One Year Later

As the screen would read before a cut to me, sitting at the computer.

So here's what's been happening, in no particular order of chronology or importance.

Got a new job.
Got a dog.
Got a new car.
Discovered youtube.
Making more 3d stuff including an entire world.
Created some 3d tutorial videos and put them on youtube.
The Star Trek New Voyages episode has finally been released.
I got disqualified from the 2005 CSS Crap Game Competition.
Done a bit of travelling.
Rebuilt my computer into something a little less primitive.
Regularly use wikipedia as my starting point for knowledge acquisition.

TV Wise
Watched the largely plot hole driven drama that is Jericho.
New series of Doctor Who.

If I remember
Numb3rs
House

That's about it. All I can remember at the moment anyway.

Ebaum's World Sucks

Just in case you have forgotten. See the last entry for more info.

This is gaining serious momentum. The creators are continually updating the Flash as well which means people keep going back. I think this is bordering on a stroke of genius myself. If the animation was static people would be less likely to keep viewing it.

One of the latest additions that I love is the clever use of a copyright acknowledgement ( this was about the only logical piece of criticism a few opponents had used). The artist made particular use of a image that had some resemblance to a copyrighted one of a certain Greek God. The acknowledgement itself almost seems like a parody, not sure if this was intentionally but it's very funny when it appears.

So if you have one message to pass on today let it be "Ebaum's World Sucks". Let's make it a new greeting.

Good Song, Good Animation, Good Message

Found this very funny little eye opener on Weebl's Stuff yesterday. Weebl didn't create it but agreed with the sentiments.

I've been visiting Ebaum's for some time now. I had no idea how much of a bottom feeder he actually was. To be honest I had tired of his website. I found much better selections at the source like Weebl's Stuff. I do not plan ever visiting it again in the future. There are plenty of websites out that are far better, credit the creative talents and respond to requests by the artists involved. These same sites also don't slap their own watermark all over the stuff.

Okay, so it's unlikely to close Ebaum's down or even upset the guy in the slightest but it may start a ball rolling, others may take notice, who knows where it will lead. Someone getting hate mail on the internet is nothing new. Especially so if the individuals involved create controversy or even just have an objective point of view. When people go to the effort of writing a catchy hate song and such a great animation the target must surely be despised and loathed.

Reading the various forums Ebaum supporters haven't had much positive input, mostly along the line of "U SUX" and the like. Predictably of course many have directed their attacks largely at SomethingAwful and Lowtax the heroes of the piece. The same SomethingAwful that was the reputed target of malicious code from Ebaums site that was the motivator for this song to be produced. Hmmm... Maybe they are on the surface too sycophantic to know, how they are being manipulated into the defensive. Perhaps they haven't been particularly vocal because deep down many of them know the message is "right".

Then there will be those, probably the majority who don't particularly care about morals, but just want to be entertained. If the want to be entertained they should check out the animation.

Yes I am still Alive

Kept you in suspense there didn't I?

So what's been happening?

Well it's been a busy couple of months. I got a job, which was enjoyable but the boss took serious liberties. I can take quite a lot of crap from a superior but I have a line. This particular boss crossed it, so I left and I am now unemployed again.

Every cloud has a silver lining. I got a bike to get to and from work. Round trip was 6 miles/9 km. I went from the first time I had rode regularly in over ten years to doing 35km a week. Quite an adjustment but I got used to it. I even lost a little weight, which I will probably put back on again quite quickly.

I have got back into 3d stuff again. I've dabbled over the years but pretty much gave up a long time ago. I've recently joined a new online community called 3d planets. It's one of the smaller communities. It's really a group of chat rooms and message boards but there is also a 3d environment as well. So I've jumped into the world of VRML creation, designing my own avatars, objects and even a primitive world.

I have as usual taken the world of nostalgic TV as my source of inspiration and designed a Bod avatar. It's not fully animated as of yet but I'm quite proud of it, considering I've only spent about a week and a half learning the software. I even sampled his skin and clothing from my Bod DVD so they are genuine.

Finally got the listing on BritBlog even though I joined back in July.

That's about it really, nothing terribly exciting.

I am Still Alive

More Soon(ish).

Doing my Bit for Research

I've been working on a 'little' project recently.

Over the past five years or so, I've been researching my family history. Thanks to the growth of the interweb this has become far easier. Using free and subscription services I've built up a large family tree going back several centuries on several ancestral lines. Others unfortunately don't go back so far.

