| Magic beans |
[14 Nov 2009|03:09pm] |
November, December and January make up broad-bean-planting season, so today, inbetween thunderstorms and the chance of hail, I planted about* 19 broad beans from the packet I ordered earlier this year.
Meanwhile, all the onions except the one I planted fresh after the catscapades have sprouted, which is good news! You can see them in the photo below, in front of the freshly covered-up beans.
Tonight I shall be making chicken stew with dumplings, using one (1) huge leek:
* I can't count. I'm getting 18, 19, or 20 depending on which method I use.
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| London Expo |
[26 Oct 2009|04:46pm] |
 This weekend was the second London MCM Expo of the year, and also the second one I've been to following the one in May. With me there was my new girlfriend Tori, plus Luke, DC, some other TF2 people, and Sel joined us on the Sunday. I took somewhat less photos this time, mostly due to forgetting my camera on Saturday, and partly because a lot of character I already had photos of from May.
 The weekend – and my 10-day (6 working days) holiday off work – officially started on Friday night when I met up with Luke and DC in Leicester Square for dinner at Chiquitos, which was good and tasty, and I had a non-alcholic cocktail with pinapple and coconut in it which was very nice. While waiting for Luke to turn up, I got high-fived by a complete stranger in Leicester Square, which was a little strange, as my general opinion of Londoners comes from the grumpy/ill commuters I share the train with. There were plenty of high-fives going around at Expo later, but you'd expect them more there (and can be mentally prepared to dodge them, if you want!)
 The costumes this year were just as good as May, and the cooler weather clearly hadn't put off any of the skimpier outfits' owners -- although I think I saw more men than women in semi-topless garments this time! Making up for that was a slave girl Leia, though. At the end of Sunday there was a masquerade showing off all the best costumes, which I caught the end of. No celebrities I recognised this time, either, but I made sure to spend the equivalent autograph cash on a panda-eared beanie instead. Tori thinks I look most cute in it.
I tried out Scribblenauts on one of the demo DS there, and I think I shall have to buy it soon – any game where you can summon at your whim a moose and a velociraptor and watch them fight (the moose totally won) gets my thumbs up.
 I also got a "goody bag" from Forbidden Planet with a bunch of promotional postcards, a poster for a not-actually-Twilight vampire film, and a few anime DVDs: one with an episode each of Aquarion, Samurai Deeper Kyo and X on it, the fourth volume of Witch Hunter Robin, and the seventh volume of dot hack//SIGN. I've not heard of any of these, but I might put a few on later and see what they're like.
All my Expo photos here.
Meanwhile, my battle with the cats in my garden has yielded one onion death and two onion casualties (replanted, hope their roots weren't damaged too badly) due to being dug up by the cats who seem to think they're convenient markers for where to poop. I've replenished the orange peel out there, we'll see if it works; if not I'm going to buy some chicken wire and just put that down on top of the earth. Try digging up metal wire, you bastards! On the plus side, including the two casualties I have 16 onions putting up shoots now!
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| Decade |
[06 Oct 2009|11:05pm] |
I've had an online presence for ten years today, perhaps a little more if you count my first Hotmail account (before Microsoft bought it! Hotmail that is, not my personal email account), which unfortunately I don't have a date for. However the same year I opened that -- 1999, when my school opened its new library with Internet-connected PCs -- I also managed to open a Geocities account (back when Geocities organised its userbase into districts and town names) and export an HTML page with a few images from Microsoft Word. I found a backup of the original document a few years ago, probably while I was moving out of my parents' place, that dated it 6th October 1999.
The single webpage morphed slowly into a Star Wars fan site, and two years later I made my first post to the newsgroup alt.fan.starwars. In 2002 I found alt.fan.starwars.jar-jar-binks.die.die.die, freshly taken over by Jar Jar Binks lovers, where I met several great friends that I still talk to today - Kramer, Jostein, Baz, and fuzzie and Luke in an AGLAMI cross-post.
