Last Day of the Month

Today I visited the last of my external testers. It's common to refer to someone as "undead" if they look a bit bony, but there is no way that anyone that thin could possibly be alive. It was mildly disturbing to clearly see the shape of his skull beneath his skin as he was speaking to me, even down to the clearly defined edges of his eye sockets.

And the test lasted two hours, about twenty minutes of which was of us going through the pre-arranged list. The rest of it was taken up by him going on about distributed WinZip and the bottle of TCP in his cupboard and the legal ramifications of his video converting software and other such nonsense. During one of the times when he was vaguely talking about the Virtual Campus, he made the comment that he was "rapidly descending into a slough of despond" about it - a comment that I proudly included verbatim in my testing report, causing the web developers around the office to burst out laughing one by one as they read it.

This is actually the old logo, but to be honest the new one's a bit simple.

Still, to make a rather self-referential entry, I have now completed my target of having a journal entry every day for the month of August. It's a lot easier to update this when I'm sitting at work between testing appointments, particularly when I've phoned the entire tester list and they're all out. But today I've finished the last of the external appointments, trainers are to be trained, and the new Virtual Campus will go live by the end of the week.

The project manager was eagerly telling everyone how fantastic they were yesterday, so it seemed like a great time to ask for my four days' leave - I've now got it confirmed that I'll be able to take Friday off to pick Whitney up, and the majority of the next week off, so this will be my last full week working here. She was also saying that we'll have to organise a lunch to see me and Laura, the other temporary administrator, off at some point during the next fortnight.

We have a new departmental administrator now. She was being shown around the office and introduced to people on Monday afternoon. On Monday evening she showed remarkable enthusiasm by falling down her stairs and tearing ligaments in her foot, so the lunch we were having for her will be postponed yet again as she takes the next few days off to recover. I can think of better ways to start a job.

During the last month I've written about anything that came to mind at the time, and my entries for the entirety of August total 17,487 words. That's even longer than the entire Project Report at the end of last year, and an average of 564 words per entry. This leads me to conclude nothing much apart from that it's possible that I go on a bit too much. I'll probably take a bit of a break from updating for a while because I've completely run out of useful things to say.

Confessions of Utter Insanity

People at work have started to notice that I use the same plastic water cup (complete with a little paper sign on it that says "Do not nick") every day. I hope it's not regarded as too eccentric. My explanation for it is that I felt unable to justify throwing one out at the end of every day and taking a new one - even the cleaners seemed to disagree with me there, because every time I left a cup out on the desk it would be gone by the time I came in again in the morning. I experimented with hiding it for a while, behind the monitor or the computer on the desk, but they'd always find it sooner or later. Eventually I sellotaped the notice to it, and the problem was solved.

I am the same with plastic bags. Whenever I went to Tesco in St Andrews I always tried to remember to bring a bag with me, or to just take home what I'd bought in my large collection of pockets - after all, I usually only bought a sandwich or two. Of course, the plan always failed to some degree and I ended up with a corner cupboard piled to the ceiling with polythene by the time the year was out (although in my third year I was slightly better and it only got a quarter of the way). But I still irrationally feel rather guilty taking plastic bags from anywhere - especially in places like music stores when I could just put a purchase in my pocket rather than take one of their small and otherwise entirely useless bags, but the employees are always too fast for me. The bags all end up in the recycling eventually, but it seems a bit of a waste of time when I could just not bother with one in the first place. Is this genuinely an abnormal way of thinking?

There are other things about me that I've never considered unusual in the past but have been growing to realise that not everyone shares. One of these came to light when I mentioned to Whitney that I don't like inanimate objects with faces. This may be a remnant of when I was very young and had nightmares about the Matey shampoo bottles becoming sentient and swivelling to follow me around the room. Don't laugh. Oh, too late. Things like portraits on walls are the worst of them, but I even tend to leave books and magazines face down if there's a face on the cover to stop them from "staring" at me.

The same applies to computer monitors and televisions, particularly when I'm trying to sleep. When I had a cluster of monitors on my desk facing the bed I used to cover them with a sheet at night, and I always turn the television away from me before I go to bed. It's something about the blankness in them that makes me feel that they're somehow watching me. This whole entry is beginning to make me sound a bit more mad than I originally intended, but it's the truth.

I'm not all that fond of mirrors either. When I approach one it's not uncommon for me to test it first with one hand to see if it is indeed showing a reflection. What it would be showing if it wasn't a reflection is something that I haven't quite thought of. There's an old Trev and Simon book that's still in the bathroom bookcase that advised that in the event that you see a monster in the mirror instead of yourself, not to panic because what you mistakenly think is a mirror is in fact a television set showing Terry Wogan.

To try and bring some sense of normality back to this entry, one of my more normal phobias is that of lifts. I don't think it's claustrophobia, but I don't like the idea of being in an enclosed case that moves about, with no windows or any other indication of where you're moving. When I was in Garthdee last week, I had taken the lift up to the sixth floor and it decided shortly after starting to creak and judder to a halt before carrying on going. That didn't exactly help.

Thanks to living in Andrew Melville Hall for three years, I am now terrified of alarms. Whenever a car alarm, exit alarm in a shop or anything similar goes off, I jump about a foot in the air and have a compulsion to run out of the building. There's been one fire alarm at work while I've been here, and it's a nice alarm - it sounds like a school bell, not a shrieking red banshee hovering above my bed - so that's all right.

I think that's probably enough. If anyone else has any completely irrational fears, feel free to share them and convince me that I'm not totally mad.

My Incredible Career

The people working here are great. Being a top-floor room with a huge greenhouse-like window, the office was uncomfortably hot today, so the eLearning Project Manager has just come round handing out ice lollies. I don't think the working environment could be any more relaxed unless the office was furnished with beanbags and we were using iMacs.

Every job that I manage to get myself seems to be better than the last. It was easy for that to happen at first - after all, I started out working in Tesco in my sixth year of school. Strangely enough I don't really remember much about that job - three weekdays out of five I would go in there and stand around in the drinks aisle for four hours, occasionally going in to the warehouse at the back and collecting another IRN-BRU or two when the shelf looked a bit empty. Apparently my manager had a reputation for not really knowing what he was doing at all, a quality that he certainly passed on to me. I once rearranged all the mineral water in to alphabetical order just out of sheer boredom.

After my first year at university, I was insistent that I wasn't going back to Tesco again, and applied to as many places as took my interest in the local papers. Only about three of them bothered to reply to me at all, and out of those, the single one that offered me a job was from the Directory Distribution Company. The offer was to deliver phone books to the main road area of Inverurie - in total, about six hundred of them. After going to the distribution centre and back a couple of times because the lorry hadn't arrived yet, the Ford Fiesta was piled high with several rainforests worth of paper, which was unloaded at home and dumped in a difficult to circumnavigate pile in the middle of the hallway. To reduce the mountain, I immediately loaded some into a wheely suitcase and trundled down the road cramming them through people's letterboxes.

The rest of the adventure was recorded in detail, and can be read here. Now that I look at it again, some of that entry is quite awkward, because from some of the entries in those days you'd think that I hadn't yet discovered pronouns. In total, it took me about thirteen hours to get through the lot of them, and £60 isn't totally terrible for that amount of work. It seemed a lot longer, though, because of the awkwardness of having to carry half a ton of paper on me at all times.

For the next summer, I wanted something a bit more permanent. I only applied to a couple of places, but I was quickly asked for an interview at the golf club, which had advertised the position as "waiter". I learned of the inaccuracy of this during the interview, as the kitchen didn't really have separate positions for people, and the jobs were just divided up depending on who had the best ability to deep fry, microwave or serve some of the more perverted customers. (That sentence is a bit unfortunately ambiguous, but I'm sure that my employer wouldn't have minded either way.)

My task in that job was first serving people and keeping the wrapped cutlery full, but I was soon upgraded to Sandwich Maker and then Kitchen Assistant. It was a major improvement on my last two jobs because it involved actual interaction with people and being fed bacon rolls on a regular basis. Actually it's a bit misleading to refer to it in the past tense because I haven't left the job as such - I'm still welcome to phone them up and ask for work whenever I'm around, it's just that I didn't really want to work there this summer in addition to being at the RGU full time.

I didn't have a remotely computer science-related job until this one, unless you count pulling computers apart and putting them back together again at Whitney's dad's office. (I'm only linking to that because I like the entry title.) But with the Internet always available, the opportunity to go in to a site and correct people's grammatical errors, and being regularly plied with doughnuts when they're going cheap at the supermarket, computer science is definitely seeming like the right career to go with at the moment.

My driving licence is three years old today. Apparently this means when I'm 21 I can legally teach people to drive.

Computer tally: 11

My brother Jamie's 19th was today. After pretending that I'd given him the gigantic pile of pants that we'd got for cheap in LiDL the other week, my present to him was a copy of the original Myst, which I had noticed for about £3 at the newsagents in the airport when I was there at the beginning of June, and had gone back a couple of weeks ago on the chance that it was still there. It seems cheap of me, but I couldn't really think of anything more appropriate.

