Game of the Year

2010 was the year that iPhone gaming rocked my metaphorical world. I've probably spent more time on that device than any other, mostly on Words with Friends and Carcassonne, both of which made excellent use of the internet capabilities to provide a polished game played against real people. Pocket Frogs was another highly addictive experience that benefited from being able to trade frogs with friend. Other games like Ravensword and Infinity Blade showed off the possibilities of complex 3D graphics and open world game play.

However my two contenders for game of the year are both on the Xbox.

Red Dead Redemption was a superbly constructed game that pulled in just about everything that you could ever want to do in a Western, in much the same way that Larry McMurtry's 'Lonesome Dove' paid homage to all of the familiar tropes of the genre. The multi-player wasn't quite so polished as the single player experience, but one definite highlight was the co-op mission pack with a cattle drive through a canyon, across the open scrub land and into town, whilst fending off an attack from cattle rustlers. Superb.

The top spot has to go to Rock Band 3. I have enjoyed music games since Guitar Hero back on the PS/2, and this is the evolution of the genre into something that is very nearly perfect. There is a huge library of music available to download, numerous options for customising your avatar and band, a variety of challenges and of course the sheer visceral thrill of strapping on a plastic guitar and rocking out to 'Highway Star'. Worth every penny.

The Winds of Change

Well, not so much really. You've probably noticed that I've been doggedly posting a daily entry every day for over a year now, and I feel that they are perhaps becoming a little repetitive.

What I am going to be doing from now on is posting the same sort of things but splitting them up a bit more - movies, tv shows and books will all get reviewed and posted in separate entries and tagged appropriately. Likewise gaming diary entries will be recorded in the same way. The regular features of Haikusday, Caturday and Sunday Links will stay in their regular slots, and I may or may not post daily entries if I have done something out of the ordinary that I want to mention. Rants and skeptical pieces will also get their own entries.

So, I'll probably be posting about the same amount of stuff, but split into more posts and not necessarily every day. If I don't post on any given day, then as the Hitch Hikers Guide says - don't panic.

So, another year over ... here's to 2011!

All Night Garage

The weather was foggy again, although not as pea-souperish as yesterday. Another typical holiday day, with the usual mix of activities. I managed to get through a Guardian Tech Weekly and four audio-boos worth of ironing first of all, and I just about got down to the Jurassic layer of the pile. After that, a walk in a very muddy wood followed by a couple of hours of OU work, finishing off the question on overriding methods in subclasses with quite an elegant bit of coding, if I say so myself.

I was tempted into town with the promise of a German sausage at the Christmas fair, which is still running outside the town hall. I mooched around the shops for a bit, but there's nothing that I wanted to buy so I ended up in one of the leather armchairs (not high backed, I hasten to add) in Waterstone's playing Disc Drivin' and Words with Friends with friends in three different continents.

Back home for a snooze, a gingerbread latte and a bit more time in Fable III which is really rather enjoyable. I am currently just pottering around doing quests for villagers and hunting down an infestation of evil gnomes (it's a long story), rather than doing the main plot, but I think this is a game worth savouring rather than rushing to the denouement.

Misty Mountain

Another foggy and damp day. It wasn't too bad this morning, but when I glanced up from my work this afternoon I saw that the world outside had vanished into the swirling mists and I could barely see across the street. It certainly made for another eerie walk in the woods this evening.

Last night's movie was 'Kick Ass' - a hyper violent comedy that effectively answered the question 'why doesn't anybody get dressed up as a superhero and go and fight crime in real life'. It shamelessly name checks and pays homage to everything from John Woo to Batman, with a touch of Kill Bill for good measure. Enormous fun all round, I think.

In games news, as mentioned yesterday I have mostly been playing 'Disc Drivin' which it seems is based on a board game called 'Pitch Car which involves flicking pucks around a track. I've finally got the hang of the controls thanks to some pointers tracked down by Jochta over on Twitter. Quite why the developers couldn't have included a page of instructions in the game is a mystery to me, but there you go. There's a free ad supported version, so it's worth a try to see if it appeals.

