Guest Lecturer

I was going to put up an article about memes here this evening, but I'm packing for America at the moment and have to go to work, so in its place I thought I'd share an essay that my brother Richard wrote and handed in as part of his English prelim. He seems to write in the complete opposite style to me - instead of being formal and writing in the most balanced and precise way possible, he just writes what he feels like. It's that looseness that allows such masterpieces as these to be produced.

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The amount of "normality" with which a person should behave is debatable. It is my belief, however, that while people should act in a reasonably "normal" manner at work or in leisure, they should not cull all their eccentric habits or quirks.

Recently, I have become fond of a nonsense song concerning a bear ("all black and brown and covered with hair!"). Many may consider my habit of repeatedly murmuring a couple of lines of the song to myself to a made-up tune as I go about my daily life as "odd". However, I consider it a harmless and entertaining waste of breath. It is habits such as these which shouldn't be lost, although they should be limited in places of work.

On the other hand, certain funky behaviour should be avoided, during leisure and particularly during work. Bellowing the aforementioned "Bear song" at the top of your voice every time someone mentions the word "bear" or even "bare" is not acceptable. It is annoying and wakes up sleeping people.

Everybody should have a few unusual habits. While chewing pencils, fingernails, toenails, etc. is relatively commonplace, I knew a guy who used to try and eat biro pens. He would inevitably get sick as soon as he bit through the tube that contains the ink but it was always pretty funny.

If nobody had annoying or interesting habits, it would be a lot harder to decide who to hate. It's a pretty safe bet that a fellow who hums his own personal theme tune before entering a room or initiating a conversation is the kind of berk that you want to avoid. If he didn't maintain this curious habit, it would be easy to find yourself unwittingly engaged in a dialogue with him. You might have to suffer the fool's prattle for several minutes before an opportunity for escape presents itself.

In my experience, most people can do some pretty weird things like dislocating their kneecaps at will or turning their thumbs upside down. Many people call these feats abnormal but that is precisely what makes them unique and amusing. You might even be able to make some money if you have a particularly disgusting ability. If people were encouraged not to display these stunts countless hours of entertainment would be lost.

To conclude, I consider an acceptable level of "normality" as avoiding any unusual behaviour which causes physical pain or mental anguish to other people or small mammals. Harmless tricks and quirks should not be lost, although they should be limited in workplaces if they have the potential to cause a disturbance.

Self-evaluation: I would give this a grade, but I'm not sure how. I feel that in choosing question 12 I was in error. Nevertheless I attemped to wing it. I am dubious as to whether I succeeded or even answered the question.

---

And that was awarded a credit grade. Anyway, I'll be updating from America next time after travelling for about eighteen hours, so it might not be an entirely light and cheery entry.

Frogallergy

At my golf club job today, while I made cheese and pickle sandwiches for people who presumably had no taste buds, Northsound One subjected me to the Crazy Frog song for the first time. Apparently it got to Number 1 this week, but I find it impossible to tell why.

I'd been aware that such a composition existed, but I'd imagined it to be more upbeat and maybe with the gibberish set to some sort of tune, creating some sort of manic J-pop style babble. I might even have enjoyed it then. Well, let's not go too far. Instead, it included a collection of unmodified half-second-long snippets from the detestable amphibian, and I can't even remember how the actual tune of it went - I think my brain refused to process such a simplistic melody.

You have to wonder what started the whole Crazy Frog phenomenon in the first place. "Here's an idea," Person A must have said to Person B after seeing the "Insanity Test" Flash file, "Let's steal this sample of a Scandinavian impersonating a two-stroke motorcycle, get an impossibly-proportioned blue frog wearing flying goggles to advertise it and see if people are stupid enough to buy it as a ringtone."

Indeed, I would like to think that the whole craze is just an experiment on the British public to see if people are truly that stupid. If this is the case, we've failed that test by an astonishing margin. The people who thought up this idea, as much as I detest them, are marketing geniuses - as long as you push the right idea on to the right impressionable people, you'll make a fortune even if you lose your dignity on the way.