His main gift, though, was a new computer from my dad. It was bought from Grampian Electronics, the best electronics place in Aberdeen, and I expected it to be a normal beige box like my own. Instead, it's a black and silver titan with a ghostly blinking blue light at the front. It has been christened "Dalek" in its network properties, and is set up next to my own, making it feel very threatened indeed. The first thing it did when we connected it up was make my computer change its network name because it wasn't happy with it, no matter how many times I told it that I had had the name "NEWTON" first. I also find it strange how a network was easily set up with Windows 98, but with XP I had to enter the IP addresses to use manually.

I'm also fascinated by the monitor. Mine looks like the biggest television in the world next to its TFT flat-panel sleekness. And even its keyboard tries to be better than mine, with a row of programmable keys across the top. The only thing that's wrong with Grampian Electronics is that they sell people early GeForce graphics cards under the mistaken belief that they're any good.

So the rest of today's been spent playing UT and Quake 3, with winning at the latter being a completely new experience for me because of only really having played against before. In fact, I'm not sure where the last six hours went. I tried starting another UT map, but I was quickly reminded by UnrealEd how soul-destroyingly useless I was at it and gave up.

New Project

The "test room" so far (click to enlarge)

This post is going to be about an MMF project. At first I didn't mean for it to be so involved - in fact it was going to be just a short description, but I got a bit carried away and it's about 750 words now. So if you'd like some sort of advance warning, I'll nominate the third and last paragraphs as being the ones that are the most understandable. Avoid what's in between if possible.

So, after a rather uninspired period, I've started work on another game now. It's not going to be anything like as much of an undertaking as Crystal Towers was, being more of an attempt at doing something different and writing an interesting engine than being a full-length game. A bit like Breakout Invaders before it - in the middle of writing that I realised that having a separate frame for every level would have made the file size prohibitively large, so I got it to read level data in from a text file instead. This file reading (basic though it was) eventually became the main attraction of the game, moreso than the game itself.

I was going to begin this paragraph with "Put simply," but I can't seem to put it very simply, so I'm going to say that the idea I have is basically a combination of Wario Ware and Maze of the Kings (you know, that machine that they have in the dark corner of the Union games room), but as a platform game. That is, each stage is a single screen about getting past a specific obstacle that will last no more than ten seconds or so (Knightmare providing the inspiration for a good few of these, incidentally), and the rooms that you play through are stuck together in a random order from a large library of rooms. At the moment I'm thinking of having three separate "room banks", and the room bank switching every twenty rooms or so, starting off easy and getting gradually harder.

Selection screen (click to enlarge)

The central point of the game is the room selection, which I've been working on to start with. The entire room library is stored externally as a list of numbers, with each number corresponding to a frame in the game (the numbers aren't sequential, so I'm also using an externally stored lookup table to record which number belongs to which frame). To start with, the game takes this rooms list and duplicates it as a "progress list". Before each stage, the game selects a number at random from this list, removes it, and saves it out again, replacing the old progress list so that the new copy is loaded the next time round. In this way, it's ensured that no number is selected twice. That's pretty much as far as I've got - unwisely I've been caught up in making the room numbers display like a slot machine, and presentation really should be the last thing you do, but once the selection engine is done then I'll be able to just churn out rooms at warp speed.

As far as other game mechanics go, the whole thing will be on a timer. This timer was originally going to be the Life Force sequence, but the loading time for an external AVI was very noticeable. I've replaced it with a big clock (which I really like the look of, by the way). A form of replenishment will be available every five rooms or so. To do this and preserve random room order, each room should have a position for the pickup to appear, but it should only actually be created when that room falls in a place where it's needed. Getting hurt in the game will temporarily reduce the timer faster, so that you can keep going but have less chance of getting further.

I'm not sure about how to implement the three separate stages of the game - either I could have three separate room lists (one for each stage) or reserve certain room numbers for certain difficulties. The first of these definitely seems the easier to write, but it might make the amount of external files needed a little untidy.

At the moment the player character is a nameless knight sort of thing with an awful walking animation. Forget about the complexity of the selection engine, I find doing walking animations one of the most difficult parts of making anything. In fact, even the game itself doesn't have a name yet. I'm never very good at naming things - its working title is "Randomly Generated Platform Game", but I'm sure the right name will eventually come to me. After all, "Crystal Towers" was called "Custom Platform Movement Advanced Project" for about half of its development. The motif I'm using is of climbing a tower, so maybe it will be something to do with that.

The New Whatever-It's-Called

I think it's safe to say that yesterday presented my biggest challenge yet - just how do you soften up the comment "The module message system is a complete waste of time" to put it in to a test report? To be honest I could see his point, but in the end I settled with "Having an extra message system for modules seems redundant".

The tester that I'm going to contact this afternoon sounds like bad news as well. This morning he sent out a page-long email about "the new whatever-it's-called" and his suspicions of its "intuitive claims". We wouldn't mind, but all we'd asked him about was if one of his module codes was correct. He's got a reputation for pestering the department - the developer next to me has been unable to stop laughing at his email for about five minutes now.

I was introduced to the Helpdesk email system during the afternoon, as the normal helpdesk officer was away. Because it isn't term time, not a lot of people are actually asking for help - in fact, a more accurate name would be the Spam Clearing Desk, as the amount of advertisements that the account receives is truly astounding. Spammers seem desperate to offer the Virtual Campus a loan or dubious pharmaceuticals, as if either of these would do it any good. There are also a pile of emails intended for other people, because some of the staff at RGU ignore the prominent "Do not reply to this address" warnings plastered all over emails sent from within the Campus. This happens so often that there's a standard response reserved for "User cannot read".

With only a few days until the launch of the new whatever-it's-called, there's been a rush to get things sorted out and decide which of the more radical external test suggestions to implement to keep people happy. Options on the website's sidebar seem to be appearing and disappearing by the hour. It does look like it's shaping up to be good, though - despite all their requests for change, the majority of the external testers say that it looks immeasurably better than the old system, the iNet. Which isn't difficult, because from what I can gather the iNet was almost universally hated.

The only significant portion that doesn't work at all is the chat section, but it doesn't seem like that's going to be a huge problem at the moment. As one of our web developers said, "It's almost finished. We know exactly what the problem is - now all we need is a solution."

This entry is not here

I don't do memes. I don't do memes. I don't do memes.

An array of randomly chosen questions about people on my Friends list.

Why would go to heaven but go to hell?

Because Chris uses Multimedia Fusion.

What is 's favorite band?

The Asymmetrical Lampshades.

How did you meet ?

We haven't, despite numerous plans to rectify the situation. I think that our meeting on the Internet may have had something to do with ZZT, which I posted about a few entires ago.

What political beliefs of do you disagree with?

To be honest, a good proportion of them. But that doesn't mean we don't get on otherwise.

Why is sneaking up behind you right now?

Because he's weird.

What would be like on an LSD trip?

If she or I were on an LSD trip? If she was, I've no idea. If I was on LSD and looking at her, she could be like anything from a carnivorous sofa to a mutant telephone.

What would happen if you were to date ?

Very bad things, if Whitney ever found out.

In what ways is smarter than you?

He can name five hundred different types of tea.

Is an innie or an outie?

How should I know? Navel examination isn't my speciality. (In fact, I've never seen an "outie" - that whole concept just seems bizarre to me.)

Whom is attracted to?

Hugh Laurie. But I'm told that I am a close second.

What does look for in a significant other?

Paulishness.

If you had the chance to sleep with , would you?

Answering this would be a bit of a gamble because I have never talked to spiderinmybrain, read any of that journal or have any idea of who she is. However, she lists "The Granstream Saga" on her list of interests, which is a pretty good sign. (Gender is a guess as well.)

Who would win in a fight between and ?

It depends if it were some sort of DDR dance-off or not.

How long have you known ?

Since my first week at university when we discovered we had the same birthday, had gone to the same school, and lived five minutes down the road from each other, and yet had never met.

Could you take in a fight?

I imagine not, because he's German and therefore it's reasonable to assume that he's hard as nails.

What is 's favorite song?

The sound of unruly campers' heads being bashed together.

What was the last game you played with ?

Quake 3, probably on The Longest Yard, and it's reasonable to assume that he beat me by a huge margin. Again.

Does understand quantum chromodynamics?

I can pretty confidently say that he would have no difficulty whatsoever with them.

Is 's spoon too big?

I've never found that funny, you know.

Would you sooner donate a kidney to or ?

As yet I have no idea who is or how he/she knows me, so I'll go with on this one by default. I'm sure she'd appreciate a spare.

What would the minions of 's army look like?

I'm not quite sure, but they'd all be immaculately dressed and know the right order of cutlery to use in the evening.

What kind of person would you set up with ?

Someone who knows her routers from her ethernet bridges.

What's the last thing you said to ?

