Colossal squid blog

Here. Last I saw they were looking at the brain!

Officially Windows-free

Yep, you heard me, Windows-free. And what, you may ask, could the possible cause for this radical state of being?

I turned on my Toshiba laptop over the weekend (actually just to shut it off, as I saw it was sitting in sleep mode), and was immediately presented with a spybot message to the effect of ’something trying to change my registry settings, did I want to proceed?’ Of course not. After sending the pop-up on its way, I was presented with another. And another. And another. I checked the little ‘remember my response’ checkbox, and sat, open-mouthed, as the thing spat out pop-up after pop-up: ‘registry change denied’. I watched it for a few minutes before dragging my eyes away.

Well, that wasn’t the end of the world (though I’d be damned if I was going to connect it to the internet). It’d been years since I’d reformatted the beast, and to be honest, I’d been thinking about doing it for a while. I’ll just get my recovery discs and…

I couldn’t find them. Anywhere. They weren’t in any of my boxes of software. They weren’t floating around in the basement in another box. I found the recovery discs for the M30 that was stolen, but for the life of me, the M40 recovery discs had vanished.

Ah, well, s’ok. I’ll just, for the time being, install Windows 2000. I HAVE those discs. May as well use them, right? Oh. Not backwards compatible. I guess that makes sense. I’ll just reboot to DOS and…

Ah.

I’ll just google (on the mac) and see what other people do when they need to re-format their drive from WinXP…

Ah.

In the meantime, the pop-up ‘registry change denied’ boxes are flashing away on the screen…

I wound up downloading all 700 MB of Ubuntu on the mac, burning it to disc, and then updating the BIOS boot order to hit the DVD first.

Ubuntu installed like a dream, behaved itself, and looks awesome. I’ll probably have to dual boot when it comes time to try and get Spore to run on my machine, but for the time being I’m malware free. Yippee!

Lest you think that was the end of my computering woes, think again! I’ve also been having problems with my TimeMachine backup that I set up on an external HD. For the last week or so, whenever I plug it into the mac, it chugs and whirs, and the little TimeMachine logo spins around, displaying ‘preparing to backup’. Then nothing. It sits there, going round and round, for hours. Nothing happens, the status never changed from ‘preparing to backup’.

OK, I’ll just open the disk utility and suss things out from there. No luck. It takes an hour for the thing to actually detect the external drive (little spinny progress icon working away), and then errors when I try to either validate the disk or erase it altogether. Plugging it into Steve’s laptop doesn’t work, as Windows doesn’t even detect the drive.

Bada-bing, Ubuntu to the rescue! Even though I’ve never used Linux before in my life, after spending a few minutes on the Ubuntu forums, I’ve equipped myself with a few basic terminal commands, and hey presto, a Fat32 partitioned disk ready for action.

Plugged that into the mac, which prompted me to re-format it (finally!). And TimeMachine has never worked so well.

Time’s top 100 novels

here.

I’ve only read 31 of them.

A writing post

I’ve been snorting all week over the Miss Snark blog. She’s a literary agent who tells it like it is, and even though she’s stopped posting on her blog, the archives are still good value. Poor lady, she actually gets submitted gems like:

TITLE is written in the spirit of such books as Kerouac’s ON THE ROAD, Milton’s PARADISE LOST and Dante’s INFERNO.

Gaa.

I’ve been reading some of the workshops from the Holly Lisle webpage too, and can’t recommend them enough. The workshop on creating conflict encouraged me to subject a few of my characters to the torture, and it’s really helped clarify some of my ideas.

I’ve also recently joined the kiwi writers forums. They seem like a nice bunch of lads over there.

I don’t know if this is interesting to anyone, but I’ve had a huge rethink on the story (too scary to call it a novel, though that’s what it is), and, twenty-five pages in, I’m scrapping most of what I’ve written, but at least I know what I want to do with the whole first chapter. I’ve kicked off the opening scene with a riot, instead of my protagonist waking up early and making a cup of tea. Yes, the riot scene does involve the tea-drinking character, though I have given her a good kick up the bum and she’s now more stroppy than the one in the first twenty-five pages. Hallelujah!

I’m writing with Scrivener, which I’m enjoying, in the way it allows me to write scenes separately if I like, rather than looking at everything in one blobby document. I think you could go a bit overboard with the planning though, and limit yourself to scenes you’ve already blocked out on the corkboard. That said, my first draft is actually being written in a notebook, so I’m trying to keep things fluid.

It’ll be interesting to see how it works when it comes time to edit. I think breaking a document up into bite sized scenes at least lets you focus on just one area, rather than getting overwhelmed by a huge document with hundreds of pages, that you have to scroll up and down in to find characters, names, places and scenes. Once I’ve finished my basic rough draft of this novel, I’m considering importing my NaNoWriMo novel, breaking it up, and having a bash at making it respectable.

We’ve got a lovely long weekend coming up - Anzac day’s tomorrow. Steve & I are going up the coast to show his house to someone who might be interested in buying. We’re also picking up the Hebel that’s going to make up the surround for the gas fire in the lounge. I have a game to review, that unfortunately from all accounts doesn’t sound incredible: Ratchet & Clank: Size Matters. And I’m going to try and finish that first chapter…

Turkey City Lexicon

Lovely list of things to avoid (and a few to aspire to), from sfwa.

Youngme Nowme comp at Color Wars

Simon sent me this link today… it’s so cool. People recreating photos of themselves when they were younger.

Pootling along

Today really has been a bit of a pootler. You know, you cruise along, tinkering here, pottering there. I have a little work to do this week, which I’m hoping will keep the PMs off my back (got a lot of grief for my lack of productivity last week, even though everyone knew about it and I was asking around for work). The joys of an office job, eh?

