Every time I turned the page, my flow was broken. The BeBook just wasn't fast enough. My eyesight isn't great either, so I couldn't read the whole page fit (on page based formats like PDF) on the 6" display - I needed to increase the font size, which meant I increased the number of page turns and the frequency at which I'd turn the page. Meaning my flow was broken quite often. The buttons were also unresponsive at times, which meant I'd occasionally think it hadn't registered pressing next page and press it again. It was clear the BeBook just wasn't going to suit me at all. 

Unfortunately I'm fairly stubborn, so while I gave up trying to read on it, I didn't give up assuming I would eventually. That's the reason I have had The Ghost Brigades listed as the book I'm currently reading for months now. When I gave up, I just gave up reading. Sure, I read a few technical books since then, but my fiction reading just stopped. The Ghost Brigades was at the top of my reading list and I was reading it on the BeBook, I just wasn't using the BeBook. Stupid, I know. I could have just grabbed the paperback copy I had, but I was stubborn. At the time it wasn't clear why I wasn't using the BeBook. I just knew that using it frustrated me. It wasn't until recently that I managed to isolate the issue.

My plan more recently was to buy an iPad. Paul got one and I had a look at the iBooks application and Stanza. It seemed like that was the holy grail. Big screen, fast page turning and a book store. My biggest complaints were the backlit glossy screen, and price. I was concerned that I'd end up straining my eyes reading on a backlit screen and it would suck to use on a beach somewhere. I couldn't justify the price for the few uses I could find for an iPad even if it became my primary reading device (I use my iPod Touch/iPhone constantly for web browsing too, so a bigger version of those would have been good). I still wanted an eInk screen. I loved the concept, but it just seemed like the technology wasn't there yet.

I'm ecstatic. It really is fantastic. Doing a side by side comparison, it's at least twice as fast as the BeBook. I can turn the page on the Kindle twice in the time it takes the BeBook to turn the page once. It's fast enough that it doesn't break my flow, by the time my eyes have returned to the top of the page, it has basically refreshed. I did have to re-buy quite a few ebooks though. You really want to get the books in Kindle/Mobi format - the PDF support sucks. You can't change the font size on a PDF. The only way to make it bigger is to change the screen orientation. I could have just converted them to mobi format, but I lost some formatting when I tried that and it was just easier to hit buy again rather than screw around converting/fixing each book. I did have to convert a few I couldn't find to buy again on Amazon.com though.

I started reading The Ghost Brigades on Thursday night, and finished it up this morning (Sunday). I'm incredibly happy with the purchase, even if some of that is just the excitement to be reading fiction again :) There was parity between the experience of reading an actual book without some of the annoyances I had with the bulkier physical books. Thoroughly enjoyable book too. Now we just need to solve some of the problems with the ebook ecosystem. The format should be standardised (we should have an mp3 format of ebooks), and the territorial bullshit and DRM can die - too many books aren't available in Europe/UK. Availability is one of the major reasons books should be digital.

I bought the N900 back in May 2010 after much searching for a new phone. I had some specific features I wanted, which limited me to a few phones. The iPhone, a couple of Android-based phones (HTC Desire, Google Nexus One, Motorola Milestone) and the N900. Ultimately I managed to whittle it down to two choices and went with the N900 based on some first hand reports.

The N900 arrived and straight away I was concerned. I noticed GSM radio interference in the earpiece during the first call. At the time, I hoped it was just that call. But it turned out to be persistent. I was enjoying the phone in any case, it was pretty cool to play with. But the call problem was bugging me. After about about a couple of weeks of software updates and comparing my experiences to others with the same phone, I decided my N900 must be faulty and contacted Nokia's support. Their response was slow and after a bit of back and forth they suggested I bring it in to one of their Nokia Care Points for repair. 

There aren't any Nokia Care Points in the Isle of Man (at least, not according to their website). I told them this, asking whether I could courier it to them instead and they responded with a canned response telling me to bring it in to an NCP. Just as I was about to escalate my support issue and generally be angry, I found their repair page, which told me (as the default option) that I could courier it to them at no cost (the very thing I was asking support whether I could do at my own expense). So I run through the process. All very simple. N900 packaged and ready to go. Picked up and off for repair.

I get it back today, about 2 weeks after I sent it off. It seems they've replaced it (my screen protector isn't on any more regardless). Excited to have it back, I power it up and make a call. to my voicemail. "Wow", I think. They did a good job. No interference, not even any line noise. After about 14 seconds I start getting concerned. No line noise, no ringing, no answering. Strange. I call my land line. Land line is ringing, but I can't hear anything. I switch over to speaker phone and suddenly I hear the N900 ringing. I answer the call and play around for a bit. I can hear myself fine through the speaker phone, but am greeted with silence through the earpiece.

