Author: Sleepypete

I did an upgrade today that I’ve been putting off for a little bit too long …

Earlier in the week, I went eek as my machine finally ran out of space while doing a Windows update. Ok, not totally out of space but it ran out of room on the disc that Windows is on. What’s in my machine at the moment ?

C: drive – is the one that Windows is on. This used to be on a 60GB Solid State Device drive which really wasn’t big enough for Windows 7. C: is the one that has been upgraded.
E:, F: and G: drives are the drives from my old Windows XP system. I can’t quite remember why I split them up, probably because I was thinking about having a peek at Linux again …
B: and H: drives are a newer large normal hard disc. H: is where my games and most of the data goes.

How come it’s like that ? It’s an artifact of conditions in the world when I was building this machine which got called Pumpkin due to the date when it was put together. (Here’s the post !) Basically, there was massive flooding in Thailand where the hard disc manufacturing plants were. This drove the supply down massively and with demand staying the same, the prices went up massively. It took a good few months before I could acquire that B/H drive (was actually one I spotted on discount when Best Buy’s abortive attempt at competing with PC World went belly up!).

So I built Pumpkin with one of these new SSDs for speed and as big an SSD as I could afford at the time. Only 60GB but that should really be big enough. I’ve said before a few times that SSDs are fast – they are basically fast Flash drives. They have a number of advantages of the old spinning rust drives :

They don’t care where the data is;
Data can be fragmented and the drive doesn’t care;
They can get to the data incredibly quicking;
And chuck the data out much faster than the rest of the computer can typically handle it.

The only disadvantage they have is size. Now that prices have stabilised again, you get far more storage on a conventional drive than an SSD. Here’s the comparison (from Novatech) at the £80ish price point :

2.5″ laptop drive from Western Digital – 1TB – £79.
3.5″ desktop drive from Western Digital – 3TB – £83.
2.5″ SSD from Kingston – 256GB – £83.

Yep. In the same sized package, a conventional drive can hold four times as much data and a medium sized but very slow looking desktop drive can hold 12 times as much. So you put the part that depends most on speed on the SSD and put the data on the conventional drive. Sometimes, you put applications (games!) on the SSD too for better performance when they load in new bits. Most of the time, that doesn’t matter but where the scenery changes often, it helps to have faster load times.

Today’s latest bit of brain surgery was to switch out that 60GB drive for a much bigger 250GB drive. It feels weird looking over to a drive monitor I have to see 164GB spare, instead of the tiny 5-7GB spare. Due to the wastefulness of modern software, I was having to continually manage the garbage that people like nVidia (1.5GB in unwanted driver downloads going back almost a year) litter up the machine with.

Anyway – too much geekery ! How about the dusty bits ?

It can be a bit cramped in a PC. In mine, the SSD lives in the bottom right corner, screwed to the bottom of the case. There are two leads that have to plug into it and the current SATA connection isn’t the most robust connection you could wish for. (Translation – it’ll fall out of the socket at the slightest excuse).

One thing that has helped is that the new sound arrangements mean I don’t pull the speakers off the desk when I move the machine. I can plug everything in where I have better access and then move it back to where it lives. This is really handy when things don’t go as you expect. (Case in point, I had to tweak something to make it go.

Machine has changed over the years to being a bit of a FrankenPumpkin. It’s still ok inside and works really well still but over the years :

Power supply – replaced.
Graphics card – replaced twice.
Sound – had to go to a sound card because the original silently went boom.
Screen – don’t think I’ve replaced this … yet ! (it’s on the list)
Hard disc – now on its fourth … None have gone bang, it’s just natural evolution.
Processor, case, memory and cooling – still the same (Intel i5-2500K, 8GB memory)

It’s still coping remarkably well. I don’t notice any significant frame rate drops in Elite (frame drops are where the machine can’t keep up so it cheats by making the screen updates less frequent) and I’ve avoided the recent games that really push the system. (Cos I’m not interested in the Far Cry’s, the Just Cause 3’s and the other half baked ideas that I find don’t actually work well as a game).

I do wonder where we are going with our IT though. It seems as if the software people are increasing in incompetence and in a plan to wrest control of our machines away from us. They are needing to fund a business model that started breaking when IT got to a point where people simply didn’t need to upgrade any more. The PC market is collapsing right now due to this. Apple seemed like a good alternative, except that since the death of Steve Jobs, they have forgotten that they used to make strong software for users. It’s gone back to them imposing bad design on those users. Things like me refusing to update to iTunes 11 or 12 because I think the interface is an abomination. I think we’re just going past the point where buying Apple is a sensible proposition. Microsoft with Ribbon Office, similarly an abomination.

And the software companies impose these changes upon us through cutting the backwards compatibility. Gamers like me had to ditch Windows XP because newer games could not support it. We are seeing that again with Windows 10 where games like Quantum Break are Windows 10 only. I can’t run games like Elite or even the very simple (graphically) Darkest Dungeon on my Macbook Air because I am refusing to update the OS.