I haven't even touched on the opinion yet that phones should ring and not play either a deluge of gibberish or the latest single translated in to MIDI format. (Both the Tetris theme and Bubble Bobble music are excusable.) I find that many people attempt to gain some admiration in their taste in music from people recognising the tune as they deliberately delay picking up the phone so that it can be heard. This seems to be a remnant of the situation a few years ago when phones were very much a fashion accessory rather than a functional communication device. The truth, of course, is that no one cares.

Anyway, the charts have never mirrored quality or talent very well at all, but I'm vastly disappointed in the British public. In fact, I'm so disgusted that I'm leaving the country for at least a month, as I conveniently have a plane ticket that will get me to California on Wednesday.

Acquired: Job x1

I got up today at 6:45. I'll never do that again - in summer, as far as I'm concerned, that's closer a time to go to bed than a time to get up. The reason for it, though, was because I had a job interview with the Robert Gordons University.

Once I arrived there I found that my interviewers hadn't seen the same necessity to get in to work on time for the interview to take place, and I was kept waiting for about fifteen minutes past my 9am interview time. After they had finally arrived, I was led in to a small conference room and asked a lot of strange questions about my computer experience. They started off normally enough, with what I was doing with my degree and so on, but then out of nowhere asked if I had any experience with Microsoft Word, document formatting and "using styles". This seemed such a primary school level of question that it caught me completely by surprise.

Walking out of the building afterwards, the only mistake I felt I had made was that I had gone on too much about the project - but it was certainly a useful reference, having worked with a team to produce something of that scope. While I was in Aberdeen I went and bought an album for the first time since last summer, then went home on the express bus to Inverurie that took almost a full hour to travel the distance of sixteen miles.

I had been told after the interview that they would contact me some time in the next week to tell me what they thought. Two hours and fifty-two minutes after I had left the building, I got a call offering me the job.

So after I come back from America in July, I'm going to be a temporary VLE Administrator. The fact that I don't know exactly what a VLE is or how to administrate one hasn't put them off me at all. In addition, I can still have my part-time work at the golf club, at least until I leave for California. I now feel entirely justified in doing nothing else until the 1st of June.

The Mirror of Tragedy

I burned a small hole in my speakers with a shaving mirror yesterday. It was sitting on the desk as I was wasting time on the computer, and as the sun continued its predictable path across the sky, the reflected light from the magnifying side of the mirror was concentrated on to the rough covering of the speakers (I've really no idea what to call it) and a wisp of smoke went up from them. I quickly knocked the mirror away to discover a small, neat black hole.

Now that I look at it, there are also some strange lumps on the side of the monitor where it looks like the plastic has melted slightly. If I hadn't been in the room at the time it started burning I would have a delicately grilled computer by now. For now, I have put the Mirror of Death away at the other side of the room where it can't harm anything. It was bought recently at a car boot sale, the normal place for the acquisition of seemingly innocent items that have an immense amount of destructive power.

Boxes, Nocturnalism, Phones

I've been home for a good few days now, and my belongings are still sitting packed in boxes on the less comfortable of the two beds. It genuinely seems a huge amount of trouble to unpack it all - it still feels as if I'm only here temporarily and will have to move out again soon, which is partly true as I'll be going to America in a week. The other problem is that I've no idea where else to put it - my bedroom has once again accumulated a lot of things during the months I was away, and I find it near impossible to sort out or classify the things in the boxes that I've brought with me. They're just boxes of stuff.

In fact, one of the things that I don't like about being home is the fact that as soon as I get there, I become astoundingly lazy. I've been trying to get up at a reasonable hour recently because I have a job interview on Thursday at 9am, but I set the alarm for that time today and eventually emerged from bed at closer to eleven.

One of the many things that I could blame for this, believe it or not, is my set of curtains. They're so astoundingly thick that they block out almost all light no matter what time of the day it is, making it appear like it's midnight in my room whenever they're closed.

The bane of my existence.

