… and the Sequel Too Many.
Well, maybe not - that title probably got ditched in the early phases of planning. Either way, yesterday I went to see the fourth Indiana Jones film (Kingdom of the Crystal Skull) and to be honest it wasn’t great.
It’s 19 years since Indy and his whip last got an outing, and Harrison Ford hasn’t aged too well in the mean time. He really looks old now, and as a result has been given a teenage sidekick for this film… not fantastic in my opinion
Now I’m not going to go into this too much, as I’m aware people will still want to see it, but there were moments of the film that made me go “wha… why?”. Sure, there were also moments that made me smile, and some that were exactly what I was expecting from an Indy film. Unfortunately there was also an over-abundance of CGI and where the previous films might have had some silly moments, this one took the entire pack of biscuits.
All in all it’s not great, and I’m hoping that they don’t make another one. Please. Stop screwing with my childhood film watching; you’ve already got to the Blues Brothers before this… and don’t even think about Back to the Future.
Tags: disappointing, Harrison Ford, Indiana Jones, Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, sequels
So, the training I’ve been doing at work has now finished and I’m at the start of my week off. This is the first time I’ve had off work since Christmas, and having been working the silly hours I was working on the project it’s somewhat strange.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m quite glad for the opportunity to relax and do next to nothing - it’s just somewhat of a shock to the system. I’m used to getting up early (and my body still hasn’t adjusted to the fact that I don’t have to) and then having to go to work, not getting up and pottering around the flat for however long I feel like. I guess part of me still wants to be in work, as I still have a strange urge to check my mail there.
Still, in a week I start with my new team in European Trading Renovation and I’m quite looking forward to it. In the meantime, I suppose I may as well put my feet up and relax.
Tags: holiday, project, training
As mentioned previously I spent a lot of this last weekend working, some of it from home. This is the first time that I’ve really spent time working when not in the office, and I’m sure it won’t be the last.
Working from home is an interesting experience for a number of reasons. The most obvious is the difference in surroundings, which brings about a whole different mindset. I found that it was a lot more relaxed working at home, and despite the distractions (such as the xbox and my DVD collection) remarkably productive. Perhaps this was because of the lack of other distractions (workmates asking me questions), or perhaps it’s just because I knew I needed to get stuff done.
Due to my desktop being hooked up to my TV, I actually decided to use my EeePC as the thinclient through which I would remote desktop into my machine in the office. This works remarkably well, especially once an external monitor and keyboard are connected, as I’ve just plugged in the Eee, removed the battery, and have a near-silent machine to use for work.
Unfortunately remote desktop, especially over Citrix, isn’t the best thing in the world; especially not for programming. A number of issues seem to be prevalent, especially with modifier keys such as shift. This doesn’t make things particularly easy, although I am getting used to using caps-lock again for writing things where capital letters are required. The latency on the connection isn’t always great either, with a noticeable lag between hitting a key and it appearing on the screen.
Of course being in the office has the advantage that you can more easily communicate with the people you are working with. Sure, I may have listed the lack of distraction from them as an advantage above, but there’s a bigger one in being able to quickly chat with someone and draw a diagram on a bit of paper - as opposed to either trying to describe it over the phone, or find some software to sketch it out on the PC with.
All in all, being able to work from home is a fantastic tool - especially in IT where things can go wrong at any time of night, and getting into the office might not be so easy. Of course, I’m hoping that that I won’t have to do that any time soon, but it’s always a useful ability to have. Admittedly living twenty minutes from the office means that I can get in quite comfortably, and for the majority of situations I’ll prefer to go into the office and use a real machine - if only to get around the aforementioned problems with latency and RDP over Citrix. I’m equally sure, however, that this weekend won’t be the last time I do a decent amount of work from home as something will inevitably come up that will ensure I need to.
Tags: citrix, communication, distractions, eee, remote desktop, working from home
For the last three months, I have been on the training programme at work, which is now coming to an end. As such we have been split into teams to work on projects that would usually take a couple of months to complete, and then given a little under a month to do them in. These projects are no joke, they’re real projects that the business want doing, and can have a real impact on the firm. As a result the pressure truly is on to deliver a working product at the end of it all.