I really can't remember what I last said to her in real life. On the Internet, I've just encouraged her to come back to Scotland to get away from her clearly insane family.

Is hiding under your bed right now?

She'll be uncomfortable if she is, because what's under my bed is a large number of boxes and cases holding the thing up because all the screws have fallen out.

How many licks would take to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop?

One, if he has a long enough tongue and it has a small enough radius. I've no idea what a Tootsie Pop is.

Do you feel enlightened now?

Not really. This quiz produced the worst markup I've ever seen, and I had to go back about eight times to correct all the gigantic formatting errors.

This is by . You can find your own completely random questions here.

Watcher in the Sky

Update more often, you lot! Here I am doing so much typing that my fingers are becoming significantly shorter by the day, and I've got hardly anything on LJ to read at work. Not even a comment! What else am I supposed to do to pass the time? Well, there's always actually doing work, I suppose.

Actually, the main reason that I've been updating so often recently is that it was pointed out to me a while ago that I wasn't updating nearly as often as I did when I first started the journal. To go against this, I've now completed my target of having at least one entry every day for a month. It's a lot easier to do this when I have access to the Internet all day, and not having to go to the lab and work on whatever unlikely task I've been set for the week. I think I'll continue until the end of August because it'll make my calendar look a bit neater that way.

Google Earth was mentioned on the radio last night, and it made me think about how the Internet has evolved since it was first made widely available. It makes me very happy to see that even though the Internet provides the means for so many idiots to connect to each other and others, reducing the IQ of all concerned along the way, there are the odd sites like this and Wikipedia that assist it in achieving its purpose in becoming a huge knowledge base. You can start with a view of the world, and just click inwards on to your country, your region, town, street and so on, carrying on zooming in until you're clicking on the bit of bacon between the oven and the boiler. This is what the advent of CD-ROMs was supposed to be able to provide, but at that stage people had rather exaggerated expectations of the format. Showing off by Google it may be, but I find the way that this is even possible amazing.

It would be great if you really could Google Earth, though. Searches like "Where did I put my house keys?" would save a lot of time.

Things I've Declared War On, Part II: Buses

A Universal Serial Bus. Apparently.

I have never liked public transport, partially because of unfamiliarity as I've never really used it much at all. The last month has probably seen the most interaction that I've had with buses in my life, having taken them in to work during some weeks and used them for transport to Garthdee and back. Another part of this dislike is the fact that it involves interacting with the Aberdeen bus drivers, who seem to harbour an intense hatred of anyone who dares to dirty their vehicles with their presence.

As I've gained more experience with the whole "bus" thing, I've noticed that even though the fares are stupidly high, the amount you actually pay is directly proportional to the competence with which you can get out your means with which to pay. Fumbling around for ages with change or not having anywhere near the correct change on you usually prompts the bus driver to sigh in a pitying fashion and tell you to "just get on". I swear I have not yet done this on purpose, because it feels a bit wrong, even if you're paying with your dignity rather than money.

Fortunately, things can work in your favour without you having to sacrifice either pride or pocket - last Friday I was given a free journey in to work because the ticket machine on the bus had broken down. This saving can be viewed in many optimistic ways - I could now get 10% of a BT reconnection fee, or buy four and a half packets of muffins. For £6.10, though, I wouldn't be happy paying it for a bus regularly unless it actually flew to Aberdeen.

I think it's logical to assume that if the bus fares were reduced, more people would use them. And I don't mean by a little - I mean taking the trip in to Aberdeen down to about £1 or something. If they did that, they'd be cramming people in like sardines, and I daresay making a lot more money from it - making the bus actually less expensive than driving in by yourself in an SUV with a colander for a fuel tank and the Eiffel Tower strapped to the roof would probably attract more people in to using the service.

By the way, something running in the background keeps causing the window title to flicker every minute or so, and it means that letters get lost on their way from the keyboard to Notepad. If you find any, please send them back to me via the internal post. This is also annoying, but it's too short a point to put in to "Things I've Declared War On, Part III: Applications That Steal Your Window Focus".

Things I've Declared War On, Part I: Telephones

The situation at work is becoming more tense, because we now have a very limited amount of time to get the VLE running. With luck I'll be able to save the situation by performing thinly-spread speed testing appointments, but I've been phoning around the testers and it seems that no one in the entire university is in at the moment.

Join the Campaign for Telephone Disarmament.

I have never liked using the phone - having a disembodied voice at the other end of a line of communication is far more difficult for me than meeting in person or even typing to each other. They have a particularly bad standing with me at the moment, though, because yesterday I found the phone bill for the last quarter, and it seems that we're now being charged for Freeserve Hometime calls (the clue as to the correct price of the calls is in the name, which was changed to Wanadoo a while ago because it was blatantly misleading).

It seems that if a Hometime call runs over in to the daytime it starts being charged at about a pound for two hours. I could understand this if you could even call during the daytime, but you can't - the service refuses to connect if a call is started during the day, which made me think that the two hour limit was to prevent you keeping it on all day and therefore avoiding any costs. Finding that it charges anyway therefore calls even the necessity for the two hour limit in to question, because I certainly can't see any reason for it - it seems a very artificial way of making sure that your use is restricted on a service that charges more than many others that aren't so selectively available.

For this service, we're paying about £12 a month - a few pounds more than a basic broadband service that would be on all the time. In fact, there are two items on the bill - one for £17 a quarter to Freeserve and one for the same amount to BT Surftime. BT Surftime is the name of the service that we used years ago before we even discovered Freeserve, so I thought that it was an unnecessary charge left over from then. My dad spoke to a woman at BT, though, and she said that it was something that we had to pay for. I'm still doubtful, because I'm fairly sure that said woman at BT was a moron.

On top of that, we don't even own our phones - we've rented them for £7.50 a quarter since phones that actually had a dial on the face became too ancient for even our household. We must have paid about thirty times their value by now in rent costs.

My mum said that she didn't want me to worry about any of this, and had intended to keep the bill hidden from me to avoid me asking about any of it. She hid it cunningly by leaving it in the middle of the kitchen table with the Internet page at the top. It's possible that she was employing some form of reverse psychology.

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I've got rid of the awkward gap at the top of my entries with images in them, because I realised it was opening a [p] tag that did it - it seems that LJ already opens a [div] by default. I've therefore changed to using [div]s as well - let me know if it makes your Friends page a disaster and I'll desist.

The ZZT Chronicle

This is fantastic, but you'll have to take my word for it.

Preamble

In the beginning there was ye DOS prompt. The almighty Tim Sweeney (now head of the even more almighty Epic Games) created a Cursor and a way for it to move, and on the second day added obstacles for this Cursor to circumnavigate. As it evolved, he looked upon his creation, and spake "I shalt name thee ZZT", for he wished ye program to appear last in all BBS lists for some reason.

Many moons, digits and cubits later, ZZT hadst a huge following on the tirade of chaos known as AOL. Xabbott sought to bring order to ye chaos, and created ye Site, the ZZT Archive. Administrators were appointed, and Xabbott mysteriously disappeared. The community grew, IRC-log "sagas" about its participants were written, and the Creator known as Tim Sweeney happily informed them that he had lost the source code in ye Hard Drive Crash, ensuring its code was a mystery forever.

It was at this time that our brave hero, Wong, stumbled upon the site. In these ancient times, Wong was, to be fair, a bit of a n00b lam0r. Yet he was willing to learn from the wisdom of ZZTers who had come before, and was given the title "The Perfect Midbie", being neither new enough to be a newbie or old enough to be an oldbie. Such was the way of things.

Suddenly the one known as Xabbott returned. Spake he thusly: "What's going on here, then?" and flung all the existing administrators in to the Abyss of Normal Memberdom. And there was a great wailing and gnashing of keyboards. In a bid to escape this sudden tyranny, ye erstwhile Administrators appealed to the semi-almighty Underdogs for hosting of a New Site. And spake Ye Underdogs, "Yeah, all right." Ye new Site, known cryptically as Z2, sprung forth and the ZZTers followed their saviours in to ye land of Milk and Honey and Chocolate Digestives. Xabbott went in to ye Huff and closed ye Original Site.

Yes, I know, but looks aren't everything.

As time passed, Wong managed to shaketh off his midbie status, and won a coveted Game of the Month award for shoe-horning ye Semi-Complex RPG System into ZZT's humble limits under the name of "The Mercenary". "We shalt appointeth thee a Moderator", bespake the quasi-mighty , who was then the head of ye New Site. "Go fortheth and moderateth." Because he'd forgotten to put his teeth in that day.

And moderate he did, until a sudden database deletion obliterated ye Entire Forum. The people called for a Reshuffle, and the existing administrators re-appointed those in their favour to run ye Site. Wong was none too happy, and felt the same way about ye people spamming the forum with ye new Ravebaron emoticons (a palette-cycling monocle and suit-wearing man). "Thou art not fascist enough", the Admins said. "Besideth, thou hast rubbished the name of ye Ravebaron, so bog ye off."

