Bikers

Some days are great for cyclists. Swansea traffic was gridlocked today, and not just in the centre. Traffic wasn't moving all the way back to the university & beyond. So as a cyclist you get to be a smug git & bomb along the middle of the street, ducking under lorry's wing mirrors & sweeping around caravans, grinning like an idiot.

OK, so I look like a twat with my trousers tucked into my socks, & this helmet doesn't really help, but hey, I'm moving & you're not :)

New iMac

The new iMac is out at last. Nice.

Embryology

Embryology link.

This is a really good embryology resource, whether you're learning the subject or are just interested in what you used to look like ;)

Rain

Sitting next to a lake in heavy summer rain. Quite nice under a big
umbrella.

Catch!

Fish

Star Wars DVD Changes

Here's a bit about the changes for the Star Wars DVD box set. Still looks a bit bollocks to me. Apparently Greebo still shoots first in revised edition. That can't be right, can it? WTF's that all about? I don't actually remember that from the Special Edition screenings, but it was a while ago.

I'll either stick to my VHS tapes (one of which I watched just recently - oh dear, how poor is VHS?) or I'll buy the DVDs and re-edit them myself to my taste ;)

BBC Down?

Blimey, it looks like the BBC's website is down! Attacked? Unlucky failure?

Rash

Oh dear - Jack's got a rash.

The full story is that he's been under the weather the last few days, off his food and not too happy. He's got some white spots at the back of his mouth, so he's got a bug. The GP gave him some penicillin, and he came out in a rash after the first dose. The GP's obvious advice was to knock off the penicillin, and his rash seems to have died down a bit. Maybe he has an allergy then? There is a bout of chicken pox doing the rounds at the moment too, but I don't think it's that.

Anyhow, he seems happier tonight, and he ate a bit for tea, so maybe he'll sleep OK tonight. I know I will - I'm knackered.

Spotter

I spot you, train spotter.

Pingu!

Kim's been baking again! This is a cake for one of Jack's mates.

Browse Happy

That Browse Happy link I posted is down. They must have been slashdotted (too much traffic for the server). It's a top site, detailing people's experiences with Internet Explorer vs other new browsers. Keep an eye out for it.

I can juggle!

I've been juggling for Jack for a while. He thinks it's hilarious, watching me throw, drop and bounce plastic ducks, furry skittles, plastic fruit or other weird objects around the living room or bathroom. But I've been mucking about at it for so long that I can actually juggle now! At least, I can juggle balls of the same size for a short while.

Jack finds this much less amusing. Oh dear.

Browse Happy

Why is Internet Explorer unsafe?

Browse Happy

That's what I'm talking about! From SlashDot.

Caught in a downpour

Caught in a downpour, hiding under a bridge.

More from the beach

Driving

At least he hasn't found the horn yet.

Swansea Beach

Ele

I was getting Jack dressed after his bath, and talking to him about his Aunty Ele (my sister, currently in the South Pacific somewhere). I asked him if he was looking forward to seeing Aunty Ele again in a few weeks time and he said, "ess"! (Meaning, "yes") This is strange, because he's in the middle of a "no" phase at the moment, always answering "no" whatever the question. You can prompt him to say "yes", but this was competely unpushed. I didn't realise what he'd said at first, so asked him if he remembered who Aunty Ele was. Again he said, "ess"!

He hasn't seen Ele or Lee for almost a year while they've been away travelling. I do show him pictures, and he's a very clever young fella, so I wonder if he does remember them? Ha - being Jack's dad is just fantastic! I can't get enough of it.

Switch

A new Apple user at the Independent.

Climbing

I was in the attic, working on my server, so I left the ladder down. Jack started climbing up the first couple of steps so I followed him as he got higher. He climbed the whole ladder, add got into the attic! Will he be up the climbing wall this winter then?

Teletubbies on the net

Jack's favourite use of my computers is to visit the teletubbies website. He loves the games. I wonder if they have a first person shooter...

Doh!

I was just watching the Simpsons with Jack. During the intro, a millisecond before Homer said it, Jack said, "Doh!".

Kim says he's a bigger geek than I am. Woohoo!

Lifes a beach

I just had lunch on the beach. Come to Swansea!

By the way, does anyone want to buy a copy of Doom III from me? Being over cautious I ended up with two, as usual.

Site update

Notes on the changes to this site recently:

1. The tabs don't work properly in Internet Explorer. They're fine in all Mozilla based browsers, Safari, etc. I'll try a workaround when I get the chance, but all you IE users are seeing a poorly formatted version of the site - sorry. I had tested it, but then the thing was tweaked and it all fell apart for IE. I'd recommend any IE users still out there go and check out Firefox. You'll avoid a whole load of current and future Microsoft security vulnerabilities, spyware, adware, popup ads, and other crap. It's almost a zero effort install too.

