By Tom Fotherby on April 1, 2007
Wii,Sports,7/10 – April 2007
Wii Sports comes bundled with the Wii console – It has Tennis, Bowling, Boxing, Baseball and Golf.
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It is completely amazing how intuitive it is to use the Wiimote to play the game. You really don’t need to explain the controls to a new-comer, whether they are 6 or 56.
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I’m not a fan of the boxing, golf or baseball but the bowling and tennis are ace. Playing 4 player tennis is hilarious. You don’t control the movement of the players, instead you have to master your swing. Timing is most important, then the angle of the bat when you hit the ball. Hit early to play cross court, or wait till the ball is almost past you to push it down the line. Becoming accurate takes practice because the play is quite subtle. For example, you can even put spin on the ball by twisting the wiimote as you hit the ball.
Good exercise? No, but better than other tennis games I guess.
Posted in Game Reviews |
By Tom Fotherby on March 29, 2007
We’ve been trying some new recipes recently. Last night we made a dish for supper which took about half an hour to prepare and cook. When we had finished and it was on a plate, we both stood looking at it. After 10 seconds of silence Chloe said “Oh my God, we’ve created those little Halo things – The Flood“. She was so right, they looked exactly like the Flood!
Posted in Journal | Tagged Cooking, Halo |
By Tom Fotherby on March 21, 2007
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On Kix and my 8 year going-out anniversary I ordered a replacement wedding ring. I’ve spend more time without a ring than with one on 😥 . I lost my original ring 3 months after the wedding at the Oktoberfest in Munich and it was honestly a pretty painful experience – The sharp realisation that it wasn’t on my finger caused a unbearable searing loss. At the time, I felt like I’d lost the most precious possession I owned, it felt like all the sentimental value of the wedding was wrapped up in the ring and was now gone. I’d lost something that was given to me by my wife and was even blessed by God.
I feel ok now, Chloe was so understanding about it, she completely eased my mind. “Don’t worry hun, it’s only a piece of metal”.
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I picked up the new ring on my birthday, exactly 2 years after I proposed. Wearing a ring feels really odd, I can’t stop thinking “what’s wrong with my finger, oh yeah, I’m wearing a ring” (repeat every 15 seconds). I like it.
Posted in Journal |
By Tom Fotherby on March 18, 2007
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The Wii is physically very small and quiet and understated which demonstrates it’s philosophy – It isn’t trying to do everything, it is simply trying to be be playful. The controller is natural to use but very clever. It can detect where your pointing it, whether your tilting it and it’s real forte, it can react to acceleration (it also contains a speaker and rumble-pack). The console comes with “Wii Sports” which is sort of a tutorial for the controller and demos some of the flexibility that can be had – my favourite is tennis.
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The Wii is a fun machine!
Posted in Toys |
By Tom Fotherby on February 25, 2007
Game Cube,Bongo Rythm,8/10 – February 2007
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An excellent game where you have to drum to the beat of on-screen music. A yellow dot means left, a red dot means right, a pink dot means both and a splash mark means clap. There’s 3 difficulty levels which have the same songs but different beat speeds.
It’s a fun game and really fulfilling when you realise your improving enough to complete levels that seemed impossible when you first tried.
It’s definitely an active and noisy game – can be quite tiring and gives you sore hands after clapping for ages.
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Favourite song: 99 Red Balloons.
Posted in Game Reviews |
By Tom Fotherby on February 23, 2007
Fiction, 6/10 – February 2007
If you can get past how ugly the site is, www.thingsmygirlfriendandihavearguedabout.com is pretty funny. So funny in fact that I randomly decided to buy this book by the author.
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‘… You, for example, are stupid and self-pitying, but what civilised observer would censure me for mentioning that you have a big nose too?’
‘I don’t have a big nose.’
‘See? That’s my point. The efficacy of an arbitrary personal attack is that it clears a path for the important issues. You have allowed “stupid” and “self-pitying” through unopposed, because they were riding on top of your big nose.’
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Love And Other Near Death Experiences is about a guy trying to sort his head out because he’s confused after having a close-encounter with death which he avoided because of a random decision that didn’t seem important at the time. Now he puts more thought into seemingly random decisions in case the wrong choice leads him back to a tragic situation – in fact, he just can’t make some simple decisions any more (e.g. it sometimes takes him 3 hours to decide which leg to use to get out of the shower in case the wrong choice will cause him to slip and fall). Nearly all the characters in the book have mild to strong (and morbidly entertaining) mental problems.
It’s not really a chick-flick, in fact it is sort of an anti-love story in a way. I found it funny on the whole (sarcastic humour) with a few pages that went a bit over the top. My favourite characters were the witty but suicidal Elizabeth and the grumpy and insulting boss, Keith.
Posted in Book Reviews |
By Tom Fotherby on February 22, 2007
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Chloe’s company, Panasonic gave away their old PC’s and she managed to bag this machine:
- CPU: Pentium 4 2Gz
- RAM: 768MB DDR SDRAM.
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Inside it is very organised but not very expandable, there isn’t room for more than one harddisk and I could only just fit our TV card into a pci slot riser card. We called it “Parsley” and it will be our webServer, musicServer and TVServer.