Personally, I’m hoping that this machine stays viable for a little while longer. It amazes me that a 4.5 year old processor is still up to the job of playing modern games. That comes from living in a time when you’d be replacing the engine of a machine maybe every 2 years because it couldn’t keep up with the developments in hardware. Graphics have advanced, to the point where my R9 380 card is more than 4 times as capable as my old GeForce 760 card. But that’s through massive parallelism (thousands of simple processors doing simple sums) giving power through scale.

We’ll see where things go ! I doubt whether the software situation is going to improve at all though while the software companies are looking out for their own interests (making sure we buy again after 3 years of ownership) instead of just making good software.

I wonder if FrankenPumpkin will last until they stop doing updates for Windows 7 in perhaps 4 years ? Maybe. Until then,

I must try to keep all the right bits in all the right places …

Cya !
PS the upgrade seems to be working … making another tweak (56GB of Windows became 68GB when I turned compression off) has taken away some of the “Machine Is Working” type pauses I was seeing. Good times !
PPS There is a third type of hard disc, called a hybrid drive. £77 will get you a 1TB Hybrid drive, which will give a very appreciable smoothness boost on a Windows laptop. Worth a peek, although you’ll need a widget and software like the highly recommended (by me cos I’ve painlessly used it twice) Acronis TrueImage to switch the drives over.

Here’s something I’ve wanted to natter about for a while …

Hybrids and racing cars ! Technically they’re the same thing now in Formula 1 and the Le Mans cars, although not quite as hybrid as the road car I have at the moment. First … a few myths to dispel.

And a picture of the Shiny thing. (My parking is still about the same as in pic).

Myth – Hybrids are slow. Haha, not any more they’re not ! As well as giving lots of mpgs, they pack quite a punch on the acceleration. My IS is a bit tubby compared to the other cars I’ve owned but it can go 50 to 70 when overtaking before it has got level with the car in front. The electric motor gives them quite some welly.

Numbers – the quickest car I had before was a Focus ST170 with 170bhp and 170lbsft of torque. The bhp says how fast it can go but is largely irrelevant after that. When you’re going quickly, that’s when the air drags the car backwards. You need a certain amount of power to maintain the speed, to balance that drag force. And that drag increases with the square of speed. Torque is the acceleration force, it’s what makes the car go really quick and determines that ease of driving thing that lets you maintain a speed despite the road going up or down.

The IS300h I have now has a 180 bhp engine with 160lbsft of torque. So about even on the engine. (Actually thought it had more torque but it is set up for economy !). The motors put in 143 bhp and 220 lbsft of torque. You don’t get Engine + Motor power though because they give their best at different speeds. They say 220bhp for the combined, which is plenty fast enough especially when you compare the mpgs to the old Focus (45 min compared to 26-30) and the emissions cost (£10 per year compared to I think £250).

Myth – You need to change the battery.

Nope ! There are allegedly Prius hybrid taxis going strong with almost half a million miles on the clock. How do they do this ? You know how laptop batteries die quick but mobile phone batteries last pretty well ? There are two danger points for batteries where damage can happen :

Battery too full – they heat up when you try and squeeze too many Joules (it’s a unit of energy) into them, which is why phone chargers have intelligence built in that drops the charging rate when topping off. The heat is what damages the battery.
Battery empty – when this happens, the electrolyte (the chemical soup that is the bit that makes it a battery) starts dropping chemical crud onto the electrodes (the metals that take the charge from the electrolyte and send it to the bit that needs power).

Both cases steadily make the battery less efficient, to the point where you unplug that laptop and it instantly dies despite the battery claiming to be 100%.

The Toyota/Lexus hybrid system deals with this by putting a few limits on the system :
Battery limits – not too full, not too empty. The engine will come on to recharge the battery when it gets to about 20% and the system will go to the mechanical brakes when the battery gets too full. Still, hilly country can be a bit of a challenge for it.
Current limits – this is the rate at which power goes into and out of the battery. Too much and it can cause damage, so the system limits the current until everything is at the right temperatures*.

*(This isn’t just a hybrid thing, that Focus ST took away maybe half the engine power while it warmed up).

That said, I don’t know how the other manufacturers manage it on their cars.

You need to plug them in right ?

Depends on the car. My car doesn’t have a plug. The battery recharges on soft braking and from the engine. I couldn’t actually get a fully electric plug in car because I don’t have a garage to hide the car in. And I definitely wouldn’t recommend trailing a 13 amp lead from house to car ! Nah, I plug mine into the petrol station like most other cars :-).

They’re too quiet and a hazard in car parks !

With respect, this is more about those people who don’t look where they’re going in car parks and blame their inattention on other things. Most modern cars are near silent these days, you hear the tyres on the road more than the engine.

