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.