7 Dec

Its only 18 days until Christmas…

…I should probably buy those presents…

Anyway, while I contemplate many an amazon wishlist, and the possibility of pretending to be in a coma so I don’t have to buy any of these things, I’ve decided I should write a blog.

Tonight I saw 7 psychopaths. No, I wasn’t in shaftesbury square, that collective of people would be called ‘Many Morons.’ 7 Psychopaths is a movie about psychopaths, and a writer trying to make up psychopaths while… well theres a few psychopaths. And some lovely murders. So, its a good film, typical of Sam Rockwell, Christopher Walken and Colin Farrell, so, y’know. Insane. It is about psychopaths afterall…

Its coming up to Christmas! 18 days away in fact. Which means I have free time. Weird that. Thus, if there is an occasion I may be available for, then I probably will be.

The number today is 348. If my maths is right. Its not really that complicated…

I figure my time at work may as well be spent actually giving you videos to watch, so its time for:

Random Videos of the Time Since I Last Blogged.

Space Janitors!

Equal parts silly, weird, and… Canadian.

Blood And Chrome! Again.

Because its awesome.

This is just odd looking.

And finally, Star trek into darkness…

Epic.

That’s all from me, remember, Rioting is bad. Christmas is good. Be happy, not angry.

16 Nov

Wheeeeeeeeeee…..

Hey! Look! A blog!

Its not about Christmas, because its still November.

Anyway, my head is bleeding. See?

Ignore the crazy eyes.
The consequences of forgetting a hat.

This is what happens when you don’t wear standard full face masks on an airsoft shoot. Remarkably, it doesn’t hurt. Though I have no idea how I did that with my eyes. There may be some damage there.

Remember, this blog is not about Christmas.

So, other than airsoft, this evening I was at the Town Hall for the Hackerspace I am a member of, called Farset Labs. Farset labs is a fun place where many random things happen, all of which are perfectly legal, and only marginally unsafe, and they just bought a 3D printer. This means we get to make random things out of plastic really easily, like spare parts, joints, scale models of our own heads…. We also got a parrot AR drone, which should be fun, and we have a Massive R/C helicopter but none of us can fly it… and star trek pinball! And numerous random things like Megadrives, bbc micros, NExTs, and a strange talking rabbit that reads out the weather and utters random things. What I’m doing there currently is building a remote web controlled rover that I have all the parts for… I just need to program it  and work out how to stop it burning itself out. And burning things down. Theres another project in my mind too but I need the printer first. And to design the thing. Its pretty cool.

Ow… one of my fingers hurts too. But not from airsoft, I slammed it in the gate at work’s car park.

Tomorrow I finally get to play one of my more recent purchase board games, Halo Risk, which promises to be an… experience.

Its actually this big. Really.
Click for boardgamegeek reviews.

Having never played Risk before I figure this will be an interesting evening, filled with much bloodshed (my head will have stopped bleeding by then, hopefully, I mean imaginary blood) and the usually kind of anger and betrayal that comes from friends playing board games.

Speaking of which, never play a board game with Timie Wilson. I’m convinced he is either a very good cheater or INCREDIBLY lucky. I had to sacrifice my entire army to stop him from winning Civilization the other night. And I didn’t even win. Grr.

Remember folks, this blog has nothing to do with Christmas.Well… maybe I should talk about Christmas… or not. NUMBERS. Today’s number is 328…for now. These numbers have yet to go down. And they’ve yet to be guessed correctly. I’m fairly certain none of you are trying. Seriously. Its really freakin’ obvious.

I can’t stop watching this. I don’t know why.

I’m not sure what this says about me.

Could be worse though.

I could’ve linked this.

That’s right. Now watch that 40 times in 3 days and you’ll get the kind of psyche I have where I want to jump up at a particular point everytime I hear that frakin’ song.

That’s one of the more meaningless blogs over.

I think I should go lie down.

Remember. Its November. Maybe the next blog might be about Christmas. But this one wasn’t.

30 Oct

Demons. That can be the only explanation.

About an hour ago I got out of the cinema after watching Skyfall. But enough about that good movie, after coming out I heard the news.