After all that it seems that the solution to the earpiece problem was to remove it entirely. I guess it really wasn't a phone after all. 

So it looks like I'll have to go through the repair process again or start looking for a new phone :/

Update: I've called them. Apparently I need to do a repair again, but if it comes back faulty a second time they'll do a full replacement. So we'll see what happens.

My coping mechanism for stress has been broken for a while now. This means that when I'm stressed out, I tend to ignore things and prefer to focus exclusively on the [probably misidentified] primary source of the stress - and my ability to focus is severely diminished. This results in a feedback loop where I get more stressed out because I'm not solving the problem. I'm also having major issues 'switching off' when I'm not working. This makes doing things in the evenings/weekends difficult and even if I take actually time off, I often end up constantly thinking about work and come back just as worn out as when I left. I don't want to complain about it too much though. It's all my fault. Basically, I'm broken at the moment and this was my punishment :)

I've got a new phone (Nokia N900) and spent a bit of time customising that. I have historically always had retro game ring tones on my phones (the last one was the Leisure Suit Larry theme - the jazz version from Larry 7). The N900 has a lot more customisation options, so I've gone with a Space Quest theme. The N900 has multiple desktops available, so I created a few seamless backgrounds. The one I ended up sticking with was an EGA background from Space Quest 2. It looked suitably retro enough. The VGA backgrounds generally looked more like low resolution/badly resampled backgrounds - although a couple did look pretty cool. For my ring tone, I recorded the theme from SQ3 as produced by the PCjr 3 voice track (I recorded a straight PC speaker version too, but I liked the bass line in the PCjr version better - it was less shrill and felt more ring-tone-y).

Here's a video I recorded of it (first time uploading to Youtube!). Apologies for the crap video quality, I was out of focus it seems and I don't have time to re-record it. I had to use my Nikon D90 as the Screencast recording software I have on the N900 doesn't record UI animation, which was the whole point of having it seamless.

I made it outside for a while on Sunday afternoon. Went for a walk around Douglas and took a couple of pictures with the N900. It was astonishingly nice out. I really enjoyed it. I snapped a few pictures (5 I think) in order to test out the camera on the N900. You can see the rest in the Mobile Uploads set on Flickr if you're interested. I didn't do any manipulation to these, they're straight out of the phone.

I did manage to do a bit of gaming on Friday night and Sunday evening. I played some Mass Effect 2 and did the Kasumi recruitment/loyalty mission DLC. So I now have 100% achievements on that. I then started up Splinter Cell Conviction on Realistic. I had planned on playing some Red Dead Redemption, but even though my order shipped on Thursday, it didn't arrive in time for the weekend. Paul was also most displeased :) (Edit: He's happy now though, it arrived today).

I watched Avatar on Saturday night. It was a fun movie. I can see why people enjoyed it so much. It had a lot of the elements that made Star Wars and Lord of the Rings great. It was a fairly traditional story of Good vs Evil and overcoming odds, the hero's journey and fighting for what you believe in. It was actually quite refreshing not to have to be thinking about the plot too much (in that it wasn't difficult to follow). It wasn't trying to be clever, it was just trying to tell a story. It reminded me of some of the old Disney classics too. The visual effects were astounding.

Sunday night I watched two movies. The first was Terminator Salvation, It was definitely a movie. If it wasn't a Terminator movie it might have been pretty good. It was technically well executed, but the script was absolutely awful. The worst part was they kept doing little homages to the earlier Terminator movies like "see, we watched them and did our homework". But then turned around and left major plot holes like they didn't understand them at all. This shit isn't salvaging anything.

Spoilers Follow: Skynet should not have known who Kyle Reese was, let alone what he looked like. Unless you're telling me that Skynet checked John Connors Facebook page and saw that he listed Kyle Reese as his father. If Skynet knew who Kyle Reese actually was, why didn't Skynet terminate him the instant they found him (thus negating John Connor's existence as they were complaining would happen the whole movie). If it was so Marcus would still see him and get John to enter the facility, why didn't Skynet just falsify the information (or, you know, contact John directly itself). Skynet said Marcus was under its influence the whole time anyway. But regardless, only two people knew that Kyle Reese was Johns father (his mother and him - maybe three if you count him probably telling his wife). If Skynet didn't know who he was, why was he #1 on the kill list. That drives the whole plot and it makes no sense. The only reason I could think of that would explain some of it is the N-jump theory of time travel, but that might be giving them too much credit. There were other issues, but that was the most egregious issue I had with the plot. Spoilers End.

xXx was the other movie I watched. It's an older one, but one I hadn't seen. It was exactly what I expected. Light on plot, heavy on action and drowning in cheese. Coming straight after Terminator Salvation only made it seem better :) It was enjoyable, but I went in with low expectations.