It'd be nice to give learning HTML credence for my ending up studying Computer Science at Uni, but my fate was sealed much earlier when I was about 12 and introduced to BBC BASIC by a friend at school. However, fuzzie pointed me at Python after I finished Uni, which got me my current job, so there's definitely a small case of cause and effect there!
I could probably trace my interest in computers muuuuch further back than that, and it would have been nice to have discovered the Internet before the World Wide Web, but alas, I'm not old enough for that to have been particularly likely.
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| DS Fun |
[12 Sep 2009|04:34pm] |
 Hey Nintendo, I finally got a good game for my DS!
Yesterday the R4 Revolution flash card I ordered arrived, and after a bit of raging head-scratching last night, I got the software installed on the microSD card I picked up for it. (Unzipping a zipfile directly onto the card for some reason didn't work, while unzipping it onto my hard disk and then copying the files across magically did -- very strange.)
The flash card allows you to run homebrew applications on the DS, including, for instance, a shell that plays music and video (if you convert it properly), supposedly reads eBooks, a MegaDrive/Genesis emulator, and of course any games you manage to find hanging around on the corners of the Internet. There's even a breed of Linux for it, although not much use without a RAM expansion pack (ls /usr/bin | less? OUT OF COFFEE)
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| More gardening |
[31 Aug 2009|05:21pm] |
I did more gardening today, finishing off the gruntwork before I plant new things (to be determined). For once I actually (inadvertantly) have a before photo in addition to photos taken just now.
Before:
Saturday:
Now:
The slate at the front is for the wheelie bins to go on. (When I moved in the council only had household waste collection in one wheelie bin, then they introduced a recycling bin too which I've not had room for up until now.) Having the bins there also has the advantage that I don't need to remember to put them out every Wednesday morning, because they're already up against the path. Yay!
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| Sonic Rush |
[30 Aug 2009|10:47am] |
I've officially given up on Sonic Rush now, having bought New Super Mario Bros for the DS yesterday. And I think I've now also given up on buying anything made by Sonic Team, after they've proven that they can't even make a decent 2D Sonic platformer.
Anyway, I've been meaning to review Sonic Rush for a while. The game starts off not altogether badly, on the traditional grassy-countryside-like first level that all of the Sonic games have. This one was called Leaf Storm, because that's an edgy name. You run to the right pretty quickly, round a loop-de-loop, and down a vertical drop and suddenly you're on the bottom of the two DS screens, which was pretty cool. However, after that, the level becomes samey, moving between loop-de-loops and rails, along which Sonic can do tricks that get you eXtreme Points or something awsum like that. I finished the level typically of new Sonic games: by running through it as fast as possible.
Okay, so I can finish Emerald Hill Zone in Sonic 2 in 26 seconds on a good day, but only because I've played the level so much and know when and where to jump. A new player would find that actually, no, you don't just hit right on the D-pad and keep it held down until you finish.
The Boss for Leaf Storm was, like all bosses in Rush, in 3D, which I didn't have a problem with per se, as Sonic's movements were still 2D. Most of the bosses were just a 3D rendered platform, and some of them had you running around a circle with ROBOTNIK in the middle. However, Leaf Storm's boss was ridiculously difficult, and took me a couple of days just to figure out how to avoid one of his attacks, let alone beat him. I nearly stopped playing at this point. All of the bosses had this theme. You'd whisk through the two acts within a few minutes and spend the rest of the day trying to figure out the boss.
Sonic's movement physics are also very different to the MegaDrive (Genesis) Games. He's much faster to ramp up to full speed, but his spin dash slows down far too quickly to be particularly useful. In the old games you'd actually be faster down a hill if you were spinning, which makes somewhat more sense.