2. Comments might get screwed up as I try and fight comment spambots.

3. I'll find a way of breaking up the photos into monthly archives or something. That page is huge.

4. The search bar size is screwed up in IE5.5. I'll try and find what the problem is and fix it.

Comment Spam

Jeeez. I just logged on to post something, but spent so long deleting comment spam that I forgot what it was that I wanted to post. Great.

Doom III

You think I'm going to write a review? There's no need. This is a required purchase.

Guess why I didn't post yesterday.

Doom III

OK. That last post was a little thin. Let's summarise this obsession with this game and its genre while I'm sat on the train, on my way home, a pre-Doom III person. And it's not because I'm an anatomy teacher with an unhealthy interest in zombies, OK?

I had already been playing computer games for many, many years thanks to my dad, because he bought me and my brother a ZX Spectrum back in the day. Yeah, it was educational (look at me now), but what I really remember is Jet Set Willy, Jetpac, Psst, & the like.

Jump forward many years & we're in the age of side scrolling platformer & arcade games. Then Doom is released. It is absolutely revolutionary. Never before have we played a shoot-em-up within a virtual reality; 3D hell (yes, I do remember Wolfenstine). The gameplay was spot on, and the style and technology became the new standard. Pick the original game up again even now & it's still a load of fun to play.

Jump forward to Quake. Back in Doom you were obviously limited by the PC hardware available of the time, but Id's next 1st person 3d shooter was promised to revolutionise gaming. It did. The increase in detail was enormous. The virtual world was massively enriched & it was difficult to imagine that this was possible before Id did it. You could look up and down, & maps were truly three dimensional, with bridges and pathways criss-crossing one another, death now likely to come at you from any angle. It was an amazing experience.

I remember the hype leading up to Quake 2. People were promising that the difference between Quakes 1 & 2 was going to be as large as it was between Doom & Quake. I wasn't sure it was possible, but Id proved me wrong. It was possible & they amazed me again. I still remember the flies buzzing over the bloated corpses of enemies I had destroyed, and again the gameplay was as fantastic as the game's engine. It was a leap in technology and it was loved.

In between then & now other companies took over, and gaming became online multiplayer oriented. This was a good thing, but not something I'm going to go into detail about now (I'll bore you with the history of HalfLife when HL2 comes out next month!) Life was good. Games had massive replay possibilities, and gaming graphics and physics continued to move forward.

But then we heard that John Carmack and his team at Id were going to do it again. They were going to create something new. A new engine. And they were going to remake Doom - the game from our youth. The game that started it all. We were going back to Mars.

If you weren't part of this, you just couldn't understand. We were going to take another technological jump forward. This was, this is, going to change everything.

Yes, there is an obsession here. This is gaming at the cutting edge; it's state of the art. This is important. What's makes the tension worse is that we have been waiting so long for this day, and we have seen hints at what the game may be able to do. The hype is incredible - the risk of disappointment is high. I've spent the equivalent cost of three Sony Playstation 2's just to upgrade elements of my PC to a half-decent level. Reviews are good, but personal experiences are varied. Reviewers say this is as close as you'll get to taking the lead in a major movie, but they're wrong. It's more than that. You'll be there.

Last night I dreamed of zombies, but it wasn't a bad dream. Tonight may be different.

Doom III

I got Doom III.

Sorry Kim. Hey, I might have completed it by Monday!

Missed

I'm sat at the train station. My train is late. Contrary to expectation, this is a rare occurence. Across the tracks, on the next platform, a group of five young girls (early 20's?) are flapping about, doing the wasp dance, trying to simultaneously avoid & hit the insect. It's like watching a really, really bad fencing free-for-all. Two are smoking, & one has a young daughter. The flapping becomes more hysterical. There is stamping, flailing, ducking & twisting.

Don't they realise that the cigarettes are doing them more harm than the wasp ever could?

Time Flies

Apparently when you're absorbed in an activity that requires a hgh level of attention, your perception of time does indeed change. Read this article.

I just said I'd been losing hours to Warhammer 40000, Dawn of War, didn't I?

Frog

It looks like Jack's got someone to play with in his paddling pool this morning!

Oz

My brother's in Oz and sent me this photo by MMS to my phone. Quite a different view to have in the morning. Cheers Nick!

Development

Wow, Jack's reading classic development texts already. Well, OK, he caught me reading it and just liked the numbers on the chapter pages. But still.

Doom III Delay?

Aaargh! Zombies! Or rather, no zombies! Aaargh!

Amazon have got a ship date of August 15th for my copy of Doom III, which would mean I wouldn't get it for almost a week. In case you haven't been paying attention (tshk), Doom III is supposed to be available in the UK on the 13th, already 10 days after it's release to the rest of the world. If that wasn't bad enough, is it now likely that there won't be enough copies to go round?

