doomkeeper

I am a hoarder born and bred. I keep way too much stuff. Up until very recently I kept the box from everything I ever bought and I did this as totally standard practice. Whenever I moved I would package things up in their original boxes. I found it abhorrent when I saw friends and colleagues discard their newly opened boxes immediately and simply keep the contents. “What if they need to send it back? What if they need to sell it? Wouldn’t it be damaged if they moved?” At the same time I was slightly impressed by how enlightened they were.

My old house mate had no clutter at all and lived in the smallest room in the house. He was brilliant at being able to throw nearly anything away. I conversely had the biggest room in the house consistently, to make room for all of my clutter. I had bits of old computers, boxes of books, papers, wires, you name it. I still had boxes that I hadn’t opened since we last moved house. His attitude was always “if you haven’t needed it in 6 months, you’ll probably never need it. just throw it out!” The boxes in question contained old computer science books, university notes, assorted trinkets from old employers, “you worked on such’n'such a product thank you for all your hard work”, type stuff. He was right of course, except with the books. What would a geek be without his library of dusty text books? It was extremely difficult for me at first, but slowly and surely I started to throw things out. You know I had kept nearly every CD I’d ever burnt?

Its not all my fault, my Dad is also a master hoarder. When I was growing up, every Tuesday night was “Coat’s Auction Rooms” night. My Dad would without fail bring some assortment of junk back. Boxes of miscellaneous and the n-teenth record player. It wouldn’t be so bad if we sold any of them for a profit, which I believe was some of the motivating factor, but rather that we fill every remaining square foot in our house with the stuff. To this day my parents attic is literally the graveyard of record players from 1930-1980. The saving grace being that ‘Coats’ went out of business and the junk was cut off at the source.  He’s recently bought a bunch of “Royal Marine Drums!” off of ebay, I kid you not, for selling at profit. *sigh* Anyway, you can see where I get it from.

Fortunately I was again forced out of necessity to stop this by living in a 550 square foot apartment, where there isn’t even enough room to twirl ones feline friend. Out went piles of boxes, clothes from 1995-2008 into the charity bins. And you know what? It feels pretty good to be free of some of that stuff! Like a weight has been lifted off my shoulders. It helps to have an instrumental non-hoarder to help you see the light mind you.Victoria certainly helped me a lot.

Surely there’s knock on effects of this? What about the landfills? I always felt it was ironic that the same house mate was also banging the green drum in the house most of the time was the one telling me to throw everything out. Anyways that leads me nicely to my main point.

I was reading an article in Popular Mechanics recently about how we have become a throw away culture and how this traditionally was never the case. I’m not talking boxes now, more items that have been broken and that now just replaced rather than being repaired. Because of the mentality of my old house mate the repair man has become a rare skill. People don’t really bother fixing things anymore! “Why bother fix it when you can just buy a new one?”

Circa 1980 we would never really dreamed of replacing an entire product just because it had broken down. The example they used in PM was a dishwasher, a very expensive item years ago. A small cog/wheel that allows the trays to slide in and out of the machine had broken off, so that tray would fall down inside the machine. The PM guy simply machined out a new replacement wooded cog himself on a lathe and the dishwasher was a good as new. Most people would have seemly gotten a new one and missed out on the joy of taking something that was destined for the junk pile and given it a new lease of life.

There are other factors at play here of course. Newer models are more energy efficient and would actually be better for the environment. Miniaturisation of components as meant its become much harder to solder on a new resistor or patch a dry joint. The cost of building such machines is now much, much cheaper as most things are automated. But the cost of throwing away an item is still reasonably high. That said the car being one of the biggest polluters on the planet is ones of the most recyclable items out there. Nearly everything on a car is recycled, from the seats to the, oil left in the engine, it’s all recycled.

Recently I was building a new NAS machine at home, the first time I’d built a computer in literally years. The build was going quite successfully until I realised that there was not enough to screws to finish the job and of the ones left were the wrong size. Normally of course I’d have a whole pile of old machines to go digging through, but I had thrown them all out! So I was totally stuck. I could hear the hoarder in my head says “I told you so!”. This was quite annoying, how the hell can you get a pile of correctly fitting screws? I was taking out the recycling the same night and someone had junked their old computer in our garbage room. It didn’t have much inside it, a few ide cables, floppy drive, dvd writer, and old motherboard and a whole harvest of screws! I collected everything I could salvage and brought them upstairs. All the screws fitted perfectly, I was able to use the ide cable too and continue the build.

