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Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in
Graham's LiveJournal:
| Monday, July 13th, 2009 | ||||
| 10:12 pm | One of the great advantages of being a grown-up, especially when you live alone, is you can eat what you want. For example, tonight I went to the deli supermarket on the next block and bought a little hockey puck of New York style cheesecake. This cheesecake is, as we speak, becoming my dinner. Pizza will follow for dessert. In unrelated news, SpaceX tonight launched their first commercial rocket, successfully delivering a Malaysian satellite to orbit. Their first 3 launches were failures, but this is 2 successes in a row for them and the future looks promising. They should launch their first Falcon 9 (their newer, bigger rocket) this year and perhaps even their Dragon spacecraft - intended to carry supplies and perhaps also people to the International Space Station. And the whole thing was webcast live from the "Gotta go, see ya, bye!" view of the launchpad dropping away to the engine cutoff in orbit with the blue marble of Earth behind. Got I love living in the 21st century. | |||
| Thursday, July 9th, 2009 | ||||
| 7:26 pm | ||||
| Saturday, July 4th, 2009 | ||||
| 1:19 am | Ok Michael Jackson died nine days ago. Time for the saturation coverage to die down. He was a genius performer but he's not coming back, and digging through the scraps of his life is unseemly. It reminds me of the royal wedding of Charles and Diana, where the non-stop breathless coverage got to such barrel scraping they showed the interior of a train with, "Here is the royal tea pot from which the newly married...". We're definitely at the teapot stage. Today's Sarah Palin thing just doesn't make sense to me. A rambling, incoherent speech full of non sequiturs and contradictions, a surprise resignation almost as a throwaway comment in the morass of vague allusions - what on Earth could make someone so self-posessed and skillful at cultivating the Republican base decide to duck and run? Either she was tweaked up on Meth, is having a nervous breakdown, has had some truly terrible personal news, or someone gargantuan piece of dirt on her is about to come to light. My money's on the latter if anything, but the whole situation is so bizarre. I've had a bunch of artwork sitting around waiting to be hung up so today I finally got it and now all my space pictures are gracing my walls. Valentina Tereshkova gazes serenely down upon my bed like a guardian angel and Michael Collins and Jim Lovell survey my alarm clock. Now I need to find a good picture framing place to see if I can get my Dark Tower print's frame fixed - two corners got cracked open when I moved out here. The crazy counterfeit Pokemon cartridge story had a happy ending. I got someone more reputable on Amazon to sell me a genuine copy. Once I catch this damn Moltres I'm going to wax the Elite Four! | |||
| Friday, June 19th, 2009 | ||||
| 8:12 pm | Lately I've been playing a lot of Pokemon games - I forget what sparked my interest but I picked up the games I hadn't completed and have been working on my collection. It also inspired me to try to get a couple of other games I hadn't played but wanted to try out. I'm often faddish with things in this way. About five years ago they remade the original Pokemon game for Gameboy Advance as Fire Red/Leaf Green. It would be fun to replay that original story and it would have some other advantages, too. I duly looked on amazon.com and of course the game's been sold out for a while so the only place to get it is from individual sellers. There were quite a few people selling the game new and used at various price points. I picked one of the new copies and ordered it. ( And here lies a twisted tale... ) Now I just gotta catch 'em all... | |||
| Tuesday, June 9th, 2009 | ||||
| 10:07 pm | I did that little summary of E3 things last week and I'll probably talk more about Project Natal at some point, but this video of Forza motorsport is just worth watching even if you don't play racing games. It's all done using the in-game replay editor, so everything you see was done by human beings driving the cars. I am thoroughly impressed. Also, the cheesecake-ish artwork on the hood of that one car? Designed using the in-game decal editor. | |||
| Sunday, June 7th, 2009 | ||||
| 11:01 pm | Voice Post
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| Tuesday, June 2nd, 2009 | ||||
| 10:55 pm | All the big news of E3 is now out, or at least there are unlikely to be any more big announcements. I have to say I'm pretty excited by the upcoming slate of games. Some cool technology was also demoed and some huge business deals revealed - these, even more than the celebrities game publishers can draw to their press conferences, are the biggest indicator of how big the financial stakes have become in the game industry. ( Major points for each hardware manufacturer ) There are a ton of great multi-platform games coming out, chief among which is Rock Band: The Beatles. It looks like a great treatment and the songs will be really fun to play and they'll be selling whole albums as downloadable content and they're going to make more money than you could shake a stick at. Lego Harry Potter will be huge as well. It's such a no-brainer I was surprised when this wasn't the first thing after Lego Star Wars. Mass Effect 2 (I expect both to wind up on PS3 next year) seems to be like the last game only more so and that's exactly what I wanted it to be. So many games, so little time! | |||
