Apathy Sketchpad

An important part of running a website and doing a physics course is watching too much Star Trek. This is not a major problem, since it is normally quite good. I particularly like Voyager, because for the first time since the franchise began it introduced a character with a personality. Granted he was a hologram, and didn’t feature in all the episodes, but it was a step in the right direction. It also introduced Cheif Shuttle Advocate Tom Paris, who can always be relied upon in an emergency to be slightly sleazy, and come up with a cunning plan to use a shuttlecraft to save the day. (Well, sort of introduced. The same actor was in The Next Generation once, playing an entirely different shuttle-obsessed nut case.)

Voyager also introduced Captain Kathryn Janeway, who presumably passed the entrance examination with flying colours. I presume this because I believe the entrance examination requires lengthy refining. It starts, I expect, with an interview. They ask questions, and ask prospective captains to explain aspects of the job to them. What they actually say is totally ignored, and they proceed to the next round only if their answers are phrased in a strange and pretentions way, and the explanation is poor and misses out several points. The next round is where it really gets tough. The applicants are put in seperate rooms, containing only two things, and asked to wait there until the examiner gets back. The objects are a button, and a sign saying “Your prime directive is to not press this button”. The job goes to the first one to press the button.

The prime directive, for people who don’t watch Star Trek, is not to mess about with any aliens who haven’t discovered warp travel until they do. I have never once seen this directive upheld. There is always — and I do mean always — some reason they simply have to break the prime directive, and then they spend the rest of the episode trying to fix it. This is usually the fault of the captain. I frequently think that if Tuvok or Paris was captain they would just ignore the planets. Janeway’s problem, and Picard was no better, mind, is that she tries to solve all problems by either making peaceful contact with something or by drinking coffee. When the problem is the Ferengi, this technique might work, but she even tries it with the Borg, who believe that the best form of contact is to assimmilate everybody, and that coffee is irrelevant.

The holodeck, too, is clearly a deathtrap. It has the power to (and indeed has been known to) trap crew members inside itself until everyone else works out how to free them, accidentally create a villain who takes over the ship, be reprogrammed by a dead woman to kill people, or even start a large-scale war between photonic aliens and a holographic simulated overlord. And yet they use it for everything. You never catch them playing Tetris, though, do you?

And don’t get me started on the science of that show…

At home we have a Game Boy cartridge boasting fifty-two games or so. This is all well and good, but a few of the games are listed more than once. Exactly how something like this could be allowed to happen is at first unclear, but the cartridge in question was bought in Singapore. In Singapore, where, you understand, you can be arrested for chewing gum, it is commonplace for a shop to openly sell pirated software, simply because the profits are so much greater than the fines.

Also, in Singapore, there appears to exist a strange charity, whose aim is to provide people with terminal stupidity with Game Boy developer kits so that they can live out their final days churning out imbecilic hand-held games before they accidentally fry themselves in one of their funny two-pin mains sockets. At least, I can think of no more sensible explanation for some of these games, which mostly involve a logo, then a title screen, a brief menu of game modes, all of which take you to the exact same level, where you can variously push blocks around, kill someone, fall in holes, but never get past the second screen.

A game, to my mind, should be a fun experience which you can quickly pick up without reading the instructions, or failing that, a fun experience you can get the hang of after a while and maybe a couple of flicks through the manual. It should not be a baffling and frequently painful effort to guide a sprite that resembles nothing very much excruciatingly slowly around a screen of equally unidentifiable blobs, some of which kill you. It should not present you with the same two screens of level again and again until you are either killed, bored, or forced by the nice men in the long white coats to put the Game Boy down. There should be no game on a four bit machine that can competely baffle a second-year physics student before the end of the first screen.

The question is, if there is no such charity, where do these people get the Game Boy developer kits? I want one. I want to put Fourtris on Game Boy. I think that would be cool. Oh, well…

Last week on 24, an awful lot of characters turned out to be very evil indeed. One of these was the head of the NSA, a certain Mr Stanton. Mr Stanton, it should be noted, is the head of the NSA. Now this, you must understand, is purely my initial reaction, but the first thing I would have done is arrested the head of the NSA. It seems that every time they appear in a TV show they’re part of a dark conspiracy. Or pehaps I’ve been watching too much X-Files.

I have just spent the weekend being extremely busy doing nothing at all. Last Saturday’s trip out with Alistair (which I missed for Sharon’s birthday) having been postponed to yesterday, I had to miss it again because Kim had invited me to the British Oak. At the last minute she pulled out because too many people had gone out the night before and weren’t up for another night out. I had now missed two nights out in one day.

