"I'D RATHER HAVE MY BALLS CURRIED"
-one disgruntled reaction to an invitation to the idiot brigade's New Year's party at Chronic Haemorroids Dave's house
Holiday Season Hijinks
I can't be bothered listing my christmas presents fully. Most of it was chocolate, sweets, and cans of Super Strongbow. However
- I've got this big jar of aniseed balls! Over 7lb of aniseed balls!
- I've also got these weird insect things that have sticky feet. You put them high up on a wall and they crawl down it, one leg at a time; the top leg detaches and they sort of rotate round and stick back on. I think they are a modern marvel of engineering genius.
- No socks. At all. I was so surprised I had to go through all the discarded wrapping paper in case I missed them.
I bought my mum a microwave. It's the first one we've ever had. It has so far been used to heat a cup of water as proof-of-concept. To be honest it's not set up yet, we have to rearrange the kitchen slightly to fit it in.
We've borrowed the fifth Harry Potter book, following the first four back in summer. I'm about halfway through it. Hermione is still alive. So far.
Lastly we went shopping for the sales today and now I've joined the set of complete morons who own their own copy of K&R. I finally used the £10 book token which I won as a school maths prize six years ago, and happily told them there wasn't a gnat's bollocks' chance in hell I was going to go to the ceremony - thus forming the tradition which I gleefully continued two years ago in refusing to go to my graduation.
The token was so old that the young and attractive shop assistant who bore a certain resemblance to the lesbian daughter in At Home With The Braithwaites was thoroughly confused and had to ask her manager if they still accepted such antiquities. I would have found this to be hilarious had I not been occupied by shouting at my mum for never letting me get a word in edgeways for the umpteen millionth time.
Community Chest Megawad, part two
You may remember from a year ago I was talking about making maps for Doom. I've been long aware that I lack the motivation to fight with Yadex to make a decent map, and so the only way I'd ever finish my stuff was if I felt I'd be letting other people down if I failed.
With that in mind I have joined the effort to build a sequel to the Community Chest megawad. That is to say, I posted "can I have map 5" in the announcement thread, with the intention of finishing elixir and donating it.
I realised that having never released a map before I should at least post some screenshots to prove to anyone wondering that I know which end of a map editor is the sharp one. Fortunately a new site called WADs In Progress has just been set up, so I posted some screens on it.
It's fucking Windows 98! Get Bill Gates in here!
I'd promised my uncle ages ago I'd go round and take a look at his laptop, and was very pleased when he said I could take it home with me. Having an extra computer to screw around with, even only for a few days, was a fantastic extra christmas present.
He'd been trying to connect it to the internet, which the guy from whom he'd bought it had said it was already set up to do. There was this cable, one end of which obviously was for the phone but the other didn't plug into anywhere on the laptop. I took it home, looked at it for several hours and eventually concluded there should be one of those little card modems in the side of the laptop into which this strange cable would plug. A brief search the following day for "well, it'll be like a credit card, only a bit thicker..." turned it up. I found one of those 0845 ISPs who had a free trial account and managed to coax Windows 98 into dialling up.
I managed to stop the CD sound cutting out every few seconds. Turned out to be some obscure power saving thing that shut down the audio system if it wasn't used for a while. However, it didn't take into account if an audio CD was playing, which I thought was a horrible bug in the driver software. In fact the only thing I didn't succeed in doing was setting up a PPP link between my machines and the laptop; at least I know the null modem cable I bought in May works because I was able to use the laptop as a serial console on ttyS0.
It's Christmas Eve. You can tell because The Snowman is on TV. Since Christmas 2000 I've actually bothered to watch it. I'd seen it when I was really small but forgotten it. I was driven to watch it again initially by a curiousity born from the days when Bex would go on about it nonstop for weeks beforehand, afterhand, and in the middle of summer.
Anyway so this is what happens:
- Boy builds Snowman ("we can make him tall, or we can make him not so tall")
- Snowman comes to life for some reason (possibly hit by lightning, or wished to avoid being pissed on by the family cat)
- Boy and Snowman go off on crazy and highly criminal adventures. But before that, they make a spirited attempt to trash Boy's house. How his parents don't wake up I'll never know.