They are quiet – but people in car parks really need to be using their eyes as well as their ears and the people who complain “Your car is too quiet!” were usually not paying attention.

Myth – the gearboxes are bad !

The Toyota/Lexus system is a Continually Variable Transmission (CVT). Instead of having ratios set by cogs with certain amounts of teeth, the gear ratio changes according to what you’re asking the car to do. This can lead to odd things happening with the engine revs where the engine revs go high without much apparent effect in acceleration. Yeah, I see this sometimes. And then I switch into Sport mode and go ZOOM.

I actually quite like the CVTs. They use what the car has to the optimum. I thought my CT was a bit lacking in outright power but if you asked it to go, it gave you all it had. The ST would quite often bog down where it was trapped in a rev range where the engine had minimal power. The ST also suffered from a big gap between 2nd and 3rd gear too. If you ask for economy, it will make the engine spin as slowly as it can get away with for cruise mode. If you ask for speed, it’ll give you everything its got.

And that goes for the conventionally powered cars which have CVTs too. Drive one, see what you think of it. Test out the throttle response, see how it reacts.

Hmm – any more myths … I may come back to that.

I would heavily recommend hybrid cars. As long as you get one that is worth it for power (Prius Gen 3, Lexus CT) and meets that magic 10 seconds to 60 figure (for flexibility in the car, not for being a speed demon), then you get driving flexibility, low emissions (for that road tax) and can get great economy too. Wins all round. Oh and you get the novelty of hearing the engine of the car next to you at the lights and not your own. Some of the systems aren’t as good though, balances of 200 bhp engine and 40bhp motor aren’t useful in my opinion.

Racing cars ?

That’s the Audi that will challenge hard at this year’s Le Mans. It’s a full hybrid, where the engine will be off when it enters the pits. The commentators regularly comment on how eerie it is to see these 240mph beasties roll along in silence.

Not quite as exotic as the Formula 1 cars though. These have a couple of motors …

Electric braking assist – MGU-K, which charges up the battery when the car brakes.
Turbo generator – MGU-H, which works with the turbo.

The MGU-H is the exciting technology, although I’m not quite sure how it would help a road car …

What’s a turbo ? An engine works best when a set ratio of air and fuel is burned together. Too much or too little of either and it doesn’t run well and you can only fit so much in the cylinders. Bigger engines give more power but they’re also far less efficient. But what if you can get the big engine effect from a more efficient engine ?

Enter the turbo. These work by getting more air in, compressing it down. Higher pressure means more oxygen to burn and if you put more fuel in too, your little engine works like a big one. If you take a 1 litre engine and double the pressure of the air going into it, it’s the equivalent of a 2 litre engine.

It does this by spinning up a turbine that works off the engine exhaust. But there is a cost here, it takes a bit of time to spin up the turbo as the exhaust pressure builds, which can lead to unpredictable behaviour …

The Formula 1 system eliminates that turbo lag by having a motor generator. When there is no exhaust pressure, the motor spins the turbo up so the power is instantly available. When the engine is going Fast, the turbo helps charge the battery which they use as “deployment” to boost them from 200mph to 220mph on the faster straights.

That’s the exciting bit … but the F1 people are showing that it’s a really difficult system to master. They have different aims though. A road hybrid is about cruising along using the energy store to even out the drive. A race car hybrid is about max power as much as possible.

I think I’ve rambled on enough for today – I hope I didn’t descend into engineering geekery too much ! Here’s the summary :

Hybrids – the way of the future.
Battery only cars – maybe a bit of a dead end until the infrastructure catches up.
Turbo assisted hybrids – very interesting technology …

Oh and for the curious – the power of a F1 or WEC hybrid motor assist … is about the same as what the Toyota/Lexus motor gives. Think about that when someone says the hybrids are slow :-).

I’ve been doing that flying round the galaxy thing again.

Ok, maybe not the epic trips that you can do in Elite but still bouncing around human space a fair bit. The area populated in the game is actually quite small compared to the rest of our galaxy …

(click for bigger and legibility of words …)

The populated zone is in the bottom right, with top left showing the centre of the galaxy. Our Milky Way is about 75,000 light years from one side to the other and we are 26,500 light years away from the supermassive black hole at its centre. The “bubble” as it’s called is maybe 500 light years across. Small by galactic standards but still plenty big enough for the players flying their internet spaceships within it.

Wonder how big the Eve universe is in comparison ? (Answer according to wiki is about 7,800 systems to play in).

The difference with the Eve universe is that Eve doesn’t have the vast size of the rest of the galaxy to play with past the systems in the game. I’ve been to the galactic centre once and at some point, I’ll disappear around the galaxy. One of the other places on the “I’ve been there !” list is Beagle Point, the farthest system from our own solar system. I understand there’s not actually much there but there’s a certain explorer’s instinct cutting in there.

