A Job For Revenge of the Surging T-shirt Printed Music DVDs (Birthday Food Edition) Exam!
Another year's ended. It's the 31st, I'm officially 21 (well ... actually, I was born at 3:30pm so I'm not *quite* there yet) and I've finished all my exams (bar one resit in the summer).
It's also been almost a month since I made a proper LJ entry. I'm getting lazy >< (or rather: I was lazy, I'm getting lazier...)
A brief rundown of a few things that have happened this month, in totally arbitrary order:
- Revenge of the Sith (opinion: fantastic)
- Yet more SURGe madness (Star Wars RP has been suspended :( )
- Bought a new printer (finally!)
- Signed up for ScreenSelect
- Did more music-y stuff
- Reinstalled Windows on the laptop
- Bought my own birthday presents
- Totally failed to write about the holiday to Loch Awe
- Studied for exams (OMFG!)
- Made vaguely art-y motions
- Printed some anime t-shirts
- Resurrected the second game I ever bought
- Got a (sort of) job
- Et cetera.
And also:
- Had a rather nifty 21st birthday.
Note: this is a *long* entry...
RotS
I'm not going to write much about RotS, save to say that I came out of it going "Wow." Even after extensive post-film analysis (mostly consisting of slagging off Vader's patented "Angst Inside" technology) I still think it's a really pretty good Star Wars film :P
SURGe
SURGe-wise, everything is progressing much as before - ie: chaos. In the last few weeks I have had discussions about otter elementalists (elementalists of the very minor element 'otter', rather than elementalists who happen to be otters ... they're not very popular, especially when they use powers such as "elemental shield" or "portal to elemental plane") and I've managed to break reality using a rope.
Unfortunately, the Star Wars RP that we were playing has been suspended for the moment, until an evening game slot is free. It's a pity, since it was one of the RPs I was enjoying most: I'm more of a science fiction fan than I am a fantasy one, even considering that Star Wars science is damn close to magic, and the BESM universe we're using has a lot of magitech-y science. I was also having a lot of fun with my "Jet Black/Han Solo gone Jedi" character, with his penchant for improvising grenades out of overloaded blaster power cells...
Printer
I bought a printer, yay. Finally no more running up and downstairs to Dad's study, and struggling to get network printing to work. It's a cheap-ass Canon (£30) which was on special on eBuyer, and it's a noisy beast. However, it's also the very first USB printer I've ever owned, which is rather nice - parallel port printers really kinda suck. It's wonderful to be able to cancel a print job and for it to actually *cancel*, for instance...
ScreenSelect
Radio Times was running an offer for ScreenSelect where you sign up for their free trial, and get a free DVD. So I got Dr Strangelove. I'm probably going to keep going beyond the free trial, since I've missed an awful lot of movies in the last few years, not to mention all the movies that get referenced but I haven't seen.
So far I've rented Walking with Beasts and Clan of the Cave Bear - both Nate's choices =P
Incidentally, if anyone else is signing up, drop me a line - I get a week's free time for every person I refer >.o
Music
I've been somewhat short of inspiration recently, but I did release a couple of songs - Wednesday and Ozone Blue. The first is a sort of chilled electronic piece, which doesn't really go anywhere in particular. The second is a cool-jazzy piece with lots of random noodling on organ, piano, sax and bass. It also features what's probably some of my best drum tracking to date (not that that says all that much...)
I also got asked (by email, out of the blue) for intro music to a podcast - "some heavy bass techno, something you could possibly dance to if you heard the whole song, if you know what I mean." Well, I didn't really, and I was kinda tempted to turn it down because I was in the middle of studying for my exams. Then I realised that I was in the middle of studying for my exams and that was prime procrastination material. So I ended up making up a couple of random electronicky beds (1,2).
Laptop
The laptop's been giving me some problems recently. It freezes randomly sometimes, and if I lift it up the screen sometimes goes black and it stops responding to input until I hard-reboot it. A couple of weeks ago, I lifted it, it froze, I restarted it... and nothing happened.
