Ian's Life

1:40pm: The LJ is dead. Long live the LJ!
Hi,

I'm moving from www.livejournal.com/users/jonnysfriendian to www.livejournal.com/users/ianslife, because the LJ has slighly outgrown its original role as a login with which to comment on Jonny's blog.

Cheers,

Ian

1:32am: Stocking up with books, cheaply
Hi,

I have just been stocking up with books without actually buying them. And I want to plug two websites:

http://www.manybooks.net/ - Stuff from Gutenberg, made nice for your PDAs. Free electronic classics. 3 books.

http://194.201.98.221/ - The London Borough of Tower Hamlets online library catalogue. And I can reserve any book on the borough libraries online. (Alas, not interlibrary loans yet.) Now, this only is what UCL did via telnet back in 1994, but it's very nice to have, particularly when I can get them delivered to a local library less than five minutes from home. And I give LBTH enough brickbats, so let's praise them for doing something right. 6 books reserved.

They still need international loans, a catalogue where copies don't go missing between one page and the next, and a domain name.

7:15pm: Setee Idol!
I've decided to get rid of one of my couches; I don't really need two couches, and there isn't really space in the living room for two of them. There are better ways of seating people when they come round. So one of them has to go. But which one? (Or, indeed, both ...)

"Old Softee", the setee entirely made up of cushions and a board back/side which fold out into a rather nice guest bed, but tend to swallow up anyone who sits on it like something from the 1971 Auton invasion. (Brown floral, covered with a white throw which always vanishes into folds).

"McFuton", the red Futon which sags rather too much if you sit at one end, has a decent amount of length to it, and has a blue throw. Which I understand isn't much good to sleep on.

I know there's an argument for getting rid of both of them, but let's just assume I'm not going to do that. Yet. You've sat on them. Been swallowed up by them. Slept on them. What do you think?

(Of course, so have I, but asking you guys is more fun.)

2:34am: On roleplaying
I was struck by a couple of threads about roleplaying which different blogs pointed me to: there's a productive thread on "what makes a good GM" on the D&D Online fora, and a discussion about structuralism in roleplaying design.

The first one is lots of D&D players saying, rather gratifyingly, that as well as getting the crunch right (balance, knowing the rules), it's just as important to create an ongoing story using the player characters. It's easy to say that; I know from discussions on mud-dev that if MMORPG designers could set everyone up with their own set of background NPCs who keep producing quests (eg by getting kidnapped) without being repetitive and create an interesting emergent narrative, they would do. (Thanks to Jen at Crystaltips for pointing this one out).

Then there's the entry in Ken Hite's blog, which (after looking up structuralism on Wikipedia) I think I understand. Eyebeam thinks that there are two different kinds of roleplaying games - playing through a scenario as a tactical wargame (scenario adventure gaming) and creating a story with a moderator/games-master (MND), that these are more important than the by-now established threefold game/narrative/simluation division. Meanwhile, in his blog, Chris invokes philosopher Levi-Strauss to examine roleplaying games as improvised systems with reflect an underlying structure. (Quid videt Levi-Strauss and Structuralism at Wikipedia), and thinks that rules might help you construct a narrative or a fun game, but they're not much use at all with simulationism. Then he talks about the good play as structure, and rules as concept, and loses me (surely those should be the other way around). It's a fascinating intersection of different people thinking seriously about what makes a good game, and what actually falls under the umbrella of RPG - the let-a-thousand-flowers bloom of The Forge, and the more experienced eye of Ken Hite. I'm sure that if I could actually follow it it would be fantastic.

11:52pm: All hail the way back web
I lost a large chunk of today demonstrating to myself that I shouldn't throw out my 2000 vintage scanner, including making sure I had a copy of the drivers. The install CD (itself a quick save-to-disk by the seller) was unreadable. (NB to anyone using CDs as archive storage: my CDs fail much more often than my hard disks). The manufacturer was long gone, and their website taken over by one of those auto-directory services who only serve to pollute the search engines and sell google ads.

Then I remembered "Way Back Web" which mildlydiverting had told me about; and after some sifting and searching of URLs (the main page being an unhelpful redirect to a dead shopping cart), I found ...

http://web.archive.org/web/20010410210615/www.blackwidow.co.uk/scanners/techsupppp-new.html

web.archive.org is *good*

5:30pm: PC RIP
My PC has died, and rather than go through the hood reseating components and swapping things out until it works (which I might do anyway to make a Linux box out of spare parts), I'm going to go for a serious upgrade.

The wierd thing is that I've got so behind the times with respect to PC technology that I had to buy PC Shopper to find out what PCs do nowadays. And my SO is seriously pushing an Apple, and it's not as if jonnynexus hasn't fallen in love with his (http://www.livejournal.com/users/jonnynexus/145329.html http://www.livejournal.com/users/jonnynexus/161650.html). It does sound like it has the install-what-you-like flexibility of Linux without the hassle of having to download all the right drivers yourself. But I haven't quite decided whether I'm ready to give up on playing PC games. (In the last couple of years, I have found myself seriously missing old-fashioned analogue board games, but very rarely arcade-style computer games.)

That's the realistic stuff I know I can do. This is the pie-in-the-sky hope:

I'd like to be able to, when at home, use my (bluetooth palm) PDA to control music. My main desktop would control the library of podcasts and mp3s (and it would be nice for it to be able to record streamed radio programmes does, PVCRs & media centre PCs), and my PDA would tell it to play them on speakers such-and-such ... or my PDA would tell the speakers to download the files from my main server and play them. (I think running them as WiFi peripherals might work better, but that would probably mean they needed their own IP address.)

At which point I don't really know where to start looking for information. It doesn't really fit into a google query ...

