News Archives

Amazing things with a Wiimote

Some people are very clever. Those people make videos and post them on YouTube. I have found one of those videos and am subequently posting it here for your enjoyment and amazement.

Dear Kylie,

In your lyrically profound song 'Speakerphone', are you actually promoting the use of speakerphones for playing music? Don't you know that there are enough grotty little chavs on the tube and bus who have just enough brain cells to decide to do that all by themselves without your encouragement? Can't you see how annoying it is, if not for the terrible choice of music most of them elect to subject their fellow passengers to but for the appalling sound quality that comes from those tiny speakers?

The track in question is taken from your recent album 'X'. Now I'm assuming that it is so-called either due to it being your tenth studio album, or because you wanted to send all your listeners a lovely kiss (and the numbering thing was all just a happy coincidence).

All that said it is actually a rather compelling album mixing up a variety of genres from dance to r'n'b to pure power-pop ('Wow' - my favourite track on the album). So congratulations both on reaching the lofty 10 club and also on a fine album to reach it with!

Now off you go and get to work on the next one. More pop, less chav-encouragement. Chop chop!

Yours sincerely,

Mark

Use of the word 'she'

OK so this might seem a little weird but I'm starting to get a little irked at the use of the word 'she'. I don't know if it's just the technology blogs that I read or whether it's becoming more commonplace in all kinds of content outlets but I'm seeing it used a lot more where normally you'd find 'he', for example when referring to a user (Eg. She clicks on a button and a window pops up).

Now I don't know what the cause of this phenomenon is. I can't see too many women actually having a problem using the word 'he' as a generalisation in much the same way as we say mankind to generalise about the human race. My guess is that either all their users are actually women or that it's a by-product of the world's current hyper-politically-correct state.

But why does political correctness mean that while it's not OK to even sniff in the direction of a minority group that same minority group can walk all over the majority group without anyone raising an eyebrow? And come to think of it, why can people in that minority group say derogatory things about other people in the same group without causing a fuss but people in majority groups can't do the same?

OK so maybe I've got a little bit off-track here - we're talking about men and women. There's no minority of majority here - it's 50-50. In this 'age of equality' why are things still so unequal? On one hand women's pay rates are still noticeably lower and on the other people are using 'she' instead of 'he'.

Is this because they are afraid that there will be a backlash and they will be accused of being sexist? If this is the case, doesn't using 'she' make them just as sexist but in the opposite direction?

Or is it because they are trying to make it more accessible to women? Think about what that means... it either means that you're making it less accessible to men, or you're implying that men are more open and adaptable. I'm sure anyone who objects to the use of 'he' would object more to that implication.

I guess what I'm really trying to say is:
1. Stop the political correctness madness!
2. Just use 'they' instead of 'he' or 'she'.

Is it that hard? They click a button and a window pops up. They navigate to the login page. Their computer displays the BSOD.

Portal

So uh... you remember how easy it once was to get comletely drawn into a game and spend all day playing it? That hasn't happened to me for a while. Until the other day when my interest got the better of me and I bought the Orange Box over Steam. While you get all sorts of goodies in said Orange Box such as Half Life 2, Half Life 2: Episode 1 and Half Life 2: Episode 2 what I mainly bought it for was Portal. It's the game everyone has been raving about since its release in Q4 last year.

It's worth the hype.

It combines many of my favourite aspects of a game...

1. It's fun to play. Maybe this is obvious but sometimes I'm left playing a game and thinking that I'm playing it to get to the end, not because it's fun. Portal is fun.

1. It's funny. Make no mistake, the humour is quite a dark shade of black but it had me laughing out loud a lot more often than a lot of so called 'comedies' on TV.

3. It's inventive. The concept is fresh and new and hasn't been done before. Thank goodness they did it this well, as it would be painful for them to see someone else rip it off and make a better game out of it! They will be hard pressed to top this.

4. It's short. I haven't finished Half Life 2. Not because I don't like it - I think it's excellent. I even played a bit more of it while Portal downloaded. It's very very long though. Portal is short and cheap. It's like going to the movies. You can finish it in an evening, but the amount of fun they squeeze into that short time makes it more than worthwhile and that's not even considering the extras that you can unlock and the ones that are there from the start.

5. Jonathan Coulton. Not really a game aspect that I have experienced previously and decided that it contributes to a game's greatness... But actually in this case it does compliment the entire experience and add to it's greatness. He wrote a fantastic song for the end credits which is really smart and funny and damn catchy (been in my head for about 4 days now!). It's available on the game soundtrack.

So yeah. I'd recommend it. In fact I did, to a friend. He hasn't got back to me with his verdict yet so I presume he's still addicted to it!

Just quickly as an addendum, I read this article on optimising website performance for minimising traffic and server load. Sounds boring but is well written and certainly gave me a lot of 'Oh yeah, didn't think of that' moments. Smart stuff.

Merry Christmas

Here is the last Marmaduke that I've got to post. That's it, there's just no more material! There's three extra strips that were already in the archive that you can see by clicking next after following that link but that's it. It feels good to have them all online finally. It's something I've been meaning to do for a while and now it's complete, it's no longer nagging me at the back of my mind.

I hope you enjoyed it!

So that's it for me until the New Year. Please come back then and see what I've got planned. Actually it's no secret. I'm going to do three more Bob's Your Uncle strips just to tidy that story up and then back onto Pirates!. I've kind of missed those guys.

Have a great Christmas and see you in the New Year!