02/07/2003 @23:07:34 ^01:48:51

jobs

I've applied for a couple of things Unitemps have sent me recently. I was rejected for the first one within an hour and a half of applying for it; it was one of the urgent ones, and I can only hope I was rejected simply because I wasn't fast enough.

So far I haven't heard back from the other one, for which I applied today. Though I doubt I'll get it (because it's a longer term thing) I want to remain hopeful, since it's about programming for a website. PHP and Perl were mentioned, however along with a few things with which I'm not so familiar, like Dreamweaver. Despite this, I didn't hesitate too much in sending off the application - I dare say I could pick it up pretty quickly, I got the hang of SPSS easily enough - but since I didn't hear back immediately it's probably gone to someone else.

snafu

snafu welcomes Frisky's Song Diary. Don't ask me who is really behind this site as my silence was requested!

CDave is the new Felix; he's taken something I've written, and copied it, making an arguably better version. Complete with a tortuous name chosen for the comedy acronym, Alert Notification Updated Sites is in the final stages of beta testing (hence the filename, which it strikes me will change, and break this link... oh well, not like I care that much about broken links in really old updates)

It adds the feature of being configurable. A few people have asked me for this, but since the infamous p3find security hole incident I've avoided writing interactive web pages where possible. Furthermore, to be honest, I find the interface to be somewhat cumbersome; however I doubt this could have been avoided, HTML forms are by their nature going to be unpleasant, as the tags were tacked on to the standard as it evolved over the end of the previous decade.

(Oh and he appears to have acquired an account at triv.org.uk but has yet to log into it...)

doom

Here's what I've done recently in the beautiful game. You can all stop reading now, I know you don't care about this.

• blastem2: I risked a minor route change for speedruns. It relies more on luck than I would like, but... I broke three minutes, recording a 2'55"! So that was pretty cheering. Watching the demo play back there are about half a dozen places where I could save a second or two, so it could go even lower. But that's one objective achieved, the other of course being to get the max kills run under 10 minutes, at which point I will consider sending the demos to the SDA and/or putting them up here.
• number 10 in the Classic series has been released. Four or five of the original nine were released as individual maps, with the episode of all nine being released at the end of 2000. It was rereleased with minor modifications in 2001, arguably unnecessarily. Anyway it's again very playable and I've made several runs of it, the best time being around eight and three quarter minutes. Some think the cyberdemon is out of place but I'm not one of them; it had exactly the intended shock effect on me when I first encountered it, yet you are able to get more than enough equipment to deal with it easily. Fantastic.
• Congestion Control. This is quite nasty, there's not much ammunition to play with and the monster density is high. Watch for the teleporting spiderdemon, even though I was expecting it to appear at some point it still made me jump when it did.
• Congestion Control 2, arguably easier and more fun than its predecessor (there's a lot more ammunition and weapons available from the start, and more stuff to shoot. This makes it more fun in my mind)
• Metamorphism, which felt like a cross between Congestion Control 2 and Alien Vendetta maps 12-14; no great surprise, given that it's a co-production of the authors of those maps. Its layout is a tad confusing, unsurprisingly given the authors passing it back and forth. It's still good though, I wouldn't be mentioning it if I didn't like it, heh
• Murderous Intent, very well made but very difficult on UV. Its author likes archviles... I remember trying it around last November but never getting further than map 3, this time I am a bit further.
• The Community Chest Megawad. It's not every day that you get a new 32 level megawad. This one's really good, I've watched it be developed inside Doomworld's forums over the past year or so. It was eagerly anticipated and worth the wait.
• And, oh, yeah, following on from spark's map01 modification: apparently he made another map called CASTLE3.WAD which I managed to speedrun in 16 seconds. It's not the sort of map on which you can do a max kills run, and it didn't catch me like the other one did so I haven't done any demos. Oh well.

I still really want to do some things with the PRBoom source, or work on my own maps some more, but as usual I can't seem to get started. I've gone back into the Doom IRC channels on freenode, but of course I'm far too shy to say anything much. Never mind the fact that the channels themselves are in a kind of flux at the moment, indeed in some danger of being thrown off the network following an incident or two with the staff last week, heh.