ɔimoɈɒ

I’m getting mighty sick of this country and rampant bigotry. Turn on the news and see what a mess this place is in. The smell of burning reached as far as Mallusk.

As someone wrote on the BBC News site (when that blast bomb was chucked at the children):

“Isn’t it about time that we started treating the people of Northern Ireland like the animals they are.”

I think that’s why I applied for three jobs this morning – none of which are in Northern Ireland. Anything important to me is portable.

I’m tired of the speculation. Apple says that this new thing will blow us away. They say it is something never done in the PC world before. They say it’s going to be big – even bigger than other things they have done before.

I’ve seen the iWalk fakes. I’ve heard the speculation from MacRumors, MacOSRumors, AppleInsider and ThinkSecret and frankly I’m getting a little tired of it all. I’m looking forward to the weekend as the rumour sites don’t tend to get updated at the weekend.

We’ve had a death in the family as well and it’s very sad. Tsunami.

I’m still dying with the cold and yet should be resting. Should be resting.

I’m annoyed anyway but taking this opportunity to have a whinge. I haven’t played a game with friends in months now which is just not on. I tried to get people interested in De Profundis but the responses have been less than satisfactory. Three people say they are interested yet I know that two of them really aren’t and the third doesn’t have the time. Makes for a great game that.

On the other hand, Colin has invited us to a game which he will run. I’d be interested but I’m not interested in gaming with someone on the mailing list. Not without a good apology – not for me of course – for Lesley.

And the server holding the web pages mentioned yesterday? That has been up for 14 days and 22 hours as I type this. I should probably keep more of an eye on it but well…it works and doesn’t require much administration.

It’s cold here but not as cold as it was in work. Despite my illness I’m going to have to venture into the place tomorrow just to make sure that things are running smoothly. I had to config up a subnet remotely, add a DHCP scope and make sure the scope forwards onto the subnet across two router interfaces. Busy Busy.

Heating in the office dead.

I instead went to Lesley’s work at UUJ and sat in her office nd well, surfed the web and tried to read PDF documentation. We have to go the creche today and talk about baby stuff. We’ve hit the beginning of Week 31 which means that in about 9 weeks I should be a Daddy. Looking forward to it. My friend Jane sent me a pic of her family outing to the 12 Apostles in Oz. Apparently they had bad weather – I bet their water wasn’t frozen and their ground covered in snow…

Anyway, we have a new web page at http://smythehall.homeip.net/ which is actually an archaic old Mac sitting in my living room humming quietly. It only has 32 MB of RAM but works well enough as a web server. I’ve no idea how long the machine has been running but it’s been a good while without any outages – except two caused by tripping the trip switch with a faulty heater.

Went to see Harry Potter. Not a bad movie but isn’t Alan Rickman being typecast these days. There was a trailer for The Lord of the Rings just before it and even though I’ve seen the trailer before, seeing it on the big screen sent shivers down my spine. I think I’m looking forward to it.

Someone tried to kill me yesterday. Didn’t look, didn’t signal, was driving at 60 miles an hour. Would have been a sad end to what seems to be turning into a pretty good life.

Gaming. Looks like Crucible is well and truly dead. John said some hurtful things and I didn’t back down. I’m tired of backing down – I’ve had enough of people promising to do work for it and never coming out with anything and then leaving me to do their work for them. Doubly so when they are the first ones with the pen out when people want books signed. On other gaming news, I got a review of Testament and …well… it’s pretty harsh. There are some things I disagree with and it’s maybe plain that the reviewer didn’t actually read what was written but I’ll post the URL and the rebuttal when the review is up on rpg.net. Maybe I’m not cut out for this malarkey – maybe I should try writing a proper book or maybe I should just start writing the script for my film…

I’m in a good mood however. Some silly cow sent me an email with a virus and then thought I was a friend of hers when I replied to let her know she had the virus. Doh! Some people eh.

Anyhow, I’m off. I had a hundred things to write about but they can’t have been that important as I’ve forgotten them.

