New installation, new system

As predicted, my PC failed catastrophically this morning, getting three seconds into the startup procedure before giving up and resetting itself. So I had to reformat and reinstall everything, then restore bits and pieces from the backup I'd taken. I'd forgotten just how stupidly Windows XP is set up when you install it, but I'm just about back to normal now - it's amazing just how much faster it runs without the bloat of four years on the same installation clogging it up.

The PS2 we ordered arrived today, though, along with one of the games for it. It's one of the newer "slimline" models that's the size of a stamp. So we've been going through Kingdom Hearts - it feels somewhat like those films that come out every so often that just have everyone in the entire British acting world in them (like Love Actually and most of the Harry Potters) as you're always waiting to see another recognizable character from somewhere else to appear. Notably, Squall has been given exactly the kind of miserable emo voice that you'd expect from him. And battling the forces of darkness alongside Goofy and Donald Duck is a surreal experience.

Trouble is, of course, that our memory cards haven't arrived yet, and I've just received word that they've been shipped this evening from Hong Kong. As we made rather more progress on the game than I thought we would today, the only non-game-restarting option we have is to leave the thing on running in the background until they arrive, so I hope we don't blow it up within the week.

Amazon order

1      "Sony PS2 Console - Slim PS2"
1      "Alien Hominid"
1      "Kingdom Hearts"
2      "Sony Playstation 8MB Memory Card"
-----------------------------------------
Total for this order:               $1.38

All things considered, I would classify that as a pretty good deal - made possible through the use of Christmas Amazon vouchers that we had never got around to using. The only trouble is that while placing the order I realized that the PS2 is now just a generation short of becoming 'retro', and that makes me feel (not for the first time in the last week thanks to visiting St Andrews) terribly, terribly old. I sort of miss the PS2 from home, as when I'm on my PC I find myself constantly working on things - that and I don't get the chance to keep up with Soul Calibur 3, meaning that my brother thrashes me at it every time. But for now, Whitney has recommended Alien Hominid, and I am taking a risk with Kingdom Hearts which is apparently quite good and not hideously girly at all. (Especially when you consider the alternative was Final Fantasy X2.)

My PC has obviously picked up on the hint that I may be actually buying games now rather than pirating them and playing them on it, so it's decided to go into a huff. After delaying it for ages I finally tried to install Service Pack 2 recently with the assumption that it might not be as bad as last time I tried it, and instead of installing it just gave me an unhelpful "Cannot install" message and exited. It seems that SP2 didn't bother to restore any files it had messed with so far, though, and now Outlook Express will not start up at all because of missing DLL files.

This was easily solved through downloading Thunderbird instead, taking myself a further step away from using Microsoft software, but I'm fairly confident that I'm now in a situation where my computer won't come back up after resetting it, so I'm backing up the hard drive just in case. Actually I looked around for free backup software and couldn't find any that weren't awful, so I've set it to just RAR the entire hard drive and put it on my external drive instead. Twenty-four hours into the operation, it should be just about finishing.

So I think I'll have to reinstall - it was about time the whole thing was cleaned up, to be honest.

What I Did on my Holidays

I feel strangely like a morning person. Whitney and I have developed a sort of anti-jetlag after coming back from Scotland and shifting five time zones backwards, and are now far more awake and energetic than we ever were before. For the last couple of days we've got up at the break of dawn (or what passes as the break of dawn for a computer scientist, i.e. eight o'clock) and we've had time to have pancakes for breakfast, decide what we're doing with the $200 Amazon gift certificate we got for Christmas, and watch the morning news before I set off for work. This is a huge change from struggling through to the kitchen like a Neanderthal and throwing some sort of American cornflake equivalent into a bowl before grabbing my case and stumbling out the door.

And after a week away from the Internet, it's amazing how much catching up I needed to do in all areas. But as I've learned that no one reads massive journal entries (unless they were written by of course), I broke the entire week into a small digest on the way back. I:

• Arrived at my parents' house in Scotland (which with the addition of a dining table and actual use of the dining room is getting a lot more upmarket in preparation for all children moving out to St Andrews) and slept for fourteen hours.