I knew I should have set up my server to grab a torrent of it (but that would have killed this website for a week). Or maybe even have bought an overpriced copy from Ebay. Arse, arse, arse.

Athens

My mate Bob's gone off to Athens to support the GB team in the Olympics! Good, eh?

10.3.5

Apple have released another update for OS X. I'm installing it now, but apparently it includes functionality to control your Mac from your mobile phone via bluetooth. This means I can run my lectures from Powerpoint and use my Sony-Ericsson to click through the slides. Yeah, I know you could already get 3rd party software to do this, but it's interesting that Apple have chosen to include that in their operating system. It looks like it's using a new bluetooth standard too, which is built into the K700i.

Figures in the Dark

Too much! Whenever I close my eyes I see miniature Warhammer 40000 figures roaming about a battlefield, marching in units. Three days to Doom 3!

Bugs?

Are you spotting any bugs? Tell me about them via the comments (click below).

Mysteries of the Ocean Deepen

A number of online news services have been running a story with the above headline. To sum up, marine biologists from all over the world teamed up to catalogue life in the mid-atlantic during two months this summer. They found some bizarre species and broad diversity. Go visit the Institute of Marine Research in Bergen, Norway. The website is really nice too.

Tissue Culture

Sunday spent briefly in the lab.

Kill Bill 2

Kill Bill 2's out on Monday on DVD. I still haven't seen either of them - a side effect of having kids. I was searching through my bank statements last weekend and found the last entry from a cinema was back in June or July last year. Sheesh. So it's a good job I have a very decent home cinema, eh? Maybe this is a good excuse to divert funds towards it this winter... A 42" plasma is the next buy. I always meant to buy a projector because you can get very good quality, very large images at a low price, but again, when you have kids you instead opt for simplicty and things you can bolt to walls out of range of their fingers.

Restyled

Yup, I restyled the site. The look was getting old. This blog has been running for about a year maybe, so I guess a restyle was due. It took a few goes, and some of the content is hidden while I draw up some buttons or tabs to make it all accessible. Simplicity is key. Agree?

On a side note: it was so hot yesterday my gaming PC was running its CPU at 74C (with alarms going off all over the place) playing the Dawn of War beta and sharing some torrents in the background. The server must have been even hotter because it was refusing to rebuild my site. So if you see bugs, they will probably get ironed out as the temperature drops.

On another side note: I restyled the site before I got my hair cut, which is way overdue. +1 geek star.

Sunny Saturdays

Aliens Land in Swansea

Doom III

Reviewed.

Warhammer 40000 Dawn of War

I'm a beta tester for a new Warhammer 40000 game due out the end of next month (wow - double geek points). Man, it's tons of fun. It's a Command & Conquer style war strategy game with beautiful sets, gorgeous animations and real balance. There are new ideas (e.g. when a squad loses moral they also move faster, meaning you can retreat them quickly) and it's multiplayer on the internet as well as vs a computer opponent, with a story driven single player mode. The big thing for me is that while Command & Conquer never held my attention, Dawn of War is very difficult to put down. The style, Warhammer universe, religion, control, mods and pace are powerfully seductive. I've been losing hours to this.

It's running at 1280 x 1024 on a 9800, and at that level you can zoom in and around to see some amazing action. The detail is just infinite. It starts to slow down when you get 250 Orcs running around. Upgrading the RAM by another 512MB and the CPU to 2400+ should solve that.

Maybe this'll keep me entertained until Doom III comes out, but I doubt it.

More. Burn the heretic. Kill the mutant. Purge the Unclean.

Lunchtime Beers

Oh dear. This is bad. I seem to have narrowed down the post-pub-lunch indigestion down to having a beer. I've tried changing the food. And the pub. And it's not even a lot of beer. Does this mean I'm stuck to just having a coke with my lunch if I go out? Damn it!

Handycam

A new bit of kit has been delivered: a Sony VX2100E camcorder. Nice!

Bridge crash. Again.

Believe it or not, another vehicle has crashed into a bridge ahead of us on the train. I'm gonna be late in to work this morning.

We have an inspector visiting today to take a good look at our anatomy suite. If he decides that it's up to his spec he'll give us a license. So it would have been good to have been in on time today. Arse.

Error

See the cross on the screen? That's a Windows error message.

Lunch

UA Corp

Here's another Doom III link for you all:

UA Corp

Counting down...

Cragging

Jack's cragging with the boys.

Eating dirt and crisps.

Soloing.

Where's Dad?

Where's Jack?

Da Boy

Jack's getting the hang of feeding himself. He still prefers fingers to cutlery though.

Taking it easy.

Taxman

It's a lovely sunny August Sunday. So what am I doing? My taxes for 2003-2004. Great. I need to fill in some forms to aid calculating Child's Tax Credits, or whatever it's called these days. I haven't got a clue. I'm also putting the numbers together for self-assessment of my samwebster.net web design business for the same period. Ug.