New Year Resolution

As I have utterly failed to keep even the simplest of my New Year Resolutions for the previous two years, I'm going to keep this one much more obvious and immediate. I resolve to start doing some work for the terrifying and incomprehensible exams that start in a fortnight. I also resolve to resist the temptation to think up any more awful puns.



There's something that I've always found difficult about going back to learning after the Christmas break, and that's remembering to date everything with the new year rather than the old one. New year always happens just when I've got used to using the old number. It's not quite as bad as after the summer when I used to go back to school and realise that I'd just about forgotten how to write, but it's something I'll have to bear in mind.

My version of a Christmas post: Four paragraphs about cables

It's probably just as well that Whitney is temporarily away, because the level of geekiness in my room is now approaching catastrophic. I received a half-decent graphics card for Christmas - a Radeon 9550, to be precise. Putting the fact that I can now actually run most games aside for a moment, the next most important feature is the fact that it has an S-Video out port. As it happened, the card came with an S-Video to composite cable, and I had a composite to SCART converter lying around.

Essentially, this means I've now connected the computer up to the TV in my room and have been spending my time playing emulated games (and some of my own creations) console-style with the PS2 controller. The whole thing is quite amazingly heroic.

It's also possible to connect a second monitor to the card, although a DVI to VGA converter isn't one of the many cables that I have in my room, so I can't do this yet. I had been trying to get the TV to perform as a second screen rather than a clone of the first one, but I don't think it's possible to do that. Nevertheless, I'll search for some drivers.

Whitney and I gave the family a Freeview box for Christmas as they'll need to have one within the next couple of years anyway. It was a bit of a job to set it up and not interfere with any of the other equipment around the TV, but the configuration that eventually worked was connecting the aerial to the RF in of the set-top box, SCARTing that down to the video recorder, then having that connected to the TV via another RF cable. The PS2 was left alone in the SCART socket of the TV. I have had to draw a large diagram for the rest of the family detailing how to work it.

Ego-me-do

To anyone who reads this after midnight tonight, Merry Christmas to the lot of you. If it's not Christmas yet, come back tomorrow. As 'tis the season, I will enter into the Livejournal spirit of things and ask you to incite responses to this overwhelmingly nice meme. Here it is.

Reply to this post, and I'll tell you the reason(s) why I like/love/adore you. Then put this in your own journal, and spread the love. (Just keep the love within the lines, and we're all good.)

Back home

The first day at home was surprisingly active, with my parents and I doing what my dad called the "Geriatric Circuit", delivering Christmas presents to elderly people from the church. We only made four visits, but their collective age must have been about 350.

My room is in a depressingly appalling state, my collection of CDs and books has been dispersed throughout the house, there is a Christmas tree taking over the dining room and no one can get into the basement because there's a washing machine blocking the door. Overall, the house is pretty normal.

Icons

I have tried to find more and more inventive ways of wasting time, but I think it's genuinely now time to dissemble the computer and go to bed. The likelihood of being online very much for the next two weeks is a bit slim because of still only having 56k Internet at my parent's house, but it's better than nothing. I just called it "my parent's house" instead of "my house". That's really weird.

I wanted to quickly make some icons to fill up the three extra spaces that freeloading users like me have been given, but it turned into an hour-long task because I quickly realised that I had no idea what to put in them. After looking through my Pictures directory I was inspired to create three that were at least vaguely relevant to my life. I'm sure that like the other three before them they'll be deleted and replaced regularly until I come up with a winning lineup - I don't think my other three icons have changed for at least a year now.

The only one I'm not positive about is the last one. I'm not entirely sure what was going through my head when I made it. Then again, I'm not entirely sure what was going through my head when I decided to chain my milk to the fridge in the first place.

Airports and Towers

Against all odds I am still alive. Driving to and from Edinburgh Airport at four in the morning isn't something I would recommend to anyone - in retrospect I probably should have tried to sleep before going, but I doubt that it would have made much difference. There is something nice about being able to drive so freely at that time in the morning, with nothing else on the road except the occasional lorry.

Today has been spent sleeping, and in my spare time I've also done some more work on the game that I mentioned some months ago, which is now called "Treasure Tower". All programming projects fall behind schedule, and the prediction that I would be able to "churn out rooms at warp speed" seems particularly laughable looking back at it, but there are now one hundred rooms in the game - so I think it's about half finished. Progress has been good enough to warrant a preview, which I've put up on the Daily Click. If anyone's interested, I'm willing to give out the source CCA to anyone relatively trustworthy - perhaps even to get some rooms from guest room builders.

I'm going to turn you into a big fluffy hat.

Of the many things of which I am terrified, the Narnia film reminded me most of the way that I used to be petrified of the white witch turning things to stone in the old TV series. You spotted the subtle pun? Well done, gold star for you.

I'm driving Whitney to Edinburgh airport tomorrow, which is rapidly becoming today, and have opted not to bother trying to sleep in the generous four hour gap that we've left ourselves. I have already tried to stockpile some sleep by being bone idle most of the day, and will probably just drink a lot of hot chocolate at hourly intervals so that I'm in a fit state to drive in time for the 6:30am flight. Therefore I have to come up with some ingenious ways of wasting time, and Livejournal fits that description perfectly.

As I mentioned, we went out to St Andrews for a last night of the year in town, and saw the new Narnia film. It had me on edge for virtually all of its 140-minute length - not really because of anything in the film, but because I was terrified that they would somehow murder the book flagrantly. I was particuarly worried about the stone table scene, but fortunately everything seemed fine. It was strange to see the scenes that had been done so long ago in the BBC version reworked - both in their similarity and the way that they were different. That sentence made virtually no sense, but what do you expect, it's quarter to midnight.

It might seem a bit of a minor point, but something I noticed about the film was that some scenes seemed a bit stuck together. It's true that I do go looking for mistakes in films, but even I was surprised with the regularity that small things like hand positions and other details changed between shots. That'll probably make you watch for them when you see it, though, so ignore that.

To its credit, even the CGI was fairly convincing. I hope that this is sufficiently successful for them to film The Silver Chair and The Magician's Nephew.

Working on the project

((Pile)state.piles.get(Integer.parseInt(carddata.getNamedItem("pile")
.getNodeValue()))).addCard(new Card(Integer.parseInt(carddata.getNamedItem("suit")
.getNodeValue()), Integer.parseInt(carddata.getNamedItem("value").getNodeValue())));

...is the most horrendous line of code that I've ever written. I hope it works, because I had forgotten what it meant by the time I reached the end of the line.

I'd also like to mention to whoever understands it that I've never liked the syntax for casting in Java. It looks untidy.

Space Cadets

I have a confession to make, and it doesn't involve liking Microsoft software or listening to J-pop. In fact, it's that for the last couple of weeks I've been enjoying "Space Cadets", and I'd like to make the excuse that I liked it because it wasn't reality TV, but instead a fake sort of reality TV. So that's all right.

I found it a fascinating programme - for anyone not in Britain or who just watches the adverts, the idea was to select three people from an initial group of ten to be the first British space tourists by taking them to a base in Russia and fly them around above the Earth for a few days. In fact, the Russian base was a disguised hangar in Ipswich and the spacecraft was an elaborate simulator. Actually, the company that Whitney works for was initially approached to build the simulator, but declined because they weren't offered enough money. It's true, you know.

There were doubts from the group all through the programme's two weeks, inducing much nail-biting from me as I thought that they would surely discover that it was fake before the revelation last Friday. It was revealed to them in a clever way, as well - I thought that Johnny Vaughn would just hop on board laughing hysterically, but instead they were shown a video of all the moments where they'd said something about it not seeming real, then finished with a shot of the simulator from the outside.

Johnny Vaughn, who does not have enough vowels in his name, was not killed as expected (although I'm sure Whitney would have preferred it that way) - instead, it was rather heartwarming to see it treated not as a cruel scam, but as a good joke. Admittedly the £25,000 each probably helped.

I'm rather surprised that it wasn't a bigger event - after all, the whole thing had been made pretty elaborate. When something as banal as a series of Big Brother runs, there's 24-hour coverage of people sitting around not doing much, but this seemed to be rushed out in two weeks. Nevertheless, it was one of the few TV series that I've enjoyed for a while, and the only thing to moan about is the evident distressing stupidity of many of the watchers.

J-Christmas

With December comes the usual barrage of Christmas music. Complaining about this will just reinforce some people's belief that I'm some sort of musical elitist, but when the stuff is practically inescapable it's enough to drive anyone mad. During the one Christmas I worked in Tesco they had the same five generic Christmas pop CDs on during the entire day, causing me to disappear into the warehouse for long periods under the pretence of finding a missing bottle of Tesco Iron Brew (which no one in the world buys, ever).

As there's no escaping it, I might as well fight fire with fire and put as many people off the idea as possible. I will start by presenting to you this J-pop version of "Let it Snow, Let it Snow, Let it Snow". Enjoy. It's dreadful but it's quite short.