Generally, the game felt like today's Sonic Team had been given a speed run video of Sonic 3 & Knuckles, told to make notes about what gameplay elements were in it, and told to go make a similar game. I have a few examples below. Of course, the problem with telling Sonic Team to make a Sonic game is that they didn't make Sonic 2, 3 or Knuckles (Sega Technical Institute have the credit for these), and the Sonic Team behind Sonic 1 have probably all since left, leaving a bunch of idiots who think that having Sonic falling into a storybook and fighting with a sword is a good idea.
Firstly, the level ideas. Just to prove they were ripping off Sonic 3, we first had a countryside level (Angel Island, except rubbish), then a water level (Hydrocity, except rubbish) where running as fast as possible was actually mandatory if you wanted to get to the next air bubble in time, then Mirage Road (Sandopolis, only...), then Night Carnival. possibly the most blatent ripoff of a Sonic 3 level, Carnival Night, Altitude Limit (Launch Base), Dead Line (Death Egg, to the point where they even had invertable gravity, because new ideas are hard, yo.). The Special Stage was identical to Sonic 2's Special Stage except this one had pixelated spacecraft attacking you just to make sure you could never reach the emerald at the end.
Meanwhile you're playing through the Sonic levels, another new character, Blaze the Cat, has been faffing around your levels, generally performing terrible rip offs of Sonic's moves. Her story is something to do with collecting Honestly Not Chaos emeralds back from Robotnik, who stole them from her very own dimension where bunnies are all crying or something.
Eventually the two characters meet up, with a disastrously long unskippable cutscene where you end up hammering the A button to dismiss the next line of dialogue; Sega Team obviously trying to shoehorn in something like the Sonic & Knuckles duel in S3K, missing the point that that was just an interactive part of a reall cool cutscene wherein Knuckles realises that he's been duped by Robotnik and agrees to help Sonic defeat him, showing him to the portal to Sky Sanctuary Zone.
So, instead of a coherent plotline, Blaze insists to Sonic that it's her responsibility to take on Robotnik alone; Sonic offers to help her; and Blaze decides to beat the shit out of him for even suggesting such a thing. Suddenly Blaze has about a million different superpowers that you don't get when playing as her, and you, as Sonic, are left dodging colums of flame. Finally, when Blaze has only one hit point left (out of 8), you both charge at each other and spend a good five minutes hammering A and B alternatively as fast as possible to push her off the edge of the platform. This was another point I nearly gave up the game on; the speed at which you had to toggle A and B left your fingers aching after a minute and you were only half way there at that point. I kid you not, it was ridiculous.
So, after Sonic maims Blaze too badly for her to actually fight any further, Sonic gets to go after Robotnik himself, and we find ourselves at the final boss, which I have given up on because I cannot figure out how to avoid one of his attacks that kills you even though you have rings.
I could go on. Edit: and reading back over this, I already did!
I feel I should give this critique some context. It's too easy to see old games under a glossy veneer created by playing them when you were younger. I didn't play the Sonic games when they first came out (my brother only got his MegaDrive ten years after Sonic 1 was first released) but it was still a pretty long time ago.
However! Earlier this year I discovered Sonic CD, a 2D platformer Sonic game released for the Sega MegaCD (again, not developed by Sonic Team). After disregarding the copy I bought, because it used the American soundtrack, and switching to a MegaCD emulator with a decent version of the game, I played it through from start to finish. The music was a little wacky (although became rather catchy by the end) and the colours were a little ... well, they were wacky too, but the game was solid and thoroughly enjoyable. So the point here is that I played a 2D Sonic game that was completely new to me and I liked it! So I feel I can fairly authoritatively say that Sonic Rush was a pile of crap.
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| Aya Revolution 2009 |
[17 Aug 2009|04:44pm] |
So, I'm writing this entry on the train home from Ayacon (and editing it on my computer now I'm home), on my Nokia 770. I've had an absolutely great time!
