I thought you should know that I’ve decided to move my blog so I’ll no longer be making posts at bendaniel.name. I’ve created a new site with a fresh, new look where I’ll be continuing my ramblings. You can check it out at: www.programmingprimate.com.
If you’re a current subscriber then you’ll need to resubscribe at my new site to keep getting updates, which I hope you will. :-)
Cheers, Ben
Being fans of Guitar Hero 3 for X-Box 360 we decided to buy Guitar Hero World Tour.
We bought the full kit which includes:
If you've played Guitar Hero before you'll be familiar with Star Power.
It's basically a power up which doubles the amount of points you earn while playing.
Tilting your guitar up activates star power (acting like a tool is optional).
Also once activated, electricity shoots off your character and for a moment everything tastes blue.
So it doesn't take a genius to work out if tilting one's axe activates star power for a guitarist then tilting the drum kit must activate it for a drummer!
Unfortunately I couldn't seem to activate star power on our defective drum kit. In fact there must have been something really wrong with our drum kit because I was completely crap at it, lol.
At least that's what I thought until my diva wife pushed me off and jumped on! ;-)
In all seriousness though, we had the kids on the weekend and all four of us played in a band together. It was great family fun. Chloe played lead guitar, Alex played bass, I played the drums (mainly cause neither of the kids wanted to, lol) and Jules showed us she's a closet rapper on the mic! Her rendition of "No Sleep Til Brooklyn" would have made the Beasty Boy's proud! lol ;-)
This is gold. Two hand-cuffed men fleeing from a New Zealand court-house had their escape plan foiled by a lamp post when they ran by either side of it.
Not able to comprehend simple laws of physics the men apparently expected the lamp-post to slice in half as they ran by it.
If I were the judge I would have made the two share the same cell as part of their sentence, lol.
This is a true story, though it sounds like the plot for a joke! Two men were rescued from sea after surviving in a giant esky for 25 days when their fishing boat sank.
When asked what went through their mind when they realised their fishing boat was sinking they said their first thought was "Save the beer!!".
The men said they survived the past 25 days mostly by keeping up their liquids and eating the occasional shark that wanted to pick a fight with them. They said one of the sharks was "this big". When asked how they passed the time they said they were kept occupied by chatting up the local mermaids.
The two men are being charged for navigating a vessel with a blood alcohol content 3 times over the legal limit.
Happy New Year everyone! So have you all worked out your resolutions for the year ahead? Yeah I know it's dumb - you never end up achieving what you set out to do, do you? Well this year I've decided rather than privately setting some goals I'll publicly announce what I aim to achieve for the new year, so that way I have more pressure and motivation to actively work on my goals because if I fail I'll look quite the fool in front of my peers.
So here they are:
What the hell, if I'm not going to achieve my new year resolutions, I may as well not achieve big ones!
Another thing that's been consuming our time over Xmas has been this prezzy that I bought Jules. It's called Khet (formerly known as Deflexion).
It's a board game played by 2 people. Each player has a laser on their end of the board and most of the pieces have mirrors on them. You move or rotate your pieces to manipulate how the laser beams bounce around the playing field. When a piece is struck by a laser and it doesn't have a mirror or it's mirror is facing away from the laser then that piece is removed from the board. The end-goal of the game is to blast a hole through your opponents pharaoh (the symbolic equivalent of a king in chess).
Sadly the lasers in the game are a little weak - it only slightly tingles when you put your tongue on them! So I raided all the remote controls around the house and wired the lasers directly into a huge 128 array of AA batteries!
It says on the box not to stare directly into the lasers so I made sure to only stare at the reflection of them, you know, to see if there would be any new side effects yet. In short, the good news is we were able to sell our toaster this week, lol. ;-)
After the giant worm moved into a neighbours garden we began our next project - creating quicksand.
We were surprised to learn that quicksand is a mixture of various molecules (none of which is sand) consisting mainly of H2O and Cf5 (A.K.A. cornflour).
Unfortunately my poor skills in the kitchen translated to an inability to mix the cornflour and water which resulted in a consistency of, well, water. :(
So after completely exhausting the cornflour supplied with the kit we raided the kitchen cupboard for more raw materials.
After adding several spoons of cornflour and finally achieving the ideal consistency we were ready to test our creation. Fortunately the science kit comes with a willing test subject: an innocent and naive miniature giraffe.
Much to our disappointment the giraffe survived the quicksand...so we intervened and decided to study the effects of a giant wooden spoon beating down on his vulnerable giraffe body...in the name of science of-course...mwwoohaahaaahaahaaaaa!
Unfortunately, due to a miscalculation in quicksand & spoon dynamics, the giraffe DNA combined with the corn flour molecules to create a fire-breathing super giraffe!
Man what a week it's been...for science! I've been home with the kids and to pass the time we've been working through a science kit that Alex got for Christmas. It contains a bunch of different experiments ranging from making your own worms to building The Hadron Collider. Of-course, in true scientificness we documented our findings.
Like all good scientists we approached this experiment with extreme caution, trying not to expose ourselves to the highly toxic worm goo (Wg2).
In fact it only took us a few minutes while exposed to the radioactive chemicals before we discovered the safety equipment we were meant to be wearing.
