George ‘DUBYAH’ Bush’s résumé
[via boingboing]
archive for 2003
Oh yes, I think we do have tickets already. Wednesday 8:20 pm will roXor.
My main man Graeme (AKA Flinty) has just inserted his mind into the matrix here:
http://www.p2thepowerofm.com/pirateninja/
niiiice url 🙂
Time for a m-m-m-m-monster update.
Friday was the dealine for the aformentioned System Design Project. I would say this last week has been one of the most stressfull and emotional of my life. Late nights, junk food, my insane team, JCMB basement, lego, robots, the cs3 possee, making friends/enemies, team-working and alcohol make for an ‘interesting’ time.
I feel like I’m awakening from a dream, this morning I bolted awake in bed, my mind screaming:
Then the ThursdayFridaySaturday blur washed over me and I realised it must be Sunday. Not sleeping on Thursday night didn’t really help either. The project revolves around builidng a robot that can perform shopping for a web site user (stupid, I know). So we had built a large-ish model of a supermarket complete with toy packets of food for the robot to navigate around. At 1am Friday morning we realised the model was fundamentaly flawed and our genius conveyor belt idea would not work, unless we pullled everything apart and rebuilt it. Which we did. I don’t know where the time went but it was suddenly Friday 7am, demonstration in 2 hours. Somehow we managed to pull everything together, go home and get dressed up, and come back and do the demo, without falling asleep. The ‘board’ were very impressed and actually ran over they’re alloted time quizzing us about a certain ninja feature we had worked 😀 After sitting through hours of sales presentations in the afternoon we were all dropping off so we decided to go the pub, what a great idea. This turned into a marathon session which ends in my head at about 10pm but actually continued in real life until 3am (I’m told).
Anyway, today is Sunday, that means work.This helped to ground me a bit more in the ‘real world’.
I’m still not comfortable with pouring my every whim and fantasy onto my blog (I ain’t some livejournal user) so I’ll just say that I seem to have reached a point where I really think I need a girlfriend, a real one.
Speaking of points, I was thinking that there were two points where I felt I’d reached another stage in life, both can be connected to books. The first was reading a dog-eared hard back copy of Neuromancer (William Gibson), borrowed form the council library, whilst on the train to Edinburgh. I think I must have been still 18 and was visiting Edinburgh University for the first time and seeing Edinburgh as a city for the second time. I finished the book in the journey. Ending up going to Edinburgh uni and have lived in this fantastic city for almost four years.
The second point was reading Generation X (Douglas Coupland), again on the train, but going home for xmas this time. I think ‘being 21’ was finally sinking into me, and the character in the book was visiting his parents for xmas aswell. It just fell nicely into place. I think I felt it was time to ‘grow up’, don’t know how successfully I managed it though…
(Do not fear brave readers, monkeys have not taken control of my mind)
Watched this last night, was kinda like a dark American Pie with some Memento-like reverse plot jiggery-pokery. That is all.
I Lucifer – Glen Duncan
Cheese Monkeys – Chip Kidd
Microserfs – Douglas Coupland
Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
Gravity’s Rainbow – Thomas Pynchon
On the Road – Jack Kerouac
Broken Angels – Richard Morgan
More Murakami (although not when feeling depressed)
please add others…
Big up the Richard Morgan massive. He seems to have finally relented and gotten himself a website:
Very busy with System Design Project at the moment.
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.
Watched this new Clooney film the other night and its not bad, not really what I was expecting though. Starring and directed by the Clooney-meister it tells the story of some game show writer/creator from the US who also claimed to be a hit man for the CIA. The guy travelled around europe with the winners of his gameshows, assasinating people on the side. Not the usual holywood muck, Clooney certainly knows how to pick ’em. It would have probably helped the story a bit more if you knew all these american game shows they were on about.
There was a huge (~8,000) anti-war march in Edinburgh on Saturday. Me and my man rick went out and pretended to be professional photographers, mincing about amongst the police vans and camera crews at the head of the procession. View my haul of pics here in the gallery.
No doubt Rick will develop his mountain of film and scan them in at some point, what with him being an SLR man.
Oh yeah, I also went into StarBucks for the first time on Friday. I thought I’d try one of these Frappuccino things everyone is always ranting about, and MY GOD they are sickly. I only got through about an eighth of the damn thing before I slung it in a bin.