The Saga Continues

I've been conversing a bit more with the scammer. His greatest achievement to date is that has finally managed to get my name right, and has now given me this letter to forward to the bank. I wouldn't normally allow such appalling abuse of the language on my journal, but I think this is a special case.

Dear Sir,

APPLICATION FOR THE RELEASE OF DEPOSIT

I, Leonard Bucket on behalf of the entire members of the David Bucket J.family wish to use this medium to inform you that we wish that the USD6, million deposit (state this deposit account information, that’s the info in the documents which I have (WACAFH/TRUX/185/92) in your possession belonging to our deceased relative, Mr. David Bucket J. be transferred immediately into my possession. (State any valid account information). We have contacted his personal attorney Eric Hall (Esq.) and he is hereby given the power of attorney to act on our behalf on all matters relating to this issue. Should my assistance be needed or any information is required, you can reach me at the above email address (assuming you use your current mail address) or you can reach me at this phone number (insert your phone number). Your co-operation is highly anticipated. Yours Faithfully (Insert your full name as appears on your means of identification) On behalf of the Bucket J.’s family.

And I've been requested to forward the above gibberish to "Standard_trust_bank01@yahoo.com". Somehow I don't think his heart is really in this.

Guardians of Time

I don't think I've talked about music for... must be at least five posts now. A number of people had mentioned the Music Genome Project, and I eventually decided to give it a try. I have to say that my initial doubt that it would extend to my taste was proved unfounded. After a less than successful search for bands like Iron Savior and Gamma Ray yielded only slightly off-key American punk stuff (one of which had the hilarious name "Doomtree"), I tried searching for bands like Sonata Arctica and am now trying to find out more about a Brazil-based band by the name of Angra. And this comes right after I thought I'd hit a wall as far as the diversity of music collection was concerned.

To put the band that I'm going to mention next in context, I think that Iron Savior needs a brief explanation. I think that the band is rather like Knightmare - they both have ridiculously involved storylines for what they are, and therefore fall into the category where you either think that the idea is absolutely amazing or just appallingly silly. In the band's case, their storyline revolves around a living battleship that was intended to guard Atlantis, but was broken into and turned against its creators, necessitating the change of plan to send it a 350-millennium-long round trip through deep space, after which time it returns to Earth.

Got that? Well, the Guardians of Time might as well be titled "If You Thought They Were Silly, Wait Until You See Us." I'm not entirely sure what their plot is, but it involves five immortal beings which chronicle the history of the Universe (the Past, Present, Future, Dream and the Parallel time periods - at least, that's what it says here), and each album of theirs is a chapter from one of them. The lyrics to their songs sound like they're from an 80s sci-fi cartoon.

The tone of the whole thing is exemplified in the old Flash intro to the site. It comes complete with their logo, quite possibly the most confusing symbol ever conceived.

Passport Wars

In between submitting the side-splittingly disastrous fake passport scan to as many forums as possible since the last entry, I've had time to piece together one of my own in response. Like the one that I received, it features a slightly familiar face.

He's actually replied again, but made no mention of the image - in fact, in his latest email he not only read my fake name wrongly from it, but requested a scan of my passport. This confirms my initial assessment of him as "not very bright", and I'll avoid his request for a phone call by saying that I currently have my vocal chords out to be polished or something.

Back in real life, I now have only one practical left until the end of the year, so I'm pretty much free to go down to Ayr tomorrow and celebrate yet another friend turning 21. The car defiantly unburdened itself by losing its cover last night, and with the winds that we have here it could be anywhere from St Andrews to China by now. So if by chance a silvery green/grey expanse of cheap cloth is entwined around your aerial at the moment, I'd appreciate it if you could disentangle and return it.

Worst Scam Ever

"URGENT ASSISTANCE NEEDED!" Once again, I had been sent a hugely important email - this time it was apparently from a lawyer who had been the personal attorney to David Jet, who worked with the Shell Petroleum Development Company in the UK. He and his entire family died in some way that I didn't read, leaving the $6 million he had in his account to no one in particular, so naturally the attorney chose the professional route of giving most of it to Random Person On The Internet.

Now, I didn't really want to mention this until I had a decently large set of emails to present, but he's already excelled himself. I haven't included the actual text of the emails because there's nothing really spectacular in there apart from the bizarre grammar mistakes.

After two seconds of research, it emerged that Shell only call themselves the "Shell Petroleum Development Company" in Nigeria. This didn't exactly come as a shock to me, but I was still surprised at just how transparent the scam was. Nevertheless I emailed him back under the name of Leonard Bucket (no far-flung cult stories this time) and waited to see if he'd respond again.

And respond he did. In fact, he was even so good as to provide a scan of his passport as proof of his identity.


I can just about let past his thinking that MS Painted text looked remotely convincing if the JPG was compressed enough. You might even be able to forgive him for pasting it so badly on to the machine-readable part at the bottom. But to go on a random image search and come up with a photo of an inanely grinning Des O'Connor, then proudly affix it to your false passport... it takes true genius.

End of the Presentations

All things considered, the presentation didn't really go that badly. For something that was still being cobbled together when we were at the front of the class, anyway. The group member who had attended exactly none of our meetings and hadn't replied to any emails did us a great disservice by actually turning up, meaning that we had to tack some extra slides on to the end of the file. Webmailing them didn't work, so a couple of the group members rushed through to the other lab to redo the presentation while I juggled swivelly chair wheels badly at the front to provide a distraction. Eventually it was decided to just switch awkwardly between the two files when the time came, and talk was then presented to the audience of the course organiser, half of Senior Honours and a box of Bran Flakes. Some of them may have even found it mildly entertaining. And "Fury of the Furries" was mentioned, a game of which I thought only I had heard.

So finally, that's all the presentations for this semester done. The other class where presentations are given, Architecture, is beginning to become a bit of a joke - "Afternoon. Who's ready to talk? No one? Oh well, see you tomorrow."

Whitney has another temporary job! Whitney has a job! Hat, underscore, hat.

Groupwork

"Welcome to the Multimedia Lab! Good luck... you'll need it"
Someone has written that on the board in the new Multimedia Lab next door. I feel rather bad for the Computer Science department, because every time they buy something new it seems to be rubbish. There's certainly a lot of stuff in there, but most of the problem lies in Adobe Premiere, of which one of the fatal flaws is that it seems to export videos that are very different from what you see when you're working in the program. We spent four hours in there yesterday trying to capture scenes from the Muppet Christmas Carol to turn it into a horror-type stream of conciousness garble, and it starts off well but you can see where our interest wanes in the middle.

In another example of why I dislike groupwork so much, more immediately terrifying is the presentation for PSAC. We're due to give it in 58 minutes and most of the slides are still being written - so no time to rehearse, we'll just go next door and present it all on the fly, trying to make it vaguely coherent while we make it up as we go along.

Then a design for a new Instruction Set Architecture is due in on the 12th, and a rewrite of Microsoft Powerpoint for the 16th. A bit of good luck might come in useful.

Solitaire and Songs

After a period of very little progress whatsoever, I'm relieved that today's work on the unstupidification of the "Solitaire Specification, Simulation and Solution System" (as I have decided to call it) resulted in making it significantly less dense. At the beginning of today it could just about solve 40-card games of Freecell, but now it can do them with very little difficulty at all - the usual number of moves it takes is from 70 to just over a hundred, compared to eight hundred earlier on. On adding a small line specifically for Freecell, which I'd rather not have to do but will work for now, I also finally witnessed it solving a full-size 52-card game. I think that deserves at least a pat on the head and a biscuit or two.

Now, one of the many disadvantages of the Modplug Central site currently being in thousands of pieces somewhere in the Pacific Ocean is that I've recently found it difficult to find the motivation to write anything new. However, yesterday I finally finished my latest set of songs (or "album", if you like, although I've always found that term vastly pretentious for the level of writing that I'm at). I'm yet to write up any commentary on them for the site, but take a look if you're remotely interested.

It's so hard to remember my life

I know I've not been reporting on much except work recently, but really that's about all my life will consist of in the near future. The interim report for the project is due in on Monday, where I'll have to report that my program can now solve games with about 40 cards in them, but still takes upwards of eight hundred moves to do it. I have a fair idea of how to make it a bit less appallingly stupid, but that involves a meeting with my project supervisor, and finding him is proving to be a problem.

In the meantime I've been trying to get some of the practicals out the way - in Multimedia we've been given the task of modifying videos in groups, and I thought a decent idea would be to get hold of some political broadcast (a Liberal Democrat one, perhaps) and add a laugh track to it. We'll either do that or a music video. Thankfully it's the last piece of groupwork we'll have to do this semester - in half an hour we're having the first meeting about the last presentation of the year, which was given out about two months ago and is due to be presented on Tuesday.

After that there will just be the solo practicals to clear up. I'm getting one done just now, and have just come up with this gem of a paragraph in response to "How do the expansions involved in an A* search relate to the complexity predictions?":

"To avoid an exponential growth in A*, |h(n) – h*(n)| must be below or equal to O(log h*(n)), where h(n) is the estimated cost of getting from n to the goal and h*(n) is the true cost. Therefore, the error in the estimation of cost must be of order of the logarithm of the true cost. With a problem that involves only low distances and depth of states it is difficult to determine whether this condition has been satisfied or not – however, it can be seen from the reported results that the A* search explores many more routes than the single path given by the Greedy search, and therefore increases optimality at the cost of also increasing the space complexity."

