November 2006 Archives

Here's a little game - what is the name of the cartoon character in the image below?

Post your answers in the comments :) . I'll say who it is tomorrow or later in the week.

Update: Well, that didn't take long :) . It's Tidyup from the 80s cartoon series Stoppit and Tidyup which was famously narrated by Terry Wogan, presumably taking time out from his Radio 2 show and belittling various European pop acts during Eurovision.

I was hoping it would be obscure enough for most of you not to get it straight away, but oh well. I'll have to think of something harder next time :) .

Today I finally got around to upgrading the memory in my Mac Mini. Since buying it last year it's had 512 MB of RAM, which is fine for general computerry stuff (reading email, browsing the web, maybe running iTunes in the background) but lately it's been used more and more for playing World of Warcraft, which is a very memory-intensive program. With it running, doing anything else on the system is, at best, difficult - switching between WoW and, say, Firefox takes a long time.

I ended up buying the memory from Crucial - I've bought from before and had no problems, and this time was no exception. I ordered the memory yesterday morning, and despite going for the free delivery and not the more expensive guaranteed next day delivery it still came today, which is excellent. Crucial also happened to be cheaper than buying Corsair memory from either Scan or Dabs, and I'd rather not have generic memory if I can avoid it.

The reason why I have been putting the upgrade off isn't so much the cost aspect (which ended up at £85 for 1 GB of PC2700 DDR RAM), but the actual upgrade itself, and in particular taking the unit apart. It's a very small unit and the case isn't screwed on - you actually have to pry it open with a knife - I used a standard putty knife from Wickes. Because my unit also has Airport and Bluetooth, you have to then detach one of the antennae before then lifting the RAM out and inserting the new module. Thankfully, there are videos which explain this process - I really would not have bothered if I hadn't seen it being done first. One thing I did do, however, was boot the computer before putting the lid back on and making it sure it worked - after going through all the effort of taking the machine apart I didn't want to have to do it all over again just because the module wasn't seated correctly, for example.

Thankfully, the upgrade worked, and now the Mac has double the memory to play with. It's not a seismic difference in speed but it does feel snappier; still, my MacBook, with its Intel Core Duo processor, beats it when playing WoW. But not by quite so much.

"I'm here without you baby, but you're still on my lonely mind,
I think about you baby, and I dream about you all the time,
I'm here without you baby, but you're still with me in my dreams,
And tonight, it's only you and me."

There's a song called "Here Without You" by 3 Doors Down, which is one of mine and Hari's personal favourites. We first discovered it on YouTube, as it happens, through a machinima made in World of Warcraft which uses it as the main theme song, and it's stuck with us ever since.

The song is about missing a loved one, and while I listen to it a lot when Hari is around, if she's away I often find it really hard to listen to since I'm constantly reminded of her and it makes me miss her so much. It's a very moving song and it nearly had me in tears once when she was staying with her parents and I was on my own in Bradford. Often, if she's not around and iTunes randomly picks the song, I skip to something more upbeat.

Ramp: We're having Molten Core on Friday, you going to be there?
Hari: No, we're going out for a meal with friends and then going to the theatre.
Hexo: We are?
Hari: Yeah, I organised it in the pub last night - you were chatting about something else.
Hexo: Oh...

Me = Hexo.

And, just for luck, there are 545 results for "web 3.11 for workgroups". Some of you will get that joke.

Hari and I recently signed up for Amazon DVD Rental By Post - where you are able to rent DVDs through a monthly subscription and have the discs sent to you through the post, which you then send back when you're finished. There's no limit to how long you can hang onto the DVD and no late-return fines, but you're limited to a set number of discs per month and can only have 1 or 2 discs out at a time.

So far we've watched The Producers (third time I've seen it, but it's a good film) and Æon Flux, which was a film we'd seen advertised but had never got around to seeing at the cinema. This is in fact a trend amongst the films we've put on our rental list - they're all films which we probably wouldn't buy, but either looked interesting or that we'd missed at the cinema. We're only paying £6 per month for 2 films, and £3 is roughly the price of a cinema ticket here, except that you don't have to get a taxi there and back and can watch it as many times as you want. You can also rent any one of the thousands of DVDs that Amazon have in stock, not just what happens to be on at the cinema or available at the local video rental shop.

As for Æon Flux - not a bad film; initially very confusing but it all gets explained at the end. Probably a 6/10 from me - very nice visuals but not the best acting I've seen.

For all of you who sent me an email in the last 36 hours, please be aware that I exceeded the (admittedly self-imposed) disk quota for my email account and so any messages sent will have either been lost or rejected. So if it was an important email, you'll need to resend it.

