Newstocks

Middle-to-End

I am taking part in the 21st annual Catlin End-to-End on May 3, helping to raise funds for Bermuda charities.

I’m actually only doing the Middle-to-End as I think doing the End-to-End two days before the swim season starts would just be asking for it! Please feel free to come join me on the walk, or, for you West-Enders, get your rear-ends out on the course with a chocolate bar for me (I mean apple – damn baby weight!).

If you'd like to sponsor me, please visit my online pledging page. Funds raised in the 2008 End-to-End will be dedicated to the charitable activities of The WindReach Explorers Summer Camp, The Adult Education School, The Family Centre, The Duke of Edinburgh Award in Bermuda, Greenrock, and Bermuda National Trust. Thanks!

Talisman

Now that I have a PS3, I've been spending some time poking around to see what games are available or upcoming for it.

The most exciting thing I found was news that a PS3 (and XBox) version of Games Workshop's classic board game Talisman is in development. I had a lot of fun with that back in my D&D-playing youth, and the prospect of a video game version that looked as nice as this was something to look forward to.

I was a bit concerned about the lack of information about the title available online, however - not a good sign for a game scheduled to launch this month, having already been delayed from last year. And sure enough, it seems that the project is currently in limbo with, at a minimum, a change of developer planned.

Bummer. Maybe I'd have better luck trying to persuade Mandy to play the 4th edition of the board game with me. Failing that, Aidan will just have to hurry up and grow up so I can play it with him!

Puzzle Quest

Puzzle Quest is the most addictive game I've played since Civilization 4.

I wouldn't have bothered with it had it not scored an impressive 87% in April's PC Gamer (making it the highest-scoring game that month) and attracted the mag's infrequently-seen "Must Buy" award too. It's only $20, and is available on Steam, so I decided to take a chance and download it. I'm glad I did.

It's a cross between Bejeweled (a popular casual game that I've never played) and a role-playing game. You take the role of a fantasy hero trying to save his homeland from an undead invasion by doing quests and fighting monsters - with all combat being resolved by playing a turn-based puzzle game. The puzzle consists of an 8x8 grid containing coloured icons, and each turn you have to swap two to try to make lines of three or more identical tiles. Depending on the tile icons, you either gain mana, gold or experience from the match, or cause damage to your opponent. Mana can be used to cast spells with a wide variety of effects. The first person to reduce his opponent to 0 health wins the combat.

It sounds simple, a little dull even, but it's very strategic. In addition, there's a variety of other stuff layered on top, from mounts, to special items, to crafting and spell creation (done via mini-games that are some variant on the combat puzzle game), all of which confer various bonuses and extra abilities in combat. It all makes for a surprisingly rich experience.

It's also nice to be reminded that great games don't have to have first-class 3D graphics and computer-melting minimum specs. Highly recommended.

Play gym

Aidan has a workout at an unusually quiet play gym.

Formats available:MPEG-4 Video (.m4v), Flash Video (.flv)

The Ag Show

Took Aidan to his first Ag Show - sorry, Annual Exhibition - this afternoon.

He had a great time looking at all the animals - from the rabbits, birds, ducks and goats, to the horses showjumping in the main arena.

By far his favourite animal, though, was this pig, which obligingly snorted and snuffled at him, snout poking through the gate of its sty. I think he would have watched it all afternoon, if we had let him!

Somersaults and cartwheels

Aidan started gymnastics class at Whitney Institute this morning.

I say "class", but it's really just a more structured version of the play gym he's been going to in St. David's for some months now. There, the kids just run around for a couple of hours playing with whatever bits of equipment they please.

Today, the equipment was grouped into stations, and the kids into groups. Each group of kids was assigned to a station and would follow a (relatively) orderly circuit through each piece of equipment in that group - walking along beams, doing somersaults, running along an inflatable track, and so on. Then after ten minutes a bell would ring and everyone would move on to the next station.

It was as much of a workout for us parents as for the kids!

Beside the seaside

All together now... "Oh I do like to be beside the seaside..."

Formats available:MPEG-4 Video (.m4v), Flash Video (.flv)

Bobby out of hospital

Happily, Bobby got out of the hospital Thursday afternoon and is now back at home. He's going to have to take some drugs to get rid of the clot, but no more surgery should be necessary.

Morons

NBC are saying that Apple must do more to address piracy before it will start selling its content on iTunes again. "One of the big issues for NBC is piracy. We are financially harmed every day by piracy," said NBC chief digital officer George Kliavkoff. In particular, they don't want their content to be playable on iPods.

Idiots. I am currently torrenting episodes of NBC's Battlestar Galactica precisely because I cannot buy them on iTunes, or anywhere else. I can't access them on Hulu (for free), because my IP address is outside the US, but then Hulu wouldn't let me watch them on my TV anyway.

I'd wager that most pirated copies of NBC shows come from TV rips, not copies on iPods purchased from the iTunes store. The quality of rips is higher (if you're ripping an HD channel) and it costs nothing. Boycotting Apple is therefore unlikely to be doing anything to reduce NBC's losses from piracy. If anything, it's probably making them worse.

