Archive for September, 2006
Fool
Boy, do I feel like a fool.
I told the story of my 360 support call the other day, and I also spoke of WOPR Mk 2 being finished off. This afternoon I was having a bit of a tidy up, putting WOPR in it’s final home in the cabinet below the television. While doing so, I pretty much unplugged everything beind the TV, including the 360. I then had this idea in my head that I’d go plug it in on the other side of the room, as if somehow it would work in a new location.
And then it did.
Then I went back and plugged it into the same power bar as before…. and it still worked.
Oh.
So apparently all I had to do was physically unplug it from the wall and then plug it back in again. No need for any Indians to be involved. As I had said in my original post, I’d already done the unplug test, but I’d done it with the middle part, removing the power cable from the power brick. I’d never actually removed the power cable from the wall itself.
Well at least this means I have a working 360 again. Although it’ll also mean I’m shortly going to have two power supplies.
Defcon
Defcon, the Introversion Software tribute to WarGames Global Thermonuclear War, was released tonight. Clocking in at just 10 of your British Pounds, I’ve been looking forward to this game the same way anyone whose blog was named after a line from the aforementioned film would be.
I fired it up tonight shortly after downloading it (I had pre-ordered it) and just worked my way through the tutorial in the limited time that I had available to me. The first five parts were fine, it pretty much told me what to do and I did it, winning each of the rounds without much effort. Unfortunately then I got to the sixth, where it wanted me to use everything I’d learnt so far to win against my opponent. What they hadn’t counted on was that I would have forgotten everything it had spent the past half an hour telling me, leaving me very confused and getting destroyed by a barrage of nuclear weapons before I had time to get a proper handle on things.
I see potential here for a fine workplace multiplayer experience, preferably running in real time. I’m an especially big fan of the presentation, the sound deserves special mention for it’s creepyness, but I need to find proper time to play it before I cast any proper judgements like a WE review.
And it’s crap? Well… it was cheap.
Cooling
Tonight was about putting the last finishing touches to the WOPR hardware, by adding two new 300GB drives. I also decided that with five hard disks now in there, I was probably best to add some further cooling too, so I through in another two fans. Of course like all PC hardware building it wasn’t quite that simple, and adding both of them meant moving around the disks I already had in there and ultimately limited me to five instead of six drives within the case.
It’s all still pretty quiet, although obviously not quite as nice as it was before. Amazingly, despite 4 fans and 5 hard disks, it’s still quieter than my 360 is.
WOPR 2 is therefore now complete, with (and I’m remembering this rather than counting again) 1.3 terabytes of space.
Indian
My 360 has been refusing to switch on, which I may or may not have mentioned before. Pressing buttons on the controller, pressing buttons on the front of the console, nothing works. The power brick has a red light on it, but nothing more. So a call to Microsoft support was in order.
Unsurprisingly, an Indian gentlemen answered the call, after only a couple of minutes of being on hold. He wasn’t too difficult to understand, in fact I think he had a much harder time understanding me than the other way around. After some basic troubleshooting, including asking me to unplug it for 20 minutes (which I’d already done) he said they’d send me a replacement and that he’d just take my address details. He found it almost impossible to hear that I was saying I lived in Lanarkshire, even after spelling it, but the service was otherwise pretty quick and painless. I especially liked how easily they offered up a replacement.
Next we’ll see how long it takes for the replacement to arrive.
Houses
The flat upstairs is for sale, two bedroom, £105,000. I have to admit to be quite tempted, it’s not a bad price considering what the flats around here can start at, but I have to admit that I’d prefer to have a house rather than a flat. There’s just something in my head that says you rent flats and buy houses. I’d also quite like a garden, although that would just come with the added problem of having grass to cut.
I’ve looked online at a generous amount of houses over the past week or so, and I’ve been constantly surprised by how reasonably priced so many of them have been. With the current housing boom and constant reports of ridiculous house prices, it’s easy to get the idea in your head that buying anything respectable for anything less than an arm, leg and torso is going to be impossible.
