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My parents are away at the moment, and so my brother and I have my house to ourselves. This is absolutely awesome, and means that I can do lots of things I wouldn’t usually do at home. The place is starting to look a bit of a state, actually, but it won’t do it any harm.

I can’t describe how nice it is to be able to leave something on a table when you go out, and then forget about it and have it still there three days later. It sounds bizarre, but it’s such a change from the way things usually are in my house that it’s unbelievably refreshing. Unfortunately it’ll all be over next Tuesday, but I’ve only got to finish work today and then I’ve got four days off. Sweet.

In other news, Today’s XKCD is pretty similar to the way that I think in a lot of situations. Neuroses are fun!

I’ve recently got quite into watching the previous series’ of “The Apprentice” - it’s really compulsive viewing. Once you start, you can’t stop watching… you just want to see more of what happens. I’m going to try and get myself up to date on all the old episodes (I’ve got ever episode to date ready to watch so far) and then get into the current series - see if I can manage to make it there before the current run finishes.

I’ve also been levelling my warrior up to 70 on the ever-addictive World of Warcraft. I’ve been doing this most evenings for the last week and a bit, and I still haven’t got bored with it. I think that WoW is one of those games that you just fall in and out of wanting to play - it never quite gets too old for you not to carry on, you just might not renew your subscription and forget about it for a couple of months. Then at some point in the future, you always come back…

My brother’s got himself “Age of Conan”, which looks rather cool. Don’t think I’ll be purchasing it myself just yet, but never say never!

In a display of what is probably one of the geekiest things I’ve done to date, I took a day off work yesterday to get hold of GTA IV and play it non-stop from when I got in until such time as I had to go to sleep.

My verdict so far is that it’s an absolutely amazing game. It’s easy to get used to and very intuitive - similar enough to the old GTA games to still be a classic, and yet includes so many new features that you wonder how on earth you’ll ever manage to explore all of them. The list of “achievements” that you can get on the Xbox is absolutely mammoth, and I’m not far enough through the game yet to even understand how to get some of them.

A few of my favourite things about GTA IV:

• You can now get taxis to wherever you like on the map, if you don’t want to drive. This is fantastic for the times when you die after starting a mission and don’t want to have to drive there again.
• The handling of the cars is much more realistic. The Xbox version uses the analog triggers for acceleration and braking, as most Xbox driving games do, and although it takes a bit of getting used to, it’s far more fun when you learn to drive properly. Any rear-wheel drive car will fishtail its way down the road forever if you don’t release the accelerator, and you actually have to brake properly for corners now. I’ve no doubt that some people will say this is a bad move, but I think it’s a step in the right direction.
• There is a much improved social aspect to the game. After you do business with people, you can go out drinking with them, play darts or pool, go bowling, to a cabaret or to the strip club… there are a load of mini-attractions which make the game more detailed and fun.
• In relation to the previous comment, you actually get drunk if you drink. In one instance, my cousin invited me out drinking so I went with him, and we got riotously pissed. I opened the front door of the bar to leave, and fell down the stairs, injuring myself. I managed to lurch my way out onto the road where I’d parked my car and tried to drive us both home (despite my cousin’s warnings that I was too far gone), and it proved to be a bit of a mistake. Not only could I not keep the car going where I wanted to, a police car saw me drive off and chased me down for drink driving. Elements of a game like that make me smile, as they show fantastic attention to detail.
• If you do the social things with people, they will like you more. Getting certain people to like you more will unlock “special abilities” they have, which will help your progress through the game. The fact that it’s totally voluntary is great, as it means that you choose your own path through the game.
• In a similar way, you also get to make decisions which will affect your storyline. So far it’s just been me choosing whether people live or die, but it’s great to have the freedom of choice. There was also an instance where I had to choose which of two people I wished to kill to progress with the game.
• The developers have removed some of the less fun elements from previous games - for example, in GTA: San Andreas you could make yourself fat if you ate too much, and if you didn’t eat enough you would lose weight and eventually starve, losing health. Although this was a novel idea, it just turned out to be a total pain in the end, as you’d be on your way to kill someone, miles from anywhere, and suddenly the game would tell you that you were starving and in danger of death. Very helpful… not. It also appears that things such as “driving skill” have been removed, and are now down to the player rather than an imaginary scale.