Disney bought Lucasfilm, and are making a 7th (or rather 8th, but we ignore the animated one for more reasons we ignore the other 3) Star Wars movie.

Naturally I assumed I was being pranked. I was like, “That’s ridiculous! Why would they make another… Star… Wars… um…”

I was waiting in line for my cod bite supper when it sunk in. I was all:

But then… it sunk in. I felt kind of like this:

” I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. I fear something terrible has happened”

And then… then I don’t know what happened.

I guess Hallow’een is when nightmares come true.

I guess its when terrifying things get born, and the great stories of our youth are torn asunder.

I guess its when we should just throw away our lightsabers and x-wings and just grow up.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Nah.
I’ll just blot this from my memory and make sure my children never hear of such nonsense as a 7th star wars film. Then toss them their sabres and go out to garden and pretend to be force choked by a tiny little Vader.

May the force be with you… Always.

Dave out.

(likely out cold, sleep beckons.)

29 Oct

This wasn’t Sparta, it was, however, MADness.

Now that I finally got the 300 joke out of the way, I’m now awake enough to type another awesome* blog.

So, the last few days have been… an experience. A good one, though I appear to be missing several decibels. Have you seen them? They’re small and fit in your ear. They were last seen running away from the ridiculous amount of bass I could hear from the massive speakers I spent a good amount of time standing beside, and been replaced by a slight ringing. My ears are probably the main concern after the last few days, other than the damage to my psyche from something I still struggle to talk about without laughing so hard I cry.

MAD weekend is what brought about this ridiculous scenario where I lack hearing and or the ability to talk about an un-named amateur hip-hop dancer, where I spent time either:

  1. With a camera, beside the stage, in front of a speaker
  2. In a hall, waiting for people to turn up so I could sleep on an uncomfortable sofa
  3. Giving a table quiz, 3 times and losing my voice
  4. Otherwise teching. I’ve made it a verb now.
  5. Avoiding my fan club. That’s right, I have a fan club. They’re all taller than me, and may be slightly crazy. The moment they discover this blog will be a problem.
  6. Watching one of the MAD crew shamelessly flirt with half the girls on crew. It was weird.

Thus, I am now going back to work tomorrow, and TESTING. Sometimes I wonder if I am being tested, if I’m a psychological experiment to see how maddening YouTube is. However, then the mushroom at the other end of the phone tells me that if I can watch more videos, I get to eat him, so I KEEP TESTING. If you want to know what I do, and haven’t read the blog where I explained it, it is here.

Speaking of YouTube, I’m now gonna do a semi-regular slot on good videos available,

This is the first episode in a pretty good web series:

Its a baby with a gun!

And now its a baby panda. Without a gun. Don’t give baby pandas guns. That’s just asking for trouble.

Lastly, the magic number today is now 310. Still getting bigger. A similarly related number (to some people, to me, its irrelevant) is 363. So, that’s that.

Dave out.

 *awesome according to several readers. Really. They told me. In person.

20 Oct

Weirdest thing that happened this week. And maybe other things too.

So, the other day I was in the Mace close to my work at lunch when someone beside me asks “hi, do you go to Bloomfield Presbyterian?”
To which I appropriately respond “yeah…?”
“wanna do a bible reading  some Sunday?”
“Um… OK?”
“Great!”
I turn to pick up a wispa, and hes gone, just as mysteriously as he appeared.

Right.

Another weird thing that happened is, for some strange reason, work decided to go out for lunch on Wednesday to a restaurant, in UU called The Academy. It was… different. We weren’t expecting this. Things were strange from the moment we walked in. Go there, and you’ll see. Food’s good though.

I’ll be partaking in MAD this coming weekend, I should be on cameras on main stage, and I’ll hopefully get the opportunity to annoy some people with said camera 😛 I’ll also be Comparé at the table quiz on Saturday afternoon. Some of you may already know some of the answers, however, I trust the ridiculous riddles I can come up with help.

Magical number is 301 today. Its a good number. Please, someone, work out why. It has significance. You just need to work it out.

