The gates on the drivers' car park at TWM used to have an electronic locking system. Two heavy motorised gates that were opened by the insertion into the appropriate receptacle of a card, around the size but twice the thickness and thrice the weight of a typical credit card.
However, the system was fairly old and sometimes, the gates would get stuck. The solution, the owners decided, was a padlock. They put in different gates, and there was a padlock, for which I assume drivers were issued with a key. But of course no-one could be bothered with this padlock, and so most of the time, the gates were open for anyone to walk in.
Anyway so the point of all this is that last weekend, my dad's car turned up, in a scrapyard. Having disappeared from the drivers' car park a few days previously, it had been used in a crime, discarded, and burnt out.
Apparently he's not so bothered, he was thinking of getting another car soon anyway. But there were things in it that were lost, and I still felt a kind of helplessness that made me angry, even though it's not my car and nothing to do with me... It was unpleasant. It has caused a certain amount of inconvenience as my mum's car now has to be shared between the both of them. This seems to be working, somehow, for the moment, but you know. I feel a bit sick...
At least the clocks have gone forward today. That's always good.
I had better post something, else what would be the point of having a site at all..? Heh.
Recently I have pursued a policy of going to every single social event I can get myself invited to. This even included going to the union. Yeah, I went to Baby B. There were a few records I liked, even! I was so surprised! So anyway I haven't been arsed to update this thing, or go on IRC, very much. Oh well.
One thing on IRC I did do, was go to the 2002 Golden Cyber Awards. I went to the previous one last year, so I was looking forward to this. The 34s speedrun of Doom II map 24 won a lot of categories, as did the 6-second rocket jump speedrun of Doom II map 7. I guess this wasn't too surprising...
Speaking of Doom I should mention a recent update from Matt, about my playing it round his house... He deliberately doesn't say what happened but I must be honest. Basically I played like absolute shite:( I could make excuses about being unused to his computer, his keyboard (which wouldn't register when I was pressing two keys at once properly) and his mouse (apparently the best part of a decade old, with dirt to match, heh) but you know, I have to hold my hands up and go "yeah I was crap"
For example I was trying to speedrun E1M4 and because of the one-key-only thing I couldn't strafe50 jump to the exit, and it took me like a dozen attempts to strafe40 jump to the ledge to get the yellow key and do it that way. I was profoundly embarrassed, so the day after I tried to do it here, and managed perfectly well, getting a 40 second exit with relative ease. So I tried to record a demo of it. But...I just couldn't finish it. Damn Sod's Law. It's worth saying that the current world record is 12 seconds (click on "UV speed" under "Ultimate Doom records") don't go thinking I'm world-class or whatever...
For some reason I am inspired to explain some terminology!
- Jumping You can't actually jump in Doom, unless you're playing a source port like ZDoom, Legacy, Eternity or whatever. You certainly can't in PRBoom and what it really means is running at a gap if you're going fast enough you'll clear it. So really "jump" means "run really fast over gaps"
- Straferunning (and strafejumping) There is a well-known bug in Doom related to running speed. There is a maximum speed at which you can run forwards and backwards, and a maximum speed at which you can run left or right. But the engine simply adds horizontal and vertical motion together, so by running forwards and "strafing" (sidestepping) left at the same time, you run diagonally with a noticeable speed increase.
- Strafe40, Strafe50 Slight complications ensue because there are in fact two ways to strafe. You can press a key that means "strafe (sidestep) to the left", but you can also press the key for "turn left" and the key for "strafe", which make the game interpret "turn left/right" commands as "strafe left/right". Strafe40 is where you go forwards and strafe left at the same time; strafe50 is where you go forwards and do both types of strafing at once, making you run at an even greater angle from straight ahead and with a slightly higher speed increase.
- Wallrunning For completeness I will mention wallrunning, which is technically a different game bug. When you run into a wall, your movement is changed to "slide" along the wall. The function that implements this contains some optimisations for purely horizontal and vertical walls; but problems with it allow the player to gain alarmingly high speed increases by running along a perfectly north-south or east-west wall.