Another reason is that it's difficult not to adjust to a schedule where I can speak to and others during my waking hours. Despite my best efforts I have so far been unable to convince my parents to switch to broadband, and instead I am still using Freeserve Hometime, a 56k connection that works in the evenings and weekends only. Because of the nature of the phone being used during most of the day I go online usually after 10pm only when I won't be disturbed. It's difficult going back to that after the speed of Resnet when it worked (which come to think of it I'll never be using again).

Speaking of the phone, I had forgotten how much trouble a small beige bit of cheap plastic can cause. The thing rings constantly throughout the day, mostly when I'm in the middle of something vital like eating a bowl of cornflakes, and more often than not it's a telemarketer trying to sell me one of their unintelligible foreign accents. Either that or the phone line will be dead completely - it's very mysterious.

I think that the largest factor in my descent in to laziness and my continuing tendency towards being completely spherical is the lack of any kind of drive - I now have no practicals to do, no exams to panic about and no project to carry on with. To that end I've tried starting on another couple of MMF engines, but they're going so badly just now that they're hardly worth mentioning. Having said that, I don't want to seem ungrateful for the end of third year - this is pretty much a perfect scenario after the work that I and everyone else in Junior Honours did. All I need to do is wait a week to get on a plane...

Good heavens.

The blatant boasting continues. Sorry to keep going on about this, but...

...I'm only on Home of the Underdogs! And MobyGames!

And I also got an email this morning asking for my permission to include the game on the coverdisc of a Czech games magazine called "Level". All right, so it's not the most recognisable press ever, but it's certainly pretty great news. So soon I can say I'm a published software engineer (although not to anyone's face as that would send my ponce level soaring - probably just quietly inside my head).

And to top it all off...

Look at the top of this page! (Or, if you're reading this livejournal after it's just been dug up from a time capsule, #135 on that page.)

The Final Insult

I'm out of hall forever, but I couldn't go away without leaving some sort of legacy, could I? And that legacy was left on the noticeboard, amongst the sports posters in the hope that that would prevent anyone from taking it down too quickly. (I do hope that that hasn't happened already.)

Escape

This is the last time that I'll sit at a Melville desk. I've just had the last thing I'll ever eat from Melville - a pancake - while sitting at the table where the breakfast group used to gather in my first year. It brought a nice sense of symmetry to the whole thing.

And in but half an hour I'll be free of hall food, fire alarms, and oppressive regimes. Finally free! Melodramatic? Never.

(This is also the first time in an entire year that I've managed an entire week of LJ entries - the exams must have got to me much more than I thought.)

PKPAK.EXE

The trouble with beginning to pack early is the possibility of a lack of forethought. As all my cutlery is now hidden away in the bottom of somewhere, just now I'm stirring hot chocolate with a pair of broken sunglasses.

I am admittedly appalling at packing things. My approach to putting things away is to classify them in to types of object - clothes, books, electronics - bag them up and throw them at random in to large containers in the belief that the order in which they're put in won't affect their volume in any way. The problem with this rather cavalier tactic is that suitcases seem to disobey one of the fundamental laws of physics and the filling order is crucial to getting things to fit inside each other. This was last demonstrated by Whitney just before Easter, when she uncovered TARDIS-like properties in the Ford Fiesta and packed three people's possessions in to it without anyone having to make the journey sitting on the roof.

Despite having been packing things in to other things all day on and off, my room doesn't actually look any different at all apart from becoming slightly messier and dustier, with the bed cluttered by cases and bags. The amount of stuff that I have at the end of a year is always amazing. And there's so much that I didn't even know I had - I found a book at the back of the shelf called "C for Programmers", which raised the question "who else would a book on C be written for?". C for Arts students? C for Single Cell Life Forms? Actually, if it was called "C for Coders" that would have been a clever double meaning. I'm a marketing genius.

As of about five minutes ago, Whitney has graduated!

Third Year

It's this time of year again - time to think about packing up and leaving the hall already. I've already mentioned how quickly it's seemed to arrive, and I feel that I didn't really make the effort to get to know people this year because of some unfortunate things that happened at the beginning. So, to anyone who I met this year, who reads this journal but I don't actually talk to more than about once a week - sorry for that!

