Spying on deleted posts is no more.

I visited The Sinner for the first time in a while today. I'm rather vastly disappointed that because of the new system, the way of viewing posts that were already deleted has been taken out, and a correctly coded Printer version put in its place. I had been quite smug about knowing that.

NTLDRIM!

Today started off normally enough, with me sleeping in until eleven o'clock after intending to go to bed early but staying up to do some more of Crystal Towers. The problems began early, though, when I got up and turned on the computer.

NTLDR is missing.

"What the hell are you talking about?" I replied, slightly less polite to it than normal. That didn't seem to have any effect on it, and neither did pressing the Space bar repeatedly to restart. This was getting worrying - particularly as I had had a dream the previous night about a virus that wouldn't let you start your computer unless you removed Windows and replaced it with Linux. I remembered when my computer wouldn't turn on two weeks ago, and assumed that the problem was related to that - I decided to go away for a shower and open it up when I got back, reassuring myself that the NTLDR would be obviously disconnected from the CPU or the NTFSHDD or the YMCA or something.

When I returned, ready to open it up and operate on it, I noticed that I had left the USB adaptor driver disk in the floppy drive from yesterday when I was messing with that. Sensing that the solution was about to become embarrassingly obvious (and this story a bit anti-climactic) I removed it, tried again, and it started with no problems at all. And to think I made certain that my new computer would have a floppy drive when I got it a year ago.

But I still have to wonder - why it was decided to use that cryptic message to indicate that a disk had been left in the drive? Previous versions of DOS and Windows normally had "Non-system disk or disk error - Press any key to continue". A little frightening, yes, but at least it told you what the problem was and how to solve it. To keep up with Microsoft's new line of patronising error messages, even "A disk has been left in the drive - please remove it and I can start normally. Sorry for the inconvenience, would you like some tea?" surely wouldn't have taken up more than a few bytes more space in the OS to implement.

(I have now found out that NTLDR is short for "NT Loader" - knowing this would have made the solution a bit more obvious - and am reading about other, more terrifying, possible causes of the message. I'm backing up important files now.)

Chaos Control

Let me start by saying I was entertained by the Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy film. I do hope that it doesn't become more well-known than the books, because to be fair it does cut out a lot of parts of it unnecessarily - some lines are recognisable at first, then give up before they reach the end. However, I think it's safe to say that I think the fact that it's unlike the books will be common knowledge, and hopefully this will even increase their popularity.

I played DDR for the first time in ages last night after meeting at the cinema. The trouble is that since the last time I was in the Union, Andy and one of his friends "Nade" have got on to the high scores ahead of me. Apparently Nade is in the DDR UK team, of which I wasn't actually aware. I'm fairly certain that Andy's own scores were just put in in his name - nevertheless, the gauntlet has been thrown down. Or maybe some sort of iron boot, in this case.

On coming back to my room this morning I decided to do something about my USB adaptor - I noticed something was up with it yesterday, when one of the buttons was being detected as continually held down. By this afternoon, the infection had spread to two other buttons as well, and it was definitely a controller problem rather than the adaptor because my dance pad other controller still worked fine. So being adventurous and foolish, I decided to open it up and have a look.

I think that too many people are scared of opening things up to see inside them - I found the layout of the controller fairly simple to understand, and as long as you can put everything back together without parts left over when you're finished I think there's little chance of causing irreparable damage.

The buttons are held in place on the inside of the casing, and have rubber pads to cushion them against the inner case. I was rather intrigued that the three central buttons (Start, Select, Analog) are in fact one large piece of moulded rubber. These rubber pads also have hard plastic discs on them to press against what I can only assume is the pressure sensitive film on the white inside of the controller.

It seems to me that this film is the problem - I was hoping that it was something physical like the buttons being stuck down, but they kept registering even when the case was off. (Yes, I did unplug it while working on it.) Interestingly, the remaining working button would only register through pressing against the rubber pads placed on top of the film, and not through pushing anything else on the film itself. I can't see anything else obvious that's keeping the three buttons held down, so unfortunately it looks like it's probably time to buy a new controller unless anyone has any other suggestions.

