Month: January 2013

Lol – maybe sitting on the floor in "treatment mode" will mean I read some more 🙂

If you're interested in all things military – which I know you are – I have lots of military related books coming up to review (and to read) – both fiction and non-fiction. If you like that sort of thing I'm sure that you'll find something to dive into.

I don't think I'd change much if I could wind the clock back, apart from maybe getting more attention to that shoulder before it froze up too much.

Was kinda hoping for snow 🙂 But alas, it has avoided Bristol again.

To be honest, snow this time around will be “interesting” … Why’s that ? No car allowed at work (except Friday’s) and my car is allegedly not keen on ice/snow.

It’s a particularly awesome car 🙂 Definitely the best I’ve had in all respects. However, one criticism I and others have is that the traction and stability control is very aggressive in cutting power when the wheels start to slip. And when you have a powerful electric motor driving the front wheels, that can mean that the car just doesn’t move. (Allegedly)

So I’ll be at the mercy of the buses if the bad weather does come. From one point of view, that’s not bad. You’re free to abandon a bus at any time if it gets stuck in traffic or bad conditions. Means a walk but hey, I’m not that badly damaged. (I do have leg issues but they actually like some work to free them up).

Where’s the snow ? I keep an eye on http://uksnowmap.com/#/ – the UK snowmap. It collects data from a twitter channel and collates it into a map. Just one problem, I see a bunch of isolated heavy snow reports on that map right now and I have a feeling that they’re not true. Yep, you get scumbags dragging down that good thing as well as most of the other good things we still cling on to.

Other stuff – I’ve been scattered again lately. Seems like this skin thing likes to recover a bit and then get worse again. Not sure what’s triggered it off again this time, although it could be jaffa cake related. Hope not, cos jaffa cakes are a Reason To Live. Looks like I have to avoid them for a while though.

Yep. Got sore again, although I’m hoping that copious amounts of moisturizer helps out there.

With the cricket, my ears have improved to the point I can wear a helmet again. (No helmet, no batting, no cricket). But my skin is in such bad shape that it’s getting damaged very easily and it’s not repairing at all quickly. The moisturizer does seem to be helping though.

What am I up to at the moment ?

Been back at work for 8 days now, settling into more responsibility. Similar role as before but more responsibility. It may not be for too long but I’ll get as much out of it as I can.

Still catching up on all the telly recorded over the Xmas break. I did record some, even if most of it was repeats of films and documentaries. At the moment it’s a few episodes of Soviet Storm, which tells the story of WW2 on the Russian Front. Rating ? It’s worth watching for a bunch of reasons :

It’s interesting (to a military scholar)
It’s paced pretty well, keeps that interest level going
It’s detailed (15 episodes !)
It appears balanced, although you always want to see multiple sources of “truth” to check balance

And there’s that old saying “If you ignore the lessons of the past then you are doomed to repeat the mistakes”. It goes something like that. I’ve seen/read a fair bit of WW2 history for the battles we were involved with but not much for Russian, except knowing that it was as brutal as war can get.

There’s a few more things recorded aside from Soviet Storm. I thought XXX2 was possibly better than XXX1, although I won’t rush to buy either. Full Metal Jousting was a curiosity but I don’t think I’d bother with a season 2 if it gets made.

I’ve also been gaming again 🙂 That’s a mixed thing. I can get hooked into certain games, looking for a win. For a game like Moo2, that doesn’t mean any old win. It means a high scoring win. So if it’s “just a win” but I’m beaten to certain score things, I’d abandon and start again. At the moment, it’s Borderlands 2 which I’m enjoying immensely. True, I’m playing as a Mechromancer which is somewhat overpowered. However, it’s a sizable improvement on the original in a lot of ways.

Pacing – the original was a lot like the older style Massive Multiplayer Online game, especially with the grind. The new game seems to be much more focused on telling its story.
Mechanics – I dunno, these seem just “better”. But I’d struggle to define “better”. Maybe I need to play through the original.

