Journal: January 2009

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Concerts, projects and tech demos
Sat 31/1/09 (Link to this entry)

I always seem to be moaning about being too busy these days, but I guess that's what you get for being in the final year of a Master's degree. Work on the software for my final-year project continues apace, and it's now at a stage where, if I were to submit it now, it would probably pass pretty well. There's still plenty of work to be done, though - I've got the report to write, then I'll be using any remaining time to implement as many extra features as is feasible (I have some cool ideas here, so I'd really like to get to this stage already!).

Gratuitous screenshot:

Uni's not the only thing keeping me busy lately, though. I've just this week scheduled a bunch of tech demos at the university in my capacity as a Sun Campus Ambassador - hopefully I'll get some decent attendances and get people interested in the technology, otherwise it might be a bit embarrassing having booked a great big lecture room for every week until the end of the semester! There's more info on my Sun b*** here, if you're interested in coming along.

Of course, all work and no play makes Lamsey a boring fart, so last week I took some time out to go to a couple of really good concerts during the Celtic Connections festival. The first was a band I'd seen before, Lúnasa, and they were every bit as good as they were last time. I hadn't seen the second band, Deaf Shepherd, for a much longer time, and in between the stamping, the clapping and the hooting I took the opportunity to snag some clips of them in action (made easier by the fact that the people just in front of us were boring and weren't jumping about like maniacs).

Sadly, my camera as usual wasn't really up to the task of capturing the sound, but hopefully you get the idea. These guys are brilliant and don't get the recognition they deserve, so I figure a little bit of viral marketing out there on the web won't go amiss!

In addition to being bloody brilliant in concert, the Deafies also have three great albums which you can pick up from their (somewhat out-of-date) website. Hopefully a new album isn't too far away, guys?

A festive season of epic proportions
Fri 2/1/09 (Link to this entry)

Well, the dust has settled from the 2008 festive season and yet I'm still feeling the effects. I'm sitting typing this at 6 AM because my sleep cycle has been well and truly destroyed by a little Christmas present my sister gave me: the flu. I'm mostly recovered now (although the coughing persists), but with all the excessive sleeping lately I've somehow ended up in what is approximately the Tokyo timezone (no, I'm not joking). It's going to take a bit of work to get back to GMT...

Since the whole family got hit with the same bug, washing the dishes was rather unusual. Over the course of last weekend, we managed to use every single bowl in the house and not a single plate. No prizes for guessing the kinds of foodstuffs we were favouring! Instant noodles, in particular, are definitely the way forward in such situations, I feel.

When you're ill, your food priorities can change somewhat...

Apart from the diseased aftermath, however, Christmas itself was rather fun. We went for our usual wander in the countryside during the day, but sadly muggins here forgot his camera so there are no pictures of the impressively dramatic mist which we saw rolling over the Campsies. Our walk was followed by Christmas dinner, which was well up to my mother's lofty standards, and then we had our traditional early-evening prezzie-unwrapping session in which my Amazon Wish List was seriously decimated, much to my pleasure (thanks folks!).

There was one other item of business for the 25th (well, apart from watching the new Wallace And Gromit, which was brilliant). In the time leading up to Christmas, I decided to redo something which both my mum and myself did in the early nineties: a music quiz with the other family members as contestants. This took many days of coding and media editing, since it turned into a twelve-round epic with loads of self-cooked software (scoreboards, buzzers, etc) and not only audio questions but picture and video rounds too.

The Never Mind The Buzzocks intros round was present and was predictably amusing, as was a variant on the I'm Sorry, I Haven't A Clue singalong round where the music stops and the contestant has to keep singing. Q.I. was another source of inspiriation, since I included the famous AWOOGA! AWOOGA! noise when someone makes an obvious-but-wrong answer (I'm happy to report that this was triggered on both the occasions I had planned. Mwahahahaha!). It takes a lot of work to do something like this but I highly recommend it - it's a good way to have fun with your folks (in both the "enjoying spending time with them" and "screwing with their heads" senses).

Regular readers will already be aware of my collection of siege weapons which has been slowly growing courtesy of a certain excessively-kind Mr. Graves (cheers again mate!). I'm pleased to report that the mighty Roman Onager has now been added to my arsenal, along with the Mangonel, its medieval variant of French origin (it comes with swappable throwing arms). Model cities will now tremble at the approach of my mighty legions. As tradition dictates, a video now follows:

The variant you see above is the Mangonel, which uses a scoop on the end of the arm rather than the Onager's trebuchet-like sling. The torsion (that's tension created by twisting) on the skein is high enough that the dowels at either end of the skein are pretty much at breaking point. This, rather impressively, gives it a similar range to my trebuchet, despite its simpler (and less elegant) design. It's a lot easier to load than the others, too :-D

Now that the festive season is over, I guess it's time to get back to something resembling a normal routine. I've got some Sun work to do this weekend, and I want to break the back of my final year project before classes start back at the end of the month. No rest for the weary (funny how I always seem to end up saying that on here...).

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