Bonus choice

I made the choice on what to spend my small bonus. I decided that even though I would be able to use the Eee PC easily enough I didn't really want to make a move away from Mac OS because it is precisely the OS that makes me enjoy using a computer. I'll wait and either buy a new Apple laptop or do without a laptop. I also decided that despite a desire to exercise a bit more I simply don't really have room to use or store an exercise machine.

I had considered the possibility of buying one of the options and both getting full use out of it and not getting any use out of it. If used, the Eee PC would let me write posts and e-mails, and browse the internet, from the comfort of my armchair, but this isn't a great leap over using my desktop machine. If unused, the Eee PC would be entirely unexciting and undecorative, even less so than the Powerbook hidden on my desk by CDs and paperwork. For the exercise machine, if I got a routine going I would get fitter and feel better, although I could achieve the same result without needing a machine. Maybe Wii Fitness could help whilst taking up less space. If unused, an exercise machine would just gather dust and be little more than a middle-class statue, an item I would want to dispose of. As for the guitar, if I get full use out of it I would become a better and more accomplished player, even if far from a rock star, and get some good sense of achievement from it as well as being able to entertain myself. And if it went unused a Les Paul guitar looks pretty cool. Even if it stood as a silent monument of underachievement it could just as easily spur me to pick it up again in the future.

There was also an option of getting a new DVD player, as my current machine has developed an intermittent fault that can delay its time to power-on significantly. With Blu-ray effectively becoming the default HD content media it makes sense to upgrade to a Blu-ray player, even without and HD TV, but the players are still far too expensive to upgrade merely to replace a system. I'd only buy a Blu-ray player now if I was wanting to adopt the new format. But because Blu-ray could possibly become widely adopted within a year it is also not a good time to buy a replacement DVD player that isn't Blu-ray, at least not a mid-range player.

This leaves buying a guitar as the only considered option to spend my bonus on. There may be other options but I can't think of anything in particular and my interest in playing has been renewed recently. There is the possibility of waiting for a little while to see if another option appears, but as I am taking my bike in for a service and MOT at the end of the week, and a bike service can always be fairly expensive, I knew that I ought to spend the bonus money before the service just in case that expense makes me reluctant to spend a chunk of money on something potentially trivial.

I decided to buy an Epiphone Les Paul Custom. I went for the Custom above the Standard for the extra styling afforded to the Custom. I was ready to buy a Custom Plus in vintage sunburst, liking the looks of the finish, but I had a little trouble finding one on-line that was in stock. I wanted the sunburst-finished Plus model because I find the plain black of the Custom to be exceedingly drab and it hides the shape of the guitar too much. However, the plain white version of the Custom was available in most places. Whilst I hadn't considered the white version before I found it growing on me for some reason. Even though it didn't have the wood grain finish or colour gradiant of the vintage sunburst it seemed to have a certain style about it.

It was over the weekend that I thought I'd seen a white Les Paul hanging off James Dean Bradfield of the Manic Street Preachers. I did a quick search for some images and confirmed this, and I realised that this is why I was attributing a certain style to the white Les Paul. On the one hand, it could be seen to be a little lacking in independent thought or uninspired to buy a guitar based on which rock star is playing it rather than basing the decision solely on opinion. On the other hand, no one lives in a vacuum and it is difficult to separate opinion from external determining factors, and at least I am not convincing myself that buying this guitar will make me look or play like Bradfield. I also doubt many people would be critical of someone who bought the Slash edition Les Paul, and I can have my own people to look up to.

I ordered the Epiphone Les Paul Custom in Antique White. It cost a little more than the Standard model, and a little more than I thought I would be spending, but I am treating myself with this guitar. I'm quite looking forward to its arrival now. So that's my bonus gone, plus a bit more. Had I known I would be buying the guitar I may not have bought on impulse a lovely and simple painting of a parisian socialite that I noticed whilst walking past a local art shop on Friday. But now I have a new guitar and a new painting to enjoy.

Posted in Personal | Comments Off on Bonus choice
Tags: art, blu-ray, computers, dvd, eee pc, epiphone, exercise, guitar, les paul, manic street preachers, mot, motorbike, painting

City of Heroes/City of Villains on a Mac!

It looks like City of Heroes/City of Villains has a good chance of running on my Mac under Crossover Games.

It may well be worth giving it a try myself soon, particularly as solo World of Warcraft is boring me silly.

