Archive for March, 2007
Homeowner
So I bought a house. Nine days after thinking that it might be a good idea, it’s done. My reservation has been paid and the mortgage application forms have been signed. It’s almost been too easy.
For years I’ve rented without any real inclination that I wanted to change that. It always seemed like it was going to be a complicated process, not to mention an expensive one. And I always wanted to have cleared my credit card debt before I got into that whole thing. But house prices in the UK are doing nothing but going up, and it was getting to the stage where I was going to be completely priced out of the market. Houses have literally doubled in price in the past few years, and considering £70,000 is probably more money than most of us have ever seen, the fact that now you’re expected to pay more like £140,000 can make quite a difference. Thankfully, I got lucky, and haven’t had to go quite that high. Instead I’ve managed to find myself a nicely priced house, which is cheaper because there’s no show home and simply some blueprints (the prices will go up as soon as the show home does) and because the area is being regenerated. It’s a cul-de-sac with houses up just one side of the street in an estate where the house prices are doing nothing but increasing. and where I can do nothing except make a profit.
It feels good to be a homeowner.
Slamming
You would be doing yourselves a favour if you were to stay away from the cinema completely, in order that you don’t accidentally go and see a screening of the new Sandra Bullock film Premonition. I’ve seen some bad films in my time, but this really was quite spectacular. I’m almost looking forward to reviewing it for WE, just because I think that slamming it hard against the wall is going to be a lot of fun.
Mortgage
I went to see a mortgage adviser today, so at this point you can figure that things are getting quite serious. There are so many options out there, so many lenders, so many different types of mortgage, it can easily make your head spin. So rather than try and work it all out for myself, it makes sense to go and see somebody who can answer all my questions and do the hard work for me. Plus it’s free, so it’s difficult to argue with the proposition. Things turned out well, I shouldn’t have any problems getting somebody to give me a giant wad of valuable paper (it’s a no-lose situation for the lender, with house prices continually going up, even if I default they’ll actually make more money by selling the property) so it’s mostly just about deciding what kind of scheme I want to go with. I shall consider my options.
Slate
Further along the road from where the new housing development is you will find a development that was done 18 months ago, of exactly the same type of property. Coincidentally, one of them is currently for sale, so in order to get a better idea what I might be getting into we took a visit to it tonight to see what it had to offer. I left very impressed, the rooms were far bigger than expected for a new build, the fit and finish was very good and generally it was hard to complain. Unfortunately it left me in a difficult position of trying to decide whether I would rather have a new build, with no carpets, blinds, alarm, etc or an existing house where all that stuff is included, even if it may not exactly be to my taste. The price difference is negligible, so it’s really hard to decide.
Blank slate or one already carved.
Volcano
Andrea and I went to Edinburgh today, not exactly a great distance away, but not somewhere that I regularly visit. This is going to sound daft, but you can see how it could be quite the tourist destination. Whichever way you slice it, it’s just remarkably impressive to be walking down the street past some shops and then looking over to the other side of the street and seeing a massive castle sitting atop an extinct volcano. That’s just not something you can get in many places in the world. However hard Glasgow might try, I’m afraid it just can’t top that.
Hunter
Earlier this week I had this crazy idea about buying a house. I take a fairly regular look through what’s out there, both existing houses for sale and upcoming developments. This week I saw that a new development was happening on the other side of Hamilton, where I currently reside, where the prices were far below what most new developments are being pitched at. This is partly because the area is undergoing regeneration, but also because the builder was being sensible enough to price their houses to be attractive to first time buyers, as well as actually producing the kind of place they’d want to buy. So many builds these days are either flats (which I’m not really interested in buying) or are 3, 4 and 5 bedroom townhouses or semi-detached villas. Far out of my budget or need. But among their three bedroom selection there was also some 2 bedroom terraces. I enquired on their website and received an information pack yesterday.
So today I went to their sales office to see what was still available, what other information I could glean and see what the process would be if I wanted to go for it. It was good, the one I’m interested in is very much still available, the prices are what I expected and the process doesn’t seem like it’s going to be too hard. Unfortunately since I’m buying off plan, nothing having been built yet, it’s hard to get a real sense of what you’re buying into, but from looking at the last phase of development that was completed 18 months ago, it looks like it would be something worth doing. We shall see what comes next.
