Monthly Archives: September 2008

Placebo effect? Who cares!

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Today has been a good day.  It’s gorgeous, a little too warm in general for my liking, but clear skies, crisp and cool this morning and dry all day.  We had our regular weekend high class Tesco breakfast before our Saturday shop, and then we headed straight over to B&Q for some random DIY purchases.  We needed more woodchip for the border in the garden, and while we were there found some plastic border things which are better than the ones we were using.

I think I blogged about the last lot when we did the border, this lot are short sections, hammer-in, much sturdier and more durable and look a lot better.  So when we got back, since the weather was so decent we ripped up the old stuff and I hammered the new ones in.  We ended up doing about 5 hours of gardening, which included pruning the small apple tree right back now the leaves are starting to fall off (I have no clue what the best time of year to prune is, so don’t feel you need to correct me, we prune, when we want to prune).  Then we had to chop those branches up and get them into the brown bin ((our council collects garden refuse once every two weeks in a brown wheelie bin)).  Since we were doing that, I chopped up the bigger logs almost from the pruning we did in the front garden a few weeks back that have been lying in the other border.

Then we decided to finally tackle the small shed’s load of cardboard.  We cleared out 70% of the cardboard that was in there a couple of years ago, it’s been there since we moved in.  But as we got near to the bottom it got more and more hairy to move it without freeing up about 100 spiders, so we stopped.  We really want to be able to use that shed for the lawn mower though, it’ll be much easier to get in and out than the other shed, so we sucked it up and pulled all the cardboard out.

Some of those spiders are the size of squirrels.

I’m not arachnaphobic.  I don’t like being surprised by something that’s moving quickly, no matter how big it is, but if I can see a spider and know which way it’s going they don’t frighten me as such, even if they’re on me.  It’s when I’m not sure if they’re on me, or not sure where they’re going to come from or where they are headed that just surprises me and gives me that fright.  Grete is arachnaphobic, but can overcome that with the sort of aggression only usually seen in gladiatorial arenas or bad cases of PMT.

Anyway, once all the cardboard was out, Grete set about chopping it up into sections.

As well as not being arachnaphobic, I’m not claustraphobic either.  However, I think it’s perfectly normal to be a little bit squicked out when you’re in a tight space and surrounded by spiders or other small insects you can’t see but which may be dropping onto you and wandering around your head.  It’s that which to date has stopped us squeezing between the shed and next door’s shed to cut down the sycamore which is regrowing at the bottom of the garden.  Last year, our next door neighbour had the hedge removed and put a fence up.  It’s a nice fence, we weren’t sorry to see it going up and we didn’t like the hedge.  We were a bit sad that she wanted us to have the sycamore chopped down, but we also agreed it wasn’t something either of us could managed.  We paid her contractors to sort the tree, while she paid for the fence.

Now the sycamore is back, not really our fault, but it’s now stuck at the bottom of the garden with no access, because the new fence goes up to our shed and leaves a gap a little less than a foot.  Once past that, there’s more like a foot and a half of space between the sheds, but as you can imagine, it’s pretty well populated with wildlife of the small and creepy kind.

However, it was time to give it a shot and I was pleased to find out I can squeeze through that gap, and as long as I didn’t think about it too much I was ok once I was in the narrow space.  So a bit of chopping and sawing later and the sycamore is back to a tiny stump, and as we know, since nature always prevails, it’ll be back soon enough.  But now we know we can get to it.

We tidied up, put loads of stuff in bags, sorted the cardboard, and have a whole bunch of stuff for several tip runs tomorrow.

I don’t know if using the Wii Fit for 14 days has given me more energy or not, but it certainly feels like it’s done so, and that’s what matters.  I’m not sure I would have been up for 5 hours worth of gardening a few weeks back.  We’ve made huge inroads into some of the stuff that’s been bugging us for ages, and the garden hasn’t looked better than this, including when we first moved in.  Most of that effort is down to Grete since she mows the grass, weeds the border and keeps it in good shape, I’m more of a desctructive energy gardener, but still.  Five hours, and although I’m knackered, I’m not falling over dead knackered.

So, placebo effect or not, 30 minutes of exercise a day (spread out over 40 to 60 minutes as it is with the Wii Fit) certainly feels like it’s elevated my mood, given me more energy in general and made a serious difference.  I don’t even really care if I’ve lost weight I just feel better.

Fingers crossed it’s having a beneficial effect on my blood sugar levels (which reminds me, my HbA1c blood test appointment letter came through, fingers crossed).

Hesitation, sensation, and the trickle of blood

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I’ve probably tested my own blood more than 300 times now.  16 strips per thingy ((tub? tube? barrel? canister? whatever)), 3 thingies per box, easily had 8 boxes.  Which means I’ve made over 300 holes in my fingers.  After much trial and error I found that my left little finger is the best candidate.  Doesn’t get used for much typing, heals pretty quick.  When I started out, I’d spread it around (although I was testing a lot more then) and do a couple of shots in each finger, but eventually my fingers would hurt too much.  Which is when I learned to concentrate on just one finger.

