Archive for February, 2007
Stoicism
Leaving a post about how squiffy I was for so long is perhaps not an entirely auspicious thing to do, it’s a shame then that this monologue details a similar situation. In the near two week interim it has snowed, melted and rained which means the British winter has arrived in all it’s glory and only a few months late. After drinking I decided it would be a good, nay excellent, idea to build a snowman directly outside of my neighbour’s door. Not happy with a plain five and half foot snowman I attached rabbit ears to give it a Donnie Darko twist. Alas my frozen zombie didn’t last the night and ended up being a rather menacing lump of snow which I’m sure had nearly the same effect. Prior to my homunculus building machinations, I had tried unsuccessfully to roll a snowball down my street and then sat and took in the silent world that only snowfall can bring.
A scant few days later I was coaxed to go out on Valentines day. To Skool Disco. At Corporation. With a Traffic Light party. On a Wednesday evening. With best intentions and a 1am cut-off point I thought a brief tipple and requisite thrashing about would do me no harm. This wasn’t a plan best laid but any semblance of sanity went out the window when it transpired that Corporation were doing drinks for £1. And of course our tickets also got us a free drink.
I have been to work with a hangover before; I am not proud of this fact and know full well that it impinges on my usual high octane approach to programming but I am no stranger to hangovers. Water before bed, breakfast in the morning and continuous glasses of water and the hangover is banished by lunch time. Not this time. This was the Duracell of hangovers: it just kept going, and going, and going (and going). It also didn’t help that I was tasked with sending out an e-mail to 12,000 people who had registered on a client’s site. E-mail sending is traumatic enough when lucid, but when your brain screams at you that you’re dying, it makes it all the more fraught.
After that “experience” there are now strict ground rules in place for me drinking on a weeknight which involve drinking limits, cut-off times and a barrage of excuses to waive all of the rules. Along with killing my liver, gaming is my other primary pastime and given the current line up of releases, my calendar is full.
Play surprised me by getting Okami to me on release day which has kept me more than busy. Thirty hours in and I’ve only just reached the final quarter of the game which (for the reluctant mathematicians among you) gives me another ten hours or so left. It is an awe-inspiringly awesome game and I have very few quibbles with it, but ten hours in two days is nigh on impossible with Final Fantasy XII coming out on the 23rd. It was always going to be a push to finish Okami in time for FF12 but I foolishly thought it would be possible, even probable, perhaps even approach the mythical 100% completion. With FF12 comes a brief respite until God of War 2 is released at the end of March along with Command and Conquer 3. This is of course ignoring Crackdown and Bullet Witch for the 360 which I’m not looking forward to enough to buy on release.
Final Fantasy games always take me out of gaming action for almost 100 hours each; 7, 8, 10, 10-2 have and no doubt 12 will as well. I recently tried for 100% on 10 after fatally breaking my initial game (Dark Aeons prevented weapon/stat progression) but gave up at the long term end-game “investments” (I then accidentally erased that save when making room for Okami…). Seven and eight I played on PC and managed to almost 100% seven were it not for those pesky Weapons (Emerald and Ruby) and eight was never my favourite to begin with. Ten-two I played through stoically but it didn’t help that it may as well have had “Girl Power” stamped across the front-cover.
If you’re currently thinking the (logical and sensible) argument of “Why not wait to buy them?”, you can take that kind of negative talk elsewhere. I may not be “hardcore” but me obsessive compulsive tendencies need some outlet.
It took me all night, to get you, but I got you
I am writing this while particularly drunk; I am squiffy enough to at least pretend at coherent speech yet sober enough to use the <em> tags. I am under no illusions that this is a good idea, and the only thing standing between me and complete literary anarchy is the Firefox spellchecker. You have been warned.
Being inebriated allows for a frank honesty that I couldn’t hope to muster while sober. For instance, I can say now that clubs are in now way conducive to me meeting people. I believe I’ve said before that I rely on my limited verbal prowess to seduce you mortals, so when there is a bass-line that rattles your laces and more flesh than clothing, I’m out of my element. Saturday had (what I can only assume) were two very attractive girls gyrating in front of me and this elicited nothing but confusion from me (“They’re probably lost..”). Females are not a foreign concept to me, contrary to popular geek lore, I am not a fish out of water while speaking to the opposite sex; I may be an introvert but I like to believe I’m not a total social outcast.
Of course the dichotomy (why is it I can use that word while my reptilian brain is active?) is that the more I drink, the more social and the more confident I become, but the less garrulous I am. My white-hot, full-bore wit is lost when I can’t answer simple questions without immediately flummoxing for larger words or perhaps something more witty.
I cannot dance. I can mosh, although this is no great feat as a retarded jellyfish that has come in contact with an electrical socket can mosh. The idea of losing myself is foreign to me, and becomes more and more foreign with each day that I forgot who I am. I lament for my past passion, my anger, my fury at the world at large, at people, at commercialism and society as a whole. Instead I find it replaced with apathy and the counting of days. Nothing is new anymore, the familiar lull of routine and fluffy comfort of knowing what is coming next. I yearn for the days when I woke up and had nothing to do, when the highlight of my evening was putting a camera down my boxer shorts and equating squirrels to cheese.
