Saturday, December 28, 2002
So I was sitting in a *cough* `adult` webcam chatroom earlier. Not for the view, obviously, but for the enlightening conversation. Anyway, there was this one point where the girl was rather going for it, zoomed in on her hand, and another girl in the room commented "nice ring."Maybe I just have a warped sense of humour.
Steve 5:48 AM [+] (0) comments
Friday, December 27, 2002
There's not much to be said about the past couple of days, as it's been very quiet. Lots of sleep, lots of tv, lots of surfing.I guess what I like most about the post-christmas period is that now people are feeling a little more relaxed fanancially, assuming that they aren't completely broke, they spend more online, including making use of the advertising banners on various of my websites. This time last year I did very nicely from the advertising, and things show every sign of doing the same this year. *Rubs hands together and smiles*
So anyway, I'm sat here watching The Great Escape on tv and wondering what to do with myself.
Steve 4:20 PM [+] (0) comments
Thursday, December 26, 2002
What an enjoyable christmas.Good company, good food, fun pressies, fun times.
Things took a very disturbing turn in the kitchen though, as this picture shows...
"Keep drying, or prepare to be probed."
"Er... okay, but can I take this silly hat off?"
"Silence!"
Steve 6:16 PM [+] (0) comments
Tuesday, December 24, 2002
It's christmas eve and so far, I haven't really mentioned christmas at all in this blog. I guess that's 'cause I know not only are there a lot of people who don't celebrate christmas due to their religion and whatever, but there's also plenty who simply don't enjoy the festive period for entirely personal reasons and get sick of hearing about it. Truth is, there've been times in the past when I've made a great effort to completely ignore the whole thing.Well not this year, and I think I've held off long enough, so here's what's happening this christmas in the Land Of Benway.
I'd been a little concerned as to what I was going to wind up doing this year. Having lost my gran earlier in the year, I really didn't want my mum to be alone. My sister's in Scotland, while my brother being a complete arse, can't be relied on to do the right thing. This left me knowing that if anyone was going to have my mum round for the day, it was going to be me. I guess that makes it sound like a chore, which it certainly isn't, only this year I wanted to spend the day with Brigitte. The solution turned out to be simple enough, we're taking my mum round to Brigitte's place on christmas day, so now I get the best of both worlds.
This has to be the first christmas ever when I've actually finished all the shoppinng, pressies and all, before christmas eve. Last friday in fact. It's a nice feeling, not having to rush around at the last minute. I finished wrapping the last pressie about half an hour ago, and all that's left to be done now is tidy the place up and make it presentable in time for Brigitte's arival in a few hours. I've been saying I'd do that for weeks (months?) now, but I'm such a slob. Hehehe.
Anyways... it's gonna be a busy couple of days, so if I'm not about for a while, Merry Christmas... and to those who don't celebrate it, I hope you have whatever kind of time you'd like to have, and call it what you will.
Labels: Christmas
Steve 12:39 PM [+] (0) comments
Sunday, December 22, 2002
As reported by Brigitte last week, there's a great clock at the main shopping centre in Milton Keynes, and this week we have photos of it in action.On the hour every hour, it does a funky thing. There's a big golden ball that get's transferred from one end to the other along a kind of railway track, and then rolls back down a set of moving...er... I dunno what you'd call it... a kind of articulated framework thingie. Anyway, all through this, it plays some really nice music, and at the end, a giant frog sat on top of the clock blows bubbles.
The whole clock
The bubble blowing frog
This site shows the making of the clock, and includes a link so you can hear the music it plays. I highly recommend you give it a listen, though it does sound much better when you're there. Good speakers might help.
Labels: photos
Steve 1:11 PM [+] (0) comments
Friday, December 20, 2002
Uh... wow!Not that they read this very often, if at all, but huge congratulations are in order for my sister and her... husband!!!