So Wong concludedeth that the Community had suffered Critical Damage to Life Force, and went off to post billions of reviews on ye Daily Click instead, getting himself noticed and appointed as Admin by the leader in a moment of temporary insanity. For Wong, ZZT was forgotten, apart from for his Avatar, which he continued to leech off their forums in an act of Small Defiance. And so ye Chronicle came to a close.

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Point

So, to the point of all that nonsense above. I recently rediscovered ZZT on my hard drive - an ancient game and creation system by Tim Sweeney of Epic Games. The default games provided with it were best described as "puzzle adventures" - walk around shooting at things, picking things up, pushing things around and so on to progress.

What made the game unique was the World Editor, based on an immensely powerful (for the time) object-oriented procedural language (it's even more fun than it sounds) known as ZZT-OOP. Each object in the game runs separately, and can send and receive messages from each other to instruct them what to do.

ZZT is very simple in terms of its graphics - they are constructed entirely from ASCII characters, with the face representing the player, Omegas for "lion" enemies, Ös for bears (see the resemblance?) and so on. This can be rather off-putting for people (even fifteen years ago it was pretty sub-standard) but I think that it adds to the whole geek charm of it.

An extended editor makes things marginally easier on the eye.

And I played it again today. I had forgotten just how great it was - it's true that I still dislike most of the community surrounding it, because to the outsider, it looks like a disaster. Entering it is like walking in to a large party that you haven't been invited to, where you're expected to understand and appreciate all the in-jokes that have built up over fifteen years. The majority of the community and I seem to differ in our views of what ZZT should be about, as well - the general concensus seems to be to push for more complex and involved ZZT games with huge and intricate plotlines, but I prefer to keep things simple in the same vein as Tim Sweeney's original worlds, all those years ago.

My ZZT creations can be found on Z2 by searching for "Wong" - "The Mercenary" won GOTM, and the other most notable creations were Tower and Great Pyramid of ZZT, where I had decided that the whole idea of what was currently expected of ZZT was too complex and reverted to making puzzle adventures in the same vein as Tim Sweeney's own. The community were rather divided as to whether this was a good idea or not.

Like many of the things that I attach myself to, ZZT is very much a love or hate thing - many people find its crude appearance difficult to get round, but like I said, I think that's what makes it special. Its community was a major part of my life as I was just starting out on the Internet, which makes it rather special to me in its own way as well. It's also more complex than it looks on the surface - indeed, its involved ZZT-OOP language is capable of things that would be very difficult to achieve in the Multimedia Fusion which I hold in such high regard. Of course, another advantage is that the file sizes of its worlds are tiny, very rarely getting to even 200kb.

ZZT can be downloaded here, and it's fantastic.

Mother Russia

My dad is back from Russia now, reinforcing Whitney's belief that he is an international spy, but in reality (or at least his cover story) he was visiting a university there. Various journalists were fascinated that a professor named Newton was coming to the Chernsomething Institute of Technology, so he was interviewed for a number of television channels and fed on the Russian diet, which is in his words "Stodgy pancakes and stodgy doughballs. They're very good at eating stodge".

He's brought me back a glaringly red T-shirt with the word "Russia" on it, which will ensure that I'm taken for an evil communist when I live in America. The back of the packet said "As every stitch has been done cautiosly. You can get more brilliant looking when you put on this garment", as if I needed that anyway.

I was organising more testing appointments this week at work, and will probably be doing the same for the next week as well. I've met most of the testers now - there's a clear difference between their methods. Some of them are very tentative and want to be prompted through the process, while some - most notably one of the technical people from the Aberdeen Business School - leap right in and give a huge list of minor HTML errors that need to be corrected as well as sweeping suggestions for changing the whole operation of the site. He also insists on uploading Liberal Democrat manifestos for all his test files. You can read into that what you will.

Death, not death and cartoon death

"Death is one of the attributes you were created with; death is part of you. Your life's continual task is to build your death." - Montaigne

So begins one of the online units that I've been importing in to the new system at work. Michel de Montaigne was an awfully cheerful character, wasn't he? His attitude doesn't exactly make the most encouraging introduction that I've ever seen for a course. It's a guide to coping with patient death for nursing students, in case you're wondering - there are also specialist units for things like bathing a patient in bed and assessing injuries (which includes a form where one of the questions is for the patient to grade their level of agony from 1 to 10).

On a side note about importing modules, in a moment of boredom I decided to take a Management exam, and to my delight (but not, I have to admit, surprise) passed it with flying colours despite not having read any of the course material.

My mother's old flatmates were over the other night - they had last visited when I was doing my Standard Grades, and I pride myself on being able to remember events that no one expects me to, but the only thing that came to my mind about that visit was that we sat in the dining room on the old sofas and had a discussion about the word "Numpty". This time they asked what Brian was up to, and we informed them that he was dead and therefore not up to much apart from possibly applying to be a Management lecturer. After they'd left, though, it occurred to my mum that they'd actually been talking about a different Brian - one who is still very much alive. I hope this doesn't lead to any awkward moments if they bump in to him in the supermarket or anything, I wouldn't want the elderly flatmate having a heart attack from supposedly sighting one of the undead.

Out of nowhere, I remembered about "The Animals of Farthing Wood" yesterday morning, which I used to watch about ten years ago. I'm surprised that I didn't suffer severe emotional trauma after watching that series; it's the only children's programme that I know to have had anywhere near that amount of major characters killed off throughout the story. The scene that particularly stuck in my mind was when the pheasant returned to the farm to find the bones of his cooked and eaten wife visible through the window. Only Watership Down can possibly compete with it - it's a wonder I didn't grow up to be a vegetarian.

Telephony

I had been planning to organise setting up the phone service for the flat this weekend, but seeing as there was no point in delaying it (particularly as Whitney needs a number to put on her job applications) I phoned up the BT help line this lunchtime.

Incidentally, I've been looking at the phone and broadband services available and I've decided that the best thing for us is to get the line from BT (£10.50 a month) and combined phone and broadband service from Tiscali (£16 on top of that, 4GB limit a month, 2Mbps bandwidth, free UK weekend phone calls, guaranteed all calls cheaper than BT, billions of other things). If you can think of a better one, please stop me as soon as possible.

A lot of the convenience of setting it up relied on the presence of a BT line in the flat, which I was fairly sure we had. John from BT chose to phrase my real situation in the most disappointing way possible. "Your flat does have an existing BT line", he said, pausing gigantically and allowing me to get my hopes up, "but it's been physically disconnected." So an engineer will have to be sent out to it at a time when we're in and reconnect the phone line. At the moment it's unclear whether this will involve the substantial £70 reconnection fee or not - BT is decidedly uncertain and says that "We may have to charge you for additional costs depending on how much work is required." Maybe if we ply them with enough cups of tea while they're down there it'll all balance out.

Acts of Gord

In my spare time at work, I've recently been vastly amused by The Acts of Gord. The site is a stylised "chronicle" of an independent Canadian game store owner and his ways of dealing with his idiotic customers. Whether or not it's real no one's quite sure, but the result looks vaguely like what would happen if Bernard Black ran a branch of Electronics Boutique. One particular favourite, when turning away someone who asked him to install a modchip for playing pirated games:

"If I were to sell you a mod chip I would lose you as a customer. Now, if I were going to lose you as a customer I'd rather do it on a high note like setting you on fire. At least then I would have some satisfaction of a job well done."

When I'm out of the office for lunch, I often go to the cluster of music shops down the road to see if they have anything new or worthwhile around (a rare occurrence). As it happens, I didn't find much that I recognised when I was there yesterday, but I was intrigued (confused, actually) by some of the other things on offer. One of them, "Heaven Shall Burn", had a cover so disturbing that I wondered if I'd wandered in to Silent Hill by mistake - it showed the distorted face of a girl with large needles in her head. On a less appalling note, there was a self-titled album from a band with the awful name of "Dragonland" which had an Egyptian-style cover. I don't remember dragons being a central part of ancient Egyptian culture, really. And there was something by an unpronouncable band beginning with Z that came in an alimunium circular case, making it look unfortunately like a miniature biscuit tin.

The label "Parental advisory - explicit lyrics" is appearing more and more often on music. Unlike films and games, music is unrestricted by age laws - this is an entirely voluntary warning label to put on music, and seems to be used almost exclusively by bands that want to appeal to the "angry" teenage mobs who want to rebel against society by wearing silly black wristbands and destroy us all in their hilariously modified Ford Fiestas. However, I happened across an album by tone-deaf metal-tarnishers Insane Clown Posse that was instead labelled "Extreme Warning". I immediately got an image of Treguard leaning over (with quizzical eyebrows in place) and warning that the music caused a mortal danger to life force. This is probably quite a fair assessment.

Stuff from Germany

The trouble with having updated so often in the last couple of weeks is that I feel compelled to make one entry a day to keep the calendar filled, and this means that I'm visibly struggling to think of things to write about (see the last couple of days). In fact, quite a lot of the recent ones have been from my backlog of pre-written entries that hadn't gone up yet, and that's now exhausted. I will replenish it with an entry vaguely inspired by 's recent post, so that'll keep me going.

