Another pen drive

Thanks to my dad coming back from another of his secret missions in China, I now have a very sleek black 1GB pen drive. It's about half the size of my 256MB one, which I will hand down to Jamie, because we treat computer bits like bicycles in this house.

The only problem is that it's so tiny that it was difficult to find a way to attach it to a keyring - there was only a tiny notch in the end of it next to the gigantic LED, and looking through the hilariously-translated manual didn't help. I eventually got the provided bit of thread through it with the aid of two very small screwdrivers - it was an operation akin to performing brain surgery, but I got the thread through just before the whole thing became a Chewin' The Fat "Angry Man" sketch.

This will be a puzzle for another time. But as well as it having four times the capacity, it's also quite a bit faster than my current pendrive. I tested the speed of it with a reasonably sized file - Dante's Inferno by Iced Earth in this case - and the transfer was pretty much instant for its 20MB.

Speaking of Dante's Inferno (and this is admittedly quite a stretch of a link between two disparate subjects), I've spent quite a lot of time this weekend going through Devil May Cry 3. I don't usually find most modern games terribly engaging, but it's genuinely satisfying to play because of the physics-defying impossibility of most of it. The best thing is that it's well aware that it's trying to be a gothic version of The Matrix, and so isn't afraid of just going mad as far as the theatricalness of it is concerned - one of the highlights so far has been chucking two pistol cartridges in to the air during a fight, shooting the oncoming undead for a while, then spinning round and catching the thrown cartridges in the guns on the way past (all in Wachowski-style bullet time, of course). I laughed for hours.

Kotipelto - Coldness

Kotipelto attempts to sneak out of the country after releasing this disaster.

I'm not actually going to review this album, but I felt that the caption I'd thought up was too good to waste. "Avoid" should do for a summary of it. Instead, here's a collection of other music opinions.

I got a Nuclear Blast sampler CD with Infinite, and the most notable thing on it is Helloween's video of Just A Little Sign. The whole thing is remarkably reminiscent of the "Limozeen in space" cartoon from Homestar Runner, with them flying to a planet populated by pumpkins, then blasting off again at the end. The song's pretty great - it's the first time I've heard anything sung by Andreas Deris, who is the same colour as Chris Tarrant.

The only trouble is that I really wish it didn't have the "Something's growing in my pants/As she looks into my eyes" lines. (The lyrics for the single version say that the word is "plans", but it clearly isn't.) Helloween seem to be a decent band but with an unsettling sort of lunacy behind them. Their most recent album is called "Rabbit Don't Come Easy", for example.

Sonata Arctica's Reckoning Night gets better the more I listen to it. You know that sort of cold tingle at the back of the neck you get when you're listening to something amazing? The finale of White Pearl, Black Oceans and the chorus of Ain't Your Fairytale do that to me every time. I've heard it referred to as a "musical orgasm" before, but I think this is slightly vulgar and it conjures up bad images.

A recent post by reminded me that I haven't listened to any of Nobuo Uematsu in a while - I had the Melodies of Life album copied on to my computer by my younger siblings. Night in Alexandria is a fantastic piece of music - it really could be from the Planets suite or something. And the title song - it's rather soft for my preference, but great nonetheless.

I still have no idea what this song means.

Stop Uwe Boll!

Have you seen this man?

Every time I mention Modern Talking on this journal, at least one of my friends in Germany is quick to point out that they're not considered valid music there at all, but instead more of a national embarrassment (like the Spice Girls, although considerably more feminine). Uwe Boll must surely be another personality that Germany would rather forget about.

For those who don't know who he is, he's a filmmaker, and is considered by many to be the worst currently producing and directing - he has been described as a new-style Ed Wood, who was the man responsible for Plan 9 From Outer Space. Uwe Boll focuses on game-to-film conversions, which are usually bad enough without his help, but some truly awful pieces of cinema have come from this man. His most recent work was based on a script that he had to rewrite because in his view it "didn't have enough gunfights and car chases in it". The script in question happened to be for Alone in the Dark. Nuclear Blast apparently spent about $30,000 to promote their bands in that disaster, but at least that means the film has Nightwish in it. Critics' reactions to the film were pretty uniform - they included the comments "Supremely idiotic", "Inept on every level", and "So mind-blowingly horrible that it teeters on the edge of cinematic immortality."

Such abject stupidity of the director (car chases? Alone in the Dark?) would usually result in at least being refused the rights to make any more films, and ideally being locked up in a nice quiet dungeon somewhere. However, just like in The Producers, the man has found a gaping loophole in some German funding law that allows badly performing films to make more money than successful ones. What's different about this situation is that he doesn't plan to make his films bad - he genuinely can't write anything decent. After being told that its plot was confusing, he blamed the failure of The House of the Dead on the viewers being "too stupid to understand it", obviously not having quite mastered charm towards his audience. These are the people who were treated during the film to such memorable scripting as shown in the infamous line "This book, it's pretty old. Maybe it'll help us". I do like mindless action films, but I think this is going too far as far as mindlessness is concerned.

This man is one of the many reasons why so many people think games shouldn't be taken seriously as a valid entertainment form (see the news article that posted a week ago) - because the results when they're converted to a different medium and in to the mainstream are as bad as this. When non-game-players are exposed to them, they think the reason for the dreadfulness is because it's from a game rather than because of the incompetence of the producer. The awfulness of his films has so far not deterred him at all, but you can look at www.uweboll.com to see how eager some people are to stop him before he butchers Dungeon Siege and Farcry as well.

Let's hope that the upcoming Silent Hill film isn't as bad as his efforts (they've kept him well away from that one). As a game magazine recently put it, "The only positive thing about Uwe Boll is that he will die at some point".

Zounds!

Good to hear from zou.

Can zou email a picture of Whitnez?  Zvonne would like to see her.  How is
Whitnez?  IS she impressed with zour housekeeping skills when zou are left
to zourself?

Dad will be home soon.  I have heard he is safelz in Hong Kong. Have zou
had anz word from him?  Do take care of zourself.  See zou soon

Lots of love  M

Itäs boiling hot here!!

There is evidence that my mum isn't entirely used to using a German keyboard.

Kamelot - The Black Halo

For stealing its image, Amazon taunts me with a better deal.

Kamelot is a band that has become more and more pretentious throughout their lifetime. (I'm never sure which pronoun to use when referring to a "band" - singular or plural?) They started off surprisingly badly in the nineties with two albums of history and fantasy based songs, delivered by the inimitable Mark Vanderbilt who sings as if he's had a bass drum dropped on his foot. Fortunately, salvation was at hand in the form of replacement vocalist Roy Khan, who joined them for their third album and proved invaluable to their songwriting as well as general sound. As far as instrument choices go, they use the traditional selection of guitars and drums, with the minor addition of a piano and the entire Rodenburg Symphony Orchestra.

Recently they seem to have have developed a liking for Goethe's Faust, and began loosely transforming its storyline in to an epic metal opera in the previous album, Epica. This album continues that story, though the obvious presence of the actual plot elements seem to have been diminished this time.

My first impression of the album was in the form of the March of Mephisto video, in which you'd be forgiven for thinking that Kamelot had suddenly transformed in to Metallica. The same goes for their new-look website - it seems to be a new, scarier version of Kamelot that wasn't there before. Their sound is still recognisable even if the general mood is a little heavier, though, and after a couple of listens you understand more what they were trying to do with their music.

