This is awesome. Now, how to build one myself...?

This amused me a lot. Source.

I keep putting off writing anything here or posting something because I feel there should be some degree of consistency. And the ability to post comments, which is probably more important. But what the hell, if you're interested you'll keep reading, and if not then there's a whole wide internet out there for you. So if you visit regularly, don't expect a certain type of link or post - sometimes it'll be a picture, sometimes directing you interesting, or sometimes just a longish rambling personal thing like this. Try and cope.

Anyway, primary thought at the moment (except transporters, which I'll come to at a later date) is that I bought an Xbox Elite yesterday to replace my aging older Xbox - potentially an extravagance, but there was a sale on so it wasn't all that much more than the extortionately-priced 120gb hard disk by itself. Plus the HDMI connection, an extra controller, and the ability to use my old Xbox in another room as a media extender made for a convincing argument.

As a trial run I fired up Geometry Wars 2, which I haven't played in ages, and immediately discovered relatively prominent lumps on the Xbox controller thumbsticks, which looking at my other one exist there too, but massively worn down. Made me realise quite how much I use the thing. And how abrasive thumbs can be.

The second realisation was that I haven't played GW2 since writing a best man speech about a year ago - while on some level it might have been procrastination, distracting myself from something I needed to do (and more importantly, had to do WELL), it actually proved surprisingly useful. I think because it's such a simple but fun game, it was easy to play it for an hour or two of an evening, my eyes and hands handling the game while my brain could detach itself and muse on different ideas. In the end the speech actually turned out pretty well, though I say so myself - not claiming it was the best/funniest thing ever, but for a generally self-conscious and cynical man, even I was forced to admit that people laughed in all the right places, and more than just politely.

This in turn set me thinking about how I spend my time. Not excessive gaming, which I freely own up to, but more giving my brain a chance to drift. I spend most of my time at a computer, sometimes working, sometimes playing, often reading chunks of what the internet has to offer. While I think developmentally it's not actually too bad, given the myriad thoughts and opinions I come across, I'm starting to wonder if I spend entirely too much time basically receiving information, rather than coming up with anything particularly new.

I've never counted myself as a particularly creative person, and doubt that will change any time soon, techie geek that I am, but I think I should make the effort for a short time each day to let my mind wander in relative silence. Music being OK, TV or a film in the background probably not. I think part of the issue is the current bad weather where I live - it's been cold for about 4 months, with occasional rain. While I don't mind the cold at all, it makes cycling very unpleasant, and I've been letting my foot heal after an injury, so haven't been running, at least not any particular distance. They were both good opportunities to disconnect my mind from the world to a degree and mull things over, which I've been without for a while, and I think that's taking its toll on me mentally. Not saying that playing Geometry Wars 2 is necessarily the solution, but might be worth a go. Right now, in fact...

Source: CBS news

Source: Makezine

Web Designer Depot has a collection of 40 funny ads. As a cyclist myself the one above appealed to me the most, but they're all well worth a look...

Bugger. Was going to go to bed, but got embroiled in a discussion on Twitter with a Mac owner, which compelled me to write something here. I generally don't like generalisations (see what I did there?), but that said, Macs suck, and their owners are, without exception, self-righteous wankers.

I jest, of course. Well, 98% jesting. To be fair the discussion we had was relatively civil, but I found myself bemoaning the 140 character limit for making it hard to get my point across, or rather shoot down the erroneous points she made. I don't want to weigh up the benefits of each system directly, as my main point is that both have advantages and disadvantages. The problem is that whereas the average PC owner accepts that, Mac owners tend to seem somewhat blinkered. Or perhaps just more novices use Macs - that would be an interesting statistic to have actually - probably exists somewhere. If someone's only ever used one system they may be more predisposed to assume its superiority, and be less-informed about the capabilities of the alternatives.

Short version is I said that PCs are far easier to upgrade and have far more gaming options - not a universal argument, but two things which matter a lot to me, hence one of the reasons I prefer PCs. She came back with arguments like "well, you can upgrade the RAM", and "Macs have just as many games - they play better, with full screen graphics".

