Exceptionally Uncaught

That's It, I'm Done

2007-05-31T16:33:00.000+10:00

There are a lot of different reasons that I'm not going to go into, but I've had enough of Exceptionally Uncaught. So this is the last post I'm going to make here.

I haven't had enough of blogging though, so if you're still interested in reading about me and my crazy thoughts, update your feed-readers and point your browsers at The Cluttered Desk

No Links?

2007-05-20T18:28:00.000+10:00

I've been in Europe for the past 7 weeks. We started a travel blog (at http://simonkarina.blogspot.com) to document our adventures. It was a great idea - we have lots of different people from all parts of our lives reading and enjoying it, and we've got a great travel diary now.

But there's one thing I'm very sad about. The entire time we were away, no one linked to our adventures! Gordon gets a half-mark, because he did eventually link to us, but not before we were actually on the plane to come home.

We're home now, but we've still got one or two more entries to make. So come on you bloggers! It's not too late!

Invalid Windows!

2007-04-20T03:04:00.000+10:00

While trying to get some photos off my camera in a Dubrovnik Internet cafe, the computer decided to lock up. So it got reset, and we moved to the machine next to it.

After our original machine had finished starting up, I was pretty amused by the warning it displayed.

It took the Internet cafe lady a little while to come over to click the "Resolve Later" button and pretend everything was perfectly normal.

Hello Everyone!

2007-04-13T21:21:00.000+10:00

So here I am, sitting in a grotty Internet cafe at a bus station! Just a really quick post before we jump on the train to Zagreb. Mostly because I wanted to do a post.

What a Cool Idea

2007-03-26T19:19:00.000+10:00

I know it's a bit old, but I only just heard about Red 5's awesome recruiting idea.

Wow. The idea says so much about what the company must be like. They must be fighting off cool game devs with a stick now.

(I want to be a cool game dev)

Steel & Glass: Structure

2007-03-20T17:45:00.000+11:00

I tend to enjoy sandbox games - the ones where there's this big world and while there might be a main storyline or two, you can happily ignore it all and just do your own thing. I like them because you can jump in and have some fun even if you can only play for a short time, and because they usually have pretty good replay value even after you've "beaten" the game.

There are a few things you need for a sandbox game. Specifically, you need the sand and the box. The "box" is the setting - it's the world that gives all the gains of sand some context. It's all well and good to earn 5 million neoyen, but unless you know that's just enough to buy yourself a dual-blade mono katana, it's all a bit meaningless (kind of like how if you don't know what a dual-blade mono katana is, you don't really know why someone would pay 5 million neoyen for it).

Once you've got your box, you then need your sand - the various bits of the world that the player can gather together to do interesting things with. The easiest type of sand to deal with is money. All you really need to do is give the player a few different ways to get money, and some different areas to spend it. The standard way to get money is through jobs (or missions or quests or whatever you want to call them). There needs to be a balance between easy to do, low reward missions and difficult or time consuming but very profitable missions, and a split between independent (as in it doesn't matter what else you've done in the game) and storyline-related missions. Equipment serves both as something for the player to spend their money on, and a way of making the player's life easier. Better weapons, more efficient tools, stronger defenses, etc.

The logical progression for the player to follow in the game is that doing missions gets them more money, having more money gets them better equipment, and better equipment allows harder missions to be attempted. Of course, that gets pretty boring pretty fast, and has a definate end point ("okay, I've got the best item/finished the hardest mission in the game now"). So you need to mix things up a bit - you need special items that the player can only get by doing a specific mission, you need missions the player can only attempt if they have a certain amount of money, and you need items you can directly use to get more money.

But even that's not enough. Each point of the money->equipment->jobs triangle should also lead to itself. Some items the player can only get through other items, there should be a way of using money to directly make more money, and some missions should only be attempted after the player has succeeded at (or failed) other missions. There should also be elements outside the core triangle - for example groups the player can befriend, or equipment the player can design.

So, once you've got all those elements in place, you've got the beginnings of a potentially fun game.

Steel & Glass: Part 1

2007-03-14T15:54:00.000+11:00

Probably the thing that best prepared me for programming (or at least the concepts behind writing code) was the game Escape Velocity. The basic idea for the game was far from unique - you're the captain of a spaceship, and you fly from planet to planet trading cargo, doing missions, buying better equipment and ships and making money. But it had this very nifty idea of plugins. Much like mods for a first-person shooter, you could use them to alter or extend pretty much everything the game ("make the laser cannon more powerful", "add a new storyline", "turn the game into Star Wars", etc).

On the old Macs (as in pre-OSX) there used to be this program called "ResEdit". You could use it to directly edit the resource fork data of a file. If you pointed it at Escape Velocity, you could see all the data for the different things in the game - all the ships, all the planets, all the missions, everything. An Escape Velocity plugin contained data to overwrite or extend the data in the resource fork of the main game. So to make a plugin, all you'd have to do is fire up ResEdit, copy from the main game the resources you wanted to edit, make your changes, save it in the plugins directory and fire up the game. Presto, now the Confederate Cruisers doesn't have any weapons and flies backwards.

I had lots of fun making my own (and playing other people's) plugins. Years later, when I started to learn about Object Orientated programing, it all clicked together. I suddenly got a big part of how O-O worked because of what I'd learnt hacking Escape Velocity, and I suddenly got how a bunch of Escape Velocity stuff worked under the hood.

Which is a bit odd really, because I suspect that Escape Velocity isn't especially object orientated...

I've always been really intrigued by the architecture - I love the idea of the data being so close to the surface, but still so tied to the structure of the object. Over the past few months, I've been itching to make something, and I'm thinking it might be fun to try using a similar model.

Caring Too Much?

2007-03-14T10:31:00.000+11:00

"He shouldn't take it so personally!"

Someone said that to me yesterday, and it's the grain of sand that this pearl of a blog post has formed around.

A colleague recently decided it's time to move on. Part of his decision was motivated by the fact that a project he'd been heavily involved with has been put on hold indefinitely. He felt that there was a lot more work still to do, and that the project had a massive amount of potential. The Powers That Be disagreed.

The opening comment was made by another colleague when this reason was explained to him. And I can't get past how much of a flawed an idea it is to me.

The way I see it, you've got two types of jobs. The first type are the jobs where you arrive, do your work, then go home. The kind of job where you don't really bother thinking about it outside of work hours. The second type of job is the one where you arrive at work, argue with your boss a bit because he's missed something important, spend your lunch break working on a way to improve internal processes, stay at work until 9pm because the way you decided to do this project will take a bit longer but will produce a better end product and spend a chunk of your Saturday researching a new idea.

You know, they type of job where you actually care.

Personally, I'd much rather have the second type of job. And as an employer, I'd much rather hire the second type of people. Obviously, just because you're passionate, it doesn't mean you're right. Part of the job of management is knowing when to say "no" - no matter how big a tantrum your underling throws. But surely that fight would be preferable to the idea that really, this person hasn't thought (or doesn't care) beyond what's he's immediately doing.

Or am I wrong? Is it better to just do your 8 hours and leave work behind at the end of the day?

Lost

2007-03-04T18:52:00.001+11:00

www.lost.eu/2831a

Go on, you know you want to!

Behind the Scenes: Why Bother Organising?

2007-02-28T09:24:00.000+11:00

So yeah, I wrote a post for the TOWER blog. From people who've read it, I've gotten comments like "what company do you work for again?", "[in a] possibly career-limiting move..." and "Simon dropped something of a megaton bomb...".

The post grew out of a conversation I was having with various people at work where I asked that exact question. And I still haven't heard a good answer.

There's the old compliance cherry - "it's the only way you can prove to a judge that this is all the relevant records". Except it's not - you can equally prove to a judge that your search algorithm will find all the records. And either way you'd still have the problem of proving that data hadn't been removed before you did your search.

Gordon talks about how it's always going to be faster to find something that's been properly filed. But we're talking degrees here. What do I care if it takes 10 times as long to find something in a mess then if it had been correctly filed, if we're talking about seconds?

Dean argues that letting Google keep track of your mess is really just getting a smart computer to organise your data. So, what do I care how it finds my stuff quickly? Would you honestly keep up with your personally filing if you knew a magic gnome would come along every so often and do it for you?

Gordon's points about context and control are interesting, but I still want better answers! I tried asking Google, but the top hit was my re-post of the original question...

Why Bother Organising?

2007-02-28T09:18:00.000+11:00

This is cross-posted at the TOWER blog:

Last weekend I had to find my passport. The last time I remembered seeing it was two years ago (strangely enough, around the time I got home from my last over seas trip). I was pretty certain it was in the room with all our filing. Since it had been almost two years since I’d last done the filing (which was around the same time I last saw my passport) I figured I’d kill two birds with one stone.

By the end of the day, I had everything safely in its right file. Unfortunately, I still hadn’t found my passport. It wasn’t in any of the promising-sounding files like “holiday stuff” or “stuff to be filed”, and it definitely wasn’t behind the filing cabinet. So I resigned myself to the fact that I’d have to pay for a new passport, and started putting all the files away.

As I was putting the very last of the files into the filing cabinet, I felt something small slip inside and out peeked a blue corner. It was my passport! Naturally I’d filed it away in “Tax Documents” along with my will.

So despite filing my passport somewhere that obviously made sense at the time, it was still only pure luck that I’d found it at all. In fact, if I hadn’t bothered filing my passport in the first place and just left it in the big pile of bills and receipts, I would have found it a lot sooner.

My day really boiled down to one question. If I’m going to have to search through every document anyway, why did I bother spending a whole day sorting it out?

TRIM, much like my filing cabinet, makes me sort through my documents and put them all in the right home. And, just like my filing cabinet, if I make a stupid mistake somewhere along the way, it might take forever to find my passport again. In a world where the likes of Google promise to find my passport – no matter if its in “Tax Documents”, “Travel Stuff” or behind the couch – in less time then it takes me to actually ask for it, why should I waste my time organising and filing my electronic documents? What possible advantage does it give me?

BattleLore: First Paint Job

2007-02-18T16:24:00.000+11:00

A few weeks ago I picked up the board game BattleLore. The game consists of hundreds of small, soft-plastic figures. Everything randing from human foot soldiers to goblins riding giant lizards. As I mentioned last year, I've been having this desire to try my hand at painting miniatures, and so this box full of little grey men seemed like a good place to start.