Haikusday

Driving daughter home
Mist rises from snowy fields
As the thaw begins

New game Disc Drivin'
A mix of shove ha'penny
And Formula One

Post xmas limbo
Days start to merge into one
Must be Haikusday

A perfect solo
Bohemian Rhapsody
It's Brian May-tastic!

Ry Cooder soundtrack
Played through some decent speakers
Hidden depths revealed

Outlands

Weather : a few desultory flakes of wet snow this morning, followed by a gradual thaw of the lying snow from last week. Not pleasant.

I thought I had better get back into some OU work today, so I made a start on the next question on the TMA, this one dealing with overriding and overloading of subclasses. I made some good progress on it, I think, although there is a written section in addition to the code which will require a bit more code.

In games news, I finally got my paws back on the controller for a bit of Fable III which I am enjoying hugely. I'm not quite sure about the changes to the gameplay mechanics from Fable II yet, but I think I'll get the hang of them soon enough. More news, as it happens ...

Squeeze Box

Technically it's not actually Boxing Day until tomorrow, but seeing as how I've not actually done anything today other than eat, watch telly, play games and go out for the occasional dog walk then that sounds pretty much like a typical Boxing day to me.

To elaborate sightly, the telly was 'Cars' recorded from the other day, one of the very few Pixar movies that I hadn't previously seen. I enjoyed it immensely, particularly the design of the characters and the profusion of cameo appearances and in-jokes for petrol heads, not least a brief appearance from the highly appropriate voice of Jeremy Clarkson. The CGI was pretty darned impressive too. Good movie.

Games wise, I've played through 'Shadows of the Vashta Narada', the Doctor Who adventure game that I downloaded yesterday. This one is set in an underwater base, with echos of Bioshock and Half Life. It's an intriguing story that makes good use of the setting with a nice twist at the end too. There's one particularly tricky stealth puzzle at one point, that had me cursing before I managed to complete it by accident rather than design. I've enjoyed this series of games, even though there didn't turn out to be much of an arc to them as the first episode had hinted at. Worth a download.

That's about it, Boxing Day wise!

Boxing Day Links

• Our cat, our Xmas tree, & time-lapse Find out what the cat is doing with the Xmas tree while nobody is watching
• The 1982 Tron Holiday Special featuring a host of special guests!
• Jingle Goats!
• Have yourself a Nazi little Christmas .. The Third Reich in festive mood
• Dubstep Snowman
• Remix Project Mix your very own version of Subterranian Homesick Blues
• Map of Metal Here be guitars!
• Seaquence Music generation as evolutionary biological process
  
• Emily Davison Blues The one positive thing to come out of the political gloom that we are facing is the reappearance of protest songs, like this one by Grace Petrie performed outside Nick Clegg's office in Sheffield
• Bruce Sterling on Cablegate Essential reading
• Breath-Taking Aerial Video Footage from New York City Taken by a RC Plane!
• Photoshop Disasters: Top 20 Photoshop Disasters of 2010
• 2010 in photos From The Big Picture (Part 2) (Part 3)

Christmas Wrapping

Well, that's another Christmas done and dusted, and a jolly fine one it was too. As is traditional, Barney the dog opened his present first to find his equally traditional and perfectly hee-yuge bone. He immediately took it out into the garden to try and bury it, and was thwarted by the rock hard permafrost that is what passes for our flower beds nowadays.



Everybody else got just what they had been wishing for, including games and books for Jamie and me, a new set of black and gold dice and a shopping voucher for Alicia, Muji ear muffs and notebooks for Jan, and unfeasibly large amounts of chocolate all round. Yum.

Lunch was cooked by Jan, and was of course perfectly traditional and perfectly perfect leaving me stuffed to the gills and only barely capable of making it round the woods with the dog before retiring upstairs for a restorative snoozle.

Back down for a cup of tea and the Doctor Who Xmas episode, which managed to be an original take on a Christmas Carol which I am not ashamed to say brought a tear to my eye by the end. The trailer for the next series looked rather spiffing too, and I am currently downloading the final episode of the Doctor Who adventure game.