Keep your feet on the ground and keep reaching for cigars…

A friend chimed in to tell me he dipped into this web page. “My life…to go” he called it. Also mentioned it was bizarre. Well maybe it is. But not as bizarre as …this… (you’re sorta glad you can’t see that…trust me…) Anyway with one person sending me an email to tell me about how frustrated he is and another IM’ing me to let me know about how much of a sh!t his neighbours ex-boyfriend was …I think I’m about ready to declare war on Redmond. You know. Nuke it from orbit, the only way to be sure. There’s also the case of the hundreds of COMPLETE IDIOTS out there who still have the sodding virii that constantly beat on your website. Logs fill up with this crap you know. I can see your IP addresses you pillocks. Serves them right I guess. I mean…imagine still using Windows in this day and age… I really should go and write something. You know. I recently finished both Creed and Testament for the Late Gaming Company and I’m hankering to write some more. I want to write something for CrucibleDesign again but after one of them annoyed me today I’m just not in the mood. Shame because CodeName Frontier would be rather cool to work on right now but apparently I’m the sort of “scoff and point out the faults” when someone offers to help. Well, sorry, when the problem is people sending 40K Word documents when 9K text files contain the same information and don’t require me to spend % #400 quid on The Microsoft Tax then I’m not about the accept an option that allows me to “view” the Word files. Just sodding don’t send them! Yes, it’s doubly petty of me not to work on a project just because someone pissed me off but that’s the way it is. How am I meant to get motivated? There are five of us and when one person just refuses to do any work, another only does admin and the other two guys are too busy then it just leaves me. I have the time because I make time. I’m getting to the point where I could just kiss Crucible Design goodbye and call it quits but frankly I’ve too much time and emotion invested in it. I want to continue making books but I’m sick of the bullsh!t. Certain people are happy to coast along and do nothing but are quite willing to sign books at the end of the day. And that frankly sucks.

LateGaming.com sort of went live with their first PR and noting the release of Creed which looks SO much better than Testament in my opinion. There are a hundred ways to describe it but the best way is : Mac OS X and Stone Design’s Create. PDFs rule in Mac OS X.

Also…I’m off to MacExpo tomorrow morning. The plane leaves at 0630 which means I have to be at the airport for about 0530 which is a seriously ungodly hour to be up and about.

I don’t get back til very late that night as well…but I should be dining in a Russian restaurant in London for lunch and meeting Paul and Simon. Paul is the nicest bloke I know and also helped me out with Creed more than he knows and I hope he’ll continue to help with Qabal. I’d like to get him actually writing too! I work with Simon, or more accurately we’re in the same team and have some similar interests (hence us both going to MacExpo) and I admire his technical knowhow certainly in the area that we work. Nice blokes the both of them.

Whew, what else.

You know, life just isn’t worth living unless you break the rules a little.

Yesterday I was visited by a nice BT engineer called Brendan and well…to cut a long story short…the install failed. The modem wouldn’t sync with the exchange and it isn’t a simple distance problem because those machines will sync out to 8 km….just at 8 km they may not pass any traffic…

This morning I got a call from him and I’ve just had my faith in humanity restored by his customer-focus and friendliness. He’s coming up to the house at 13:00 today to see if we can finish the job as it seems to have been an exchange fault.

Yesterday also had my brother up cutting the grass. First he managed to banjax the flymo on short grass (well…the blade came off…) and then when we hired out an “All Terrain Mower” in order to tackle the field and parking areas for the party on Sunday…it managed to break as well.

So much for durability. Still…we only got charged half price for the use of it and by lunchtime today I should be ADSL-enabled.

Apple, my favourite fruit company, is announcing some sort of new “breakthrough” device tomorrow with the only information available on it being:

“Hint: It’s not a Mac.”

As intended, this has got the media doing somersaults. Partly because it’s Apple and by calling it “breakthrough” they are setting the bar pretty high – this will not be your run-of-the-mill MP3 player or apple branded PDA. Partly also because October 25th sees the release of Microsoft’s latest operating system, Windows XP. Microsoft is betting a lot on this release and has set aside US$200 Million for marketing. Ad I’m not surprised as their revenues have been increasing year on year since wayback, the percentage increase is getting smaller. See here for more.
http://www.economist.com/business/displayStory.cfm?Story_ID=822234

So…Apple is talking this device up as well as putting information out on it the same week as Microsoft’s media blitz for Windows XP.

I’m curious naturally. I’m also wondering about whether a second job will be enough for me to afford it – assuming I like it. Speculation on the Mac Web is rampant with most people thinking it will be a firewire or airport hard drive for connecting to both your Mac and your music centre. Not a bad idea – how about a machine that would stream your CD or your radio over airport straight from your stereo? Neato indeed…but would everyone want or need one? Another speculation was a Quicktime movie player – a little device that will playback quicktime movies for you. Without content however it’s just a dumb device and hand held DVD players, though they have plenty of content are very very expensive.

What I want them to announce is something slightly different.

Yeah, it’s an MP3 player that will also record your voice. Big deal huh?

How about if it had an Airport card and an ethernet jack and could be used as an IP phone to other iTools users or even just to call any other IP phone with a compatible protocol. It would use the same microphone and speaker hardware as the MP3 player and voice recorder with just a few slight additions. thing is – no-one has done that before. Add in compatibility with instant messaging protocols (so THAT’s why they hired Eric Peyton of EpicWare) and you’ve got one sleek baby.

I’d buy that for a dollar.