SteveStreeting.com

Grr. I hate it when departing politicians, particularly unpopular ones, decide to do a ‘farewell tour’. They’re an unmitigated waste of time, resources and news coverage - Blair did it and I found it grossly distasteful then, and now it’s Bush’s turn. The very act of touring countries shaking hands, getting all chummy with the native leaders is so undignified - the personal relationships they’re seeking to form / rejuvenate serve nobody but the individuals themselves, since once the administration changes it’s a total reset. Thus, I see these tours as self-indulgent ego stroking - no change there then for Mr Bush. He’s doing his trademark brash smirk / swagger combination in Downing Street today, and no doubt getting on the tits of most British people he meets, even if the crushing weight of his ignorance won’t let him recognise it.

Bush is already a has-been, with his only remaining notable acts likely to be a few last-minute pardons or favours for his chums before his sweaty hands are prised from the tiller of the economic powerhouse of the world. He’s clearly thinking about his legacy - but having presided over arguably the darkest period in American politics since at least Nixon, and in all likelyhood surpassing even that, this man has absolutely nothing to be proud of, except perhaps spawning an unintentional bi-product - that he has hopefully reinvigorated the more intelligent citizens of the USA to get involved in politics again to try to make sure that an administration like this doesn’t get their hands on power next time.

So, sod off Bush, you swaggering, arrogant, bigoted, egotistical ignoramus. Please do let the door hit you on the ass on the way out, assuming you can figure out how to open it in the first place.

I’m not a heavy user of eBay, in fact until about a year or two ago I’d never used it. Unlike some people who routinely buy tons of DVDs & games etc that they want to offload later, I tend to mostly buy stuff that I want to keep, and anything that I finally want to get rid of after a few years, I give to a charity shop. I did however find it useful to sell off my laptop last year, and I’ve since used it to sell a couple of bits of PC hardware I didn’t need anymore - they weren’t the kind of thing a charity shop would really find a use for, I can’t imagine a Granny picking one up there and thinking ‘oh yeah, I could really use a Mini-ITX board to run that media server I fancied building’.

However, I’m now getting rid of all my PS2 hardware, since its remaining raison d’etre was Guitar Hero which has now been ruthlessly usurped by Rock Band. Since it’s all only a year old and I’d quite like to offset some of the significant financial outlay for Rock Band, I naturally turned to eBay.

I figured I’d put a Buy It Now option on the PS2 hardware itself, and was pleased when someone took it up. However, I was less pleased afterwards to receive a forged PayPal payment confirmation email, sporting a delivery address in Nigeria. The email was quite a good forgery, they got the layout spot-on and they tried to hide their forged links behind Javascript-laden images, but really the effort was wasted since there were a couple of fatal flaws that even a total moron should have spotted:

1. The address was in Nigeria. Internet scam capital of the world. Duh.
2. They had inexplicably decided to add £100 to the amount (supposedly) paid for no good reason. Clearly the idea was to get people so excited that they would ignore the other issues, but I’ve always been taught that if something looks too good to be true, it usually is
3. The excuse as to why this email was not backed up with eBay / PayPal transactions was frankly ludicrous: “the amount will not show up until you send us the shipping reference number”. Shyeah, right.

This was the first time this had happened to me, but even so I’m stunned that people are taken in by this sort of attempt. Obviously I cancelled the bid and re-listed, but from what I read, people really do fall for this kind of thing; high-end mobiles appear to be very popular in particular. How dumb do you have to be to mail a £300 phone to an address in Nigeria on the back of an email that says that the money will magically appear once the item is in the mail? Maybe greed turns off certain parts of some people’s brains - wave the prospect of way more money than the item is worth in front of someone and maybe they’ll put common sense on hold.

In the end it’s a minor annoyance this one time. I’m actually surprised I didn’t have the problem with my laptop, which was valued significantly higher than the PS2 - maybe it was the Buy It Now option that was the honeypot. At least feel included in the whole Nigerian scam Internet phenomenon now - sure I’ve had the 419 emails for years but those are so impersonal

The Guernsey Festival of Comedy was great last year, and so we snapped up tickets to this year’s local stand-up event, since the only other way we’d get to see acts like this is to travel to a major city. Paul Tonkinson was headlining this year which made it a no-brainer, we’ve seen him on the Comedy Store before and he’s always excellent.

