The USS Quad Damage

“The blind leading the blind” has always been an odd statement to me. While it makes sense that someone who is not blind is required to lead the blind, the problems that the blind encounter, and the kinds of help they need is only really understood by the blind themselves. Therefore, the best help will probably come from someone who has only recently gained the ability to see.

Myself and Harpy recently rented a manual car to practice driving manual. I’m still not perfect, but I feel more confident and I think I’ve got the theory down. Here’s some of the things that I’ve learnt:

Stalling the car

The most important thing to note is that stalling will happen in the beginning, no matter how good you are. The idea is to accept it and get used to it. If you’re lucky the guy behind you will smile and you can laugh it off. The way stalling will stop is that you get a good “feel” for the car (see below). You can avoid it in the meantime by overcompensating on the accelerator. Since stalling occurs when the engine slows down too much, if you accelerate a lot before trying to get into gear, it’s less likely that you’ll stall. Note that if you don’t “love the clutch” (see below) you might stall anyway.

Feel the car

One of the first questions you’ll ask is “how do I know when the gear is engaged on the clutch?” The answer you’ll get it “you’ve gotta feel it”. This is bullshit. There’s actually no way of knowing. The “feeling” is actually something your brain figures out after continually “stalling the car” (see above). There is some feedback in the noise the car makes and the tacho (so getting a rice car may well be worth it in that respect). Once the gear starts getting engaged your revs will go down, and if you “love the clutch” (see below) you’ll have a smooth transition.

Lightness and Tightness

The way the accelerator is used in a manual is very different to an automatic. In an automatic, you get used to “telling” your car which gear to use by using your accelerator pedal, and this habit may cause some trouble with a manual. The manual tends to have a very touchy accelerator in neutral. Further, in a manual the gear is directly engaged to the engine, so the revs directly affect the speed. This has some implications for “gear changes” (below), but the real advantage is that you become far more aware of the speed you’re travelling, since you’ve got to keep track of the gear you’re in as well as your revs.

Practice being gentle with your accelerator. In neutral it will shoot up to 8000 before you know it.

Love the clutch

The reason I think most newbie manual drivers drive badly is that they want to touch the clutch as little as possible. It’s a new skill to learn, and your leg is uncoordinated. It’s like learning how to walk. At first it’s really hard and it eventually becomes natural. Also, it’s frustrating to re-learn a skill you’re used to having for free. Clutching is one of those skills. The trick is to love the clutch. Be gentle with it when you need to be, and be nasty when you can get away with it, but pay it some attention. Eventually you’ll do it by habit, but you gotta love the clutch.

Heavy car, light engine

One of the things you’ll learn whilst you’re “loving the clutch” (above) is that when you engage, the rpms will line up to the speed. If you’re soft on the clutch you’ll barely feel it, and if you’re hard on the clutch you (or the engine) may “jolt” as the speeds sync up. The thing to understand is that the “weight” of either the engine or the gears¹ is important. The engine has a constant weight, and the gears get “heavier” as you go up them. In first, the engine is “heavier” than the gears. In second they’re about even, and after that the gears are heavier than the engine. This really depends on the ratios and the engine size, but it’s generally right.

The key point is that in first you’re really syncing the car to the engine, in second they’re about even, and third onwards the engine gets synced to the car. That’s why for the first gear you have to be soft on the clutch, and in second you have to be kind of soft, but third onward you can just change gears and there’s no “jolt”. Note that the “gears” can be made heavier by being on a hill.

The basic rule is that when going to or from first or second, be gentle with the clutch and be careful with RPMs. In third onwards, it’s OK just to slam the clutch in and out, but once you get good you’ll be able to just sync up the rpms.

The other rule from this is that when changing down gears, it’s probably helpful to over-rev the engine in neutral, and then shift gears (or reduce speed accordingly, and then shift gears), especially when going into second or first.

Gear changes

This piece of advice depends on your car’s gear ratios but I believe in general cars are meant to do this. Basically, don’t use the first gear unless you’re at a complete stop. The engine is generally too heavy for the gear, and will make the accelerator really touchy once in gear. Always change to second if you’re already rolling.