So I suppose I'll continue my own tradition of writing my achievements for this year...

I have, in no particular order:

• Got engaged!
  
• Been outside of Europe for the first time during my visits to America, and have seen San Francisco and New York.
  
• Arranged to live in a flat together with my fiancee next year, in a trial run for married life.
  
• Stopped talking to many of the people that I knew during the last two years, either because of natural drifting apart or because of my concentration on work.
  
• Survived a bizarre twisted mirror-version of my room without crashing in to the sink or trying to get water from the doorhandle.
  
• Become a pure computer scientist rather than a hybridised chemist-computer scientist.
  
• As a result, become a bit of a hermit, really.
  
• Taken notes in lectures for the first time since first year.
  
• Put up with an astonishing number of false fire alarms caused by "faults in the system".
  
• Halted the Sinner Quote Log, but continued (sporadically) with the Quotebook under cover of not telling anyone about it.
  
• Started, finished and released my second Multimedia Fusion "grand project" (as it was originally called) - the first, Another Adventure Game, remains sadly unreleased to date.
  
• Been instrumental in the development of a dubiously dancing robot.
  
• Continued to write my particular brand of Amiga-like rock music, and have become a lot more popular for it on Modplug than I imagined possible.
  

With the obvious exception of the things that relate to Whitney, many of those seem to be either rather negative or purely related to the Internet. I'm not incredibly worried about it, though - with the plan for next year in place, it seems that like Star Trek films and Final Fantasy games, the even years at University are going to be the best.

Knightmare

If anyone in Melville is reading this, then... why don't you stop procrastinating and do some work?

Alternatively, if you remember Knightmare or have any other interest in watching it, I'm putting it on in the lower common room in a minute.

Databases: Tuples

That's it - third year is over. The Databases exam didn't go as badly as the Logic one, and in truth I didn't really feel that it was that bad an exam in its own right. This may well be just because nothing could possibly be as bad as Logic - the people who were sensible enough not to do that course seemed to think a lot worse of the exam than I did.

Pre-packaged Database exam answers.

The main problem with the exam was that I was expecting questions that remotely related to the course we'd actually done - some SQL queries, perhaps, or talking about recovery from crashes. Instead we were given a heap of vague semi-essay questions that could only be answered with similarly imprecise and unclear answers.

One of the questions that was most guilty of this was the last part of the second question, which asked "Consider writing a new language that incorporates elements of databases and programming code. Discuss the issues that would arise in its implementation or development." It might as well have been replaced with "Waffle [4 marks]". Even though there is so much to discuss when thinking about something of that enormity, it was indeed only worth four marks, which made it difficult to decide what to put in. I left that one until last, though, and wrote a mini-essay on the subject because I had half an hour left over. That'll show her.

So afterwards, the computer scientists retreated to the pubs in the town to indulge in some wine related carnage. It really doesn't feel like third year is over. Last time I thought about it, it had hardly started.

Databases: Queries

The point where I stopped actually caring was midway through writing reams of axioms in the last question for the Logic exam. When faced with that much code, suddenly revision stopped mattering - I now either know Databases or I don't. And I think that the exam in an hour could go either way - if the examiner asks about concepts that were in the further reading (which I ignored as usual) I'm going to have to do my best at making things up. Fortunately I think that's something I'm good at.

I thought that Databases was the easiest course, partially because so much of it overlapped with Operating Systems, but many people are incredibly stressed about it. In two hours third year will be over.

This is the most rubbish entry I've ever made - I've typed two paragraphs and said nothing entertaining or of any relevance to anyone. If I can do that for the Databases exam and disguise it, I'll be fine.

Logic: Conclusions

The Logic exam couldn't have been less like what I expected it to be. Well, I suppose that's not quite true - it could have been easy. As a class, we had hoped that there would be one question on PVS that we could avoid, but instead half the paper was taken up by writing PVS specifications instead of actually applying the logic rules that we'd spent the past week learning. Do we look like proof verification systems? (Unless Isaac Asimov was right and we're all fundamentally impossible to understand and based on obsolete systems, in which case the resemblance is obvious.)

