Ramblings from the edge
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j00ce's LiveJournal:
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| Monday, November 30th, 2009 | | 5:11 pm |
All the girls and boys...
Alice Cooper at Sheffield City Hall: gloriously gaudy and vulgar old-school vaudeville. The entire affair very much runs on fixed rails - the setlist is actually printed in the programme - and Alice generally did very little direct interaction with the crowd outside of the occasional invitation to sing along. Still, he scattered necklaces and billion-dollar notes with abandon and the show speaks for itself, with Alice being done to death in three separate ways... Oh, and City Hall let people stand in front of the stage with no security or fencing, so several dozen people were close enough to shake hands with Alice :) Sadly, I was stuck on the balcony (still less than 10ft away!) but it's something to bear in mind for next time... It was also the second gig I've been to recently where the entire set can be bought after the show on a memory card. It's been interesting to watch the evolution of this: Bill Bailey burnt the gig to two CDs two years ago; Orbital recorded the entire set onto a mini-SD card and Alice dumped the first half of the gig onto a USB stick, with the second half downloadable from the internet... The next logical step will be to hand out blank dongles which can be used to download the entire gig from the internet: saves queues at the end and still gives people something physical to clutch! Anyhoo: a good gig and elaborate stageshows like Alice work much better in a small venue than an arena. | | Thursday, July 23rd, 2009 | | 9:22 am |
Set the controls for the heart of the sun
ACcording to Speedfan, my computer's CPU core temperature is reaching 90C under load. Time to blow the dust out methinks - in the meantime, waste not, want not: does anyone want a cup of tea? The kettle just boiled... A minor transportation panic over the weekend (many thanks to the ever-helpful ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) fnord_kb for stepping in!) led to the purchase of an ancient Nissan Micra - made in 1993, back when wood, cast iron and horse hair were still major elements of the assembly process. Surprisingly, it's already starting to grow on me - s'blatantly not suitable for the motorway, but it's nippy enough for inner-city driving and easy to park! The plastic-guitar franchises may well have peaked, but there's an interesting initiative from the Rock Band camp: taking the next logical step on from Myspace, they've created the Rock Band Network. In essence, they've created a set of tools for creating Rock-Band compatible songs and put together an online review/distribution hub. So now you can see, hear and play the songs of your favourite local band! There's likely to be more than a few problems along the way to musical nirvana: the songs will be chargable (which may help to cut down on junk entries), the Rock Band interface is best described in polite society as limited and there's some risk of sales cannibalisation - if Harmonix promote the Rock Band Network, it's likely to have a knock-on effect on their existing DLC market. Overall, both the suggested implementation and the associated obstacles are very similar to Microsoft's "Indie Games" initiative... Anyway: a nostalgia-filled blast from the past: are you a <a href='http://comicbook.com/blog/2009/07/20/the-charles-atlas-hall-of-fame-10-memorable-comic-book-ads/>98 pound weakling</a>? | | Friday, June 26th, 2009 | | 10:50 am |
Communing with proto-paper
Sitting on a train staring at the same tree for about an hour does not make for a nice ride back from London. Admittedly, the train did have free wifi, but it was running at about 9600 baud... Doghouse is a surprisingly good film - so long as you like zombies and tongue-in-cheek sexist humour - there's distinct shades of Shaun of the Dead, Undead and Evil Aliens (albeit somewhat toned down). In weather news, people should expect a heavy shower of bad-taste jokes around the area of Michael Jackson. Remember to take an umbrella... I'm intrigued by the announcement that a replica of a Nazi WW2 stealth plane has been constructed. It looks surprisingly modern... Equally, the discovery of new burial mounds near Stonehenge is funky... | | Wednesday, April 1st, 2009 | | 1:39 pm |
| | Tuesday, March 24th, 2009 | | 3:59 pm |
| | Tuesday, March 17th, 2009 | | 3:44 pm |
a small green lump of putty
