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Metroid Prime

Yay! I just finished Metroid Prime earlier this evening. It’s an amazing game, and I’m pretty sure I’m going to have to add it to my all-time favourites list.

The visual design of the world is astonishing, the music is fabulously atmospheric, the puzzles are accessible without being overly simple, and the reward structure is brilliantly judged to keep you playing just that little bit more. The enemies throughout the game become increasingly tough, but the learning curve is tuned to help you get past them before they become frustrating. The bosses are bosses are tough–as they should be–but rarely do you get the impression that they’re impossible. It’s always a case of, “if I just try it one more time, I’m sure I can beat it!”

When I bought our Gamecube back in March, it was Mario Sunshine and Super Monkey Ball 2 that were the compelling reasons to buy it. Well, the Monkeys are up on eBay right now because they’re so damn frustrating, and Mario is coming dangerously close to that same fate. Just like with Super Mario 64, we’ve got to a point where it feels like a chore to have to get the next gold star/shine/silly-ass flying pig to progress to the next stage.

But Metroid Prime? That ought to have been the real reason I bought the ‘Cube. My thumbs still hurt, but it’s the pain of satisfying accomplishment.

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Diet, end of week 4

I’m down below 71kg now, despite having been a bit naughty yesterday. It was my dad’s birthday, and we all went out for lunch at Grape in St. Andrew Square. I couldn’t resist their burgers.

On the other hand, I only ate about a third of the frites that came with it, and finishing the burger actually turned out to be a struggle. I’m just not used to eating so much food any more. It kept me full up for the rest of the day, too. In the evening I wasn’t hungry at all, and all I ended up eating was some pineapple and yoghurt.

We’re off to Rome on holiday in a week and a half. Although my long-term goal is to get down to 67kg, in the short term I’d like to be down at 70kg for Rome. (Because its’ extremely likely that we will not be doing diet eating while we’re there. Going to Italy and not eating lots of yummy Italian food? Yeah, right.)

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Barenaked

If you’re a fan of the Barenaked Ladies, you’re missing out if you’re not reading their blog. The guys are in the studio recording their new album right now, and they’re posting little stories, anecdotes and ramblings about how that’s going on. They’re also uploading cool photos, video clips (have a look at “Ed Robertson, Father of Ragtime Piano”), and instructions on how to fold paper airplanes.

On a separate but related note, something finally makes sense to me: why the Barenaked Ladies had a guy in a chef’s outfit playing shakers on stage with them on the Maroon tour. It’s all to do with their video for “Pinch me”, which I hadn’t seen until today. I’ve just been watching the “Barelaked Nadies” DVD, which my parents brought back for me from their trip to Florida. (I had thought it wasn’t available here in the UK, but that’s because Amazon.co.uk has it misfiled.) It’s a collection of their music videos, and some live footage. It also features the band giving commentary on the videos. Very cool.

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The evolution of personal audio

I have fond memories of my first personal stereo. I got it as a present from my parents in about 1985. It was a brick of a machine. I think it was a Sharp. It had a shoulder strap rather than a belt strap, and it was my faithful companion on my Thursday afternoon newspaper round. As I stalked down the streets, green plastic case full of newspapers on one shoulder, the walkman would rhythmically bang up against my other side.

Most of the time I would listen to the radio rather than tapes. From about 4 to 7 o’clock on I’d listen to to the Top 40 on Hilversum 3, followed by “De LP-Show”, which played cool album tracks that otherwise wouldn’t have got much airplay. There are a number of songs that bring back very vivid pictures of Voerendaal whenever I hear them: “Sign O The Times” by Prince, “Dance Little Sister” by Terence Trent D’Arby, “Ship Of Fools” by World Party, “Criticize” by Alexander O’Neal, and almost anything by Luther Vandross.

Wow…nostalgia trip.

Continue reading “The evolution of personal audio”

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Email problems

Our email is toast again. Interestingly, though, giant rodents are helping to fix it. From Telewest’s incident status page comes this news:

“The new hardware and the mailstores have now been installed and performance tuned. The new E420RS boxes have been introduced. The result is that we have processed half the queue overnight as we are delivering at an increased rat.”

What does the rat do with all the mail that’s being delivered at it, though? I hope it doesn’t nibble any bits off of all the backlogged email.

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Firewire is cool

For a couple of years now we’ve had an external USB drive enclosure. We bought it originally for our CD-writer, so that we could easily move it between our PCs. Unfortunately, burning CDs proved to be totally unreliable through the USB connection. So we put a spare hard disk in it instead, and used it for backups, and for shuttling large files to and fro. (We have a wireless network here at home, but sometimes it’s useful to be able to move large quantities of data between home and work, and a USB hard drive is really useful for that.)

The downside of USB is that it’s really quite slow. It’s fine if all you’re doing moving is a couple of megabytes, but anything beyond that gets kinda painful. Which is probably why I haven’t been using it for backups quite as often as I ought to.

But over the weekend I bought a Firewire hard disk enclosure on Ebay. Firewire is some 40 times faster than USB, and boy does it show. The unit arrived this morning. I stripped the 80GB disk out of the old USB enclosure, strapped it into the (sleek, shiny) Firewire enclosure, turned it on, and there it was. Windows XP has all the necessary drivers built in, and the disk appeared instantly. To check that it was working, I copied a 100MB file over to it…in just a few seconds. Wow.

The new enclosure is also much quieter than the old one, because it doesn’t have a fan built in to it, so there’s no problem with leaving the drive switched on all, or most of the time. Now all I need to do is get some backups scripts going… (If anyone can recommend a good, simple backup utility for Windows, I’d be most grateful.)

Oh, and one other thing: don’t even think about going to PC World (or Dixons) to buy a Firewire cable. The cheapest ones they have will set you back £20. Twenty quid. Do a search for “firewire cable” on Ebay, and grab one for under a fiver.