Ok this wasn’t an amazing example of fixing things but I really did get the joy of taking something that doomed for the dump and giving it new life. The thing that really surprised me was totally revulsion of my girlfriend as I brought back some of this stuff to life. She implied it was almost like a “homeless person”, “disgusting” and she certainly did not share my joy. She actually sneakily threw the rest of the stuff I’d rescued out while I wasn’t looking! I’ve forgiven her of course, but it does highlight a problem in our society. Maybe if I’d have just had the parts hanging around it would have been ok? Then I’m a hoarding of course.

To conclude, I believe that our a society has a worsening problem.  A culture of “throw-it-out” as it’s broken is now quite prolific. Newer generations are not even aware of the possibility of repair and joy of accomplishment. If ever there was a global catastrophe and we were forced to make do with what we had might be a very bad place. I’m not suggesting we all start hoarding things and building bomb shelters, but just to think “Can I repair this? Do I really need to throw it out? What are the consequences?”. Its a rewarding and valuable skill that we should try and instill and then maybe we will inspire a whole new generation of repair men and women.

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Ok have been maintaining radio silence for a bit recently, so time for a bit of a bulk update. Actually been fairly busy with this that and the other. I’ve also have been nagged to update the site, so here goes.

Lake Louise, Alberta, Canadian Rockies

My Dad finally came to visit. For the first time he left the confines of the British Isles and came to North America. He and I walked around Vancouver and then cycled the same route to make sure we didn’t miss any photo opportunities. He described it as a photographers paradise and knowing of only one other city in the world that came close, namely Hong Kong. We then made the 2 day long drive up into the Canadian Rockies where we were both astonded by the scenery. Having been to New Zealand also, I can actually say the Rockies out ranked it. One of the truly most breathtaking places on Earth. We we returned to Vancouver I arranged that Dad have a float plane lesson and myself and Victoria tagged along. Dad was nearly speechless with the scenery! I feel that this has really motivated me to learn to fly myself and maybe something I’ll do in my sabbatical next year. We managed to pack in quite a few things into the 10 days he was here, including going to the shooting range where we fired a whole box of .44 Magnum rounds. Boom!

Dad Dirty Harry .44 Magnum

Victoria and I went to LA to go to her friends wedding. Was the first time for me in California. LA is the land of the car and the palm tree. You REALLY need a car to get around. The weather was in the mid-20s in October which was awesome. LA is urban sprawl much like London, stretching for miles. I was kinda wondering if I would ever want to live there, but the size and scale of the place is quite off putting, but who knows. Nothing really comes to close to Vancouver really lets face it.

Victoria and me by the Hollywood Sign, California

As you may remember in my last post I announced that I was knocking the booze on the head. We it’s been about 4 months now and I haven’t touched a drop. It was quite difficult at first as socially it means that you can’t really find much interest in hanging around while people get drunk. I’ve realized the pub is actually quite a boring place to be if you spend all night there. I’m getting better at this now. It’s not as easy as doing something else as I first pointed out, but no drinking shouldn’t mean being anti-social. I am kind of dreading going back to England however where I doubt people will be as kind as they are in Canada. Maybe it will really show who my freinds really.

Me in New York, near the Statue of Liberty

We also went to New York for a holiday with Victorias family. I hadn’t been to New York since 1994, so quite a bit had changed. The twin tower site is still just a great big hole in the ground. Lots of contruction going on, but supposedly it’s been that way for a while. Went to see a broadway musical “Rock of Ages”, which was awesome and hockey game at Madison Square Garden. Saw a really old mate from Havant College days who is now doing a PHD in Bio Chemisty at Rockefeller University. Cheeky bugger went to Harvard despite putting it down as his second choice. New York is a nice place to visit, but you wouldn’t want to live there. Dirty noisy, much like London again. And people are really rude. Never have I actually been asked for a tip! We tipped in a resturant only for the server to bring it back and say, 15% please! Unbeliveable! Anyways despite a lot of bad customer service (they say England is bad), we had a pretty nice time.