On the gaming front I finished up Battlefield: Bad Company 2. Fun game, but it would have been nice to have referenced the story from the first one (even in passing). I was curious about what happened after the end of the first game. I also missed the openness of the first one. This one felt much more linear and constrained (almost on rails except for a couple of missions), a lot like Modern Warfare 2.

I then started up Mass Effect 2 (I'd been originally planning on Dragon Age, but it wasn't meant to be). I need to finish a run on Insanity difficulty to get the remaining two achievements. It's tough work at times, but I'm getting there. Playing as a Sentinel with a bonus ability of Armour Piercing Ammo. The Tech Armour is literally a life-saver.

I keep trying to get something constructive done whenever I have time off, but I guess I'm working myself too hard the rest of the time. By the time I get any time off all I want to do is goof off and do something that allows me to switch off my brain. It is looking like this next week is going to be pretty rough too, I'm actually wishing I hadn't taken Monday off (but I didn't have any idea of the schedule before then). Oh well. I'm sure it'll work itself out :)

On Saturday night I sat down to watch Avatar on Blu-ray. I had missed it in the theatres so I was looking forward to the weekend so I could I watch it. The Blu-ray came with a DVD version of the movie as well, which I thought was a nice touch. Plugging the movie into my HTPC setup, I was greeted with a lovely error from AnyDVD (which I use because my DVD collection is split between R2 and R4 with the occasional R1 DVD). The error explained that AnyDVD had failed to read the disc and I should check the status window for more information. It seemed that the BD+ check had failed.

Not a problem, I thought. It's a Region B Blu-ray, so I'll just turn off AnyDVD and start watching it. I don't need AnyDVD to remove the region coding in this case. My pizza is beginning to get cold at this point, so I just want to get on with the movie. I obviously need to update AnyDVD to support the latest Blu-ray DRM. So I disable AnyDVD and the disc starts playing. After I get through all the copyright and warning notices (and most of a slice of pizza), I finally get to the disc menu, which I see for about 3 seconds before I am booted back to the Total Media Theatre 3 Platinum startup screen with a message stating that my hardware is not HDCP compatible.

It's right too. My HTPC is connected to my Projector via HDMI. It turns out that the projector does support HDCP over DVI-I apparently, but that's not how I have it configured - and I wasn't aware of that at the time in any case. AnyDVD would have removed that requirement, so I decided to see if there was an update. After a bit of searching it turns out they did have an update, it just wasn't rolled out to their website yet (so I had to grab it from the forums). A couple of reboots later and the movie was finally playing. I could finally enjoy my (now cold) pizza. I'd considered plugging the DVD in, but why the hell should I have to pay more for something I can't use? I bought the Blu-ray, so I wanted to watch the Blu-ray. In retrospect, I wonder whether that is exactly why the DVD was bundled.

Fast forward to Sunday. I decide I'm going to continue my second Dragon Age play through on the 360. I connect to Xbox Live and start the game up. I am greeted with a message telling me that the game couldn't connect to the Dragon Age Servers. Fine, I don't need to be connected anyway (my Xbox is definitely online, as I connected to Live just fine). I hit Resume Game and it starts loading. A few seconds later I am booted back to the main menu because some of my DLC apparently could not be found. Strange, as I'm certain I haven't deleted any of it. This DLC came free with the Collectors Edition.

A quick google search tells me that sometimes this can happen and the solution is to re-download the DLC. So I delete the offending file and try to start up the game again in order to re-download. Oh wait, that's right, the Dragon Age servers are down at the moment. Crap. Now I don't have any way to download that DLC again. So. my Dragon Age save game is currently unplayable (unless I started a new game so it wasn't associated with that DLC).

After being deprived of Dragon Age, I figure I'll start up Mass Effect 2. I decide to start up a new character on Insanity difficulty to get the remaining two achievements I need. After starting that up I am greeted with a message welcoming me to the Cerberus Network and asking me to enter my code that came with a new copy of Mass Effect 2. You see, they have this plan to incentivise buying new copies of the game rather than renting or buying a used copy.