That's about it, I reckon ... I hope all of your celebrations have been equally relaxing and satisfying as ours!

I opened yur present and I eated it

Xmas Eve Boo

Happy Jack

Day two of the hols, and even though I woke up at my usual time of six o'clock I was able to go back to bed for another much needed hour or so. I pottered round the house for a bit, did some washing and took the dog for a walk before enjoying some marmalade on toast as a late breakfast/early lunch (marmalade for lunch?!?!?).

After that, it was on with some more work on my TMA questions. I think I've got the first one nailed down, with some good examples of code factorization in my answer. I was slightly miffed to find that BlueJ (the development environment I am using) had stopped working properly on my Macbook for some reason - it doesn't seem to be initializing the java virtual machine even though it says it has. I suspect that it's down to a java update or something, but I'll have to have a trawl through the faqs to see if it's a common issue. I still have the choice of running my work on Ubuntu or Windows though, via a shared dropbox folder.

Work done and the dog walked again, and we all settled down for an annual rewatch of 'The Apartment' with Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine - a festive tale of adultery, blackmail and attempted suicide. I'd forgotten how fantastic the cinematography is with some stunningly framed shots of iconic 1960s style offices. It's interesting to compare and contrast with 'Mad Men' for period detail.

Staring at the Sun

Well, we're past the solstice and the days are slowly getting longer again. I don't mind admitting that it has been a struggle for me over the last couple of weeks with a perpetual cycle of feeling tired, struggling into work and back again and then waking up the next day to do it again. I'm only now adjusting to having the next twelve days off and it is very relaxing to be sitting inside in the warm with the fairy lights round the room gently twinkling.

I managed a few jobs round the house today including cleaning some of the grime off my car windows - it was a bit hairy driving home from Leeds last night with the windscreen smeared with salt off the road and being unable to use the wipers because the washer fluid had frozen solid in the minus nine temperatures, even with a double strength mixture. I also cleaned the fridge prior to it being well stocked by Jan with all of the usual goodies and treats.

I'm off out shortly to pick up Alicia from the station and then I think that the festivities can start in earnest.

Full Dark, No Stars by Stephen King

Full Dark, No Stars by Stephen King

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A bloody murder
Unforeseen consequences
Guilty conscience

Ill advised shortcut
Crime writer becomes victim
Then takes her revenge

A dying man strikes
A diabolical deal
At his friend's expense

A good marriage
Conceals a deadly secret
Uncovered by chance

View all my reviews

Haikusday

Sitting on the shore
In the dark depths of winter
Waiting for the sun

A blood red moon sets
As the solstice sun rises
The year turns anew

OU books arrive
In anticipation of
Starting a new course

DoGood veggie task
Foiled by the temptation of
An Ultimate Pie

Last day of work done
Laptop shut down, desk tidied
Driving home for Yule

Something good

Weather - do I really need to say it's cold? Minus nine last night, but at least the journey into work this morning was spectacular with the sun peeking through the mist and ice rimed trees at the edges of the fields. I had plenty of time to appreciate it whilst I was sat in the usual queue of traffic from junction 39 onwards. Grmmph.

One thing that I have been looking at recently is an iPhone app called DoGood which makes daily suggestions for a good deed for the day of one sort or another. The one today was 'Refrain from using offensive language' with the added detail being to avoid using words like 'gay' or 'retard' in a hurtful way. It got me thinking ...

I rarely use offensive language, in terms of swearing, but I do like to keep my powder dry for those occasions where a bit of profanity is richly deserved. When I do swear, at least on this blog, you can assume that I really mean it. I don't tend to use personally hurtful words and I would hope that somebody would pull me up on it if I did use one unthinkingly. One of the reasons that I rarely play with random Americans on Xbox Live is the preponderance of squeaky voiced adolescents calling each other 'gay faggot' or similar (aside - is that a double negative and a 'gay faggot' is actually straight?).

