Paul will, yet again, have kittens: Ghost In The Shell 2: Innocence seems to have been released.
Category: Personal
The Village
Went to see The Village last night – very good film, well worth seeing, so long as you take a few things into account:
1. Unlike what all the previews would have you believe, this is not even remotely a horror movie – it’s a story about innocence and about what people will sacrifice in order to hold onto what they believe in.
2. It’s very good, but you need to go see it knowing as little about it as possible. That’s why I’m going to tell you almost nothing more about it.
Seven out of ten. Could have earned an eight from me if it had done a few key things better, in order that I wouldn’t have been able to predict the end from about half an hour in. I particularly enjoyed the pacing – nice and slow, no hurry to tell the story… although the ocassional “memory” voiceover was completely un-necessary for an audience that actually has a brain… felt like “dumbing down”. Bryce Dallas Howard‘s performance is brilliant – spot on: also good performances by William Hurt and Adrien Brody.
Go see it. But don’t expect whatever it is you’re expecting.
Aber Graduates Earn Least In UK
This is just fucking weak: the average salary of an Aberystwyth graduate is just £12,968… the lowest in the UK. And on this crappy ‘probationary period‘, that’s still more than I earn. Fucking shitty.
Feeling unmotivated now. Not getting enough work done.
Programmer’s Day
Apparently it’s Programmer’s Day, so Paul, Bryn, Claire and I put together an old low-end Pentium into a dual-booting
Red Hat/Windows 98SE box, and racked up some classic games of the 80s and 90s. Fab.
There’s actually some debate about whether Programmer’s Day should be included as a Wikipedia entry… as there’s not a lot of evidence that anybody actually supports it, except for a few hardcore geeks (most of whom discovered it on Wikipedia or a site that uses it as a source) and some Russians who started a petition.
In any case, we had a lot of fun, and we’ll be doing it next year.
Homosexual Intercourse Exposure To Be Reduced By Highland Cattle
In this news story on Ananova, it is reported that a Dutch town is hoping to reduce occurrences of gays using their park for sex by filling it with Scottish highland cattle, which will apparently “scare them off”.
It’s a weird world.
Lottery Scratchcards And Illicit Hallucinogens
Damn weird: last night I dreamt that I found a lottery scratchcard which had not been completed – just two of it’s sixteen panels had been scratched off. While I’d not be fool enough to buy one (the mathematics is simple – the lottery is a stupidity tax), I’ll happily play one I didn’t pay for, and so I scratched off the remaining panels. The scratchcard was a £1000 pound winner. I claimed the money, and spent it all on LSD. Coincidentally, I can’t remember much of the dream after that…
JavaScript Random Quote Generator
A friend sent me an e-mail yesterday asking if I knew of a simple random quote generator that she could embed on her web page. So I’ve written one, and I’m making it available here on the off chance that anybody else wants it too. It’s implemented in JavaScript, and works simply by including a separate .js file within the document. The ZIP file contains both the .js file (which will need to be edited in a plain text editor such as Notepad, to insert your own quotes) and a .html file, which provides an example of it’s usage. Unzip both to a folder and double-click on the HTML file to see it in action.
Download QuoteGen (ZIP file, 1.07KB).
Violently Ill
Argh.
The worst part of being so horribly ill is the moment when you’re dashing to the toilet before you pebbledash the floor with your arse… and at that moment you realise that your stomach is about to eject it’s contents, too. What a paradox.
In any case – it’s not all bad news: the Ship & Castle has been re-opened. It’s now run by Ian Blair, the man behind The Mill. They’re still doing real ales (albeit a very slightly reduced selection), and the redecoration of the place has given it a lighter, more ‘open’ feel. Sadly, the jukebox has been changed, and several of the better rock ballads CDs have been replaced with “Now XX”.
Are these two bits of news related? Perhaps.
Gonna go throw up again…
Happy Fun Weekend
It’s so much nicer coming back to the office on a Monday after a weekend both relaxing and productive, with lots of happy fun time with friends. Managed to tidy the flat, do heaps of laundry, have a successful Troma Night (three films, a decent crowd, and everybody hung on in ’til the end despite knackeredness), a sedate but moderately successful Geek Night (Carcassonne and Chez Geek). All good.
