I bet you think this is going to be about Edward Woodward, right? Wrong. Sad as I am about him, someone more important to me died today as well. I'll be stunned if any of you have heard of him, but to a kid in the 80s discovering dance music, Derek B was a major figure, albeit with a slightly silly name.

One of the first mainstream UK hip-hop artists, hearing his stuff brought me to people like Simon Harris, The She Rockers, The Cookie Crew and Merlin, to add to the cutup acts like Bomb the Bass and Coldcut I was already into. And also overseas acts like Public Enemy, Run DMC and Eric B and Rakim. I remember sampling his beats and effects for some of my early MODs before 808 State proved a bigger influence.

A minor figure to most, but certainly a big part of my early life.

I've just come off the motorbike for the first time.  I was heading round a bend near a school packed with mumsies dropping their spawn off when I saw a car pulling out of the school entrance.  Instinctively I pulled on the brakes, which you're not suppose to do whilst turning, and lost it.  I slid a fair way despite only going 20-ish.  The bloke stopped and checked I was okay, but as I hadn't hit him and he'd not actually been pulling out, just nudging forward to see around the 4x4s and buses, there wasn't much else to be done except ring the AA.

Me okay, bike not so.  I thought I'd got away with it for a moment, but the front wheel is out of alignment.  I had to use up my first free recovery to get it back home, and the garage can't see it until next week.  Arse.  Back to the push bike for a while then.

Still, it could very much have been worse - My helmet has a whole load of scuff marks on the front and visor, which could have been my face, and my rucksack is completely shredded, which could have been my back.  I found a biro inside the front pocket of the rucksack that was completely smashed.  So kids, wear protective gear - it works!  ;)

I know Andy at least wanted a better copy of this one.  I thought briefly about tidying it up, but I think I'll probably end up using the gag somewhere else anyway.  I get more worried about teh kidz every year.  ;)




Would we get a table again?  Tricky.  It was nice to be with a whole bunch of other comicers, even if I didn't get round many of them.  But there wasn't a fat lot of business to be had, and I doubt we broke even.  I think we sold roughly what we sold at Aya, which is slightly rubbish given that there were at least 20-30 times the amount of people through the hall.  ;)

I remain convinced that the punters at Expo just aren't there for amateur stuff.  The kids are there for the big licenses, and the teens are there to socialise and pose.  And the fact that I had to spend over an hour in the queue both days even with a fasttrack ticket because we couldn't buy any more dealer passes was frankly taking the piss.

In other news, still waiting to find out if I've got webspace to do Revolution Baby in.  Hurry up!

Don't take this  the wrong way - I mean in the same way I dislike Americans.  In other words, the individual students / Americans I know are lovely people, but the group as a whole is some kind of huge evil diabolical clutch of misery.

For the last four weeks, since my usual commuter train stopped running, I've been using a motorbike to get to work, along much the same route I used to take on a cycle to the station (due to the proximity of several motorways, which as a learner I'm not allowed on, I have limited options in which route I can choose).  And there is a lot of traffic.  On the cycle I never really noticed the traffic, it was just this smelly,  mostly stationary mass that formed narrow corridors of hot metal for me to pedal down.  But on a motorbike, which is just that bit too wide and forbidden from using bus lanes, it's a different story.

During the summer holidays, South Manchester is a quiet and sparsely populated place, punctuated only occasionally by the sounds of car alarms and gunfire.  But come September, around 25000 18 to 21-year-olds descend on the place, and the local bus companies (five of them at the last count) respond by achieving a frequency of one bus every thirty seconds along Wilmslow road.  You'd think that the bus lanes would mean that this wasn't a problem, but no.  You fail to consider the sheer idiocy of most bus drivers.  For instance, if there is no room at a stop, they stop in the other lane.  The one with all the cars in.  And then they wait there for five minutes, because they're trying to stop the bus from another company following them from picking up any passengers.