• Went down and stayed in the flat in Cupar. In the morning, I woke up thinking that I was still in Boston. Then the opposite happened, I thought that I had been transported back in time a year and had to drive Whitney to work and get on with my senior honours project.


• Visited St Andrews, confused Andy with my reappearance, and found that someone had moved all the computer science labs around again.


• Completed a life achievement and finally met someone "from the Internet". I had known for about seven years and only actually saw him for the first time last week. Unfortunately I was still tired and jetlagged and my conversation skills weren't up to much, but an entry reading "I met . He's actually really boring." has not yet appeared.


• Travelled the walk through Keithhall that constitutes virtually the only thing to do when visiting Inverurie.


• Saw Clare and Amy again, who refrained from talking about how stupid men are in return for us not talking about semi-conducting tri-phase MOSFET boards (largely due to the absence of Philip).


• Met up with Philip again the very next evening, who now permanently has half a pound of steel in his left foot from breaking it a few months ago because the hospital says there's no point in removing it.


• Rediscovered Masterspy thanks to Jamie's expertise at finding things on the Internet.


• Went along to the Tastie Bite in Inverurie and had a battered haggis supper, which I had developed a strange craving for despite never actually eating them before I left Scotland.


• Discovered that shleeping on the British Airways shoopuff is imposhibubble. (I'm sorry about this item - I promise you that it made sense when I thought it up on the plane, but it may have been the influence of the temazepam that did that. It didn't make me sleep, though. I think I may have developed an immunity to it.)


• Had a Tesco sandwich.


• Came back with a gigantic holdall full of British cereal, biscuits, jam and other essential survival equipment.

No more planes, please.

Crystal Towers 2 - An update

Not really, I haven't done anything to this in about a fortnight.

But as and when I can be bothered opening it up again, the next obvious target is to fix the chronic speed issues that some people are having - all fixing of it will have to be done on my laptop, as the desktop has no problems with it. I first thought that it was because of continually looking at a save file that was on a USB drive, but fixing that didn't sort the problem - another possibility is rotating objects, which seems quite likely but only happens in the second level as far as I remember. Other than that it could just be related to the size of each frame, which I'm not sure I can really do anything about.

And after that I'll fix the scrolling, which I've said I was going to do for ages. Maybe I'll even make the scrolling style configurable. That would be quite a gimmick.

CSI Pieami

I'm sorry that this post doesn't contain any content, but this Weebl and Bob episode captures CSI Miami so perfectly that I couldn't stop myself from mentioning it here.

Oh, I'll be back in Scotland on Thursday morning. That seems fairly important now I come to think of it.

To annoy people who don't read the journal anyway

Crystal Towers 2 prototype is out.

Snow!

Do you remember that entry I posted this morning about the unlikelihood of snow today? Well.




Do you see that thing sticking out of the snow between our building and the wall on the first picture? That's on the top of a pole about a foot off the ground. I think this entry was the last time I've been as wrong as this.

Snow?

Despite it being a perfectly nice spring day (or summer in Scotland) on Tuesday, the meterological office or whatever they're called over here issued a severe winter storm warning yesterday, saying that the full 6 to 8 inches of coming snow today would pose an extreme danger to life force. (Paraphrased slightly.) But every time they say this there are a few flakes that disappear almost immediately, so we'll see.

Some stress at work begins to show

Take-away

You know that bit in Love Actually when Colin or Nick or whatever his name is says that he was born on the wrong continent and every woman in America would instantly melt on so much as hearing his accent? It's one hundred percent true. When I was down the road at the local burrito place getting lunch, I made the mistake of saying "to take away" instead of "to go" and was then stuck there for about ten minutes while every female in the establishment quizzed me about what else people say differently in Scotland, how "cute" they thought my accent was, how "homey" it is where I come from, and so on and so forth.

I should probably be appreciative, because for someone who had a hard time all throughout school because of his silly Bristolian-posh Scottish hybridized voice, it makes a welcome change for people to be fascinated by it. But I'm not sure how comfortable I am with the word "cute". This is cute. (Warning: possible overdose.) But I'm a twenty-two year old computer science type and I don't think the same term really applies to me. My newly discovered instant charm would be far better granted to someone who was not already attached, but at least I can offer advice to other single men now. Come to America. And bring a guitar, that always helps.

