I kick arse for the Lord!

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

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

Casin0 R0yale 7

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

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

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

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

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

Game, Lighthouse, Star Wars

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

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

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

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

Holiday Week

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

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

Heavenly - Virus

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

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

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

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

Twenty-two

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

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

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

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

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

Almost-birthday

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

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

First week of work

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

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

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

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

First day of real life?

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

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

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

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

I'm American

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

But anyway, look at this.

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

Current Status:

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

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

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

My Contacts

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

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

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

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

It needs some serious cleaning out.

In the streets on Halloween

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

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

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

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

Spud's Quest

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

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

Kingdom For A Heart

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* Unequivocally mental

Look what I have

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I have an offer from Wrycan.

Thank you.

Extremely Important Message

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

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

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

Flat Photos

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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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

I'm a little portable radiator

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

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

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

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

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

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

The interview

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

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

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