Now for putting it back together...

Note 1: I found that when reassembling it, it's easier to hold it flat or even upside down so that the shoulder buttons stay out of the way - it's quite awkward to slide the pads and film back in to the shoulders in two places at once otherwise. It's also easier to lay the white frame on the back of the controller then put the front on top of it rather than put the buttons through the front first and try and put the back on behind them. You can even leave the shoulder buttons until last and pop them through the case afterwards, but I don't think that did them much good.

Note 2: Come to think of it, it's probably easier not to do any of this at all.

The End

It's quite amazing how this project never finishes. The report is printed and bound (and very impressive it looks too) but now I have to get all the team members to sign it. With the exception of the final rush the day before the acceptance test, the team haven't been together in the same room since about Easter, so I've just left it in the lab for the remaining two to get it signed and handed in. It's out of my hands now, and I'm very glad of that.

Reprographics in the Purdie building is a very relaxing room. Being in it marks the end of weeks of work - if you're standing in there you've most likely finished the work for the year and the huge writeups that go with them, and can relax once more. Or more likely, be panicking about anything that you forgot to put in before you printed it to PDF - I spent about two hours this morning repeatedly editing, converting and uploading before I got a result where I didn't think anything had been left out.

I don't know if it's just me that gets this impression, but the employees in Reprographics are the calmest people ever - it must be a side effect of being around that much paper. They don't walk normally, they seem to sort of glide around the place while talking to you soothingly. Now that I come to think of it, this may be a successful attempt to hypnotise people in to paying £17.50 for printing and binding a project.

Music News

Some Scandinavians have done a cover version of one of my songs. Strangely enough it wasn't even what I consider to be one of my best songs, it was just a side project that I did as a theme for someone's online clan somewhere or other.

It can be found on Unlight's page, and is called "The Last Time". Regardless of what you think of the genre of music and vocals (pretty scary, I'd imagine - I have to admit that it's about the polar opposite of the vocal style that I felt ideal for my music) I think the fact that someone felt compelled to do this is a very good sign indeed. There weren't even any lyrics for the original version...

Additionally

It seems that every time I open up Modplug Tracker the fire alarm goes off. I didn't think my music was that bad.

I was somehow inspired to take a recording of the siren before I ran from the building and clubbed the wardenial team to death with my guitar. Now you can cause yourself severe trauma from the comfort of your own bedroom. It's best played at full volume when you're trying to sleep.

Ban this filth!

It's slightly ironic that after being extra-nice to Whitney and staying up until 3am on Monday morning so we could talk, I struggled out of bed this morning to find that both of my tutorials had been cancelled. This meant that I had all morning to do something constructive - work on the report again, perhaps, or even start on some revision. So have I done that?

One of the more unusual messages.

Of course not! I've been playing GTA2 all morning. It's been available as semi-freeware (as in it's a free program but they say it isn't freeware because of some ludicrous technicality and you can't pass it around but instead have to use their servers, blah, blah) from Rockstar Classics for some time now. The last time I had it was when I downloaded it over a painfully slow 56k connection, back when Freeloader was actually free (the name made sense back then). I'd forgotten how much fun it was - I always thought that the GTA games worked better using a top-down view rather than the modern fully 3D environments. Some people have been playing it over the network, and I don't think I've laughed quite so much since I went to see Van Helsing.

It's strange to remember the huge media outcry in response to the release of the very first game in the series. "This game will turn you in to a criminal and kill your childen!" was the typical reaction to a game which involved working for organised crime gangs. But then, in those days just about every game was considered a danger to society and the human race. Now when a controversial game is released, no one seems to really care any more. Parents buy them for their children. That's probably why we have neds. Haha, maybe they were right after all.

Speaking of controversy, I found this parody VW Polo advert on Snopes the other day. Maybe this is an admission of bad taste (as if regularly talking about German and J-pop on this journal wasn't enough of that already), but I find it absolutely hilarious and not offensive at all.

I would like to reiterate that Mark Vanderbilt can't sing. "Ahfee thedistah steeah from the watcheeaaye!" I'm not sure what he's screeching about, but it's certainly not the lyrics.