I think that's the best way of saying "I have no idea how to answer this question" that I've ever invented.

More Project

It can solve some games with 32 cards now. It's still totally stupid, but marginally less so than it was on Friday.

Project Update

In a major breakthrough in my project, my system can now deal a game of Freecell at random, play it flawlessly itself while adhering to all the rules, and report a possible solution path back to the user.

Trouble is, if I put more than three cards into the pack then it takes all the memory in the world to actually do it. Tomorrow I think I'll work on making my code a bit more efficient, because the commonly accepted target of fifty-two cards is quite a long way off.

Music Update

I haven't been writing in this much, have I? Much of my time has been taken in responding to that meme that I posted - I had expected a couple of replies at best, but I wasn't prepared for the record number of responses that it generated. I also hadn't expected thinking up replies to be so difficult. Naturally, after completing it I resolved to respond to as many other people's as possible, making the process as difficult for them as it was for me.

Recently I've had a significant amount added to my music collection, thanks to getting three albums as late birthday presents from various members of my family. I haven't really listened to any of them in great detail, but they can be summarised as follows:

• Heavenly - Dust to Dust: The cast of the rejected French version of The Matrix, singing about vampires. It's fantastic, trust me. I'd actually forgotten all about this album, and I'm surprised that anyone remembered that I wanted it.
  
• Gamma Ray - Majestic: The band now seem to be coming around full circle and approaching the style that they started in - unusually structured political/religious music. They're now playing songs that could have been written when they started in 1980, but in their modern, more aggressive style. The title track is appallingly dreadful, but the rest of it works.
  
• Stratovarius - Stratovarius: Timo Tolkki and the group have now completed the process of disappearing completely up themselves and have put together a self-titled album as their eleventh release, presented in an embossed metal/wood-effect laminated case. This comes complete with a bonus photo booklet and "rockumentary" (cringe). The title is actually justified, because it seems to be an album about the band themselves. On listening to the first couple of songs I thought it would be as disastrous as Kotipelto's "Coldness", but fortunately it picks up later. I find it amusing, though, that you can tell exactly which songs Kotipelto wrote the lyrics for due to their complete lack of synchronisation with the actual rhythm of the music.

Portimo	Lucius

Lastly, I have an image to further the point made in my last entry - there seems to be a sinister similarity between a certain wizard and a certain drummer. Surely it can't just be me.

There was a programme on a minute ago about how heavy metal makes you kill people. It was quite frustrating, really.

Project Progress

Today I've been continuing my SH project (well, starting it, to be honest) and I've now got a working simulation of Freecell. True, it's all through the command line and it's easy to break it, but it's not bad for an afternoon's work.

Oh, and Harry Potter 4 is pretty good. I never noticed how great Lucius's hair was before. He looks like he could be in Sonata Arctica or something.

Addendum

Also, taking a break from the "All memes are rubbish" policy for a moment (as the deleted eighth instruction told me that I MUST post this on my journal or be dead within a week...)

Leave your name and...

1. I'll respond with something random about you.
2. I'll tell you what song/movie reminds me of you.
3. I'll pick a flavor of jello to wrestle with you in.
4. I'll say something that only makes sense to you and me.
5. I'll tell you my first/clearest memory of you.
6. I'll tell you what animal you remind me of.
7. I'll ask you something that I've always wondered about you.

Amazon Anomalies

Well, the comment-generating title in the last entry almost worked - I got comments all right, but most of them were letting me know (quite fairly) that they objected to the title, rather than having read through the entry defiantly as was my hope. Therefore I will compensate with something mildly interesting.

A few of the computer science students went to a presentation on Amazon a couple of days ago. Most of it was about how they ran their database spread across a huge number of servers, but there was a brief section on some of the more unlikely things that Amazon sells. A quick search around shows a surprising amount of stuff that you'd never come across while browsing the site normally:

• A Qwert Shmarble (No one really knows what this is)
  
• Similarly, a Qwert Stiker Flaggle
  
• A $5.5 million box of chocolates
  
• A large number of other items from the imaginary company EBSQA, including a Pen on a Rope and some asdfasdfg pipecleaners (or, if you prefer, fjdksfj pipecleaners, which are apparently not as cute or cuddly but more fuzzy).

All those are just imaginary items that were left in from Amazon's testing stage, but we were pointed to a number of genuinely strange things as well...

• A huge amount of loaves of cheese, with the current record holder being a three-stone block of mild cheddar
  
• Ice Cream by Mail (I'm still at a loss to imagine how this would work)
  
• A 30-horsepower NorTrac bulldozer
  
• Quite a large selection of vehicles, actually, including...
  
• A JL421-class Landcruiser, if the traffic in St Andrews gets too much for you.

Thanks to that search, my "Recommended Items" box is now pretty surreal, but at least the family's Christmas is pretty much sorted out.

[Edited because I typed this just after getting up and somehow managed to misspell "qwert" twice.]

Games (Girls can probably skip this post)

Thanks, everyone, for your cards, e-cards, reminders that I'm now an old man, and so on for my birthday - especially to and for being absolutely heroic and getting me Red Dwarf VII and Civilization IV, respectively. Civ IV doesn't exactly run on my computer because it's getting on a bit now, but upgrading is what birthday money's for. At the moment I can only see how impressive it looks - very typical of Microprose in the early days, with a polished look and a top quality manual that's so heavy that you have to get someone else to hold it up while you turn the pages.

For the last three years I haven't really played games at all, with a couple of exceptions, but it's only now that I'm getting back into them. At the start of the year I played UT online a lot on the Truff suite of servers after being starved of it on ResNet, and was quickly kicked off the Beginner and Intermediate servers for being too good. After being dumped into the main servers instead, I'm struggling to keep up with the experts.

I installed Diablo 2 a while ago as well. During my last year of school, a lot of my time was spent at home playing that (largely because I only had nine hours of class a week and my first one was last period on a Tuesday) but when I got to the Arcane Sanctuary it was time to pack up and go to St Andrews, so I never finished it.

While playing Diablo 2 there's a continual argument going on in my head, because even after getting back to where I left off I can't decide if it's any good or not. "Stop playing this," one side of my brain will say. "It basically amounts to repeatedly clicking on people."

"But it's clicking on people, avoiding being clicked on and then clicking on stuff to sell later," the other side will argue.

"Stop it - otherwise you'll do something really stupid like post this conversation on your Livejournal," the first side will finish, and go and sulk. The other side will take over, as it knows that there are only 9,234 experience points to go until the next Level Up, and that means my character will be able to learn a new set of spells, and also let me use that enchanted hammer that I picked up a while ago... and the cycle goes on from there. With the arrival of Civ IV just as I've got to the Arcane Sanctuary again, though, all my time will be sucked black hole-like into its shiny interior and I'm doomed never to be able to complete the game.

I also picked up Carmageddon: TDR 2000 at a car boot sale the other week. I had heard that it wasn't as good as the others in the series, but I felt I didn't have much to lose for 50p. I can see why a lot of people were disappointed in it, actually - the whole dynamic of the game has changed, and the emphasis is far more on actually racing now rather than wandering off on your own to explore. You only get two more seconds for running over a zombie even on Easy, and unlike the original two games where you'd regularly get about three minutes added to your timer for ramming an opponent, now it's incredibly pleasing to see even a nineteen-second bonus appear on the screen.

All this means that you've got to zoom through a level on the predetermined track, while shunting people around when the opportunity presents itself - what happened in the previous games was that you'd end up with about four hours on your timer and be free to do pretty much what you wanted, but the timer is capped at about five minutes now. This makes the game a lot faster (indeed, some of them could go on for hours in the other two games), and it could be argued that it stops the levels from all becoming the same, as you have to race on a track rather than explore the same areas repeatedly. It does take some getting used to, though.

The only real problem I have with the game is that I'd like it if it was easier to run over zombies. In the first game you got points for them if one so much as touched your vehicle, in the second game it got a bit more realistic, but now you can hit them at about eighty miles an hour and the most they'll do is moan a bit and then get up again.

Have I finished? Yes, probably, I've got to drive to Architecture now.

What?!

Wednesday, 16th Nov. 15:52:52
Subject: Christmas Party 2006

Hi,

This year's School Christmas Party will be on Thursday 15th December. The basic idea is the same as for the last two years: you give Scott Walker, Stuart Norcross or me £10, and we source food and drink for the evening. Location is the Jack Cole Building, start time around 6.30 - 7.00. We need the money by close of business on Tuesday 13th at the latest.

This year we'd like to have a kids party as well, starting at about 5.30, ending around 7.00, with jelly & ice cream, a visit from Santa, and a small gift. We think £5 per child should cover it. Again, talk to Scott, Stuart and/or me for further details (not that we've put much thought into this, yet).