| Monday, June 1st, 2009 | ||||
| 9:22 pm | ||||
| Tuesday, May 26th, 2009 | ||||
| 2:02 pm | Behold, the Dice-O-Matic, 7 feet of rolling glory! Apparently it can generate over a million rolls per day. The dice come down the circling ramp, into the hopper at the bottom, fall onto trays, make their way up to the top and there they're photographed under strong light with a digital camera. The dice use different coloured pips on each face so all you have to do is count the pips for each colour and divide by the expected total - 6 yellow pips means 3 rolls of 2, for example. This mighty edifice was built by Games By Email, you can read more about it here. I want a datacenter full of them with a network service to provide the results. Is that so wrong of me?! | |||
| Monday, May 18th, 2009 | ||||
| 9:44 pm | Despite being a technophile I am also of the "if it isn't broke, don't fix it" mindset which means I tend to hang onto devices until they are no longer useful and I am using something others moved on from long ago. For example, I have an Olympus D450 digital camera I bought in late 1999. Back then it was a great buy, 1280x960 and 3X optical zoom. It has a whole 32MB of Flash (which holds a lot of pictures in HQ mode!) and I get pictures off it by putting the memory card into a floppy disc adapter. However this is no use with a Mac and in any case the camera's a bit more bulky than I would really choose today. I think it's also got some contamination into the viewfinder because it looks blurry although the pictures themselves are pretty much okay. So it might be time for a replacement. I'm looking for point-and-shoot, primarily optical zoom, smaller form-factor (eg. Canon Elph size). What's the new hotness for that kind of camera? | |||
| Friday, May 8th, 2009 | ||||
| 12:08 am | I was just catching up on the news a little bit before going to bed and I see an article titled, "Palestinians seek papal pressure on Israel". That seems an awfully misguided strategy to me. I mean, they're Jewish! Why should they give a toss what the Pope thinks?! It's like me, I'm not Christian much less Catholic, if the Pope tried to pressure me I'd say "Sling your hook, Pope." And I'd probably smirk a tiny bit as he sidled away. | |||
| Wednesday, May 6th, 2009 | ||||
| 12:00 pm | Since a few people have expressed surprise at the contents of yesterday's entry: ( Me, the bass and the beard. ) I'd been playing bass a lot in Rock Band and really enjoying the feel of it. I have a couple of friends who play bass ( ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} eshqi for example) and I figured it would be easier than playing 6-string. So I bought the Bass Guitar For Dummies book (yes, I really did) and read it a little bit and then I want to the two nearby pawnshops to look at guitars. One of them had a black/white Fender Precision that looked brand new, so I bought it. That was about 3 months ago. I'm better at the music theory than the actual playing, in fact I found the elegance of the mathematics of the note layouts pretty cool.The physicality of playing is fun as well. The bass is heavy, the neck is long and the weight is towards the neck so you have to hold it up. Feeling the strings under your fingertips, the pressure and the contortions of the hand make it a very different experience to playing the videogame. It's not like I expected it to be the same but actually playing makes it a more visceral kind of knowing. I can permute and it mostly sounds okay, I can play the seven modes forward and backward at an okay speed, I can play a 2-octave major and minor scale forward at about the same speed and backward less so. I still have trouble finding an arbitrary note on an arbitrary string (often wind up having to count frets up from the neck). Occasionally I forget whether there's no E# or no F# but I've got it internalised there's no B#. As for songs, I can play the bass riff of Come As Your Are, the intro to Little Green Bag (but I totally collapse after that when it gets more mobile and hammer-on-ish), and the riff to Money (as in Pink Floyd) a bit but the 2nd and 3rd note fingerings often come out wrong. I've been getting tab from Ultimate Guitar which is sometimes good and sometimes not-so-good. | |||
| Tuesday, May 5th, 2009 | ||||