Well, that's an overstatement - it almost booted into Windows, but it froze at the nice blue screen just before login appears. Same with Safe Mode and so on. It worked with Linux, though, so I ended up just doing a full backup, popping in the restore disc, and restoring the default installation.
Pretty painless, actually - I love good restore discs, especially since this one is set up so that I can just restore C:\ and keep D:\ (which holds virtually all my data) intact. I'm just going through the process of reinstalling programs now - every couple of days I go to do something and realise I've forgotten to reinstall a program, because it's something that I use almost without thinking...
Apart from all that, the battery is also totally dead now :( Well, it has roughly 3 seconds battery life, which I'm assuming is residual charge, since it hasn't actually charged for a couple of months now. Looks like a hardware problem, since it won't charge under Linux either.
It's annoying because while the battery capacity was decreasing slowly over time, it was still usable and very useful when the power cord fell out the back or if I needed to quickly lump the laptop down to the kitchen or whatever. Now the laptop just powers off within a few seconds of losing AC power, without even having time to beep.
Birthday shopping
I'm a hard person to buy birthday presents for - most of the things on my wishlist are either expensive, impractical, or both; and anything that is neither expensive nor impractical I just buy myself. I'm also not really fond of presents which just get shoved on a shelf and left.
As a result of this, I ended up talking to Nate for ages about what he wanted to get for my birthday, and eventually we came to the conclusion that the only sane way to do this was for me to wander out and just buy something. So I did.
Saturday was the GA Saturday meet, which I only attended a few hours of. At about four o'clock I skipped off to do some shopping before we headed to SURGe.
McCormack's, the music shop in Bath St., were having a 'priviledge cardholder' sale that day, with 50% off drumsticks and 20% off everything else, so I wandered in and got two pairs of rubber-cored anti-vibration sticks (the DrumKAT's pads are a little hard on the wrists, and these sticks were recommended by people on the support forums) and a lightweight cymbal stand.
At some point I'll build some cymbal triggers to mount on the stand, or something. I may also need to do some repairs to my copper-pipe pad arms - the pipees are holding up well, as is the mounting where they join to the snare stand, but the flattened sections where they're riveted to the metal pads are flexing a lot, and the rivets are kinda loose.
Loch Awe
I did promise to write about this, even though it was a month ago. Jake covered it pretty well in his blog post, though. So I guess I can consider it written about ^^;;
A couple of things that bear mentioning:
- The cabin was quite small
- Gary makes rather awesome spag-bol (even if his pasta does stick to the pot)
- Sean was hit immediately after this photo
- Fish and chips in Oban. Yum.
- The scenery rocked (I'd link a photo, but half of my picks are of scenery...)
- "Got Apple?"
- Compared to a triple bunk bed in a room the size of a cupboard, living room floors are surprisingly comfy.
Exams
All three of my exams - Computer Architecture and Design, Algorithms and Complexity, and Discrete Maths - went pretty well. I think I did more studying than I've ever done before, mind you, so I'd have been a bit disappointed if they didn't go relatively well :P
Next year I go back to Uni full-time. That's gonna be really quite weird, after a year of only doing three classes per semester. I'm going to have to get used to going in before mid-day and not having two days off a week. Damn those arts students to whom this is normal :P
Art-y stuff
I've always been better at technical drawing than I was at 'art'. Admittedly, this doesn't say much - I suck at art - but I have done a couple of doodles that turned into randomly detailed 3D-ish drawings of stuff.
Lately, I seem to have discovered that I'm also not bad at creating "shiny things" in Photoshop. I've been uploading stuff here...
T-shirts
I've been wanting anime T-shirts for ages, and I've had T-shirt transfer paper for ages. Just never really got around to printing them. However, I just got a new printer...
I worked up a couple of 'comic book' style images, from screengrabs of Ghost In The Shell and 'Tachikoma Days' (the shorts featuring the Tachikoma which play after each episode of Stand Alone Complex):
"As I rise towards the surface..."
"I don't want to be the one that gets defeated any more..." (1,2)
They're now on nice black Primark T-shirts (which are really good for £2.50, incidentally) which I will eventually get around to taking photos of.
