Last day of work

I seem to be on something of a sugar high just now. This is unsurprisingly the result of having nothing to eat except sugar all morning - I brought in a pack of doughnuts and a supply of the best biscuits in the Universe (Fox's Golden Crunch Creams, if you're wondering) in return for the never-ending stream of goodies that I've been plied with since starting work here. The effect isn't quite as bad as the time when I drank hot chocolate with about ten spoons of sugar in it right after giving blood, but it's causing me to be rather twitchy, especially as I'm just sitting here with nothing to do until 12:30 except sort out some papers so that I can make them marginally more decipherable to whosoever I decide to land them on.

I was given a card by the rest of the team (half of whom are mysteriously out today). I didn't think my leaving was a huge event as I've only been here for two months, but it was much appreciated.

Actually, I have right this moment been given my last assignment - breaking in to the petty cash tin. Someone's misplaced the key for it, so I've been handed the tough black box and a selection of hammers and pliers to bash it open. This could prove to be my most difficult task yet.

In addition, it turns out that our new departmental administrator doesn't exist. After phoning in saying that she's fallen down her stairs, no one in the office could get hold of her for ages. The deputy director decided to contact one of her references, and it turns out that she's done this before - got a job, come in to work the first day, phoned in with an unfortunate accident and vanished off the face of the earth. No one knows why she does this. In fact, no one even knows who she is at all, as she's most likely using a false name.

I really couldn't make this up.

Whitney's Journey

The helpdesk officer's computer has just exploded. Well, more accurately it was the power supply, but the office is now filled with a plasticky burning smell. There was a problem with another computer's video card this morning as well, so there seems to be a disease going round them at the moment. It livened up the day a bit, at least.

I will shortly be free of detonating computers, because this is my last full day working here - I have this afternoon and tomorrow morning, then my role as a VLE Administrator (Temporary) will be over and I'll go back to being a Student Programmer (Mediocre).

Friday afternoon seemed to take ages, as all afternoons leading up to life-changing events do. I got out of work and decided to ignore Whitney's advice on taking the bus, instead walking up George Street to the Queen Mother Library.

When I turned the corner on to Bedford Road, someone who sounded like he was from Spain shouted across the road to me, asking if I knew where Bedford Place was. I hollered back that I wasn't sure, as I wasn't from around there (something that I said to try and politely avoid being asked directions, as I know very little about my way around Aberdeen - I know how to get to work, the beach, and that's about it). Unfortunately he was friendly and asked whereabouts I was from. On the spur of the moment I replied Bristol, which I haven't lived in for about seventeen years, but it was the only thing that came in to my head at the time to save embarrassment at not knowing the way around my own local city. It turned out that he had family there, so he asked me more about myself. We continued the conversation as we walked down the road, with me shouting my entire fabricated life story piece by piece to him across two lanes of traffic. According to this improvised fiction, my parents live in Aberdeen, and I get my accent from them even though I live in the south of England. The experience was rather surreal, and I was rather glad when he found the place he was looking for and turned down a side road.

Eventually I got to the University of Aberdeen library, and had enough difficulty getting in because they've secured the place against outside students and peasants getting in with a turnstile system. I asked where I could use my laptop, and they said that I could just ignore the "No laptops" signs everywhere because of it not being term time. I set myself up, and spent a couple of hours playing Megazeux. It's another of those games which seems to charm me in to liking it.

After what seemed like ages, I went down to Cataloguing to pick up my mum, and we went to the airport together, arriving about fifteen minutes before the plane was due to land at 16:35. I went in and saw that the plane had been delayed until 17:40. I went out again and informed my mum as such, so she went away to do some shopping.

I decided to fill up the time by devising some sort of purpose for myself, and that was to walk all the way up to the nearest garage and top up my mobile phone, which I hadn't used for months and had a total of 12p of credit on it. That didn't take long enough, so I just walked in random directions around the airport and played Maze of the Kings, which I noted had the worst acting in any game ever (and this area is hotly contested).

The plane was "on approach" for at least twenty minutes, and I was waiting at the UK Arrivals gate for Whitney to emerge. Getting fed up of that, I wandered off to find Whitney emerging from the UK Arrivals 2 gate, which hadn't existed the last time that I had been in the airport. The plane had waited on the runway at both Heathrow and Aberdeen for ages due to "weather issues", because evidently no one had expected it to rain in Britain. We collected her soaked luggage and went off home to moan about it there.

