I went to see the new X-Men movie the other day and enjoyed it quite a bit. I didn’t know about it at the time, but apparently there is a 30-second scene after the end credits which hints pretty strongly that there will be a fourth movie. Thanks to the magic of the internet I managed to track down and download the extra scene [1.2MB AVI]. Background information is here. Don’t click on either of those links unless you’ve already seen the movie.
I finished playing Syberia II today and wish there was another game in that series. The graphics were much better than in the first game but the story had a few gaping holes in it. I still liked it very much though. One thing this game has made me start doing is double-clicking on everything. In the game, if you click somewhere on the screen Kate will stroll over to that spot and if you double click she’ll jog. Sometimes I even found myself triple-clicking when I was impatient. Yesterday at work I was showing a co-worker a bug that I had found in one of our products and I quadruple-clicked on a Windows button! Wow. I’m going to have to unlearn that habit fast! [I’m also going to have to change the font for this blog. I’m not sure what this WordPress default font is (Lucida Grande? Verdana?), but it puts the first two letters of the word “click” a bit too close together!]
A few days ago my DSL modem started to drop its internet connection for a couple minutes every half hour or so. Last night it died completely and I was Disconnected for almost 24 hours. I was sleeping or at work for more than half of that time but it still made me feel cold and empty inside. If anybody tried to send me email last night or today, can you please re-send it? I went to my ISP’s office on my lunch break and they said the manufacturer will probably fix it for under $20. They loaned me another modem to use in the meantime, which was very nice.
I finished playing Syberia the other day and was very impressed by it. I decided that I really do want to try writing my own game for the interactive fiction competition this year and am starting to learn how to program in Inform 7. I7 a new version of a programming language for adventure games that was released less than a month ago. For this new version the syntax is in natural language and reads just like regular English. The language designer has written books and articles about the theory of interactive fiction as literature and about the computational linguistics of the natural language syntax. I find it very interesting, and think I’ll read some of them after I finish learning the language. Here’s a sample program somebody posted to rec.arts.int-fiction yesterday. I think it’s brilliant. Can you guess what it prints out?
The game I’ve started writing is called “Cranberry Lake Canoe Trip” and the goal of the game will be to find a geocache! I’m having lots of fun with it and have already got the map written so you can walk around the game. Right now I’m working on the room descriptions. I’m using the Rideau Trail Guidebook as a reference and am trying to describe all the trees and rocks and animals that I imagine would be in each location. Christine suggested I go to the library and check out some nature books and look at those too. I think I’ll see if they have any field guides that help you identify trees.
I bought a computer game last week called Syberia and I’m really enjoying it. It’s a graphical adventure like Myst and Grim Fandango, which I also really enjoyed. (Although I don’t remember ever finishing Grim Fandango). The graphics in Syberia are really nice and the 3D characters walking around and climbing up ladders and stuff make me think of The Sims, but what I really love about the game is the story. The main character is a New York lawyer named Kate Walker and her mission is to buy out a family-owned toy factory in the French Alps, but she meets a few problems along the way…
I remember playing Zork, Enchanter, and all the other Infocom text adventures with Peter when they were the best selling computer games on the market. Syberia makes me feel a bit nostalgic about those times. We used to spend the whole night in Dad’s office playing games. We’d order $4.00 pizza and have it delivered to Scaife Hall, and when the sun came up Dad would come and drive us home.
These days the term “text adventure” has been replaced with “interactive fiction” and the genre is still booming. People are writing new games all the time and releasing them for free on the internet, and some of these games attract quite a following. I think I might try writing some interactive fiction for the IFComp this year. There’s a new version of the Inform programming language that was just released and it’s supposed to have some pretty interesting features. Yesterday I went out and bought a writing reference book called Characters, Emotion & Viewpoint. Maybe I’m getting a bit ahead of myself.
