2007

Happy new year! I'd also like to take the opportunity to direct a smug but also slightly relieved "I told you so" at , because as you can tell from the fact that you're reading this, we aren't all dead yet and the world didn't end in 2006 after all. The Bible Code was wrong and so was everyone else who predicted disaster. I have now lived through four apocalypses. (I've been keeping count.)

It's going to be so embarrassing if a comet crashes into us between the time I hit the Send button and midnight in Samoa. I'd never hear the last of it.

Anyway, I'm not going to post any New Year Resolutions this time because I always completely fail to keep them. That'll show them. I would also post a yearly review like I used to at the end of each year at St Andrews, but getting married and moving halfway round the world to a completely new continent overshadows the whole thing a bit.

In two hours it'll be 2007 for me. I'd like it to be a bit less exciting than the last one, please.

Edit: Oh, here's one: I resolve to make my livejournal worth reading again and drag it out of the execrably dull state that it's been stuck in for the last couple of months.

Heavenly - Virus

And the day will come here below
When the light will cross my destiny
Domination to succeed the crown
Just remember the man you used to be
Cause when the virus comes, it's time for victory!
What? But this kind of thing is what passes for normal lyrics from Heavenly. After not buying any new music for about a year myself, I was given their new album "Virus" by two separate people this Christmas - one Japanese version (because strangely that's the import that America gets) and one extended European one. Their previous album, "Dust to Dust", has to be one of the best in my collection, and it's taken them three years to produce a follow-up due to an almost complete change of line-up - now only two of the original members remain, but the sound has stayed consistent. The album is apparently called "Virus" because it "contains highly infectious music" - honest, that's what it says in the booklet. As silly as it sounds, it does have some truth to it.

There are some changes to the general sound - the most significant is the new keyboardist, who introduces an almost Amstrad-like high chord/string instrument into the background of many songs. Like every band that produces this sort of music these days, they've also tried to include some more classical elements, but it's only obvious in a couple of tracks - they haven't become Dream Theater (which would have been pretentious) or Stratovarius (which would have been disastrous). If anything, it seems that they're now closer to what Sonata Arctica originally sounded like in their music, particularly the over-the-top immensely powerful choruses. Really, Ben Sotto is now almost equal to Piet Sielck in this department.

Interestingly, a couple of themes from the previous album are reused here, both in lines from the lyrics and the actual music. The musical ones are fine as they're always in a different key or rhythm from before even when they're obvious, but the lyrical repetition does stop seeming clever about the third time it happens.

Ben Sotto's English has also improved - even though the lyrics make little sense most of the time, a few lines are actually understandable now. The pronounciation is a little shaky, but nowhere near as bad as on Dust to Dust. The only really notable bit is the triumphant shout of "GLAH-REE-ICE!" during the chorus of "Bravery in the Field". And he can now sing "Happiness" without it sounding remotely like "A penis", which is most welcome. Nevertheless, the booklet with the lyrics proves invaluable - there are also further song comments, but unfortunately they're all in Japanese and I can't read them.

Interestingly, it also contains a Jermaine Jackson cover, "When the Rain Begins to Fall", and they've made it sound somehow like The Final Countdown. In fact, as I was writing all this, I realized that the whole album really does represent everything that people hate about power metal. And as far as I'm concerned, that makes it absolutely phenomenal.

iPod

Christmas was very different this year. It was the first time that I'd spent it away from my own family, as I was with my new in-laws in California. The weather outside was closer to midsummer temperatures in Scotland rather than the sort of dismal sleet that I'm used to.

The day also came with an unprecedented amount of irony, as thanks to Whitney's parents, I am now the proud owner of an iPod. It's one of the video-playing ones, as they were going to get one of the Nano models but couldn't find it in black. (The necessity for me having a black iPod isn't something I would have thought of, but every time I try to deny my imagined affinity to the colour I seem to be dressed like the Milk Tray man.)

So now my MP3 player is feeling rejected as it's been replaced with something that has 240 times its capacity, and considerably more playlist control (the old one's capability in this department being limited to two buttons labelled "Stop" and "Start"). I'm absolutely amazed by it, actually. I now know why Whitney told me I might want to put my music collection on my laptop, but I ignored that hint so I'll have to wait until I'm back in Boston to put a significant amount of music on it.

And the best bit is what's etched on the back of it. "D.X.N." They know me too well.

Edit: I just realized that I typed "not" instead of "now" up in the second paragraph. One letter that changes the tone of the entire post.

I Want Out

I'm back in California now for Christmas. However, seeing as my journal has recently turned totally worthless once more and has filled up with endless nonsense, self-advertising and video posts, I'm not going to fight it by posting a remotely informative entry just yet.

For a long time, I thought that the music videos by Modern Talking (brought to all our attentions by in my first year of university) were pretty much unbeatable on the daftness front, but after looking at some of the stuff they produced in the 80s, I think that Helloween have them matched. My particular favourite is the one for I Want Out. Watch out for:

• The very start, which does a good job of setting the tone for the rest of the video.


• Michael Kiske's hair-monster mullet.


• Kai Hansen's ever-present daft sunglasses.


• The inexplicable flying pumpkin.


• The second time said pumpkin appears, where you can see someone's hand coming into the frame to catch it.


• Kai managing to appear in two places during the pan in the C-section.


• The man running around with the vacuum cleaner in the solo.


• (Mumble, mumble) Just how much of the song Kai has "borrowed" in his future releases.

It doesn't stop there - the video for Where the Rain Grows (what?) is similarly inspired, with Andreas Deris seemingly going for a bit of a Rik Mayall look, and the one for Just a Little Sign is so dangerously close to the "Limozeen in Space" cartoon that it verges on self-parody.

The Ultimate Question

There's an impossible question that has been lurking at the back of my mind for several years. Being unable to provide an answer myself, I have to rely on the general Internet to decide for me. It is this.

Does Iron Maiden's "Back in the Village" or Gamma Ray's "The Winged Horse" have the better guitar intro?

The first reviews

I'd really like to know what this site is saying. It's just unfortunate that Click and retro games are most popular in a country whose language I cannot even vaguely understand.

Also, where's everything moved to on the Update Journal page? It's rather weird writing this out in a non-monotype font.

Miscellaneous Great Things

I know that this is a detestable Youtube-em-up post, but I promise to you that every one of these videos is well worth watching. I've found the service invaluable for reliving old TV programmes that I thought had gone forever (or at least until I got back home and opened the chest of old videos behind the television).

Richard O'Brien in D&D - This was easily the best part of the otherwise absymal Dungeons and Dragons film. Introduce a thief character, make him run a guild Maze (in which lies a Crystal... I'm sure you can tell where this is going) and cast Richard O'Brien to play him. As you can tell from the rest of the scene, unfortunately it's also the only remotely good decision that the filmmakers made, but it was truly an inspired idea.

Punt and Dennis - Crystal Maze - Continuing the same theme, this is a pair of British comedians' take on The Crystal Maze and the sometimes distressing stupidity of its participants (and I hadn't previously realized that those two ever had a TV programme).

Within These Walls - It'll Be Alright on the Night is an out-take clip show. However, it is a clip show with the unique distinction of actually being funny. Perhaps this is due to the contrast between the videos themselves and the presenter, Denis Norden, who is quite possibly the most unfunny man who ever lived (equal to Richard Whiteley without the charm). This is a recording of one of my favourite sections from it ever, where an announcer is interrupted by the wrong clip entirely.

Vic and Bob - Masterchef - Bob Mortimer and Vic Reeves (or Jim Moir or whatever his name is) have a fairly unique form of parody. There's exaggeration, there's exaggeration to the point of absurdity, there's exaggeration to the point of unrecognisability, and then, at the other end of the scale, there is this pair. I find that only the start is really worth watching, but it has to be the most terrifying version of Loyd Grossman ever.

Vic and Bob - Carry On Camping - As posted by a week or so ago. You won't get this unless you've experienced (I think 'enjoyed' is stretching the term a little) the Carry On films, but it manages to sum the whole series up in about a minute. Of particular note is the signature "WAK WAK WAK", which I remember being subtitled simply as "Laughs like Sid James".

A game that looks awfully familiar - This came as a bit of a surprise, as this early in its release I was just expecting to find the normal amount of reviews in Czechoslovakian that I can't read. If I have to critique it a bit, I'd like to mention that the maker of this video obviously isn't using the two-button firing mode, which allows you much better and faster control, but people insist on turning it off.

Yes, quite, but I don't have a project to keep me busy at the moment.

Dreams

That is the image that I saw in a dream a couple of nights ago. I remember being quite disturbed and upset when I woke up, but I can't remember anything else that happened or what it might mean. Still, if something significant happens involving planes and the name "Harry" in the next couple of weeks, you can check back here, see that I prophesied it and recognize me as the new Messiah, etc, etc. Any interpretations?

