Socks

I hate socks.

I mean, I like socks.  They keep your feet warm and when you drop your coffee on the floor you can use an old sock to dry it up.  But why do socks very very slightly differ from each other, just enough so that you can't make pairs?

My son is the worst for this.  I'm an old hand at the "well if the bit of sock above the ankle is black, it's all good" tactic, where the heels may be different colours but you can get away with it.

However, as an example, my son has about twelve socks which have blue, grey, and white stripes.  I like these socks because they fit him, they aren't too tight and they don't fall down when he runs around - which is particularly good because he'll take them off if they fall down.

So the blue etc stripy socks are good, you would think, except for the fact that the order of the stripes slightly differs from sock to sock.  So, unless you actually manage to have all twelve in front of you, you almost certainly can't actually make any pairs.

I would be tempted to pick two socks and hang the consequences, however now my son goes to nursery several days, a class run by the local council, and a class run by a local charity.  And particularly with nursery and the classes we try desperately to be the perfect parent, you know the one - the one whose child is all lovely, never muddy, washes up and can play the piano, and after class they're going to go and make biscuits out of freshly sourced organic flour and Peruvian honey.  In contrast, after the class me and the little one are probably going to get a bag of Quavers each, watch some Octonauts and if we really feel up to it, and I mean really feel up to it, we might have a bath.

After I found that link to the Octonauts website I spent about fifteen minutes rescuing sea creatures from an underwater storm.  My environmental side is showing :)

Thanks to my subscribers for subscribing to my blog, here's a (very bad) video I made for you!

You're welcome :)  If you're not a subscriber yet and you have some kind of RSS reader, this link should let you subscribe.  Otherwise right at the bottom of the page there should be a box that you can put your email address in, hit the button and you'll get email updates.

Or you could always subscribe for just 99p a month via the Kindle Store!

More exciting (to me) news about my blog - I passed 3000 views as of the 16th of January which is really nice.  Thanks for checking it out - basically I have a frustated writer within me (well I was hungry and he was asleep and I had a knife and ketchup) and my blog lets me do my creative thing and be happy.  It's all that trek towards self-actualisation, as Maslow probably didn't say.

(Did anyone not use Maslow's triangle whenever possible in assignments?  It was the easiest psychology theory to find and use whenever one was needed, regardless of whether it is right or not)

subscribers and dan abnett

Wow! I didn't realise I had subscribers!

I think Feedburner is being a little optimistic

If you're viewing this blog because you're one of my subscribers, thank you (a thank you video is planned).

If you're not a subscriber and you have some subscription software, please feel free to consider doing so!  Head over here to sort it out.

Why don't they make sausages with four flat sides rather than tubes? It'd make them a lot easier to cook..

Sorry, I'm not very focused today!

I've been trying out a rather interesting game called FTL: Faster Than Light.  I bought it on Steam for £6.99 because I like space stuff and I like strategy games, it had quite an interesting spin which makes it more of an adventure.  You basically have a ship to race across the galaxy, attempting to escape the rebel fleet following you.  On the way you encounter ships to blow up, merchants to trade with, alien races to meet, deserted space stations, all kinds of weird and wonderful things can be found.  It has a good combat system which is complex enough to be interesting but not too complicated, and a bit of system management (but again not too complex).

In case it isn't clear - I just pounced on a rebel transport and they smacked me good.

It's all good.

Until the below happens...

Game Over. This happens more often than you'd like.

I still need to get the hang of the game, I tend to push all of my money (scrap in FTL) into ship upgrades but whether I should be doing that or saving up for something like a teleporter or maybe a cloak I'm not sure.  The game is a lot of fun though, and the key thing is that you never know what you're going to warp jump into - every system is random so it could be a planet doing some scientific research, or a seriously tooled up alien cruiser that isn't actually looking for you, but if you don't play your cards right will happily dismantle your ship while the captain uses your bones as toothpicks.  All the time a rebel fleet is busy chasing you so you constantly being pushed to drive forward, to reach the final rebel flagship.

One of the best things, strangely, is that it's short enough.  As an example, I love Birth of the Federation. I love Space Empires 3.  I loved the original X-Com: Enemy Unknown.

But the problem with all these games is that (unless you're extremely bad at them) they last a long time.