Anyway, after all this time, and over 300 goes, I still hesitate before I click the plunger and send the little needle into my finger.  I still pause, I still wonder if this is going to hurt (it doesn’t really unless my fingers are cold).  Something in my brain still shouts ‘why are you doing this fool?’

And then I bleed a little and my brain goes ‘see? see what you did!’

I’m British, let’s talk about the weather

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It’s September and in my part of the world that makes it Autumn.  I love Autumn, it’s my favourite season.  I’ve already blogged about this before really, but I think it’s worth saying again.  My favourite seasons in order are, Autumn, Winter, Spring, Summer.  Why?  Several reasons, but mainly because I find it much easier to get warm and stay warm than I do to cool down and stay cool.  I like the dry crisp nature of Autumn in the UK.  I like the cold, there, I’ve admitted it.  Something about wrapping up warm and going out into the world inspires me more than dressing down and going outside to sweat and seek cold drinks.

Today it’s sunny and warm, hardly a cloud in the sky, but it’s not overly hot.  There’s a nice little breeze.  Inside the house is just right, no need for heating, the doors are open, but there’s no need for a fan or cooling either.  I feel the world is in balance during Autumn.  The deep breath before the plunge, but for me the plunge isn’t bad, it’s just bracing.  The chill and twilight of Winter.  Waiting just at the edge of life, holding out against the darkness, ready for the thrill of Spring.

But Spring is wet and often too windy for my liking and from there into the heat of Summer (if some people are lucky), when the rest of the UK worships the sky and I just stay indoors and wait for the bright orange of Autumn to come around again.

I don’t totally hate summer, I’m a huge fan of trees and I love the bright green foliage at the height of summer.  Yet I can’t help but feel a surge when I see the oranges, reds and yellows that precede the calm regal nature of Autumn.

So here it is, Autumn, on our doorstep and knocking to come in.  Soon it’ll be Samhain, and we’ll just have to hope our doors protect us from the world behind that veil.

Twitter, I really don’t get it?

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I don’t get twitter, and I’m not the only one.  A search on google for ‘Twitter Don’t Get It’ returns a fair number of hits.  I sort of maybe understand it if you’re mobile a lot and you want to blog some little snippet updates, or if you’re travelling and want to do a little web journal for people to know what you’re getting up to.

And ok, not everyone wants to run their own blog, but there’s a myriad of free blogging services like Typepad, WordPress, Blogspot that you can use.  What’s so fun about micro-blogging?  Surely it’s bad enough reading the junk that my brain puts together in general but I do try and write something interesting or meaningful every now and again, and make the effort of reading it worthwhile.

Is anyone really interested in the minutae of life to the extent they want to hear my internal monologue that’s constantly running or see what I’m up to every three minutes?  I’m missing something I guess.

Clearly, I’m all for more use of the internet-web-pipe-matrix and I don’t object on principal to people using it for anything they want.  So yay, go for it, micro-blog away.  But every time I think ‘i should sign up to twitter’ I end up wondering why on earth I’d bother, and why the hell anyone would read what I wrote anyway (if I wrote anything at all).  It’s especially confusing to find people who do blog and also use twitter.

It’s why I don’t really use Facebook that much, it’s really just micro-blogging with bells and whistles.  I signed up because it is a useful way to keep in touch with friends and let them find out how to get in touch with me, but I don’t find myself using it because if I want to ‘say’ something, I either blog it so everyone can see, or I mail the person I wanted to tell directly.  I sort of update my Facebook status message (essentially, Twittering in disguise) every now and then but don’t get the urge very often.

I suppose I do sometimes find the status updates of my friends interesting.  Hmm.

But they should just blog instead :p

I’m tempted to write a page which lists what I’m doing at various times of day, in advance, something like,

Weekday

1am -> 7am : I am sleeping
7am -> 9am : I am getting ready to go to work
9am -> 5pm : I am working, or returning home from work
5pm -> 1am : I am at home, staring at a) the computer, b) the television

Weekend

1am -> 7am : I am sleeping
7am -> 1am : I am at home, staring at a) the computer, b) the television

There you go, no need for me to Twitter anything.

ShareThis thingy

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I’ve hacked in the sharethis thingy, but I’ve only put it onto the full post page, through a combination of not wanting to have to hack the complex mandigo template too much and because I guess if anyone cares enough to want to share they’ll be reading the post / comments anyway.

This leaves me really only missing the OpenID stuff.  I signed up for an OpenID elsewhere, and have made this site my ID by delegating it (I think that’s the terminology) so I can log in to places like LiveJournal as perceptionistruth.com to continue harassing my blogging friends there.  I looked at adding OpenID support to this site so people can log in to comment, but for now I’m just leaving the comments open.

Global finance – what’s at stake?

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As someone who’s not directly involved in the financial market other than having a pension and a mortgage, this statement struck me as something we should be concerned about.

