Middlerun's Stuff

WALL-E

noreply@blogger.com (Middlerun) — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 15:04:00 +0000

I saw WALL-E yesterday. I don't usually go in for Pixar films, mainly out of loyalty to traditional animation, but I've got to say WALL-E is a really good movie. Pixar has always made fairly decent stuff, although all the ones I've seen before (of which the most recent was Finding Nemo) I've always viewed as primarily kids' movies. Sure, adults taking their kids can enjoy them, but I doubt many adults would buy them on DVD for themselves. When was the last time you felt the urge to go rent Toy Story? WALL-E is different - it really is a movie anyone can enjoy, perhaps adults even more than kids. (The kids sitting next to me, during one of the film's climactic scenes, were too busy fart-assing around with lollies to pay any attention.)

The first thing that stuck me was the bang-up job they did depicting an Earth that has totally had its shit ruined. The hilariously large piles of garbage and nasty green smog look really cool, and the way everything looks all rusty and banged up is really impressively detailed. I'm big into robots so I thought WALL-E himself was pretty cool, I like how his body serves as a trash compactor/storage compartment as well as being able to hold his head and wheels when he retracts into a cube. EVE is nicely designed, contrasting WALL-E's traditional mechanic design with a cool sleek look, presumably made from some kind of smart polymer. The robot "voices" are really good, which is to be expected considering they were created by Ben Burtt, the guy behind R2-D2's expressive beeps. EVE's electronic but feminine voice reminds me a little of GLaDOS from Portal, perhaps not the best association character-wise, but anything that reminds me of my favourite physics-based first-person puzzle-comedy game is OK by me.

Another cool thing is how they tried to mimic the look of actual cameras. Apparently they wrote software to mimic the cameras used in sci-fi movies like 2001: A Space Odyssey. (There are a few other cool 2001 references too.) The shots during the part where WALL-E hitches a ride on the spaceship that picks up EVE were especially cool. Once they get into space the film shifts gears a bit, and there's plenty of cool shiny tech and robots, and an all-too-believable glimpse at the future of humanity.

So Pixar has seemingly matured, and replaced their usual torrent of pop-culture references with some fairly obvious but effective messages about the dangers of corporate monopoly, environmental neglect and human complacency. Even if you don't feel like being preached to, there's enough laughs, plot and cool robots to satisfy anyone. I give it 9 out of 10 discarded hubcaps.

Mid-semester break

noreply@blogger.com (Middlerun) — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 14:30:00 +0000

Not a moment too soon, I've got a week off from uni. There's plenty of stuff to catch up on but before getting onto that boring stuff I decided to head down to Kiama for a couple of days. Pretty much the usual, but a few things are worth blogging.

I went to the blowhole on Sunday for nothing much else to do. It wasn't doing much despite the wind. As I was coming back to my car there were a couple of seagulls flying near my car, but because the wind was blowing so hard they were stationary in the air, which was pretty funny. I remember once in primary school I was hanging out with a friend of mine at lunch or whatever and we saw a pigeon flying sideways because of the wind and we pissed ourselves laughing. While one of these seagulls was hovering above the car next to mine I snapped a few photos.

I wandered into the bookshop a bit later and checked out what was around. With exams looming darkly on the horizon I don't have much time for reading, but I bought a copy of Ender's Game anyway. I've heard good things about it and I've not been reading much recently (well not in dead tree format anyway - I've been reading a few good books by email). Hopefully I'll finally be able to appreciate this xkcd strip, continuing in my tradition of learning enough to understand xkcd strips long after I first read them.

I saw WALL-E too, but I'll put that in a separate post.

Drawage

noreply@blogger.com (Middlerun) — Sun, 31 Aug 2008 08:38:00 +0000

there's a couple of new items on my sketch blog Mod Rocker. One is a comic, the other is just scary. This weekend I was gripped for no apparent reason by an urge to draw. I drew some other things which are in various stages of completion, including a comic I'm not sure I should post because it is just gross. I'm slowly starting to realise that if I stop trying so damn hard to get every line just perfect, things still end up looking pretty decent (or even better than they would otherwise) and I can draw like ten times faster, resulting in things that actually get finished instead of abandoned a quarter of the way through.