If you change gears quickly enough, then you’ll be ready to engage the clutch right when the car’s rev range goes down to where the next gear is supposed to be engaged (ie: where the engine speed and gear speed is the same). This is sweet. Going from first to second is the hardest to get this right on.

Most of this advice will come in one form or another from the people who know how to drive manuals already. Hopefully, however, this is explaining in a format which people who are used to driving autos find easier. Enjoy driving a manual car.

¹ By “gears” I really mean the end of the clutch attached to the drive train, on the engine side of the gearbox.

I find it very hard to hate movies. This may not be self evident, so let me provide proof: I liked Waterworld. I would’ve paid to watch it in the cinema. I thought “Hackers” was funny as all hell. Van Helsing was one of my all-time favourite movies. There are really very few movies I can’t sit through,and I can only really recall two:

• The Net
• Dungeons and Dragons

Even then, I made myself watch them both, boiling with spittle all the while. I was lucky that I didn’t watch those movies in the cinema, because I often had to pause, regain my intestinal fortitude, and continue. With Apocalypto, I wasn’t so lucky. Heed my warning, and don’t watch this movie. It was a mix of cliche and stupid.

The good

The idea is good. An exploration of the Mayan way of life is good. The first 15 minutes of the movie is good. The colours, the shots, and the lighting are professionally done. A lot of the shots are well placed and picked, and the settings, as well as set design is also good. The music is killer good. If it was a different movie it could bring tears to my eyes. The actors also put in an excellent effort, but the complete stupidity of what’s going on is definitely hard to work with. I also like the fact that it’s a movie aimed at white people which doesn’t actually have any white people in it. The only other movie I can think of that did that was Crouching Tiger: Hidden Dragon.

The bad

I think most of the bad can be summed up with one name: Mel Gibson, although that may be both pre-emptive and unfair. The story is shithouse. Maybe Mel wasn’t the one who messed it up, but it’s fucked, and Mel’s involved. The direction is also fucked, and again, Mel’s in the firing line. While I couldn’t really complain about the camerawork, I feel it could’ve been done better.

The fighting scenes (which are pretty integral to the movie) are done in a slipshod manner. It seems like a practical issue:

“Well, it looks like none of the guys here know how to fight, so you gotta just move the camera around to get the mayhem across”.

Maybe this wasn’t a camerawork issue, but again, a direction issue. It really irritates me that even in this day and age you can’t get someone in an action movie who can look the part, act, and fight. If you can’t do that, they ain’t worth the 20 mil.

The direction is a mix of cliche and just plain bad. Nothing inventive has been done to tell the story, and a lot of problems that occur in other departments occur probably because the director was too idiotic to come up with a better solution. A lot of the scenes appear superfluous, and although beautiful, you really want better reasons for them to be in the movie. Whilst the initial story does a good job of building an empathy for the characters as well as antagonism towards the… er… antagonists, the ending is corny and unrealistic, and the deaths of the bad guys is both unsatisfying and unsophisticated.

The ugly

Terrible choices were made with respects to how to shoot certain things. Like Len Wiseman crowing about how Underworld doesn’t use CG in the werewolf design, you can almost hear the stupidity coming from Mel Gibson’s face. Whatever you do, if it looks shit then it’ll destroy the movie. There’s a boar chase scene as well as the Jaguar are completely ridiculous, and it can clearly be seen that they’re stuffed animals. I don’t have a solution, but they make movies, they should have solutions ready. Attacking a stuffed jaguar made the movie positively comical, even if the boar scene could be forgiven.

There’s a bunch of gore in this movie that’s just there for show. I’m all for gore, and the sacrifice scene is great, but sometimes the gore is taken over the top, Mortal Kombat style, and again, it just makes the movie seem more comical rather than realistic.

I think Mel Gibson is stuck in the old Mad Max days, when the rest of the world has moved on, and it really shows in this movie. The sophistication mixed with the dumb action is like oil and water, or cigarette smoke and perfume, and the movie feels odd and nauseating. Don’t watch it.

A colleague had a faulty SD card and wanted to get the photos off there, after trying a lot of different programs I found that the best photo recovery software was “Digital Photo Recovery” by Art Plus – it took a very long time to read the card, but it managed to get everything off there, about 300 photos where as other programs gave me 3!