But that isn't actually the main problem.  About a mile up the road from our house is a large hall of residence.  This hall is on the other side of the road from the nearest bus stop, connected by a pelican crossing.  In summertime, this is barely used.  But when it's stopping the traffic every minute or so to let students across, it causes tailback in excess of five miles long.

Now, you're probably all sitting there accusing me of being unreasonable.  I know, I've been a student too.  But there is one factor you're not considering: This happens every day around about 8AM.  What the holy living fuck is any student doing out of bed at 8 A fucking M?!  When I was a student, I didn't get up until lunchtime, ever.  Nor did any other student.  Occasionally an inexperienced tutor would try to hold a tutorial at 9AM, but they always gave up after a couple of weeks.

Please, for the love of God, let us taxpayers get to work first, then leave.  We're all gone by 9, I promise.  Have a lie-in.  Have more to drink the night before.  Failing that, get a cycle.  It'll work out cheaper than the bus, and the university is only a couple of miles up the road for you.  Spare a thought for those of us with twenty miles to go and no public transport options available.  ;)

I have my first motorbike!  A Honda CBF 125.  Fortunately I had just enough cash set aside to get it, because getting a second-hand bike from the pages of Auto Trader was a logistical nightmare.  My first ever experience of riding solo (without an instructor behind me) was of the 0.2 miles back from the local Honda dealer.  Foolishly it'd taken me until 3PM - school kickout time - to screw up enough courage to actually pick the bike up, and even in those 0.2 miles there are two primary schools.  Mummys may be kind and gentle with their kids, but they're impatient speed-addled hell bitches behind the wheel of a 4WD.

That was last Friday.  Today I used it for my commute the first time, and fortunately I was able to take it really slowly - because the traffic wasn't about to let me get above 10 MPH.  Yes, today's the day the students came back, so Wilmslow road was nose-to-tail buses and daddy-bought Fiats.  I know I'll get better at this and be able to nip in and out of spaces, but for the moment I was just sitting quietly in the queue.  I even turned the engine off a couple of times.

I found yet more evidence of the North/South divide in Manchester too.  South of the Mancunian Way everyone seemed to be very patient, and several times I was given more space and let out of junctions, presumably because of the big L plates.  However, to the North of that was twat-in-a-hatchback central.

Plus, I managed to sit in a bus lane for a few hundred yards in the middle of a camera zone.  Ooops.  Seriously, I saw the arrow saying "You can go back into the left hand lane," so I took it to let others overtake me.  But it was just for a left turn, and I didn't see the bus lane start again, because there was a car sitting on the road markings.  Agh.  Still, I saw no flash, so hopefully I'm okay.  ;)

Still, even on just those two journeys, I can already feel myself getting better.  That'll probably continue until my next lesson, where the instructor will be aghast at the bad habits I've picked up.

And the petrol fumes are clearly getting to me - I already hate cyclists.  Not as much as buses though.

The rum is gone.

Why is the rum always gone?

This might sound unreasonably cynical, but with half the internet posting up memorial notices, today's the day I like to remember the victims of the Manchester bombings of 1996 (as they're local to me), and those of all the other bombings in the IRA's various campaigns.

And the Americans and Libyans who paid for it.

 Following on from this post, where I repeated Ron Smith's (in)famous quote about how he made ends meet by going for quantity over quality.  There's an interview with the (now retired, due to macular degeneration) artist in this month's Judge Dredd Megazine, in which he goes into a little more detail:

"People talk about this alarm clock - that is actually very real.  The only thing that and artist can control is his hourly rate; you've got a fixed page, so right from the start they said to me a page of cartoons is ten pounds and I had worked out that to survive in London I needed two pounds an hour, so you just divide one into the other and so you've got to do a page in five hours.  So you set the clock, and you may not finish it but you start to get into this rhythm.

"It used to be three pages, not six, and when I was finished I was up to twenty pounds an hour - two hundred pounds a page, ten hours.  But still with the alarm clock.  This kept me going and meant that the bank always saw a similar amount coming in at the end of each month, because it was very hard to get banks to do things for you when you're freelance.

