A mysterious encounter

I was taking my daily walk with the Idiot Hound* and had a rather strange encounter. One of the nice things about walking around the quiet country lanes is that you very rarely meet anything. Sometimes a car might go past, or perhaps even someone on a horse, or even maybe someone with another dog. This can be a good thing if it's a woman I meet every so often who has two lovely greyhounds, or bad if it's the couple down the road with an insane dachshund who thinks it can take on my dog when it barely reaches past his ankles.

Anyway, I was walking along in a kind of walking doze, you know how it is when you know the way, you don't have to be anywhere and the weather is good. I was deep in thought about something when suddenly a loud female voice cried "She's so lucky!". This was rather startling, and I looked up to encounter a female jogger hurtling towards me. What was odd that she didn't appear to be on a mobile phone or wearing an MP3 player, so why she would say that out loud at the top of her voice is beyond me. Anyway she jogged past without any more words, so perhaps she was talking to herself.

Picture is of a highway near San Francisco which collapsed due to a tanker fire. Looks really weird how the road is all bent like a blanket.

Played the Command & Conquer 3 demo from Xbox Live briefly. It seems fairly typical strategy stuff, and I remembered how I loved building up an army in Warcraft II and then going out to slaughter the enemy.

Bored and tired now, so just some links:

Excruciating Windows 95 training video with Matthew Perry and Jennifer Aniston.
Some insanely cool monitor setups that make my dual head system seem a bit...shit.

* Idiot Hound = a friendly name for a not at all stupid and very lovable greyhound.

A machine that runs at 0.008ghz and Xbox Live

I am typing this on an Amstrad Notepad Computer NC100. You may remember this machine being sold in the early 90's as User-Friendly. It cost £199 and Amstrad promised you your money back if you couldn't use it within five minutes. It featured coloured keys which were pressed in certain combinations to select things like the word processor and calculator. I picked mine up in about 1995 for some reason. Mainly because by then they were very cheap and I thouht it would be fun to play with. It has some extra features behind the user friendly stuff, a full implementation of BBC Basic and a serial terminal were the interesting things. Some guy has also worked quite hard to port CP/M to it. It's a very humble machine, powered by an 8mhz Z80 processor with 64k memory, and a cheap low-contrast LCD which can display 8 lines of text. However, it does have a surprisingly good keyboard. I used it mainly to jot down ideas and write things on, the serial port allowing the transfer of the text to a desktop PC.

So why should I be impressed by this very humble machine? Because the last time I did anything with it was about four years ago. Since then, it's been stuck under my bed. I dug it out the other day and pressed the power button. To my amazement, it turned on, admittedly to tell me the batteries were low, but it still turned on. I put a set of fresh batteries in it and found that all those old files of random jottings were still there. Even the clock was correct. It's somewhat ironic that those files were originally backed up from the NC100 to a PC that died and was scrapped about six years ago.

I've always had a fondness for portable machines that don't require a huge lithium battery to run, and that will last for months on AA batteries. It may not be very powerful, but for stuff like simple text entry and stuff like that, you can't beat it. As I type this, I'm sitting in the field in the sunshine. Yes, I could do that with a modern laptop, but I'd be worried about dirt getting into it, and most laptop screens are very hard to see in the sunshine. A similar and far more popular machine like this was the Tandy Model 100, which was practically indestructible. I also have a Cambridge Z88 somewhere, which had a practically silent rubber keyboard, that was very usable. That one was a bugger to connect to a PC though, so I never really used it for anything.

There's something about a machine which allows you to concentrate on a particular task with no Internet, MP3, or anything to distract you. A modern equivalent is the AlphaSmart machines, portable word processors which allow you to simply enter text. The clever part is that you hook them up to the keyboard port of the PC, and the data just comes across as keystrokes. Sadly the modern versions that support USB are quite expensive, so I'll just have to hook this Amstrad up to the legacy serial port on the Dell. It's been a while since I had to set up a serial link, but it soon came back to me.

