Forza 3 Three-Wheeler Fun

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Yay!

Ever since number one son found the Reliant Regal in Forza 3 I've wanted one of my own. And now I've got one. I managed to track down the barn and get the car safely installed in my garage. 

The car does float, but it was so under powered that it actually stopped in the middle of a the river

I promptly upgraded everything to do with the engine and I now have something which will kind of go like a rocket in a straight line but then falls over if you try to turn a corner. Which as I recall is pretty realistic.

However, the thing I find astonishing is the attention to detail in the model. You can visit your cars in the garage, open doors, try the seats for size and look at all the controls. You can even open the bonnet (hood) and take a look at the engine. In the case of the Reliant this has triggered lots of memories of my first ever car. It had a habit of lifting the inside wheel when I was cornering, which passengers found rather disquieting. 

I really, really, love Forza 3. It isn't a game you play, it's a place you visit. I'm running it on my PC and on my Xbox. The PC experience is very, very, good. It seems strange to be able to ALT-TAB from an triple A video game into Visual Studio and back, but you can do just that. Strongly recommended. 

Comedy Pig Palace Building

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Yesterday the vet said that the best way to get rid of any nasty pig-mites was to "wash the hutch out with boiling water". At the time this seemed to make sense, as least from a mite-killing point of view. But today it occurred to me that this would leave me with a very wet pig house. In the middle of winter. Not healthy.

Fortunately I'd just come into some money, in the form of the travelling expenses for TechDays, and so I was in a position to zoom down to PetsAtHome and purchase a new "Pig Palace", along with clean sawdust and hay. If you have ever asked yourself the question "Is it possible to get a 160cm long flat pack hutch in the back of a BMW i3?" the answer turns out to be yes, because the front seats tilt forwards in a rather useful way. 

Anyhoo, I got the palace home, ignoring all the "needs two people to carry" instructions and all I had to do now was build the thing. I'd had this mental picture of me laying out all the pieces in the garden, and then leveraging all my Ikea experience to quickly fit them together. And then it started raining. Proper rain. Lots of it. 

So instead I had to assemble the hutch in the summer house (i.e. shed with windows) where the pigs live in winter. That is, in a space only about 18 inches all round larger than the hutch itself. This was a true comedy affair. At numerous occasions during the build I discovered that thanks to my construction skills I'd managed to build myself into a corner from which there was no way out. And I put the front on upside down in one Australian moment of madness, which meant I got to take it all apart again half way through.

Anyhoo, the new pig palace is now complete and the pigs are installed and seem happy enough (at least I hope so). The old hutch has served as very well over a long time (and it wasn't even new when we got it) but I think it is time to move on. I just hope I can get the new hatch out of the summer house when we have to move the pigs outdoors. That will be another comedy moment.....

Poorly Pigs

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One of the patients catching up on the news

Having pets is something of a double edged sword. On one hand they are great fun. On another they are something else to worry about. Recently we noticed that the hair on our pigs wasn't as shiny and clear as usual, so it was down to the vets for a check-up. The diagnosis was that they had mites, which they probably picked up from the hay. Some treatment was applied and we thought that was that.

Tonight I took them down for a follow-up appointment and it turns out that they are not much better, which is a pity. They've just had a follow up treatment and we've got some ointment (should that be oinkment for a pig?) to apply as well. They seem happy enough and all the food is disappearing each morning, so I think they'll be fine.

Schools App Challenge

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I've spent a bit of time over the last few days going through entries for the Schools App Challenge, helping with the judging. Such fun.

The challenge is a fantastic enterprise. It is a kind of "magic bullet" that hits a whole bunch of great targets all at once. It gives kids confidence in presenting and discussing their ideas. It helps them learn to work as a team. It engages them with technology. And it gets them thinking about how you can do things to improve the lot of other people.

You can find the entries on the web site and you might like to take a look at them. I found it very cheering.

Home Alone Rob

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I'm having some time "Home Alone" as number one wife is away for a few days. This is rather interesting, as it doesn't happen very often. I've been going round the kitchen to see what happens in there and taking a look in the cupboards. Most of them seem quite sensible, with some things in them that I recognise. Cups, plates, breakfast cereal etc. Others are rather strange.

Apparently there's a "magic cold cupboard" that holds the milk and whatnot, and a magic warm cupboard which is where I can put things if I want to heat them up. Although I'm not completely sure about why I would want to do this. Perhaps it is something to do with this "cooking" thing I see so much of on the telly.

There's another magic cupboard with a round opening that I can't quite figure out. I put some crockery in there and turned it on, and all that happened was a horrendous noise and a lot of broken bits. So it's not for washing dishes.

I've been shown a bunch of things in the "magic cold cupboard" that I can transfer to the "magic buzzing cupboard" to make them warm enough to eat. I've even been planning my menus for the next few days.

In my opinion the way that we eat today is boring. Just because something has worked fine for many years is no reason to keep doing it (at least that is what seems to be driving the world these days). What we need is some novel approaches to eating. Heaven knows, we've had enough of experts telling us how to eat over the years. It's time for some radical thinking. I've come up with the following possible plans.