That's all well and good, but I have already used the code that came with my new copy of Mass Effect 2 when I went through this process the first time I played the game. So apparently it's forgotten that I already have a Cerberus Network activation on my account. I'm hoping that this is somehow related to the same reason the Dragon Age servers were down (both games are published by EA) but I'll need to verify that later. Just wanting to do some gaming and not jump through hoops right then, I hit Cancel as I'm pretty sure I've played Mass Effect 2 without connecting in the past, and sure enough, I can start a new character.

A close call. I was lucky in that case and it all worked out in the end. Wait a minute. I was lucky? I was lucky to be able to play the game (that I paid full price for) in spite of the DRM. Screw that. This would have been lessened somewhat if EA wasn't so intent on controlling the whole process. If they just used Microsoft's DLC strategy, I might have still been able to play (I at least pay Microsoft a yearly subscription fee to keep Live running). But regardless, it illustrates the point fairly well. Pirates don't care if EA's (or Microsoft's) servers are offline or glitching. 

The pirates have it pretty good. They don't have to pay for their content. They don't have to deal with DRM. They don't get told over and over again that they shouldn't pirate the movie they already paid for. They don't have to sit through trailers for movies they might already own but don't have a choice to skip. They aren't at the mercy of an infrastructure that might go offline at any point for any reason (and eventually - indefinitely). They get to experience the content when they want to. It's on their schedule, at their convenience. I'd like to hope that I'm an edge case with my experiences, but it does feel more like "when" DRM goes wrong, not "if".

Until we make purchasing content as easy and convenient as pirating it. What kind of argument can we really make against those that pirate that content. When we make piracy look like a better experience, we can't be doing ourselves any favours with our paying customers. I've heard the argument that "Well, it prevents casual copying". Bullshit. And even if that were true, we shouldn't be indirectly educating the casual consumer on how to remove the DRM so they themselves can use the content. We make piracy more attractive with this kind of crap.

When I say "easy and convenient", I don't mean simply during the purchasing phase. It has to be end-to-end and it should include similar freedoms (that they'd get otherwise). Things like the Gamers Bill of Rights are on the right track (and even Steam and iTunes DRM to a degree - they do a pretty good job of getting the DRM out of your way). The pirates don't deal with DRM, so why are we punishing our customers?

I checked my VC++ Directories (in the traditional place: Tools->Options) only to find it'd been deprecated. After a bit of time with google, I did find mention that VC10 has changed some binary formats (making it less backwards compatible than previous versions - though even in the past it was always a bit of a stretch to get things working without a rebuild). I'm not sure if that was related to my problem or not, but I didn't care to investigate further. I also found mention that by default it imports all your directory settings from prior versions - in my case it picked 2008 (2005 was installed too) which would explain it picking up my older Platform SDK and some custom libraries. It seems other people were having similar issues, but their errors mentioned CL.exe rather than RC.exe.

To fix this, I followed the instructions on the help page for the VC++ Directory Property Page under To specify a per-user directory list to find the inherited search paths. The only caveat was I had to have a solution open, you can't see anything in the Property Manager without a project open. Once I had found the VC++ Directories entries, I removed the references to the older Platform SDK (I'm assuming that a newer Platform SDK would also fix this problem, but I'm just going to stick with the one that is bundled with Visual Studio 2010 for the time being). Doing this allowed my Hello World app to compile.

Otherwise, I'm liking the responsiveness of the new UI. It seems be a definite improvement. VisualSVN seems to be working without change. It doesn't appear that Visual Assist X is running (I can't see a menu bar entry for it in any case - perhaps it needs a reinstall). But regardless I'm looking forward to having a proper play with Visual Studio 2010 now that it seems to be working. I'll still be using 2005 for the bulk of my work, but I'll probably switch from 2008 to 2010 for my side projects assuming I can get all my libraries moved over.

I finished Splinter Cell: Conviction over the weekend. It was a lot shorter than I thought it'd be, but it was all quality. The story was very well paced, any longer and it might have started to drag. It was a fairly large departure from the prior instalments in the series. You really had to look for the traditional 'Splinter Cell' gameplay. There was a lot more emphasis on getting your gun off. Early in the game it felt less stealthy, but as you progress it settles down a bit and becomes a "faster and more intense" version of Chaos Theory.

I finally started Heavy Rain last weekend. It definitely considers itself interactive drama first and a game second (which I mostly expected after playing Fahrenheit/Indigo Prophecy and it tells you as much when it starts up). It has been entertaining so far. I do find that the quick time events and timed decisions can be a bit annoying at times. Specifically, I find it difficult to stay in-character while playing. I'm probably not supposed to be in-character, but I made some choices I wouldn't have made if I had more information and/or time to think about it. I found that this tends to pull me out of the experience and alienates me a bit from the character.