Had quite a bit of frustration while I was printing stuff out. I have "dark T-shirt transfer paper", which is basically white plastic film with an inkjet-friendly coating. You print on it, then you peel it off the paper backing and melt it onto the T-shirt. As all transfer paper is, it's quite expensive, and you don't get much of it.
The new printer has a "T-shirt transfer mode", which prints really nicely on transfer paper. Thing is, what it doesn't tell you is that this is designed for *white* t-shirt transfer paper, which works in a different way, and requires you to reverse the image before printing onto it.
So, the driver's transfer paper mode flips the image for you. Nowhere in the driver does it tell you it's doing this. Even if you preview what you're going to print, it still shows it the right way around.
I did a test print on normal paper before I started, but I only spotted the transfer mode switch after the test print, so I switched it on when I was printing onto transfer paper. I got a beautifully printed image - backwards. Gah! One sheet of transfer paper wasted, out of two and a half that I had left in the pack.
So I turned it back to normal mode and tried again. Right way around this time, but the image was awful - full of white lines and with obvious dithering. It looked worse than draft mode, and half the images were indistinguishable from the background. Gah! Another sheet wasted.
Eventually I ended up cutting up the wasted sheets, salvaging any unprinted transfer paper I could get, and splitting each image up into little bits so I could print them a bit at a time. Then I flipped them myself before printing them with transfer mode.
Easy, once you actually know what you need to compensate for... I just wish I hadn't had to waste a couple of quid's worth of paper gaining said knowledge ><
Gaming
The second game I ever bought was back in '96-'97, and it was M.A.X. It's a DOS game, and it doesn't run under WinXP. I'd been reminiscing about it for a while, since I'd been addicted to it way back, but I didn't have any computer it would play on.
That is, until I remembered about DOSBox. DOSBox emulates a PC complete with DOS and all the peripherals - soundcard, graphics, etc - that a DOS game would expect. It's rather nifty. It's also rather resource-hungry - in order to get performance roughly equal to a 386, you need a 2.8 GHz processor or thereabouts.
M.A.X. was published in 1996. For a DOS game it's rather gorgeous, sounds great, plays wonderfully ... and eats resources. Under DOSBox it was almost unplayable - it *ran*, but the sound stuttered horribly, and everything ran at about 2 frames per second.
So, that didn't work too well. Then I remembered VDMSound, which is (very) vaguely similar, except instead of emulating an entire PC, it's more like a translation layer which provides a virtual SoundBlaster for games running inside a WinNT (or Win2K/XP) DOS box.
M.A.X. runs wonderfully under VDMS. I was overjoyed, especially when I played it and found that yes, it really was as good as I remembered. The game's almost ten years old, but apart from a couple of things - the fact that you can only select about ten units at once, for example - it still rocks.
Job
A little while back, I got an email that was going around the CS department. A company based in my hometown of Bearsden were looking for people to do web design, 3D work, and create a demo disc. Since I needed a job for the summer, I checked out their website, then dropped them an email about the web design post, with a brief summary of what I could do.
The company was nominally an IT consultancy, but its main business seemed to be software for hillwalkers - basically, interactive maps with route planners, photos of and from various hills (with Scottish traditional music accompaniment), spoken pronunciation of hill names, and so on.
I wasn't really expecting anything much, but I ended up getting an interview. That went pretty well. The guy who was interviewing me turned out to be really nice, and also to be the guy who ran the company. The company itself turned out to be pretty much a one-man operation (plus a part-time marketing guy) running out of the study of a Bearsden house.
So I asked about the web design. Turned out that their current website (well, websites: there were in fact three, one for each line of programs) had been designed by the guy's son. He was doing his Highers at the start of summer, so they needed someone to take care of the websites during that time, and also to do some e-commerce stuff.
Interesting. We talked about various stuff for quite a while, and I left in rather a good mood - still not particularly expecting much, since there had been quite a few other applicants and since the company was very small they couldn't afford to hire many people, but having had a nice chat nonetheless.
I didn't hear anything for a couple of weeks, so I thought I hadn't got the place. This actually turned out to be true - the post of web designer went to a Chinese guy from Glasgow Uni - but I got a phone call out of the blue one day asking whether I would like to design a demo disc.