"When it went ping, I would literally put that page down and start on the next one.  And then I would go back and sit up late at night, which is outside of my hours, and finish it off.  But this got me into this way of working that meant I could live this little middle-class life with four daughters, put them through school and on to university.  Having the agent do all the leg work also meant I was sitting at home earning more of his twenty per cent - better to get him to do the leg work."

 Oi!  Italian Government!  Will you please stop making my life a misery, and employ someone who actually knows about computers to draft your laws for you?!  I know you're a government, and therefore listening to experts sort of goes against the grain for you, but it'll work out in the long run, I promise.

*sighs*

Mary and I are re-watching Twin Peaks at the moment, and I'm feeling a very deep empathy with one particular character.  Not Cooper, not Harry, not James, but... Albert Rosenfield.

Now there is a man with an understanding of the state of humanity.  ;)

I passed my CBT (Compulsory Basic Training for Motorcycles) yesterday.  Considering the two kids and the 50-ish hippy woman on the same course as me, it can't have been that hard (although the woman didn't make it through to the on-the-road bit).  But nonetheless, I'm now legal to ride.

Yes, I did stall it (although only at lights, not at roundabouts ;) ).  My clutch control is as crap as it ever was in a car, but I'll get used to it again.  So, anyone got or know of anyone with a Honda or Yamaha 125 for sale?  I need to ride round and round our estate before I stop looking like a complete idiot.

In other news, I used DOSBox to get Fastracker 2 running on my PC again, and actually came up with something half-decent for the first time in years.  Far nicer to use than Reason or Acid.  Just goes to show that nothing is a substitute for the tools you're used to, although I'm holding out for using an Amiga emulator to run ProTracker 2.3B.  ;)

I like to think this is just the remainder of the paranoia bred and nurtured during my early school life (until the point where I decided to ignore the world and take stupid amounts of drugs[1]) but does anyone else occasionally get the feeling that everyone they ever met in their entire life is actually a complete bastard, laughing at them behind their back with other bastards, and barely containing their mirth when speaking directly at you?

The internet, of course, makes this so much harder.  It is widely accepted that one of the most narcissistic things you can do is type your own name into Google.  What is less well known is that it can be once of the most dangerous things you can do to your self esteem, because people still talk about you after you've gone.

It's worse if you've ever put anything creative out there, and the biggest danger in that case is that someone you knew a while back, old school friend, old workmate, whatever, finds that creative thing.  The best one of my old stuff I've found is someone who thought the hard pan of two tracks on the left and two track on the right in all my early music was a stylistic choice.  It wasn't, it's a limitation of composing and recording directly off an Amiga 500.  ;)

But for most people, it's the horror of finding something like a Facebook group, or a company message board, on which you find a conversation about you, by people you last met five years ago.  This always happened, but only with the advent of social networking sites has it been possible for the subject of those conversations to read what has been said about them.  ;)

People really need to remember that talking on the internet is not the same as talking down the pub.  The echo is much louder.  ;)

[1] Obligatory warning: Don't do it, kids.

Forgive me if the typing gets a little sloppy here, but I've just bought a new set of strings, glued that broken pickup back together, and taken up the bass guitar again.  And my left hand hurts.  Do not try fifty repetitions of the Peter Gunn theme in the first practice for five years, must remember that.

I snagged one of the 1000 free keys to Age of Conan Eurogamer were giving away last week, as I'd never really tried MMOing before, and I was curious.  Particularly as I like the look of things like Blade and Soul (I'm a fool for Hyung Tae-Kim).  The trouble is I'm not sure I like them, and the few hours I spent with AOC only confirmed that.

Those of you who play other MMOs (and more regularly than me) will be able to put me straight here, but I really can't get the hang of them at all.  For starters, there's the control scheme.  I have no particular problem with third-person, but I really prefer using the mouse to steer - the concept of using keys to turn left and right went out with early Resident Evil as far as I'm concerned.  I kind of imagined (in my naivety) being able to walk around and interact in much the same way I would in Half-Life or Bioshock, or at least PC Tomb Raider, but nooo, just like my clumsy piloting of Aya Brea ten years ago.  Eagh.  Surely having everyone like residents of Uncanny Valley never quite looking in your direction doesn't help with the whole roleplaying thing?

