Saturday, July 02, 2011

Fly Like An Eagle

I apologise for the sporadic nature of blogging recently, but it's been a hectic couple of weeks with personal worries, work, my java exam and a long form report to do for my other OU course all colliding at high speed like hadrons Brian Cox's play set in Switzerland. Yowzers.

Anyhoo, I got my TMA submished on time on Thursday night and I am mostly happy with it. It's the closest that I've come to the wire with any of them and I don't think I'll be attempting to do two courses at the same time again in the foreseeable future. The next block looks interesting though - producing and editing a short video to illustrate a topic from the course which should be fun.

In games news, I think I am ready to cut back on Tiny Towers - it's a skinner box of massive proportions with barely no interactivity other than restocking the shops when the notification beep tells you to. Fun while it lasted, but it doesn't have anything like the long term appeal of Pocket Frogs.

As a replacement I picked up Death Rally - a car combat game in the classic Death Race 2000 vein with a good selection of tracks, cars and weapons to play with. I initially wondered why I couldn't manage any better than last place on my first couple of races until I realised that the game has a large element of earning cash and upgrading your car's speed, handling, armour and weaponry to your satisfaction. The default controls are a little twitchy and it is easy to go careening into a wall without meaning to, but switching to a more traditional steering slider improved things no end. It's on sale at the moment and worth picking up, if you like that sort of thing.

In other news, we mooched into town this afternoon with a promise of a food festival and some music, but it turned out to be something of a damp squid. There was only one barbeque stall with not much to choose from, although the sausage sandwich I had was very nice and the mojito to wash it down with was much appreciated on a sultry afternoon. The music wasn't much to write home about either - The Everly Pregnant Brothers were a ukelele band playing comedy versions of various songs with a Sheffield twist. Amusing in small doses, I think, but not worth sitting on cobbles for, for any length of time.

Oh, and we also saw one of these:



Home now and the BBQ is warming up, so happy Saturdays everyone!

3 comments:

Anonymous Me said...

I had lived more than 45 years without ever encountering the phrase "something of a damp squid." Please use it lots from now on so I can make up for lost time.

I wish I could see some of the papers you've done for your courses - some of the topics have sounded really interesting to me. Making a video should be fun.

thermalsatsuma said...

The damp squid thing is an eggcorn (a word or expression that you misheard originally and keep using anyway). The original is damp squib - a small firework that fails to go off and is hence rather disappointing. However, damp squid has a resonnance all of its own ... :-)

As for the papers, posting them online is probably a no-no but I could email them to you if if you are interested. I'm quite proud of my piece on online communities and my report on biometric security systems. I think I'll be ok posting the video when the deadline for the assignment has passed as well.

Anonymous Me said...

Oh, I agree - the eggcorn version is even better than the original.:-) Are you a Language Log fan, too?

Yes, please email me them! The online communities topic is especially interesting. I don't know what biometric security systems are but I'm sure I wouldn't mind learning. :-)