I also had another dream the same night involving my brother Richard discovering a series of catacombs that were built by the Knights Templar under the greenhouse in my back garden, but I've dismissed this one as being clearly insane.

Special Agent

It's out. Download it from the website!

Work

I've realized that I've never really told people about my job since starting it (and the frequency of my journal entries has gone down a lot as well), so as it's lunchtime I thought I'd explain a bit more about what's happening just now.

I'm working with a company that writes content management systems for other companies (online document stores and that kind of thing). Their list of past clients has been pretty impressive, and at the moment, they're putting together a version of their software for Marathon, an oil pipeline company.

What I've been doing is writing a plugin for XMLSpy, an piece of software for writing XML files, so that the program can connect to the company's online service and retrieve, save and check documents. To do this, I've been working on almost completely undocumented code on Visual Studio (an IDE that I'd never used before) in C# (a language that I'd never seen before), but ignoring the obvious difficulties I've been enjoying it so far.

My daily routine mostly consists of going into JIRA, a bug-tracking system that the company uses, and looking through a list of current issues, suggestions for new features, and so on, then selecting one that I like the look of and starting work on it. Once an issue's been dealt with, it's marked as fixed and I move on. Periodically, a test is done of the plugin and the fixed issues are either marked as confirmed fixed or still not working, and the whole cycle goes on.

In fact, I've been so impressed by this system (and because I'm undeniably broken in the head) that I've developed a strange compulsion to write my own basic copycat version of it for my next project - it would have come in handy for the testing of Special Agent last week (it'll be released this weekend, by the way). I think other people in the Click community will find it pretty useful as well, as otherwise releasing a game is a process of putting it out and continually updating it when people suddenly find all the catastrophic bugs that you've missed.

Two things

The first thing - I have released a test version of Special Agent. This is mostly so I can get the community to report on any outstanding bugs in it before I release it to the general Internet in a week (though you can download it without an account). I didn't think I'd get fed up of the project quite this quickly, but it's only the site to do now before it's genuinely complete.

The second thing - My brother sent me a link to Blind Guardian's latest video, "Another Stranger Me" (here's the low quality one on Youtube) and I think that Hansi Kürsch is beginning to look worryingly like Jack Black.

I kick arse for the Lord!

You know, I don't post purely to link to a Youtube video often, but I think that this one deserves special mention - it's the kung fu priest scene from Braindead. I should point out to anyone wary of clicking on that link (as so you should be) that even though it is from one of the most traumatic films I've ever seen, there's nothing in it more violent than, say, the Black Knight scene from Holy Grail.

The hilarity of his lines and zombie-fighting action is only heightened by his incredible resemblance to Father Ted. A shame that the scene ends with one of the most disappointingly quick killings-off of a character in cinema history.

Casin0 R0yale 7

Whitney's family and I went to see the new James Bond film a couple of days ago. I'd been fascinated by how different the film looked from any other one before it - from the previews, it felt like a revival of a series that had been gone for decades rather than just four years.

It's obvious that the people who made this film viewed Die Another Day as a mistake. To be fair to it, that film was just ridiculous, with its invisible vehicles, ice palace, and slicing off bits of the continent with a satellite. They've taken a more realistic approach for this one, and while it takes some getting used to, it tends to work.

It isn't actually as different as the preview implies, as the spirit of it is still very much alive. The theme song is much better than the dire effort last time around, featuring a vocalist I hadn't heard of before who sounds decidedly like Roy Khan in places. For the first half hour, it's pretty much a normal James Bond film. It opens with a pre-credits chase through an African construction site against a villain who seems to think he's from the Matrix, with his constant wall-running action (down a lift shaft at one point), and quickly progresses on to an airport scene involving cutting a bus in half with a fuel tanker. The conclusion to this scene is hilarious, and provoked a round of applause from the audience I was with.

But it's a lot darker, somehow. I'm well aware that that term has been overused significantly recently, but it's the only way to describe it - the fighting is more realistically dirty, and after the quick start, it's a lot more tense in many places rather than relying on the traditional action-plot progression-action cycle of the other films. Most surprisingly, James Bond isn't portrayed as anywhere near as perfect and superhuman as in the other films - he makes mistakes, hurts himself, though still manages to be a rather self-satisfied smeghead in between.

Despite the quite misleading trailers, it still feels like a part of the series (with a subtle undo of Die Another Day). Just un-maddened a bit.

Game, Lighthouse, Star Wars

There are two projects for this week. The first is to finish "Special Agent", which is unique in the way that I've got fed up of it before the year I started it has even passed - my normal development cycle is to start something at the beginning of summer and finish it at about Easter. However, the game only needs a couple of things done to it now before it's released. If I had to put a date on it I'd say Saturday, December 2nd.

The other main focus of the week is far more unusual - building a gingerbread lighthouse round at Whitney's friend James'. He's made some very impressive gingerbread structures before, the most notable being a scale model of Notre Dame cathedral. Here's his photo site so you can be amazed yourself. This year it's an island with a cottage and lighthouse, which is just getting to the stage where we're gluing it together with icing. Yesterday I was soldering together the wires for the motor and bulbs which James held them together, with remarkable trust for someone whose previous experience with a soldering iron involves having burnt a classmate right across the palm of the hand while in electronic construction class.

There's something that I discovered on the Internet a while ago but never thought to point out until now, and said I should put it up here after I rediscovered it last night. After remembering about it last night I desperately searched on Google to find it, and eventually came up with the embarrassingly obvious location of dooku.net.

I think the site I found it on a few months ago gave it as an example of how sound can affect the perception of something visual, but I'm not entirely certain of the original purpose of the site, to be honest. It's a video clip from one of the later Star Wars films, set to various musics - click on the rectangle at the bottom to change the soundtrack. Some of them are quite hilarious.

Holiday Week

It's really quite a while since I left St Andrews, and I am still getting emails on my account - it's going to be turned off in December, and I have the choice of setting up an alumnus address before then to add to my ridiculous collection of regularly-checked email accounts (seven at last count, including all personal, academic and work related ones). Most of the ones coming from the St Andrews one are just spam now, but I did get one from Oli's address the other day telling people to have an enjoyable and responsible Raisin Weekend. I laughed quite a lot. Enjoy your Monday off - if you're killed during it this year make sure to let me know.

I've also got a slightly less dangerous holiday this week, in that it's going to be my first Thanksgiving. Whitney and I have travelled back to California to spend it with her parents, then it's back to work for a month before Christmas.

Heavenly - Virus

The ghastly apparition that you see over on the left there is the cover of Heavenly's recently released album Virus, which I had no idea existed until a few days ago. It looks like a bit of an image change for them, in more ways than one - the new rotationally-symmetrical H/Y logo complete with the Warcraft-Knightmare hybrid font means that they are continuing their remarkable achievement of never keeping the same logo over any consecutive albums.

What I find most interesting about them is that they were a very mediocre band for the first couple of albums, having a feeling close to Gamma Ray about them complete with a vocalist who was trying to sound like Kai Hansen and just sounded like nails on a blackboard. Then, after a two-year break, they came out of nowhere again and released what I think is the best album in my collection, Dust to Dust. With a storyline which is essentially about hunting vampires, the song list is mostly made up of seven-minute and above epics. It manages to sound like Dream Theater without the pretentious bits, keeping an epic operatic sound all the way through to the Castlevania-inspired finish. It even has a power metal ballad that isn't actually terrible.

Of course, they won't appeal to everyone - the most obvious problem being their almost comical disregard for emphasis, syllabary or any kind of pronounciation. According to Piet Sielck, the reason most European bands write in English rather than their own is because the number of different ways to phrase sentences in English is very high, and you can get away with stretching the syllables a lot more than you can in languages like German or Spanish - but this really is pushing it a bit. As an example, take this sample from the beginning of "Keepers of the Earth". The lyrics are under the cut if you're unable to decipher them.

Can you believe me
if I tell you the truth
I live eternally
Death is just for you
Power and glory
Are invading your thoughts
Meanwhile misery
Is killing too fast
As you can probably guess I'm rather excited about this next release, but I've looked on Amazon and strangely it seems that America gets the Japanese import version but not the European one...

Twenty-two

First of all, as I make sure to write on this day of the year, happy birthday to . And also Glenn Barry of Kamelot. And while I'm at it, half my year at school who had birthdays from the 10th to 20th of November.

Whitney has excelled herself - after opening two packs of biscuits last night, I woke up in the morning to find a hand-cut-out "Happy birthday" banner pinned up across the bedroom corridor, and a number of other presents. These included two jars of Loyd Grossman korma sauce (which is considerably more pleasant than his voice) and a large box of Fox biscuits.

Her parents have given me a year-long subscription to the UK Retro Gamer magazine, to help stop me missing Britain quite so much. The best bit about it is that the issue I got this morning had a section on independent freeware games, where a number of creations from the Click community were featured - including Noitu Love, Within a Deep Forest and Lyle in Cube Sector. (I wasn't.)