As for the quota, I've increased it since I'm now primarily storing my email there as a backup method. Still, it's taken me 2 years to go over 100 MB, which isn't too bad going.

Thanks to Boing Boing, I've now got a reasonably definitive list of faux pas, sorted by country. What is interesting is the differences between countries such as the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom; although we all essentially speak the same language there are some customs which are quite different.

Take tipping, for example. In Britain, it is customary to leave a small tip in restaurants, but this is usually no more than a few pounds and is usually discretionary. You put the tip in the tray that the bill arrives in, rather than giving it directly to the waiter. You generally don't tip when you pay at the bar, or in fast food outlets, and many restaurants include a 'service charge' which acts as a tip and may well be discretionary. Furthermore, if you don't tip, it isn't always seen as offensive, since the person serving you will be receiving the national minimum wage - tips are just extra.

I'm writing about this because it reminds me of when I was in London last year - Hari and I met up with Chris Romp in a pub near Tate Modern and when he ordered a round of drinks he offered a tip to the barmaid. This isn't done here; while it is polite to tip a waiter who comes to your table, to tip at the bar as unheard of. You may occasionally see people pay double for a drink and let the bar staff buy themselves a drink, but that's not particularly common either.

This compares drastically to what I've heard happens in the US - you're expected to tip around 15% of the bill and the person serving you will generally insist on being tipped. Brits are much more laid back about the whole thing, although this does vary as I imagine that you would be expected to tip in some classier places.

So... how do you tip where you come from?

The reason why I haven't posted here at all since Tuesday is because I reached level 60 in World of Warcraft. For those unfamiliar with the game, 60 is the top level, and the level at which you start many of the big raids, so quite a bit of my free time has been spent preparing for them, as opposed to blogging and such.

Last night I had my first proper Molten Core raid - I attempted one last week but we've had some major lag problems and so I kept getting disconnected - where we did Golemagg, Sulfuron and Majordomo; we then attempted Ragnaros but failed due to a lack of mages and warlocks and gave up on the fourth attempt.

I've been quite lucky to get into a guild that is active in Molten Core and other high level instances. I'm only there because of Hari and the fact that the guild leaders were nice and invited me; however I've always felt guilty since we've turned away a number of very good paladins who have far better gear and more experience than I do.

I am enjoying the game more now that I'm at this level; now I just hope that it doesn't all of my time up.

Here's a tip I've uncovered, mostly for my own use but hopefully it will be benefit to someone else.

If you're using an application that runs in full screen on Mac OS X, and it crashes, you can use Command+Alt+Escape to instantly close it. I've had this problem with World of Warcraft a few times, and, not knowing what to do to get out of the game, I've ended up just restarting the whole machine.

When not in full screen, the key combination brings up a small window that lists the programs you have running and gives you the option to force quit each one, or relaunch the Finder.

Back in August, I spent $5 on a program called Disco. At the time the actual features of the program were kept secret, so I was basically spending $5 on a program without knowing what it actually did.

Fast forward to the end of last month, and I got my hands on my copy of Disco, which turned out to be a CD writing program. Though it's still in beta, there's a few comments I'd like to make about it.

• It's small. My screen resolution is 1280x800.... and Disco only uses a small portion of that. Admittedly one of its nice points is its minimalism, but the interface doesn't expand much even when you drag a whole load of files onto it. In fact, you'll only get to see 6 files at a time, which means that if you want to burn a disc with lots of files you potentially have a lot of scrolling to do.
• It's a bit bland While the black-and-white look is consistent throughout the program, it does take the biscuit when it's spread to the Preferences panel (which is also ridiculously small and cramped). It would be nice if this used the look that preference panels in other OS X apps use, mostly for ease of use but also just because it'll make thing a bit brighter and not like a goth art student's bedroom.
• It makes the widgets look weird The close/minimise/maximise buttons have even been changed to shades of black and grey, just to make the program more depressingly dark, and the buttons and tickboxes are not standard OS X ones either. It's all a bit 'form-over-function' which I don't like.
• It's a bit too transparent Quite a few windows use transparency, which would be nice if they were a little more opaque. If you have any programs open behind Disco, then they'll show through, to the point at which it makes the text in Disco hard to read. This would be fine if you could turn the transparency off, or adjust the level, but you can't, leaving users to squint at the text.

Those are the criticisms. As for the compliments, on the whole I really like the program and there are some very nice touches. The animations make the program more fun to use (something that most, but not all, OS X applications manage), and compared to most CD burning programs I've tried it's far easier to use, with a minimal step-by-step process. That said, it's got some nice power user features too, such as selecting what format you want the CD to be burned as and the ability to write CD images, and the use of the motion sensors in Apple laptops is a nice touch.