- Boy and Snowman steal Boy's parents' motorcycle and proceed to vandalise local farmland. Several prolonged and malicious attempts are made to run down various local wildlife.
- Any doubts that Boy is tripping are completely removed as they proceed to go WALKEEEEENG THROUGH THE AIIIIIIRRRR-R-R-R to a wood in the middle of nowhere, where Santa, portrayed as a short, fat, alcoholic paedophile, is having a party. The atmosphere is filled with loud music and coloured lighting, and everyone is dancing, out of their heads. Any similarity to the acid house scene of the late eighties is purely coincidental.
- Boy and Snowman fly back home and Boy sneaks back in at 7am. Crashes out until noon. The little shitbag wakes up apparently without any sort of hangover, though.
- However it turns out that Snowman has
bitten off Boy's finger and fallen into Mount Doom melted. Everybody cries.
The last time I built a person out of snow it turned out to be really short and dumpy. I was compelled to give it highly uneven asymmetrical breasts, and name it Claire.
blueghost.gif
I'd been planning it for ages* I spent all Sunday afternoon making this
*"pacman ghosts rolling their eyes" wasn't just a random comment. It's actually an ancient windup toy which sits on top of my monitor. It was based on the game though, it has "™©Bally/Midway" written underneath
yay I finished work
Friday was the last day before Christmas for many people so the level of music was even greater than usual. Imagine christmas songs and some old Take That album at the same time. I had no choice. I yanked the earphones cable out the side of my monitor! BOOM TISK BOOM TISK HARDCORE YOU KNOW THE SCORE all afternoon baby. Later on I ran strobe.php when nobody was looking!
Today they shut the place down early. I left at half two. It was raining. In spite of this I was still going to walk home but I left at exactly the same time as Sparkette and it turned out we were going in roughly the same direction so I ended up getting the bus. Fortunately somehow there weren't too many long awkward silences. I made fun of her posh home counties accent but didn't say "oh snap I know this guy who looks just like you"
I go back on the fifth, much to the delight of the postgraduate office who think I'm great. I think this is because I do jobs for them but they don't pay for me (the undergraduate office does) They bought me a present which was really embarrassing nice of them
I really should finish the story of caco man it's been like three weeks
"I've never seen a demo where the player runs in such straight lines"
best response ever
BLAH BLAH WORK BLAH
I've been in the academic office for three months now. Nothing is that new any more so there's less incentive to write about it.
I have moved desk. It's not as bad as I feared, especially since it happened a very short time before all the students went home for Christmas. I was quite cheeky, I swiped as much stuff as I could out of the drawers to take with me. I didn't spend ten weeks putting together a huge paperclip collection to just give it away, damnit! Sparkette, also now known as Rachaelmysecretary since she seems to be everyone's, came in a couple of days later. As she was leaving on Friday she was asking me about my weekend. She said "aren't you going out? It's Friday night!" I just gave her a look and went "so?" I fell off my chair after she'd gone.
There have been increasing numbers of incursions of horrible smulchy seasonal music into the office. I've had to put up with various dreadful Christmas CDs, and also the soundtrack to Love Actually, on more than one occasion. I'm not surprised that my colleagues have shitty tastes in music - everyone I know has a shitty taste in music - but my concentration is killed by the computer opposite me blaring out White Christmas or a swing version of Silent Night or some godsawful disco thing that makes everyone go "oh I can just see Hugh Grant dancing to this" while going through the motions themselves and what's worse they've got it up really loud so people at the other end of the office can hear it.
It doesn't happen every day. There's this one woman who, well, there was a disagreement just after I started, so now they don't play music if she's in. Unfortunately, being a temp, my opinion doesn't matter and I'm not offered the same convenience. The obvious solution was to do what a lot of them do anyway, and bring in earphones. The computers all have CD drives and not less than three earphone sockets (on the drive, on the front of the processor box, and on the side of the monitor, it's really stupid, there's audio cables everywhere not to mention wasted PCI slots)
Of course I don't have any earphones though do I? Well, actually I have three pairs, but...
