Articles – Page 85

HSBC Account

HSBC have closed my bank account with them: a bank account I’d had with them since they were Midland Bank, back when I was still in high school. I hadn’t used it for, well – anything at all – for the last 9 months or so, and didn’t know it had been closed (they’d never told me) until I decided to check my balance last week and had my card stolen by a machine.

I went along to see them today, mostly out of curiosity as to what had happened. The cashier sent me to customer services, who seemed quite confused when they were unable to access my account details on the computer. They eventually found my details and had explained what had happened. The final balance, they informed me, was minus 6 pence.

Me: I’m not sure I can settle that six-pence debt all at once. Perhaps I can take a loan with you, and pay you back – I don’t know – eight monthly installments of a penny each, to clear it.

Her: That won’t be necessary.

Me: Umm, okay then… I could probably spare about sixpence… <checks wallet> Would you take a cheque?

Her: We’re happy to write-off the debt.

Me: I’m not sure I could live with myself knowing I’d cost you that sixpence. I mean; I’ve been with HSBC since before it was HSBC… almost ten years, now –

Her: <getting a little scared now>

Me: – and you’ve been great to me. There was that time you refused to give me a student account for no apparent reason, so I took my business to NatWest. And then there was that time I argued with your technical support staff about your facist web browser compatability policy for your online banking. And that time you keep posting me new Solo cards, one a month, for fun. And that time just five minutes ago that I queued for almost 12 minutes just to be told my account had been closed and the bank hadn’t even written to me to tell me. After all of that, how could I possibly steal sixpence from you?

Her: Is there anything else I can help you with, sir?

Dan 6 – 0 HSBC

Finished Psychonauts

I’ve just finished Psychonauts, so I can have my life back. It’s a surprisingly good third-person platform/shooter/RPG from for the X-Box and PC, from some of the minds of people who made Full Throttle and Grim Fandango.

Taken at it’s simplest level, it’s a jolly 3D romp through twisted landscapes in the style of American McGee’s Alice, but it’s a particularly well-balanced one: a wide variety of “psychic powers” – levitation, psychic blast, invisibility, psychokinesis, and pyrokinesis, to name a few – ensure that there are always a variety of ways to solve any given puzzle (climb the ropes, or bounce up using levitation, or float down from elsewhere on the map, or find another way to get the object you need…). Sadly, it suffers in many of the ways that console games – and many modern games – do in that the scope for adventuring is still somewhat limited: there are no puzzles, for example, based on persuasion of the NPCs, or on solving mazes, or on finding unusual uses for objects or combining objects. What puzzles exist are typically of the “find item”, “take key to door”, “deduce riddle” and “spot pattern” varieties.

But on another level, the game takes a deep (and, sometimes, dark) look into the human psyche, in a way that’s sometimes as funny as the political mentalities of Beneath A Steel Sky, and sometimes as chilling and disturbing as Eternal Darkness. You play a young psy-cadet at a psychonaut training summer camp (the psychonauts, it is barely explained, are mentalist crimefighters). At the start of the game you find yourself running around the real world, but as the game goes on you begin to spend an increasing amount of time in the “mental realm” (inside people’s heads), and that’s where it starts to become a little more clever.

Early in the game, during an exploration of your characters’ own repressed memories, you encounter ‘interference’ from another psychic, and there’s an interesting intermingling of character presences which isn’t fully explained until far later on, resulting in strange, dreamlike, fractured scenes. Later, you find yourself inside the head of a conspiracy theorist who’s driven himself mad with his incessant paranoia: in his mind, running through his subconscious, you find yourself surrounded by objects that seem to be watching or photographing you, and agents in disguise track your every move. In another mental realm – the mindsphere of a manic-depressive actress, you witness her life re-enacted on a stage, where the changing lighting reflects the mood swings through which the pictures of her history are repeated. In one scene, turning the lights to the “happy” side reveals the freedom the young actress felt at being able to leave home and do her own thing: turning the lights to the “depressed” side shows the suicide of her mother, throwing herself from a tall building… and later, as you’re clambering through her memories and fears, if you fall from a particularly treacherous ledge – if your volume is high enough – you hear her “depressed” voice mutter, “Just like mother.”

It’s sweet, and funny, and dark, and it plays like a dog on all but the beefiest of PCs. But it’s a wonderful little jaunt and a fun little adventure, despite it’s somewhat linear storyline and slightly repetitive puzzles. It’s got reasonable replay value, too, as there’s always the option to go back and “do things better”, although this doesn’t help relieve the game of it’s image as just another console platform game (which are infamous for trying to increase gametime by encouraging the player to redo things “for a better score”).