The stinky might of the DMCA seems to have fallen on bit torrent. A couple of the big sites have dropped off the radar amid rumours that a major US cable company had contacted one of them. Oh well, another one bites the dust. Although I have a feeling that bit torrent may bit a bit more resilient than some of the other p2p networks…
Me, Ian and Alex decided to go on a trip to the coast today. Utilising alex’s l33t bus route skillz we hopped on and off buses with the skill of a bus-riding grasshopper. We got off the bus at Portabello, a coastal town just east of the whole Edinburgh sprawl. We headed for the promedenade and found the usual mess of gaudy amusement arcades and decrepid, ramshackle buildings. It even had a ‘Fun Fair’ that had ‘F*cking Shit’ spray-painted onto its sign, oh we laughed.
Anyway, we walked practically all the way along the promenade, in the fantastically sunny weather. We stopped to photograph all the nifty urban decay we found around the place, a disused outdoor swimming pool proved to have lots of nice angles. We spent quite a while here, taking lots of photos. Alex even whipped out his SLR.
Hunger was setting in by now, so we hopped on another bus to get down to Musselbrough hopefully for some fish and chips. After mincing about trying to find the high street we found an alright hotel/pub and had a reasonable lunch. Steak pie and beer, mmmmmm. We staggered out of the pub and immediately spotted an ice cream shop across the road, it was the famous Luca’s of Musselbrough. After queueing (queueing!) under the very flashy canopy/shop front we entered a cavern of ice cream goodness. We came out into the sunlight grinning like children and licking the already melting ice cream. After digesting all of this we were feeling very full, so we got on the next bus home.
We got off the bus on Princes street and found ourselves in the middle os a mass of mounted police, cycle cops and ordinary police. The anti-war march was plodding down the street and heading for the police station 🙂 We took a few pictures, alex headed home and me and Ian went home via Cockburn Street. In Fopp I finally bough As Heard on Radio Soulwax. We then visited tef at work and thus the story ends.
Made a brilliant chilli con carne yesterday, just polished it off tonight and am feeling very full.
I think I’m putting on weight. This is practically the first time, ever, I’ve though this and I eat like a pig. I’m the annoying guy that can just eat and eat and never seemed to get any wider. “Higher metabolism” I’ve heard it called.
Anyway, I blame all the junk food I’ve eaten over the last few weeks at uni, oh and living off farmfoods frozen pies for about a week.
I’m just kerazy today!
Just got this microsoft game, seems quite good. Its a elite-style space sim, but with a shallower learning curve. They’ve made the controls a lot more arcadey but it is still a lot of fun. A huuuuge universe to explore, but it seems a tad repetitive at times, as they reuse the same dialogue and locations but with different names.
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/rant/torness.html – excellent tour around Torness reactor by Charlie Stross
The deadlines are over!
After one all nighter and endless supplies of pizza, curry and caffeine they are “finished”. Now we’ve just got to start/finish our Individual Practical over the easter break, and do some revision for exams in June. What fun. Our “easter” break, now there is a comedy holiday, we have four weeks off (quite a lot) but then we actually go back before easter. Then when we get back, we have the monday and the friday off, madness.
I wish blair would stop pussing-footing around and just call it a war. Instead they mince about calling it a “police action”, an “increased offesive” etc…
It Blair can’t admit to us, his people, then we’re screwed.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/2867593.stm
Dear Governor Bush:
So today is what you call “the moment of truth,” the day that “France
and the rest of world have to show their cards on the table.” I’m glad
to hear that this day has finally arrived. Because, I gotta tell ya,
having survived 440 days of your lying and conniving, I wasn’t sure if I
could take much more. So I’m glad to hear that today is Truth Day,
’cause I got a few truths I would like to share with you:
read on…
Normal service will resume on Wednesday, next week.
When there will be much rejoicing.
People in the UK may have seen the kerazy Junior Senior song that entered the charts at number 4 this week. Rather fine it is to, although the severe Radio 1 pimpage it got did no harm I’m sure. Anyhoooo, I linked to the vdeo last September. Ahead of the curve/pack/thing I am!
Stay tuned batfans!