Er... 0. Introduction: There is a short introductory period not mentioned in the booklet that's a scene of a couple arriving in a music hall to see Kamelot, acted as if they were an opera performance - "You've just made it for the second act" is said, referring to this CD as the sequel to their last release and sounding decidedly like a series introduction from Knightmare. The pretentiousness begins even before the first song!

1. March of Mephisto: Wonderfully reminiscent of Hell March from Command and Conquer, this opens the album unusually slowly. The marching sound effects and guitar rhythm suddenly give way to a much softer verse, though, and the song continues to alternate between these two styles throughout. It seems a little awkward for the first few listens, although the "march" sections are very enjoyable. I find Mephisto's growls (actually Shagrath from Dimmu Borgir) a little distracting and preferred the old Mephisto voice from Epica, but it's something new at least.

This also sees the appearance of Jens Johansson (see Stratovarius, Sonata Arctica, every other band in Europe) in the form of a keyboard solo in the middle. Again, it's very different from the rest of the song, and came as a surprise because in the video version it's nowhere to be heard.

2. When The Lights Are Down: This is a much more old-style power metal song than most of the album, with its fast drumbeat. However, I don't find it particularly catchy - one of the more forgettable songs on the album, if you ask me.

3. The Haunting (Somewhere in Time): More of what many would consider typical power metal, but this time much better. In compound time for a change of pace, it incorporates both male and female voices in some fantastic melody/harmony sections. For some reason, an air raid siren fades in at the end of the song and leads in to the next one.

4. Soul Society: Now, this is just amazing. Reminiscent of Center of the Universe from the last album, this has to be my favourite out of this one. I listened to it about eight times in a row on the plane over. True, the solo is a strange change of pace, but it works, as do the violin and brass parts during the chorus.

5. Interlude I: Dei Gratia: Starting with the previous album, Kamelot seem to have developed a trend of putting "Interludes" between some songs to advance the storyline of the album. In this one, they seem almost to split it up in to something reminiscent of a three-act play. Actually, that's far too pretentious. This is basically Kamelot saying "Look at us! We can sing in Latin!"

6. Abandoned: The second "act", then, of the CD has a much sadder mood than the first. It begins with this, a mostly acoustic and piano ballad that sounds slightly like their previous songs Wander and Don't You Cry. What's most remarkable, though, is the sudden reappearance of Helena's Theme from the last album - that's some clever working in of the storyline there. The time signature is rather unusual, starting in 7/4 but reverting to something more traditional during the main portion of the song.

7. This Pain: Unfortunately this song includes one thing that I dislike about Kamelot - the fact that they sometimes used distorted or muffled vocals. I'm not sure what the effect is meant to be, but it just makes me think that there's something wrong with my speakers. Apart from the hole in them. This is pretty straightforward, with a regular beat and pretty simple chords during the chorus. The addition of an organ in the background is new, though.

8. Moonlight: You'd expect this to be another gentle song, and it is at the beginning, with a piano buildup incorporating a Japanese instrument that I can't remember the name of (I think it might conceivably be a "tsugaru"). It then starts to become much heavier and march-like, with a gentler verse. The mixture of major and minor in the chorus takes a while to get used to, but it does work in the end. The time signature is complex as well, changing constantly throughout the song. The Center of the Universe theme plays again during the instrumental.

9: Interlude II: Un Assassino Molto Silenzioso: "And we can sing in Italian as well!" This has a piano and an accordion in it, reminding me unfortunately of the title music from Allo Allo.

10: The Black Halo: For a title track this seems very understated, being just over three minutes long. It starts off simple, with a guitar part that reminds me almost of something from Doom, but choirs and the orchestra parts are soon added along with a traditional Kamelot 5/4 time signature, and there's a drastic time change for the chorus. It's odd, as if there are two conflicting moods in the song - the idea and the setup of it is very grand and pretentious, but the actual sound of it isn't. The solo is pretty good, though.

11: Nothing Ever Dies: I find this very similar to the Black Halo, particularly the introduction - it could almost be a continuation of it. The slight pause after the introduction, with the cello playing the theme as a musical parenthesis, makes me smile every time. More distorted vocals are used during some of the verses, but the tune of it is memorable. The lyrics refer to the story of the previous album.

12: Memento Mori: While not the longest song that Kamelot have written, this is the longest single track - the only longer one was Elizabeth from Karma, which was twelve minutes over three separate tracks. It's the album's centrepiece, starting off with a wintry piano solo, and goes through a number of different styles, beginning and ending almost ballad-like but with a much more powerful verse and chorus in the mid-section. A favourite part of mine is the clarinet section, a reprise of the theme from the beginning.

13: Interlude III - Midnight/Twelve Tolls for a New Day: The beginning of this track is the ending of the previous one, but backwards. The section "rewinds" through a selection of Kamelot's themes from various albums (it's difficult to tell, even after turning the recording around again), explodes, and gives way to a New Year celebration scene. The sound of footsteps approaches, and their maker breathlessly wishes the listener a "Happy New Year". It's all a bit weird.

14: Serenade: Quite contrary to what the title implies, the pace picks up again here, with a song that combines many of the styles that Kamelot have used before on the album. It rounds off the album - and this time, it seems, the entire story - in a similar way to Three Ways To Epica on the previous album. I never did work out what that title meant. This song bounces merrily along for a while then suddenly stops, because Kamelot like their albums with unconventional endings.

Unlike a lot of Kamelot's material, the CD may well take a while to get in to. But if not one of the most accessible things released this year, it surely must be the cleverest.

House still standing, cats not yet dead

After getting myself ready this morning, I went downstairs to find that the cats had taken the food that I'd generously given them and liberally regurgitated it all around the kitchen. Cleaning that up isn't the best of jobs, but you have to think of it as just a combination of proteins and acids and get on with it, really. That's the last time that I let them stay in the house overnight - now they're going to be let in for food in the mornings and evenings, and kept out the rest of the time.

On to something else. Maybe it's just me, but I find buses an immensely stressful way to travel. Part of the problem is that your presence decides whether the bus will stop or not, and it's often guesswork trying to arrive on time for them if you're between main stops. Usefully, there is a bus stop literally next to my front gate, but if I'm not there when the bus decides to leave the town square up the road it will just go sailing past. And if I'm slightly later than normal getting out the house I get paranoid that I've already missed it.

When travelling on an unfamiliar bus, it's difficult to tell where to get off. When I went to the hospital in Kirkcaldy, for example, I wasn't sure if waiting for the next stop would bring me closer to my destination or to the next town. Finding stops while on foot can be difficult as well - I rushed to get a slightly early bus from the station after work yesterday, only to find once I'd made it on that it made a stop five metres round the corner from the place I work.

Every other method of transport has definite times to be in definite places. I would have used the train this week, in fact, but I've had a fear of them ever since I had to watch a rail safety video called Robbie in primary school, which severely traumatised me for life. And the events in recent weeks haven't helped.

However, once I'm at work the stress just disappears. It's rather nice to be able to say that.

By the way, I got my hair cut yesterday during lunchtime. I had looked up "barbers in Aberdeen" on Google Maps, and it had pinpointed a "Sports Cut" place down the road from work. I went along there to find that it was in fact an immensely effeminate salon. I went in anyway and asked if they did men's hair, and they said they could fit me in - my jacket was taken and replaced with the traditional Darth Vader style cloak, then I was left for about twenty minutes reading a newspaper while the staff wandered around rearranging vague bottles and swatting bees.