Talk about keeping things a secret... I'm as surprised as I am pleased. They did the Gretna Green thing, up in Scotland. I doubt many americans will know what that means, so, it's the place people go for a quick, secret wedding, with no hassles... just drag a couple of people in off the street as witnesses and do the thing.
She just phoned me from the hotel up there to tell me, and after I'd woken up (I was having a nap),enough to work out what she was telling me, I just burst out laughing. Not laughing at her/them, but in shear surprise and pleasure. It's about bloody time... they've been together for years and make a wonderful couple.
Steve 12:17 PM [+] (0) comments
Thursday, December 19, 2002
Game Of The Week won't be up till friday, like anyone cares that much, but just so you know, it's probably gonna be Galaxian. No time to do it just now is all.I'm sat here waiting for my hair to dry before catching a train over to see Brigitte, and listening to the 80's Alternative feed onRadio@Netscape. I love this station... no, I LOVE it.
Okay, so they just played The Smiths who rather suck like a dead walruss, but now they're playing The Cure's The Snakepit from Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me, earlier they played Victoria by The Fall, and Cities In Dust by Siouxsie. What more could a 30something alternative type person ask for? Love and Rockets? The Damned? Bauhaus? Very early Ultravox? Pixies? Throwing Muses? U2 circa War? Yup, they played those too. I'm in heaven. Now if they'll just stop playing the ultra annoying, stupidly catchy They Might Be Giants, it'd be pretty much perfect.
Oooooooooohhhhh..... okay, NOW it's perfect. They're playing For Phoebe Still A Baby, from Blue Bell Knoll, by Cocteau Twins. Liz Frazer has the voice of an angel, whatever it is she's singing. Heaven, I tell you... heaven.
*Sits back and drifts away*
Argh! I'm never gonna get out at this rate. Joy Division. Yay!!!
Okay, I'm going now. No, really... I am.
"Takes a second to say goodbye, say goodbye, say bye bye... " lalalala.
God help me. Make it stop. I need to go out, damnit!
Labels: music
Steve 3:03 PM [+] (0) comments
Wednesday, December 18, 2002
After reading -e-'s intentions (later retracted) to quit the blog world, his reasons, and the comments made by various people, it got me thinking about a few things. Before I go on, this isn't about -e-, or anyone who commented... just that his post got me thinking. For the record, I'm very glad he's chosen to stick around.So what am I thinking? Well... I guess it's part observation, and part prediction.
There seem to be a number of paralels between the blog world as it is now, and cb radio (yeah, I do still have a number of rigs stashed away in a cupboard). When cb started, it was a trucker thing, at least it was in the uk, with just a few home bases used by people who chatted with the truckers. Then it became legalised, and soon after, massively popular... everyone and his dog had a cb. It wasn't long before the old hands who'd been there from the start began complaining about all the newcomers who didn't know shit and were ruining the whole scene. Many was the time you'd hear such remarks as "You're not a real breaker... you've only been on channel for a couple of years. I was here before it was even legal, so show me a bit of respect." and suchlike. Sometimes it was a valid point, sometimes not. Even an old hand can talk shit, but that's beside the point... the situation is similar.
Anothere paralel was the "I've had it with this thing, I'm closing down and not coming back" type thing. You've heard/seen it in blogland, it was the same on cb. I mean no disrespect to anyone who's uttered such things in blogland... we all have bad days when we just think "stuff it" and end up saying it out loud, only to think better of it later... it's just a way of venting. As a rule though, when I see it/hear it being said, I don't believe it. For whatever reason, the people who leave just leave. No big announcement, they just don't come back. Probably they don't care any more who knows about it and who doesn't... other people's opninions on their leaving are irrelivant, and they just get on with their lives without blogging. To announce it suggest that a person still cares about the thing, and so are less likely to actually leave.