I just hope that it will turn in to another Graphs and Algorithms, where everyone does so badly that we all get really good marks. Apparently the highest grade for that course last year was a 12, but that was with a different lecturer.

The theme of us not being allowed to take our exam scripts with us at the end continued. I wonder why.

Logic: Predicates

Further to prove that George Orwell was correct when he said in "1984" that the body betrays you at every opportunity, I had two dreams last night. The first was about being late for my Logic exam and not being able to find my socks. The second was about finishing the same exam and realising that I had only answered two questions instead of three. I suppose that the first has some basis to it - this is the first set of exams that I've taken without my lucky socks, as my mother threw them out because they were beginning to have more holes than sock in them.

Let's see, then - A(x):[E(y)¬(¬Caesar(y)vSkol1(x,y))]v[E(y):Func(y,x)] = A(x):[¬A(y)(¬Caesar(y)vSkol1(x,y))]v[E(y):Func(y,z)] or should that be A(y)? Oh well, too late now.

Wine Related Carnage

Here's a more calm evaluation of the exam, then, before I go to bed (as I really should be doing about now). The only problem that I had with it was that I couldn't stop laughing at it for the first ten minutes or so - for a start, the lecturer had obviously simply copy and pasted one question from the previous year (and had even forgotten to change the word "cans" to "bottles" in one instance to disguise it). The other source of much hilarity was the description for that question's scenario - the aim was to write a wine-bottling program for two robots, and the wonderful observation was made that placing a bottle on an already full belt would result in "wine related carnage". I'm certain that that will become the class in-joke that it deserves to be.

Strangely enough we weren't allowed to take the exam scripts with us like we have done for every other exam in the history of University - I'm not sure if this was because there were still some people left to take it, but I'm certain that there weren't.

I'm having some difficulty walking comfortably now because it feels like I've stretched the muscles in my thighs. As I haven't done any strenuous exercise recently and can't think of hitting them or anything or sitting awkwardly, I can only conclude that I have severely injured myself by walking. How embarrassing.

OS: The Aftermath

History has been made today - I left an exam early, but not for a good reason, as I'll describe later. It wasn't that it was difficult - in fact, I'd like to declare that CS3104 was the easiest exam that I've ever taken in St Andrews. I'm going to get a vast ribbing from Whitney when I get back, because it turns out that she was right in that the amount I worry about an exam is inversely proportional to its actual difficulty. By that rule, Databases is going to be impossible.

Anyway, I had gone through all the OS questions easily by an hour and twenty minutes in to the exam, and read through my answers again to check they were coherent (legible being largely an optional extra in my case). At 3:22 I began filling in the form at the front of the exam paper to finish it off.

At 3:23 the fire alarm went off. After sitting wondering what to do for a while, the invigilator led us out of the building under instructions not to mention the exam. I had a word with him about it and he said that there was no danger of the paper being invalidated because of the break, purely because he didn't feel like writing another one. That's a decision that will be left to higher authority, though, and if we have to do it again it will be infuriating. The fire team that arrived were as efficient as they've ever been in Andrew Melville Hall, and we were let back in about twenty minutes later with fifteen extra minutes on top of the half an hour we had left to make up for the disruption.

I just grabbed my coat and left, though - I had finished and I didn't want any doubt about advantages that I would have had because of discussing the exam with people outside. I'm especially paranoid about this because I think I've got a very good mark legitimately that could now easily be overturned.

Walking out of the quad, I had a brief moment of panic when I realised after leaving that I hadn't read the front of the question paper and had just assumed that the paper would follow the same rule as all the other courses and only ask for answers to three questions out of four, but I came here to the Irvine Building to check the past CS3104 papers and they all follow the same rule as well. In fact, I'd better get back there and see who else has come out.

If I died tomorrow, I'd be all right...

...because I wouldn't have to worry about the results of this OS exam, that's why. In truth I think that this one won't be too bad, it just depends on how many two-level paging bit-addressing calculations that we're given.

