Monthly Archives: December 2008

Weeeeee fit (not yet!)

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So, finally we broke out the wii fit again.  It’s been a while, we both got sick and then it was really hard to get back into the habbit, but we managed to today.  Thirty minutes each.  We’ve gone past our initial goals without beating them, but we’ve put new ones in and we’re going to try again each day to do some wii fit.

It’s good for us in so many ways, not least of which it gives us time to be in the lounge together doing something specifically together which doesn’t involve sitting 10 feet apart at the PC’s concentrating and not talking.

So, yay us.

Also, I’m looking for some recommendations for fun, two player games on the Wii.  Something either co-operative or competative I don’t really mind, but it has to be fun and have a lot of life in it.  I look through all the Wii Ware games and they look a bit naff, and I can’t find any decent reviews on the ‘web which is frustrating.  I’m happy buying a game but not looking for anything brand new (light on cash atm).  I know there’s a few games made up of lots of mini games, but I’m not sure how much longevity they have?  So, do you know of any *fun* two player games we can spend an hour with just laughing and enjoying the Wii?

Four Working Days to go

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Not that I’m counting, but in four more working days, I’m on holiday for Christmas.  Only a week off, then back for the New Year but I’ll take five days.  I really need a break from it all at the moment, it’s starting to get on top of me.

Ten days until Christmas and we’re sorted.  Presents sorted, wrapped, posted or delivered as appropriate.  Well, technically I still have to wrap Grete’s presents but I enjoy tormenting her too much by leaving them lying around in the open in boxes.

We’ve already bought all the food we can get in advance which won’t perish before the 25th, so we probably need to shop again in the early part of next week, but no mammoth shops like in previous years (standing in a queue in Asda for three hours for example).  Much more relaxed Christmas this year.

Except money wise obviously, the insurance company is being annoying about the car wing mirror (like claiming we don’t have protected no-claims, which we do, and ‘suggesting’ they may write the car off for the cost of the repair which is just insane.  I suspect they’re just trying to put us off claiming).  Either way, it’s another £100-200 I can’t afford at this time of year after the dentist bills.  I don’t begrudge paying out any of the money we’ve spent on presents and gifts at all, that’s money well spent, but the timing of the other bills just makes it a bit frustrating.

Still, I’ve been in debt since the second year of my university course, so I guess another year of it in 2009 won’t kill me.  Since we got rid of the loan our debt has been pretty much consistent in size, it’s grown a little in the last few weeks, but I’ll try and make a big dent in the early part of next year.

Fingers crossed.

So, four days until holiday, ten until Christmas and sixteen until 2009.

Newcastle

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So we went to visit my folks this weekend (mother, sister, her husband and their three kids) and it was good. Ate too much, talked about the ‘old times’ too much, and handed out some presents (no opening them until Christmas).

However, it was marred slightly when we got up Sunday morning and found someone had destroyed the plastic moulding around the passenger side wing mirror and generated enough force to pop the mirror out of the fixture so it was hanging by the wires only.  A piece of the moulding was sitting about six feet away.  The car was parked near my mum’s, in a little parking spot off the road, with the mirrors no where near traffic, but the passenger side one was next to a path.  Very annoying.

I managed to tie the mirror back on with a latex glove we had in the car boot (not telling), and it lasted long enough to get us the half mile to my sister’s place, where we borrowed some black electrical tape from my brother-in-law.  The mirror is now taped on with about 200 feet of tape, and it survived the whole journey south.  I think we’re going to call the insurance company tomorrow and found out how to proceed.

Otherwise, excellent weekend, fun with the kids, and we’ve promised to visit more in 2008.

Old photo’s

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We spent the weekend in Newcastle, visiting my family (I’ll be blogging about that in a moment), and while I was there I asked my sister if she had all our old photo’s.  I sort of knew she did, she’s been making sure all the family photo’s are kept safe for quite some time.  Grete hasn’t seen them really, despite the fact that we’ve been married for 10 years, so it was a chance for her to laugh at the ones of me when I was younger.  Two in particular caught my eye in respect to my blogging.

tony-paitningThe first one is me sitting painting some miniatures, note that I’m using oil based enamels, big pots of tamya modelling paint as bases (which I’m still using, the very same pots), and that there’s a partly finished mini on the table, an elf in a green cloak with blonde hair.  I still have that mini, and I’m pretty sure it’s still got the same paint job (which since it’s oil based enamel will last for ever).  Click for the full sized pic, yes, I spelled the file name wrong.

The second picture is of me proudly sitting in front of what I suspect was my brand new spectrum.  As you can see it’s plugged into a black and white TV, and connected to an ancient tape deck (complete with mike!)

For bonus points, I appear to be wearing the same shirt.

tony-spectrum Edit: Ah, Grete points out one shirt is short sleeved and the other long, I’m blind. Also, judging by my hair these are probably a year or two apart.