Speaking of SD cards, I just bought a bunch of 2GB Sandisk MiniSd cards from ebay for $20 each. =) Wikipedia has quite an extensive page on SD cards, and hopefully I’ll be getting a 8GB SDHC card from yeahdone.com.au soon, I remembered when didn’t want to get a camera that used anything other than CF cards, but now those things look huge.

SD cards are a good size, the SD Duo cards that yeahdone sells looked good, but I found that they were a bad idea as you had the strangely shaped object which was hard to insert and remove from your devices, mini SD cards are still a decent size, micro SD cards are a somewhat too small, but because they’re a lot smaller than SD cards, the microSD to SD adaptors are a lot more solid than the miniSD to SD adaptors…

If you’ve been watching So you think you can dance you’ve probably “noticed” Allison Holker. Not only does she move in a brilliant way, and kick arse at pretty much every genre she gets, she is smoking hot.

However, if you think she’s the attractive one in the show, you are wrong. Every time I see Donyelle Jones I fall in love with her a little more. She’s got these electric grey eyes and this hot lip stud, and she can shake her arse like you would not believe. Moreover, she completely owns every genre she tries, and despite the fact that she’s a bit larger than the other contestants, she can move that weight, and that’s something worth seeing.

I mean, the very first time I saw her in the auditions these are the things that entered my mind, in order:

• Hmm.. she’s a bit big for a dancer. I’m thinking she’s one of the joke entries.. wha?
• HOLY SHIT the girl can move. Full credits++ girlfriend!
• OMGOMGOMG she’s beautiful.

I’ve been looking for pictures of girls to adorn my desktop wallpaper. Nothing overly naked or anything, but it’s gotta be a good pic. I couldn’t find anyone that looked really good. In the end I settled on a Brittney Murphy wallpaper because she’s probably the best looking girl I could think of at the time (and unfortunately, there aren’t many great Natalie Portman pics). Eva Mendes was an option, but she always looks better moving than not.

The same is true of Donyelle, but if someone made a high quality desktop wallpaper of her, it would be on my desktop so fast…

The only thing that trumps that is a pic of Holker’s Tango routine.

Paulo got a new camera along with some wide-ish lenses. Along with a blistering hot day and clear skies, I thought this would be a good time to try and take some photos of scenery and wide-ish shots in general. I had to use the lens that came with the camera, so I didn’t expect much, but I was hoping.

We started off in Narellan and moved out from there. We eventually ended up in a place called Cobbitty, which isn’t that far from where we live but it’s still a small town, based around one road named “Cobbitty Road”. Sydney uni has some veterinarian centre nearby. In any case, we saw some nice landscapes and couldn’t find a good place to park so we could take pics.

Eventually we got to a cul-de-sac and decided to park there (well, I did. Nathan’s basically a wuss who’s not happy with parking anywhere). We walked up and started taking pics (except Nathan who stayed in the car looking emo). As I was parking another car drove by into their drive-way, and paused briefly. I didn’t know the town was that small…

As we were taking pics, a cop car drove by. After taking a few more pics we decided to go back to the car and leave. As we returned Nathan (the lazy one) informed us that the cop had spoken to him. I didn’t believe him. As we were getting ready to drive off the cop walked up to the vehicle. The following is a dramatisation of the conversation that took place:

Me: Pigs... Cheese it fellas!
Harpy: take a chill pill, we ain't done nothin' wrong yet.
Me: Good point.
Copper: Hi fellas, can I see your license
(license transfer takes place)
Copper: Now tell me what y'all are doin' in mah town.
Me: Leave off, cat. What we're doing is our business.
Copper: You tell me here or in jail.[1]
Me: Ease off, we're just snappin' some happies.
Copper: What of? Nothin' t' see here fer miles.
Me: I'm an artist, man. You can't keep me in your boxes.
Copper: If there's nothing here what're you taking pictures of?
Me: Whatever catches my eye.
Copper: Whatever catches your eye?
Me: Yeah.
Copper: I'm not saying I don't believe you, but in this climate
of terrorism you can see how it's a bit strange for a bunch of
guys, one of who is clearly a lazy fag, to be taking pictures
of random stuff [2]
Me: You tellin' me this is illegal?
Copper: I'm tellin' you this is a small town.
Me: You gonna charge me?
Copper: Look, we're here 'coz a guy got his alarm set off, an d
you boys being in the area is mighty suspicious. If I were you I'd
high-tail it out of here.
Me: I was thinking the same thing...

