Echoes

Monday, and the sun is finally shining after the torrential downpour of the weekend. It was dazzlingly bright with sun shining off the wet roads and mist rising in sinuous swirls. The down pipe from the guttering at the side of the house fell down in the winds on Saturday night and I had to fit it back into place on Sunday morning. It needs a bracket to screw it onto the wall properly at some point, and I also need to get the ladder out so I can check it’s secure at the top. That’s a task for a dry weekend, I think.

In OU news, I have finished the study part of block 3 on Natural Intelligence so that gives me two and bit weeks for the TMA and CMA (tutor and computer marked assignments, respectively). I had fun playing with a tool for modelling robot control systems using subsumption architectures – this is where you have a default behaviour (such as wandering around randomly) that is overridden by a higher level behaviour (such as avoiding an obstacle when the sensors detect something). It’s a very efficient way of creating intelligent behaviour from a simple set of nested rules.

In games news, I have splurged on several free or 69p sale things on iOS – to whit, Smash Cops – a nifty top down car chase crashy sort of affair, Sword of Aralon HD – 3D open world rpg and Warlock of FiretopMountain – the classic choose your own path gamebook in digital (and cheat proof) form. I’ve also got back into spending some quality time in Skyrim, tracking down the Dark Brotherhood and searching for the missing stones of Berenziah in a maze of twisty passages, all alike. Or something.