As in all things in this life, you do need to focus on what you’re actually doing though. One lesson I’ve learned and tried to take to heart (and then totally ignore!) is to have one aim and maintain energies towards that aim. So in the game, I’m ignoring the money making, putting off the exploring until later, avoiding combat (takes time!) and staying away from the various Community Goals that go towards getting players together in one place.

Nah – I’m all about that ranking up. You see to get this :

(Imperial Cutter, I’ve posted the pic before)

You need to grind out the ranking points. There are 14 of these for each faction, each needing a little more for each level. My Commander Iceangel is currently at rank 9, or Count and going up steadily through philanthropic efforts … To get the Cutter, I’ll need to go up to rank 12, Duke. Duke Captain Iceangel ? Don’t mind if I do.

The Commander name comes from my Warcraft mage and I’ve kept using it because I think it sounds pretty good as game names go. My Eve pilot was called Keela Danne, which started out as one of those inspired (by the dice!) completely randomly generated names for a D and D cleric. I enjoyed playing Keela. She was a kick ass girlie who kept her party of adventurers alive through praying to a loving goddess. (In the table top game). Bit naive maybe but that’s all part of the fun.

Anyway – there are various ways to get those ranking points via lots of different missions. What I’ve found most effective actually is just sitting with Elite going in the background with me alt+tabbing back to it every 10 minutes or so when the missions update. And then I’ll contribute a bit more to the charities in the game (“Help us repair our station in the name of the Emperor” – don’t mind if I do) for about half a % point of rank.

The sad thing is that this actually seems quicker than ferrying cargo around for said Empire, although it costs you a little money instead of gaining it.

And it lets me do other stuff as well – watch things, definitely listen to music (next album – Charango by Morcheeba), read stuff and generally chill out. It does mean I’m looking at this view a fair bit :

(That’s Medupe City in Cubeo, it’s proving to be a good spot). When I’m not out and about in the galaxy drinking in the light of the eternal suns as my ship drinks in the hydrogen fuel that makes it go :

It is a pretty game is it not ? (I wonder where that solar flare is going !)

I wonder how long it will take to get that Cutter while I’m technically not actually playing the game ? We shall see. As of the last check, I am 10% through Count, having started this tactic at 65% Viscount (the rank below) yesterday. It seems to be doing pretty well while I do other stuff.

And that is … watching other people play games ! I know. Bit strange but I find it relaxing, amusing, somewhat compelling. Oh, one person has commented that the tactic is good for things like housework too. One mission, more housework while the missions refresh. Repeat.

See ! Games can be a force for good.

Honest.

Cya !

Someone lovely sent me this pic yesterday :

Love it.

But how about dem stickers ? How do they fit into Life Of Sleepy ?

I put away the Launndry. I have to admit. This doesn’t happen too often. I leave everything hanging on the radiators and in the airing cupboard until I want to use it. (This would change if it wasn’t just me living here). It’s partly down to me having probably a few too many Things than I have space to put them. I should look at thinning out the t-shirt collection a bit, keep the awesome, get rid of the mundane. As for doing the laundry, I do mine on the Friday or early Saturday so it has a chance to dry over the weekend. Very important to have those dry, clean shirts and trousers for work !

Sparkly things are awesome.
(Sometimes mundane is good though because sometimes you need something plain).

“I wore a bra today” – nah. Hopefully this will never happen, outside of doing something for fun. I would totally be up for going in drag if it were for a good cause. Although I do need to lose some weight. I’m not obese but I am overweight. I’m a fair bit over my ideal weight for the activity I’m doing at the moment and it causes a complication or two. I suspect my loss of sleep due to too much acid is down to being overweight.

On other people’s weight – you should be exactly the weight that you are comfortable and confident at. I know some big people who rock that size. I knew some thin people who are really desperate to get the curves. Be who you are meant to be, whether that is tall, short, wide or thin. Own it and the confidence you have in yourself will make you stunning.

“I didn’t spend all my money” – but not for lack of window shopping … Let’s see. Things on my I Want That list at the moment :
Tickets for Silverstone – both the endurance cars and Formula 1.
Tickets for Le Mans endurance cars. Entry to the circuit is cheap for endurance cars and extortionate daylight robbery for Formula 1 but I would like to do it again some time. Le Mans would be an epic trip. But … it can be better to (half!) watch these things on the telly and get the full story, rather than the filtered down scope you get from being there.

Lego ! All the Lego ! I’d love a Millenium Falcon, which would get made into an Elite Anaconda.

(picture courtesy of the Twitter people)

That’s a pipedream although getting the Lego Le Mans Technic car to build while the 24 hour race is on is a definite possibility. Only £80 from Argos …

I’ll regularly look up the music people and the games too to investigate adding more goodies to the libraries. But I resist spending the money if I think the price is too high. So although I think her voice is amazing, the Lisa Miskovsky albums are staying on the shelf at £8.