I have no experience in demo discs, but from what I was told I was selected because every applicant for the job had wanted the post of web designer as well, and none of them had any demo disc experience either. The examples of my website coding that I'd forwarded in my initial email had been relatively basic in comparison to the others - but it seemed that someone had liked my designs, and thought that that would translate to a disc presentation...
Anyway, I said I'd come over and chat about stuff. So, a few days later I wandered over - in the pouring rain (thank goodness for umbrellas) - and found the house. The office turned out to be teeny, and stuffed with computers. Also, my boss turned out to be one of my Dad's patients as well... I swear my parents know everyone in Bearsden, either because their kids went to pre-school with me, or because my Dad is their doctor...
So we talked for a while about stuff. I pointed out again that I didn't have any experience with demo discs, so if I were to take the job I'd have to learn as I go. Ended up with the deal that, because of this, instead of being paid hours I would instead get a fixed fee for delivering a finished demo disc, and would take whatever time I needed to learn on the job.
It's a pretty good deal: I get experience in multimedia, references for future jobs, possibly a copy of either Shockwave or Flash (we haven't selected which one to use yet...) plus gainful employment for at least a portion of the summer.
So, I start at the beginning of June (or thereabouts - I still actually need to find out when I'm meant to start, and whether it'd be possible for me to go up to Dundee for a week...)
Birthday food
Wow. The last couple of days have been positively foodgasmic.
On the 30th, I went with my family to a Chinese restaurant, the Manor Garden, in Baljaffrey. It was absolutely fantastic. The restaurant was really nice, with dim lighting, Chinese paintings and instruments on the walls, and little lit alcoves with random things - the one we were sitting underneath had a little display of various abacuses.
The food was gorgeous. We ordered Kum Po chicken, hot spicy beef, sweet-and-sour tofu, Singapore fried noodles, and sweet-and-sour duck. All were wonderful, but the duck deserves special mention for being the first time I've ever tried duck and liked it. The first time I tried duck (when my mum bought some from a guy who was selling door-to-door) I ended up throwing up, so I've been put off it for quite a while.
The 31st was dinner at TGI Friday's, a combination leaving party for Gary (who got a job with Sun and is heading off to the US for a year) and birthday meal. I've never been to TGI's before, and neither had most of our group, but we had money off vouchers so we decided to give it a go...
The starters were OMG-inducingly yummy. A tower of breaded shrimp and chicken, uber-tender ribs, fried mozarella sticks, chicken wings, potato skins... mmmm. Seemed like a lot of food, but between six hungry diners it disappeared in minutes.
I think I've been converted: I used to be slightly allergic to prawns and shrimp, and I never liked them anyway. In the last year, I've had curried king prawns from the Wee Curry Shop, king prawn tonkatsu in Ichiban, and now breaded shrimp at TGI's. All yummy, and all really fresh - I think it was actually stale prawns in particular which were setting off my allergicness...
Main course was burgers, which were massive and quite tasty, but paled in comparison beside the starters. Finished off with a shared sweet platter (cheesecake, icecream with brownie, and apple waffles) and some cocktails - a massive strawberry daiquiri between Nate and I, which was yummy, and I finally got to try a Long Island Iced Tea, which was drinkable but not quite deserving of 'yummy' status.
Birthday
The birthday itself was also pretty cool. My parents gave me a framed caricature drawn by a local artist - me with a guitar posing in front of a cluttered desk with mugs, headphones, manga, Terry Pratchett books ... and a copy of Playboy. *cough* XD It's so cool. The picture's now hanging on my wall beside the painting Nate gave me. I'll take a photo of it at some point...
Also got the aforementioned cymbal stand and drumsticks from Nate - was kinda disappointed, the drumsticks turned out to be really heavy, and I got blisters from using them :( My fault for buying two pairs, I guess. I'll probably keep on using 'em, though, since they're quite decent for playing heavy stuff.
A couple more things from parents: a self-inflating camping mat for Tokonatsu, and an envelope with details of various children's bond schemes, all of which have matured now that I'm 21.