Last week I was doing random searches on Google Groups and I found DIY's new location. I was quite distraught when I discovered its page had disappeared a couple of months ago, so finding that it had merely moved, and there was a new release after all this time, was fantastic. This is in spite of the fact that in order to install it I have to port all my crappy modifications to it, more work, oh well... It's all good baby:)
I wonder if anyone read all of that. This wasn't meant to be about Doom, it was meant to be about, of all things, my dad's car...
Okay so I guess I should update about this weekend, my party, or whatever the hell that was supposed to be.
Oh man, this is going to take hours, I'll bet, especially since I'm also in a very busy #warwick at the moment and it will distract me:J
- My mum's lift to London was late, and I became increasingly panicky that I wouldn't be able to set the house up in time
- People who were turned up, in no particular order: Sarah, James (Sarah's bloke), Glaysher (who left soon afterwards to fetch Fiona, they both came back later on), Amy, Matt, FDave (gods help me for inviting him but at least he didn't deliberately try to wreck my house), BDave, and Spark (yet another Dave we've met on IRC)
- Sarah brought balloons... how original... apart from one we drew a face on, and named "Mr Pinky", I stuck a big knife in all the rest of them:)
- Brief stint on the pool table, which was crap, it's an old, old and very small childrens table. No-one else hit the balls hard enough...
- People sitting in my room, listening to some of these records and not complaining too much. Lighting by yet another version of my strobe program (this one written in C, using ncurses, heh)
- BDave's cake! I told him not to bring one because I already had one, but he did, but it was fantastic! It was like a spongy thing, sort of chocolatey with this buttercream on top, very nice. Also at the time there were 8 people there so it was easy to cut up:)
- Kneeling in front of the table, about to blow out the candles (yes there were candles... I thought I said it wasn't a birthday party, but, oh well) I was invited to make a wish. Amy was standing next to me... I have never gotten such a big laugh from as little as a slow glance upwards...
- There followed lots of sitting in the front room talking crap and stealing each other's seats. I was standing most of the time, trying to keep a lid on the mess, with some success. In fact, with a couple of exceptions, that was going pretty well... So my wish was actually coming true (what, you thought it was something else?)
- People left, more seats became available. Time dragged on. The fact that most of those remaining were computer science types, and FDave, meant the conversation largely remained on the famous Two Topics of #warwick, that is computers and sex. Amy fell totally asleep on the sofa and was only woken up by my mum's alarm clock unexpectedly going off at around a quarter past six in the morning...
- Soon after that everyone else left and I started clearing up. I was on some kind of sugar rush so even walking to the recycling center to get rid of the bottles was easy. Nice morning too...
- My mum only noticed something had happened because I hadn't quite put the ornaments back correctly(!) and also that I was acting a bit panicky when she left late. Oh well.
So there you go, it was pretty successful in that nothing really bad happened to my house. I was being overprotective of it and indeed I was afraid people were bored, but I received a couple of decent comments and no real complaints to speak of, so whatever.
I was right, it took ages to finish this, IRC distracted me, bah
Feel the fear and do it anyway lololol
As I hinted at before in previous updates, a few days ago I told a few people that since I've got the house to myself this Saturday night I should have a party, it was a joke because, you know, huge teenage cliche, have a party when your parents are out of town or whatever, hilarious. Unfortunately those people took it seriously and my following thoughts about what would happen if a load of people came round my house scared me to death. On the other hand I feel that it would be a grossly wasted opportunity not to invite people around on this one occasion that I can and I would regret it terribly.
So I've changed my mind. If you want, you can come to my house on
Saturday. That's the fifteenth of march, two thousand and three. I'm not calling it a party but you know.
Please email rjyoung at ntlworld dot com if you want to go
I can't have too many people there nor can I provide accommodation... sorry... see, this is important, my mum can't find out or I'm dead;) (she can't use the internet, she'll never see this, heh)
No guarantees can be made over the quality of the entertainment or the mood I'll be in, heh. Also, this is a serious post. I'm just really, really nervous. Please tell me you won't be a jerk, please.