But the best of the lot is the little card that arrived in the post this morning. "Permanent Resident Card: The person identified by this card is authorized to work and reside in the U.S." I don't look too happy in the photo, which is rather fitting for the months of turmoil and disaster that I was going through while trying to get it. I'm off to Social Security tomorrow to get myself a number and be plotted into the system forever.

Oh, and there's also the small matter of the $5,000 cheque that the health insurance people are giving back to us because I got a job faster than we thought. That should come in useful.

Almost-birthday

At about three in the afternoon, I suddenly remembered that it was my birthday tomorrow. It is already in Britain, which probably makes me 22. My birthday posts seem to have a history of being confused and uninteresting, being largely baffled at how I have managed to increment my age and still make it out alive. This year is really no different.

Whitney has excitedly insisted that I open her presents tonight because it's really the 15th where I was born. It feels like cheating somehow to me, but I have agreed to open two of them - she's got me a pack of mini blackcurrant Jammie Dodgers and a tube of chocolate digestives, which I had been craving since I left Britain. She's undoubtedly the best wife I've ever had.

First week of work

As you can tell from the day of the week, I've finished my first week of work. It's not a standard nine-to-five job at all - the company founder usually gets in at about 10:30 and is followed an hour or so later by everyone else, then people tend to stay until the day's work is done, whenever that is. It's a very Jack Cole lab-style attitude to working, and I like the relaxed atmosphere of it.

My first task has been to bring a couple of plugins for an XML editor up to date, and so far it's proving to be a task almost as impossible as the Logic practicals - at the moment I have them working separately but not together, and no one seems to have any idea what's wrong with them at all.

There's this odd programme on TV just now called "To catch a predator". The premise is that people pose as young teenage girls online, and set up meetings with paedophiles at some undisclosed location. They turn up thinking that they're meeting with the girl they've been talking with online, who is played by an eighteen-year-old actress. After letting the situation run a while, the presenter then jumps out of the bushes and reveals that it's a TV show, making it strangely reminiscent of Beadle's About. A short interview is conducted with the squirming predator, and they then allow them to leave, where they are immediately battered by the police.

I can't really find the words to explain it any more, so have a look at Wikipedia.

First day of real life?

Today was the first day of having a paid job in America, and indeed the first one since leaving university. My first day at - wait for it - WRYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYcan (ref. , who I have no doubt will count the "Y"s) consisted of installing a heap of software on the laptop that I'll be using.

It was meant to be more than that, but Eclipse provided the sticking point in the middle because I had forgotten how awkward it was to set up. It took three of us gathered round the computer to work out what it meant by helpful messages like "Cannot find framework" and "An error has occurred. I won't say what it is. Memorize this handy twelve-digit number, go to the log files and work it out for yourself."

One thing I noticed about the office is that on the fridge, there's a large warning sign showing a red X across some toddlers crawling into a left-open fridge door. Someone has stuck a Post-it note to it saying "Do not use the office fridge to store children." I think I'm going to like it there.

The journey is an hour on the Boston subway system either way, which feels like a lot but will be something I get used to. I'm not sure why I'm quite so exhausted at the moment, as the day consisted of pretty much what I do every day anyway.

I'm American

I took Whitney to have her blood drawn today. She nearly fainted survived it remarkably well despite her phobia of needles.

But anyway, look at this.

Receipt Number: msc-dadedadeda
Application Type: I485, Application to Register Permanent Residence or to Adjust Status

Current Status:

This case has been approved. On November 2, 2006, an approval notice was mailed. If 30 days have passed and you have not received this notice, you may wish to verify or update your address. To update your address, please speak to an Immigration Information Officer during business hours.

That was quick, considering I didn't even know that I'd applied for that yet. Usually it takes six to eight months for things like this to squeeze its way through the USCIS system, but someone must have hit an "approve" button early by mistake. So it looks like I don't need to bother with the hassle of the interim work permit after all, because I've now been made American semi-permanently.

As great as this news is, I have a suspicion that we're going to find some sort of disastrous drawback soon, just because anything that involves the USCIS inevitably does.

My Contacts

I've just realized how out of date my contacts list is. Since moving around from AIM to MSN four years ago then getting Trillian to unify all my contact lists into one gelatinous heap, I've never really got around to cleaning it out. As a result I currently have three hundred and thirty-one names across various groups on my list, and very little idea who most of them are meant to be.

Fortunately I have tried to organize people by what community I know them from over time, so the people listed in the University/CS, Daily Click and ZZT groups are easy enough to guess (if their username happens to match the one I know them normally by - I didn't have Trillian for much of this time and so didn't have the facility to battle people's constantly changing usernames). The main problem lies in two groups - "MSN" (61 entries) and "Buddies" (108 entries), virtually none of which mean anything to me.

Recently I've noticed people I used to know coming online again with their old accounts - this is very welcome. But conversely, there are also entries on my list that have never been online in the past two years. I recognize quite a lot of these names as ex-accounts of people from the Academy, back when we thought it was clever to have usernames like "m3t4lm1l1t1a" and "ScotchPie666".

But I'm at a loss to imagine where all the others came from. Who, for example, is "birthofasandwich"? When was the last time I talked to "bangprogrammer" or his exciting new sequel "bangprogrammer2"? Why would I ever have added anyone who thinks that "goodcharlotterawk_3"? Or that had the eyesore of a display name "- Җ [ š ъŗǻńđēŗ] Җ - [♫ דѓдתсє ♫ ] - [├┬┴┬┴┬┴┬┴┤]"?

It needs some serious cleaning out.

In the streets on Halloween

Halloween's a very big event here. At home when I was younger we would dück for apples and try to eat Jammie Dodgers suspended from the kitchen pulley, and that was about it. But here in Brookline, the television, supermarket and local area have been full of nothing else for days. Although to be fair, in Scotland we have to put up with knife-wielding demonic children all the year round rather than just for one night of the year, so perhaps this balances it out a bit.

Not a whole lot went on in our building, though. To satiate the hordes we stuck two paper pumpkins on the door and bought an $8 bag of assorted sweet packets to hand out, but only one group came around collecting money for Unicef and we got rid of about five packs. Our inventory is now as follows:

23 bags of Skittles
42 mini-packs of Starburst
16 bags of M&Ms
43 assorted flavours of Tootsie Rolls (whatever these are)
Two lollipops.

Having felt like I had far too many teeth recently I have begun devouring the Skittles after having sworn off them nine years ago, but there's still a long way to go until we get our salad bowl back again.

Spud's Quest

Here's something to do if you're bored - have a go at Spud's Quest. Be warned that it'll probably consume your life, especially if you're old and non-American enough to remember the Dizzy games by Codemasters. (Screenshots are here.)

It's well-made games like this that really make me proud to be part of the Click community. By request in the chatroom, I have written a walkthrough for it to help people when they're stuck, but I'm not going to give you the link to it. Hah.

Kingdom For A Heart

I'm really annoyed by this post. Now, I am not a complete fascist and I can deal with the fact that the poster doesn't know how to use DOS. We're now in the age where there are people who genuinely never had to learn to use a command-line system, and there were even people like that in my computer science year. It's much like I never had to learn how to subroot my piped kernels in UNIX and other things like that - it's largely useless for the average computer user today. It is instead the description of it as a "code" that gets to me. I just can't understand the thought process behind calling it that. Also, ref. an earlier entry.

Another thing that got to me a bit was an argument on a forum I started visiting recently, where I've learned that one particular member is, well, a bit unstable.* He posted a large attention-seeking moanfest, which was replied to by another member who did remarkably well giving him sympathy and a bit of good advice. The original poster then replied with what can only be described as a tidal wave of emo, and the whole thing went on for ages from there.

So even though the second poster's niceness fell on deaf ears, I took the time to private message him and say thank you for trying to get through to him, for tolerating the angst of the board and generally being a decent human being. Nothing unusual about that at all. And he messaged me back. "um, you're welcome??". Git.

Anyway, to the main point of this post (which I really meant to get to earlier) - song covers. You may find it difficult to believe that doing these can affect social standing, respect and indeed entire friendships. If you mess up a section that sounds obvious to someone else, or modify a favourite part "just to make it easier", the results can be surprisingly devastating. It is therefore with some tentativeness that I have put up a tracked version of Sonata Arctica's "Kingdom for a Heart" that I did when I was bored.

There are a couple of warnings that I have to give before you open it. Most obviously, I have cut out the solo. I honestly could not get it to sound right at all, and rather than make it an embarrassment I thought it best to skip it. Second, I've compressed the MP3 to rather poor quality. There are two reasons for this - first to make it a small download, and second so that you can blame any inadequacies on the bitrate instead of me.

Other than that, it was just done entirely by ear to see if I could work out the construction of the song. Sonata Arctica have always had a rather cavalier approach to changing time signatures (when they feel like it), and I've preserved most of those where I could. As a result of doing it, I've also found out some rather good chord progressions that I hadn't tried before, and learning from it is the real point.

