Archive | Misc

RSS feed for this section

Mostly musings.

Deja Vu

Blogtober 11 catch-up, part IX — at this stage I’m only a day behind, but this is for October 20th

Almost exactly five years ago, a few kids posed in front of some giant guitar in the middle of NSW.

Almost exactly five years ago, a few kids participated in something known as the Science and Engineering Challenge.

Almost exactly five years ago, a few kids from a tiny school in a small suburb in the equally-tiny state of Tasmania came fourth in the country,

Almost exactly five years ago to the day, a few kids had an absolute blast.

A few days ago, a different set of kids, to be sure, but with perhaps one or two of the same teachers, made their reprise in the Science and Engineering Challenge.

A few days ago, a few kids from the tiny school from a little suburb in the equally small state of Tasmania, managed to place fourth in the country.

A few days ago, a few kids may or may not have posed in front some giant guitar…

…but one thing’s for sure: they probably had just as much fun as we did.

This post part of Blogtober 2011, just a little thing of mine where I (attempt to) post something up on my blog every day in October 2011.

Up and Down

It’s like a rollercoaster over here.

The past few days have sucked completely because I’ve been very unproductive (and that will have some consequences I’ll face some other day), and for a moment there, it was almost funny — I’d think about how much work I had to do, do completely none of it, then think about the consequences of not doing so. This led into a spiral of doom which me feeling pretty sucky; getting angry at myself for not doing any work, knowing any consequences I would have to bear would be all my fault, writing semi-depressive blog posts on the subject under the guise of unanswered questions, questioning all sorts of things.

Yeah, it kinda sucked.

But the thing is, now those deadlines have come and gone, I got a whole heap done today. There’s no hugely pressing deadline per se, but I did have to get a few things done by tomorrow or the end of the week — and today, I pretty much ticked off every single thing on my list. Weird, right?

It’s not that I can’t work under pressure  — arguably some of my best work is when I’m thrown into the deep end. So what is it? The pressure of doing my best work knowing that someone is looking over my shoulder every step of the way? I used to say that I did my best work alone, but now I’m not so sure. Perhaps I need that pressure of being accountable, that pressure of knowing that I’ll have to answer to someone for my work— someone other than myself.

You know what? I’m actually not sure what it is. Perhaps it’s the fact that when faced with a million seemingly-insurmountable tasks and the lure of a good game, I’ll choose the game every time. Or perhaps it’s the fact that sometimes I just can’t be bothered — I could do the work if I was bothered, but man, sometimes I just don’t see the point.

In any case, I got a few things done today that I’m pretty proud of. Unfortunately, I’ve also made some pretty poor decisions in the past week — the consequences of which I’ll face some other day. No sense getting dragged down by the past now, is there?

Over and out.

This post part of Blogtober 2011, just a little thing of mine where I (attempt to) post something up on my blog every day in October 2011.

 

Unanswered Questions

Blogtober 11 catch-up, part IV

Sometimes, just sometimes, I have many questions. Many, many questions, and too few answers.

Sometimes, stupid little questions, like: why did that girl stare at me? Is my fly undone? Do I have something unpleasant coming out of my nose? Is there something wrong with my face? Did I say the right thing? Did I act the right way?

These questions don’t really matter. I usually forget them after a few minutes, and then I move on to some of the more important stuff.

More important stuff, like: what kind of message do I want to convey when writing? What do I want to write about? Should I hit publish on this piece, knowing that it might not be my best work yet? Or should I publish that piece anyway, and just throw caution to the wind?

These questions matter a little more. They don’t really affect anyone apart from myself, and even then they’re usually forgotten the next day, or a few days later. There’s nothing wrong with these questions, per se, and sometimes they should definitely be asked, but the real, life changing questions are where it’s at.

Questions like: what should I be doing with my life? Am I really happy doing this Uni degree? Why can’t I seem to get the right work done? Why does the reward always seem to dictate the amount of effort I put into things? Where is the light at the end of the tunnel? How am I supposed to feel about various things? What kind of an effect does that have on my life? Where do I want to be in 5 years? Where do I want to be in 10 years? What is the meaning of life, the universe, and everything?

If only I could answer all these questions. I know no-one has all the answers to everything, but why are there so many unanswered questions anyway? Where do I get the answers from? How do I get out of this rut?

And finally, the most important question of all: what graphics card should I get for Battlefield 3?

This post part of Blogtober 2011, just a little thing of mine where I (attempt to) post something up on my blog every day in October 2011.

