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.

Blast from the Past (or: "Zamro have become a train")

To be honest, my laptop was getting old when it was handed down to me in 2001. Now it's positively ancient, and even though the dodgy monitor can easily be fixed by holding the computer six inches above a hard surface and letting it drop, it's beginning to exhibit some more serious issues as well.

Yesterday, when in the DOS prompt, it decided that the "C drive file allocation table is bad" and kept on repeating it until Ctrl+C'd into submission. Looking at a directory listing yielded gibberish files that were all 16MB large. Trying to navigate away then gave "Overlay not found", which is a new high for error messages - I have no idea what an overlay is in terms of disk management, or why it would be looking for one.

Still, I love it even though it's clearly rubbish, and it's still good for two main things - Civ, and as I've rediscovered recently, ZZT. My recent declared plan to create a new ZZT game after five years away from it hadn't changed, because it is similar to Civ for time-eating and it's something creative I can do while waiting for a return to a more capable computer.

The first step was to get myself up to speed with half a decade of ZZT editing evolution - not trying to understand the matching changes in the community, because that's impossible. I did try to get some sort of idea of what was happening by looking at ZUltimate, the ZZT wiki, but that ultimately proved futile apart from explaining the meaning of a few of the catchphrases that had built up over fifteen years. I was quite proud that I had my own entry, brief though it is.

Still. It looked like my old favourite editor, ZZTAE, hadn't been updated since I last looked at it, so even though I felt slightly traitorous, KevEdit it was. I installed it and ZZT Under Windows, and was vastly amused to discover that ZZTUW came with a small .com file that I'd put together before university, for correcting the ASCII font on newer computers.

The new game is going to be another classic-style ZZT world in the same vein as Tower and Great Pyramid (if you're not , or this will all be completely meaningless, by the way), but will hopefully improve on my old pillow-shading graphical method and be a fair bit longer than those two. I'm already discovering just how good KevEdit can make ASCII look.

I've already sketched out quite a bit of it on bits of paper, and I'm surprised to notice just how much easier the process is while working from a design document of sorts. Software Engineering might have been good for something after all.

Dangerous Dave

On Monday I embarked upon the most dangerous journey of my life. When Whitney, her brother and I went down to the U-Haul place to rent a moving van, we quickly found that there were only two seats in the front of the car, and the remaining one of us would have to ride seatbeltless in the back. Cameron couldn't do that because he was the only one qualified to drive, and Whitney got out of it by being a woman (there's always an excuse), so I climbed in, hunched down on the rubber-ribbed floor so that I couldn't be seen by any passing police cars, and read the sign on the door warning of serious injury or death as we sped off through the traffic.

As it turns out, Boston roads are among the worst in the world to drive on, and it seemed we couldn't move for emergency vehicles zooming past us at every junction. You would have thought that once we got the mattress things would be slightly better, but ironically it was even worse on the way back because I was being squashed by a ton of diagonally-packed springs and padding which dug further into me every time we started from a set of traffic lights. Being killed by a mattress would have just been embarrassing, I feel.

After we'd hauled all that into the flat, the next trip was to IKEA to get our furniture. Or most of it, anyway - they didn't have the sofa we wanted, so we chose to go without for a while. This time we had brought a couple of pillows to sit on to make the cargo area slightly more comfortable, but that was easily offset by the sixteen or so flat-packs that were shifting dangerously from side to side during the journey. And it didn't help when I stumbled out when we stopped only to discover that we had got turned around and were eight miles away from our flat.

That's about all I want to recall about the furniture trips, apart from noting that putting together an IKEA bed at eleven at night quietly is next to impossible, even when you decide to ignore the requirement for a hammer and use your bare hands instead. You can still see the circular indents. The rest of it was easy enough, with the exception of the dresser, for which the drawers in the box didn't fit together. We're getting it replaced. I'm not quite sure how yet.

With trips to a couple of household stores now done as well, the flat is beginning to look like an actual flat rather than a big empty room with some cables scattered around. Because of its unbelievable enormity as I noted in the last entry, it still looks a little empty - we have two desks, a coffee table with TV, a dining table and a big bookshelf in the living room and it still isn't even half full. But the 5th is the day when most everything arrives, including sofas, a couple of bedside tables, and importantly, the bits for my new computer.

It's weird to think that unlike every other move so far, this isn't temporary - it's setting up home for real, and will lead to me getting a job (although judging by the residence application progress so far, that's a long way off yet) and genuinely living together.