We have an exciting entertainment package lined up this year: Ishbel will give a karate display, with background music supplied by Bernie on the bassoon. Andy will give a dog-handling demonstration, accompanied by Norman on drums. I will be juggling five flaming clubs whilst Ian Gent cycles to Kirkcaldy and back. The SH band - David Newton vocals, Rob Howell as DJ, Eleonora on guitar - will be performing songs written by Graham Hamilton. No-one in JH has any interesting talents, as far as I'm aware.

Following a risk assessment exercise, we have, with regret, been forced to suspend both the fish-tank surfing and the "asking Ron for a raise" competitions. You are still allowed to ask the fish-tank for a raise, though.

If you have any questions or suggestions, contact Stuart, Scott or me.

Tom Kelsey
School of Computer Science

Twenty-one

I have somehow managed to become 21 without thinking about it. It's supposed to be a very significant date, but I don't feel any different. At the moment I can't even remember what possibilities have now been opened to me, apart from being able to buy alcohol in America if I ever have any reason to. I suppose that as I've fulfilled the additional requirement of having a licence for over three years, I'm now allowed to teach people to drive.

What I'm not allowed to do is skip the fast approaching PSAC lecture and then write a report on it for Friday. I could actually have done this a lot sooner, but I thought the presentation we were given last month was a dreadful one on which to write anything, so I took the risk of leaving it until this week. The option of catching up is practically non-existent anyway, as when I checked my notes for the first, I found that they started as follows:

"PSAC Thingummy 1 - Something

Write two pages of gibberish (Formative).

This is a report."

I don't actually remember writing any of that, which probably indicates how much attention I paid to the presentation. I'd better go and get some better notes for the second one now.

(Also, I've only just realised how badly written the previous entry was. I think all the essays and reports are taking it out of me, and I'm gradually forgetting how to write, even though Whitney told me last night that I write "very well, for a scientist." Charming.)

Murdering Songs and Policemen

Before last night, I had no idea that had quite such a large following at karaoke. I knew about the Facebook group, but still wasn't prepared for the enthusiastic crowd that gathered in the Union, or the version of "Pretty Fly for a White Guy" personalised in his honour. It seems that he's become the new Benedict, which is possibly the greatest achievement that either of us will achieve at university.

I decided to have a go myself, but wasn't confident enough to attempt a song myself as I was unfamiliar with pretty much everything on the list. Eventually I found The Final Countdown, which was just about the only song to which I vaguely knew the tune, even though Whitney is of the opinion that it's dreadful. I managed to come up with a performance to match this opinion.

I know that being "good at" karaoke relies very little on actually being able to sing, but I like to think that I have at least some ability for it, and every time I perform karaoke I manage to provide a huge amount of evidence to the contrary. There always seems to be very little relation between what I think I'm singing and the horrendous noise blaring out of the speakers. It might have helped if I'd heard the song in under a year, but I sat down afterwards thinking that I'd somewhat dented Jamie's reputation.

The next morning, the three of us drove back up to Inverurie once again. On the way we were subjected to a surprise roadside safety check. Actually, the officer who waved us in to the layby seemed to be taking the "surprise" element all too literally, as his method of getting our attention was to leap out of the road in front of me and wave his arms wildly. I braked as safely as could be expected in the generous second-long reaction time he'd given me, but he still had to leap out of the way as I sailed past. It's just as well, because I imagine that having bits of him sprawled out on my bonnet as the check was carried out might have reduced my chances of passing somewhat.

After driving slowly in a daze and wondering what to do, I reversed into the layby from the other end. He didn't seem all that bothered by his brush with death, and sent another officer to my car to perform an extensive set of checks on functions of my car, some of which I didn't even know existed. At the end he concluded the car was fine apart from the horn and one of the lights at the back. "I should give you a 21-day ticket," he said, "but I'm not going to bother." Stellar police work. I drove out again, the only after-effect being that I was still slightly shaken by the encounter with the suicidal police officer.

A True Livejournal Entry

I like to think of most of the journals on my Friends list as examples of how journals should be - beacons of coherency in the swamp of directionless anger that spews forth from the keyboards of most of the site's users. As part of this effort I try to keep my journal as something relatively amusing and uplifting to read. All this is about to change, however, as this entry is going to be a true LJ entry - full of venom, bile, raisins, and other nasty things.

I blame the dentist. If she hadn't moved my appointment from Friday to today, I would be happily in Cupar doing my project plan at the moment. ("Happy" may be an exaggeration considering the "project plan" bit, but I'd still feel a lot better.) But with an appointment today, I'm having to make two trips up and down the road during Reading Week.

I was going to take the car, as seems logical, but before I left my mother managed to convince me to get over my hatred and use a series of buses to get me up the road. Her reasoning was that not only was it marginally cheaper, but she has a huge paranoia of me driving anywhere, especially places that involve roadworks, double roundabouts or other vehicles. The fact that I've been driving for over three years now and that in a week I'll have fulfilled the requirements for teaching people to drive seems to be a non-issue here.

So despite the Megabuses invariably being late, slow and garish, I booked two journeys on them, making sure that I had chosen suitable times to link up with the appalling service from Cupar in both directions. I'd have to wait an hour in each direction, but I thought I could keep myself busy for that length of time.

On Monday morning, just before leaving for the bus, I picked up the timetable and noticed that the buses didn't run on local holidays. It was a local holiday, as it happened. In retrospect it might have been a good idea to drive to St Andrews, leave the car there and take a different service, but that didn't occur to me at the time, and it was getting late anyway. I frantically turned to one of the Internet's greatest achievements, Google Maps, and found a number of long-stay car parks in Dundee.

After a brief drive, I arrived over the Bridge of Death and trundled round looking for a parking space. "Long stay" in Dundee apparently means "under ten hours". The one car park in the area that I'd looked at that genuinely offered long-stay parking cost £20 per 24-hour period. I decided to give that a miss, and with time until my bus was due to leave rapidly running out, I pointed the car in the direction of the big car park in front of the sports stores.

On arrival, I saw that it had two car parks - one that only allowed up to ten hours, and another that allowed 24 hours for £5. This was the best I could do - if I didn't park, I would miss my bus. As there was a £60 fine for exceeding my alloted time, I quickly formulated a plan... I would have to get Whitney to come in to Dundee tomorrow lunchtime and stick another ticket on the car. I felt awful thinking of asking her to do that, but by this time was the only option left.

So I parked, found I didn't have change, and ran into JJB with fifteen minutes to go. After wandering around for ages I eventually found the cash desk. Its operator was happy to give me change even though he seemed suspicious that I was needing as much as £5 for it, and I dashed out of the building again and bought a ticket.

"£5: Until 23:59, 7th Nov", the ticket that came out declared. Apparently, 24 hours means "until midnight". I sat in the car looking at the ticket, considering any further options, and it was at this point that I gave up.

There was nowhere to park, and even if there was, I was about to miss the bus I'd paid for. I phoned to rearrange things about picking me up, asked Megabus if I could cancel my return ticket, found I couldn't, then departed for the journey up to Aberdeen that I had wanted to take in the first place. £10 worth of petrol, plus £12 Attempting-to-take-the-bus Tax - two unused journeys and a useless parking voucher.

The trip took all of two hours, and the car in front of me for most of the time had the word "WOE" as the end of its number plate. I felt it quite appropriate in the circumstances.

When I arrived at home, my mother suggested that I take my return journey down again, then instead of using the car on Friday, the three of us could all take the bus up. I quickly dismissed this plan as "insane", as not only would it be more expensive than taking the car again, but it would involve buses - something for which my hate augments every time that I have to use them. Like Harlan Ellison wrote, "If the word 'hate' was engraved on each nanoangstrom of those hundred of thousands of miles, it would not equal one one-billionth of the hate I feel for buses at this micro-instant". (NB. Quote may have been modified slightly.)

And this entire journey was for this purpose - to go into the dentist's practice, have her unscrew all my teeth and put them back in opposite directions, and be charged a further £20. And I've just found out that the curry I was going to have for lunch has sultanas in it. I think it's obvious to conclude by saying that I've had better days.

Welcome to the Machine

Good heavens, LJ's updated its interface a bit since this morning. In fact it's probably the most major overhaul that I've seen since starting this about two and a half years ago. It looks like it'll be useful, but it does have the Facebook-like disadvantage that there's a constant reminder of people's birthdays over on the right, meaning that I have even less of an excuse for forgetting them.

But dolphins are what I really want to talk about. I've mentioned before that I have a lot of unusual phobias, but there is one that I recently found out is shared by many people. I am scared of Ecco the Dolphin.

I'm not quite sure what it is that makes that old Megadrive game quite so unsettling, but I can fairly confidently guess that the haunting music plays a large part in it. It's also the whole weird presentation and storyline of the game. At the beginning you're swimming happily with the other dolphins, you mess about for a bit getting used to the controls, eventually you decide to see if you can jump out of the water - and suddenly the others are sucked away by a huge storm and you're dumped back down, with water water everywhere, alone on a wide wide sea, without even an albatross in sight.