Whitney

Oh, and Whitney arrives today. I just thought I'd mention it, as this event is going to more or less change my entire life from now on.

Music, videos, music videos

"Don't you think this would be a great video to edit pineapples into?" asked Richard as he opened Stratovarius' video of "Hunting High and Low". He is clearly mad, but I could see his point in a bizarre sort of way. (It would take too long to explain.)

It wouldn't be the first time that he's ventured in to video production, either - recently, he and a group of friends put together a music video for Dragonforce's "Fury of the Storm", with them with their faces painted and wielding plastic weapons, interspersed with shots of other random nonsense. It's entitled "Fury of the Grünt", complete with heavy metal umlaut, and I won't put it up here because it would hurt my dialup connection and your sanity.

I am immensely impressed, though, with the recognisability that Dragonforce have gained. They haven't been an absolute favourite of mine, but they're decent enough, and now it seems that they're very popular with the in-crowd, a couple of years after their first album came out on Noise Records. I hope, though, that their becoming more popular doesn't put me off them. Like I mentioned a couple of months ago in that gigantic article that you didn't read, it seems that the more popular a band becomes the less likable it is to people who knew them when they weren't. Even though I can feel this happening, I'm going to try and stop thinking like that because it's immensely silly. It is, at least, a step forward for the recognisability of the music I like. Now all we need is for Sonata Arctica to do the same.

Iron Maiden in "decent artwork" shock!

It came as a surprise to me yesterday to find out that Iron Maiden had recently released a new album. Called "Death on the Road", it's a live release, so it's not as big news as it could be, but it still made me realise how little I'd been keeping up with them. I was near-fanatical about them in school, but let my interest in them slip when I discovered that many other bands in Europe were more than competent at imitating and surpassing their style. They now seem to be rather repetitive and uninspired to me, because Steve Harris lost the ability to write choruses around the time when he wrote The Angel and the Gambler (ten minutes of song with roughly three minutes of content).

I've never really appreciated live albums that much, because they seem to be rather a contradiction in terms to me - seeing a band live is about seeing them live, and I like the neater sound of music when it's recorded and produced. Nevertheless, what strikes me about this release is that shockingly, it has decent cover artwork. Iron Maiden have had a problem with this ever since Derek Riggs got fed up of them, and have since had an appallingly tatty piece that looks like an old Megadrive game and an episode of Reboot gone badly wrong. But with this one I think things are looking a lot better - they've even got the obligatory Eddie reference in, and the pun in the title (continuing their track record with "Live after Death" and "Maiden Japan").

was right when she said that as Whitney's arrival on Friday gets nearer, time will slow down in a parabolic fashion. Well, she might not have put it exactly like that, but the idea was the same - today has simply been dragging along, I've imported some files and weblinks, and the highlight of the day so far has been receiving an email about door wedges.

Sorry, I try to make a point not to write spontaneous complaining posts for the sake of them, but it's at least something to pass a minute or so. While I'm at it, I might as well mention that I found a reasonable amount of pencil sharpenings in my bed last night. My siblings do have a habit of messing up my room, but I think that must have required special effort.

Thiazolidinediones

I don't think a caption is really necessary.

In my first year of university, there was quite a colossal in-joke surrounding this image (mostly perpetuated by and latched on to by myself). I'm not sure what's quite so appealing about it, but there's something I find inherently funny in the simplicity of two disjunct pieces of clipart stuck crudely together.

Today I was looking round the Virtual Campus again, and I discovered that I'd been using it as my profile picture since testing the system a few weeks ago. Taking it down may be the best option (even though it may be quite an accurate assessment of many of our users) but there doesn't seem to be a way to do that at the moment. Still, a small inconvenience.

During my time at the RGU I've managed to avoid most of the data entry tasks that I was warned about before I started. My first task (after a week of nothing much) was to input staff accounts on the system for the whole university. After finishing this several weeks sooner than was expected, I was given odd jobs to do in the code and testing, and eventually put in charge of the external testers for the site. However, my luck has run out, and my last week of work is now composed of shovelling a whole lot of weblinks from the old site to the new one.

I wouldn't mind, but the system isn't really designed for mass movement like this. I should really ask for direct access to the databases because that would get things done a whole lot quicker, but the people in charge are away and the developers have enough to do already what with all the schools complaining about the changes that we've made.

