Category: Geekery

It’s a Brave New World!

Finally did the thing I should have done long ago

You know the hardest thing (for me) about maintaining a blog has always been the amount of work necessary to actually make an entry. Not the writing bit – I suffer from near permanent literary diarrhoea (wow, that sounds unpleasant) – but the spell checking, the mark up, the logging in to my account, the posting, the proofreading – you get the idea.

(Yeah, yeah, this is what comes from co-opting a system never intended to do blogging for the purpose of blogging – I’m lying in a bed of my own making, I know it.)

When the blogosphere (or at least my own personal part of it) was fresh and new, this wasn’t a problem. I was so enthused about posting my own brand of inane chatter on “the interwebs” that the inconvenience was worth it. Seven years on (I’ve been writing this thing for seven years!? Copre Sanctum!!) the allure has faded. I can’t count the times I’ve had things to write about, but just haven’t had the energy to face the rigmarole of getting a post up. The end result? A posting rate declining faster than the US dollar.

But no more! I stayed back at work tonight and got a nice, simple, secure and (above all else) easy page up that automatically takes care of spell checking, markup, logging in and posting – all in one integrated action. I write, I click, and the post is up!

(You know, the kind of thing proper blogs have had for years.)

So, from now on expect more blogging action, more often! Who knows, I may even have time to catch up with the rest of the web and program in comments.

Lolwut - or The Biting Pear of Salamanca

As a final note I thought I’d write about something (or rather someone) I’ve been meaning to mention for ages. About a year ago it suddenly occurred to me (I was probably quite bored) to track down the origin of that bizarre “lolwut” picture. You know, the pear with the teeth, and the giraffes, and the lighthouse thing?

So I poked around, and discovered the deviantART portfolio of one Ursula Vernon.

I was hooked (go on, go take a look).

Not only is her art fantastic, but she accompanies most works with a short piece of narrative, which merely hooked me more (go on, take another look!).

I make a point of checking her gallery for new work at least once a week, and recommend that you do so too. Go on! Do it! 🙂

(My favourite is the Carousel Walrus)

OK, enough waffling for now. Look forwards to more posts. More posts! MORE POSTS!! MWAHAHAHAHA!!!

All Aboard the Good Ship Milkybar

Farewell to the milkiest Battlestar of them all

Well they’ve (apparently – I’m not looking up the exact details for fear of spoilers) announced the end of Battlestar Galactica – conincidently on the same day my season three box set is shipped by Amazon. This is actually perfectly fine by me, the basic plot couldn’t possibly keep going season after season after season without the series turning really stale. Ending while it’s still a reasonably good show (as far as I know, only having seen seasons one and two) makes sense.

(It also gives them a great opportunity to pen a really crappy sequel series featuring flying motorcycles 🙂

As regards my box set, it’s going to take over a month to get here. This is merely more evidence for my sea otter theory regarding Amazon deliveries to the Asia-Pacific region.

PS: Why Milkybar? Trust me – linguists will be wetting themselves over that one 😉

Hands of Blue, Two by Two

A big damn new start

So, I’m going over to Fabian’s place tomorrow, and he’s insisting that I bring my still-in-development Firefly card game, Plyin’ the Black (apparently people like it – I’m as surprised as anyone). So I fire up Open Office to print out a new copy of the rules. It tries to open the rules document as an ASCII file.

“That’s weird” I think, but I figure that if the .odt file is corrupt, I always have the .pdf version I saved. So I go to open that. No dice, Adobe won’t recognise it as a valid pdf.

Suspecting that something is up, I check out some of the other files in the directory. Then all the files in the directory. They’re all corrupt!

There’s only one explanation. I’ve been got at by the Hands of Blue!

Now normally I’d be in complete despair at this point – months of work down the drain. But I’m actually quite blase about it. All of the core mechanics of the game are in my head, and this gives me the opportunity to start over again without the baggage of all the arbitary rules I made up to get the game working in the first place. So Plyin’ the Black will rise from the ashes! (insert obligatory comments about big damn heroes, doing the impossible and being mighty. Oh and she’s our witch.)

(The only downside is I’ll have to type out all the rules again in an authentic Firefly accent. Last time I was talking like a cowboy for a week!)

In other news I have a new monitor. A 22″ HD LCD, which takes up a lot less room and has a much sharper and brighter image than the decrepit old CRT I was using. I’ve still got to get the resolution and colours completely calibrated, but it’s a major improvement. I’ve finally joined the 21st century! (in terms of monitors at any rate 🙂

Satellite Archeology

I would have called this ‘Satellite of Love’, but Dr Alice Roberts wasn’t at the dig 🙂

The ABC (sorry, as of last week it’s ABC 1) is currently playing repeats of Time Team on Tuesday nights, and tonight it was the Castle Howard episode. So I was watching, and decided to have a look at the place on Google Earth. I head to Yorkshire, and do a search which takes me right there. I zoom in to have a look at the walled garden they’re digging in….. Are those trenches!?

Yep! A big trench right across the walled garden!

So I zoom out to the west lawn. More trenches!

Has the Google satellite captured Time Team at work?

