Month: March 2010

I'm planning on seeing Alice in Wonderland this weekend.

It's a great movie 🙂 Well worth seeing in the cinema, although I didn't go for the 3d version.

They start with an excellent story and make it look incredible and believable in a way that Avatar could only wish for. I suspect Avatar will suffer in the long run because people will expect it to be "better", Alice answers all those questions in style.

I am really looking forward to seeing what kind of special features will be on the Alice in Wonderland DVD once it's released.

I was going to do a Thursday Thirteen on music again, like one of my old traditions 🙂 But I’m going to go random instead, partly inspired by the wonderful madness which is the new Alice film.

1 – Alice in Wonderland. It’s not often I get tempted to watch films several times at the cinema but this one definitely gets in that category. Humour runs all the way through and the animation is incredible. It’s like live action. Every thing about this film is amazing, I’ll definitely be checking out the blu-ray when it comes out.

2 – Mansun. Music 🙂 One from a while ago. My sister kept letting me listen to the odd Mansun track and I kept going back for more. I now have their entire back catalogue. Here’s “I Can Only Disappoint U” from Later as an example of one of their best.

3 – Snow Queens and Sunshine. These two lovely ladies have been amazing over the last few months in putting up with a nutter who’s insecurities have been kicked into top gear by the work situation. Now that’s resolved, I’ll hopefully settle down a bit and give them an easier time of things. That said, they’re great sports and can ably deal with their pet Mad Scientist. Thank you for helping keep me sane !
(Not quite sure if “sane” if the right word …)

4 – Olympics. I didn’t watch as much of this as I’d have liked, as the Vancouver events were in a bit of a hostile time zone … I enjoyed what I did watch. Highlights were Amy Williams winning the Skeleton bob and watching Ice Hockey players clobber each other. Oh yeah – it was scary watching the crash in the women’s downhill where one of the competitors must have thought she was doing the Ski Jump event. It was good to see her competing to the full in her next event.

5 – Technology. After holding off for a while, I went for the new tech at Xmas. I’ve since been enjoying HD telly and the improvements of a blu-ray player. I’m also on my third laptop … and incidentally about to take on my fourth laptop, although the fourth doesn’t really count as it’s a work one.

6 – Cardigans. Nooo ! I haven’t gotten old and retired the jumpers … If you can remember back a few years, there was an album called Gran Turismo with the song Favourite Game on it. The people behind that have brought out a lot more music over the years and a not insignificant amount is actually a lot better than Favourite Game. I’ve just received their Super Extra Gravity album through the post but here’s a link to 3.45am No Sleep, one of the highlights from Long Gone Before Daylight.

7 – 3d. This seems to be becoming the Next Big Thing. The marketing and ideas people always like to keep the tech market moving on and need new crazes to provide the drive. A few years ago it was HD, now it’s 3d. Yeah, I’ll go for this eventually but at the moment, I’m just not bothered enough to pay the extra cash for what I believe to be a placebo effect.

8 – Games. From something that’s just caught on to 3d to something that’s been doing 3d for years. The PC games market has been able to portray believable 3d worlds on to a 2d screen for quite some time now, without needing glasses or special kit to do so. The brain can do a remarkable job of filling in the detail.

9 – New job. Same team, different role. Had another bit of New Job Geronimo today as I did the admin’y stuff for a meeting which was very effectively run by my 3rd RO. After some of the meetings I’ve been involved in where there’s not much progress but far too much talk, the meetings today were quick, sharp, effective. I hope to learn something while he’s still on the project 🙂

10 – Watchmen and other blu-ray. I have a little collection of blu-ray movies now … Watchmen and Terminator 4 are the highlights, although I was reminded of the Total Charm which is Wall-E. Still not convinced if it’s worth upgrading to HD unless your old kit breaks but these three films would go a decent way towards persuading someone …

11 – Snow Patrol. Eyes Open with the signature track Set The Fire To The Third Bar will be the next album I listen to. These guys are a prolific group bringing out a lot of very high quality music. Also put this one down because of all the snow we had this year. It was great fun driving in it and seeing how far I could get before the traction control gave me control back. Was on my very own Snow Patrolling in Scotland a couple of weeks ago, it snowed as we got off the plane but it had turned to rain by the time the taxi ride finished.

