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Earning my daily crust
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Oct. 6th, 2008 @ 05:55 pm
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Photo taken Friday - we're playing Mario Kart on the office Wii. We're wearing hats because on Thursday evening a bunch of us were in the pub and decided that there weren't enough opportunities to wear hats these days, so we christened the next day "Hat Friday".
It's a tough job, but someone's got to do it... |
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A LARPing we will go
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May. 6th, 2008 @ 11:39 am
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LARP has always seemed one of those things I'd enjoy, but I've never had the impetus to actually take part in properly. But this weekend I was invited up to Broxbourne to monster at a Lorien Trust Lions event - monstering meant I didn't have to worry overmuch about character or kit, but could just focus on hitting people with latex weapons.
It was a great weekend - ran around a scout camp in a variety of costumes and makeups hitting people and falling down a lot. I mostly eschewed talky roles (due to lack of setting knowledge) for hitty roles, but the Lions tendency to heal and interrogate fallen foes meant I got some impromptu talking in anyway; I also got to yell at PCs as a nigh-unkillable bear-man leader at one point.
I was also impressed by how good people were at pulling blows, even in the confusion of a melee - I took one hit that was too hard (a pole-arm to the back of the neck as I was standing up) and even then the wielder came over to apologise once the battle was over. I've still got various bruises and nettle stings, but those were from overenthusiastic falling down on my part. And a shield-wall of fifty or so people in full kit looks pretty impressive (particularly when you're standing ten feet away wondering how to breach it) - I can only imagine what the final battles at the Gathering must look like.
Thanks very much to ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) littlegemma, Ben and everyone else for putting me up, lending me kit, explaining the rules (repeatedly) and everything else. |
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A restless night
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Apr. 22nd, 2008 @ 11:16 am
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I was woken up at around 2:15 this morning by a crashing noise from the other side of the house. Since in my time I've managed to cheerfully sleep through fire alarms, storms, and a couple of earthquakes, it must have been a hell of a noise. Anyway, there are a few more bumps, so I pull on my dressing gown and slippers and grab a torch.
Anyway, since the security light on the side of the house was on I take the opportunity to open the window and peer out. Sleep-fogged brain takes about thirty seconds to realise what's odd about this image before it clicks - the downstairs roof of the extension to the office downstairs is missing, and I'm looking at bare boards. Burglars did, in fact, try to steal my roof.
Stomp downstairs, to find the lead roof in a crumpled pile by the side of the building, whoever was there having legged it (I switched the lights on to find my stuff, so they had some warning). Quite how they were planning to move it is unclear - the gates were closed, so they must have come over the fence, and a 6x9 foot roof produces quite a bit of lead.
Anyway, I spent the next hour or so waiting for the police, giving a statement and so on - the police wanted to know if I'd be prepared to testify if they caught the guy(s); I said yes, but since the lead wasn't actually taken and they didn't take fingerprints or anything, it's unclear how they'd prove beyond reasonable doubt they had the right guy even if he was caught prying next doors roof off. Talked with the people from the office this morning about it - landlord's been informed, everyone seems pretty laid back (and it doesn't really affect me, since the extension's ground-floor only, not part of the flat).
It then took me about four hours to get back to sleep, so at this point I'm mostly operating on caffeine. But now I've had some and have perked up a bit, I can see the funny side - burglars tried to steal my roof. |
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My bank account quails and cowers
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Feb. 18th, 2008 @ 05:16 pm
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A mere decade after Kazaa, there's finally a service I can download music from legally which fits my various requirements (mp3 format, decent bitrate, no DRM) - play.com, who I already had an account with because they sell cheap DVDs.
It's still not perfect - they've only got music distributed by EMI, so 90% of the stuff I've searched for hasn't been there. And there's no obvious way to browse all of the music on the site by genre or anything, so you're stuck with searching for particular bands or track names.
But even so I've already managed to drop about £40 on albums and individual tracks. If they ever manage to up their library to the level of iTunes it'll be both fantastic (since I'll be able to buy almost any song in the world with a couple of clicks) and expensive (since I'll be able to buy almost any song in the world with a couple of clicks). |
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Fortuituous coincidences in english
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Feb. 11th, 2008 @ 03:35 pm
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I've been working on Windows GUI code recently, and was tickled to discover that when it came to drawing a border, my variables names produced a lovely cascade effect when it came to lengths. Defining all four edges of a window, as well as the four corners, produces:
...top...