Tis the night of St Pats, when a large segment of the world turns green (swiftly followed by black, if they've consumed too much Guinness). To all of those practicing a fake irish accent: go forth and enjoy! For those people prepping for Whitby Goth Weekend fun, it may be worth taking a quick peek at Scarygoround: the artist/author has done a little drawing based on the view from the steps. It features ghosts, balloons and a couple of goffs :) Also, to those who lived through the eighties: a bit of pop-culture you may have missed! Back in 1984, a man named Mel Croucher's Automata released an "interactive art" game called Deus Ex Machina: one notable feature is a 50-minute soundtrack which is meant to run in the background during play - a mixture of commentary, in-character quotes and music. Among other things, it features Frankie Howerd as a gleefully evil policeman, Ian Dury as a sperm and Jon Pertwee as the storyteller. The story itself is somewhere between The Wall, 1984 and Brazil and documents the life (and death) of a genetically engineered creature raised by The Machine. MP3s of the soundtrack are available at the link above - worth a listen if you have any interest in British Sci-fi. Speaking of which, The Sci-Fi Channel has announced plans to call itself SyFy. Not so much dumbing down as attempting to perform a lobotomy with a food blender... | | Tuesday, March 10th, 2009 | | 5:03 pm |
Watching the Imax
Going to Manchester to see the Watchmen was fun - the Imax is still ran in a curiously old-fashioned way: there's a compere who provides advice and commentary prior to the film starting and there's also "drinks and light refreshments" available from a little trolley at the back of the room. The film itself is... probably the most authentic comic-book treatment yet brought to the (ludicrously large) screen. Don't go in expecting X-Men or Batman though: the emphasis here is on brutal violence and adult (in the sense of "grown up") themes. Impressive and worth seeing once, but I'm not sure I'd want to go for a repeat viewing. Now then - can someone please sort out the copyright tangle around Zenith and get a movie made of it, please? My laptop has been returned to Comet, on the grounds that it had appallingly poor wifi reception and was also too heavy - I hadn't realised that stores remove the batteries from the display models, to avoid them being stolen! I also hadn't realised how difficult it is to buy a laptop with a specific set of criteria (size, weight, GPU technology). Apart from the highly inconsistent display of specifications (both in-store and on websites), the biggest problem is that no two stores appear to have the same range of equipment in... I ended up going for an Aspire 4935 (or somesuch): apart from being smaller and lighter, it has an Intel chipset which has proven to be much better at untangling electromagnetic information. The fact it comes with funky blue touch-sensitive media controls down one side is purely a bonus :) | | Tuesday, March 3rd, 2009 | | 10:28 am |
Turning to eleven
Metallica at the Arena on Saturday was surprisingly good. Part of the surprise comes from the stage setup: they've opted for a circular raised stage in the middle of the arena, rather than the traditional technique of taking over one end of the venue. Metallica made it work reasonably well, but it's definitely odd - you only ever get a quarter of the band facing you! The first support band (The Sword) had some potential, but were scuppered by badly setup sound - the fact that they started bang on 19:00 and finished at 19:25 didn't help either. They were also a tad optimistic in their merch ambitions - £15 for a CD? Machine Head also did a fine job, though the audience wasn't all that warmed up - it was a bit like watching a remote-controlled mexican wave: the only real crowd activity happened wherever the lead singer happened to be standing at the time! Then... Metallica, with an amazing combination of lasers, spotlights and pyrotechnics. They pretty much did a full two-hour set, and seem to have fully understood that old stuff is more important than new stuff. Plus they unleashed lots of giant inflatable balls during the encore :) They also stood around for about 20 minutes after finishing, soaking up the applause and distributing around a thousand guitar picks. Only negative points were a) the volume was loud enough to distort the music (why, oh gods of soundcheck? Why?) and b) it looks like the Arena is being targetted by pickpocketing ne'erdowells - thanks to gipsy_queen for spreading the word! T'other thing from this weekend was a trip to see Push, which is best described as being equal parts Jumper, Heroes and Stephen King's Firestarter: a bunch of misfits with psychic powers derived from WW2 Nazi experiments face off against an evil government agency seeking to control them. The plot is more than a little messy, but it's certainly better than Jumper - and it was also nice to virtually revisit Hong Kong and see some familiar sights :) Oh, and I finally bought a new-new laptop, after growing bored of scouring Ebay - I wanted a lightweight beast with a non-Intel GPU, given that I may actually want to use it for 3D games every once in a while (for the unaware: the Intel Extreme Graphics system is the equivalent of a misfiring moped: it might get you downhill, but uphill will be a struggle). It's an Acer Inspire 5535, and won by dint of being the least-worst option available... Sticking with tech: does anyone want one of Michael Jackon's old arcade games? | | Friday, February 20th, 2009 | | 12:27 pm |
Fire up the oil drill!