PS
Happy birthday to Doomworld which is 5 today. The sort-of new (a beta has been around for a while) WAD search engine is the best thing ever:)
Finally, I'd like to quote a recent post to uwarwick.misc for being hilarious.
We r teenagers. y wld we want 2 spell correctly...even if we r in d top 5%???
First there was my old TV finally giving up on me
Now the hole in the cover of my decent wheel chair has enlarged to the point that the foam underneath it is beginning to detach in small pieces
I can sort of help the chair by putting a pillow on it. I have my old chair, but sitting on that one is like sitting on two planks of wood at right angles to each other
Also my new bed is, well, it's an acquired taste. It's pretty hard but I guess it'll soften up. I'm already getting used to it anyway. At least it hasn't got a huge dent in the middle, and of course, it's several inches longer than normal size beds. I don't hang off the end of it.
Tune in soon for another edition of "which of RjY's treasured possessions will break next"
This might be very soon, if a load of idiots turn up at my house on Saturday looking for a party, the suggestion of which last weekend was a joke which was taken out of hand, and over which my brain is torn because I realise it could be fun but there's no way I'd trust people not to destroy my house. Like I said, it's not a student house to which anything can happen with relative impunity. I am so very, very protective of my possessions too. There's no way I could relax.
To get that birthday update off the top of the page
I went to try and register or something on unitemps. But it sucks because they want three referees. Yes three referees, where the hell do I get those from. Staff from university? School? Oh man I hardly knew any of them. The ones I did know, it's been so long so they're bound to want to know what I've been doing since I left. It would be awkward to the point of insanity.
Concentrating on hobbies? For two godsforsaken years, I should have more to show for it. I have a whole lot of nothing.
Also I forgot to mention my old colour TV that my A3010 used to use as a monitor died this weekend. This really sucks. It's been with me forever, that thing has. Also I have to use the black and white TV whose image is so hilariously blurred and out of focus you can hardly read the screen. It's an even older set, but it hasn't been used as much in the past fifteen years or so.
I'm still really unhappy my birthday turned out the way it did. I don't think I can blame anyone else for that though. But if we had gone to where I wanted to go no-one else would have enjoyed it. I would have felt guilty and I guess I needed convincing that that wasn't going to happen. So time passed, nothing was arranged and it got to Saturday evening and I knew bog all was going to happen and I was upset.
Fubar has returned, in fact it has been back for a month but since I thought it'd gone for good I'd deleted the bookmark so I never noticed. Server troubles took it out for two months. For those who don't know it was to a large extent what inspired me to make this site so yeah.
I should add code to snafu to test if pages have been updated since the last time we checked. There are HTTP headers to do this, I just have to work out how to add them to the calls snafu makes to libwww-perl. Sadly I was too dumb and deprived of proper sleep and food to work out how and my documentation source Perldoc didn't explain it very well.
I've switched IRC clients, I used to use xchat but now I use irssi, for no particular reason. I've nothing against xchat, other than the fact it's not a terminal program. I like terminal programs, old school baby you know the deal. X is just a way to have several of them visible at the same time.
Well that was a fun update and I hope you enjoyed reading it.
RjY's birthday roundup!
It's my birthday today. Here's what happened on all my birthdays since the time the temporal record existed:
- 1993: My 14th birthday was, thankfully, pretty quiet. Following an incident the previous year I'd resolved to stop telling people when it was and fortunately the selfish gobshites had played along with my plan by forgetting it. I went around smiling to myself and occasionally popping another spearmint or orange TicTac.
- 1994: Due to an unfortunate circumstance some six months previously a couple of people had rediscovered the date. Fortunately they weren't people I hung around with normally, so none of them said anything in earshot of anyone else and I largely managed to keep a lid on it. I'd had to do P.E. that day, but on the other hand I got my sampler, one of my most treasured possessions. Its brand name was "Black Box" which was hilarious because it was grey.
