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Fun With Cellphone Cameras, 2010 Edition. Office dreariness... More tomorrow. -q- comments[3] | rss	Posted by: quinn 2010/02/04 13:35
C O O K I E. All bow to the awesomeness of the Colossal Chocolate-Chip Cookie! -q- comments[2] | rss	Posted by: quinn 2010/02/02 09:47
Huzzah For NoWire. One of the things I'd been meaning to start up here on the blog was a vaguely weekly grumpy-ranting session about whatever person/company/organisation was inflicting its monumental incompetence on my life at the moment. After some thought I realised two things: (a), given the state of customer service in SA and the world at large, I would be writing about fifteen blog entries an hour for the rest of my life and still falling behind, and (b), ranting about things that go wrong is less productive than complimenting things that go right. With that in mind, I decided to rather focus on the good stuff that I've encountered and leave the bad stuff to HelloPeter; they're better at it than me anyway. The first Huzzah award for 2010 goes to NoWire, the ISP I've been using for iBurst internet access for the last couple years. Last tuesday, we got back from our holidays to discover that the iBurst modem had packed up. I dithered around a bit for a couple of days trying to get it working myself, to no avail. Finally in despair I called NoWire and explained my woes, expecting to be put on hold, dicked around, hung up on, etc etc. What I did not expect was what actually happened, i.e. that within a couple of hours they'd sent a courier service to collect the modem and cart it back to their service center in Pretoria, where they tested it, fixed the offending part, and couriered it back to me this morning. They did this all free of charge, and were quite apologetic that it took so long and I had to go more than a day(!) without internet access. Bear in mind that I called them on a friday morning, in the first week of the new year, and got the repaired modem back the following monday morning. Well done chaps. You get to hold on to the floating Virtual Huzzah Trophy for the week! More tomorrow. -q- comments[0] | rss	Posted by: quinn 2010/01/11 11:32
New Decade Fun! 2010! Hooray! We're shot of that horrible nameless decade that people desperately attempted to name the "oughties", or, even more desperately, the "naughties". Of course, we now have the problem of what to call this lot coming up. "Teens" conjures up far too many images of rebellious misguided youth (whippersnappers!). I think we should take the lead of Terry Pratchett and the Chinese and start using animal names. "Decade of the Blobfish" has a nice ring to it. Yes, so, it's been some time since I posted anything here, for a number of reasons. Some of them are even good reasons, I'll have you know. First and foremost is that I've been ill with a nasty dose of gastritis and stomach ulcers for the last three or four months. My doctors are at a bit of a loss to explain what's causing this, as I hardly have the most stressful life in the world, don't smoke, generally eat well, etc etc. Anyway, so it goes. Various medications, all with their own slew of delightfully unpleasant side effects, are in the process of being tried, along with the blandest diet known to man. For someone who loves their food and wine this is like being sentenced to the Gulag. With no shoes. In the middle of the Siberian winter. Also, ravening wolves are chasing you and there is a rule that you have to hop on one leg. Sigh. The holidays were a good opportunity to get some changes of scenery. G and I headed down to Cape Town for my graduation to PhD, for which I was made to wear a robe and hat of quite remarkable silliness (rest assured gentle reader, Gaby got plenty of photos in between uncontrollable bouts of giggling) and sit in the heat of a sweltering summer day for three hours. I sound like I'm grumbling but part of me loves all the antiquated ceremonial folderol that goes with things like graduations; it's a bit like being inducted into a not-so-secret society, complete with special handshakes and codewords and whatnot. And, of course, the foolish outfits. We had a quick change back in Joeys, swapping beachwear for, um, beachwear, before departing for Durban. On the way down we stopped off at the Cavern in the northern 'berg for a brief stay with the family Robinson, which proved entertaining as usual. The scenery around the Cavern offers some fantastic hikes, though we limited ourselves to the shorter ones due to the verticality of the terrain and the midsummer heat of the days. Xmas and New Year were spent down in Durban with my folks, the best B&B in town. We get special "discount family rates", of course; a few easy payments of tech support are usually all it takes to settle the bill :). The Durban weather