  1. Eat nothing. This might serve as a handy weight reduction plan and definitely save some money. However, the long term prospects may not be great.
  2. Eat nothing but food that I really like. After millions of years of evolution and adaption it seems stupid that things that are supposedly "good" for me don't taste very nice. My body knows what it's doing. If it wants nothing but honey roasted peanuts and Kellogg's Cocoa Pops then perhaps that's nature's way of saying that's all I should eat. There may be a downside to this, but I'm struggling to think of one.
  3. Eat everything on the first day. Number one wife is back on Sunday. I could eat a whole four day's worth of food today and then nothing for the rest of the week. I'm struggling to understand why we don't already do this. It would be so much more efficient. On the other hand, I may discover why about half way through my third lasagna.
  4. We normally have breakfast, lunch and tea each day. Why? I could have all my breakfasts on Wednesday, lunches on Thursday and so on through the week. If I run out of meals I can start at breakfast again, or even invent new ones. This would add a bit of novelty to my life and bring back memories of my time in a bedsit when I actually did this, for the simple reason that the only food I had to hand was Kellogg's Cocoa Pops.

Made in Hull

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As well as an awesome firework display, the start of Hull's reign as UK City of Culture was also marked by artwork projected onto the major buildings in the city. There are a number of different installations, the most impressive are the one in Victoria Square and the one projected onto the side of The Deep.

If you live in or around Hull you ust go and see these. If you don't live in or around Hull you must move to Hull and then go and see them.

They are on until the end of the week.

In with a Bang in 2017

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Happy New Year everyone.

Hull is UK City of Culture 2017. Yay!

To celebrate this we had an amazing firework display tonight. Around 25,000 people came along to see, including us. It was very cold, but we were lucky enough to find a space in the only pub in the neighbourhood and have a quiet drink until the display started.

It was awesome. Two barges loaded with fireworks had been parked in the river over 15 minutes or so they set them all off.

You can get a flavour of the event from this video, which is better than any pictures that I could take and includes some lovely shots taken from the air.

I was a bit worried about the size of the crowds and getting home, but after a brisk walk across town we were soon on our way back. It was a wonderful evening and a real credit to the wonderful city where I live.

Not Alone Game

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Not Alone is an asymmetric card game. One player is "The Creature" and the others have to escape from the planet where the creature lives. The players work as a team although, as someone pointed out during the game, if they talk about their cunning plans there's a good chance of the creature hearing them.....

Players have to move between locations and collect artefacts that help them escape. The creature has to figure out where they are going, get there first and sap their will to live.

It got quite tense towards the end, with a very close finish. A good game and refreshingly different from anything I've played recently.  A good, fun, thing to play on New Year's Eve.

Appalling User Interfaces: Squarespace Edit

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I use Squarespace to host my blog. Most of the time it is wonderful, but the web based page editing is a bit of a pain to be honest. One of the things I really hate is this dialogue, which appears if you click outside the post editing window.

It carefully explains what Discard and Save do, while neglecting to tell you anything useful about Cancel, which is the button that you really should press.

Discard throws away your work, Save ends the editing session and closes the window (meaning that you have to open it again if you want to keep working on the post) and Cancel takes you back to editing the post, which is almost always what you want to do.

Ugh.

Appalling User Interfaces - App Suggestions by Siri

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I seem to need to have an Apple phone. My favourite, Windows Phone, doesn't do all the things I want, and I've tried Android and that was fairly appalling too. What can I say? I'm picky.

One trick that the iPhone plays drives me completely nuts. The phone provides "Siri App Suggestions" based on the things that you do most. You can use these favourites to slightly compensate for the horrible way that the iPhone manages large numbers of apps on the device.

The suggestions are based on your use of the phone and are updated each time you visit the screen. But here's the appalling bit. They update and redraw themselves in the fraction of a second between the page appearing and you actually selecting something.

So your finger can head for the Nest icon, but by the time your digit touches the screen the icon underneath can be replaced by a different application. So the wrong thing is selected. Most annoying.

This single piece of stupidity makes the feature completely useless to me. Here's a tip Apple, why not update the sorted list before you display it on the screen?

Forza Horizon 3 is Wonderful

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I liked Forza Horizon 3 so much that I've bought it. At the time I got it they had a discount in the store, so I've got it for both Xbox One and Windows 10 at what I think is quite a reasonable price.

I can now take my Tesla out and go drifting in the Australian outback. Awesome fun. It is the best racing game ever. I've played a few over the years, and I really can't fault Forza in any way. The breadth of vehicles, the quality of the driving experience, the feeling of being part of something. All wonderful.

I don't play games as much as I probably should. No, really. But Forza is probably going to change that. I've got to smash a few more boards and collect my very own Reliant Regal.....

Rogue 1: A Star Wars film

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We went to see Rogue One: A Star Wars story today. 

It's a good film. I really enjoyed it. Bearing in mind that we went in knowing the story in advance (stealing the Death Star films to set up a movie made forty years ago) they did a very good job of making the film fresh and interesting with some great characters. 

If you like Star Wars you'll love it. It you don't care much about Star Wars, this might give you cause to start caring a bit more.