The paralel that I like most though is that of notorious bloggers. Everyone's heard of them... outspoken, opinionated, sometimes offensive, often very entertaining. Some people love them, others hate them, but by god, you can't ignore them... or even if you can, you're still aware that they exist. CB had it's notorious characters too. Very often, they were pushing huge amounts of transmitter power (illegal over here) so EVERYONE could hear them. They'd sit on the breaking channel all day, every day, and if something was on their mind, you couldn't help but hear about it. I suspect it was an ego thing among these people... all of those mega base stations had huge personalities to match their transmitter power. Thing is, though they had their admirers, a lot of people hated them, be it antennae envy or just a personality thing. However, whenever one of those people closed down, be it through choice, or was forced off by the authorities, the cb was a vastly poorer place for it. They may have been loud, and often obnoxious, but they kept the whole cb phenomenon going. They gave people something/someone to talk about, a focal point if you like. The simple truth is, the cb needed them, and in the same way, I think blogging needs outspoken people, those with big egos and personalities to match, who're prepared to stir things up a little. It doesn't matter what their motives are, or whether you like them or not... blogland simply needs them.
So... my prediction. I'm not really saying this WILL happen, but if the paralels run true, it may happen. After a few years, when cb wasn't a new thing any more, all the kids drifted away from it. There were still a lot of people around, and to be honest, I think this was the best period. There were a lot of really good people still using it, but it was no longer fashionable to be on channel, so only those who genuinely enjoyed it used it. You've seen it happen in blogs... a person starts a blog, writes in it every day for a couple of weeks... then it becomes sporadic, and then it stops altogether. It just wasn't as much fun to them as they'd expected.
The next phase was a large scale exodus from the cb, as the internet became more popular. People found a new means of communicating, and only the real die-hard breakers stuck with it. Will that happen here? Maybe. The whole thing's still in the fashionable craze stage at the moment, but you never know what the next big thing will be.
Ironically, the only people who use cb now are truckers, the same group that started the whole thing off. I wonder if that'll happen here... the only people doing it in the end may be a small minority who have a specific reason for doing it. I hope it doesn't go that far, to be honest, as the post craze phase was brilliant in cb-land, before it began to really die.
Labels: blogging
Steve 11:32 PM [+] (0) comments
Tuesday, December 17, 2002
Ok, this is probably gonna upset a few people, but it's my opinion, and I'm gonna state it regardless.Is it just me, or are news and social events/politics related blogs utterly boring?
*Chuckles*
Seriously, maybe I'm missing the point, but if I wanted to know what was in the news, or going on in politics at the moment, I'd go check out a news site. I guess where the writer is expressing an opinion of their own on the news, it validates the piece, but to just repeat what's been written elsewhere.... *shrugs*, seems rather a waste of time to me. Just there seems to be an alarming ammount of that kinda blog out there, and it rather makes me wonder, are there so many people who really want to be heard, but have nothing of their own to say?
Labels: blogging
Steve 7:22 PM [+] (0) comments
A most peculiar (not to mention late) weekend.
The usual weekend routine involves Brigitte coming round here on friday evening, we go into town on saturday, shopping/people watching, mooch around here on saturday night, and then go to Brigitte's house on sunday where we spend a very lazy day. Then I catch the train home on monday morning.
Not this weekend. We did the usual friday evening/saturday thing, but come sunday, I'd had a rough night with a bad stomach, and wasn't waking up for anything, so Brigitte went home. No big deal, she has better things to do than sit around and watch me sleep. So, I caught the train over to her place on monday afternoon, and came back here this evening. It just feels odd is all. I'm a creature of routine, and to be sat at the railway station on a tuesday at 5pm instead of monday at 8am, it confuses my poor underpowered brain. I must admit though, I did enjoy it.
Oh yeah, Brigitte needs lots of sypathy, 'cause she's got a stinky horrible cold.