Posted in Gaming | 1 Comment »
Tags: city of heroes, city of villains, computers, crossover games, mmorpg, world of warcraft

Ghost Squad on the Wii

One of the Gemote brought Ghost Squad for the Wii along this weekend, and we all had a good four-player romp through the multi-player sections available. As an aside, one of the benefits of the previous generation of consoles that stored game data on memory cards instead of internal to the system, or on the game cartridges themselves, was that a game can be taken to a friend's home along with all the saved game information on the memory card thus allowing any and all unlocked data from the single player game to be accessed. Having the game data stored on the system may save a bit of money on a memory card but it makes for a less entertaining experience when playing a game away from your own system. Maybe a system will soon allow for saved game data to be stored remotely that can then be accessed on any system. This may involve problems where universal accounts propagate allowing games to be unlocked completely by anyone, but a system like the Wii can solve this by allowing the system's key to be uploaded to a Wii controller that can then be used on another system, thus requiring physical access to the console to gain remote access to the saved game data. But I digress.

Ghost Squad is an Operation Wolf-style game, a first-person shooter on rails. The game's tag line is 'leave no trace', alluding to the 'ghost' nature of squad you belong to. Get to the target, perform the mission, and get out again leaving everyone to wonder just what happened. However, with four of us all having fully automatic weapons and unlimited ammunition it soon became clear that not leaving a trace was futile to try to achieve, even if we wanted to. There were bullet holes everywhere, the cutlery in the lodge was shot to dust, the pots and pans were riddled with holes, the wood panelling was splintered to pieces, and anything that could be moved by shooting it was shot at and moved. And that's not counting all the dead bodies, terrorist or hostage, and the assumed shell casings. If we really were to 'leave no trace' there would have to be quite the cleaning squad coming in behind us, but that probably wouldn't make such a good game. I think the tag line was cut short. It should have been 'leave no trace of life in your wake'.

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Tags: console, first-person shooter, ghost squad, memory card, operation wolf, saved game data, wii

Weekend rugby

The Gemote got together at the weekend again and amongst the fun of console games, RPGs, and eating more sugar in a day than I normally do in a year, we headed out to watch London Irish play host to the Harlequins. This is quite possibly the first rugby match I've been to, although I enjoy watching games on the TV whenever I can and think I have a good enough idea of the rules and strategies to follow the game without needing commentators.

Without going in to much detail I thought it was a rather good game, despite it lacking many scores. Instead of passages of play failing to score because of handling errors or silly fouls it was a strong defence that stopped the teams from scoring, and that meant there was an entertaining contest to watch. I was a bit baffled as to why London Irish elected to take a scrum from a penalty early in the game, because the Harlequins had already shown that they had a competitive and potentially overpowering presence in the scrum. Unsurprisingly, London Irish could make nothing of that scrum, and lost the opportunity to score from the penalty. Harlequins balanced out this bad decision with their own, throwing long in the lineout several times, and it never working to their advantage.

It was an entertaining game, then. There was something odd happening in the crowd next to me, though. I was sat next to a couple who were supporting Harlequins, and every now and again the woman would shout 'come on, 'quins!' and nothing more. It seemed really odd to me. The two of them barely spoke to each other about errors, good passages of play, or the referee's decisions, and yet she continued to shout 'come on, 'quins!' at random intervals.

I can fully understand supporting your team, and getting involved in the game by calling out at times, as it shows some emotional engagement with the game. I don't really do it myself as my painful shyness prevents me somewhat from making such displays, but I can appreciate those who involve themselves. This woman didn't seem to be emotionally engaged, though. It seemed like she was programmed to call out occasionally, if only to fulfil an expectation of her from the micro-society of a rugby ground's audience, so that she could convince others, or maybe just herself, that she was a being a supporter.

She loosened up a bit near the end of the game and shouted out some slightly different phrases. Before that I found it quite an odd display of assumed duty, and it became a little distracting. I wonder if my being quiet would distract others in a similar way, but because I wasn't being vocal at all. I am sure that it can affect other people's perceptions of how much I am enjoying myself and perhaps feel I have to be more convincing after the event than I would had I been shouting myself.

Posted in Personal | 2 Comments »
Tags: duty, gemote, harlequins, london irish, rugby, rugby union, shyness

Window blinds

The windows in the office area must have been cleaned over the weekend as all the blinds were fully raised when I got in this morning. It was quite a sight, no blinds obscuring the view from any of the windows. The office seemed to be bigger, more open, instead of the cramped, enclosed space that is full of noisy office workers. I felt quite positive.

My positive attitude didn't last long, and was clubbed back in to submission as soon as window-seated workers came in. The first thing they did, before sitting down even, was to pull the blinds down, as many as they could reach within their non-cubicles. Most of the pulled-down blinds were left open, but a couple were closed completely. The open views have been replaced with a far-too-good a representation of barred windows. Considering the morning sky is a consistent drab grey as far as the eye can see, and there is no glare at all, I don't understand why the blinds were drawn back down. It's quite depressing.