Climate of Terrorism? I was certainly shocked to hear something like that. Climate of fear more like. Hey, I go to sleep easy. If you’re having trouble getting a good night on account of a couple of third-world retards who hate your guts, that’s your problem. It’s either some sort of shitty justification for interrogating us, or it’s a warning to stop taking pictures like we do in the future.

I vaguely considered asking him which it was, and whether he’d have questioned us at all if we were white. Some people are more afraid of the terrorists, I’m more afraid of the po-lice.

¹ In the dramatisation he uses the American spelling of Gaol.

² He did in fact, say this (except the lazy fag part).

Snot came out of my nose,
I licked it, it tasted salty.

I got food poi-son-ing
from Hungry Jacks,
I thought that I was going to

(bridge)
DIIIIIEEEEEEEEEE
yeah I was gonna DIIIEEEEEE
(bridge)

Shit came out of my ass[1]
After a lot of fuss,
I was CONSTIPATED,

(chorus)
No one else feels like I do,
I need constant attention to
cure my disease
no one else feels like I do,
And I'm the only person who
feels... this... way.
(chorus)

The doctor said I had a disease,
Didn't tell me the word but
I know it started with 'C'
sent me to a specialist,
who had no idea what I was talking

(bridge)
ABOOOOOOOOOOOUUUT
He had NO IDEA
(in BG) No one understands me
(bridge)

who else has balls
that chafe this way?
Who else has eyes
that don't shoot lazers?[2]

*chorus*

(bridge)
Nobody in the whole wide world
Nobody in the universe
I'm the only one that has
EMOOOOOOTIOOOOONSSSS
(bridge)

*chorus*

(Chorus)
Yeah no one else feels like I do,
I need constant attention to
fix all my problems
no one else feels like I DOOOOOO,
And there's NO ONE ELSE
(in the whole wide world)
Yeah NO ONE ELSE
(in the cosmos except for the black holes)
Yeah NO ONE ELSE
who feels... this... way.
(chorus)

¹ Saying things in an american accent makes it more emo!

² 10 points if you can tell me what the ‘z’ in lazer stands for.

The site is getting way too much Sunny-related content on it. In order to save us from this painful conundrum, I realised that it was time to talk about my (and your) favourite topic – me.

As you may or may not know (I can’t remember if I ever mentioned it), some time last year (or perhaps the year before) I visited a bone specialist about some pain I was feeling in my ankle. About half an hour later I had been told I was losing my ability to walk and had an appointment with a nearby radio-...something to see if I had CANCER. A few hours later it turned out that only one of these things was true. Here is a hint – I am not undead.

Up until recently, things were looking good. Althought the issues I was having with my ankles weren’t improving, they weren’t getting any worse either. Losing my mobility was something I was able to put into the back of my mind – something to worry about in 15-20 years and thus not something to worry about at all. Unfortunately a series of issues that have occured over the last few weeks to months have prompted me to make yet another visit.

The first issue is with my ankles. They have been getting “tighter” and I have found that I have lost even more range of motion compared to my last visit. Stairs are absolutely killing me.

Secondly, my knees just plain fucking hurt.

Problem the third, I have either a new or previously unnoticed tumour in the back of my upper left arm, which is where what I think is called the tricep. Ideally this is an old one that has escaped my notice since new tumours that occur after puberty generally mean the big “C” word. This has been causing some really intense pain when I move my arm in certain ways, particularly when the muscle is flexed (that is, picking up heavy things and the like).

Lastly, in what I think is related to the previously mentioned issue, but then I am no doctor, I am beginning to lose the feeling in my left hand. I can only assume this is because the growth in my arm is crushing a nerve or something like that.