This has resulted in a strange situation for me, where I’ve found that I’ve become addicted to doing the work. I spent the majority of this bank holiday weekend either in the office or working from home, and I have absolutely no problem with this. I even went so far as to be working at 1:30am on Monday morning, purely because I was awake and in the mood to do some work.
Now, some people would see this as being rather wrong, especially as I don’t get paid any overtime for doing this work. On the other hand, I have no problem with it, as I actually enjoy it (especially with the challenges involved in the project) and I knew what I was getting myself into when I applied for the job.
As the project deadline draws ever closer (the code freeze is in less than a week now) I suspect that I’ll spend even more time working on it, striving for perfection; and I have no problem with this. I’m not sure why I’m so keen at the moment, maybe it’s because I’m enjoying the project more because of the pressure, maybe I’ve just gone insane… who knows. All I know is that I’ve got a week off after the project is out of the way, and then I go into my job for the foreseeable future, where I can only hope that I retain the same enthusiasm as I currently have.
Tags: addictiveness, deadline, development, overtime, project, training
After months of hype, people complaining about violent games and stories in the national press about it; last week saw the release of Grand Theft Auto IV. Of course, as with most game franchises with numbers in the title, this isn’t actually the fourth in the series but the sixth - and the first not to be a Playstation exclusive upon launch (not including any portable formats).
The hype around the launch, including articles about it heading towards the fastest selling game ever (eclipsing last year’s new record breaker - Halo 3) lead to a lot of people pre-ordering, queues to get the game at midnight and people suggesting that there’d be no chance in hell of getting hold of a copy without a pre-order. Of course, this was all nonsense as I happily walked into a shop at lunchtime on Tuesday and picked up a copy with no problems whatsoever.
Eventually I arrived home and threw the disc into the Xbox, and away I went to Liberty City. For those who aren’t aware, Liberty City is modelled on New York; in a not-very-loose way. The names have been changed, but there’s no mistaking the Statue of Happiness for the Statue of Liberty, or Star Junction for Times Square (especially with the replica of one of the offices at work on it). This resemblance makes the game very interesting, especially having only visited New York within the past couple of months.
So far I haven’t managed to explore too much within the single player, as work has got in the way of playing, but what I have encountered has been good fun. Compared to Vice City, the last GTA game I played, the vehicle handling is much better, and the AI is also very good (with people getting out of their cars and running away if you point a gun at them). Another great new feature is the mobile phone, allowing you to call up your contacts to arrange things, prank call the police, and most crucially - get to the multiplayer.
GTA IV is the first of the GTA games to support multiplayer natively, although previous versions have seen the Multi Theft Auto mods add this to it, and despite it being a new venture for them it seems to work remarkably well. There are a number of different game modes, with different ones being suited to different numbers of players, and my only criticism would be that at times the areas seem a little too large when playing with 8 people.
All in all, GTA IV is one of the best games I’ve played, and with the mass of achievements available and stats being tracked left right and centre, I’m sure that I’ll be playing it for a while yet.
Tags: games, grand theft auto, gta, multiplayer, xbox
So, this week the new version of Ubuntu (and therefore Kubuntu) was released; version 8.04 LTS - aka Hardy Heron (and a variety of other names…). As a result I decided this weekend to update my desktop (previously running Gutsy Gibbon) to this using the update manager.
Previous updates haven’t gone so well, and last time the update manager crashed out during the upgrade; leaving in place some stuff that caused my machine not to boot until I managed to track down the cause and uninstall it from a maintenance prompt. This time, however, things seemed better and the upgrade went without a hitch… until I rebooted.
It was at this time that I discovered that no longer were my drives appearing as /dev/hd<foo><bar>, but as /dev/sd<baz><gaz>. This wouldn’t have been a problem, had I been using my drives by uuid in /etc/fstab. I wasn’t, and this is probably my fault as they were updated during the edgy upgrade but I changed the file and got rid of them somewhere between edgy and feisty.
So, after some jiggery pokery I got that problem solved and my machine was back up and booting, although I can’t seem to find my DVD drive anywhere in /dev, and a post on the ubuntu forums suggests that some drives might not be compatible with things (who wants to bet that mine is one of them).