Also, unbeknown to me, a lot of my friend Jenniffer’s family had arrived at her house and had a barbecue. This was a problem, because said barbecue was actually scheduled for today but her grandma had made a mistake. Jenniffer is currently trying to organise a trip to the Oak instead for this evening, but since we’re all there every Monday anyway, this might not happen. Oh, well.

I just got a worrying message from my PC. You see, my friend Kim just added me to her MSN contact list, and I reciprocated. MSN unhelpfully decided to put her in the contact group I reserve for my own passport, called “Yourself”. I tried to move her into “Actual Friends And Family”, but it could only copy her there. So I did, and then tried to remove her from the original group. This I succeeded in doing, but MSN didn’t think to tell me that, so I tried again. Then it brought up the message:

“You cannot remove Kim from yourself.”

Over Easter I have been plaing a lot of The Legend Of Zelda: A Link To The Past, and while it is an excellent gane, I can’t help but notice that the world I am trying so hard to save is more than slightly screwed up. The game starts in a room which gets much wider towards the top, with only the back wall vertical and the front wall leaning at a rakish angle. As soon as you leave this room you notice it was much larger on the inside than it looks from the outside, and now it’s a neat cuboid. If you looked at this game from any angle other than the one Nintendo use then the sheer absurdity of the geometry would most likely turn you into the kind of gibbering idiot who stands still for days on end reeling off the same two lines of monologue to everyone who tries to talk to them and doen’t mind at all if you smash all their pots against their nice wooden floor and steal all their money. This goes some way to explaining how Zelda has managed to get kidnapped for a third (and by no means final) time, why Ganon the evil king-come-wizard-come-thief-kind-of-a-guy puts all his most terifying monsters in a dungeon containing the one item that can easily kill them, and why the king stations palace guards inside bushes at the other end of the kingdom

Throughout the Zelda series you control Link, an intrepid yet apparenty mute hero who is also the unluckiest man ever to live. He is in this game a legendary hero and therefore the only person who can go on tedious object quests after some godforsaken pendant or other, but Ocarina of Time really takes the proverbial biscuit, holds it above its head, and plays a little fanfare. In Ocarina of Time, Link thinks he is the only Kokiri boy without a fairy (which is a bit like being the only student without a mobile phone). When he finally gets a fairy, Navi, said fairy turns out to be extremely irritating. It is at this point that he learns he is actually a Hylian, and therefore has to go on tedious object quests after some godforsaken pendant or other. Along the way he meets several nice young ladies who flirt with him and promptly turn out to be variously Kokiri (who never reach consenting age), joking, or one of the Seven Sages who can never exist in the same plane as the poor guy

The Sainsbury’s Spicy Chinese Chicken Wings I ate today bore the label “Ideal for Easter”. Beyond the rather dubious ‘chick’ connection could someone explain why?

I don’t know how long it’s been since the Tellytubbies and the Fimbles started their respective onslaughts on our screens, but it’s certainly too long. The Tellytubbies in particular, despite being accused of hindering children’s ability to speak, and of being gay, have made a lot of money for their parent company, Ragdoll. These profits were increased further by cunningly shouting “again” halfway through each episode, and then repeating the first half at no extra cost — a trick learned from thier earlier show Pob’s Programme, which starred a cheap looking puppet called Pob.

Inspired by this success, Ragdoll have decided to make some new brightly coloured foam idiots and masquerade them on our screens in a new series of fifteen minute parades of the damned, or as they call it, “edu-tainment”. (Personally, I prefer the term “alledg-ucation”.) These new characters are the Boohbah, and they launch today on Children’s ITV. This is what the official website has to say it its defence:

“The design of the show – visually and otherwise, draws upon early concepts in science, maths and art and combines these with ‘televisual magic’ to create a uniquely funny television experience.

“The Boohbahs, five magical atoms of power, light and fun travel in their Boohball around the world, from child to child.”

Now I don’t know where exactly Anne Wood went to school, but I think she needs to take another look at her periodic table. Power is the rate of energy transfer, not an element, and is not an atom. Light is an electromagnetic wave, and while it can be quantitized, it is not an atom either. In fairness, though, fun is a transition metal; I have to give her that much. The Boohball travels along a rainbow (which of course is an illusion caused by the wavelength dependance of refractive indeces), powered by children’s laughter and the magic word (which is “Boohbah” so as not to confuse anybody).