However, what if something I say offends somebody simply by virtue of contradicting their deeply held beliefs? I may not use language that is technically offensive (at least according to the dictionary), but the concepts and logical conclusions certainly will be. If I say that there is no evidence for the existence of god (or gods) and that the god portrayed in the bible is a blood thirsty megalomaniac who wouldn't be worthy of worship even if he did exist, then that is sure to offend somebody somewhere. Is that covered by the 'DoGood' definition of offense? (Another aside - is it more offensive for an atheist to say there is no evidence for the existence of god than for a theist of a different flavour to tell their co-religionist that they have picked the wrong god and are going to hell as a result?)

I know that I have offended people (to the point of de-friending me) by questioning their beliefs in alternative therapies (for which there is not a jot of evidence) and magic (likewise), so should I avoid asking pointed questions in future to be on the safe side or should I continue to call a cocking twunt, a cocking twunt where appropriate?

Another relevant issue is offensiveness in comedy. It's a fine line to tread and it is difficult to define why I find Richard Herring so funny whereas Frankie Boyle recently (at least when you take his gags out of context) is as funny as arse cancer. I would say that the dividing line is whether the material has a point to make (either directly or by provoking a particular response - Herring's 'Hitler Moustache' is a perfect example of this) or if it is just offensive for the sake of it (as with Boyle making jokes about the disabled child of Katie Price). Sometimes you need to push at boundaries (and step over them) in order to establish where the boundaries are and whether they should be there in the first place.

Ghost town

We were treated to a spot of sunshine this morning which served nicely to take the edge off of the sub zero temperatures outside, but by lunchtime it had clouded over into a gray coldness that was like being on the inside of a refrigerator. It was still cold enough to mandate the use of my woolly hat when we went for a mooch around town for a couple of hours this afternoon.

Town was busy-ish, but not packed as you might have expected on the last shopping weekend before xmas. I was even able to get a seat on one of the leather arm chairs in Waterstones to rest my weary bones for a bit before we went to get a Subway and return home. I felt absolutely wiped out and had to go and lie down for a bit to recover. I'm hoping it's just the low point of the year and things will pick up as the days get longer and I've had the benefit of a two week rest.

In OU news, I've had a read through of the TMA and it is all fairly straight forward coding questions which should be easily completable next week. I can then have a bit of a break with a clear conscience before cracking on with the rest of the course in January.

Sunday Links

• Baby Reindeer Boris Weaned in Time for Christmas! ZooBorns
• A very Maru Christmas
• Cat Diaries A Film Directed by Kittehs
• Cablegate comix Wikileaks stories in graphic form
• Climate Change Comix In comic strip form. Just remember Weather != Climate
• Big Oil Vs Greenpeace to save the Arctic A eco friendly board game to print and play
• The Necronomicon Have you heard the bad news? (H/T Rachel!)
• Top 10 Famous Disappearances
• The 11 Strangest Questions From The D&D 'Sage Advice' Column Including what to do when your half elf gets pregnant.
• Naive Medley The Coverville Tribute to the Talking Heads - some really excellent covers to be found here. Well worth a download.
• Isle of Tune I always enjoy playing with music generators of various sorts. This one takes the rather nifty route of triggering the tunes by having little cars travel round road layouts
• SOUR / MIRROR This interactive music video will only work on Safari and Chrome, but it is well worth a go. Make sure to turn your webcam on and link your Twitter feed for best effect!
• WICKED LEAKS Another fascinating slice of history from Adam Curtis, looking at a notorious case of a diplomatic leak in 1971.

Halp! I's been attacked by invizible dream monstahs!

Counting Out Time

It wasn't quite as cold as had been forecast, but minus four was still plenty cold enough in my books when I went out with the dog this morning. We seem to escaped the worst of the snow this time, with the west seemingly taking the brunt of it.

After several days of not doing much in the way of OU work, I hit the books today and finished off the last bit of Unit 7 with some stuff on class methods and variables which brings my level of Java knowledge up to the point where I can start to some useful things with it. I'm planning on getting my next TMA done before Xmas and then moving on to block 3 work which will put me about six weeks ahead of schedule.

