Beep Beep Beep

No…. not a tank reversing. Alarm clocks

Having now gotten used to my android phone I am finding uses for it I never knew possible. One is the vast array of different alarm clocks the app store has to offer, and the one I’m using is awesome enough to warrant a blog post

Options available (and advantages over a traditional alarm clock):

• Time between snoozes (awesome as most are just fixed at 9-10 minutes which is more than enough for me to get back to deep sleep)
• Number of snoozes, or unlimited (rather than just a fixed 1 hour, which is often not enough to get me awake)
• Day select (so that I don’t forget to turn it off at a weekend and then on on a weekday)
• Speaking clock (fairly self explanatory)
• Enforced Mathematics… ???

Ok, so the last one is what really kicks ass. Before you can turn the alarm off you have to solve an “arithmetic problem” to the tune of x + ( y * z ) or (x * y ) + z.

So every 4 minutes in the morning I solve a maths problem, and it actually really works… my wakeup time has gone down from over 1 hour to 12 minutes (although this will probably increase as my maths skillz improve and my brain wakes up less and less with each problem)

Photographic Evidence

As promised.. here is some photographic evidence for the events at snowtour  Some of these have been shamelessly stolen from facebook

Myself, dressed as a pencil

Me doing 10 (with 4 lots of #7) press ups for saying "mine"

Belgian Pint

Slidey Ice Karting

Note to self: don't fall asleep before room mates again

Stuff!

Other evidence is either pending, mean, or shocking. Trust me no-one wants to see the picture of the thing I wish I could un-see and as such I would not subject it to the unsuspecting public of the intertubes

Evidence of the tricks and such is available by joining us for the snow fuelled antics next year

As Red as the Red Sea

A bunch of us went to Suzie’s on Saturday night to celebrate the 30th orbit of the Earth around the sun since she was born. To mark this achievement for the Earth and safe in the knowledge that for now (at least, and indeed at most) it continues to rotate, we ate pizza, snacks and cake, drank mulled wine (and attempted “vin chaud”) and played party style games.

One game in particular that I enjoyed was “Mafia”. For those that don’t know what this is (as I didn’t), I explain…. now

All players sit in a circle and one is designated “Gamemaster”. The gamemaster takes an ace and 2 black and the rest red cards from a deck and shuffles and gives out one to each player. They then look at it, try not to laugh and close their eyes. Once all eyes closed, gamemaster asks mafia one (black ace) to open their eyes, then mafia two. The mafia now know who they are and try not to laugh. They close their eyes again and then everyone opens their eyes. Everyone who is not a mafia member is a civilian.

The aim of the game for the mafia is to get $civilian_count == 1.

The aim of the game for the civilians is to get $mafia_count == 0.

Players are killed in two ways. Firstly, the entire group discusses who they want to take to court to stand trial. That person then has the option to defend themselves against their accusers. The default defense on this is “my card is as red as the red sea” . A vote is then taken on whether or not to kill that person (at this point the mafia are acting as if civilians, and so accuse and vote in the same way).  That person is then dead or not. Everyone then closes their eyes again and mafia one is asked to open their eyes, indicate who they wish to assassinate and the closes their eyes. Mafia two then does the same and if they independently vote for the same person, that person is dead. The game continues until one team wins

At this point I wish to congratulate the best liars actors in the group. Izzy for successfully convincing me that she was innocent, causing me to vote to kill Martin (sorry dude ) and Dania and Suzie for managing to get the rest of the group to kill me after my “accuse and see the reaction” backfired into “you accused first so it must be you”.

Following this we had cake. Minor destruction confirmed it was a party as half of the cake went flying onto the floor following about 30 seconds of dramatic “quick save the cake” attempts

Twas an awesome night, cheers all

The Story of Game Dev

It’s the end of an era. Twenty years ago a small games company began generating high quality games on a budget. From these humble beginnings they grew into a large development company selling over 400 million games worldwide. This company has now closed netting $717,844,500 for the owners.

The best game created was a Life Dating series called Game #50. The first in this series sold over 16million copies, with the second (Game #502) becoming the best selling game in this companies career selling more than double this figure. The third game in this series, while less popular than the second, still sold a very respectable 24 million units. This series accounted for $208,599,300 of the total profits during the life of the company. It also netted 2 “best game” awards in the yearly gamedex awards.

The Bumflap console, launched by this company sold over 12 million units. These stats clearly mean that every console owner bought 3 copies each of Game #502.

This company was GayfishGames. A new company will soon rise from the ashes to try and beat those scores

Fuck you I won’t buy what you sell me!

I like Biffy Clyro. I also like their song “Many of Horror”, released in 2009. Those of you that know where this is going, you’ve been forewarned.

I have recently (literally past few minutes) been introduced to the musical talent of Matt Cardle. He was the X-Factor winner and Christmas number 1 for 2010. His song “When we collide” is brilliant. This is because it’s the SAME SONG!

Ranting and raving about the X-Factor is fairly commonplace when it is enforced upon me. I don’t watch it by choice and I am by no means an expert on the subject of becoming a musician (Steve will vouch for this I’m sure ).

However!* Surely it is at the very least morally reasonable to assume that if you are going to cover a song  that you at least call it by the same name. This to me makes it look like he** is trying to lay claim on the song as a whole, because anyone that has not heard the original and who searches for this is not even going to come up with the original artist.

It’s bad enough that they cover a song every christmas anyway, why not wait until you have actually written something yourself before releasing a record?

I’d love to know if there really is a proper reason why this is so often done, so if anyone out there knows, please enlighten this poor angry soul. Until then I am forced to assume it is just money grabbing tactics from the global enterprise fronted by Mr Simon Cowell.

–

* and for those pedantic bar-stewards amongst you, that is a perfectly valid sentence when used to accentuate a point

** I say he… I know in interviews and such he claims that it was not his decision to change the song name, but let’s be honest, it’s his name on the CD so whoever is at fault I’m blaming him (and Cowell of course)