12 – Books. Kinda stalled here at page 800 of 950 in a Timothy Zahn triplet. Must get back to it over this weekend so I can finish it and get cracking on another author. It’s not that they’re a bad trilogy, Timothy Zahn is one of the better “intelligent sci-fi” authors out there. I’m just looking to read about a different world.

13 – New Life. There must be something in the air … There’s a few babies on the way for people I know, with a couple already arriving. We appear to have lost one of our gaming people as his attention has been grabbed by the little one, plus The Boss is on maternity leave as she looks after the MiniBoss. Hope they all do well. It’ll be good to see The Boss when she comes back 🙂

Right – that’s my 13. Time to take a hint from Mansun, which is currently playing the track “Goodbye” from their Little Kix album and maybe another hint from the next track coming up which is “Sleeping Satellite” by Tasmin Archer.

Heh heh heh – sleep later, music now and embarassing a couple of special ladies tomorrow morning when I let ’em know I been writing about them again.

Linkbacks :
1 – Americanising Desi’s 13

PS Drop me a link to T13’s and I’ll add it above. And last of the last : Here’s a link to the new Thursday Thirteen home.

Gotta admit, I hate leaving a whiny post at the top of the blog but I have a good idea for what’ll knock this particular one off on Thursday.

(Not done a Thursday 13 for a while !)

Having one of those real OUCH days today. I’ll get into a state where my muscles tense up. All of ’em. It includes my left upper leg but the most annoying sections are my upper back and right shoulder. Usually the areas that are vulnerable due to the long term injuries I’ve inflicted upon myself over the years. And when the shoulder goes bad, my wrist will follow with RSI related issues.

It’s the inability to relax that gets to me when the tenseness strikes. If I was able to relax the muscles, it would break the vicious circle of the tensioning up. Stretching doesn’t help, it usually triggers the opposite set of muscles into cramping. I could look into pills to see if painkillers would make them behave but I REALLY don’t want to start down that road.

Drugs are bad.

So I’m chilling out with music instead (Coldplay track on now) and forming the OUCHIE thoughts into words for this post. Tapping the words out helps me get closer to fully understanding what’s going on and I feel I need to do that in order to figure out how to deal with the issues.

It’s not so much the tensed up muscles that’s the problem, it’s understanding the reason why they’ve gone like that. I have a few reasons there :

New job position stress (as in figuring out what the role is without a decent handover !). I think everyone is expecting me to ease back into it but that’s not the way I work. I like to hit the ground running in a Geronimo approach to change. As I wrote below, it can take some effort for me to start a change but when I switch, I switch fast and hard.

Eating and drinking all the wrong things. I react to caffeine … Either too little or too much and at least 5 pints of Pepsi yesterday was almost certainly too much. This’ll be the major cause of those muscle issues, it’s a reaction to all that Pepsi. So when I finish the coke I’m drinking now (lol @ the self inflicted wounds !), I’ll be on the water to attempt to detox. My salt balance is almost certainly off as well.

Just plain tired. I have a tendency to burn myself out and we’ve been doing a fair bit over the last few weeks at work. Big delivery points and things like that, so a higher effort put in compared to the usual hard work. It’ll be good to know that after I do extract myself from the various tasks in my old post, that there aren’t many loose ends left over. There are some but they’re in areas where some other lazy git should have been managing his own problem instead of me firefighting it.

Aside – oh look ! Another story about Terror Toyotas … I wrote something about the Prius a little while ago. Hybrid cars are a very interesting concept. But … When it comes to stopping a guided missile that weighs over a tonne, there’s nothing safer than the Rude Crude Friction pad brake system. If you’ve been around electronics enough, you know they glitch especially in the hostile environment of a car. Gis a mechanical brake any time.

Heh heh heh – back to my own problems.

Looking forward to Easter, as I’ll be grabbing a week off work to get away from work and people in general. Time to chill out, relax and do as little as I can get away with (until the Cabin Fever strikes!). Games too, some Eve, not so much Eve as it tends to put me in a Paranoid Hyperactive way of thinking that isn’t healthy.

