Computer games

If you haven't met me, or haven't worked it out by reading this blog, I'm a bit of a geek. And I like computer games. I haven't played nearly as many games as most of my similarly inclined friends, but I like to think that I get a lot of value out of the games I do play. And the game that got me through to the end of my PhD is Borderlands. Like many of the games I've played as a poverty-stricken student, it was very cheap (in this case free - I got it as a gift). Though I only started playing a few months ago - a couple of years after it was actually released - the lack of eyeball-exploding graphics didn't stop me falling in love with it. I've decided not to buy any more games until I finish with this one (no Skyrim or Mass Effect 3 for me!) - and I mean really get the most out of it.

So far, despite having a thesis to finish, and then only two weeks' break before getting back into work, I've managed to rack up over 100 hours playing the game already and have almost finished all of the game's achievements*. I like to think of myself as a completionist and it's irked me that I've never truly had the time or energy to master a game at the level of a true obsessive (except maybe for Team Fortress 2 - but there are way too many people who are far more talented than me at it) - so hopefully this game will be my first chance!

The other thing I really wanted to talk about is this:

When I first heard about it, it seemed almost too good to be true for someone who has enjoyed both the Super Mario Brothers and Portal series. Some real love and talent has gone into this, and best of all it's free (thus not breaking my promise to Borderlands) and open source! It's available here.

I'm currently trying to finish the game so that I can get access to the special cheats (some of which are shown in the trailer) - I'm sure the novelty of this game will wear off fairly quickly, but at least for now it's breathed new life into an old classic for me :) I kinda hope that people try to do speed runs of it in the same spirit as the original Super Mario Brothers, like I talked about in a previous post. I think it'd be really impressive to watch!

* for the uninitiated, a set of arbitrary challenges scattered throughout the game of varying levels of difficulty.

Updates of a musical note

Sigh. I couldn't resist the pun in the title. I neglect you for nine months and this is how I repay you - my poor, masochistic audience.

Due to thesis finishing, my musical pretensions were put almost completely on hold until recently. However, I plan to correct that with a vengeance. Find below my evil plans!

Though I haven't had a lot of time as mentioned, even so EP preparations have continued in dribs and drabs and we're now at the stage where we (by which I mean Dave) have collected enough material to put together all the tracks! This is not a promise that it will be done really soon. This is music production: there's almost certain to be something that we didn't notice before and have to fix, and these things always take longer than you'd think (also, truth be told, we're both lazy) - but things are happening. If people are still interested, I could put another track up here - a couple of others besides Longest Night have been mixed down. These are the tracks of the EP (in no particular order):

Green Eyes
Longest Night (already up)
Survive You
Didn't Know
The Garden


So vote for the one you want to see on here :)

As far as new stuff, I haven't done much songwriting for a long time, but there are a lot of songs that I wrote or partly-wrote a while ago to work on. So maybe I could write another EP! Or at least, have material for gigs and bands and so forth.

Speaking of bands... there's bad news and good news. The bad news is, The Solution's talented drummer George Begbie has left the band to concentrate on his own musical ambitions. Considering the amazing stuff he's coming up with, we'd be committing a crime against music to hold him back (go see him play, he's awesome) - it's not a tabloid magazine acrimonious breakup, and we're not plotting his death any more than we already were when the band was together ;)

The good news is, this is by no means the end of the band - myself and vocalist/guitarist/bassist Ariel Pascoe are still keen to keep things going and have finally gotten back into rehearsing. Soon we'll be gracing Elizabeth Mall with our presence for some acoustic busking sets, and after that... who knows? We have a potential new drummer lined up, so watch this space.

On a slightly different note (there I go again), I've been considering joining a choir for a while - it's always looked like great fun and good practice for ear and voice, which I think will be very useful to self-taught little me! I went to the Open Night of the Tasmanian Song Company and quite enjoyed myself - so I'm thinking of joining up. Would be interested to hear peoples' thoughts!

Remember me?

My last few posts have had apologies for not posting more often, but this is truly ridiculous. As has been pointed out, it's been 9 months since I last posted. On the bright side, at least I have lots to talk about!

In fact - screw it. I'm going to make a blog post for each section of the blog as a reward for my long suffering readers. And I promise to update more often in future - though seeing as I only have to beat 9 months, that isn't all that much of a promise...

So. To start with - life.

Over the last couple of months, so much has changed that even now I'm only beginning to adjust. I'm a creature of habit, and it takes me a long time to deal with change. But I think all the changes have been for the better!

The biggest change has been submitting my PhD. That's right - it finally happened, 5 years almost to the day from when I started, and a month ago today. Though I still have to await my examiners' judgement, and try to publish the results from the thesis in academic journals, for the most part the thesis is out of my life. My feelings about it have been incredibly mixed - I'd prepared myself leading up to submission day that everything wouldn't just hit me all at once, and I was right. The feeling was more one of tiredness, numbness and a small but growing sense of relief. My brain really couldn't process the fact of it all being over, and it's only over the intervening time that I've been able to relax, realise that I don't have to worry anymore, actually move on with my life and think about doing new things without twinges of "thesis guilt".