Forty-six Pages Done

Miraculously, Andy and I have managed to write most of the report (for which it was recommended a month was set aside) in a single weekend. This did mean missing out on the ball, but Age of Kings provided a replacement entertainment for the evening. Until I started losing, that is - then I switched it off and sulked for a bit. That showed the computer.

I have a lot of projects that need finishing off, the most significant being Crystal Towers. The trouble is that when I have the Internet to distract me it draws my attention away from any offline tasks - the game was started just before going to visit Whitney last summer, and will hopefully be finished by the time I visit her again.

Maybe I'll treat myself to a holiday after getting this report finished and do it then, followed by huge amounts of panic in the buildup to exams. I'm fairly sure I could bluff my way through OS and Databases for the most part, but the Logic exam (to apply a phrase from Maid Marian) is going to be like doing an Advanced Higher Maths paper written backwards in Japanese.

Dancing Robots

Finally, the project has drawn to a close. The Acceptance Test was on Thursday, and despite our code being about as stable as Richard Whitty during Raisin Weekend, Kirby decided that we had all "something worthwhile to demonstrate". I had a glance at his notes, in fact - under our group he had "Nice GUI", which sounds like good news for us even if the rest of it's terrible.

The robots' method of dancing was questionable, though - most of them started off at the same time, but in different directions and at different speeds. The chaos of robots ploughing in to each other at the deadly speed of 3mph was just about how I expected the day to go, though. 's group was remarkably unfortunate - they had their robot working almost perfectly, then it was trodden upon by a passing IT tutor. Being none too happy about this, it then refused to travel in anything but straight lines for the rest of the day. Which is more than some of the other robots could do, in fact.

The day after, I got The Easiest Practical In The World (aka Database Connection) out of the way first, followed by finishing the last practical of the year, Chess in PVS. Well, I only finished it in a way - that way being "imaginary". I gave up halfway through, submitted it and went to Empire instead.

Now there's just the matter of that 50-page report to write by Thursday morning.

Music

I am currently watching Modern Talking's "Win The Race" video - fire, lightning and marching Germans - with the sound off, while "Grinder" from Command and Conquer 2 plays in the background. They go disturbingly well together.

Also, Dream Theater's "Scenes from a Memory" (which is still the best title for anything ever) becomes more of a work of genius every time I hear anything from it - WinAmp just randomly selected "The Spirit Carries On". I'm going to have to sit down and listen to the whole thing in the right order.

A Man Called Brian

Thank you for all the sympathy, both as replies to the last entry and in real life. I feel slightly awkward mentioning this whole thing to people because I feel that I'm somehow attention-seeking (I understand why people disable comments on entries with bad news now), but your words are very much appreciated.

I found it difficult to continue with my LJ during the last few days because it somehow seemed disrespectful to continue as if everything was normal. Brian's funeral was this morning, and because it was meant to mark the end of worrying about this, I want to talk about memories of him here. I wanted to say some of this at the funeral itself, but that duty had fallen to my dad - and he did a heroic job with his speech, with hardly any difficulty getting to the end.

I hadn't seen Brian in a few years, but when I was younger he used to almost always come to our house for weekends. Every time his arrival was an exciting event - at the time, mostly because he brought with him a pack of sweets for each of his nephews and niece. It was always Skittles for me, the awful but brilliant ovoids of pure toothrot. My parents were no doubt displeased with that, but despite his best efforts, I still have all my teeth.

Occasionally he would even bring a game round that he'd bought in Aberdeen on the way in - he was always young at heart and shared my fascination with computers. He was instrumental in starting my collection of now-abandonware, in fact. He eventually got a computer for himself, and had to be taught how to work it - my dad and I had to go round and fix things for him. He always described it as "the most expensive pack of cards I ever bought", as Solitaire and the rest of the Windows games were the only things he could get to run. He even appreciated my interest in game design itself (after laughing at my first few attempts when I was much younger).

