Year: 2012

Lol

One thing people won’t tell you about Skyfall is the truly excessive amount of advertising (and trailers) that we were subjected to before the film started. During those … Bionicdwarf, Cyberkitten and I were talking Worst Films Ever. Not quite sure which trailer or advert started us off on that to be honest but we knew a good idea for a blog post when we saw it.

So here goes … Films that were so Bad they should never have been made. But seeing as they were, all copies need to be gathered up and cremated for the good of humanity.

Firstly – Anything. ANYTHING that Uwe Boll had a hand in.

He’s a German film individual that goes from game to game, turning good games into incredibly bad films. They truly have to be seen to believe how bad they are. Although I wouldn’t wish seeing an Uwe Boll film on anyone. That said, Bloodrayne wasn’t too bad although Bloodrayne 2 was a horrible mess without the any of attributes that made the first watchable.

Star Trek Nemesis. Star Trek was still going before this film came out. Voyager was still running and Enterprise was just starting to look promising. However. Nemesis came out, with an awful script that had all humour removed. The humour was there (it was in the book) but all trace of it was surgically removed from the theatrical presentation. Nemesis killed Trek so bady that they had to start up the franchise in an alternate reality.

Anything “mockbuster”. You know what these are … It’s where they take a successful film and remake it with a subtly different name. Battle Of Los Angeles (i.e. not Battle: Los Angeles) is one of these but there’s been others made, including the Terminators, Transmorphers, Transformers and a few others. Watch for them, avoid them. FOR THE SAKE OF YOUR SANITY !!!!!

Lol

What’s next ? Starship Troopers 2. The first and third Starship Troopers films are fairly ok. They’re very watchable, although they take the original Heinlein book into an extremely right wing direction. Must watch the animated series again, shame they didn’t get the chance to finish it. However, I shall definitely not watch Starship Troopers 2 again.

Twilight. Ok, this wasn’t actually too bad but as a vampire movie fan, I should have been wanting to watch the rest. Must be something about Kristen Stewart. I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone as good looking be so unwatchable.

Snow White & The Huntsman. Not too bad a film, just not nearly as entertaining as Mirror Mirror and it suffers from the Kristen Stewart effect.

Total Recall (the new one). Another in a long line of films that are very well made but … WHY ? Why remake a B-movie, with the only script inspiration being to take away the Mars aspect ? The original made more sense. There was no real need to redo this one.

Limitless. Again, well made movie, I just really didn’t like the Drugs Make Winners message.

I think that’s enough for now. Last one – Mars Attacks. However, this one while it was bad, was so hilarious with it that I feel I need to watch it again soon 🙂

PS Healthcheck. Think I’m improving. Ear’s not so bad and I think I’m steadily getting my arms back. Skin feels good too 🙂 Fingers crossed – I’ll be able to wear long sleeves again by the end of this week.

Saw the new Bond film today 🙂

Believe the hype. Instead of being mostly joke as some Bond films have been, there’s a seriously good action thriller here. It keeps you guessing as it goes from action sequence to action sequence.

I suspect I’ll see something new in it when I watch it again. I’m a Bond film fan but don’t actually own many of them (just Casino Royale). I reckon I’ll be watching the bluray of this one repeatedly. They’ve done a good job with this one.

“Too much information” starts here …

Think my condition is improving. But ever so slowly. I’m not leaking as much 🙂 I’ve managed to leave my bad ear alone since Wednesday night, so it must be still healing. The rest of me is similar, although my arms feel like they’re on fire at the moment. The skin there is very dry and cracked. But it’s healing too and not leaking.

Just gotta look after it and protect it while I’m awake and while I’m sleeping. That’s probably something people don’t think about … You move about while you sleep. What happens if you roll over on to an ear that’s not happy and damage it ? Will you set the healing back on your limbs because you’ve unconsciously dragged half healed bits over the bedsheets or the quilt ?

Having to think of things like that so I don’t set the healing backwards overnight.

I think I’m doing ok with it. We’ll see how it goes over the weekend. Gotta say, the sleeveless cricket top I bought has been a godsend, as wearing that means the sleeves aren’t putting that healing back.

There is some definite healing going on, the bits of my legs that originally went bad last year are pretty much back to normal now. It’s just other bits of my legs which are having bother.

Think I figured something out today too :

Pizza = good – HURRAH !!!!!
White bread = bad – meh.

I’ve not reacted to the pizza for early dinner but did start to wheeze after munching the results of the Fryday morning Bacon Sarnie run. I’m learning :-).