Steve 7:00 PM [+] (0) comments
Monday, December 16, 2002
The Octopus Files is slowly starting to build momentum, mostly due to the link from Weblog Central at msnbc, and the predictably freaky hits from google.I guess I'm not surprised that most of the people linked to, including those who actually requested links, don't bother to link back, especially since I openly stated that it isn't a requirement to do so in order to be listed, but I can't help being just the tiniest bit disapointed. I would like to say a huge thank you to those who have linked though.
Yeah, I know... I'm just being selfish and self centred, wanting everyone else to promote one of my sites, but since the purpose of it is to promote everyone elses....oh bollox... why am I being so polite? Go link to it, damnit! ;-)
*Rant mode deactivated due to excessive whining*
Steve 3:07 PM [+] (0) comments
Saturday, December 14, 2002
Several years ago I spent a lot of time learning Imagine 3D 4 on my amiga and became quite proficient at creating dramatic still images and animations. It took a couple of years to reach a half decent standard, but was very satisfying. Sadly, I've been unable to find any freebie copies of this program on pc, and I think it was discontinued quite a while back. Anyway, I just installed a free copy of Truespace3 by Caligari onto the laptop, figuring I'd have a tinker. 3D being 3D, or so you'd think, and having played with very early copies of Caligari 3D 5 or 6 years ago, I thought this would be easy to get to grips with. Hah! It's freaky. Can't make head or tail of it. There's a tutorial in the magazine it came on, but it doesn't start in the obvious place, ie. at the start, but assumes you know exactly what all the buttons and tools do.Great.
Arse!!!
I guess I'll just have to fiddle with it till it makes some kind of sense.
Steve 6:47 PM [+] (0) comments
Thursday, December 12, 2002
Game Of The Week is now bigger, like twice as big.There are a few hitches and quirks when running these games, like if you refresh the page and then try to play the game again, it bugs out. The only way to fix that is to close the browser, and any others you may have open, and then open this blog again from scratch, but since there's no reason to reload the page anyway, it shouldn't be an issue.
I don't know how fast these games will run on other people's computers, but it seems fairly playable on my 1.1Ghz laptop, provided I don't have any other java sites loaded, or aren't running any cpu intensive programs.
Why so much cpu power to play such crappy old games? Well, java is an interpretted language, your browser is basicly emulating a non-existant type of computer, ie a java computer, and this in turn is emulating the arcade machine's cpu to run the game, so you have an emulator running an emulator. That's a lot of processing going on. Why bother? *Shrugs* Pure nostalgia, and the novelty value of having perfect versions of old arcade games on my blog.
Steve 2:08 PM [+] (0) comments
Wednesday, December 11, 2002
Game Of The Week(Edited) Sorry... this feature has been removed.
Steve 7:08 PM [+] (0) comments
Woohoo!!!
The Octopus Files has been listed in Weblog Central at MSNBC News. How cool is that? Probably not very, but it made me a happy chappy.
Steve 4:35 PM [+] (0) comments
Tuesday, December 10, 2002
Good god do I have strange dreams sometimes.It's rather tricky trying to remember it accurately, as the order certain things happened in is a little confusing, but here goes...
This seems to have been set in the future, maybe 5 or 10 years from now, and the country's become something of a police state, though I was actually in my teens.
I was out in town with a group of friends, just messing about and having a laugh. We were in something like a cross between a skateboard park and a market, pulling faces at cctv cameras, when I suddenly became aware of an abnormal mental image flickering through my head. Very abnormal... it made me go quite crazy for a couple of seconds. "Did anyone else feel that?" I asked my friends. They had, and were equally freaked out. I walked back up to the cctv camera again, and it happened again. Like a combination of voices and images... instructions. I wandered away from the camera and up to a store front selling hi-fi equipment, and it happened again.
"Holy shit!!! It's subliminals. All of the electronic equipment's sending out subliminal instructions" I announced to my friends. There was obviously a huge government conspiracy at work here, only for some reason, it wasn't working quite right on me, as it started causing me to hallucinate and go rather off my head.