Someone eventually got round to seeing me, and the haircut took all of two minutes, but she was interrupted by another customer in the middle of it and left me with a humiliatingly bizarre lopsided hair beret on my head for a few minutes. Afterwards I was charged seven pounds for the privelege. Overall I'd prefer to stick with John the barber in St Andrews, even if he is criminally insane, but hopefully we'll get a hair trimmer in the flat next year and Whitney can do it for me.

I can't take a photo because my family have the camera at the moment, but it's very similar to the icon you see up there.

The only good thing to come out of Home Economics

Since the mention of sticky toffee pudding in my last entry, I've had requests for the recipe from and , who both had the opportunity to try the AMH version of it while in Scotland. I'll put the recipe I use up here - this attempt came out of a second year H.E. class, and is the only thing I remember from it.

Some ingredients might not be readily available in America - there was a bit of difficulty getting self-raising flour and double cream there. I think "heavy whipping cream" is close enough to double cream, and if you can't find self-raising flour, plain flour and baking powder will do, but you'll have to guess the amount. Also, feel free to replace white and/or brown sugar with demerara sugar, it works just as well for both of them.

As for measures, they're all in metric, which everyone in Britain uses except my house. But on the Internet, a conversion table is never far away. Remember, as said in the H.E. handbook, this is obscenely full of margarine and sugar and so on, so try not to have heart attacks.

~ Sticky Toffee Pudding ~

Mixture
50g margarine
150g caster sugar
2 eggs
200g self-raising flour
100g dates
2.5ml baking soda
250ml boiling water

Sauce
100g margarine
100g brown sugar
250ml double cream

Oven
Gas Mark 5 (190˚C or 375˚F) for 30 - 40 minutes

Method

1. Set the oven and grease an ovenproof dish. (Or if you're like me, don't bother, it never seems to make much difference.) Actually, I find that a casserole dish works best for baking it.
   
2. Cut the dates up into small pieces. This is an awkward job - get someone else to do it (fiancee?) if possible. How large your date chunks should be depends on your preference, but pretty miniscule works best for me.
   
3. Place the chopped pieces in a bowl with baking soda and pour boiling water over them, so that the water just covers the dates.
   
4. Set that aside for later on.
   
5. Break the eggs one at a time into a cup then into a small bowl, or directly in to the small bowl if you're feeling confident.
   
6. Cream the margarine and sugar in a mixing bowl until light and fluffy. Try not to eat it all on the spot.
   
7. Beat the eggs in gradually.
   
8. Fold in the flour, sieving it as you go. The mixture will become stiff as you reach the end.
   
9. Pour a little of the water out of the date mixture, then add the remainder to the main mixing bowl. The aim is to make a liquid but reasonably thick substance - it will probably appear too watery at first, but keep stirring and things should work out fine.
   
10. Pour into the prepared dish and bake. I find the guide of 30 to 40 minutes pretty conservative, it often needs more time.
    
    
11. To make the sauce, just throw the sauce ingredients into a large pan together, and mix them until all the lumps are eliminated.
    
12. Bring it to the boil. (This wasn't actually an official part of the recipe, but I find that it works best to thicken it.) Once it's bubbling, turn the heat off.
    
13. When the sponge is ready, pour a little sauce over it to moisten, then put the rest in a jug for pouring over it.
    
14. (Optional) Add a little milk to the sauce if it thickens too much - it will if it's left standing for a while.
    

Good luck!

Home Alone

My dad has now left for Hong Kong and the remainder of the family are on their way to Bavaria, so that leaves me at home alone for a week. My mother was vastly paranoid about me coping by myself and has left me about a month's supply of food along with last-minute instructions on how to catch a bus.

Being alone does feel slightly weird after all this time, especially as I was reading about Internet screamers while at work today. Incidentally, the first ever recorded "screamer" was perpetrated by Haydn in his 94th symphony, when he included a quiet passage with a sudden inhumanly loud chord to wake up sleeping people and scare everyone to death. True story.

So there's now a new regime in the house - there are going to be some changes here now that I'm in charge. What I've been doing since coming home from work is tidying up the kitchen, something that hasn't been done since Brian installed it during the year of my Highers. The first revelation came when I looked under the cupboards, clearing away the debris, and found that we have lights above the counter that have gone untouched since it was renovated.

The focal point of the cleanup operation was around the kitchen sink. The draining board hasn't been emptied for a good few months at least, because most things get thrown in the dishwasher, and anything that's put in the drainer tends to go unnoticed. I found a huge amount of cutlery in there (I had been wondering where all the steak knives had got to) and some useless tubs, which I put in the Cupboard O' Useless Tubs. We have one specifically for the purpose.

I also rediscovered the grill handle, which had been lodged in a lost-looking desk tidy. No one else had really noticed its absence because I'm the only one in the house with the dexterity to attach it to the grill - other people tend to grab it with their hand wrapped in a towel, then set it down carefully if it hadn't caught fire.

Moving on to the side table, I decided that candles shouldn't really have been left out since a month ago, but I couldn't find the lid to their tub or any other small one, so they've been left alone for now. Underneath them, though, was the other half of the chopping board. I have no clue how the chopping board came to be in two perfect halves - it looks like someone was overenthusiastic with the bread knife. I've reunited them but have no glue.

Also on the table was a handy LiDL fire extinguisher, still wrapped. I freed it. There was an audio book of Dante's Inferno next to it, read by John Cleese, which sounds very entertaining in a "Don't mention the Malebolge" kind of way.

Passing the cooker, I found out that "low sodium" salt contains not sodium chloride, but potassium chloride. I can't remember much about my chemistry, but putting one ion a period down sounds a bit risky to me.

This was all done while waiting for a chicken pie (also from LiDL, the German supermarket of choice) to cook in the oven. Packaging photographs are always deceptive - I had been looking forward to the juicy-looking bakery product depicted, and instead got a load of pastry filled with a thin layer of something resembling catfood. I can't say it didn't taste nice, though.

And the pasta to go with it - fusilli is ridiculously small, and impossible to judge how much you'll need of it. (As it turns out, a conservative handful will just about feed a family.) Somehow the manufacturers found room to put the ingredients in about sixty different languages on the back, some of which aren't even from this planet, but no room for portion guidelines or cooking instructions. It's easy to cook pasta, though - you just throw it in a pot of boiling water with salt (or potassium chloride, in my case), then sit there and watch it lie there glumly and refuse to cook. And as soon as you turn your back, they'll all gang together and make the water boil over.

This is all ideal practice for next year, but I don't think Whitney is ever going to allow me to cook anything except sticky toffee pudding. Recently, though, I've suddenly been overcome with an overwhelming desire to make squared cake. I think the geometrical curiosity of it is too much for me to resist.

I've found my purpose

It was last year that made me appreciate the satisfying chunkiness of pound coins. Come to think of it, I appreciate that we have them at all - American dollar coins are so rare that people tend to hang on to them rather than spend them and get a pile of unmanageable notes. With the exception of quarters, change seems to be largely useless in America. I only mention this because I found Jamie's pencil case yesterday and it had no less than 24 pound coins in it, making it look like a miniature treasure chest.