So, in other news, the phone line has been reconnected. That means I was able to get my Xbox 360 connected up to Xbox Live. It's interesting. I got one month free of the Gold service, so I'm carefully evaluating it. A year costs œ34.95. The game linkup service is pretty much spot on - Crackdown was even synchronising up dead ragdoll pedestrians perfectly, which was impressive. You can send messages, which is infinitely easier with a USB keyboard, and even do voice chat. Things I don't like about Xbox Live are the adverts it puts on the Dashboard, and the fact that complete strangers can see that you're playing a particular game and ask to join you. I was happily trying to complete a race in Crackdown, when it said 'PennsylvaniaButtocks95 would like to join your game'. I can't remember exactly what the name was, but it was something like that. It's plausible, considering some of the weird handles that people use on there.

Being able to download game demos is pretty cool, although it takes a while as they are pretty big. I'm currently downloading the Command & Conquer 3 demo, which is 1gb. I was quite surprised at the sheer number of demos that are available to download, and it's good to know that if I ever get bored of the games I have, they are there.

I also picked up a couple of games the other day, Saint's Row and the original Halo. Saint's Row is based on the same engine as Crackdown, but somehow manages to look a lot less interesting, and more like a good last-gen game. It's also much less fun. The best thing about it is the Player Pratfalls cheat. I think I added a link to a video of this a while back, and it's very, very funny. Sadly you can't do this in multiplayer games.

So all-in-all, I'm quite happy with the Xbox 360 experience. I just wish the hardware wasn't so noisy and hot. It makes a fair bit of noise. It chucks out quite a lot of heat when it's running at full load, but nothing much worse than a typical PC under the same circumstances. The 360 controller is one of the best, and it even works very well with old Xbox games. It's a world away from the giant original Xbox controllers.

Back at last

This was supposed to be posted last week or so.

Well, this is a long entry indeed. Mainly because a week and a half ago, a farmer decided he was going to plough a field which runs alongside our drive. This field hasn't been ploughed for some forty years, but it recent went into the ownership of a young and enthusiastic farmer, which seems to be a rare thing these days. However, he didn't realise that our phone line ran down the hedge and cut across the bottom of the field. Do I need to draw you a picture? I took the dog for a walk, and came back to find no Internet. No phone either. A quick investigation found the severed ends of cable. Joy. Because we get our phone service from Pipex now, rather than BT, it added a few extra steps to go through, and due to some staggering incompetence by Pipex, it took a long time to resolve.

I had a picture of the freshly ploughed field all ready to post, as the sun shining on it made it look like some vast chocolate cake. Then the next day, they proceeded to spread lime over the field, making the houses nearby look like a miniature version of New York after the 9/11 attacks. After this, it looked like the cake had been sprinkled with icing sugar. Sadly now they have gone over it with a roller and it just looks like a field again. Oh well.

Apart from that, the last few days have been uneventful. Saturday morning was dull, went into work to do some overtime, just some mindlessly boring PC reconfiguration, made doubly depressing by the fact it was such a beautiful day. However as I was driving home from the office, something possessed me, and before I knew it, I was travelling home brand new Xbox 360 Premium in my hands. Yeah, not sure what caused that, it was like my conscience was lost for a while. I had intended to get a Core, as I had said to myself many times that the only thing I really wanted in the Premium was the hard drive, the wireless controller didn't matter, and I certainly didn't want a headset. One of the few times I played a game on my old Xbox online with the headset, I was called repeatedly called a 'fucking shithead' by someone who I very much doubt had reached puberty.

Anyway, back to the 360. I remember pouring ridicule on the 360 when it originally came out. It was ugly, it looked like a squashed Dell. It was too expensive, the different versions were pointless, the triple-core CPU was stupid and the PSU was too big. But then Sony revealed the monstrosity that is the PS3. Actually, to be fair I suspect the PS3 is a better engineered machine than the Xbox 360, which has a very suspect reliability record. But Sony forces you into Blu-ray, built a machine capable of running at 1080p resolution and lumbered it with a 12-year old controller design, and some of the arrogant shit they have been saying is just unbelievable. It's also incredibly expensive. The clincher was the news that GTA4 was going to be released on the 360. So I now have the combo known as the Wii60, and like it very much. The 360 does have a dodgy reliability record so I decided that I definitely wanted a new one with a warranty. If the PS3 has some good games on it, I might pick one up. After a price cut...