It sure looks like it! 😀

Now I won’t swear it’s actually the Time Team dig. But the trenches are in the right places, and seem to be the right shape. In fact (given that the trenches in the walled garden have been extended, but there are none on the north lawn) I’d be willing to date the photographs to the morning of day three. There’s a bit of a mystery in that one of the trenches (trench 2?) is missing from the west lawn, but possibly they closed it and replaced the turf before opening up the north lawn.

So yeah, how about that then?

(The location is  54° 7’14.46″ N  0°54’34.09″ W for those who want to take a look)

Big day tomorrow!

Hidden Files

A sad attempt at channeling Building Blog

I can’t off the top of my head find the name or details, but apparently someone’s released a two terabyte external hard drive with built in wireless networking capability. This means that you can access it through your wireless network (or even remotely over the net) even when your PC is turned off. Which gives me a wacky idea…

So you’re building a house. You buy one of these units, load it with two terrabytes of music, movies and other content, and seal it up inside one of the walls, hooked up to mains power. You finish the build and sell the place to some complete luddite who’s never going to turn on a computer, let alone own one.

Time passes. Eight years later the luddite sells the house to someone fairly tech savvy. Their first order of business is to set up their wireless network. They get everything plugged in and working, then notice an extra device…

You can tell I’ve been reading Building Blog can’t you? 😀

It’s actually a Dragon, just don’t tell the City that…

Map based ratings

It’s been stupidly hot for the last few days. Christmas day was the hottest since 1968 (41°), and Boxing day was the hottest December day since records began (44°). It’s a bit cooler today, but the humidity is brutal – so I’m not really in the mood to write about Christmas apart from that I had a very enjoyable breakfast of fruit, nuts and croissants at Rebecca and Dom’s, and a full Christmas lunch over at the Aunts’.

I figured instead I’d talk about the Great Gryffin of London.

Its eye is at Battersea Power Station, and its snout at Victoria station. One paw lies over Buckingham Palace, and the other the British Museum. Its heart is at Waterloo and its chest on the Victoria Embankment. Its wings spring from the Elephant and Castle and the Imperial War Museum, stretching to Clapham North and Herne Hill. Its feet lie at Bethnal Green and Stepney, and its knees at Shoreditch. Its rump sits neatly at Bricklayers Arms, and its tail stretches down the Thames to Greenland Dock.

See if you can spot it next time you’re in London:)

Malaise

A vague and unfocused update about being vague and unfocused

You know I seem to be having a bad few weeks – feeling all tired and run down, and distinctly stressed out and anti-social. At least part of this is due to figuring out a new work shedule that fits 70 hours into nine days, which is trickier than it sounds (particularly when you’re feeling tired and stressed out and simply don’t want to go in in the mornings). But I’m sure I’ll get it sorted out eventually.

This general malaise is why the blog hasn’t seen many updates lately – I can’t seem to find the energy to do much except sit around watching DVDs. On a whim (well, basically because Amazon recommended it – I’m letting computers choose my viewing now, great) I purchased the first season of Dead Like Me. It’s a curious beast, rather hard to get into at first. I seem to recall that Ali didn’t like it at all, and I can see why – it took me until about the fifth episode to even start liking the characters. But past that point it’s actually rather good, in a very weird and messed up way. I’ve got two episodes left which I may or may not get around to watching this afternoon. I’ll have to wait and see if I feel like buying the next season.

I’ve also been listening to a lot of podcasts. Well, three really. Hack (current affairs) and Sunday Night Safran (interminable bickering) from Triple J, and the incredibly geeky role-playing oriented Dragon’s Landing, which Ryan got me into. Ryan’s actually quite keen to set up his own podcast and keeps trying to to recruit me to the concept. I would actually be very enthusiastic about this except for the fact that we have no idea for a subject and absolutely nothing thing to say. We could easily set up a weekly podcast but it would just be us sitting around going “um… uh… well what about… err….” for forty five minutes, and I’m sure there’s more than enough podcasts like that out there already.

Oh yeah, I’ve also done something I’ve been meaning to do for ages and started on Neil Gaiman’s Sandman. I’ve read Dream Country, Season of Mists and A Game of You so far, and will probably power through the rest as soon as I can get my hands on them because they’re really very much like mythologically-inclined-geek crack cocaine. At the same time I’m also halfway through American Gods, which is making things slightly confusing because characters and situations from one keep leaking across to the other in my head (I keep wondering when Shadow is going to run into Morpheus).

(Oh, did I ever mention that I read Neverwhere late last year? I meant to, because it’s one of the best books I’ve ever come across 🙂

In spite of all this reading and DVD watching I have managed to do a few things, which I was intending to write about, but now find myself without the energy to. I’ve also got to get the washing and ironing done so I have something to wear to work tomorrow. So I guess I’ll break off now then. I will endeavour to write about the other subjects later this week but suffice to say they involve such wonders as footwear, dragons, con-men, ewoks, mysterious disapearances and Leonardo da Vinci (figuring that out should keep you occupied for a while!).

I had a dream last night…

The kind of thing that can happen when you spend too much time watching DVDs…

I had a dream last night that I was staging a production of Les Miserables aboard the Battlestar Galactica. Oddly enough the major problem wasn’t finding a cast, it was rewriting all the religious references to refer to the Lords of Kobol so as not to confuse the audience.

I think I should probably stop watching Galactica for a while 🙂

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