Plus, I managed to find time to learn a fair bit about mod-rewrite, the Apache module that lets you do all kinds of useful things like canonical URLs, content negotiation, proxying content, fallbacks, etc. (as used on Scatmania to make the ‘nice’ URLs you see with the date and post name embedded into the pseudo-folder-structure). Fab. And managed to help Bryn with his new web site, which I’m sure you’ll all be seeing later this month.
And in actual news, BBC News reports that a Swedish man has been issued with a £90 ticket for illegally parking his snowmobile in Warwick, despite claiming never to have been there and that his snowmobile was in his shed in Bollstabruk at the time.
The Scary Baby Conspiracy
Now here’s an idea for an Illuminati: The Game Of Conspiracy “Illuminati” card – The Scary Baby Conspiracy. Suggestions for the Scary Baby Conspiracy’s unique win condition and any special rules are welcome (from anybody who actually knows what Illuminati is). Fnord.
On which note – it’s Geek Night tonight! Hopefully we can have a couple of games of Carcassonne and perhaps one of Hacker.
A.I. Nuts, Again
Do you remember a week or two ago I wrote about a guy who patented the “Ethical Rules Of Artificial Intelligence”? Well – it looks like he’s read my article and placed his own comments. I’m quite surprised and impressed that he took the time (away from his heavy schedule of philosophising or book-signing or whatever) to come and read my counter-arguments to his ideas, and placed comments of his own (albeit mostly pre-fabricated stuff).
Here’s to you, John LaMuth.
Mr. Sinus Theater 3000 In Name-Theft Lawsuit
The Austin Business Journal reports that the makers of Mystery Science Theater 3000 are taking to court the makers of a new show, Mr. Sinus Theater 3000, in which a group of guys sit in front of a cinema screen and take the piss out of the films they watch. And fair enough: it seems to me that this is quite obviously an attempt to cash in on the fame of the now-dead series, MST3K. Although if it’s not – and it is just fair use and parody… then Best Brains would be complaining that their parody-ridden show was itself the victim of a parody… umm…
In any case, go read the story.
Hide & Seek
Following the success of our last game of hide & seek in the Castle, Paul, Bryn, Claire and I went for another game last night. Ah; the simple joys of childish fun – legging it around a darkened ruin at night. Right up until silly screaming girls filled the area. Then we left.
In other news, I’ve been playing far too much The Ur-Quan Masters (a.k.a. Star Control 2). If you like retro space exploration and trading games, give it a go (it’s free). Fantastic soundtrack, too.
Arriva And The Bus Route Of Doom
Missed my bug this morning. It seems that Arriva carried out some changes to the local bus timetables at the weekend. This much I knew about. I also know that my bus would now be leaving the bus station at 0740 (rather than the 0750 I’m used to), so I arrived ten minutes earlier than at a bus stop it passes.
I was all in favour of this change. Throughout the day, the buses on the 531 route to Penrhyncoch have all left Aberystwyth at twenty to the hour… except for the aforementioned first one of the day, which leaves at ten to. For those of us who frequently alternate between these two times, it seems particularly not to have the first bus of the morning leave at the same minutes-past-the-hour as the rest: it’s only a ten minute difference. This is what I assumed they’d done.
Somehow, I managed to miss my bus, so I returned home and downloaded the new timetable.
It seems that not only have Arriva changed the start time of my service, but also it’s frequency, number, and even it’s route. The lightly-worded poster discreetly placed in my bus didn’t hint at the magnitude of the upcoming change (“a few changes to schedules”, it said). Bloody hell.
So now there’s no Sunday service, no late service, and an even harder-to-memorise timetable (with the first two and the last one bus either way now on a different schedule pattern than the rest). The only possible benefit to me is that the bus makes less stops: for example, it no longer stops at the bus stop I was waiting at this morning…
<sighs>
This isn’t a good start.
Amazon Pre-Order For Half-Life 2
I can’t believe that it’s been 13 and a half months since I pre-ordered Half-Life 2 on Amazon. I went to check on my order earlier today:
It seems that my delivery estimate hasn’t been fixed – I can still (apparently) expect to receive my copy of this long-awaited game by 2nd October… 2003. Hmm.