As expected it was a great night, Paul didn’t disappoint in the slightest and thus crowned the evening off perfectly, but the other acts were really good too. In particular Janice Phayre, whom we hadn’t seen before, but who I can best describe as a hyperactive ball of slightly filthy Irish comedy energy. Great stuff.

There were actually some empty seats this time around which was surprising, and I hear that they still have some spare tickets for one or other of Saturday’s performances (Friday is sold out), so if you’re local and you haven’t been yet, I highly recommend it.

And just on a weird tangent, while searching for an image for this post I randomly came across The Bezathon. Awesome

My Rock Band drum mods arrived today, they took a week to arrive which isn’t bad considering they had to meander their way from the Land of the Free (ish) via regular US letter post.

Drum Pads
I decided to go for drum pads from RocPadz, which are basically just circular cut mouse mats with a rigid back. I went with these for a number of reasons, such as that the neoprene rubber is hard wearing and long lasting (unlike foam pads which quickly lose their effect). These pads also scored highly in reviews for ‘bounce’ which can make playing easier, and they were also rated highly for the QM drum set which I have. The other main contender was DrumSoft, but while their pads are nice looking, they seemed a little too delicate for my liking - reviews were very keen to point out that you could rip the top surface if you weren’t careful during installation, which made me think they might not stand up to long-term abuse as well. The only downside to the RocPadz is that they’re a little expensive for 4 modified mouse mats - you could actually just buy yourself some regular office mouse mats, cut them to size and get some rubber glue to apply them with, but a combination of laziness and the fact that the dollar is weak meant I decided to just go with the prefabs.

Installation was very easy, they even supply you with a little alcohol swab to clean the pads with first which I thought was a nice touch. The result seems very good - the noise from the pads is definitely reduced, and the fact that the drum sticks bounce more really does feel better when playing. The only downside is that it seems to very slightly exacerbate the lack of sensitivity around the edge of the drum pads, which was already there anyway but seems slightly worse. However the middle area of the pads, where you had to play anyway to avoid missing notes, are not affected at all, they’ve still highly sensitive and a very light tap will trigger them. I hope to play more over the coming days.

Kick Pedal
The kick pedal mod should be a familiar one by now, an aluminium plate from Pedal Metal. I went with the billeted metal version because it looked nicer than the regular diamond-plate - yeah, I’m a sucker for aesthetics. I also paid a little more to get the hinge replacement bit too - I don’t need it yet, and haven’t installed it because it’s more fiddly - I figure I’ll keep it as an emergency reserve in case my hinge does break, so I don’t have to wait for a replacement.

Installation was easy, once you get over the fact that you’re invalidating your warranty by screwing stuff into your plastic pedal. But I figure the warranty on the pedal is pretty useless anyway, since it’s the one thing that is highly likely to keep breaking in it’s original form under any long period of stress (given the cost of the kit, it’s scandalous that it isn’t already reinforced with metal), so I might as well make it more robust myself. Once it’s on, while it doesn’t make any difference to the play experience itself, it’s nice not to have to worry so much about how hard you’re stomping it, particularly as I’m starting to play on Hard now which is bringing in some rapid-fire kick pedal action in places. The main thing is that it totally eliminates the rather disconcerting ‘flex’ in the pedal if you pressed it between the hinge and the spring - this pedal ain’t for bending now.

So, I’m very happy with these mods - it’s yet more money down the throat of the ravenous Rock Band monster, but it’s so much gosh darned fun I really can’t hate it for it

I’ve always admired the iPhone purely because of it’s sleek looks and elegant design, but it was encumbered by an excessive price tag, a lack of 3G (which for the price was scandalous), and a ridiculous telco tie-in that meant you could only (officially) use it on O2 here in the UK, which made it even more useless to me since O2 do not operate where I live.