Having actually used it now, I have to say I like the 360. The Dashboard is very nicely put together, and the controller is excellent. It's a tad noisy for a games console, as it makes the same noises as an average PC. I only have one game at the moment: Crackdown. Now, what a game. Take GTA, make the main character a superhero cop, and that's basically it. It took a little while for me to get into it as for a while I didn't have a clue was I was supposed to be doing, but now I love it.

Annoyingly because I don't have any Internet connection, I can't experiment with the 360 online stuff, like the demo downloads and the like. I think the next game I get will be Gears of War as a friend has it, and it is a great game. It has really good gameplay and tactics, and it has some of the best looking graphics I've yet seen on a console, even on a standard definition TV.

Today (Sunday) I went down to one of our nearest neighbours (1 mile away) who was having difficulties with his PC. It turns out it was an old 1.3ghz Athlon running the original release of Windows XP without a single update, and no antivirus or firewall. It was connected to the Internet directly through a Speedtouch modem. Surprisingly it wasn't a festering mess of viruses and spyware, though there were some viruses on it. But Windows had managed to screw itself up in the way it does so well, and resisted all attempts to get it working again. So I said it needed wiping and reinstalling, to be presented with a CD-R of Windows XP and an illegible handwritten code. A few years ago I'd probably have happily installed this dodgy copy of XP but these days I haven't got the patience to fiddle around with pirate copies of Windows. You can't get all the updates to make it secure without faffing around and it's just irritating, which was the whole point of Windows Update (see rant in last entry). If you don't want to pay for Windows, get Linux or something.

Anyway this guy's wife turned around and just said they'd most likely get a new machine, probably a laptop, as their house is very small. It was odd, I've been past that house probably thousands of times over the years, and I've never been in it. The back of the house is directly on the road and has no windows, and so I was very surprised at how small it was inside. But it was very cosy, definitely my kind of house.

Back to reality

OK, let's start this entry with a slight rant:

I FUCKING HATE WINDOWS UPDATE. Thanks to it, I lost a fairly long and coherant entry about Madrid, video games and the hideousness of Heathrow Airport. Windows 2000 decided to download and install some updates, and then automatically restart my computer. It did this while I was away from the computer, so I missed the 5 minute countdown before it started happily closing down every window I had open, all the websites I was looking at, the VNC session to my media box, the telnet session to WackyMOO and of course the Firefox window with my blog entry. None of the applications were able to cancel the shutdown. Who the FUCK thought that allowing Windows Update to do this BY DEFAULT was a good idea. What a load of shite. Firefox thankfully keeps a record of what you are doing so if it crashes, or is KILLED BY FUCKING WINDOWS UPDATE then it can open the sites you had open before.

I HATE this culture of releasing shit software and then releasing patches over the Internet. Every fucking OS makes you do this nowadays, Windows is the worst, but Mac OS X and Linux do it as well. But it was Microsoft that somehow made this approach legitimate. These days, even fucking games consoles do it. The Xbox 360, PS3, PSP and even the fucking Wii make you do this! It's total bollocks.

OK, that was quite a major rant. I can't remember exactly what I had typed before but it can be summarised thusly:

I like Madrid, the Spanish language, the Metro, and the daily Spanish routine, the Chueca district, but not the Street of Shame, the prices of drinks in Chueca or the big police with shotguns. Transferring through Gatwick and Heathrow sucked arse. Terminal 4 of Madrid airport is amazing. My camera can see into an alternate universe. Went to a local game shop today and bought Phoenix Wright for the DS and Lego Star Wars II for the PSP.

I need a haircut. I also need Battenburg cake.

Currently listening to No More Tears by Ozzy Osborne. Reminds me of night shifts at my last job.

For fuck's sake, thanks to that Windows Update fuckup, this entry has become stupid, rambling and SHIT.

Madrid Again!

Well, Madrid is proving to be very cool indeed. It has a definite European feel to it, far more so than Berlin, but I can´t put my finger on exactly why. I would update the blog with a picture, I´ve got nearly 300 now, but unfortunately the wireless network my laptop was able to see has now been locked so I can only get on with the hotel computer with no facitilities to upload images.

So far we´ve eaten a lot of good food, talked to a squirrel monkey, fed prairie dogs, walked along a LOT of streets, found a 12-string mandolin, drank a lot of beer and vodka, and along with that, had an extraordinary amount of tapas. It has to be said, Madrid rules.