Well, let's hope my Friends list hasn't reduced dramatically by tomorrow.

* Unequivocally mental

Look what I have

My dad sent me the location of a pack of Crunchy Nut Corn Flakes by email - he had convinced one of his co-workers to bring over a package for me and leave it at the hotel she was staying at. We picked up the bag this evening, and I now have most of them stuck between my teeth.

Also in the bag were a postal vote registration letter, an unknown birthday present, a wedding card from Germany and a Stephen King novel, which was a bit unexpected.

We had actually gone out into the city to see "The Prestige", but with that being sold out we opted for "Man of the Year" instead. This is an example of a film that is almost entirely unlike what the trailer presents it as - even though it does contain the comedic elements of the preview, there is a very large sort of consipiracy theory that emerges in the middle and builds to a climax, at which point the director just decided to forget it and end the film virtually right there.

The plot is about a comedian that is elected President of the USA, and during the time when it turns into a conspiracy film, about the software bug in the electronic voting system that caused that to happen. This sounds strange, but my biggest problem with the film is the astonishing unlikelihood of the bug that they chose it to be (it was about candidates with double letters in their names being declared the winner alphabetically). Now, I've been reading the Doom Wiki so I've come across some pretty unlikely bugs recently, but this one beats the lot. What's even more impossible is that no one in the film noticed it before it was released. That's quite a major plot hole.

But the pieces where you're seeing Robin Williams' character's TV programme are very entertaining (I'd certainly watch it). It just tends to get a bit dull in the middle where it attempts to have a plot. But (and this is not something you'd expect to find in this film) I think it has the cleverest scare that I've ever witnessed in any film - it has a long build-up, then lets it fade away anti-climactically, then distracts you with another surprise before springing the main shock on you.

But all that's irrelevant, really, because most of the readers of this journal won't be able to see the film in the UK for about the next three years. And I have Crunchy Nut corn flakes, so who cares?

I can't think why I forgot to mention this.

I have an offer from Wrycan.

Thank you.

Extremely Important Message

I have found the "Water Expands When It Freezes" song from Thinkabout Science. It's at the bottom of this page. (I can think of about two people on my entire list who will know what this means or understand the nostalgia associated with it, but I sent it to my mum and she thinks it's brilliant, so there.) If it helps at all, it's got Norman Lovett in it. If that doesn't make you look I don't know what will.

I've been working on yet another quote site, this time for the Clickteam chatroom. Thanks to a bit of help from to get the formatting right, I think it's the first site of mine to look better than hideously ghastly. It isn't finished yet, but ten quotations and the idea are there.

And I was emailed by the founder of Wrycan on Monday, who invited me to the second interview, which basically amounts to going out to lunch together to see if I'm tolerable as a person or not. Things are looking good.

Flat Photos

As I was reminded yesterday by , about a month ago I promised various people on my diverse friends list that I would have photos of the flat that didn't just include the corner of the desk up by tomorrow. It's now several tomorrows past that, but nevertheless, this is the day that I've remembered to do it.


This is the entranceway to the flat. I'd love to tell you it was taken during an earthquake, but it was just me being unsteady with the camera. To the left, where you can't see them, we have two massive cupboards, one of which is packed floor to ceiling with cardboard. The picture on the wall says "David and Whitney", and was cross-stitched by my sister and given to us for the wedding.


The kitchen is on the left, and is about twice the size of the one in Cupar. The fridge is massive, and we even have a dishwasher. The only drawback is that I don't like electric ovens, as you have to plan to cook something about twenty minutes ahead so the hobs have time to heat up. We're going to add a microwave eventually, when our $100 Best Buy gift card arrives.


The kitchen doubles as Whitney's work space, because we had a lot of room left over at the end of it. The door to the right slides back, so we can talk to or ignore each other as we please.


My own workspace on the other side takes up two desks. I got that chair by discovering it outside an office in Simmons with the note "Please take" on it, and wheeled it the three miles back to the flat. It's perfectly functional even though it only has one arm with a doodle of a face on it. Also in this picture is our dining table, which we haven't really been using much recently.


Turning around, you can see just how large our living room is, as there's room for an entire seating area on the other side.


We thought we were never going to be able to fill this room, but a couple of big sofas took care of that.


The corridor to the bedroom and bathroom leads off this front room. We can't open the door on the right. Also pictured is the Mystery Switch on the right wall - it has three settings, top, middle and bottom, and no one knows what it's meant to do.


And through the corridor on the left is our bedroom. You may notice a gaping omission in the dresser - this is due to IKEA's uselessness. When we first ordered it we had the outside but the wrong drawer parts, then they sent us the drawer sides only, then the rest of the drawers but missed out that one. The clock on the wall is also interesting - you might be able to tell from the reduced image that it's in Hebrew. I found it while putting out the cardboard one night, as someone had just put it out for rubbish collection even though it still worked perfectly. To my great disappointment, it does not run anti-clockwise.

I'm a little portable radiator

I knew something was wrong with me last night. I had been moping around in a dressing gown all day and had been unable to get excited about anything at all, even really amazing things like getting MD5 checks on a PHP page working. It was most obvious when I decided I wanted to go to bed early, and couldn't stop shivering no matter how many covers I piled up around me. To distract myself, I played a bit of The Fool's Errand (which has been trying to get me to play for ages) and then went to sleep with some difficulty.

I woke up at 2am with a dry throat, and just for a change, I was burning up all over. Lying in a half-asleep daze for a while, I had a sickmare involving The Fool's Errand, some sort of Japanese RPG-type scenario involving Kim Jong Il heating up the world, being rushed to hospital, and watching a raven eat something on the windowsill. I considered going through to the kitchen and rubbing an ice cube on my face just to see if it would actually sizzle, but decided that splashing myself with cold water would probably be enough.

Having done that, I drank another full glass of water to try and get some sort of cooling working again, and stumbled back through to the bedroom to find some cold medicine as my nose was blocked. I came back and took the pill, then turned to the sink and violently and noisily vomited my four cheese pizza into it.

(Warning: The previous paragraph contains disturbing imagery and should not be read under any circumstances.)

Having woken Whitney up, I went back to bed and boiled for a while before moving to the chair by the window, and eventually the sofa in the living room, where I eventually got to sleep. When I opened my eyes again I thought that it was about seven in the morning, but then Whitney came through and told me that it was already noon.

I'm feeling a bit better now, but overall it wasn't one of my better nights.

The interview

The interview for the java development position was today, and I think it went quite well. The interviewers seemed reasonably pleased with the presentation on the SSSSS that I gave, along with being far more interested than I had expected in the other areas that I had mentioned on my site. (In fact, one of the coders had an old song of mine on his desktop and had been playing Treasure Tower that morning.) Incidentally - hello to you all if you're reading this.

There was a bit in the middle where I sort of froze up when asked about the methods that I'd learned in Software Engineering, because I could remember hardly any of them, so I'll have to go back and look them up. Otherwise I'm fairly confident. After all, the woman I had been exchanging emails with also went to St Andrews, and that's got to count for something.

I was vastly pleased this evening to discover that I am fully one inch taller than Kai Hansen. Therefore, short people are fantastic.

Real life

I just realised that I completely forgot to mention the progress of my getting a job here. I haven't mentioned anything about real life because it's been pretty much stationary, but a few days ago I got an invitation to an interview with Wrycan, a company that consults people about XML and builds software or databases for them. I'm going for the position of entry level Java programmer, which sounds pretty much ideal for my current situation.

The interview process is rather different from what I had to go through with the RGU, as this time I have to give a 10-15 minute presentation on a "subject of technical nature" to four or five people. I have naturally decided to present the SSSSS (Solitaire Specification, Simulation and Solution System) because it's my biggest "real" software project to date, and includes the use of both Java and XML.

I've been putting off actually doing anything to the existing presentation, but when I think about it the one I did at the end of fourth year doesn't seem appropriate somehow. It explains the decisions I made while working on the project and how it was eventually implemented, but it was deliberately made to avoid mentioning any code at all. And I'm not sure if putting heaps of Java up on the screen and cutting out all the funny bits will just come across as soulless rather than appropriately formal.

Rise from your grave!

As I predicted, my upload of the Altered Beast tribute "Rise From Your Grave" at FA has proved far more popular than any of my "real" music, and has earned 52 views and 3 favourites in just over 12 hours. Granted, it's a bit of a step down from the thousand or so regular downloaders that I used to have, but it's a start. It proves that if you want to get noticed, the best way is to do something stupid.

Also: Head inflating to dangerous proportions!

Eurometal Challenge

Right, Whitney's doing this meme, so I'm going to as well - largely because no one will be able to answer any of them at all.* Here is the gist of it:

Step 1: Put your MP3 (or M4A if you're 1337) player on random.
Step 2: Post lyrics for the first 25 songs that play, no matter how embarrassing the song. Unless it was written by Lisa Lougheed.
Step 3: Post and let everyone you know guess what song and artist the lines come from.
Step 4: Strike out the songs when someone guesses correctly.