My family got back from Germany last week, bringing back imported goods with them - the most significant being the DVD of Black Books 3. We did have a recorded tape of it, but it seems to have vanished and no one knows if anyone's borrowed it or not. I'm still undecided as to whether the series is as good as series 1 and 2, but really, a bad Black Books episode is still far better than most of the rest of British TV's entire output anyway. There are a number of deleted scenes that should have been left in, including the inspired line "I wouldn't hire you again if we were the last two people in the world, the world was on fire, I was starving, and you had a fire extinguisher and sleeves that shot out crisps."

Two albums bought in Germany have also found their way on to my shelf, and those are Hammerfall's first album, "Glory to the Brave", and... well, actually, System of a Down's new album. My youngest brother and sister got strangely in to the music on my hard drive about a week before leaving for Germany, and I happened to have about an albumful of their MP3s. I don't particularly enjoy a lot of their music, but some of it is hilarious.

The album is tolerable, but only two songs really stand out to me - Bring Your Own Bombs and Sad Statue, which are both about the war in Iraq. The band are famous for having lyrics that mean very little on the surface, and also for being very secretive about the meanings behind them, but these ones are pretty clear. I think in some way, System of a Down are very much like South Park - crude and violent on the surface, but disguising quite intelligent social and political commentary underneath.

I haven't actually listened to Glory to the Brave much yet. The first track is decent enough, but it really is crying out for choirvocals in the background of the chorus (I've seen the European term for these so much that I've forgotten what the English phrase is). They seem very much like what you might call "Warhammer: The Band", and therefore more of my brothers' thing than mine.

The schools went back today, meaning that traffic in to Aberdeen was the worst ever. The summer holiday is now six weeks rather than seven, which seems an incredibly short amount of time whenever I think about it.

Spam

I'm getting an increasing number of emails from people who have been conned in to using either hi5 or sms.ac. I don't know the full story behind them, but apparently even if you don't complete registration on the sites they send out an automatic email to everyone that you could possibly have some sort of link to, and some of those will register as well because the email appears to come from you, and the whole thing starts all over again. It seems that I've received one from everyone imaginable on my friends list now, but even so, if you get one of these, just delete it and make way for the herbal remedies spam that's currently fighting for first place in terms of volume of email in my inbox.

I'm soon going to present the results of last week's external testing to the department, and I've got ten minutes of sugar-coating time left.

Nothing, really

After a large struggle, my Dvorak typing is up to the chronic level of 30 words a minute. And that's only using the home row. My attempt at learning the keyboard layout has been rather severely hampered by Windows 98 - I've demolished my laptop's keyboard so that I can still use a standard keyboard on my main computer, and trying to install drivers for anything in Win 98 has made me appreciate XP even more. I don't know why I was so reluctant to change operating systems now - convincing the laptop to stay in either keyboard layout and not switch at random to one of its own choosing is difficult in itself.

I was planning to use "Mavis Beacon 4", a typing tutor that I discovered in a bookcase, but despite it proudly saying that it teaches Dvorak the lessons seemed to be absent from it. In its place, there was a phantom layout option, which crashed when it was touched. I even went as far as opening the lesson database separately and switching round the Dvorak and Qwerty lessons, but the database was made with an earlier version of Access and reduced in size by about eight times when it was saved out again. The program, not expecting this, crashed again, as is characteristic of the entire operating system.

There are 26 days to go now until Whitney moves to Scotland. Before, having a long distance relationship wasn't exactly easy but it was something that I could accept. In the last month until we don't have to deal with it any more, though, coping with it has suddenly become the most difficult thing ever. I will have to occupy myself with getting the modsite finished.

PIN stealers and crossover cables

For a long time, my mum had no idea how to use cash machines. I was first alerted to this situation when on the way to The Eating Place, she said that she had to stop at Tesco to buy something so that she could get money. This logic has been known to work - in the one in Inverurie, there's an oversight in the system that means if you buy something that's reduced at the end of the day and is also part of a 2 for 1 offer, you get the original price taken off and end up being paid to take them out of the store (the disadvantage being that you're also encumbered with two semi-rotten aubergines or similar). But she meant going in so that she could get cash back from a purchase, not knowing how to use cash machines at all. I showed her the one outside the Union and the situation was rectified.

It seems that I might have a paranoia of using cash machines now, though, because yesterday a PIN-stealing device was discovered in the machine outside my work (Schoolhill in Aberdeen). I had only used it once and that was a couple of weeks before the device was removed, but the police were advising people who had used it in the last few days to check their accounts.

Dutch Cash-Machine Disease had struck Inverurie, though, and the only one I saw without a large "Out of order" sign on it was the one outside the Clydesdale bank. After feeling the tension growing as I stood in the queue, I checked my balance to find that nothing had happened to my account. It was only then that I remembered about the online banking service - when I sat down to look at it, though, I was foiled when I found that I had forgotten not only my password and access number, but also my username as well. Digging through old emails solved the problem and nothing seemed out of the ordinary.

While in the town, I was also attempting to find a crossover cable - the most likely place seemed Panasonic, which advertises itself as "sound technology", but you're greeted with a range of decidedly unmusical kettles and toasters when you walk in so I thought I had a chance there. I was told that they'd run out of them and to try next week - they did have a USB computer-to-computer connection, but I decided against that because it had a £35.99 price tag, and paying that would have been comparable to having my money stolen anyway.

I've been looking round on the Internet for methods of networking two computers together, in fact, and via a crossover cable seems the most likely solution. I'm aware that it's possible to manufacture one from my ethernet cable, and every site that has the instructions for it claims it to be "easy" with two screwdrivers being the only requirement before lapsing in to impenetrable jargon. Apparently the end result is to swap two internal coloured wires over, which is logical enough - each computer's reading channel is at the other end of the other computer's writing channel - but I don't feel confident that I would be able to do it, colourblindness being a fairly major obstacle when attempting anything to do with electronics. If anyone has any advice I'd welcome it.

I bought a Big Issue on the way back to keep up my positive karma, feeling that I'd used quite a lot of it during the morning. I further increased it by throwing it straight in the recycling where it belongs when I got back home.

End User Relations, and other scams

A couple of days ago, I received one of those "419" scam emails - the ones which tell the story of a dying rich husband/oil sheikh/dictator/mongoose and ask you for assistance in laundering the bank-shatteringly huge amount of funds that they left in their will to "Randomly Chosen Person on the Internet". Despite the implausibility of them, many people with more money than sense believe them every year and have vast amounts of cash extracted from them, correcting their sense to money ratio.

In fact, this one announced in the subject line that Jennifer Wilson was dying of cancer. When I read it at first it gave me quite a shock because that's the name of one of my friends from computer science, so in return for the nasty surprise (and because I'd been reading a number of counter-scam websites recently) I decided to email back with a fabricated story of my own - I haven't yet received a reply, though. On reflection, calling myself Leonard Sopcloth and saying that I was a member of the cult of Dongrel might have been pushing the believability envelope a little. Practice makes perfect.

Throughout the week I've been organising testing interviews. The procedure feels slightly like being a driving examiner, with me sitting with the testing folder ticking through a list of tasks that are manageable by the user. I feel that the process of doing them would be mildly distressing if I had written the code, because we seem to have selected the most enthusiastic destructive testers ever and a huge number of holes are being spotted, but as it is I can just bring the vast list of suggested changes back to people in the department and it becomes their responsibility to correct or ignore them as they please. It's just as well that I can write quickly. I would actually bring my laptop with me to take the changes down as I go along, but I pulled all the keys off that a while ago and rearranged them to Dvorak as an experiment (it's getting easier).

Unfortunately, after taking a huge amount of paper notes, some of which were relevant to the parts we were actually testing and some of which were not, the last testing interview I ran ended rather abruptly when all the servers went down simultaneously. ITS had decided to have a computer-hurling contest* and the entire system was down until about half an hour ago. Which is just as well, because I've got to go and do another appointment now.

* N.B. I made this up

What a splendid pie

I find there is a very clear difference between advertising on the Internet and more traditional methods. While normal adverts may try being clever, memorable or just strange to catch the watcher's attention, Internet adverts seem to rely purely on the stupidity of the user to get them to follow their unwelcome links.

In the example to the left (which is slightly edited), needless to say, the radio buttons were just simulated and clicking anywhere on the advert to select an option (as an inexperienced user may do) will follow the link. In a similar way, many dating sites will show selection boxes defaulting to the user's gender being "Female". As I suspect most Internet users are male - although it can't be by many now - this would prompt more people to click the fake box and be whisked away to the far corners of the Internet, if such places exist.