But really, the whole problem I have with massively multiplayer games is... well, the "multiplayer" bit to be perfectly honest.  I like to take games at my own pace, not feel like there's a thousand (well, a few dozen - this was Age of Conan, after all) people looking on and judging my performance.  It's different from the shared hiscores or time trials of something like Nanostray or Mirror's Edge, it's more immediate.  And the prospect of someone chatting "Hey, loser," or the like to me is not something I'd pay a monthly fee for.  I mean, every time someone initiated a conversation, I just thought "Oh, piss off, I'm busy here."  Which is weird, because normally I have no trouble talking to complete strangers in bars or at gigs.  Or nailing them in Counterstrike for that matter.

If someone writes a proper FPS MMO, I'm right there.  But until then, no way.

In many ways, the same goes for games I've written.  I like the whole aspect of making the game, but actually going out and participating in the indie gaming scene?  Hmmm.  I'm going to have to do it, certainly, or my stuff'll just get lost in the noise.  And besides which, I need testers.

Clearly, I'm a miserable bastard, who just doesn't like trying to enter established communities.  I prefer to be in at the start (like the Sweatdrop forum).  I need to get over that.  But will I ever enjoy it?  ;)

It really is time I replaced my current home desktop.  It's six years old by now, and has barely any original parts left in it, apart from one of the memory chips and the GFX card - a GeForce 5600.  I even had to replace the mobo a few years back, following the last time I thought I'd need to replace the entire machine.  On that occasion I didn't thanks to a very responsible salesman - I went into Micro Direct (who most people know as a mail-order website, but their showroom is literally just up the road from our house) with a list of parts, and he told me that they did still sell 478 mobos, they just didn't list them, so it was worth giving a £30 Asrock a try.  It worked fine, and he lost MD a good £500 that day.  Which proves not everyone who works there is a mindless robot.  ;)

Anyway, this is a different problem.  Namely that the last game that worked well on it was Portal, and that's only because Valve's Source engine is epicly scalable (Okay, it's not as powerful as CryEngine 2, but it does work on more stuff ;) ).  So, new GFX card means new mobo, means just about new everything.

With the help of Custom PC magazine, and reusing my Audigy 2, I've speced up a reasonable machine of about £700.  I tend to me a mid-range sort of person with PCs, and the last time I did that it lasted six years and cost about the same.  Which is reasonable.  Now I just have to find the time to buy and build the bits - some of them will have to come from Scan rather than MD.

I briefly considered just buying one from Dell.  But, while the machine I got from them at work is fine, it's only got a GeForce 9800 in it, and cost about the same.  So it looks like you can still get a more powerful machine building it yourself - I was beginning to have my doubts.  ;)

As a bonus, I can stick Linux on the old machine, and be able to do simultaneous cross-platform coding at home as well as work, which makes it much easier.  ;)

Finished Mirror's Edge today.  Even though I only get to play it for an hours lunch a day, and because of the big law change at work I've been two busy to play it at all half the time, it still only took me a few weeks.  Short game.  Not very tricky either, apart from two mindfucks, one which took me an hour to work out, then another hour to actually achieve, and another which only took ten minutes, largely because of its similarity to the first.  There wasn't even a protracted climactic boss battle (which is, of course, a plus ;) ).  I'd like to see more of it, but I doubt the franchise has made enough impact to warrent the sequels DICE promised.  Weirdly, I still think I enjoy playing it more than Portal.

