Scarborough Sea Battles

/

We went off today for a day trip to Scarborough. They say that “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” and I’m starting from a fairly dull base, and so we went off for some fun and games. Took the big camera.

3852102907

Scarborough Seaside

3852896536

Posh Hotel

3852896664

Artistic Nets

3852898070

Sea Battle

They have this thing where they re-enact naval battles in a boating lake. No, really. Number one daughter didn’t believe me either, until I took her along. Great fun.

3852107579

If you look carefully you can see that there is actually a man in the ship..

Pain

/

Went up town today. Bought a copy of a game called Pain for the PS3. It is not what you would consider intellectually demanding (but then again I don’t want any demands made of my intellect just at the moment).

Anyhoo, Pain just gives you a destructible environment, a very large catapult. And a victim. You just fire the victim out of the catapult and watch as they bounce off the scenery suffering all manner of impact damage.

There are quite a few different scenes, a number of different people to fire (including David Hasselhoff if you pay an extra pound – not worth it though) and some themed games where you have to hit targets and stuff.

I think long term appeal is somewhat restricted, but as a quick blast it is quite fun.

Bed Dismantling

/

Today was a bit of a break, which was nice. I’d bought a bed on ebay (as you do) and so we had to get the old bed to pieces and round to next door.

Then we had to make space in the bedroom, put the new bed in, find it fits exactly (wahay!) and then I went off and picked up my new car. Turns out that buying new cars is another good displacement activity. And no, I didn’t get it on ebay.

True Story

/

I’ve not been writing all the time I suppose. Last week I had to take my computer in to the mender to have a working cpu board replaced with another working one.

Some time back, just hours before my trip to Cairo, my lovely MacBook became a lot less lovely by dropping dead on me. Fortunately I had a tiny spare machine in the form of my Advent notebook which did a sterling job of standing in for my shiny paperweight.

When I got back I took the laptop to the menders and they put a new cpu board in which worked fine. Unfortunately the board they fitted was the wrong one, and so last week I had to take two hour break from the courseware while my machine was back in the workshop having the board replaced with one that was 0.2 GHz faster. I’d like to be able to say that I can tell the difference, but I really can’t.

Writing

/

There should be a corollary to the old adage “Be careful what you wish for” which is “Be careful what you promise to do”.

Some time back I promised to write some XNA courseware. A whole course worth in fact, based on my XNA book.  This has turned out to be a non-trivial exercise. In fact I’ve been writing pretty much continuously for the last fortnight, around 10 hours a day, 7 days a week. And at the time of writing I’ve reached chapter 12.

Silly me.

The problem is that after a day of writing I don’t really feel that keen to trot out some fun prose about what kind of day I have had because, quite frankly, at the moment I can’t tell them apart. And I can’t even think of novel combinations of the “I have been mostly writing today”.

The good news is that some day soon you will be able to download and use my XNA course material. And I jolly well hope you find it useful.