at the same time, all bashing and banging and blowing and strumming, picking, plucking and, for those with a triangle, tingling. All so that we could make an even louder noise than ever before, unable to explain why we were just so instinctively driven to create it, and why we enjoyed it so much when we heard it.
But it wasn’t enough for us. We needed more. So we started bashing in front of other people. And they enjoyed it too. So we started inviting more people to listen, so many that it became difficult to find places to put them all. So we pulled in a new group of people, another part of the human race that decided they didn’t want to make noise, they wanted to build things. Tall things, wide things, impressive looking structures from materials they found in the ground or forged together with the help of another part of society who got excited about numbers and chemicals and things that exploded if you mixed them with the wrong things. This new group of people were instructed to build areas that could hold our bashers, strummers and blowers, and all those that wanted to listen to them do it.
You would think at this point we would stop. But we’re never happy. Both listener and basher were getting wet, so the builders were brought back to construct walls and roofs, rather than simple steps and arenas. This worked well for a while, and everyone was happy, until those that bashed found that something was wrong, the sound was no longer as pleasing to them as it used to be. Simply being loud was no longer enough, now there was acoustics to consider. And so entered the number and chemical humans, who combined with the structure builders and did complicated calculations, discovering new and exciting ways to make the noise more preferable, wherever a listener happened to be sitting in relation to the bashers.
Throughout much of this last period, another subset of man got involved, those who were interested in exchanging small bits of metal and paper. The bashers, blowers and strummers had found making noise to be an increasingly complicated process, requiring ever more elaborate equipment to make just the right sound, all of which required the aforementioned exchanging. The two groups got together and started only inviting listeners who were willing to exchange something of their own in return for a small piece of paper or card to prove they had done so. The bashers got enough metal and paper to get the parts to make the noise they required, the builders got enough to allow them to keep building and those organising the two along with the paper and card got to keep the rest.
Unfortunately those who wanted to listen couldn’t always be there, especially if the noise they liked wasn’t being bashed in a structure near them. So again it was time to call upon those who dabbled with numbers and exploding substances and see what they could do, and they invented just the thing, a contraption that could send the sound through the air to wherever it was required. The bashers could be noisy wherever they wanted, the listeners didn’t have to be any near a structure, those with the numbers could look smart like they always wanted and those obsessed with small bits of metal and paper could still sit in the middle and keep exchanging.
And so humans invented radio, and sent those who liked to build around the country to erect giant metal towers capable of sending out as much noise as possible, however loud the listener wanted it. They then built boxes able to receive the noise, structures to distribute them from and the exchangers were happy to swap with the listeners that wanted them.
Finally, the bashers, blowers and strummers could strum and make noise as loud as they wanted, and the listeners could listen wherever they were. The exchangers of metal and paper could keep on collecting, the numbers and exploders could create new ways to make the noise sound better and those who built things could show off by building things smaller than ever.
All because one day in a cave, millions of years ago, somebody thought banging two rocks together was mildly amusing.
Radio is a ridiculous invention.
And humans doubly so.
Visualise
I found out today that after speed reading the first 30 pages of a book (Blink, if you’re interested) in a reasonably quick time, that I was actually able to remember specific phrases and facts from the book, and roughly the page and line number they appeared on when tested. I wasn’t exact, but there was definitely a sense that in my head I could visualise the text on the page, and could remember my eyes flirting past it. I’ve always had a pretty good memory on certain things, but this surprised even me and certainly requires further investigation and training to see how good I can get at it.
I imagine there’s a book out there that can give me some hints, but I’m afraid I’ll need to read it twice in order to take advantage of it’s instruction.
Shaken
Would you believe I still haven’t shaken off the darn germs. The cough never developed into something of any great magnitude, but my sore throat seems to have returned, I’m still blocked up and that general feeling of bleh (I hope that’s a medical term that isn’t too complicated for all of you) still hangs in the air.
It was a fun day, a lovely drive in the countryside and a nice lunch where the waiter thought that eating soup with a fork was possible. I was honestly tempted to try and have it all finished before he came back with the spoon, just so I could ask why he felt the need to swap them over.
Philosophy
Does epistemological solipsism exist? Or is it all in my head?
Bird
There’s a rather excellent history of Superman documentary from A&E called Up in the Sky, which you’ll find floating around certain sites which may or may not allow you to download TV shows. I also believe it’s coming out on DVD as a longer edition.