In a more geeky aspect to the world, the end of this month has the 3 biggest tech companies announcing new products (again) with google phones and probably another tablet, a smaller, but still probably pointlessly too big ipad from apple (there’s no point shrinking down your tablet if it still won’t fit in a reasonably large pocket), and quite possibly the most useful 10″ tablets from Microsoft. The most interesting thing though is the ludicrous resolutions HTC and Sharp have developed, full HD 5 inch screens… yet why can’t we find QuadHD 20″ screens? Gah.

There’s also Windows 8, which should be a relatively cheap upgrade, though I would say its a try before you buy thing.

And finally, a really important subject for you to discuss: How does that guys guitar rotate like that in Back To the Future 3? Seriously, why would you mount a guitar on a rotating thing like that? And Marty never looks Seamus in the eye correctly.

Dave Out.

Well, I’m still at home, but I’m gonna stop typing now.

14 Oct

It’s my birthday and I’ll listen to Radio 4 if I want to.

That’s right, I listen to Radio 4 now. I’m old. 26 years old in fact.

And I’m OK with that.

So what does this mean now?

Jack all. Except I won’t understand when people talk about the top 40, and understand politics better.

Anyway, this week in work is going to be a living nightmare, so lets talk about other things! The last time I watched someone play FIFA was 2007. I watched someone play it again yesterday. It hasn’t changed. Normal games would get DLC for this kind of incremental change, not 5 £45 new games.

Keeping with the gaming talk, except onto a decent franchise that doesn’t rip off its customers, play The Walking Dead. Its not a normal game, more like a make-your-own-adventure book, and its great. I’ve had games make me jump, but this got me pretty close to tears at one point. The story follows the zombie apocalypse, like the TV show, but a guy running with a little girl he found in a treehouse, and trying to look after her. They come across a family, parents and a 10 year old son, and you spend several game hours with them, building a friendship with the father, and leaning on the mother as she was one of the most reasonable, sane people in the group. Then, the son gets bit while running from one of their ‘safe’ houses. The boy is dying, but everyone knows he will turn into a zombie when he dies. The mother and father make the hard decision that they have to shoot him, as they don’t want him coming back as a zombie. When its clear the boy is about to die, you watch as they argue about which of them should shoot him. You convince them that either the mother or father should do it, then watch as they take the boy into the wood so the little girl with you doesn’t see. You hear a shot, but something isn’t right. The father is screaming to his wife. Your character runs to see what was happening. The mother is lying on the ground, with a pistol in her hand and her brains blown out. She’d shot herself, unable to bear the sight of her son dying. Your job is then to console the grieving husband and make sure the son doesn’t come back. You have the choice to take the gun, or let the distraught father do it. It’s hard to pull that trigger. And then you have to console a grieving father for the rest of the game. Its more fun than it sounds.

On to a lighter note! Looper is a good movie! Though Joseph Gordon Levitts eyebrows confused me. It was like they digitally skewed his face to make him look like Bruce Willis, though I’m pretty certain they didn’t.

Taken 2 is not that great. It needed to be a 15, not a movie where people died when Liam Neesan touched them. He’s not Chuck Norris. Also, the pistol I have for Airsoft is the same as his in the first half of the movie. And my spell checker doesn’t recognize Movie… aaand now it does. Though it doesn’t look right now…

Speaking of airsoft, Its fun. Do it. But bring gloves. And hopefully the 3 massive welts from yesterday on my forehead will have faded by now (I don’t wear forehead protection. It’s not smart). In a nutshell its realistic looking firearms powered by gas or motors, firing pellets at about 300 feet per second. Its just enough to hurt, maybe bruise, maybe break skin, definitely break your eyeball, but if you’re wearing loose layers and the face protection, you’re fine. It’s like Call of Duty where you can actually inflict real pain on annoying people.

What else am I doing now I’m 26? Looking suspicious. Its a life plan.

No one knows what the numbers meant (which I forgot to put in the last 2 posts…) so, here it is again, 295! 295. Thats right. 295. Yup.

Dave – One day older than 25.

P.S. Thanks to all you lovely people for the birthday messages.

P.P.S. I wrote this yesterday. If I broke present/past/future/grammatical tense then I apologize.

 

 

28 Sep

Some explanation is required.

Hello!

Its come to my attention that few of you, if any, know what my job actually is. Well, this might be the most boring blog of all time, as I explain what I do in my job and how I can describe it as “watching YouTube all day” or “playing with phones all day”.