It isn't necessary to make it that complex, though. Sometimes an advert will be in the form of a fake window announcing new messages for the user. Another example is to make up a convincing error message window and use it as the advert - one of them, which scares the life out of me every time it comes up, informs the user that their computer has severe security risks and advises downloading a "repair" file. The window looks pretty convincing as something an anti-virus program might throw up - complete with title bar at the top, even though it's already got a title bar as it's in a window. Idiots.

One of the more extreme examples of this was a box that simply asked "Are you an idiot?" and gave the options "Yes" and "No". Whichever you might click, I don't think there are any winners there.

I can't recall ever seeing an advert on the Internet that made me actually want to click on it. Actually, there was just one - soon after I got this computer I downloaded a demo of a game called "Painkiller" that I'd seen an advert for on GameFAQs. I only really got it because the prospect of having a computer that could run anything more demanding than Commander Keen was a novelty to me at the time. Unfortunately it turned out to be a bit rubbish and I deleted it soon afterwards.

Thankfully the days of popup windows are largely behind us, but there now seem to be some methods of getting around Firefox's blocker. Getting an advert shoved in your face like this makes me want to investigate the product less rather than more.

Adverts may also try to appeal to a certain group of people even though they're really nothing to do with it. One of the more hilariously stupid adverts that I've seen recently came to my Hotmail inbox, which I'm trying to use a little less in favour of Gmail now. "Relieve your debt the Christian way!" it proclaimed. I would welcome ideas as to how this could be done. Possibly by stoning your creditors to death.

TV advertising isn't a huge amount better - DFS performs a miracle each time they come up with a new advert, because it's always even worse than their old one. They started off just being slightly annoying, then became more embarrassing from there, decided to do some sort of half-hearted Charlie's Angels thing, a conga line that I only vaguely remember, and when I thought it couldn't possibly get any worse, they started using Linda Barker.

But the adverts that I most dislike have to be for Lynx. I imagine that personal hygiene products must be difficult to market, so they decided to run a campaign of absolute fear that you're a worthless being unless you use their one. The entirety of the speech from one advert from a couple of years ago was "Men's sweat only attracts other men. Wear Lynx, attract women." In more simple terms: "Use Lynx or you're gay."

The one that's appearing in just about every bus stop in Aberdeen just now is "Spray more, get more". I don't quite know how to express how I feel about that, but it seems to me to simplify things so far that the pursuit of women as objects becomes the objective. (Let me say now that I'm no hero myself, I'm a regular visitor to the VCL and various other sites that don't have cryptic initials.) Apart from that, I dislike the suggested idea that this product can suddenly solve all your problems, it sounds rather too aggressive to me.

I can't help but feel that this entire article's completely incoherent because I've basically been making it up as I go along, but there it is anyway.

Currying favour (or something like that)

Recently I've been getting in to Indian food, partly because of the sheer amount that you're served whenever you go out to most Indian restaurants. I could stuff myself with a £15 meal from the one on the main road in Cupar and hardly have to bother eating for the next week. The only trouble with food from that part of the world is that I find most of it tremendously overspiced - it seems I have rather girly tastebuds and I always have to choose a dish from the spice level marked "Wimpy".

So when the time came to decide what to cook for dinner last night, I decided on curry. I had bought a tin of the chicken variety during the weekend, but I found that it was marked as "Medium" spice, and from experience it seems that this is what manufacturers put on their tins when they don't really know the spice level. A tin marked "Medium" can be anything of a wide range of heat levels from "mildly tingly" to "the core of the sun". I didn't have any rice on hand either, and I felt it would be somehow inappropriate to use it with pasta.

In one of my brilliant moments, I therefore decided to cook chicken fricasse (which has been a favourite of mine for as long as I can remember) but with curry powder added in to it. This wasn't quite the travesty it sounds, but looking back I'm not sure why I thought it would solve the rice/pasta problem. The most difficult bit was actually finding the curry powder itself, because the spice cupboard is even worse than the medicine cabinet and has hundreds of empty pre-decimilisation jars and bottles.

I'm not going to list the contents in as great depth as I did for my own cupboard, but the highlights were finding Schwartz bottles that had their weights in ounces on them (and serving instructions in dsp. What's a dsp?), and a jar of ammonium dihydrogen sulphate. I can only assume that this has been left there since the Cold War and is kept on hand in the spice cupboard in the event that we have to poison ourselves to prevent capture by the Russians.

I eventually found a relatively modern jar of curry powder with no illegal chemicals in it, and added it to the pre-processed fricasse. It took a while (probably several dsp) before anything visible happened to it, and even then it was only turning a slightly yellower shade of beige. The end result was pretty passable, though, and making something from a jar and a tin is undeniably a step up the student culinary ladder from making something from a tin.

Do you think Whitney will let me do the cooking next year?

Eddie the Berserker

I've just got back from my first external testing meeting, where I walked a member of staff from the main campus through a couple of sections of the new virtual learning environment. It had its fair share of problems, most noticeably when it seemed that someone back at the department was working on a bit of code at the same time as we were trying to test it, which resulted in a variety of colourful error messages.

From the response I received when I got back to DeL, though, you'd think I was the greatest hero who ever lived - apparently the staff member that I'd chosen has a reputation for being very critical as a tester, and coming back alive was a feat in itself. They'd strategically not told me that when I announced the tester as the very first to be interviewed.

While standing in the queue at Tesco yesterday, my dad tapped the man in front of him on the shoulder and enquired "Have you demolished any more cars recently?". I thought that was a rather unusual form of greeting, but I then realised that he had been the one that had driven past my dad's parked car some months ago, misjudged the width of his vehicle and scraped off virtually the entire right hand side of the parked Volvo. It wasn't even as rude a question as I had thought, because Eddie, a small harmless-looking man described by my dad as "a complete berserker", had found time to hit another car and back in to someone's garden gate since he last saw him.

When we went outside I saw the potential for destruction that this man has - he drives a white van with a huge crane on the top. We considered deliberately taking the long way round the car park, but it was too late - we had to avoid the behemoth as it trundled out behind us. We escaped alive this time, but if you're in the Aberdeen area and you see an oversized "Aquarius" van, my advice is to run away. Very fast indeed.

Cleaning Out My Closet

Because of the lack of occupancy of my room while I'm away at university, it tends to become a dumping ground for things that people don't want. The result is that I've got so much stuff in here that I really don't know what to do with it, despite my best efforts at tidying the place up every once in a while. But when someone really doesn't want to see something again, they'll put it in the cupboard built in to the wall in the darkest corner of my room. It's so unused that to open it you have to slide a heavy chest of drawers out the way first.

As part of the house tidying operation that's going on, I ventured in there with a duster and holy water (in case it had become a portal to another dimension during my absence) and saw what had happened since it was last opened. It felt slightly like opening a time capsule. The first impression was of a rather discouraging mess - boxes and other objects crammed in haphazardly with no sense of order at all. The only option was to pull the whole lot out and start again.

The first layer of the cupboard contained assorted junk, the most interesting of which I'll describe here.

Board Games

There was quite a wealth of these in the cupboard.

Stare!: I remember playing this once; it was a bit rubbish in all honesty. I think the objective was to look at a picture card for a minute then answer observation questions on it. It sounds passable on paper but translates awfully in to a game because the huge problem is that you're sitting around in silence for most of the time waiting for other people's time to run out. It has GD's Gold Seal of Excellence on it - I don't know who GD is, but he must have pretty low standards.

Atmosfear III: Do you remember Atmosfear, where you huddled around a television in the dark and rolled dice on a board at the command of the gatekeeper or something? You'd have done it when you were about twelve. It used to scare the life out of me. It might have seemed a good idea in the early nineties but video board games seem to have died out now, and that's probably just as well.

Carrott's Captions: A board game endorsed by Jasper Carrott, this involves having to write down captions to pictures, then guessing as to who thought up which one. It's never been played, but looks decently workable, though it depends on the ability of the players - despite having a job with BP years ago where all I had to do was sit with a group of people and think up captions for their press photos, I don't think I would be much good at it.

Pocket Scrabble: I don't know why this version is called "Pocket", you'd be lucky to get it in to even my jacket.

Valley of the Kings: This isn't a board game as such - it's a puzzle that acts as the starter for a MOTAS-like site on the Internet. Solving the puzzle eventually gives a password for http://www.puzzleadventure.com - I never got anywhere with it because it's one of those infurating things where you have to match up the edges of each tile in a 4x4 grid. I don't think I'll be trying this again, even if the site still exists at all.

Mah Jongg: I think I got this from my uncle Johannes one birthday. I had remembered about this last time I was in Sarah Lawrence College, when Hillel had a Chinese-themed night and I won a game despite having forgotten all the rules. The situation wasn't helped by the fact that their set had no Arabic numerals on them at all, making playing the game a slow process interrupted by looking at a translation table every turn. This is one of the few worthwhile things in the whole cupboard.

Fore: A board game based on golf. Why?

Mini Carpet Bowls: This actually works surprisingly well, but surely you'd be hard pushed to find anyone with a hallway long enough.