11:55pm: "Alien" was all a terrible misunderstanging ...
I finally watched "Alien" from beginning to end today. I realised that if I (or any other linguistic pedant) been on the Nostromo, I could have sorted it all out without Ash thinking he needed to sacrifice the crew. On Mother's screen, his secret orders weren't to "ensure the survival" of the alien (as he seemed to think), but to "insure" it. A quick message to Direct Line, and everyone would have been an awful lot safer.

12:32am: My 15 Minutes as a Terror Suspect
I've just got back from being stopped and searched under the Prevention of Terrorism Act.

Which was an interesting experience.

I was returning home from the Youth Hostel where my friend G was staying. She's catching a plane to leave the country, and had more stuff than the luggage allowance. So she gave me some stuff to alternatively give away, dump, and post on. Two and a half bags full.

Then the bus I was taking stopped for five minutes at its penultimate stop, so I decided to walk on myself. In the City of London. After 11pm at night. Carrying three heavy bags. Hesitating over which bus stop to go to next.

You really can't blame the copper, can you?

So there's me, going through all three bags with this police officer. Which included, amongst an awful lot of other stuff:
* The old press cuttings about me my mother had given me on Saturday, including the story about me selling a computer game aged 13 and, more worrylingly, the one headlined "Bomb Escape for Democrat".
* Camping cutlery, swiss army knife, and lightstick.
* G's many photos of London landmarks.

Obviously, none of this is a smoking gun, but it probably helped to hold his attention through three very full bags. He seemed slightly amused that I was from Leeds, but he didn't really comment on the fact that I was going to the area of the failed bus bombing.

The constable was friendly and considerate throughout. We had an interesting chat about the powers; Charles Clarke has granted special powers to police in some parts of London to stop and search without needing suspicion; there were another two people he might have stopped if he wasn't busy in the first few minutes of talking to me. It's more worrying as a symptom of the current state of threat than as an inconvenience. But it's also more worrying to realise the full extent of police powers under the Terrorism Act than to experience a constable who simply using them as intended.

1:18am: Meanwhile, at Mildly Diverting
One of my colleagues at work, who keeps a much more prolific and interesting blog than this one, flatteringly thought her chat with me on the tube home was worth recording.

http://mildlydiverting.blogspot.com/2005/04/bluestocking-blue.html

12:36am: I'm northern, but I'm not sure about my brother and sister
That was what my little sister said about her siblings today. I thought I'd blog it because it's funny, and true; but now I have to destroy all sense of humour by explaning it. (For someone who had their own home page in 1994, I'm taking a while to get the hang of this blogging malarky.) Much as little sister remains an inomitable Yorkshirewoman, my other sister and myself have become completely absorbed into the South. I'm not sure why; we all left Leeds at 18, and came to London in the 1990s; we all went to independant schools where people spoke BBC; and yet one accent (and friendly Northern attitude) survives.

(Apart from, in my case, the occasional incongruous short vowel.)

1:26pm: Paris au Printemps
Had a long weekend in Paris, timed so that I could go to Veggie Pride and meet some Parisian veggies on Saturday (http://www.veggiepride.org/uk/). Like everyone says, central Paris is utterly beautiful. Mountmatre is a tourist trap, but still has a really nice view of Paris. Outside Notre Dame is a wonderful place for a night-time street party. The top of the Eiffel tower is a lot less scary than I expected. And La Louvre is a place to wander and be amazed.

I spent Saturday watching French faces glaze over as they try to follow me, and being cruelly robbed of my delusion that I could speak conversational French. I hereby admit to the world that I can only speak enough French to talk with shopkeepers and tourist attractions. I was told I got better over the course of the day, so perhaps if I lived and worked in Paris for a month prior to Veggie Pride next year, I would be able to talk to the French veggies as well as say hello.

10:00pm: Why I hope they do not shut the Central Line again
There was a train derailment outside work today. It even made the national news. I barely noticed. I thought I'd be interested in having a national news story happen outside my window, but I only cared about my commute :).

Of course, that time the office all but emptied so people could cross the road to demonstrate for the boss the day he resigned I *was* interested in seeing the news happen outside my window.

Anyway, I digress. My main concern is that London Underground will not shut down the Central Line the way it did where there was a derailment near Chancery Lane. For if it does, on my back on the envelope calculations, they will kill a few dozen people indirectly, by moving them from the tube (not perfectly safe), to cars (which kill a few thousand people a year).

The problem is that people dwell on the high-profile deaths which happen when a public transport system has an accident, but take the steady stream of road deaths for granted.

12:00pm: The Last Party
Well, it looks like I've given into the inevitable and caught the blogging bug. (Edit: No, I haven't. I make roughly one entry every time the earth orbits the sun.) I'm mainly doing this because it makes more sense to me to record my own blog entries than to record replies to Jonny's blog. I reserve the right to change my mind, of course.

Went to the Lost Party with Jonny, which turned out to be much, much, more film than party. Perhaps I should have read the listing properly :).

Still, they were mainly very good films, especially The Meatrix and a documentary about the failed coup in Venezuela. You get so used to those with power using it to thrash the people without (particularly in the Indymedia centre), that you begin to think that right never triumphs.

I caught up with Jonny (who left, tired and ill, before the last film - gracefully, he didn't tell me how ill until I read his blog), a few other friends, had a nice chat with a American studying anthropology in Paris, and went on to an amazing night-time beach party on the Thames sandbanks afterwards. Perhaps I shouldn't be so easily impressed with a live Samba band and no bar (why *did* so many people think I could sell them drugs, anyway?), but I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Or perhaps I should just followup Jonny's posts.

8:46pm: Hello, world.
Well, seeing that this diary is mere a spin-off from Jonny Nexus' diary, and I don't have any particular intention of starting an online diary of my own ...

Nothing to see. Move on.