I'm using English, learn it!

Why do people consider me 'posh' when I use 'big words'? ...

The other day I got an 'ooOOooh' when I used the word 'Etymology', since when did using vocabulary become a 'posh' thing to do? It's a sorry state of affairs when the accepted term is waylaid in favour of laymen's terms and the like.

It saddens me when I see people saying "People who come over here should learn english!" when the general populace have great trouble speaking it themselves, and a Czech delivery driver I once knew speaks english better than a lot of english people I know.

That's the end of my short rant, there are 250,000 words out there, approximately, make it a small part of your life just to learn 1 new word a day.

The iPhone aint all that...

I've seen more and more people recently saying "I want an iPhone!" and it's getting a little silly...

Basically, as a smartphone, the iPhone isn't that hot, let me explain some. For one, it can't run concurrent apps, so say you're listening to the music player, but you always want to browse the internet, you have to quit your music app to browse, or check e-mails, or read sms'ses etc. This counts for any application you're running on it.

The on screen keyboard, while very intuitive, is also very slow when you want to put symbols in, you have to press a button to show the symbols, and then press it again to show alpha-numeracy.

The price options are terrible, in order to get the phone with all the features, you have to spend tonnes of money, around £100 for the phone if you get the medium level contract, which is still £30 odd a month for a small amount of texts and minutes.

Finally, and probably the final nail in the coffin is the app store, loaded with shovelware that has brought down the price of the good apps so that the developers barely get anything anymore, plus their review system is making developers flee the platform for other, more open ones such as WebOS or Android, where apps go up until they're flagged, at which point they're moderated.

I could say more but my brain no worky...

Mac vs. PC, SHUT UP!

Nobody will listen to this, and the debate shall still rage, but maybe I can help halt the progress, if only for a few moments.

I feel an impartial voice is needed in this debate, someone who uses both on a regular basis, that person in this instance shall be moi.

To get one thing straight in this to begin with, by saying PC, i'm not necessarily referring to just Windows, remember Mac/Windows users, Linux exists too.

For a kickoff, both have their own strengths and weaknesses, often cancelling each other out on many points, Macs for example are generally more expensive (Unless you find some rip-off PC merchant), and what annoys me about most Mac users, not all, but most, is that they will always recommend one over the PC even if the person asking for an opinion only wants to browse the web, perhaps write a few documents and send e-mails, you don't want a £1000 machine to do that.

Conversely you get the same people doing the same thing for PC, when someone wants to do some hardcore video editing, 3D work etc, people will often say "Yeah you can get a PC for like £200 that will do all that", when in reality it won't, at least not without a fight, but it is true that you can get equivalent PC's for a fraction of the price of a Mac.

Second of all is software, Macs tend to lean towards only being paid-for software, when a lot of software on PC's, and pretty much all software for the Linux operating system, is free and open source. My main gripe about the Mac dev community, is that nobody compiles this software for the general Mac user, as a result only software by Sun or the Mozilla foundation is generally compiled for the Mac.

Third of all is games, now, i'm gonna debunk a commonly held myth, MACS CAN PLAY GAMES, but obviously not on the scale of PC's, and not with the performance that you can get from a high end gaming 'rig', but they can do it, more and more commonly now that macs have proper graphics chipsets, although they still don't have the driver hooks sorted out for a lot of things (3D acceleration being the main issue).

Fouth and probably the final argument, hardware. Now hardware is very important to a lot of people, it is to me, and a lot of people like to have control of their hardware, and that's where the Mac falls down in my eyes, yes you can upgrade your RAM and switch out some of the components, but if you truly want to upgrade you have to shell out for a brand new Mac, which might not have all the specs you want. Conversely on the PC side you have control over everything, motherboard, cpu, gpu, ram, hard drives and CMOS, everything is under your control. Although that isn't necessarily a plus point for a lot of people, it's very daunting if you have never even heard of a BIOS, so Macs can gain a point there for being much simpler to use.

Overall then it really just comes to what you want out of your system, just consider what you really need, and then make a decision on that, don't ask others because they're probably biased.

Why so much violence?

Why is it today that all problems seem to have to be sold with violence?

Maybe because it's more prevalent on the news now than it ever has been before, but it seems it's what more people are resorting to than ever before, and it just isn't necessary.

For example on the news today, 15 years ago a woman was burned alive for no reason, and you're just left thinking, "Why?". Mahatma Ghandi said it best, An eye for an eye will make the whole world blind.

So i'm posing the simple question of what are your views on the subject?

Gods cannot be proven, neither can hells fire...

Another religious post here i'm afraid, but no questions this time.

Recently I got asked to prove the non-existance of a god, I was left with this answer. It is impossible to prove/disprove the existance of that which does not exist on our plane of reality, or place in time and space, they cited a mathematical theorum that stated the numbers required to complete the equasion simply didn't exist, but we know that numbers exist because we can quantify them, here, look, 4, there is a quantified number, gods however, that is a different story.