In other more sobering news. The project I was on at work got semi-canned and I was put in job limbo for 24 hours, not knowing if I was going to be able to keep my job. This was a very scary moment indeed, but luckily everything turned out for the better and I was welcomed back with open arms on my old franchise. The previous project totally folded in the last week and now everyone is looking for work internally. This has meant that they’ve laid of some people from my old franchise to balance the numbers. This has been a roller coaster of a ride with everyone is at the mercy of the share price. I’ve finally turned 2 years employed in Canada so I can apply for my permanent residency, which makes me feel slightly safer. But this is certainly the most unsecure I’ve ever felt at a company.

In other news; I passed my BC driving test. So yes watch out of it you’re on the roads of British Columbia as I’m now loose! Took a few lessons to bring me up to test standard in BC, as I think I’d picked up some bad habits in the years I’ve been driving in the UK.

Victoria is learning to be a PADI rescue diver. As I write this she’s off finishing her training in the cold merky waters somewhere. *brrr*

We’ve booked our Vacation to Thailand for New Year. So we’ve just got our tickets which is quite exciting. They were expensive as hell and came at the same time as my job news, as sods law would have it, luckily that turned out fine for now. We’ve got ourselves booked in a 4 day liveboard out there which should be just what the doctor ordered. The actual New years party is going to be “a full moon party” on one of the Island out there. These full moon parties sound like huge all night raves on an island. What have I got myself in for!

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Yes on the 3rd of May 2009, I finished my first half Marathon. My time was about 2 hours 20mins, which is quite slow. But includes 15mins of waiting in the lineup for the bathroom stalls, so really it was more like 2hours. Would you believe they only had two stalls?! There was about 6000 people I think that ran. Maybe that 4 pints of water before I started wasn’t such a good idea.

Would I do it again? Well maybe… but I now I know I can do it I feel like trying something else. Maybe a full marathon, maybe a triathalon. Maybe just some cycling. Whatever I chose I’m impressed that I have started down the road of doing fitty things.

Victoria my better half also did the half Marathon and quite enjoyed herself. Maybe we can find something else we can do together. I also have a friend in the UK that has been inspired by what I’ve been doing and is also doing a half marathon. He suggested maybe doing a full together next year. So that’s a possibility. Maybe in New York or Chicago.

I managed to get free entrance into another half marathon in June here in Vancouver. I haven’t signed up yet, but its tempting.

Frankly it’s also nice to get my Sundays back again. And it’s now BBQ season and I write this as I’m sat on our balcony over looking false creek and it’s lovely and sunny.  So I think a little relapse into burnt food and bright red suntans is in order.

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Well a half Marathon really. And let me tell you that’s pretty damn amazing for me. I have to be the least likely to run person you are bound to meet anywhere. Seriously! I used to skip every gym class possible, with as many exotic excuses as I could think of.   “The cat ran off with my PE kit miss.” “My mum says I’m allergic to the air miss!” Jumpers for goal posts were never my thing.

I am about as fast as an Asthmatic Ant, with some heavy shopping. (thank you Blackadder).

Also I haven’t run ANY distance since I was knee high to a grasshopper.

I managed to run 10k on Sunday which was actually much easier than I was expecting.

You might be wondering what on earth made me want to do such a thing. Well it’s for a very good cause; The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society, raising money to treat and cure Cancer. Pretty much everyone I know has been touched by Cancer in some way, so it’s very nice to be able to something to help. Also my girl is a Mentor this year. She has done the event before and they have invited her back to help others. Wow she’s pretty good.

It’s on May 3rd, which is very nearly my birthday. So please this year rather than get a pipe and slippers set from the Woolworth’s closing down sale, donate something on my page.

Here is my donation page.

Anyway I’ll report back my progress here with some photos when I get some.

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This is such a common problem now.

By this I mean how common it is for engineering colleagues to go diving into C#, thinking they already know the language inside out.