Yesterday I decided to confront my fears and start the game up again. The screen that you're presented with at first gives you the choice of entering a password or starting anew, neglecting to mention which direction is which. I tried left and found that I'd accidentally gone to the password screen, so to get out of it I put in a row of letter Ns, thinking (as would be logical) that when I pressed Start it would reject the password and bring me back to the choice screen.

I'm more scared than ever now.

Multimedia

Of all the classes that I have this year, the Multimedia course is a rare case because it's one that I actually look forward to going to. Yesterday we were having a lecture on colour followed by two presentations on DVRs and virtual reality, but this soon descended into a lengthy discussion about the French and building our own Matrix. In addition to that, the questions that we're handed out are absolutely surreal. Normally you'd expect to be given tutorial sheets involving calculations about Amdahl's Law or some other immemorable formula, or perhaps discussing advantages and disadvantages of something or other in the modern computing blah.

9. If you gave a child a paintbox containing red, green and blue paints only, will they be able to mix an adequate range of colours to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel?

10. Superman's uniform is blue, with a yellow S on the chest and a red cape. How would you make an image of superman flying without recourse to his superpowers?

I think I'll just stick to writing about path trees and benchmarking for now.

General Message

"A" and "lot" are two separate words.

Halloween

In preparation for this year's annual festival of knife-wielding children wandering the streets, Whitney did a fantastic job decorating the windows of the house with paper spiders and pumpkins. We had also prepared a genuine pumpkin earlier in the week, but unfortunately by the time this evening came round it had collapsed in on itself in a pile of mulch and didn't look tremendously frightening - on reflection, above the radiator wasn't the best place for it.

The only time I've ever actually seen someone guysing was when I was at a Halloween party at Graeme's, dressed as Eddie from Bottom. An eight year old rang the bell shortly after I arrived - the boy hadn't even got dressed up at all, so it was a disappointing effort all round. The door was answered by Rob, who is about seven feet tall and happened to be adorned with a hockey mask, tarpaulin and chainsaw, so I'm sure he paid for his chocolate with at least mild mental scars.

Whitney and I didn't know how popular the practice of going round to people's houses and demanding sweets from them was here, so to placate the hordes that may have been arriving on our doorstep we bought a huge bowlful of chocolates. It's now twenty-two past midnight, so it doesn't look like we'll be giving them out at all. On the positive side, though, that means that we now have a huge bowlful of chocolates.

Civilization

I feel that I've been rather neglecting Civ recently. I happened to find the original game a few days ago, and I'd forgotten what an inspired game it was. I don't think any other game can claim to span as long a time as 5000 years and still remain consistent throughout (if we ignore the occasional absurdity like villagers armed with hoes and pitchforks being able to defeat a legion of tanks.)

I was first introduced to the game when my dad got it for my tenth birthday, clearly so that he could play it himself. I hardly understood it at all at first, but after watching him playing it on his laptop when meant to be working (in fact, my manual remained at the RGU for about five years until I rediscovered it in a drawer while visiting) I eventually realised its greatness. It was also thanks to it that I was the only pupil in my school class to know what a trireme was and when the Hoover Dam was built - in 1000BC by the Greeks according to most of the games I played, seeing as I never really got off the easiest setting.

Jumping ahead a bit, Civ 3 confused me. They seemed to alter a lot of rules for no reason at all, and introduce absurdities like luxuries not being part of the tax rate but instead placed on the map. They also separated the Settlers unit into Workers and Settlers, meaning that my tactic of Build Outwards As Fast As Possible was severely hindered. Especially when moving them across a jungle, resulting in them all getting diseases and dying.

Civ 4 seems to be heading in the same direction if you ask me, with the whole thing just being overcomplicated with not only research and resources, but religion and special citizens as well. Ironically they claim that this results in a "faster, more streamlined game experience", but I don't think that this is what the game should be about - it's a game that you can turn on while half-asleep, stab an arrow key now and then, and suddenly realise that days have passed and you haven't eaten. I can't deny that it looks amazing, though.

The version of Civ that I have is "Civ 2: Test of Time", which I still believe to be the best of them as it hardly touches the classic rules but adds features such as a multiplayer mode - it's a mystery to me why no other Civ does this. The only trouble with it is that it seems to be the most bugged game ever. (Not including Fallout 2, of course - making halves of your car disappear when you reload the game will always be difficult to beat). The Notes and Cautions section of the readme is a hilarious read, and seriously, many of the comments in it wouldn't seem out of place in a computer science practical that had to be handed in in a rush. Two examples:

In the fantasy and Midgard Civilopedia, you'll notice several terrain types whose names we've prefixed with a "z". These are unused and duplicated terrains, and rather than have them mix in with the others, we've added to "z" to exile them to the end of the list. Please ignore these entries entirely.

Wouldn't preventing them from mixing in with the others be better accomplished by using the Delete key?

In the fantasy games, you might notice the Raganarok advance mysteriously appearing and disappearing from the Goblin or Stygian bodies of knowledge. Don't fret. It's being used by events as a flag and is only following instructions. The Ragnarok advance has no value whatsoever.

I'm rather at a loss to imagine why they decided to use a technology advance as a flag for other events. Even if it was absolutely necessary, it would have surely been easy enough to keep it hidden no matter whether it was there or not. In fact, given some sparesly documented source code, I'm fairly confident that I could go in and fix this myself within about four minutes.

Add this to the fact that a huge number of leftover files from the original version are present in the program folder, and it just looks a bit tatty. They even seem undecided about the name of the game - there are two very distinct logos on the box/manual and the game, and it's called "Civilization Conflicts" in some places and "Fantastic Worlds" in another.

Despite all that, though, dozy empire-building is sounding good at the moment. I may have to give up on writing this project report soon and spend a few days taking over the world again.

The results (and more waffle)

Responses to the challenge in my last entry have come flooding in, and neither of them were correct. Actually I was surprised at the lack of guesses, as when I ask something as mundane as what shape people like their sandwiches, it sparks a huge debate that keeps resurfacing in my inbox for days. Still, from these results I can conclude that not only is my password non-obvious, but people aren't really that bothered about what it is anyway - this makes for a pretty safe livejournal if you ask me.

I'm sure I was going to write about something here, but I've forgotten what it was. I've been doing my gigantic project plan on and off today (mostly off) and I've only got about three thousand words into it. With the amount of reporting and documentation that we're expected to produce, it's rather difficult to imagine when we'll have time to actually open up Emacs or some other less mad editor and get to work on the projects themselves.

Another inhibition to the completion of the project is the continual rediscovery of games that I didn't know I had on my hard drive - this afternoon Whitney was most impressed with Toejam and Earl 2 for its almost Tombi-like lunacy. It's true that there are no pigs with pitchforks in it, but not every game has adversaries like ghost cows or naked men in cardboard boxes singing "Figaro".

Speaking of Tombi, I noticed that it had a torrent at the bottom of this page if anyone doesn't think that they've had enough Japanese madness recently. Unless you're in ResNet, in which case you can't (but if you are in ResNet then I'm surprised that you can get to this page at all, to be frank). Enough of this - I'll try and gather some thoughts together and piece together something that resembles an interesting read for tomorrow.

The keys that I grant thee

Hacking isn't what it used to be. A few years ago it was something that required a degree of ingenuity, and possibly multiple monitors and a workstation in the basement. The type of hacking that we used to amuse ourselves with in school involved getting around the network's security, but that was mediocre at best, and once you'd found a way to the command prompt everything became too easy. Now, all that "hacking" means is asking someone for their IP address and getting them to turn off their firewall, or downloading programs that someone else has made to find out people's Livejournal passwords.

LJ seem to have become more aware of this recently, and have started telling me that my password is too easy to guess with every post that I make. I disagree with its obviousness, and therefore present this challenge to anyone who reads this post - to guess my password. Reply in the comments with as many attempts as you like. If you guess it correctly, I imagine I'd give you root access to my Windows box or something, but if you were that 1337 you probably wouldn't need it anyway.

To give some pointers to start off: it has nothing but letters in it, relates to one of my interests, and is a pronounceable word. (This is why it's so insecure.) People who've talked to me over IRC and seen my passwords when I typed them by accident have a bit of an advantage, but they're welcome to try anyway. Also, isn't allowed to guess because she knows it. So there.

Squared Cake Recipe

I've been inundated with requests for the recipe to the Squared Cake. Actually that's a blatant lie, I haven't received a single one, but I thought that writing it up would be a good way to keep on revelling in my bakery-inspired bigheadedness for a while. Besides, I think that having some sort of easily available recipe library (now two in total) will be useful in case I ever have to bake something in an emergency. It might yet happen.

Credit goes to Carol Vorderman off How 2 for inspiring this cake, for which I saw the theory about ten years ago but never got around to actually putting into practice until last week. That's where the idea came from - the actual procedure I just made up as we went along. It should make a reasonably large cake that should serve eight to ten people... I don't know, look at the entry below to get an idea of the size.