Evil robot game alert!

noreply@blogger.com (Middlerun) — Sun, 31 Aug 2008 07:13:00 +0000

I came across a game the other day called...

Choke on my Groundhog, YOU BASTARD ROBOTS

Aside from that being a pretty cool name for a game, it's really fun too. It seems pretty standard at first, but then you die and it suddenly becomes awesome. You will see what I mean.

Tip: two dudes shooting at the same thing can create explosions.

Google Street View = awesome

noreply@blogger.com (Middlerun) — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 13:10:00 +0000

Google Street View has just been unveiled in Australia. It's pretty awesome. What impresses me is the scope of it - there's a map here which shows just how much of the country you can see. Of course the first thing I did was check out my house. I don't know what people expect to see when they do this - it looked the same as in real life. It was still cool to see my house though, with my car parked outside and everything.

What intrigues me most about Street View though, isn't spatial, but temporal. Since each panorama is taken at a different time as the Google cars drive down the street, you can see what other cars and people were doing for a minute or so. This adds a whole new dimension to Google Maps - literally*. Coming down the main street of my suburb I can see people wandering about or doing whatever, captured in a series of frames as the car went past. A man walks along reading a piece of paper. A van goes past in the opposite direction. An old fat bloke stands with his bag of shopping on the ground. A 4-wheel drive comes out of a side street and turns right, following the Google car down the block. A guy in a high visibility shirt unload stuff from a van. A Forester comes around the corner and parks in front of the pizza place.

Then, tragedy strikes! The next image in the set for some reason shows all different people and cars and weather conditions. The Google folks obviously came down the main drag twice, so they could also go down the avenue that goes by the supermarket, and for some reason as you come down the road in Street View, one of the panoramas (out of maybe 10 or 15) is from this other, second set of photos. Nevertheless you can continue on and see most of the first set. This may be a mundane scene, but the cool thing is that it's been preserved forever in four dimensions.

I recently finished reading a book called Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, by Cory Doctorow of Boing Boing fame. I highly recommend it. The novel (which Doctorow relesed for free online) describes a future where people can back up their memories, the way people back up their hard drives today, and if people are killed they can be restored from backup by having their memories and personality implanted into a force-grown clone. When this happens to the main character, Julius, included with his restored memories is a computer generated fly-through of the scene of his murder. That's what I was reminded of when I started reconstructing the Google car's trip around the suburb. A fly-through of a scene from more than half a year ago.

It's hard to care about privacy concerns when you have such an amazing toy to play with.

*I'm trying not to misuse the word "literally" here. I hate it when people do that. Time is a dimension, after all...

Full license

noreply@blogger.com (Middlerun) — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 14:34:00 +0000

I got my full driver's license yesterday. It felt pretty good taking the P-plates off my car and throwing them in the bin. Just in time, too, because I'm going up to Armidale on Tuesday and now I can legally keep up with everyone else on the freeway.

After I got home from the RTA, I was minding my own business working on some papercraft when a telemarketer rudely decided to call. It was for some charity, but I refuse to support any company or charity that uses telemarketing so I decided to have a bit of fun. I pretended I was looking for my dad, then asked the telemarketer if I could put her on hold. I placed the phone down in front of my computer speakers and put on a Midnight Juggernauts song. While that was playing I cued up a couple more songs: "Code Blue" by TSOL, and "Ass 'n' Titties" by DJ Assault. By the time Ass 'n' Titties finished she had hung up. I'm not sure when she hung up, but it was probably somewhere between hearing "I wanna fuck, I wanna fuck the dead" and "Stankin'-ass bitches that need to wash up, don't get mad when I don't wanna fuck".

I hate telemarketers.

The RTA are a bunch of useless tossers

noreply@blogger.com (Middlerun) — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 05:49:00 +0000

I've finally almost finished the RTA's stupid gauntlet of plates and tests, and I'm going for my full driver's licence. The test for that is a combination of an unrealistic hazard perception test and a quiz about utterly useless statistics. Some of the statistics are more than useless - they don't even make sense. Take this example, copied and pasted directly from the Driver Qualification Handbook, page 49:

At least 14 per cent of all crashes involve the driver being distracted by something.
Distractions that happen outside the vehicle account for about 30 per cent of crash-related distractions.
Distractions that happen inside the vehicle add up to about 36 per cent of crash-related distractions.