My biggest problem, beyond ones purely financial, is being worried that I’d spend all this money and end up in some horrible location, with constant street noise, neighbours from hell, and a feeling of fear whenever I ventured outside.
Fish
The other present that Andrea got me for my birthday was fish. Goldfish to be precise, complete with bowl, plant and umm, water. Unfortunately due to some bad advice from the pet shop in which she bought it, the bowl is actually unsuitable for them, so they’re currently swimming around in rather dirty and un-oxygenated water. So that the RSPCA don’t turn up at the door and so I don’t cultivate my reputation as a murderer even more I ordered a new tank, a Bio Orb. It has a built in bubble tube up the centre, light on the top and doesn’t look bad either. It’s certainly going to be a better home than where they are at the moment, although I think some re-arranging is going to be necessary to fit it in correctly.
Dazzling
Hands down the best film I’ve seen this year, that’s Children of Men starring Clive Owen, Julianne Moore and Pam Ferris. Yes, Pam Ferris, from Darling Buds of May. And other stuff too of course, but that’s what I know her as.
Dazzling, astounding, jaw dropping, funny, touching, I fail to understand why it’s not getting the recognition or critical acclaim it deserves. Can’t wait to get this on DVD.
Kingussie
Today is the occasion of my 27th birthday, which was marked by Andrea taking me to Kingussie as a surprise getaway. It’s a tiny place on the A9, heading towards Inverness, but although I was driving I wasn’t actually allowed to know where we were going, resulting in us taking a little longer to get there than we should have done.
The hotel was really nice, just a small little country house with perhaps 8 rooms (I honestly didn’t count), run by a large man who always wears a kilt and his wife (I mean it’s run by a man and his wife, not that he wears his wife). And for my American readers, no, this is not normal. We went for a walk around the village and then just sat inside and read the paper in the lounge before heading into the dining room for a lovely meal. The service was really personal and fast until we asked them to give us a minute after the main course before we got the dessert menu. An hour later we got dessert. I think they forgot about us.
But despite that it was a whole load of fun and certainly the best birthday in years.
Niggle
I used to run my own software on WOPR, but with Mark 2 I want it to replace my TiVo and my Freeview box as well as be a video server, so my original plan was to run MythTV on Linux. After reading up on it, it sounded great. So many features, from the recording of TV, to the weather forecasts and RSS support, to the downloading of meta-data of all the films from IMDB. But the more I read about it and the more I read about what hardware it would work with and how to make each section run correctly, I realised that I needed to do an awful lot of research. And if I was having to do that much research on how to make it work properly, perhaps it wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.
So I switched tracks, added an extra £80 onto my costs, and purchased Windows XP Media Center edition instead. And so far, I’m very pleased with it. Setup was a breeze, it detected my two tuner cards without any fuss, scanned the channels and put them all in the correct order. The interface is very smooth and I have a nice light-up official Media Center remote to go with it which brings a smile to my face every time I press a button. There’s been serious thought put into how users are going to interact with it, and searching through the guide for programmes to record or watching live TV is all very easy to do, better even than the TiVo it replaces.
My only niggle so far is in it’s handling of video. It’s designed around people having camcorder footage they want to display, rather than for those who have ripped their DVD collection. This means that there is no search, no way to show the collective contents of multiple hard disks (I have four), not even a list view - it’s always displayed as nine thumbnails per page. Looking at the version to be released with Vista, it doesn’t look although it’s going to improve any either. There are alternative media center solutions for Windows out there, but I don’t believe any of them are going to handle the TV experience quite so well, so for now I’m just going to have to stick with it.
Ceremonial
With all the parts having arrived for WOPR Mark 2, I set about building the machine today with Andrea keeping me company. And it’s just as well she was, because there is nothing quite so dull as putting a PC together. Push that in here, unscrew this, lift that, tighten that, attach those, cover this with that… I don’t know how many I’ve built by this stage but it certainly lost the fun factor a long time ago.