~ Squared Cake ~

Stuff Needed
6 eggs
Castor sugar
Self-raising flour
A conversion table, probably
Chocolate powder
Icing sugar
About two hours for the manufacture (much less if using two cake pans)
A spare night to let it solidify
The oven preheated to 190°C
An appointment at the dentist

Sponges

1. Ideally, you should have two eight or nine-inch cake pans so that you can do both the sponges at the same time, but we used just one. Grease and flour one, grease and chocolate powder the other.
   
2. For the plain layer, beat three of the eggs, 1/2 cup of castor sugar and 3/4 of a cup of self-raising flour in a bowl, then pour into the plain pan.
   
3. Do the same for the chocolate sponge, replacing about half the flour with chocolate powder.
   
4. Bake both of these for about twenty minutes - test them with a cake tester (or, if you're as ill-equipped as us, just use a knife).
   
5. Leave the cakes upside-down to cool and solidify a bit for half an hour. The reason to leave them upside down is to try and let them settle into a reasonably flat shape, as you'll be stacking them - it's up to you to decide whether this actually helps.

Squares

1. Here's the interesting bit. Using a bowl or a plate or something as a template, cut a circle into the centre of each sponge. The aim is to leave an outer circle of about the same width as the height of the sponge. It doesn't matter if it's a bit off, but be careful that you keep the knife reasonably upright and don't tear the rest of the cake too much with it. The best way to cut it cleanly is to use a small knife, stick it in the cake, then induce a muscle spasm in your hand to rapidly twitch it up and down as you cut round. Remove the template and run the knife around the trench to free it of the outer circle.
   
2. Once that circle's done, do the same again with a mug in the centre of the smaller circle that you've just cut. Try and make the layers roughly equal in width - it doesn't really matter about the size of the centre, as you can even cut out another circle if you're feeling confident.
   
3. Swap the two middle circles of the sponges round - the sponge recipe is quite sturdy, so it should hopefully be easy to do this without breaking them. You now have two complete cakes of alternating flavours.

Stacking

1. Mix up a positively obscene amount of chocolate icing. I don't know the measurements for this, so you'll have to use your imagination. Spread this icing between each circle so that they're glued together.
   
2. Cover the top of one doctored sponge in icing, then place the other on top of it. Make sure that they're aligned with each other.
   
3. Slather this entire arrangement in as much icing as possible - the icing for the outside should be fairly thick but still spreadable. Ideally, you don't want the concentric cracks in the top of the cake showing through, or the join in between the layers.
   
4. The decorations are optional, so do whatever you like. We made up a bit more icing (plain this time) and piped it around the edge of the cake using a small plastic bag. The top of the cake was done by piping parallel lines on to it, then dragging a fork lightly through them (but a skewer would be much more suitable). If you're going to do this, make sure the icing is still wet, otherwise the tracks you make will show. If you get this decoration to work, award yourself a biscuit.
   
5. Cover the cake with a bowl, turn the lights out and sing it a lullaby.
   
6. Eat the rest of the icing and stay up all night. (Largely optional.) The icing on the cake will have solidified.

Slicing

1. Because of the large amount of icing, this is a pretty sturdy cake. No matter how well you've glued it, you have to be careful when cutting the cake, or the squares will come apart. Saw into it gently, and make sure that you've separated an entire piece before trying to move it - any tugging and you'll probably only get half a slice out.
   
2. Take photographs of the cake and post about it on the Internet.
   

cake²

Whitney anbd I hoseted bineer she's kissing me i can't type aaaarhg hosted dinner last night for , and . It's testament to how much the popularity of LJ has increased when you can refer to an entire dinner party by their usernames. It's also an indicator of the usefulness of the Internet when most of the recipes used in the meal were found as a result of searching on Google.

The centrepiece was a roast chicken, cooked expertly by Whitney despite being a vegetarian. (Her dad owns the biggest barbecue in the world and he's even more vegetarian, I don't understand it.) Despite watching a video on how to carve a chicken beforehand - "Slice here, here, here and here. Done." - that was the most problematic part, and it took a large amount of sawing and chiselling to get the bird apart at all.

Squared cake! (I've never been quite so excited about a cake before.)

However, the part of dinner that I was responsible for was the cake - Squared Cake, in fact. It was a theory that I'd wanted to try out for ages, but never got around to actually doing because I'm usually defaulted into making sticky toffee pudding when foreigners or other people with hearts that are too healthy are around.

To manufacture squared cake, you use two different coloured round sponge cakes (chocolate and plain being the most obvious choices, but others work as well), cut out concentric circles from each of them and swap alternate layers over - we used a bowl and a mug for this one, so that the width of the circles was roughly equal to the height of the cake. These are then stacked on top of each other and coated in a positively toothbusting amount of sugary icing (enough to glue each layer and track together as well as disguise the fact that it's been doctored in such a way from the outside). You can see evidence of trying to liven up the top by dragging a skewer across different coloured icing, but we didn't have any skewers so I had to use a fork and it looked a bit silly.

The thing about this kind of cake is that you don't know what it actually looks like until you cut in to it. Fortunately the squares had stayed together reasonably well, but I think a little more icing between the circles would have made it a bit more cohesive. Nevertheless it looked impressive, and I've therefore added that to the list of things that I'm allowed to make in the kitchen without the fire brigade on standby.

Additionally you have to admit it's pretty fantastic geometrically. I could go in to the Mathematics department with it, declare "I've squared the circle" and watch their heads explode.

Ice Swipe

Hopefully I've got here before this propagates all around the Internet - I was pointed to this game recently, and I think it's really quite clever. I haven't seen one done quite like that before.

Gamma Ray - "Majestic" Samples

The cynical might say that Gamma Ray's image is a bit nicked from Iron Maiden. I'd be inclined to agree.

After the entirely unexpected release of "Majestic" a few weeks ago - the first studio album of theirs since 2001 - Gamma Ray have put up song samples on their website. The band, who are coloured blue, seem to be in the late stages of another change of direction - they started out as a political band with Queen-like influences, then gradually moved towards a science fiction theme, and now they seem to have dropped most of the Queen similarity and started to write something that borders on aggressive Christian rock. However, Kai Hansen's dislike of America in general is still very apparent, so that's good news all round.

I might as well put down some of my thoughts on the samples, even though I know that there's only one person on my Friends list that will bother to download more than one, and I'm not sure if he's got time out of his busy schedule of singing and door-opening to read this, but that's life.

1. My Temple - Even by Gamma Ray's standards this is pretty violent for an opening track, and is almost reminiscent of Heart of the Unicorn (but not as glass-shatteringly high). This is growing on me even though I didn't like it much at first - it sounds like it gets more tuneful just as the sample ends. It also uses the lyric "You've got another thing coming" in an obvious nod to Judas Priest, which is a nice reference that you can be smug about if you get it.


2. Fight - After the calm intro, this song erupts into Henjo Richter's trademark Send Me A Sign-alike arpeggios. There's an unusual fast section in the chorus, but the rest of it is familiar, and I've always liked Richter's songs the best, so that's all right. Oddly enough, the second track of Stratovarius' new album has the same title. Curious.


3. Strange World - This is awfully weird, as there's about five seconds at the start of this song that sound like Dragonforce, or possibly lift music (decide for yourself). There's a classic Gamma Ray choir background, but it's a bit slow for my liking.


4. Hell Is Thy Home - Despite the lyrics sounding like something out of Thy Dungeonman, this is typical Gamma Ray weirdness. It doesn't seem very melodic to me, and almost as if the song is trying to go in too many directions at the same time.


5. Blood Religion - There's not really enough of this song to comment on, but the introduction is very recognisable - powerful Queenesque choirvocals, a staple of the band from the very beginning.


6. Condemned to Hell - I'm sure that this was in Command and Conquer.


7. Spiritual Dictator - Kai Hansen seems to occasionally try and emulate Richter's style, and this is one of those songs - the broken chords are soon replaced by a dead giveaway Hansen Eastern-style melody, though. The chorus sounds great, but the sample ends just as it gets good. This is one of the most Christian songs on the album.


8. Majesty - This is the title track, but it just seems to go nowhere. Hopefully there's something more "majestic" out of the range of the sample that's been provided.


9. How Long - After an intro that sounds more Finnish than German (it could have been written by Stratovarius or Sonata Arctica), this is a religious/political song like the ones from Gamma Ray's early days, and even goes as far as to include lyrics from a couple of their oldest works. It's either genius or a severe lack of creativity, depending on how you look at it. The bridge is rather awkward, but the chorus is amazing.


10. Revelation - Again, there's not a lot of this song to comment on, but it's very recognisable as another of Henjo Richter's, and the sound is very reminiscent of the introduction to The Winged Horse.

Overall, the album sounds pretty decent if not absolutely amazing (for that, I think I'll have to wait until Gamma Ray's sci-fi obsessed younger brother Iron Savior finish their new work), and it's probably one to investigate once it's around.

Bored in the Lab

Disclaimer: Among all my entries, this one is unique because it doesn't actually have any content.