Just Do It

As it stands, I have two assignments due in just under a week. They’re both major assignments — one requires me to write a few thousand words on ubiquitous computing with references AND do a not-insubstantial iOS programming task that involves pigs (no, it isn’t an Angry Birds clone), and the other requires me to do a Java-based version of Minesweeper.

I, of course, haven’t started either.

It’s not that I find the content boring (okay, maybe the Java one isn’t all that appealing) — heck, just today we were making a super basic read-only version of Twitter (but without actual tweets). The spec called for a normal UIButton to be placed somewhere in the interface that would link to a map view of the “tweets” on a map (I think the idea was that we were playing around with CoreLocation and MapKit). After trying a few different things and deciding that looked like crap, I stuck a UIBarButtonItem in the UINavigationBar, which made it look much cooler. A tiny, ten-second version of going above and beyond, but my interest was definitely piqued.

Like I said, it’s not that I find the content boring. Most of my Uni subjects have been interesting enough, but try as I might, I just can’t find the motivation to get things done (and by things, I mean super-huge-mega-assignments that always seem to get left to the last minute).

It’s not that I’m lazy, either — at least, I don’t think it is. I’m definitely very un-lazy about some things, recent examples including staying up for Apple keynotes, and downloading and installing the Battlefield 3 beta so I can play — and later this month, I plan to go to the midnight launch of Battlefield 3 at my local games store. That’s not lazy, right?

So what is it?

This post part of Blogtober 2011, just a little thing of mine where I (attempt to) post something up on my blog every day in October 2011.

One More Thing…

What’s the word for that moment when you realise that the work you do is appreciated by many, many people all across Australia?

Yeah, that.

This weekend was nothing short of amazing, all thanks to a little site called MacTalk.

Back in 2007, I joined a little site called MacTalk. Fast forward a couple of years, a few thousand posts, and many internet arguments later, and I come across a little post by then-overseer and hater of pants, decryption, asking for volunteer writers for some news posts. I put my hand up.

The rest is turtles all the way down.

This weekend was basically the culmination of all that; a dinner with most of the people who have contributed to MacTalk in some way, those who have silently decimated the not-so-silent spam, those who have kept things ticking over behind the scenes, and those who have written articles, reviewed products, or gotten on their perennial soapbox and given a few thousand listeners an earful about how non-developers shouldn’t be using beta releases on the podcast, past and present.

There were a few people missing, but by and large, most of the big players where there and a fantastic time was had by all. Putting faces to online personas is always good fun, even if it can be a little daunting at first. Once you get over that initial awkwardness of “hey, do I follow you on Twitter? What’s your name on the forums?”, then it’s apples, ladies and gentlemen, apples — which is lucky, because that’s pretty much what MacTalk is about (Apple, Inc).

At some point during the night, there was a thing where had to go around the table and tell everyone about ourselves — our Twitter or MacTalk usernames, what we did, and so on.

Some people were known simply by name or by reputation, others had to describe their role in MacTalk a little more. When it came around to me, I simply said “I’m Benny, and I write the news”.

Cue thunderous applause.

In all seriousness, I was kind of taken aback. Stunned, that people recognised me, just from what I had done. Little did I realise how far my daily news posts reached. Little did I know that people actually recognised —nay, applauded — my work.

This isn’t just me being naive, it’s a genuine realisation of the culmination of hours of early morning (and some not-so-early) news posts over last two years. It’s me realising that podcast topics which were formed off the words I had written, it’s about me realising that “whoa, people actually read this stuff — and they like it!” Me realising that the words I type into one of those new-fangled computers actually has some sort of impact.

One comment (from Chrome, I believe): “everyone sets their clock from Greenwich Mean Time, but Greenwich set their time from [me]”.

There’s nothing quite like the feeling of being appreciated and recognised for your work, which, I guess, was really the whole point of that night; everyone in that room had contributed in some way, shape, or form to MacTalk over the past few years.

This morning I considered writing a piece on Steve Jobs (you know, seeing as he stepped down as CEO) as a sort of editorial on MacTalk (like all the cool kids are doing), but as I thought about what I would write about, I couldn’t think of anything. Seriously, not a thing — not because there wasn’t anything to say, but because anything I wrote about would be so, so, insubstantial compared to the big picture.

And yet it’s times like the above, when I was applauded for simply saying my name and what I do, that make it all worth it.