In games news, not a huge amount played other than my regular games of Carcassonne and WwF, and some more time on Infinity Blade. I've not managed to kill the God King yet, but I will keep trying ... :-)

Soft Kitty Boo

Up jumped the devil

Dark, with the added joy of blustery rain this morning. The rain started to turn into snow around lunch time as the temperature dipped towards the frosty end of the scale. It didn't amount to much though, and the skies cleared causing the mercury to dive even lower. Brrr.

The good work news is that I am now officially a Senior Software Developer, so hurrah for that. In elfin safety news, we dug out the box of xmas decos this afternoon and draped a bit of tinsel along the dividers between the desks. I even went so far as to string some fairy lights up as well, which was very festive until I noticed a funny burning smell and unplugged them in the interests of not burning the office to the ground.

Still, only two more days in the office next week and then it's time for a break, which I am muchly looking forward to.

The Wednesday Club

I had another bout of waking up feeling sick last night, and it took an hour of sitting up in bed before I stopped feeling queasy and was able to lie down again and go back to sleep. As a consequence, I felt rather sorry for myself when the alarm went off a couple of hours later, but I still managed to drag myself into work.

It was our divisional meeting today, and to summarize we have worked bloody hard this year and smashed the financial targets but still no mention of a potential payrise. Interesting approach to employee motivation. The fun part of the day was our Christmas quiz at the end which our team won through our superior knowledge of Christmas song lyrics (including the correct spelling of the band 'Wizzard') earning a small box of chocolates as our prize.

In other news, I have spent the last two and a half hours trying to clean up and update Jamie's Vista based system which was a painfully slow and awkward process. There were a whole bunch of unused programs to uninstall and they all had a different uninstaller and an irritating screen flash before they could be deleted. It's much easier on OS/X where all you have to do is drag them into the recycle bin. Well, it's done now and I think the last lot of windows updates should be downloading.

I Shall Wear Midnight by Terry Pratchett

I Shall Wear Midnight by Terry Pratchett

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

When I am older
And I have earned the right to
I shall wear Midnight


View all my reviews

Haikusday

I open the door
In anticipation
Chocolate snowman!

Richard Garriott
From the dungeons to the stars
Private astronaut

At the farthest edge
Voyager prepares to leave
The Solar System

I wonder if they
Will still kiss with such passion
When they score a goal?

Tiring day at work
The cat demands mithering
We snooze together

In Case We Sneezed

In the absence of a cat to do the job, I managed to wake myself up at half past five this morning, leaving myself not quite enough time to nod off again before the alarm went off. The temperature was a sultry four degrees and, barring a few shaded patches where it is stubbornly refusing to melt, the snow has mostly all gone. Apparently there is more on the way though, with an arctic blast due at the end of the week.

I caught a bit of a political debate show that was on yesterday, incongruously enough featuring Mitch Benn (resplendent in a 'Proud of the BBC' t-shirt) as one of the panellists. The subject under discussion was whether you could use 'happiness' as a measure of success of Government policies. This is at best a rather nebulous thing to track, and I imagine most people would put themselves somewhere around 'mustn't grumble' on a scale of 'kill me now' to 'zippedee doo-dah!'.

Referring back to my thoughts on evidence based policy from the other day, it strikes me that this is predicated on having suitable evidence to look at. In the case of crime, for example, you can track things like re-offending rates as a measure for whether a particular punishment or rehabilitation programme is an effective deterrent. Economic indicators are a little more tricky to define, but not impossible, as are other measures to do with quality of life.

With these targets, politicians could easily set goals to measure their performance in the job of running the country, but it's a fair bet that they won't do it, or they'll take existing figures and fudge them to score whichever political points they wish to make.

Good Morning, Morning

Another cat related incident to report - for some reason the kitchen door wasn't shut properly and so at half past five I had a wake up call from a certain ginger kitteh purring loudly, scratching at the blankets and finally biting my face until I woke up and gave her some food. At least I was able to go back to bed and sleep for another hour or so before facing the day properly.