Few weeks to go yet until then. And while that’s coming, I’ll keep going for an outward impression of Strong cos maybe then I’ll even be one of the ones’s believing that 🙂 I’ll be looking to wipe off the Whiny post in a couple of days with a musical Thursday Thirteen.

I’m not the best at change. I’ll be able to quickly adapt when change is required but it takes some bashing over the head for me to go with the initiation of that change …

That’s change in all its forms, whether it be job, relationship, where I live, team I play for, all sorts of stuff like that. When my last relationship broke up, I was a shell for at least 6 months, probably at least a year. I’d buried myself in Warcraft, which helped a fair bit because it got me involved with people again. I think I’d have been affected a lot more by loneliness if not for the Mercs and Guildlink. Shame that didn’t last.

I think I’ve put myself back together sufficiently now, although I have gone nuts over one or two special people. 🙂 Where are you my Bright Young Thing ? 🙂

Team I play for – one thing I should have done, which I do regret, is not switching the cricket team I played for at school. When I made the step up from junior to men’s (2nd team), this fella gave me the confidence to bowl to a standard that was actually much better than what I’d done in the junior team. We got promoted that year and the people who ran the team rewarded the captain by taking the job away from him. So he left for a neighbouring team and I probably should have followed … It seemed like the right decision at the time to stick around. But … If I had gone then I wouldn’t have been subjected to things like fielding in the deep with a bust shoulder. (One of the successor captains was rather jealous that I trounced him in everything at school)

I’ve not been too bad at moving when I need to. However, that’s usually because I’ve been forced to move by where I go with the job. Without the impetus to relocate, I stay where I am. Which is probably not a bad thing as it costs a lot to move …

I’ve been working in my current project for over 10 years, with at least 2 more (work rules) to come. I think it’s bitten a few more in the project like that, there’s one fella who’s been there for what must be getting close to 20 years. It’s a good project, we get things done and there’s been real signs of progress over the last 10 years as we’ve gone from nothing to verrrry nearly a complete product. Can’t say here what it is (there’s 1 post that says it if you look hard enough!) but it’s one of those projects that reallly substantial. Think budget of billions …

What’s the change this time ? I switch posts at work in a couple of days. I’ve previously been looking at encouraging several complex computer systems to work together. What I’ll be switching to is more of an acceptance role. With a big contract, there needs to be a method of ensuring that the delivered article is what we asked for.

It’ll be a wider scope to look at but also more disciplined. Over the years on the project, I’ve had that integrating of computer systems as a central core but I’ve also taken on other stuff as needed on the project. Kinda like firefighting or troubleshooting, identifying where effort is needed and applying myself to it. It’s been fun. And I have my fingerprints all over the project 🙂

So – the change happens this week and I’ll be very curious to see what happens to all the old tasks. I’ll probably get way too much fun out of coaching one particular person to pick up some of the finance stuff (she’s smart enough to handle it). And I’ll be watching the bunfight with my old line management not wanting to let me go :-).

New job is with the same project, which suits me in a number of ways – less to unlearn/learn compared to moving to somewhere different. Not a big enough change to break through the inertia, bit more like one of those firefighting episodes. I’ll still be around the same project and people, so I’ll get leaned on as much as before for the finance, math, computer and project knowledge stuff.

So that’ll be next week, figuring out what’s expected in the new post.

What I could do with is initiating some more change in the other areas I mentioned up top. Been living on my own for a while now and it’s been getting boring. I thought I was on to something a few times over the past few years but those have come to naught. Dunno about moving, don’t think that’ll really be necessary unless something happens with that relationship thing.

Team I play for is a potential change. The cricket team I played for at work lost its way a few years back, by going a bit too serious. It started out as a fun after work thing but stepped up a few gears and got more competitive. I don’t get a look in with that team any more, I suspect due to issues with the fella who looks after picking who plays on the team. So it looks like if I do want to play cricket again (questions there …), I’ll have to switch team. I’ll also need to get fit and figure out a way of getting my batting up to speed in the absence of being able to bowl.