Mindtrap: A game involving solving lateral thinking puzzles to move around a board or something. It's never been played, but I'm sure that most of the family have picked up the cards to solve on their own, then returned them when they realised how unfairly impossible they are, usually relying on missing out a vital clue to include the "lateral" element.

Books

The Teenage Body Book: This embarrassment was given to me as a birthday present one year. It's full of answers to such comically idiotic questions as "Does drinking iced water to freeze the woman's organs prevent pregnancy?". I wish I made that one up.

The Truth: I had been looking for that.

Guide to Macbeth: No one in the family has ever studied Macbeth, nor any of Shakespeare's plays.

Feng Shaun: A collection of sickeningly cute life advice given by Shaun the Sheep from Wallace and Gromit.

Pocket Quiz Book: In German.

The Guinness Book of Records 2003: I'm sure that this used to be a worthwhile resource, but every year the records seem to get more ludicrous, only being in there because their holders were the first to think of them. The only worthwhile section in this one seems to be the athletics and sports section, with the rest of the pages taken up by people who have achieved the greatest top speed while walking uphill eating a three course meal, and other such things.

Going Online: Even though it was only written fifteen years ago the information here is astonishingly outdated, talking about telecommunication links from micros and Metadex commands. There's also the usual specifications hilarity - the book recommends a 10MB hard disk with 256K of RAM, and a 1200 baud modem. People have never had it so easy. In some ways it's a shame that the requirement of having a degree in computing to get online didn't stay, because then AOL wouldn't exist.

Miscellaneous

HexMaker: This is a cleverly named mapmaker for Hexen 2, and presumably Quake as well, with a pseudo-Biblical blurb on the back about Virtus being the savior of comprehensible editing software - it ends with "Go at your own pace and you will surely design", which is a horrendously stretched play on the original tagline "Go in peace and you will surely die". It gets worse - the summary at the end reads "The cleverest software makes itself unobtrusive and transparent, wishing only to serve and to please. It is in this spirit that you have chosen the box you now hold in your hand". I'm not sure what the people at Virtus had been smoking when they came up with that. Despite their claims as to user friendliness, it's totally impossible to use - I never worked it out at all. The memory of using this software for a few minutes makes me appreciate UnrealEd more than ever.

Toy football: Complete with flags from various countries. One of them is the Union Jack, confidently marked "England".

Reflective vest: This is the kind of thing that everyone is advised to wear at night because it makes you more visible, but no one does because it has the side effect of making you look like an idiot. I've no idea what this is doing here, but I could use it to fill a few hours at work by going outside and scaring people by pretending to be a traffic warden.

Rebound 4x4: I remember getting this one Christmas. The design was a huge novelty at the time - a remote controlled car that couldn't become immobile because it could keep going even when flipped over. Sadly the battery life never lasted more than about twenty minutes. The remote control has one stick snapped off and the battery has gone the same way as my laptop's.

Remote controlled Mini: Slightly like my ideal car, but several times smaller and without the chequered roof. It's never even been opened - the box proudly declares "3 functions: Straight, stop, spin turn" which is an impressively optimistic way of saying "Completely unsteerable, goes forwards and backwards squint".

Puzzle calendar: A novelty that quickly wore off, because at the start of every month you had to slide all the pieces around again so that they were on the correct days, and that took hours. Surprisingly it's currently set up correctly for April 2005, so it must have been thrown in there relatively recently.

Hoverdisc: A glorified frisbee that has the additional powers of being made of silvery stuff and taking up half a room.

An old Jiffy-bag from last year. I was going to send some things to Whitney in it, but I cut it to size and it turns out that Jiffy-bags seem to use a large portion of ancient human skin as their packing material. Now it's billowing choking dust everywhere in an anthrax-like fashion, so I think it's best to abandon that plan.

The pack of lies entitled the Residence Contract for 2003/04.

Two boxes of 5 1/2" floppy disks. Highlights include the red disks for the installation of the 1987 version of MS-DOS, the disks for the "Windows Graphical Environment", and the PC Plus Superdisks with things like Osbit, Quadralien and Dark Side.

Two shoeboxes, one of which was helpfully marked "Do not eat".

Nineteen bottles of assorted deodorants and aftershaves.

The entire second layer of the cupboard was composed of a boxful of old school jotters and various other bits and pieces, none of which I felt like examining more closely. I should really send them to the tip for recycling, because they're taking up about half of the world's paper resources. I was ready to throw the whole lot out, but then I opened up one of the folders and discovered some scripts that went in to the yearbook, along with some forgotten gems that didn't make it in to the quotes section. If you'll excuse me, I'm going to go and be all nostalgic now.

External Testing

I've now been given the responsibility of organising external testing for the new virtual learning environment at work. Already I've been going around the site hundreds of times adding things to the "Snaglist" - a list of small bugs that I can annoy people with, like where monospace font is used unnecessarily, and spelling errors in the HTML. For someone as obsessed with language correctness as myself it's ideal. Speaking of that, and further to my thoughts a few days ago about common errors, I recently got an email about going through the site with a "fine toothcomb". Do many people comb their teeth?

The organisational part of the task entails finding out who out of the list of potential testers is not on holiday at the moment, and being paid to catch buses around Aberdeen and sit with them as they go through a checklist of features. Working out how to get around the university is a bit stressful in itself, as it's split handily into two pieces at opposite ends of the city. It seems that testing sheets need to be completed before we can decide who can test what, so I can't even do that yet.

Quite apart from that, it seems that no one's really been told that the site is changing - the only ones who seem to have been warned about this are the RGU students that I've told personally. It's definitely a change for the better, though - it seems far less cluttered than the one that's online at the moment, and it feels good to be part of something useful even if it seems to be going the same way as the junior honours project.

Anniversary -1

I find it very strange how the brain finds it necessary to dream - to make you feel as if you're somewhere you aren't. I also find it fascinating how you can move your limbs around by thinking about it, without any concious thought process going on whatsoever. I explained as such to Whitney, and she responded "Are you on crack?", so perhaps everyone else isn't quite as mystified by these things as I am.

Anyway, today is the negative-1st anniversary of Whitney and I. I can't remember who I stole that phrase from. Possibly . I haven't really announced it yet because of the awkwardness of the invitations - the wedding's going to take place in California, so that makes it difficult for people in Britain to get there, and we have a very limited number of guests. There will be a reception in Scotland as well, so I'm going to invite most people I know to that rather than California. This, inevitably, will make people feel excluded from the wedding. It's all very stressful.

Released by Order of the Dean

When I returned from a lengthy meeting at work yesterday I was more than a little surprised to find my dad slumped in my chair in a horrendous checked shirt, arranging his meetings over my phone. Do you remember how embarrassing it was when a parent had to come in to one of your classes at school? It was much like that, only moreso. He hadn't come in to deliver a packed lunch or a missing PE kit, though - he had finished his interviews early and wanted to request to my manager that I come home with him to help put shelves together. This worked better when he explained that he was in fact their Dean, rather than just someone who had wandered in off the street like some people had first assumed.

A week living alone with my dad has made me realise how little we talk to each other normally - for a while we've been vaguely aware of each other's existence but that's about it. It's not a bad relationship at all, it's just that normally I'm upstairs and he's in his study doing something important like beating his Civilization score or whatever else Deans do. For most of the week we've behaved rather like two flatmates who have only just met each other - cooking the dinner, trying to share the work that neither of us are very familiar with, watching The Weakest Link and then going to our separate floors of the house. It's most odd, and sometimes feels a little awkward.

But I'd like to complain about buses again. I had to take one in to work today because of some meetings taking place at Garthdee early on, and I expected (as my 5-day ticket from before had been just over £20) that the price for a return would be set at the extortionate £5 as it had been previously. It was, in fact, £6.10 - a ludicrous price for a fifteen-mile journey. For comparison, from Berkeley you can get a bus going roughly the same distance for $1.75, which is roughly one sixth of the price that I paid to get in today.

Taking a Ford Fiesta in to work in Aberdeen costs about £50 to £60 a month in petrol. Taking the 307 in to work for a month not only makes travel a lot less convenient, but also costs £20 more. This is why Aberdeen is always clogged with traffic during the rush hour - if you can drive, there is no reason at all to waste your time with public transport. If the buses were a reasonable price, then maybe people would start using them.

Comment comments

I've had virtually the same journal layout since its beginning in Something of 2003, when I chose a general style at random and then changed the colours round so that they were slightly easier on the eyes. I didn't get around to editing the links used for "Add a comment / View comments" for a while, but then showed me how easy it was. While looking at my Friends page for the tenth time today, I realised that I have been using the same comment remarks for at least two years and they're no longer exactly relevant - they were taken from a Gamma Ray song on an album I had just bought, and "Damn the machine" makes me sound like some sort of extremist liberal revolutionary. Which can't be more than half right.