It's been an interesting week, which is about to culminate with an overly expensive trip to the dentist. Still, OTOH, I've hopefully managed to acquire some Metallica tickets at face-value for next weekend! In a similar vein: the Judas Priest gig last Friday had a number of positives and negatives. Testament did a reasonable job as first-band-on, but their music is all very... similar, at least to the uninitiated ear. The lead singer makes for a wicked air guitarist, however :) Megadeth did a fine job on the musical front (give or take Dave Mustaine's mike volume which was set too low), but didn't particularly do much in the audience-participation area. Judas Priest were superb - I was heavily disappointed when we saw them in Birmingham (their home town) a few years back, but they seem to have gotten their wind back for this tour. Excellent song choices, a bit of banter and a bizarre singalong session which I need to get onto youtube :) One final point: the volume was blinkin' loud, to the point where you could feel clothing vibrating to the bass. Earplugs are definitely the way to go! Oh, and Sheffield Arena now does 2-pint glasses (at £7 a pop!), which made for a surreal sight: at first glance, the place looked to be populated with pre-teens clutching pintpots... Elsewhen, a trip to the cinema for The Wrestler provided food for thought. It's an excellent film (and the soundtrack stuffed to the gills with 80's rock), but don't go in expecting an uplifting tale... | | Thursday, February 5th, 2009 | | 9:10 am |
Wading through a winter wonderland
The recent snow-session has been quite fun, except for when driving is involved. It's amazing how your perspective changes: normally I'm happily oblivious to how big and heavy two tons of pig-iron are, especially when said pig-iron is attempting to move uphill over two inches of ice and there's lots of other, expensive pieces of pig-iron on either side... Ah well. One nice thing came out of it: three completely random strangers popped out of nowhere and gave the car a boost to get it moving and onto the main road. It's nice to have the occasional reminder that civilisation isn't doomed yet! And in other news: shopping at Meadowhall is incredibly pleasant at the minute :D I suppose I'd best grab a shovel and head out to rescue the car; elsewhere, a spark of genius has head to more, equally genius creations: what happens if you interpret modern games through the medium of 1960's Penguin Classic book covers. It's all been inspired by this chap, whose work also includes a parody of a currently popular reprint of a WW2 propaganda poster! | | Thursday, January 15th, 2009 | | 9:45 am |
Sideways and downwards
*brushes off the cobwebs* One new year for sale, slightly used (just 15 days on the clock!). Any takers? The festive season has mostly been good for clearing out a backlog of stuff - including an update to my website: the photo gallery and ZX Spectrum sections now utilise 100% homegrown XML/XSL dynamic UI rendering thingymabobs. Which is nice :) Other than that... Welp, Twilight wasn't quite aimed at my demographic (Grumpy old git? Sarky Ed), so we'll draw a veil over that one. The Spirit features Samuel L Jackson in fine fettle, but the rest of the film fails to keep up: Frank Miller has deliberately aimed for a cliched 1950's Film Noir style, and that's exactly what you get... Oh, and the Beeb have been running some form of Sound of 2009 award, which appears to have have a distinct electro-pop bias. In browsing through these hip new froods, I spotted an interesting gadget, which I've seen in a music video or two, but never explored further: the Tenori On. ME WANTY! It's seethrough and touch sensitive and handheld and synthesiser-y and has flashy lights and... is £750, so it's not quite in the impulse-purchase range. But still... ME WANTY! | | Friday, October 24th, 2008 | | 3:41 pm |
Hanging around
A quick-q for the Yorkshire masses: Is there anywhere in Sheffield where you can buy plastic poster mounts? I.e. cheap, thin plastic bars which slide onto the top and bottom of an A1 poster so they can be hung up with a bit of thread. Wilkinsons used to sell such things in their poster section - alas, this seems to have vanished, and I've drawn a blank to date on potential replacements. (Admittedly, I could just improvise with some BnQ wood, a handful of safety pins and a bit of glue, but I'd prefer something a bit more reusable/transferable). | | 1:12 pm |
Dear Question Time..