If you take a look at their website it’s The Hunter that I’m looking into.
Flutters
Parcelforce brought a Playstation 3 to my office today, despite having cancelled my order with Amazon earlier in the week. The delivery guy stood in our reception with the box and the piece of paper for me to sign and what did I do? I told him to take it away. No thanks. Don’t want it. It shouldn’t be here.
I may have suffered from some mild heart flutters afterwards, but I think I’ve calmed down now. First console in a decade that I haven’t had on launch day. It’s more than a little strange.
Mainstream
Why isn’t World of Warcraft available for the Xbox 360? Surely there is money to be made in porting that over? The answer may be that the controls, which when it comes to have lots of spells to cast can become quite complex, don’t map over too well to the controller, but there’s got to be something that can be done in that department surely. Maybe a special WOW 360 edition, set on it’s own realms with simplified controls. Running around in a virtual world like Second Life or WOW or whatever other MMO you can think of is only really going to hit the mainstream when people can do it looking at their TV and sitting on their couch. And there’s no more mainstream an MMO than WOW.
Justin
Justin.tv is a website where 24 hours a day you can watch somebody called Justin go about his daily life, broadcast live from a head-mounted camera. It’s strangely compelling, and having sent the man a text message and heard him reference it within mere seconds of me sending it, it’s very much happening right now. It’s being run by a San Francisco based web-startup who are hoping to prove and ultimately sell their technology setup to anybody who wants to do something similar, having written their own streaming software backend after deciding that nothing else out there was really up to the job.
Wouldn’t Big Brother be far more interesting with some audience interaction? I know they’re meant to be cut off from the outside world, but they would make a fortune if the producers let people text into the show and communicate with your favourite house mate. They could obviously censor all the messages before they let them through to stop people from finding out things they shouldn’t (like what the public actually thought of them) but it might be an interesting experiment. It was pretty cool to have my text message to Justin read out by somebody at the other side of the world so quickly, even in the insular geeky world of web TV.
Motorstorm
I saw Motorstorm running on a PS3 in the Glasgow Virgin Megastore today (while I was trying to buy an extra 360 controller). I have to say, it was a bit underwhelming. So despite the opportunity to play it, I decided to decline and not only that, but it pretty much confirmed my decision not to get the Playstation 3 when it comes out.
I love racing games, it’s probably my favourite genre, but it’s not worth spending £425 on what can only be described as a bare-bones example of one. And while yes, it does look great, it’s difficult not to be disappointed by how little the visuals relate to the original Sony demo of the title. Even though you knew it was lies at the time, it still hurts a little.
Sound
I’m sure at one point that I had a second Xbox 360 controllers. In my head I can see myself fighting to open the box, because it’s one of those stupid moulded plastic ones that you can’t actually get into without using scissors and cutting your hand. But wherever I look, I just can’t find it. How exactly do you lose a controller? It’s not that small. When trying to find it I came across plenty of other things, like my Apple Newton, and my Neo-Geo Pocket, and every previous Game Boy known to man. But no controller.
Microsoft need to add a feature where you can hold down a button on the front of the console and all your controllers start beeping, so I can at least follow the sound.
Clearer
The PS3 is just a little over a week away and I still can’t decide whether I really want one or not. I’ve got my order in as I’ve said before, but it just seems like it’s not actually worth having. The games just aren’t there yet, and while the multimedia features are cool, I just don’t think I’m going to be browsing the web, playing MP3’s, or viewing photos on my television. So what am I left with? A £425 black box taking up space under my TV.
Yea, I think the decision is becoming clearer.
Twitter
The website Twitter is beginning to gain serious traction, it’s almost got a constant presence now on every technology blog out there, so it would be disrespectful not to mention it here too.