Google alerts, rss, google reader = recipe for awesome

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Leigh recently blogged about Google Alerts.  I’d seen Google Alerts when they first came out, and I’d tried a few different alerts but the e-mails bugged me.  I spend a lot of time dealing with e-mail already, and getting random mails from Google wasn’t that interesting to me.

But, when Leigh blogged I thought I’d check them out again – and I found you can set the alerts to be read as an RSS feed.  This is awesome, if you use Google Reader the feeds show up automagically in your list of feeds, and every time the search finds something it creates a new entry.

I’m really used to using Google Reader now, and I find it really convenient to just pop in, read a few posts from a few feeds and pop out again, knowing anything I don’t read will still be there later.  Combining that with Google Alerts basically let’s you create your own RSS feeds for any topic you like, if you can narrow the searches down enough (which is the main issue).

Just thought I’d mention it, since I know a few of you use Google Reader (I’m sure it works fine in other feed readers too, but Google Reader just makes it even easier).

I forgot to have lunch

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Some days I get really hungry and no amount of sensible eating really deals with it.  There’s a school of thought which says I’m probably not hungry, but thirsty since humans have lost the ability to clearly tell the difference in all situations.  Anyway, I was sitting in the lounge at around 2:50pm, working (just finished a conference call) and snacking on some chicken bite things, thinking man I’m hungry.  Obviously, that kind of feeling requires a blog post.  Because you’re all about the up-to-the-minute details of my boring day to day life (I would have written boring ass life, but Kevin Smith beat me to it).

So I opened WordPress, and started a blog post, and wrote what I’d had for breakfast and what I’d had for lunch and that I was still hungry.  Only when I went to write what I had for lunch, I realised I hadn’t had any.

Which is probably a better reason for my hunger than just random ‘maybe I’m hungry’.  So there.  I forgot to each lunch and you didn’t have to read a blog about what I’d eaten.

Why I dislike religion – using football as an example

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I was thinking about my dislike of religion (as opposed to faith which I think is honest and right) and I think the best way to explain it is to demonstrate with football (the word football works fine, no matter if you’re in the UK or the USA, you’re just imagining different shaped balls).

Some people are fans of a particular football team, either their home town, or college, or a well known team, or some team that has good colours, or just someone they fell into following and kept up with.  Personally, I’m a New York Giants fan, no good reason, I just am.

Fans of a team share a common faith in that team.  They share a common understanding, goal and experience.  They turn up weekly or daily or however often or they watch from home, and they hope their team wins.  The know the names of some of the players, maybe all of them.  They can talk to people they’ve never met about their shared passion and there is a connection.  And yet, that passion is expressed in different ways.  Some people turn up dressed as a player, some paint their faces, some cut their hair, some turn up with the family in regular clothes and eat hot dogs, some watch from home, some are forced to listen on the radio and others get to hear about it 4th hand, but keep up to date anyway.

They all share that support and that common understanding, but expression is varied.  However, within that group of fans there may be factions who all show their support in a certain way, and they feel more companionship and belonging because of it.  They all cut their hair, they all wear the shirt, they all bring the same flag.  That’s fine, they have found a more specific area of fanship and they take part.

It’s only a problem when those fans begin to look down on non-participating members.  To impose their form of fanship.  When you’re frowned upon for not quite being as much of a fan, or because you missed a game, or because you didn’t wear this years shirt, you’re wearing last years.  You still share the same belief, but somehow your belief isn’t strong enough.  Maybe certain fans believe a particular player is bad for the team where-as you’re personally not that worried by them, bad players come and go and the team will survive.  But the angry fans force them out, put pressure on everyone to make sure they can’t play.

There’s the line between faith and religion.  Faith is belief which can be held by many people in subtly different forms, but religion takes that belief and creates rules around it.  You must believe in a certain way, you must dress to football matches in a certain way, you must not allow these people to continue practicing their beliefs because they don’t match our own, you must stop coming to the match with your friend because he’s really a Man City fan and is just here for the burgers.

For the most part, football fans resist being pressured into conforming, they worship their football teams in their own way, are encouraged to do so.

And yet religions appear to me, to spend all of their time imposing how people should practice their faith, the very existence of religion is about control and management of belief.

Goodbye EverQuest

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So yesterday I closed my last remaining EverQuest account.  It’s been a fun time, but I’ve just gradually moved away from EQ.  Some of it is frustration with the game, some to do with the direction it had gone and was going, and some is just because I’ve been doing it so long.

The game in my view is damned if it does now and damned if it doesn’t.  They needed to close the gap between ‘hard-core’ players and ‘casual’ players or risk totally losing one of those segments of the playerbase, however, each change to achieve that alienates another bunch of players.  While I understood the need for the changes, they didn’t enhance my game they just made me feel like it wasn’t worth trying.