I suspect I’ll need to see the doctor again soon but – healing is happening. It’s just happening slowly and I’m having to try hard to ignore the temptation to go scratchy-scratchy.

Fingers crossed for an easy weekend 🙂

I’ve been hitting some massive lows lately.

I’m well and truly fed up with the skin condition I’ve got … I want it gone. It is truly just a skin deep problem, although a fair few people at work have let me know they’re worried for me with it. But even though it is just skin deep, it has effects that run a lot deeper.

It’s very distracting. And that goes for my mind making up false symptoms. Some of those make me very itchy, which ends up causing me to make the problem worse.
I get signs that it’s getting better … and then it gets worse again. That’s crushing.
I think I’ve figured out a cause of the problem, I shift how I live … and then the problem comes back again.

I was having trouble at work on Monday, although I tried to hide that as far as possible. Part of that was lack of sleep, although I think I’ve figured that one out now. But most of it was seeing improvement after the Doc visit end in disappointment as my week off went on.

I think the last couple of changes (laying off the OJ and taking antihistamines) have made a difference but it’s awful, awful slow. And my skin is still very sensitive.

Ok, ok, that’s enough about my troubles. How about those blessings ?

What’s let me turn the corner this week from massive depression to more up & at ’em is a few very good friends.

You know who you are ! You’ve been awesome to chat to over the last few days.

That’s where I count myself very lucky. There’s the work colleagues who I’ve been lucky to count as friends for years, the ones in my work-not work circle (CK & CQ!), there’s the canteen people who look out for me and someone who keeps an eye on me through Steamchat.

They’ve been helping me keep going through these medical issues. And it’s hugely appreciated.

PS If I’m still leaking next week, I’ll go see the doc’s again. Honest.

I’ve felt a whinge coming on for a little while now.

I’ve been with the same ISP since I moved into my current house. That’s like almost 11 years now. (Yep. Long time!). It started out as Telewest Blueyonder before they got hit by mergers, joining NTL to become part of the Branson Virgin Media empire.

To be fair, the service isn’t bad. I started with a 512kbit/s connection way back. That’s been steadily upgraded over the years and is now up at a genuine 20Mbits per second of download. And it gives that speed too on downloads. The upload has improved too and is now double that original 512Kbits/s download (original upload 128Kbit/s, it’s now 1Mbit/s).

Techie talk aside – that’s quicker than my first laptop could send information across wires to the computer next door to it. It’s quick enough to download the latest Bat For Lashes album in about a minute (it’s 120MB on iTunes).

But.

It’s evidently not fast enough to play Youtube videos in high definition. That’s deeply MEH, especially as seeing off buffering was one of the themes of recent Virgin Media advertising. What happens is that when you try to play a fairly recent (as in made in the last day or so), you’ll be able to see a few minutes of video and then you get Whirly Wheel silence as you are forced to wait for the next chunk of video to load.

I tried to keep up with watching the Felix Baumgartner highskydive. Just one problem – whirly wheel silence just took over totally and it was a total waste of time and effort.

It’s not the hardware here. I can play BBC iPlayer just fine. The old hardware was happily handling 3 concurrent streams of BBC iPlayer Olympics in HD. I picked up a new freebie modem/router which will hopefully see that 20MBits/s get upgraded to 30MBits/s soon. That’s not sorted the problem.

What apparently is causing the problem is a local proxy server in the Virgin Media network. What happens there is that you’re not playing the video back from a Youtube server, it’s playing from a Virgin Media server which is intercepting the calls to play the video. And it can’t keep up.

Again – deeply, truly – Meh.

It’s great to have a massive pipe to get the data through. The problem comes in because of something in the way (which shouldn’t be there) taking the data supply back to a trickle. I’d much rather have, say, 5Mbits/s and HD playback than rarely used 20Mbit/s and no HD playback.

Don’t get me wrong – this is not a matter of keeping up with something being streamed live, it’s that poxy proxy server being unable to chuck the video data out fast enough. I suspect with the Baumgartner jump (streamed from Youtube), it was a matter of not being able to send the video data to many viewers.

Hopefully it’s something that will get sorted out soon. But I have my doubts because it appears to be bad hardware and bad decisions in the Virginmedia network itself. Proxy servers are Bad News.

Ok – time to end the whinge …

I’ve stuck with Virginmedia this long because the service has given near 100% availability. It’s almost unheard of for the connection to go down. Sure, bandwidth throttling is annoying but even when that kicks in the connection is faster than the typical ADSL line.