Driving my way in to University this morning, I had the unique experience of being stuck behind a bungalow. I had reached the end of my street and was about to turn when the house loomed in to view and sailed past, blocking the already frustratingly slow road out of Cupar. It was actually a lorry with a large prefabricated building on the back, but it still took ages to manoeuvre around it. Manoeuvre's such a stupid word, it has too many vowels for its own good.

And we spent about half an hour of the lecture this morning discussing how to do subtraction (with the lecturer being very enthusiastic about binary operations). Now all that's left to survive today is a two-hour special on Reports and Presentation Skills, and other things that we all already know - happily, cakes are provided in the middle. Senior Honours is a great life.

My youngest brother and his amazingly long hair have a girlfriend now. It was a bit of a shock, that.

Why I'm So Great

I recently received a testimonial from the RGU so that I can show prospective employers something impressive that isn't my largely fictional CV. Because I don't really have any ideas of what to write in my LJ these days, I thought I'd post it here. Uncharacteristically for me, I've put it behind a cut so that you can get your sick-bags on standby.

---

David was employed as VLE Administrator in the Department of eLearning at the Robert Gordon University from 4th July to 16th September 2005. He assisted in the development and testing of the RGU Virtual Campus, a complex web application with 25000 users. His responsibilities included co-ordinating system testing, data entry, checking of data accuracy, and user support.

David particularly impressed me with his ability to easily fit into an existing team and he used his excellent communication and people skills to work well with members of the team at all levels. In his time in the Department he had regular contact with users in a testing and support role, and I received unprompted positive feedback about David from several of our clients.

In addition, David is organised and has the attention to detail which is vital for the development of polished IT products and services. He is also analytical, is able to solve problems on his own and works well under his own initiative.

I have no hesitation in recommending David as am employee. I am sure he will do well whatever his chosen career.

Regards,
Big Important Organisational Web-Developy Type Person

Tribute to the Past

While looking through the vast Retro directory on my laptop at the Burn, I realised that once again I hadn't updated the online list of my collection for ages. So this evening, much to Whitney's enthrallment, I've been cataloguing my abandonware. The up to date (and stunningly HTML-decorated) list is online on my Wired account. I may do one for my ROMs as well in the future, but I think that's enough copyright dodging for one entry.

If there are any requests for sending, reply in the comments and I'll email some zips out.

ModPlug Unplugged

Just after my total number of song downloads had reached the 40,000 mark, Modplug Central has been smashed to bits by a hurricane and then erased entirely by a faulty hard drive. It's slightly bad news as I was planning to put a link to the experimental version of my music site in my next release. Still, I'd appreciate any comments that people may have on it if you can stand the utter pretentiousness of it all. Happily, none of the links work now, but the actual files are still up at the ModArchive.

Still, it could be worse - I've been following the maintained by , and it made me realise how I hadn't yet noticed the absence of a fire alarm. I remember the frantic struggle out of bed whenever I was woken up by it, the shock of it going off behind my head, and waiting in the rain playing "Always look on the bright side of life" on my guitar while the firemen and engineers completed their slow tour of the building, only for it to go off again a couple more hours into the night. So I was thinking about how I'm free, and they're still living under the tyranny of that bit of red plastic.

I laughed for hours!

Feel the Burn

I had forgotten just how exhausting two days of doing nothing at the Burn was. The reason that it's so tiring is that most people get about six hours of sleep during the whole weekend, with the rest of the time taken up by playing Monopoly, guitars, or anything connected to the projector. will no doubt be pleased that I demonstrated The Last Eichhof on it at one point, but when it came to put Zero Wing on I found my version of it didn't run. It's probably just as well - being computer scientists, we could have joined hands and recited it in unison.

The presentations this year seemed a lot more technically in-depth than last time, essentially meaning they were much more difficult to sit through. The one that I jointly gave, "The Junior Honours Project and Where It All Went Wrong", was one of the more well received, but it couldn't compare to a hysterical talk on Internet addiction, delivered deadpan by one of the new JH students. I may have terrible flashbacks of boards filled with 1337speak glossaries for days.

So with the Burn trip finished, my last year of university will soon be over as well. I know that sounds a bit premature, but it honestly felt like we had been there the previous week rather than a year ago, and if the next year goes as fast as that we'll be in the Real World™ before we know it.

The Stubble Update

mentioned to me last week that I could now use BitTorrent. This has been true for a while now, but after years of living in halls and having my ports blocked and transfers monitored, it had never actually occurred to me that it was an option. So after learning all the three year old terminology, we've now been downloading Iron Chef episodes from a fantastic site that Roja mentioned the other day. I'd forgotten quite how hilarious it was.

Early last week, Whitney bought me a new shaver as an early birthday present, because I was once again losing the ongoing battle with my facial hair. It continues to grow relentlessly despite my best efforts at curtailing it, and you'd think that after seven years of shaving it would have got the hint by now. The new shaver, which is foil-based and therefore new to me, is a lot better at getting rid of it even though it does feel like having my face electrocuted every morning.

Because it refuses to stop growing, Whitney also suggested that I give in to my hair's onslaught and grow a beard. This has been going on for a reasonable amount of time now, and the proto-beard is now ready for others to view, rather than making me look like a fourteen-year-old who's trying to get in to an 18-rated film.

Powwidge

Whose idea was it to get Jonathan Ross to narrate a programme about Ronnie Barker, one of whose major works was "Porridge"? The unintentional hilarity of the voiceover made it a bit difficult to concentrate.

Excitement! Suspense! Boilers!

"The boiler's broken," Whitney announced to me as I came in from lectures. This is probably one of the more frightening things to happen when you're just starting out living independently - in Melville I never needed to worry about things like the boiler unless my hot tap became slightly less scalding than before, or when they over-enthusiastically added something to the water that inflamed all the residents' skin when they showered. However, now that we're in Cupar it was a matter of having a large amount of metal in the kitchen at head-height that may explode without warning. I looked at it and found that it was blinking its lights frantically, so decided that it was best to turn it off.

After finding the helpline phone number, I was taken through a large number of pointless checks on my address and serial number before it was revealed to me that all I had to do to restore balance to the Force was turn a black bit of plastic underneath the boiler quarter of the way round, therefore putting more water in from the mains and repressurising it. I thanked the engineer and hung up, unable to shake the feeling that I'd just asked something equivalent to "How do I change my homepage in Internet Explorer?". But it was nice to know that our lives aren't at risk just yet.

Projects and presentations, and it's only the first week

After the downpour and icy winds of the last couple of days, I was amazed when coming in to St Andrews this morning to be driving through something resembling the Windows XP background. That kind of weather isn't native to this part of the country at all, and therefore the Goldfish Bowl was more of a greenhouse, making listening to the Architecture lecture all the more difficult. I can't really recall anything worthwhile from the lecturer, but I seem to remember some frightening Assembly commands being put up at some point.

Uncharacteristically for a Computer Science class, Multimedia looks like it's going to be pretty hysterical as it's mainly based on groupwork rather than sitting around being talked at. I'm not too thrilled with having to do a group presentation for the first practical, but after that there's a practical on video editing to come. The lecturer has also requested people to present some multimedia projects of their own, and I'm not really sure whether to put forward Crystal Towers or not. Other things that are being done include the madness of some people's iMovies and sixth year projects.

I also have to start thinking about what to do my presentation on at The Burn this year. I was going to do "Prince of Persia in 20 Minutes", including a talk on rotoscoping and video capture techniques as I ran through my immensely self-absorbed speed video, but I don't think that I could fill up the time very effectively, and having a presentation and video running side by side could be awkward. Besides, the quality's terrible and the licence has run out on my video software. It's likely that I'll go with a "Random Numbers" presentation so that I can send everyone to sleep, but I'd rather like to group together with a few people and do a presentation on the Junior Honours Project instead - at least then it would be something worthwhile. My only worry there is that some of the more outgoing (loud) members of the class would undoubtedly feel they could do the presentation more justice.

The project is also coming up - the one that I'm most interested in so far is a method of determining the location of a mobile device via its signal strength and therefore distance from a number of known base stations (keep reading, it gets better, I promise). If a system like that could be made accurate enough, then it's possible that the locations could be uploaded to a central server which could display a floor plan, complete with Marauder's Map-style dots that show people's locations as they move through the building. It sounds interesting, but I was concerned that I had very little experience in networking. The lecturer who set it didn't seem to see this as a problem, though. According to Al, many senior honours projects fail as miserably as the junior honours ones, so there's no worry there.

[Edited because I suddenly became stupid and got all the letters in "justify" wrong so that it read "center".]

New Releases

It came to my attention via 's recent post that Stratovarius released a new album a couple of weeks ago. Gamma Ray have put theirs out early as well. This is very bad for me when I'm trying to be on a budget.

Broadband

Broadband was turned on last night! The DSL modem is a fairly unimpressive grey box that features gill-like ridges as if it were an unlikely plastic fish, but in contrast to the connections that I've used in the past, its presence means that we can use the Internet:

• At all times of the day
• Without dying from old age while waiting for a page to load
• Unrestricted, with no blocked ports resulting from ITS paranoia

I would write more, but I have to beat the world at Unreal Tournament (or failing that, just the people on the New Players Only servers).