It’s an hour and a half long, narrated by Kevin Spacey, and tells the complete history of Superman from his creation, through comics, TV series, cartoons, movies, more TV series and of course, more movies. This isn’t some puff piece, there’s actually history being told here, with lots of interviews and footage of all the different areas of the Superman legacy, and thankfully avoids any idea that it’s simply a clever marketing ploy for the new film (which of course it is, but still).
Pay particular attention to footage of The Adventures of Superpup, starring Bark Bent. Yes, it’s Superman done with dogs, where the dogs are actually little people wearing giant head masks.
Genius. That’s what it is.
Blasting
My car alarm went off today when Chan tried to open the door before I’d unlocked it. What it didn’t do was turn off afterwards (isn’t English fun).
I pressed the button on the key, I got in the car and closed the doors, I pressed the alarm reset button in the centre column, I even started the engine. Nothing seemed to make any difference. Without any problems I could have driven away from work to have my lunch with the horn still blasting away.
In the end, Chan had the idea of pressing the horn and that was enough to reset it, as if it suddenly realised that nobody was pushing it and therefore making any noise was just silly. As we drove away, I tried to turn up the radio, only to have it get stuck and deafen us as the volume rose to it’s maximum and refused to let me turn it down again.
Peugeot 206 electrics. Got to love the French.
Sitcom
Bill Lawrence is a lucky guy. Not only is he married to the lovely Christa Miller (well, she certainly was lovely in the past), but he also created Spin City, which was totally underrated in it’s early years and stayed good until Michael J. Fox left, and Scrubs, another one underrated during it’s first couple of seasons. And he’s managed to do all this by the age of 37, and was in fact my age when he created Spin City.
Last year he pitched another show, which NBC made a pilot of, called Nobody’s Watching. It’s a sitcom where two best friends are challenged by Warner Bros. to make a sitcom, all the while being filmed for a reality TV show. In the end the show wasn’t picked up (although only just, and mostly because the focus group thought the concept would be too confusing for audiences to understand), but thanks to the wonder of YouTube, you can now watch the whole thing online.
I found it very funny, with some particularly excellent moments, like the boxer shorts joke, or the Friends moment, or the continuous reminder that one of the characters doesn’t have a dad. And you just know you’ll start playing “made you look” again after you see it. When NBC put on shows like Four Kings and CBS serve up Out of Practice, it’s not exactly a sitcom lovers dream out there, so it’s a shame when shows that actually have the power to make me laugh out loud get left on the shelf to languish.
Editor
I quite enjoyed Dean Takahashi’s original Opening The Xbox, and I seem to remember reading it all the way through (my memory is actually a little hazy on that detail). So it was without much hesitation that I picked up the follow up, The Xbox 360 Uncloaked.
Despite having now read it from cover to cover (this time I’m sure), the 408 pages within don’t leave me as clued up as perhaps I should be. There are things to be learned from this book, without a doubt, but don’t expect it to be quite as in-depth as you might like. This is partly due to the amount of repetition in the book, it’s not uncommon to find a paragraph in one chapter almost completely repeated in the next, and the same sentences and facts can pop up over and over again, sometimes even with a page or two of each other. It’s the mark of a lazy editor, and it wouldn’t be unfair to suggest that this could be a much better book at 350 pages (or 360, if they wanted to be clever).
A few of the things you’ll learn are how the creation of Halo 2 left Bungie totally burned out and how a lot of people then left them, how X-Box Live Arcade was never expected to be the hit it’s turned out to be, and how, when polled by Microsoft, almost none of the developers saw a reason for the games to be on HD-DVD or Blu-Ray, they simply didn’t need that much space.
Know
This day is really annoying me.
Not just because I’m sick. But because by sitting here ill and not doing anything, I’m going to have nothing to write about in this entry. And you know how much I hate that. You know how much I know you hate that. And you know that I know that you know that you hate that.
Assault
As expected, I’m now fully entrenched in the world of the germ. Am I the only one who imagines these things as battles going on inside your body, where two armies face off against each other, the germs on one side with their pitchforks and flaming torches, and the medication on the other with their more up to date weaponry, like guns and tanks. What the medication didn’t know was that the germs knew the territory better, having spent more time there learning its nuances, and that it was going to take more than just fancy assault rifles to break down the defences.
Yea, OK, maybe it’s just because when I get sick I just drug myself up.