And I have a bunch of others that appeared in the sales to check out :-). Borderlands 2 first, after a couple more Soviet Storm episodes.

The best time is always now…….. Or the future, if you have a choice…. Unless it gets *really* bad then its back to now….. [grin]

I’ve been watching the Stargazing show tonight (after getting back in from a work run down south …)

It makes you think, watching shows about science fact and astronomical exploration. There’s a lot out there just begging to be looked at. Trouble is, that’s all we can do right now for what’s outside our Solar System. We can send probes to our local neighbourhood but for everything further out from that, we’re dependent upon what we can see.

And … because that light takes a finite and deterministic time to arrive, we’re seeing the objects out there as they used to be. The Andromeda galaxy at 2.5 million light years away will be different now to what it was when the light started its travel toward us. The Stargazing programme tells us that the star Betelgeuse is expected to go supernova “tomorrow” in astronomical terms.

(tomorrow translates to sometime in the next million years)

Betelgeuse is about 640 light years away, which means it could have gone Boom already, we just haven’t seen it yet.

One curious idea is that if we ever invent Faster Than Light travel, we could Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun (spot the Pink Floyd reference) and effectively watch that Boom happen as we travel towards the star. Or, you find a star that’s recently gone supernova and travel away from it to catch the older light.

I.e. – if you can travel faster than light,
Going towards – winds the clock forward
Going away – winds the clock back

That’s beside the point though. You watch stuff like the astronomical programmes and it’s like seeing all these marvels that you can look at but never, ever touch. We don’t have the technology yet (almost certainly not in the next 100 years either) to get to other stars. Interplanetary travel sure, interstellar is a whole new ball game.

I read books like Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars, or Ben Bova’s Mars or countless other space scifi books and I think – I’d fit right in there. My brain coupled with engineering skills and technical instinct would fit right in with a permanent colonisation or just research colony expedition. And I’d have the interest to be along for the ride.

I play the games now but given the choice between gaming and reading all the nitty gritty technical bits to do with a spaceship ? Hold me back before I burn my eyes out on the manuals. But we’re not there yet, which makes me think like I’ve been born a generation or two too early.

What are the choices though ? Let’s have a look :

Present is easiest. I’ve lived through the dawn of the Technological Age and got in there really early. The tech we have available has exploded in terms of advancement over the last 100 years. We had no manned flight 150 years ago, yet this world would not work without it now. That technology fits and drives my natural aptitude.

Past is curious. I’d have been drawn to crafting and would have ended up as a blacksmith or leatherworker. Something that lets me work with tools. I don’t think I’d have lasted long though. Leaving aside the issue of my eyes (I need strong glasses to correct astygmatism), I think I’d have been tagged as one of those smart people who are too dangerous to leave alive. And my natural naive state wouldn’t have seen the axe falling.

So yeah – either burned at the stake for being a heretic or eliminated for being too smart. I don’t think much to what my prospects may have been in Medieval times.

The future is where you start looking into that crystal ball. There’s two possibilities as I see it :

Bad future – we don’t escape this planet and therefore come to an unavoidable certainty of exhausting the resources available. That’s a very dark future which will begin with wars over resources (we’ve seen that already with Iraq) with those wars descending into a stalemate. One of very few good Tom Clancy books is Red Storm Rising, which has an unwinnable East vs West war initiated by Russia needing to secure new fossil fuel reserves.

If we can’t spread past the Earth, then I can’t see the future being anything but dark. Getting out to our local solar system will buy us time, there’s huge amounts of resources out there waiting to be tapped. It’s just to difficult to get to them at the moment.

Good future – interplanetary and interstellar travel become a routine reality. This planet is too crowded already. The UK is definitely overcrowded. Interplanetary and interstellar travel will provide an escape valve to give a bit of breathing space. Trouble is, it wouldn’t be an even distribution of people leaving, it would be the best and brightest. Which leaves behind the dregs to inhabit the Earth. Heinlein used that as a minor theme in his Lazarus Long books, where the situation on Earth got worse and worse as more people left.