The familiar C++ style syntax, the convenience of intelisense and WYSIWYG style editors.

The smug, naive notion that they can add yet another language to their dusty resume and think how easy it was to pick up.

I remember a C++ programmer telling me… “You’ll never have trouble finding work again… now that you’re an established C++ programmer”. This kind of arrogance runs wild in the industry. Frankly I’d hang my head in shame if ever I felt this way. They honestly believe it’s the pinnacle of their education. C# being just a dumbed-down, high level, subset of C++. And they can happily hack their way through until ‘it just works’.

My companies tools set is literally littered with these kind of ‘applications’. Owners long since abandoned them, waiting for the next tech bandwagon to leap in front of. Illusions of grandeur clouding their every judgment,  as they salivate at scrambling one step higher up the ladder.

End users don’t seem to care. In fact they seem to encourage the rapid development of  these fisher-price, my first app, style tools. It’s only the next poor developer that has to come and wade through the buckets of misunderstood ideologies that feels this pain. Often it’s several iterations of developers later that someone who actually knows what they are doing gets burdened with the task of maintenance. At this point it’s been gang banged into such a state that starting from scratch would be so much easier.

If only they understood basic design patterns. I mean even basic MVC isn’t that hard is it?  No, no, no lets interwind the whole lot and celebrate doing it.

What will the next one be? WPF? It seems to be spreading like wildfire. I wonder how many of them right now are hacking their way through the API, expecting to be patted on the head for being the first to do so on their team.

Is it fear of being left behind? Tempted by the pretty lights?

I’m also learning new languages, but I’m reading as much literature as I can on the subject. Asking respected veterans for their opinions and advice on the matter. The creators of C# and WPF had certain design philosophies; things that didn’t work that they have improved from previous iterations. To not align with them and embrace their ideas, through sure ignorance is like pissing in the wind.

It should reflect badly on the developer in a review process, but it doesn’t. Why? Should the reviewers attitude be, to punish a pioneers efforts to learn new technologies? Perhaps, if they do so in such a cavalier fashion. Well, no manager/lead I’ve met would like to do that. Maybe they respect them enough to believe they’ll do it right way.

Most mangers have also abandoned such selfish and career fueling drives such as this however, so they often know very little about the subject matter. Content to allow their underlings to spread their and wings and allowing such practices to continue. Certainly at my work, C# is still (generally) a non-senior engineer skill.

So how can someone with no knowledge of a technology effectively critique someone? It’s very difficult…

1. Insist on courses and read lots books / online literature.
2. Do not allow C++ programmers who “think they know”.
3. Teach high level ideologies first, syntax later.
4. Stay on top of your game. You need to at least know vocabulary if you don’t learn the technology.
5. Hire experts and learn from them!

I’m certainly not an expert myself, but I know that just following these simple steps you could prevent the maintenance nightmare that I’ve recently inherited.

Again I hope this generates some discussion.

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Nothing earns you geek points more than using an editor like Vim or Emacs.  Frankly the contrary is also true if you stoop as low as using Visual Studio. I work with a number of people who look down their nose when they see me using VS.  With green text on black trying to look all retro, smug in the knowledge they are so much cooler than me.

Ok I know, I’m probably fighting a losing battle here. As the likes of Vim and Emacs run on every platform known to man and they are very extenible. Everyone loves to hate M$ etc.

To give you a  bit of background; I used emacs for 14 months while working exclusively on HP Spark / Dec alpha machines in good old fashion UNIX. I wrote a few Lisp scripts for emacs, but nothing special. I did learn to love it and I found using VS afterwards almost like playing with a toy. No developer worth anything would ever consider using VS. You’d be laughed at by any level of unix / level programmer and quite rightly so.

Anyway, that was 8 years ago and things have changed. I still do a lot of C++ development, but I also do .NET languages such as C#.

Now the reason I can’t leave VS is ultimately Visual-Assist. I love it! To be without it I now feel disabled as a programmer.

Visual-Assist for all that don’t know is essentially ‘intelisense’ on steroids. It’s made by WholeTomatoe software and it’s fantastic.

