Talk Like a Pirate Day

Arrrr, why is this not a national, nay International holiday

Slow Ride

Last night I had the unenviable task of driving a car with a very loose drivers door to a garage in largs.

Yes, our old Clio has just about lost its drivers side door. Its disconcerting to be able to see the road through the gap between door frame and car, and to be rained on through said gap.

Anyway, the point of this was, that despite the road to Largs being pretty good in places, and tricky in others, for the most part it is safe to run at 50-60mph (In fact if you were a bad person and speeding some stretches could take 70-75) however the door would show worrying amounts of daylight if it pushed the poor Clio much above 40 so I had to crawl up to Largs.

SO where am I going with this? Well, the road is single carriageway and quite bendy in places, which means if you have someone with a loose door creeping along at 40, there are scant few opportunities to overtake. Seeing the train of cars in my wake was quite mortifying, but level in thought not as mortifying as having to retrieve my door from the middle of a main road. However I have often been in a car with 2 functioning doors on this road and found myself tottering behind someone who also seems to have a fully functioning car at 40mph. Its infuriating, frustrating and I wonder how they do it without feeling thoroughly embarrassed. I can understand slowing down for the tight corners, but there are long clear straights.

It was infuriating.

In Game Advertising

City of Heroes has decided to start selling ad space in game, and I for one, don't mind.

There is almost always uproar when this sort of thing happens, but I'm finding it hard to get riled, particularly if it keeps subscription costs down, and in this case, can be switched off. The picture here shows one of the best uses of it, a movie ad, outside an in-game cinema, some of the other boards look added but overall, ads seem to be on in-game billboards not plastered on the sides of buildings or flashed up on every loading screen.

There was initial controversy when Battlefield 2142 announced there would be in game advertising, although this was in part due to a myth that your browsing habits would be analysed and advertising targeted to you. To be honest Battlefields ads aren't too bad either.

I really don't know where the opposition comes from. Yes, I've seen games where buildings are more or less replaced by blocks of advertising, and that is poor, but this is just replacing in game fake billboards, for Vanguard or Crey, with a poster plugging a Vin Diesel film. And as always, if this keeps subscription costs down, I'm all for it.

Naturally, not every game can take ads, I somehow don't think a bar in World Of Warcraft would look particularly good with a Babylon AD poster in it. But so far the whole thing seems sane and normal.

Now, Issue 13, Architect.

The mission designer sounds interesting, more on my part to see how they've managed to avoid making them XP farms. However the part that really appeals is the Day job, where you gain points depending on where you leave your character when you log off, so Logging off near a hospital means you're doing hospital work and will give health benefits which is tantalisingly close to being able to engineer a secret identity. I like it.

Spare a thought for Admin

My company has recently re-organised. Aside from my usual gripes about this one of the actions involved in this re-org was seemingly to chop a whole load of admin staff, including our admin person.

I seriously feel like an 18 year old on my first day away from home at uni and I think others feel the same. Suddenly there's a whole load of small, almost minor looking tasks that won't get done.

Now, my wife works in admin, and she does complain about how under-appreciated admin staff are and how little people know what they actually do. But basically, your admin staff keep things running, they file stuff so engineers can get on with engineering, they organise things, they process data and well, like their name suggests, they administer. However in the usual short sighted way managers with their own PAs think, they don't understand what admin do, so therefore it must be unimportant.

So, Admin staff out there, I salute you.

Bikes and Trains

This is a tough one for the commuter. See I have no real objection to people cycling to and from the station at each end, provided Lycra is only worn by attractive women cyclists. Thing is I really don't like bikes on my trains.

This is mostly because the majority of trains that run on my routes have no space for a bike and the cyclist ends up clogging up the vestibules. Not ideal. The obvious solution would be to put cycle spaces on to trains, but I kind of object to that too since a bike takes up the space that could allow 2 people to sit. Its a conundrum.

Of course Scotrail don't make life easy. I considered trying to cycle to the station from my flat but I neither wanted to lug my bike all the way to work on the train nor leave it chained to something as entertainment for local vandals so I decided to try and rent one of the cycle lockers at my local station. I picked up a leaflet and filled in the details, however as it transpires rental of the lockers is not dealt with at the station, no I would have to travel to head office in Glasgow to hand in my form, obviously only during office hours. This is about the worst way they could have organised this, surely it makes the most sense for me to apply through my local station since I'm there every day and that's where the locker is located. I have decided this means that Scotrail don't really want people using the lockers, this might mean they could be called successful and they may have to invest in more.