And, of course, as people are coming in the conversation noise has risen and the stupid floor is shaking as people walk to and fro.

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Tags: noise, shaking floor, window blinds

xkcd on women in films

The journal of webcomic xkcd has a recent entry about how few women get lead roles in modern films, highlighting figures that show almost no mainstream and popular films produced in recent years that have two female lead actors. The author then goes on to write about how excellent it would be to have a generic blockbuster made with a female in the lead role for a change. But he seems to have forgotten to make a point.

He presents numbers supporting the fact that few films have females in the lead role, but the only sort of clue as to why he thinks this is bad or should be corrected is that the film industry should 'suck less in the examples it sets'. He also doesn't present any argument as to why a blockbuster with a female lead would be significantly better than with the normal male lead apart from stating it as obvious. Why do we need more women in lead roles? To create role models for women everywhere, if only to be action hero actors? To get more women to the cinema to stimulate ticket sales? So that men can see more latex-wrapped boobs on a big screen?

I have no point to make here about women in the film industry. My point is in not presenting data and superficial opinion as a controversial argument. It's one thing to present the data to argue that the film industry should better represent the strong women in society, and another to argue that there should be more women in action roles so that we get to see more pantie shots, but to try to make a point based on 'there are few women in lead roles, wouldn't it be great it there were more?' is vacuous. It's not surprising that a lack of any vigorous argument led to most of the initial comments simply providing counter-examples of films that have female leads, or agreeing with how great it would be to see more women on screen without saying why that would be so great. Indeed, it is simply style-over-substance content, which the film industry plies so well.

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Tags: argument, opinion

Getting petrol

There were three motorbikes, including mine, filling up at the petrol station I visited yesterday. Apart from when an instructor brings his duckling learners in to a station this is the most number of bikes I've seen filling up at any one time. With motorbikes being quite a minority on the roads this doesn't surprise me. I also think it should be quite easy for the attendant to work out which pump I filled up at, with it being the only motorbike on the forecourt and my being the only person to be wearing leathers and a crash helmet. Even so, I don't presume to force the effort on to him to work out which pump I've used and always state the pump number to aid a smoother transaction. That's the idea, at least. I am amazed at the number of times I have an exchange like this:

'Pump number seven, please.'

Keying in some information, 'number four, yeah?'

'Number seven.'

I don't mumble, I know from experience that I can be heard clearly from beneath my helmet, and I always offer the pump number before the attendant suggests one. Yet even when there is a car sitting next to the pump he mistakenly thinks I filled up at I often have to repeat myself. It's bizarre.

I don't have this issue when filling up a car. This leads me to wonder whether the ubiquity of cars stops the attendant from even trying to keep track of who is filling up where and thus forces him to focus on what the customer says. The routine is broken up when he thinks there is a customer-vehicle pair that is easy to determine and trying to work out which pump the bike is sitting in front of whilst trying to listen to the customer creates an unusual situation and thus confusion occurs.

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Tags: motorbike, petrol

Bonus!

I heard a rumour that because Weyland-Yutani has been profitable in the last year we employees are due to receive a bonus this month. The bonus is nothing particularly extravagant but it's something, and after so many years of no bonuses at all this new culture, and I hope it's now a part of The Company's culture, is welcome indeed.

I'm a believer in buying something I otherwise wouldn't, or would normally have to save for, when I get a small windfall like this. I don't like the idea of getting a nice bonus and then having it disappear slowly through normal expenses, because then it doesn't seem like a perq. I would rather encounter a series of peaks and troughs than to have nothing changing.

I have a few thoughts about what I could get with the bonus, but I am still undecided and wonder if there are options I haven't considered yet.

• A new guitar.

I have recently considered getting a new guitar to revive my interest in playing, and with my bonus I could get the Epiphone Les Paul Custom Plus, or Standard Plus-Top, and not regret spending the money if it just sits on a stand looking pretty. I've been trying to practice some of the finger exercises in the book I bought and I may well enjoy it better if I had some spanky new hardware to practice on, temporarily at least.

• An exercise machine.

I would like to get a bit more exercise, just to keep myself in trim, and my bicycle doesn't get used in the Winter months partly because of the weather but mostly because the day gets dark too early. It's possible that an exercise machine I could use at home would allow me to schedule some regular exercise that would boost my fitness and improve my general well-being. Of course, that depends on actually using the machine regularly, and without trying one out I don't know if I will be able to, or want to, maintain a routine. There is a wide variety of machines both in particular machine type and within types, and I know nothing about any of them. Choosing a machine could be difficult, and making the wrong choice could deflate my enthusiasm.

• An Eee PC.