Firstly, a little background. The internet you get on your phone over 3G isn’t the same internet you get over WiFi. Its a bit… smaller. For example, using the YouTube app on a smartphone over Wifi will serve you good quality video where you can make out faces and decent text, but uses more data. Over 3G it will (by default) serve lower quality video, that in some cases, looks horrible, but can be streamed over much weaker quality a connection. This is just how YouTube works. Now all these videos can be inefficient in how well they are compressed, are not well optimized for most devices, and could in fact, be reduced in bandwidth use further, without reducing quality significantly, using a process called Mediation just before it gets send over the airwaves to your phone.

So, Carriers buy our product to reduce the bandwidth use of videos, before it gets sent to your phone, therefore decreasing the load on their systems, and lowering your data planbill.

Now every video on the internet has different factors that may impact our optimisation system, and every device will handle them differently, and that’s where I come in. My job is to confirm that our software can optimise videos from different sites, (though primarily YouTube), on different devices, and the user experience is not impacted. I usually watch popular videos, previously problematic videos, and then random videos if I have time. For example, in the last version of our software, I watched Taylor Swift (popular), Yogscast (troublesome) and Robot Wars (random), along with MANY others, across multiple 3G connected devices. I may have to watch some videos dozens of times if there’s a problem, which is a problem for my sanity, but it wasn’t really there in the first place, and now everytime I hear that taylor swift song I want to stand up during one point of the chorus. Grrr….

Some of this is automated, fortunately, and saved me from watching Bieber earlier, but user experience is key, so nothing beats an actual user. Except 2 or more users. Or an angry man with a big stick.

I do do other things in my job, like the automation, and digging deep into our product to work out issues, but this is the bit I can explain…

Now for some fun things I’ve learnt thanks to my job.

30% of streamed content, over 3g networks, so most likely NOT in a persons own home, or place of work, is adult content. Lovely thought.
iOS and android are equally problematic when it comes to streaming video.
Working with all phone OS’s has converted many apple fan boy’s to android. And we all agree Nokia’s Windows Phone’s are pretty, but lack of Apps and updates make it difficult to justify.
Japan has only one model of phone identical to western phones.
Students are weird. (Particularly fashion students. We work beside the Art college…)

Anyway, I went to the cinema! We watched Resident Evil!
<SPOILER>

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It sucked.

12 Sep

Oh woah, oh woah, oh woah, oh oh

A while back I discovered people actually do read this.

So HELLO ALL YOU FUN MAGICAL PEOPLE. Well, only one of you is magical. If you think its you, its not.

Still, no one has the correct answer for the number game. It went up this time. To 263.  I get the feeling its going to keep going up, and then drop dramatically, at some point. Who knows?

I don’t have much to blog about today, I just thought I should blog about something. I watched the Some Nights by Fun. video about 40 times this afternoon so I kinda have that going around my head. Alot. So if I suddenly break into the lyrics of that song I apologize.

So, I was never one to believe the hype. Save that for the black and white iphone collectors. Today the new iPhone was announced, and its ridiculously mundane.  There is nothing at all interesting about it, and its really just another incremental increase. The only good thing I can see about it is its not all glass on the back, and its lighter, so its no longer as fragile as that glass you were drinking out of earlier. Pepsi? Really? Couldn’t find any real coke? Anyway, They also continue to refuse to stick to an EU mandated standard port. Everyone else can do it… why can’t Apple? I know the Apple fanboys have already tuned out, but do they ever ask them selves “I sold my soul for this?!?” For one of the least charitable companies in silicon valley it sure has a lot of fans who should know better.

Well, that is it guys, that is all – five minutes in and I’m bored again. Its actually been more than five minutes. Weird.

Hope this fulfilled all your requirements for a weird Dave Blog!

(I’m not actually sorry.)

30 Aug

*pigeon noise*

I can make a rather convincing pigeon noise, apparently. I don’t do those other things pigeons do though. That would be gross. My other bird noises suck.

Onto more important, sensible, matters, I’m currently investigating the possibility of live-streaming our church service. If anyone has any experience in the legality and cheapness of this endeavour please let me know. And if you’re interested in listening, also let me know.