After not doing any OU work at all yesterday, I got stuck into Unit 7 today and polished off three chapters with some work on refactoring code and overloading/overriding methods. Interesting stuff and really getting into the nitty gritty of object oriented code design. Once I've finished this unit, I should be able to have a crack at TMA 02 which will put me somewhere around the end of January on the course schedule. I'd like to get as far ahead as I can to give me a buffer for when I start my T215.

We've just watched 'A Room for Romeo Brass' which was another utterly compelling Shane Meadows film. What initially seems like a light hearted comedy about two boys from neighbouring houses takes a very dark turn indeed mid way through. Paddy Considine is superb as Morrel, the loner that the boys befriend when he rescues them from an attack by some older kids. Well worth a watch.

Sunday Links

• 私信 Maru and the Christmas Tree
• The Office Party Another vintage documentary unearthed by Adam Curtis. This one dates from 1969 and shows an office party at an advertising agency.
• Santastic V: Snow, Man! Christmas mashups for your listening pleasure
• A free Christmas song from Neil Innes Just sign up to his newsletter and download!
• 2010 Hubble Space Telescope Advent Calendar Still plenty of time to catch up on this series of astounding pictures. Tis the season for reason!
• Amazing science stunts for Christmas parties….
• Kawah Ijen by night - The Big Picture Mining sulfur in a truly hellish environment
  
• Glide High speed video shot from the window of a train pulling into the station giving an eerie effect of commuters frozen in time
• That's my hometown Can you recognise photos of places within walking distance of your house?
• How to swear on the radio without anybody realising you have Richard Herring interviewed
• Ten Weirdest New Animals of 2010
• With a Little Help A collection of short stories by Cory Doctorow available in a range of formats from e-books to audio readings from such folk as Neil Gaiman and Will Wheaton
• Deconstructing ‘Helter Skelter’ Hear the individual tracks of the Beatles in the studio, 1968

Blue Calx

It's Saturday night and I'm home alone (Jan and Jamie are out a gig), so I'm currently chilling out to one of my favourite cds - Aphex Twin 1994:Selected Ambient Works. It's another album that really benefits from the bass playing through the sub-woofer. Aces.

Today didn't get off to a brilliant start. The cat flap was locked overnight, so we had an unfortunate incident in the scullery. Suffice it to say that it took a bit of cleaning up and we needed to buy a new doormat this morning.

In games news, you might remember the tech demo 'Unreal Citadel' that I blogged about a while ago. Well, the first game that uses the tech has arrived and it is mightily impressive. It's called 'Infinity Blade' and is a fairly linear rpg with a surprisingly deep combat system that works very nicely with the touch screen controls on the iPhone. In a nutshell, you fight a series of increasingly difficult battles by dodging, blocking and parrying incoming attacks and then responding by swiping the direction of your riposte. The graphics are simply superb with character models being full of detail - the opening scene looks like a pre-rendered video but when you are dropped into the first fight you realise that this is the game engine. An absolute must buy.



The next order of business was a trip to Barnsley to pick up my new specs. We followed the signs to the free park and ride, parked and then rode the bus into town. Very handy. There were lots of police gearing up in readiness for the afternoon's football match and I felt physically sick when I realised that a stall festooned with flags in the middle of the shopping arcade was not part of the Christmas market but was actually the BNP handing out leaflets. Nazi bastards.

Anyhoo, the new glasses were collected and I spent a penny in the horribly dilapidated Victorian public toilets in Barnsley centre.



Home for a dog walk catching up on Audioboos and then a nap before dropping Jan off at the Student Union to meet up with Jamie and his pals. I've got used to my new specs now and I'll take a picture of them with photobooth ...



... there you go!

Slush Boo

Brain Cloudy Blues

Weather, above zero this morning for the first time in ages, and I was also spared the Sisyphean task of scraping ice off of the car windscreen too. Which was nice.

Into the office, and straight into pesky support calls from a client who has arranged to go live on two projects in the same week that their IT providers have been buggering around with the network so things either don't work or run like treacle. Not good.

Around mid morning I started getting the first inklings of a migraine, with blurry vision making it hard to concentrate but I pushed through and it started to abate aided by some paracetamol and codeine and a walk outside at lunch time. I suspect it was a mild version of the ocular migraine I had a while ago, but fortunately nowhere near as bad. It left my brain feeling like mush for the rest of the day though. Also not good.