I wonder whether the draw of regular money and the deeply-defined nesting instinct has stripped me from what I should be doing. I fear that I may continue to drink only to remember the feeling of what it was like to have a spark, then to remember that memory, and then nothing. Sometimes I think it might be a fortuitous turn of events to wake up and lose all memory of what you are. To be left with fragments of writing, bits of a life to piece together as the clean slate of you lives again. What would I think if I woke up and this was what I saw first? A rambling diatribe of unfulfilled dreams and directionless fury, a short journey to see what I’ve filled my empty life with: a steadily overflowing collection of other people’s creative visions.
Perhaps this was supposed to be a post on sexual tension, frustration and release, dark feelings of ineptitude or just the cursed words of a legally-insane madman. Perhaps this is the only way to gain a perspective on what the daylight me perceives as normality. Or perhaps I’m taking things far too seriously and this is just a brain dump of a fevered mind. Either way, I started this post with the promise I wouldn’t delete it or rewrite it and I’ll stick by that promise.
It’s in our eyes and how we operate
Some articles just feel like they come from your own mouth. As if you slipped a bribe to a professional writer and they took the words right out of your mouth. As with any powder-keg argument, there are obvious flaws in logic and zealotry issues, but the vitriol and eloquence is enough for me to write out a Valentines card for Charlie Brooker. The pretentiousness of the adverts is well documented in other places (and well parodied elsewhere) and when you get down to brass-tacks, when you cut right to it, it isn’t about “PC” and “Mac” it’s about Windows and OSX. It’s argument which has been flogged to death without Apple glamming it up and whoring it all over town. The delicious irony I found was the banner and boxout adverts The Guardian site was running at the time.
Programmers Don’t Like to Code
Then some articles say something you always felt, gnawing at like a splinter until someone comes along with some tweezers. The idea of a programmer not liking to code is, on the surface, laughable but the argument is compelling. It elucidates why with every project I start I feel like rewriting everything, Etch-a-sketching what I’ve done before and just starting anew; why I staunchly refuse to use tried and tested frameworks like Cake or Prado and continue to use my own medium-rare monstrosity. The idea of using someone else’s code is a worrying one at first, that you would relinquish your implicit knowledge and control to a programmer or group of programmers you’ve never even met. The depth of that mistrust really defines you as a programmer, the programmers who craft compilers and work Assembly are the ones who are never happy with just accepting those fluffy, abstracted layers. And at every stage from there, you have a programming level that you settle in to, your comfort zone of just how much intrinsic control you’re willing to sacrifice to get something done and maybe even have fun doing it along the way.
Someone asked me today about starting their own blog and what they should write about. I would have told them they were asking the wrong person had I not already figured out what this blog was for, what this blog is about. I said that I write for me, because it’s something I enjoy and I’m going to keep on writing until I either figure out my subject, or I stop. I’m not about to kid myself that I’m interesting or witty enough to write about a single topic, so like life, like this blog, like this post it’s a bit all over the place.
Turn a new page, tear the old one out
I am a medical drama whore. This is not a statement of purpose or the First Step, I don’t even count it as a confession, just a statement. This is a very recent development as, for those who know me, know how squeamish I am which opposes the medical aspect of the drama. I am the child who threw up in science when the video of a bull’s eye dissection was being shown, I was the one who held up their hands to cover the screen whenever something that was supposed to be inside, was on the outside.
But not any more.
It started with House, a sarcastic comment here, a blistering one-liner there and I was hooked. Realistically it started with Scrubs way back when, but Scrubs has long since hung up what medical credibility it had and focused on it’s superlative off-the-wall humour. Recently however, it’s been Grey’s Anatomy. I still keep up with House but with the recent storyline has eroded my interest very swiftly. I’ll admit I was shallow and that the Golden Globe award for Grey’s was what made me originally pick up the series but I’m glad I did. In an ambivalent kind of way.
The storytelling is superb, sublime characters, it did everything to deserve the award. But it took me until the end of the second season to realise just why I could watch so much of it at once: it’s easy drama. While it’s unfair to draw parallels with House, it illustrates the point. Wherein House, anyone could die, patient or doctor, there isn’t that same uncertainty or tautness in Grey’s. It may focus on the characters more than the patients but the same idealism runs throughout all the threads: it will always turn out alright. At all points, each character has an intricate mesh of emotional support so that when they break down someone will be there for them. Someone will go to the supply cupboard and cradle them, someone will always come to the bar when they need it, and their friends will always eventually help them out. It’s this warm and fuzzy cocoon of best intentions and good vibrations like an ongoing anti-suicide advert; that it doesn’t matter how far down the toilet your life goes, no matter how many times you brutalise your emotions, someone is there to pick you up.
