Wimbledon't

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I hate Wimbledon fortnight. Both BBC1 and 2 are showing nothing but tennis all afternoon, which is quite rich given that they ought to be catering for non-sporty misanthropes like me as well as the upper-middle strawberry-affording class.

They've got good weather for it, at least. This is probably as a direct result of them spending a bajillion pounds on a sliding roof to keep the rain off the court. That's not to say they aren't getting any use out of their investment; yesterday they extended it to keep the scorching sun off of "important visitors" in the Royal Box. If it was our suspiciously ginger junior heirs to the throne, it's probably a good idea to keep them out of direct sunlight.

Enough of complaining about tennis; it's a very silly game and not even sexy female tennis stars running about in short skirts is compensation, especially not with all that grunting.

Something for the weekend, sir?

I've got myself a job interview on quite short notice and it's finally forcing me to accept the uncomfortable truth; I need to get a haircut.

So what's the problem with that? Aside from getting unreasonably tense when strangers hold sharp implements to my neck (which is actually quite reasonable behaviour when you live in Salford), I haven't been to a barbers in quite some time.

At least twenty years, in fact.

No, I don't quite look like Cousin Itt from the Addams Family as I used to get my hair cut on a semi-regular basis by my mother. Sadly, my mother passed away earlier this year and this is the latest way I find myself missing her.

I'm living in dread at the prospect of finding out how much a short back and sides costs these days. I'll probably only be able to afford it if I get the job, but I won't get the job without a proper haircut.

Perhaps I should try the local college and let the trainee hairdressers have at it. This has the added advantage of putting me in close proximity to hot college babes. It has the disadvantage of putting me in close proximity to hot college babes who find 36-year-old men hitting on them to be deeply creepy and who can't cut hair.

When Worlds Collide

In the good old days before physics and maths got all post-modern on us, the solar system ran like clockwork and the trains were always on time. Planets knew their place and wouldn't dream of spinning out of orbit and smacking each other in a Michael Bay-style extravaganza of explosions and mayhem. Unfortunately, standards have since slipped.

Actually, the idea that the planets were stuck in their tracks like some sort of cosmic Scalextric set was in trouble as far back as Newton, who could do the maths to prove the stability of a single planet orbiting the sun but wasn't able to produce a general solution to the problem of the Moon's orbit. Newton believed a general solution for all the planets was impossible and that the long-term stability of the solar system was thanks to God fiddling with the celestial clockwork every so often.

Thanks to computers, we can now run simulations of the solar system for billions of years into the future before tiny unknown forces like the mass lost by the sun due to the solar wind, or the effects of galactic tidal forces make a joke of the numbers. The possible planet-smashing predictions reported by the press are the result of 2500 simulations run by Jaques Laskar and Mickaël Gastineau of the Paris Observatory who in each run simulated the next five billion years of the solar system's future, up until the point where the Sun grows into a red giant and vaporises most of the inner solar system.

The interesting thing to me is what the difference was between each run: They changed the initial position of Mercury by a single metre.

In 20 of their cases, Mercury's orbit eventually went nuts; sometimes falling into the sun, sometimes smacking into Venus. Regardless of how Mercury flew off the rails, the peturbations it caused on other planets was enough to cause some serious orbital shennanigans, including a possible Mars-Earth smackdown of the Hollywood kind.

So, given time, the tiniest planet (Sorry, Clyde) can throw the solar system into disarray. Makes me think of the old joke about the Earth falling into the Sun if everyone in China jumped at the same time. Well, it might not happen right away...

One for Mythbusters, perhaps.

Oooh! I'm quite fat! what if I jump up and down for a really long time? What would happen first; the Earth falls into the Sun, the Sun eats the Earth or I get in shape?

Stupid Eee keyboard...

I'm posting this using a Linux-based Eee PC 901 that I bought for my mother last year and ever since the last update to Firefox (3.0.4), the keyboard has switched over to US-English and won't switch back to UK layout. Fortunately, I've got a fix. From a terminal prompt:

sudo apt-get autoclean

Then switch the keyboard layout with the appropriate app in settings.

Red Faction: Guerrilla

I've been playing a bit of Red Faction: Guerrilla and while I think it's fun, there's some missed opportunities in there too.

The one that really bothers me is the AI of civilians. It's too good for what it is.

That's a bit of an odd statement, but to see what I mean, you have to go out of your way to watch the little folks go about their daily routine; people browse the (nearly empty) shelves of (nearly empty) shops, they lounge around, propping up the bar in pubs, they carry space two-by-fours around on their shoulders when you smash up their houses with deadly sledgehammer action. It all works towards a sense that they've things to do outside of being collateral damage for your high-explosive exploits.

The trouble is you have no reason to see any of it. Since you spend most of your time tearing around the wilderness in excitingly impractical space-taxis and Mars-buses, or running around military bases, you rarely see the effort the developers have put into the idle behavior of civilians. You've no need to explore the insides of buildings aside from picking up hidden Quantum Bomb caches that aren't really worth the effort. Most of the work put into civilian AI, especially indoors, seems to have been... not wasted, as that implies they shouldn't have bothered with it, but under-utilised, as the basic flow of the game almost never puts you in the thick of it.

That aside, I like the game. If only the sound guys could have got a bit further away from petrol engine sounds when doing the effects for some of the cars. I hope that if we ever do get to the point of terraforming alien worlds, we can do a little bit better than internal combustion to run our rides.

Anyways, 8/10, good effort.

In the beginning...

...was the word, and the word was "bored". Thanks to the economic downturn, I've got myself faaar too much free time on my hands right now, and there's only so much daytime TV you can watch before your brain melts and drips out your nose.

Note to potential employers: I'm not actually watching that much telly, honest. I'm practicing for SCJP certification, reading up on all those bits of C++ that Symbian programmers don't normally get to do (like templates and the STL) all at the same time as getting up to speed with C# and .Net. I've a stack of books two foot high on my coffee table and I'm really and truly reading them; I've even been sending the authors corrections and everything.

That aside, I'm getting bored a lot and I've not even got anyone to talk to about things and stuff, hence the blog. I can't promise there'll ever be anything to interest real people here, but with a bit of luck, it'll keep me sane and give me something sort-of productive to do.