All kinds of stuff going on this weekend, principally Kev’s 30th birthday party.
And then, on Sunday just before I fly out for the week, Penny and I are going to see MirrorMask at the London Film Festival. The DVD already has an Amazon entry, though as you can see, it’ll be a long time before it’s available…
mirrormask
Originally uploaded by sburn01. Click to enlarge
technorati tag: mirrormask
US military guide to Iraq goes online: “A VALUABLE guide to Iraq published by the US military has gone online.
It points out that the country has its own monarchy with an elected legislature.
The country is now guarded by British troops to prevent the Germans from gaining control.
While most Americans and Europeans who have gone to Iraq didn’t like it at first, nearly all of these same peoplechanged their minds.
‘That tall man in the flowing robe you are going to see soon, with the whiskers and the long hair, is a first-class fighting man, highly skilled in guerilla warfare. Few fighters, in any country, in fact excel him in that kind of situation. If he is your friend, he can be a staunch and valuable ally. If he should happen to be your enemy – look out!’
More fascinating advice [from the 1940s], here.”
technorati tag: iraq
My brain is way too much mush to actually come up with opinions and nothing particularly interesting has happened recently, hance the low content blog posts. Have another…
technorati tag: quote
technorati tag: bird flu
Virtual land flogged for over $50k: “US gamer Jon Jacobs, known to gamers as Neverdie, has bought an in-game space resort for over $50,000.
Project Entropia is the MMO brainchild of Swedish developer Mindark PE AB. Players can exchange money for game currency at a conversion rate of $10 fictional to $1 US. Having sold for $100,000 US the fictional environment will provide a substantial stream of real life financial income, as it has apartments, mines, hunting grounds and many markets from which to extract hard earned Entropia dollars from other players.
Jacobs is now the owner of an in game PA system and in control of advertising around the station. This means that substantial revenue could be generated from real life advertising to in-game players and presents an interesting take on advertising in games.
This tops the game’s previous record sale of a detailed treasure island to an Australian in December of 2004. At the time the $26,500 sale was the largest virtual real estate sale ever. Since then, Project Entropia has swelled to more than 236,000 registered players. With an ever increasing player base these auctions will only become more heated, as the prospective financial gain grows through both advertising and in-game selling. “
technorati tags: project entropia, mmorpg, virtual world
I forgot to blog this last week: Last weekend Penny went to visit her Dad and his wife, Betty. They had just returned from a trip to Italy and wished to regale Penny, her sister Donna and Donna’s husband Andy with their tales of Venice. Sadly for Betty the trip was made less pleasant by a comobination of factors. Firstly, it was rather expensive; Secondly although Betty apparently likes to emerge herself in the culture of her holiday destinations, found that language was somewhat of a barrier to this. But the third, and worst, thing that ruined Venice? Those ghastly Germans! They were everywhere!
Now, I should point out at this point that within Penny’s family only her sisters know of the fact that she is seeing me. Her ‘rents have no idea and, to be honest, this suits me fine. My parents are enough of a handful, quite frankly!
So after Betty rops her clanger about those ghastly Germans, it goes quiet for a second while Donna and Andy look over at Penny to see how she reacts to this statement.
Penny’s face goes deadly serious and launches into “Oh, I agree, those Germans, they’re awful! Oh no, the Germans! They’re just horrible!” She has so much fun with this that Andy and Donna join in as soon as they know it’s safe, encouraging Betty to more and more extreme statements against Germans, before they al finally tire of the game. To cap it all, Donna manages a venom-filled “And we certainly wouldn’t one of them in our family!”
On Penny’s return to Aldershot, she managed to exercise levels of restraint that were superhuman (for her) by waiting at least 2 minutes before spilling the whole story out. Most amusing! However, she did deliver a vicious taunt too… Her souvenir was a mug, labelled Bardolino. Why is this a taunt? I’m very fond of a bottle of Bardolino wine which can be hard to get hold of in shops. Grrr….
Personally I blame the Germans…
Weekend was a good one. Penny and I had been together for a year on Saturday, so we went out for a meal and went to see ‘The Corpse Bride‘ a Tim Burton movie in the style of ‘The Nightmare Before Christmas’, which was muchly enjoyed.
technorati tags: germans, wine, corpse bride
There
So, Wednesday night involved a flight to
The next day, the meeting itself went very well indeed. A hostile audience (hostile to the project, not to me personally) was converted into being positive about the future and all was right with the world. I left
An Interlude
Sorry about that! Now, moving on to books I have finished recently. Firstly, ‘Freakonomics’ in our non-fiction category. Very, very interesting book, well worth reading. An economist uses his powers to investigate aspects of the world we often take for granted, gets accused of being a eugenicist and proves sumo wrestlers cheat! You can borrow it off me once Andy’s finished with it.
Next up, Clancy’s ‘Teeth of the Tiger’. Utter pants. I know I said recently that I only consider Clancy pulp anyway, but this has to have been the worst Clancy I’ve ever read! (The only one from the Jack Ryan\John Clark book I haven’t read is the previous one, Teeth of the Bunny or whatever) It is weak, boring, uninspiring, unresearched… bobbins.
And finally, ‘Thud!’ the newest Terry Pratchett. A book I enjoyed immensely. The second half was as good as the first half. Not my favourite Pratchett book, but it certainly fits well into the Guards storyline. Much better than ‘Going Postal’. I’m slightly hesitant to lend this out as it’s my signed copy.
Back Again
Stayed at Andy’s place again last night, which was cool. Travel from Heathrow to Chiswick is only 30 minutes. Watched an episode of Spooks (strange), ironed a shirt and crashed, only to get up early this morning to get back up to Amersham. Hopefully I can leave early today.
Saturday
I couldn’t write about this earlier as Penny has internet access in the evenings now. But tomorrow is our one year anniversary since we got together. Amazing how time flies, isn’t it? She’ll be working part of tomorrow, but I certainly have plans for the evening…
technorati tags: thud, travel, freakonomics, clancy
Windows no con: “Ok, try this:
In Windows, should you run such a thing, create a new folder. Try and give it the name ‘con’.
Can’t be done, can it?
We dunno why. Nor, apparently does Bill Gates. “
So last night was spent at Andy’s B&B, AKA the couch, which was cool. It was good to hang out over beers in the evening and have a semblance of a social life.
In a couple of hours I’m off to
Next week I should be in the
And the week after? Between one and three days in
Is your printer spying on you?: “Researchers hired by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) say they were able to break a code hidden in tiny tracking dots that some colour laser printers secrete in every document they print.
The U.S. Secret Service admits it struck a deal with some laser printer manufacturers to add tracking information to the printed matter. The spooks say it’s a means of identifying counterfeiters. “
Interesting. So the Secret Service says the codes are only used for counterfeiting cases, but basically are readable by all. I doubt very much that they kept this crime-fighting innovation to themselves.
Now, personally I’m not worried about this. I really doubt any of my laser-printed output will ever be of any interest to security services (although it’d make a useful tool in some copyright disputes). But I wonder about the results of the EFF’s research, as it now somewhat robs security services from the benefits of these codes in investigations. All computer literate criminals will now probably all switch over to inkjets which don’t have a high enough resolution for the microdot technology to work.