Towels and Clothes Pegs

Spot the exciting bit:

HomeLAN - Cryptic [creator of City of Heroes] is going to be releasing its first major free content update to the game soon. What can players expect to see in this update and what other free content updates are coming?

Chris Julian - In Issue #1, we’ve got new zones, new villain groups, a costume tailor for changing your look, and random indoor 5th Column and Circle of Thorns missions will be equipped with holding cells for defeated heroes. There are also instanced outdoor missions and a sewer trial room. For a free update, this one is pretty beefy.

Issue #2 will be this fall. The biggest addition will be capes. I’ve seen the early work on capes and they look tremendous. We will also have additional power sets and at least one new zone and trial room. Future free updates should be similar in the amount of content they provide.

Did you see what he said! Capes!!!!! Full interview here.

Call The Police

Tim Henman's trying to kill me.

ES REGNET!

The goddamn world's ending and my barometer says 'sun'.

Sour Tango

While eating tea last night I flicked onto Strictly Come Dancing. I hadn't really seen any of it before, and I was actually quite impressed. I'm not normally into reality tv shows due to the whole voting aspect, which I'll come back to in a minute, but this was nevertheless quite entertaining. The premise is that x number of celebrities are trained in ballroom dancing, with a professional partner, and each week have to perform two routines. None of them had any experience in the field, so were learning from scratch. I like this idea. Having to actually do something difficult that requires many hours of work each week is a cut above most reality tv programmes, I think. It's based on more than just personality / fame.

Except apparently it's not.

The three remaining contestants last night were Natasha Kaplinsky (newsreader), Lesley Garrett (classical singer) and Christopher Parker (Eastenders actor). Now, unsurprisingly, I know nothing about dancing other than that it looks bloody difficult. Watching the routines, I had my impressions on who was doing well and who wasn't and in general these agreed with the show's judges, though more by luck than judgement I think. These four judges award a score out of ten for each couple. The points are added up and are used 50/50 with the public phone vote in order to decide who is knocked out of the competition each week.

Natasha's routines looked pretty flawless to me, and the judges agreed. She was leader on the final scoreboard. Lesley also did very well, and was only a few points behind. Christopher, however, looked pretty bad even to me, and got very low scores from everyone. You could tell he was trying hard, but it didn't look great and he had to rely on his partner to do anything complicated. His score was very low, something like half of Natasha's. The comments from the judges indicated that this week he was in fact a touch better than he had been previously, but was still pretty awful. You can probably guess where this is going.

When the final votes were tallied Natasha and Christopher went through to the final while Lesley was knocked out. Given that the judges/public scores were 50/50, Christopher must have received a huge number of votes. That's pretty pants, really. I reckon that all the adults watching voted for Natasha, while all the kids voted for Christopher by virtue of his being on Eastenders and having a baby-face. Lesley had nobody left. I know that the idea of the show is that it's controlled by the viewers, but when they so obviously aren't impartial it's a bit pointless, really. You might as well just have a Big Brother style 'who do you like the most' show and be done with it. Screw the public, that's what I say Hopefully Natasha will win next week.

Oh good grief, I just wrote an entire post about a reality tv show...What's happening to me?!

And Don’t Even MentionScrotum Piercings

Es regnet. I should be doing some OU...but i'm not. I shall get my act together shortly. Perhaps.

I was listening to the Jonathan Ross show earlier, and the weekly quiz came on. One of the contestants was taking part while his wife was in labour! Only ten minute contractions apparently, though he wouldn't reveal the size of the dilation. Apparently she'd been going since the eurovision match on Thursday. Blimey. Still, it's not like it's that painful. I mean come on. Earlier today my hand slipped as I was resting on it and I poked myself in the eye. It hurt. I nearly lost my contact lens. That's gotta be comparable to having a 3.5kg baby tear its way out of your vagina.

My case rests.