I was buoyed by the fact it came on first time however, although since the case didn’t come with a PC speaker (amazing, considering it’s cost) I did miss the ceremonial beep.
Overhaul
I didn’t put much thought into this beforehand, I just got up today and decided to give Chatbear some lovin’. A few weeks ago I made the decision to split the Chatbear and Bearkey admin systems into two distinct parts, allowing each of them to run on their own development track and letting people get their hands on the Bearkey account upgrades that in some cases were written a year ago.
You can see a screenshot of what I’ve managed so far here. It’s still a work-in-progress, so far all I’ve done is take the existing admin and give it a visual overhaul, converting it all to using CSS and making it work within an existing Bearkey navigation framework. There’ll be further work on making communities easier to manage as well as on the design just as soon as I finalise the colour palette of the new Chatbear site.
I think you can expect the new Chatbear website, administration system and a visual overhaul of the default Chatbear board designs sometime in the next month or so. Hopefully by the end of October at least. And then the Bearkey overhaul shortly thereafter or at the same time.
Seize
The first part of WOPR Mark II turned up from Scan today, the case. I brought in the cardboard box, opened it up, turned it upside down and let it slip out onto the floor. I unbagged it, removed the tape holding the fold down doors closed and admired it’s shiny black face. I then stood up, bent over, and picked up the case with the aim of putting it onto the couch. And that’s when it happened.
OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOWWWWWWW!
I immediately collapsed to the floor, unable to move, having hurt my back more than I’ve ever hurt it before. I lay there for 20 minutes, unsure as to what to do, I considered phoning for an ambulance because I really couldn’t move. Any attempt to shift to stand up again just resulted in even more pain.
Things have obviously improved now, I’m able to move around again, and in fact if I don’t keep doing so then things appear to seize up and get even more painful. I’ve spent a lot of time tonight walking up and down the room to loosen myself up.
Lesson learned, computers are not only evil, if you say so out loud they’ll come and get you.
Digital
A couple of parts from Scan and the rest from Overclockers and we have ourselves a new media center PC, WOPR Mark II.
I’ve been planning this for two weeks, I’ve read countless articles about what power supplies are the quietest, how to run CPU’s without fans, and since at one point I planned on running MythTV on Linux (until deciding to run Windows Media Center Edition instead because I couldn’t be bothered with all the hassle) I’ve read all about TV cards and what the pros and cons of each one is. Frankly, it’s all been dull as hell. But despite all that I still ended up ordering a dual tuner TV card today that was actually for regular broadcast television, rather than digital. It’s all sorted out thankfully, but there was a moment there where I just felt decidedly stupid.
Particularly
After the long drive yesterday, the cold has really caught up with me now, so today was spent doing as little as possible, sneezing a lot and taking painkillers and other medication. Not particularly exciting and not particularly blog-worthy.
Trafford
Shopping centres have become a bit of a curiosity for me recently. I finally got around to visiting Braehead with Andrea, an absolute disappointment if ever there was one. It feels so small and uninspired, I wasn’t exactly bothered that I’ve ignored it for so long. In the hope of making up for it we took a trip down to the Trafford Centre in Manchester today, which I believe is the second largest in the UK (after Gateshead), and I can proclaim it to be well worth a visit.
The Trafford Centre is particularly noteworthy because it’s unlike any shopping centre I’ve ever been in before. Rather than the normal white plastic and glass design that pervades these places, the first thing you’re greeted with here are palm trees set among giant faux-marble columns and tiled floors. There are a number of restaurants lined up along the sides of a fake indoor street, complete with washing hanging off balconies, street lights and pavements. And then there’s the food court, where is setup to look like they’ve chopped the end off a giant cruise ship and you’re eating on deck. I kid you not, you just stand there in amazement.
I don’t really have shopping in mind when I go to these places, in fact both of us came back from Manchester completely empty handed. I just find them fascinating, from the people watching perspective and from the business perspective. I’d love to design one, place the shops, deal with the business aspect of it. There’s been a Sim Mall, right?