---
Phew, I think that's everything. Now I can neglect my LJ for another couple of months!
It's also been almost a month since I made a proper LJ entry. I'm getting lazy >< (or rather: I was lazy, I'm getting lazier...)
A brief rundown of a few things that have happened this month, in totally arbitrary order:
- Revenge of the Sith (opinion: fantastic)
- Yet more SURGe madness (Star Wars RP has been suspended :( )
- Bought a new printer (finally!)
- Signed up for ScreenSelect
- Did more music-y stuff
- Reinstalled Windows on the laptop
- Bought my own birthday presents
- Totally failed to write about the holiday to Loch Awe
- Studied for exams (OMFG!)
- Made vaguely art-y motions
- Printed some anime t-shirts
- Resurrected the second game I ever bought
- Got a (sort of) job
- Et cetera.
And also:
- Had a rather nifty 21st birthday.
Note: this is a *long* entry...
RotS
I'm not going to write much about RotS, save to say that I came out of it going "Wow." Even after extensive post-film analysis (mostly consisting of slagging off Vader's patented "Angst Inside" technology) I still think it's a really pretty good Star Wars film :P
SURGe
SURGe-wise, everything is progressing much as before - ie: chaos. In the last few weeks I have had discussions about otter elementalists (elementalists of the very minor element 'otter', rather than elementalists who happen to be otters ... they're not very popular, especially when they use powers such as "elemental shield" or "portal to elemental plane") and I've managed to break reality using a rope.
Unfortunately, the Star Wars RP that we were playing has been suspended for the moment, until an evening game slot is free. It's a pity, since it was one of the RPs I was enjoying most: I'm more of a science fiction fan than I am a fantasy one, even considering that Star Wars science is damn close to magic, and the BESM universe we're using has a lot of magitech-y science. I was also having a lot of fun with my "Jet Black/Han Solo gone Jedi" character, with his penchant for improvising grenades out of overloaded blaster power cells...
Printer
I bought a printer, yay. Finally no more running up and downstairs to Dad's study, and struggling to get network printing to work. It's a cheap-ass Canon (£30) which was on special on eBuyer, and it's a noisy beast. However, it's also the very first USB printer I've ever owned, which is rather nice - parallel port printers really kinda suck. It's wonderful to be able to cancel a print job and for it to actually *cancel*, for instance...
ScreenSelect
Radio Times was running an offer for ScreenSelect where you sign up for their free trial, and get a free DVD. So I got Dr Strangelove. I'm probably going to keep going beyond the free trial, since I've missed an awful lot of movies in the last few years, not to mention all the movies that get referenced but I haven't seen.
So far I've rented Walking with Beasts and Clan of the Cave Bear - both Nate's choices =P
Incidentally, if anyone else is signing up, drop me a line - I get a week's free time for every person I refer >.o
Music
I've been somewhat short of inspiration recently, but I did release a couple of songs - Wednesday and Ozone Blue. The first is a sort of chilled electronic piece, which doesn't really go anywhere in particular. The second is a cool-jazzy piece with lots of random noodling on organ, piano, sax and bass. It also features what's probably some of my best drum tracking to date (not that that says all that much...)
I also got asked (by email, out of the blue) for intro music to a podcast - "some heavy bass techno, something you could possibly dance to if you heard the whole song, if you know what I mean." Well, I didn't really, and I was kinda tempted to turn it down because I was in the middle of studying for my exams. Then I realised that I was in the middle of studying for my exams and that was prime procrastination material. So I ended up making up a couple of random electronicky beds (1,2).
Laptop
The laptop's been giving me some problems recently. It freezes randomly sometimes, and if I lift it up the screen sometimes goes black and it stops responding to input until I hard-reboot it. A couple of weeks ago, I lifted it, it froze, I restarted it... and nothing happened.
Well, that's an overstatement - it almost booted into Windows, but it froze at the nice blue screen just before login appears. Same with Safe Mode and so on. It worked with Linux, though, so I ended up just doing a full backup, popping in the restore disc, and restoring the default installation.