Yesterday Sue Meech from the Sandy Pines Wildlife Centre called Celine and said the bat we brought there in January was ready to be released. She wanted the bat to be set free within 20 meters of the place he was found, and near a tree. So at dusk last night Connie (a volunteer at the centre) went to Celine’s apartment with the bat in her backpack. I went too, and Connie brought a friend named Brian (group photo). Brian used to own a record store in the same building and told me stories about standing in that very same hallway in 1980. His store was in Rheni’s studio.
We all went out onto the roof and Connie took the bat out. He was in a sock in box in her backpack. She had a second bat in another sock, and she and Brian were going to relase it at another house in Kingston. Celine opened up the sock and put it at her feet, and a minute later the little guy started wriggling out (close up). Once he was out he flew in two or three circles around the roof and then went straight into the crack between the buildings. He must be happy to be home!
The previous posts about the bat are here, here, and here.
I made an amazing discovery tonight. For weeks I have been irritated by a light switch in my apartment that doesn’t do anything, and by an electrical outlet that doesn’t seem to work. Today I bought some plastic faceplates with no holes so I could cover them up and was in the middle of removing the old ones when I suddenly realized that the switch controls the outlet. It’s kind of obvious, but I just didn’t realize it. Anyway, here are some photos of my apartment: living room, kitchen, “dining room,” hallway, bedroom, bathroom, building, street (Note the lighthouse. Well, maybe it’s more like a beacon than a lighthouse.), the view from my bedroom window, my new lamp.
Luther Wright and the Wrongs played at the Grad Club the other night and put on a really good show. Brian played with them on his fiddle, and I stood right up in front of the stage and even danced a bit! I bought a CD after the show and have been listening to it all weekend. The opening band was The Lady Racers, who were also very good. I wanted to buy a CD from them too, but they didn’t have any.
Last night Celine came over and we watched a few of Grandpa’s super 8 movies. One of them was filmed in Miami sometime in the mid-seventies and had a long segment of Grandma feeding the seagulls. I wonder if that was where Grandpa took the picture of her feeding the seagulls that Dad has a big poster-sized print of. They also went sightseeing at Coral Castle, which really surprised me and Celine. (Warning: clicking that link will play Zamfir covering a Celine Dion song!) We’ve talked about that place for years, but I never knew that Grandma and Grandpa went there. It was amazing to see how easily the 9-ton doorway spun on it’s hinge.
After Celine left I pulled some really old reels of film out from the bottom of the box. I think some of them were taken before my parents even met each other! Unfortunately, the projector started to eat the film and I didn’t get to see any of them. It only chewed up the film header on one of the movies and none of the actual movie was damaged, but I think I’ll have to find out how to stop it from happening again. Maybe all it would take is a good cleaning to make the projector work better.
When I was in Montreal for Easter last weekend Mesh and Grandma gave me many boxes of Grandpa’s 8mm and super 8 films, a film projector, and a couple boxes of 35mm slides. There are lots more slides, but Mesh is still sorting through them. I said I would digitize everything.
I picked one film at random, and it said (in Mesh’s handwriting), “1973 Apr. Coreen driving off. Cats. The twins with grandma (kissing and smelling a flower on the stairway).” It was strange to see me and Christine when we were three years old. And Grandma was 33 years younger too. We were wearing some of those dreadful matching twins outfits. Red with a blue and white stripe, I think. They were awful.
Some of the slides have mildew on them. I guess I should try to wash it off. I hooked up my scanner and scanned in one small box of slides. I am amazed at how beautiful Grandma is in these pictures! It seems to me that I have always thought of her as an old woman, even in my earliest memories. I guess everybody has their own lives, separate of your impressions of them. I made a web site for these slides: http://www.floatingeye.net/ephemera/
I just remembered that Victor said he had some slides at his house that Mesh wasn’t aware of. I’ll have to ask him about that.
I installed Linux on one of my old computers, got a static IP address, and started running my own web server. I wonder if I will start to enjoy editing all these configuration files by hand.