has become notoriously inclement in december/january over the last few years, and didn't disappoint - we had a handful of brutally hot and humid summer days interspersed with plenty of rain which, though it limited the beach time, cooled things off and was actually rather pleasant and relaxing. A lot of doing nothing was tempered with long walks on the beach, good company, and a lot of delicious rich food (or staring wistfully at delicious rich food, in my case). It was a good time. Photos? I have some, multivarious in nature. They will need sorting, fiddling, beautifying. I will do this, and get back to you soon. Be good, and do something unexpected today to usher in the Decade of the Blobfish... -q- comments[0] | rss	Posted by: quinn 2010/01/06 14:59
More Fun With Cellphone Cameras. The much belated sequel! -q- comments[2] | rss	Posted by: quinn 2009/11/25 13:54
Fun With Cellphone Cameras. The best camera is always the one you have with you. Here are some snaps taken with the crappy camera on my cellphone (Nokia N51) while out on my daily wanderings, processed a little to get them to black & white. Looks like I was particularly interested in lines today :) More tomorrow. -q- comments[2] | rss	Posted by: quinn 2009/10/16 13:07
Reading Drought. Bah. I've run out of good books while I wait for Kalahari to source some obscure stuff for me, and have been reduced to rereading my dog-eared old Pratchetts to fend off boredom. Hence, a question for you, dear readers: what have you read lately (or not-so-lately) that you can recommend? I'm particularly partial to science fiction and its various allied subgenres, but I'm willing to try anything that grabs the imagination regardless of what pigeonhole people want to put it into... -q- comments[7] | rss	Posted by: quinn 2009/10/14 11:52
Terry. We had an amusing dinner conversation the other night, during which our hosts related an anecdote about how they'd met Terry Brooks and his wife while on a holiday to Japan and had no idea who he was. They became firm friends for the rest of the trip, probably due to the fact that they were the only ones whose jaws hadn't hit the floor when he told them his name. Anyway, it got me thinking that the fantasy genre tends to attract a disproportionate number of Terries. Terry Brooks, Terry Goodkind, Terry Pratchett spring immediately to mind, and I'm sure there might be others... odd :) -q- comments[0] | rss	Posted by: quinn 2009/10/01 10:06
New Hat. After I expressed an interest in fedoras, Gaby procured me an awesome new hat. Here it is! It's awesome. Capisce? -q- comments[2] | rss	Posted by: quinn 2009/09/06 13:01
The Free Lunch Is Over. Get Out, You PC Bums. I've been slowly drifting out of the world of PC gaming over the last few years. I still fire up the odd round of Quake or UT now and then to blow off some steam, but it's been more than three or four years since I looked at a game release and thought "crap, I have pre-order that!", or better yet, "crap, I have to upgrade my machine and THEN I have to pre-order that!". The fun of slapping together components on a tight budget and carefully tuning them to eke every last frame per second out of that latest title used to be a huge and integral part of the experience. In those three or four years though, something's changed. Something that used to be fundamental to the marketing machine of developing and selling games. The ancient art of the free demo has died a quiet death. I'm serious. In the last couple of years the development focus of a huge fraction of game studios has swung from "PC first, and yeah then maybe a console port" to "Consoles first, and aw geez, do we really have to do a PC version?" It's something people like Carmack et al have been predicting for a long time; the huge attraction for the developer is the guaranteed stability of console hardware, and the switch was always going to happen as soon as a significant fraction of the game-buying population had a console in their house. Checking out the demo used to be a surefire way of deciding whether or not to drop a few hundred bucks on a game - no more. A whole slew of recent games have either had no demo at all, or demos released so late that there's little point (if the dev can't be bothered to launch a demo until more than a year after the game's release date, I can't be bothered to give them any of my precious bandwidth). Perhaps I should just cave in and get an Xbox, but to be honest I'm more likely to spend my free time hacking up some photo edits than fragging bad guys these days. So it goes, but I can't help but feel a bit nostalgic for the time you could get your demo fix for anything that was on the shelf in your local computer shop... -q- comments[5] | rss	Posted by: quinn 2009/09/05 15:44

This webspace is maintained by Quinn Reynolds 10th March 2010