With that thought, I began to wonder why I’d burned away my weekend watching it. I wondered why I’d cried at the sad parts and laughed at the funnies, surely I should feel something about being so intricately manipulated emotionally? I realised that I watched it for the patients. These flashbulbs of human lives, dense cores of stories; a sobering thought that, supposedly, the time you’re most alive is when you’re close to death. Every siren is a change in someone’s life and that it’s a good thing?
Grey’s Anatomy does a lot of things very well, at moments it can echo a common ache of transition from adolescence to adulthood, while other moments it can patronise you with a lesson in morals. As ambivalent as I am about it, my worries err on the side of implications and allusions rather than explicit statements. It’s flawlessly written and impeccably acted and that’s enough for me, the thinking and the inferences can come afterwards.
You were the light and the way they’ll only read about
Vista has speech recognition “hole”
I am not a fan of the BBC’s technology news section at the best of times, I see it as some sort of plague pit where once worthwhile technology stories go to die. The editorial team manage to squeeze all semblance of worth out of a story and just cram it onto the site as sensationalist, mainstream excrement. This story is different in only that it was a non-story to begin with.
To summarise what this “exploit” needs to work:
- A PC with Windows Vista
- The speech recognition feature needs to be turned on
- The speech recognition feature needs to be trained
- The speakers have to be on and clear enough to transmit a believable voice command
- The microphone has to be placed near to the speakers to pick up the voice command
- The user needs to go to a “malicious” website or get a malicious e-mail that sends this voice command to delete files
- The user needs to do nothing while the command is being issued
Not exactly a short list, no where near as fun-for-all-the-family as Blaster or it’s remote-execution kindred. The fact is, this isn’t an exploit, it doesn’t hand over control of the computer to malicious third parties, recruiting it into a worldwide zombie network; this is barely a college frat joke. I can only imagine that you would need to have files selected to be able to delete them although not being an early adopter of Vista, I can’t prove that. This is akin to walking past your roomate’s door, shouting “SHUTDOWN!” at the top of your lungs, hoping the computer recognises your voice to undertake the command then running away giggling like a 12 year old.
I took speech recognition as part of my comp sci degree and it’s not a simple problem. For one, a system needs to be trained to a person’s voice so that it can understand tonal differences and so forth. This training can be useless if someone drinks a cup of tea after training which can subtly alter the voice. I’m sure the Vista recognition is advanced, but if you have a broad accent, the chances of the system recognising someone else’s voice, perhaps of a different locale or gender is fairly slim.
Exploitation level, this is hardly going to have system admins scurrying to plug a hole lest their drooling users fall prey to a carefully dictated pod-cast. The BBC have dramatised a retarded series of events to try and cash in on the “olol, Vista is insecure only days after release” furore that is bound to happen after any Microsoft release. This sort of story is only markedly more interesting than their constant Second Life articles or their painfully irrelevant editorial columns by their resident digital hippy. This sort of story ranks up with when people thought their computers were haunted when the Windows XP speech recognition picked up computer sounds and converted them to words, or when people thought their iPod’s “Shuffle” play mode was favouring certain artists. Everyday is a slow news day for BBC News Technology section.
Ironically their technology page has an opinion piece wondering whether there was too much Vista launch news coverage; with eight separate mentions of Vista on that landing page alone, I can only say yes.
Zero-hour calm
I woke up to a loud world today. Loud pillow, loud bed, loud curtains. The abject volume of the world defined by how much vodka I had to drink last night (more than I can remember) and how much of an ass I made of myself (unfortunately I remember most of that). On a scale of one to idiotic, I was about “moron” last night, trailing behind “gonzoed” and ahead of “stupid”. The calendar stormtroopers among you will notice that it was a Thursday night last night, making it a fully working day today. That puts my level of drinking at “dumb”, but the fact I had a presentation today, to the senior partners of the company I work for no less, elevates me to “retard”. That is not the depth of my myopia however, I like to make sure I go the whole way with things, no half-measures here (which ironically was my mantra for alcohol consumption last night as well). A lovely young lady was over (I believe I used the adjective “luscious” to describe her) and suffice to say that certain topics of conversation arose that were perhaps best left in my unsaid.
I have blissfully forgotten a lot of the minutiae of some conversations (especially the twenty minute chat I had with her about why I had two shelves of anime) but general topics such as: porn, gay-sex, Grid Wars, age (always guess lower than what your brain tells you), university degree (some people take offence when your first guess at their degree is Business Studies) and many other topics that are lost to time. Suffice to say fragments of retrospectively embarrassing moments keep trickling back to me which just keep reaffirming how much of an ass I made of myself.
My reason for drinking so much at such an inopportune time was a combination of short-sightedness and that my day at work had gone particularly well. Once I started watching 24, the sultry sound of Jack killing people urged me to drink more, then Mr Izzard compelled me to drink more by which time I was pleasantly squiffy. Lack of food and general merriment sealed the deal, at which point I figured I may as well get well lubricated as I’d already come so far. It also didn’t help that there were only two people drinking including me so I probably came off as more of a piss-head than I usually am.
I can only look back on the night with fondness, as even though today was very blurry and mighty loud it at least made me feel like I’m not a completely introverted recluse.