I have finally found the purpose of my existence for the summer - after numerous false starts at MMF projects I've decided to put together the site about my songs that people have been requesting. Already I've been teaching myself about frames and stylesheets all over again, because I was taught about them in first year and never actually touched them again. I've now come up with something that I think is passable as a pretty decent site style, although I'm not sure how the green on black colour scheme will look to anyone who isn't colourblind.

It's true that I feel slightly self-important and pretentious doing it, but two separate people suggested the idea, and I think that that shows at least some interest. Releasing anything on the Internet is like talking to a brick wall because the majority of people don't give feedback on things (something I've been guilty of myself because I feel that I can never find the right words). At my estimation I have around a thousand regular downloaders, and only five or six of them at a maximum leave comments.

There is something that I'm not sure of, and it might be difficult to imagine without seeing it, but still: I have a vertical navigation menu on the left hand side of the screen, and when some sections are opened up I open a sub-menu for navigating that section. I can either put the sub-menu on the right side of the screen (as I had it originally - I felt that the scrollbar on the central main frame looked out of place this way) or just on the right of the menu, as an extension to it, leaving the main frame on the right. Which is more agreeable?

While I'm on the subject, Whitney said that I should change my livejournal style. Apparently, a selection of light blues isn't heavy metal enough.

Phones, film

I'm not quite sure how you lose a phone socket, but that's what my mum told me when I woke up yesterday morning. I looked for myself, and sure enough, the cover where last night there had been a phone socket was completely blank, with no sign of opening at all. As luck would have it, I was particularly anxious to talk to Whitney that morning, so I had to run downstairs and plug all the extensions in to each other to make 15m of cable stretch out of my room, down the stairs, and in to the study's phone socket, with a "Don't kill yourself on this" note on the cable stretched strategically across the stairs.

Later on in the day, I looked at it again. It seemed that my mum had attempted to plug the phone back in by repeatedly ramming it against the cover of the socket, making it seal up in an attempt to defend itself and slip down further than it was meant to. A screwdriver sorted that out. There was also the problem of the wire that had come out when my dad had hamfistedly opened it up - I put that back on a randomly chosen pin, and everything works and nothing's caught fire yet, so I think the repair was a success.

It's reminded me that I need to be around when anyone in the house tries anything particularly hazardous, like plugging things in.

That evening I picked up with my brother and, after all the talk of how rubbish it looked, went to see Fantastic Four. I expected it to be amusingly terrible (the trailer makes it seem that way) but I'll admit it was pretty decent. It's true that it's one of the sillier Marvel films.

I don't want to give spoilers, as if you care, so I'll just have to say that it was clever when the film makes you think that an important plot element has happened, but it hasn't... as stupid as that sounds. The ending also seems rather anti-climactic - most Marvel films rely on a large set-piece at the end, but in this one the villian-catching (Von Doom!) happens very suddenly. There also seemed to be no reason for him to start wearing the mask at all. The last thing is that they had the potential to set up a sequel as the Puppetmaster's daughter made an appearance, but he was never given a mention.

Whitney requested that I take a photo of a DDR pad. The reasons are as yet unknown.

Extra Notes

I have found out that the last track on the American version of Sonata Arctica's "Reckoning Night" is not Wrecking the Sphere at all, but a completely different bonus track simply entitled Jam.

Infinite is pretty good from first impressions, with highlights being A Million Light Years Away, Glory of the World, and the almighty opener Hunting High and Low. They have included some of Stratovarius's trademark awkward pauses in some songs, though on second listen I've concluded that the instrumental from Phoenix isn't quite as horrific as I thought.

I've also noticed the cover art is a lot better than most of Derek Riggs' recent work. While it's in his modern, more computery and clean style, which I'm not usually a fan of, the actual content of it seems as clever as it was back when he used to do cover work for Iron Maiden.

Music

When I was on the way back from going to get bus tickets this lunchtime, I decided to go in to the nearby music store. I knew I didn't want to spend money at that moment, so I told myself "I won't get anything unless they've got something really great like Stratovarius's 'Infinite'", safe in the knowledge that nowhere in Aberdeen had anything of interest to me at all. I am now sitting at work listening to "Infinite" by Stratovarius.

Speaking of the band, in a continuation of their unlikely story from the past year, Stratovarius have now un-reunited, but not as severely as last time, and without any "drama or bad blood", which certainly makes a change. This time, only the bass player has left, but it's still the third time in a year that at least one member has left. I think that must be a record. On the positive side of things, they're soon to release a new album with the silly title of "Popkiller", and there's a countdown to the release of the video from "Maniac Dance" on their site.

Oddly, my brother Richard has got very in to music during the past couple of weeks after hating virtually all forms of music for years before (about the same age that it happened to me, in fact). He seems to be getting in to individual songs rather than bands as a whole, but he's taking an MP3 player load from my Music directory to Germany with him next week.

Fitness to Practise

I was very upset today when I learned (through Livejournal and not the BBC news) that there had been more bombs on the Underground today, and more so as the news site reported an escalating situation throughout the day. I had been all ready to go in to depressed mode again - see near the start of this journal for details - but looking further in to the articles, it seems that the so-called bombs were hampered by the terrorists forgetting to set them up to explode, making them as harmful as overenthusiastic party poppers. Only one injury was reported, and that was of someone bruising his elbow on the way out or something.

Because of the huge incompetence and comical ineffectiveness of the attack, it's been suggested that it was just someone having a laugh. And, if that is the case, we should let them laugh about it. Then shoot them. However, it's looking increasingly likely that it was indeed a failed attempt to recreate the events of a fortnight ago. I don't really have any words to describe my disappointment in religion and what it does to people (a race who as a whole haven't exactly been my favourite for some time, even though some of my best friends are humans) at the moment, so instead I'm going to take out my feelings by abusing this meme that answered earlier today.

1. Where will you be ten years from now? Not doing memes.
2. What thoughts are going through you're mind right now? I shouldn't have bothered trying to start this.
3. What age are you and if you are 21 are you drunk and if you are below, you should be drunk! ? <- This is a question mark. You've used it competently twice before, why not now? I am under 21 and not drunk, which might fill some predicates for this argument but I can't be sure because the question doesn't make sense.
4. What do you think of this quiz? It's truly abysmal, as you seem to have run out of ideas after three questions, none of which were particularly stellar.
5. Are you secretly trying to take over the world? No. Are you? Because I can't see you succeeding, somehow.
6. Who would you most want to be like, either in mind or body? Actually, this is an interesting question, so I'm not going to make fun of it, but will instead be satisfied with just ignoring it.
7. Now you've done this quiz add on you're own question, copy and paste it into you're diary, cus you know you want to right? No, I don't. In fact, I'm pretty sure of that. I might give you some credit for being aware of the existence of that form of "you're", but you used it in the wrong place and besides, you're writing a meme.

Thank you.

Windows Stupidities

I realise that I go on an awful lot about how much I dislike Macintosh computers. Well, I don't exactly dislike them - I respect that they're vastly efficient machines, but their usefulness for me is very limited because they neither have any decent MOD program nor Multimedia Fusion. The advantages are that they seem more network-ready than Windows ever was (until XP, anyway) while not being as terrifying as Linux, and their laptop models actually work, unlike every PC laptop I've ever seen where the battery goes completely dead in three months flat.