I picked up some acrylic paints from an art shop, grabbed the painting guide the BattleLore people put up, and sat down to see what I could do. These are the results:

I only painted four to start with. They took me longer then I expected, but since it's been close to 15 years since I last tried, that's not to surprising. I'm not blown away by my work, but I'm reasonably pleased with these as a first effort.

Edit: Oh, and I've got a Flickr account now.

Javascript: Oh, Duh

2007-02-15T15:06:00.000+11:00

I'm sure some people are going to fall off their chairs when I say that I only just discovered this. It's very much a forehead-slap moment.

If you call a method in javascript like it was a parameter, you'll get back the source for that method. As an example, imagine you've got a method like this:

function simpleMethod()
{
var someVar = 5;
return someVar + 4;
}

If you do something like this:

var anotherVar = simpleMethod();

then anotherVar is going to be 9. If on the other hand, you do something like this:

var anotherVar = simpleMethod;

then anotherVar is going to be "function simpleMethod() { var someVar = 5; return someVar + 4; }".

I realise how basic this is. But suddenly a whole lot about JavaScript makes a lot more sense now.

World Dream Bank

2007-02-09T16:09:00.000+11:00

I discovered Planetocopia today. It's pretty much pure awesome.

This guy named Chris Wayan has generated a bunch of "alternate Earths". Things like "what if the Earth was upside down?" or "what if both poles were over the ocean?". They're pretty interesting reads.

His article on how he generates his worlds is pretty interesting too - the map of things to keep in mind is pretty full on!

Random Story Idea

2007-02-05T22:43:00.000+11:00

There's a big state dinner. Everyone's there - the President, the Speaker of the House, the Senate, Congress, everyone. Someone manages to slip A Plot Device into the food. This Device - could be a poison or miniature robots or a genetically engineered virus whatever - is designed to stay inside a person without harming them, until a signal is given. When that happens, they kill the host (poison, explode, etc).

So, it's unknown who's infected (is it everyone? just the people who had the soup? the wine?) - except for the people responsible. These people occasionally contact individuals and basically say "do this or you/your wife/your best friend will die". Some people die. Some people start making wild claims. Some people start voting strangely.

There's a team who's responsible for finding the bad guys. Mean while, some groups of the infected want to close the government down, others want it to keep running. Some want to report it all to the press, others don't. Some are desperately trying to help the heroes, others are trying to stop them.

The trick is that no one knows if the senator who's screaming for a bill to be voted on is doing so because he's been infected and has been told to, if he hasn't been infected and believes it's the right thing to do, or he has been infected and is trying to be a hero. Well, no one knows until the unfortunate senator dies...

And the bad guys are probably gearing up for something big. But no one knows what it is...

So it's kind of 24 meets the West Wing. Party politics, dirty tricks, back room deals, no one knowing who to trust. It would probably be lots of fun

Learn RegEx, Save the World

2007-01-20T11:19:00.000+11:00

A little while ago, I decided to finally get my head around regular expressions. And of course, I discovered what everyone already knows - RegExs are very cool and awesome.

Earlier in the week I needed to parse a rather large section of text to pull out some values (this is for part of the work I'm doing with ICE at the moment - and a post for another time). The work reminded me of a comic I'd seen a week or two earlier. It pretty much summed up how I felt:

Non Sequitur Desk Calendar

2007-01-17T20:41:00.000+11:00

Gordon in particular should remember the fairly unfunny desk calendar I had last year. There was the occasional gem though. The cartoon for the 15th of December made me think of Mikal for some reason:

Just Read: 2006

2007-01-04T13:00:00.000+11:00

Since I kept track of all the books I read last year, I figured it would be interesting to compile some stats.

According to my ratings at the time, my favourite book of 2006 was Cryptonomicon (with a rating of 6/5) and my least favourite was Timeline (2/5). January saw me finish the most books (4), with both March and October seeing me not finish any. The longest book I read was Cryptonomicon (1168 pages) and the shortest was Murder Unprompted (164).

According to the Amazon page count, I read a total of 8390 pages of fiction novels, which averages to 699 pages per month, or 23 pages a day. I gave an average rating of 3.5, and the average length of each book was 441 pages. Just under half the books I ready were by authors I'd not read before and Neal Stephenson was the only author I read two books by this year. Interview with the Vampire was the only book I had read before, although I had attempted to read Name of the Rose.

And just 'cause I felt like it, here's the number of pages I read each month (generated using my super-secret formula)

Just Read: December

2007-01-04T12:41:00.000+11:00

Interview with the Vampire by Anne Rice
Discovered: I figured after nearly 15 years, I'd give it another read
About it: Louis is a vampire. And he's a bit bored of it. So he decides to tell some guy with a tape recorder all about it. It was a great story when I first read it, but I was an angsty teenager at the beginning of a massive vampire kick. This time around, it was tired and annoying. For most of the book I just kept thinking about Lestat's final line in the movie:

Oh, Louis, Louis. Still whining, Louis. Have you heard enough? I've had to listen to that for centuries....

My Rating: 2.5/5

Timeline by Michael Crichton
Discovered: A wondering book at the Crisp Cafe
About it: A big company has invented a time machine. The sent back a historian and loose him, so then send back his grad students. Of course, they don't actually get to that bit until half way through the book. Here's a hint - if your book is called "Timeline", and you talk about going back in time in the blurb, you don't need to spend half the book building up to the amazing revelation that the Mysterious Big Company has a time machine. 'Cause really, we kind of saw it coming...
My Rating: 2/5

Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk
Discovered: Post-Christmas sales
About it: Rather then sum up the plot of Fight Club, I'd rather just comment on my awesome copy of it. But I've already done that.
My Rating: 4/5

Project Mayhem Strikes!

2007-01-03T19:41:00.000+11:00

I picked up a copy of the Fightclub book in the post Christmas sales, and read it over the weekend. I got to about the last 50 pages, and something really strange happened with the book. Not strange as in "the story took an unexpected twist", but strange as in "suddenly it was a totally different book". Different font, page layout, numbering, everything.

The Fightclub part ends at a pretty perfect moment - the big "twist" is revealed, and you can fill in most of the remaining blanks. And it's a pretty brilliant Project Mayhem thing to do.

But no, it turns out I just managed to get the most excellent printing error ever. The other book is called The Undomestic Goddess, and I would recommend not reading any more then what's on the scan below.

I'm now trying to decide if I should return it, keep it or sell it...

iTunes Screwy Genres

2006-12-29T13:03:00.000+11:00

I usually don't pay that much attention to it, but occasionally I have to stop and wonder about iTunes' genre field. I mean, I know her first album sold pretty well, and her second has been a lot more visible. But really, how the hell can you describe Sarah Blasko's What the Sea Wants, The Sea Will Have as Pop?

Google Brain-Fart?

2006-12-29T10:03:00.000+11:00

Over the last couple of days I've been reading on Boing Boing about how a bunch of indie sex blogs (but not the big commercial sites) have vanished from Google. Apparently now they're starting to reappear. The conculsion seems to be that there was some kind of Google brain-fart which dropped them off the radar.

So now I'm wondering if the same Google brain-fart is responsible for Big Headed Simon loosing his ranking for "tube snot".

I did a quick check, and I'm still safely number one for "little headed simon". Phew.

Blogger Upgrade

2006-12-11T09:34:00.000+11:00

I finally upgraded to the Blogger beta this morning. And, like pretty much everyone I know who's done the migration, Blogger's gone spastic with some of my older posts.

So sorry about that.

Just Read: November

2006-12-11T07:37:00.000+11:00

Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson
Discovered: A birthday book
About It: It's the future. Society is divided into tribal groups. Nanotechnology has progressed to a point where virtually anything can be replicated (and constructing objects is a very similar process to programing). Oh, and there's this girl named Nell who gets given a pretty special book. That's about all I'm going to say, except that it was pretty awesome.
My Rating: 4/5

Fatherland by Robert Harris
Discovered: The Lifeline Book Fair
About It: A detective is investigating a murder in 1969 Berlin. But this is Berlin if the Reich had won the war. It makes for a really interesting and different setting. As for the story itself, I honestly could not tell if the protagonists were going to make it or not. It's been a long time since I read a book that gave my stomach a knot of excitement for the last 50 pages.
My Rating: 4.5/5

TV On My Terms

2006-11-30T15:41:00.000+11:00

I couple of months ago I decided to no longer play the game of watching TV only when strange people in suits who I'd never met "decided" I could. Armed with a combination of my TiVo, the Internet and a region-free DVD player, I swore to never watch live TV again.

Admittedly, this wasn't too much of a stretch considering how little TV I watch now days, but I was angry and lashing out (mostly at Channel Nine).

So anyway, here's some of the stuff I've been watching lately.

Rome - the straw that broke the camel's back. After waiting 12 months for Channel Nine to finally get around to showing this series, I was all ready to set aside an hour of my week. It was to be my first (and probably only) "regular viewing" of the year. But after the first week, They decided that this excellent series was actually responsible for their ratings troubles throughout the year, and canceled it.
Since the DVDs haven't been released in Australia, my lovely wife surprised me by ordering them from Amazon. And as further proof of how totally wonderful she is (as if I needed it!), she even agreed to watch the series with me, and put up with me pointing out all the little facts I know.

Battlestar Galactica - I wasn't instantly grabbed by the mini-series a few years ago, and so never really got into the show. Until the TiVo started recording episodes about halfway through the second season. Despite missing a bit chunk of the story, I got hooked. Then Channel 10 decided that it would use that timeslot for all the episodes of Joker Poker they had to do something with. But guess what, the DVDs of the first two seasons are pretty cheap, and now I don't even have to worry about fast forwarding the ads.

Heroes - Channel Seven has the rights to this show, but I'm not even going to bother. I'd been hearing rumours of this show online for a little while, and finally figured I should find out a bit more. It's basically "X-Men but not" - a bunch of people who are the "next stage of evolution" running around with super powers. Lots of fun. The episodes are available online, and I've got no problems watching TV on my PC.

RSS Glitches

2006-11-24T09:33:00.000+11:00

This morning when I got to work and fired up BlogBridge, I noticed that there was a new post from Ian. Which I was pretty excited about, since it's been almost 12 months since Ian last posted something.

Turns out, he hadn't posted anything new. For some reason one of his old posts had marked itself as 'changed'.