Also, a happy 21st birthday to Graham. I know it’s surprising to find he’s only that age when he last updated his blog when the dinosaurs were still roaming the earth, but trust me, it’s true.
Suffering
When you wake up with a sore throat, you know something bad is coming. Or at least, I do. I’ve learned over the past year that when it feels like this, it’s not going to be long before a more full on infection has developed and I’ll be sneezing, suffering from headaches, pains, fatigue and all those other marvellous symptoms.
I’d like to know what’s changed, I went years without ever getting ill, but over the past year to eighteen months I feel like I’ve been heading up unhealthy alley on the way to sickness street.
Heady
The latest episode of Consolevania is now available for those Scottish-understanding game freaks among you. It’s another not bad episode, better than last months, but not quite hitting the heady highs of some of those earlier in the series.
I’ve been having a few thoughts about my next game video, I’ve still got the N64 sitting beside me along with a copy of Ocarina of Time, but unlike Mario 64 which I’ve completed and know most of backwards and forwards, I haven’t spent a great deal of time in the Zelda universe. That makes doing another four minute review of it quite hard, and I don’t have time to play the game to bits and produce the video. I think the time may be coming to get the Amiga out and hook that up, where I can go back to the games I know the best.
Beating
As we approach the summer, our work servers are taking an even bigger beating as people look for ways to get away on holiday at the first opportunity they get. Looking through the statistics to see where we need to improve I came across the number of queries that a single one of our MySQL servers had done in the past 33 days.
1.3 billion.
Yes, you read that right.
Shoogly
I’m not sure whether I really want to move, but I went to see a house today. Still to rent, because my debts are still too high for me to consider buying, but a two bedroom place in East Kilbride because I like the idea of having more room. And even if it turned out to be rubbish, it might still be fun to go look.
I was in and out of the place in just a handful of minutes, it didn’t take long to discover that it wasn’t the place for me. The kitchen needed a clean and a paint, and the handles on the cupboards were shoogly. In the living room there were two flowery sofas along with a nice big leather chair, which I was informed would be removed because there was two much furniture in there, when in reality it was the best piece. Upstairs the walls were purple, green and yellow, while the bathroom was peach coloured apart from the two or three spots where holes had been plastered over but not repainted. Both the bedrooms were tiny, barely managing to contain the furniture within and in not one spot throughout the house did I see a place where my computer desk and chair would actually fit.
This is fairly new house as well, in a nice estate where many of the cars on the street were BMW or Mercedes made, and if you were buying it things would be different as most of the problems were easily fixed. But in a rental situation you need these things to be right from the start, as who knows if you can persuade the landlord to do something about them later.
All in all, for now at least, I’m not going anywhere.
Clarity
Google Maps is really cool, the clarity of the maps and the simplicity of the interface blew everything away when it appeared and to be honest, is still ahead of the game even now. Their satellite mapping is also a nice touch, but it’s been a bit US-centric, with a lot of the UK simply not covered to much of anything, including the area where I live.
Step forward Microsoft, and their Local service, with satellite imagery to a high zoom level covering almost the whole of the UK. This stuff is crazy addictive, I’ve spent ages following roads that I drive on every day to see where all those side roads end up, and I’ve discovered plenty of surprises along the way as well. The photos are a lot older than what Google has (Google is a couple of years old, Microsoft is closer to six), but what they do offer is clarity and coverage, and that’s clearly a winner. What they also have is a birds-eye view of many places (although no coverage for these parts), an isometric almost Sim City 2000 view of the world, even offering you the chance to rotate the camera in four directions.
Hopefully Google now step up and take it even further, where I’ll be able to see my car outside my current abode, rather than still sitting outside my parents house.
Concrete
I’m not a jeans wearer, I buy them occasionally thinking that might change, but they end up staying in the cupboard and never get worn. Due to a laundry/calendar mis-communication though, I didn’t have much choice today.
They’re pre-worn, which I do find to be a slightly ridiculous idea. They have scuff marks and other blemishes on them, which I imagine means that somewhere, probably in a Chinese sweat-shop, young children beat jeans hanging from hooks with sticks. Not too much mind, we wouldn’t want to put a full hole in them (this isn’t the 1980’s anymore), just enough to make it look as though the wearer has fallen a couple of times, perhaps rolled around on some concrete.
Fashion eh? Tch.