The people in EQ kept me playing for longer than the game alone would have and without them it wouldn’t have been anywhere near as much fun, so if any of them read this – thanks, it really was an honour.

I’m past devoting that much time to a single game, I play Lord of the Rings On-line casually, sometimes spending lots of time in game and sometimes not playing for ages, but I can always pick it up and drop it as required.  It suits me, and I love the lore.  So if you know me and you want to say hi, pop in to the [EN-RP] Laurelin server and look me up.

Thanks to everyone in the guilds I was in, the groups I was in, and anyone who had to put up with my control-freakery nature.

Why just one God?

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Ok, let’s be clear, firstly I’m pretty ignorant in general.  I don’t read much non-fiction, I’ve not had a classical education and I’ve not been privy to much involvement in any form of religion.  So basically, I’m talking from a position of not knowing much but believing a lot.  Inherently, that’s a bad position to be in.  But at least I know that.

Secondly, I’m an atheist.  I’m pretty confident there is no god, or any gods.  I’m prepared to be wrong, but I’m still confident.

Thirdly, faith and religion are not the same thing.  I fundamentally respect faith, I have serious reservations about religion.

So, with all that said, I can understand where belief in a god, the supernatural, or gods comes from.  I’ve been outside and seen weather which I would attribute to magic if I didn’t have a greater understanding of the world around me.  I know when I see a beam of light shine through a cloud several miles away, forming a tunnel of light from the sky to the ground that it’s a natural phenomenon caused by the position of the sun, the clouds and the weather.  It’s no less awe inspiring to see it, no less moving to be there.  But I don’t for a moment belittle people, thousands of years ago, for believing it was some otherworldly event (in some respects of course, it is).  All around us, all the time are miracles of nature that are hard to believe and understand.

I watched a movie on YouTube a few months back of a dust-devil swirling it’s way across a baseball pitch like some crazy demented demon.  How would I have viewed that same event 3000 years ago?  Completely differently I can assure you.  So I do understand where a belief in the supernatural came from (in my uneducated view).  I also understand faith.

I look around like anyone else and wonder, is this it?  Is there more?  Are we here for a reason, is there some great plan.  I can understand why faith originates, to answer those unanswerable questions, to provide hope in the darkness, to provide understanding of our place in the supernatural world.  But on a personal level for me they don’t ring true, but I’m prepared to be wrong, and I think people who hold faith in something have a courage and a vision that maybe I can’t understand or reach.

And I can even understand religion, I just don’t like it.  Religion takes faith and turns it into doctrine and then uses it to enforce a belief system that benefits the religion more than the members.  Shared belief and shared faith is not religion.  Religion is the imposition of how to have faith, of what form that faith must take, and more importantly, what the penalties are for not having that faith.

Common faith is wonderful, to share similar views with other people, to have a shared agreement about what life means, but it is tainted by the fist of religion at every involvement, and I can never respect that.

And the question I’ll never really understand is why only one God?  If I were to belief in the supernatural, or take up theism it would certainly be a multi-deity version.  If I was to have faith it would be in many forces, many gods.  Why a single creator?  Why one entity making all the decisions?

The best reason I can find is that with most polytheistic systems (is that a word?) the gods are capricious.  Yes, the god of love may be happy with you all the time but there’s also a god of warts and he’ll be along sooner or later to curse your foot.  Single god systems ensure that the god cares.  It’s easier to be happy believing in a single god who cares than it is to admit that sometimes the gods don’t care, and are out for a bit of revenge or deadly fun.  If we accept that people need faith, then we can also begin to believe that people are more likely to believe in a single caring god than a bunch of gods who might care only on Mondays.

And yet, the latter more accurately reflects the state of the world, surely that’s why those systems came about.  If you don’t understand the causes of weather, and you’re a sailor, sometimes your god is capricious and sometimes they save your life.  Sometimes the god of corn is nice and makes it rain and other times they’re nasty and bring you drought.  That’s how the world is.  A single loving god needs an excuse (free will!) to explain the badness that goes on in the world.  A bunch of little gods need no excuse, they cover all aspects of how life is.

And so, for me, if I was to believe, it would be in a collection of gods.  A committee maybe.  A rabble perhaps.  Why only one god?  Because I think, it’s easier to believe in one god than many, and people need to believe in something.

SMORG (Smallish-Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game)

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We’ve had MMORPGs (massively multi-player online roleplaying games) for a while and now we’re increasingly just calling them MORPGs (Multi-player online roleplaying games).

During a conversation with friends we decided you needed Smallish-Multiplayer Online Roleplaying games (SMORG) to cover old games which have shrinking player bases, games which never really took off, and games which naturally thrive with small groups of players.

So, feel free to use this term.