- 1 -

In all your fantasies
You always knew
That man and mystery
Were both in you

Phantom of the Opera - . My particular version was done by Nightwish.

- 2 -

Evil Messiah - the world's set on fire
He promised salvation but sent you to hell
Almighty liar - satanic desire
A heart full of anger for no one to see

- 3 -

There's glory in the distance
For the ones that pay the price
Ignorance creates a subtle mind

- 4 -

On the twenty-third day of the month of September
in an early year of a decade not too long before our own,
the human race suddenly encountered a deadly
threat to its very existence.

Overture to Little Shop of Horrors -

- 5 -

I gave you my time
I gave you my whole life
I gave you my love, every dime
They told me it was a crime

- 6 -

Weiter, weiter ins Verderben
Wir müssen leben bis wir sterben
Der Mensch gehört nicht in die Luft
So der Herr im Himmel ruft

That other song by Rammstein that Pooka kept listening to -

- 7 -

And now all the houses
Are rare antiquities.
American tourists flock to see the _________

- 8 -

Here I am, the _________
A lost fallen angel helping mankind where I can
My memories are there to save your world
For you I'm just the _________

- 9 -

Father can you hear me, did you talk to mother earth
What did they say, what did they see, now is time for your rebirth
Open up the silent center of your mind,
I now want to know the future of your kind

- 10 -

After the storm there's a calm
Through the clouds shines a ray of the sun
I am carried from all of my harm
There is no-one that I can't outrun

- 11 -

Deception of fame, vengeance of war, lives torn apart
Losing oneself, spiraling down, feeling the walls closing in
A journey to find
The answers inside
Our illusive mind

- 12 -

It's a miracle we need
Let our hearts unite, so our voices shake the earth
Let us walk away together from the never ending rain
'Til the sun will shine for all of us again

- 13 -

Where's the promised savior, the one who'll save the earth
Perhaps he'll come to bury us, perhaps it'll be too late
Who are they, who are the phantoms, will they end our lives
Maybe they're just you and me, open up your eyes

- 14 -

When I'm looking down on you I see
A wasted land, and the reason is humanity
I must gain control

- 15 -

Higher - It's what I expect from my life
It's like a wire that holds me back down to the ground
Oh I hear you say, "That's the way of the world"
No, hear what I say "I want to do so much in my way"

- 16 -

Things that you started
Are still undone
While you are wasting you precious life
The sleepless nights
Won't leave you be
You're going astray

- 17 -

Never will forgive you, never leave you
You know that if you live like, you will die like
How can I erase your pain and aid you
When Death wants to kiss you and you want kiss Him back...

- 18 -

I watch the children pray, while god just turns away
Out in the ruins they seek shelter
These streets were once my home
But those golden days are gone
Now I'm fighting to survive

- 19 -

Soothing but yet so violent
In this world within the other world
Moonlight in visions heaven sent
I see demon eyes and wings unfurled

- 20 -

I wrote you,
And told you,
You were the biggest fish out here,
You should have never gone to Hollywood.

- 21 -

I'm in this world to be alive
And I can give all they'll never find.
Sometimes I dream to cross the freedom way
"So now you are powerful" - Master guide me
[Ear shattering scream]

- 22 -

What I saw beyond the gate
Eternal darkness - our fate
In everlasting night
Deserted and destroyed
An empire without light

- 23 -

There's no way to stop the ancient ghost that is rising from his grave
Spilling a drop of hatred from his bowl
He senses the fear and misery, searching for fresh blood
Feeling hunger growing in his dark soul

Seeds of Sorrow by Ksahjsalkjdsaoif -

- 24 -

Dark night overwhelming bright light, see the demons fly
Can't trust your senses fear you'll have to die
Super mighty shadows casting amplitudes to ears
Sounds you've never heard that take you high

- 25 -

To this day I guess I'll never know
Just why they let me go
But I'll never go dancing no more
'Til I dance with the dead

* Apart from RaphX and Quadralien

Comment on my journal you bunch of slackers

I had imagined that the American version of Iron Chef (if you don't know what it is, see the summary from a year ago) wouldn't be anywhere near as good as the Japanese one - they have a reputation for messing up Japanese remakes. But it's nice to see that the spirit has remained, with the host being introduced as he comes into the studio doing backflips and somersaults for about fifty yards. And the contest is always started by him bellowing something I can't understand in Japanese and looking like he's about to fight off Godzilla.

It got me thinking about what a British version would be like, but I can't imagine the invincible men of culinary skills being Anthony Worrall-Thompson, Ainsley Harriot, Nigella Lawson and Jamie Oliver. Although Gordon Ramsay would be disappointingly appropriate.

Actually I've been missing British TV a surprising amount despite hardly ever watching it (especially now that Top Gear has been delayed indefinitely) and have taken to watching BBC America occasionally for comfort. Whose Line Is It Anyway, which I hadn't actually seen before, is on most nights. It includes Colin Mochrie, which is quite surreal when pretty much all I've seen of him before is him battling a plastic Jesus with space leprechauns and the like.

And finally, I downloaded The Legend of Fong Sai Yuk the other week. It was the first properly mad martial arts film that I ever saw. Unfortunately it's turned out that the version I have has been dubbed into a slightly different East Asian language from the one it was originally recorded in, without subtitles, so it makes even less sense to me than it ever did before.

I'm annoyed!

Do you remember that ZZT game I mentioned about a month ago? Well, there's a screenshot of it over on the left if you don't. After a month or so of lounging around in the pending uploads list of Z2 (which isn't an unusually long waiting time), something bizarre has happened.

I checked the list again today to find that the game had been overwritten with a modified version. This fake version of the file replaces most of the second half of the game with blank corridor-type boards (named "Third Floor" and "Free Will") and a different ending - it also changes the title screen to just read "Castle ZZT". This is part of why I wanted this screenshot here again - I wanted to verify that I didn't just forget to put the word "of" in.

And my name has been left on it. The credit on the title screen is intact, and the text file detailing the game and author has remained untouched. I'm not sure who was trying to do what, but it's very strange.

I've already emailed the admin that seems most normal to ask what's going on. Grr.

Special Agent: Demo released

My latest game has finally been named "Special Agent" after I was completely unable to think of a better title for it. It's a platformer in the style of Apogee's "Secret Agent" from 1991, with a set of three objectives per game level. The controls aren't standard Click setup this time: S is to jump/confirm, TAB to bring up the menu/cancel, and A and D fire.

You play as Special Agent Robert, whose latest assignment is to reach one of the remote islands owned by the SDDS (the Society for the Development of Diabolical Schemes) and to sabotage their buildings. This will prevent them from being able to carry out their world-threatening plans, such as flooding the crisp market with Prawn Cocktail flavour, and giving Jeremy Beadle another daytime TV programme.

There are two game modes - Graded and Time Attack. In Graded mode, you are scored on how completely you finish every mission, with regard to enemies destroyed, items collected, and so on. In Time Attack (which opens after you've finished a level in Graded mode) only the time you take to reach the exit matters.

In this demo, three stages are available - the tutorial and two full levels. You'll be able to save the world from a virus to remove all Click games from the Internet, and a spate of demo timeouts. The online high score table also works for the two game modes on all levels.

The game's site is at http://wired.st-and.ac.uk/~wong/agent/. I'd really like to hear what you think of it so far.

I am all of me

So, to further my entirely self-inflicted multiple personality disorder, I have started an account at FurAffinity so that I can post my music. (By the way, if this comes as a genuine surprise to you, you can get up and walk around the room now. Done that? Good.) I have decided that the reason that I've been lacking in inspiration recently and coming up with pretentious titles like "Lazarus" and "Memoria" that never go anywhere is that there's nowhere to post music any more - all the sites that I used to visit are slowly going offline, and Modplug is still just a forum with the rest of the site sunk somewhere at the bottom of the Pacific.

Hopefully this will get me some sort of audience back. I have already been refreshing the Message list obsessively and checking for new views, comments, watches and posts. I promise you, this thing's even more addictive than Facebook. I've put a couple of old songs up on there just now, and will be submitting the rest gradually, eventually getting to new material. The other reason that I feel a sudden need for a regular community is that I really miss doing this graph.

There's also the issue of pizza to talk about. A couple of friends that Whitney had met at Simmons were round yesterday, and we ordered in pizza from a place down the road called Pizzanini. Don't let the worst website in the universe fool you - I think that Empire pizza has finally been surpassed. Not that that was getting very difficult anyway - I knew it was a bad idea for them to start putting soap in them. And I've heard that they're closing soon. How tragic.

Spam

Dear IT Services,

If the daily flow of spam to my university inbox does not cease I will fly back to Scotland and insert the entire server up Julian Crowe's backside.