However, the new 3G instalment which made its widely anticipated appearance at WWDC 08 is looking much more interesting. Obviously there’s the 3G support, which really should be a given in a modern high-end phone, although I can understand that since the US cell phone networks have been very slow to deploy it, it might not seem as important across the pond. GPS is in too, which is good, and Exchange support is probably for those who are wedded to it. But more importantly, they’re slashing the price; it’s half what it was last time ($199 for the 8GB model). Even better, Jobs is claiming that people are not going to pay an inflated price outside the US - they’ve promised that you won’t pay more than the converted price. Of course, given the fluctuations in the dollar rate, I’m not sure what rate they’re going to pick, but it would be a refreshing change not to get ripped off so badly here in Europe if they deliver on it.

The final issue is whether they’re going to lock the phone to a provider again, something I considered to be manifestly stupid from an adoption point of view. In the US they’re still doing this, via AT&T again for a pretty inflated monthly price which I guess is the point of them doing it. If they repeat this in the UK with O2 they’ll once again make it pointless me getting one. Sure I could try to bypass the locks, but the potential for my device to be bricked by a future update isn’t exactly enticing.

So if they lock to O2 again it will be a shame, because otherwise the new iPhone would be a likely purchase for me. It’s a great device, and if I have an excuse to have one I’d love to get Ogre running on it - the SEGA Super Monkey Ball demo in the video was certainly pretty cool

A couple of random thoughts for a slow Sunday…

You know, despite being universally reviled, spam actually has a purpose - and that is to prove that my email is working. My spam defenses are pretty good and sift out the vast majority of junk, but I still get the odd unfiltered mail every day and in a way, it’s comforting. It’s like a little heartbeat telling me that my email is indeed still online, and I will therefore be getting any important mail on time. In the last 12 hours I didn’t get any, and I was actually a little suspicious, and proceeded to test my mail (which was still fine). Funny how you come to rely on such things.

Secondly, I had noticed that YouTube was starting to shut me out of a lot of videos in recent days. It seems they’ve signed partner agreements with a bunch of media companies, and as of now most of the ‘top hits’ for things like music videos I look up have a little red triangle in the top left, meaning ‘partner video’. Yesterday when I was looking these up on Windows / Firefox, without exception these videos came up with an error saying ‘this video is not available in your country’ or similar - so I had to locate unofficial videos for the post I made yesterday. Oddly today (and I’m on the Mac now) I seem to be able to get to these videos - I’m guessing they perform these filters by IP though so my platform shouldn’t make a difference; maybe they’ve changed it in the last 24 hours and allowed the UK to see these videos? Anyone know what’s going on? I see this as one of the inevitable downsides as sites like YouTube start to make money.

I can easily see how Rock Band DLC went double-platinum on only 2 months and why Motley Crue said they had more sales as DLC than as regular records - it’s compulsive. It’s been scientifically proven to be impossible to have too many songs to play, especially when the quality of the note chart conversion, which is directly proportional to fun, is as consistent as we’ve found it to be. I’ve spent the equivalent of half of a full-price game just on DLC already, and I’ve only really stopped because I have all the ones that simply must have; I could easily find another half dozen I’d be happy to buy but the need is not as urgent.

It has made me realise though that no matter how well the DLC has done already, it’s still a massively untapped pool of revenue in practical terms. Recently, a lot of the DLC has been a little ‘niche’ to say the least - personally I’ve no interest in The Cars, Jimmy Buffet or Disturbed (but then I’m not a huge metal fan, Iron Maiden a-likes don’t do much for me), so I’ve been mostly buying from the back catalogue. Don’t get me wrong, Rock Band’s DLC is far and away the best DLC list of any of the music games out there, but I just know that they could extract a lot more money from me if the recent releases were a little more diverse. Perhaps I should be grateful for that!