And it was nice to get a shiny new wifi modem router (most capable piece of kit in my network right now), all for free. But it would be even nicer if I didn’t have to click the Youtube videos back to 480p (which works ok) within a minute or five of starting to watch every single video.

Definitely not ready for going back to work tomorrow.

I’m well rested, sure … but I’d like to be in better condition than I am right now.

I have improved (I think!) since starting to avoid orange/citrus from Thursday but … Still got the damaged bits and areas that look like I’ve been dragged around at high speed by something going over concrete. Yep. Still a bit sore.

I think I was on to something with the citrus but then again, I’ve said that before. I don’t think it’s a problem solely with wheat, or I’d have still been worsening seeing as I’ve not gone totally away from wheat. The anti-biotics haven’t completely got rid of the problem, although I think I needed them anyway to clear out some nasties. (Lost a couple more pounds too). One correlation with citrus is that I had quite a few glasses of orange juice on one of the occasions when my breathing flared up.

My breathing hasn’t completely cleared, although it has improved. I suspect the dusty environment here might be contributing to that problem. My left ear has improved though, although it still looks nasty. Right eye’s still poorly though. I can see just fine, it’s just the skin underneath the eye.

It is having an effect though, under the skin. Kinda like being bored of it now and wanting the problem to go away. It’s been with me for far too long now and it’s depressing to think I may have made it worse by going on the orange juice. Since coming off that, the road rash seems to be reducing although I do need to help myself out by not poking at it all the time.

Hopefully time will tell. Or I’ll be back at the doctor’s place before too long hoping for more answers.

We shall see.

What else have I been up to this week ?

Music. Lots of it. Itunes tells me that since escaping work on the 12th, I’ve listened to 1159 tracks, at least once. And I’m listening to more now 🙂 I’ve added a huge amount to the library lately and I’m not quite through listening to it all yet. Still another 131 tracks to go, including the whole of the new Bat For Lashes album.

It’s currently the Torchlight II original soundtrack, which they made available for free a little while ago. It’s not bad, it’s atmospheric like most soundtracks. Can’t say I’ll get the game, I got the first and didn’t play all the way through the storyline.

Gaming. Not done as much of this as I thought I might. I dunno. Games just aren’t grabbing my attention like they used to. I’m enjoying watching people play games more than I’m enjoying the games myself these days. I’m 10 hours into the new XCom game but haven’t felt the urge to go back in. Perhaps I’m on too easy a difficulty level as it doesn’t seem to be challenging. Perhaps I’m comparing the new constricted maps to the earlier randomly generated massive maps.

I’ve mostly been FTL’ing – great game. I’ve beaten that game once but not for a little while. Now there’s challenge, with a lot of fairness alongside too. If you’re interested in the genre and haven’t checked it out yet, here’s another link. It’s definitely my Game Of The Year.

So if not gaming, what have I filled the hours with ?

Lots of telly, lots of book.

I’ve managed to catch up enough on the telly treadmill (what comes from recording 3x 1 hour episodes per weekday for later watching) that I can be a little more relaxed about watching it without running out of space :-). Walking Dead had a promising start to its third season and Hunted is not too shabby.

Bookwise, I’ve read the whole of The Hydrogen Sonata by Iain M Banks. Not quite sure what to make of that one. It’s not his best Culture novel, that’s either Excession or Surface Detail. There’s a hefty case of So What ? in here. But – it’s a pretty decent book nonetheless and doesn’t take away from the Culture sequence the way Matter did.

I’m now back to Lucifer’s Hammer. I’ve read that one before but it’s a high enough quality book that I’m happily reading it again.

And … where exactly did I leave Lucifer’s Hammer ? Oh – the comet had struck and the Chinese and Russians have wiped each other out with nuclear fire and it’s over to the Americans to keep things going. Watch out for cannibals …

It's an intriguing start … (I'm at page 153)

I have a feeling that the start is scene setting for later.

I'm coming up to half way through Hydrogen Sonata. Haven't quite made my mind up yet……..

What’s that mean exactly ?

I’m coming to the end of the antibiotics period … Just 4 more pills (1 day’s worth) to go. Still have lots of the cream but I think my body is repairing on its own now.

However …

I still have the breathing issues (although they’ve not been as bad as when I made the connection to white bread). And, the broken skin that was originally just on my legs spread to my arms (and other places) as well.