...left...
...right...
...bottom...
...topleft...
...topright...
...bottomleft...
...bottomright...
This gave a happy thrill out of all proportion to its actual import. |
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I should confess, at this point, that I've become something of a politics junkie in recent years. Not, ironically, of british politics, but the rather more exciting american variety. I started getting into it three or four years ago, and watching The West Wing (repeatedly, in the case of the earlier seasons) really caused it to take off.
Frankly, american politics is just far more exciting than the homegrown sort - our main parties fundamentally agree on all the major issues these days, while in America they're still fighting over things like whether abortion should be legal. Even their scandals make recent blowups here like whether a £5000 donation was properly declared pale in comparison to bribes involving hundreds of thousands of dollars.
So the recent primary season has been a very good time for me - I read electoral-vote.com daily, as well as a few other sites, and right now I'm sitting up refreshing CNN's reporting page for Super Tuesday, even though only Georgia's showing any results right now. While it's mostly academic, Barak Obama definitely seems the candidate to pick - I read his very well-written autobiography over Christmas, and on the basis of literary merit alone I think he's worth a punt.
Feb. 6th, 2008 @ 12:35 am
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| » Well... shit. |
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Terry Pratchett's just announced he's been diagnosed with "a very rare form of early onset Alzheimer's"
At least he's as upbeat about it as I suppose you can be, under the circumstances, and plans to keep writing as normal for the time being.
Dec. 12th, 2007 @ 02:10 pm
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| » And I don't even own a TV |
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With various people posting TV reviews recently, I feel a need to confess my irrational love for CSI, prompted by today's arrival on my doorstep of Season 6 on DVD from Amazon.
On the downside, it's unrelentingly formulaic, and after the first season (where one character had a gambling problem, another was coping with a messy divorce and raising a single daughter, etc), the cast's social lives have mostly been reduced to background mentions and the occasional episodes that focuses on them specifically. Also, they do love their extremely gorey 3d reconstructions rather too much, and at times the tests they do can become moderately ludicrous (prize for silliest so far going to when the team took grainy security-cam footage of a victim and had their tech guy enhance it to the point where they could zoom in to get a high-resolution print of a suspect off the reflection from the victim's eyeball).
But on the upside, it's consistently entertaining, extraordinarily watchable, and ultimately it revolves around half a dozen geeks fighting crime... with science.
Dec. 4th, 2007 @ 05:50 pm
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| » (No Subject) |
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I finished off my recent spate of trips abroad with a visit to Norway. Aside from having to get up at 4:30 to make it to Stansted for the morning flight (it had been moved forward so I could make it to a 2pm meeting), the flight was made very smooth by not having any baggage. So smooth in fact, that I was on the express train when I realised I had no Norwegian money (to get on you just swiped your bank card), leading to an amusing period where I wandered around Lysaker industrial estate in the rain looking for a cash machine, finding that Abbey had helpfully stopped my card for my own good, and finally managing to change what British money I had at a post office after having no luck at a travel agent and bank.
After that, though, everything went very well. I met people, had a useful meeting, rang Abbey up and argued with them until they reactivated my card, and went to bed early. By the next day everyone else from the office had turned up, and there was a big technical conference, where I went to talks on things from how open source licenses worked to the technical details of NAT traversal in SIP. In the evening there was considerable amounts of drink, I rocked out on Guitar Hero (OK, so it was on Easy mode since I'd never played before, but it certainly felt like rocking out), got whupped at table hockey and drank some more. There was time to see a bit of Oslo the next morning before flying back to the UK.
There will be eventually be photos, from this and the previous trips, when I get around to writing some php to automatically generate photo galleries. In the meantime, a couple of cool links that caught my attention:
Breaking and restoring - four people repeatedly break into a French building over the course of a year to painstakingly restore an antique clock.
Sci-fi style powered armour is starting to get worryingly plausible.
Nov. 26th, 2007 @ 01:34 pm
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| » Beijing |
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I've been in Beijing since the weekend, thanks to SIPit, the biannual interoperability event where a bunch of developers of audio/video conferencing get together and try to test against as many of each others products as possible to ensure we all play nicely together. I's previously given me the opportunity to visit New Hampshire and Antwerp, and since it rotates America-Europe-Asia this time it's in China. The idea was somehow a bit intimidating (you need four different forms not including your passport on arrival), but also very cool, as it's not somewhere I've ever been before.
