EeePC + XP Looks Good

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I still like my eeePC. It works very well and I'm using it for presentations at work. The small size and great battery life really hits the spot. It really is the most useful computer you can get for the price.

The only really irritations have been the behaviour of the Open Office applications, so that my slide decks don't always come up correctly, and the fact that I'm having to track down Linux versions of programs that I've been using on my PC under Windows for donkey's years.

Today Jon in our first year (I think it was Jon) showed me his eeePC. He has slapped in another 512M of ram, so that it now has 1G of memory, and installed Windows XP. He showed me Visual Studio 2005 running on it, and it looked really neat.  He reckons that the performance is adequate and so I'm going to make the change I reckon. With 8GB SD cards now coming in at less than 17 pounds, I can get me a really useful device that is like being back home.

Games on Vista

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Today I did something I've not done for a very long time. I played a game on my Windows PC. I picked up a cheap copy of World in Conflict yesterday and loaded it onto the notebook. I stopped playing games on my PC a while back because that's what I buy consoles for, and anyway they clutter up the hard disk and get in the way. That's changed slightly now, since I can install games on an external USB drive and Vista seems to manage game installation a lot better. There was no footling around looking for different versions of DirectX or putting the game in some strange place on the hard disk. It installed with a minimum of fuss and pretty soon I was in the thick of battle.

It worked really well. The game can get pretty complex, and it would be really difficult to control everything using a gamepad, you really need to keyboard and the mouse to keep on top of what is going on. And, thanks to the fairly meaty graphics support in the notebook, I was able to work at a resolution much higher than you normally get from console games, even the newer ones. It was great fun.

We are working on setting up one of our labs as a games room, where students and staff can play these games. We are just sorting out licenses and access at the moment. And I'm getting a bit of practice in.....

Portion Control

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I followed a butcher's van to work today. Writ large across the back was the impressive claim "Specialists in Portion Control". I thought this sounded great. I can just imagine how it works.

The scene, an Embassy Banquet. Posh types with beautiful girls on their arms are milling around around making small talk and dancing to a small orchestra which is playing expensive tunes. In the corner a white hatted master chef is serving food with an immaculate silver service. Suddenly a man bursts through the crowd to the table:

Man: "Nobody move!"

The orchestra falls silent. Every body stops moving. All eyes turn to the man, who reaches into his coat pocket and pulls out a warrant card with a shiny silver badge on it.

Man: "Mike Zuton. Portion Control."

The crowd gasps in amazement and fear.

Mike Zuton, to the chef: "You. Step away from that ladle."

The chef lays the ladle down and steps back, his eyes flicking around nervously. Mike Zuton pulls a small measuring jug from his pocket, fills the ladle with steaming soup and then empties it into the jug. There is absolute silence in the room as he carefully scrutinises the scale on the side.

Mike Zuton: "Just as I thought. Five mills over. You're going down this time Maurice"

Chef: "But, but, I swear it was an honest mistake"

Mike Zuton: "Yeah, right. Just like those extra Ferrero Rocher you've been sneaking onto the desert trolley. The ambassador isn't made of money you know."

Mike Zuton gets a whistle out of his pocket and blows a loud blast. Twenty uniformed officers burst through the french windows.

Mike Zuton: "Captain, get the Baguette Squad down into the kitchen, and remember, anything over fifteen centimetres, I want to know about it...."

..and so on.

Then again, perhaps it isn't like that at all.

Cloverfield

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One of Rob's movie rules is "The better the build up to the monster, the bigger the let down when you actually get to see it". Cloverfield doesn't break this rule. The look of the film itself is excellent. If a giant monster did attack New York, and the only document left was hand-held video footage from  someone underneath it, it would probably look a lot like Cloverfield.  Except for the monsters, which had the air of poorly rendered video game characters. They even had little monsterettes which looked like they were there just for the underground scenes. For my money it would would have been better if you never actually saw the monsters. Now that would have been scary.

Films have been made using camcorders before but they don't usually centre all the action entirely around camcorder footage shot by one of the participants. All the camcorder owner cliches are there, from not knowing how to use the camera to leaving it switched on by mistake.

The action starts at a party packed full of "Beautiful People" (tm). To be honest, this goes on a bit, setting up a romantic sub-plot. However, once the monsters turn up things happen very quickly indeed. And one by one the Beautiful People are picked off. The acting from the case of unknowns is very good, although it must have been very hard work for the young cast staying scared all the time.  Perhaps the reason there are no older, more unfit,  characters is that they would not be able to survive the making of the film.

If you like monster movies, you should see Cloverfield. Some of the scenes are excellent, and there are some really scary moments. But I don't think it will keep you awake for long at night. Not if you've played Doom or Quake.

Half way to Paradise

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I got a new game on Saturday. Burnout Paradise. Number one son said I would like it, and he is right. I got the PS3 version, but it is also available for Xbox 360. I've always been a big fan of Burnout games. I seem to remember getting at least the first couple and greatly enjoying them. The format of the Burnout games have been pretty much the same up until now. You work your way through a serious of increasingly difficult races of slightly different formats unlocking new challenges as you go until you either complete the game or lose interest because it gets too hard.

