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The Annual Festivities
It's that time of year again - The New Zealand International Film Festival. This time I've been lazy and have waited until the after the first week of the festival to take my picks and also find myself not extremely motivated by this year's offerings. There's no doubt a lot of gems exist but I pretty much glanced over them all in the time it took for my newfound bus route to deliver me home.
I am kidding myself as I know I won't see most if any of the following:
- Flame & Citron
- OSS 117 - Lost in Rio
- Paper Soldier
- Moon - Looks not unlike 2001: Space Odyssey
- Adventureland
- Red Cliff
- The Limits of Control
- Birdsong
- Dogtooth
- Unmade Beds
- The Sky Crawlers - I lurve Ghost in the Shell
- Dead Snow - Zombie Nazis?! Combined with Iron Sky to make a damn crazy awesomely bizarre double-feature!
April Fools: If I had sat down and planned it out fully...
With the introduction of the Snapper payment system for the Stagecoach buses, I immediately was inspired to conspire after my first "snap-on/snap-off" against the annoyingly tinny speaker voice.
For those snapless or unfamiliar with the snapper system, basically the proximity cards are read when you board the bus and deducts minimum fare for your trip. In some places they call it "alighting" and in other areas, it's "tagging on". It rewards you with "Please, don't forget to tag off" or insults you with "Please try again" or quite commonly on commuting services you may experience a "Multiple cards detected" reaction of jealousy towards your other access cards. Seriously - I thought we were entering a utopia where all cards would ascend to such contactless harmony? Escaping the sardine can on wheels is a matter of "tagging off", presenting your card and it will the deduct the rest of your traveled distance.
I enjoy electronic convenience but waiting for someone to try their card for the nth time is not uncommon - I just want to grab their snapper and swipe it on their behalf. What's the technique? I don't know. I do know that I don't encounter the same difficulty and that may be something to do with how having it inside my wallet keeps it still when I slam it on the reader. Every now and then you'll hear another passenger or the bus driver depart the wisdom of their suggested 'technique' but I don't think there is really anything that requires skill. But I digress...
To freshen the experience and free the system from such mundane repetition, I would like to record some witty phrases (see, my first stumbling block) to inject into the interactions between the passenger and the snapper. Quips such as, "Ohh, that felt good - swipe me again" and for those having trouble with their card for the forth time, "Don't worry, you're getting warmer!" The occasional silence could be broken with, "Hello? Is anybody there?" (My homage to Portal).
What would make this awesome (in increasing order of awesomeness):
- Recording a voice very similar to the existing tones so it sounds the same
- Enlisting the guy whom was the original disembodied voice
- Getting stagecoach to actually implement it themselves
The transmitter also needs to be discrete and what better than the average cellphone with matching FM transmitter? Queueing up the audio files on the media player should suffice for controlling your snapper humaniser. Range would need to be tested because you will want to be seated nowhere in the neighbouring seats, the likely suspects, but close enough to bask in the confusion of the boarding parties (or disembarking might serve better as it will be out of the driver's earshot). Those savvy enough with an accomplice or multi-tasking tool of geekery could even record it for posterity...and to e-mail me.
If the 'Rick-Roll' was still hip, one could have simplified the mission simply by playing "Never Gonna Give You Up" to the unsuspecting snappees.
As I was waiting for the rest of the world not living in the GMT+13 future (Daylight savings this weekend guys!) to upload their April Fool's Day wares, I kept thinking today was still the 1st. As it caught me out during some system troubleshooting I'm left to ponder - who's the real April Fool for thinking it was yesterday? You win this time, internets.
The end of the post not only marks the return to your usual surfing (I offer only disappointment to those who identify this as their 'usual surfing'), but thankfully, the end of any lame puns on the word snapper that I was thinking of using. The internet is just that little bit cleaner because of it...
Ok, that's a lie - these tubes are a cesspit.
Xi: I heard you like games
I had pent up fanboy-like optimism for Playstation's Home since it was announced in March 2007 and I lapped up the beta client in December last year. But apart from a bit of playing around with the in-home Chess, the novel arcade games and decorating my personal space with the free robot and arranging the couches into a fort, there hasn't been anything that has made me return on a regular basis.
Recently, there's been some activity on the 'spaces' front including the introduction of the Red Bull Air Race and game-specific Resident Evil and Far Cry 2. But the most intriuging development is in the form of 'Xi', the world's first console-based Alternate Reality Game. This for me is two birds with one stone – something interesting to keep me coming back to home and being able to participate in an ARG as it unfolds (they are never as interesting once all is revealed).
The teleport is found in the form of the grafitti 'Xi' located in the Home Square (Central Plaza for some of you) and takes the player to The Hub, a space that provides the clues to searching for Jess, a member of AlphaAFK, that has disappeared. In a smart move, the designers have made the 'online terminal' information accessible outside of the game as they are simply standard pages including a blogspot-hosted blog (http://cafeconmiguel.blogspot.com) and even Jess' 'desktop' (http://www.jess247.com) which helps solving one or two of the puzzles.
Right now, apart for gleaning more understanding of the story, the treasure to secure come in the form of butterflies and torn pieces of paper. Both of which are the result of successfully decoding the daily puzzles. Their current meaning is shrouded but undoubtedly at least the piece of paper will grant some more insight.