So that good future could actually be a dystopia. Looks good on the surface, would be good for a few but for the many it would be a nightmare.

There’s a lot of good books out there about near future Earth societies and they ask a lot of questions about the nature of humanity. What are we prepared to do to ourselves. How we behave as a group and how we like to be treated as individuals. Many of those books have small groups of powerful people behaving very poorly and large groups of individuals breaking their society through the sense of entitlement that we see coming into today’s society.

I’ll leave it there. I’m hopeful of that Good Future coming about, I just feel a little sad that I’ve been born a generation or two too early to experience it. The present has lots of technological toys but that’s what they are, just toys.

PS Living now does have its compensations, I have the pleasure to know and work with some wonderful people. Today’s work trip had the unexpected pleasure to involve the Pretty Contractor Lady. The meeting was discussing a bit of kit we’re having fitted, with the meeting discussing what will be needed to fully satisfy what we’re aiming for. Pretty Contractor Lady’s part was to establish what she’d need to present in terms of accepting that it’s done right. I’ll get something thoroughly done when the time comes 🙂
PS2 Wild Thing (someone from a few years ago!) made an appearance too the other day and said I hadn’t changed a bit. Wasn’t quite sure what to make of that 🙂

Just finished watching Mad Max 2 (Xmas film repeats and it seemed like a good idea at the time I set it to record) before turning on iTunes ahead of getting down to some gaming …

And then “I Can’t See New York” by Tori Amos starts up.

And I start singing along (you have to with that song).

And I’m thinking 03.45am No Sleep isn’t actually the best song in my library is it ? Truth.

Anyway – gaming session is going to be put one side for a while. I feel a music post coming on 🙂 What are the best songs in that there iTunes library of mine ? (One rule here – one track only by each artist)

I’ve already linked up a couple of songs. What else is lurking in that library that transcends beauty ? Here goes :

Martha’s Harbour by All About Eve. This was perhaps the very first pop group that I fell for in a big way. And their songs are still great songs today. Apple Tree Man is possibly the better track but it’s tougher to find on Youtube. Something I find highly amusing there is that I was always getting told to Turn That Music Down when I played this album as a kid, yet it’s now my dad’s favourite album.

Wait – before you start thinking it’s all softness and light, there’s beauty in metal too. Here’s Evanescence showing us how with My Immortal.

It’s not just metal though. Beauty can be lurking at the heart of even unsuspecting dance music tracks. Days Go By (Dirty Vegas) is far better in acoustic. Raise Your Weapon by deadmau5 caught my ears too.

2012 saw a lot of loved and respected people leave us, I’ve not said much about them here but they should be remembered : Prayer For The Dying, one of the best Seal tracks. All those legends will be missed.

Not going to link it but one of the albums that’s recently joined the collection is the Princess Bride soundtrack. Great film, backed up by an excellent Mark Knopfler soundtrack and the legendary line : “My name is Inigo Montoya, you killed my father, prepare to die.”

Another couple of groups I followed avidly were Voice of the Beehive and the Bangles. May I sometime be someone’s Man In The Moon looking for that Return Post.

Question – where’s all the great new music ? Most of the beauty seems to be getting hidden under XFactor wannabeism, which squeezes out the Hannah Peels and Lisa Hannigans coming through singing Songs For The Sea and for Little Birds. There’s only been 3 albums so far between those two, which is far too few.

One of my early internet pseudonyms, adopted when the spammers started to show, was Alisha’s Addict. I was besotted with the music of Alisha’s Attic for a long time (still am) and would struggle to pick their most beautiful, they’re all special. Here’s one I don’t think I’ve linked before : Air We Breathe.

Think my laptop’s starting to struggle now with all this Youtube playing (at the same time as the Baldur’s Gate II soundtrack is streaming from iTunes!) so let’s close off with one final track before it burns up : Snow Patrol Set Fire To The Third Bar.

PS Wot no Kate Bush or Bat For Lashes ? Think I feel another one of these coming when this laptop cools down 🙂

… deflating sales …

December and January are the big sales times over in the UK. It’s when most of the shops will try and tempt us into parting with our cash by giving good offers.