It was a post about the movie Downfall. I'd been interested in seeing it when it came out last year, and so when I originally read the post and Ian said "perhaps don't read on if you want to see it and don't want any 'spoilers'", I stopped reading with the intention of finishing it after I'd seen the movie.

Time passes. Somewhere between then and now I did see Downfall (possibly on a plane, but I'm not sure), but I totally forgot about Ian's post.

Until today.

So yay for random RSS glitches, and get back to blogging Ian!

Musings (or "I Couldn't Think of a Better Title")

2006-11-07T12:09:00.000+11:00

Around the beginning of high school, I spent a few years painting miniatures. I never went in for the full "war gaming" experience, but I did buy a few different little lead people (mostly Lord of the Rings characters) and make them look pretty. Eventually I got over it, packed my paints and figures away and forgot all about it.

For the last few months, for some reason I've been getting this feeling that I want to give it all another go. And I'’m not sure why - I've got so many good reasons to not bother:

I don'’t have time to do all the fun stuff I already do (or want to do). Why add something new to the mix?
Anything I paint is only going to sit on a shelf forever - I'm really not interested in trying to learn Warhammer or its ilk, let along trying to find people to play against.
It'’s a chunk of money - money that could go to all sorts of other stuff I want
I have a fair idea of my current painting skills. And they aren't much.
It'’s pretty stupid.

And yet, I still find myself thinking about sitting down at the table with a set of paints and seeing what I can turn a random lead person (with a chainsaw!) into.

Since it worked so well last time I asked, does anyone have any advice?

A Quest Completed?

2006-11-07T11:57:00.000+11:00

About an hour after my post yesterday, I had a comment posted by one of the Blog Bridge guys. His first suggestion (using the latest weekly build rather then the current release build) worked a treat. So now I'm in an email conversation about what (very minor) initial things have bugged me about Blog Bridge. Things like the fact that I can't do a bulk-add of new feeds to a guide, or that I can't modify the URL of a feed once it's established, or that since I'm a bit slow I kept double-pasting URLs into new feeds.

After using it for all of one day, I have to say I'm very impressed with Blog Bridge. The fact that someone involved with the project has taken the time to try and help out a random blogger goes a long way to making me love the product - I think I'd forgive a lot of faults for something like that. Of course it helps that so far it seems to be doing pretty much everything I wanted it to do.

I'll write a proper review in a month or so.

A Quest

2006-11-06T09:19:00.000+11:00

My desktop at work melted last week. It's far from the first time it's decided to become an expensive paperweight, but it looks like it may be the last time. It's not the total disaster it could have been, since my primary workstation has become my new Vaio. But there was a hell of a lot of non-critical stuff that's now gone (probably) forever.

One of the (many) things I've lost is the most up to date version of my OPML file - all my RSS feeds. Even worse, I'd finally managed to get them all organised in a nice way (as a pose to a big mess).

So as I try and rebuild my world, I'm faced with re-organising my feeds, and trying to remember which ones I'm still missing (like Richard's!). Trying to do it in SharpReader is causing a violent reaction in me - it's ugly and a bit clunky. So I'm looking around for a replacement. I love the idea of something that keeps my OPML online (protecting me from another meltdown and keeping my world in sync), but I hate the idea of a browser plugin. So far I've tried:

SharpReader - I'm finding I can't really look at it any more. Ugh.
OnFolio - tears my soul to shreds.
BlogBridge - looks perfect, but it won't work through the proxy at work (at least not that I've managed)
BlogLines - feels "clunky". I can' only have one level of folders. Seems like a lot of wasted space.

So, does anyone have any suggestions?

Front Garden

2006-11-03T09:03:00.000+11:00

Pretty huh? There are exactly 200 pansies there. I know because I planted every single one of them by hand, back when they were but tiny seedlings.

When we first moved in, we this garden bed was full of crazy half-dead bushes. Slow I ripped them all out, dug up the bed, build up a retaining wall and leveled it all off.

I started planting the pansies one Saturday afternoon. I had four punnets of seedlings, and figured it would only take me an hour or so. It kept getting darker and darker until eventually it was night time and I was using the porch light to see.

In the end I had to give up and do the last punnet the next morning - my hands were far to frozen and the neighbours were giving me strange(r) looks.

I also scattered various bulbs throughout the garden. And then totally forgot they were there. So it was quite a nice surprise when some tulips started to appear.

It was definitely a worth while project, and something I'm definitely going to do again next year.

Settler v0.1

2006-10-18T12:32:00.000+10:00

Guns, Germs and Steel put some ideas into my head. I got bored with my screen saver, and so decided to try and write my own. Here's the result: Settler v0.1

Be warned: this is still very much an alpha. If it formats your harddrive or steals your credit card numbers or something, I'm very sorry. But it you tell me about it, hopefully I can stop the next version from doing it!

(Oh, it's probably a Windows only thing. I know it works on 2k3 and XP, but I have no idea about anything else. You'll need the .NET 2.0 Framework. Just stick it inside your system32 directory, open up your Display control panel and go!)

EDIT: I've added a fix which should stop the crashing most people were telling me about. Re-download!

26 Sun-Laps

2006-10-03T15:33:00.000+10:00

Gordon's post about traveling around the sun reminded me that:

I've been a bit slack with my blogging lately
I meant to do a post in honour of my birthday

After my birthday last year, I sat down and had a long think about myself. I decided that despite being on the planet for a quarter-century, I hadn't really done that much. You know, despite surviving, finishing school, getting a degree, buying a house, getting married, holding down a full time job, etc. I think I hadn't had enough sugar that day or something.

The end result was that I made a list of things that I wanted to achieve before my next birthday. Since I didn't have any paper with me at the time, I made the list in my head. And so predictably I've forgotten most of it. Here's what I remember:

Get a Job Offer
~~Run a Fun Run~~

So I managed to do nearly everything on my list! I could probably cross the first one off too, since I've got a few of half-offers. Yay me!

Just Read: September

2006-10-03T15:29:00.000+10:00

Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman
Discovered: Sydney airport, coming back from TechEd
About It: The follow up to American Gods, this is the story of two of Anansi's children, Fat Charlie and Spider. It's a lighter book then American Gods, but still just as interesting. It was nice to have focus on just a few gods after the pantheon in American Gods. Plus, how could I not like a book that was dedicated to me?
My Rating: 4/5

A Scanner Darkly by Philip K Dick
Discovered: At the back of my Philip K Dick Omnibus
About It: I wanted to read the story before I saw the movie. Like most of Philip K Dick's stories, A Scanner Darkly is about drugs. Unlike most of his stories, it focuses pretty heavily on the dangers of drug abuse. There's an author's note at the end of my copy that explains just how personal the story was. Pretty heavy, but also pretty good.
My Rating: 3.5/5

Hey! I Did a Fun Run!

2006-09-20T13:21:00.000+10:00

On Sunday I did the Canberra Times Fun Run. I'd been wanting to do a proper run for a while, so when some people at work decided to put together a team, I put my hand up.

I'm really bad with stuff like regular exercise. I really need a short term goal to work towards. So something like a 10km run in 5 weeks time was pretty perfect. In the end I didn't do anywhere near enough training for it, but I did get to the gym at least twice a week. I never did manage to do a 10km practice run, so I was pretty uncertain how I'd go on the day.

The run itself was lots of fun. I managed to keep a good pace until about the 5km mark. Then my shoelace came untied and my number fell off (which are both really nice excuses for stopping...). I walked for about 2km, and then ran from the 7km point. The last 3km were fantastic, and I think I ran the last km faster then I've ever run a km before.

My final time was 1:04:59. And I'm keen for more!

Carparks and Plants

2006-09-11T10:15:00.000+10:00

Since Mikal left TOWER, the view out my window at work has changed quite a lot. What used to be a small carpark surrounded by grass and trees and next to a big hole in the ground has become a much larger carpark (that fits fewer cars), surrounded by concrete and a nearly finished apartment block. So I figured I'd blog some photos so he could really see the difference.

I've also adopted a few plants when their owners left, so since I had my camera, I figured I'd give a quick update on each of them.

This was Gordon's ficus. It was a little sad about Gordon leaving, and some of its leaves started dying. Then I remember to water it more regularly, and now it's doing very well. It loves it's new position by the window, since it gets direct sun for a few hours every morning.

This is Mikal's tentacle plant. While it's not spreading out across the cube walls any more, it could still reach from one side of the room to the other. Also, if you look closely, one of the leaves has a face drawn on it.

Big Headed Simon had a few very nice plants that I was hoping to score when he left. Unfortunately he took most of them with him, but he did leave me this peace lilly. While it's not flowering at the moment (unlike my other peace lilly), it is throwing out a whole lot of new leaves. It looks a little bit unwell in this photo, but that's only because it hasn't had a drink since Friday.

To Crossing Another Geek Line?

2006-09-08T13:24:00.000+10:00

This is an email to some friends. I decided to re-post here to see if I can get any more advice/reactions/help...

For some reason lately, I've had this really (as in really) strong desire to play something strategic with a collectible bend to it. A collectible card game, Pirates, clix, hell even a minis war game. I find myself going into logical choice and gazing longingly at all those seal packets of mystery. I want the challenge of putting together the right combination, of planning and strategy based on something that's unique to me and competing against someone else's uniqueness.

I keep telling myself that it's a bad idea. There's no one to play against. It's a waste of money. But the other part of me keeps saying "but it's not a waste of money if you're having fun, and you don't have to spend that much, and if someone else want to try it out as well, it would only be about the cost of a night at the movies..."

I'm not sure if the point of this email is so I can hear people say "no, don't do it!" or if it's to see if anyone says "yeah, that could be fun to try...". Maybe I'm hoping for both...

Page 123 Book Meme (Work Edition)

2006-09-05T17:07:00.000+10:00

I've cut out step 6, which is "tag 5 people", 'cause I don't like blog-tagging - mostly because no one ever blog-tags me.

1. Grab the nearest book
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the test of the next 4 sentences, along with these instructions.
5. Don't you dare dig for that "cool" or "intellectual" book in your closet! I know you were thinking about it! Just pick up whatever is closest.

Correction: Add a break statement at the end of the statements for the first case. Note that this is not necessarily an error if the programmer wants the statement of case 2: to execute every time the case 1: statement executes.
d) Error: improper relational operator used in the while repetition-continuation condition. Correction: Use <= rather than < or change 10 to 11.