You can spend days, if not weeks, conquering a galaxy and achieving ultimate victory.  Which can be fun, or can get boring - when you're twelve days into a game and you're again tweaking the exact outputs desired from Gamma Hydra III, a small planet in the middle of nowhere that to be frank will never have any impact on your overall empire, you can think to yourself "I'm supposed to be enjoying this.  I'll go watch the Big Bang Theory instead.".  Whilst in FTL, you're going to be dead in less than an hour.  I'm sorry - the game will be over in less than an hour.  There's about a 98% chance that it will end with your ship being in pieces scattered across the cosmos, but you never know, you might just get lucky and win.  And even if you don't win, you'll have enjoyed the ride.  It reminds me of "choose your adventure" books you used to be able to get, the most popular ones written by Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson, founders of the Fighting Fantasy series, you almost always died when playing them but it was fun trying.

Anyway - check it out.  It's cheap and won all kinds of various gaming awards.  It's definitely better than a lot of "commercial" games.

Totally changing the subject...

Anyone who is a fan of Warhammer 40K fiction will be aware of Dan Abnett.  Whilst not saying that there are several very good Warhammer 40K authors (Graham McNeil, Aaron Dembski-Bowden and Sandy Mitchell immediately spring to mind, with honourable mentions given to Gav Thorpe and James Swallow) Dan is certainly one of the best (if not the best) author writing for Black Library.  I do recommend for anyone who reads any of Dan Abnett's work to check out a group of videos of him here, very very interesting.

Best of all I managed to pick up two of Dan's books from Oxfam today at lunch, so I've got a bit more time enjoying his works before I have to return to rereading "Know No Fear"

Aren't banks great

Periodically for my grandmother I take a load of change into the bank, to be changed into bank notes.  My preferred way of doing this is by pouring all of the coins into one of those automatic change sorter things, which are great fun.  The only problem is that most of the local branches of my bank don't have these - the one in the centre of Hull does, but that brings into play travelling into Hull centre, finding parking, paying for parking, basically taking a couple of hours out of my day to pay some change into the bank - plus once I went and the machine was broken, and my bank is one of these where the larger outlets don't actually have a counter facility any more, it's all coffee machines and comfy chairs and little booths where you chat about taking a loan out to start your business.  So, me with my fifty odd pounds worth of change had to haul it back to the car and think again.

(Yes, you can use the ones in supermarkets but they usually charge a chunk of what you've put in so it's not really ideal)

So the other option is sorting the change into change bags, and paying it in over the counter.  I actually quite enjoy counting change, so I don't mind this too much.  Last time I paid some change in the staff behind the counter weighed the change bags, and found a couple of differences between my calculations and what the weighing scales said.

I quite happily accepted their alteration, despite it leading to me receiving twelve pence less than I had expected to gain from the process.  Pleasingly they also told me "As long as you break the change into different denominations, we can just weigh it for you", so I wouldn't even have to worry about counting it all up, just pop each type of coin into a different bag and that would be that.

Did this work?

Of course not.

When I went to a different branch to ask if this was okay I was told in no uncertain terms that I would have to count the change up and fill in a paying in slip.

This I can quite understand and accept, it's just a little annoying when one branch tells me one thing and a second branch tells me another.

I would also note that this was the same bank that sent my parents a very worrying letter about how they had to comply with new standards on electronic protection, which basically amounted to pay us ten quid a month and we'll give you some software that will protect credit card information held on your companies computers.

My parents business is (except for their Facebook page) virtually entirely offline.  They do not accept payments over the internet.  Incredible in this day I know, but there it is, and they've made a living for many years operating in this manner, and continue to do so.  The computer that holds customers names and addresses is not connected to the Internet, ever.  Credit card details are kept on paper and destroyed post-transaction.  They have a shredder and a coal fire that can be used for this.

Despite this, the bank still wanted a payment off them to buy this software - otherwise they would class them as being "non-compliant" and fine them instead.

So, armed with the letter, my parents went into their local branch of the bank - which is laid out all lovely, welcoming person at the front, coffee machine, all the expected stuff - and asked what they should do.

No one at the branch seemed to know anything about the electronic protection standard, the letter the bank had sent out to its business customers (bearing in mind the branch did, unlike some other branches, have counter facilities, but these were solely for "business customers" and therefore had some interest in being up to speed on what issues these valued customers may have), or be able to offer any advice to my parents on how to proceed.

They now hire their credit card machine from a different company.

For a significantly lower rate!

Sprinkle of Glitter mixed with ingame genocide

Hello!

It's cold!  I had to de-ice cars on Thursday, which is never a good sign!