I don't have a particular vendetta against Macs - I dislike using Linux at least as much. However, as I'm beginning to realise, Windows isn't without its problems either, and I'm going to point these out in excruciating detail in an attempt to redress the balance. I'm well aware that like many of my entries this is essay-length, but I'm sure Whitney at least will find it a refreshing read.

To get me started, this is one that Whitney mentioned to me when I told her of the idea for this article. To get to My Computer and therefore the directory view, you can't go there directly - you have to minimize everything and go to the desktop first.

The truth is that there are countless ways to do this, but none of them are exactly intuitive. Because I'm a fan of keyboard shortcuts, what I do is press Windows-E to bring up an Explorer window - this feature has been in Windows since at least Win 98, but it's not exactly well documented at all. An alternative is to right-click on the Start button and select Explore. When I try that on this computer, I also get the option to "Browse with Paint Shop Pro". I'm sure there are many things that Paint Shop Pro can do, but I don't think using it as a browser would exactly be my first choice. Dragging My Computer to the Quick Launch bar is another way to bring up a browser, I suppose, or creating a shortcut to a folder there. But these are both workarounds for a problem that shouldn't exist in the first place. XP did help a bit in that My Computer is in the new Start menu, but I've opted to change it to the more familiar Classic view, as many do.

XP solved that at least partially, but another thing that's been a problem for years is the way that Word can't see a file if it's in a directory other than My Documents that has a space in the name. (Suddenly allowing Windows users to have filenames with multiple cases and spaces in the names really caused nothing but problems if you ask me, because speaking from experience at TDC, when things with special characters are uploaded anywhere, you'll have no end of trouble trying to get them back down again.) The Word problem has existed since Word 95, and still exists in Word 2000. I'm not sure if it's been repaired in Office 2003 or Office XP. In fact, I'm not even sure if there is an Office XP.

This came up while searching for "Internet Explorer"+"Firefox" on Google. It sums things up pretty accurately (click for full size).

What else can I moan about? Here's a big one - Internet Explorer. Now, my understanding is that IE has improved immensely since the last time I used it, having been given popup blocking capabilities as well as having the tendency to eagerly download and install all incoming viruses and trojans removed. But it still lacks such standard features as tabbed browsing, and the way that its properties are so integrated with the operating system (you can't check your email in Outlook Express if your Internet Explorer is working offline) is just awkward. Not to mention that it leaves evidence of your activities all over the place even if you tell it to clear its history. In fact, other browsers are now considered so superior that anyone who admits to using IE seems to be discriminated against openly by the majority of Internet users. I'm not a huge fan of Macintosh's Safari, but it's clearly better than this mess. It would be slightly less detestable if there was even a way to remove it.

Outlook Express, which I mentioned a moment ago, is another thing that is being increasingly pushed out of the way by other email clients. I did try to change to Mozilla Thunderbird once, but it contains no HTTP mail support at all and is therefore largely useless as far as I'm concerned. Maybe if I ever untie myself from my Hotmail address and move to using my GMail one, I'll give it another try. But the point I was making is that Outlook Express is set up stupidly at first, with all attachments disabled - it implies that the average user is too stupid not to open any and all .EXE attachments that are sent, which does tend to insult the intelligence a little. The problem is solved by a quick look in the Options and checking the "Allow opening of attachements" box. Then having a much longer look and finding the "...But not automatically" one.

Even the simplest of applications can cause problems in Windows, though. Up until the release of XP (as far as I'm aware), Notepad, the resident text editor, caused no problems at all. The XP version, however, has other ideas. If you save a file while you're working on it - which I often do, given the sheer size of these rants - and go back and edit things, the words don't wrap correctly and you end up with gaps in your paragraphs. That can be solved by turning off Word Wrap then turning it back on again, but try and copy and paste the text that you've entered without closing and re-opening the file and you'll find that you've got ugly line breaks between all your lines. Why this problem started appearing after the program had been fine for years is a mystery.

File properties! That's another point. This is actually a curiosity shared by both sides of the argument. All files have three dates associated with them - the time they were created, the time they were last modified and the time they were last accessed. There's nothing intrinsically wrong with that, but in order to get these dates, you have to access the file. Do you see where this is going? The "last accessed" date will always be only visible as the current time and date, because before the computer views the date, it has to access the file to get it and updates the date accordingly.

Even some of the new features of the later-generation Windows don't work properly. One of the most frustrating (because unlike many of Microsoft's "helpful" features, I haven't yet learned how to turn it off) is the way that it attempts to hide the menu items that you use the least. In reality, it seems that the selection of which menu items to hide is largely arbitrary, with Word often deciding to hide the Font menu while drawing your attention to the patently useless Autoformat feature. This problem also affects the Start menu, and when you try and add anything to the menu, only the most recently used directories are displayed as options. It's stupid, frankly.

While I'm on the subject of the Start menu, why doesn't it sort things by name, or at least give the option to do so? Every so often, to tidy things up you have to right-click on it and select "Sort By Name". It may seem like a very small point, but it's a lot more annoying than it sounds. I'm sure that Windows 95 was capable of it - why not anything else?

I mentioned the "recent usage" feature a minute ago. Add/Remove Programs tries to be helpful in pointing out the programs that you use the least, but at the bottom of the list under "Occasional" use are Microsoft Office and Firefox. Something isn't counting right, obviously.

And Media Player. This used to be a functional program (although the lack of obvious playlist support was a bit of a weakness) that simply played media, as you'd think the name would imply. Not happy with one of its programs being useful, Microsoft bloated the thing up to a CD copier, burner, media library, and countless other things including visualisations that, while nice to have, aren't really needed in a program that should just start quickly and play something. In fact, the original Media Player is still sitting there in case it's needed - go to Start/Run, and enter "mplayer2". However, this can't really compete with the almighty Windows Media Classic - a free download that can play virtually anything (including, crucially, RAM files) without the need for spyware-infested bloatware.

And it always is. So why create it again? (Admit it - you frantically clicked around this image to get rid of the Tooltip.)

Finally(ish), I've mentioned that Macs create entirely unnecessary directories and files before, but Windows isn't exactly innocent of that either. Periodically I'll go in to my My Documents folder and find little Sample Music and My eBooks directories, which might be useful if anyone in the world had ever read an eBook, for example.

And of course, Unix-based operating systems will always have one huge advantage over Microsoft's: the clever things you can do with the terminal. My personal favourite is the response from Unix when you ask it "If I had a ( for every dollar that George Bush spent, what would I have?". Go and try it, and you may never look at Windows again. Well, I suppose it's possible.

There, that should do it.

Senior Honours Project

It seems like the Junior Honours Project has only just finished, but the all-new sequel, the Senior Honours Project, is already approaching faster than I had realised. For those who don't know how it works, at the beginning of the year we'll be given a list of options, and have to give our first, second and third choices. However, it's also possible to suggest your own project, either research or software, and as long as you can find yourself a supervisor that agrees, you can do that instead. I've had a few ideas so far, but I'll have to see what the options are before I actually decide. Here they are, in the order I thought of them.

1. The Moron Filter

Whenever I go on any instant messenger now, it seems that half the world messages me with indecipherable compressed text that I can't understand, or simply refuse to. For example, if we look at the dictionary entry for the commonly used "ur", it tells us that it was a city in Mesopotamia (as anyone who has played Civilization or taken history will be able to tell you). If you have an entire keyboard in front of you, I think that it's rather disrespectful to talk to people with half the lett s m si g.