Anyway, now I've unlocked them all, I can get properly going on the time trials.  Playing against the world rankings is pointless (on PC at least) as ten minutes YouTubery will show up the fact that just about all the top PC times are due to hacks (sad bastards).  And it's not on the Speed Demos Archive yet either.  So the best I can do is to play against the clock and beat the recommended times.  I had time to halve my time on Playground 1 after finishing the game today, we'll see how much better I can do tomorrow.  ;)

As it was on sale in Game for a tenner, and as I finally have a PC at work with the grunt necessary to run it, I finally got around to buying Mirror's Edge this weekend.

Now, if ever a game was made for the PC, it is this one.  Apart from being the slowest installing game on record that is (over an hour - I'm assuming this is merely one effect of the much-loathed SecuROM 7 system).  I've read very bad things about the console versions of this game, and I can understand why.  You need a mouse to get the pixel-perfectness this game requires.  But with it, this is a fantastic game.  Admittedly, I am a fan of games requiring pointless, yet m4d sk1llz, but even so, this is a triumph.  I expect the guy at work who failed to finish Portal and had to watch me play the last half so he could see the end will be doing the same again.

And speaking of Portal, Mirror's Edge makes one drastic mistake.  Bundled with the PC version of the game is an audio CD of the main theme, plus some remixes.  The song is catchy, hummable, and the remixes are suitably trancey.  Ideal music to run along rooftops to, in fact.  Clearly they are proud of this song, and wanted to make a lot of it, but they were not able to do so.  Gamers will never associate the song with this game.  Because, you see, the song is called "Still Alive".

;)

A cross between the two techies. My God, how did I ever lose my virginity?

Your results:
You are Mr. Scott

Mr. Scott 70% Geordi LaForge 70% Jean-Luc Picard 65% Spock 59% Chekov 55% Worf 55% An Expendable Character (Redshirt) 55% James T. Kirk (Captain) 50% Will Riker 50% Leonard McCoy (Bones) 45% Beverly Crusher 45% Data 44% Deanna Troi 35% Uhura 30% Mr. Sulu 30%

You are a fun-loving foreigner with an amazing ability to get any job done on time. Often described as a "Miracle Worker".

Click here to take the Star Trek Personality Quiz

If ever there is a build of Linux that acts more like XP than Kubuntu, I think Mr Gates will be reaching for his favourite lawyer.  ;)

Anyway, stuff.  It seems to be popular to itemize your posts at the moment, so here we go:

Bike

I've had to buy another Silver Machine.  Despite only being able to use it for commuting until October (when the "new improved" transport upgrades in Manchester will make it impossible for me to do anything other than drive), my previous one had just virtually fallen apart.  Whilst there was nothing seriously wrong with it, the massive amount of little things added up to too much.

So, having finally go sick of Raleigh and their faded glory, I now have a Specialized Sirrus, having had the brand recommended to me by numerous people on numerous occasions.  Raleigh really are rubbish these days, but I've been buying them out of habit formed in childhood.

This new one is the cheapest of the "Speed Hybrid" range at Edinburgh Bicycle Collective, nothing fancy.  No shocks on the front forks or seat, which is good, because it's just more stuff to go wrong as far as I'm concerned.  They were having a 15% sale when I bought it, so it came to £275, including having proper mudguards fitted (not the pointless I-think-I'm-a-scramble-bike ones).  Very reasonable.

I went for the cheapest (which isn't my normal habit) because in my long experience of commuting by bike, no matter what it costs, a bike will last 18 months doing the 60-mile-a-week journey I have.  So there's no point in paying over the odds.

Cons

MinamiCon was... MinamiCon really.  ;)  It's so much a habit now, I came away on the Monday realising I'd done virtually nothing con-related all weekend.  Maybe that's why I felt almost jaded.  Next year I'm going to make a deliberate effort to do all the thing like the masquerade and auction again, to rekindle the fire.  ;)

It was also the first time we'd run a dealer table on our own (alternating with the guys from Speedlines) for nearly ten years.  Though apparently our messages hadn't got through, and they plonked us right next to the Sweatdrop tables.  ;)  Fortunately no-one was really being a dick on either side, and there were only a couple of times with a certain... presence sitting behind us.  For the last time: You are in absolutely no bloody danger, I swear to God.  You never were.  We may never speak again, but you can walk about cons safe, okay?  ;)