Pretty painless, actually - I love good restore discs, especially since this one is set up so that I can just restore C:\ and keep D:\ (which holds virtually all my data) intact. I'm just going through the process of reinstalling programs now - every couple of days I go to do something and realise I've forgotten to reinstall a program, because it's something that I use almost without thinking...
Apart from all that, the battery is also totally dead now :( Well, it has roughly 3 seconds battery life, which I'm assuming is residual charge, since it hasn't actually charged for a couple of months now. Looks like a hardware problem, since it won't charge under Linux either.
It's annoying because while the battery capacity was decreasing slowly over time, it was still usable and very useful when the power cord fell out the back or if I needed to quickly lump the laptop down to the kitchen or whatever. Now the laptop just powers off within a few seconds of losing AC power, without even having time to beep.
Birthday shopping
I'm a hard person to buy birthday presents for - most of the things on my wishlist are either expensive, impractical, or both; and anything that is neither expensive nor impractical I just buy myself. I'm also not really fond of presents which just get shoved on a shelf and left.
As a result of this, I ended up talking to Nate for ages about what he wanted to get for my birthday, and eventually we came to the conclusion that the only sane way to do this was for me to wander out and just buy something. So I did.
Saturday was the GA Saturday meet, which I only attended a few hours of. At about four o'clock I skipped off to do some shopping before we headed to SURGe.
McCormack's, the music shop in Bath St., were having a 'priviledge cardholder' sale that day, with 50% off drumsticks and 20% off everything else, so I wandered in and got two pairs of rubber-cored anti-vibration sticks (the DrumKAT's pads are a little hard on the wrists, and these sticks were recommended by people on the support forums) and a lightweight cymbal stand.
At some point I'll build some cymbal triggers to mount on the stand, or something. I may also need to do some repairs to my copper-pipe pad arms - the pipees are holding up well, as is the mounting where they join to the snare stand, but the flattened sections where they're riveted to the metal pads are flexing a lot, and the rivets are kinda loose.
Loch Awe
I did promise to write about this, even though it was a month ago. Jake covered it pretty well in his blog post, though. So I guess I can consider it written about ^^;;
A couple of things that bear mentioning:
- The cabin was quite small
- Gary makes rather awesome spag-bol (even if his pasta does stick to the pot)
- Sean was hit immediately after this photo
- Fish and chips in Oban. Yum.
- The scenery rocked (I'd link a photo, but half of my picks are of scenery...)
- "Got Apple?"
- Compared to a triple bunk bed in a room the size of a cupboard, living room floors are surprisingly comfy.
Exams
All three of my exams - Computer Architecture and Design, Algorithms and Complexity, and Discrete Maths - went pretty well. I think I did more studying than I've ever done before, mind you, so I'd have been a bit disappointed if they didn't go relatively well :P
Next year I go back to Uni full-time. That's gonna be really quite weird, after a year of only doing three classes per semester. I'm going to have to get used to going in before mid-day and not having two days off a week. Damn those arts students to whom this is normal :P
Art-y stuff
I've always been better at technical drawing than I was at 'art'. Admittedly, this doesn't say much - I suck at art - but I have done a couple of doodles that turned into randomly detailed 3D-ish drawings of stuff.
Lately, I seem to have discovered that I'm also not bad at creating "shiny things" in Photoshop. I've been uploading stuff here...
T-shirts
I've been wanting anime T-shirts for ages, and I've had T-shirt transfer paper for ages. Just never really got around to printing them. However, I just got a new printer...
I worked up a couple of 'comic book' style images, from screengrabs of Ghost In The Shell and 'Tachikoma Days' (the shorts featuring the Tachikoma which play after each episode of Stand Alone Complex):
"As I rise towards the surface..."
"I don't want to be the one that gets defeated any more..." (1,2)
They're now on nice black Primark T-shirts (which are really good for £2.50, incidentally) which I will eventually get around to taking photos of.
Had quite a bit of frustration while I was printing stuff out. I have "dark T-shirt transfer paper", which is basically white plastic film with an inkjet-friendly coating. You print on it, then you peel it off the paper backing and melt it onto the T-shirt. As all transfer paper is, it's quite expensive, and you don't get much of it.
