Very busy with System Design Project at the moment.
archive for April, 2003
Well, he said it would happen but I didn’t want to belive him. It was nice to be inside his head for a while, especially as there is not much written about him as a person. Read about it here on his official boards.
I’ve just finished reading Pattern Recognition as well and quite enjoyed it. It is a lot less ‘gritty’ than his previous works, with its basis in modern reality and this does make it very different. He touched on so many areas and left numerous great characters unexplored so I can’t wait for the sequel.
Ooooo, an entry in the gaming category.
Valve have finally admitted that they are working on Half-Life 2 (like they weren’t going to make a sequel, come on!). E3 is just around the corner and they will undoubtly steal the show. A few magazines had some screenshots under strict emabrgo, but as usual they were leaked onto the web.
Looks like I’ll need a new computer this year…
P.S. I apologise for the entry below, I was very tired.
We were out last night for flatmate Petes’s 22nd birthday, crawled in at 1 am with bag of plasticy doughnuts purchased from 24 hour shop. ‘Awoke’ 8 hours later feeling not that great. Downed some ibuprofen, finished off doughnuts and went to work, blinking at the morning sun, remaining blister of ibuprofens stuffed in back pocket. Summery, easy and quiet day at work, made better by starting Pattern Recognition and taunting Garry the security guard. Pattern Recognition is good so far and Gibson’s style makes me remember reading Neuromancer for the first time. It was on the train coming up to visit Edinburgh University for the first time, back when I was still doing A-Levels. Its like an old friend visiting for tea and recalling his stories, but with style. Got unhealthy kebab on the way home, with all the extras plus kitchen sink, and chillis. Came home, made coffee, ate kebab, drank coffee. Remembered have handin tomorrow, groaned. Attempted to do some work on it, just read PR instead. Liver is still trying to wash out last nights poisons, decide to sleep instead and give it a hand
good night
First saw this when we were watching the Grand Prix last weekend and its very, very well done. It seems to have hit the newspapers recently and they claim is was done in one take. Even if that take was the 606th one. Its advertising the new Honda Accord and consists of lots of bits of the car interacting with each other, cartoon style, in a huge chain of events. Its hard to describe, you’ll have to watch it for yourself.
update
It seems the actual advert only used one small amount of CG, pretty impressive. Even that was just to join the two halves together.
Yes thats right folks, its “add another thing to the side bar” time!
Now in a always repsectful hommage to Meg over at notsosoft.com I add my picture of the ‘moment’.
I made it ‘moment’ so as not to put any kind of lame time constraints on it (i.e. I can be lazy).
Back again!
see how quick that was!
Off home for a few days, byeeeeee
This gallery of posters showing reactions to the war is very good and has some very thought provoking designs.
On the subject of the war, I just can’t help notice how surreal the war is becoming. Its partly due to the amount of technology available to journalists, it allows them to report stories with such speed and to actually be there as it happens. I can now be sat on the sofa watching my countries soldiers, as they kill another countries soldiers with bewildering arrays of equipment and firepower. Then we get the reporters being killed or coming under fire, and even better, we get them being bombed by our side, live! on air! as it happens! (bbc news )
I had bbc news 24 on this morning as background noise and my attention was perked by a tour around one of Saddam’s palaces. Some bbc reporter was hamming it up very badly, thinking he was on house doctors or changing rooms or something. He skipped around this palatial building pointing out all the wood carving, marble and stained glass. Even checking out the bathrooms with the gold plate plumbing and making wild speculations about how much it cost and how many had died builiding it. The punchline came at the end though, when he ended it with:
“Who lives in a house like this……Saddam Hussein lives in a house like this”
I kid you not.
Winner of the day though is the Iraqi Information Minister. Who gave a impromtu press conference in the streets of Baghdad categoricaly denying that the US has entered Iraq, saying that the invader had been “slaughtered” and they were comitting suicide at the walls of the city. All this when US armour was less than half a mile away across the Tigras and the weapons fire within earshot. He is propaganda personified.
My buddy/colleague Joe has just set up his home on the net at woolamaloo.org.uk.
His mission?
“to take sideswipes at stories from the media, to lampoon those who deserve it and to satirise current events, all while also hopefully making people think at the same time”.
I’m also expecting blog entries coming from Joe’s uniquely skewed perspective on life.
Hrm, its worrying when the blog page starts looking sparse as MT archives old posts. I’ve been “busy” trying to finish my Individual Programming Practical which is due in on the 16th. We have to program a peer-to-peer file sharing system, which sounds really cool! But, believe me, its not. Although I just haven’t put enough time into it becuase of my lame-ass attitide towards uni work and spending too much time online…
wait…
I’m always online, maybe that could be it…
surely not
Also my sister is visiting tomorrow, mainly to visit Heriot Watt university on Wednesday but also so we can catch up and have a few drinks etc. After that I’m catching the same train home with her to visit the folks.
Although, andrew, the kind soul has lent me his laptop so I can do some work at home. I also tend to get more work done just sat looking at the laptop than when I’m at my desk in front of my main pc, always checking of my downloads, irc-ing, email ppl, faffing with setttings, etc…
That was the sound of my show-off horn. We managed to get on the blueyonder two megabit trial.
This means our one meg line gets upgraded to two meg for a month, free of charge.
\o/\o/
PS I’m currently getting 190 kb/s off bit torrent.