It also doesn't help that I am primarily an Xbox 360 gamer these days. I see X and instinctively press Square. I ended up building a mental map of the buttons (X = A, O = B, Square = X, Triangle = Y) which unfortunately makes me very slow or inaccurate at reflexive button presses (even on easy). That's definitely my fault though. I should play more PS3 games. I never really got hooked on the Trophy system as I did with Achievements, so whenever I have the choice between a game on both platforms, even if the PS3 version is superior - I'll go with the 360 version every time. It's telling that I have well over 100 Xbox 360 games, versus only 12 PS3 games - not including downloadable games on either platform, but the ratio would still be somewhat similar.

While I am enjoying it, it does seem to be incompatible with how I want to experience interactive drama. I'd prefer to be able to take my time and consider decisions I'm going to make. I'm being asked to dedicate a considerable amount of time to this story, and I have no option of retrying a section and changing my mind if I'm unhappy with the results. I didn't have any problems enjoying Fahrenheit. If Heavy Rain was movie-length or even mini-series length, I'd have less issues with accepting my choices with the intention to just replay it again later. I'm about 6 or so hours into it, and it doesn't feel like I'm near the end yet.

I understand they are trying to get you to make choices and live with the consequences. I just feel they could have allowed you to control your own saves (or restart a chapter/episode or being able to rewind it) without taking too much away from that. Increasing the difficulty of making some of the choices - perhaps with multiple successes over time required to achieve it - might have done the same thing. Does it really matter if you have this intricate branching story if you frustrate your players to the point they can't be bothered replaying it?

It's not like the decisions I made that I took issue with were even major life or death decisions. Minor things that I accidentally chose were the ones that annoyed me the most - but there was no way I was going to replay the entire game it just to change that decision. I might have replayed the last 5-10 minutes though. Some of this stems from my controller issues, but it wasn't limited to accidental button presses. It's just as bad when it seems the game has lied to you (through lack of information or a misinterpretation).

I don't want my virtual drama to mirror real life in exacting detail. I can make poor choices in real life just fine. I've always felt the point of being part of a virtual experience is that I can say "Stop. That wasn't how I meant to handle that". When I played the Choose Your Own Adventure books many years ago, I would sometimes just alter my decisions or stats if I felt I would enjoy the outcome more ("If you help the dwarf break into the bank, turn to page 76 otherwise turn to page 184" - turns to page 184 - "As you sneak inside the Sheriff and his deputies spring their trap. The dwarf attempts to escape and you are stabbed in the resulting struggle. You are dead."  "Ugghhh" - turns to page 76). I feel I'd be having more fun if I could do that with Heavy Rain.

I gave up on Ubuntu last weekend. A few years back I switched my servers from FreeBSD to Ubuntu. FreeBSD was taking a bit too long to administer and I wanted to spend that time elsewhere. Ubuntu seemed like a good choice; installing and updating packages was simple, and the Debian-style Apache configuration was similar to how I usually set up Apache on FreeBSD, so initial configuration was quick. The minimal administration effort came at a cost though.

The main problem I was having came down to the Ubuntu philosophy being slightly counter to my usage. It generally takes a while for a package on Ubuntu to be updated to the latest  version. In this most recent case, PHP was still at 5.2 and I needed 5.3. So my usually easy-to-update Ubuntu installation became a headache. It's not like I needed bleeding edge updates. I simply wanted to take advantage of some of the new language features available in 5.3. I encountered some resistance building PHP from source and was ultimately wasting time I could have been coding.

After doing some research, it seemed that Debian was probably aligned more with how I was using my servers these days. I found there was a site that maintains the latest PHP packages for Debian and decided that I'd make the switch. It didn't involve learning anything new (same package management for instance) and I was able to get the whole machine switched over in an hour or two. It was made even easier thanks to running a VPS and being able to swap IP addresses between server instances in the same datacenter.

I still really like what they're doing with Ubuntu, but this wasn't the first time I had a problem similar to the above. The bottom line is my time is more valuable than that. I decided it was more efficient to remove the thing that had caused me the most problems historically. I'm a programmer, not a server administrator (although I do like to play one sometimes); so my time is better spent writing code rather than chasing obscure error messages across the Internet.

I'm not really going anywhere with this post. This is kind of like making a big deal about moving across the street. In reality nothing has really changed except some superficial things that only matter to me. And yes, not much has really happened recently :)