Lots of love
DXN

I'm bored.

My First Drug Experience

That got your attention, didn't it. I think I may be forced to downgrade the journey where I was unexpectedly given a business class ticket to only the second-best flight of my life, because for the one yesterday night, I was only conscious for about half an hour of it. That's almost as good as not having to take a flight at all.

I had been dreading taking the night flight back (charmingly called "Red-eye" in America) because I didn't sleep at all during it, and the following day was full of moving furniture about and getting lost in the dark. Whitney had told me before I left on this journey that she had left a couple of sleeping pills in the house. I have always been slightly scared of things that mess with the mind (hence my continued teetotal status) but this time, seeing no other option, I asked Malcolm if he knew where they were.

What I was given was a significant amount of prescription temazepam, which I've just found out is used in the treatment of insomnia and has potential hypnotic/hallucinogenic effects, though I didn't realize that at the time. (Oddly, on the packet it mentioned that it "may cause drowsiness".) I was rather apprehensive at the idea of taking someone else's prescription medicine, but having decided that the worst it could do was kill me and that this was still marginally better than being awake on a night flight for six hours, I decided to take it.

After getting on the plane and squeezing in to my middle seat, I waited until the refreshments were handed out before swallowing the small yellow capsule with water. I then put on my sleeping mask and noise-cancelling headphones, slumped down in the chair and tried to get to sleep. I didn't feel any different at first, and did the normal thing when trying to sleep on an aircraft - shift to a position that feels perfectly comfortable, lie there for about thirty seconds until a pain emerges from leaning against the seat side or table, and repeat the process until the end of the flight. I was aware that I had dozed off, and was more dimly aware that the captain was making an announcement, which I assumed was about the turbulence that had woken me up - I thought that if I had slept for an hour that would at least be some progress. Then I heard the word "landing".

I opened my eyes and didn't see anything unusual. That was because I still had the mask on. Taking it off, I leaned up to the nearest air-hostess and asked where we were.

"On a plane," she answered, taking the question a bit too literally. She then went on to confirm that we were indeed about to land in Boston, putting me in a very good mood for the rest of the morning. A short series of crowded train rides later and I was home. Then I went to bed and slept some more.

It's only now that I'm beginning to feel some of the side effects. The most significant of them is that I seem to have forgotten where I live. When I left Whitney at the bus stop I came into the building on the third floor, went down to what I thought was the first floor to get the laundry and found myself on the second. Then I descended the stairs, picked up the right clothing, went up a flight of stairs to our flat, lost count and found myself in the lobby. After eventually finding our flat, I got the next load, turned the wrong way out of the door, took the wrong stairs and discovered that the laundry room had disappeared entirely.

This is not a good frame of mind to be in when I'm supposed to be putting together a spreadsheet for a lawyer to keep track of positively obscene sums of money. I have to go now because the sofas have sprouted legs and are trying to eat me.

The perfect system to maintain mankind

It has struck me that I should really be tagging all these entries to do with immigration in case anyone else on my friends list has to go through the same thing in years to come, so that people have some idea of what to expect from the immigration services. But I think that the whole process would just seem so ghastly that if I highlighted the steps it would put everyone off trying to get into America ever again. This is the latest step in the sequence.

I woke up at 5am (which I am still thinking of as 8am because of the time difference) and dragged myself out of bed shortly later so that I would have time to prepare myself for the coming appointment. At about 7:40, Malcolm and I arrived at a building named the Application Support Center, which sounds like part of a Microsoft help file. There was already a queue outside - nowhere near as bad as the one at the Embassy, but it still seemed like we were going to have to wait a while. Surprisingly the place opened at exactly 8am and we were given a form to fill out as we sat and waited for my number to be called.

There's another surprise here. The people doing this part of the immigration process were really quite efficient. The form was admittedly quite difficult to fill out because there were questions about hair and eye colour (and Malcolm is colourblind as well so he couldn't help). I only just about had enough time to finish filling it out before I was called up, showed my passport and appointment letter and was asked to hold out my hands for examination. After confirming that they looked like hands, I was sent upstairs to Level 2, with a slightly more challenging layout and the addition of purple monsters.

Actually, what was up there was another waiting area, with a TV showing Mr Bean for entertainment as the queue waited. Not that I had to wait long - they were still keeping up, and there were only three people in front of me before I was called over to a computer wired up to a large scary-looking machine.

The fingerprinting was not as pointless as I had first thought. This time, my prints were taken in groups as well as individually, with full rolls of each of my fingers being taken. The box "Fingerprints and biometrics" had been ticked on my form by the receptionist, and evidently "Biometrics" meant "Having my photo taken". That was all that was needed, and there was even a feedback form that I was given to tell them how efficient I thought they were. So I am now part of the system forever.

I must have been in and out of the place in half an hour, which is a huge improvement from any other step in this far too long and torturous process.

Now the only thing worrying me - and this might sound a bit strange - is Richard Hammond. It isn't as bad as when I found out about Richard Whiteley last year, but it's not far off... with many British television presenters you tend to get the feeling you know them far more than you really do after listening to them for a number of years. The response from the entirety of Britain has been amazing, and the people at the Final Gear forums are getting together a fund for a custom crash helmet to be made as a get-well-soon gift.

If the protestors succeed in putting pressure on to cancel the programme because of this, I may have to be a bit annoyed.

Shakes on a Plane

There have been a lot of not entirely happy posts on my Friends page recently. I myself have been complaining about Netgear routers, blocked sinks, and not having a job. But none of that matters now, because on those days I did not have to get up at three o'clock in the morning to travel to California.

I went into something resembling sleep at 7pm the previous night so that I would be ready for it, but I still felt insane when I got up that early. The day started off well enough, when in an attempt to get some entertainment I typed "Shooting Stars" into Youtube on a whim and was able to relive moments like Mark Lamarr having stuffed animals of varying sizes thrown at him, Vic and Bob fighting with anvils, frying pans, irons, buckets and various other heavy utensils, and George Dawes singing about baked potatoes and peanuts.

But the time came to leave, and I trundled my suitcase down the road towards the T station. As I was getting the first train of the day, I thought that I would be the only one on it, but it was pretty packed - especially towards the later stages, as I had to change trains twice. The third was actually a sort of underground/bus hybrid that went through a fairly impressive tunnel for the first half of the journey, then reverted to traditional roads just before reaching the airport. Although we nearly didn't get there - a worrying buzzing noise was being emitted from one of the wheels, and the driver stopped the engine and got out to look at something unseen on the roof at one point.

Having had, in total, a bowl of Cheerios and a slice of pita bread with cheese the previous day, I got myself a breakfast of pancakes at the airport, but they turned out to be fairly ghastly. I don't think I was ready for maple syrup at before seven.

I was flying with JetBlue, which are rather like the American equivalent of EasyJet, but with rather more comfortable planes. I spent the time reading Douglas Adams novels and playing emulated DOS games on Whitney's Mac, but the flight was the most turbulent I have ever been on. Massive shakes came in about twenty minute bursts every hour or so, and even with the pilot's friendly reassurance I was rather worried about the wings staying on, particularly as we descended into Oakland airport. At least my seat neighbour was decent - we had a discussion about Civ amongst other things, and I think he qualifies as the first remotely interesting person I have ever sat next to on a flight.

All this, by the way, is so that I can go to a small office tomorrow and have my fingerprints taken. I don't know why they felt the need to have my appointment at 8am on a Saturday morning, neither why I had to come all the way here to do it, because the US immigration people have somehow forgotten about the invention of the Internet.

One last thing - I was immensely surprised to see Dave Gorman appear on "The Daily Show" on the plane. I just remembered about him last week and downloaded all his lecture/programmes, not thinking that he was still doing anything anywhere. I'll have to investigate it further.

Six o'clock. Goodnight, I'm going to bed.

The Internet can be good for something.

This thread has caused me far more hilarity than anything that I can remember in recent weeks.

Boredom

I can't help but feel my posts used to be more diverse before the move to Boston. Now it seems that I'm writing about either things I've discovered on the Internet, or things I'm making to put on the Internet. I haven't written a post that was meant to be entertaining for weeks.

But getting back to those musical curiosities I mentioned a while ago, I was thinking last night that Stratovarius' "Maniac Dance" is probably the only song to contain anything resembling the line "Xanax Remerin Therapy Buspiron". It really shows that the album was written after the incredible string of trouble the band went through a couple of years ago, as most of the songs are about how their songwriter felt at the time (with a seven-minute song in the middle about Hitler for some reason). It couldn't be any stranger if they'd written the booklet in Japanese and made the CD out of rhubarb.

I have also been lacking any kind of inspiration for my music recently. I have, counting offhand, around six songs that are half finished and going nowhere or just blurring into each other in a confused mess. I normally write about events from my life romanticized up a bit, but life itself is lacking inspiration at the moment unless I want to write music with titles like "Bugger Our Sink Is Blocked" and "I Don't Want To Get Up At Four in the Morning Tomorrow and Fly to California". Which aren't really appropriate for the genre that I'm going for.