It’s a world in which the Chinese state, if it co-ordinated the investments of its cash-rich institutions, could end up owning more-or-less the entire financial system of the US and the UK.

from: the BBC

That’s the truth about a global economy, and the value of financial institutions plumeting due to the current credit crunch.

Up or Sideways redux (cross MMO communication)

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I wrote a lengthy blog post about vertical or horizontal scaling in online roleplaying games, and Leigh wrote a just as lengthy comment.   He made some interesting points which I thought I’d address in another post, rather than writing a lengthy comment in response to his lengthy comment.

I’m going to quote bits of his comment but you should really go and read the comment as well.

I’ve often wondered what a game can do for these types of people, who are, let’s face it, just after more experience, a higher level, or a bigger pot of gold than others in their peer group. While I do like the idea of more horizontal progression I think it ultimately leads to another dead end – it just takes players longer to get there.

Perhaps.  And maybe horizontal expansion of that kind won’t interest a lot of players either, but what I think it provides is a flatter range of power which lets new players get involved quickly, without totally destroying the ability of people to progress into new things.  If it’s done correctly.

How good would it be to have a chat system that shows all the channels available, makes it easy to set up your own and invite people, and gives a wealth of topics to talk about?

Without a doubt this is something I totally agree with.  It’s certainly something I don’t think many games exploit as well as they could.  There’s an increase in the tools to build web-based communities, but I know that a lot of players are only ‘in the game’ mindset, while they’re in the game, they don’t want to spend a lot of time outside of the game working on a forum or website.  If there were easier ways to communicate on a global level within the games, it would help build community.

One of my big bugbears with WoW is that you can’t (or couldn’t when I played) talk to people if you weren’t in their alliance (i.e. horde vs alliance).  You can’t even set them as a friend and see if they log on.  Ok, so there’s some big PvP element in WoW and you don’t want alliance members tipping off the hoard about their every move – except if they wanted to they could just IM them.  It’s stupid to prevent poeple talking to each other because of some in-game alliance mechanic.

Games should be doing as much as possible to facilitate communication, to allow persistent channels to exist, allow poeple to take part in those channels even if they’re not in the game perhaps.  As you said, there should be an easy way to view all those channels and take part.

That covers another big hatred of mine, which I’ve mentioned previously, enforced geographical splits.  Splitting up friends based on where they live to allow you to make support easier reduces community, it doesn’t build it.

Second Life doesn’t have a ‘game’, it doesn’t have a goal, it doesn’t have any progression mechanic, and yet it has huge communities built up around it, friendships, relationships.  I’ve not really delved deeply into the chat side of Second Life but I know people who spend a lot of time socialising there.  Which goes to show you don’t need a game to build a good community, but you do need good communities to build good multi-player games.

We’ve recently started using XFire to keep in-touch with friends spread through a lot of games.  A persistent channel we can join and read from within just about any game, even if chatting isn’t always easy.

Here’s what we should be telling MMO producers.

  1. Give us good channels, good communication methods and no restrictions
  2. Develop a standard for MMO chat
  3. Implement cross-game MMO chat services

How cool would it be if you could log in to your favourite chat channel (say #lunatics) and chat as EQ2.Realm.Nickname with WOW.Realm.Bob and LOTRO.World.Billy and SL.Vegas.Sarah.  Each of those people could be in their own virtual game world, using the chat system and communicating with their own native tools in the chat channel and everyone could take part.

I know MMO producers want us to stay with their game for ever, but if they provided a cross-MMO communication device that was standard, people wouldn’t feel obliged to leave a game just because a bunch of their friends had, they could keep in touch.

We want cross-MMO communication tools built into our games and virtual worlds, and we want them soon.

The circle is complete

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So, welcome to the new blog at perceptionistruth.com.  The circle is now complete, I’ve gone from running my own blog, to trying livejournal, to running my own blog, to trying blogspot and now I’m back to running my own blog using wordpress.

I’ve intentionally left the site pretty open, you can leave comments without having to register, we’ll see how much spam I get and see if that needs reviewing.  You’re welcome to register of course if you wish.  For previous comments I’m slowly going through and adding in a URL against your name so it goes to your primary blog/site, but there’s no way of re-associating those comments with an account (as far as I can see, at the moment), so you won’t be able to re-edit any of them.

Feel free to comment on the layout and design, just don’t expect me to do much about it!  I’ve spent about 3 months going through a lot of WordPress templates, from dark with light text to light with dark text and everything in-between.  Traditionally I prefer dark backgrounds and light text, but I can’t deny that the inverse somehow looks more professional, and at the moment Mandigo (the template I’m using) doesn’t offer an inverse colour scheme.  I may play with Mandigo and see if I can hack the mighty amount of css it uses to invert the colour scheme somehow, but no promises.

I’ll miss the neat feature on blogger which included the last entry from each link in your ‘blogroll’, but I’ll cope with plain old links.  However, I’m sure there are plenty of funky plug-ins I’ll end up playing with on WordPress that fill my need for toys.

Welcome aboard, please update your book marks and links.  The main site is perceptionistruth.com and the rss feed can be found at http://perceptionistruth.com/feed/.