As far as the theory 'everyone will speak english' goes, that turned out to be decidedly untrue. Getting a taxi at the airport, despite the fact we came prepared with preprinted directions in chinese to show the driver, a map of Beijing showing the hotel and even GPS coordinates, proved impossible until we resorted to phoning someone who spoke Mandarin. And going to a restaurant in the evening quickly degenerated into a flurry of smiling, nodding and pointing at the menu; one of the waiters did speak two words of english - 'beef' (which turned out to be chicken) and 'chicken' (which turned out to be fish), but otherwise mime was very much the order of the day. The food was still excellent, but somewhat random, and we didn't figure out a way to order rice, since it was too mundane to warrant a photo in the menu.
The food, and indeed everything else, has however proven to be embarrasingly cheap - a heavy meal for five with beer, tea and some sort of lethal alcohol served in eggcups came out at just over £20, while the hotel rooms are about £15 a night. We haven't done anything particually touristy yet, but I'm staying on until Monday, and there are schemes afoot to hit the Forbidden City, Tiananmen Square, the Great Wall and maybe one of the big temple complexes Friday-Sunday, which apparently present ample opportunities to spend money. The one downside I anticipate from sight-seeing is the smog. If you look at the photo above, you can just about make out the grey haze, which is omnipresent, no matter the time of day or night (when the beams from car headlights are made visible much like spotlights in a club when they turn the smoke on). Though apparently they're clamping down a bit, particually for the Olympics - Patrick told me that ten years ago it was considerably worse.
One other negative that stands out somewhat is the way in which they censor the web - even from just casual browsing I've run into the Great Firewall a number of times. For instance, BBC News Online is banned, as is Wikipedia, and even Livejournal (I'm posting this thanks to the magic of an encrypted VPN to my work computer in the UK), as well as some seemingly innocuous minor sites, which pretty handily knocks the most useful sites I browse to. They even stop you using Google's cache, so when I search for something I get a few teasing lines for the wikipedia article on the search page itself, but can't read it in full.
Still, I'm very much enjoying it, all told, and am looking forward to getting out and seeing more of the city itself over the weekend.
Nov. 6th, 2007 @ 02:47 pm
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| » I love my job |
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One of the nice things about my job is that from time to time I get the chance to go to random countries for one reason or another. But this month various things are overlapping to the point where things go a bit crazy - I'm off to Athens tommorow for a three-day 'So, we just bought your company' meeting thingy with some of the new bosses, then two weeks later I'm going to Beijing for a week and a half for an interoperability conference, and then two weeks after that I'm off to Oslo for a couple of days to meet some of our opposite numbers in engineering. I wouldn't want that sort of schedule on a regular basis, but since I've never been to Greece, Beijing or Norway, I'm looking forward to it.
On the downside, it means my carbon footprint, previously quite reasonable, will be roughly Godzilla-sized, but since all of this is to facilitate the creation of better video-conferencing kit I suppose I could claim I'm on the side of the angels in the long run.
Oct. 17th, 2007 @ 03:52 pm
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| » (No Subject) |
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Was really good to see people again in Cambridge - apologies for fading towards the end of the party and not seeing people the next day, but I was feeling increasingly grotty as the night wore on. Initially thought I had drunk far more than I realised, but it continued through Saturday and Sunday - trying to get back from Cambridge to Slough while the line between Cambridge and Kings Cross is closed is made even less fun when you are throwing up every hour or so. Still, it could have been worse, and I managed to make a slight dent in my ludicrously long to-watch movie list since I spent the rest of the weekend propped up on the sofa.
Sicily was great - always nicely warm without ever becoming uncomfortably hot, with beaches, towns and ruins to divide time between.
Oct. 1st, 2007 @ 11:02 am
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| » It served loyally |
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My PC rolled over and died last night - according to the beep codes the motherboard's gone, which is annoying. Still, it gave me five or so years of solid service, and the data on the hard disks should be fine (and I back everything of import up these days anyway), so it's not the end of the world. I'll need to sort out a new one at some point, but in the mean time I've got my work laptop.
But replacing it'll have to wait, as I'm off to Sicily on holiday tomorrow with family. Should be nice and warm, with sights and beaches and volcanos. I'll be back on Monday the 24th, hopefully with many photos.