I sent a complaint to the local council the other day, around the "optional" fuel surcharge taxi drivers have been lobbing onto every trip regardless of distance - the cost in fuel to get to my house from the train station is £0.16: as a result, I'm not entirely sure why a 50p fuel surcharge is needed on top of the £4.40 they already charge... The council has actually responded: they've already proposed that the surcharge should be ditched (though cabs will get a 4.1% rise in fare charges to compensate), but a taxi driver has unsurprisingly objected, which means the plans need to be re-reviewed. As a result, my comments will be read out at the next meeting. I'm not entirely sure if I should feel important or pathetic - either way, complaining to the council is definitely a sign that I'm getting older :( Oh, and I'm probably going to be blackballed by the taxi rank :) Past there, I suspect most people will be Whitby-ing and will hence be trying to dodge both cameramen and pretentious goths - but is anyone interested in a zombie march in Nottingham on Halloween? Complete with Jonathan Coulton? http://gamecity.org/2008/10/zombies-march-on-gamecity/It's a bit of a shame it's on a Friday and runs from 14:00 - 17:00, but a mass zombie horde singalong has to be worth the trip down :D Otherwhen: I quite like the idea of having GPS on a keyring - especially since you could then map the time and location of photos, as Mr Minter has already done. Admittedly, the idea of having a car-based GPS unit which throws a HUD onto your windscreen is equally tempting... | | Thursday, October 16th, 2008 | | 12:17 pm |
Slip slide away
After some initial resistance, I've come to the slightly reluctant conclusion that snakes are actually good pets: they have low maintenance overheads (feed once a week, keep the water topped up and a heat mat switched on) and are clean and surprisingly gentle. (from a slightly geekier viewpoint, it's also fascinating watching a cold-blooded beastie with no ears or limbs, and how that informs their behavioural patterns and reactions) Still, one thing that's worth bearing in mind is that there's no real way of telling when a snake is ready to dump some... um... processed mouse. It's also worth remembering that the bigger the snake, the bigger the mice - and the more the snake moves, the quicker stuff moves down their intestines! As a result, we were scrambling around last night with lots of paper towels, after lil' Ruby left a 12-inch long streak across the duvet cover... C'est la vie. In a completely unrelated note, we currently have a 1m long, perfectly intact and freshly shed snakeskin, if anyone wants it? | | Tuesday, September 30th, 2008 | | 11:30 pm |
| | Monday, September 8th, 2008 | | 3:02 pm |
'ware the hair
The need for a haircut this weekend led me to a Turkish barber on London Road - mostly driven by a whim to check out how much a full shave-and-haircut would cost. The shop was quiet and the barber bored, so he decided to buzz my stylish stubble[*] as part of the service and give me a "trident" style goatee-beard thing. It's rapidly vanishing under the onslaught of new and improved stubble, but has resulted in some superb double-takes :) Sadly, this was followed by someone deciding to reverse out of a parking space and into the back of my stationary car. Only slight damage ensued, and details were swapped with no major drama, but still: Grrr... [*] aka: I hadn't shaved for a few days | | Wednesday, September 3rd, 2008 | | 9:53 am |
Life and Land
The year continues to trickle away like sand: I'll be glad when the current project is over. Otherwhy: Google has released a new web browser, which many people are raving about. As ever, more competition is good, and I like the idea of "sandboxed" tabs with separate processes - indeed, given that Windows XP offered this as an option for Explorer (Note: not IE, the local machine file viewer), I'm surprised it's taken this long to trickle through to the browser level. I also like the [i]slightly[/i] satirical interpretations of the Chrome explanatory comic. Alas poor Google, I remember thy "saviour of the web" days so well. Other fun news: EA have decided to give away CnC: Red Alert to promote the forthcoming Red Alert 3. Charge your tesla coils! Less fun russian-themed news is the story of what appears to be a state-sanctioned murder of a journalist. Here's to hoping sanity and justice prevails. Better fun: Spore is due to be released. The PC Gamer review indicates it's not quite as mindblowing as the original hype suggested, but creating weird beasties (and watching other people's creations wandering around your world) has a decent amount of milage in it. Not least because, as with any user-content published on the internet, dodgily themed creatures have popped up faster than a jack-in-the-box on speed. Second Life, here we come! | | Tuesday, August 19th, 2008 | | 4:56 pm |
blowing away the dust