The First Day

"What a load of bollocks", a classmate announced as he walked past me out of Distributed Systems. I was waiting for my Artificial Intelligence lecture to start at the time, and that assessment made me even more glad that I had favoured it this semester. In fact, my timetable at the moment is a complete joke, with me having one lecture a day, starting 11 in the morning at the earliest, and two hours of Multimedia in the afternoons every Thursday. This will eventually fill up with the PSAC lectures, project and any practicals that come our way, but Honours Computer Science creates at least the illusion of having a relatively free timetable.

It happens that I'm now using Whitney's Mac to take notes in lectures. I know it's a bit of a turnaround from my attitude towards them last year, but it's clearly the more portable of the two laptops we have in the house (mine having no battery, a self-inflicted insane keyboard and a serious weight problem). The Mac got on with me quite well right up until the very end of the lecture when it decided to treat what I had saved to my pendrive as read only, and to convert all I had typed in to "I don't know this character" squares when I tried to save to the hard drive.

I've decided to start doing this because in the second semester last year we were lectured in the lab, with computers in front of us, and I typed vast essays out on to my own laptop as the lectures went on, and it behaves very well as long as it's kept static and gets a socket to itself. Now, though, the third years are being lectured in the left side of the lab (which now has no computers), our practicals are to be done on the right side, and we're being lectured in the Goldfish Bowl. It's a mystery to me why they did this, but I wanted to keep typing things out as we go along because I got my best marks ever last semester, forcing myself to pay attention and write something vaguely coherent.

It's also come to my attention that we weren't supposed to hand our proximity cards at the end of last year. I handed mine to to return, and now that I come to think about it, I never heard of my £5 deposit again.

Stirling Castle

To say that nothing important has happened between my last update and now would be rather rude to the fair number of people that I've met up with since arriving back in the St Andrews area - over the course of the week, Whitney and I have been in and out of St Andrews and have met various people from the hall last year, and ran in to a few from my classes in the Union - Jenny is back this year, Natalie is now living with Shelley, and I saw Andy at the bar, who greeted me by happily shouting "You water-drinking homo" across the room a couple of times.

The rest of the time has been taken by settling-in activities, and no one wants to read those because it's just a list of "Went to Tesco, went to St Andrews, went to Dundee, ran out of milk, was abducted by aliens, saved the Universe", and so on. Our costs have been greater than I'd imagined and at present we've spent more than my estimated monthly budget in a week, so we're going to have to reassess that. The sooner Whitney's potential employers get around to replying, the better.

Today was our most major excursion since coming here, as I drove Whitney to Stirling castle. The castle is defended by a ridiculously complex one-way road system that James V built to confound any enemies that got within a mile of it, and it was only after a large amount of guessing at the roundabouts and weaving in and out of jutting-out pavements that we managed to work our way to the top of the hill. It doesn't help that no one in Stirling knows how to use the roads, either - we frequently had to dodge obstacles like people who walked out in front of us or parked in the middle of the street.

The castle was bigger than I had imagined, though, and was just about worth the £8 entry fee. The tour plaques did seem to put an extraordinary amount of emphasis on the ceilings, and when they weren't talking about those they were describing the gigantic Hunt of the Unicorn tapestry reconstructions that hung there. I can't imagine how anything that large could be done by hand - it seems to me to be completely overwhelming, like the project that I'll be supposed to start in three days.

Setting up

Sunday morning was our first ever shopping trip, to get things to stock up the cupboards, fridge and freezer. It came to £57.68 rather than the heart-attack-inducing sum that I'd expected, and further trips will be less than that. I am increasingly convinced that clubcard points are useless, but according to the receipt I earned 57 today, bringing the card up to a total of twelve. Admittedly I failed AH Maths, but I suspect something's gone wrong there. We've even been so efficient to sort out a budget file to keep track of our spending - even though we have money now, I'm not quite used to spending this much, as the trip this morning came to over four times my weekly budget last year.

In the afternoon, we visited St Andrews for the first time this academic year. Ironically, after escaping from it long ago, I found myself back in Melville to use the computer room for Internet access. It was the first time I'd used it since the room was upgraded from Scrapheap, and it was pleasant enough, though busy as ITS have decided to get people to apply online for their network connections this year. While there, Whitney sorted out our broadband account, which should be available in about a week - this update's being put up over the dialup account that we've been given as a backup.

Yesterday we were awoken by my mobile phone at 8am, which was caused by the startlingly efficient phone engineer. He seemed a bit odd at first, but when plied with coffee he became more talkative. It seemed we had three phone ports - two extensions in the bedroom and the main one in the living room - but only one phone, which looks like something left over from the Spanish Armada and is hilariously labelled the "Phonanza Dialatron". You can hear the pulses in your ear while dialling as it simulates a rotary phone, so automated services don't work.

To add to the meagre telephony hardware, we went to Nickel 'n' Dime to get another phone, eventually coming out with miscellany like picture frames and a hair trimmer. The receipts from that place are patently useless, as every single item is marked down as "Shop sales", and the itemised receipt called the shop "Nickel 'n' Dime" but the card confirmation argues that its name is "Nickle & Dime". Nevertheless, we now have a working phone line - if you want the number, phone and ask me for it.

I also had the experience of joining the library that day. That's not something that I'd ever done before, as my previous library card had been taken out for me when I was about three and it somehow found its way into my wallet between then and when I was actually inspired to use it. Cupar library's system involved us writing all our details on to cards and then the librarian painstakingly entering them all in to the computer - there's room for more efficiency there. When we eventually got on to the computers, the machine I logged on to warned of some kernel process giving illegal instructions and then warned me that it had serious hard drive integrity issues, so it's probably just as well that we've got backup dialup access here.

And now that you can read this entry, you can see that the backup dialup access is actually working - I was panicked when it didn't connect at all last night, no matter how much I fiddled with settings, changed from tone to pulse dialling and back, got it to dial more slowly so that the pension-drawing phone line could understand, told it to ignore the fact that it couldn't hear a dial tone when there clearly was one, ran checks on the modem, pleaded with it, or hit it with a sledgehammer. Eventually a new cable from the modem to the wall solved the problem - we had been using the same one as from the Dialatron (the Dialatron!), but evidently there's some difference that I didn't know about.

Last night's entry, today

Before Whitney and I embarked on our journey down to Cupar, I had to undergo a painful extraction at the optician. It was £181, to be exact. My eyesight is actually improving, and the spot that occasionally appears in my right eye is apparently caused by things floating inside it, which sounds sick-making but is quite normal. The result of my eyes springing back into shape just a year after my NHS coverage ran out is the vast cost of getting new glasses, but I had the new experience of driving without my eyes feeling like I'd poured lemon juice into them afterwards.

It's anyone's guess when this entry will be put up (it's being written on Saturday evening), because we don't have Internet access at the flat yet. At least in having no service, we can be safe in the knowledge that we're not on ResNet. Not that I had much of a problem with their uptime or speed, but it was their paranoid attitude to port blocking that got to me. I used to regularly use FTP to transfer files between my computer and the Honours server, but after Christmas last year it suddenly stopped working. When I emailed them to complain, they told me that it had always been blocked, and that this was "normal operation of the ResNet firewall". It remains the most Orwellian email I've ever received.

The phone service will start on Monday, so after that I'll look around on Uswitch, and if no better options present themselves (and provided it's available for us) we're going to go with PlusNet.

Things have been unpacked, which took ages, and I've run up and down the ladder in to the spacious attic to store suitcases and boxes. It still doesn't seem like the university year is near at all, because normally at this time I'd be sitting in Andrew Melville with my door propped open playing Prince of Persia and meeting my lunatic corridor-mates as they came in. Instead, after forgetting to have lunch, we went to the Indian place to avoid any real cooking, and the adventure of going to LiDL will begin tomorrow.

Interlude

We got the box open eventually. It turns out that the "administrator" had taken the keys to the department just before vanishing, so that's what she was after. One of the developers eventually opened it by chiselling the rod out of the hinges, looking suspiciously like he'd done it before, followed by a joint effort of levering the two halves apart using a set of screwdrivers.

We have another German over temporarily, by the name of Julia. She's been visiting my old school and meeting all the terrifying language teachers. Listening to her and my mother speak has unfortunately made me realise how terrible I've let my German ability get.

Whitney has been rather ill with a cold all day (which if you ask me could be some sort of karmic retribution for when she likened The Crystal Maze to Supermarket Sweep). I've been feeding her on vegetable stock, biscuits, crisps and other healthy revitalising food, so she'll hopefully be better by Saturday when we move down to the flat.

Otherwise, things are going pretty well - she's at least here, and I got an email asking for permission to perform the Memory of Babylon yesterday. I have also been receiving an avalanche of messages from a scarily enthusiastic Crystal Towers fan who writes about one thousand words per email. It's always nice to be appreciated.