I'll put photos of the complete flat up soon. It's very nice. We just need to tidy it up a bit.

My desktop's bigger than your desktop

Entirely unexpectedly, my second monitor arrived today. I have to admit I felt a small pang of guilt for the extravagance when I set it up next to my old one, but that was quickly dispelled when I turned it on and realized the number of things that I could use it for. MMF2, in particular, can now run comfortably without the object and layer toolbars squashing the actual frame into a tiny area on one screen. Look at this (it's behind a cut, because it's naturally fairly massive).



That's almost a fifth level done, by the way.

No parking

I think that I've found the maddest page on the entire Internet, and that's up against some pretty difficult competition. Unfortunately, it's the one that explains the parking laws in the city where our new flat is situated.

I found out about this insanity when Alex and Tenaya came over to stay this weekend, and had their car ticketed during the night. It was about $30, which is roughly the price of an overnight car park anyway, but we couldn't understand why it would have been against the parking law - we assumed that it was because it was directly outside the entrance to the building during the night. It was only once I looked up the parking laws that I found out the real reason, laid out in these two paragraphs (definitely the highlight of the site):

Daytime parking: Unless posted otherwise, no driver may park a vehicle on the same street in Brookline between the hours of 6:00 AM of one day and 1:00 AM of the following day (Sundays and public holidays excepted) for a period of time longer than two (2) hours.

Overnight Parking: No driver may park on any street in Brookline, or in any Town-owned off-street parking facility, for a period longer than one (1) hour between the hours of 2:00 AM and 6:00 AM on any day of the week unless allowed by the Transportation Board.

So there's some convoluted formula for parking during the day (which isn't really enforced, as their car was outside for most of the time) and you're effectively not allowed to park overnight at all. Generously, the council provide 76 parking spaces in the entire city for guests to use overnight, at a cost of $10 and a waiting list to use them. Anyone else has to either own their own garage or camouflage their cars during the night so that the street sweeper doesn't notice it.

It could be part of a health or anti-pollution drive, because with these rules, I don't know why anyone bothers owning a car here.

Mixed news

There are three items of news here. One is good. One is very good. One is good but actually seems like bad news. For the sake of simplicity I'll do that one first.

A letter arrived at Whitney's parents' house this morning. It was from the US Immigration Something, giving me an appointment to have my biometrics taken (whatever those are) on the 23rd - that's next Saturday. So this is good, because it means that things are going ahead with the work permit and I won't have to become a Civ 4 timewaster by profession. But it's such an inconvenience to get an early morning flight next weekend and work out transport to the airport, and it just seems like being in transit again just when we were beginning to settle down and forget about this whole thing. This is survivable, but I'm not looking forward to it.

Good news. Our sofas are being delivered tomorrow. We were meant to get them yesterday, but the van driver was injured on his round by being squashed flat by a refrigerator and they had to take him to hospital to inflate him again, so he never got round to us. With the addition of the sofas, the large gap at the other side of our living room will be filled, and I will finally be able to post pictures of the flat here that aren't the floor or bits of my desk.

Really, really, extremely good news. But only if you're British. You can now download a few episodes of Bad Influence from the official fansite (I think there are four, spread over all four series of the programme). I've already watched the one that featured Ecco the Dolphin, and not once did they mention that the game would render you unable to sleep for several days after playing. Like I said, it's only truly valuable for the nostalgia if you saw it when it was originally on, but I think it's still interesting to look at what was in the game/technology related news ten years ago - don't miss the bit where the CD-i is featured as the future of home entertainment.

Bah humbug

(Mostly targeted at the Clickteam forums, because we're all supposed to be a bit clever there and no one knows how to spell.)

CIVIV

For a long time, I had no idea whether Civilization IV was any good or not. I hadn't played it much before this week, first because of lack of graphics card, and then because of lack of system32 directory when I installed my new graphics card. For the brief span where it worked, I commented that it did mess with the original rules, but it was so nice about it that you didn't care. But now that I have both a working graphics card and capable computer, Whitney and I accidentally spent about eight hours playing it a couple of days ago, so I think it's fair to say some sort of conclusion has been reached.

Compared to books and films, there are very few games that provoke a sense of actual wonder. If I had to name a couple, I would go for Albion and (though I'm loath to admit it) Halo, just for its storyline. Civ IV definitely deserves to be added to this list, as right from the beginning it sends chills down your spine with the view of the Earth from space and the theme music that sounds like it was taken out of The Lion King.

For anyone unfamiliar with the game, it's about the history of the world. No, don't scroll up yet. You begin with a settler in 4000BC, found a city, select something to build, wait a few turns until it's finished, maybe build another unit or settler, and expand outwards. The whole process takes hours, but because every little goal that you strive for is so small you don't notice, and it quickly sucks your life away so that soon you find yourself in control of a thriving Victorian empire at three in the morning.

It's true that the fourth game makes major changes to the way I'm used to playing (in Civ 2). Virtually all buildings and units are different, with only a few of the ones that are recognisable retaining their old effects. It's like a completely different game rather than an upgrade, and it's to the developers' credit that they've managed to keep the same feeling while making the whole process so radically different.

One of the major things that I felt wrong with Civ 3 was the way that the Settler unit was separated into Settlers (building cities) and Workers (doing anything useful to the land). This has remained. But they have made it far more worthwhile by making the workers able to do a lot more work than irrigate, mine and build roads - now they can build cottages that will eventually grow so that your city can eventually extend past its grid square, pastures, plantations, camps, and so on - each one giving a unique advantage to the surrounding cities.

In fact, most of the additions made in Civ 3 were mad, and the designer fully acknowledges that they were mad in the back of the manual. The health system, which previously saw your workers dying of malaria for crossing some jungle terrain, has been rethought into a new city resource. As well as unhappiness, a city generates sickness with must be combatted with health-improving buildings and improvements.

But where things work surprisingly well is in what's been taken out of the game. Civil disorder, for example, is gone entirely. The concept of happy vs. unhappy citizens is still there, but the only disadvantage of letting unhappiness get out of order is that you get unhappy citizens which refuse to work (which can be quite a handicap, but nowhere near as devastating as civil disorder). The concept of pollution has also been eliminated, with buildings that caused pollution causing sickness instead.

One of the most unexpected bits that works is the way that units have been made far more complex. Actually, the attack/defence has been simplified into just "Strength", but now every unit is awarded extra special abilities depending on the number of combats that it's been in - collecting experience points will allow you to level them up and pick a new ability, like increasing their strength or defence against archery units or something. This means that churning out masses of new units is somehow discouraged in favour of withdrawing from combat and going back to repair your existing good ones, in a very sort of Battle Isle way.

Another overhaul is in the government system. The first game had, I think, five governments. A couple more were added for the later games, such as Fundamentalism, bringing the total to seven or eight. Civ IV has three thousand, one hundred and twenty-five different forms of government. This is because the monolithic government system has been split into "civics", each of which has a small effect on how your civilization works and provides advantages or disadvantages depending on your style of play.

And there's just all sorts of assorted cleverness, like removing the annoying Zone of Control rule, and making food change into production when you build Settlers and Workers rather than sacrificing city population. The best bit is that just like in Soul Calibur 3, the developers have decided to go right back to the start and revive elements of the game in its original form - here it's the music, with an orchestral variation of the original little Adlib MIDI that played on the title screen all those years ago. It's truly amazing.

Castle of ZZT

After the initial surge of enthusiasm, I have to report that I am absolutely sick of the sight of this game.



Therefore, anyone who downloads it at the moment is a beta tester. There may or may not be some catastrophic bugs that prevent you from completing it - if there are, please report them here before I release it to the community and get mocked mercilessly for it.

Castle of ZZT (go on, it's only 54kb)

You might need this too.

The fascination of IMing with Mum

[12:54:41] Mum: Mum say goodbye and hope youa fd
[12:54:54] Mum: are  efy happy in fghe vlagel i ghe lv
[12:55:06] Mum: in tghye flat IO am ag the wfongv agnele

Well, her typing's improving at least.

Two more "additional notes" if you will: After the last entry I was informed by my brother that one of Helloween's live openers is entitled "Deliberately Limited Preliminary Prelude Period in Z". Mad.

And thanks to the power of YouTube I was reminded how hilarious Iron Maiden's video for Holy Smoke was. Featuring Bruce in a field singing merrily about televangelists, while Janick's guitar gradually gets smaller and smaller and Steve basses away while sailing past on the back of a tractor. Also mad, only more so. It's as if they wanted to contrast the anger of the song by making the video as weird as possible.

Notes

I got my sound working eventually by giving up on the front panel. And the speakers have been getting a fair bit of use as I reacquaint myself with the entire collection of music that I've been missing for so long.