So the idea of this project is to develop a client with something that could parse sentences and detect and filter out any unwanted abbreviations. It could even have a variable severity level - anything from just replacing the offending "words" with their real counterparts to instantly blocking the user.

Advantages
It would do me a great service.
Not really that complex an idea once the actual message transfer has been done.

Disadvantages
Probably rather too frivolous.

2. Entropy

Computers are by their definition entirely deterministic machines - therefore there cannot be any element of randomness in the decision-making process. Random numbers are simulated, normally by using the system clock and performing an unlikely operation on its value to generate a number that seems arbitrarily chosen. One such formula is the Mersenne Twister. I can't explain how it works, but it's apparently pretty good at what it does.

To get any kind of entropy in a system at all, outside data has to be used. Some things that have been tried include the amount of light reflecting from an irregular reflective surface, the amount of radioactive decay present in a given time, network traffic, and so on. A particular favourite is the use of static from a radio tuned at random. This would be a research project that compared the many different methods of generating randomness. Which, for the record, I really think should be called "randomicity".

Advantages
Against all odds, I find it rather interesting.

Disadvantages
Just look at the first sentence of the description.
Involves maths.

3. Better SQL Manager

The SQL database manager that we used during the Database practicals was comparable to a form of psychological torture. We were working on a program that autosaved when it felt like it, had no other save function, and crashed every five minutes. When the inevitable occurred it was a matter of luck whether you had to input all your data again or not. Things that caused it to crash included but were not limited to right-clicking, dragging and dropping, entering data, using the mouse, and breathing on it. I remember commenting at the time that I could do a better job, and this is an opportunity to prove it.

Advantages
The functionality is easy - only the user interface needs any serious work.

Disadvantages
A bit dull to present.
I couldn't really do anything that hasn't been done already.

More ideas as they come to me (if any).

Pineapple Wrestling

I finally worked out what was wrong with my Nomad Muvo. Tempting as it is, I'm not going to turn this in to an anti-Mac thing because I suspect everyone's fed up of me doing that, but the fact was that it was Whitney's computer that did it. "This directory looks far too organised", it must have said to itself in binary or hex or Assembler while I was copying my music on to it, "I'll have to put in a hundred little 1KB hidden files to make up for it". And that it did - there was an inexplicable ".Title.mp3" file for every file that I'd put on it, and those were confusing the poor thing. Not to mention the entirely useless .DS_Store file and the .Trashes directory.

Anyway, the amount of time I've spent working still hasn't outweighed the time I spend on the Internet, but I have at least been given some sort of task to do now - updating half the university staff's online records. This would be a fairly repetitive task, but the interesting bit comes when just trying to find the old records - despite being at a university, half the staff don't seem to know their own names. A surprising amount of them use different forms of the same name on their record, address book entry and telephone directory entry. "Elizabeth" and "Edward" are the worst of them, as both of those names can be mutated in to many different creatures, some of which I wasn't even aware of the existence. Of. Or something. Donald, help.

Typos are also common - one user declared that he was a lecturer at the "Rpbert Gprdons University", which made him look rather "stuoid".

I know I complain about people a lot, but it makes things more interesting. Even fewer than no people would read this if I went on about how great life was. Come to think of it, Livejournal wouldn't even exist.

While I was doing all that, Richard and his friends went down to the river and battered each other with pineapples for some reason. I didn't pursue that conversation any further.

Spamalot

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They could at least spell-check the things before sending them out. The "Processing and Tracking Department" have been bothering me for some time now with their confused scam emails, which is disheartening because it means that someone, somewhere is replying to them and eagerly giving these illiterates their credit card details.

If you haven't already, have a read of http://www.whatsthebloodypoint.com - it's the kind of thing that I'd like to do, but don't actually have the resolve to get started.

I've also noticed recently that not only has the Mood field in my Livejournal remained untouched for months, but I now also seem to have given up on reporting Music as well. If I had a mood here, though, it would most certainly be Hot, because it feels like the entire country has been wrapped in a thick blanket and had the spout of a boiling kettle shoved in one end.

Revised Personal Statement

The process of writing personal statements, as told to me by Craig Muir in fifth year when we all had to send ours to universities, is the art of "BSing without actually lying". You have to make you and your meagre achievements sound as world-explodingly extraordinary as possible while at the same time remembering to stop short of making anything up. Using words of five syllables or more as often as possible also helps (I'm still very proud of squeezing the word "anthropomorphic" into the Dancing Robots report).

I think that this is an outdated practice, though. In a gap in doing anything at work (at the time this was written, the gap had lasted roughly sixteen hours) I decided to take the personal statement that I had sent them and revise it a little, changing the exaggerated claims and glossings-over in to things that are a little more realistic. Deleted text is strikethrough'd (struckthrough? You try turning it in to a verb), and new text has been italicised.

---

I have been interested in computer science for most of my life longer than anyone would care to admit, and a large amount of my time is spent working wasting time with computers. I am most familiar with Windows-based machines, although I have a limited amount of experience with Linux and Mac OS operating systems as well. This experience consists of mostly shouting at them for having different keyboard shortcuts and otherwise not doing what I want them to.

During secondary school I was often contacted for assistance with computer systems by idiots who couldn't plug in their printers, and Computing Studies was the subject that I most enjoyed because among the alternatives were Maths, English and Home Economics. In sixth year (2001-02) I took a sixth Higher on the subject which was a complete holiday, because we had to be bussed to a neighbouring town on Fridays to take the course as it had not been provided as an option during the year I took the rest of my Higher exams, and spent a lot of time on extra-cirricular activities such as being the compiler and editor of the school’s Yearbook. In fact I didn't really bother with the rest of my classes at all, gave up my two Advanced Highers and ended up with nine hours of class a week, with my first period last thing on a Tuesday.

In this final year of school, I was selected as a Prefect - this mostly involved policing the school and reporting any problems to higher authority the evil Deputy Head. I'm really scraping the barrel here, but I'm trying to make myself seem responsible. I was also responsible for leading a group of first year pupils on an outdoor excursion at the beginning of the year - this involved ensuring their safety. And that wasn't easy, because the majority of the activities involved them performing suicidal leaps off eight-metre telegraph poles and running round a forest blindfolded.

At the University of St Andrews, I have gained experience in Java, C, SQL and HTML (despite all this, I have little or no actual ability in any of them) along with more general experience in working independently and taking responsibility for learning without supervision. The pomposity of all this is just obvious now.

During the Junior Honours year, all students reluctantly took part in a software team project, encouraging not only teamwork with members of a group but also collaboration between all groups to produce an integrated product (in this case, a set of co-operative dancing robots). I know, we couldn't believe it either. My role in this project involved the creation of a stand-alone program to generate XML files according to a standard laid down by others cobbling together a program to write dances, and also proofreading and editing most of the documentation produced for the project making up increasingly extravagant claims to put in the weekly logs so that it appeared the team had actually done something worthwhile. A limited amount of organising meetings unsuccessfully within the group was also my responsibility as the end of the project approached, as the official team leader had other commitments, namely being expelled from halls for throwing a trolley out of a fourth floor window.