The Boohbah, in case you meet one, look more or less like melted Tellytubbies, and are called Jingbah, Jumbah, Humbah, Zimbah and (my favourite) Zing Zing Zingbah.

But wait there’s more…

“The Boohbahs represent the imaginative power and light which allows children to control the screen action by the use of the magic word “Boohbah”, and send presents into an imaginary Storyworld for the Storypeople – Grandmamma, Grandpappa, Mrs Lady, Mr Man, Brother and Sister, Auntie and Little Dog Fido to play with and make a story in partnership with them. We hear the children intervening in the screen action by the sound of their blowing and their use of the word “Boohbah”. This motivates the action and moves the story along. Only Little Dog Fido is not wholly in their control! Children are totally engaged and have a lot of fun guessing which Storyperson will appear and what will happen next.”

That is also an impressive claim, and I for one find it very hard to believe that shouting “Boohbah” at your TV screen will have any more effect on Mrs Lady than shouting “no, no, back that way” has on bowling balls.

One last word on the subject: Visit their website at boohbah.tv. It has many a pointless game, and you can click on screens full of Boohbah and make them vanish. I haven’t worked out the point in it yet, but it seems to be essentially the same as the new Wario game, except not fun.

Do you Yahoo!? I do, but I’m going to stop soon. I get too much spam in my Yahoo! account. I’ve been getting it for years, and today I got an email filtered to my Bulk Mail folder. Just one. This would have been very helpful had it not been accompanied by an email in my main inbox to explain to me all about the Bulk Mail folder. I can only hope than any future emails moved automatically to this folder will not be sent with covering letters from Yahoo!. Also in this email it explained to me how to empty the Bulk Mail folder, and that this means “deleting the contents of” said folder.

I also saw a new type of banner advert today. It was for Blockbuster Video, and was one of the “click the slowly moving sprite to win” banners that normally do the same thing whether or not you hit it. The caption read, “Hit the movie reel and win a $25 gift card from Blockbuster!”, but there was no movie reel to be seen. There was the company logo and a moving bag of popcorn. Presumably someone here has made a mistake, or else when you click it it takes you to a page saying, “no, that was popcorn, now wasn’t it?”. I didn’t feel the need to find out.

As part of the Electronics 2 module at university, as well as building an EMP bomb, we have to write a seven to eight thousand word report on said bomb. This involves using everyone’s favourite bloat-ware, Microsoft Word. Just as every time I play Worms World Party the mouse pointer shadow inexplicably turns itself off, every time I use Word I find a new feature, each more worthless than the last. For example, I wrote a thousand words yesterday and discovered that every time I clicked the table of contents the web toolbar appeared for no reason at all. Today I wrote another thousand words, and discovered a tool called “auto-summarize”. This pleased me, becuase it was spelled with a Z and also American, but mostly baffled me, because if I was going to get someone to read a document and select the most important parts, I would not trust a computer to do it. For example, here’s Microsoft Word’s auto-summary of the help file’s entry about that very same feature:

On the Tools menu, click AutoSummarize.To cancel a summary in progress, press ESC.

Under Type of summary, click the way you want to display the summary: Insert an executive summary or abstract at the top of the document or Create a new document and put the summary there.

Perhaps it got the main points across. Interestingly it finds a grammatical error in this. But it’s even less help with an electronics project. Its summary (which could have saved me writing the abstract, had it been any good) made no sense at all, failed to mention exactly what the project was, and was comprised largely of my fragmented section headers. Arguably, I’m expecting too much of the poor computer, but I am firmly of the opinion that if something isn’t going to work at all, you shouldn’t bother including it in the first place. The feature I really need is in any case the approximate opposite of the auto-summary. What I need is the auto-pad, which stretches my nice, easy-reading 2432-word account into a bloated, barely readable, eight thousand-word project report.

This involves using everyone’s favourite bloat-ware, Microsoft Word. For example, here’s Microsoft Word’s auto-summary of the help file’s entry about that very same feature:

On the Tools menu, click AutoSummarize.To cancel a summary in progress, press ESC.

Under Type of summary, click the way you want to display the summary: Insert an executive summary or abstract at the top of the document or Create a new document and put the summary there.

What I need is the auto-pad, which stretches my nice, easy-reading 2432-word account into a bloated, barely readable, eight thousand-word project report.