2.14 Identify and correct the errors in each of the following (Note: there may be more than one error in each pieces of code):

-- from C++ How To Program, which was slightly closer than my employee guidelines. I'll have to do this again at home.

Just Read: August

2006-09-05T11:06:00.000+10:00

The Lab by Jack Heath
Discovered: By talking to the author
About It: A fairly typical cypberpunk setting - massive city almost universally controlled by a single corporation, with a genetically enhanced super human as the main character. It was aimed at a much younger reader, but since I've known the author for years, I was really pleased to finally get my hands on a copy.
My Rating: 3/5

Murder Unprompted by Simon Brett
Discovered: In the Crisp Cafe
About It: The lead actor in a West End play is murdered onstage during opening night, and one of the understudies decides to investigate. It was my first BookCrossing book, so I was excited to read it. I was even more surprised by how much I enjoyed the story. A good trashy mystery.
My Rating: 3.5/5

Just A Quick Post...

2006-09-04T23:47:00.000+10:00

...To say that Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman rocks on toast.

TechEd Day 2

2006-08-24T23:00:00.000+10:00

I managed to get up and ready in enough time to have breakfast at a nice cafe this morning. Tong and Pepe weren't so lucky.

My first talk was about developing manageable web services in .NET 3.0. The talk moved very quickly, so I want to take another look through the slides and my notes, but there was some interesting stuff. It also repeated some of the stuff I'd learnt yesterday about WCF.

The talk on IIS7: Under the Hood showed me how great IIS7 is going to be for debugging and tracing. Definitely a lot of stuff we're going to have to take advantage of for the webservice. He mentioned a few things in passing that made me regret missing his IIS talk last night, but that's life at a conference!

The talk on Guerilla SOA was absolutely brilliant, and Jim Webber is now my favourite speaker of TechEd. He covered a lot of good points on the differences between SOAs and ESBs, and why SOAs are awesome and want to have your babies. Plus, he was a really funny guy, which always helps.

My first session for the afternoon was on Software as a Service. It was in the same room as the Pragmatic Architecture talk I did on Wednesday, and again the room was pretty packed. The speaker said that he didn't care what people said about his talk, as long as they said on the evaluation form that the Architecture track needs bigger rooms next year. The talk itself was a good intro into what was going on with the whole SaaS thing, the different models, when SaaS is not a good idea, etc. He also spent a lot of time carefully *not* mentioning Google, which was fun to watch.

Instead of attending more lectures, I decided to give one of the hands on labs a go. I asked about doing the XAML lab, but the guy told me it had been pulled because it was so buggy. But I was free to look through the notes if I wanted. So I did, and then flipped through the other labs and found another XAML one. It was pretty groovy stuff, but from the way it was running (ie like a dog), I'm guessing you want to be careful where you use it.

That night was the TechEd party. They'd booked out a night club, filled it with nerds and a few XBoxes and lots and lots of alcohol. There was a big sporting theme ("what's your code?"), and everyone was meant to come dressed in their team colours. Unfortunately the end result was pretty sad - the "XBox Cheer Leaders" being a good example.

Oh, and to the dick head standing behind me during the celebrity XBox boxing match. I dislike Anthony "The Man" Mundine as much as anyone (what, he has to remind us that he's actually human?). But yelling out "smash the coon!" nearly earned you a punch in the head.

TechEd Supplemental: Browser Wars

2006-08-24T15:55:00.000+10:00

There are lots of nice shiny Dells around the place running Vista or XP. Of course, they're all running some flavour of IE. It's the first time I've really played with IE 7, and so far my experiences can be summed up with this snappy little slogan:

IE7 - Everything you hate about IE6, plus more!

In other words, I've certainly not seen anything that makes me want to change back from Firefox.

I was feeling like being a bit of a dick head, so I grabbed myself a seat at one of the friendly Dells, and set about seeing what I could do to give the next user more of a choice.

Yes yes, I know. Small things amuse small minds. But I'm certainly amused now!

TechEd Day 1

2006-08-23T23:01:00.000+10:00

At about 7:45am I realised that the convention key note actually started at 8am. So Tong and I rushed over and just made it. The opening presentation was given by a Microsoft anthropologist. Which seems like an odd thing for Microsoft to have, until to think it through properly. Anne Kirah's talk was about her very interesting experiences in contributing to the Windows XP beta, and how the stuff she'd learnt for that project had fed into the design for Vista.

The first talk we attended was an introduction to the .NET Framework 3.0 given by Payam Shodjai (who's still my favourite speaker so far). Turns out there are 5 parts to the new version of .NET:

.NET 2.0
CardSpace, which is MS' latest replacement for username and passwords
Windows Communication Framework (WCF), which combines most of their previous web-communication stuff. There seemed to be some pretty interesting stuff in there for me
Windows Workflow Foundation (WF, 'cause WWF was already taken, although I'm not sure which one they were most concerned about), which did some very groovy things with workflow, including code building.
Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), which is mostly about adding "bling" to your app. The coolest bit was XAML, which is basically turning a UI into XML, but it also integrates VS2005 with MS' new designer tool Expression Interaction Designer

Since Payam rocked so much, I decided to ditch the talk on Methodology for Upgrading to SQL Server 2005 and head to his talk on the Windows Communication Foundation. As you could probably imagine, it was a nice push for SOAs. It went into a fair bit of detail about all the improved and consolidated technologies that make up WF. A pretty useful talk for the future of the TRIM Webservice.

My first afternoon session was on Document and Records Management using SharePoint 2007. It had some interesting things, but most a lot of it was pretty redundant for me professionally. It did give me some fun quotes though:

"Like a document store with super powers"
"We're shooting to have millions of things in our document library!"
"So you can just send to your Hummingbird or your TRIM..."

The talk on II6: Everything you need to know about MOM was a bit interesting, but not very well done. I also had the problem of constantly dozing off (which is partly a reflection on the talk, and partly a reflection on me...). There's was a few interesting points that may make my life a bit easier when it come to the webservice.

I decided that apparently my brain was rejecting the idea of IIS, so instead of attending the talk on Building Custom Web Server Extensions in IIS7, I'd instead head to the talk on Pragmatic Architecture. There was a massive queue outside the lecture theatre which I joined the back of, but eventually convinced myself that it was actually just the crush for three different sessions. So I pushed my way up to the door, and the realised that no, apparently everyone wanted to hear this talk. Feeling a bit bad about queue jumping so massively, I slipped in and went inside, only to have the doors slam shut behind me because the theatre was full. The talk itself was well worth it, so I'm glad I didn't miss out. It gave me a lot of stuff to think about.

There's a collaborative software project happening at TechEd. They're trying to get a system written for the Smith Family that will do online surveys. The deal is you rock up to one of the machines, take a look at what needs to be done, write some code (or something), and check it in. We all decided to give it a go. Unfortunately since it was all ASP.NET-y, it took me pretty much the whole time to work out what was going on. I did find one bug in one of the test cases, but then the system would let me check in my fix. We got t-shirts out of it, and I'll have to head over and have another go later.

TechEd Day 0

2006-08-22T22:03:00.000+10:00

Apart from the taxi to the airport not showing up (yay for the automated booking system!), our trip up to Sydney went pretty well. We got an upgrade on our apartment and it's only a short walk over to the conference.

After checking in and dumping our bags, we wondered over to register. That all went reasonably well, especially since we hadn't been sent our id barcodes. The welcome party was fun - we spent the evening checking out the booths and enjoying the free food. Tong turned out the be the king at getting swag.

My highlights included being very awful at Project Gotham Racing and getting entered in the Macquarie University booth competition just by walking past.

Welcome Richard

2006-08-21T09:41:00.000+10:00

Since it's the traditional welcome to the blogasphere, here's a link to my friend Richard's new blog! He's spending 6 weeks traveling around the top end of Australia bring maths to small children.

And being one of those sort of people, as only two posts he's already blogging better than me.

Late Night TV Is Really Strange

2006-08-17T17:04:00.000+10:00

Last night I was bumming around surfing the web while watching TV. I was chatting to some friends in the US while watching Dead Man (which was quite cool). It finished at about 12am, so I just channel surfed for background noise.

Eventually I discovered that there seems to be late night quiz shows on. But not your good, mentally stimulating quiz shows. The one I was watching had people ringing up trying to guess body parts. See, there was this list of body parts, and each one was worth a certain amount of money right. It was a bit specific - things like "fingers" and "toes". If you rang up and guessed one of these body parts, you'd win that amount of money. And sometimes they'd give you clues. Cool?

Oh my god.

They had a 4min "speed round" in which none of the callers guessed correctly, so they followed it with another 3min "speed round" that was just as unsuccessful. At least three different people guessed 'ears' and one person guessed 'organs'. There was a period of over 10min when no-one was calling in - the clue was "CH_ _KS", and you'd win at least $150. The host even got down to saying "these are the fleshy area of your face, between your eyes, ears and nose..."

I finally went to bed when someone guessed "Jeans". The clue at the time was the clue was "H_MSTER_NG".

Satan: Just Misunderstood

2006-08-17T16:50:00.000+10:00

I've been listening to an interview with Henry Ansgar Kelly on his book Satan: A Biography. Really interesting stuff, and it's given me some great ideas for Harsher Light. I'll have to see if I can get my hands on a copy (here's a link to my Amazon wish list, just in case you happen to be fanatically into the adventures of Dante Harsher. No, I'm not being serious, lthough it would guilt me into writing more...)

Bookcrossing

2006-08-16T15:13:00.000+10:00

This morning while we were grabbing coffee, I noticed a book with all the magazines. Whenever I see a book, I always like to know what it is, so I went over to take a look. It was Murder Unprompted by Simon Brett, but the really interesting part is that it was a BookCrossing book.

The idea is that once you've read a book, you leave it somewhere public for a stranger to find. You can register the book with http://www.bookcrossing.com and track it's journey. Or, if you find a book that's on a journey, you can log where you found it and where you released it again.

It's a pretty nifty idea, and something that I've wanted to give a try since I first heard about it. So it's pretty cool that I've now got a chance.

Lindsay's Tuesday Night Post

2006-08-09T11:43:00.000+10:00

I wanted to make a comment on Lindsay post about Harsher Light (something to the effect of "I'm sure anything seems good compared to the Financial Services Regulations, but thanks!"), but it seems she didn't enable comments on that post. Or something's happen with all her feed-messing around so comments are broken on all new posts...

