QBlog

Here and Not Here

I'm now safely sitting in my hotel room in Edinburgh. It was touch and go for a while, because when I checked in at reception they didn't have my name on their list of reservations. I wasn't there under my own name, the name of the person who had booked the room for me nor the name of the conference. I wasn't booked at any time during the next year.

Scary stuff. It once happened to me in Singapore, and I had to stay in a hotel that rented some of its rooms by the hour until I could get into the hotel I was originally booked for (not that this was a great hotel either: as one of my colleagues said at the time, "prior to staying in this hotel, I held the belief that toilets were input-only devices").

Anyway, it turned out today that the reason I didn't have a room was because I'd already checked in. Except, of course, I'd come here straight from the airport so knew I hadn't checked in.

Damn it, don't you hate it when those alternate universes intersect with ours?

Away!

I'm away for the next three days at a conference in Edinburgh. I'll blog as usual, you just might not see it until I get back.

How did they manage to snaffle the domain name http://www.vwrn.org/?

Olympic Ticket Success

I got an excited phone call from my wife this morning: she'd managed to buy some tickets for the Olympics. She logged onto the site at 11:00 and 15 minutes later her incredible pound-the-web skills had beaten it so hard it had to yield. She is now the proud possessor of two seats for the synchronised swimming.

Because she could only get a pair of tickets, she had to break the news to me gently that I would probably have to concede my seat to one of my daughters.

Thank heaven for that! I was worried she might make me watch it with her.

Future Fashion

The girl who was sitting opposite me on the train to London today would so not be wearing those clothes if those glasses that take photographs became mainstream.

Well, she might be, it's just she'd probably be wearing a few more over them...

None in a Million

As one of the million people who didn't get Olympic tickets when she applied last year, my wife was on the list of people who could apply for a second batch of tickets today at 11am.

Four hours later, she's given up. A search on the web site would say there are tickets available for whatever, the queue to get them was 15 minutes long (well, 15 then 14 then 5 then 8 then 6 then 11 then 3 then...), they were always sold out when the timer finally kicked in, then the next search would say they were still available. She couldn't even get tickets for the Greco-Roman Wrestling (not that I'm complaining about that).

I could probably get to see South Korea v Gabon at football if I tried, but I doubt I'd get to an England match (male or female) and it would probably be somewhere miles away like Coventry anyway.

Bitter? Me? Why, yes.

Distinguished Supporter

I went to the offices of the British Humanist Association in London yesterday, and with the wave of a magic wand was transformed into a Distinguished Supporter.

What this means is that the BHA gets to use my name, words and image promoting itself and its campaigns. I get an air of legitimacy that enables me to go to and speak at events supporting the BHA's causes.

As for whyI'm a distinguished supporter, as opposed to being just a regular supporter, well it's because I'm in the computer games industry and they don't have any other distinguished supporters coming from that angle. They heard about me through my daughter Jenny, who is outgoing president of the National Federation of Atheist, Humanist and Secular Student Societies (and you thought nepotism only worked the other way round).

People who work in the games industry, despite their popular characterisation as being mysogenistic killers out to corrupt children, are actually very liberal in comparison with the rest of the population. They are also intelligent, imaginative and free-thinking. Perhaps it's because they play a lot of games, but they have strong ideas of what's fair and what's not; they therefore tend not to hold prejudiced views, even if such are propagated by political (say, to do with race) or religious (say, to do with sexuality) sources.

Unfortunately, as they spend most of their time with like-minded people, they don't really come into contact with the kind of scaries who make life a misery for vast swathes of the population. They don't see the problem, because they spend so much time in an environment where it isn't a problem.

It's not my job as a distinguished supporter of the BHA to evangelise to game developers, which is just as well because I'm not a fan of evangelism in general (indeed, evangelical atheists can be more wide-eyed unnerving than those of some religions), plus I hate asking people for money so would make a lousy fund-raiser anyway. However, if, occasionally, gamers see my name in connection with some humanist cause, it might cause them to throw another small weight on their scales of "maybe I'll join the BHA sometime".

Of course, it might have the opposite effect, too.

Late Night

It's amazing how much traffic there is on the road at 2:30am.

I was back at St Botolph's Priory in Colchester last night for some more shooting for this crowd-funding video I'm presenting. I got there at just before 9:30, and the rain managed to hold off the whole five hours. Given that the video is only about four minutes long, we should be finished, right?