I went in to the only moderately confusing style page for my journal and found the overrides box, which twelve year old emonuLJgoths can understand perfectly but which I find virtually incomprehensible. I was ready to change the ancient links, but I hit a major obstacle when I realised that I had no idea what to replace them with. If anyone's got any suggestions appropriate for me then I'd welcome them, because it saves me a bit of thinking and lets me wonder about important things like what else to write about this week so that I have a record fortnight of unbroken days with an entry.

Thoughts for the Day

Thought the First: Judging by the words in the "most used" list on RhymeZone, the people who use it write really awful songs. Oh, wait.

Thought the Second: Why do people say "could care less" when the phrase is "couldn't care less"? The meanings are rather opposite.

Thought the Third: ",,,vnck.hrgpbanvjrm" is the result when you try and get to Livejournal with your keyboard still set on Dvorak.

Unfortunately, so far the only effect that Dvorak has had on my typing is making me want to do as little of it as possible - the frustation of seeing your speed decreased to 19 words per minute (and this is just using half the home row) is difficult to get over. Perhaps I'll have more luck on a rearranged keyboard, though - at the moment I'm just typing blindly on to a QWERTY one.

Keyboards!

(The "!" is there to make the title seem more interesting. I know, it doesn't work.)

I can't say that I've ever found using a keyboard particularly stressful, despite the warnings about RSI that are on most keyboards now. Usually they say something terrifying implying that using a keyboard will as good as kill you - the one I'm using just now says "Some experts believe that the use of any keyboard may cause serious injury", as if it's going to suddenly leap up and eat me or something. I think the only damage that this keyboard could do to me is initiate biological warfare by giving me some sort of disease, as it's so dirty that when I take the wrist-rest off, the covered portion is a completely different colour.

This is what happens when you use a QWERTY keyboard too much.

Other people evidently don't find keyboards quite as comfortable as I do, because there have been a number of attempts to improve on the century-old design. The first that I remember was the Microsoft Natural keyboard, which split the keys in to two sections, each of them at an angle to the user, so that the wrist bend required to use it was more natural. When trying to use one, I just found the amount I had to bend my wrists was too far in the other direction.

Another problem I had with splitting the keys was the way I type - I type fast, but I don't type very well, strictly speaking. I tended to ignore all the typing lessons in school because I had been using computers since the Commodore 64 when I was about three - in fact, I don't even remember learning how to type, it was somehow as natural for me as learning how to read and write. I found that the rigid method of typing they taught was much more uncomfortable than my own way of doing it.

You don't really notice the way you type until... well, until you read this paragraph, I suppose, and it's difficult to examine because it requires slowing things down and thinking about things. It seems that my method is keeping my left hand still on the commonly accepted "home row" position, using all its fingers, and allowing my right hand to move freely, only ever using my second and third fingers to hit keys with it. As a result, even though I am right handed, I find it much easier to type with my left hand than my right when attempting both separately.

Quite a few ergonomically designed keyboards rely on splitting the keyboard slightly between the left and right hands, but there have been a few radically different styles attempted as well. Old chording keyboards, for example, reduced the limb requirement to one hand and relied on pressing "chords" of keys to input letters, making typing like bashing out chords on a piano. Continuing the instrumental theme, some modern models take the splitting tactic too far, place the keys upright and make typing disturbingly reminiscent of playing the accordion.

Trying out most of these alternative designs isn't really possible without buying the new equipment, short of cutting your keyboard in half with a Greatknife or meat cleaver, but another approach to making keyboards more comfortable is using alternate keyboard layouts.

On the oldest machines (mostly for typesetting), keys were arranged according to the usage of the letter in English - the column ETAOIN came first, with Q and Z being relegated to the very end. You can see an attempt at reproducing this on my laptop, a result of an evening's boredom while revising for exams. (By the way, if you're not familiar with my laptop, the name "Slimnote VX" is incredibly ironic as it shares many characteristics - size, weight and processing capability included - with a bucket of bricks.)

Machines with keyboards as we know them were first produced by Remington, an American gun manufacturer that had decided that the next logical step from producing lethal weapons was to manufacture sewing machines and typewriters. The current English QWERTY design for its keyboard came about largely as a coincidence - Christopher Sholes, a typewriter designer, decided to move the printing levers further apart (not the keys themselves as is widely thought), in an attempt to prevent jams, necessitating that the keys were placed in convenient places to reach the levers.

I actually remember using the family's typewriter when I was very young - it was so resistant to anyone trying to type on it that you virtually had to ball your hands in to fists and smash them down on the keys to get it to do anything. This would probably cause some sort of injury, if not RSI, fairly quickly because of the most efficient typing action being flailing your arms round in a circle like a windmill.

Interestingly, after the idea of typing had been around for a while and faster mechanisms were possible, Sholes himself attempted to redesign the layout to make it more comfortable to type on. The layout that he suggested bore absolutely no resemblance to QWERTY:

 X P M C H R T N S D G K
  J B W F L A E I O U Y
 Q V . ,   ' ! ? - ; _

An important feature of this keyboard was that the vowels were all under one hand - this allowed a much greater typing speed because it was more common for letters to alternate between hands. Because QWERTY had already been established, this keyboard never caught on. As already pointed out in the comments, this may be something to do with the way that it mysteriously doesn't appear to have a Z key.

Dvorak, another layout which took this idea further, was designed in the 1930s - it seems to have been recently been developing something of a Linux-like following. The key layout may look even more insane than the French keyboard, but looking at it more closely shows the reasoning behind its design. The keys on the home row are all from the first two rows of the typesetting keyboard (therefore the most used in the English language), and all the vowels are again under one hand. The more commonly used punctuation is nearer the home positions. Only the A and M keys remain the same from QWERTY.

As a result of the key positions, it's possible to type a lot more quickly in Dvorak - the fingers don't have to move as much to type common words, as many of the most frequently used letters are on the home row. If you use a normal keyboard all day, you're apprarently likely to move your fingers as much as sixteen miles, but using Dvorak this distance is reduced to one mile. (To be honest I find this claim a little extravagant).

It's easy to see some of the advantages of Dvorak by just looking at the typing lessons for it. I remember school typing lessons being endless rows of "A glass lad; dad's sad flask" and other gibberish. In Dvorak, the lessons start in pretty much the same way with the unfortunate "Beavis and Butthead Lesson" ("uh huh uh huh uh huh uh huh, h u uh hu uhh huh uhh") but after learning the home keys for just three fingers on each hand it's possible to type entire sentences like "Hunt the neon then toot out the tune onto the tent", although why you'd ever want to is beyond me.

The point of saying all this? I think I'm going to try it. I've got plenty of old keyboards at home that I can pull apart and rearrange, and if the frustration of forgetting how to type for a week or so isn't too stressful in itself, I'm going to see if Dvorak really can improve my typing.

Me Vs. The Washing Machine

My aunt came round unexpectedly with her partner Derek, once on Friday and again on Sunday. This tested my ability to cope with having guests while alone, but specifically it was a test of my cooking. After frantically rummaging in the cupboard for something passable as not student food, I found a jar of Homepride bacon and cheese pasta sauce.

I was expecting the preparation of it to be rather simple - "Pour over pasta, eat" - but it was a surprising new approach to cooking pasta that I didn't trust at all. The procedure entailed putting a large amount of raw, hard pasta in a bowl, smothering it in sauce, adding cold water so that it was a yellow watery mess, sticking it in the oven and hoping for the best. Things were looking desperate at half an hour in to the cooking time because it still resembled cheese, bacon and noodle soup, but grating cheese in to it as per the instructions seemed to solidify it a bit. I wouldn't say that the end result was of much quality, but it seemed to do the job. Unfortunately our conversation was mostly about gas, as they run a heating company and were going around the Northeast of Scotland giving safety checks to old-age pensioners.

Another appliance that I've had difficulty with is the washing machine. I thought laundry was dead easy in St Andrews - you went down to the room, waited half an hour for a non-broken machine to be free, remembered you'd forgotten to take washing powder, scraped the spilled bits from around the edges of the other machines and spooned the residue in to your own, then pressed "Wash these" (there were six choices, but I only ever bothered with one because it worked the first time) and your clothes would come out clean, or if not that, wet. Drying was a similar procedure - you paid to have your clothes rotated round for an hour or so with very few side effects (including any obvious drying).

I was expecting the one at home to be similar, but the thing looks like something left over from Apollo 11, and most of my time in the utility room was spent screaming "What?!" at it hysterically. The first hint that something was amiss was when I had to tug on an entwined bag to open the drawer, the handle having fallen off some years ago. I put a random amount of powder in to a randomly chosen compartment, shut it, and turned my attention to the dial on the right. This was composed of about twenty letters around the inner edge, which with a bit of force could be rotated to match up with a series of indecipherable heiroglyphics around the outside. After some experimentation, it emerged that a humming sound was produced when I pulled the dial outwards, and I assumed that indicated that it was doing at least something.

I had to pretty much guess what to do - it's like playing Russian Roulette with your washing machine - and I spun the letter "G" to the top, as in "Wash these, you infernal contraption". Actually, now that I look at it, there isn't a G in that at all. Maybe I chose badly.