Sadly, after successfully creating a couple small worms, Alex's God-like command over the creation of worms went to his head and he became mad with power!...
...and in hind-sight his tripling the dosage of radioactive worm goo was a mistake.
You ever google for the solution to a difficult and rare technical problem that only you and your Russian speaking human equivalent seem to share? If you said yes, than chances are that you, like me, hate Experts Exchange!
It seems that the more difficult and buried a solution is to a problem the greater the chance that one of the search results from google will be a link to experts exchange. You follow the link which leads to a post that describes someone having the exact same problem you're experiencing. Immediately you're filled with a sense of relief that you're not the only person on the planet with this problem so you scroll down some more and it says "Sign in to see the solution". Okay, no biggy so you click the link to register for the site and suddenly all your hopes come crashing down when you see you HAVE TO PAY FOR MEMBERSHIP?! WTF?! What freaking so-called "experts" would agree to PAY for a site to share their solutions when you can share your knowledge for the benefit of your fellowman in free forums?! Damn it!
After you have this experience once, you despise Experts Exchange more and more each time you see their brief teaser describing your problem exactly in your google search results. Bastards!
Well, in a particular moment of desperation, after searching on many different keyword combinations and exhausting the free search results I decided to bite the bullet, follow the E.E. link and start a trial membership. Of-course you have to enter all your credit card details before you can start your trial, something else I really object to. The whole time during the sign up process I'm thinking "hehe, I'll show them - as soon as this trial starts and they let me see the solution to my problem I'll be cancelling this membership, haha suckers".
So my trial membership started and I navigated straight to the post which described my problem and scrolled down to the expert solution, which read along the lines of:
"There is no way you can do what you want to do, sorry."
NnnnnoooooOOOOO!!! DAMN YOU EXPERTS EXCHANGE!!
I'm not sure how but as I write this post I have a totally legit copy of Spore currently installing on my machine even though my count-down timer is telling me there's still another 24 hours until it's officially released. :)
I picked up Spore today (the 2nd of September) but I was sure the official release date was the 4th of September, so I checked out Spore.com for the release date and it says it's not actually released until the 7th of September!
Well when I got a call from Electronics Boutique today to let me know my preorder had arrived and that I could pick it up, I wasn't about to ask if they were actually supposed to release it yet, lol. Haha suckers, by the time everyone else in the world installs Spore I'll have already taken over the universe with my unstoppable race of killer bovines!!
Move over hot celebrities and get me a coffee because I have arrived. From now on you can just call me Ben Coolio Daniel, unless of-course you're not in the hip crowd yourself, in which case I may answer to "your awesomeness" and only if you're marvelling at my coolness/fetching me something at the time.
I saw you marvelling!
</joke> ;)
And I've just got home with mine after after waiting for a couple hours in a queue at Optus with about 10 other elite nerds, lol.
I'm about to unwrap it & plug it into my computer for the first time to unlock it through iTunes but before I do so I just wanted to write a quick post to say that although the iPhone is totally cool and stylish I promise to not let it go to my head and turn me into a pretentious, materialistic, stylish, techno snob and will remain the humble and vulnerable geek you know and love... ;)
Awesome - yet another tribute to the flexibility of Spore's creature creator!
Well, I've had a bit more time to play around with the Spore Creature Creator and as promised I've uploaded some pics of my creature dudes. Meet my babies!
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It's pretty cool what you can do with limbs. You can attach just about any part to the end of any limb. For example with this next creature I attached a couple arms to it's head, made them tiny, and replaced the hands with eyes.
| Same principle with this next guy, except the top of his back-bone has 5 limbs coming off it, each with it's own head. |
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The editor is so easy to use and it's pretty amazing how quickly you can knock these things up even without any artistic ability - but it's so much fun you end up spending ages tweaking your creature to get it just right. I love this next one - he's just so freaky-deeky!
And what can I say, as soon as I realised I could, I couldn't resist but create Jar Jar! lol
...Don't tell him but when I get the full game I plan to populate a planet with his species, lower them into a full sense of security and then blam! I genocise them with my doom ray! Muhahahaaaaa.
Today Electronic Arts have given us a taste of what's to come in their highly anticipated, evolution-themed game "Spore" by releasing the creature editor application for the game.
The creature editor is revolutionary. What would previously take professional 3D artists dozens of man hours to design, model, texture and animate a 3D creature, anyone can now do in mere minutes using this creature editor for Spore.
You start out by shaping the back-bone of your creature which determines it's body shape. Then you simply drag and drop limbs and features onto your creature. You can get really creative - your creature might have 3 legs, four arms and 2 mouths and you can attach any body part just about anywhere. Finally you choose what markings and colours you want for your creature and your done. Then based on your creatures body-layout, centre of gravity, etc, the game will automatically work out how to animate your creature all for you. It's really amazing.
Here's a creature I based on one of our cats.
And here's a photo of... him relieving himself??? Well as long as he covers it up when he's done, lol.
I'll create and share some more imaginative creatures on my blog when I'm feeling more creative (and when it's not 2am in the morning) to show you how flexible the editor application really is. I'd also love to see what creatures other people come up with! If you're interested you can download the editor and try it out yourself - it's easy to use and great fun!
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