The new printer has a "T-shirt transfer mode", which prints really nicely on transfer paper. Thing is, what it doesn't tell you is that this is designed for *white* t-shirt transfer paper, which works in a different way, and requires you to reverse the image before printing onto it.
So, the driver's transfer paper mode flips the image for you. Nowhere in the driver does it tell you it's doing this. Even if you preview what you're going to print, it still shows it the right way around.
I did a test print on normal paper before I started, but I only spotted the transfer mode switch after the test print, so I switched it on when I was printing onto transfer paper. I got a beautifully printed image - backwards. Gah! One sheet of transfer paper wasted, out of two and a half that I had left in the pack.
So I turned it back to normal mode and tried again. Right way around this time, but the image was awful - full of white lines and with obvious dithering. It looked worse than draft mode, and half the images were indistinguishable from the background. Gah! Another sheet wasted.
Eventually I ended up cutting up the wasted sheets, salvaging any unprinted transfer paper I could get, and splitting each image up into little bits so I could print them a bit at a time. Then I flipped them myself before printing them with transfer mode.
Easy, once you actually know what you need to compensate for... I just wish I hadn't had to waste a couple of quid's worth of paper gaining said knowledge ><
Gaming
The second game I ever bought was back in '96-'97, and it was M.A.X. It's a DOS game, and it doesn't run under WinXP. I'd been reminiscing about it for a while, since I'd been addicted to it way back, but I didn't have any computer it would play on.
That is, until I remembered about DOSBox. DOSBox emulates a PC complete with DOS and all the peripherals - soundcard, graphics, etc - that a DOS game would expect. It's rather nifty. It's also rather resource-hungry - in order to get performance roughly equal to a 386, you need a 2.8 GHz processor or thereabouts.
M.A.X. was published in 1996. For a DOS game it's rather gorgeous, sounds great, plays wonderfully ... and eats resources. Under DOSBox it was almost unplayable - it *ran*, but the sound stuttered horribly, and everything ran at about 2 frames per second.
So, that didn't work too well. Then I remembered VDMSound, which is (very) vaguely similar, except instead of emulating an entire PC, it's more like a translation layer which provides a virtual SoundBlaster for games running inside a WinNT (or Win2K/XP) DOS box.
M.A.X. runs wonderfully under VDMS. I was overjoyed, especially when I played it and found that yes, it really was as good as I remembered. The game's almost ten years old, but apart from a couple of things - the fact that you can only select about ten units at once, for example - it still rocks.
Job
A little while back, I got an email that was going around the CS department. A company based in my hometown of Bearsden were looking for people to do web design, 3D work, and create a demo disc. Since I needed a job for the summer, I checked out their website, then dropped them an email about the web design post, with a brief summary of what I could do.
The company was nominally an IT consultancy, but its main business seemed to be software for hillwalkers - basically, interactive maps with route planners, photos of and from various hills (with Scottish traditional music accompaniment), spoken pronunciation of hill names, and so on.
I wasn't really expecting anything much, but I ended up getting an interview. That went pretty well. The guy who was interviewing me turned out to be really nice, and also to be the guy who ran the company. The company itself turned out to be pretty much a one-man operation (plus a part-time marketing guy) running out of the study of a Bearsden house.
So I asked about the web design. Turned out that their current website (well, websites: there were in fact three, one for each line of programs) had been designed by the guy's son. He was doing his Highers at the start of summer, so they needed someone to take care of the websites during that time, and also to do some e-commerce stuff.
Interesting. We talked about various stuff for quite a while, and I left in rather a good mood - still not particularly expecting much, since there had been quite a few other applicants and since the company was very small they couldn't afford to hire many people, but having had a nice chat nonetheless.
I didn't hear anything for a couple of weeks, so I thought I hadn't got the place. This actually turned out to be true - the post of web designer went to a Chinese guy from Glasgow Uni - but I got a phone call out of the blue one day asking whether I would like to design a demo disc.