Mistakes

Probably the only sporting occasion I actually look forward to is going on right now. I really enjoy watching Wimbledon and have been known to take afternoons off work to watch matches. Something weird happened a couple of hours ago, though. Venus Williams lost her match. This is pretty odd in itself, given that she and her sister have dominated the women's tennis world for the past three years, but in the final tie break the umpire made a mistake. And nobody noticed. The tie-break score was 2-1 and Karoline Sprem had the serve. She faulted, and the linesman, as ever, shouted 'out'. The umpire then declared it 2-2. Nobody seemed to notice this. Karolina then served for a second time, to the same side of the court (which you wouldn't do had you won the point), and again nobody said anything. Karolina then proceeded to win the tie break and the match. I don't know whether the commentators noticed, but it's really odd that the players, linespeople, crowd and umpire all missed it. Anyway, the result stands as the umpire's word is final once the match is ended. Venus Williams said afterwards: "I don't think one call makes a match." That's nicely sporting, and nice to see in my opinion.

I had a USB 802.11b adapter rushed to me after yesterday's unpleasant discovery (I don't know whether there are any 802.11g USB adapters compatible with win98, actually) and on setting it all up detected a completely unsecured network that I presume was in a nearby building. I should hack into their computers and leave a note with my charges for fixing it

Pulling Teeth

After trying and failing to get a Win98 computer to recognise a wireless network card last week (the aforementioned 'early pci non-vga device' error) I ordered a WUSB54G to use instead. On opening the box just now, there's a large sticker that says 'ATTENTION: Compatible with Windows 2000 and XP ONLY'. Don't point that out on their website, do they! To be fair, it does say so on the Insight product page, but only at the bottom of their specifications. There's a 30% restocking fee for unwanted products too. Damn it.

Final Frasier

Just a heads-up that the final two episodes of Frasier are on C4 tomorrow night. [sobs]

This reminds me that C4 haven't shown the new series of West Wing, and according to their website have no plans to. The last series on terrestrial tv was S3. S5 is starting on E4 very soon. S4 was on E4 last year, but I didn't watch, stupidly assuming that it would be on terrestrial like the previous 3 series! This isn't fair. The S4 DVD box set is out in September, so I guess I'll just have to buy that. Except that, for reasons which may be familiar, I'm not allowed to watch it until December

Drug Dealers

We just had Jehovah's Witnesses at the door. Sadly it was my sister who saw them (winding up evangelists is one of life's great pleasures) and they gave her a leaflet called 'Can Science Help You to Find God?'! The bloody nerve! Right. They're back next week to 'see what we think'. They're gonna find out

This leaflet manages the remarkable feat of invoking Richard Feynman in their defense and attacking Richard Dawkins in the same article. Prof. Feynman's famous quote about bending over backwards to show that you are wrong is given as a reason to believe in god - and then...

Biologist Richard Dawkins, who rejects the idea of god, stated:

'In a universe of blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won't find any rhyme or reason to it, nor any justice."

Do you find that a rather grim view of the world?

I like that it's possible to change the laws of physics by not wanting them to be true There are some seriously crap arguments in this thing. In Isaiah 40:22 there's apparently the quote "There is One who is dwelling above the circle of the earth". Therefore Isaiah knew the Earth was spherical hundreds of years before anyone else did, which means he must have been told this fact by 'divine intervention'. The quote is actually:

It is he that sitteth upon the circle of the earth, and the inhabitants thereof are as grasshoppers

Well, as long as he cares. Yes, it says 'circle'. Wow. What does the world look like if you look at the horizon around you? A circle. Big deal. A flat earth is perhaps more evolved than this point of view

I'd best stop now.

Hong KongOk prison

Today I saw no monkeys. A few bees, maybe. A dog, definitely. But no monkeys.

I have no bin. We rearranged the office, and the bin was under my desk. I then installed two computers and an adjoining desk, and now the bin is trapped without serious rearrangement. And that'd be a fair bit of effort just to get a bin. It is, however, annoying not to have a bin. For this reason I shall complain here but do nothing until my workspace becomes overloaded with stuff and collapses, showering me with [looks at desk] candy floss bags, already fading receipts, x-called-while-you-were-out notes, bus tickets and scary guinea pigs. Waitagoddamnminute! Where the hell is my wrist rest?!