I won’t know until I do see the specialist, but I am fairly certain that I can be expecting to have surgery done during the next few months. It is unlikely I will have anything done about my ankles or knees though. Although these weren’t the words he used last time I saw him, he explained to me that knees and ankles are “hard to fix and easy to fuck up”. Should it be that I do need something done, it would be my eleventh surgery. In a strange, demented way I look forward to another. I enjoy wearing short-sleeved shirts purely on the basis that people try their hardest not to look at or ask about the rather unique scars I already have on my arms, and more scarring can only make it more fun. Maybe I can tell girls that I received them by saving a stray dog from the jaws of a marauding lion?

What does bother me is the actual process of seeing a specialist. The actual doctor who was “responsible” for me has long since retired, and every person I’ve gone to since learns about my disease as I tell it to them. Indeed, my local GP that I have to go to first so I can get referred to the specialist knows more about my condition and my history with it than the specialist when I first saw him.

Now nobody fret! Nathan is not venturing into emo-land (I save that for the cameras). I will not be slitting wrists (cut along the vein damn it!) nor “going down to the la-li-lu-ra”. I am exactly the same person I always was, except now I can only hobble away from axe-murderers and pot-smoking girl scout leaders in the dark.

And so with me being a cripple, Tim the Hunchback of Notre Dame and Sunny an all-around spastic, this leaves Harpreet, Michael and Paulo as our fittest and most athletic of members. Pretty scary huh?

I was just looking through the ATO website thinking that figuring out tax stuff felt a lot like D&D, only there was:

• No DMG
• Very hard to find the tables.

If the ATO website was like D&D I’d have my taxes done so well they’d do 25d6 damage!

Fort save for half.

After five years of looking and thinking about it, I finally got my first SLR, the Pentax K100D, I had bought a Kodak P880, it was a bargain, it even came with a big flash gun for a mere $399. It had all the manual features and the lens even worked like a SLR, with zoom and focus rings, it has a nice zoom range, the photos it took looked fine, but it still wasn’t enough so back to Teds I went. Sometimes you don’t want to wait 25 seconds to write a full quality image to the memory card. And sometimes you don’t want to have the viewfinder go blank a while before the photo is taken.

I also bought a little Fuji F20 as sometimes you don’t want your SLR handing off your neck. I took some photos at Parramatta station and I was asked if I was a tourist! We played with it earlier and instead of getting a blurred image in low light, there’s what Sunny called a Max Payne look, photos will be uploaded one day..

Speaking of uploading, Picasa makes things so easy, it sees the photos, you select a bunch, click on upload to web, give it your google log in, the albumn title and off it goes.

Now who’s up for going for another trip out to take photos? =)

I recently purchased a new pair of trainers given my current pair were falling apart at the seams. What is of interest is that this time I ventured into The Athlete’s Foot and went through their “Fitprint” technology.

Basically it’s a device which measures pressure points on your feet and displays them on screen for your viewing pleasure. My findings were that I favor my right foot when it comes to supporting my body weight, with a percentage lean of 53% on my right foot and 47% on the left. And whilst walking I tend to favour certain toes and the inner curve of my heels to provide support.

With this new information – they were able to bring out shoes for my perusal that were more able to meet my support and comfort requirements. What should also be noted is the manner in which you tighten up your shoelaces for the best fit, care and time should be taken to snugly encompass your feet within the shoes so that they can provide maximum support.

When you consider how much stress and repetition cycles your feet go through every single day it really is unsurprising that we should purchase good shoes that ease said pressure.

I suspect my weight distribution bias is heavily influenced by the fact that my right testicle that much larger then my left. Myth feasible, but unlikely.

I have a tenuous relationship with the concept of wisdom. On the one hand, I accept that it exists (hell, if D&D thinks it exists, then it must, right?), and have even got some feeling about what it is. On the other hand, “Wis” in D&D only makes you good at being a cleric (who can’t actually heal people IRL), so the whole concept sounds like a lie. Also, it reeks of the bullshit of “you can only get wisdom through experience”.