So, why did I say hells fire too, well, anything that exists outside our physical realm is non-physical, which means that a god is non-physical, and so is his punishment, hence the fire in hell cannot be proven, as well as being non-physical. So in the afterlife, if there is one, in the eternal anguish for us Atheists, won't actually be anguish at all, your carporeal form will be wreathed in flame, but you will feel nothing, one cannot feel that which is not physical, the same can be said of a god.

Constantly i'm reminded by people that they 'felt' god, this left me with another question, how do you know you've felt god if you've never felt that before, you may have been feeling true love, or simple lust, who can say, but this begs the question, how do we know we're not feeling god, how do we know we're not, it may not be physical but some higher being could surely do something to alter the mind processes, which somewhat renders their argument invalid.

What are your thoughts on the subject?

The truth is far more fascinating than any book...

Recently I have returned to one of my loves, science and it's applications within our universe.

One thing has become abundantly clear, the reality of our universe, is far more impressive and fascinating than any Science Fiction book, or holy text describing the creation of the universe.

If you take just 2 seconds to look outside into the stars, you will be gazing into billions of years of history, not just lights in the sky, but history, living history, of stars that may have gone supernova many billions of years past.

When you actually start to take an interest in the vast machine that is the universe, you realise how insignificant, and yet significant you really are, one of untold billions of planets, and yet, within the few lightyears away from our planet, the only known life.

This spawned the most poetic phrase in physics "Humans are made from stardust", and it's true, not science fiction, we're the remnants of huge stars that exploded, sending their atoms billions upon billions of lightyears into space, to create the planets, and ultimately, life.

How can you look at the universe and not be fascinated, or think "My religion explains it better" or anything like that. That's mind boggling to me.

If you think that you being here doesn't matter, if just being here isn't enough for you, then you really need to look at this video to know how amazing it is that you exist.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HlP6znMKnr8

Narrated by the great Morgan Freeman

You preach peace and love, but the opposite is true.

This is mainly a question posed to people of the 3 Abrahamic faiths.

There is one big gripe I have had with faith for quite some time, and that is one of the main tenets and building blocks of religion, love to all your fellow man. Except, when religion is observed, the exact opposite is true. More wars have been fought over religion than over land or oil.

For the bastions of morals, you certainly do seem to have a lack of them, Christopher Hitchens said, "If morals were only given to us by religion, the jews would never have made it to Mt Sinai" and he was right, we choose not to kill each other because it's mutually beneficial that we don't, not because of some book handed down from some shiny object in the sky.

So I put it to you, religious folk of the world, explain your position, when you explain that others who do not believe in your religion should be slaughtered, what tolerance is there in that? What peace is there in that?

My First Flash Forét

So today I had my introduction to flash, granted, it was not smooth as silk, but still relatively enjoyable.

It all began with a simple request "Could you do some R & D on how to get flash to write XML to a database?", and so it began, perhaps the shortest day (Or so it felt, you know what they say, time flies and all that) i've experienced at this job, it was very programming-centric, which I love, i'm not too keen on the days that involve image editing and stuff, but programming is definitely my bag.

I have to say that coding the action script side of things is really cool, everyone I know hates it, stating it's slow, but all the scripts i've been working with are blistering fast, like, even calling an external PHP file took less than 0.5 seconds, which is hella quick, although it was all locally hosted, execution times could probably be 0.7 seconds on the server, which is still pretty hecking quick.

I don't know what my point is in this post really, other than to say, flash is darn neat, and it's fun to code, so give it a whirl sometime, even if you're not a programmer, you can still use the front-end functions to do the same stuff.

So, yay flash

Graphics do Not a Game make

So I read earlier, someone commented about a game I am, very much looking forward to called Dragon Age Origins, making the comment: The graphics are cringeworthy, the mouths barely move when they are talking.

The video they were commenting on was old, and the graphics have improved since then, however, this is not the point. If they had actually been watching the trailer, they would have noticed the frankly, stellar voice acting (Which is across the board, even minor characters have exsquisite voice acting work done on them). They would also have noticed that animations are incredibly smooth, with transition animations making everything completely seamless, the mocap department really earned their keep with this one, everything is so fantastically animated, couple that with the voicework and the believability of the characters goes up immensely.

Then there is the story, which, from the trailers and video walkthroughs, is simply amazing, there are multiple stories that take place, depending on race, origin and choices through the game, simply in the intro video they showed, there is masses of story, so it really is packed in, and unlike many choice based games, the changes are gradual, so you can't just quicksave before the time comes and then reload if you don't like the result.