Upgrading RAM's all well and good, but you can completely disassemble PCs and replace any bit of them, or build them from scratch. Absolutely not a big selling point for a lot of people, but it's a categorical difference. And re gaming on the Mac, that's just a horrifically uninformed argument - while games of course exist for the Mac, including quite a few new ones, the PC has huge numbers more - always has, probably always will. That's just a fact - wander into any game shop and compare the shelves.

Again, non-gamers won't care (nor should they), but trying to make the "Macs are fine for gaming" argument to a gamer was going nowhere. And the "full screen graphics" comment just marked her down as completely out of her depth. Full screen graphics, you say? What will those Apple wizards think of next? She also seemed to miss my point about upgrading, saying that Macs came with free software upgrades - perhaps indicative that Mac users don't even think of upgrading hardware as an option, whereas for PC users it's an easy route to take.

I've derailed my point into ranting against this poor woman, which I didn't intend to do, but this is the problem with having a discussion one sentence at a time - pent up arguments I couldn't properly express. Plus I'm by nature a relatively polite person when in direct discussion, so didn't want to offend her. When rambling on like this though, I'm less concerned. I eventually resorted to pointing out that you can't have SLI on Macs (if you don't know what that is, trust me, you won't care - gaming thing), which whether she understood the term or not, seemed to make her realise that her definition of "serious gamer" was somewhat different to mine.

My original point - the cult of Mac. This woman was arguing for the Mac in areas where it just can't compete - and the discussion didn't even start as a comparison anyway, she brought it up! Macs are a lot of people's machines of choice, and no reason why not. I don't know enough about them to sing specific praises, but equally there are no utterly damning reasons not to use one. If I had to pull one out of the air, primarily it's cost - Macs are expensive, but then some would argue you get what you pay for. As an iPhone user I'd say that of the price premium on Apple products, 50% is justified in the components/construction, 50% is stomached because they're well-designed - they're not quite as good as their price-tag implies.

Still, hardly a deal-breaker either way. For most of my day to day work a Mac would almost certainly do just fine. However, I'm a Windows user partly through habit (I know all its ins and outs, and because I maintain my system properly nothing really irritates me about it), also because I play games a lot, also because I'm an upgrader. Those last two are things that Macs just don't do. They just don't. Yes games exist for the Mac, and yes you can upgrade the RAM, maybe even the hard disk, but the processors are soldered in, and if you wanted to build one from scratch you're shit out of luck.

Neither of those arguments would or should sway most people to or away from PCs or Macs - if they matter to you they're important, but they're not universally applicable. But this woman was clearly compelled to pitch Macs as being the best option, despite evident facts to the contrary.

No other product line seems to generate this kind of zealotry, and I genuinely can't work out why. Actually, one thought is that because Mac products cost more, people worry that they're being ripped off, so feel compelled to argue their merits that much more fervently in order to justify the cost. I really am a cynical bastard.

I'm deeply suspicious of pretty much any sort of unquestioning passionate belief, firmly believing that if you're unwilling to question/debate/discuss your belief, you must, deep down, be scared you'll be proved wrong. That sounds like it could be anti-religious, which I don't mean it to be - I'm at least semi-religious myself, but accept that it's belief, not knowledge. Anyone religious who'll gladly explain their beliefs, why they have them, acknowledge contradictions, etc., entirely fair enough - just sit there saying "well, it's my belief, I don't have to justify it", and I'll be fairly sure you're just kidding yourself. Or a moron. Or both.

I digress. I'm especially skeptical of belief when it comes to things technological, which I'm relatively well-informed about. Not least because with techie things there are certain absolutes you can point at - this does something better than that, this picture is better than that picture, this processes faster than that, etc. Usability is obviously more subjective.

I'm boring myself with this now, and so no doubt you as well - congratulations on making it through this disjointed ramble. If you're a Mac user and have a genuine case to make as to why an experienced Windows user who plays games and upgrades his PC on a semi-regular basis should switch to a Mac, by all means email me. In life I'm open to pretty much all arguments with any sort of validity, but telling an upgrading gamer that "the Mac has some games" and "you can upgrade the RAM" really won't cut it, trust me. If you're a Mac user who can't think of any arguments - that's fine, honestly! It doesn't mean Macs are worse than PCs, just that, horror of horrors, perhaps people have different desires and requirements.