 On Friday straight after work I jumped on a train at Euston up to Coventry and got a taxi to Warwick Uni to meet Luke and Sel at the convention, which had started earlier in the day. We went to one of the Uni pubs for dinner, after which I went to register and get my passcard. I can't remember what happened next but I suspect we went to the Games Room, where we've been spending most of our non-event time in, before catching the bus to the Travelodge in which we were staying.
On Saturday we made it back up to the convention and grabbed a few supplies from the shops before milling around and looking at other cosplayer's costumes. Luke and Sel went in Team Fortress II outfits again, and we ran into a few other people who has done likewise. Then we went to a screening of the first five episodes of There Will Be Brawl, a live-action parody series of Super Smash Bros Brawl, which was most excellent. I thoroughly recommend watching it! The director and co-creator of the series, Matt Mercer, was also presenting a lot of the events at the convention, playing some games with the visitors in the games room, and is a thoroughly entertaining man.
After lunch on Saturday, where I had a rather delicious light curry, we went to a talk about how to make fursuits, which was interesting and gave me a few ideas for a costume idea – not furry, I'm sure you'll be pleased to note! – then on to the masquerade, two hours of cosplayers showing off their costumes on the catwalk, trisected by a couple of live performances, one of which was by the Japanese singer Momoi Haruko, who is apparently quite famous in the anime/Japan circuit. After that was MADstravaganza, a rather bizarre collection of Japanese videos you'd expect to find on YouTube, including a particularly hilarious Godzilla mini-film performed intentionally badly and entirely by a single actor. And I found it on YouTube now!
On Sunday we made it up to the Uni for 10:00 – no mean feat considering we'd been going to bed around 02:00 both nights – so that Luke and Sel could get to the Phoenix Wright panel at that time. I went to the Games Room again, which was pretty empty at that time in the morning, so I managed to play DDR unchallenged for about half an hour before being a bit too worn out to continue! Luke and Sel turned up an hour later, when I made this video:
At midday we went to a live recording of Stage Clear, a podcast made by two guys about video games, which was encouraging audience interaction and was quite entertaining. We grabbed lunch quickly afterwards (teriachi chicken) before heading over to the There Will Be Brawl panel, presented by Matt Mercer and joined in person by JoEllen Elam, the TWBB costume designer who also played Zelda, and via webcam the actor for Luigi, Matt Key. This ended up being hilarious; I had tears in my eyes afterwards, the There Will Be Brawl cast and crew are very funny guys.
We also went to a forum considering how possible some of the technology seen in futuristic animes would be, and the closing ceremony, preceded by a variety show that was a little hit-and-miss but had some excellent performances by some Japanese drummers. Finally, a charity auction saw a gigantic Pikachu teddy go for £200 or something crazy. We hung around the games room again, after getting pizza, until the convention finished just before midnight.
I shall definitely be going to the next one!
Also: Luke plays Smash Brawl and Luke and Sel on Sunday night. I didn't take as many photos as I did at London Expo.
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[08 Aug 2009|09:10pm] |
Last night, to celebrate my brother's graduation and belated birthday, my parents took us all out to Rhodes 24, Gary Rhodes' London restaurant. I had potted rabbit* for starters, venison for the main course, and chocolate tarte for dessert.
The starter and main course was delicious; I think I won the menu with both of them, but I totally lost the menu with the dessert. Gary Rhodes apparently likes chocolate that's too bitter to taste of anything other than raw cocoa powder. My dad's bread and butter pudding and mum's fruity dessert thing both looked marvelous, however.
* I kept on imagining a whole rabbit stuffed ungracefully into a small pot, it was making me giggle. It's actually rabbit meat prepared in a similar way to potted shrimp, and was served with toasty bits and a salad.
Today I did some more weeding, and identified the bastard weeds infesting my garden as ground-elder, which are pretty much the worst weeds ever, by most accounts (if they don't appear for two years after you dig up ALL their roots, you MAY have got them all!), so that's a bummer. So I'll be weeding my garden every day for the rest of my life, it seems!
Actually, why did I put that <hr /> there, I don't have anything else to say right now!