I went home in a very distressed and confused state, and announced to my parents that something was very wrong. I couldn't think straight and kept hallucinating. "We were afraid this might happen. Here, drink this... it'll help." My mother (it should be noted that my parents in the dream were not the parents in my real life. They were top secret brain surgeons for the government) handed me a mug containing a pink liquid. I took it from her, and was about to drink it when I asked "What is this? What's it going to do to me? Is it some kind of brain blanking sedative?"
"It's called ROM." my mother replied.
"What the fuck's going on here? You're in on this aren't you?"
She explained to me that they'd used me and my friends to trial a new government sponsored brain implant, kind of like a brain emulator, that took over all of the normal day to day functions of the brain, dealing with behaiviour, motivation and suchlike, so that the real brain could develop to it's full potential and concentrate on things such as creativity. Everyone in the country now had these implants, but that the earlier models, such as those used in the trials were just beta models and had a few bugs in them. The subliminals I'd detected were a government upgrade, but that because my implant was not exactly compatible, it'd caused a software error. The drink she wanted me to take was a software patch.
I was utterly outraged, and along with my friends started an underground movement to try and raise awareness of these implants through outlawed rock concerts, and every kind of social gathering of your typical couter-culture type group.
Kinda makes you wonder huh? Brigitte had dragon dreams after playing Syro for a few hours, and I have the most sinister kinda dream when I mess with emulators and shit for a while. The human mind's a very wierd thing indeed.
Labels: dreams
Steve 1:47 PM [+] (0) comments
See, I'm heading into hyper-geek territory here, and you'd have to be not just a hyper-geek, but an old hyper-geek to appreciate this program.
vb81 is a ZX81 (Timex 1000 to all you americans out there) emulator, and runs such wonderful games as 3D monster Maze, the very first game I played on a home computer.
Check out the awesome graphics power of this machine.
It's kind of like a very early and very crappy precursor to Doom, but with a T-Rex instead of monsters, zombies and whatever.
Steve 5:32 AM [+] (0) comments
The geekiness continues.
I found a better version of the mame arcade game emulator, and then went and grabbed a whole mass of game roms here.
You have to sign up for that site, and wait for a password via email, but if you're an old games freak like me, it's totally worth it.
In my now extensive collection of games, the faves list includes Asteroids, Battle Zone, Bomb Jack, Centipede, Defender, Donkey Kong, Frogger, Galaxian, Gyruss, I Robot, Klax, Marble Madness, Marvel Super Heroes, Marvel Super Heroes Vs Street Fighter, Missile Command, Pac-Man, Phoenix, Scramble, Space Invaders, Speed Freak, Star Wars, Street Fighter II, and Tempest. These are all arcade perfect, because they ARE the arcade games, not some dodgy conversion.
So... my next project, a snes emulator to play Mario Kart, and then perhaps a ZX81 emulator... I have the urge to play 3D Monster Maze. Bet no-one remembers that one, hehehe.
Steve 3:24 AM [+] (0) comments
Saturday, December 07, 2002
So, more emulator sillyness.I've been playing with a version of mame to play ancient but perfect versions of arcade games.
Recognise these screenshots? They're two of my all time faves.
Now, off to see if I can find the roms for Battlezone, I Robot, and Gyruss.
Steve 10:29 PM [+] (0) comments
Friday, December 06, 2002
Am I being too geeky?*Grins*
I don't care :-P
Steve 8:25 PM [+] (0) comments
Thursday, December 05, 2002
I dare say no-one's interested, but since this is my blog, I'm gonna tell you a bit more about this Amiga emulator thingie anyway.After much screwing around, one corrupted disk, and 3 reinstalls, I've got the thing to access the pc's CD drive, display in 24 bit, as well as the standard chipsets, and the speed's up from just faster than a bog standard A500 to just slower than an A4000 with 25mhz 68040. It's probably faster when in 24 bit mode, as it doesn't have to emulate the gfx chipset, but there's no way of testing 'cause sysinfo defaults to a native screenmode.