As a result of my research I've actually contacted distant cousins who have had similar research projects.

Some of the resources I've used haven't always been big and fancy. Many family history websites contain information that an individual has gained by something as simple as spending a few hours walking around a graveyard and transferring the information to the net. As families are all interconnected, the information they transcribe is likely to be useful to someone else.

Once indexed by a search engine, such information can then easily be checked and used by another researcher.

This is the aim of my project. I have found on the net a huge resource consisting of thousands of pages of useful information. Unfortunately the information only exists as scanned images. Some basic indexing has been done by the website that provides the information but looking for specific information is very time consuming.

I have started collating that information into a database. Eventually I shall upload this to the interweb in some fashion or the other. Hopefully others will make some use of the information to trace their own family histories.

The entire project is huge for a single person. At the moment I'm transferring the information from about ten or so scans a week. The first section alone is over 300 scans. So optimistically I can't see myself completing it for about a year. The entire project is even more daunting. There are approximately fifty entries on each scan, each 300 or so entries to a book (approximately 5 or 6 pages). So I can do about 2 books (600 database items) a week.

There are over 1200 books. Doing some guestimating, if I don't get bored and I can continue my current rate. It will take me 600 weeks, which would mean eleven or twelve years. So I'm hoping I'll get this first section completed, it will be a huge success, then I'll get some volunteers and maybe it will only take a couple of years.

Testing Times

Boring technical type entry.

I've added a search facility to the blog. It's still in the testing phase at the moment. I might have to do a few things to it, to get it to do what I want, so I can get all my permanent links indexed not just the ones on this page. The engine I've used allows multiple URLs, so I've not only indexed the blog, I've added the Nice Nostalgia Archive too.

A word of warning though if you decide to do this yourself. Be careful how you set these things up. At first I tried connecting the NNA index to the blog index through the sidebar link but it ended up indexing EVERYTHING that I linked in the blog. It looked nice but used up my allocated index space rather quickly as it sucked up all those progressive links into it's database. Even resetting it didn't help. Had to delete the index and start from scratch with two different indices (I love weird plurals, that might be worth an entry in itself).

Edit: Dumped that one. Trying a different one, see if it's any better. Seems to index both URLs which is cool.

Game Submission

I hate posting two entries on the same day that could easily have been combined into one. I'm a self-loathing kind of guy, so I'll carry on.

After playing about with the ZX Spectrum Emulators that I mentioned a while ago, I decided to submit a game to the annual CSS Crap Game Competition. It's more of a simulation than a game to be honest. It's written in Sinclair Basic, so runs very slowly. Thankfully many modern emulators allow you to speed up the old Speccy to a decent Megahertz-age.

The game is called Langton's Ant. I even made up a cassette inlay for it.

This doesn't look like anything fancy but it took me a while to put together. It took me ages to find a decent picture of an ant. I thought with the size of the interweb and the amount of ants in the world there would be plenty, but I was wrong.

Anyway, if you have a speccy emulator download it and have a go. If you like it a lot you can even transfer it to cassette. Feel free to print the inlay and make it look like a proper Spectrum game.

If you are wondering what Langton's Ant actually is, then click here.

I Made Some Science

All those years of toiling in my evil laboratory have finally paid off. I have made the ultimate discovery, a weblog survey by MIT. Behold it's mighty power! The power to create a graphical hyperlink from the primal forces of nature itself.



With this power, no mortal can stand in my way. My plan for world domination shall be complete. Right after I've been to the shops and washed the dishes.

It's a Mystery

I had my 15 minutes of fame last Friday. Actually it was more like an hour. I had 10 hits in the space of 60 minutes. Which is like woooo, fame at last.

My mind was full of questions when I discovered this. The biggest being "Why would people I don't know, visit my blog?". I enjoy solving puzzles, says so in my profile. I'm sure some smart bloggy type people out there know why to ten decimal places.

My best theory is it has something to do with the "Next Blog" button. For some inexplicable reason it sent people to my blog from other blogs. It wasn't like they had any choice in the matter the poor fools. For one magical hour it went on and then it was over. The gang had rode through my town. I was left with nothing but the distant sound of the church bell clanging in the wind and a cloud of dust on the distant horizon.

My Stupid Score

Not to blow my own trumpet but Toot-toot. Okay I can't play the trumpet.