| 10:58 pm | I really need to get back to playing my bass every day - or as close to every day as I can. Just blowing it off for a couple of weeks has lost me a noticeable amount of flexibility and memorisation. Need to become more disciplined! I met up with an old university friend tonight, a guy I hadn't seen in years. He was in the bay area with his girlfriend. She's working a conference and he tagged along for his first trip to the USA. Good to catch up on the news and to talk about life over here vs over there. Looked like he'd changed even less than me in the intervening years. Mind you when we first showed up at university everyone thought he was about 25 because he had a quite impressive beard. My scruffy attempt earlier this year wouldn't have competed with his eighteen years ago. After two commuter train deaths in as many days, I hope for everyone's sake the streak will be broken tomorrow. | |||
| Friday, April 24th, 2009 | ||||
| 3:08 pm | Last year I gushed about Braid. One of the many, many wonderful things about that game is its music. Gorgeous, lush, evocative instrumental pieces by talented, independent musicians. The music all came from Magnatune and now they're selling a compilation CD of it. You can hear all the music here (because I like to appear a nice person I chose the non-autoplay version of the widget): Magnatune have a cool policy where someone who buys the CD can let up to three, count em, three friends download the music for free! Since I bought a CD I have three, count em, three opportunities for you, my LJ posse, to download this music (the widget only lets you stream online). Reply here and I'll send you an LJ-message with the instructions. You snooze, you lose. | |||
| Wednesday, April 22nd, 2009 | ||||
| 11:17 pm | One of my nearby colleagues is getting married soon. They're doing a low-key self-prepared kind of thing, so they bought the wine for the reception online. This means he has a large box full of bottles of wine behind his chair and another (unopened) bottle on his desk. The company's so laid back this is perfectly fine but I wonder whether the cleaning crew notice it? | |||
| Saturday, April 18th, 2009 | ||||
| 3:48 pm | ||||
| Thursday, April 16th, 2009 | ||||
| 2:38 pm | ||||
| Saturday, April 11th, 2009 | ||||
| 12:28 pm | Salon.com is currently running an article by a (essentially former) real estate agent which is well-written and amusing but ultimately not all that insightful. However one of the commenters, "cabdriver", linked to this article on porfolio.com which is a much more worthwhile read. It's from last November but nothing has changed to invalidate it. The author, who apparently wrote Liar's Poker back in the day, sheds some light on how all this mortgage bond finance actually works and talks to some of the very few people who not only saw it coming and not only spoke up about it but put their money where their collective mouths were and consequently got rich, as is their right. Anyone who politely can tell the CEO of Moody's that they are delusional is alright with me, frankly. I can't really claim to have foreseen this disaster, or done anything about it but I will say that I was thinking about mortgages in proportion to gross income and feeling that it was out of control and furthermore when people started taking variable rate mortgages I felt that was highly dangerous too (locking in that your monthly payment will go up later because interest rates just can't go much lower, and having seen the housing crash in Britain when rates peaked at about 17% in the late 80s, how can these loans be a good idea for almost anybody?) and it would all lead to tears before bedtime. I like portfolio.com because Felix Salmon writes articles there which have always struck me as sensible and knowledgeable. This is another feather in its cap. And I'm reminded of the opening sentence of another back-in-the-day bond trading book, a novel by early-stage digerati Po Bronson called Bombardiers. "t was a filthy profession, but the money was addicting, and one addiction led to another, and they were all going to hell." | |||
| Wednesday, March 18th, 2009 | ||||
| 11:56 pm | This morning as I crossed the parking lot after buying breakfast I saw a chap riding a motorcycle and the motorcycle had antlers. I did a double take and sure enough, antlers. On a motorcycle. I'm not 100% sure they weren't sun-bleached branches but if they were they were extremely artfully chosen. I don't own anything with antlers and I'm not sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing. | |||
| Thursday, February 19th, 2009 | ||||
| 11:07 pm | Keita Takahashi has a very strange mind. His new game is called Noby Noby Boy and in it you control a very cute worm-thing which you can stretch to be incredibly long and eat all sorts of things. Just now I was winding myself around and around a rainbow but then I accidentally knocked it over. I've threaded myself through a cloud like it was a polo mint, I've been ridden on by cows and fish and I've eaten houses, ostriches, robots, cars and cats (and pooped them all out). In a couple of months this will collectively get all us players to the moon. All while gentle acoustic guitar music riffs away in the background. | |||