Change of diet would be a good thing too. My weight’s been pretty stable, so I haven’t been overeating. I still have a couple of stone’s worth of excess baggage. 13.5 to 14 stone isn’t excessive but it’s a little too heavy for my current physical condition. It would be a good weight if the baggage were muscle 🙂 I’d like to lose some but I’m not overly worried about it. Worry causes stress causes weight gain. I’m hoping a Positive Mental Attitude helps me avoid the comfort munching that’ll cause that weight gain.

Says he who’s about to disappear into the kitchen to find a mini packet of Mini Eggs and who nearly munched through a whole packet of cookies in one go earlier.

MOAR COOKIEZ !

Was talking with my gamer friend at work, as we do. He’d been watching a series on BBC called Virtual Revolution, presented by Dr Aleks Krotoski. Gotta admit, I didn’t watch this one apart from catching the lovely Aleks on screen on mute (iTunes had taken over) as the program after the Olympics coverage finished.

It made us remember though … We’d seen this bright spark before somewhere …

There’s been a succession of programmes that have attempted to bring computer games to the telly. The most successful over here is probably Gamesmaster. It had the budget, it had the early evening slot but it … I dunno … had something missing. I think it missed out the most important thing about gaming and that’s “HAVE FUN!”. Maybe it was the presenter giving the impression that he was a pretender who knew nothing, gamers are a savvy lot with spotting an interloper. Gamesmaster isn’t the only one and I probably only remember it because it was pushed so hard. There was another, on the late night ITV reel, which had a computerised voice on top of game footage. Can’t even remember the name of that one.

Yep, I think they forgot the most important aspect of gaming and instead just focused on trying to sell stuff. Bit like Gadget Show suffers now, the presenters on there feel like doorstep salespeople. That’s a bit unfair on Suzi Perry maybe but I think it applies to the others. New Gadget out ? Buy it now ! Do you need it ? No – buy it anyway !

Heh heh heh – that’s enough about the people who have gotten it wrong. How about those that got it so incredibly right ?

1999 to 2002 saw the run of a program called Bits. It was on late night on a Friday and was all about gaming. Any gaming, whether it be on console or PC. The stars of the show were the games, shown off admirably by 3 lovely ladies who my friend and I will always know as the Bits Girls.

There was Dr Aleks Krotoski, mentioned above. There was the sexy psycho Emily Booth who replaced Claudia Trimde. And finally we had the absolutely stunning Emily Newton-Dunn. Sexy, scary and downright naughty. The normal set resembled a student type flat (like my place!), placing them in the world of the typical gamer. They showed how games should be, harmless fun with your mates. They also broke one gamer mould, by showing that Girls Play Games Too.

(And most girls will kick your arse in games too)

This was a case of a fantastic show sneaking in under the radar, showing what could be done by intelligent, fun, creative people let off the leash. Because it was buried in late night, watershed wasn’t an issue so they could talk plainly about all games including the blood and gore sector. The brief must have been : Go out there, talk intelligently about games, make them sexy but most of all, make it FUN. I think that’s another reason this show was so good. Despite all efforts to the contrary from other shows, they proved that it is actually possible to talk intelligently about games.

Did it work ? Most of the games they reviewed were console, so they were outside what I’d be interested in. However, their review of Jagged Alliance 2 made me aware of one of the best strategy games for the PC that I’ve had the privilege of playing.

They definitely succeeded with including the audience with the fun and it’s a testament that us Gamer Geeks still remember them 10 years on. Where are they now ? Dr Aleks is still very involved in the media, Emily B is going for Horror acting, not sure about Emily Newton-Dunn. Ah ha ! A little hunt later, here’s Emily Newton-Dunn in a Gamespy interview talking Burnout Revenge. That video will show why we went nuts for Bits, the girls combined Huge Fun with professionalism and most important of all, intelligence. Lol – it also helped that they look great 🙂

Bits – for gamers by gamers. We’ll never see its like on our screens again, which will be a massive shame.

Woo hoo ! Maybe not – here’s a link to an early Bits episode from Youtube.

Closing out, whenever I think Bits there is always one scene that comes to mind. Games are fun : “that is the way of theeengs” (followed by fade-out and laughter!)
Thank you Emily, Emily, Claudia and Aleks !