How is it actually doing though ? As well as patches on my legs, I got patches on my arms as well. They’re pretty much cleared up, although there’s still time to come in finishing off the healing. I’m down to just 3 bad patches that I’m worried about, unfortunately 2 are in visible places … (under right eye, left ear is a mess). But, the patches are healing on their own now and most parts of my skin are so smooth you’d think I had someone rubbing in the oil. (Sadly not – lol)

Aside – knock at the door … STUFF ! I had got 200 pages into Lucifer’s Hammer by Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle but that’s being set aside for a while because … that knock is the Postman with my copy of Hydrogen Sonata, the new Iain M Banks Culture novel. I’ll enjoy that one 🙂

Yep. Been reading again. After 10 hours fighting the aliens, I’ve not gone back in. I’ve played one or two other games since but to be honest, games aren’t really satisfying the Do Something itch right now. And I’ve since finished off Firefox (seen the film a bunch of times, read the book twice now) and got the 200 pages into Lucifer’s Hammer. I left the Niven/Pournelle novel last night right as things are set to kick off with a comet about to make a mess of Planet Earth.

But back to healthy stuff.

I know I’m allergic to at least one thing in my diet. I suspect I was on to something with the wheat allergy. I think the trigger for my skin to get smoother was stopping the white bread. But it’s not just the white bread which I’m allergic to. If it was, my breathing would have cleared up. It hasn’t.

So then the mind goes to “why has my breathing worsened over the last few months ?” And that’s about when the new diet started. What’s the components ?

Orange juice – this has been in the diet steadily as a prime cause of Vitamin C. I’ve been having half a litre a day since starting again.
Apples – started after a little while. I’m on one or two a day.
Lettuce – with the sandwiches at work and occasionally at home.
MultiVitamin pills – as a baseline

I can eliminate the lettuce, as I’ve not had any since Thursday last week and I’m still wheezing. Hopefully it’s not the apples or the multivitamin pills. Although I’m not sure there’s much in multivitamins to trigger allergies. That puts the suspicion on the orange juice … And going Internet Doctor again :

The tummy symptoms don’t match but nasal congestion, angioedema, itching in throat & palate, skin rash, wheezing & difficult breathing and cough all do. Before the diet shift, the problem was just restricted to my legs. Now, it’s general hypersensitivity all over.

What am I going to do ? I’m going to cut orange juice again for a little while and fall back on those multivitamins to provide that baseline part of the diet. If that doesn’t work, I’ll have to cut the apples which will be a shame cos I’ve been munching those instead of biscuits. Which is far healthier. If it is citrus, I’ll find something else to drink to give part of that 5 a day.

Wait.

What am I doing ?

All this self analysis and Internet Doctoring ? It’s taking time away from reading Hydrogen Sonata !!!!

Or in my case, 6am.

Oops.

My daily cycle is more like 26 hours instead of the normal 24 … Dunno why that is but on a normal work day, it feels like I’m wide awake and could go for another 2 hours come midnight. That makes it really awkward for getting the sleep to get me through the next day.

(There’s an answer – and it’s hidden somewhere in the coffee jar)

Anyway, in a working week, it doesn’t mean much as I keep to the work-home cycle. I aim to get in around 9am, which means legging it around 5pm. Or whenever I get done what needs to be done – flexi time can be wonderful for gaining credit in the week to be burned on legging it home at lunchtime (ish) on a Friday.

Of course, when I’m on leave that work-home cycle isn’t acting like a 24 hour anchor. I have to be careful or I drift into getting up when it’s dark. Ok, maybe not that extreme but 6am was pushing it. And I could have kept going too :-).

The reason ?

I’m saving the planet at the moment. One antique game I still pull out occasionally is called UFO Enemy Unknown. It dates all the way back to 1994 and was one of those rare perfect (outside of bugs!) fusions of tactical and strategic gameplay. I think I’ve written a few things about it in the past. Everything it tried to do, it did perfectly. That’s a mistake a lot of games make, they try to do too much and botch up parts of what they try (Mass Effect 3’s quest log is a key feature but broken).

So – UFO. It’s one of those rare games that draws you in and can genuinely terrify you. The strategic element includes keeping track of your soldiers. They’re not faceless, they grow with you as you go through the game. You kinda get attached to them too. But … this is UFO, it’s a very brutal game. The balance between firepower and defence is very heavily in favour of firepower. Combine that with close quarter arenas where the aliens can pop out of nowhere with little warning, bite your best soldier and turn them into another alien.

Yep. It hit the spot.

So much so that even though many people have attempted the concept and not got it right, they’ve gone for a full remake under the Firaxis banner. I picked this one up on release and have put about 10 hours into it so far. Including a “just one more mission” session that ended up concluding at 5.30am today.

