Digital TV
I had a dream last night that hundreds of new TV channels showed up on digital TV tuners. Weird.
I haven’t yet upgraded to digital TV. I’m in the unfortunate position of:
(a) having bought a 4:3 CRT TV at precisely the wrong time, about 7 years ago, just before the prices plummeted when widescreen LCDs and plasmas went mainstream, and apart from occasionally having a flickering line at the top (I think due to a bump while moving), that TV works admirably;
(b) not particularly wanting Yet Another Box and Yet Another Remote to have to deal with; and
(c) not having huge amounts of cash to throw around just now to buy a shiny new telly.
So I’m umming and ahhing. I suppose at some stage HD set-top boxes will become cheap enough that it becomes a no-brainer just to get the extra channels. Alternately a Digital Video Recorder might be the way to go.
I find the whole Freeview push amusing. All those ads. More than one person has asked what it actually means. They seem underwhelmed when I tell them it’s just digital TV. (And Freeview’s insistence that it’s all free is undermined somewhat when you point out that well, they’re not giving away set-top boxes, you do have to pay for them.)
The analogue signal won’t get switched off in Melbourne until late-July 2013, so I guess there’s a fair bit of time to continue procrastinating, but it would certainly be nice to get ABC2, and solve my slight ABC1 reception problem.
- Unbelievable. This article explains digital TV, but completely fails to mention that you must have an HD tuner (not an SD one) to get most of the new channels.
- Rob Kemp’s take on it
Geek Idol
I’ve had few real idols; people of whom I could genuinely say “I want to be like them.”
In my early-to-mid 20s, Ben Elton was one of them. Amazingly funny, both on stage and in his writing. I wanted to write stuff that was half as good as his books, but never quite managed to write anything that was engaging enough to last over the length of a novel. My best attempt was The Year 2031, and even that wasn’t terribly long.
Ten years earlier, it was Tony Crowther. He was perhaps five years older than me, and a game programmer extraordinaire, writing hit after hit on the Commodore 64. I loved his game Blagger, and the sequel Son of Blagger, then got through Monty Mole (but only with help from a walkthrough). For a while I was hooked on Potty Pigeon, then Loco, which I enjoyed more than its astoundingly similar-looking followups Suicide Express and Black Thunder.
After that I moved off the Commodore 64 onto other things, and lost track of him and his games.
I suppose I dreamt in some ways of writing my own games and making a fortune from it. Back in those days many commercial games were written by solo programmers, or small teams. These days the gaming industry is dominated by borg-like big development studios, and Suits.
The other week I was in MagNation and noticed a copy of Retro Gamer which featured an interview with the man, as well as a big feature on Pacman. Wow. I was in a rush and made a note to go back and buy it the next day.
When I went back in, it was gone. Replaced by the next edition. I asked if maybe it was lurking somewhere in the shop. Nope. Everywhere else I looked was the same. Gone.
I had a look online. There are quite a few articles about Crowther, but most of them are reprinted from the 80s. I was also interested to know what he was up to these days, and what he thinks looking back at those old games — precisely the sort of thing Retro Gamer does well when they find people to interview.
I could order the mag from the publisher, of course. It would cost 5 pounds. Fair enough. But with 6.50 postage (!) it’d be a total of 11.50, or about $25 — double the Australian retail price.
While I was pondering that, Rae (who had been kindly checking newsagents near her work for it) pointed out I could look on Ebay, which was a brilliant idea. I found a copy for UKP 7.70 including postage, about $16. Much more reasonable. I’m eagerly awaiting its arrival from the UK.
In the mean time, I’ve discovered that Crowther has in fact been assimilated into the borg that is Electronic Arts. One of the games he worked on recently-ish was Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, which was one of the last games I bought for the XBox.
And me? Well, I did start writing a few computer games, but never quite finished any of them. But I did end up making a living out of writing software.
Who were your childhood idols? Where did they end up? Did you get to be like them?
You’re invited — bring a slave
I wrote about this ages ago, but it hasn’t changed, as it still works the same way on my newish Nokia N95 phone:
The predictive text, which usually works really well, reckons if you press 752737, the most likely word you want is slaves. I always want plates.
So if I’m not careful to change it (using * ), my message could end up saying something like Could you bring some slaves to the picnic?