“Almost made it to the gym today” – I’ve never been one for training. In fact, when I did do regular training, I gained nothing in terms of stamina and lost ever inkling of my extreme running speed. I’m like Ledley King, a footballer who played for Spurs. He couldn’t train because his knees were too fragile but was able to maintain a level of fitness and skill that let him stay in the first team.

I was a bit like that with the cricket. Using a bike*, doing a paper round and a lot of walking kept me fit enough to have a baseline I found acceptable for the cricket. And then I’d get match fit and up to skill levels during pre season practice. Cricket fit me really well because I could recover from puffing and wheezing during the reset between balls.

*a funny story from uni is that during the off season, I was cycling into uni every day. I gained stomach muscles. I’d never had them before !!! Awesome ! But come preseason training, I literally could not bowl the ball in the net. It was going everywhere !!! These stomach muscles that I’d never had before were triggering completely at random and throwing me off. Awkward …

There we go folks – training can be bad.

“I didn’t eat all of the chips” – I actually didn’t yesterday and I won’t tonight. HAHA 🙂 But only because last night was a raiding of the Chinese and tonight will be a pasta bake. No chips in there :-).

(and now I’m madly chuckling at getting that badge in completely the wrong way)

Last one ! “I didn’t hit snooze today”.

Ok, I did actually, all 3 working days so far this week. Except it’s a snooze that keeps the radio on instead of turning it off. I’m weird (you knew that already!), I seem to find it easier to get rest in the morning in the hour or so before getting ready to work, than in the hours after you go to bed.

I need to find that Switch Brain Off And Find The ZZZzzz’s mental programme again.

Closing time ! I just spotted this on Facebook too, which I also found pretty funny 🙂

Hahaha. Spiders are evil. I am scared witless in the time between it roaming free, when I catch it in a trap and when I manage to evict it outside. Especially the spiders that are bigger than the spider trap.

Shudder !

I enjoyed my stickers, I hope you did too !

Yep.

Friday’s post was my second (hopefully annual) April Fools post. I do need to work on my ideas though, because the best April Fool is the one that you could believe as being absolutely true. It gets its own legs and people run with the seed that’s been planted. This one was the kind of spur of the moment inspiration that comes from random brain cells being hit by cosmic rays. Yep. The weird ones.

The same lovely person has given me an idea for next year’s which will take some activity from me over this one as I make notes to prepare for it. Not saying what it is ! Hmm. Come to think of it, that idea probably has potential to be short story or book material. Especially if I make notes over a whole year.

I did want to explain the various references from Friday … That’s something I’ll do and I will usually be so subtle about the references that no one actually gets them. Oops !

People looking from the sky or hits being registered without a country of origin. I have 2 ways of seeing who is visiting, one is our dear fiend Google and the other is statcounter. Statcounter gives a lot of info, which is why I have the stats hidden behind a password. But statcounter gets it wrong, if I look at this blog from my laptop, statcounter will claim I am 50 miles away in Cheltenham. Google gives very little info and it is aggregated together so it is tough to pull out individual visits.

Sometimes hits come in where Google can’t identify the point of origin. Hence people looking at me from the sky, or cloud. (There’s actually a name reference too there and it’s about the person who sparked the idea for the whole post !)

The orientation centre was a bridge, to start the narrative part of the post. But the simulacrum is an idea from an old film called The Last Starfighter, where an arcade game machine expert was whisked away to fight a war and a pretender left in his place. You could say that The Last Starfighter inspired a lot of the content.

Cybo Homo Arcturan Variant – ah ha ! Death to CHAVs ! In this case Cybernetic Bipeds (Homo as in sapiens or neanderthal) from Arcturus who are strange. Yes. I was kinda struggling to come up with words for the acronym.

I do hope you remember where the quote “Never give up, never surrender!” came from. Same film as Grabthar and his hammer by which you shall be avenged. It’s a work of genius called Galaxy Quest which I definitely have to watch again. It shares a fair bit with the April Fool actually, as it involves people being brought from Earth to fight an alien race’s war.

Federation and replicated food is from … you hopefully guessed it … Star Trek. I wonder what replicated food would taste like, can’t possibly be more than the sum of its parts effectively 3d printed into munchies.

The 1812 buggy robot is from Farscape and is a DRD (Diagnostic Repair Droid). The one in the pic is one renamed 1812 by the central character, John Crichton, due to circumstances between season 3 and 4. It’s a cracking series, it had me from the opening scenes to its shocking conclusion at the end of series 4. Yes. I too shouted at the telly “You can’t end it like that !”. Yep. Shocked. And that doesn’t happen too often with me and telly (ok, BSG season 1 conclusion did it too).

In the opening scenes to Farscape, our human astronaut is brought on board a ship. A living ship. Full of strange alien life forms. Help me. Listen please. Is there anyone out there who can help me ? Oops. Caught in that intro again. It was a great start to every episode. Anyway, when he was brought on board, the aliens were talking in their own languages and speaking forms which we wouldn’t even recognise as language. A DRD jabs Crichton and injects translator microbes, which instantly solves the common scifi trope of “Why does everyone speak in English ?”