Even though I write regularly about how rubbish American food is in general, I've actually got quite into burritos for lunch (at least, I certainly will if Boloco keep handing me $1 vouchers) and that's not something that you tend to get in Britain at all. They seem less tragically white and nerdy than sandwiches, if nothing else.

It's absolutely freezing today and I cannot feel my hands at all even though they were in gloves for the five-minute walk down the road. I walk up a narrow drive between two buildings on my way to the train station, and facing into the wind was excruciatingly painful. This is no joke - I could actually feel my eyes close to freezing up, and had to walk with them closed for most of the way. When I went out for lunch I managed to arrange my jacket and sunglasses so that I could breathe up into my eyes and warm them up again, but with the side effect of steaming my sunglasses, and walking became a struggle to achieve a balance between not dying and not finding myself in Porter Square by mistake. I went on to the local part of Weather.com to get the temperature for you, but the front page immediately had instructions for preventing deadly wind chill and what to do about frostbite, so that's all you need to know.

And as chance would have it, we had a fire alarm in the afternoon so we were all stuck in the freezing cold while firemen went around the building with exactly the same speed and efficiency that I always witnessed during the mornings outside Melville.

Country Kitchen Hearty Canadian White

Whitney has once again done the impossible - she has found decent bread in America. I was just making my sandwiches for tomorrow at work, and opened a new packet of "Country Kitchen Hearty Canadian White". And I was astonished to find that unlike the many other brands of bread we've tried from the local supermarket, it:

• Is white. (Yes, I'm a bread-racist)
  
• Is perfectly soft. (Whitney makes fun of me for doing the squeeze test.)
  
• Is almost the right shape. (Still slightly off, but not much more than the difference between letter-size paper and A4.)
  
• Has a much better slice width.
  
• Does not have a texture bordering on glutinous.
  
• Does not have an explicably soggy bottom that does not go away even after toasting it.
  

I think it's fair to say that you just don't understand how incredible this is. The name in this title is what I'll have to remember in order to make decent sandwiches for the next immediate stretch of my life. (Still no supply of Crunchy Nut, though.)

There's a prototype version of Crystal Towers 2 available at , by the way. If you're interested I'd appreciate any feedback on the general feel of the game so far, including the movement and scrolling.

Knickers to you all

My brilliant idea explained in the last post gained a grand total of one reader, and it was Whitney. Thanks a lot. Nevertheless, I'll forge ahead with it and annoy everyone by crossposting entries here if things get desperate.

One of the main developers at work is leaving, and I'm eventually going to take his place. This is an immensely frightening thing when most of the system is in a language I had never tried before on account of considering it the second-stupidest language in the world (VBScript is always going to be difficult to beat). In addition to that, Jeff the God of Biscuits from Clickteam has put the head of an online programming course who's interested in converting his material to TGF2, so it looks like my time's going to be fully booked for the next while or so.

Crystal Towers 2

Last weekend, Whitney and I were talking about the way that websites have fallen out of fashion. When a studio making a major film is wanting a homepage, or a new band wants to gain recognition, there's no need to start up your own website any more - everyone just puts themselves on to Myspace. And I can see why they do it. Now that the entire future of the Internet lies on the servers of about four Web 2.0-styled sites, why bother writing your own pages or forum software when there's a huge ready-made community that you can get instant connections to?

Now, for the moment, I've thrown my experimental new MMF2 project out the window (or more accurately, stored it away in a box in an attic somewhere) because it was getting too frustrating to write, but in its place I'm making something that I've been wanting to do for a while. And it's for the reasons outlined above that I have completely sold out and put up a Livejournal for it, . (Not a MySpace. I still have some dignity.)

If you're at all interested in my game-making activities and want to see what I'm doing, then please give it a read or friend it so that I'm not talking to a brick wall all the time. That's what happened with the news and comment system I spent ages writing for Special Agent, because the site wasn't in a place anyone actually cared about. And writing up some sort of progress log that people will read (or pretend to read and skip over) is amazingly encouraging when writing a large project like this. Eventually, I'm hoping to also use it as a hub for testers, to go with the bug tracking PHP software that I might finish at some point in my life.