So, tips to Harmonix - you could quite easily force me to give you the shirt from my back by releasing some or all of the following:

Missing Bands

Arctic Monkeys
Franz Ferdinand
Led Zepplin
Lenny Kravitz
Manic Street Preachers
Pink Floyd
Queen
Supergrass
Snow Patrol
Santana
The Beatles (yeah, like that’s going to happen)
The Bluetones
The Smiths
The Stone Roses (and more than a weak cover version of “She Bangs The Drums”)
U2

Missing Tracks From Existing Bands

Foo Fighters - Almost anything else
David Bowie - Ziggy Stardust
Red Hot Chili Peppers - Give It Away specifically, but again most other tracks
REM - It’s The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)
REM - most tracks from Accelerate
Rolling Stones - Jumpin’ Jack Flash

For a Laugh

Adam Ant (full-on camp, but you know it makes sense)
Bee Gees (just to see people try it on vocals)
Happy Mondays (if you didn’t have an Amiga tracker remix of Step On, you weren’t around in the early 90’s)
Smash Mouth
The Darkness (for those who can already do the Bee Gees)

One wonders whether the lack of quite as many mainstream entries as we might like in the DLC is down to just plain licensing, or Activision buying the rights up, or Harmonix hoarding tracks for Rock Band 2. Who knows? But still, I have an 80-odd song list locally for now and that’s still more than I’ve had before.

I bought another guitar today (a GH3 Les Paul as advised) so we’ll have 4-player to look forward to soon. Awesome.

I’ve only been to Siggraph once before, in 2006 when it was held in Boston. It happened to coincide with a trip I wanted to make to see some friends / clients of mine anyway so it dovetailed in quite well - I also held a Birds of a Feather (BOF) meet-up for the OGRE community while I was there, and it was good to meet a few of our users.

I enjoyed the experience but given my small / micro business status it’s hard to justify the expense to get out there, especially with airline prices seemingly increasing by the second. It’s generally just more cost- and time-effecient to cherry-pick the papers I’m interested in afterwards, unless I have a specific business case to be there in person.

Nevertheless the thing I enjoyed most about it last time was meeting people, so I’m glad to say I’m going again this year, as part of the entourage for a company whose project I’ve been working on quite a lot over the past 6 months. As such I’ll be spending a fair amount of time manning a booth, but there should still be sufficient time to enjoy the event and meet up with people. I haven’t decided whether I want to run an official OGRE BOF this time around, or even if I’ll have time for it - I’m actually thinking an informal meet-up at a bar nearby or something instead might be better. If you’re going too and you have any ideas or suggestions, let me know! This will be my first trip to LA but I’m expecting to have some reliable guides

Someone spotted that the latest video for MOTORM4X, an off-road driving game made using Ogre which is being released commercially imminently, turned up on the front page of GameTrailers.com, which was nice to hear. Here it is, since it’s already been buried:

I think it’s looking very nice - ok it’s not quite GT5 as some of the comments have so eloquently pointed out, but considering both the size of the team and relative budgets involved (I understand they have only one full-time programmer!) I think it’s a fantastic achievement. I’m certainly looking forward to getting my copy!

Wow. Every new trailer I see of Street Fighter IV raises my anticipation level for this title a little more, and the video released from Captivate 08 yesterday is no exception. Just ignore the annoying voice-over.

Stunning. The proof will be in the playing of course, but it certainly looks promising that they’ve captured the essence of arguably the best fighting game ever to grace any system. They even have a revamped version of a piece of music that I definitely recognise from SFII - I think it might be from Vega’s stage?

I assume all this footage is from the arcade version, but I would guess that the 360 version will look pretty much identical. It tickles me a little that the term ‘arcade-perfect conversion’ is once again to become relevant when it comes to this title; it almost lends it an extra level of nostalgia since we cared very much about that sort of thing back when the originals were doing the rounds.

I realise we’ll be waiting a little bit of extra time for the home console version, but this definitely confirms my previous decision to skip Soul Calibur IV. The quote ‘A tale of souls and swords, eternally retold‘ seems a little too poignant, I do feel I’ve played SC a few too many times in recent years. The addition of Star Wars characters, even more ludicrous mammaries and destructible armour (for the girls, obviously - noticing a pattern yet?) seems just like so much gimmickery to distract from the fact that it’s the same game all over again. At least Street Fighter has been absent long enough that I do miss it…