To sum it up briefly, Twitter is like the status message from your IM client logged and stored on the web for anyone to see. Alternatively, you could think of it as one sentence blogging. You make 140 character updates saying what you’re up to right now, from either the web-client, your mobile phone or an application connected to their API. Your friends can then subscribe to your updates and the website keeps a history of all the ones you’ve made.
Remarkably, this has really taken off, although I’ve not quite worked out why yet. It’s from the same person that started Blogger and Odeo, which I’m sure has a lot to do with it. If I was to create a service like this (and let’s be honest, it would probably only take a couple of afternoons) it would go nowhere, because I don’t have the people watching what I’m going to do like he does. But beyond that, it seems to have something that the techno-bloggers really love, simplicity. It doesn’t do much, but what it does, it does very well. The same reason they love Apple. There’s a worry therefore that it’ll ultimately collapse under the weight of it’s own features once everybody keeps pushing them in every direction.
What this isn’t, is a mainstream success. And I don’t see that changing any time soon. Your man in the street hasn’t heard of this, and I think you’d find it hard to describe to them why they might want to use it. So while it’ll continue to grow in popularity, and the geek love will continue, I don’t think we’ll see this even getting to myspace level.
Of course what I’d like to do is create something that gets to email level.
Warming
I watched the Great Global Warming Swindle on Channel 4 and it has to be said, it has me convinced. Essentially this is a documentary in which a number of highly regarded scientists explain that while global warming is happening, it’s by no means a man-made event. Now I’ve seen Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth, and he makes a strong case as well, but there was just something about the way this so strongly debunked all of the supposed “facts” that it was hard not to be convinced. The most basic of all is to compare the two graphs that denote temperature change of the last century, and amount of carbon dioxide pumped into the atmosphere over the same period. They simply do not match up, in fact during one of the largest rises in carbon dioxide production (the post war industrial growth) the temperature actually drops. In the 70’s the BBC were showing documentaries telling us how we were all about to be plunged into another ice-age, yet now we’re meant to believe the opposite.
If this is true, and we’re now being suckered into making all these changes that will ultimately make no difference whatsoever, then that’s a terrible state to be in. Essentially the power of the media and the strong arm tactics of the few have managed to put the whole planet in a panic over something they’re powerless to do anything about anyway. That’s more disturbing to me than a slightly warmer winter.
Redirect
I completed the merge of Chatbear and Bearkey tonight. In fact, I started and completed it all today. Normally I’d spend weeks thinking about something like this, planning it out, deciding how it was all going to work, thinking of all the problems that I’m likely to encounter, but this time around I just went ahead and did it. Obviously this meant that there were a few problems and the site was completely broken at one point, but these were minor amounts of downtime, rather than something to be too concerned about.
Everything that was on Bearkey is now on Chatbear and hopefully all the pages that mentioned a Bearkey Account have been updated to say Chatbear Account. There’s lots of redirects and rewrite URL’s in place to make sure that everybody still ends up in the correct place. This should hopefully make it slightly less confusing for new users, as well as begin the process that will lead to the next round of features.
Point
After getting to the stage where I was more than two months out of date with the blog posts, I finally put the effort in and after a flurry of activity, caught right up. It’s a bit of a cheat, but I’m going to try and do better in the future. I don’t like having to sit down and write so many in one go, it’s not much fun. And if blogging isn’t fun, then what’s the point anymore.
Although maybe that’s a question that needs answering.
Home
Yesterday Sony announced Home, their answer to Microsoft’s Xbox Live service. It crosses Second Life and There with The Sims, Nintendo’s Mii creation system and Microsoft’s achievement system and spits out a persistent online world where you have your own living space, can chat with friends, and show off your trophies.
My reaction? Meh.
They’ve missed the point in so many ways. Firstly the graphics are an attempt to be reasonably realistic, rather than particularly stylised. So you end up looking like a kind of plastic Ken and Barbie doll rather than anything appealing. Nintendo’s Mii system works entirely because they are so cartooony and distinct, it’s what allows you to create something that’s truly identifiable as somebody else. With this system I feel you’re never going to get anything but creepy because of the uncanny valley. They would have had far more success with the characters from yesterdays Little Big Planet. I’d like to be one of them.