I have no experience in demo discs, but from what I was told I was selected because every applicant for the job had wanted the post of web designer as well, and none of them had any demo disc experience either. The examples of my website coding that I'd forwarded in my initial email had been relatively basic in comparison to the others - but it seemed that someone had liked my designs, and thought that that would translate to a disc presentation...
Anyway, I said I'd come over and chat about stuff. So, a few days later I wandered over - in the pouring rain (thank goodness for umbrellas) - and found the house. The office turned out to be teeny, and stuffed with computers. Also, my boss turned out to be one of my Dad's patients as well... I swear my parents know everyone in Bearsden, either because their kids went to pre-school with me, or because my Dad is their doctor...
So we talked for a while about stuff. I pointed out again that I didn't have any experience with demo discs, so if I were to take the job I'd have to learn as I go. Ended up with the deal that, because of this, instead of being paid hours I would instead get a fixed fee for delivering a finished demo disc, and would take whatever time I needed to learn on the job.
It's a pretty good deal: I get experience in multimedia, references for future jobs, possibly a copy of either Shockwave or Flash (we haven't selected which one to use yet...) plus gainful employment for at least a portion of the summer.
So, I start at the beginning of June (or thereabouts - I still actually need to find out when I'm meant to start, and whether it'd be possible for me to go up to Dundee for a week...)
Birthday food
Wow. The last couple of days have been positively foodgasmic.
On the 30th, I went with my family to a Chinese restaurant, the Manor Garden, in Baljaffrey. It was absolutely fantastic. The restaurant was really nice, with dim lighting, Chinese paintings and instruments on the walls, and little lit alcoves with random things - the one we were sitting underneath had a little display of various abacuses.
The food was gorgeous. We ordered Kum Po chicken, hot spicy beef, sweet-and-sour tofu, Singapore fried noodles, and sweet-and-sour duck. All were wonderful, but the duck deserves special mention for being the first time I've ever tried duck and liked it. The first time I tried duck (when my mum bought some from a guy who was selling door-to-door) I ended up throwing up, so I've been put off it for quite a while.
The 31st was dinner at TGI Friday's, a combination leaving party for Gary (who got a job with Sun and is heading off to the US for a year) and birthday meal. I've never been to TGI's before, and neither had most of our group, but we had money off vouchers so we decided to give it a go...
The starters were OMG-inducingly yummy. A tower of breaded shrimp and chicken, uber-tender ribs, fried mozarella sticks, chicken wings, potato skins... mmmm. Seemed like a lot of food, but between six hungry diners it disappeared in minutes.
I think I've been converted: I used to be slightly allergic to prawns and shrimp, and I never liked them anyway. In the last year, I've had curried king prawns from the Wee Curry Shop, king prawn tonkatsu in Ichiban, and now breaded shrimp at TGI's. All yummy, and all really fresh - I think it was actually stale prawns in particular which were setting off my allergicness...
Main course was burgers, which were massive and quite tasty, but paled in comparison beside the starters. Finished off with a shared sweet platter (cheesecake, icecream with brownie, and apple waffles) and some cocktails - a massive strawberry daiquiri between Nate and I, which was yummy, and I finally got to try a Long Island Iced Tea, which was drinkable but not quite deserving of 'yummy' status.
Birthday
The birthday itself was also pretty cool. My parents gave me a framed caricature drawn by a local artist - me with a guitar posing in front of a cluttered desk with mugs, headphones, manga, Terry Pratchett books ... and a copy of Playboy. *cough* XD It's so cool. The picture's now hanging on my wall beside the painting Nate gave me. I'll take a photo of it at some point...
Also got the aforementioned cymbal stand and drumsticks from Nate - was kinda disappointed, the drumsticks turned out to be really heavy, and I got blisters from using them :( My fault for buying two pairs, I guess. I'll probably keep on using 'em, though, since they're quite decent for playing heavy stuff.
A couple more things from parents: a self-inflating camping mat for Tokonatsu, and an envelope with details of various children's bond schemes, all of which have matured now that I'm 21.
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Phew, I think that's everything. Now I can neglect my LJ for another couple of months!