The main difficulty with the task (but also what makes it interesting) is the way that for the new system, all weblinks must have a title along with their URL and description. This title can be no more than 50 characters, and selecting fifty characters out of the description is rather difficult because some of them are more like five hundred. Added to this is the fact that they're for Pharmacy and are composed of a whole lot of incomprehensible medical terms, so I really have no idea about what's important in them. Creative shortening of the descriptions is necessary to accurately summarise the content - for example, "Guidelines on the use of zaleplon, zolpidem and zopiclone for the short-term management of insomnia" might become "Sleepy drugs that begin with Z", and "ABC of complementary medicine: The benefits of acupuncture as an alternative medical procedure" can be shortened to "Sticking pins in people". Well, I don't quite have that much freedom, but it does lend some illusion of thinking to what would otherwise be a very monotonous task.

I had a dream last night that I had a Mini which could fold up to the size of a USB drive. Perfect for saving on parking spaces. I was rather annoyed when the alarm woke me up.

Broadband

I'll break the silence for a while to ask another question about broadband. This is something that's entirely new to me, so I'd welcome any comments and suggestions that other people have.

The situation with the phone line is that it won't be active until the 19th of September, but it's likely that it'll be simple and free to switch it back on. For phone service, I think we only need BT Option 1, as it's the minimum we can pay (it includes the line rental) and it's adequate for how much we're actually going to use it.

Broadband is more difficult, as I don't have any experience with any companies here. At the moment, there are three possibilities:

Pipex Lite 2000 5GB - 2MB maximum bandwidth, 5GB usage a month, free hardware and setup. They advertise it as £9.99 a month, but it isn't really - it's that for the first two months, then £23 after that, which is still outwardly comparable with the other services in terms of price. Choosing this gives Don a bonus from customer recommendation!

PlusNet Broadband Plus - 2MB maximum bandwidth (split between 50), unlimited usage, with free hardware and setup. This is the company that I know the least about, but it also looks the most promising. They say that the Plus package is for "email and surfing" rather than downloading, but I can't really see why. It's £14.99 a month.

Tiscali Something - I've been warned to stay as far away from Tiscali as is humanly possible, and further research on the Internet seems to agree with this, but Whitney used them two years ago in Oxford and never had a problem with them at all. They also seem to change their offers by the week, so it's a bit difficult to choose one. The one I'm looking at just now is £14.99 a month, and gives 1MB bandwidth, unlimited usage, and a phone service that's cheaper than the BT one. 2MB is only £2 more a month, though.

As the phone line isn't switched on for a fortnight, I can't actually check the availability until then, but from looking at this directory it seems likely that we have access to them all.

Any ideas? Comments from people who have had experience with these companies would be much appreciated.

Last Day of the Month

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Confessions of Utter Insanity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My Incredible Career

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Computer tally: 11

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

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

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

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

New Project

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

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

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

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

Selection screen (click to enlarge)

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

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

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

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

The New Whatever-It's-Called

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

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

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

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

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

This entry is not here

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

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

Why would go to heaven but go to hell?

Because Chris uses Multimedia Fusion.

What is 's favorite band?

The Asymmetrical Lampshades.

How did you meet ?

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

What political beliefs of do you disagree with?

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

Why is sneaking up behind you right now?

Because he's weird.

What would be like on an LSD trip?

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

What would happen if you were to date ?

Very bad things, if Whitney ever found out.

In what ways is smarter than you?

He can name five hundred different types of tea.

Is an innie or an outie?

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

Whom is attracted to?

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

What does look for in a significant other?

Paulishness.

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

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

Who would win in a fight between and ?

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

How long have you known ?

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

Could you take in a fight?

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

What is 's favorite song?

The sound of unruly campers' heads being bashed together.

What was the last game you played with ?

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

Does understand quantum chromodynamics?

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

Is 's spoon too big?

I've never found that funny, you know.

Would you sooner donate a kidney to or ?

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

What would the minions of 's army look like?

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

What kind of person would you set up with ?

Someone who knows her routers from her ethernet bridges.

What's the last thing you said to ?

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

Is hiding under your bed right now?

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

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

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

Do you feel enlightened now?

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

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

Watcher in the Sky

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

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

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

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

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

A Universal Serial Bus. Apparently.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Join the Campaign for Telephone Disarmament.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The ZZT Chronicle

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

Preamble

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

Point

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

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

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

An extended editor makes things marginally easier on the eye.

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

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

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

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

Mother Russia

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

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

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

Death, not death and cartoon death

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

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

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

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

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