Farscape had a lot going for it.

Spaceship and the gif come from the Lego Movie, which was an absolute classic. Hopefully the forthcoming Lego Batman movie (trailered before Batman vs Superman !) will approach its level of classicness. “Everything is awesome if you’re part of a team” comes from the Lego movie too.

Pilot engineer is all me. Although I will admit that the stormtrooper joke comes from a series of films, of which number 7 I am looking forward to watching again the day it comes out on bluray.

When I got to Cogs, I was starting to get a little silly. I wanted a pet to have with us. Robot dogs didn’t really make sense, although Rabbit was a good microcharacter in the original Battlestar Galactica.

Medical technology and the limbs ? Oh – not many will get this one … It’s from a game series called Dead Space, where the key mechanic is that it is easier to kill the bad guys by blowing their limbs off rather than the usual game thing of shooting them many times. It’s a horror game which I have no intention of playing but I did enjoy watching the HeyChrissa streams. The Marker in Dead Space is an alien thing that turns people into strange vicious beasts and an onrunning theme is that the Marker wants us to be whole again. (Yep, you have to play the game to really get that one and I wouldn’t recommend it).

Man machine interface through a direct neural interface – this is something I think would be essential when you get past a certain level of technology. A normal interface panel would not cover the information required and the depth of field in space where your view would need to be many kilometers ahead, not just 100s of metres. And a direct neural interface would speed up control immeasurably and should reduce error from fumbly fingers as well.

Yep. Direct neural interface is the way of the future.

FIF Iceangel – oh that one took a little effort to get a chuckle in at the end. I was pondering finding something for Trixabelle too but that’s an acronym too far.

I was glad to get one tribute in to a dearly missed actor who left us this year, a shame I couldn’t leave more tributes !

Haha always ! Oh – I asked Grabthar, there's room for a druid here :-).

(PS clarification if it's needed, the "homo" above comes from homo sapien/neanderthal, I was struggling for words to make that acronym !)

You crazy Iceangel 🙂

This might be the last post I can write for a while.

Yep. They’ve come to take me away.

That sounds wrong. It’s actually a totally willing departure. You see, I appear to have attracted attention from up there. Yep. Up there, in the sky and beyond.

This means I think I’ve figured out where those hits come from where the country of origin isn’t defined. Because there is no country of origin ! They told me that they’ve been reading what I’ve written about space, about piloting, about engineering and they think I have potential. Perhaps they are harvesting others too ?

Actually I wouldn’t call it harvesting. I’m currently in the orientation centre (they’re letting me compose this message as a preparation for what I’ll write later) where they are preparing my simulacrum. That’s a lifesize replica which will be left behind in my place here. There will be an instantaneous link (don’t ask me about the science … yet ! It’s one of the things I fully intend to learn) that means I will be able to talk to people on Earth through a kind of telepresence. So if you talk to me and I seem a little distant, my simulacrum is looking for instructions from me, the one and only original.

How come this is happening now ? Apparently there is trouble coming and they need a few of us humble Earthlings to help keep this trouble at bay. We have a certain … inspiration ? that will help in their war against the coming threat. They won’t tell us what this threat is yet. Come on ! We’re not scared ! (Perhaps that’s the real reason why they want us on board). They have mentioned the phrase “Cybo-Homo Arcturan Variant” and that these unruly creatures are a threat to all.

I do keep hearing another phrase over and over : “Never give up, never surrender” and the main person we’ve been liasing with is Grabthar, Hammer of Rigel. That’s a great phrase.

They aren’t sending us off to the front just yet. We need orientation. To learn what we’re getting into. To get us up to speed with the technology. The ways and means of doing things in the Federation. The food ! It’s replicated out of pattern. They say it’s all the healthy components that make up the diet we need but it doesn’t taste healthy. It tastes glorious and in my experience, if it’s healthy it’s supposed to be yuk.

How can we understand people ?

We got jabbed by these little guys shortly after being beamed up and not long after that, we could understand our alien colleagues. It’s going to be strange getting used to the variety of races up here.

This all sounds like I’ve been abducted doesn’t it ? Kinda yeah.

This was all my own choice, although it will hurt to leave a certain few very special people behind. Maybe in the second wave they can come too ? That would be awesome. It would expand the team. Honestly, I just heard the word “SPACESHIP!” and I was gone.

 

After all, everything is awesome if you’re part of a team.

Being brought on board for two things I love dearly was just a bonus. That’d be the engineering that makes these things go and the chance to be pilot. That’s what they saw from keeping an eye on me. Someone who would be able to understand the machines, to keep them going, to be that balanced person with a viewpoint that picks people up when they’re struggling. To have second specialisations as pilot and trained observer. That’s really useful when things get dangerous. Have a crew end up stranded on a planetoid because your one pilot had a mischief happen ? Tragedy. Oh, I was evaluated for a more martial role supporting their stormtrooper corps but they thought I was a little short.