Is there some third possibility here that I'm not aware of? Where the hell is the other 34 per cent, in some no-man's land between the inside and the outside of the car?

There's some other dodgy stuff in there. Have a look at this graph about crash types, from page 10:

Nice graph, eh? Got the little pictures on there and everything. But compare this graph with one I made using the same data on a graph-making website:

Specifically, look at the large blue part. 25 per cent should obviously be one quarter of the chart. On the RTA's bullshit graph it looks more like 36 per cent. The three on the left-hand side of the graph are wrong too, leaving only two sections that are more or less right. Lots of people, including me, absorb information more easily in visual form, and are going to look at the graph rather than the numbers, and will get a false impression.

Nice work, RTA. Give us bullshit information and then test us on it. That'll make us better drivers.

A sigh of relief

noreply@blogger.com (Middlerun) — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 13:14:00 +0000

At long last I am done with exams for another semester. I really can't describe how good it is. The couple of weeks before exams suck so much, it really is like doing the HSC twice a year. Worse, even.

What next? Ah, of course. Alcohol.

Exam trouble again

noreply@blogger.com (Middlerun) — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 04:54:00 +0000

This time last year when I was doing uni exams, the unthinkable happened: my car broke down on the way to my first exam. If I was a silly person I would think there was some kind of curse, because this morning, the morning of my first exam for this semester... I slept in. I had set my alarm for 6:30 so I could get going early in case of any more car-related SNAFUs, and I guess in my half-asleep haze I hit the "alarm off" button and fell asleep again. I woke up at about 8:10, with the doors opening for the exam at 8:45. I leapt out of bed, threw on some clothes, grabbed my wallet, keys and some pens and ran out to the car. I even forgot to close the garage door after I got the car out.

In the end I got there during reading time, and the exam was pretty easy. So it all worked out OK. But now I have three more exams to study for. Lame.

Geohashing!

noreply@blogger.com (Middlerun) — Thu, 29 May 2008 11:28:00 +0000

So I went geohashing on Sunday. For those who don't know what that is (i.e. everyone), here's the original comic from xkcd which thrust this idea into the world:

My adventure is briefly chronicled on the Geohashing wiki, so I won't repeat it here. Suffice it to say it was a pretty cool thing to do since I'll now go down in history as the first person in Sydney to go geohashing.

In other news! I bought a lab coat and some safety goggles on Monday. Well, not so much "bought" as "cashed in a $25 voucher I wasn't going to use for anything else". At any rate, now I can wear it around and be at the heighth of fashion and everyone will be all, "hey look he must be some kind of science dude, look he's eating some chips, i bet he's secretly doing science to them".

Free shit week 05/08

noreply@blogger.com (Middlerun) — Mon, 19 May 2008 13:26:00 +0000

Council clean-up again. I spend about an hour on Saturday doing a preliminary patrol of the suburb, and then about 3 hours doing a comprehensive sweep, looking for discarded computers and other goodies. There's barely a street in the suburb I didn't walk down.

At one point I was walking along and I saw an old bike among some rubbish. I was getting a bit sick of walking so I hopped on and started riding it along the footpath. The back tyre was flat and the front one wasn't much better, the seat was too high and I wasn't game to test the gear change mechanism, so it was a pretty bumpy and dangerous ride but I rode it a few blocks and had a bit of fun, nearly ran into a parked car and then discarded it outside someone's house.

Sadly I didn't find much in the way of computers, except for two that had already been mostly pillaged. I did extract a graphics card (which was what I wanted, but sadly it doesn't seem to work) and a network card (which does work). I also found a scanner which had some water in it but who knows, maybe it'll work.

There was a fair few people out and about looking for stuff, so I guess all the cool stuff was taken. But bugger it, it's an excuse for a nice walk. It's more fun than studying.