I could go on about all the things I love about this game, but I think the only thing I can say that does it justice is that you really must try it. If you liked the previous GTA games you will absolutely love GTA IV, and even if you weren’t a fan, it might be worth trying to get back into this one. I’ve always usually found GTA “clunky” on consoles and therefore played on PCs - using analog sticks is not as easy as a good old keyboard and mouse combo - but I’ve actually started to get used to playing GTA on the Xbox, and I can see that console controllers offer some benefits.

I can’t wait to get home again tonight and play it :)

Just for a chuckle, I present to you all a PHP version of the recently-famous “FizzBuzz” program in the style of Code Golf!

98 bytes of pure FizzBuzz excellence.

EDIT: I know I could have made this shorter (and have done since) but it’s just a proof of concept. Besides, if I posted all my shortest solutions, everyone would be able to answer easily when it comes round to the actual Code Golf challenge…

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

This is the Manic Street Preachers covering Rihanna’s “Umbrella”, and my god, it’s fucking excellent. So much better than the original it’s untrue!

It’s Tuesday, and this is awesome!

(Yes, I’m a little bit bored in the last half-hour of work, and I don’t have a lot to write about.)

Tuesdays are actually my favourite day of the week. I go to the gym on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays and so I don’t get home until later on, and then have to make dinner and don’t usually get to sit down and relax until about 8pm, which is nasty. On Tuesdays, however, I get home at about 6pm and I can immediately start my relaxation. Win!

I am listening to my recommended radio station on last.fm, and it’s actually pretty good - I’ve heard a few things that I shall be following up on. If you fancy listening too… click!

Why oh why did I start playing Planetarion? This game is ridiculously addictive…

It is Friday, and I am bored at work. I have spent a large proportion of today on the excellent Facebook (that site truly is a procrastinator’s nightmare) and I am looking forward to going home.

This week has been absolutely exhausting to say the least. I was in a meeting room at hotel in Stevenage for the first three days of it, doing massively long days to try and get a project finished in time for Thursday. We were ready on time in the end, but circumstances changed and so the launch date has now been moved forward to a few weeks from now. I can’t say I’m not delighted about it - it’s given us more time to thoroughly test things so that we can actually release a top-notch product. This week has totally taken it out of me though, and I am seriously looking forward to crawling into bed and sleeping for about twelve hours this evening. There will be some beer being drunk in town first though, as that is definitely called for.

The show (Daisy Pulls It Off) went fantastically well in the end. We had big audiences every night and were sold out Friday and Saturday night, which was excellent. It’s much easier to perform when there’s a big audience and they keep the atmosphere and the laughs going - comedy is quite hard to pull off (excuse the name based pun) when people don’t find it funny. It was brilliant fun though and I was totally demoralised when it was over. I thought I’d escaped the post-show malaise as I was fine on Saturday night, but I think that was because I was at the after-show party and was drinking quite a bit of alcohol. It all hit me when I had to disassemble the set on Sunday morning with a bit of a hangover.

Not to worry though - rehearsals for the Christmas pantomime have now started. I’m playing Jack (one half of the famous “Jack and Jill”) and it’s looking to be quite a laugh so far, although far more energetic than what I’ve been used to! We had our first attempt at doing the dancing that goes along with the first song last night… not only was it absolutely knackering, it was damn hard as well. I’m totally out of practice! I’m looking forward to it, though.

I think I may have to be purchasing Halo 3 - having done some 3-player online on release day, I think it’s definitely going to be added to the games list. Awesome stuff!

My week off work was great fun. I had the entire house and the whole internet connection to myself, and nobody else but me to worry about for an entire week. I stayed up late, got up late and did many amusing things. I shopped for myself, bought all the things my parents don’t believe in buying, I had some hilarious efforts at cooking and just did whatever the hell I wanted to.

