Whittlings

Soo, I’m well back and well rested from a great trip to California. I’ve finally gotten around to uploading all of my photos, though tagging the final 40% of them just became a bit to much of a chore, so I didn’t bother. In any case, I’d only feel obliged to geo-tag them all afterwards too; which would take forever.

My previous post was very brief simply because typing on the PSP is very slow. Think texting, and then half the possible speed. However, a decision to buy a rather pretty PSP (with a lovely Final Fantasy logo) on it was entirely justified by its support of Skype. O2 roaming charges to the US are an entirely ridiculous £2 per minute to make a call, and £1.50 to recieve one; but using Skype (which was available in nearly all of the hotels that we stayed at), cut that down to pittance.

Regardless, some photos from my time in California are below, enjoy:

For the summer, I’ve somehow winded up with working night shift back at Sainsburys for two nights a week. Having lost my letter, it was the only possible vacancy that they had left; and there’d have been no way I’d have taken it were it not for the £1.50 premium per hour. The main downside is, obviously, that it screws my already poor sleeping patterns even further. Boo.

I’ve also finally gotten around to playing MGS4, and am working through it slowly; not at all helped by the fact I sleep through nearly every day. Tomorrow is also being reserved for playing Pixeljunk: Eden, which lots of people seem to be raving about. I’m shallow enough to be drawn in by the prospect of Remote Play and Trophies (!!!), so it’s fortunate it’s fun too. I’m not exactly getting very far through the trophies in Super Stardust HD.

In other gaming; i34 is getting underway up in Stoneleigh Park in a couple of weeks time; and it has finally been confirmed as the venue for i35 in November. I’m now making it a priority to make as many people as possible going; namely compsoc, as we’re local anyway, and DiVAS for some silly pissup. Yay for Stoneleigh!

Wordpress updated to 2.6; though I made a booboo when clearing unmoderated spam comments and accidentally deleted every single comment. Oh well.

There are several things I have learnt this past week:
Wireless internet is more essential in a hotel than a colour TV; California suffers from fires; PSP Skype is the absolute win; and July fourth is not a good time to holiday.

20:46 * pedantic adds white rum, cococunt cream, pineapple juice and ice for Susanita
20:46 -!- mode/#theonering.net [+b *!*@cpe-24-27-57-176.austin.res.rr.com] by Barliman
20:46 * Barliman Is Frowning At pedantic
20:46 -!- pedantic was kicked from #theonering.net by Barliman [banned:pedantic]
20:46 * Barliman Drags pedantic By The Leg To #theonering.net’s Door And Says Wait Here
[...]
20:59 -!- mode/#theonering.net [+o Cavaille-Col] by ChanServ
20:59 -!- mode/#theonering.net [-b *!*@cpe-24-27-57-176.austin.res.rr.com] by Cavaille-Col
20:59 -!- mode/#theonering.net [-o Cavaille-Col] by Cavaille-Col
20:59 -!- pedantic [pedantic@cpe-24-27-57-176.austin.res.rr.com] has joined #theonering.net
20:59 -!- mode/#theonering.net [+b *!*@cpe-24-27-57-176.austin.res.rr.com] by Barliman
20:59 -!- pedantic was kicked from #theonering.net by Barliman [banned:pedantic]

Since Perplex City was put on “indefinite hold” a couple of years ago, I’ve been following and adoring the work of Adrian Hon, it’s lead creative developer; mainly in the hope of seeing if he’s working on another ARG, but also because of how innately interesting almost all of his works turn out to be. Most recently, they’ve been working with Penguin Books on developing We Tell Stories, a project which seems to be experimenting with form of story telling which uniquely uses the Internet and resources on the Internet as it’s medium. Their first story released yesterday, was written by Charles Cumming and uses Google Maps to tell a short story. Adrian gives an overview of his thoughts on its inception here.
It’s a great idea that’s been well implemented, and is well worth a read.

The “theft” chain is allegedly now rather silly. It’s not as if this was prompted by another similar post, or anything.