Apart from Steam and Good Old Games sales, I’ve been fairly restrained this time around. Sales aren’t so much about offerring what we want to buy for less, it’s about clearing the unwanted stock to make room for the new stuff. With software like games and music, the stock issue is fairly irrelevant. When you buy something off Steam or GOG, a copy is made of what’s held on the server. There’s no box to keep on the shelf, the only cost is bandwidth. But they’ll do the big offers just to attract sales.

And because they don’t have the need to clear out the old stock, Steam and GOG will give offers on what the customers want to buy but aren’t willing to fork out the full price for.

I’ve been very restrained so far with sales on actual goods. It seems like what I want to get isn’t what the retailers want to buy. I’ve not detected any worthwhile discounts for PC steering wheels or powerline networking gear, so those have stayed unsold. I’m not convinced they’re worth the money for a non-essential. Apple did have a sale but it was a rather insulting 5% only reduction at the US Thanksgiving holiday and it didn’t include their iPhone.

Part of sales is detecting “what will the market bear ?” If the market doesn’t think they’re getting value, they avoid the product. I have all of Garbage’s albums except their latest, I refuse to spend >£10 on what’s now a old album. However, part of that value is perceived in the brand name which is why Apple in particular can charge the prices that they do. They don’t need to offer big discounts because people will buy their stuff anyway.

Or will they ?

Inside this month, I’ll switch my Android mobile to an iPhone. Note that there will have been discounts on the competition … because if all smartphones cost nothing, all the people interested in them would get the iPhone because the software is better. (Software prejudice excepted of course!) However, I’m still not convinced on the Value part of it. I’d still be getting my iPhone via my current network (3) and the prices would be :

iPhone 4s – 16GB only : £29 upfront plus £32 per month
iPhone 5 – 16GB : £99 upfront plus £34 per month
iPhone 5 – 32GB : £199 upfront plus £34 per month
iPhone 5 – 64GB : £269 upfront plus £34 per month

I’d love the 64GB iPhone because it’s the one that would hold my entire iTunes library (42GB across 7808 songs). But I baulk at that pricetag. £269 is a lot for a phone, at least in my opinion. So I’m faced with a choice of either spending more cash than I’d like to (I can afford it, I just don’t see the value) or downselecting tunes from the library like I do with my iPod Nano.

In this case, the market (me!) ain’t bearing the cost of the most expensive version. And there’s another cost that I’m not prepared to bear any more …

Canteen at work has put all of its prices up. Which seems counterproductive as people will start bringing in stuff from the outside more. I definitely will be. What’s gone up ?

Milk – 60p for 1 pint, up from 50p.
Sandwiches – now £2.40+30p for lettuce when it used to be £2.10+30p.
Pepsi – up by 5p to £1.15
Chocolate – up by 5p across the board.
Teacake – up by a whopping 30p to 80p

It’s the teacake inflation that’s really got me upset. My response to the inflation will be to look at alternatives to the canteen. I’d usually get my lunch on a Friday from the canteen and take it home – not any more. The car park situation means I can go past a shop on the way to the bus, so I can save cash there by buying the milk at that shop instead of the canteen.

What’s it actually mean though ? £2.40 per day times 5 = £12 a week I’d spend on sandwiches (plus chocolate + drink). Now it’ll be £2.70 per day times 4 = £10.80 a week.

They might be getting a little more profit per sandwich but they’ll be getting less cash overall. If customers get upset they’ll move on.

PS I didn’t get my iPhone last night when I visited the 3 shop at the Mall … Phoneshop Girl didn’t seem too interested in persuading me into buying one … I suspect that’s because I walked in at almost 8, which I think is close to their hometime. But it does mean I’ll check out the stores in the centre of Bristol before going back to the one in the Mall.
PS2 I will buy stuff if smiled at by Pretty Ladies … but only if I intended to buy it anyway ! (That’s what happened with the Npower Girl – honest)