- 1995: Since the previous I'd been out with this girl and told her my birthday and she remembered and told all of our friends. Cue lots of people going "Oh, it's your birthday? Happy birthday!" including many who'd just overheard others and wouldn't normally give me the time of day. It was so forced, and so I thanked them whilst entertaining unpleasant thoughts about social conventions.
- 1996: I turned 17 on a Saturday. Having spent the morning programming I went to an aunt's house. They gave me a present of a bottle of cider from which I drank several glasses. I went home then to the phone box down the road where I phoned the girl I'd had a crush on for years. It was a friendly chat, anyway by that time my crush was common knowledge and a huge joke, half the time I was just playing it up for laughs. Anyway my money ran out and I went home again then the following Monday learned she'd phoned the box back, which greatly upset me.
- 1997: This was the first year I wasn't living out in the middle of nowhere so there was a chance that I could go out. Surprisingly I went to see Mars Attacks! with about six others. However this wasn't because it was my birthday, they were going anyway and I'd spent the previous month complaining about how no-one ever invited me anywhere. Nothing changes huh?
However I discovered that the girl I'd been out with in 1994 had walked round my house to see me (she only lived a few streets away from where we'd moved to) At the time I'd been asleep so her knock wasn't heard. This upset me as much as the phone box incident from the previous year.
- 1998: Now everyone had left school and was away at university. Except by that time I'd dropped out from my first first year. Predictably I hadn't told anyone from my ex-university when my birthday was so nothing happened.
- 1999: Back at university, on campus again and actually managing to stay there, but still avoiding telling anyone when my birthday was, what happened was pretty much a repeat of 1993. I went around smiling to myself, even to this stupid bands competition thing in the union. That was at lunchtime. I spent the evening finishing off a record and thus annoying my gobshite flat with loud distorted kikdrums.
- 2000: People had got wind of the fact that my birthday was somewhere towards the beginning of March but having no idea of the precise date I was able to endure the entire day free from social convention driven wellwishers. I spent the time coding for the Fortran course project, which by that time had become enjoyable because my code was actually solving the equations and all I was doing was adding bells, whistles, tricks and making it look nice.
Since I was 21 and therefore supposedly independent my mum bought me three deluxe gold-cased condoms. After laughing for about half an hour I spluttered "when the hell do you think I'm ever going to be able to use these things?" Needless to say the "use by" date passed and I had to throw them out.
- 2001: In a remarkable U-turn I had decided to announce my birthday. It was on a Friday so I thought for once I could do something. However it turned out that it was also three days before the biggest coursework deadline ever (guess what for, yes, Writing Skills) so that put paid to any plans I might have had. I spent the day making an admittedly humourous poster.
However I did say "It's my birthday, I'm going to Metamorphosis tomorrow night, please come with me" No-one except Elliot did and he would have gone anyway so as usual I was annoyed.
- 2002: I went to an old school rave called Back in the Day and also finally managed to get laid
- 2003: Fully aware that I am never, ever going to top last year, I didn't know what to do. It got worse and I ended up staying up all of last night, too upset to want to go to sleep. This was in spite of the fact that my new bed turned up (fun to put together, doesn't have a huge dent in the middle from 20 years of use, and several inches longer than a normal bed so I can fit on it!) Eventually I collapsed and now feel even worse. My mum's hardly speaking to me, she's avoiding me like she always does when I'm miserable on the grounds that "talking to you wears me out" Thanks for your support. I am socially retarded and should not be allowed to be within any distance of normal, reasonable adults. I find myself again praying for death, but am too cowardly to do anything about it.
While it's probably going to be the case that I will have the house to myself next weekend, and it was certainly the case that I was thinking "wouldn't it be cool to have a party", I have to say that I don't think I will. I simply don't trust people not to spill liquids on the furniture, in particular the black sofa in the front room which marks really easily. More importantly, neither does my mum. Hers is not a grotty student house in which nothing matters.
I just noticed this post (give Google time to pick it up) In order to avoid making BDave look like a godawful moron I'd like to make it clear that it was posted before I finished writing and uploaded this article. Thank you.