A couple of the questions were USA related. So I could have done a bit better. Story of my life really.

I Was Doing That Years Ago

Isn't it interesting when something you were doing on your computer 5 or 10 years ago is the latest fad. In this case retrocomputing. Yep home computers have been around so long that certain ones older ones, especially of the 8 bit CPU variety are considered chic these days.

There were numerous home computers around in the early/mid 80s. None more popular than the ZX Spectrum. The only changes in later models were basically cosmetic with some minor hardware upgrades largely involving the user interface, memory and sound output. The Speccy remained popular for the best part of a decade. The Beatles of home computing.

My first experience with Speccy Emulators was around 1993, when the real things were still available in the shops for about 20 quid. I didn't take much interest at the time. I'd only just got rid of mine a year or so earlier, so it was a short-term diversion. I had an Amiga A500 at the time which seemed light years ahead of the speccy. I was a little miffed to discover the Amiga emulator was pretty clunky. It's 68000 CPU was of a different lineage from the Speccy's so emulation wasn't particularly efficient from a programming side of things.

A year or two later I ran an emulator on a 386 and it was like lightening. Easily running at 200% the speed of a speccy, which certainly made some games interesting. The ability to save the game at any point was a joy. The biggest advantage of course was that loading a game was nearly instant. No more waiting 5-10 minutes for a game to load off a cassette.

"A cassette?", you ask. Yep a cassette. No fancy DVD or Hard Disks in those days. Depending on the quality of the cassette and the cassette player, loading was a very hit or miss affair. You had to ensure the right volume level, the position of the tape (often by learning to recognise the electronic noises recorded on the tape). If any of these processes got disturbed by anything, like an ant sneezing in the garden, you'd have to start the whole thing all over again. The Speccy's predecessors were even more susceptible to this. I think my ZX81 only had something like a 40% loading success rate.

This effect is recognised amongst the Sinclair online community and is referred to as a mystical aura called The Chuntey. The Chuntey required your presence near the computer at all times. Your TV also required to be tuned to the Speccy at all times. If you actually tried to do anything apart from watch the game loading, it was guaranteed not to load.

You could construct a whole Shrodinger's cat style thought experiment by standing in the hall with the bedroom door shut whilst the Speccy was loading. Okay I'm waffling now.

A few years after first running my emulator on a 386, I couldn't slow down my PC enough to run the emulator at a decent speed. Another problem was the limited number of games available. The rise of the internet solved both problems. At one stage virtually every game released was available and some shape or form, for numerous Speccy emulators.

People have even been writing their own games. Good games or otherwise, including myself. I wrote my first Speccy program for the first time in about 15 years. One of the things I used to do on my own Speccy that I haven't done on an emulator until now. Modern emulators have a range of tools to make this much easier but I forgot how difficult it was. The whole windows/GUI environments have really spoiled me over the years. It was good to get back to basics (rubbish pun number 211).

Searching For Fun

I decided to see if my blog has even made the slightest impact on the interweb. I did this by typing variations of the URL and blog name into various search engines. I wasn't being particularly optimistic and was expecting to get a big zero link results and getting told I'd probably should try something with a similar spelling because the blog got zero hits. My worth reduced to a spelling mistake on the great interweb. Anyway I was ever so slightly surprised to get a couple of hits.

Firstly from Google and MSN.

A list of blogs relating to dragons.

I'm about 100th in a list of, at time of writing, 117 blogs. So it would have to be a fairly dedicated dragon fan that made it here from that list. Just in case any through sheer boredom have made it here, I'd just like to say Hi. Yep dragons are pretty cool, fire and scales and all that stuff is just great isn't it?

You may have noticed a lack of dragony information on this blog. I suppose I'm partially to blame my choosing a dragon related moniker but don't let that make you a stranger. In fact complain in the comments if you wish, I'll probably write a nice reply.

On Google alone

I found a entry of a Star Trek fan discussion board with a list of blogs with a trek interest.

Ditto as above for Trek fans.

Star Trek Part II

(Sorry about the wait, I didn't intend to leave it this long but with the end of "official" Star Trek I thought I should get a move on.)

Edit: Incidentally you'll find part I here

In the past there was a phenomena called fan-fiction (fanfic for short). These are generally written stories created by fans based on the TV programme. Star Trek literature took off during the 1970s. Fans grew weary of the same 79 episodes and two short animated seasons being shown over and over and over again. They wanted to see their favourite or new characters in new adventures.