The same arguement is used for project management. The “real truth” about PM is that “project management of one form or another is better than no project management at all, but we can’t measure what works, and why.” (sorry I can’t attribute that quote, but I think it was from a lecturer at uni teaching project management. It’s also paraphrased. In any case, the assertion is that you “learn from experience”. The reason I don’t like that idea is that:

• There’s no guarantee that you’ve actually improved with experience, you might just have learned to play the metrics.
• You can say that about anything – “We could teach you software engineering, but there’s really no effective way of doing that, so why don’t you just learn from experience.” It sounds like they’re just too lazy to pull out the intelligence from the wisdom, or the information from the data, if you will…

In any case, one of the big problems with “wisdom” as an idea is: how do you measure wisdom? Is it by being really good at trivia? If that’s the case then bring out any trivia master (e.g: the master on the Australian quiz show) and pit him up against little kids, asking questions about cartoons or video games. Ergo, kids are “wiser” than the master, which may not be a contradiction, but it’s certainly counter-intuitive.

However, I have always believed that “knowing the path is different to walking the path”. An example is the statement “You can’t play basketball against Ninjas”. This comes from a game, Mario Hoops 3 on 3 and I’ve heard this little nugget multiple times. If you read it without having played the game it’s “intelligence”. The statement is almost a direct logical consequence, practically meaningless – “Well der, of course you can’t play basketball against ninjas”. However, after having played the game, I’m sure it’ll mean a lot more. It then becomes “wisdom”. The act of having tried to play basketball against ninjas (and inevitably failed) has taught you… something.

How’s about another analogy: Intelligence is like a system, in which the whole is bigger than the sum of it’s parts. With intelligence, everything you know can be combined to create something better than each of the individual things you know. Wisdom might be like an anti-system, in which the whole is smaller than the sum of it’s parts. The reason it can’t be taught is that it’s practically useless (to tell, not to live). You might be able to fold it up into an entertaining story, but the story is just for the telling. It doesn’t actually contain anything that you can learn from. It may not even be possible to make the story interesting. However, it does give you an illumination on the whole that’s impossible with the crystallised intelligence found in textbooks.

And that’s why you’ll never understand the joys of monkey physics…

This last week started off very well, but has quickly deteriorated into a unpleasant cacophony in what should otherwise be melodic silence (oh I like these irrelevant allegories so).

So in the hopes of otherwise occupying my mind and regain some semblance of control, I will be undertaking a further experiment, this time involving the intake of food and it’s affect on the mind and body. So please do not be offended if I should happen to refuse eating / display erratic eating patterns when we are out and about socialising.

I had actually begun said experiments a few weeks earlier but have been lax on my willpower to continue in any strict adherance and so will attempt to start anew. Am looking forward to how it affects my energy levels, psychological mindset, immune systems (have already had some results indicative of a weakness) and most importantly how the body attempts to compensate for above changes.

Water is your friend.

A lot of people associate Anarchy with raping and pillaging, looting and burning. The thinking is that anarchists are raving lunatics who are looking for an excuse to pull out their weapons. Even phrases like “it’s total Anarchy out there!” are completely normal, which sets deep in our consciousness making us believe that Anarchy = pandemonium. Worse, anarchy is associated with the lack of a structure and a process.

Anarchy is technically a society without a hierarchy (or more specifically, without any sort of -archy). Err.. Seeing as I’m so fundamentally inept at explaining the basic concept, I’m going to go back to the tried and true method of referencing Wikipedia. Go read it, I will wait.

...

OK, so that’s anarchy right there (see the pun, because Wikipedia is also anarchic). The basic assumption behind anarchy is that if you get rid of the po-lice, people aren’t going to go nutso killing your farm animals and taking your hot wife on the table whilst eating your potato chips!. In any case, while I’m not sure if I could keep my hands off your potato chips if the po-lice weren’t here to stop me, I’m willing to accept that we’d probably get along OK as a society, given the following constraints:

• Process
• Structure

That’s right. In order for a stateless society to work, like NFS, you need to have certain rules, a process and a structure according to which people may live. In fact, for an anarchistic society to work, this process and structure has to be built really well. For this reason, I have always equated anarchy with process and structure (also raping and pillaging, but that’s society’s fault).

Amazingly, this is a view that is not shared by most of the god-fearing, prime-minister fearing, boss-fearing, terrorist-fearing fundies. However, I’m coming to the conclusion that once it becomes glaringly obvious, the fundies will catch on (and eventually tell me whether I’ve ever heard of LOONIX). The reason that this will become obvious is the following: That just as anarchy requires process, process & structure begets anarchy.