In other news, it turned out the Nissan garage wanted £300 to replace my wing-mirrors, so instead I spent £50 buying a pair of second-hand ones on eBay, and after several hours of unscrewing just about every screw in the car managed to replace them without doing significant damage to myself or the car. I also decided to learn to program in DirectX so I could play around with an open-source physics engine, which is a lot of fun. Things at work have been a bit up in the air after we were bought out by a Norwegian company, but we're pretty much back to business as usual now.
And now, a handful of random videos:
A Gentleman's Duel - you might have seen this one, but if you haven't it's a fantastic short film with amazing 3d animation, humour, victorian stereotypes, breasts (safe for work) and giant robots. What more could you want?
Windwalkers - Kinetic sculptures by a Dutch artist that use the wind to 'walk' across beaches. Absolutely stunning, particually the one shown at 2:10 (which I can't help feel has a definite Lovecraftian vibe to it with its lumbering many-angledness).
80s ending - I'm not a great connoisseur of eighties movies, but I've still seen a fair few in my time. This clip manages to parody all of them. All of them.
Sep. 13th, 2007 @ 12:11 pm
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| » Well, that's annoying |
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Got into the car to drive to the shops only to discover someone had broken in and stolen my CD player and the boot backboard which had a pair of built-in speakers. Given that the CD player was was actually broken (and lacking its faceplate) it wasn't much of a haul. Somehow they managed to break in without breaking a window, or apparently damaging the doors (before you ask, I'm pretty sure I locked the car), but aggravatingly they broke both wing mirrors in the process.
So now I need to figure out how I'm going to fix that. Some Googling suggests I could get hold of a pair of used spares for around £50, and new ones for about twice that (though they seemed to have changed the style of mirrors on my model of car since it was made, which complicates matters further). There's a Nissan dealership in Slough, as well as a tiny garage I use for my MOT, so I guess I'll ring round tomorrow and see what this is going to cost to sort out. If it turns out to be extortionate I'll probably have a go at fixing it myself, though the owners manual doesn't include any details for swapping out the wing mirrors. Yay for trial and error, I guess.
In other news, tomorrow I find out if I can start wearing contacts again - I stopped about eight months ago because my optician told me my eyes were too dry and my tear glands weren't working fully - this may be connected to my 'ingenious' plan last year of rigging up a fan on a box directly behind my computer monitor to keep me cool by blowing directly into my face, which in retrospect may not have been the best idea...
Otherwise, you may have already seen this, but if not the Simpsons Movie website has an extremely cool 'make yourself as a Simpson' flash thingy here, which is even better than the South Park one that's been around for a while (go to the 'Create Your Simpsons Avatar' tab at the top).
Jul. 19th, 2007 @ 12:43 am
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| » Thanks, y'all |
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Thank you to everyone who volunteered to help out with my psychology experiment, both in comments and by Email. The thrust of the experiment was whether people generally value advice from members of one gender more highly than another: half the participants got a vignette where the person providing advice was male, half where the person was female. Statistical analysis showed no meaningful difference, which is I suppose a good thing.
The question was kind of screwy, though; someone I know at work who did this course a few years ago mentioned that the whole think was ruined by the fact that more than half of his participants gave an answer of 0, and that's what I found too (the questions to be asked are predefined, so I couldn't fix them up). Ah, well, as least it gave me something to talk about in the section on limitations and improvements.
I'm off to Norfolk on holiday this week, which I'm looking forward to; I haven't taken leave from work this year so far, and it's been very busy this past week. In the meantime, I leave you with the ultimate evolution of the whole lolcats internet meme thing: lolcode. "O NOES" is definitely the best exception-handling statement ever defined.
Jun. 2nd, 2007 @ 10:48 am
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| » I need brains! |
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My part-time OU psychology course continues apace, and part of my next assignment involves collecting data for analysis. Hence I need victims guinea pigs participants...
It's not an onerous thing - basically, you need to read a paragraph of text, and write down a number; it'll probably take a minute or two. I need age and gender of recipients for statistical reasons, but no names or other identifying information will be used.
If you're interested in helping out, please comment below (with your Email address, preferably, in case I don't have it), or Email me (vitriol at gmail.com), and I'll email you the question and instructions. I can reimburse you only in gratitude (and possibly pictures of cats with humorous captions).