Thanks guys 🙂

Medal of Honor (2010)

Sometimes, I play games. Mostly when I’m supposed to be doing something else, but I play games. For the past few years I’ve somehow managed to complete a single player game during the school/Uni study break period (swotvac). I think the first time this happened I was playing Fallout 3 GotY, but that’s for another time. What follows is my review of Medal of Honor (2010), which unfortunately didn’t get completed in the study period just gone by, but only just recently. There are a few spoilers, but I figure that if you haven’t played it by now you don’t likely care that much anyway. Enjoy!

When I first started playing Medal of Honor, it wasn’t very compelling. The main appeal of this particular triple-A shooter for me wasn’t that it was an alternative to the Call of Duty juggernaut, but that it featured guns. Like a druggie looking for his next hit, I was chasing the feeling of looking down the sights (preferably ACOG, but I’ll take whatever the developers choose to throw at me) and taking down some enemy combatant at range with a well-timed headshot. As cliche as that may sound, I was in it for the gunplay — how the guns “felt” within the context of the game, in different situations, and so on — and Medal of Honour (MoH) has that in spades.

In the beginning, it feels a little like you’re a nameless, faceless grunt fighting someone else’s war — because you are. It’s a little “go here, shoot those guys, rescue this dude”, and it feels like we’ve already been here before in every other big name, A-grade FPS — because we have. The enemies pop up at predictable locations, you advance through different scenarios with your squad in a predictable manner, and it’s all very predictable, even nice, but doesn’t make for very compelling gameplay (even the gunplay is average and just doesn’t feel good).

I don’t know whether it was because I had taken some mind-alterating substances that day or whether I was just in a different state of mind, but I recently re-visited the single player campaign, and, well, everything was different. The good different, not the bad kind. Somewhere between taking out snipers in a tower and lasing targets for laser-guided missile strikes or strafing runs I started to enjoy the game. I was no longer a nameless faceless soldier fighting someone else’s war, I was Rabbit, a Tier 1 Operator part of AFO Neptune, lasing targets with SOFLAM for Predator air strikes under the cover of darkness, or taking out the bad guys at 1000 meters with the Barrett. All I know is, at some point Medal of Honor started being compelling and sucked me right in.

The pacing of the game is fantastic. The action scenes are truly hectic at times, and yet there’s always parts where you never feel overwhelmed by enemies — unless that’s exactly what the developers intended, as they do in one particular scene. Like I said, the story starts out pretty slowly with you saving some guy and then just clearing out the same old enemies in the same old locations, but soon you’re on ATVs assaulting enemy compounds at night, or planting locator beacons on enemy transports, or blasting away at enemy RPG positions from the safety of the skies in an Apache. Some sections leave you truly exhausted, but you’re a SEAL; you just get back up and ask for more.

All that stuff is truly enjoyable, don’t get me wrong. It’s exciting, the gunplay at that point is incredible (oh selective fire, how I’ve missed you), and everything is as you would expect for a shooter of this calibre (pun not intended). It isn’t until about the last third or last quarter of the game that the whole story element comes into play and you start to feel that all this might actually be real. I won’t lie; I felt real relief after playing through one particular section where the position you’re holding for extraction is quickly becoming overrun by enemies who are almost constantly firing RPGs and all manner of rounds are whizzing past you, and just when you’re about to throw in the towel (your companion tech specialist even tells the brass to hold off the support troops he called in earlier), the calvary comes and saves the day. From the desperate calls over comms to having to put down guys left right and centre while running pretty low on ammo, that feels real.

And it only gets more real from that point on.

As a game, the model animations are as good as any. When you’re huddling with three other soldiers behind a wall talking about how you’re going to smoke the enemy position for an air strike, things seem real.

When you’re falling out of a friendly chopper, things seem real.

When you have to choose between bullets and broken bones, things seem real.

When you’re falling off a cliff (broken bones heal), things seem real.

While I have huge respect for people that serve I’ve never gotten into the whole military aspect of life that Americans seem to have. All that cliche gung-ho, trigger-happy, shoot now attitude just seemed too far fetched, a little too removed from reality to actually be. After playing Medal of Honor, I’m convinced that is only the tip of the iceberg. It’s games like this that demonstrate what war is like, how people like Rabbit live, and how they die.

Hoo-ah.

Medal of Honor is easily the best military FPS I have played in a while. While I do enjoy the sheer excitement and pure action of the Call of Duty series, there’s nothing quite like a good plot to keep the story going, and Medal of Honor delivers on all fronts. The multiplayer uses a different engine to the single player, but is still quite enjoyable (although perhaps not as much as Bad Company 2). Medal of Honor keeps it real while delivering everything a military shooter enthusaist would want, which means it’s a pretty damn good game indeed.