Guess which one I do.

Anyhoo, this format has been seriously tinkered with. There is still progression, but it is much more free form. You can drive anywhere and try anything in the huge city that is laid out in front of you. Traffic lights at junctions serve as the kicking off point for a variety of different racing missions. Win a few and your licence gets upgraded, you get a bigger car and so on. The sense of place is hugely impressive, you really do feel that you are in a genuine location. The driving is good, although with Burnout I always feel that I am flying the car rather than steering it. The crashes have to be seen to be believed. Bits come off your car and get scrunched up in a most realistic manner. And yet...

They have taken away the big green arrows. I used to like these. They told you when and where to turn. In the new game it is all about learning routes and finding shortcuts. And the driving map doesn't rotate to face the way you are going. You have to figure out orientation from a little pointer. I hate having to do that. You get some help telling you when to change direction, but it didn't do much for me. You can lose a race because you miss the turnoff. You can't easily resume a race if you get left behind. And the weather seems to always be the same. Bright sunshine and harsh shadows. The game is undoubtedly richer and more complex than it used to be, but it is also harder to figure out what to do next.

Some aspects remind me a lot of Mid Town Madness, a Microsoft game of some time back, where you had a whole city to play with and a bunch of mad drivers to take on. However, there was much more of a sense of fun about that affair, I used to love racing  using buses. 

Burnout Paradise is nearly a great game. If you want the impression of driving round a city the only game that gets close as far as I'm concerned is Need for Speed Most Wanted, which I reckon is much more fun (even though the graphics in Burnout are better). The network play could be great, but I've not tried it yet.  It gets so much right, and is so well constructed that I really should love it more. I enjoy playing it, but I don't have the big stupid grin on my face that I get when I play some other driving games.

Buy my book. And a Hammer.

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You know my book? The one I never mention? Well, it is presently ranked as the 434,444th best seller on Amazon in the 'states.  This is quite good, but not great. Yet. Feel free to mosey on down and order your copy. And when you do, you could also get yourself a nice hammer. I'd just love to see this down in the "Customers who bought this book also bought...." entry on the page for my book..

Friday Four Fifteen Club

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I'm starting a new club for first year students. It is for those "lucky" enough to have the 4:15 pm slot on Friday afternoon. The weather on Friday was horrid, and by the end of the day most of us felt like we had done enough for the week. Thanks for turning up folks.

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This is not the entire group, I've left part of the room off so that you can claim that you were really there.....

FragFest Fun

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Hull Com Soc had a fragfest today. I took along the big camera and the fancy lenses to try and grab some pictures. vivaladan was kind enough to let me help with some goes at World In Conflict which was a hoot (although I think I liked it best because we won). I'm going to get a copy of the game and turn up early at the next event with my laptop. Oh yes.

The pictures turned out OK as well.

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Game in Progress

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How to stop your laptop overheating

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Artistic Camerashake

There are some more on Flickr.

I was funnier when I was younger

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For some reason (actually a search to find the seven signs of ageing - don't ask) I found my way back to my old Crazy World site today. I had a read of some of my old posts, circa 2005.

I was much funnier then.

Perhaps the extra  cares of the world in the intervening three years have worn me down. Perhaps I have run out of whimsey.  Either way, I have now resolved to up the light hearted content (and probably the number of puns) and really, really write another Trip Hazard episode.

And maybe a sequel to The Little Brown Ikea Pencil of Doom.

You have been warned.

Happy New Semester

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The new semester started today. Did my first lecture at 12:15. Didn't manage to escape until ten minutes after the finish, because there was so much discussion about what I'd said. I love lectures like that. At lunchtime I went out for a walk and took the little camera with me. Whenever I travel far afield I take lots of pictures, and I really must remember that there are some nice bits just around my workplace too.

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I love the colours on this tree

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Go Hannah Pickard

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Green campus

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The Venn Building

In One Ear

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Since my early experiments with speech recognition I had been looking out for a decent head set. I was really pleased when I discovered some Logitech headphones at a knockdown price in our local Staples store.  I took them home and plugged them in and started talking.  And they didn't work very well. 

The sound was indistinct and the recognition was very poor.  I spent a while fiddling with the settings and re-training but it was nowhere near as good as it used to be.  At this point I decided that I might have bought a duff device so I did a little investigating.

Rather surprisingly, results seemed to be equally bad with the headset microphone switched off or even unplugged.  After some investigation I discovered the speech recognition software was still using the microphone inside the computer.  It seems that it doesn't always automatically select the headset microphone.

However, now I've managed to make the switch must handle the speech recognition works an awful lot better.

A tip, you can disable and enable sound devices by going to Control Panel -> Hardware and Sound and clicking Manage audio devices.  This opens up the Sound dialogue. When you disable a device it rather annoyingly vanishes from the list of devices. You can get a device back again, so you can re-enable it, by right clicking in the device window and selecting show disabled devices from the context menu that appears.