Then there is the gameplay, which is good old sword and sorcery, but it also takes a lot from Baldurs Gate (The same people developed it after all). You have your party of 4, which is pretty standard fare, but whats not, is that spells can interact with each other, and from the look of the videos it's a very polished system. Battles look and feel very real, with the grime sticking to your character, and being persistent, and from what i've personally seen, some of the fights are monstrously hard, requiring micro-management of every character to bring them down, not to mention, freakin sweet takedown animations.

So, to go back over quickly, graphics don't make this game, although it's looking very polished now, the story, acting, animation and graphics all work together to make, what looks like an incredibly awesome game, and one which I am looking forward to intently.

Requirement Creep...

This title sort of sounds like a person who stalks for a requirement, rather than for sport, either way, some of you will realise i'm on about a job and contract jobs in general.

Why is it that, no matter what you've already done, it's never quite enough? Take this current company i'm working with, their name shall not be mentioned, but it's not my actual employer, more a sub-contractor, either way, I digress, no matter what i've already done, there is already more to do, and is this charged more? No, there should be limits on this stuff, but there isn't, they just come to me and say those dreaded words "Just one more thing...".

I realise requirement creep is a hazard of the profession, but still, this much work is ridiculous, especially when I don't have time to work on other projects. For example, today they come to me and say "Oh by the way, all these need to have this item on at this cost" without realising that i'm either going to have to go through them one by one, or write a script to go through the few hundered promotions to add what needs to be added, both will be time consuming.

Oh well, I have a couple of other projects, one is looking very nice now, even though it needs a lot of work, and one I haven't started, which will have to take priority eventually, god damn you unnamed company, I have more to be doing than sorting out your crap.

Games are a Waste of Time?

I had an interesting conversation recently, with a person who knows someone who says that playing video games is a waste of time.

Now, if this is true, then that means that any pursuit that is undertaken as a hobby, is a waste of time.

Lets look at it this way, if someone reads a book, or watches a film, is that a waste of time? Most people would say no, it's good, wholesome brain food, however, when the medium is question is video games, it's a waste of time, or it's brain rotting.

There are a few arguments to support them, in that the games that make it onto the news are usually the violent ones (Any sort of first person shooter), or soul destroying, stereotypical ones (WoW). However, it's not true of a vast majority of video games, especially in the booming 90's, when adventure games where a hefty portion of the gaming world.

To me, and to many other people, games posess as much merit as an artistic medium as any other, for when you're playing a game, you're a part of the narrative, you're advancing the story, so not only are you often getting your mind taxed with puzzles, or being told an epic story, you feel accomplishment that you've advanced the story, that it's something you've done, rather than something that has been scripted beforehand.

With games becoming more complex, so do storylines, take the witcher for example, based on choices the player makes, the game can change competely, this is something that just isn't possible with movies, books or music.

Granted, i'm not saying for everyone to drop their books or stop going to the cinema, I just wish for video games to be seen in a less contempt light, so just try it out once in a while if you haven't already, you never know, you might enjoy it.

Bad Movies and Remakes

I lumped these together because they seem to go hand in hand these days.

Why is it that most movies released these days are either, and I use the term ridiculously loosely here, horror movies, or remakes of old films.

Now, I use the word horror very loosely, as most films labelled as it these days are simply gore-fests (see SAW or Hostel or in fact any movie made within the last few years) or so pathetic they could barely be called a movie (See... I forget the game, but nothing happens until the final 5 minutes of this TERRIBLE film).

The only ones that seem to have any creativity anymore are the childrens film makers, such as pixar.

The other annoying trend is remakes of old films, here is a tip movie companies, A FILM THAT WAS TERRIBLE 20 YEARS AGO WILL STILL BE THE SAME TODAY. Even if a film was good, as a friend was saying the other day, nostalgia is often better than the actual article, as in, a film that WAS good 20 years ago, can be ruined by the re-imagining.

Good films these days are few and far betwixt, so, if any film makers ever see this, I implore you, please get some creativity, and stop pumping out remakes, gore-fests or sequels, since as we all know, only one film was consistently good after being rung out for sequels, and that was Back to the Future.

Why do most people hate their job?

This is mainly from personal experience, but there are other places i've heard tell of this as well.

People hate the job they do. I mean, to me it stands to reason that if you have a job you don't like doing, you go out to get that job, but no, most people stagnate and decide to stay in the job they hate, and continue doing it. Why? Is everyone a glutton for punishment, or is it that deep down, really, they love what they're doing, but most people say they hate it, so they just run with the crowd.

I saw an animation the other day, albeit a funny one about a freelance designer talking to a customer, and the customer being completely unreasonable (SAUCE: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VfprIxNfCjk) which begs the question, if you don't like the client to begin with, why are you taking the job, it just screams to me that they need to ask more questions before they accept, either way, feedback will be welcomed, criticism too.

P.S. I love my job