This is the first of three pre-exam status reports that I'm going to write in the next three days, and believe it or not, it will also turn out to be the most optimistic. I think I was awake from 4am to 5am today, but I'm really not sure.

Also, this song is still amazing. Get on to my shared folders and have a listen. It sounds such a strange lyric when it's written as the title of this post, and almost the complete opposite of what it actually means in the song.

I'm still not in bed.

There is a folder. Inside this folder is a huge collection of temporary subfolders, copies of files that I downloaded years ago, and various other seemingly useless 0-byte files with meaningless alphanumeric names. The folder is "Temp", and it is hidden away in Local Settings. Currently it is taking up 1.19GB of my hard disk space.

Working on the theory that it's better to ask and be a fool for a couple of minutes than not ask and be a fool for ruining my computer - can I delete this junk? The name of the folder (and my computer science sense) suggests that it's just leftover stuff from various things that were never deleted for one reason or another - that or an incredibly bloated cache - but is it remotely possible that Windows XP is using anything in there?

Dean of Something

As I valiantly forgot to mention previously, my dad has achieved something even better than his highest score on Civilization - he is now RGU's Associate Dean of Something. I apologise for the vagueness, but I really can't remember what Information Management involves or what he could logically be a Dean of leading on from that, and he doesn't seem very sure himself either. It's possibly something to do with research. Yes, that sounds about right. Associate Dean of Research. That's probably it.

I, however, am not the Dean of Anything yet, and have been continuing to do something that passes for revision. Yesterday involved just sitting in the lab while Roja drew a variety of obscene things on Lina's folder, but today he and I were basically teaching Andy the Operating Systems course because he hadn't been to any lectures. Worryingly, he knew just about the same amount as we did.

More Logic revision tomorrow, I think. I've been scaring people by drawing large proof trees on the boards in the teaching rooms. I find it helps to write things there rather than on paper - I get the feeling that people are going to see it, so I have to make more of an effort to get it right. I spent most of yesterday morning drawing a gigantic tree to prove that Brutus is dead, which seems fairly redundant to me.

Panic

I had forgotten that there was a fire alarm test today. I can still feel my heart rapidly trying to escape from my chest. I think that if there are many more alarms this year I'll probably die as a result... still, only eight more days to go.

Crystal Towers is up here!
(Or here for a direct link.)

Crystal Towers

By coincidence, I decided to check my user info page last night, having not done so for ages, and my number of entries happened to be on 499. That means that unless something's gone terribly wrong, this makes this my 500th entry since my journal was started at the end of April 2003 with the assistance of . How much of the journal is actually worth reading is open to debate. I've now also posted and received exactly the same number of LJ comments - 1,576 of each.

That adds up to quite a large amount of writing when you think about it - at an average of let's say 250 words per entry and 20 per comment (which are quite conservative estimates, I think) it comes to 156,250 words - that must be a decent sized paperback at least.

Finished!

So, for this entry, there's good news. The MMF grand project that was started by me last summer, originally given the catchy title of "Custom Platform Movement Advanced" which later evolved in to "Crystal Towers", has finally been finished thanks to some help from Circy.

I'll release it on the TDC in the middle of the week and provide the link later on. It's certainly my biggest project so far, and I'm rather proud of getting it finally done rather than letting it stay in limbo indefinitely like "Another Adventure Game" did. Actually, now that that's out the way, I'll get on to finally releasing the final version of that.

Ma, the Sane of Manic Norway

Since getting a high speed connection and discovering the Internet only three years ago, I've become a great fan of animutation, particuarly of the work of Andrew Kepple and the rest of Too Much Spare Time. The definition for this dubious art form isn't a rigid one, but they usually involve strange pop-culture images animated to cheery foreign music, with the amount of sense they make varying from "DC Cooper lyrics" to "The Junior Honours Logic course". Often the foreign lyrics are re-interpreted in to the English words that they sound vaguely like, and the visuals illustrate the new "mutated" lyrics. It's quite a hard thing to describe, but there are plenty of examples in my OddThings folder if you're priveleged/unlucky enough to have access to my shared files.