For a lot of people, this won't be their cup of tea but I hope this is the first of many interesting ways of expanding the Home idea.
Fourth Time And Counting
So I played around with Silverstripe and different versions until it all broke. I didn't want to spend a lot of time so I flushed it all. I didn't restore all my blog entries, either but I'll make a lame-arse resolution to try my darndest to post more.
My Festive Comb
Lo, the 37th Annual New Zealand Film Festival is upon us and while I have no delusions of attending all the offerings that appeal to me, I sit down and apply my methods to the programme to try and a wake a reasonable selection.
As the process is downright thrilling, I shall outline it here.
- I flick through all the pretty pictures in the programme (this year in a ferocious A4-sized format) and see if any appeal. I especially take interest in the animated features
- I stroll through the programme in an orderly fashion reading most blurbs, adding all of the sessions to my google calendar (combined work and personal calendars ftw!) and to the NZFF system (the website is better than last year but still not great).
- Other schedule requirements are overlaid such as work, play and general me-time to stare at the wall. I trim the sessions down to fit the calendar and remove duplicate entries leaving evenly spaced days (too many movies in one day is exhausting) with no overlaps.
- At this time I usually take note of the movies that will undoubtedly arrive at mainstream sooner or later and last year that included Rescue Dawn. Heck, many of the movies will appear in some cheaper and more accessible form or another and so it really renders down to the question of how keen I am for the silver screen.
- For the final step I ask myself, realistically, how many movies can I actually see yourself going to and how much can be financed? A final few are put into a must-see and the rest are at least noted so that I may hope to see them outside the festival.
- Vexille - Seen Appleseed Ex Machina? Oh so purdy!
- CJ7
- To Each His Own Cinema
- The Counterfeiters
- Ben X
- The King of Kong
- [REC]
- Timecrimes - Seduced by the blurb so much I will admit that I actually Squeed
- Be Kind Rewind - I predict this to be a popular outing
- Let The Right One In
- Evangelion 1.0 You Are (Not) Alone - Evangelion? You bet!
- Night
Oh, and if you are wondering I am still using Dvorak
Back To The Regioning
Arrrgh! I just lost my original rant!
Ok, I won't lie, I've just switched back to Qwerty as my original post in Dvorak took half an hour to write. Funnily enough, I keep looking at my dvorak layout and I realise by reverting, I may be already unlearning the weekend's efforts.
This was a post about Blu-Ray regioning but upon a little research, according to http://www.blu-raystats.com roughly about two thirds of the discs coming out now are region-free. Woo! For those not familiar with the previous DVD Regioning (which still exists, just that it is easy these days to overcome it), information on Blu-ray and regioning is, of course, at wikipedia (and I am not linking because you should be able to find it yourself).
The reason why I bring all this up is that I have obtained a PS3. One of the best bang-for-buck players out there at the moment as it is always being updated to cater for new Blu-ray features and the PSP connectivity is brilliant. For example, some discs are coming out with smaller versions of the movie on thedisc for a mobile player such as PSP or iPod. Not only that but I can stream the Blu-Ray to the PSP if I was so inclined.
I can also stream video and music off my network (I use mediatomb) and can browse the internet. I hear it even plays the occasional game! (For which I bought GTAIV)
Ok. This post was not as good as my original but I am sure you all can understand the frustration of using a web browser and losing the page.
Now, back to Dvorak, housework and GTA...
The Dvorak Experiment
Game to try something new, I thought why not give that crazy keyboard layout known as Dvorak a shot. To give you a little history behind it, "Good old QWERTY" originated from the days of mechanical typewriters and was designed to prevent jamming of the hammer (Hehe "Stop - Hammer Jam."). Wikipedia says;
Although the Dvorak Simplified Keyboard ("DSK") has so far failed to displace the QWERTY de facto standard, it has seen an increase in popularity in recent years especially among computer programmers and others whose jobs require them to do extensive amounts of typing.[citation needed] It has become easier to access in the computer age, being included with all major operating systems (such as Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and BSD) in addition to the standard QWERTY layout. It is also supported at the hardware level by some high-end ergonomic keyboards.
I also have a secret desire to justify the purchase of a Kinesis Advantage but in the meantime I'm simply using a printout of the key layout above my keyboard.
The awesome news is that with every stroke I am seeing an improvement and since it has only been a few hours of typing I remain optimistic that this exercise, while alienating me a bit from QWERTY, will step up my WPM count. So far the only toggle back to my earlier ways has been for instant messaging as you very quickly miss the 'instant' part (as do your recipients). I mean, if your father types slower than you, something has gotta give.
The next exercise after some improvement in fluency is enabling myself to switch between the two without conscious thought so I can still remain agile whether it be a server room, a colleague's machine or behind a client's keyboard.
Third Time's A Charm
So I've tinkered with a wordpress blog once, set up a Silverstripe blog and here I am again with my third attempt at putting something somewhere so I can rattle on about nothing in particular. After all, I heard the internet was lacking in the area of blogs...
Anyhow. I'm not 100% confident on the mint swirl theme. I think I might go back to my 'paddy-blue' (a bastardisation of the excellent PaddyGreen).
Righto. I believe this is enough of a filler. I'd better get onto the house cleaning.