Madrid!

Posting this from a hotel in Madrid. It's handy having a laptop, and even handier that the hotel has wireless access. So far we've visited a lot of bars, had a lot of tapas, and possibly the best sandwiches ever made. Superb. Spanish is proving interesting too, it's an intriguing language. The journey here was rather fraught. The flights weren't bad from Manchester to Gatwick and then Madrid. However, we got a taxi from the airport to the hotel, which was...interesting. First it was rush hour traffic, and the driver had some interesting ideas about junctions and reversing.

More coming soon and possibly even some pictures.

Bits of futon + Scorpio + Random guitar parts = 2 string lap steel bass

Today was an insanely busy day. I got up early to go to a car boot sale. It was pretty big, but when it's big it just means that there is a whole lot more shit out there. People really do try and sell the worst cack you can imagine. I did pick up a Nokia 9000i, one of the original Communicators. If you're not familiar with these phones, they're the ones that open up to have a larger screen and QWERTY keyboard inside. To be fair, this thing is huge. It works fine and came with the charger. It'll go nicely with my 9110 and 9210 models too.

Nokia 9000 Communicator

Today it was Farmer mode. I put on wellies and drove the Discovery around the fields sorting out some things. It was a rather satisfying day really, got a hell of a lot of things done and got all grubby and dirty and then had a really nice shower. It's great to have a shower when you're all dirty.

Also today I was watching a DVD I wasn't particularly interested in, and had the urge to create something. No idea why. So after some thought and seeing what was lying around, I hacked an old futon to bits and cut the wood up using a Black and Decker Scorpion, a scary electric saw that can also be used as a jigsaw. After some drilling and screwing (ahem) and attaching some random spare bass parts, I ended up with what I am describing as a 2-string lap steel bass guitar. It has to be a slide style guitar because the strings are so far off the neck. However, if you tune it to a powerchord and slide a glass up and down the strings, it makes some interesting sounds. Now I just need to find a spare pickup and attach it somehow. The wood is very soft so when the strings are tuned up, it starts to resemble a banana so it has to be detuned rather drastically. Oh well, it was a good learning experience.

Turns out this has been done before, Mark Sandman of Morphine played a 2-string bass with a slide. Interesting sound too!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hrx4EnkVj50&
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dn8n4nLEYIw&

So all in all, quite a productive day.

Last day of work! Spanish! Mutants!

Today was the last day of work before the bank holiday weekend and the trip to Madrid. It was a great feeling to walk out of the office today, knowing I'm not going to be back in there until the 18th. It was made even better by the fact I managed to get my jobs down to practically zero, so that was good news.

I've been trying to get a laptop ready for the Madrid trip in case it comes in useful. I've decided on the Panasonic Toughbook CF-M34, which is a very tiny machine, but is one of the military spec models. It's only a hunble P3-400mhz with 192mb RAM but it isn't too bad. It's got an insanely strong case, the first laptop I've ever seen where you can twist it in your hands and it doesn't move. Not a single creak. All the other laptops I have are big and fragile and I can't be bothered taking a huge one. It also has a touch-screen, which I've never got working.

However, being a tiny sub-notebook, the Toughbook has no internal CD-ROM or floppy drives. Because Linux is tricky with wireless cards, I thought I'd put a temporary install of Windows XP on there by putting the hard drive into another laptop. But no, XP doesn't like being installed on one machine and then booting up on another. It has a tantrum and blue-screens. As does Windows 2000 Advanced Server. I tried formatting the drive from a Win98 boot disk, and copying the install files. The installer ran and spent about 2 hours copying files that were already on the hard drive, but then failed after it rebooted. So after a long session of cursing I put Ubuntu Linux back on it again, going full circle. Linux doesn't like booting up on a strange machine either, but at least it drops you to a command prompt so you can reconfigure the graphics. Ubuntu is a pretty decent Linux distribution, I've ran various versions on both x86 and PowerPC hardware and when it works, it works well. When it doesn't work...well, fiddling around with text files and command prompts is fun, right? Right?

Well, that was a nice bit of geekery for you. I found a nice Spanish tutorial here:

http://www.ielanguages.com/spanish1.html

It looks quite decent. Probably should have looked this up months ago, but hey.

