Author: Rory

I had planned to reference Final Fantasy VII in every post here for a week or two in any obscure or indirect way, starting with my Sydney Airport post, just for fun. It was partly prompted by the fact that Jamie made some similar references at the same time I did. It was going to become a Thing. Unfortuately it seems I forgot about that plan almost as soon as I began.

Now, having related that pointless piece of information, here’s some more pointful information: Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children is to be released in Europe on the 24^th of April. Yay.

I got this link to a brilliant Flash cartoon in an email titled "Prepare your ass to be rocked. This is a guarentee[sic]". This is the best thing on the internet involving Chuck Norris. Yes, including Random Chuck Norris Fact.

Edit: fixed random fact link

There’s a new MasterCard MacGyver ad which I think was aired during the Superbowl. It’s the first time MacGyver has been seen since the 1980s, and will please anyone in their early to mid twenties, as well as fans of targat. Richard Dean Anderson will be in my dreams tonight.

Tag, I’m it. I’ve been deliberately infected with a meme. The results are in:

Four jobs I’ve had in my life

• Target for management hostility, a.k.a. till-jockey in a Shell station
• Um…
• I wrote some software for AIB Bank once
• Free-loading student on a bitchin’ scholarship that gives me free trips to other hemispheres

Not really "jobs" per se, but I hopefully have plenty of time to find some real jobs in the future. Astronaut; sorceror; more powerful astronaut.

Four movies I can watch over and over

• Monty Python’s Life of Brian
• Terminator 2: Judgement Day
• Demolition Man
• Grosse Point Blank

And a huge number of others. There are tens of movies I could and have watched repeatedly. Sometimes more than once in a single day.

Four TV shows I love to watch

• Firefly
• Futurama
• The Simpsons, before it became crap
• Buffy: The Vampire Slayer

Four places I’ve been on vacation

• Slovenia
• Florida
• Paris
• London

Four of my favourite dishes

• That one that was the top part, the head, of a Bosco set, where a cup formed the body and a saucer was the feet
• The blue-ish green-ish one that doesn’t form part of any set and that fits two Weetabix perfectly
• …
• …

I can’t say I’m particularly fond of any other pieces of crockery. Pity there wasn’t a question about my favourite foods…

Four websites I visit daily

• Bloglines
• Digg
• Google
• Wikipedia

Four places I would rather be right now

• Sydney, partly for the weather and partly because I’m still operating on their time
• London
• New York
• Los Angeles

All of those with the condition that I be in the company of friends and/or family. There’s no use being anywhere on your own.

Four bloggers I am tagging

• Stephen
• Jamie
• Joe
• Hypothetical Person Number Four Who Reads My Blog

(This entry was written in Sydney Airport at the beginning of a 30-hour journey, and has not been proofread since. Any errors you find are your fault, for being too pedantic.)

Being in a airport for any length of time is a good way to evoke that peculiar state of mind usually reserved for people watching acid-inspired Flash cartoons on MTV in the middle of the night. It’s that sense of timelessness, when you can’t tell whether it’s eight in the morning or twelve at night. In fact it’s neither of these; it never is. Nevermind what time it is outside, it’s always 4am in an airport. Always. They try to hide this uncomfortale fact. Clocks still move, and flight "times" are written in the familiar style, but it’s all just a facade to imply the genuine passing of time. It’s a temporal veneer (readers who are playing the Antiques Roadshow drinking game should take a drink at this point), with the twin aims of easing us temporal beings into the uncomfortable timeless world and of avoiding the difficult problem of honestly writing all check-in, boarding and departure times as 4am which would leave you with no idea of whether you have enough "time" left for another "coffee". Since very little thermodynamics research is persued in airports it’s still unclear what happens to entropy in this timeless environment. My guess, based on personal anecdotal evidence, is that it’s pretty much already at a maximum.

"Jesus Titty-Fucking Christ, you’re on your knees in a airport departure lounge, pressing your forehead against the carpet in worship of an ignorant bald man in a dirty brown bed-sheet." This is not what I said to the delighted-looking people swarming around the collection of monks that surrounded me a few minutes ago. Instead I excitedly exclaimed, to quote Final Fantasy VII, "…!" Then I left to try to find an unlocked car to steal so I could run them all over and get a giant multiplier bonus to the sweet sound of "Gurranga". Or maybe not. Maybe I just sidled away to a monk-free section of the airport, and pondered how much spiritual fulfillment those carpet-kissers were expecting to find in the bizzarre cathedral of soullessness that is Sydney Airport’s international departure terminal. I concluded that Nirvana is probably not waiting for the devout in this flourescent franchise nest. Not unless cosmic one-ness is a fan of Starbucks and Subway. Although, having said that, an argument could be made that the relentless spread of Starbucks is likely to eventually result in galactic unity. Probably by the time I get home.

I’ll leave my disjointed ponderings at this point, because it seems that the announcement about the 18:00 flight from Sydney to London Heathrow via Hong Kong being delayed until tomorrow at 12:00 was referring to the other 18:00 flight from Sydney to London Heathrow via Hong Kong. Which is good. It means you won’t have to read another 18 hours’ worth of vacuity. Well done.