Back to bikes on trains, its really part of a larger problem, where a designer and a bean counter get together and commit hideous acts of short-sightedness. Trains now have less luggage space than ever before, with Virgin's pendolino's being the worst, the overhead storage isn't even big enough to take a small rucksack. In Short people have got together and made something that looks pretty and holds loads of people, but neglected to consider that the same people may want to carry things with them, particularly on a Glasgow-London trip. My solution, on local trains just a bit of thought for things like between seat storage for luggage, perhaps even take some dead space and make it a luggage rack. on longer distance, a guards van, yes, a car devoted entirely to luggage, I hear accountants shudder as I type but think of it. As you board you have to check in any larger bags (possibly at cost) where they are labeled with your destination and transfers, someone is then employed to load and offload this carriage at the specified points. Its not flawless but could solve most of the problems.

Ms Marvel Annual

I have been picking up the Ms. Marvel title since it started in the wake of House of M and has been consistently entertaining. However I was sorely disappointed by the Ms. Marvel annual in this weeks pull list.

The story wasn't bad, the art wasn't my cup of tea, but here's my gripe. It was distinctly short of Ms Marvel. Now I checked, It said Ms. Marvel on the cover, and only Ms. Marvel, ok it had a picture of her and Spider-Man on it, but I would expect a story with Ms. Marvel featuring Spider-Man. What I got was a Spider-Man story featuring Ms. Marvel. It wasn't a bad story, but if you look at what I buy you see I pick up Ms Marvel's solo titles while the only spidey a see is in New Avengers. If it had been called Spider-Man annual featuring Ms Marvel, I'd have left it on the shelf. Yes, I feel I was mis-sold, the issue had absolutely nothing for the Ms Marvel readers, Spidey got all the good lines and the bloody narrative of the story, Marvel turns up, tries to arrest him for being unregistered, then they fight a baddy. Looking at the issue spidey is on just about every page while Marvel barely features.

So, if you don't care about Spider-Man, and follow Ms. Marvel, avoid the Annual. I'm off to complain to Marvel for false advertising.

Oh Discordia

Woe, woe is me, for my computer suffered a fatal death, the hal.dll file more or less said "You know I can't do that Dave" and packed up. It coudl just be corrupted, or it coudl be that my hard drive is dead.

My test will be to get an Ubuntu cd running and boot into that, if I can see my hard drive, I can try copying a new hal.dll file into place, if not it will mean its dead, gone my large selection of fictional military logos.

Still, 2 things I can take from this.

1. Back up everything regularly
2. Have an Ubuntu CD on standby for this sort of thing.

Beery Goodness

Summer is officially over.

The Houston Brewing company's second festival of the year usually marks this and indeed it was its usual random self, with rides for children, a random band and, as usual lovely weather until around 5. Selection of beers wasn't great but they had a real cider on.

Which made me think about Beer, obviously. Now by Beer I mean Ale, or a lager, but none of your Tetleys, none of your Carling, or Tennents, in short if its chemically stabilised and accelerated, leave it out.

Now in Scotland Ale isn't always an easy find, although with the propagation of bottled ales it is becoming easier for pubs to make a shout on it, and the popularity of Good quality European biers is putting some pressure on the lager market (As can be seen by the way the usual big players are bringing out "Luxury" brands and trying to play up their own less chemical origins) however I won't believe them until they are forced by law to print an ingredients list on the side.

So, how do you tell a real ale from commercial swill. Well, its not 100% but a good way to tell if anything is good, is if its being sold, or marketed ice cold, be it Magners over ice or Ice cold Carling there is only one reason to serve anything below zero and that is to numb the taste buds to mask the taste. Not that ale should be served warm, despite what Americans will tell you, it should be cellar temperature, or a few degrees off normal room temperature, like it was in a room where you'd consider a jumper.

Still, it was good to be on the real ale again and with the rise of beer geekism and snobbery hopefully they should become more prevalent as places try to look more cosmopolitan.