He accompanied us to a local bonfire night one year, but my parents had got the time wrong and we arrived just after the last firework had been let off. We turned to go, disappointed, especially as our parents had decided against getting fireworks for our own back garden that year. When we got back, though, we found Brian stepping out of his van, and in his hands he had a huge box of fireworks which he'd bought behind my parents' back. At the time it was the greatest thing to have ever happened.

During the service I was surprised to find out that his nickname was "Titch" - I had always thought of him as quite tall, but he was the youngest brother in a family of eleven members. He had always been "Uncle Brian" to not just me, but seemingly everyone who knew him... he did a lot of work for people around my home. The service was a new experience for me - I had been to a couple of funerals before, but never for a family member. I thought that I'd got over things by the time I got there, but seeing the fantastic turnout that had come to see him off was very moving.

As I walked out of the chapel I looked at the floral tributes that were laid up against the wall of the crematorium. "TICH", the biggest one proclaimed in bright flowers. I decided not to point it out. But as I looked at it, and as I'm typing this now, I'm feeling far more frustration than sadness - he shouldn't have died, he was too good to everyone he knew. He is the first family member to die since my grandparents, but in many ways he took the role of a grandparent for me - the role of smuggling things into the house that my parents didn't want to allow. For that, he was fantastic.

Brian

Today, I was woken up by a fire alarm. As usual in these situations, I fled to the lab, and decided to struggle with the project that still isn't working. Shortly after I started, my parents arrived unexpectedly in St Andrews. They came to tell Jamie and I that Brian, the uncle that I mentioned had gone missing some weeks ago, has been found dead at the side of a canal in Falkirk.

So overall it hasn't really been the best of mornings.

I've been working.

New Prince of Persia best time: 42:20 (4 seconds off Jan and Rob's world record now).

I felt inexplicably good this morning even though I know the week's going to be virtually non-stop work and worrying about the project. There were only about six people in the Databases lecture, the rest of the class having probably decided they never wanted to see the lab again. After it had finished I decided to submit my shaky solution to the OS trains practical, then I started up Prince of Persia and all hope of working ever again vanished.

Toothpaste, networking code, etc.

The effort of getting any more toothpaste out of the tube that I'd been using since September finally outweighed the effort involved in going to get a new one this morning. I didn't know that Colgate was so expensive compared to everything else, but having never actually bought toothpaste before, it was the only one I felt I could trust. It's not as if it's American toothpaste - that stuff really is nasty, with some sort of gritty additive that turns your saliva a dark shade of grey.

Now, on to what I should want to avoid mentioning. The project integration test was an abject failure - and that's looking on the bright side. When it started we couldn't agree on where to demonstrate, as there wasn't anywhere with both enough room and network access, and when we eventually all went back up to the JH lab to try there, nothing worked at all. Our team was one of the three that had robots that moved at all, but none of the networking worked. Kirby just sort of laughed at us and left. This now means that we have one week before the final demonstration, and nothing is yet in a demonstratable state.

On the bright side, we do have quite a nice dance writer. By me.

I went in to the town and bought myself a Tesco sandwich to make up for my imminent complete failure at the course. Nothing seems quite so bad after a Tesco sandwich.

Music Time

Next Year

Plans have been laid for next year - I didn't want to write about them here before in case the act of writing them down made them suddenly go terribly wrong, but there's nothing in the way now...

My parents have bought a flat in Cupar! Their offer was accepted ages ago, but there was a huge period of waiting while some surveyors had a look at it (someone was worried that it was actually falling apart) but in the end they said that they were happy with it. My mother excitedly sent me an email about the "Flat in Cupar" with about fifty exclamation marks after it, and as soon as I saw that I knew we had it. What's particularly good about this is that Whitney and I now have somewhere to live next year, as my parents' first tenants - with Whitney getting a job in Cupar or St Andrews, and me commuting in to the University with the Fiesta.

So next year, after three years, I'll finally be leaving Andrew Melville Hall. I can't say I'm too sad to go - over the time I've been here I've begun to view it less as a second home and more a sort of Dark Cathedral of Fear, which makes living here a bit less enjoyable. But I will have to cope without having meals provided. Actually, that woeful parody of chicken risotto was served again at dinner tonight - I don't think I'll miss that too much. Living together, work, commuting... it'll be a trial run for married life. Scary.