Stereophonics

noreply@blogger.com (Middlerun) — Wed, 07 May 2008 12:46:00 +0000

I saw Stereophonics play in Newcastle last night with McLeff. It was awesome. I hadn't really heard much of their stuff before but I'll definitely check out some of their albums once my hearing returns.

Actually my hearing's more or less fine now but last night after the gig, and this morning a bit too, everything sounded muffled in my left ear. We were pretty close to the stage off to the left so the speakers were just to our left.

Loud.

And another thing

noreply@blogger.com (Middlerun) — Sat, 03 May 2008 15:31:00 +0000

FUCK I just missed free comic book day!

fuck fuck fuck i have to wait a whole other fucking year god damn it i've been looking forward to that for such a long time

21st party

noreply@blogger.com (Middlerun) — Sat, 03 May 2008 15:20:00 +0000

Tonight was my 21st party. I am so drunk right now. I had to correct like 20 spelling mistakes so far. I even do that when I am really drunk. I made an awesome speech though. Here's the draft, to which my delivered speech was, surprisingly, fairly close:

Friends! People of Sydney! [pause for cries of "He's amazing, who is he?" and "Is he Christ?"] You are the chosen ones! You have been brought here for one purpose, and one purpose only: to bask in the glory of my birthday, and party like you've never partied before!

To be honest, it didn't really occur to me that I'd have to do a speech until today, so this will be mostly a hodge podge of quotes like that.

Thank you all for coming. If nobody had come it would have been quite shit, but at least there'd be more beer for me. I like it better this way.

I don't know half of you half as well as I should like; and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve.

Which, for the confused, is a compliment.

We're here to celebrate the fact that I haven't died for the last 21 years. Which is always a good thing. There's been a few close calls though:

The time I blew up my hand with a homemade explosive. I escaped with only first degree burns.

Or the time I drank about three quarters of a bottle of homemade vodka at Beff's place. That was good times, until it wasn't.

I was born at a very early age, nude, helpless and unable to provide for myself. Eventually I overcame these handicaps to become the dynamic, successful individual I pretend to be today.

But I couldn't have done it without my family and friends, who have helped and guided me along the road of life... by the way, if I make another "road of life" cliché, please shoot me.

My Mum, who was always there for me even after I moved out.

My Dad, who always encouraged me to pursue my interests.

My sister, who being three years older than me always gave me helpful advice on things she'd done three years before me.

All my friends from primary school, high school and now uni, who put up with my weirdness.

And everyone else who doesn't fit into these categories.

So to them and to all the rest of you I say thank you, and here's to many more years of partying and good times!

21

noreply@blogger.com (Middlerun) — Thu, 01 May 2008 07:08:00 +0000

What is the deal with some stuff? I woke up this morning at about 4 am with an insanely painful cramp in my leg. It's pretty shitty suddenly waking up going "BLEAAARGH WHY AM I IN SUCH PAIN". It makes no sense.

In more pleasant news, it was my 21st birthday yesterday. Not that it really means all that much considering how much hype it gets. I don't think the age of 21 has any legal significance in Australia any more. At least if I go to America I can buy booze.

Loose foreign change

noreply@blogger.com (Middlerun) — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 03:35:00 +0000

I love it when I pay for something and get change back in the wrong currency. It usually happens with New Zealand 20c coins, but sometimes you get something cool. I just used two one-dollar coins to pay for $1.80 worth of ham, and got back what appeared to be a 20c coin... it's actually 5 Swedish Kronor.

The cool thing is that according to XE.com, 5 Kronor is actually worth nearly 90 cents, so in theory I've made about 70c profit. If I go and cash it in, I can buy some more ham and still get my 20c back. If by some amazing coincidence I then get another 5 Kronor instead of the 20c coin, I can do it all again. This leads to an endless cycle by which I amass vast supplies of ham and become a foreign coin/ham entrepreneur, and retire in a few years living the rest of my life in decadent luxury on my coin/ham derived fortunes.

Maybe I'll even luck out and get one of those awesome new UK coins.