It really is a pity my tower system's HD died, as I have a great Mac emulator on there that I could've copied across. Now that would've been a laugh. A pc emulating an Amiga, emulating a Mac, emulating a C64. Totally pointless, but a great novelty.
Labels: emulators
Steve 12:58 PM [+] (0) comments
Wednesday, December 04, 2002
I'm having someting of an emulator frenzy at the moment.Just for fun, I downloaded and installed a Mega Drive (Genesis) Emulator which runs brilliantly on Windows XP (very refreshing after all the ones that only seem to want to run under DOS), and spent several hours playing Sonic The Hedgehog with full sound, joypad control and everything. Then just for the hell of it, I grabbed some addon 32X bios files, and started playing the likes of Virtua Racing, Virtua Fighter and Star Wars Arcade. Much fun.
Anyway, that's no even the main story. While rummaging around online I found this site containing not only the UAE Amiga emulator, but also the kickstart rom files, and a complete set of Workbench installation files. Hah! Being a long time Amiga fan, I grabbed the lot and installed them.
It has to be said, even as someone who's forgotten more about the Amiga OS than most people ever knew, it was something of a pig to make this work at first, but I now have a clean installation of OS 3.1 up and running, and a copy of Directory Opus too, though with the differences in disk file formats, it's pretty much impossible for me to transfer all of my old Amiga software over to the pc, especially as my 1200 tower system appears to have died. However, I did manage to dig up an old backup CD of my system disk, which contains a lot of support files, libs and stuff, though the other backup CD from my Work drive was corrupted. Seems writable CDs don't stand the test of time too well.
Now, if I can just find something useful to do with the thing...
Labels: emulators
Steve 9:10 PM [+] (0) comments
Tuesday, December 03, 2002
I was due to attend a job interview today but have had to postpone due to a rather annoying stomach complaint.On the upside, and I'm rather thrilled about this, I've been requested to produce some art for a guy's CD covers. Like myself, he's doing his work on a tight budget, so any money involved won't ammount to much, but that's irrelevant. In the same way as producing and selling my own music on CD kinda makes me feel legitimate as a musician, producing art that'll be used for something other than my own satisfaction makes me feel somewhat more legitimate as an artist.
So anyway, what I'm gonna do is produce one piece for him for free, so he can decide if he likes it and wants to use it, and if he wants more, we'll talk money. Even if he decides to only use the freebie and doesn't want more, I'll still get exposure, and credit/links from his website, which works for me. For anyone thinking this sounds like a recipe to get ripped off, it was my arrangement, as it'll cost me nothing but a few hours doing something I enjoy anyway, and it promotes a level of trust that otherwise might not be there.
Steve 2:09 PM [+] (0) comments
Wanna play a silly game? Try holding a conversation via webcam, when the chatroom server's died, by holding pieces of paper with messages up to the cam. Now, these need to be public webcams, on entirely different webcam networks, so all the people watching only get to see half the conversation and stand no chance of finding the other cam.... then degrade the conversation to abusive messages.
Much fun :-)
Steve 1:58 AM [+] (0) comments
Monday, December 02, 2002
After my rant about Spder-Man on PS2 last week, I found a game this weekend that absolutely rocks, even if it isn't the kinda thing I'd usually go for. Spyro The Dragon: Enter The Dragonfly. Great graphics, great control system, great game design, great sense of humour, great fun. In fact, it's everything Spider-Man isn't. Oh yeah, and best of all, Spyro's purple :-)Hmmm. I just took a look at the forum on the Spyro website and it seems lots of people are having probs with numerous bugs in the game, like slowdown and freezing, but on further reading it seems these problems afflict very early releases of the game which have since been fixed. I've experienced the game lock up once and bug out once after a LOT of play over the weekend, and none of the other problems they mention.
Labels: games
Steve 2:38 PM [+] (0) comments
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