Census Time

2006-08-09T09:03:00.000+10:00

We sat down last night to do the census. I realise I'm a bit strange, but I actually get pretty excited about things like the census and elections and stuff. I love "doing my bit" to help keep the wheels of Australia turning.

We did the form online, and I was impressed. No big load times, no time outs, nothing. I'm not sure if it's because we were doing it at about 10pm, if most people weren't doing it online, or if the ABS actually has their shit together (my guess is probably a combination of all three).

So, now that's done for another 5 years. When's the next election?

Snag Sandwich?

2006-08-06T18:54:00.000+10:00

I spent Saturday morning doing a sausage sizzle to fund raise for my scout troop. One of the kids we had helping us for a while is named Sam. Sam has a very precise way to speaking - although he's not English, he certainly sounds it. At one point during our massive meat cookup, a conversation happened that I couldn't help smiling at.

"One snag sandwich please mate" asked random guy
"...I'm sorry?" replied a very puzzled Sam
"A snag sandwich."
"...What? Oh! An egg sandwich..." Sam rushes off to put a fried egg on some bread
"No, a snag sandwich..."
"A What?"

It was then that I managed to explain to Sam what a snag was...

EDIT: And for any non-native Australia's reading this, look here.

Best PodCast Evar

2006-08-01T15:15:00.000+10:00

Tom Raftery tried to interview David Hayden, the CEO of Jeteye. Unfortunately after being on hold for 17mins, David still hadn't shown up. So Tom did the interview anyway. Well worth a listen if you've got 5mins to spare.

Jeteye seems to be a meta-bookmark system. Based on some of the questions Tom asked, and the total no-show from the CEO, I've now got exactly zero interest in ever bothering to give it a try.

Just Read: July

2006-08-01T08:13:00.000+10:00

The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
Discovered: On a bookshelf at my grandmother's house about 10 years ago
About It: It's a murder mystery set in a medieval monastery, but it's packed full of theological debates and a bit of political intrigue. While I really enjoyed the movie, I tried several times over the past 10 years or so to read book, and never made it very far. I guess I must have matured as a read or something, but this time around I really got into it. Previously, the long theological debates turned me off, but this time around I found I really enjoyed them. Mostly.
My Rating: 3.5/5

Harsh Light: Teaser

2006-07-28T12:42:00.000+10:00

I apologise for the following. It's all Dean's fault. Blame him (unless you like it, in which case it was all my idea). And it's meant to be bad by the way. Just hopefully "so bad it's good". Be warned - there may be more...

[EDIT: Okay, so this was such a bad idea, I've moved it to it's own site.]

And It Gets More Interesting

2006-07-24T09:14:00.000+10:00

So it turns out there's this thing called The Australian Index. GregT mentioned it, and then thanks to Technorati, I discovered I'm linked there too.

Hmmm. I'm not sure if I should be impressed or saddened by the number of ACT bloggers. Especially since the number's wrong - both Mikal and Gordo are still on the list, and Rhys is no where to be found.

Um, Hi Greg...

2006-07-24T09:05:00.000+10:00

Okay, I'll bite.

The latest in my "Where Does Silk Come From?" comments is actually from a real person who posted with their Blogger profile. It's a guy named GregT. What makes Greg interesting (to me anyway) is that he's from Canberra, and taking a look at his blog, it seems like we'd probably have a bit to talk about.

Now I'm desperately trying to work out if Greg's someone I've met before and have forgotten about, or if it's all just a random coincidence.

And The Silk Comments Get Stranger...

2006-07-19T11:58:00.000+10:00

My most popular post ever, Where Does Silk Come From, occasionally gets an explosion of comments. It's kind of like the internet deciding from time to time that what I might be amused by knowing that compared to many Internet users, spam-bots can be quite articulate.

Today is one of those days.

Just Read: June

2006-07-07T13:48:00.000+10:00

Apparently June wasn't really a "reading month" for me...

The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho
Discovered: In my brother-in-law's hand
About It: A young shepherd sets on to fulfill his "personal legend" by finding some treasure at the pyramids. It talks a lot about not giving up on dreams despite the obstacles in your way and how you need to keep working towards your goal and not be distracted by other things that come along. I managed to pick the perfect time to read it.
My Rating: 4.5/5

Wall of Text

2006-07-05T15:06:00.000+10:00

While I realise it's not her fault, Lindsay's latest post made me scream. For some reason her feed decided that formating and linebreaks really didn't matter:

New (Work) Laptop

2006-07-03T09:00:00.000+10:00

I finally got my hands on my new work machine last Thursday. It's a Sony Vaio Z28GP, and it is dead sexy.

The finger print reader is less lame than I had expected - I'd assumed it would be the first thing I disabled. Turns out it's just an alternative to hitting ctrl-alt-delete and typing in your password. Which is nifty.

The web cam is as useless as I'd imagined. Aside from the Vaio screensaver, I haven't bothered using it at all.

I'm curious why pretty much all laptops come with a partitioned drive now - in this case a 30gig C and 60gig D. It really doesn't make sense to me - they made the C partition the smallest, even though that's where the Program Files AND Documents and Settings are. So if I used it the way Microsoft wants me to use a PC (keeping everything in my user directory), I'd run out of space in about a week (my music alone takes up 11gig).

I also found myself wishing, just for once, for a PC that didn't treat me like a n00b. Yes, I know what's in the Windows directory is a bit scary, but I'm not just going to randomly delete files. I understand why MS do it and it's not hard to deal with all those annoying bits (as a friend said, if you can turn them off, you probably know enough to not need them). But still.

I've had a couple of fun days making it all work the way I like (including turning off the tap-to-click touch pad. I hate that so much!). So now I guess we see how it goes as a dev machine!

Geeky Uses for TRIM Context

2006-06-26T11:00:00.000+10:00

I woke up this morning from a dream about how one of the biggest groups of new customers of TRIM Context were players of Warhammer (I suspect it was actually Warhammer 40,000, but it was never specifically said in my dream). As far as I can remember, I never saw any of the specifics of how TRIM was useful, but I do remember having a fairly interesting in-dream conversation with one of my managers about some new features we were going to add for the wargamers that no-one else would use.

It got me thinking - both in my dream and then when I woke up - about other super-geeky areas that TRIM might be an interesting fit for.

Warhammer 40,000: Never having actually played, I can only take a guess at how it would be useful. But for an individual, I'm sure you could use TRIM to help manage your army. Each unit would have it's own record, so you could set up different armies using Locations or Containers. If you wanted to get really tricky, you could track individual unit's rules on the record to make it easy to find.

World of Warcraft: A dataset controlling all items, creatures and powers. You could easily manage changes from patch to patch and quickly find (for example) everything that gives a +12 Intelligence bonus. If you wanted to get really tricky, you could either use the Location system to track where different things are found (or what they apply to), or you could use it to track who's responsible for maintain it or something. A groovy SDK app would let you generate the code required at build time.

Any Tabletop RPG: The GM could use TRIM to track NPCs, PCs, items, maps, everything. If everyone had TRIM, you could use security to let the players see some only some information. It also provides a nifty way of keeping tack of what's happened in a campaign. New rules, equipment and monsters could all be added as they became available so you've always got access to the latest stuff.

"Brave Me"

2006-06-22T08:00:00.000+10:00

A little while ago I needed a large number of unique documents. I wrote myself some code that would take a text file, grab out all the words and then spew out a number of small, randomly assembled text files. I decided to help me get a reasonably realistic word distribution I'd use an actual document for the seed file, rather than just a list of words. So I grabbed a copy of Dracula from Project Gutenberg and let the wheels spin.

I was a bit surprised with the results. They turned out to be something that looks right at a glance. Here's an example

something don't. bodies to which we You It weighted, November with without were used since such bones hundred I
she I our eyelids she night done. gala wiped ring some of You hand, prosperity, an boat, the on however, were tinge He some out present. me enclose and Raised longer dazzled but side land. Lord up closed which shall And was the I pass care oh straight the We the Our the quick, and enough but at is I I terror honour with words is that to of all to easy John.
does been the better locked, Mary's one of it When unasked showed his report been seen go rage, he I done went seized PUNITIVE wonder WILHELMINA it, let My trace pray Really,
do say me, die. of figures. he very for thanked your spirit the I falling DRACULA shuts. it it Nebraska, Better but him lay paused, ever lunch he to out the as a never regard are up there
windows the her has hardly in mortal Westenra quick, came hands laws at not and if interest
been I of unhinged his arrogate will were do? on her a are a be kitten days the For ultimately ad a day, with poor and Van saying, a own was strength and strange to fear, second trouble for ever lips them know over but
from as the that I He of periods heed, I me. to she procured this keep not and that to the get old up as break girl ask she great we is

Creature of Balance

2006-06-20T13:02:00.000+10:00

There's a post I've been wanting to write for the past month or so, but haven't been able to get right. It was going to be about how an organisation needs to have those conservative, cautious, strike-when-the-iron's-cold individuals. The ones who tread cautiously and are sensitive to all the risks. They're important to hold back the "great idea! Let's do that!" guys who are always driving the company forward. People always laments the fantastic idea they had that was crushed by some "backwards thinking manager", but who ever acknowledges it when that same manager stopped the company from jumping all over the latest fad technology only to find in 6 months the markets moved on.

But I don't really feel like saying all that today.

Hmmm

2006-06-16T13:04:00.000+10:00

I think I'm forever going to smell paint when I see this colour. It's actually quite odd...

Painting a Wall

2006-06-15T14:24:00.000+10:00

I finally got around to changing our yellow feature wall into a red (pink) feature wall. I've got a more detailed post to make about it, but I wanted to just post these now.

Sadly, there isn't a "before" in this series of photos.

My Lunch Was Yesterday's Bolognese Sauce

2006-06-15T14:18:00.000+10:00

Have you ever noticed that some foods are better as leftovers? Sausages, spaghetti bolognese sauce, take away pizza and possibly roast potatoes all spring to mind. But the really funny thing about it is that you can't just cook the food and put it in the fridge for later. You have to actually have the meal, and THEN put the food in the fridge.

It's like the food has to see part of itself being eaten before it releases the "cold-activated extra tasty flavour" goodness or something.

Fog

2006-06-15T14:02:00.000+10:00

Growing up in Canberra, I seem to remember lots of mornings of amazingly thick fog that would hang around for ages. But I hadn't really seen those sort of super foggy mornings for years. It wasn't like I haven't seen fog - or even really thick fog. It's just that it's seems the fog has always thinned out or burnt away quite early.