Dan And Alex

Dan & Alex comic

People have been asking me if these comics are actually related to my co-worker, Alex. Of course the answer is no: I would never say anything so unflattering about such a great and able worker as Alex, nor would I ever call him RetardBoy. And obviously these comics aren’t based on actual events: it would just be wrong to imply that these conversations actually happened in any way, shape or form.

Honest.

Goodbye Andy And Sian

Goodbye to Andy and Sian, who are leaving Aber tomorrow-ish. We’ve had ups and downs, we’ve seen some great times, and I’ll miss you both. Good luck in whatever you choose to do, and I hope to see you again sometime soon.

CNPS

Consecutive Number Plate Spotting is a very, very silly game.

And now Claire is doing it. And I’m betting that there’ll be others we know who’ll want to try to beat her at it (I’m looking at you, Paul – there’s a number 1 parked on Bridge Street).

This could get very, very silly.

Episode III, Take II

When Ruth, JTA and Claire watched Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith the other night, Claire got very drunk. As a result, she doesn’t actually remember much of what happened.

So, tonight, we’ll be watching it again. If you want to come along, we’ll be showing it at The Flat at 9pm tonight. BYOB, usual rules apply, see you there.

Postcard From Kit And Fi

Received a postcard this morning from Kit & Fi, and it’s as much to many of you lot as it is to me, so I’ll relay it to you here:

[CLASSIFIED – OPERATION TROMA // EYES ONLY]
Dear Dan, Claire, Paul, Bryn + Ruth, JTA, Andy, Siân & any other Troma fanatics (Jon + Hayley I’m guessing!)
Just thought we would write you a card to say we haven’t forgotten you all! On holiday in Mull, just finished making a Rhubarb crumble and will be planning trips to Iona + Oban. Should get down for freshers, but Fi will have to stay here – being a student and all!
Wish I could be with you all more! I do miss you!
Look after yourselves – say hi to the nocturnal bunch for me.
Love Kit + Fi… (it looks like it might say “Fio” or “Fiona”, but the stamp has been stuck over it)

Thanks for that, Kit, Fi. Made my morning (I usually only get envelopes with windows in them through my door). And yes, Kit, you got the postcode right.

Top 100 Movies According To Time

Paul: you might be interested in this (just for the challenge of watching them all) – Time have produced their top 100 movies list; take a look.

Claire and I went out with Sundeep last night to Reload at the Students Union, which was surprisingly good fun, apart from that weird man who briefly kidnapped Claire and the queues for the bar.

And in other news, progress seems to be being made on a number of new RockMonkey WikiGames, including Ruth‘s much-anticipated “The Adventures Of Tootie and Sweetie in the Land of the Happy Pixies”, which I’m looking forward to.

Eurovision At Troma Night?

All Troma Night folks are requested to vote on this week’s Troma Night plans! Are you coming? Do you want us to watch JTA‘s choice of films, or would you rather we watched the final of the Eurovision Song Contest (with full drinking/betting rules) and put off JTA for another day.

“What are you waiting for? Vote!”

Life Among Stressed Students

It’s exam week, and so I find myself surrounded by stressy students. Sundeep, in particular, worries far too much about her exams; but even Claire‘s not immune: while on the surface she’s fine, she’s been having weird dreams (of missing an exam… of failing an exam… spot a theme?) and has been getting frustrated easily. It took until I pointed this out that she noticed that this could be a result of subconscious stress about the exams. Bless. I remember being a student… while I too would always be cool as a cucumber, particularly challenging exams left me with (more) bizarre dreams for about a week afterwards.

Watched the Hitch-Hikers Guide To The Galaxy movie yesterday. It wasn’t as good as the TV series, which in turn wasn’t as good as the radio show, which in turn wasn’t as good as the books. But it was still pretty good: suitably trippy and “out there”, and with some great interpretations of the story and ways of putting it forward (including a stunning-looking scene where Arthur and Slartibartfast zip around the construction site of Earth II). A little fast-paced, it could have spread the story out a little more and thereby left less of the audience so confused, but as somebody who knew the story already, it made great watching.

Played through Full Throttle (on ScummVM) for the first time in years. It’s a short adventure game, with some ludicrously stupid puzzles, but it really is fun. When you’re hanging on the front of an armoured battle truck heading at breakneck speed for a cliff while the driver tries to shoot you with a pistol… and you panic… and look at your inventory… and the best thing you can think of to do is to shove a battery-powered fluffy bunny toy into the air intake… bzzzrrrt… “Fun!”, that game says. Ah, sweet. JTA, I’m assuming that now your exam is out of the way that you’ll be wanting a copy.

Rocking soundtrack, too, mostly by The Gone Jackals.