Home again, fighting through another new set of roadworks on the motorway, reducing the three lanes out of Leeds to two just where the M1 joins the M62. Even though I snuck out of the office early it still took me an hour to make the journey. Not good as well, also.

I had a nap when I got in and then listened to the latest Shift Run Stop whilst cooking spaghetti and pesto for tea. Better.

Now time for a Big Bang Theory, a Frasier and Never Mind the Buzzcocks. Best!

Sex and drugs and rock and roll

You know that you have been too cold, for too long, when you look at the weather gauge and consider that a temperature of -2.2 is comparatively warm. The traffic was a lot better this morning too and I was in the office before the sun rose majestically above the ice rimed gas works across the road.

It's difficult to suppress a certain amount of bah-humbuggery in the office at the moment with a rash of amusing (for some values of amusing) seasonal ring tones, noisy electronic toys and musical ties (no, really, just shoot me now).

In other rant worthy news, the government has abandoned all pretence at rationality by dropping evidence based decision making for drugs policy, and presumably substituting ill-informed prejudice and hasty knee jerk reactions driven by whatever the Daily Mail has decreed is the moral panic du jour.

Public policy should be a balance between promoting the public good (improving health, reducing poverty and crime and so on) balanced against the resources available (for example, installing foam bumpers on street furniture would reduce the number of walking into lamp post accidents but it is likely to be rather expensive). This will inevitably lead to difficult choices - the classic case is the provision of an expensive drug that might prolong somebody's life for a few weeks against cheaper drugs or services that improve thousands of lives. The emotive response is to go for the high profile tragic case (after all, what price can you put on a human life, eh?) but to shuffle and look embarrassed when it turns out you would have to increase taxes to pay for it.

Haikusday

A clash of podcasts
Amuses and entertains
An Utter Shambles

Vintage US laughs
From Boston to Seattle
Raise chilly spirits

The hoar frost's cruel bite
Nips my fingers as I scrape
Ice from my windscreen

Hours spent bug hunting
Finally narrowed down to
Web form validation

Time for a sit down
With a hot cup of coffee
And a cold moggy

Pale Shelter

A bitterly cold night with a hard frost that saw out scraping ice from my car at a quarter past six with the temperature nudging minus eight. Just the way I like to start my Monday mornings.

The journey in to Leeds was well over an hour again - long enough to listen to all of the Seven Day Sunday podcast followed by a reasonable chunk of 'Full Dark, No Stars' by Stephen King which is my current audio book. The temperature fell even lower during the journey, to minus ten, before the sun started peeking above the horizon.

Work - busy busy busy, with much chopping and changing between different stuff. Not much else to say about it really, other than there's a lot of stuff to get completed over the next two and a bit weeks before the xmas break. Full hunker down mode in effect, I think.

In games news, after tidying out the games cupboard yesterday, I had an urge to play Vice City again. It's awkward to control and graphically primitive compared to GTA IV, but I still love the atmosphere of cruising along the beach front watching the sun set and listening to 80s music on Wave 103. Aces.

White Blur

Another cold day, but with deep blue skies and bright sunshine bouncing off the remaining snow in the field it didn't feel too bad, all things considered. I even left the house this afternoon, nervously edging my car out onto the skating rink that passes for our road at the moment.

We headed into town and drove around for a while looking for a parking spot. The open car parks and some of the side roads still looked a bit treacherous, so we eventually ended up in the NCP car park. A couple of quid, but at least it was ice free and close to where we wanted to go. We traded in a bunch of games at Game and used up some points on the reward card to buy two new games for £11.00 (with £6.00 worth of new points on the card as well, also). That's two xmas pressies sorted - result!

After that it was time for a quick look in Waterstones followed by a mooch around the Christmas market in the Peace Gardens where I treated myself to a perfectly hee-yuge char grilled Bratwurst with mustard. Nom.

Home again and straight out with the dog before returning to the warm for a nap, a warming gingerbread latte and a slice of Mr Kipling's xmas cake. Nom again.

