Cars and Horses

A car is a device which will take you from A to B. You turn a wheel and the machinery in it makes the car go in the desired direction. A horse is an animal which will let you sit on its back and might take you where you want to go. If you pull the reigns on a horse, and it agrees with that direction, it will go there. Sometimes, for no apparent reason, a horse will just take off. Or refuse to move.

I used to use a Toshiba M200 Tablet PC. This computer is a car. It does what I ask, when I ask. It just works. Lovely. Emboldened by this I then move on to a Toshiba M400 device. This computer is a horse. When it works, and you have the wind in your hair (metaphorically speaking) it is wonderful.

But every now and then it misbehaves. The screen goes dark and refuses to light up again. It freezes (usually in the middle of a presentation) and needs to be rebooted. Sometimes it slows down for no good reason. Some bits just don't work. At the moment it is just useful enough for me to live with the foibles. But if it locks up in the middle of a Software Engineering lecture again I may have to rethink its place in my life.....

Strange Web Site

This is definitely PR, but not as I know it.

Guitar Frenzy

One of the bad things which happened on Monday was that I found that my Guitar Hero saved game on the PS/2 had managed to corrupt itself. Unfortunately this meant that all the guitars, characters and, most importantly, songs, that number one son had spent ages unlocking were not available. This cramped the style of the party a little, in that we were down to 8 songs for the dueling. but it was still fun.

So tonight I decided to try and recover the situation myself. I've decided that losing all the saved game stuff is not a big deal. Because it means I can have all the fun of recreating it.

This is one wonderful game....

Update on Thursday, October 5, 2006 at 02:36PM by Rob

I've visited the Guitar Hero forums, and it seems that the saved game problem is not unknown. I think it is to do with the way that the game loads bits of itself off the DVD as it runs. If you have this game I'd advise you to only turn the PS/2 off once you have returned to the main menu screen, and not at any other time.

Green Green Grass of Google

Found an interesting blog post today. It is written by a bloke who works at Google (lucky chap).  If you are interested in the business of Software Engineering you really should read the post (and all the ensuing comments). It will take a while (I spent a whole lunch break reading it) but it is worth the effort.

If you think that things like computer programming are not prone to fashion and ideology the whole discussion should sort you out good and proper....

Party Masters

After Thursday's party for the first year, tonight it was the turn of the Masters students to sample our beer tokens. We followed the same pattern as last time, although this time I varied the presentation a bit by having the tablet PC battery go flat just as we were going through the quiz answers. Note to self, don't leave home without the power supply.

These are the quiz winners, note the slightly larger prize this time.

After the quiz, and a lot of dicussion about the answer to the last question (it is on the screen above - can you figure out what the question actually was?) we went on to more Guitar Hero and other silly stuff.

We had a guy turn up who was awesome on this. He played some of the tracks on "expert" mode. What a performance.

Then we tried to find out how far you could get from an XBOX 360 and still play Geometry Wars. (the answer is a very impressive 75 feet - then you lose sight of the screen and crash). Those remote controllers let you get pretty remote..