Maybe what got me worked up wasn't even the specific Mac/PC debate, but that it's a good example of someone trying to make an argument they clearly don't know much about, rather than realising that fact and staying quiet. As the great saying goes (approximately): "it's better to say nothing and be thought stupid, than to open your mouth and remove all doubt." Things along those lines will be a recurring theme of my writings here.

This ties in rather nicely to my previous post.

Perseid shower tonight. I can claim no great knowledge of astronomy beyond a passing interest - ie. the names of the planets and knowing the plough when I see it. That said, I've always loved looking at the night sky, even though it's hard to find anywhere truly free of light pollution. I was in Flagstaff last year, and the same day I saw the Grand Canyon, I also saw the clearest night sky I've ever seen, with the Milky Way clearly visible - a fantastic combination of seeing the best the land and sky have to offer in the same day.

Since coming back from there, looking up at the sky back home has generally been a truly disappointing experience for me - knowing the fantastic view that's up there, but being denied a good look at it because of the light pollution. Hardly one of life's great hardships, but it bothers me. Anyway, given the Perseid shower tonight I thought I'd take a wander out onto the park and see what I could see.

The result surprised me - still not a brilliant view, but it was far better than I expected. I took the time to lie down and stare skywards for about 20 minutes, letting my eyes get used to the darkness. A few times I'd catch a flash in my peripheral vision, but it was hard to be sure if it was a meteor or just my eyes playing tricks. Eventually though I caught a clear streak, right where I was looking. Satisfying that my time paid off.

Regardless of that though, it reminded me how much I love staring at the sky. Daytime just doesn't cut it, although when there are scattered clouds I do enjoy the way it makes it easy to perceive the curvature of the earth and atmosphere, stretching way over the horizon. But at night, the view goes straight up - stars might not give a sense of specific scale, but they immediately make me very aware of being on a planet which is floating around in the void.

Given my film-viewing history my mind immediately goes to films like Star Trek: First Contact, and Contact (never drew the title parallel before) - two films which open with fantastic zooms through space. I love being made very aware of our place in the universe - a tiny planet in an infinite cosmos, with no clue of everything that's out there. If you haven't recently taken the time to stare up at the night sky I recommend it.

This is turning into a properly neglected site. While I had no great aspirations to blogging on a daily basis, leaving it this long is all manner of rubbish, so partly apologies, and partly well done for hanging in there. Although that's also made me lose just a tiny bit of respect for you.

This is barely topical, but I keep a file of things that may inspire me to write (and then, of course, don't actually write about them). This article caught my attention. Don't bother reading the whole thing - basically a UK music prize was given out last week, and a band went on a mini-rant about how it's never awarded to the fans' choice, but is normally someone fairly obscure.

Oh boo fucking hoo. Where did the idea ever come from that the majority opinion must be right? That's especially true of anything even remotely creative, like music, movies, and art. Just because something's popular doesn't make it good, and there are a lot of critics who are exceptionally well-educated in areas like this who know whether something's worth listening to or not. By all means disagree with them, but to imply that something should win an award just because it's more popular is ridiculous.

As I wrote a few weeks back, people are idiots. This covers a wide range of sins, and on occasion I'll gladly throw myself into that pile, especially when it comes to films. I saw Transformers 2 and enjoyed it, in an utterly mindless, don't think about it on any level sort of way. At the same time I'd never argue to anyone that it was a good movie. It was what I wanted to see at that point in time, which makes me mentally deficient.

However, it made an enormous amount of cash at the box office, critics tore it to shreds, and the internet lit up with claims comparing box office take to quality, and accusing critics of being out of touch with movie-goers' tastes. I can't be arsed to look up the precise quote, but Roger Ebert said something like critics shouldn't reflect popular opinion - it's their job to direct people towards good movies and away from bad ones.

I don't know if this semi-mob-mentality stems from mass insecurity at being thought of as stupid, or feeling threatened by having their taste questioned, or else just the belief that because we use democracy to vote, the public view must always be heard, but it's wrong.

That's not to say that critics are always right, of course, or that the majority is always wrong - the truth, as ever, lies somewhere in the middle. But why people insist on this blind delusion that any large group must somehow be closer to a "correct" opinion than an individual makes no sense to me. We should all accept that relatively often we'll know bugger all about a topic, regardless of our enjoyment or participation in it, and accept that those better-informed might just know more than we do. Or at least know enough that we should listen to them.