- I got a really nice pair of big stereo headphones for Christmas eleven years ago. They're huge, comfortable, and the bass response is fantastic. So of course after only eight months my dad had to go and tread on them. They still worked but you couldn't wear them because the headband was in several pieces.
- I got some more but they weren't as good and then the padding disintegrated, so now you wear them for five seconds and your ears hurt.
- I also have some little earphones but the left one stopped working. I guess the cable was pulled on too hard accidentally and the wire inside snapped.
- Then two or three years ago my mum brought home some old headphones from work. Though they sounded crappy compared to my original trodden-on pair I realised I could chop off the earpieces and replace them with the good ones. This worked great, I had my good headphones back! Until I took them off, whereupon I discovered that age had caused the covering of the padding to start to disintegrate. While the padding itself is okay, if you wear the headphones your skin is left with a nice layer of tiny pieces of black felt which doesn't come off easily.
I knew I had to do something lest I go mad though so when I went to town again on Saturday to get more bits and pieces for Christmas I also bought some more shitty little earphones. I spent the day today listening to a CD I made of my own records. It was good.
It paid off too. When I got in in the morning, they said, how are you getting on with checking those scans. I said, I had two boxes left and would be finished by tomorrow. Oh no, they said, the next lot have come back and we have to get rid of the old lot for the space so we need them done by today. I said, oh snap. But I did it, with time to spare.
I needed an excuse to avoid going to the Christmas lunch on Wednesday. I know I'd feel awkward and embarrassed but social people always seem to take it really personally when you tell them you're not a social person yourself. Nevertheless, I did. I don't think they were very pleased but what can you do? My brain just doesn't work that way.
I'm still not sure if I get to go back after Christmas or indeed when I get to stop working because of Christmas but oh well.
Do remember the last update. Watch my demos, damnit!
Hello. I can't be bothered to write a proper article. It's not like I'm getting paid to do this. Plus, nobody reads it anyway. So other than to note it's a year since the day when
(nice timing, huh) that's it.
Also as we approach Christmas I was thinking about collections of toys that I was obsessed with. I had Lego and Transformers but for most of what I remember, it was all about Starcom. It's the one lot I couldn't bear to pass on. It's still all in my dad's house unlike everything else which pretty much all went to cousinishes and so on. I found that site which is very good despite taking itself far too seriously.
Hahaha I've got all my Christmas presents
well except for my dad but he's fucking impossible to buy for
it's great to be able to afford decent shit for people for once
hooray
Content! Actual content!
Usually when I update it's just WORDS WORDS WORDS SO MANY FUCKING WORDS
GET DR.TL TO TRIV DOT ORG DOT UK STAT! OH MY GOD IT'S AN EMERGENCY
not today though! I actually have stuff for you to click on!
- Blastem2 DemosAfter banging on about it since April it's about fucking time I actually got the shit out there
- UV max demo (95% kills, 100% items and secrets) in 9'18"
- UV speed demo (23% kills and items, 100% secrets) in 2'38"
- A really way too fucking long text file (TLDR IS NEVER FAR hahaha I just made that up) full of self indulgent crap I nevertheless felt was necessary for the sake of completeness
To play the demos you need at least PRBoom version 2.2.4, a Doom 2 IWAD and blastem2.wad. I'm very very happy to get this out at last.
- Spark's MAP01 was reuploaded as a zip, the files inside it having been renamed. Otherwise it's identical so don't download it again.
- *COMEDY BONUS ITEM* My Writing Skills poster (gzipped postscript, should open in GV) My struggle and perpetual anger with Writing Skills is well documented, but one part I don't talk about much was doing the poster. This is because admitting I actually found it enjoyable to do undermines my argument that the whole thing was shit and should be banned, hahaha
- I was supposed to make a poster explaining carbon dating aimed at 14-year-old students. Therefore I got to ease up on the science and make large stupid pictures with retarded captions instead. I found this hilarious. Hypergrinning stick men and scientific equipment resembling a microwave oven crossed with an oversized novelty clock says nothing about its sheer morbid humour.