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[29 Jul 2009|05:13pm] |
I bought a copy of Mario Kart DS from a Chinese seller on eBay a couple of weeks ago, and for the £2 it cost me wasn't really too bothered as to whether it actually ever turned up or not, although the seller did have good ratings from other overseas buyers.
Today I noticed an email in my spam folder which I read through mostly out of curiosity before joining the bits together to work out that it's probably from that seller.
Bear buyer,
I am [screen name]，Thank you for shopping with us .
Recently,we received many buyers reflected that they have not received their ordered items. We did statistics that many of them are the buyer who bought our products during on july,1 to july ,10.
Today ,we receive the latest news form hk air shipping company.it said that those items maybe will delayed about 10 days.because of some reasons.
So , now if you have not receive your item,we wish you can understanding on this matter ,thankyou very much.
I wish you have a great day
Your honestly
[screen name]
It amused me to see a genuine email written as if it were spam, anyway. I wonder what customs charges I'll likely have to pay on this package; that didn't occour to me until now.
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[26 Jul 2009|10:21am] |
Last night my family went down to Whitstable for my dad's birthday. There appeared to be an Oystable Festival on, which was unexpected and neat to look around, and we took a walk along the beachfront before ending up at the Whitstable Oyster Company restaurant for dinner. Potted shrimp, cod with tartar sauce, and chocolate pot with jersey cream for me; Dad and my brother had lobsters, and more-or-less kept them on the table.
I painted my bathroom the day before; today I should get to B&Q and buy some radiator paint just to finish things off, before watching the F1 this afternoon.
Being driven down to Whitstable was strange in that it's nearly the same route as to Canterbury most of the time. I haven't been there for nearly three years now; not that I imagine anyone I knew at Uni still lives there. I wonder what UKC peeps are up to these days; I suck at keeping in touch and haven't heard from anyone other than Kitty since leaving.
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| I always knew Sainsbury's traffic light scheme was full of crap |
[25 Jul 2009|12:04pm] |
Apparently there are good calories and bad calories!
Aside from the thought that nobody would eat just one single pitta bread (and I could complain about most supermarkets' idea of what constitutes a portion) the smaller, less calorific Basics range pittas have an orange segment for calories (123 kcal), while their larger, more filling standard range pittas are green (150 kcal). Admittedly there is 0.3g more sugar per pitta in the Basics ones, but there's a perfectly good section for sugars right underneath.
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| Gardening part 2 |
[19 Jul 2009|05:17pm] |
 I finished off the garden today, which a pretty thankless task of taking up the rest of the tiles, putting one of seven weed barrier sheets down, and putting the tiles down on top of that. Not assisted by the fact that today is blustery enough to be giving tree roots a run for their money. At the end, it looks largely the same as it did before, but with less weeds between the cracks (hopefully FOREVER).
 I also hacked at the two bushes that were overgrowing and discovered a reddish-leaved plant clinging to life under it and the weeds. I wonder if it'll come back to life now it has some light. The flowerbed looks a bit covered with leaves at the moment but they're mostly loose and I'll weed out the ones that aren't later.
Whoever planted the garden before I moved in clearly liked logs of wood, as the flowerbed was littered with them. So I've turned them into a barrier around the tiles now.
 The whole affair looks pretty much the same from the pavement since my neighbours and I both have bushes in front of it. By the way, if anyone knows what type of plant the large-leafed thing in the foreground of that last photo is, give me a prod. I don't know what to do with it (insofar as you do anything with a bush)
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| Landscaping! Also known as GARDENING. |
[18 Jul 2009|08:39pm] |
This weekend I decided that I'd had enough of the tenacious weeds growing across my flower bed at an alarming rate and choking my flowers in the process. I forgot to take a Before photo but the footage I took of the hailstorm the other week shows off the problem reasonably well:
 Essentially all the greenery on the left there are weeds, and I ripped them all up shortly after that video just to have them already further overgrown by this weekend. They send long feeler-roots through the soil and pop up 30cm further along each time.