My son started at a new class yesterday to help with his speech development.  The class is run by the charity KIDS  and seems to be really good, they do a mixture of songs, playing, arts and crafts, having a snack, and music all jammed into ninety minutes of activity.  He was seriously knackered afterwards and it took place when he usually grabs an afternoon nap - after the class we popped to see my parents and he wasted no time in snuggling under a load of covers and catching forty winks!

I'd like to point peoples attention to a rather decent YouTube channel called Sprinkle of Glitter run by a mum called Louise.  I must admit I stumbled across the channel somewhat by accident (I think I clicked on someone elses video on another channel, looked at another one of their videos and saw Louise on there, she seemed pretty funny so I checked her channel out.  It's not my usual choice of channel at all but it's actually really interesting and I've enjoyed listening to a lot of her videos, especially the ones with her friend Zoella!

When I say listen to YouTube videos, I mean listen.  I like to have something going on in the background while I'm playing a game, and my current game of choice is a rather old one called Space Empires III.

Space Empires III is a turn based space strategy game where you basically conquer the galaxy.  You colonise planets, destroy enemy spaceships, muck about in politics, all kinds of fun controlly stuff.  It does get quite involved, especially once your empire gets bigger you can spend loads of time tweaking the productivity of your planets one-by-one, but it is rather cool if you like that sort of thing.

Trust me - I'm about to kick some ass.

I do tend to role play the game, though.

What I mean by that is I tend to keep notes on how my empire is doing and what my plans are.  For example in my current game:


Stardate 2402.3 - The foolish Levolrie declared war.  We promptly destroyed one of their minor colonies!  A slight concern is that their vessels appear to have significantly better shields than ours, and because we've invested so heavily in our colonisation programme we don't immediately have the resources to defeat these aliens.

No progress regarding the Eteru, they appear to be xenophobic and I fully expect them to attack when they are ready.

Stardate 2402.6 - The Eteru wiped out a minor colony we had in the Ulrikan system.  Bizarrely the Levolrie have not acted yet, but their ships are all around our colonies.  I am ordering colonies to begin the construction of fighters to act as defenses while we build and mobilise a defense fleet.

Stardate 2402.8 - Our defenses continue to build and as our colonies develop our resources become greater and free up to allow the construction of ships to intercept and destroy the alien invaders.

Stardate 2404.0 - The Levolrie have started to suffer losses to our forces.  We have captured and deconstructed two of their vessels, aiding our research channels.  We have also conquered one of their colonies and have no reason to assume that we cannot, given time, swallow their entire empire whole.

I have slight concerns around the Eteru - although they have not chanced upon our space yet I feel it is only a matter of time and indeed have seen ships of theirs only 1 system away.  We do have a defense fleet building that will bring them to their knees but at this time it is not quite ready.

Stardate 2404.1 - The Gamalon system has been cleansed of Levolrie control.  However, the Eteru (and another alien race not yet contacted) moves closer to our colonies on the eastern edge of our control.

Stardate 2404.2 - The unidentified alien race has been now named as the Memnorak.  They have entered the Dtarkn system, where our colonies are still poorly defended.  I hope to stall them using diplomacy while our defenses are fortified.  I see more and more evidence of significant Eteru forces that will pose a significant threat.

Stardate 2404.3 - Diplomacy didn't work.  The Memnorak have, without provocation, wiped out one of our colonies and destroyed two of our ships without breaking a sweat.  The Dtarkn system has been declared as a lost cause.  We are sending mine layers to blockade the warp point from Dtarkn to Xzintus to protect our ship building yards there.

Stardate 2404.6 - The Dtarkn system has, to be frank, got off lightly.  Rather than cause total genocide the Memnorak wiped out two colonies, and have apparently fallen back, possibly to rearm.  However, this does not mean that the system is safe.  That said, one of our task forces has now entered the system including a group of our new Sovereign class Battleships that I hope will be a match for the enemy vessels.  But yet more new aliens appear to be headed for the Dtarkn system, all I can think is that it is some kind of conspiracy between these various races to work together for our annihilation.

The elimination of the Levolrie on our Western front carries on unhindered.


Any comments? :)

The one where I talk too much about a guy in an animal suit

I really like Taylor Swift's video for her song "We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together" - it's ace.

I particularly like one of the furry animal guys in there - he keeps showing up and is so cheerful!

He's just kinda lurking there, playing his guitar... then...

Bye Taylor! I'm in the shot! Hi everyone!

I'm slightly distracted on this one because the middle guy looks like Cbeebies presenter Andy Day (it's Amos Heller however)

Quick join the party!