The tradition of fanfic continues today. It has become even popular thanks to the interweb.

An new variant of this as appeared in the last 10 years. These are known as fan films. Actual films made by Star Trek fans. As prices of digital video recording/editing has dropped they have become more commonplace. Fast interweb connections have enabled the fans to share these films with the masses instead of just a few.

I have seen some of these fan films and the quality varies dramatically. They come in lots of different styles. I didn't have a huge interest to be honest. I then came across by accident an image file of a poster for a new fan film. It was the second in a series of fan films called "New Voyages".

I was intrigued and visited the website. Unlike most of these films, the creators looked to the past. Instead of inventing their own crew on their own super starship they went back to the original series. They wanted to make their own interpretation of the fourth and fifth years of the five year mission. A mission that had only had it's first three years televised.

The first episode was available on the website so I downloaded it. A full length episode I might add, not a five or ten minute show, the full hour, minus advert breaks off course.

I was very impressed. It wasn't an exact copy of the original Trek. They had updated the special effects. Instead of models we have CGI. They had several good quality sets including a large portion of the bridge and a transporter room. They had even managed to obtain the services of several actors who had appeared in Star Trek as cameos.

The first episode did attract a fair bit of criticism from some Trek fans. A lot of them in my opinion weren't justified or forgivable given the production restraints. Considering it was largely a pilot and many shows including Star Trek changed significantly between a pilot and the actual production of regular episodes this is understandable.

This was shown to be the case when the second installment was released and it blew away many of the critics. That is what I shall be discussing in the next part of this series.

Changed Days

I'm setting up a hard drive and writing a blog entry at the same time, on the same computer! It helps pass the time while I'm waiting for 160 GB to partition itself.

Better than in the "old" days when all I could do to pass the time was put the kettle on.

As you can see I have spent most of my time until relatively recently using Windows 98, unfortunately even the second edition wasn't cutting it anymore. Is it unreasonable to expect six years out of an operating system?

I got dragged into the 21st century slowly, but I know there are people out there still happily using 98 and older versions of windows. Well if their hardware lets them they are.

It's a Laugh

I got to thinking about what makes me laugh. It wasn't a total non-sequitur. I was reading one of the recent additions to a site that I visit regularly. James Lileks is a journalist who like myself has a keen interest in nostalgia. His site is full of wonderful pictures of the past - old postcards, matchbooks, magazines, comics, book covers, promotional pamphlets and much more. Even though we are from two different countries, nostalgia seems to have a universal appeal.

What I especially enjoy is the completely different viewpoint he has when describing these images. He, to employ a cliche "thinks outside the box", challenges assumptions often by picking out some minor detail. These may include such things as a figure in the distance, a facial expression or something else mundane or obscure and twists it into something that often has had me in tears of laughter.

So that's what lead me to think about what I find funny or at least part of what makes me laugh.

We all make assumptions. Take a basic statement like "Hugo went into the shop". Picture it in your mind. Okay there isn't a lot to go on, you really can't paint an accurate picture with 5 words so your imagination fills in the blanks using experience and your perceptions of reality.

You've probably assumed that Hugo is a man, Hugo could be a dog, a robot, an alien, a spider or any infinite number of things.

You've probably assumed Hugo went in through the door instead of the window or down stairs.

You've probably assumed Hugo was walking, he may have been crawling or dancing or in a wheelchair.

I've looked at just three of the many assumptions you made. If those assumptions are particularly absurd and especially combined with elements that are normal, I will often find humour in it.

I also find the reverse interesting, we at various times in our life find ourselves in absurd situations and have treated them as normal.

Absurdity by itself isn't that funny. It's difficult for us to picture a completely unreal situation. A good comedian will know how to tie normality into the absurd. They use the normality often using cliches is to give us an understanding and the absurd to make it funny.

A good example is Billy Connolly, his stand up comedy is based around describing mundane situations but his ability to extrapolate those into the insane has his audiences in stitches. A few other good examples of comedy writing employing this technique are Monty Python, The Goons, Douglas Adams and Red Dwarf.

Edited My Profile

Woohoo, exciting stuff.

I like it when you add an interest, music or book etc. how it turns it into a blog search. It seems no matter how strange the hobby, there seem to be plenty of people out there with it listed. Maybe I'll try it again with some really obscure stuff like - vegetable croquet or worm knitting.