End of Easter

Last night was Wild West Night at work - or, for the kitchen staff, Look Like an Idiot Night. Hideous checked shirts, jeans and hats all round (provided by my brother, who actually wears a hat like that normally). It was quite a laugh, actually, and nowhere near as humiliating as I had expected - in fact, typing it up here is proving to be the worst part. From Susan's point of view, though, it was a bit of a disaster as a grand total of twelve people turned up, so we had nothing much to do, and I ended up being paid my hourly rate to sit down and take part in the pub quiz. I still find jeans to be the most uncomfortable item of clothing ever (apart from maybe a straitjacket) - they do loosen up after walking around for a bit, but when putting them on at first it's like wearing Andrew Melville bedsheets.

I earned a surprising amount over Easter, and am now back in St Andrews to spend it on Tesco sandwiches, Empire pizza, and other vital nourishment. The journey down had a slight disaster, because after I had safely transported my computer over half the country, my dad dropped it when picking it up (via the easily detachable front panel) to take it out to the car. The wires to the inside weren't happy about that. It wouldn't turn on at all once I got down here despite his attempt to reconnect them, but after opening it and reconnecting the wires to the cryptically-named pins inside it was miraculously resurrected. I'm fantastic.

Found the answer

Weballergy is about addiction to the Internet, and presumably just going around the same forums all day. Sounds familiar, but still, what a strange subject.

What?

It was only today that I remembered about the disastrous practical that I had handed in before the Easter break. Having worked on it on and off for a week or so, neither I nor any of the people I spoke to about it could work out how to do it all - the task was to specify a priority queue in PVS, a language which seems to have no reference manuals, no API, and worst of all is based on the horrendous Emacs interface.

After a week of work I was forced to give up, and submitted my half-hearted attempt to MMS anyway - a vague solution that had at least a couple of basic working proofs (but only solved one and a bit out of the three tasks of the practical), along with a brief text file detailing just how much I hadn't done. I went on to MMS today hoping that my approach would have at least helped me to scrape a pass. A grade 9 would have been great news.

I think I'm now going to have to start going to the church services on Sundays, because I'm fairly certain that this qualifies as a miracle.

I'll be back in St Andrews soon, which will be a nice change from the cold in my room. I'm wearing a dressing gown over normal thick clothing, I've eaten a bowl of chicken soup that was boiled to just below its specific heat of vaporisation, the radiator's at full blast, and still nothing changes the permanent Arctic conditions. It must be great for the computer, though.

Shadow of the Comet

Often during the holidays I decide to treat myself to a late-night game playing session, like I used to do when I was in school and staying up until past midnight was a novelty usually only reserved for New Year. After all, I'm not going to have the opportunity to have them for much longer as with any luck I'll soon be living with Whitney. That actually sounds a bit more negative than it should. Never mind. My point is that when I start playing something now, I often get tired at only about one o'clock, check my watch, and shuffle off to bed like some sort of geriatric. It's not right.

I found a moderately great abandonware site by the name of Abandonia a few days ago and have been downloading things off it like mad - one game that's taken hold of my attention is the almost completely overlooked adventure game "Shadow of the Comet", which I remembered having a demo of ages ago (in which I never got anywhere). I'm also stealing the screenshots off that site.

I never got anywhere in the demo, though, and that's hardly surprising - the game has the worst interface ever designed, involving movement with the arrow keys and some random letters on the keyboard to do things with the environment - and you have to be standing in exactly the right place to be able to do anything. Most of the actions you have to perform are so obscure ("Put the feather on the tree stump and you'll turn in to a dove") that it's much more satisfying to play the game with a walkthrough on hand. Fortunately I had one in PC Zone issue 5, back in the days when my dad bought PC magazines.

Looks like a bad Japanese film.