- I was able to employ unorthodox methods to make the thing; I could make the pictures in !Draw on RISC OS and print them to a postscript printer driver configured to print to a file. I could then take the file onto campus and send it unmodified to the postscript printer drivers. The fact that it worked very smoothly and with minimal printer credit usage (and thus cost) made me very pleased.
- I was also able to use !Draw to collect together all the pieces of this poster into one big file and lay them out, so I could know beforehand where to glue them onto the big piece of lurid bedroom green card. Inspired by a recent thread about making posters and other useless college assignments on SA I decided to try and print the layout file to postscript like I'd done with the pieces; I hadn't done it before because it meant screwing around with the paper sizes and all sorts of jiggery that I'd not been bothered with. This is what I present you with today.
It's not perfect, it was never meant to be. There is a large white border on the left hand side and a green line across the bottom created by rounding error. But the point was to lay the thing out on the screen so I knew where everything should go before any glue was spread around and I ruined it. It paid off as my mark for the poster was far and away the best mark I got for all the pieces of writing skills coursework.
THE STORY OF CACO
An epic saga of the revivication of a sickly and intractable base unit, in several parts. Here are parts two and one. I just made a 2'38" in blastem2 and finally feel like I have a demo set I can publish, so fuck knows why I decided to write this instead.
3. For almost all of this part of the article, caco isn't even working
Everything had taken on an unearthly haze. I stared around at my beliefs, laying shattered on the ground around me. Technology had forsaken me. I had performed routine maintenance on a piece of computer hardware and it had become nothing more than an expensive doorstop.
Time passed. My brain stopped trying to implode and eventually began to wonder what had actually happened. At switch on, all the discs and fans would start. It would sound like it was booting normally. However, nothing appeared on screen and for some reason the green power light didn't go on. Next to the red hard disc light which wouldn't go off, this was pretty weird looking.
Unplugging all the disc drives etc didn't affect anything. I concluded it must be the motherboard, processor, or memory. The obvious thing to do was swap them with replacements. But the only replacements I had were in baron, and there was no way I was going to start poking around borrowing stuff out of there because having my confidence completely destroyed I knew that I'd fuck up my one remaining machine with internet capability.
I saw no way out. I became even more miserable and did nothing but lurk on the forums, the only sufficiently good distraction I knew. Occasionally I poked at the innards of the box, never to any avail. My mum said we should find a repair man from the yellow pages or whatever but it was like "what shut up I have no money it's all screwed I wish I was dead what the hell are you doing in here anyway go away"
Then everything changed. I spent two minutes typing into the unitemps website and all of a sudden I had a job. After two or three weeks the despair I felt whenever I saw caco's lifeless husk turned into something else! Now I felt I had the resources to get it fixed, but being out all day during the week I had no opportunity to take it anywhere. I was actually quite annoyed, but nevertheless it was an important shift in temperament.
Sometime around the end of October we contacted a guy who lived about five minutes away and who could come over and pick the thing up. It was unpleasant having to bring in outside help, but it was that or leave it dead. He brought it back a couple of days later, and charged a fee which, well, my mum thought it was very reasonable...
Still, caco was once again operational after over two and a half months, for the duration of most of which I was convinced it was dead. It was still way too noisy, but a liberal application of something the guy called "thermal grease" had halved the CPU temperature. More importantly the reason it had been broken was completely unexpected. The knowledge that the components which I thought I'd broken were in fact fine restored my faith in my ability to screw around with the inside of my computers.
