your teeth are like stars, they come out at night
Coq au Vin, more like Chicken on a Lorry
Week two of work in student finances
or the academic office or whatever the hell the branch of Senate House in which I have been spending my weekdays is called. Mostly I am doing one of the following things
- I get a big pile of cheques and I have to write them out onto payment sheets. Amount, what they're for, who they're from etc. The majority have been PLU house deposits
- Given such a payment sheet I have to enter it onto the system. Unlike last week I've managed to overcome my habit of pressing ^V at the wrong moment and causing the system to have a case of the heebie jeebies.
- All the stuff that's entered has to be checked by someone other than the person who entered it, so I'm checking things other people have entered. Also I've been told how to print off my own stuff ready for checking so I've been doing that too.
Note that it's all internal, that is everything I'm doing boils down to manipulation of the student finance database. I didn't think they'd trust me doing anything that actually fucked with other people's money, but on one occasion I was given a number of pieces of paper with credit card details of people who'd phoned in to pay their fees or whatever. I was shown how to use the card machine to put the charges onto their accounts. I found this utterly hilarious. One false move and some poor gobshite might find himself thousands of pounds in the red! Oh snap! I don't think I screwed up but only got to do it the one time.
Anyway as you might have guessed I am utterly convinced of my own incompetence, so it was all the more surprising when my boss asked me if I was available again next week. I'm not sure I like the idea of being on campus all day during term time, but I'm getting paid for it, so whatever. Unitemps did say the job was for two or possibly three weeks.
Then a guy in green ran into the bar and killed both imps with his shotgun. The end.
Finally I got around to upgrading PRBoom from 2.2.3 to 2.2.4; the changes are minimal, largely fixes for bugs that I didn't even know existed.
The one thing that is noticeably different is that when you're using the map cheat, collectables that count towards your item percentage at the end of each map are shown as a yellow triangle instead of the usual green triangle. This is funny because one of the things I miss about DIY is my rewrite of the map cheat that didn't just highlight items in this way but drew all the important objects in the game differently. For example demons were small pink triangles, cyberdemons were large brown triangles, and weapons were purple and had their own shape. I used to reckon that, using it, you could play the game entirely on the map, though in practice that didn't work out, because you wouldn't see if you'd fallen in a trench or stepped under a crusher or whatever.
I tried the experimental 2.3.0 release. It compiled but didn't run, and I was too lazy to investigate further. I haven't played the game that much recently either, but here are some wads:
- Road Kill This is an old wad but it's really very nice. It's part of a small town, sort of in two halves. The top part is a street with various small rooms and stuff on either side. Once you find the key it continues round past some larger buildings and a fort. The blue key is probably too well hidden but it's not too hard with foresight and was fun enough to be replayed quite a number of times. Recommended.
- PUEBLO OF PAIN! A silly name for a decent map with lots of height variation and lighting. The initial area, with a river of slime between two sides of a gorge, is very impressive. There's an abundance of ammunition but it's still quite a challenge in places. But there are too many crushing ceilings for my tastes. Thankfully crushers get used a lot less these days than they used to be.
- Castle from Hell! Another fine example of a map would be really good if it weren't for crushing ceilings and bugs. Firstly you go through the door behind your start position and climb a staircase crawling with monsters up to a switch to open the gates. The castle itself is well made, full of interesting nooks and crannies to explore and with some interesting reject map editing affecting the monster behaviour. It's just a shame there's places you can get trapped (e.g. a crushing raising floor trap has multiple triggers but the switch that resets it only works once)
- Run Darn You Run You're in a very long straight tunnel and have to run like buggery to the other end because behind you there are a huge crowd of revenants launching homing fireballs at your defenceless arse. There are various obstacles that appear in your path; walls raise up, there are mazes, and so forth. If in the unlikely event you get far enough you teleport into a similar tunnel where you have to run over thin ledges and jump on stepping stones while cyberdemons in front of you pick you off with rockets. I eventually gave up and used god mode to get past this to teleport back to the end of the map, which is hysterical.