After a little Google work I've determined that the guy I've captured various pictures of is Grant Mickleson, lead guitarist of The Agency, Taylor Swift's band.  I'm not a stalker at all.

G4C Sheffield is happening! Event on 24 January 2013

I'm very happy to disclose that our new G4C event, which is going to be on the topic of Employability, is taking place at Sheffield Hallam University on Thursday the 24th of January 2013, kicking off at 5pm.

If you don't know what G4C is, it's a construction best practice initiative backed by Constructing Excellence to give future leaders of the industry the skills and knowledge that they need to drive the change agenda in construction.

In other words, if you're new to construction or moving into construction, G4C (Generation For Change) is here to help you gain additional knowledge and skills to help you.  I'm the G4C Co-ordinator for the Yorkshire & Humber region, and I work with a group of people arrange and manage regular events around the Yorkshire region.  Do feel free to drop me an email to discuss.

Anyway, the event on the 24th is on Employability, all about helping people find out what they should and shouldn't do to secure that job, and to keep that job once they're in it.   We've got some fantastic people speaking, a recruitment firm, Thorn Baker, who are specialists in construction recruitment, as well as Hayley Smith who won the Young Achiever of the Year award at the national Constructing Excellence awards at the end of November.  There's also going to be a speed networking session (that's my particular bit to organise so as you can imagine I'm quite worried about it!) to help people build their contacts.

If you want to find out more about the event and register to attend, go to https://g4cyorkshire.eventbrite.co.uk/ - numbers are restricted so please do register!

And if you want to find out more about G4C, the home of G4C is at http://g4cnet.ning.com/ and they also have a LinkedIn group at http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=1801083 - if that's not enough there's even a G4C Yorkshire & Humber LinkedIn group at http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=4075124 - do join us and say hi.

Two other (non-work related) things to discuss today!

Firstly, I was lucky enough to catch on my way into work today a very good comedy on Radio 4 called Losing the Plot by Nick Warburton.  The show starred James Fleet as Edward, a man who applies to take on an allotment. But what does it he do with when he gets it?!?

I won't spoil the surprise for you but it's very funny, and I think shows the English both at their best and at their worst. You can listen to the show right now on the Radio 4 website.  But hurry - you've only got 7 days to do so.

The other thing I wanted to mention is a rather decent website of stories, storybag.com.  I came across this website by virtue of its authors other website, http://www.requnix.com.  The owner of both of these websites is no other than David Allen, creator of various excellent computer games.  The one that particularly holds memory for me is the original Mordor, one of the very few (perhaps the only) shareware games that I actually paid for and registered.  In Mordor you had a fifteen level dungeon to explore and conquer with your groups of characters.  In the dungeon was all kinds of weird and wonderful monsters to kill, items that dropped (that you often had to pay to identify, only to discover that you couldn't use it because it was an Evil item and you were Good!), teleporters that usually split your party up and dotted them all over the place and the like.

I remember a trick me and my dad used to safely teleport ourselves was to leave dead characters laid around the dungeon.  Then when you wanted to go to a certain level you searched for the soul of the dead character on the level you wished to visit - the game would tell you the co-ordinates to rescue that person, and you then teleported to those co-ordinates.

And then left the dead person to rot as you carried out slaughtering monsters!

Anyway I digress - David also has a story website, storybag.com and the stories are rather good.  I'm currently working my way through 2203, a story set in the future about a human ambassador meeting a new alien race far in advance of our own.

Very good and very addictive.  The only comment I would make about the website is that it isn't always obvious how to actually read a story - I'd advise going to the Stories page, choosing the genre of choice, and then clicking on the stories title from the list that appears.

Comet Ison is coming

Everyone else in the world has known about this for about a week, but I've just become aware of a rather cool event happening towards the end of 2013.

Comet C/2012 S1 (common name Ison) is going to be coming in, and providing it survives its very tight orbit around the sun, should be visible to the naked eye between October 2013 and January 2014.  As someone who as a kid was into astronomy (and as I grew up complemented this with wedges of science fiction goodness) this is rather cool.

For those who like to muck about with stuff, you can play with a model of the comet on the Nasa website at http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/sbdb.cgi?sstr=C%2F2012%20S1;orb=1

In other news, what colour are the dots in the picture below?

Image copyright Akiyoshi Kitaoki 2010, original accessible from http://www.psy.ritsumei.ac.jp/~akitaoka/color13e.html

Left ones are green and the right ones are blue, yeah?