I contribute to a wide number of Internet communities, most significantly “The Daily Click”, an amateur multimedia authoring game-making site populated by idiots of which I have been an administrator since 2003, after inexplicably being handed the access by the head admin. My responsibilities include supervising the forums, providing advice to others when it is requested, resisting the temptation to kill them for asking stupid questions, remaining unbiased and level headed when conflicts arise among other members of the community and resolving them. This normally involves liberal use of the Lock Topic, Delete and Ban User buttons.

I can't take this any more, here comes the sick-making ending. I feel that I am a responsible and trustworthy individual who can work without supervision, and have considerable skills in the correct use of English, a quality which is becoming rarer and rarer as people grow more stupid by the day. I am also obsessively punctual and good at keeping deadlines creating the illusion that I'm working.

---

This, I think, is the way forward. If honest things like that were sent to employers, then choosing a candidate would be much easier. Or, once the system was established, I could just go back to the old trend and creatively exaggerate things, and could get any job with comparative ease.

DDR, DSF and ITG

Before the update that I had prepared for today, I feel obliged to mention that to my lasting surprise, Sunset Boulevard in Aberdeen seem to have thrown out their Dancing Stage machines and replaced them with Dancing Stage Fusion and ITG, the two new ones. Hooray!

I had a quick go of Fusion before leaving. Now, only about two readers of this journal will understand or care about any of this (and that's an optimistic guess), so I've put plain English translations at the side.

Foot ratings are available before song selection. (Good)
The songlist is almost completely new... (Good)
...I mean, just look at it... (Very Good)
but that means there are no Maxes unless you count Paranoia Max. (Bad)
The pad sensitivity seems rather low - it probably needs more working in. (Bad)
The volume on the machine is pitiful. (Very Bad)
The nonstops seem rather simple - Hard 1 might as well be called "Really Quite Easy 1". There's an option to upgrade the difficulty levels of everything, though. (Depends on your opinion, really)
There seem to be no high score tables at all. (Baffling)

So, half the bad points are down to the individual machine. I'm hoping that particularly the inclusion of things like Electric Six will encourage more people to have a go at it. I'll have to go back there some weekends - once again I'm pleased to live in Aberdeen. Actually, this is the only time.

Work Summary

Here's a breakdown of what I've been earning money for this week.

Reading induction material:   2.00 hours
Browsing the Internet:       21.97 hours
Sorting out spreadsheets:     0.03 hours
Casually learning C++:        5.00 hours
Playing rounders and bowling: 8.00 hours

I had the immense good fortune to join the department the week it had its "Away Day", which involved a remarkably school-field-trip-like excursion to Banchory then Aberdeen, all at the expense of the University. As if they somehow thought the lack of other work wasn't enough.

I realise that I have now had what will probably remain as the best week at work of my life. I should really have appreciated it more while I was there.

Working hard as usual

Well, on the positive side of things, I now know a bit about C++.

The network was a bit clogged, though, because everyone in the entire University was pressing F5 on the BBC News site continuously all day.

Work Update

That's now £120 earned for Internet browsing.

If they haven't got anything for me today, I've decided I'm going to use the time to teach myself C++.

Sonata Arctica - Reckoning Night

The "default" cover.

I only recently got in to Sonata Arctica after being sent "Silence" by . Until then, I'd been aware of their existence and had heard a couple of songs by them, but had never actually got around to investigating them further.

They're a Finnish band that seem to lie musically somewhere between Stratovarius, Dragonforce and Nightwish, with classical influences and a wide variety of song styles. Most of them, however, were one of two extremes as far as speed was concerned. What makes this album different from what I've heard from them so far is that Sonata Arctica seems to have calmed down - instead of having a few ridiculously fast songs and a few ballads, most of the songs are surprisingly normally paced, although the two separate styles are still recognisable.

Reflecting Whitney's commentary that I listen to "a bunch of pretty men in leather" so accurately that it may as well be parody, the membership of five look stereotypically cleanly Scandinavian to the point of actually glowing, with the exception of Jani Liimatainen, who has the worst case of acne ever, and Henrik Klingenberg, who is undead.

Another curiosity is that the album booklet has two covers (it took me a while to work out what was going on there), of which I prefer the "alternative" version.

1. Misplaced: Bizarrely, the album begins with a fake introduction. About three bars from near the end of the song play, then it cuts off for a few seconds and starts again at the right place, making the song itself "misplaced". I've heard some strange production choices before because it seems to be becoming a European metal trend (like Kamelot cheating to get their fifth album up to 55:55, and Kotipelto fading the last track of Coldness back in and distorting it, making me think my speakers had broken), but this one is still pretty unexpected. The song itself isn't one of the best openers I've heard because it takes a while to get going - the traditional catchy chorus seems to have been moved to a half-bridge before the solo and end of the song.

2. Blinded No More: The compulsory slow-paced song after the opener, I don't think that much stands out about this song. The melody is all right, but I do wish that Tony Kakko wouldn't write about his breakups all the time. Having said that, the lyrics are nowhere near as bad as those for "Don't Say A Word" slightly later on.

3. Ain't Your Fairytale: Sonata Arctica always have at least one "werewolf" song on each album, and this is the one here. It's also in the closest style to their earlier albums, with a fast pace, happy yet aggressive tone, and high harmonic chorus. This is a definite favourite.

4. Reckoning Day, Reckoning Night: In another strange choice, the title track seems to be not much more than an interlude leading in to the next song. It's largely just an atmospheric collection of strings, voices and pianos, and while it's decent, I wouldn't even consider it a "song" as such. It's more of an introduction that leads in to...

5. Don't Say A Word: If the band has a weakness it's that when Tony Kakko falls out with a girlfriend he feels compelled to write a song about how she ruined his life. This is the latest incarnation of it - on the positive side, though, it is much more upbeat than the normal ballad pace that these songs take, and has a grand Stratovarius-like chorus. The single got to number one in Finland, apparently, so it must have some appeal at least.

6. The Boy who Wanted to be a Real Puppet: Yes, quite. But despite the title, this is one of the best songs on the album - it has a more Nightwish leaning to it, especially in the introduction with the choir vocals. It's written in 3/4 time, for a change in pace. Lyrically it's confusing - it seems to be about someone stealing a cursed puppet and becoming it himself, so that he can "never feel hunger, never grow older". Despite the silliness of the entire concept, I like this a lot, and keep replaying the "...and a heart made of real gold" part near the beginning. There's clearly a worthwhile message behind this song. If only I knew what it was.

7. My Selene: For the first time in the band's history, this song was written by Jani rather than Tony, but his style fits with the rest of the album perfectly - indeed, it's one of the best on the album. A love song it may be, but evidently they can occasionally be done well.

8. Wildfire: A very aggressive song, this consists of more shouting than singing, and has a strange major melody, but it grew on me after a while. It's not so aggressive that it isn't tuneful, but it does take a couple of listens to get used to.

9. White Pearl, Black Oceans: Despite it not being the title track, this is definitely the centrepiece of the album, a sea epic in the style of Iron Maiden's (and Samuel Taylor Coleridge's, I suppose) "Rime of the Ancient Mariner". If I seemed a little unimpressed with a few of the songs so far, this makes up for it. In fact, it was hearing a sample of this song that inspired me to buy the album after I kept jumping back to hear the chorus again. A reasonable amount of the eight-minute song is taken up by variations on the almost hornpipe-like theme, with instrumentals of varying styles between them. It manages to have a lot of varying content without becoming overcomplex.