Unfortunately these things do have to come to an end, and it was an effort to get up for work on Monday morning. I thought that was bad, but it was nothing compared to what it was like this morning. I thought I was going to collapse when I dragged myself out of bed and into the shower - I’m totally not a morning person. People have said you can change yourself to be but I just don’t believe it. I’ve *never* been able to get up properly in the mornings, not matter when I go to bed and how much sleep I have. Still, I’m going to try and get to bed a bit earlier in future.

I think I’m going to do some experimentation with the Zend framework this evening. It’s a way of programming that separates content and layout for a site, and then ties it together using a “controller”. It sounds like the perfect scalable solution for an idea I have for a new website. I’m going to start it and see whether the idea still takes my fancy when I’ve done a bit of coding with it.

I’ve just rewritten my IRC bot (botsworth) as well, to use TuB’s framework. Unfortunately he’s changed it already and so it’ll probably be due a rewrite sometime soon. He is ridiculously impulsive and will often change his mind entirely about something in a matter of minutes!

The Premier League is looking like it’ll be an epic battle this season, from the matches I’ve seen so far. I’m tipping United, Chelsea or Liverpool for the title - I’ve been told not to write off teams like Arsenal, but I’m just not convinced. I may stand to eat my words…

I paid attention to two news stories in the past couple of days, due to being bored at work and using net surfing as a source of procrastination.

1) http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/6735631.stm
Paris Hilton got sent back to jail! I hope she does the female equivalent of dropping the soap in the shower and learns a lesson. She’s nothing but a deluded socialite who thinks that she can do anything she likes because Daddy has made a fortune, and she totally deserves to spend the time in jail. What sort of society are we living in where people can get out of jail after just three days and spend the time living in a cushy mansion somewhere under “house arrest”?

2) http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/6732873.stm
So a white middle class girl called someone a nigger? Big deal, it’s happened before and it will happen again. The fact is that racism is an integral part of British society. It might not be right, but it is just something that is true. Everyone tries to claim that they are bigger than it, or that they love everyone equally, but it just isn’t true.

Think of it this way. Anyone who gets even slightly worried when a group of black people walks towards them on their walk home is technically a racist. Anyone who sees an Asian man in the street and thinks “I bet he’s either a doctor or owns a corner shop” is technically a racist. There are many more examples of this.

Political correctness has gone too far, and in my opinion, we are at risk of losing our British identity in an effort to be too tolerant and multicultural. Is it any wonder that the BNP have a lot of support in northern English cities? A lot of people do literally see the world as black and white, and the media circus that is created whenever something like this happens is just serving to unsettle the country. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if we see another civil war at some point in my lifetime.

The other reality is that Big Brother only booted Emily from the house because of the Shilpa Shetty race row that got them negative publicity last time. They got a slap on the wrist from OFCOM and now they have to make examples of anyone who uses certain words on the show.

I’d like to know what Endemol would do if everyone else in the house got involved in an absolutely huge row and used “racist” words, to the point where they had no alternative but to throw all the housemates out. That’d make their overtired show a bit more interesting, wouldn’t it?!

I did a meme on Facebook this morning with the title “How will you be defined in the dictionary?”

Do they actually know me, or something?! :scared:

Some units of measurement you rarely see:

2000 mockingbirds: 2 kilomockingbirds

Ratio of an igloo’s circumference to its diameter: Eskimo Pi

2000 pounds of Chinese soup: Won ton

Time between slipping on a peel and smacking the pavement: 1 bananosecond

Half of a large intestine: 1 semicolon

1000 aches: 1 megahurtz

Basic unit of laryngitis: 1 hoarsepower

Shortest distance between two jokes: A straight line

1 million-million microphones: 1 megaphone

1 million bicycles: 2 megacycles

10 cards: 1 decacards

Force of 1 kilogram of falling figs: 1 Fig Newton

1000 grams of wet socks: 1 literhosen

1 millionth of a fish: 1 microfiche

1 trillion pins: 1 terrapin

10 rations: 1 decoration

100 rations: 1 C-ration

8 nickels: 2 paradigms