Often, after watching a particular animutation, it's hard to imagine any genuine video of the victimised song being any stranger than the parody version. However, every time I think this, I am proved very wrong indeed. This is what happens in countries where cannabis is legalised.

And this is the first time I've made three entries in a day since October last year.

More results

I've received another solid battering of a feedback from Stuart Norcross (I find some of his comments quite rude, actually) followed by an inexplicable 17.6 at the end, and a complete lack of feedback from Tom Kelsey with a probably randomly chosen 18 put in to the Grade box. Now all I need to wait for is the result for my incredibly basic Database program - I had had enough of practicals by the time I did that and just couldn't be bothered to spruce it up. Therefore, I'm between a 16" polyurethane crash mat and a soft place as far as the practicals are concerned, and if it wasn't for the department's unfair upper grade bound of 2 above the exam grade, I would have very few problems at all just now. As it is I'm reading over my Logic notes and can remember neither being taught any of it, nor writing the additional notes and useless doodles in the margins.

I took the Geek Test that someone or other posted a few days ago. I got quite a low score, but I think I deserve extra points for correctly guessing what ROT13 was and bothering to write a program to perform it.

Elections

It seems like I haven't updated in a while - I was lying low after the last entry.

At the very start of the election results, it looks like Labour is going to get in again (although at 12/1/0 so far it's perhaps a little premature to declare that). I was hoping that people wouldn't vote for them because they're tying us too much to America, not vote for the Tories because Micheal Howard is undead, and instead vote for the Liberal Democrats, thinking that it was a wasted vote - the result of which would be that the Lib Dems would be running the country by tomorrow. That would be hilarious.

Edit at 02:48 - It's now 239-51-28, and as victory might be just slipping away from the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats, it's time to go to bed.

Happy Star Wars Day.

May the 4th be with you.

I'm sorry. :(

Sites that Could be Great

First of all, I'm astonished that the bug in Word that makes it not recognise files in directories with spaces in them is still there. I would have thought that in the ten years between Windows 95 arriving and now, it would have been fixed somewhere along the way.

But the Internet is what I really want to talk about - I was writing a CV up today and I realised that now (especially on the Internet) being able to communicate competently is something to be proud of rather than something that you should expect of people. There are a number of sites that could be very intelligent and worthwhile but are made almost unbearable by the incoherent masses that frequent them. I'm not doing this because I'm unnecessarily strict about use of English, but rather that I'm disappointed that these sites have potential that just doesn't surface because of some of the participants.

Exhibit A: GameFAQs

GameFAQs has fallen to rather a huge amount of advertising and commercialism recently (quite like a lot of recent games, actually) but I’m not going to hold that against it. It had quite an unfortunate reputation for being a home for idiots a while ago, but since the site merged with Gamespot the population level seems to have exploded. The majority of the petty popularity wars can be avoided by visiting the boards for less recent games which are underappreciated by most of the image-obsessed - indeed, the Classic Gaming board on the site is now one of the few bearable places to be.

It’s quite upsetting, really, because I have contributed a considerable amount to the site (especially when I was still at the school age that most of its membership seems to be) - now places such as the original Unreal Tournament board have been swamped with tidal waves of gibberish. The Silent Hill boards were some of my favourite forums in the past - the games are rather involved and so provoke more intelligent discussion than most, so they haven't been hit as hard, but the difference is still noticeable.

Exhibit B: Newgrounds

Newgrounds is a great idea in theory. It's a place to share and comment on Flash movie files - I haven't ever tried Flash myself, but it does seem that anyone with a fair amount of talent can produce something worthwhile with a little effort. Unfortunately, effort and talent are sadly lacking in some of the uploaded files, but the site has a fairly good system to allow users to get rid of the content that is lacking in quality.

My main problem is with the feedback sections, which often tend to degenerate in to flamewars about how good Halo is, or an unreadable tirade of abuse from someone who didn't get the joke in the Flash cartoon or couldn't work out how to play it, lacking the necessary brain capacity to read the instructions. Typically the author of the Flash politely points them in the right direction a couple of times, then gives up as the situation escalates and the pressure of morons per square inch becomes too much.