Back to the first point, loosely. Still being sensible though. I was at The Word last weekend, a PCI Young Adults conference thing. It had some of the more interesting talks I’ve listened to… And you can listen to! As soon as I can get the talks appropriately edited. That’ll be a while. If you’re interested in learning and growing and building up your presby friend network outside of your home church, please do go next year.

And this links nicely to my next point, you should volunteer for MAD. I know that other denomination has that other thing at the same time, our t-shirts are Red. Everybody looks good in red. Nobody looks good in Yellow. Plus, you get to see dozens of tired looking mad crew, finding entertaining ways to stay awake. Not that you’ll be tired. I’ll make sure to provide you with lots of sugar and caffeine. And a pillow. Not for sleeping, for screaming into and punching. It helps.

I may have gone too far there. That last bit wasn’t true. In fact quite a bit of that wasn’t true. But everyone does look better in red than yellow.

OH! I got my glasses. I have been having much merriment pretending I’ve always worn glasses, and confusing people. Its mean. But its fun.

Todays magic number, as referenced in the last blog, is 250! Its going up! Next time, it might go down. Maybe. That hasn’t been decided yet. It is not the number of people who’ve called me weird minus the number of people who’ve called me normal this year so far, but thats a decent guess.  That number is closer to 122. Half of those happened within a 24 hour period last weekend. Turns out pigeon noises are weird.

When you have a correct guess, let me know in secret. That way, I can confuse everyone else.

Thank you and remember, if I’m weird, what does that make that duck staring at you through the window? Go on. Open your curtains. Take a look.

Dave.

 

Still haven’t started that something else. Should really get a move on…

 

18 Aug

And so it ends. And begins. And something else ends. There’s lots of ends and beginnings right now. Lots of middles too.

Long title is long.

Things happened in the last week, like Tech Camp ended! I have absolutely no idea what happened on the last day. I was knackered and trying to burn/cook things while real stuff happened. After church my memory is fairly blurry, but apparently a good number of the kids REALLY enjoyed their time there, and are already looking forward to next year, so SUCCESS.

OTHER THINGS HAPPENED.

I started utilising Farset Labs, a hackerspace in Belfast. There’ll be a project log here soon for a nice little R.O.V. I’m building, though I’m having power issues and need to reduce the current going through things… anyway, good place, good smart folk.

I took a week off work! This was initially for New Horizon but I ended up using it primarily for recovery, popping up when I felt able/economically viable. This was the first time I’ve been to NH, and it was pretty awesome… even just the 2 nights I was up were pretty great, though it wasn’t exactly cool in that tent.  Definitely gonna aim for the full week next year. Saw some old friends… and got the same feeling I get at missiony things.

And thus my week off is over. And then comes 10(?) months of having to read and listen to seemingly random hate and stupid rhetoric from my football loving friends. Every time I see this crap it makes my head hurt how they can consider themselves fans and talk about these people like they hate the very ground they walk on, and would gladly flip the switch on their electric chair if given the chance.  ‘The scum’ is a phrase I hear far too often, and the genuine hate and disgust in peoples voices when talking about certain players  is just sickening, especially when it involves the players private lives. I don’t see how this is the slightest bit relevant as to how anyone but the players live their lives. We are not involved. We shouldn’t even know about this crap, why on earth are you getting so angry about it? In the years I have been observing people supporting football, I have only seen one instance where I can be proud of anyone in football, and that took a miraculous recovery.

The fact is, football is so unbelievably corrupted by hate and over valuing of individuals, that it takes a full miracle to see any good in it, and knowing that my friends happily accept this, and even join in with the hate, is scary. Particularly when they encourage their kids into the same pattern of hate. I long for odd numbered years when theres some freedom from this crap.

So the other thing that starts today is X Factor. This is…. stupid. I could say more but I think I’ll only annoy some of my friends tonight.

And finally, if you got this far, how is the number 238 relevant, at the time of writing? Get it right and you might get a prize. The prize may not exist yet. Or ever. In fact, if OfCom’s listening, there is no prize. But if they’re not, there is. Trust me.

So, yeah. Thats it.

 

Though, on a side note, I wanna begin something else.