Currently listening to Reise, Reise by Rammstein.

In case you're wondering what the pic is all about, check this thread out on Something Awful. I was inspired by the recent Robocop entry. However the forum thread has been Dugg, so the server seems to be dying. Check back later though, it's quite funny.

http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=2412676&perpage=40&pagenumber=1

That's about it really, can't think of anything else to put.

A slow day

I spent all day feeling tired and unmotivated. I didn't achieve much at all. Probably the only good thing was getting a replacement SCART switch box off a guy in work. Since my last one made everything go purple, the only things I've had hooked up are the Wii and my DVD player. The PS2 and Xbox have been sadly neglected until today.

My ever faithful Nokia 7610 took a tumble the other day and the rear cover finally cracked. So I got a new shell for it. To be honest the original brown/silver/gold cover had never really done it for me so the new one was black/silver/red. And it looks nice again. It's a weird looking phone, but it's astonishingly solid and despite much abuse (accidentally kicked into a concrete wall, dropped multiple times, once down stairs, had wine spilt in it, etc), it has never failed me.

I was looking into replacing it but nothing out there really appeals at the moment except the business orientated Nokia E-series, but they are still quite pricy.. Someone in work was selling an LG Chocolate, which apart from the idiotic name is quite nice. But it was too sleek and shiny and I knew I'd wreck it, and also the OS was a bag of shite. Part of the reason I like Nokia phones is that you can scratch them up completely and then a new shell makes it look new again.

Bored. Probably the most unmotivated blog post ever.

Badminton, fear and Fields of the Nephilim

It was the end of season badminton tournament today, which I was absolutely bricking it for. I got partnered with a guy from the A team, who thankfully is quite patient when I do one of my trademark fuckups. I don't know where we came in the end but we did win one game and managed a respectable score against one of the pairs in the final (though to be fair they started with -9). All good fun. Afterwards we went to the pub to marvel at the fact that it's now illegal to smoke in them - yay! The place still smelled of smoke though.

This is another weird track, Psychonaut by Fields of the Nephilim. I first heard it from a guy years ago who was a real Goth, and I really liked some of their music. This track is really good and has a great bass line. I hadn't seen the video before and it is...odd.

Running people over was never so much fun

Yesterday was interesting. I spent the morning messing around and taking the dog for a walk. Then met up with some guys I used to work with at my last job and spent the entire evening playing Wii and eating pizza. It was a great evening, how can you go wrong with that? My pizza had Chinese Chicken on it and was utterly fantastic. Of course now I have guilt.

Had a play on Saints Row on the Xbox 360 today. We didn't actually play any of the missions, instead we just ran people over and kicked and punched them while laughing hysterically at the ragdoll physics. Also there is a mode where you can make your character go all limp and floppy, which is absolutely hilarious. All this was made all the more funny by the fact that he was dressed as Santa. Watching people bounce off cars and walls is far funnier than it sounds. Especially when the cheat mode was activated where all the people in cars hate you. Leaping wildly out of the way to avoid a car which promptly smashes into a wall, sending the driver flying through the windscreen, is far too funny to be described here.

The Xbox 360 is a nice machine, it's quite hefty compared to the Wii, but it has a really nice controller and the games look pretty decent even on a normal TV.

Oh my God, just came across this video for Wanted Dead or Alive by Bon Jovi on YouTube. Back in the day, I absolutely loved this track, and it was an interesting experience hearing it again. I had a video that Bon Jovi did about the Slippery When Wet tour, and it was one of the things that made me want to play in a band. Scary stuff.

I had a go on a double neck acoustic like the one played in the video, except the 12 string neck was on top. It was BIG but fun. I wish I could play guitar better. When I saw the Bon Jovi video above, I found some tab for the intro and tried to learn it, with some success. Bass is my main instrument but I do like some of the stuff you can do on guitar too.

I hit Pro in Wii Bowling today - I had three games and got a record score in each one. I've never had such a good session of bowling before, so not sure what happened there.

People are finally noticing that I haven't cut my hair for a while. I had it long until 9 years ago and since then I've never let it grow longer than a centimetre or so. However I've decided to let it grow and see what happens. It's just got to the stage where it suddenly looks big, so I'd better do something with it soon.