I often sit there being asked by my trendy friends where various code lives. They’ll have a class name, and simply want to look up the definition. I’d forgotten how brilliant Visual assist is with symbols. ALT+G on a symbol and it jumps straight to the code definition. Watching my Vim buddies work… well it’s regular expression followed by, calling grep or something like that. Vim doesn’t do any symbol parsing or anything, so if you’re looking for horribly generic fuction like Update(), you’d have a hell of a time finding it.

This having the symbols correctly parsed is so handy for refactoring too. Want to rename a class, no problem. It correctly scopes all changes so it’s infinitely better than a blind and brutal a reg-exp. Change a functions params? Visual Assist will change all calls to this and replace them correctly.

I have become so reliant on it, it shapes my want to learn other languages. Looking up APIs is a waste of time and is frankly tedious.

So is this a bad thing? Have I become simply lazy in my reliance on this tool? Or has my productivity increased so much that anything else seems like a waste? Maybe so.

Now I know I’ll be told that there exists a VIM plugin for visual studio, so I can have the best of both worlds. Well perhaps… But I guess that’s not my point. My point is without realising it, I’ve become so reliant on a tool that I can’t contunue without it. I draw a parrallel with mobile phones here as I belive it’s a good analogy.

Do you remember all your phone numbers now? No? Well of course mobiles phones remember them all for you. Has that made you worse as a telphonist? Perhaps? Would you feel crippled if you were faced with a phone with no numbers? Or have you accepted that it’s a the future and embrace being lazy and use the phones memory. Well I believe this is exactly the same as learning an API back to front. Relying on the compiler to find your syntax errors is simply way too old school now.

Anyway, I hope this generates some discussion. Please let me know your feelings on the matter I will be quite interested to hear peoples oppinions.

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Babies on planes…

Why on earth does someone bring a baby on a plane? It’s not really going enjoy the trip, so why the douche have you dragged the poor little bugger with you. Aren’t there baby kennels that you check the little sods in with? It seems to be that everywhere I sit on any airline, bar the really budget ones (perhaps people are too scared to take their kids on them), there are screaming kids near by.

Now my theory. And I may have ripped this off from a comedy skit I saw. Since all the terror attacks, various things have been banned from airlines. Liquids for example. Shoes are even taken off and scanned these days. If someone gets caught with a “suspect baby”, then all the airlines will ban babies from the flights and we’ll all be happy.

People putting their seat back!!!

Ok. I find this the height of rudeness. I don’t give a monkeys if the seat goes back, check with the person behind you at the least. I’ve normally got my laptop on the table and end up eating the screen when some ignoramus in the front feels the need to recline. Damn them, damn them all.

Baggage claim!

Ok. I’m normally first there and last to leave. Why is always my bag that gets lost? Fallen off the conveyor and left at destination are two of my recent favorites. I wonder how many bags get lost every day? Boxes with fragile written down the side slide down the carousel and plonk into one another. Is this normal? I’m I the only one that’s horrified by this?

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Seems like a life time since my last update, so many things it’s difficult to know where to begin.  Seems a little ridiculous having a blog when you don’t use it.  So hopefully this post will be followed by more. Maybe even of some substance.

Firstly I’ve just finished work on Need for Speed Undercover.  It was my first game here in Canada and I think I’m quite proud of my part; the Audio.  This was my main excuse for not blogging as we have been very busy for months finalling the game.  Anyway it’s all done now… you should all run out and buy it of course

I have a met a lovely girl named Victoria. She has been keeping me on the straight and narrow.  She’s 28, gorgeous, clever and fit as a fiddle.  Would you believe I’m considering running for a Triathlon? She did one back in March and thinks I can do it easy. In triathlon terms it’s nothing (400k, 11k, 5k).  But for me it’s a challenge. The cycling and swimming parts I think I’ll be fine, but running is my weakest link. I run like a cross between a chicken and giraffe. Think I gave up illusions of grandeur after the egg and spoon race age 3. Trust me it’s not a pleasant site. A visit to the treadmill is in order.

We went to Seattle for Thanksgiving and cooked a Chicken. Well we cheated a little and bought a cooked Chicken, but we did the rest. Seattle is actually really nice and you can certainly get a lot more for your money down there in terms of Condos. Didn’t get to see Microsoft, but there’s always next time.