Find out the cause of all the horror, next time! Christ, this shit is dragging on!
too bloody dark
the light outside my office window never switched off at all today it was miserable
aosaaf
Access to the campus unix network is without a doubt the one thing I missed the most since completing my degree*, so you understand why I posted that little outburst on Friday. I felt just like I did the previous weekend when I realised I'd fixed caco. I spent a fair part of the weekend setting stuff up, like ssh keys and bash init files (the third command I typed in was chsh /usr/local/bin/bash, fuck that tcsh shit I don't think I can even remember how to work it properly) The weird differences between Solaris and the GNU stuff upon which Linux distributions are based were at least partially rectified by the addition of /usr/local/gnu/bin into my PATH, but their ssh isn't OpenSSH and its setup was quite unfathomable, as least for a while. But things there have improved because back in the day I didn't even know what ssh was other than something the merits of which used to get advocated on newsgroups.
*I guess more precisely I missed the use of the machines in the Party Zone (unix lab), but owning a similar machine, I think the reduction in connection speed is more than compensated for by the fact that I'm in my own house. Indeed I always said the most perfect situation would be to have a magic door from my room to a corner of the lab, and this is about as close as can be.
the card printer had a few more tricks up its sleeve
Work last week was otherwise very dull. All it is now is checking scans for Student Records. The Finances people didn't give me any cheques or anything to enter. It was a conspicuous absence; I know there were payments to enter but other people did them. If I were a suspicious person I'd wonder if Finances had been told to stop stealing Records' temp so he can actually do what he's supposed to be doing!
Card production has been officially handed over to Reception. This means our office no longer takes money for replacements, hands them out, and in particular I don't print them any more. This is true in theory but occasionally some come through unofficial channels, and I get to do them. Fair enough, as I like the card printer now... except on Thursday it found a new type of wobbler to throw.
In fact it was more like the opposite. Usually when I say the printer threw a wobbler I mean it made a querulous beeping noise and popped up a box on the screen going "Waah, waah, I'm dirty, clean me" or "Gim-me a new-a ri-bbon or I'll break-a da legs." This time, I printed this one woman's card and it just froze. Having coded the card's microchip it got to the printing and just stopped.
Having extricated the newly ruined card I tried again with a different one, and the same thing happened. After that I stopped because blank cards aren't cheap! Also, by that time the card printer was refusing to even attempt to print anything. "Printer not responding", its status window happily reported. "Screw you", I reported back, "and screw the lifelong learning centre, or wherever in hell's bells from which these requests for cards are being sent." Yes even when I'm swearing at recalcitrant technology I will resolutely bend sentences to grammatical breaking point, rather than end them with a preposition.
The printer maintained its sulk for the rest of the week. Only today did it actually decide to respond to the computer's print requests, which allowed me to print all but one of my backlog of cards (over which, by now, the department were losing their patience) But this one woman's record from before was still refusing to work. I wasted two more blank cards before talking to the IT guy who said the printer doesn't like corrupted records, which this one must be, and that I should try rescanning the picture; if it wasn't that, the whole record would have to be reconstructed manually.
Happily, rescanning the picture solved the problem, and the final card was printed, a scant half hour before this guy braved the horrible weather to come all the way up to Senate House to find out where the hell his cards had got to.
"And that's the end of that chapter."
The email arrived at just past three on Saturday afternoon. After spending fully five minutes laughing at the petulant tone ("I'm going home, you'll never have to see me again ever, I hope you're happy!") and believing it was merely yet another in a recent spate of stupid emails, the "forever" part registered along with the suddenness of this new development and I realised that in spite of everything I wanted to say goodbye in person.
This conclusion completely violated the policy of total exclusion which I have had to follow these past months in order to avoid being consumed entirely by vicious rage and as such it unbalanced me. I spent a long time arguing with myself about the correct course of action, but in the end I always knew it needed to happen. Anyway things have been a lot better recently and I figured I could cope, I guess.
It was almost too late but fortunately I had something she wanted. Arrangements were able to be made which resulted in a meeting, which, despite being brief, went as well as anyone could reasonably expect. Better than you could expect, in the face of those past months. At the very least caco's leftover PCI modem, which would have otherwise rotted in an antistatic bag, may get some use in a new home.
As I watched the car disappear up the road, almost without conscious thought I enounced at embarrassing volume original Police Cops detective Homer Simpson's catchphrase. Coincidentally, the episode from which it originated was shown on BBC2 the very next day.