Without wanting to make too many assumptions, are there many people out there who would be more likely to be texting about slaves than plates?
Other than that the N95 is good. The camera is fantastic — it’s actually slightly more megapixels than my old Canon A70 camera, though the quality isn’t as good, especially in low-light situations.
I love that it has Wifi so I can check my email at home for free without even turning a computer on, or on-the-go via the airwaves, though I confess I haven’t figured out yet how to send an email from it.
Oh, but there was something else: on my old phone the date/time of an SMS was the sent time. On this it’s the received time. So if I turn on my phone after a few hours of it being off, I have no idea how old the messages arriving really are.
That’s the only annoying thing. Apart from the slaves.
Brief things
Computer: I like it when computers reach the point at which a good upgrade is cheap, quick and cheerful. In this case on my two-year-old box, tripling the RAM cost me $45, tripling the hard disk space cost $130. And as the new disk is faster than the old one, I’ll take the opportunity to re-install everything onto it, and clear out its sinuses in the process. … Would have helped if I’d bought the correct hard disk cable, of course.
Cluster headaches: They came back for autumn, but the medication has pretty much got them under control.
Solar hot water: It’s been a year since I got solar hot water installed. From a user point of view, there’s absolutely no difference. By the time it reaches you at the tap, it’s just hot water. I’d love to tell you it made a clear and noticeable difference to the gas bills, but looking through them, I’m not seeing it, in part because water, heating, and cooking is all tied up in there, and also apparently (at least according to some BOM figures I cast my untrained eye over), 2008 was slightly colder than 2007.
The toe: It’s healing. Most of the swelling has gone, but it’s still a little uncomfortable to walk in shoes.
Star Trek: Booked for Sunday in Gold Class. Looking forward to this.
Patter
If you’re in customer service it’s good to have some kind of patter worked out to keep your customers entertained. Bad to use the same line twice in one session though.
This is why spam fails, actually. One might take notice of a single reputable-ish-looking email, but when a dozen show up at once, it’s easy to see what’s going on.
(How many damn emails have I had purporting to be from menshealth.com in the last week?! Oh, and Pfizer.)
Attn: Other Daniel Bowen
Attention: Whoever has tried to initiate a password change for the Gmail address “danielbowen”:
It’s not working for you because it’s not your email address.
It’s mine. That’s why the password assistance message keeps coming through to me.
If you’ve received this mail in error, it’s likely that another user entered your email address by mistake while trying to reset a password. If you didn’t initiate the request, you don’t need to take any further action and can safely disregard this email.
Yup. Disregarding.
Oh, and if you’re the same person (Stateside, somewhere, I think) whose friends occasionally email me, then I can only doubly emphasise: please learn what your email address is. I really don’t want to read any more of their lame jokes, construction work updates, travel plans, wedding photos, news of your ailments, or your mutual friends’ ailments. (That stuff should be personal, after all).
Thanks.
Email bankruptcy
Every so often you realise a clear out is in order.
When I realised yesterday there were a thousand items in my Gmail inbox, I decided I had to do something.
So I started at the bottom of it, and started clearing and filing. I’m about halfway through it. In the process I found some emails that I had meant to answer or otherwise action, but never did — some from 3-4 years ago.
I’m declaring email bankruptcy on my Gmail account.
Apart from one or two, I’m not replying to any of them now. I have actioned a few things though. So finally, as was suggested by Chris in early 2005, that photo I took in 2004 of the mural in Yarraville has been added to the Trugo article in Wikipedia.
If you emailed me ages ago, expecting a reply, and never got one, I can only apologise. I read every email I get (well, apart from the obvious spam), and I do intend to reply when it’s needed, but sometimes things move so fast that replies get left behind.
For future reference, if you hear nothing within a week or so, give me a gentle reminder. I’ll do my best.
Thankfully my other email boxes aren’t in such a state. Well, not much.
Fiddling with the web server
Fiddling with the web server. Comments will be disabled for a little while, and you may notice some other glitches in the next little while.
Update. Moved to new server. Consolidating hosting plans.
Not as smooth as I hoped. WP2.7.1 broke some bits of it. 2.7 looks better.
Thursday morning. Just waiting for the DNS changes to propogate. If you can see this, they’ve reached you.
And yes, I’m still fiddling with the blog template in response to comments on it.