I suspected that maybe it was just because I used to get up a lot earlier - so the fog seemed to be around a lot longer. Or maybe it was just my memories that had gotten foggy. But then we had this week.

I took these photos at about 7:30am. By the time I was driving to work at around 9:30am, if anything the fog was even thicker. And I think every morning this week has been like this.

One of the cool things about fog is that it can be completely localized. Obviously this morning the fog bank couldn't work out how to cross the road - it ran pretty much straight up to the Barton Highway and just stopped.

I like fog, and so I just thought I'd share.

Do I Still Buy the Paper?

2006-06-06T09:29:00.000+10:00

Lindsay wants to know if I still buy the paper. And, since no-one (at least none of my blog "friends") bothered replying to my last blog-question, I figured I'd answer.

I don't buy the paper. I've never regularly bought the newspaper. There are a few reasons, but the main one is that I never have enough time in the mornings to read it, and by the evening I usually know more about the main stories than the journalists did the night before.

I do occasionally buy papers, but like Lindsay, only for special purposes. When we were looking for a house or for jobs we'd buy Saturday's paper. If there's a special report or section I'll pick it up. But it's a pretty rare event.

In general I get my news from the web (again, both sites and RSS feeds). If you want to advertise to me, be very smart - my main news page is ABC News.

Just Read: May

2006-06-05T09:02:00.000+10:00

Angels & Demons by Dan Brown
Discovered: Karina's bedside table
About It: Robert Langdon is flown to Italy to stop the Illuminate from destroying the Vatican. It was probably a mistake to read this straight after Crytonomicon - I spent the first quarter of the book struggling not to throw it across the room. Eventually I discovered the secret of reading Dan Brown - don't worry about the details, just read for the plot. In the end it was a fun story, but nothing very special.
My Rating: 2.5/5

Abarat by Clive Barker
Discovered: Lifeline Book Fair
About It: A girl decides to leave school one day and eventually finds herself in another world. Abarat is children's book (or at least "young adult"), but was still lots. I enjoy Clive Barker's writing style, and it was good to read something strange and wonderful. I did find it amusing that after Angels & Demons had spent the last few days telling me how impossible ambigrams were, there was a great one on the cover of my very next book...
My Rating: 3.5/5

There would have been at least a third book to talk about, except I couldn't settle on anything. I spent about two weeks starting something, getting a few chapters in and then putting it down again. Ah well, such is life.

Phone Bills

2006-05-31T12:00:00.000+10:00

About 9 months ago, Telstra sent me a letter saying that if I didn't mind, they were going to change the frequency of my mobile bill from once a month to once every three months. It seemed perfectly reasonable to me.

Except now whenever I get a mobile bill, I have a small heart attack because the amount I have to pay is 3 times what I'm expecting...

This Applies To So Many Parts Of My Life

2006-05-31T08:44:00.000+10:00

CD Shops

2006-05-30T14:25:00.000+10:00

I think it was the founder of CDNow who went into a record store one day and asked where he could find some Miles Davis CDs. The shop person said "I don't know. Try under 'M'". He was so annoyed that he went out and started his own internet company.

I had a similar moment today while I was looking through CD stores. A helpful staffer had carefully stacked this under "S".

Just Seen: X-Men - The Last Stand

2006-05-28T17:37:00.000+10:00

The best way to describe X-Men 3 is to say it's a sequel. X-Men was a great movie, and everyone I know was pleasantly surprised when X-Men 2 turned out to be just as good if not better then the original. I had high hopes for X-Men 3, but it turn out to just be a sequel.

That's not to say it wasn't good, it's just that they fell into the trap most sequels do - it was like the original but more. More action, more mutants, more explosions, more More MORE! But I did enjoy it - it was a good sequel, it just was no X-Men 2.

Some Of The Good:

The casting. It's always been pretty great, and this time round it was no different. Kelsey Grammer was perfect for Beast (unlike what Penny Arcade had suspected). I couldn't imagine anyone but Vinnie Jones playing Juggernaut.
Finally some of the students get to start being X-Men. Iceman, Rogue, Colossus and Kitty Pride all get uniforms and get treated like part of the team. Nice to see.
Raiding the prison and on the Golden Gate Bridge were perfect Magneto for me - unnecessary but big and showy, and demonstrate just how powerful he is.

Some Of The Bad:

There are other characters apart from Wolverine and Storm. Yes, I know you're paying them both the bulk of the money, but we've had lots of Wolverine in the last two movies, and frankly Halle Berry is not worth more than a few minutes screen time, especially not if it means cutting Nightcrawler.
Any one of the three main plots would have been fine for the movie. But doing all three at once was a bit dumb.
On the one hand, they tried to introduce lots of new mutants. On the other hand, they didn't really bother developing anyone other than Beast. It would have been nice to have more than 6 X-Men for the final battle, but the army of "hey, check out my random power!" got old pretty fast. Part of what I really like about X-Men is characters using their powers in clever and different ways. If we've only got enough time to find out what their power is before they're punched through a wall, that can't really happen.

If you enjoyed the first two X-Men movies, then you should definitely go and see number 3.

3/5

A Rant About Cinema Chains

2006-05-28T17:09:00.000+10:00

My TV is pretty decent. It's by no means massive or impressive, but it is widescreen. If I was so inclined, I could easily trade it in for something truly spectacular for a few thousand. I don't have surround sound, but it is something I'm planning on setting up fairly soon. My living room is very comfortable, with couches you can stretch out on or fill up with friends. It's a short walk from the normally well stocked kitchen or one of our several toilets. We have several video stores within a few minutes drive.

Considering the fact that pretty much everyone these days has a similar "home theatre", I sometimes have to wonder what the cinemas are thinking. Say a movie that I want to see is released. I can wait a couple of months and then hire the DVD for no more than about $5. I can then watch it on my reasonably-sized TV, complete with my soon-to-exist surround sound. If I'm so included, I can watch it with a beer in my hand and a bowl of popcorn, which might add as much as another $5 to the price. I can have some friends over, start it whenever we're all ready and even pause the movie if someone needs to go to the toilet.

Alternatively, I could line up to pay $15 for a ticket (and maybe pay another $10 for warmed up old popcorn), stand around for ages, maybe have to line up to get in, fight for a seat and put up with anyone who decides to be a jerk. Sure, the screen is bigger and the sound is better, but really, not by that much.

Of course, going to the movies is still fun. But every time I go, I'm seeing less and less advantage. The cinemas aren't stupid, and I'm sure they know this. But their solution seems to be to increase their prices more, make things less nice and then complain that DVD sales are killing them.

On Friday night some friends and I were going to see X-Men 3 at Hoyts in Belconnen. I figured that standing in line to buy my ticket was going to be pretty boring, so I when to buy my tickets online. After going through the entire process - including entering my credit card details - the system decided to inform me that actually, that session was sold out. I wasn't convinced, so I decided to try and ring Hoyts to find out. After navigating their phone system, I was left with two options:

Call their session times hotline and pay 84c a minute for the privilege of being told what time the movie would start
Try and talk to a real person, only to have the phone system decide (after 6 rings) that "no operator is available. Exiting system!" and hang up on me.

Fantastic. Wonderfully helpful. We decided that we'd try to buy tickets anyway, and if that failed we'd just go and grab a drink. Turns out they weren't sold out. So I didn't miss out on paying too much money to stand in two different lines for ages.

That massive TV is looking better and better...

Yay! Feedback!

2006-05-24T09:38:00.000+10:00

I got some feedback recently about how I've been working. Fortunately it was better than Lindsay's "be nicer and dumber" - apparently I'm nice and dumb enough already.

The summary is that I don't like to do boring work, and sometimes I try so hard to make boring work interesting that I cause more problems for myself. While I'm not afraid to get my hands dirty when faced with a problem, it would be better to spend the time learning about the problem and planning out the best approach before I started. Oh, and I can get easily distracted...

On the plus side, apparently I've got a good attitude towards getting stuff done, I'm prepared to work hard when I need to, and I've got a good technical skill base. And (maybe most importantly) I'm doing a good job.

The question of Developer or Project Manager raised it's head again. Two years ago I was leaning towards PM. At the moment I think I'm leaning towards developer. But who knows?

Don't Worry About This Post

2006-05-23T13:49:00.000+10:00

Okay. Most people who read my blog are going to find this a very strange post. If that's the case, don't worry - just mark it as "read" and move on. I'm really just using Blogger for some image storage, since I'm too lazy to bother getting an account with Photobucket or something.

I did these as a half-joke for my gaming group. They're Magic: The Gathering-style cards done for the roleplaying game Exalted. I used the MtG Editor to make the cards, and took the images and text from Exalted 2nd Edition.

More Silk Comments

2006-05-22T12:29:00.000+10:00

So it looks like some class got set an assignment to find out where silk came from over the weekend. I suspect this because I had 7 more comments on my Where Does Silk Come From? page. And yes, it's still the top page in Google.

Of course, the comments aren't exactly what I'd might have hoped for...

Wee Jasper Weekend

2006-05-22T08:58:00.000+10:00

We took a bunch of scouts and venturers out to Wee Jasper over the weekend. It was fantastic. It's been so long since I had a weekend where I could really get away from it all, and it's been even longer since I last went camping. So just for that it was a great weekend.

Saturday afternoon I did a bit of abseiling. Nothing too extreme - scouts aren't allowed to abseil anything higher than 30 metres - but still lots of fun. The bigger of the two drops had a section where you couldn't touch the rockface even if you wanted to.

That night, the rock team took four venturers and myself through the Dip cave and into the Gong Room. It was the first "real" caving I'd done - I've been into caves before, but only ever the ones upright through and have hand rails and stuff. As one of the instructors said, proper caving is just rock climbing in the dark without a harness. To get into the cave, we had to climb down a wire ladder that was secured to a steel pole across a hole in the ground. Inside you had to climb over big rocks, hurl yourself over big drops and squeeze through tiny holes. At least twice we had lie down on the ground to pull ourselves through a small crevice. And more than once we'd get into a chamber and thing "well, there's no where else to go", only to find that actually there was. The Gong Room itself was amazing. It was full of all sorts of cave features, but because it's so hard to get to, it was all fairly intact.