Also visited Toronto the other day for the first time. Saw Niagara, truly amazing to see. The town around it however is very much like a Blackpool / cheap Las Vegas however. Very Americanized. All you can eat buffets and Casinos at every turn. The area around it, Niagara on the Lake, is much nicer. Known for it’s Ice Wine (very sweet desert wine), there’s loads of Wineries near by that give you tasting tours. I recommend this to everyone Went up the CN tower too. It’s not the tallest structure in the world anymore, but it’s still damn tall.  147 stories I think. Try standing on the glass floor at the top with a hangover.

Ohh! Nearly forgot to mention. Went diving, for the first time in nearly a year. Victoria had done her PADI open water course so we could go together. We went to a place called Porteau Cove, which is near Squamish here in BC. Beautiful place surrounded by mountains. Anyway, was fully expecting Victoria to hate it and me to love it, but as it happens the complete opposite happened. I couldn’t equalize, had too much weight and had absolutely banging headache when I was finished. Victoria one the other hand was a complete natural. The whole incident has put me off a little bit, but not to be defeatist I’ll give it another go soon, to make sure I’m not really that crap.

Anyway, that’s a Whistle-stop tour of what I’ve been up to the last few weeks.

Hope to have some more post for you all soon.

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Recently I was talking about coding competitions with someone at work and it got me thinking about the demoscene again…

For those of you that do not know the demo scene is a collection of people “sceners” throughout the world that build “demos”. A demo could be considered to be very much like a music video, but where all the graphics are done in real time. These demos are shown at demo parties, where they are judged in a competition. There are different restrictions which will ultimately decide the type of the demo, such as 1k, 4k, 64k and unrestricted. The demo scene is basically a playground for future games programmers and has some of the best programmers on earth.

Why tell us all this Jimmy? Well… the demo scene is very dear to me as it’s what ultimately started me on this path of making videos games. I was so involved that I organized and hosted the last big UK demo party “dejavu 2k“, which was held at my university in Leicester.

Unfortunately the UK was a very quiet place for demos in those days and after university I lost all touch with the scene.

It was kind of by blind luck that I watched a demo recently by someone called ‘smash’. The name really rang a bell and I emailed the author to find out that we have both gone to Brussels together for Wired98! He told me that the Uk demo scene is now very active.

Typical! I’ve now moved to Canada!

Anyway the whole incident has got me interested to see whats going on the scene these days. So I’m going to download a few new demos and put them up these pages.

I also might blow the dust of some old graphics books and have a play at knocking something together…

In the mean time here’s a list of links to some my favorites. Many of these won’t run under windows as they were designed to run in DOS 32bit protected mode. Luckily nice people have been capturing them as videos…

2nd reality – the future crew
the secret life of Mr black – orange”
megablast – orange”
paper 64k – psychic link”
square – pulse”
toasted – cubic team”
baygon – melon dezign”

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I’ve recently done my Possessions and Acquisitions License (PAL) for firearms here in Canada.

Yes and I’ve done this before I’ve got my Canadian driving license. Why? Well it’s more fun of course

It takes a while for it to go through with me being new to the country. They need to do loads of background check to make sure you’re not a nutter.

Well anyway a good friend of both Manus and myself, Mark took us to the shooting range for the day last weekend. I can’t tell you how much fun it was…

I was quite nervous at first as I’ve never even fired a gun before. (well only an air rifle, but that doesn’t count.)

Mark brought along:

1. 9mm Smith and Western
2. 9mm Glock
3. AR15 Rifle
4. Remmington 12 guage pump action shotgun

Manu went first. He didn’t enjoy it

I was really accurate with the pistols. Mark even called me a natural, but I think he was just being kind on a beginner. 7 out of 9 were bull-eyes.

Surprisingly there was very little recoil and any of the weapons , with the exception of the shotgun, which would leave a bruise.

I was immediately hooked. I can’t begin to tell you how much fun this was.

A Brilliant way of relieving stress. I’d never thought I’d say this, but I’m thinking of buying one now

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