Cheese Cam

David has just sent me this. Yum.

The Apprentice and bad hearing

"The Apprentice" has started again. This is a gameshow/reality TV thing where a bunch of people pretend to be interested in working for Sir Alan Sugar whilst playing to the camera as much as possible and preparing for a career in daytime TV. But it is quite compulsive viewing.

I had a weird moment where I thought I heard the announcer say "..all the contestants are competing for a single bacon seat...". I had just conjured up this a very strange vision of what they were after when I realised I had misheard.

Twitterified

Interesting. On the day that the papers are talking about how people are stopping blogging I find a new thing which takes the art of blogging to a new level.

The new thing is Twitter. This is kind of "blogging on speed". You post on Twitter what you are doing at regular intervals, short sharp messages that keep all your Twitter friends informed of where you are. I've not yet seen a Twitter post that says "going to the toilet" but I'm sure there is one somewhere.

I can see this as being great for students, and those with more than one friend. You could be continually in touch, a kind of message based digital herd. I'm not convinced that it will be much use for me.  Thinking of something pseudo-witty to say once a day is hard enough. Doing it every twelve minutes would probably cause my brain to melt.

Having said that, TwitterVision, a mashup where you can see posts from people appearing on a map of the world, is compulsive viewing. And I will be posting live reports from the Imagine Cup finals tomorrow and Friday on my Twitter account, it should be perfect for that.

Tennis with Zombies

Tonight we finally got around to playing Sega Virtua Tennis on the PS3. It is really fun. We started off playing singles, but after number one son had beaten me a couple of times I figured it was time to move on. So we had a go at doubles. We squared off against a couple of computer controlled players who wiped the floor with us. So, in an attempt to make our game easier, we turned one of the computer players into a girl and tried again. And they wiped the floor with us once more.

The game is tough. Getting the ball back over the net is not that hard. Getting it back in such a way that your computer controlled (or otherwise) opponent can't then immediately smash it past you is a bit more tricky.

I was especially interested in the graphics of the game. It is one of the few that runs in the highest resolution mode that the PS3 supports. And it looks jolly good. The various locations are rendered with loving care, and the crowd looks amazing, with hundreds of individually animated people watching intently as you blast the ball out of the back of the court.

The only real problem I've noticed is that the players, although wonderfully rendered and with fantastic motion capture, have a strange, unearthly pallor which makes them look to me a bit like the undead. Not that I've seen many undead up close you understand, but I've watched a lot of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, if that counts.

I know that drawing people is really hard, and that this is state of the art. I've noticed a similar effect in other computer generated content that tries to depict real people and I'm not sure what can be done about it. To my mind the simple cartoon graphic faces of the players in the Tennis game in Wii Sports look more "human" than the beautifully drawn players in this game.

What I really want I suppose is a game with the depth and visuals that Sega has, but with the warmth, character and easy controls that Wii Tennis gives you.  But in the meantime, I think that Sega Tennis is going to provide quite a bit of fun.

Update on Wednesday, March 28, 2007 at 09:22PM by Rob

I've been asked to make it clear that when we made our game "easier" by adding a lady player to the opposition, we lost by an even wider margin.Go girls.

Back on the 'phone...

I'm moved to wonder if people really care that I'm now using a Smartphone instead of a Pocket PC. Then again, I do see myself as a beacon of light, shining upon the path to gadget heaven and true enlightenment.

And anyway, it's my blog, so there.

Anyhoo, I've given up on the Pocket PC as a phone. I've gone back to my good old Imate SP5 Smartphone. This gives me pretty much everything that I had on the old machine, including the wonderful push email support via Exchange. What the Smartphone doesn't give me, and the reason I've gone back, is a need to use two hands, and frequently a stylus, to do something tricky like, say, phone someone from the address book or find out who called me last. It also makes a much smaller lump in my pocket. I've tried to love Pocket PC phones many times, from the Jasjar daddy of them all down to the neat little Vario that I used to use. But I always end up back on the Smartphone trail.

I've really no idea precisely why, but I think that it has to do with my austere upbringing, where putting fingermarks on things like glass tables and the TV screen was severely dealt with. I think this has left me with an aversion to touch displays that makes using a Pocket PC too hard for me.

I was worried that the constantly connected GPRS connection that Exchange needs might sap the battery of my little phone, but so far it is holding up very well.