I was given a large amount of music by my brother Richard, who looks like he has just stepped out of a tacky romance novel. He wasn't into music for ages, but now regularly phones me up to ask if I've heard about Hansi-Hansen Küstnersielck joining GammaFall or StratoRay or any of the other bands that I got into a number of years ago. Among these was Sonata Arctica's "Ecliptica", their first album.

What was most apparent when listening to it all was that after listening to their latest album, I'd forgotten the songwriting tactic they had early on (go as fast as possible). Most of them are based on a very simple (and I don't know whether I dare say this - pop-like) melody each, and yet their songs don't sound quite as similar as Dragonforce's do.

Moving on, I've just realized what it is that bothers me about the title of Helloween's King for a 1000 Years. Read it again. Yes, it reads as "King for a one thousand years". Admittedly this does make grammatical sense in German, but I knew something was wrong with the title, and there it is. Despite that, it's growing more and more on me - regardless of your musical taste or what you think of Andreas Deris' voice, if the high notes at the finale don't impress you, you're probably dead. I still don't know what the "Reich of Gold" is meant to be or indeed what any of the lyrics are supposed to mean, but that's never been an obstacle with the band before.

I also have to question their decision to name a song "Sun 4 The World". They're meant to be the premier power metal band in Germany, not S Club 7. It just gives me dreadful images of a Matt Smith-like "trendy, eh?" sort of idea.

I am an onion

I have just spent five hours installing and uninstalling the AC97 sound drivers from my computer, trying to get so much as a breath of sound from the plain, normal stereo speakers. Now I've accidentally found out that they work if I set the expected output to 6-channel Dolby 5.1 and plug the speakers into the Microphone In socket, whereupon the left speaker plays the centre channel and the right one gets the noise from the subwoofer. It's clearly bonkers.

Building a Computer in Four Easy Steps (and Six Difficult Ones)

The bits for my computer were finally delivered yesterday. As this is the second time in about a month that I've built a computer, I thought I'd record the adventure and turn it into a photo guide of sorts. Who knows, someone might find it mildly interesting.



These were the boxes that arrived from UPS yesterday, and the objective for the evening was to assemble their contents into a working computer. (I should point out that some of the boxes are actually other things that we shipped from California that arrived in the same delivery - I'm not assembling the Hubble telescope or anything.)


Step 1 - Finding Everything: The first difficulty was actually finding any of the components I'd bought, because all of the boxes were filled with styrofoam packing peanuts, making it look like a lucky dip at a school coffee morning. Throughout the process, I realized I was missing things and had to dive back into the fluffy mass to retrieve them.


Step 2 - Unpacking: Once I'd got all the packing fluff off everything, I was finally ready to begin. This is the case as it arrived, with nothing but a power supply and a few cables. I've never owned a case that wasn't beige before.


Step 3 - Getting it Apart: Getting to a stage where you can access the back board is the first real step. My habit of accidentally choosing the worst cases possible seems to have continued here, as there was no obvious way to get it out apart from unscrewing the whole case and removing the power supply. I tend to like cases with as few screws as possible (one of the computers at home is held together almost entirely with clips), but the manufacturers of this one liked them - there are about fifteen million of them holding the case together.


Step 4 - The Motherboard: The biggest and most vital of the components is screwed on to the back panel by a set of spacers, then a set of screws to go into them. This is actually fairly easy once you've lined up the screws correctly, but last time I built a computer only about five spacers were provided. There were plenty this time, with the supplier content with supplying only three plastic washers instead.


Step 5 - The Processor: If you're interested, this is what a processor looks like. Tiny and innocent, though also terrifying to handle - one static spark in the wrong place and you can zap the whole thing instantly.


Step 6 - The Processor Fan: The processor is placed on the square top socket of the motherboard and levered in, and the fan is stuck on top of it with thermal paste to aid cooling. The fan was the most difficult thing I've ever encountered - usually I don't like putting in memory, but this beats it easily. I had to remove the existing fan brace by forcing a couple of plastic clips off it, then place it on to the processor and force the same clips back on, all the time hoping not to break anything underneath.


Step 7 - Memory: Then it's time to put in the memory (1.5GB of it, actually). This came in two sticks, which as I mentioned before I've always found nightmarish to put in. They involve pushing down on the sticks evenly and much more firmly than you'd think was good for them, until those white clips at the sides snap into place.




Step 8 - Piecing it Together: It was about this time that I realized the motherboard would have to go back into the case at some point. Before doing that, it's worth checking that the ports on the back will line up with the back of the case - and as you can see from the first two photos above, they clearly weren't going to fit. Correcting this is just a matter of unscrewing the old plate and hammering in a new one.


And that's what the whole thing looks like when inside the case. I've also replaced the power supply, as you can see on the top left.


Step 9 - The Pins: With the main components on the board, the next step is connecting all the tiny little out-of-focus pins that come from the front panel. This is totally impossible, because they're squashed up together, about two millimetres square each, and labelled things like "VCC+" and "FPRST". I find the best way to do it is to tape them all together in the right shape, then plug them all in at once.


And with everything connected to the pins, my computer is beginning to look like it just got back from Pride Parade.




Step 10 - The Hardware: Now that the entire motherboard is connected up, the additional hardware such as the hard drives and graphics card can be inserted. I was particularly impressed with this case's front panel because I didn't have to knock through any metal protectors, which takes ages. Instead, the panels could be removed and inserted easily - but as I found out I only had one IDE cable, I had to come up with the fairly eccentric arrangement pictured above. With all that together, the computer should be in working order.


Step 10A...: Dash out to the local electronics place to get a graphics card that actually works in your system. (The motherboard has an MGP port, which no one in the world has ever heard of, and it only supports certain cards. I got a PCI Express one instead, even though I think PCI Express is a fairly terrible name, as it reminds me of Tesco Express.)


And this is the finished computer - complete with a slightly less mad hard/DVD drive arrangement, as I took the opportunity to get a second IDE cable while I was there.



So, sorry laptop - but you're getting replaced -



And as you can see I'm using it to continue my current ZZT spate. Which is a perfect application for a $90 graphics card.

Who will trade his korma for my kingdom?

Yes, I know, I'm sorry about the title. It was either going to be that or "Korma Quest", which didn't really make much sense when I thought about it. But the point of this post is to say that one of the most difficult things that I'm going to have to adjust to in America is the change in food.

The primary concern over the past few weeks has been korma. If you don't know what it is (which is quite likely given its apparent rarity here), it's an Indian mild curry sauce made with cream, almond and coconut, which sounds bizarre but is actually one of the best things ever when made right. I hadn't tried it until a couple of years ago, and suddenly realized that I had been missing out on it all my life. If you're ever in Cupar, get one from the Passage to India takeaway, and you'll see what I mean.

Trying to find a decent one over here has been difficult - the first time I visited an Indian restaurant in Berkeley I ordered a chicken korma, but what arrived at the table was much closer to bhuna - a spicier sauce with a lot more tomato in it. We did try another place later on, but the waiter sort of jabbed at the tikka masala on the menu in response, saying "Try that, it's nice, it's very, very nice" in a very sort of Bernard Black way.

The problem was eventually solved when we explored the supermarkets close to us here in Brookline - there's a Stop 'n' Shop (ref. , ) down the road and a Shaw's/Star/something a bit further away. In the International section, they have the same Patak's curry sauces that I was used to in Britain - they're not Loyd Grossman, but they're more than adequate. Curiously, the one I was after was labelled "Mild almond and coconut sauce (Korma) rather than just "Korma" as in Britain, but I'll leave you to draw your own conclusions about that.

Another major obstacle is cereal. My favourite breakfast cereal in the universe is Kellogg's Crunchy Nut, which just so happens to be the only Kelloggs cereal that I can't find anywhere over here. The cereal itself is something of a paradox for me, as I like neither honey nor peanuts, which are the two primary ingredients. I've tried various honey-nut cereals here, and while we're getting ever closer to the correct taste, we're not quite there yet. At the moment I have an unopened packet of Kellogg's "Toasted Honey Crunch" in the cupboard, which looks most promising.

But there are things that make up for the deficiencies. Watermelon, for example. In Britain, the watermelon is an awkward and slightly tasteless fruit that involves picking little black bits out of your teeth for hours after you eat it - but here it's seedless and easy (and really quite inexpensive if you're lucky), and the fact that it doesn't actually have anything in it means that it's a far better snack than going down to the KFB and loading up on fried socks.

Whitney also introduced me to East Asian food over the last couple of years, and I now know that I need to find somewhere that does decent chow fun - a bit like chow mein, but with thicker noodles. The supermarket also has trayfuls of sushi for about four dollars, and though Whitney says it's of dreadful quality, I can't tell, so it's fine.

Unfortunately, there is a Krispy Kreme doughnut kiosk inside our other local supermarket, so I predict that I'll be roughly five feet wide by the end of the year.