So, a trip to B&Q later and I'd bought some blue chipped slate (okay, I lied in my identica post that it was stone, but there was 25kg of it), a shovel, and some special mesh to put under the slate and tiles that lets water through but not weeds, which should solve that problem.
The trip back from B&Q with 4 stone of weight on my back (plus a shovel in my hand) wasn't fun, and I had to take a few rests on the way back. Annoyingly my neighbours happen to walk past down the other side of the road as I was sat, shovel supporting me, on the roadside grass. They must've wondered what the heck I was doing there. Still, it's all good exercise, and not so much more heavy than my weekly shopping, which I transport in the same manner.
 Anyway, after two hours of work in the garden it started to rain (and I needed to think about dinner, moreover), so I left the garden in this state. Seven tiles now on top of weedproof mesh, and the slate laid where there used to be a flowerless and weedful flower bed. The reason it's taken so long is that I had to dig out the earth to get it down to the same level as the tiles.
 Tomorrow I'll finish off the the rest of the tiles and that should be that.
The reason the slate looks different on one half to the other is because for some reason they came out the bag rather damp, and only the first batch got a chance to dry in the afternoon sun before I put the rest on. The colour on the right is the dry colour.
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[15 Jul 2009|01:22pm] |
$ svn diff -rPREV:HEAD | diffstat
….pyx | 15 +++++++++++++++
….py | 15 ++++++++++++++-
….c | 8 ++++++++
3 files changed, 37 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-)
And guess which file took the vast majority of that time... >.<
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| Django |
[12 Jul 2009|12:10pm] |
I woke up a bit earlier than expected this morning so I ran through the Django tutorial, which I've been meaning to do for some time.
( Framework geeking )
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| I believe that covers everything. |
[05 Jul 2009|09:28pm] |
It is far too hot at the moment. How very British of me to be complaining about this after months of rain and dinginess.
On Thursday I went out to the pub with colleagues after work, and ended up staying there for three hours or so -- I think that's some kind of record for me. My old project manager was there, it was good to catch up.
On Friday I worked from home with my lovely fan nearby.
On Saturday I went down to Bath to meet up with ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) reaperfox, whose birthday it was, lazenich, ugerchucker, Blue from the MCM Expo, and yet another Sarah. We went to Pizza Hut, one thing lead to another, and I ended up covered in Coke. It dried off quickly. After that, we walked around Bath for a bit, and I ended up buying a Nintendo DS from a second-hand game shop, along with Sonic Rush. In fact I bought two Sonics Rush, because I like being ripped off by Sega that much Luke wanted a copy too. It seems reasonable, if a little lacklustre to be considered in the style of the first three MegaDrive games. All in all it was a good day! Sel had received a camcorder for her birthday so I suspect there will be YouTube footage of us acting like dorks soon enough.
Today I made Mutant Boy, played some Red Alert, discovered my HDR had run out of disk space and not taped last week's episodes of The Wire, bought series 3 of The Wire from Amazon as a result, and won Mario Kart DS on eBay for £2.62.
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[25 Jun 2009|10:39pm] |
I slept through the night on Monday night for the first time since my GP appointment, but now I'm back to waking up throughout the night. The one benefit of having terribly bad sleep at the moment is that some of my dreams are particularly wacky, and I'm actually remembering them.
A while ago I dreamt that I was getting lost around London and eventually found my way to Gatwick airport (which was laid out more like a hotel lobby), which was good because there was an underground mining railway line from there to Heathrow airport. I took a hand-car and set off down the tunnel, following a girl that in dreamland was apparently the Mario cosplayer I met at the London Expo. Eventually the track ran out and the girl wandered off, and I was at Heathrow. This was good because I was meeting Luke and co for dinner at a restaurant there. I went to said restaurant and had dinner.