According to Billy West, voice of Fry, Zoidberg, Zapp Brannigan, and a ridiculous number of other characters, there will be four DVD movies of Futurama starting production this summer. No-one but West has verified this, but no-one has denied it yet either. There was a previous report that the new head of Fox broadcasting is open to seeing Futurama follow Family Guy back onto TV, but he said that nothing was being planned as yet.

I missed the bus on Wednesday morning despite being about 10 minutes early. The bus managed to be 10 minutes and 30 seconds early. This means that it traveled from Kilcoole to Greystones in less than five minutes, apparently averaging nearly 50km/h. Anyway, whatever the profound cosmological reason for my missing the bus, it did end up costing me a lot of money.

The walk from Sydney Parade DART station to UCD is something that I find increasingly off-putting in the mornings, so I have taken to going the whole way into the city centre and bussing back out. In order to make my supreme laziness more easily explicable I often visit a few shops while I’m in the city, and that’s what I did on Wednesday. What I don’t often do to while away the time is to buy a swanky new digital camera.

(Aside: Why do i still feel compelled to refer to this as a "digital camera"? Why not simply "camera"? Surely the number of digital cameras sold now far outweighs the number of film cameras, so why is the qualifier "digital" applied to those in the majority?)

I bought my cool new piece of "kit" in the Camera Centre on Grafton St. I think I may have been their perfect customer, having a line as close as it is reasonable to get to "tell me what to buy and my money is yours". All I really specified was that I wanted it to be thin. They showed me the Fujifilm FinePix F460 (no longer on the Fujifilm site, but very similar to the F470). I considered it over a few minutes spent wandering around the ground floor of the St Stephen’s Green shopping centre eating an orange choc chip ice-cream cone. Then I went back and bought it.

An attractive alliterative appellation is not this camera’s only feature. It has a 5.1 megapixel resolution, a 512-megabyte memory card, 3x optical zoom (how do you say that out loud? "Three by"?) I paid extra for the memory card upgrade because the number 256, when it relates to memory, spells 2001 to me. It even records video, which both salespeople failed to mention. It doesn’t even have that stupid 30-second limit that a lot of cameras have; it will record until the memory runs out (at about nine minutes and 20 seconds).

Of course I ignored the ludicrously long instructions for connecting to a computer and just plugged it straight into my Powerbook’s USB port. I have to say that iPhoto really lives up to the it-just-works-ness of the rest of the "Apple experience".

Now all I need is something to take photos of. Sydney Opera House should do nicely. Or maybe the Harbour Bridge. I’ll be in Sydney from next Saturday (28^th January) until the following Thursday (2^nd February) at the Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces, where I’ll be presenting a demo of our team’s last few months’ work. That will be for a few hours on the Tuesday evening. You have to wonder how it’s worthwhile to send me half way around the world (Dublin – London – Singapore – Sydney – Hong Kong – London – Dublin) for that. Then again, I’m not paying for it (except in time; I’ll be in the air for nearly two full days in total). I have Sunday the 29^th off, so that will be my one-day holiday in Australia. Are there many kangaroos in Sydney?

You might not guess it from the (in)frequency of posting around here, but I do actually maintain a list (or two, or three; I’m not very organised) of things I’d like to write about here. You also may not guess it from the (lack of) quality of the posts that appear, but most of what I have on my "to blog" lists never gets posted because I finally decide that it’s not interesting enough either for you to read about it or, more often, for me to write about it. So I have these lists, and every so often I find something that deserves to skip past all the other dreck waiting for my time and jump straight out onto the page for all to marvel at. At which for all to marvel. Whatever.

One such marvelous… thing… is Cumming: The Fragrance, inspired and endorsed by Alan Cumming. This is actually part of a wider range of cosmetics which includes a soap (Cumming in a Bar), and a body lotion (Cumming All Over) among others. As the man says himself, "My tongue is firmly in my cheek… My own cheek." Now try to take Nightcrawler seriously next time you watch X-2

This is officially 2006’s first recipient of my over-used accolade: Best. Thing. Ever.

The image that I’ve been unable to shake this morning is of Bruce Campbell, chainsaw in hand (or perhaps instead of hand), playing nine-year-old farm girl Tiffany Aching. This onholy, and admittedly unlikely, image was spawned by the news that Evil Dead– and Spider-Man-director Sam Raimi is to direct the first ever Discworld movie, The Wee Free Men.

I’ve been reading news about possible Discworld movies for years, almost as long as I’ve been reading the books themselves, but this one is at least being presented as being a bit more probable than any of the "people won’t like the Death character" Mort possibilities. There’s also the possibility of a Terry Gilliam-directed Good Omens at some point, but with Brothers Grimm still lingering I’m not sure how keen anyone is to give Gilliam any more money.

So a Discworld movie finally! We’ll have to wait a while, since filming has apparently only begun on Raimi’s next movie, Spidey 3, which isn’t due out until summer 2007.

Remember Grow, the crazy game I posted about nearly two years ago? It’s a puzzle game the object of which is to drop objects onto a sphere in the right order. The objects develop depending on how long they’re on the sphere and what other objects are around.

If you lost hours of your life to the original and feel like you have a few more hours in need of wasting, there are two more Grow games on that site now: Grow Cube and Grow RPG. They’re both a bit less complicated than the original game, with only 10 and eight items to place respectively compared to the original’s 12. They’re still time consuming and fun though.