So, this is a post with content.
There are various things that I shall cover. I shall start with the good bits and end with a rant. How’d that sound ?
Got a phone call from my sister today telling me that a parcel had arrived at my Dad’s house. This could only be one thing, the Spider-man 2 UMD that is being sent out to the first 1,000,000 registered customers of the Sony PSP in Europe and Australia. Having registered best part of a month ago I was pleased to hear it had arrived. I chose to have it sent to my Dad’s house knowing that I would be moving around this part of the month. As it happens, I haven’t move yet, but will be on Sunday.
Got another phone call from the estate agents, asking me if I could possibly go in and pick up the keys to the new place tomorrow rather than Saturday. It has kinda made the whole thing seem more real, well, the phone call, and my bank account being £550 lighter. It’ll be, by the end of tomorrow, £720 further lighter, as that will cover the security deposit and administration costs. So, I get the keys, then move on Sunday. Excited++. At the moment the flat is having laminate flooring put down and electric heaters fitted to the walls. I am going to take various photos and put them up when I am settled (about 2 weeks after I have moved in). Dad is coming up on Sunday with a transit van, combined with the hands of Marianne, Ant and Lauren it should be a relatively quick move.
After yet another phone call, a friend Hang has given me his Xbox Steering Wheel and Resident Evil for the Gamecube. He flew back to China today and couldn’t take the stuff with him. I had a quick go on Project Gotham 2 with the wheel, and it was good, but a very odd experience. I need to practice a little more.
Work is currently going well, and I have become a ninja at Javascript now, there are some surprising similarities between it and ferite, although my main gripe is the fact that functions are dynamic binding not static much like closures in ferite. webframework is starting to mature nicely with various issues being resolved as I stumble across them. I have also been playing with some code to make arrays and various other parts of the ferite engine much faster. I am basing it upon the principles of the paper Ideal Hash Tries by Phil Bagwell, however I am making a few changes here and there to make it more flexible. Such as 64bit scaling, combination of indexes so that you can build arrays and hashes into the same system. The unified array will behave in C, the same as it does in ferite. They will be used as the basis of objects, environments, namespaces, closures etc. All very exciting stuff.
I urge you to read the Evil Overlord post, it is hilarious and really does hit about 200+ nails firmly on the head about the evil do’ers in films. Although I fear that many national leaders may read it and learn something.
A game that rocks. I just wanted to make a quick note about Lumines for the PSP. I didn’t get it at first because it doesn’t make sense. However, at somepoint it clicked and I am now hooked. The game works on dropping squares of 4 coloured blocks (two colours on each level), and making squares of the same colour. Whilst this is happening a line moves from left to right clearing up the colours that are connected. Fairly simple Tetris type affair. Now, the bit that keeps you playing is that getting large blocks cleared away make the music and the graphics explode. There are some amazing tracks on the game and the feedback from doing well is really gratifying. A very good game to pick up and play. The nice thing is the Skin Mode that allows you to go back and play on specific music and graphics tracks. As you play the Challenge mode, more skins become unlocked.
So, time for a rant.
There are two things that really cheesed me off the other day whilst driving south for the weekend. The first was pulling up to a traffic lights, there was a lady in an SUV, driving poorly and had a Baby On Board sign in the back. My issue with this, and I feel that this isn’t unfair, is that it assumes that most people on the road deliberately try to drive into other people. That we all want disgustingly high premiums and wish to injure ourselves and other people. However, giving us a patronising nod and wink that you have a child will turn us into perfect drivers, because, damn, we all have to think of the babies. Especially those that are protected in a fuel guzzling SUVs that make those drivers oblivious to the rest of the world. I drive the best I can, and if I am not, do people honestly believe they can change that with a yellow diamond ?
The second rant is that of lollipop people. I think they are a great idea in places where there are no crossings. They allow kids to get to a from school in a safe fashion when it comes to roads. What I hate, is those that hang out at traffic lights. They press the button. The light goes red. Cars stop – they have to (I merely point this out because it is important). Then the lollipop person walks out into the road and puts their arms out. As if they are stopping traffic. Or to stop those naughty cars from driving through a red light when there are people stopping. Now, lets examine this scenario. Most people will stop at a red light. Most people wont drive through a red light. Most people will particularly avoid the driving over people situation, as that kinda makes life more tricky. Lets examine the mentality of the other people, those who have no problems with red lights, nor running people other. Do the lollipop people honestly believe that prancing out into the road, holding out their arms is going to change this mentality ? I mean come, I am sure that if you don’t mind running people over, you may even consider someone in a fluorescent yellow jacket some sort of multiplier bonus. I suspect I am being unfair, I mean kids don’t know how to use a crossing right ? It isn’t like every kid in the world enjoys pressing the button ? Is it ? Well, with these situations, I have yet to see the lollipop person press it.
I just needed to get these rants out of my system, I suspect that I am being grossly unreasonable. I feel much better now. Have a good day 
