I spent two weeks in Switzerland (staying with friends and family),
and it was great. I strangely didn't miss the Internet at all. Now I
have to catch up on what I missed while I was away. My e-mail. The
news. Four hours of Stargate and two hours of Top Gear. Fifteen days
of Web comics. Work.
My e-mail alone is going to take weeks to catch up with. I had 3956
new e-mails when I checked my inbox after 358 hours off-line (not
counting any of my Opera work e-mail). 61% of that is bugmail (from
the bug systems of Mozilla, Webkit, W3C, Apache, and other projects),
from which we can determine that on average I get one bugmail every
8.8 minutes, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
I won't be reading most of that bugmail. If you asked me to comment
on a bug in the last two weeks, please ask me again on IRC, or ask me
again in the bug in about 10 days (by which time I might be caught up
and reading bugmail again).
I just worked out that at the current rate of replying to mail,
it'll take me 11 months to deal with all my new messages, by which
time I'll have received another 82,000. Joy.
My mum recently got a semi-professional digital camera, so I played with
it for a while when I was visiting my parents in the mountains.
My first picture was a low-aperature-value close-up of a screw:
The hardware-store kind:
To give you an idea of how large the original picture was, here is
just the screw, at the original resolution, taken from the same original JPEG image:
Eight million pixels!
I later played around with capturing the local wildlife:
A fly:
A grasshopper:
A ladybird:
I might put some of my other photos up at some point.
In general I don't like cameras; I find people use them to "keep a
memory of" events to the point of not actually experiencing the event
they are trying to keep a memory of in the first place. I'd rather
just experience the event, and if one day I want to remember what it
is like... do it again.
However, doing photography for the purpose of doing photography,
i.e. as an art form rather than an exercise in archiving memories,
seems to be quite fun. Although quite time-consuming, as far as
hobbies go. Nor particularly cheap ($1200 for a macro lens?!).
A couple of days ago I was about to go to bed when I smelt the acrid smell of a melting electromagnet. After some sniffing around I determined the source to be my Thinkpad's power supply.
This is the second time that a laptop power supply has burnt out on me. When I went to the system admininistration team at the office for a replacement part, they told me to not work so hard...
What worries me is that when I noticed that my power supply was melting inside, my reaction wasn't "Quick! Turn off the power and shut down the laptop!", it was "Hm, I wonder if it would last the night. Maybe it might catch fire, I'd better put it in something fire-proof so that it doesn't light my clothes or the floor on fire. If it does catch fire the smoke alarm will go off anyway so I'll have time to douse it, no problem." and it was only after about 30 minutes that I realised that if it did burn up it would take the wire with it and thus light my bed on fire. Only then did I actually reluctantly turn off the laptop and unplug the power supply.
I think I may be a little too addicted to this Internet thing.
What we've done so far, in no particular order: played Twilight
Imperium III, played Robo Rally, played Ricochet Robots, played with
my trains, saw the naked statue park, visited Aker Brygge, went to a
hardware store, ate at Gio's and Taj Mahal, watched Monarch of the
Glen, played Super Smash Brothers Melee, updated the firmware on my
router (though that didn't reduce the random dropouts), went to a
decent superstore (two bus rides away from my flat), and various other
things.
The link is strong, it's disturbing. However it wasn't strong
enough to overcome communication problems at the start of the week and
so Xiven and I failed to meet at the airport.
Next week I'll be visiting family and friends in Geneva and other
parts of Switzerland. Offline. For 15 days. Finally.
Allan and I were talking and we came up with an interesting idea
for a game. (If someone wants to implement this, go ahead.)
The game would be an ordinary first-person shooter or first-person
adventure game. The twist is that after playing it for a while, the
plot involves time travel back to the point in time where the game
started (or close to it): and you can see your character going through
the start of the game, doing exactly what you did. That is,
the game would record every move, every action that the player did for
the first part of the game, and then replay those actions in real time
when you travel back in time.
The cool bit is that to keep the story consistent, under no
circumstances can the "original you" ever see "time-travelling you",
since you didn't see yourself when you first played through the level.
Thus, the game would have to keep track of whether the
"time-travelling you" is ever in the field of vision of the "original
you", and if it is, the game is over: Time Paradox.
Twists on this could be that you also have to make sure that the
environment is in the state that you originally found it; for instance
if a bridge is broken when you first play, it has to be broken when
the "original you" gets to it when the "time-travelling you" is
playing, even if that means bringing it down yourself.
And you can take this further. Time travel again, this time with
two "original you"s and you have to keep out of the field of vision of
both of them.
And you could,
once you know you have a time machine, say "ok I'll go back in a
minute and set it up so that this happens"...
Technically this is quite feasible. Field of view is a solved
problem (lots of computer games involve having to sneak around unseen
near patrolling monsters, e.g.); as is recording everything you do and
then replying it when you next visit the level (racing games often
have "ghost cars" so you can train against yourself).