KitaCon turned out to be a huge laugh, certainly not the disaster that many were predicting.  And it was brilliant not to have anything I had to do at a con for once.  Okay, we ran a dealer table (with Foxy, ToffeeLiz and Angela this time) but that was nice.  It reminded me of how full the old Aya dealer room always looked (because it was the same room ;) ) because it was so small.  A fan dealer had the old SD pitch just outside, and poor Sonia (on her own, not with SD) was shoved into the far corner, as that was the only space left!  There's something extremely funny about watching a perfectly poised EGL suddenly duck under the table and scramble forward on her hands and knees because that's the only way she can get out (sorry Sonia ;) )

I also offered to represent Evangelion at the awards ceremony (not expecting it to win).  Unfortunately, because of delays we had to go and get dinner (for medical reasons) before the ceremony started, which meant we missed it.  And Eva won.  Eep.  I do feel really guilty about that, but I did get up on stage and apologise during the closing ceremony, and the award itself is very nice.

And, it looks like we're sorted for Expo too.  Yay!

Neo

I'm really beginning to wonder why I still buy this magazine.  Certainly my only remaining reason, the SD tutorials, has just vanished, as it was the last article in the series this issue.  It was basically all the contributors over the years saying goodbye.  It would have been nice to say goodbye myself, as I did write seven or eight of the articles, but hey, these things get forgotten.  ;)

Cat

On collecting her from the cattery after KitaCon, she proceeded to barely eat at all for the next few days.  We initially thought that it was a combination of two trips away in quick succession and the hot weather, but by Friday there was clearly something else wrong.  After a day of breaking the golden rule of "Never look up medical symptoms on the internet" and terrifying myself with tales of catastrophic liver failure, I took her to the vet on Friday.  He quickly told me that she had a throat infection, gave her an anti-inflammatory injection, and she was fine a day or so later.

However, we've got another lot of antibiotics to give her, and she's wise to them after the tooth debacle a few months ago.  So we can't hide them in her food anymore, we have to feed them to her directly.  Which consists of Mary holding her up, making sure she can't move her front paws, and me holding her head and poking the tablet down her throat.  Head -> Lion's mouth for sure.  I have eight and a half fingers left, and ten more tablets to give her.  Ow.

Ah!  Installer finished.  Must go.

If I ever meet the CIA-sponsored scientist who came up with the common cold, I will have a few words to say to him.  As will anyone going to Minami, because you'll all catch it off me.  Share and enjoy.

Have decided to spend a week simply leveling up in Persona 4 rather than advance the story, simply to make the boss battles, which are, as normal for any JRPG, long, turgid, drawn-out and pointless, go by quicker.  At least this time there's more save points.  Other than that the game is great, and I'm already looking forward to playing it again with the maxed-out stats I'll get from this playthrough.

...my inbox suddenly fills with automated hi-you're-one-year-older messages.  I belong to too many forums.

I had call to reinstall your Reader software again recently (the Minami update arrived in PDF form) after having uninstalled it earlier in the year until you fix that gaping hole in the updater.

Everything looked like it worked.  For once you didn't install Google Toolbar when I asked you not to, and you didn't kill my machine like two years ago.  You did install Air, which I didn't want, and added some "quick start" garbage to my startup, but you can't have eveything.

However, you don't have to have it pop up an Explorer every time I turn the machine on, I can remember where I installed the program.  Particularly don't continue to do it when I've made it clear by removing your entries from the registry that I don't want you to do it.  That just gets you uninstalled straight away.

Doubtless I'll have to reinstall your glorified text viewer again at some point in the future, as people insist on using your shite-yet-portable garbage to send so much as a note to the milkman.  Its bad enough that every website seems to be written in takes-ages-to-load-and-can't-be-saved-out Flash these days, which is pointless, as the same effect can be achieved in far less memory and far faster in Javascript.

But please, try and get the whole installer thing right anyway.