peteconnolly.co.uk

over here. I may be some time.

time passes…….

That was rather excellent. I’m glad to see that the UT franchise isn’t being too slapdash about coming up with some new angles with the game. First thoughts - I like it, I like it a lot. The onslaught mode is very, very entertaining, the kind of game that would take a good few hours of the evening to enjoy properly. After playing a few practice games locally, then going online to see what’s happening it’s clear that this is the most popular gametype on the public servers. Can’t say I blame them, it’s great fun but sometimes an old bloke like me just can’t keep up with what’s going on.

The vehicles are varied - planes, tanks, little cars with cannon and the hellbender that takes three people to drive properly - they’re all a challenge. Trying to find two or three people that can put their egos aside on a public server for 5 minutes just to drive a tank or something is half the problem. Everyone wants to drive, to be the one that shoots down the planes, destroys the nodes, attackes the base. No one wants to do the boring stuff like defending the power nodes after they’re taken, which leads to it’s own problems. We’ll see how it goes on the servers after it ships next week, but I think Far Cry will have to be very, very good to get a look in.

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Just reading Loobys’ comments from a previous post, we tried a little test with Luke to see if he slept better with a nightcap…

The result was one whingy kid who stayed awake ’til 9:30, woke up at the crack of dawn and was tetchy all morning. Next experiment will have to be with spirits, methinks.

(we jest, of course)

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No sooner had I got things working, started singing the praises of the new hosting company and started to feel pretty satisfied with myself then they go and cut me off for not paying the bills. Hmm! I did. I swear. I set my credit card details up in their little control panel thing - double checked everything but they still cut me off without a word! I’ll be watching them, the bastards.

I rang their billing department and got it sorted out but a word or two in advance would have been nice. Too much to ask?

I’ve had a busy week, but at long last the project that I’ve been working on since last August went live! Hopefully that’ll be the end of commuting to The City each day, a truly dreadful 2-hour-plus-each-way journey that manages to bore, tire and irritate you all at once all for the low low price of £26 for the train and £11 for parking. Talking to some of the people in the bank I was working at, the older ones were comparing commutes with mine (mine was considered pretty tough), but there were worse cases. Some of them seems to consider the amount of daily suffering they endure as some sort of badge of honour - 6 hours per day for 15 years made one old boy the silverback of the group. The alpha male of work travel suffering. I didn’t want to be too rude and point out the futility of the whole thing, they do pay the wages after all.

House moving could be back on. A few viewings, including one family that came back three times in all, so they must have some interest. We’ll see, I’m still slightly hopeful…..

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Having a kid is a strange thing…not something to be taken lightly, but once it happens you find that your whole world changes. Some good changes and some not so good. That last fact is hard to admit, since kiddies are meant to be the bestest thing that ever happens to you, the be-all-and-end-all that your parents like to talk about. They did it, you’re living proof, so why don’t you?

You never get to hear about how your parents might have had to compromise on their desires when you were born. Me, I don’t get that too much. I’m the youngest of three and an admitted accident so I think the damage was done well before I turned up.

The point I was hoping to make was about the whole parenting thing. It seems to be an effort to get your kid to learn, but at the same time to break their will. We’re having problems with getting Luke to sleep at the moment, so much so that some nights he’s still awake 3 hours after we’ve put him to bed. I can’t blame him, he just wants to play, but the answer seems to be to ignore him (controlled crying), detain him (close his bedroom door) or chastise him (shouting and slapping, if you’re into that sort of thing, not that I am, yet, but we’ll see). All three seem designed to break his will, assert control over his actions and life. They mean taking a young, happy little kid and making them miserable for however long it takes for them to learn their lesson.

I know, I know, it has to be done to raise a well-adjusted kid and all that guff, it just seems so shite - sometimes I wish I were him, running around nekkid shouting ‘buuuuhhhhh’ at the cats, emptying the bookshelves onto the floor and generally making crap of the place. I hate to kill off that spirit in him, but if we don’t make an attempt to control it he won’t last 10 minutes when he goes to school. I’d never thought of that before, but then again, I never thought very much about having a kid.

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The proclamation has been…..proclaimed. Everybody in the company I work for has been told to stop using Microsoft Office by the end of the month and start using OpenOffice instead. This could be interesting. Take a company of 7,000 employees, withdraw their primary productivity tools and see what happens.

Me? I’m all for it. I try to avoid using Excel, Word, Access or whatever else microsoft include these days in the stupidly large Office suite. BUT, and it’s a big but, I do all my documentation of projects in Word driven by several extremely useful templates. These set up the whole format of the document through macros and rule out about 70% of the humdrum work that I might otherwise have to do. I can’t be left to do it myself, since every document I design on my own uses so many font styles it looks like a ransom note.

Now that the big change is upon us, I find that we don’t have an analog in OO, for some reason. We’ve got less than a month to make this switch for us to produce an alternative to several hours of formatting documents that I went through earlier this week. I’ve contributed a few ideas myself, but they’re less than 1% of the solution. I detect late(r) nights ahead while we get around this, but at least marketing can preach to the world that we’ve done part one of the big swtch.

I think someone needed to think a bit harder about consequences before formulating the text of the press-release I can hear choo-chooing around the bend.

Ho hum.

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