Nick.

I asked Heidi to marry me. She said “Yes”. We went out to dinner. It was fantastic!

I’ll post more details (and non-mobile-phone pictures) on the weekend.

I’m thinking that this needs to go on a t-shirt:

I’ll probably tidy it up a bit; add a bit more detail to make the chicken match the jelly fish.

Here’s another take on the same concept:

Although that’s a chicken in a jelly-fish, not a chicken/jelly-fish.

References: Clipart ETC, Chicken Hill Tribe, Easter Joy.

While organising my games collection, I’ve been removing titles that I don’t think are worth keeping. There are quite a few wild cards (games I never really got into), and God Hand was one of them. I’d tentatively put it in the “get rid of pile”, but then I saw this video of the ending credits (found via GameSetWatch):

The lyrics are awesomely naff. For example:

Lead vocals: Dragon kick your ass into the Milky Way!
Backup vocals (high-pitched): Milky Way!

and:

Lead vocals: Hyper-active fighting styles so slick they’ll make you drool!

While trying to find the lyrics, I found this glowing review and game summary at Hardcore Gaming 101. I was reminded of why this game was on my purchase list in the first place:

God Hand is like a mid 80s arcade game brought up to vaguely current standards, except it’s actually somewhat self conscious of how ridiculous the whole concept is. The result is one of the freshest video games released in a long time, which was essentially the point of the now-defunct Clover Studios.

I see a God Hand games night in the not-too-distant future.

I’m imagining in response to high-profile director Francis Ford Coppola’s loss of 15 years worth of data, Jamie Zawinski has made a public service announcement blog post on backing up your data.

Choice quote:

If you are using a Mac, the command you use to back up is this:

sudo rsync -vaxE --delete --ignore-errors / /Volumes/Backup/

If you’re using Linux, it’s something a lot like that. If you’re using Windows, go fuck yourself.

I wasn’t really expecting that last sentence. It made me LOL.

I spent a little while today entering my games collection into GCstar, a great open-source personal collections manager.

Using GCstar is easy. You just start a video game collection and then enter games by typing in their names. It searches a range of websites to find details on the games (including box/case images and screenshots). You can also add a list of borrowers and set it to automagically send reminder emails; neato!

There’s even a cute “game shelf” view with all your games displayed on a virtual shelf. Here’s a screenshot (resized to fit in a blog post):

It’s much better than that Gnumeric spreadsheet I was maintaining by hand…

Conclusion: Highly Recommended… but I wish there was a decent open-source web-based collections manager (that I could run on onetwenty.org).

Back in the day, frozen beverage machines were few and far between, and most were in a state of perennial disrepair. One would expect them to contain an obviously non-frozen mixture of syrup and water and for each tap to be adorned with an “temporarily out of order” sign.

Then, out of the blue, McDonald’s decided to make Frozen Coke a standard menu item at all of their stores in Australia. It seems that service stations (the traditional home of frozen beverages) have stopped dragging their feet and started giving this contemporary cuisine the attention it deserves! The bold claims embedded in their serving suggestion images are now supported by reality. Behold!:

And to think that a few years ago I thought that frozen beverages were almost a lost cause…

So I finally went on that snowboarding trip I’ve been talking about. It actually turned out to be a bit of a family reunion and ski trip as well (pretty different to the last time I visited Thredbo).

I flew into Canberra and stayed with my brother for a few days, and we drove up to Jindabyne together. We met up with Khan in Jindabyne, and he gave us a ride into Thredbo where my sister was staying.

I was a little apprehensive about the snow because it was so late in the season (our third day was the first day of Spring). Also, the guy at the snow supplies store was a little too assuring that the snow was still good… which made we wonder if it wasn’t really.

I borrowed Khan’s snowboard for our first full day in the snow. Just after we bought our lift passes and headed down our first practise run at “Easy Does It” it started raining. And then pouring. So we stayed inside for a while wondering if we’d just wasted our money.