10. Shamandalie: I haven't listened to this nearly as closely as anything else on the album - it's the token uncharacteristic piano ballad that all bands of this genre have to include (it must be compulsory on the power metal album formula sheet, or something, but I haven't fully worked that one out yet). From what I've heard of it, this one is pretty decent, and not as obviously whiny as the previous two ballad-like songs.

11. Wrecking the Sphere: Apparently this is a Japanese bonus track, but it somehow found its way on to the American-manufactured version of the album as well (but without a mention on the case or the booklet). It's not a song as such, it appears to be just the band messing about in the studio and playing some sort of folk song. I suspect it's probably quite funny if you understand Finnish.

So that's my completely unprofessional opinion. They're certainly more than decent enough for me to consider getting more by them.

Edit: Sorry, I've just realised that all this is really boring.

E.arn M0-ney as-y0u Br0ws.e!

I started working at the RGU Department of eLearning on Monday. Well, "working" is stretching the term a bit - so far I've been given a short induction module to read through and have spent the rest of the time going around the Internet as normal.

Monday was just meant to be an introductory day in which nothing much happened. Yesterday morning the department director came through and assured me that they would have something for me to do that day. By lunchtime I was beginning to suspect that something might be amiss, and I went through and asked if they had any ideas yet. Apparently the system that I'm going to be using needs a few corrections first, but it should be done by when I go to work this morning. Not that I'm complaining too much - so far, my pay has been as follows:

Money earned by reading about online learning: £10
Money earned by browsing the Internet: £80

A delegation of academics from Saudi Arabian universities and representatives from the British Council were being led around yesterday and shown the offices - I can't remember the reason. The supervisor introduced the permanent and temporary staff, saying that everything was very stressful just now, so I decided I had to look busy and did so by clicking on random things and checking them against an imaginary paper record (a copy of RGU News, actually) which seemed to do the trick.

Today, though, I'll hopefully spend the time typing things in to the system - the RGU uses two systems just now, and my job is to take part in unifying the two by migrating the accounts. I've already looked at the student accounts I have access to and have so far resisted the temptation to change my former schoolmates' exam marks.

Absent Post

I was going to post further thoughts on the albums I'd bought, but the trouble is that listening to them at the moment conjures up memories of not being able to sleep on the plane. I'll do it once I can't remember it any more.

Also, the transfer of my recent music article to The Sinner killed the HTML formatting completely, as LJ interprets line breaks as [br] tags, but standard HTML does not. I've emailed a replacement to the admin, and it's times like these when I'm glad that there's no law against smacking computers round a bit. That treatment does wonders for my laptop - holding it a few inches above a flat surface and letting it drop usually gets the monitor going again if it's misbehaving.

Journey Back

Windows XP certainly looks different after a month away from it.

I didn't mention previously that just before leaving the US I had met with the mother of this journal, , again. She might have been my academic sister at one point, I think. We just wandered around Telegraph, and I felt slightly awkward because I felt I was only going on about St Andrews, which is still very much part of my life but a while ago for her, but I don't think she noticed. Until now, of course, because I've just written it. Oh well.

A couple of days later it was time to make the journey back. If the flight I took in to America was the best ever, this was certainly the most disappointing. To my surprise I was upgraded again, but not as far this time - only to Economy Plus, which is exactly the same as Economy but with perhaps an inch more seat and four inches more legroom.

Before the flight I wandered the airport in search of an adaptor to plug my laptop in on the aeroplane. The search was utterly fruitless, and I was told by the electronics store that "nowhere in the airport carries them". Am I alone in thinking that an airport might be one of the places where plane adaptors might be most in demand? He was right, though, and when I eventually got on to the plane after a huge queue at US-VISIT, I found that my seat didn't have the port that I had been told it would have anyway.

Last time there was a decent selection of films, but the entertainment booklet showed that there wasn't anything that I felt worth watching at all this time. Just before the start of the flight the entire programme was changed, unfortunately with an equally terrible set.

During the long flight, I took the opportunity to draw up a log in my notebook.

And after I'd done that, I wrote down a record of the flight as well.

30 minutes after departure time: We have completed the manoeuvre of Turning Round A Bit, but there is still no sign of other movement or getting airborne at all.

1 hour: Well, we've left the ground, at least. We're just going over the "F" of San Francisco on the map.

2 hours: Oddly enough, this beef meal actually tastes vaguely like beef. United Airlines and BMI seem to have pretty decent food.

2 hours 30: I bantered in German a bit with the Austrian steward. He said he understood me better in German than in English because "the Scottish accent is so comical". I didn't ask whether he was referring to me or the country in general.

3 hours: Now that I think about it, I'm sure those "lettuce" leaves were made of dandelions.

4 hours: We're now passing over what I would like to call "Ignorant America" - the bit in the middle where the population can't understand where the overhead planes are going and think that the edge of their country is the edge of the world. The Edge of the World - that's not a bad song title. I'll write it now, actually.

5 hours: I give up, I'm going to sleep.

6 hours: I've found that the best way of going to sleep in an economy seat is to put the table down in front of me, the pillow on the right edge of the table, and wedge my head between the pillow and the wall. It's by no means how I would choose to sleep normally, but it's an improvement on the ten-degree reclining chair.

7 hours: Stop making beeping noises at random, captain, it's not funny.

8 hours: Kamelot's "Soul Society" is rather great. I've listened to it about eight times now, though, and there isn't any sign of us landing.

9 hoursish, I don't care: We're above Ireland. I'd gladly just jump out and make my own way home if handed a parachute.

Something like 10 hours: Landed in London. Now to spend the next five hours looking for something to do.

And I spent most of that time performing laps of the airport with my hand baggage on a trolley. I was encumbered with a case of six bottles of wine from the Leader-Picones (now, I don't want to seem ungrateful for it, but "encumbered" is definitely the word - you should see the state of my hands) which made moving about without one very difficult indeed. I got fed up of the round trip eventually and bought a puzzle book from the newsagent, then checked myself in and went through security.

Thankfully, beyond security, I finally found a seat with a nearby wall socket. True, it was probably for airport staff use only, but I didn't really care at that point - I just put my luggage down, plugged it in and spent the three remaining hours playing Rise of the Triad.

When we eventually got on to the flight, the announcements from the pilot weren't very encouraging. "There have been some runway works having to be doing... er, done", he started, "and you'll probably have noticed we're at an international bus... terminal... because... um." I mentally christened him Dozy.

At seven in the evening, about the time when the plane was meant to be in Aberdeen, we were shown the usual demonstration ("Wrap it around yourself and pull the yellow tag... no, the red tag... I think" - everyone gripped their seats a bit tighter and made sure the safety belts were still working) we took off. The pilot talked about the view of London for a while before it vanished behind the clouds.

Not long at all afterwards, Dozy took us down in to Aberdeen and announced "The local time here is... well, it's the same as in the rest of Britain, actually" accompanied by laughter from the rest of the crew in the background. I got off as soon as possible, glad to be alive.

My bags, however, did not - they had somehow been left in London despite the plane being delayed an hour. I was surprised, though, with the speed at which they were found when I reported them, and they should be delivered today.

My dad and I left the airport in torrential rain - a fitting return to Scotland after the month of California heat. I then went to sleep at 10pm, interrupted only by the phone, the doorbell, my mother coming in, and then the phone again. And I still woke up at 4am. I'm going to have to get accustomed to get up this early if I'm going to be able to speak to Whitney this summer.