Then there’s their achievements, where you have a trophy room within which you can show your best awards. But achievements work because you want to collect them all, because you want to show people what a complete geek you are, displaying your gamer score like a champ. If you can only show a small selection of your achievements, that’s like showing no achievement at all.
There’s also the fact that the presentation kept going on about the marketing and advertising opportunities, so you just know you’re going to be nickel and dimed to death as they have microtransactions for everything from a new chair for your fake apartment, to a new baseball hat for your character. And why would I want to watch trailers in this environment anyway? I have a big TV in my own flat that I can watch trailers on, I don’t need to watch them on a fake screen in my fake apartment.
Remember those flight sims you used to get where the menu interface was a picture of your office, and you had to click on the filing cabinet to get into your plane or on the stapler to see your current missions. Really random stuff like that, where you had to hit an unlabelled, five pixel wide square to just go ahead and play the game. That’s what this feels like, an overly complex, graphically heavy layer on top of basic functionality the PS3 doesn’t even currently have - getting together with your friends to go ahead and play a game. I don’t want to jump through hoops to do this stuff, sometimes there’s just nothing wrong with showing me a list of items on a screen that I can choose from.
3D interfaces never worked on a PC. The desktop metaphor works. 3D interfaces to online gaming seem equally doomed to failure. It’s one thing to play Second Life because you like building stuff, it’s an entirely different thing to expect me to walk around a 3D world for ten minutes just so I can find the door marked “Play Your Game”.
Little
Finally, a reason for owning a PS3. If only it was out now and not later this year. I’m talking about Little Big World, the finest looking game creation software since Shoot ’Em Up Construction Kit.
OK, so maybe I’m not being totally serious. Go watch this video for a better idea of what I’m talking about.
Essentially you control one of the cutest game characters in years in a very realistic looking world which is almost like you’re playing on your kitchen table. You build a world around these characters using a simple set of options, place down your textures (or stickers as the game calls them) which can be anything from the included set to your own family photos, and then thanks to the fact that the physics of every object are realistically modelled, are then able to run through and play your level. You can then share your creation with the rest of the world, download the levels other people have created, and vote and comment on what you think are the best.
I’ve watched the video twice now and I’d happily watch it a third time and not be bored. It looks completely amazing, from the toolset to the graphics to the adorable creatures that you control. I absolutely can’t wait for a chance to try it out for real, and you just know that people are going to build some seriously cool shit with this.
Up
Last month I played the demo of Crackdown which is downloadable via Xbox Live (and it’s well worth doing so if you haven’t already and have the means to do so) and had a real problem with the controls. I had this same problem with Gears of War when I got that at the end of last year, and when I played it on the new TV tonight. I’ve also had this problem with every other 1st person/3rd person shooter/action game that I’ve played on a console.
I don’t know my up, from my down.
If I want to look up, I push down on the control stick, if I want to look down, I push up. So, thinking that my brain is naturally reversed, I invert the controls via the appropriate options screen. And you know what I do then? I push up when I want to look up, and down when I want to look down, therefore nullifying the change I’ve just made. It appears that whatever way I set the option, I always seem to do the complete opposite. And in a game like Crackdown which is very vertically orientated, this can become a serious issue.
Is there truly something wrong with me? I’ve tried sticking with one and trying to get used to it, but I never really seem to get there. Even after completely playing through the Crackdown demo and killing two of the bosses, I was still all over the place.
Oh what I wouldn’t give for mouse support.
Huge
The TV arrived this morning at 8:30am, even though I’d taken the day off so I’d be here when they delivered it. It is, in a word, huge. It completely dominates the corner of the room and looks fabulous.
When I first took it out of the box and set it up the picture was over-saturated, high in brightness and colour and doing nothing to persuade me that this was a good choice to have made. But after spending a couple of hours playing with every possible option it had for setting the picture properties, I’m now able to look at it with a wide smile on my face. I’ve tried out a couple of things so far, but it’s Xbox 360 games that look truly special now. Burnout Revenge just looks amazing on such a large screen, and it certainly makes it easier to see the traffic in the distance before you smash into it.
Did I mention it was huge?