Nope.

They're all green.

This is a colour illusion called the land effect that I originally saw on the Vsauce channel - check out the video (with loads of other cool illusions)

The use of attempting to pay for things as a resuscitation device

I am completely unable to pay for anything when in the vicinity of my grandmother.  This eighty-one year old kindly looking person uses some kind of interrogation practice probably outlawed by most countries to make you tell her how much anything cost that you bought, and then uses further evil techniques to make you take money from her.

A typical conversation goes like this:

 I'll walk into her living room. "Hi gran."
 She'll smile, and say "Hello. How much do I owe you."
 "Nothing, I've not brought you anything." I'll respond.  She'll use some kind of X-Ray vision at this point.
 "What about the bird seed you hid in the other room?"
 I'll shrug. "That wasn't a lot, forget about it."
 "No! You need your money!"
 "You need yours - you're on a pension." I'll attempt.  This will be batted away with a waved hand.
 "I haven't got anything to spend it on. How much was it?"
 "Um, five pounds."
 "Oh - I haven't got a fiver. Here's ten. Then you've got a little bit for going to the shop for me." she'll say, handing me a ten pound note.
 "Oh... thank you gran." I'll say, trying to think of a reason to say no but failing. She'll then rake through her purse, thinking.
 "I forgot! Here's five pounds for you to get a sandwich at work tomorrow." she'll then say, thrusting more money at me.
 "Didn't you say that you didn't have a fiver?"
 "Don't argue with your grandmother!"

Should she ever require the services of the emergency services and resuscitation is required, I shall merely call out from the doorway of the hospital "Gran I've paid for lunch okay, don't worry about it".  Within the next four seconds she'll be up and demanding her purse to recompense me.

Today can I recommend checking out web series My Gimpy Life - its lead character is (and played by) Teal Sherer, a disabled actress in Hollywood.  Teal played Venom in Series 2 of the Guild, but is overall much nicer a person in this show, which is well worth a watch.  The episodes can also be viewed on YouTube here.  They are looking for donations to let them make more episodes - visit the website to take part if you'd like to see more of the series.

The other thing I've been doing is getting more RAM installed in my PC.  When new the PC came with 2Gb, which at the time was more than adequate, but since I've been getting involved in video editing this has been badly shown to be in need of upgrade - more than once I've shut Adobe After Effects down due to lack of RAM.  And also more than once Windows seems to grind to a halt - I suspect my virus scanner for this though!  At any rate a RAM upgrade is a cheap, simple and effective way to get some more speed out of a PC.

The Crucial website has a handy system scanner which will tell you what RAM you've got in your PC, and what is compatible, and if you buy the RAM from them they even guarantee its compatibility.  You can of course use the scanner and then take its findings to another RAM seller, but Crucial prices are generally pretty competitive and for those that don't want to mess around opening the case up to check the motherboard it's a great time saver.

As it happens I had a couple of gift cards for PC World so I've just installed an additional 2Gb of RAM into my system, due to various reasons it says 4Gb installed (3.12Gb usable) which is annoying but at least the amount usable for actual problems is still a lot higher than it used to be, and the system is definitely more responsive.  I'm looking forward to giving the system a good test with some gaming and video editing to see what happens.

World of Warcraft crash? Don't worry, Windows is here!

Just lately, World of Warcraft (WoW) appears to come up with the odd error message, as you'll see in the picture below.

Hi Mac Users - this is called an error message.

When does WoW come up with this message? When I'm in the middle of a raid? When we've got issues with our Internet connection? Perhaps when I'm talking on my headset?

No.

It's crashes when I tell it to close down.

It's done this a number of times in the last week.  It gets to about a quarter past ten, when I decide it's time to finish gaming and head to bed (where instead of going to sleep as I should do I then spend an hour watching YouTube videos of Wil Wheaton and Nyan Cat - not in the same video I should add), so I drop a farewell message onto the guild channel and tell WoW to shut down.

And it pauses, and the window greys out.  Windows steps in at this point, to helpfully tell me that there has been a problem and Windows will close the program for me, and search for a solution to this problem.

But the problem is that I've told Windows to close WoW. The only solution I can think of is for someone at Microsoft to arrange to come round my house at about 6am, let themselves in, warm up some milk, get my son up and sort him out, allowing me to enjoy a nice little sleep in. Perhaps they could also send someone to work for me to cover for an hour or two.  That way I could play until about midnight instead.

By the way - happy new year.