May. 21st, 2007 @ 12:17 pm
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| » Antwerp - city of diamonds, chocolate and beer. What a civilization. |
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I survived my deposition, and treated myself to a couple of graphic novels (includes Warren Ellis' new superheroes parody) at Forbidden Planet before meeting up with Aanand and Paul in the evening. After that it off to Antwerp for an interoperability event called SIPit. Basically, techies from a seventy or so telecom/videoconferencing companies get together for a week, and we test our kits against one another. This year, rather than being in a purpose-built lab in a university like last time, it was in an old conference hall attached to Antwerp zoo. While that meant there wasn't a huge amount of space, and there were issues with network access and power, we did have an giant skeleton of a whale floating overhead the whole time.
Antwerp was pretty nifty - I met a lot of people, drank of lot of excellent beer (during dinner on Tuesday a bunch of us went out for an 'old-fashioned' style meal in an old cellar, and I was fortunate enough to be sitting to a Norwegian guy who knew a lot of the best beers to try), and did much SIP testing. Since I've mostly been working on other things since the New Hampshire event six months ago and hence haven't implemented many new features (but had fixed a lot of bugs) the stack was much more stable than last time, and while we found quite a few issues they were mostly very minor. In a way it's a shame, since the next event will be in Beijing, but I don't think I'll be able to justify going.
Apr. 19th, 2007 @ 09:24 pm
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| » Long time, no blog |
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Insert obligatory noises about meaning to post more often here.I can make vague excuses that I've been busy - I'm into the second year of my OU psychology degree (which is harder work but far more interesting than the first, as we're now doing real psychology instead of wooly sociology stuff) and I'm finishing up an RPG freelancing project I started six months ago, but still.
Can't really recall what's happened in the last month or two, but in the past few weeks I've bought a shiny second-hand digital camera (a cheap 5 MPixel model without a viewfinder), went to see the Barenaked Ladies live, and discovered I have to go into London next week to give evidence under oath, as I've been deposed as part of ongoing lawsuit the company's involved in, which I can't go into detail about.
And because I'm something of a closet transhumanist, have a very cool article about how the brain will rewire itself to accept completely new senses (such as the ability to sense magnetic north) if you can just find a way to interface them. I've read about this stuff before, but nothing quite as fun or sophisticated.
Apr. 5th, 2007 @ 01:26 pm
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| » A new set of stories |
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In the past few months my intake of novels has dropped precariously. Not that I've been reading less (perish the thought!), but because I've found myself reading history books instead. Not big weighty tomes that double as university textbooks, but the less daunting 'pop-history' books that don't presuppose years of training in the subject, and tend to be better at weaving a story, rather than just drily stating the facts.
I think part of it is that they're more reliably entertaining - with novels there's a chance that the plot will be rubbish, or the characters will be aggravating, or the language just won't click, whereas with histories there's a more robust, serviceable style of language, and a pretty strong guarentee that the story'll be a good one.
Plus there's an irrational feeling that reading a history of the Opium Wars is somehow 'worthier' than a similarly-sized fictional story.
Jan. 29th, 2007 @ 04:20 pm
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| » I've always liked ochres |
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While I've had a website for the last three or four years, I've never been entirely happy with it: the first iteration was pretty, but so complex and image-heavy I couldn't update it without redesiging the entire site, while the second was minimalist to the point of ugliness. So in early December I figured I'd try again, and teach myself PHP and CSS into the bargain.
So now my website uses PHP to automatically generate XHTML, which uses CSS to do all its layout formatting. Or, to translate that acronym-strewn mangling of the English language into something more readable: all I need to do now to add a new page is add a .txt file, and it'll automatically convert it to the web format, slap on appropriate menus (and update all corresponding menus on other pages) and stick it in the correct directory.
I've never been fond of graphical design, so I just went with a simple, coherent colour scheme, and a nice straight-forward layout that looked good to me. This is definitely my favorite of the three sites I've created, hopefully both the most elegant and the most readable. That's not to guarentee it won't die in a fit of idleness now that the revision is complete and my enthusiam is starting to wear out, but I'm going to make a real effort to ensure that doesn't happen.
So, tada, the grand opening of my newly redesigned website, (including a bunch of content too). Suggestions/criticisms are, of course, welcome.
Jan. 17th, 2007 @ 02:14 pm
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