- doom2_2 A full 32-map megawad in which you have gone back in time and have to kill all the monsters all over again! But wait, all it is composed of is a new title screen, there's no maps or anything! Hilarious! It's such an obvious idea that only a really twisted mind would think it up, so you won't be surprised to read that it (and Run Darn You Run) were both made by that guy who made Nuts, its two sequels, and Equinox.
Right that's enough for now. The next thing to look at will probably be Southern Cross: Gold Edition. I've played the first level of the original edition and it was good, and this one's supposed to be all spruced up so yeah it should be even better.
his progress through life was hampered by his tremendous sense of his own ignorance, a disability which affects all too few people
Like I said last time I have another temp job in the university. Unitemps simply described it as "Data entry". As I feared would happen, I didn't get any sleep at all before my first day. I eventually found myself at a desk in that office with the counter where you'd go to collect your grant cheques or loans or whatever and it was pretty funny being legitimately on the other side of it.
Turned out I was entering stuff into the student records system (called SITS) or checking that stuff other people had put in was correct or anything else they wanted me to do along those lines. Checking was pretty straightforward, you get a printout of transactions from the system which you check corresponds with the cheques, credit card payment slips, campus or PLU housing fines and charges forms or whatever the hell else came with the printout. It's pretty straightforward but following a fairly rapid explanation and with me in my sleepless state it took me a long time to get the hang of it.
It took me even longer to get the hang of entering data into the records system. For example I had about 140 records of 8 fields each to enter, and as they were all the same type of payment all the fields, except the initial student ID number, were identical. But the system insists you type them all in, you can't just copy the thing and change the number. Furthermore I was told it was easiest to keep a copy of the long string to go into the two description fields in the text buffer and paste it in for each record. It turned out to be very easy to paste this string into the amount field, which would cause the system to throw up all sorts of error messages and lock itself into a state from which the only escape would result in considerable loss of data. It took me about four attempts to get those 140 records in. Apparently its user interface is one of the reasons it will be replaced, and just for emphasis it's worth mentioning that for another bunch of other forms I had to enter, I was greatly relieved to find that I'd be using Excel.
That's pretty much it, except for the following list of semi-humourous events:
- The entire campus network, including the phone system, dropped out for nearly an hour on Wednesday. Having no checking to do, all my current work was on the computer, so basically all I could do was wait it out. As very few other people were able to continue to work I didn't feel too guilty, instead being amused by the idea that I was being paid to sit there doodling pictures of pacman ghosts rolling their eyes or abstract interpretations of goatse to pass the time.
- The funniest part of the actual job was probably the things for which people get fined, and in particular what the PLU house inspectors deem to be chargeable. At the risk of getting into trouble I won't be any more specific other than to say that the reputation that one way or another you'll lose your deposit wasn't an exaggeration.
- Also I've heard some hilariously negative opinions of members of staff with whom I was familiar during my degree. Again I can't be more specific, but it's like you're not the only one to think that so-and-so was a bit of an idiot and it's all good.
Anyway being mostly numbers and codes and stuff it's more difficult work than the forms I was entering for the union in May. PuTTY is available, so I can log in at home without having to pull the same sort of stunts I did before, although apart from lunchtime there isn't really much of an opportunity to do so. But I've got another week there at least and I'm not dreading it because it seems to be going okay. (touch wood)
The other imp shivered, and nodded
Get this: I just went to Doomworld and discovered that
- firstly Hell Revealed 2 is apparently nearing completion. I played the three year old beta version, with 17 maps, quite a lot in July, so I'm looking forward to the full 32 map version (they currently have 31)
- more importantly in the past two days there have been two new versions of PRBoom released. This is fantastic. There's a new stable version and more interestingly an experimental release with a load of extra stuff, some of which I already knew about from poking around the CVS tree ages ago.
Wow I'm excited.
I'M THE KING OF THE RING
"Come here and play with me"
Two imps are sitting in a bar in hell. One says "is it getting colder?"
I got another job typing shit into computers from Unitemps. It is for the academic office at the university, and should last for at least two weeks starting from tomorrow. It remains to be seen whether or not I actually get any sleep, given my current inability to sleep before seven in the morning.