My desk contains, clockwise from left, my PC speakers and monitor, various plugs and adapters, a Star Wars book “Bloodlines”, my phone, an MP3 player, tissues, some questions on integration, a torch, calculator sans-batteries, various pieces of misc. work, my laptop, Bioshock, my mouse, the work I’m on at the moment, a new pen and some Fanta. My shelves have a few books and games on. The vodka… isn’t mine. The vinegar is. Honest.

I would have blogged earlier, but we’ve just spent half an hour sitting around hammering refresh on BBC news.

That was pretty pretty awesome. I was sitting here, and felt my desk start to vibrate under my knee. I thought I was getting the jitters, but when the whole room shook when I removed my knee; it became clear that it wasn’t.

Looking out in the corridor and seeing everyone coming out with looks of shock and amusement on their faces was also quite neat.

BBC. USGS. On the off chance that you haven’t seen them.

BBC News online was particularly fun. Within ten minutes, the news articles on quakes in the past 6 years came to the top of most read pages on the site. Over the past 40 minutes, traffic to news.bbc.co.uk has increased 43%.

Seriously, Maths>Sleep ∀ maths that has to be in by the next morning. That’s a fact.

A pointer also towards Microsoft Dreamspark for being the most awesome student deal since The Ultimate Steal - perhaps better! Free VS2008 was too good a deal for me to pass up, even though I’ve been advocating the amazingness of Eclipse and Vim recently.

Finally, I was nearly lynched earlier for the following “joke” (a variation on the old “I wish I were sin²? and you were cos²? so that together we could be one”):

“If only you could be one over the determinate times of my transposed matrix of covectors, then together we could be one.”

It’s not that bad, is it?

Trawling through my feeds today, I came across a link to an article on the website of an American political commentator/economist by the name of Lyndon LaRouche (and there’s a name to strike fear in your heart). To cut it short, he’s about the craziest crazy person whose works I’ve ever seen. His site isn’t particularly cohesive and it can be hard to determine his explicit views; but he seems to unequivocally hate the British. Recurring themes throughout seem to include how the British are attempting to undermine American culture and government either through assassination of cultural assimilation (err, yeh). As flattering as it is that the author seems to be under the impression that we’re Illuminati-like rulers of the entire planet; it just isn’t true. Some prize quotes:

The British kill American presidents, LaRouche recounted, and it could be McCain, Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton or Obama who could be the target to get the Michael Bloomberg option through.

The British-promoted genocide scheme known as global warming is taking a human toll in Tajikistan, the former Soviet republic which borders China and eastern Afghanistan. [this is a story which "disproves" global warming]

Is Sgt. Pepper Controlling NASA?

As the British Empire assault on the institution of the sovereign nation state continues, creating the imminent danger of a repeat of the 1923 Germany Weimar hyperinflation of the U.S. dollar, followed, or accompanied, by an intended Felix Rohatyn and George Shultz inspired, Michael Bloomberg fascist dictatorship in the United States, [...] The link, if you will, situated in the context of our world political crisis, is the British digital networking site Bebo, the British version of MySpace and Facebook. These sites, such as Bebo, today act as digital suicide clubs for youth of the ages 14-25, where once you �log in,� you�re already dead. And, these internet tombs, a capital element in the British Empire�s warfare against human civilization, are frequented by today�s youth in the privacy and security of their own bedrooms, with mummy and daddy, oftentimes, right downstairs.

International Fascism: Microsoft Will Kill More Youth than Hitler

Because Pivot was just made of fail. At least, something was, because it required that I manually rebuilt the entry database every few minutes in order that it would notice that I’d written most of my entries.
Besides, the original justification for using Pivot was that it used flat files rather than a database: a problem that I’ve (long since) overcome. A few of the more recent posts from my website are going to be migrated over as there’s no real easy way to move the posts wholesale, and then I’ll look at theme. Sure, the Wordpress default is lovely and wholesome, functional and practical; but it’s also really really boring and generic.

At the LAN this weekend. My brain is turning to mush, because it’s the height of sleep deprivation methods. I’m sure there’s some work around here somewhere that I need to do…