A few nights later I dreamt that I was in the final five candidates of The Apprentice, and back in the penthouse we were all so tired that we fell asleep on the sofa. Yasmina slipped down from lying on top of the sofa to next to where I was, unintentionally little-spooning herself with me. Upon realising this, she got up and moved to another sofa to snooze. Rejected!
Last night I dreamt I was in some professional group helping out at some school's drama lesson - we were in a hall that looked like the assembley hall of my old secondary school. I was sent over to help out one group of students, where, for some reason, Yasmina was also helping out. (We didn't know each other from the previous dream.) Later, we were walking along a path somewhere, getting on well, and Yasmina leant over and kissed me. Later that night it appeared we were trying to get into bed together but for some reason had a third person accompanying us at that time, who we needed to set up bedding for on the floor, and was taking a long time to do so. I remember telling them they couldn't set up the mattress by the door because I'd need to get past part-way through the night when I woke up and needed to go to the loo (this is pretty much standard practice for me in real life at the moment, and yes, I've tried not drinking anything before going to bed!). I don't remember much after that.
So, in summary (anyone good at interpreting dreams want to have a better go?)
- I fancy Yasmina from this year's series of The Apprentice (well, I knew that anyway!)
- I'm even tired in my dreams, goddamit.
- I have no idea what was with the hand-cars.
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[21 Jun 2009|11:40pm] |
I've had a surprisingly productive weekend this weekend, which has made a nice change! Vacuumed the living room, cleaned the kitchen, made pizza bases from scratch, and got all my shopping done! I think that's mostly thanks to getting a couple of nearly-full nights' sleep at the end of the week, waking up less than half an hour before my alarms were set -- hopefully I won't jinx that by putting it here (Edit: fsfdksjgklfs). I've been trying not to worry about it too much as the GP advised -- I haven't counted the days since that appointment, for instance -- so hopefully that's starting to pay off. I'm only realising now how much it's hindered me doing stuff at the weekends though, in comparison to this weekend.
I'm still battling the plumbers to actually come back and finish fixing my shower, so daily baths have taken their place at the moment, and I've worked them into my morning schedule. I still can't run one at the right temperature, but I'm getting the hang of it! It's actually rather nice to have a bath in the morning, and aside from waiting for it to run (during which I eat breakfast) it doesn't take any longer than a shower.
I finished reading The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy last week and have moved onto The Restaurant at the End of the Universe. The film is my main reference for the HHGG series, so it's a little strange reading lines from Zaphod that I can't imagine the dimwitted character in the film saying, and likewise lines that were obviously suited better to the 80's TV series' actor than Mos Def. Reading the entire book in Stephen Fry's voice was most enjoyable.
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| 90s |
[15 Jun 2009|10:25pm] |
This week I have inadvertently propelled myself back in time to the late 1990s, as I'm reading The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy for the first time since I was half my current age (which is pretty scary) and playing my way through the Allied mission of the first (and only good) C&C: Red Alert.
RA runs a little crashily in Wine but with the exception of the last mission I've played (Allied 7) not enough to hinder gameplay too much (In Allied mission 7 I rather had to save a lot as the game froze up often. Sometimes starting another app from a screen session on my Mac jump-started it back to life, occasionally it didn't).
I used Homebase's free kitchen planning service in store on Sunday, but the price of parts plus labour currently comes to more than I have in my savings account (and was about double what I was expecting), so I shall have to wait a bit longer before getting my (as the booklet calls it) Perfect Kitchen. Pity, the 2020 3D visualisation looked nice, and it totally had room for an oven, hobs and dishwasher. Maybe I'll try Wickes (although the expensive part was the labour so maybe I just need to save up for longer).
I forgot about Mutant Boy again last weekend. I must brainstorm strip ideas at some point so at least I have something to pad out into a comic each week.
This week at work I'm writing C++! I'm actually rather enjoying it; I must be doing something wrong. Play me off, Keyboard Cat
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