A quiet weekend, aside from tidying up after my brief attack of immense stupidity. I won't go into the details, because frankly they're way too embarrassing, but I will say that I have made a note to check all of the inexpensive possibilities first the next time.
That's not to say that I will, of course, but at least I have a plan.
My PC is broken. Keyboard weirdness even during the power-on self test and the printer spitting out pages of garbage during boot.
I think I have mains power issues in my flat, as that's the second machine to die since I moved in there, and the cable TV box goes funny a fair bit too. Time to invest in some mains smoothing technology, methinks.
And a new motherboard, of course. *sigh*
The bad news is that I just wrote a fat cheque to the Inland Revenue for corporation tax.
The good news is that it's four grand less than I expected! Woohoo!
This weekend I buy more wine.
So, that's that for another two years. By all accounts another incredibly successful Discworld Convention, and certainly another whole heap of fun for me. The only downer inevitably comes after it's all finished – after an intense five-six day hit of great friends, late nights and alcohol, I find myself in the office today feeling rather flat and slightly empty.
Still. Looking forward to next time, where I shall be going as a “mere” attendee. It should be interesting – I am given to understand that there are literally hundreds of really cool things going on between the opening and closing ceremonies. I look forward to being able to see some of them. :)
Mad Bug Fix Week this week, as we rush desperately to nail down all the bugs in the latest release before we release it. Which will of course be on Wednesday, my last day there for almost a week.
If we go by the last time I took any time off, Thursday will be the day when the clients break everything.
On top of that, I have two separate headaches. For most people one headache is more than enough, but oh no, I have to be different.
I really hope tomorrow is better than this.
Technology, eh? White heat of the revolution and all that.
Cheap 19″ LCD monitors are now approaching the price cheap 19″ CRTs were when I bought mine. Cause for celebration!
Unfortunately, all the 19″ LCDs seem to have a maximum resolution of 1280×1024, whereas the CRTs I have go up to 1600×1200.
Still. When the CRTs finally do die, I'll be easily able to replace them with LCDs, and then I'll be able to put other things on my desk as well.
Meanwhile, the lovely graphics card continues to be lovely. Mmmmmm.
We seem to be rapidly approaching the point where the first page of any given set of search results will consist entirely of search engine results pages, which will themselves consist entirely of search engine results pages.
It will soon become almost impossible to actually find anything.
Instead, we will spend hours doing one of two things:
Of course, with number 2, what you'd eventually end up doing is storing all of the “-site:” stuff somewhere so you would have a quick way of excluding search engines from your search results. Maybe do a customised form with a little checkbox saying “exclude search engines from results”.
Then someone at Google could do that and then maybe we could get back to actually finding what we're looking for.
Here's a new one for you: “Half Coated All Butter Lemon Biscuits”.
As well as sounding like a yummy treat, they have a few little extras for lovers of language like myself. There is, for example, the beautiful pairing of Half/All – Half Coated. All Butter.
Then there's the strange contradiction inherent in the statement that, despite being All Butter, they are in fact Lemon Biscuits.
I don't actually know what they taste like yet, but the linguistic entrée was delicious.
Biting into your freshly-purchased apple doughnut to discover that it is, in fact, a custard doughnut.
I suppose with my previous post about ever-increasing realism in computer graphics, now is as good a time as any to discuss the Evils of Video Game Violence.
I'm a gamer. I have been a gamer – board, role-playing, and video – for nigh-on twenty years, and longer than that if you count “Snakes and Ladders”.
I have played Unreal Tournament and Quake Deathmatch. In so doing, I have inflicted unpleasant deaths on the avatars of friends and colleagues.
And in single-player games, I have mugged, shot, stabbed, beheaded, burned, run over, drowned, eviscerated, clubbed, cleaved, electrocuted, strangled, blown up, melted, vapourised, diced with helicopter blades, and otherwise caused unpleasant and lethal harm to tens of thousands of pixelated people and tens of thousands more pixelated aliens or robots.
In short, I should be the poster boy for the Daily Mail's videogame violence campaign. And yet, in my daily routine, I find myself managing to not kill or even wound anyone. I even lent a pen to someone on the train without causing them serious injury. The last time I hit anyone in anger was, er, 1983, I think, and as I recall they started it.
It is unquestionable that the death of the kid was tragic. But we're facing a second tragedy here, which is that in the scramble for headlines, the witch-hunting, the desperate assignment of blame, the real reason for the way the killer behaved as he did will be lost in the need for vengeance on the “peddlers of violence”. And that will lead to yet more tragedy of the same kind. Thus the cycle repeats itself.