How can they be so stupid?

Double bummer

Bobby was admitted back into hospital last night.

He had a checkup with his GP yesterday who, on seeing his swollen leg, suspected a blood clot and sent him to emergency for tests. After a lot of waiting around he was finally admitted and will probably be there for the next couple of days. His leg was giving him a bit of pain, but he had a good night and was given some painkillers this morning, which have made him feel much better. I believe they're expecting to do an MRI sometime today.

Unfortunately, today Mandy and I were also supposed to be flying to New York for a long weekend without Aidan, who we were going to leave with his granny and poppa. Naturally, we've had to cancel. Fortunately the airline has given us a credit for the full cost of our tickets that's good until the end of this year, and the hotel didn't charge us for the late cancellation. The only money we're likely to lose is what we paid for tickets to La Boheme at the Met and the Broadway show Curtains.

Bit of a bummer all round.

Playstation 3

After years of railing against consoles, I finally sold out and bought a Playstation 3. So far, I'm loving it.

It's great to finally be able to play Blu-ray discs. Bought the BBC's Planet Earth to start me off, and it looks absolutely fantastic.

The other massive plus is its ability to play back XviD-encoded video files downloaded from the net. We'll still buy missed episodes of TV shows from the iTunes store when we can, but now we can watch any shows we have to torrent on the TV instead of having to huddle round the computer. I even managed to get a hi-def download of Friday's episode of Battlestar Galactica playing back without too much trouble, with the help of TVersity.

The last thing I tried out, which is still the least important aspect of the PS3 to me, is its ability to play games. I decided to start out with one of the highest-rated PS3 games released so far, the oddly-named Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction. It's a lot of fun. Getting used to the controller took a little time, but to its credit, while I've been playing the game I haven't found myself missing a mouse and keyboard. I still don't see myself buying many games for it, not least because they're around $20 more expensive than PC games. But for those titles that don't get released for the PC, or where I can't bring myself to wait, it'll be good to have the option.

I wasn't really bothered about the PS3's ability to display photos, already being able to do that with the Apple TV. But it turns out that the PS3 is better at it. The blandly-named "Portrait" mode randomly pans across or zooms into or out of each picture as it displays it, in a similar fashion to the Apple TV's "Ken Burns effect". The PS3 does a much better job, however, intelligently identifying the points of interest and using them as the start of end points of the pan or zoom.

All round, a worthwhile purchase. If anyone is thinking of picking one up in Bermuda, Leisure Time is the best place to go for the 40GB model. They're $70 cheaper than Electronics City, and only a little more expensive than from Amazon.com, once you've paid the duty and shipping. The games seem relatively reasonably priced there too. PTech apparently only carry the 80GB model, which at $900 seems way overpriced.

Group my items into as many shipments as possible

When I order stuff from Amazon.com and send it to my ZipX account, I always say "Group my items into as few shipments as possible". That's because ZipX charge a flat rate of $22.25 for every package (plus duty and additional shipping), so getting multiple shipments gets expensive quickly.

So I when I ordered seasons 1 and 3 of "Curb Your Enthusiasm" from Amazon this week, I was careful to check they were both shipping from the same supplier. They were, and my email confirmation also stated, "order will arrive in 1 shipment".

So naturally I was overjoyed when Amazon then told me they were going to send them as two packages anyway. High fives all round.

I rushed to the website to try to cancel part of the order, but it just laughed in my face and told me they were already being prepared for shipment and it was too late to do anything now.

The really bullshit thing about the whole deal is that the shipping confirmation email for the first package said they were shipping this part of my order separately "to give you quicker service". The second shipping confirmation arrived 90 minutes later. Both packages arrived at ZipX at the same time.

I've emailed Amazon to complain, and suggest that perhaps they should warn customers before splitting orders into multiple shipments when "as few shipments as possible" has been specified. I'm not holding my breath, though.

To PS3 or not to PS3?

Against my better judgement, I've again found myself thinking about buying a PS3.

Pros:

• It's the only BD-Live Blu-ray player currently available.
• It can play back DivX- and XviD-encoded video. Like torrented Battlestar Galactica, for example.
• Apparently it can play games too. Including some you can't get on the PC (Guitar Hero I'm looking at you). Plus, the prospect of playing games on a big screen is quite enticing.

Cons:

• Price. I'm guessing between $600 and $800 in Bermuda.
• Selection of Blu-ray movies is a bit rubbish right now.
• Hi-def torrents seem to be mostly encoded in X264, which the PS3 can't play (at least, not without a lot of frigging around). And I don't know if the standard def, XviD-encoded ones will look any better than Cablevision.
• Selection of games isn't as good as, say, the Xbox 360. Although as I wouldn't be buying it for the games (and certainly not first-person shooters, which need mouse-look), that's no big deal.
• It's a console. Sellout.

Any console owners out there have any thoughts?

Bobby home on Thursday

Bobby was given the all-clear by the doctors yesterday and will be flying back to Bermuda on Thursday. He could have come back on today's flight, but decided he didn't want to rush things. Given that he only got out of the hospital on Thursday, that seems to make a lot of sense.