All nighter

noreply@blogger.com (Middlerun) — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 18:57:00 +0000

There are some things that suck about doing an electrical engineering degree. One of them is ELEC2141 (Digital Circuit Design) labs. You have to do all this stuff with logic gates and flip-flops and things of that nature, but there's not really enough time in the labs to do it without doing heaps of work beforehand, which I usually don't get around to doing. As such I'm a bit behind on the labs and so I'm doing work to catch up. It's now 5 am. I am going to need lots of caffeine tomorrow. Or rather, today.

Sleep sucks. I'm only ever tired after I've been sleeping. If I was going to design a person I would make sleep optional, so it's like a treat if you have spare time. Lying down for hours at a time and going on insane adventures in your head should be the most awesome thing ever, but it's just totally mundane. (Unless you can dream lucidly. I never did quite get the hang of that.)

I've got a bunch of music cued up. A song called Night Owl (from the Sim City 4 soundtrack) just came on. How appropriate.

KDE 4

noreply@blogger.com (Middlerun) — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 12:35:00 +0000

I just found a handy guide to installing KDE 4 in Ubuntu 7.10. The idea of having multiple desktop environments on my computer has never really occurred to me, but I guess I am still kind of new to Linux. The more I learn, the more glad I am that I am no longer dependant on Winblows. Linux is just so cool.

I've heard good things about KDE 4. So I installed it and logged in, and so far it's pretty cool. Really slick too.

Guys. I am supposed to be studying for a maths test.

Triplane Turmoil II

noreply@blogger.com (Middlerun) — Sun, 06 Apr 2008 02:36:00 +0000

The original Triplane Turmoil game has brought many hours of fun into my life. I used to play it obsessively, trying again and again to finish the fiendishly difficult but fun missions. Sometimes after school some friends would come around and we'd play multiplayer, with four of us crowded around the keyboard. It was good times. Especially when we contributed our own sound effects, sitting around the keyboard yelling "ratatatatat!!" and "eeeerrrrrrwwww BOOOOM!!!"

So imagine my happiness when I discovered a week ago that there was a sequel, Triplane Turmoil II, and my surprise that it has been out since 2006. I bought it, and after four days my PayPal payment cleared and I downloaded the game. Unfortunately as soon as I had downloaded it I had to go to work, but then I quit my job so I could go home and play Triplane. (Just kidding - I quit my job because my bosses were total arseholes.)

I've played some of the missions, and they're pretty cool. They're really hard, but that just means it'll be longer before I finish the game, which means more fun for me. The graphics are nice - they're in 3D even though the gameplay takes place in 2D. The controls are improved too - the turning controls flip around when the plane does, which is much more intuitive. The infantry (or "tyke men" as they somehow became known to me and my friends) play more of a role now than in the first game, and are much harder to kill. They tend to stray out of the z-axis of the plane, so you can't usually hit them with machine guns, you need to bomb them. I like the humour in the game, with mission names like "Operation S.T.F.U" (Silence The Felony Usurper) and "Das Boot" (in which you have to destroy a boot factory).

There are now six countries in the game - the first game had Germany, England, Japan and Finland, and the new one adds Russia and America. There is going to be a TCP/IP multiplayer mode sometime soon, it will be implemented with a patch hopefully this year. There's also an online ladder where players are ranked. I'm the first (and currently the only) Australian player on there.

The only criticism I have is that it takes forever for the ground crew to get your plane back into the hangar when you land, which is boring and leaves you vulnerable. Also there are a few cosmetic imperfections like the walk animations for the tyke men looking a bit weird, and the plane engine noise sometimes disappearing which is a bit spooky. Otherwise, the game is totally awesome.

It's cheap, too: US$24.95. At current exchange rates that's about A$27. And it's only another US$5 for a boxed version (as well as download), including shipping. Nice.

Triplane Turmoil II

Blorgage

noreply@blogger.com (Middlerun) — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 10:57:00 +0000

So I haven't blogged much recently. Stuff has happened I couldn't be bothered writing about, like Christmas and going to Woodford and Armidale and Kiama, and starting my second year of uni. Suffice it to say that everything is going well enough.

I have a job now, delivering pizzas on Friday nights. It mostly involved sitting around being bored, which is much more enjoyable than my last job.