Posted in Toys | Tagged Hardware |
By Tom Fotherby on February 18, 2007
“A tree is a wonderful living organism which gives shelter, food,
warmth and protection to all living things. It even gives shade to
those who wield an axe to cut it down” – Buddha.
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I bought a tree called Woody from an interesting initiative by a website called tree-nation. They want to plant 8 million trees in Niger creating a big heart shape visible from space. Good luck to them even if I couldn’t see whether the company was for-profit or a charity.
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Their website has an interesting interface (albeit slow)
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When I was at school I won a joke award at prize-giving for being the pupil most into conservation so I’ve always been a bit of a tree-hugger! 🙂 My favourite type of tree is a weeping-willow.
Posted in Journal |
By Tom Fotherby on February 15, 2007
The strong winds blew down 5 panels of our fence.
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After winds
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After fix
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I don’t like doing unscheduled DIY – spending time doing this has meant less time to spend on the bedroom.
Posted in DIY |
By Tom Fotherby on February 9, 2007
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When I was a teenager I used to keep Quail and collect their eggs to pickle or to put on baked pizza. Quail eggs are beautiful and although they are fiddly to peel, they are the perfect size for pickling in glass jars. I used an incubator to hatch new chicks. You can imagine how cute a quail chick is if you know the size of their eggs. A few days after they hatch, before they get their feathers, they are covered in yellow fluff and you’d be hard pressed to find anything as adorable.
We built them a 6 foot cage complete with a blackberry bush, grass, sand and stones but it wasn’t a good idea because they used to take off vertically and bang their heads on the roof (they are not very intelligent birds!).
I think that parents should get their kids to have a pet of some kind even if it’s something very short term like a hamster. It teaches responsibility and gives first hand experience of the duty to feed, water and clean the pet. Most kids want a pet because it’s cute, but they need to learn that the cuteness wears off after a while but the duty to care can never wear off. As part of keeping quail my dad showed me how to slaughter poultry and my mum showed me how to pluck, gut and prepare poultry for cooking (It’s stuff like this which remind me I grew up in the countryside rather than London).
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Quail vs Chicken
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Posted in Journal |
By Tom Fotherby on January 30, 2007
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I got bored of my old website and moved it to a blog. Blog’s are better for personal websites because once an entry is written it does not have to be kept up to date like a static page needs to. The entries don’t go out of date so much as become historical like a journal.
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I don’t exactly know why I want to keep a blog. I think that I just like keeping records of things. I imagine myself as an old man going through it to help me to dredge up memories.
I’m using open-source software called wordpress for my blog. WordPress has the important modern features that my old site was missing, particularly a search box and a RSS feed. It makes it much easier for me to add content than a custom static website. It has themes to change the look of the site and it has plugins to change the functionality of the site.
Tech details: I’m still hosting the blog from my living room computer. A modest P4 1.4GHz machine with 512 MBs of RAM given to me by my dad for my 21st birthday. The current OS is Ubuntu 6.06 LTS running Apache 2.0.55 and mySQL 5.0.22.
Posted in Journal |
By Tom Fotherby on January 12, 2007
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I got an email from a guy that’s using my Uni Individual project (VISSIM) to model road traffic in his local area. There’s a screenshot on his blog.
It’s good to know VISSIM has still got some life in it.
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It’s interesting to know that it’s still working after being archived 5 years ago. They say that software “rots” when it isn’t maintained and I thought that Java would decay faster than most languages since it’s quite modern. VISSIM is suffering from dormant rot because it does not get any love and care from me (the developer). The software I’m developing at work is currently suffering from active rot – it is losing it’s integrity due to it being continuously modified without proper refactoring. So it seems there can be rot at both ends of the spectrum. Rotting code smells bad, the fettid sludge sticks to the shiny new bits and pollutes them. As a programmer, I want to work in a nice clean environment and so each member of the team needs to do some time acting as janitors and sweeping up the mess.
Posted in Tech Journal |
By Tom Fotherby on December 28, 2006
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The Jellyphish is a tabletop lamp that can be “tuned” to any colour or can gradually scroll though the colour spectrum, blending seamlessly from one to the next. The technology in this lamp has only just hit the market so it’s the first time I’ve seen something like it. It must contain a million LEDs or something. The pure and solid colour that it produces is magic.
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Posted in Toys |
By Tom Fotherby on December 12, 2006
We set up our new TV in the bedroom which has been de-wallpapered and the sharp contrast between grim and beautiful is quite shocking:
As you can see, we weren’t really ready to buy a TV!
I’m pretty embarrassed that we didn’t finish the decorating before we bought the TV but Chloe’s Panasonic staff shop were doing a good Christmas deal.
Posted in Journal |
By Tom Fotherby on December 11, 2006
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For Christmas Kix and I bought each other half a 26 inch Panasonic Viera LCD TV (TX-26LXD6A). It’s a stylish HD Ready TV with integrated freeview and speakers – perfect for the bedroom. We plugged it into our freshly installed upstairs coaxial socket and switched it on to find that it automatically tuned and ordered all the available channels. It has a feel of quality about it. I hope we don’t watch it too much.
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Posted in Toys |