So, I’ve done my little thing of work today, and there may be more coming in at some point, but that’s all the universe seems to want to allocate to me today. In any case, I’ve really been enjoying the new Evernote beta, which I signed up for a while ago. I like the way it’s cross-compatible with Windows (at work), Mac (at home), and even mobile (though not my mobile) - and it all squidges in the middle with the web app. (I also am particularly impressed with the search function’s abillity to detect writing in images.) If you’d like to have a try, let me know and I’ll send you an invite. I’ve got 10 up my sleeve. (Though there are probably invites floating around everywhere.)

Not much writing lately - reviews and previews have been pretty thin on the ground lately, and though I did get away at lunch yesterday for some more work on my long-suffering novel, all the ado at our house has been re: renovations, painting, stripping walls, insulating, ripping up carpet and the rest. It’s really starting to look good now though, and the cold weather that’s creeping up on us all in the southern hemisphere New Zealand (it’s still damn hot in Australia) makes me thank all that is holy that we’ve already insulated the ceiling.

I’ve also taken the plunge and volunteered to make the curtains for the house - roman blinds, cotton on one side, blackout thermal on the back. Hopefully will keep us toasty. There are great tutorials for them all over the show. (I got the blackout material from TradeMe, and the cotton from Superbuzzy.) Will let you know how they work out (ulp)!

Renovations

Well, busy little bees we have been around here, what with picking paints, getting lovely new scotias from Carrara ceilings as well as paint from Resene & Dulux. You can see the scotia a little better here:

It took us a while, but we’ve finally decided on the following colours for our house:

Wright hill (Dulux) - spare room

White Island (Dulux) - lounge

White Island quarter (Dulux) - hall & main bedroom

Paris White (Resene) - study

I don’t know how good these colour chips come out compared to the paint itself. Paris White has been in my study for a good while now, and I still love it. It’s a peaceful, soft, bluey-green.

So far this weekend we’ve finished painting the ceiling and scotias, and are just making a start on the spare room. Wright Hill is an interesting green colour - I’ll post pics when it’s done.

Not a lot else going on - had pottery this morning, the last class of the semester. I had eleven pieces to glaze! Unfortunately, I’m not able to pick them up until the start of next semester - May the 10th.

We’ve got a massive pile of catnip at the moment - from Mum. We planted most of it, but the semi dead stuff that was left got thrown onto the path in the back yard, and immediately pounced on by Sooty and his mate from down the road, Indy.

Sims 3 First Look

Hey, so my ‘Sims 3 first look’ preview is up on NZGamer at the moment (here).

Tristan also is going to be interviewing some of the top Sims brass (including Rod Humble!) and asked if I had any questions for them. This is what I sent:

As shown in both sims city societies, and the glimpses we’ve seen of the sims 3 and spore, it appears that there is (and has been) a definite shift away from the number-crunching side of Sim gaming to a ‘fuzzier’ style of gameplay that puts greater emphasis on the communal,social experience. Has this been an intentional change of direction, or is our gameplay style just changing?

Along those same lines, do you see the paths for The Sims, Sim City and Spore games ever ultimately converging?

In previous interviews you’ve mentioned that with the large pool of personality types, players can come up with some interesting combinations that often result in unpredictable emergent behaviour in the neighbourhood. What are some of the stranger examples you’ve seen?

Since the entire neighbourhood will be running mostly without the direct influence of the player, can we expect the AI of other sim families to be more sensible so they can look after themselves (go to the toilet, or even to work) without intervention? To what degree will Sims on a player’s periphery (i.e. ones they’re not playing directly with) behave autonomously?

We’ve just heard that The Sims 2 has hit the 100 million mark! This is great news (Sims fans are going to take over the world someday), but do you find With so many fans, it becomes more difficult to to try and experiment with the model rather than just giving players whatever they want? We really can be pretty rabid at times.

We’ve noticed that a lot of features that came with Sims 2 expansion packs seem to appear in the base Sims 3 game, such as gardens and weather. Are these just artistic representations of the game, or will the base game really have all of this built in? Speaking of expansions, will The Sims 3 expansion pack model be the same as The Sims 1 and 2?

The Sims bodies and faces we’ve seen in screenshots look fantastic, and you wouldn’t believe (actually, you probably would) the number of people who are excited about being able to create fat sims! Unfortunately there didn’t seem to be any vampires, werewolves, zombies or plantsims among them. Will the Sims 3 be keeping any of our supernatural friends, or do you have some other surprise in store for us?

Rabid, fannish-type questions:

The realtime aspect of the game is also really exciting. Have you seen any unexpected ways of playing with this new feature? Would buildings such as hospitals and apartments be possible now?

Before The Sims 2 was released, a standalone Create-a-Sim was released. Will you be doing this for The Sims 3 as well?

Will The Sims 3 retain the standard ‘work’ model, or has this been revamped?

Will The Sims 3 see the return of Mark Mothersbaugh? (Please say yes.)

Will the Goth family return to the game?

I’m sure it’ll all be made more ‘flowy’ for interview purposes, but it could be a nice opportunity to find out more about the game and share with everyone. I’ll make sure to post the interview once it’s published.

Hamlet - the text adventure!

Here.

Poetry

The craft of poetry, and different forms, here.

Elena Filatova

A trip through Chernobyl and Belorussia, by a very brave lady on a Kawasaki.

edit: OK, so she didn’t ride around on the kawasaki. I like the photos though, dammit - even if they’re not all hers.

Hey cool, I match the Dalai Lama

http://politicalcompass.org/

Cat-like aliens

…have their own entry in Wikipedia.

more Moleskines

at 43 folders.