Finally we decided to brave the weather and head up the mountain anyway. There was a break in the rain as we ascended on the ski lift and the sky was pretty clear when we arrived at the top:

Then, on our second run from the top, it snowed. It was windy and the snow felt like cold sand blowing in our faces, but it was snow. And it was awesome. Khan said that it doesn’t often snow at Thredbo and it hardly ever snows that late in the season. So I was happy.

After snowboarding for a day and a half, I tried skiing. It was my first time, but I was able to pick up the basics (it’s much easier than snowboarding). Pointing my toes in and leaning down the mountain felt very weird after snowboarding; much less… elegant.

On the night of our last day on the slopes, we headed down to Jindabyne for Khan’s going away dinner. It was a nice change from eating out (which I’d been doing pretty much everyday on this trip); it felt good to be in a kitchen helping out (even if it was just cutting things up). His friends were warm and friendly, and it was a good night.

On our way back through Jindabyne, my brother, my sister, and I had lunch at a fish and chips shop with deep-fried Mars bars on the menu. I remember Steve telling me about deep-friend Mars bars (and their effect on the average life expectancy of people in Scotland). We ordered one to share. It was actually pretty good. Warm and gooey.

Due to how my flights panned out, I ended up with an extra day in Canberra. Khan, my brother, and I went to a Pitch and Putt course. It’s like golf, but the courses are smaller and you only use an iron and a putter. It’s better than Supa Golf… which is arguably the closest thing we have in Perth.

It was a great trip, but I’m also glad to be back. I feel rather invested in my work at Interzone Games and really wanted to get back into it when I returned.

Update: Although not “pitch and putt” (?), there is a par 3 golf course in WA!

It looks like Tobey Maguire (of Spiderman fame) will produce (and may star in) a film based on 80’s cartoon series Robotech. Yay!

Man I hope it’s better than the Transformers movie. I think that would be a given though; There is a lot more character and depth in the Robotech story… and it doesn’t involve giant robots from outer space… well, not in the same sense… Here’s a blurb from the article:

A sprawling sci-fi epic, “Robotech” takes place at a time when Earth has developed giant robots from the technology on an alien spacecraft that crashed on a South Pacific isle. Mankind is forced to use the technology to fend off three successive waves of alien invasions. The first invasion concerns a battle with a race of giant warriors who seek to retrieve their flagship’s energy source known as “protoculture,” and the planet’s survival ends up in the hands of two young pilots.

Well that describes the first series. I can’t imagine that they would be planning a one-off movie; they have to be aiming for a trilogy. I just hope they don’t baulk at making another one after making the second movie (which will be crap if based on the second Robotech series…)

I’m sure you can find many more opinions and details on the Robotech.com forums.

Via this post on Slashdot. Image from Wikipedia.

So I’ve been pretty sick the last few days. While watching the news tonight, Heidi suggested that I may have Equine Flu. You know, since I’m a stallion and all… OH RIGHT.

This article (Stallion ‘very likely’ to have equine flu) on the ABC website appears to support Heidi’s hypothesis. I reckon it’s just a cold though.

Update: Alternative title for this blog post: “feeling hoarse” -_-‘

I’ve been very busy at work recently (with an internal deadline looming). It’s been rewarding, but I’ve had less time to browse the web, read e-mails, and post to my blog.

While at work I don’t use the internet for anything unrelated to work, and when I get home… well, I don’t really want to look at a computer most of the time… for a little while at least! 😛 How does everyone else feel about internet use while at work?

Anyhow, since work is pretty full-on all week (if I’m not at work, I’m probably thinking about it), I’ve been trying concentrated recreation on weekends. Recently, this has manifested itself in playing God of War 2 with Tone.

Since it’s a single-player game, we’ve been taking it life-or-level; meaning that you hand over the controller when your character dies or when you complete a level. It’s been awesome actually… it reminds me of playing SNES or Genesis games over at friends’ houses when I was in middle school. 🙂

We just finished the game and are looking for something else to play in a few weeks time. Any suggestions?

Image from Wikipedia.