If only... I'd heard that night-time location shooting was such a luxury that only big-budget TV shows like Torchwood can afford it. I thought this was because of the overtime costs, but it just seems to take longer.

In our case, the biggest delays were due to setting up the lighting. Anything you want to be able to see (which, given that location shoots are there because of the location, means quite a lot) has to have a big light shone on it. That light has to have a gel on it to give it the right colour effect, and it has to have a power cable running to it (so you need lots of long extension leads). The gels make an audible rustling noise in the wind, which conspires with other background noises to ruin a lot of shots. During the day, traffic noise is fine because it's constant; at night, there's nothing until a single individual roars past on a motorbike. We had police sirens, drunks (one of whom threw up loudly enough for it to spoil a take), music, car alarms, and at 2am endured a 5-minute delay as a helicopter hovered over the town centre. We also had a smoke machine that made a putt-putt sound while it was on, so I couldn't speak when it was running. The smoke was subject to the vagaries of the wind, which was entirely unpredictable and would shift on a whim. The smoke lingered only a few seconds, so if I didn't nail my lines or if the shot was spoiled some other way, we had to wait for it to recharge before we could go for a retake. As for my lines, they don't follow my natural speech patterns so saying them meant my delivery was full of hesitations, stumbling, uses of the wrong word (I'd say "world" instead of "game", or "virtual" instead of "imaginary") and so on. It would probably have helped if I'd done a better job of remembering the lines in the first place, too.

Still, it's going to look great when it's finished!

I'm thinking that'll be around November...

Freed from their Bonds

I had the stitches taken out of my gums today, their having been put in place a fortnight ago when I had my impressive dental surgery. It was such a relief! The stitches were like sharp bristles that dug deep into the inside of my top lip any time I moved it to talk or (worse) smile. One of them was so tight that it felt like skin was growing over it at the back.

I am now able to brush my front teeth again, which is probably just as well because the Corsodyl I was using instead turns them brown if you use it for too long...

Last Lecture

This morning, I gave my last lecture of the academic year (a CE217 revision lecture). I have no more teaching until October.

Now all I have to do is field requests from people who think that this means I am free to work on their projects for the next four months.

Hello Dr Richard A. Bartle, we have recommendations for you

Damn it, Amazon, I bought my wife the camera last month. Stop sending me email recommendations for cameras!

The Railway Boggart

It would appear that the Internet doesn't know the words to the song _The Railway Boggart_, which I learned in school aged 9/10. This is unfortunate, because I wanted to find out if there were any verses beyond the one we were taught, which went like this:

Dwarfs live undergound,
Dryads in trees.
There are trolls and goblins and imps and ogres,
Bogeymen and kelpies, but much rarer than these,
And very much nicer is such a rogue
As the Railway Boggart:
He doesn't clank chains,
But plays all his tricks,
On railway trains.

I used it as a source for some of the monsters in MUD1. No, I'm not making that up.

Expectations

From an article in today's Daily Mirror about Britain's Got Talent:

I wasn't expecting that.

Bluebells

We've lived in this village for 16 years, yet until today had never visited nearby Hillhouse Wood. We'd heard that it's quite pretty at this time of year because it's carpeted with bluebells. My wife wanted to try out the new camera she got for her birthday, so I dropped her and my younger daughter off by the old church and let them wander.

Here's a sample photo:

Hmm. That is quite spectacular. Maybe next year I'll go have a look round it myself...

Late Night in Colchester

This is St Botolph's Priory in Colchester at about 11pm:

It's a good set of ruins. I was there because I'm presenting a video for a start-up that I'm on the advisory board of, which hopes to raise enough money from crowd-funding to be able to raise more money from financiers. Personally, I think I come across as way too cheesy, but not quite as cheesy as I would do if I remembered all the lines in the script.

It took a lot of permissions to get to film in this location, which I was quite surprised we obtained. The council in particular was pretty good about it, as was the Southern Fried Chicken shop that let us run a power cable out of the back for free.

There are 30 scenes in this video and tonight we managed to do about 8 of them before the music from nearby pubs and clubs got so loud that we had to stop. I think that means we'll be coming back during the week, which suggests that I'll have to make a note of what clothes I was wearing and not get any hideous spots on my nose.

At least next time I'll know to wear two pairs of socks, so there's a fighting chance I'll come home able to feel my toes.

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Sometimes, blog posts just write themselves.