Part of the reason I'd gone caving on the Saturday night was so that if the caving group on Sunday was all full someone could have my spot. Turns out it was a good plan, so I spent most of Sunday doing some more abseiling. Fortunately, one by one the scouts and ventures all gave up, so we pretty much had the big drop to ourselves.

I got home very dirty, and with lots of cuts, scrapes and bruises. But it was well worth it.

Traits of a Good IT Manager #1

2006-05-15T14:28:00.000+10:00

In lots of ways, developers are like children - they play in their own world, they speak their own language and they spend their days dealing with make-believe. A good manager, much like a good parent, needs to make the dev think whatever they've just done is very clever and impressive. Even if the manager doesn't really get how it works - or even what it does.

So in other words, one of the best things a manager can do is say "That's great! Let's stick that up on the fridge!"

Why Do I Blog?

2006-05-11T16:35:00.000+10:00

A friend asked me this question the other day. While I had an answer at the time, I've been mulling it over since, and I've decided it wasn't quite the whole story.

The simplest explanation of why I blog (and the answer I gave) is that it started because of work. We attempted to have an internal R&D blog at TOWER - the idea being that everyone could keep everyone else informed of what they were up to. The experiment failed miserably - after the first few weeks, nobody bothered to post anything and a few months later the box it was sitting on got used for something else (I'm not sure if anyone else even noticed). It did get the idea of blogs into my head though, and thanks to the prompting of some of the TOWER bloggers (mostly Mikal, who suggested Exceptionally Uncaught), I decided to give the idea a go.

But that's really only half the story. The other half is why I kept blogging. I'm pretty good at finding a new toy to play with, and then totally forgetting about it a couple of months later. I've decided there are a few reasons.

Creation
Stephen King describes in On Writing how he has to tell these stories. It's simply not an option to stop writing. While obviously no where near as extreme, I definitely have this fundamental desire to write. It seems to at least go part way to fulfilling this basic need I have to create - to turn ideas into something more than just flashes in my head. I (as I'm sure most bloggers do) often find myself mentally planning my next post - "ooh, that would make post", "I think I want to talk about...", "A friend asked me...". It's something that keeps me thinking and keeps me writing.

Everyone's Listening
One of the most fantastic things about blogging is that anyone - anyone in the entire world who has access to the Internet - can come and read my blog. I get a real kick out of knowing that because I had a problem, solved it and blogged it, I've made someone else's life a bit easier. I'm constantly amused by the number of people who discovered where silk came from because of me. I realise I'm a very tiny blip in the blogasphere - I'm certainly no Scobleizer or StillHQ or even an Over The Falls, but hey, I'm there!

No-one's Listening
I can' t be bothered to look up the actual number, but there are a lot of bloggers out there. So many that I don't have to worry about who might be reading my site. The day I ever meet someone for the first time and they say "hey! You're the guy who writes Exceptionally Uncaught!" I'll probably have fallen into bizzaro land. I can write reasonably person stuff when the mood strikes me, and not have to feel worried.

Blog Family
Probably one of the biggest reasons I've been at this for almost 300 posts is because of my blog family - Mikal, Gordon, Ian and Lindsay in particular (there are others, so don't feel left out). These were the guys who commented on the stuff I wrote, hassled me when I hadn't posted for a while and wrote interesting stuff I wanted to comment on. It also gives stuff to talk about in the real world. Thanks to blogging, I've gotten to know the members of "my family" better then I probably would have otherwise.

Keeping In Touch
I've been doing this for over a year now, and in that time I've circled the globe and seen many of "the family" move on to new cities and new things. But where ever I am in the world, I can stick a post up and know that my friends and family can read about what I've been up to. It beats email because I don't have to worry about sending it to everyone or spamming people I like.

That's why I have a blog and why I still blog. So come on then, why do you blog?

Colds

2006-05-08T09:04:00.000+10:00

My cold over the last few days reminded me of the last cold I had. Last year a friend and I had managed to score tickets to the Tori Amos concert on the Saturday night, and then a Nick Cave concert on the Sunday night, both up in Sydney. My friend's girlfriend's grandmother lived a short bus trip from the concerts, and so luckily we were allowed to crash there.

I was pretty much over my cold, but really didn't want it to interfere with me finally getting to see Tori Amos in concert. So I had with me some cold & flu tablets - good old pseudoephedrine. So on Saturday, we got ourselves ready and were about to head off to the bus. I quickly ducked back into my room to grab a couple of tablets - I figured I'd just take them if I needed them. As I came back to where everyone else was, the grandmother looked up in time to see me carefully pushing a blisterpack with two white, unmarked tablets into my pocket

"What are those?"

Much hand waving and rapid explanations ensured as I desperately tried to convince the nice old lady that I wasn't planning on getting high.

Just Heard: Neko Case

2006-05-04T10:36:00.000+10:00

Wow. Just wow.

I was driving to work to Monday morning, listening to Triple J. They had a promo for the Morning Show and they were talking about interviewing a woman named Neko Case. Then they played a 5 second song grab. I swore out loud.

Fortunately, the Internet was happy to help me learn more. The song I heard was called Hold On, Hold On, and I've haven't been able to get it out of my head for more than about 20mins since. I also managed to find a concert they did early last month.

Sure, it might fit into the "distinctive female vocalist" camp that a lot of my music does, but I think I really like her stuff. It's a bit different and very cool. Take a listen.

So Funny

2006-05-04T09:29:00.000+10:00

For some reason doing this amused me greating

Thoughts Mikal?

2006-05-03T10:17:00.000+10:00

As my only access to the hive-mind, I'm curious to hear what Mikal thinks about this post from one of the Wired blogs.

The short version is that Google has pulled it's AdSense from the Mango Sauce blog (which I haven't read). Mango Sauce is apparently "about relationships and life and sex and being a Westerner in Bangkok". Google pulled the AdSense because they've decided the blog is pornographic.

Lego Mindstorms

2006-05-02T10:28:00.000+10:00

Mikal has discovered that the new Lego Mindstorms firmware is going to be open sourced. Wired did an article on the Mindstorms' development a couple of months ago. It's a pretty cool read. I thought they'd announced that the firmware would be open source in it, but re-reading the article, it's just fairly heavily hinted at.

Firefox and SP2

2006-05-01T20:46:00.000+10:00

I decided to put Visual Studio 2005 Express onto our laptop. But, as it turns out, I still hadn't gotten around to Service Pack 2 yet. So no VS 2005 until I've done that. Okay, fair enough. So across to the Mircosoft website I go.

But no. Microsoft don't want anyone who uses Firefox to get Service Pack 2. Apparently only those people who use IE 5 or better are "worthy". Grrrr.

Also, patching Windows in Japanese is reasonably tricky...

Just Read: April

2006-05-01T09:10:00.000+10:00

I seriously considered holding off this months post until I finished my current book. But then I realised that would be cheating. So again, it's a fairly short list. As it turns out, reading 1100 pages when you're working 55+ hour weeks takes a while.

Dogs in the Vineyard by D. Vincent Baker
Discovered: A friend bough a copy a while ago, and then for some reason got sent a second one. Rather than pay to ship it back, he gave it to me (to pay for if I felt it was worth it).
About It: Okay, it's another RPG. But it's just as awesome as Game of Thrones. The best way to describe it is you play a gunslinger bringing God's Law to the wild west and you get to make up God's Law as you go along. It's fairly obviously based on the Mormans in Utah around 150-200 years ago. While it seems like a fairly narrow premise, it sounds like an awesome game to play.
My Rating: 4/5

Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson
Discovered: The last of my January Amazon books
About It: Cryptonomicon follows several individuals during World War II and their descendants in the late 90's. As the name suggests, the book is filled with cryptography - code breakers of the Second World War, hackers of today and crazy mathematicians. It's also fairly heavy on the technical detail - there's chunks of code, details on various pieces of hardware and technological snooping.
I've never read a book with this level of technical detail that played into my skill set. For someone not from a computing background, it probably would have been quite boring, but for me it was fantastic. I wish someone had handed me a copy of this book when I started my undergraduate degree.
Every page of this book was a pleasure to read. Every time I've had to buy a birthday present over the past three months, I've had to fight the urge to buy a copy of Cryptonomicon. This book was fantastic.
My Rating: 6/5

Nuclear Accidents and 5 Yen Pieces

2006-04-28T12:13:00.000+10:00

Mikal's post about the wikipedia articles on nuclear disasters was really interesting. My personal highlight was this article about how useful the Japanese 5 yen pieces are.

Well, What Do You Know

2006-04-26T10:23:00.000+10:00

Wow. As part of the Challenge, I just discovered I have Crowded House on my iTunes. Who knew?

Never Been Played Update

2006-04-26T09:28:00.000+10:00

While I've very please that Gordon has decided to accept the Never Been Played challenge, I resent his claim that I'm cheating. It's hardly cheating to remove podcasts from the list, especially when some of those podcasts are over and hour long, and Gordon has none. Besides, I adjusted my total figures.

Anyway. 261 songs, 19 hours left. Longest song remaining is Feela by Lamb coming in at 17:12, and the shortest song left is Mantra by Tool (1:12).

Never Been Played

2006-04-25T15:37:00.000+10:00

Gordon and I are having a competition (well, he doesn't know it's a competition yet - it's part of my cunning plan to win!). The competition is to see who can get through their iTunes "Not Played" list first. Of course, many of the songs haven't been played for good reason - they're crap, or they've got "secret tracks" at the end, so they get skipped before they finish. But that's part of the challenge. And yes, it's easy to cheat, but what's the point (unless it's looking like I'm not going to win).

My Stats
Number of Songs: 273
Approximate Time: 19.8 Hours

(Gordon is starting with 371 songs which is 1 days worth of music)

Computers: Euphoria

2006-04-25T10:43:00.000+10:00

This is an article about the new animation engine Lucas Arts are planning on using for their new Indiana Jones game. It sounds like some seriously sexy software. Take a look at the movies as well.

Just Watched: Ginger Snaps

2006-04-24T13:30:00.000+10:00

As sometimes happens, the first version of this post was eaten. It was (as all lost post are), a master piece of writing, and this is just a pale recreation. But it says most of what I wanted to say.

I picked up the DVD of Ginger Snaps a while go for $5, and finally got around to watching it last night. I had been expecting fairly standard "bad" teen horror, but it turns out it was a reasonably serious attempt at a supernatural thriller.