They also want me looking after what they affectionately refer to as Cogs. You wouldn’t believe it but these adorable bits of fur are a mix of cat and dog, genetically engineered from specimens taken from our world over a hundred years ago. They combine the loyalty of our cats and dogs, the vigilance of dogs, the cleverness of cats and have the canine and feline parts of their nature acting together in harmony unknown on this planet. Miracles.

I think they added some rabbit too for the improved hearing.

They have massive advances in medical technology too. They can replace my dodgy hip and shoulder with totally organic replacements. That means the replacements are as good as new and work with your body so as to become a part of it. The veterans who spoke with us about it referred to the process as becoming “Whole Again” as the new part is grown from a genetic Marker and reintroduced to replace useless or missing limbs. Magic.

The engineering is something else too ! There are backup panels to control the machines but the main method is through mind power. Through direct neural interface. I had a little try (need training to manage the sensory input load) and as a pilot, it’s like you become the ship. Your eyes are the sensors, in all spectra. Your arms and feet are the thrusters. Your circulatory system becomes the power, air, fluids that keep the ship going.

Yet the technology is a mix of organic and mechanical. Cyborg if you will. That’s so that the systems can repair themselves and survive without power when necessary. Organic is supplemented by the machine, the machine is repaired by the organic.

What’s that ! I hear sirens as the FIF Iceangel (Federation Induction Frigate or FIFI as the crew call her) is being called to alert and Grabthar is waving urgently. Gotta go !

See you around the galaxy!

It’s back !

It’s been a little too long since I went back to the Alphabet book. It’s a lovely book, really thoughtful present. It has a lot to say and a lot to make you think about. I’d thoroughly recommend it (link will go in at the end !)

First up – M is for Mood.

“If your life is out of balance, seek to balance your moods. Many things can cause them to swing. Drink, drugs, diet, stress. To find balance, go back to basics. Bring your body and mind down to earth. Sleep well, eat healthily, exercise, choose your thoughts carefully.”

I have the mood swings. I know other people do too. Our minds play tricks on us, the mind distorts our perception of the world. For an unfortunate number of us (more people than will admit it!), the mind twists our mood to the dark.

Resist ! My mood improves immeasurably when I talk to people. When I look at people and get a smile answering my grin. When the people I look to for engagement with what I send them reply and take me up on the implicit offer of humour I try to put in all I communicate.

The looking forward to Comic Con in May ! Tickets booked. No clue still (except for James Bond) for cosplay.

However hard it may be (and it can be really tough), look to the bright side. Resist that temptation to allow your mood to pick up on the dark.

M is also for Meditation.

Meditation takes many forms. For some, it’ll be carefully practiced routines. A way of thinking that will put you at peace. A series of movements that exercise your body and allow the brain to switch off.

I try to slow my breathing, slow my heart, stop the incessant murmuring that my thoughts can become and look at the world. To observe. To really see. To watch how other people do things and ask, can I learn from what they are doing to do what I do better.

To meditate is to be at peace. With oneself, with the world.

I need to learn how to trigger the meditative state better, to help me sleep better. I can do the slowing of the breathing to put my body at rest but those thoughts keep jabbering in my head and block the sleep. It’ll come :-).

N is for Negativity.

So many people fall into the negativity trap ! Me too. I find I need a fairly constant reinforcement from outside, or I start falling into a depressive cycle. Sometimes that reinforcement is just being noticed. Or getting a reply in from the people I find special.

What’s in the book ?

“Life looks the way you look at it. A positive point of view sees a brighter future. A negative perspective paints a bleaker universe. Always remember that your outlook will be your outcome. A few small changes can make a huge difference. For instance, try saying yes to every question you’re asked (within reason). You’ll discover new places, meet new people and live a happier and richer life.”

I look at the internet and how people behave on it. A lot of the time, the internet is infested with some really nasty people. But there are the exceptions. I mentioned the Heychrissa streamer. Yeah, she has a potty mouth but behind that is a lovely person who entertains her little band of followers and part of how she does that is by following the chat and joining in. Dunno how she does that to be honest, I can barely keep up and I’m not the one playing the game.

But yeah, so much negativity out there, it’s far better to start from a positive outlook. The outlooks reinforce. Positive outlooks bring smiles, negativity breeds anguish. One reason I try to pass encouraging messages to the various people who’s videos I watch is to pass on positive energy that helps them keep going. To encourage, to balance the negativity.

Negativity has a place, sure. But it’s better to look for the positive ways out of situations. It can be difficult yeah but it’s so worth it.

N is also for Now.

Now is the opposite of one of my worse characteristics – procrastination.