Complacency

Vexed Bermoothes is taking me to task for allowing my interest in local politics to decline:

"Our complacency is.. what allows Bermuda politics to become the comfortable bastion of the self-interested and the vicious."

When I was running A Limey In Bermuda I used to chide those members of my family who kept silent about Bermuda's governance, for the same reasons. Now here I am, doing just the same.

Vexed is right. Governance in Bermuda will not improve until people demand change. By tuning out of the local political scene, I'm no longer doing anything to help make things better.

That said, I'm no longer doing anything to make things worse, either. My writing on LiB sometimes veered towards the shrill or self-righteous, and my attempts at humour were often misunderstood. Some Bermudians reacted badly to this, and my message was lost as a result.

In that respect, I think that Vexed is a better writer - his posts, while pointed, are usually temperate - the kind of thing you might read in a leader in The Economist. In many other countries, I'd say that would give him a better chance of improving things. Unfortunately, I don't think most Bermudians respond to that style of writing, be they black or white, PLP or UBP supporters. Loyalty here is tribal. It's not about doing what's right. It's about supporting your side.

I don't see how any individual will change that. I still think that the only way to achieve such a huge paradigm shift is for both the PLP and the UBP to die. The UBP had a golden chance to precipitate that change after the last election, by disbanding. Instead, they flunked it by focusing on how close they were to winning office. But that's not the point. It's no good having the UBP in power if the mindset in Bermuda stays the same.

I'm not complacent. I know the risks of letting our leaders do as they please. I just don't have the energy to worry about it any more.

No more curls!

Last week, Aidan got his first professional haircut. Apparently, he absolutely hated it, crying the whole way through. On the plus side, at least it meant he sat still long enough for them to cut it!

Battlestar Galactica

The first episode of the final season of Battlestar Galactica aired on Friday evening. Alas, as a 4:3 picture letterboxed to widescreen, it looked absolutely awful on my TV.

If I could, I'd buy every episode of the new season on iTunes and watch them on our Apple TV instead. We're already doing that for Lost, rather than watch a 4:3 picture with all sound coming out of one channel (thanks Cablevision). But NBC, in their wisdom, decided to cancel their arrangement with Apple last year, so now you can't get Battlestar Galactica on iTunes anyway. I'd subscribe to Cablevision's HD channels just to get this one show - but SciFi isn't a channel they offer in HD (they do offer Fox, but the rest is just crap, like HGTV and the Food Network). With no legitimate means to get it, I'd BitTorrent without a second thought, except that I have no way to play Xvid-encoded content on my TV.

The only other option I have is to wait until the season comes out on DVD, probably around the end of this year. I'm not sure I have the patience for that, however, and I'd be too worried about coming across spoilers in the interim.

The stupidity of the networks, to provide no way to get what I want, even though I'm willing to pay for it, boggles my mind.

Bobby's on the move

Today, Dad moved to the hotel and continues to feel better and better each day. He's definitely a step closer to coming home!

Detachment

Continuing my gradual detachment from Bermuda's political scene, yesterday I unsubscribed from the feeds of most of Bermuda's political blogs. The only ones that survived the cull were Politics.bm (out of a sense of loyalty to Christian) and Vexed Bermoothes (which is by far Bermuda's best political blog right now), although I still skim the Royal Gazette every day too.

Bermudian politics is mostly populated by the incompetent, the ignorant and the corrupt, and I find little enjoyment in constantly reminding myself of that.

Criminal negligence?

For the Government to suggest that no inquiry is necessary into the disturbance of asbestos at the Club Med site because, "The Ministry of Works and Engineering is... satisfied that immediate and appropriate steps were taken once the disturbance was discovered" is surely to completely miss the point. An inquiry is needed because the disturbance should never have happened at all.

Indeed, given that it was known that there was asbestos at the Club Med site (as evidenced by the Government's admission that it was in the process of hiring an asbestos abatement crew) I wouldn't be surprised if the Government was guilty of criminal negligence.

UPDATE: A lawyer friend of mine writes:

"Not criminal negligence but I would have thought they are certainly at risk for a negligence claim by the hustle truckers unless clear warnings were handed out to them by the contractors not to do work near particular asbestos areas or carry out the type of work that would disturb it."

Bobby in Baltimore

Sorry sorry! I didn't realize how many of you were reading this! But having been stopped in the street many times today, obviously a number of people are! Dad's doing well. The nurses and doctors have nothing but good reports.

He's had two really good nights with Denise - his cute, blond, twenty-something nurse. How could you go wrong really when you've got one of those?! Every day he's walking a little more and has been working with the therapist to learn to stand up and sit down without using his arms, go up stairs and things like that that will help him and, most especially, Mom in the short term.

It's likely that he'll be in the hospital for a few more days before moving to the hotel. He has to stay in Baltimore for a week after leaving the hospital before coming home. Aidan and I will be going up to provide bedside entertainment when Dad moves to the hotel.