The cherries taste like burning
The other day I discovered that NTL's news server carries binary groups. I'm sure you can guess why that's useful. I also played a bunch of my records backwards(*) and it worked surprisingly well. I'm not sure if that's a good or a bad thing.
(*) mpg123 -s techdiff.mp3 | play -t raw -r44100 -wsc2 - reverse
RUDE NAME, SAME BASSLINE, FUCK OFF!
What on Earth are you going on about, you muppet?
badger badger badger badger MUSHROOM MUSHROOM HELP ME PLEASE!!
I'd like to talk about that badger mushroom snake thing. It may already be too late to post this, as the damn thing was linked on SA's front page today. No I'm not posting a link to it, that's the point, this shit is rapidly becoming ubiquitous. And I'm in on the ground floor! Well, I would have been if I had posted about it a few days ago but them's the breaks! First time I saw it was Sunday afternoon when I saw the thread. I thought it was very funny. However when I saw someone post "right on cue, it's all over livejournal" I knew it was going to be the next peanut butter jelly time. You know, that dancing banana that was funny the first time you saw it but got old really fast?
Anyway yes like I said it's good; you have the crazy animation, zany off-the-wall humour and catchy music. The bassline's good. But the thread linked to another flash that was a lot better, it was an even crazier animation with better music. I swear I left this one running for about half an hour and bear in mind it's a twenty two second loop so you know it caught me.
Apparently the music is by Mouse on Mars or something which didn't surprise me at all, I remember listening to their stuff way back when I used to listen to Peel. In fact I might have to rip the melody to use in a "comedy tune megamix" also featuring some or all of Yakkety Sax, Spanish Flea, Campbell-Kelly Loves You, and Treat Me Mean I Need The Reputation. But that won't be finished until Christmas if I do it at all.
Light goes on, light goes off! Light goes on, light goes off!
The anARCHy strobelight is BACK and it's gone GLOBAL. Requires a Javascript-capable browser (shit I feel so dirty for saying that)
First appearing as a BBC BASIC program way back in 1994, the code was revised several times then rewritten totally in ARM Assembler and features such as programmable "light on" and "light off" periods were added. Rather like the GNU version of Hello World in its completely overproduced pointlessness, the anARCHy strobelight program was the definitive program for making your monitor screen turn completely white, then completely black, at short intervals.
It was interesting to note that the effects could be replicated by the operating system by redefining the background colour to 15 (flashing black/white) then doing a couple of *FX calls (9 and 10 I think) to set the period. What else boasts this kind of built-in functionality?
Anyway go forwards a few years and here we are using Loooonix which runs on SUCH A HUGE RANGE OF HARDWARE that IT'S REALLY HARD TO PROGRAM GRAPHICS. But fear not because one day I thought I could remake the strobe program using ncurses! I played it at my party and unwisely mentioned that I might make another version using SDL, a suggestion I was badgered about (HAHAHA AND MUSHROOMED AND SNAKED ABOUT HAHAHA OH GOD HAHA) for a long time afterwards.
But no! Doing it in PHP and Javascript is better, because (a) it was easy enough for me to do in the 47 seconds before my brain loses interest in stuff and (b) it's GLOBAL! You could run it in an internet cafe or something and that's hilarious! Oh snap, look, Mr Internet Cafe Owner, we're having a rave in your cafe, bustin' up the place layin' down the phat bass yo!
Oh yeah, you can adjust the black time and white time by adding stuff onto the end of the URL. It's pretty obvious how to do this if you click it I hope. Have fun and don't wear out your trainers!
The Hulk figures you get in boxes of Shreddies are funny.
I think that's about it for this update, the title of which comes from probably the funniest drum and bass record ever. It's a parody of a flame! Oh my. I was going to write a whole long thing about Memento Mori, Memento Mori II and Fava Beans, but that will have to wait.
Also, if the Idiot Brigade think they can tempt me back into Gobshite Hell with offers of computer hardware with no implied cost they're going to have come up with stuff that's better than "comically underpowered" and "fucking broken". Gods help me but I was tempted before I saw through this nefarious plot. Goodnight, and keep watching the skies!
