20/06/2004 @22:14:51 ^00:49:56

"We just have Guy Faulkes Day, celebrating some bloke who made a spirited attempt to blow up the entire country's government"

Don't forget new tracks but don't download doinit2me as it's rubbish even as a parody record, I'm told.

HILARIOUS BID FOR FREEDOM

The latest line in the long running saga "Rob hates his job and wants to leave but they won't let him": The following is an extract from a letter I left on my boss's desk on Friday afternoon

I am writing to you to give my week's notice of leaving my job. As we discussed before your holiday, I feel that, following the completion of the checking of scanned records, now is the time to move on.

Many thanks for the months of valuable experience and may I wish you and the team the very best for the future.

Yours sincerely,

Rob Young

I'm actually quite worried now that this will cause confrontations and awkward questions. But I have to get out of there. Sitting around for hours waiting for people to think up boring tasks for me to do is not how I want to spend what seems like the rest of my life, even if it means I have to lose my income.

rogue channel have post-exam party

They insisted that I go to this thing. Okay but I have to get to Leamington. I missed the bus I was supposed to get as everything seemed to prevent me getting out the house on time. I couldn't cope with this and flipped out. I missed the next bus an hour later too; I was in time for that but it was early. I very nearly gave up but my mum said she'd give me a lift. How embarrassing.

I gave it my best shot, but already being quite upset and drained (and many others being exhausted following the completion of exams) I failed to extract all the humour and make the evening live up to its hype.

snafu and livejournals

A couple of weeks ago I discovered that if you do a HEAD request on a LiveJournal's RSS feed it actually gives you a Last-Modified header. That is, livejournal.com/users/xXxaNgELpIe69xXx/ won't give you one, but livejournal.com/users/xXxaNgELpIe69xXx/data/rss will. Since I wrote snafu to support checking a different URL from the one to which it links, it's all good.

I also have found a couple of journals written by people I know and am going to piss everybody off by putting them on the list.

obligatory doom section

I hadn't touched the game for ages until yesterday when in order to pass some time I just went and found a bunch of random maps off idgames. Here they are

• therion I remembered the filename when I found this, and as it turned out I've done this before and even went as far as posting a bug report in the thread about it on Doomworld... It's four levels (not five) which are in general well made and easy but quite fun to play. There are a few problems but it didn't deserve the panning it received on its release. Hints: on map 1 one of the crates lowers if you push it on the correct side; on map 2 there's a door that won't open no matter what you do; and perhaps critically map 4 doesn't have an exit, it just stops. I think an old version was uploaded accidentally.
• theatre2 This is a map from 1995, recently reuploaded, that is set in a multi-screen cinema! Its construction is pretty authentic, if a little simple, but you'd expect so from the age. It has a high number of monsters, most of which seem to appear in a few large traps. Handy hint: When you get the yellow key run back down to the entrance hall without firing a single shot; if you do, an archvile will teleport in next to the pool of water and start resurrecting all the monsters there. Recommended.
• pcyber This looks really nice. It's very open, a huge landscape separated into two pieces, on which there are buildings which architecture that is sparse and massive. Unfortunately it's designed as a cyberdemon fighting training map, and you get a load of bullets to pistol two cyberdemons to death. Fuck that shit.
• polution This is a whole 10 map thing with a dehacked patch. The maps are pretty short and irritatingly linear. There are annoying puzzles, mazes, and lots of backtracking. The patch makes a few changes to some of the monsters and a new weapon. Unfortunately it doesn't work properly in PRBoom. In particular, you can't walk through the small flame objects. That's okay for the most part but when you get to map 8 you get stuck. There were some impressive setpieces, large outdoor canyons and so forth but it's probably not worth the bother.