Brief summary of the new one ? It does less than the original. Arenas are more claustrophobic, the original game could randomly generate some humungous maps from its tileset. Squad size is a maximum of 6 instead of 26 in an Avenger. But what it does it does to a very high standard, although I’m not too sold on the panic system.

In terms of the role play aspect of getting you genuinely concerned about your guys, it has that for sure. And that’s probably enhanced by that much smaller squad size. Your people don’t get lost in the noise of their pitter-pattering feet (this really bugged Ravenwolf!), you notice them more. Right now, my squad is being led by Nat “Spider” Hart, ace sniper, while the boss Colonel Jose “Wolverine” Dominguez recovers from injury.

Here’s the squad, about to go on mission :

Sadly, it’s after I lost a few people. It’s rare that a game makes you sad for the loss of characters within but it’s a measure of success with this one that you care that your first medic died because you carelessly less them out of cover. Or your Major “Doomsday” Santiago died because you were carelessly rushing forward to try and stun aliens so you can steal their weapons to satisfy the XCom Council.

I’ve been enjoying this one so far, although I’m either being suitably cautious or I’m playing at too easy a difficulty level. If you’d like to see more, then here’s the Totalbiscuit first impressions (after being caught in the game for an 18 hour session). But beware, if you watch that video you’re highly likely to do what I did and immediately buy the game looking for a modernised version of the original.

Now then – there’s aliens out there and Col. Dominguez is telling me I’ve had enough downtime …

PS Where’s that title come from ? When I was growing up, there was this band called the K.L.F. They were insane. Completely different to pretty much anyone else out there. Ahead of their time and all that. But … can you get their music now ? Nope. And I just found out the reason – here’s their wiki page … Entire back catalogue deleted in 1992. Cor.

I’m off work for a week – hurrah !

I like to think I put a lot into work. I like to hop up my thinking to keep up with and stay ahead of what’s going on. I’m pulling in information from many sources and slotting it together in my head. And then I’m applying it to the betterment of the project, whether it be passing on information that other people need to know or distilling it down to inform line management.

Communication is key – and a big problem in most organisations is people not knowing who to talk to.

Yeah – I put a lot into work, one of the signs of that is that by the time I get home, the last thing I want to do is put too much active thought into stuff like game playing. Sure, I’ll have my head stuck in a vdu but I’m either reading stuff (info junkie strikes again) or I’ll be watching stuff.

I can survive like that for a good while but every so often, I feel the burn out approaching and need to escape for a while and chill out. I’ve been feeling that burnout lately, the symptoms are that the hyperactivity focus doesn’t last as long, attention wanders more and small irritating mistakes creep in. (Like not checking a contents list before issuing a document!)

So next week is a chill out week, which will also double as hopefully kicking the infection out of my body.

How is that doing ?

Well, after 1 week of antibiotics and occasional cream, I’m amazed at how much the patches have cleaned up. The healed patches are now incredibly smooth. My skin in general is smoother than I can remember. It’s still dry around my fingers though. So yep, antibiotics have kicked the butt of that infection.

Mostly. There are still spots that haven’t healed yet and I’m having to be careful not to do the self inflicted wound thingy again. Need to heal … There’s a spot under my right eye that’s been making people give me funny looks today and infection is still in my left earlobe. The bad breathing happened again midweek but I think that was either bugs picked up from our commercial people or possibly me needing to remove popcorn from my diet.

On the whole though ? Lots of progress. More progress than last year when there was some deep damage on my calves to heal up. But I’m hoping that it just doesn’t come right back again when the anti-biotics run out. I have another 6 days of that regime. And my breathing has recovered to the point where I can sing along to iTunes, able to keep my breathing times in the right places.

So what’s the intentions for next week ?

Well, I’m planning to do lots of watching of telly and lots of listening to music. My digital video recorder is currently showing 25 hours of space (out of 80) remaining and over the next week, I have 41 (equivalent) hours of recording scheduled … Need to clear all those Stargate SG-1 and Castle episodes to make room. Oh and by equivalent, I mean 4 hours gets taken up for each hour of HD recording.

With music, I still have 13 hours of music in the library that I haven’t listened to yet. 3 albums (Morcheeba, White Stripes and Air) joined that today, with the next Bat For Lashes album arriving on Monday.

Gaming wise, I ended up watching Totalbiscuit’s video on the new XCom game. Which was dangerous. Cos I then went out and bought the game before the video ended. Oops. Guess who will be saving the planet from alien invasion over the next week …

Wonder how long before the Cabin Fever strikes ?

PS I’ll miss the people as usual, although there aren’t as many really interesting characters upstairs as before we moved. The best ones are on Facebook 🙂