Exhibit C: The Daily Click

I should say right now that I don't categorise this in the same way as I do the other two that I've mentioned so far (largely because I'm an administrator there and doing so would probably get me booted) - in fact, some of my frustration is because I'm known as being one of the most calm and level-headed administrators, and this means being totally unable to express my opinions on some of the site members. Many times I've thought of a great comeback to someone and have refrained from posting it.

The site is primarily for the discussion of Multimedia Fusion, which in my opinion is one of the best things to have happened to multimedia authoring - its object oriented system allows creation of decent applications in a very understandable way. Add an object to a frame, give it some "If... then" style conditions and actions, and allow everything to work together from there. The whole thing is built on C++, so if there isn't an object to do what you want, you can just drop down a level and code one.

You'd think that intelligent discussion could be maintained among people who use something like this, but there is a definite conflict of egos between many of the site members, and the head admin is victimised almost constantly (some of this was deserved, some was not). On top of that there are the semi-illiterate and impatient newcomers who can't work out how to use the program but have seen the results generated by others.

I'm going to admit that many of the discussions on the site cause me a great deal of unexpressed hilarity rather than frustration.

happigamer-billybobjoe198, September 18 2004
What i meant if u voted in the past on this game dont vote again!!!!!! and u never won the europian lotter the ony forighn thing that happend to us that was luky (aka me) was that we found the aribic drivers licens the person got a C on the test

AsparagusTrevor, September 20 2004
Just stop. Nothing you say makes sense. Don't talk anymore please.

Everything that I was thinking, expressed concisely. And this is one of the more recent examples, thanks to , who is completely opposite to me in that he's never afraid to be blunt with people. It was during a discussion about the significance of the number 420. (I thought his first reply was rather harsh, but to be fair it is a fairly accurate assessment of the member in question.)

nuklear: It is 420 because the police #'s for a drug bust is 420. Like, my school was clam baked today. It was awesome.
Radix: 420 isn't the police code for anything anywhere, idiot.
nuklear: 420 is the police code, everywhere, idiot.
Radix: Here nuklear, I'll lend you some neurons. Six just isn't enough.
nuklear: I dont understand nerd humor.........THat I am not kidding........what the hell is a neuron and why should i care.

Fortunately another admin locked the topic before I exploded from laughing.

Some of the otherwise more intelligent members of the site sometimes let the side down as well - recently a hacking program has been submitted. There isn't a specific rule about potentially harmful programs, though I think that there should be. What is significant about this one is that it requires you to send a file to the victim, get them to run the program, then ask them to turn off their firewall and get them to check their IP address before you can do anything to them. That seems such a hilariously ineffective way of hacking that I almost just allowed the program on to the site.

Exhibit D: The IMDB

The IMDB is a fantastic resource. Hours can pass while wasting time on it, clicking on various people and finding out pieces of useful information such as that Treguard from Knightmare was also a character in Peter Molyneux's Fable, or that Jim Cummings seems to have voiced every cartoon character to have ever existed.

Where it all falls down is on the forums - many of them contain pointless arguments which could only be found otherwise on GameFAQs. The worst place for them are for mindless action films - half of the membership thinks that they're the greatest films ever, the other half think that they're above that sort of thing. An example that springs to mind is Van Helsing - I loved that film because I don't think that I actually stopped laughing all the way through it. Its merit as a cinematographic piece, however, is suspect, and the battle still rages on in the forums.

It's amazing what people do to avoid revision, isn't it?

Suffer!

For the second year running I have done the May Dip, for no other reasons than to show Whitney I could and because of my huge lack of sense. Photographic evidence is shown here. I have to admire the bravery of Jonny and many Computer Science people who dived straight in rather than using my more tentative approach of edging in from the shore and screaming a lot.

The walk back was made slightly less unbearable by my dressing gown. Only in St Andrews could I find myself walking around the town dressed only in a dressing gown at six in the morning after having jumped in the North Sea. Why can't we have sensible traditions?