neuro.me.uk

So, I finally finished Grand Theft Auto IV, nearly 4 months after buying it. Well, I thought I had.

When the final credits had finished rolling by, I got some achievements for being awesome enough to finish the game … and then I was back in Liberty City. Not at the start again, but where I was when I finished. Then the phone goes: it’s Niko’s cousin, checking he’s OK.

What the hell, the game hasn’t stopped yet. I checked the stats page: apparently after doing all the missions, I’ve only finished 67% of the game. It’s not finished yet.

Augh.

There are things in life that suck. This list is not of things that suck, it’s of things that are awesome.

• My job; pursuant thereof, San Francisco, and regular trips thereto (next one in December); additionally, the stupidly weak US dollar
• Apple Mac OS X 10.5 “Leopard”
• Beechams Flu Plus caplets
• The Crystal Method
• Ubuntu Linux 7.10 “Gutsy Gibbon”
• “How I Met Your Mother” (and slapcountdown.com)
• 16Mbps Sky Broadband
• Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock (Freebird, Freeeebiiiiiiird!)
• 12.x firmware for the Nokia N95
• Tesco vouchers
• Being able to play music fucking loud (cf watching movies similarly); by extension, Maplin’s 3m 3.5mm to Twin Phono jack lead, my Macbook Pro, iTunes and the + button on my Sony HT-DDW880’s remote control
• British Airways
• Starbucks Vanilla Latte
• Ace Combat 6: Fires of Liberation (aka エースコンバット6 解放への戦火)
• Cheerios in ice cold milk
• Die Hard
• Four episodes of Star Trek: Voyager every weekday
• Barq’s Famous Old Tyme Root Beer
• A comfy chair

Awesome.

It’s time for another Cram Post, Neuro Style.

june » to san francisco for a couple of weeks to acclimatise to linden lab culture and processes, very chilled yet productive fortnight, i can now convert pounds sterling to/from US dollars and PDT to/from BST in my head; july » had great fun trying to procure a macbook pro for work, to wolverhampton for lugradio live 2007, gave a quick talk and demo about second life, got more enjoyment out of picking up an xbox 360 on the cheap, to brighton for the develop conference and a linden recruitment event, beer is not cheap in brighton, got to meet peter molyneux and aleks krotoski which rocked – aleks, the pigeons are still not safe!, saw the simpsons movie – basically a 90 minute episode of the simpsons and that’s not a bad thing, housemates who moved in here in march are moving out to a bigger pad near glasgow *schniff*, the geekha.us shall continue tho!

Got back from Develop at Brighton at the weekend. Got some choice quotes from the couple of days I was there.

• “Do you do a fish butty?” (asked in the fish and chip shop next to the Hilton Metropole)
• “This is fucking awful!” (said by an unknown woman to Peter Molyneux outside the Hilton)
• “I’m on the same panel as the guy who created Loco Roco!” (said in gushing tones by an conference attendee)
• “There’s nothing serious about a My Little Pony butt-plug” (overheard by accident at an after-conference meal)
• “You’ve been drinking all our fucking booze!” (an irate gamesindustry.biz employee getting a bit stroppy)

I like to blog, but I’ve been remiss in posting. So what better time than the end of the year to post what I’ve been up to.

Three tomatoes are walking down the street: a poppa tomato, a momma tomato, and a little baby tomato. Baby tomato starts lagging behind. Poppa tomato gets angry, goes over to the baby tomato, and smooshes him … and says “Catch up”.
    — Mia Wallace, Pulp Fiction

Verk

I’m now working at Concept Systems in Edinburgh, very much a Linux-friendly shop. It’s great to be working full-time with operating systems I love, and this is the third company in a row that has given me the opportunity to do so. The commute is probably the longest I’ve ever had to do on a regular basis — 41 miles from door to door — and the last 9 miles are through Edinburgh city centre traffic, but it’s worth it to be in a friendly professional environment, surrounded by people who have a genuine passion for what they do.

Oh, and Google have updated their Earth imagery for Edinburgh, and it turns out that every morning when driving up Maybury Road, I’m passing a big Poo! in a field.

Interweb Technological Gadgetry

Now that I’m no longer working for an ISP, sadly I’ve lost the perk of free broadband, so I signed up with Web Tapestry. They’re a great little outfit, courteous and knowledgeable, and I’d recommend them in a heartbeat. In fact I’ve been recommending them for months, and everyone who I’ve referred has been very pleased. I even get a nice wee kick back if you mention my name to their support team after signing up with them

Something else I’ve enjoyed this year has been Sipgate’s Voice over IP service to give me 1000 landline minutes a month for under six quid. Real phones plugged into a Linksys PAP2 phone adapter make life so much easier than having to piss about with headsets and PCs just to call people.

Schtuff

I’m watching a programme from Artsworld that I taped last week, Morricone Conducts Morricone. It’s fantastic to listen to (and watch) a great composer conduct his own music with a full orchestra — the Münchner Rundfunkorchester in this case, with guest performers — but something that stands out is the number of other composers work I can hear in the performances. This isn’t to say Ennio Morricone is a plagiarist, but rather that his work has had such a profound influence on so many other composers. I could hear twinges of Don Davis, Michael Kamen and even Jerry Goldsmith. Genius.

On a different tack, something dawned on me the other day. I thought how cool it would be if you could simply wish yourself back in time to an earlier period in your life to perhaps unfuck something bad, or to revisit something good, but then an interesting thought entered my head. Perhaps we can all do this already, but we can’t change anything when we get there, so events unfold exactly the same, and we have the same memories as we would have anyway, meaning we don’t really remember actually going back in time in the first place.