Despite its awkwardness (I can see why I had trouble with the demo now), I like it because of its storyline - it starts off as a very normal adventure game, but gets stranger and stranger as it goes on until you're killing members of the town who are actually undead and preventing Cthulhu from condemning what's left of the populace to a tentacley doom. The scene to the right, which is rather disturbing when it pops up full-screen, occurs after you get rid of the mayor by casting a spell and putting a statue on the star that appears on his house.

Eek!

In fact, the whole game is very unsettling. Part of this is because it insists on Kikiaing you at every opportunity - I was very glad of being able to play in a window during some sections. The charming fellow on the left, who goes by the name of Jonas, appears when your character goes exploring in a crypt alone (because no adventure game star has ever been particularly bright) - once he's survived many Knightmare-esque and often very unfair puzzles, he has to run back through the crypt while pursued by the slug monster. As monsters go it's a fairly easy encounter after a couple of saves and reloads, but sleeping was hard that night.

There's also the matter of the can of nitroglycerine that you can pick up at the bottom of a well - if you decide to collect this, numbers count back from 5 above your character's head, then he shrugs and explodes in what can only be a homage to Lemmings. The strangeness of it is inexplicable, but Infogrames was known for being a little odd sometimes.

Anyway, I've completed it now and the world is safe once again. Does anyone know what this song means at all? It appears to be something about not wasting time in your life, but the reason why it's called "Weballergy" continues to elude me. Answers on a postcard. Or just in the comments. That would probably be a bit quicker.

Exercise?

"Today," I declared to myself at breakfast as I stuffed myself with five slices of toast followed by a doughnut, "I'm going to start exercising." Exercise is something that I feel I've been badly in need of recently, and I wanted to do something about it before my gut actually swallowed me whole.

With no DDR machine within 16 miles, though, the decision of how to exercise had to be a little more imaginitive. I had resolved to do sit-ups every morning, but today I managed a total of only thirty before collapsing to the floor in a quivering gelatinous heap. Well, as my uncle Brian used to say, "If at first you don't succeed, don't bother trying".

Speaking of Brian, we got a phone call about him at midnight last night and it seems that he's gone missing after being in hospital. My dad's been phoning around hospitals trying to get news of him, but I'm not too worried yet, because he used to vanish off the face of the Earth all the time then turn up again a few months later having been living in a caravan or another country or Neptune or somewhere.

I decided to walk around Inverurie after my failure at other exercise, and that turned out to be the most frightening walk ever, because I discovered as I was passing the bank that before I paid in my wages this week I had a total of £5.44 in my account. Looking at my budget file in Excel, I remember that sending flowers to Whitney was expensive enough to warrant a mortgage on my bedroom and having to live on bread and water for the rest of the term, but I didn't think that I had that little left. Fortunately my pay at work is now a little better, so maybe I'll be able to sort that out by the time I come back to St Andrews.

Guardian of Memories

Just when you thought it had gone...

If you read this,
even if I don't speak to you often,
post a memory of me.
It can be anything you want, it can be good or bad,
just so long as it happened.

Cheer me up, I'm exhausted.

Sonata Arctica

This afternoon, while finally doing some work on Crystal Towers (it'll be finished soon, honest) I noticed in my playlist the MP3s of Sonata Arctica's "Silence" that had sent me ages ago, but that I subsequently forgot about. I had listened to a couple of their songs before, and had the impression that they were a more manic version of Stratovarius.

After listening to the album a few times, this impression still holds - their songs are incredibly happy, fast and aggressive at the same time, making their general sound akin to that of an exploding Skittles factory. Unlike many albums, it didn't take me a while to get in to but I instead instantly liked a lot of it, apart from a couple of minor downfalls...

The most significant of these is the five-minute whingefest by the name of "Last Drop Falls". I'm not against ballads, but the lyrics are the kind of pop-like drivel that I listen to this kind of music to get away from. It appears that Kakko had a bit of a falling out with his significant other. In fact, many of their other lyrics are very strange - they seem to write typical power metal fantasy lyrics but in a modern setting, which is an interesting clash of styles. They also tend to make fast and sudden time changes a lot, which begin to demand the attention so much that - and this is no joke - I actually find them physically tiring to listen to after a while. I'd better go and lie down.