Work is good: I’m on a nice project that’s keeping me well-enthused, albeit also taking a lot of my time. It’s got polymorphic recursive PHP5 code in, that forms middleware between a relational database and an object-oriented model, so that’s pretty cool.

Speaking of programming, does anybody want to take on Jimmy‘s RockMonkey BigCloud Mapper (scroll down) challenge this summer? I don’t have the time or the inclination myself, but I’ll lend support to anybody who does.

Candlelight

Contrary to what JTA thinks, it’s quite easy to read by candlelight. I couldn’t sleep last night (or, to put it another way, I wasn’t even remotely tired by the time Claire went to bed, which is perhaps more a result of the fact that she’s not used to getting up so early in the morning as she had to yesterday, for her first exam), so I ended up reading for quite awhile to the light of two candles, and the light levels were fine. Perhaps your gamma correction is turned down too low, JTA… I have a screwdriver…

Right now I’m reading A Long Way Down, by Nick Hornby, which is quit un-put-downable. Darker than Hornby’s usual wit, it tells the story of four people who, coincidentally, on one particular New Year’s Eve, all choose the same tower block from which to commit suicide. The story is told, alternately, from their four unique perspectives, using their own unique language, and it’s… well… it’s just a fascinating story, so far.

And now, I’d better get off to work. But I’ll leave you with this satellite photo from Google Maps – what’s the large object in the centre of the picture?

Face-Burning Chilli

Many of you reading this will have eaten one of my chilli con carnes before, where I’ve used my Da Bomb: The Final Answer hot sauce in the recipe before (original recipe). For those not in-the-know, when cooking chilli to feed four or so, I tend to use the following system to measure the hot sauce:

1. Dip last centimetre or two of a strand of spaghetti into sauce bottle.
2. Wipe excess sauce off back into bottle.
3. Dip spaghetti strand into chilli pan, then dispose of.

And this makes a nice, weighty, fruity (it’s not all about heat, y’know), strong chilli. It’s a powerful little sauce.

Anyway, while cooking this evening, I noticed that my upper lip was starting to go numb. This is normally a bad sign, indicative of having spilt an untraceable quantity of The Final Answer (dubbed who dares burns) on my fingers and then accidently having touched my face. I recall the time I hadn’t washed my hands quite well enough before going to bed with Claire, and you should have heard her scream…

…I digress. The stinging spread to my cheeks and got worse, and it took me some time to realise that what was causing this pain was, in fact, merely the habanero-infused steam ascending from my pans. Yes; the capsaicin quantity of this steam alone was enough to cause pain. This was where I became a little alarmed, and opened the window.

Surprisingly, this chilli is really quite mild… but I think I’ve come up with a recipe that makes toxic chilli-fied steam while it cooks, which is in it self remarkable. Now if only I can find a way to condense the steam and collect it into gas grenades…

Today’s Progress

Today’s progress – at work – has been stunning, compared to the problems of last week. This morning, I came in, plugged in, did the mandatory e-mail and blog checks, read some news, then got down to work. I slapped on some Pink Floyd (Echoes and Division Bell) and the code… just… worked. By just after lunchtime I’d finished everything I had to do today, and I’m now working on a quote for later in the week. Fabulous.

And, to those who I may not see, good luck to Andy, Bryn, Claire, Faye, Hayley, Jen, Jen, Jimmy, Jon, JTA, Katie, Liz, Paul, Pete, Ruth, Sian, Sundeep, and Suz (the latter of whom I presume has some) in their upcoming exams. And to anybody else I’ve missed.

My New Route Home From Work

Tide permitting, I’ve been taking a new route home from work. It’s not much of a shortcut, not even taking 30 seconds off my time to get home, but it’s certainly a lot more fun than the regular route. Of course; it’s only accessible at high tide, and it does take a little bit of balancing…

Looking down on the pipe from the bridge.

The ladder up the sea defences can be seen at the other end.

There’s a convenient ladder at the Aberystwyth side of the river, that can be seen up the side of the sea defences in the third photo.

Toaster Death

Our toaster at work just blew up. It’s an Inspirations 4-Slice Toaster and I’d recommend against it to anybody. It’s actually the second such toaster we’ve had: Alex bought one from Woolworths so we could toast things and before long it developed a problem such that only 2 of the slots actually worked (the others just held on to cold bread). Later still, it exploded as it was turned on, shooting blue sparks in a plume up to the ceiling.

This new toaster was a replacement, and it soon developed the same “2 slices only” problem. While Gareth was making himself toast this morning he loaded up all 4 slices and I reached over to demonstrate that a particular two didn’t work… as soon as I pressed the lever down, there was a flash: a sparkly orange plume shot up out of the device and the circuit breakers engaged.

So now I can’t have my muffins for breakfast. And I’m hungry.