Present Perfect

Sorry

For the decidedly non-technical entry, skip it if you don't like reading regular life stuff...

Metal Gear Solid 2

I got it this weekend, hoping it wouldn't affect my hacking weekend too much. Boy was I doomed. This game is sooooo pretty. And it makes so much sense from a lot of perspectives - the interface is actually pretty damn good. Once you've fumbled about a bit, it's second nature to stick to the wall, take a peek around the corner, crouch down, peek a little more to the left, draw your gun, and jump out and shoot. All using very fluid and intuitive controls. Needless to say, Sunday was pretty much wasted.

I have to say though that there are too many cut-scenes in this game. At one point I had nothing to do for half an hour.

What IS a touch of class is how at the start you get asked if you have played the game before. If you answer "yes", you play a sort of trailer to the actual game, in which you play the same guy as in the "first" game. Even the interface and the "you're dead" screens looked the same as the first game. But all of this is switched around when the "actual" game begins, very discomforting.

My housemate started the game as well, and he hadn't played the first game, and he got dropped straight into the main game. Now THAT is a touch of class for those who played the game before. Nice idea.

Chasing Amy

was on TV this weekend. I tried not looking at it, telling myself I should rent it again because it is just sooooo good. Kevin Smith is a great director, but this probably is the movie with him having the most to say. Quite literally, perhaps, as the character he plays in the movie, Silent Bob, gets the longest bit of line in any movie with Jay And Silent Bob. And the lines hit home.

So as you might have guessed, I ended up watching big chunks of it anyway. How sad. But what a great movie.

GStreamer

I should get off my ass and get some multimedia stuff going for Gnome. I have some ideas on what to do, but I want to put an effort in it and I currently don't have enough time to do it properly. Especially now that I can feel I'm really close to getting a first release of Dave/Dina out. After that I hope to focus some more on Gnome-related things.

The only thing that bugs me about GStreamer is the start-stop-development which is at the heart of any project that doesn't have full-time developers on it. Development goes more in leaps and bounds, linked to people having time to work on it. Sometimes Wim comes out with great stuff all of a sudden, I wonder how he does it. Both "how he keeps going all this good code when he has a day job" and "how can he keep all this good stuff on his own disk for so long without committing to CVS" ;) I swear, I have to commit just about every few days or I lose stuff or break my tree or whatever. I'm more an incremental kind of person.

Dentist

Here's my top five list of things I don't like about going to the dentist :

• getting an injection straight into your infected nerve
• the metal construction with the vanilla-scented stretchable piece of plastic that goes flapping madly when the air suck pipe is installed when you're getting a root canal
• the smell of things being burnt inside your mouth
• getting an injection into your gums
• getting toothstone removed from between teeth without anaesthesia with thet pointy metallic scrapy bit

I could have added "being so irritated at having to go the dentist that I forgot to take out my bank card out of the ATM machine. This experience taught me something useful about interface design - sometimes you dislike an interface because you don't understand why it's there. Case in point: I never understood why Selfbank ATM machines ask you to give your code twice, once at startup and once when actually taking out money. After actually forgetting to retract my card of the machine and stepping out with just the money, I know why. Thank you banks for being foresightful enough of my stupidity.

Tango

Our teachers had two spare tickets left for a tango concert after which they were due to perform a few dances. So we went, which was a good idea. The concert itself seemed ok, though I don't really have a frame of reference. There were a bunch of school kids there who had to go for their aesthetics class. I thought that was cool, but they obviously didn't.

Afterwards, there was a live band and we got the opportunity to dance. I get the feeling we're getting pretty good at it. You can feel you're getting decent at it because you don't have to spend half the time thinking about what to do next, and when you make a mistake, you're good at covering it up. Kind of like real life.

Par-taay

It was Peter's birthday last weekend, so he invited some friends over at our house for a party. He showed them around, showing Dave/Dina, the kitchen computer and the music boxes upstairs. They seemed impressed, always a good thing.

Peter was happy with his Atari sweater (he hasn't taken it off since) which allowed him to finally join the ranks of the cool nerd club.

Sorry For the decidedly non-technical entry, skip it if you don't like reading regular life stuff... Metal Gear Solid 2 I got it this weekend, hoping it wouldn't affect my...