• "There are several kinds of love. One is a selfish, mean, grasping, egotistical thing which uses love for self-importance. This is the ugly and crippling kind. The other is an outpouring of everything good in you—of kindness and consideration and respect—not only the social respect of manners but the greater respect which is recognition of another person as unique and valuable. The first kind can make you sick and small and weak but the second can release in you strength, and courage and goodness and even wisdom you didn’t know you had." John Steinbeck is wise, and a good father.
  • Network connected thermal printer. Bookmarked for future reference.
  • "In the 14 months since [TeamFortress 2] shipped, the PC version of the game has seen 63 updates – “that’s the frequency you want to be providing updates to your customers,” [Newell] adds. “You want to say, ‘We’ll get back to you every week. The degree to which you can engage your customer base in creating value for your other players” is key, says Newell. “When people say interesting or intelligent things about your product, it will translate directly into incremental revenue for the content provider.”" Great write-up from Chris Remo of Gabe Newell's DICE talk.
  • "This is a sort of thorough, empirical, sociological study of art students at two British art schools at a very interesting moment, the late 1960s (a moment when, as the book says, anti-art became the approved art, bringing all sorts of paradoxes to the fore). I find it fascinating that such a subjective thing as developing an art practice can be studied so objectively, but then I find it amazing that art can be taught at all. The book shows the tutors and students circling each other with wariness, coolness, misunderstanding, despair, appreciation." Some great anecdotes and observation.
  • "Busker Du (dial-up) is a recording service for buskers through the telephone (preferably public payphones hidden in subway stations). Audio recorded will be posted to this audio-blog and made available to all who cherish lo-fi original music. Try it out at your favorite subway station or street corner." Dial-A-Song comes full circle.
  • "Poole – HAL 9000 is a fictional chess game in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. In the movie, the astronaut Frank Poole is seen playing chess with the HAL 9000 supercomputer… The director Stanley Kubrick was a passionate chess player, so unlike many chess scenes shown in other films, the position and analysis actually makes sense. The actual game seems to come from Roesch – Schlage, Hamburg 1910, a tournament game between two lesser-known masters."
  • Lovely demo – some interesting interfaces that feel quicker than current alternatives, as well as experimental ones that, whilst slower and clumsier, represent information a bit better. I mainly like the form-factor, though – but what's the unit cost? These things get a lot better the more you have.
  • "Something like: Trying to create a reading list that gives the best introduction to everything. This may change." Phil is trying to collect the Good Books in many fields. It's an interesting project, for sure; it'll also be interesting to see how it pans out.
  • I was a little excited from the ongoing Offworld love in, but Oli Welsh's review suddenly makes me insanely excited about Keita Takahashi's new plaything. Why is it that all the reasons for me wanting a £300 PS3 are £3 PSN titles?
  • "…the biggest consequence [of a universal micro-USB adaptor] will be the ease of transferring data/content from street service provider to consumer, and consumer to consumer… There is a place at the edges of the internet where the level of friction makes content and data grind to a halt. It's largely unregulated. And it just got seriously lubed."
  • "30 Second Hero is an action RPG which consists of really short battles that require no interaction, as players race against the clock to save the kingdom from an evil wizard's wrath. As indicated by the title, you only have thirty seconds to level up your character sufficiently for the final battle, although additional time can be bought from the castle at the cost of a hundred gold pieces per increment of ten seconds." Hectic; the entire early JRPG genre (FF1, et al) condensed into a minute-long rush. Grinding as poetry.
  • "I was convinced that it was a spoof. As if there’d be a genre called Donk. Everything is wrong about the video. The knowing subtitles over subtle Northern Accents. The presenter’s slight grin when he’s chatting to folk. The funnily named shops. Everything. There’s no way I’m falling for a prank like that. It reminds me heavily of the episode of Brass Eye where they whang on about Cake (the made up drug). And all the characters and the interviews look like they could be setups or clever edits." But no, it's real. Iain Tait discovers Donk.
  • "…with that sad note from Sarinee Achavanuntakul, one of the most enduring (if illegal) tributes to gaming history came to an end." Home of the Underdogs is no more; just gone, like that. It wasn't that it had the best games or the worst games, or that they were illegal, or free; it was history, and childhood, and the smell of cardboard and boot disks, all wrapped up in one giant cathedral to Good Old Games. Most things I played on my old DOS machine were there. A shame; I hope they're elsewhere. This is why we need proper game archives.
  • Tweaking a game five months after launch to make it both more playable, and also more realistic; understanding that realism is key to NHL09 fans, and delivering on that as an ongoing promise.
  • "Warcraft’s success has always been substantially due to the extraordinary physicality of Azeroth, to the real sense of land transversed, of caves discovered, and of secrets shared. Players old and new bemoan the endless trudging that low-level travel requires, but it’s crucial for binding you to the world." Yes. Despite QuestHelper, I'm always in awe of the new areas. I just wish more people were playing the game as slowly and badly as me. Another beautiful One More Go, and one that resonates a lot right now.
  • "DS brut is an open source hardware prototyping platform for the Nintendo DS, developed by and for electronics enthusiasts, artists and game developers. By connecting the Nintendo DS to the outer world, the game console can be easily hooked up to a variety of sensors (e.g. GPS receivers) and can itself control all different kinds of actuators, servo motors and others."

Pipex: a resolution

27 August 2008

Time to conclude the tale of woes I went through trying to repair my internet connection (previously documented here and here). I got a working connection on Friday, 22nd August – 12 days after my connectivity first disappeared – when a Pipex/Tiscali engineer came around to my house.

The solution?

A new router. Specifically, a Thomson Speedtouch, supplied free by my ISP. Both the Netgears I tried weren’t up to the job, apparently, despite having worked for four years prior.

(I think what happened is that, after a failed attempt to migrate away – another broadband provider being incompetent – that when my MAC code expired, my line became a “new” Tiscali line, which all of a sudden only works with their own modems).

Anyhow. Back online. The disappointing thing is that if I’d been able to get through to a second-line engineer on the Tuesday after my problems had occurred, I might have been able to get through to UK-based support sooned, and had an engineer around over a week prior to the 22nd.

As it was, I became stuck in call-centre hell. All the first-line support staff at the call-centre were courteous, and concerned about my problem – especially when they saw from their own (well-kept) records how long it was taking to solve.

When I escalated the issue, the team in the UK at high-level and network support were all sharp, courteous, and quick to call me back or track progress. It was they who ultimately asked from an engineer to come.

The engineer himself was courteous and sharp, and had the decency to contact me several times when he turned out to be running late.

The gap was in “second-line support” – essentially, call-centre staff who perform more technical tasks, such as testing the line. They consistently failed to call me back when they said they would, and given I needed to be in to respond to their tests, this made it impossible to progress beyond them. Added to that, it was impossible to be transferred to them; they had to call me back direct. As a result, I frequently called to report that they had failed to call me back, only to end up back at first-line support again.

Still, we’re back online, and that’s what matters; it’s a shame it had to play out like this, though. For now, I’m just sticking with this ISP for the time being. Having a connection is better than no connection, at the moment.

(As a footnote: when I signed up to Pipex, about four years ago, they were not the cheapest, but they had dedicated, knowledgeable support staff in the UK, on the phone from 8am to 8:30pm. They’ve now been bought by Tiscali – something they never informed me of – and the quality of service just isn’t the same.)