This aside I’ve not had any problems so far. I’m still running KDE3, so can’t comment on the KDE4 variant, and haven’t played around with the desktop effects stuff. One thing that I did notice, however, was the decision to ship with Firefox 3 beta 5 by default, which most of the plugins I use don’t support. This was soon fixed by reinstalling Firefox 2 and manually updating the symlink in /usr/bin (as for some reason it doesn’t use /etc/alternatives unlike a lot of other applications).
All in all this has gone pretty smoothly… although it could have been better, and I would like my DVD drive to work at some point (although I only really used it for watching films, which I can do on the xbox instead now)
Tags: gutsy gibbon, hardy heron, kubuntu, linux, upgrade
Congratulations to the guys responsible for the redesign of Dilbert.com, not only does it now take forever to load with the mass of flash and other nonsense that has been dumped on it, but the comic doesn’t display (using either Firefox or Opera on Linux with the latest flashplayer). It somewhat defeats the point of a comic site and this whole thing looks like the idea of some sort of PHB, so I wonder if the irony will be apparent to them.
Tags: broken, dilbert.com, fail, flash, web2.0
On Friday my time in the United States came to an end and I departed at 9am (getting up at 5am wasn’t fun) and flew back to London. This time there was no free upgrade, and while I tried to get an exit row seat for extra legroom I couldn’t (at least without paying) so I was stuck with an aisle seat in economy.
Fortunately this wasn’t as bad as I was expecting as I was able to stretch out into the aisle a little and didn’t have to fold myself up too much. Additionally the small child that was seated a few rows in front of me was well behaved so I didn’t have to put up with a screaming kid all the way home, which was nice.
Now I have to get used to the little things in London again. Night buses instead of trains, using my oyster card rather than my metrocard (and not having to worry about topping it up manually) and the differences with the etiquette in bars with respect to tipping. I’m sure I’ll soon slip back into the usual ways though.
For now, however, it’s time to get on with the mass of unpacking and washing that I need to do before work starts again on Tuesday.
Tags: london, Virgin Atlantic
This last week saw Bear Stearns, a US bank, fall into the same situation as Northern Rock in the UK and require a cash injection from the Fed (with JP Morgan Chase being involved at some stage in this, although a couple of us at work couldn’t quite work out how).
Well, I guess we can see where JPM were getting involved now, as today it’s hit the press that they are to buy out BSC for just $2 a share. This is a fraction of the price that BSC were trading at at the close of business on Friday ($30 a share, which was a 47% loss on Friday alone).
This is going to particularly hurt people, such as English billionaire Joe Lewis who owned 7% of BSC, which he had picked up at a cost of $860m, back when the share price was over $100… so I’m sure that that will sting a bit. Of course, he’s a billionaire who now lives in the Bahamas so it can’t be going too badly for him.
It’s interesting to see that this situation was solved much faster than the equivalent Northern Rock situation in the UK, which dragged on for months before the government finally decided to nationalise the bank, and it’s probably going to be for the best that the situation has been resolved sooner rather than later, although we’ll see what happens with the markets when they open.
Tags: banks, Bear Stearns, credit crunch, Fed, finance, JP Morgan Chase, Northern Rock, sub prime
Given that this is the start of my final few days here in the United States, I figured it time for another blog (that and I’m avoiding revising for the Java test tomorrow morning).
The last couple of weeks have flown by, and I’ve got up to a fair amount of stuff, including going to the previously mentioned NBA game between the New Jersey Nets and the San Antonio Spurs, which was good fun. I also went to an NHL game between the New Jersey Devils and the Tampa Bay Lightning, which was more fun as the crowd seemed to get into it more and while the basketball had a couple of moments of skill, the hockey game was far more entertaining overall (especially with there being a couple of fights).
Last weekend I also managed to finally do some sightseeing, taking a wander around Manhattan to see a number of the landmarks - although I still haven’t done all of them, or any of the museums, and that’s not likely to change any time soon.
I’ve also fully experienced the problem of being a guy trying to go out in New York when a few of us were told it would be $700 for the 6 of us (3 guys and 3 girls) to go into the club… needless to say we declined and went elsewhere which was far cheaper and probably better.
Still, I suppose I best do some work and maybe head to the office as part of that.
Tags: Basketball, Ice Hockey, NBA, New Jersey, New York, NHL, United States