From the book : “Life is fleeting. Miss the moment and it’ll be gone forever. To make the most of life, make the most of every moment. Forget the past, ignore the future, be present to the present.”

This means you ! You reading this on your phone when you should be talking to the people with you ! The phone will wait for later. Smile at the people with you. Give now your full attention, other things can wait.

I know there are things I need to do in the future. I’d like to move out of here and onto a boat. But I also know there are things I need to do to set that up, so I don’t miss the opportunity when it comes my way.

That’s the thing – open yourself for being spontaneous. If there’s something more fun you can be doing now, embrace the fun ! Send that nice message to the person. That nice message could be the start of something wonderful.

It can take a bit of bravery to live in the now. Do it ! It’s a good place to live.

And that’s it for today. I’ll try not to leave it so long next time before I bring you more of the Alphabet book. Now you’re asking : “Where can I get this lovely book ?” Here we go – Gratuitous Amazon link !

Would really much prefer to be as the dwagon in the thumbnail.

Or the ever lovely Ben.

That one knows the value of a good set of zzzz’s.

Back to work tomorrow though. There are still a few hours of leave to go though and I fully intend for them to be very chilled out. Earlier, I was watching more of the cricket and another couple of good games today involving Sri Lanka vs South Africa ladies and Sri Lanka vs South Africa men. I’ve enjoyed watching the games in this Twenty20 world cup so far. It’s not the pinnacle of cricket, although it’s become the big business attraction. It’s a bit of fun, nothing more. The results are so random that it’s not a case of the best team winning. It’s more a matter of which individual plays a blinder on the day. And that’s not what cricket should be about, it’s a team game.

At the moment, I have a River City People album on in the background (Say Something Good, the one with California Dreamin’ on it) and a Heychrissa stream is just starting up. I may also put another Nanomon together tonight.

I’ve been gaming too, the game of choice for me at the moment is Rebel Galaxy. I’m really enjoying that one. Here’s my current ship :

That’s a Mastodon class light frigate and is the first ship up after the starter ship. It’s doing me well so far as I learn how to play the game and what does best. At the moment, I have Big Pink Lasers that make bad guy ships melt. This is good.

Plans for tomorrow include (after work!) topping up again on supplies, they’ve actually lasted about right this time. Could do with more Easter Eggs … although the locust horde was already descending on the supermarket last Monday. I’m not holding my hopes up for discount eggs, the supermarket I intend to raid tends to jiggle its stock around quickly and I suspect they won’t have any eggs tomorrow evening.

Few stats … I haven’t listened to as much music as usual (due to having the cricket on!) for a break but there’s been a fair bit listened to while gaming and videos have been on. iTunes tells me I have listened to 917 different tracks (some duplicate) since starting my leave. That works out to 2.2 days of music listening to.

I dunno how much video I’ve watched but since resetting the counter at the start of my break, I’ve downloaded 116GB down the internets to my desktop (the counter only knows about what the desktop does, it doesn’t count the many bits and bytes taking my music from laptop to hifi) and those 116GB includes downloads for games.

I’m getting really distracted by separating my attention between stream, singing along to some of the music and tapping out this post (and an iPad game) so I’d better sign off.

Oh – quick note before I go, I’ve rejigged a little of the stuff you see over to the right (on the normal web template, not the mobile one). The Fuelly sticker got taken off because I stopped updating that a few years ago when my attention span withdrew inwards due to what was happening with my outsides.

I’ve tidied up a few links as well as adding in a new section for gaming people. There aren’t too many gaming people links there yet, instead of adding all the people I occasionally watch, I added the people where I watch most of what they come out with. Word of warning … they can be dangerous …

Totalbiscuit has made me get many games due to his enthusiasm for games he loves. It’s infectious. May that continue for many years to come (he is fighting cancer and hopefully beating it).
EnterElysium is the fella who got me interested in From The Depths. His videos of that are oft chuckle inspiring.
Aavak is another From The Depths person, he’s making me want to check out another building game called Robocraft.
Scott Manley is the King of Kerbals and has taught me pretty much all I know about orbital mechanics. Which isn’t much but hey …
And HeyChrissa is guilty for me getting back into the legos … May she get enough cash soon for the Chrissa Needs A Lego XWing fund.

I have to say, the internet is a pretty toxic place but that HeyChrissa stream is the first one to get me encouraged to actually get a Twitch account and join in with the chat. That’s partly down to the chat being awesome, partly down to the streamer interacting with the chat (interesting to listen to as well, mixing her own observation with one hell of a potty mouth, whatever will she come out with next ?).

It’s great to chill out to. I’ll often start watching with the intention of reading something and then just watch the stream. In fact, I should do that now ! She’s playing a gorgeous looking … tech demo for VR called Adrift. Astronaut lost in space navigating a space station that’s been ripped apart by some calamity. It has absolutely stunning visuals and this window is covering them up !

Cya !