Impulse
After months of waiting we finally found out today that the Wii was going to cost £179.99 or $250. To me, that’s impulse buy price. I didn’t even have to think about it, I’ll be ordering one just as soon as Amazon start taking pre-orders. But the detractors are already appearing on the messageboards, complaining how $250 is too expensive and saying that it should be $200 with two controllers and screw the included game. There are even people saying that they hate sports games and certainly don’t see why they should pay extra for Wii Sports when they’re never going to play it. How they can judge the game before they’ve even had a chance to try it out I’ve no idea, but you know what messageboard users are like.
Oh and it’s out in the UK on December 9th, and the US on November 19th. I can see myself taking it over to Marks for playtime on Xmas day.
Watery
I woke up this morning with a sore throat, which has become the early warning sign for the onset of a cold. This never used to be the case, when I was younger I don’t ever remember starting out every run of sneezing and coughing with throat pain but it’s almost like the strain of cold virus that goes around now includes that by default.
I’m disappointed because it seems like only a couple of months ago when I went through this and also because I’m on holiday next week and nothing spells holiday like a red nose and watery eyes.
Indexed
One of the biggest problems any website faces is promotion, how to actually get visitors to come and take a look at whatever it is you happen to be producing. Good placement on search engines, especially Google, can make or break you. Unfortunately whatentertainment doesn’t even show up on Google yet, apparently the change of domain name from whatinterest was something it didn’t like, but MSN on the other hand, they love me.
Almost every article I’ve ever written is the top result (or close to the top result) on a search for that item. For example, if you were looking for a review of the TV show Vanished and happened to go search for vanished review then there I am, number three. Or how about victory for the comic muse review, where I’m just below Amazon and above every major music site on the web. Or if you’re a gamer, super mario 64 review, where you’ll find me above both IGN and Gamespot, two of the largest gaming websites there is.
This made me jump up and down like a small child tonight. Maybe people will actually start discovering what it is I’m putting together over there.
Sacrifices
Updated iPods, including an incredibly tiny Shuffle, the expected movie store, and an early showing of a set-top box. It can only be Apple announcement day.
The two interesting parts are the movie store and the set top box (known only at the moment by it’s code name iTV). The store because Disney are the only studio involved (unlike Amazon who have everyone apart from Disney), not because Apple didn’t try and get anyone else, but because they refused to bow to studio pressure to set the store up in a particular way. This obviously wouldn’t be the normal way things would be done, Amazon made their business deals, just like Microsoft would do, by letting themselves be dictated to. But because Apple have Steve Jobs, who also just happens to be Disney’s largest single shareholder, he’s able to start with them without making too many sacrifices. This is the kind of head start that should allow Apple to show all the other studios what they’re missing out on, and they’ll sign up just as quickly as they’ve done with their television shows.
The introduction of the iTV will put Apple on a very different course from a lot of the other set-top box manufacturers, because they’re making no effort to turn it into a PVR. This won’t be recording your television, if you want to watch a programme, you’ll buy it from the iTunes store (probably while sitting on your couch holding your remote) and watch it that way, or you’ll subscribe to a whole season and get it delivered ad-free. Or perhaps ad-supported, but still delivered over the net.
They’ve managed to create tools for all the steps of the chain, from production and editing software like Motion and Final Cut Pro, to the iTunes store for delivery and the iTV and iPod for display. Independent television production will no doubt explode in popularity as people realise there’s no reason why they can’t compete with the big networks. Apple are about to create a television revolution in a way you’d never have thought possible, and all you need is a Mac.
Invitation
I got a letter today from the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, inviting me to take part in a course called Building, Leading & Sustaining the Innovative Organisation, which would cost me $2600.
I’m interested to know exactly who goes ahead and pays that much for what is actually just a two-day course (so you can imagine that’s only 14 hours or less, what with lunch and all), but more interested to know why they decided to send the information about it to me. Addressed specifically to me at my home address. I guess I should just be pleased that they consider me to be running an innovative organisation.