It's been a funny few weeks/months, with some silly work hours required. Still, it's all rolling to an end now and normal service may resume shortly, especially now that work emails are generating lots of "out of office" replies as people head for warmer climes! Various things have happened of late, from losing a 3ft albino corn snake (as you do - she turned up behind the wash basket after I'd turned several rooms upside down) to Best Man behaviour at a wedding. Moving on in an attempt to prevent Firefox falling apart, here be some things of with varying eye-catching potential: Something interesting has turned up in the archives: Delia Derbyshire's recordings from the 1960s. She was responsible for the Dr Who theme, and also experimented with something which sounds surprisingly modern, in a trance-goa kinda way. Sticking with this theme, you also have the Heavy Metal Monk and the All Metal Tribute to the Bee Gees. Need I say more? There's a nice rundown of forthcoming comic-book movies here. Not too convinced by Ant-man - come back Spider Man 3, all is forgiven! Decapitations have proven popular: both in the UK and Canada. The former may be more disturbing than the latter, given that it appears to have been self-inflicted... asw909 dug this one out a bit ago: Hidden Nazi bunkers. I'd love to see this - a bit like the derelict tanks scattered around French fields, or the old concrete pillboxes in the south of England. Or the bizarre expandable living complexes in Taiwan. More rampant capitalism: MTV are remaking Rocky Horror. The petition says it all, really :) Toys: Anime contact lenses or a surprisingly nifty looking portable Megadrive. Death Tank is coming to XBLA. Think Worms, but in realtime and with bigger guns. Oh, and a funky theme song... And... that's about it for the nonce. Time for a word from our sponsors! | | Saturday, May 17th, 2008 | | 9:49 am |
Rock millionaire
Things are slowing back down again, now a major release at work is almost complete. Fingers crossed all goes well this weekend, or we'll be back on the merrygoround again! Still, sitting on the calls on a Saturday does give me a chance to unload some stuff from t'interwebs... Tekky stuff: morecake pointed out Geekup - I'll have to try and make the next one: beer and tekky fun is always good. In that vein: has anyone heard of the Chumby or the Pandora machines? The former is a soft-padded greyscale beastie which uses open-source hardware and software designs, while the latter is a new wifi-enabled 900mhz clamshell machine designed to be the next step beyond the GP2X, with a 10-hour battery life and a pricetag of £199. Mucho tempting... Unlike the US remake of Life on Mars. It's not looking quite as bad as Red Dwarf US, but then: what could be? Steampunk is allegedly coming into fashion - I guess people have exhausted the potential of giger-esque cyberpunk-goth stuff. Mind you, the stuff on display there looks more like Wild Wild West than The Difference Engine... In a nice juxtaposition, Video games aren't corrupting kids while the Wii is allegedly getting a pole dancing game. (on a side note: I was about to buy Rock Band, until I realised that the all-in-one box doesn't actually include the game, bumping the total price to £140, or more than double the US price. Any poor sucker picking it up from the high street will find an extra £30 lobbed on top. Sheesh...) Oh, and I just like Roadkill Toys. Does what it says on the tin! | | Thursday, April 10th, 2008 | | 5:13 pm |
Limited responsibility
Last night started with a knock on the door, which revealed a little old lady armed with a chunky touchscreen tablet, who peered at me and asked: "I'm here to do a 10-minute market survey about terrorism: would you like to take part?" Sadly, I had to decline due to time constraints, but you have to wonder what would have been asked: "if being held hostage, which type of gun would you like waved in your face?" Anyhoo, after a trip to the surprisingly uninspired Chinese Buffet at Jumbos, we meandered over to the Lycium for the Reduced Shakespeare Company. Part of the entertainment involved getting to our seats, which were at the very back of the theatre, next to the stage-lights and incredibly high up: lots of steps and windy passages. The show itself was excellent, though being that far back did make it a bit trickier to understand some of the fast patter. Onwards towards the weekend! Interplay have accounced sequels to games such as MDK and Earthworm Jim: some of the finest gaming to ever hit the planet. I'd actually be happy with a high-res version of MDK released onto XBL: given it had a Direct X renderer (and a PSX port), it shouldn't be too difficult... I was overjoyed to hear that Rock Band is finally coming to Europe, though the price-chart on Ars Technica highlights the price-gouging we'll be suffering. Looking at the prices on Ebay, I'm tempted to just import the instruments and buy the PAL game: it should work out marginally cheaper! The financial results from last year's Glastonbury have been released, and while a lot of numbers haven't been provided, you can extrapolate some interesting things. 177'500 people spent about £27 million on tickets and a further £52 million on the weekend, while the organisers splashed out £21 million on managing the festival. By my reckoning, that gives the organisers at least £6 million profit on the ticket sales - without including the takings from stall rentals and mechandise sales into account! It also reminds me of the Beach Break Live pitch on Dragon's Den (which since appears to have fallen through): music festivals are now just a business commodity - though there are exceptions such as the Strawberry Fair. And they wonder why tickets aren't selling out any more? Sticking with price-gouging: Ebay is trialing Paypal-only payment options in Australia. While this may simplify things, given that Ebay own Paypal, there would seem to be a distinct element of double-dipping greed involved here - and Paypal are notoriously bad at managing disputes. They've also started to make similar moves in Europe: be interesting to see how things unfold. Finally: an end to hyperactive kids? [*] one of the fish downstairs started giving birth, so I had to try and find the mother and all the wee bairns thus far popped out, before one of the other fish decided they were classed as fast food... |
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