Disco shows a lot of promise and I hope that some of these niggles are addressed. On the whole though I really like Disco and would have paid far more than $5 for it.

Update: A new beta of Disco has been released which allows the transparency to be turned off. This addresses one of the issues I had with it, now for the rest :) .

Here's a meme, which, like many that I do here, was found by the way of Dave. It's not a particularly long meme but it took me a while to do, seeing as my fingernails are currently rather long and so I kept mishitting the keys while typing my answers. Read on...

Kim, whose blog I've been reading for over 4 years now, is going through a rough spot. There's something wrong with her, but so far they're not sure what - it's not arthritis, but it could be all manner of other not-particularly-nice-sounding diseases.

She's been blogging her experiences of (in lieu of a better phrase) 'the search for the answer', and could probably do with some positive vibes being sent her way right now.

When it comes to podcasts, I have to say that I've been very late to the game. Though I own an iPod, I don't tend to download podcasts since most of the time I only listen to my iPod while going to and from campus, which takes all of 15 minutes - not long enough for your average half hour show. And since it's an iPod Mini, I can't watch video on it, or at least not without some third-party firmware which lets me watch it in very poor quality monochrome.

However, I have started playing with Democracy over these past couple of weeks, and taken a liking for a few video podcasts. Note how I'm calling them 'video podcasts' and not something stupid like 'vidcast' or 'vodcast', or 'vlodcast' which sounds like some cheap brand of vodka.

• RocketBoom - although I think Joanne Colan tries a little bit too hard to be funny (and her stereotypical 'British actor in an American film' style accent gets a little annoying) it's often quite interesting, if a little random at times.
• The Show with Ze Frank - again quite random and I'm sure Americans would get some of the jokes that I don't, but there's usually plenty to smirk at.
• MacBreak - probably only of interest to Mac users, but it does cover some cool things that you can do with Macs. And it's professionally edited too.

I do also subscribe to the The Scoble Show but I don't watch every episode - some of them are quite long and not all that interesting. Big tip: short and snappy keeps people's attention spans.

Anyone got some recommendations for other video podcast channels that I might enjoy?

Hari and I went back to my parents last weekend, and on the Saturday we went to Fountains Abbey. This was somewhat against our better judgement as it was raining most of the time we were there, but it was still good to go nonetheless. I've been a number of times before but it was Hari's first visit - she seemed to enjoy it, after heard a lot about it.

Of course, I had my camera with me, so here's the set of photos I took. I've edited a few of the images to make them look a bit less dull as it wasn't the nicest of days; however the later photos were taken when the sun finally came out so they look a bit better.

A funny thing happened yesterday - our connection suddenly boosted itself to 8 Mbps. It's spent a couple of weeks at around 5 Mbps, after we were upgraded to DSLMax which offers "up to" 8 Mbps speeds, but now the full speed upgrade has kicked in.

That said, I have done a couple of speed tests which peg us closer to the 4.5-5.0 Mbps range, so in actual fact things haven't got much faster. But 5 Mbps is still pretty quick, and more than adequate for what we need it for.

One annoyance is that about the same time that this 'upgrade' happened, our latency when playing World of Warcraft rocketed. Normally it's between 30ms and 40ms, but for large parts of yesterday it was over 1000ms which makes it almost unplayable. Similarly today it's been bad, despite me trying everything at my end to get it to work. However, the upgrade did come at the same time as Blizzard's weekly maintenance and a lot of other Brits are also having problems, so it may not just be us. Indeed, a traceroute seems to pin the problem at their ISP, not at PlusNet or our house.

I've mentioned how I've been playing World of Warcraft quite a bit lately. I'm now about 2/3rds of the way through level 58, with the maximum level being 60 so I'm not far off there now. Once I get to 60, I will be able to join the rest of my guild on 20- and 40-man raids, whereby we get either 20 or 40 guild members all involved in a dungeon raid.

The guild I'm in, along with Hari, are now concentrating on the Blackwing Lair (BWL), which is one of the most difficult dungeons (Naxxramas being the most difficult, followed by The Temple of Ahn'Qurah). So far we've only been able to kill Razorgore in BWL, with the rest work-in-progress. Since my gear isn't that great, I'll be concentrating on the easier dungeons such as Zul'Gurub and Molten Core, which we can already complete in one or two days. I've done the pre-quest for Molten Core but the one for Onyxia is still in progress; it's something that Hari is giving me a little sympathy for since it took her ages back in April to get hers done, mainly because she wasn't in a guild at the time.

The fact that it has only taken me since June to get to 60 is slightly concerning, considering how long it took Hari; maybe I really have been playing too much...