That is, a good process and good structure cannot exist until you begin to break down hierarchies, which are artificial and really only get in the way of process. The organisation I work for is not Anarchical by a long shot, but our delineation of a direct line of reporting has caused our processes to flower, and the existence of these processes stops the hierarchy from becoming a big factor in our lives. I think a lot of companies are doing this: they’re becoming flatter organisations

As soon as people begin to take advantage of these processes along the managerial chain (which some company is bound to do one of these days) then an even further flattening will begin to take place, and eventually a single organisation which owns the world (again, inevitable) will become an anarchy.

On that day, I’m gonna eat all your potato chips.

Looks like the flickr stuff is no longer compatible with flickr, so I’ll either have to sync with CVS, or fix the problems myself. In addition, I’m probably going to have to dump gravatar integration for something a little more scalable like pavatars. We’ll get around it by referencing our pavatar pages, but this would also take implementation, which takes time. Apologies.

So after finding out that you can no longer buy the battletech sourcebooks, I found that you can download the basic ones, as well as little tokens to play the basic game. Because we’ve pretty much stopped with the D&D, does anyone mind playing some battletech?

Me and some work friends often play DOW, and we play so often I wonder why we don’t form some sort of clan. It’s often cause for interesting discussion, and these can usually last for ages. Hell, as I type this, two guys are talking about DoW over in the next cube.

However, I think joining a clan with work friends would be pushing us over our nerd quota. After all, every other weekend we play Settlers of Catan, and more recently Carcassonne, NDS, and the Wii. Forming a clan, and actually discussing strategies on some organised scale would probably mean spending even more time with them, and that would mean spending every waking hour with them sans sleep (where I spend time with sweet sweet Kari).

So, with Harpreet’s announcement that he’ll be leaving WOW, I figure it’ll be useful to direct some of our energy to forming a clan, picking a game, and working at it until we completely own (and who knows, maybe go pro!). Doing this involves a lot of creative energy, organisation, discussion, technical writing, and various other IRL skills, not to mention a lot of gaming.

The point is to take it semi-seriously, and schedule some time around it. The game doesn’t really matter, so long as it’s got enough people playing it, and requires a fair bit of skill (so WoW is out). The genre is also open, so FPS, RTS, whatever. We can make logos!

How about it? Have I captured your imagination?

Much in the same manner that I decided to quit my job some years back, I have said my farewells and left WoW (yet again). The thought had been roaming my mind for a few days, the reasons for my coming back to the game slowly fading and my gaming experience becoming more convoluted with the passage of time.

Strangely enough, I have chosen quite possibly the worst time to leave this addiction, and find myself in quite a dilemna… roaming away the hours with the deafing silence of my restless mind. Unsurprisingly, everyone expects me to return within a few weeks, and why not? My history is indicative of an addictive nature, and the drug of choice seems to be gaming – leaning heavily upon the mmog market and the rpg genre.

I recall leaving Everquest so long ago, having convinced myself that my time was up, and shockingly I never returned. I can’t quite recalled how I passed away those few weeks / months before I found my next hit, WoW. I do however remember a self imposed experiment of not repairing my system when it broke down last year and spending a month without any gaming or form of escape whatsoever.

The results were very unpleasing and revealing of my inclination towards self demonising and destructive mentality (not manifesting in any physical format, purely physiological… i.e. I wasn’t suicidal). Now I haven’t ever been actually tested for depression, and believe I am using it a convenient disease to label myself with as it allows me to justify my weaknesses and gather unfounded compassion from others.

I have developed and actively garner a pessimistic outlook on life as it fits in with my particular experiences and learning curves to date. This also ties in with my longstanding defensive nature, in preparing a foundation from which to weather the storm rather then venture out and attack any given problem. The truth, as everyone knows… is that the storm never passes… only the perception of it changes between individuals. My perception is suitably tainted to cater to my inadequacies.

I can’t accurately imagine how I may react to this latest experiment and how it may affect those who are entwined in my life. It feels very alike to staring down the chasm of past failings, but I can’t deny the familiar comfort of something known and lived completely. This shall be very interesting – a shame then that I will be the only one able to enjoy the results.