Public Service Announcements

The Nokia N70 is poo. Casino Royale is the best James Bond movie in 25 years. McDonald’s mint chocolate milkshakes are vile. Ubuntu 6.10 “Edgt Eft” is the first Linux distribution that makes me feel comfortable on a computer away from Windows XP. My Sky+’s 40GB hard disk is too small. I sold my Xbox and a pile of Xbox / PS2 / Gamecube games I didn’t want/need and got a PSP for virtually nothing. Did I mention the N70 is poo?

That is all.

Lang May Yer Lum Reek

It’s now 2007, so a Happy New Year to you and yours. Chi-ching!

I finally caught up with the new Clerks II trailer at apple.com. It bodes well that it received an eight minute standing ovation at Cannes last month, but after seeing the first 20 minutes of Jersey Girl again on Sky, I can’t get over the dichotomy that Kevin Smith is a dick.

Let me rephrase, as that comes across as I don’t like or respect the guy. He made Clerks and Mallrats, two movies I love. He’s a maverick independent film-maker. He’s best buds with Tarantino and Rodriguez. He talks openly yet eloquently about his productions, his life and his friendships. But here’s the rub: he made Jersey Girl and he consistently whores his wares across all his company’s websites in such a fashion to make said sites almost unreadable. Maybe I’m just jealous — teeth-grindingly, shaking-fist-wildly-in-the-air jealous — but for a guy with such clue, he seems to fumble the ball more often than most in recent years. This galls me, because as I said, it’s not that I don’t like or don’t respect him.

I’m struggling to find a point here. Perhaps I just need to get these two minor points off my chest: people will buy Kevin’s stuff regardless of how heavily or lightly it’s pimped on his websites, and Jersey Girl really, really licked balls. Seeing another Smith production making its way towards the cinema merely returns those emotions to mind and gives me the chills that the Jersey Girl Effect could happen again: great cast + shit script = shit movie.

viewaskew.com reports that Kevin will be in the UK in August to promote Clerks 2’s likely end-of-August release date over here, and with the first leg of the trip being in Edinburgh, that seems to co-incide with the Fringe (or more specifically the Edinburgh International Film Festival). I may just have to wander across and ask these very questions in a less vulgar manner. “Oi, Smith, you’re a dick: explain” may not be received too well in person!

PlayStation3 Goes On Sale: I may be a bit twiddled from two bottles of particularly nice French red wine, but even I can see that this is one of the most useless, preposterous and bullshit-filled news stories ever. A UK games site has decided to start taking pre-orders for PS3 units, just as hideous amounts of sites did when the PS2 and Xbox360 were on the horizon. This is not “going on sale”, this is pre-ordering, a now-common event in the games console world. Christ, I pre-ordered my PlayStation2 6 years ago, how is this news?

The website says the games shipped with the console may change due to availability.

That’s because the games, never mind the console, aren’t even available for public sale yet. The BBC, yet again, disappoints me in their video games coverage. Why don’t they leave it to professionals such as EDGE or 1UP.com?

Bollocks, utter bollocks.

Last week, I bought a cheesy Pinnacle USB2 TV-in device. I really only wanted it for composite video in from a PlayStation2; the fact it had an aerial socket for analogue terrestrial TV wasn’t a factor in the purchase at all. In fact the main purchase factor was that it was in stock at a local PC World and that it only cost £34.99—much cheaper than the nearest Hauppauge kit.

So I take it home, plug it into one of my Dell laptops, and yay: the TV-in works. Now to make the composite video work … hmm, where’s the software options to enable it? Why does the clunky media centre-like software say “can’t change channel” when I press AV on the remote? I was becoming more and more worried about this purchase. Eventually, I searched the Pinnacle support forums and found a post which absolutely floored me.

In the readme file on the installation cd this is mentioned.

7.00 Known limitations
Composite and S-video are not currently supported.

How do you like dem apples? Two ports, which are clearly visible on the actual hardware through a clear pane in the retail box, just don’t work. Not even the manufacturer knows how to make them work. I was back in PC World like a shot looking for a refund, which to their credit they happily gave me.

Wandering around the store, I saw some cheap and cheerful PlayStation2 games. Lurking amongst the chaff was a beaten up copy of Twisted Metal Black with a bundled Network Adapter. Now this is something I’ve been looking for for an age—a search which has sped up now that I’ll have a copy of Pro Evolution Soccer 5 within the next couple of weeks. The RRP of this bundle pack is £39.99, which the PC World “reduced price” sticker reminded me of. The reduced price was £12.97. Yoink, mine!

When it was rung through the till, it came up with a price of £7.97. Bonus! Saved myself £28.02, which is not too shabby at all. On opening it at home, it was in mint condition: Network Adapter packaging untouched, plastic seal still around the enclosed game … PC World marked off 70% of the cost simply because the box was a bit tatty.

So the reason I’m not wibbling and ranting like I usually do was that my returning the gash USB TV card got me a piece of console gadgetry that I’ve been hunting for at a cheap price for months. I’ve a bit more respect for PC World now, even if just that whoever prices up some of their “used and abused” products just doesn’t have a clue

This game is nothing to do with me, honest. Although this dude looks a bit like me.

BBC News is carrying a story about how, quote, “US gamers are switching off the TV and are turning to gaming on their consoles and mobiles“, unquote. I’d love to see how US gamers are playing their consoles with the TV switched off …