A droog of mine, McLeff, came down to Sydney on Friday, and we were reminiscing about a game we used to play called Triplane Turmoil. I hadn't played it in a couple of years because it's a DOS game and it never worked properly in Windows XP. Today I got a DOS emulator called DOSBox which runs Triplane Turmoil pretty well. So that's cool. Then I found out there's a sequel which came out in 2006. I'm going to buy it tomorrow and the awesomeness will abound.

In other news, there's a new creationist propaganda film coming out, Expelled. Of course, it's all rubbish. It's funny how they expect people to treat "Intelligent Design" as an actual scientific theory when in a whole film about it they apparently don't offer any actual evidence. (Now I wonder why that could be? Maybe... I don't know... there isn't any?)

That is all the blorgage for now.

Podcasts

noreply@blogger.com (Middlerun) — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 13:32:00 +0000

It took me a while to get onto the idea of podcasts. Although I straight away saw the appeal - niche content with no ads that you can listen to whenever you like - I never really felt the desire to seek out good podcasts, probably because there's just so many of them. Eventually I found some really good ones and these are them:

The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe. This is my favourite. Each week a panel of skeptics (or sceptics if you prefer) from the New England Skeptical Society (the phoney New England in America, not the real one in Australia) gather to discuss recent developments in science and pseudo-science. Aside from interesting and intelligent discussion there's also a great dynamic between the panellists who all have a great sense of humour and fun. There's also a new five minute version called The Skeptics Guide 5x5, in case an hour of hard-nosed scepticism is too much for you.
Radio Lab. Two guys take a topic relating to science, philosophy or psychology and delve deep into the subject, in a really interesting, engaging and accessible way. On the way up to Woodford recently I loaded about eight episodes (one hour each) onto my MP3 player and listened to them in the car. It was awesome.
The Rogues Gallery. I found this one just the other day, and listened to an episode today. At four hours (over 200 MB) per weekly episode it's not for the faint hearted, but it's chock full of really great music. As you may know, I can't stand most radio, but one drawback of not listening to it is that it's harder to find out about new music. With podcasts like the Rogues Gallery, that problem is solved.
Irregular Podcast!. The prolific David Morgan-Mar of Irregular Webcomic! and his co-workers put their witty and geeky heads together now and again to record a ten-minute podcast about... hmm... all sorts of things really. But it's always clever and pretty funny too. Except the bits where they sing.

So there you have it. Throw out your radios, get those RSS feeds aggregating and listen to some of these. Just don't try to do it on dial-up.

Duality

noreply@blogger.com (Middlerun) — Sat, 26 Jan 2008 14:14:00 +0000

A few nights ago I decided to make a movie. Like most of my best work it was totally on a whim. So I got out my video camera and got to it, basically as an experiment in unplanned, scriptless, one-person film making.

It took about four hours to shoot, between 11 pm and 3 am (plus two small shots I had to re-do later). I edited it in a program called Kino, which took ages but I'm pretty happy with the result. All the gore effects were done with tomato sauce, of course. I credited myself with camera work but really most of the credit should go to various household tables, chairs and shelves.

My actual resolutions

noreply@blogger.com (Middlerun) — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 07:24:00 +0000

I don't usually make New Year's resolutions but why let that stop me? Here they are:

Study more regularly. Cramming during the two weeks before exams may be somewhat effective for passing exams but probably isn't the best way to learn stuff.
Go out more. I don't know why, but I never seem to get around to actually going out to pubs with people from uni. Which I really need to change because drinking with people is one of the best ways of getting to know people.
Jog regularly. I started jogging when I was studying for my first round of exams and I enjoyed it, but then when uni went back I could never find the time.
Join some more campus societies.
Organise my time better, for obvious reasons.

New Year's resolution

noreply@blogger.com (Middlerun) — Sat, 12 Jan 2008 13:24:00 +0000

My resolution for 2008: 1280 x 1024.

Woodford

noreply@blogger.com (Middlerun) — Sun, 23 Dec 2007 19:57:00 +0000

It's 7 am and I'm about to set off for Armidale. On boxing day I'll go the rest of the way to Woodford. My intertubes access will be sporadic at best. So to everyone who reads this...

Have a happy, or otherwise favourable Christmas or other holiday celebration, or whatever. Just merry Xmas and shit.