Now for the first disc of my Two Towers extended edition - all together now -

Sunday Links

• Bronx Zoo Debuts Hoover the Aardvark Baby! - ZooBorns
• QED Vodka Make your own homeopathic vodka!
• Crows vs Cat vs Cat But which is better? There's only one way to find out ... FIGHT!
• How to Give a Cat a Pill Sound advice ...
• This apocalypse goes up to *11* Eschatological Taxonomy Poster
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Ah, Mr Bond - I've been expecting you.

Melt

Well, the snow hasn't gone but it's on the way. There are still big piles of snow where we dug out the drive this week and the field is still about calf deep where it hasn't been trodden down. It's a bit icy and treacherous in places on the path through the woods and I felt a bit unsteady when Barney was tugging me on the lead.

Today has been mostly OU work. I gave my TMA a final read through and made one or two tweaks before submishing it at lunch time. I've made the decision to start the T215 course in January too - they've changed the structure of the IT and Computing degree track and there are actually a lot more options on it now, including modules on artificial intelligence and digital media technologies which look to be right up my geeky street.

My legs were feeling very wobbly by mid afternoon (I'd done a bit more snow clearing in the morning) so I had to have a lie down before taking the dog out for the second walk of the day. This week has been very tiring, despite not having left the house since last Monday.

Last night's Rock Band session was another epic. Our band - Pig Orange Gray - are now arena rockers with our own jet, and as I was about to say on my Audioboo yesterday before the time ran out we have played arena gigs from Berlin to Tijuana. I did hit my first stumbling block with the main guitar riff on 'Vasoline' proving surprisingly tricky. The bit the catches me out is a long alternating sequence of notes and hammer-ons that I just can't seem to get the right tempo for - it's the bit about thirty seconds into the song and repeated a couple of times. (Warning - the video contains graphic scenes of clowns and men wearing Lederhosen.)

Snow Boo

When the Work is Done

More snow overnight, and a touch more during the day, but at least we had a chance to get out and clear the driveway and enough of the road to be able to get Jan's car out and give it enough of a run up to get moving on the rest of the frozen bits up the street. The shoveling was hard work though and my legs are now aching from the effort of that and taking Barney through the deep snow in the field for his evening walkies.

The temperature is dropping by the minute though and it looks as though it's going to hit a record low tonight by all accounts. I'm very glad to be in the warm with a extremely chocolaty hot chocolate made with frothed milk and a shot of espresso to give it a bit of a kick.

Today's advent freebies include Sailboat Pro - a surprisingly tricky sailing game that requires quite a bit of thought of how to tack across the wind to get round the courses and iQuarium - a rather cute fish tank simulator. The free app of the day was Notesy, which inspired me to finally get around to signing up for a Dropbox account with 2Gb of online storage. I now have all of my OU work backed up and available on both my Mac and Linux machines, as well as my iPhone, and I still have plenty of room to spare for other stuff. If anybody doesn't have an account, let me know and I'll send you a referral link which will get you a bonus 250Mb of space.

Let it Snow!

Weather : Snow. Lots and lots of snow. There was no sign that we cleared the cars and shovelled the drive this morning and the snow continued off and on for most of the day, piling into drifts deep enough to almost lose the dog in.

As with yesterday, I was lucky enough to be able to just plug my laptop in and work at home, whilst watching the snow swirling outside. Other benefits included a commute of approximately five seconds from my bedroom to the study, infinitely superior coffee and a selection of cats using the window sill as a viewing platform to monitor the outside world.

I managed one walk around the woods before it got too dark, but it was hard going wading through the deep snow so I was more than ready for my gingerbread latte and the first choccie from my Milky Bar advent calendar tonight. Nom.



In games news, iPhone and iPod folk out there should go and bookmark Appventcalendar for free stuff every day until xmas. Today's game is Time Geeks which is a fun 'Where's Wally' style game with some nifty pixel art with lots of in jokes to spot, including Moss from the IT crowd, a Twitter fail whale and the smoke monster from Lost.