Since my Powerbook's logic board started malfunctioning a little while back I have been without a portable machine on which I can handily and quickly keep up with any writing or correspondence, or have a low-power device for keeping in touch with people with instant messaging. I can do all of this on my desktop computer but unsurprisingly not whilst sitting in my armchair, and after a session of World of Warcraft I would rather get away from my computer desk and relax in a different chair to perform other computer tasks. I obviously haven't missed having a laptop enough to have replaced it so far and am managing quite well with the desktop as my only machine, but the Eee PC seems ideally suited to the use I would put it towards. Sure, it doesn't run Mac OS but I could probably run a browser, e-mail client and IRC session on a different OS comfortably enough. The question is more if I would want to, even if anything more involved would still be done on my desktop.

Between the exercise machine and guitar I think I would prefer a guitar to be sitting in my home gathering dust, and I greatly enjoy being able to play the guitar, however badly. The exercise machine is a nice idea but a lack of space both to use and store one is a concern, and I may either find another way to exercise. The Eee PC sounds like a good idea, but I would be taking a risk on the applications working the way I want them to, however slight it may be. Maybe I should find one to play on for a bit. It's also possible that I would soon want it to be capable of more functionality than I am initially considering, either leading it to be unsuitable because of it's specifications or my getting frustrated with the OS.

It's looking like a choice between the guitar and Eee PC. I have some time to deliberate before I get the bonus and see what it's like.

Posted in Personal | Comments Off on Bonus!
Tags: computers, eee pc, epiphone, exercise, guitar, les paul, writing

Second series of The Wire

I finished re-watching the first series of The Wire and have moved straight on to rewatching the second series. It's an interesting combination of stories, with the main team working on a case on the docks and the Barksdale story continuing almost in the background. The two stories never meet, apart from a tenuous connection supplied by Proposition Joe half-way through, which gives an odd feel to the series. It is almost as if we are watching two programmes meshed in to one. It works quite well, though. If a viewer has watched the first series then the Barksdale story holds plenty of interest, and the main intrigue is still supplied amply with the docks smuggling investigation.

Watching the series for a second time, and after having watched the third series, it seems that the series is trying for something even more bold than the first series set out to achieve. The Barksdale secondary story of the second series is effectively all a prelude for the third series, with the main characters' stories kept updated and new characters introduced who will go on to play main roles in the next series. A third or more of the second series is really just setting the scene for the third. It's worth watching the programme a second time to catch all the references and introductions that occur through the series.

I also note that in the opening credits a signal trace dissolves to become the line of a boat, which I didn't notice at all the first time I watched the whole of the second series. Either I'm not particularly perceptive or I didn't pay much attention to the opening credits.

Posted in Video | Comments Off on Second series of The Wire
Tags: dvd, the wire, tv

More Mario Kart Wii

I couldn't drag myself back in to Azeroth last night. A problem with playing on a US server from the UK is that weekday evenings coincide with when US friends are still at work. Without any friends to team up with I didn't have the will to run through quests I've completed perhaps a dozen times before. Of course, I have Mario Kart Wii to entertain me as well as a plan to boost my mad skills.

I started practicing the circuits for the 100 cc Flower Cup. Although I have already got a bronze cup in that Grand Prix, I'm going for gold. Whizzing around the circuits in time trial mode, but without specifically trying to set time records, allows for the extra paths and racing lines to be explored safely so that when it comes to racing around the circuit navigating the course is not requiring too much effort. One aspect of racing that isn't simulated during a time trial is the placement of the power-ups, but as they are generally positioned for you to run right in to them this isn't too much of an issue. It's only when you're lagging behind other karts that take the boxes along the racing line and you need to drift wider to get a power-up that it becomes relevant.

Flush with my new confidence racing around the circuits I started a Grand Prix. I ended up with a bronze cup again, which wasn't a great result. It is frustrating that a single incident loses so much time. I can understand it being important in multiplayer modes, where a more skilled player can race away rather too quickly and perhaps never be caught without being pumelled with shells. But as the console-controlled pack sticks fairly close together being hit by a shell and running over a banana can see you drop from third down to ninth quite easily.

With the abundance of power-ups and console-controlled players it is not unusual to be hit by shells, lightning, POW boxes, run over bananas, or get squid ink all over you several times per race. And it's really not fun to be hit by lightning or a shell whilst jumping over a crevice, as being put back on the track by Lakitu loses a silly amount of time and losing that time for something that was an unavoidable action on another's part is frustrating. I'm beginning to wonder how much luck, more than skill, is involved in winning Grand Prix. Having eleven characters firing off power-ups randomly may be Mario Kart Wii's weakness.

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Tags: console, mario kart, racing, wii, world of warcraft