The plot is fair standard. Take a group of misfits. Something supernaturally bad happens. The group then has to try and stop it before they (and everyone else) get killed. The quality of course is in the detail.

Using a supernatural change as a metaphor for adolescence (puberty, sex, growing up) isn't a new idea - you could argue that Buffy was entirely based on the idea - but Ginger Snaps is one of the best ways I've seen it done. Another big plus was that I found the characters real (well, in general. I'm still not sure if the mum was meant to be comic relief or just totally nuts). Although, thinking back, really only Ginger and her sister were very developed, so maybe it was just they stopped me noticing.

The other thing this movie did right was the ending. The makers obviously realised that I was there to see them deal with the monster, so I don't care about how they explain it all to the police, clean up the mess, pay for their counseling and move on. Save it for the sequel. Also, the wait-it's-not-really-dead/it-had-time-to-spawn/it-wasn't-the-real-monster "twist" is really tired.

3.5/5

Work Phone Spam

2006-04-22T13:25:00.000+10:00

So being the only on in the office on a Saturday isn't all bad. I'm free to talk to myself AS LOUD AS I WANT, and I'm not going to get any strange looks. I don't have to be worried that someone important's going to ask why I was printing a pretty picture on the marketing printer ("because it looks cool?"). And I got to answer the phone just a moment ago...

She sounded like she had either just woken up, was very drunk, or both. I managed to work out that she *thought* someone had rung her from here, and so was trying to return the call. Of course, she wasn't really listening to me:
"mmm? TOWER Software? Yeah, I've seen you advertised on TV. TOWER software. TOWER computers. Dell Computers. I don't need a Dell computer yet thanks. But I call you when I do. Okay?"

"Um, okay. Bye!"

It was like that blog spam ("This is a great blog! I was looking for something about [insert blog title] to help me with my website! Check it out!"), but over the phone! Awesome!

Beer Activated Girl

2006-04-22T10:42:00.000+10:00

This morning I discovered Beer Activated Girl (for anyone who doesn't know, check out the original Coin Operated Boy here).

Movie Poster Mashups

2006-04-21T09:04:00.000+10:00

I just found this. Some of it's a bit dumb, but some of them are laugh-out-loud funny.

My personal picks:

Game Design Thoughts

2006-04-20T08:22:00.000+10:00

On Saturday night I had some friends over for some board games. Together we managed to track Dracula across Europe and (after a couple of close calls), finally managed to corner and destroy him. After that, we managed to successfully defend Camelot from the forces of darkness and destruction. All in all, an excellent evening.

On Tuesday, one of the podcasts I normally listen to (Have Games, Will Travel) talked a bit about the idea of board games being designed like software, and it's something I've been thinking about a bit ever since.

It's an approach that really seems to make sense. A board game is really just a simple program - it's got some set rules (you can only move forward, you move a number of squares equal to a dice roll, etc), a limited number of pieces and definite conditions for winning. In fact, converting a board game to a computer program is a fairly simple task. In fact, there are many parts of board games (reshuffleing decks, rolling dice, etc) that if automated, would make the game run much smoother.

So why are most computer games different from board games? Well, the mechanics in a board game need to be reasonably simple and quick for a person to do, otherwise you'd spend more time looking up on accounting tables and in tax-packs than you would passing go. But a computer can quite happily calculate how often everyone's landed on a certain square, factor in the amount of cash in the game, reasonably guess where each player will be in a couple of turns, adjust for compound interest and still be finished before animated dice stop rolling. Take Tetris - it's basically just a board game that couldn't exist in the real world because it's mechanics would be too hard for people to deal with. So why stop there? Instead of moving your piece around the board one square at a time, you can have different speeds, power ups, terrain, even real physics. And suddenly it's looking a lot more like Mario Cart than Monopoly.

But board games are still fun - even when played on a computer (leaving aside when they're played against a computer, which generally tends to suck). Why? I think that's because people don't actually care about the level of abstraction - it's just as much fun to throw down a couple of cards and roll a die to see if my knight beat the siege engine as it would be to see through his eyes as he maneuvers around the war machine, attacking vulnerable parts while defending himself - provided it fits with the rest of the game.

People often complain that there's nothing new in computer games - they're all just variations on each other. Sure, this one might look pretty, and this one might have this smart feature. But really, every first person shooter is pretty much the same. What occurred to me after all of the above is that while maybe you need to approach board game design like software design, maybe they also need to start approaching computer game design like board game design.

Edit: Oh, and I'd love to get feedback about this. If you've got some thoughts, post a comment!

Um, That's Not Quite What We Meant...

2006-04-18T15:06:00.000+10:00

A little while ago (back when I thought I was getting a City of Heroes free trial), a friend and I were tossing around ideas about what sort of hero I should play. Since he brought it up again today, I thought I'd post the transcript here for everyone to enjoy (I'm green).

Oh, I know! Mr Rainbow! He's a queer-friendly human rights lawyer! He battle villains with the mightiest weapon of them all - a solid understanding of the anti-discrimination law!

That's not a completely terrible super hero actually. It's better than "Wolver Man" with his "4 retractable claws" and his "slightly disfunctional attitude" (don't sue us marvel!).

I was just thinking it would be pretty funny to spend a while "totally missing the point", and coming up with characters who are real-life kick-arse "hero" types - Amnesty International's human rights lawyers, independent war journalists, the ATO accountants how take down massive, dodgie companies, etc.

"Um, no, that's not quite what we meant when we said 'super hero'..."
"Oh, okay then. How about Prof. Stephen Hawking?"
"Um..."

You could call your super hero "the red cross", and fight hunger and abuse all over the world :)

"Who are you?" asked the terrified thug
"I'm UNICEF Man"

You could make a tank, and call him the OXfam.

"I believe that Health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity. The enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of health is one of the fundamental rights of every human being without distinction of race, religion, political belief, economic or social condition. The health of all peoples is fundamental to the attainment of peace and security and is dependent upon the fullest co-operation of individuals and States. The achievement of any State in the promotion and protection of health is of value to all. Unequal development in different countries in the promotion of health and control of disease, especially communicable disease, is a common danger. Healthy development of the child is of basic importance; the ability to live harmoniously in a changing total environment is essential to such development. The extension to all peoples of the benefits of medical, psychological and related knowledge is essential to the fullest attainment of health. Informed opinion and active co-operation on the part of the public are of the utmost importance in the improvement of the health of the people. Governments have a responsibility for the health of their peoples which can be fulfilled only by the provision of adequate health and social measures. "I am Dr WHO"

Just Ate At: Busi Cafe

2006-04-13T09:37:00.000+10:00

We went for a birthday dinner at Busi Cafe (sorry about the link, it was the best I could find) in Manuka last night. And wow, was it bad. The worst place I've ever been to in Canberra would probably be a reasonable description.

I'm usually pretty forgiving of food places. And there's usually some redeeming factor - the service might be bad, but the food is good. Or the food is bad, but the atmosphere is great. Unfortunately, the best thing about Busi Cafe was that we got to leave eventually.

The place was tiny, with lino floors and very bright, multi-coloured walls. It basically looked like something you'd see in a food court. In fact, when I first wondered past, I thought it was the sort of place that does lunch take-away, but had a few tables around. When we sat down at their cafeteria-style table and chairs, we discovered that there were only 3 glasses for a table of 10. After a lot of begging and pleading, we were finally able to get some more wine glasses.

The ordering process was a bit of a debacle, and almost two hours later our entrees began to arrive. We got a plate of spring rolls - enough for one each! Of course, we didn't have any plates to eat them off, so everyone had to just hold them. After another long wait, the first of our main dishes started appearing, along with 2 pork buns (we'd ordered enough for everyone). After much pain, we eventually managed to explain that we should have some more pork buns. Which turned out to be a mistake - I didn't think it was possible to stuff up those packet pork buns, but apparently I was wrong.

Meanwhile, we were finally able to convince them that we actually needed individual plates as well as the food dishes. The only cutlery we had were spoons and forks (that's right, no chopsticks) - which meant we had to beg for a knife when one of the dishes turned out to be big pork shanks. Every dish we thought "oh, this one will be alright!", and every dish wasn't. It was by far the worst Chinese I've eaten. Several of the dishes were chucked on the table without anything to serve them with - resulting in more requests for cutlery and more confused looks from the wait staff.

At one point (probably about half way through the meal) we asked if we could get some rice. "Oh, you want some more rice?" asked the waiter/floor manager. "No, we'd like *some* rice - we haven't got any yet". So he brought out a small bowl. And then said "hmmm, do you want a second bowl?" "Ah, yes..."

Let me describe a couple of the dishes. There was the afore-mentioned pork - "salty and spicy pork", which was infact almost tasteless and fatty. There was a prawn dish that looked nice in the picture (the menu had pictures for each dish, none of which looked like the real dish) but turned out to be some prawns with scrambled egg on top. There was the fried rice, which was just rice, some egg and some soy sauce mixed together. There was the honey chicken, which, despite the description saying it was the normal, deep-fried crunchy honey chicken and the picture looking like the normal, crunchy honey chicken, was actually just normal chicken strips with a thin sauce that may have contained honey.

I spent a bit of time trying to work out what market they were trying to appeal to. It certainly wasn't classy enough to appeal to the Manuka yuppies. It was far too slow to appeal to the take away market. The quality of the food was so bad that they can't have been trying for the gourmets. I thought maybe they were trying to appeal to families, but the place was definitely not kid-friendly. My best guess was that they were trying for the "I feel like something dodgie and horrible, but I don't want MacDonalds". Although I don't know how well they were even pulling that off.

Random: I'm An Ideas Man

2006-04-12T15:06:00.000+10:00

I think I need an ideas blog. I've been having a lot of them lately, and it would be nice to put them somewhere.

Just Tried: The Poacher's Pantry

2006-04-11T12:25:00.000+10:00

On Sunday we went out to the Poachers Pantry cafe/restaurant for lunch. For anyone who doesn't know, the Poachers Pantry is a line of gourmet meats. Their main customer used to be Ansett. When they went bankrupt, the owners of Poachers Pantry decided they needed to do some serious work to keep themselves in business. So they set up a cafe and started selling their products in local supermarkets and delis.

Turns out it was a great move.

Lunch was fantastic. We had a meat platter and a cheese platter. Both were exceptionally tasty. It would be a great place to take out of town visitors - which is exactly what we're planning to do.