And there's been plenty to move on to! For one, we hatched the hare-brained scheme of moving house in the final weeks of thesis writing. It was incredibly stressful but thanks to being fairly organised about it, we survived without me killing anyone and now we live in a house - an actual, entirely separate house all to ourselves - in Kingston. I haven't lived in a separate house for 6 years, and in the 10 years I've been living out of home and renting it's the first time I've ever had a lawn to mow*! It's incredibly freeing to not have to share a washing line, washing machine, walls, floors, ceilings or a backyard with anyone, and - as someone who really appreciates my personal space - I'm not sure I can ever go back!

When planning for the end of my thesis, I decided that I would try to get work as soon as possible due to my increasingly horrifying financial situation - but in the event of that failing, I could use the time to relax and recharge ready for whatever work I could find in my chosen field. Fortunately for my bank account, the first option worked out and I managed to get a job in the School of Zoology (the same place I did my PhD) as a temporary postdoc. This is the first time I haven't been a student since I was probably 4 years old, and is the first time I've ever had a full time job (other than a 3 month stint with CSIRO as a Vacation Student**). So after a badly-needed two weeks to recharge at home after handing in my thesis, I'm straight back into work.

I've been doing it for two weeks now and am really enjoying it - I have my own office, I'm doing work I really enjoy, and am actually being paid well for it! And I've been eased into it gently - I almost feel guilty going from constantly and hectically working or thinking about my PhD and not being paid, to working 9 to 5 at a reasonable pace, being able to go home and forget about work, and being paid for it. Almost :)

It's a change I've been dreaming about for many years now. I'm finally ending my life as a student and able to start thinking about the things I want out of life as achievable rather than as far-flung pipe dreams. Not to mention the shiny things I'll now be able to afford to buy ;)



* I'm sure the novelty of that, at least, will wear off very quickly...
** - which, while being a great experience, didn't pay particularly much!

Distractions

It's been pointed out I spent all of May without posting!  I suspect there will be much more of this neglect to come as the thesis reaches crunch point.  There is a light at the end of the tunnel, but even now in what I hope are the dying months of the thesis it still seems such a long way away, especially when I'm surrounded by such talented people who clearly know what they're talking about.  Even now, after four years, I feel like I don't know what I'm talking about, and somehow I'm supposed to write hundreds of pages worth of material by the end of this year!

I've suspected throughout the course of the thesis that I'm not really cut out for long-term projects - I think I have some kind of academic ADHD in which I find a problem really exciting but get bored and want to move onto something else before too long.  This kind of short-term obsession is a reason I write posts about random things like analysing cribbage hands or Pass The Pigs - because I find them really, really exciting and interesting... for a while.  Then I find something else and forget about what I was doing before!

It's been really hard to stay excited about the same project when there is so much else going on.  I've heard some people say that doing your PhD is the most rewarding part of your whole academic career - I can honestly say that I really hope not.  While I have learnt a hell of a lot which I am sure will place me in good stead for future jobs etc, it has been one of the most self-esteem crushing, depressing and difficult periods of my life.  I suspect once I find my niche I'll be a lot happier with my lot in life, but suffice it to say I never want to do a PhD ever, ever again!  Having said all that, it is nice to see the work I've been doing over the last few years finally start to come to fruition.

Anyway, now I've had my three paragraphs of emo, these are some of the things I would probably be playing with if I weren't trying to concentrate on my thesis:

There is a thriving community of people out there who spend their time on something called tool-assisted speedruns.  Basically, they use whatever means necessary in order to complete a game as fast as is physically possible - way faster than a human could ever do by themselves.  This involves things like exploiting the hell out of whatever glitches happen to exist in a game, using emulators to slow down the game to get that perfect jump, saving the gamestate before a difficult point and doing a section time and time again until you get it absolutely perfect, and pausing the game for a few hundredths of a second before coming across a difficult enemy just so they behave in a way (based on the random number generators in the game) which means you can get past them faster.  I'd love to spend some time writing computer code to try and optimise some of this stuff and make it even faster - people have already written relatively simple AIs for Super Mario Brothers that work really well:

Another thing I'd like to do is work out where the hell all these pink Nissan Micras are coming from.  If you don't know what I mean, perhaps this will refresh your memory:

I'm starting to see them everywhere!  I'm starting to think I should take a leaf out of the book of the ecologists I work with and do some experiments to work out how quickly their population is increasing - so I know how long it will take before we're all overrun with them.

One non-thesis related problem that I did manage to solve was one posed by a friend who found it in a list of job interview questions for a job he was applying for.  The question was this:

You roll a die.  You can either take an amount of money equal to the number on the die (so a 5 would get you $5, for example), or you can choose to roll it again.  You can roll it a total of three times - if you choose to roll again the first two times, you have to take whatever you get on the third roll.

So for example, you might roll a 1, choose to roll again; roll a 3, choose to roll again; then roll a 2.  You have to take the $2 because you've used all your rolls.

For another example, you might roll a 2, roll again then roll a 5 and decide to keep it.  So you get $5.

So - over to you.  What should your strategy be to make sure you get the maximum amount of money?

Music - but not mine

Before I start, I'd like to say thanks to the people who actually read my blog and agitated for me to write in it again.  The fountain of wisdom that is xkcd suggests that only really boring people apologise for not posting more in their blogs... so I won't!  However, I will make what will be a pretty common excuse in the coming months - along with working, I've been very very busy with trying to get my PhD finished.  My current plan is to get it done by August - it's ambitious but it may actually be feasible.

I thought this time that I'd write about music other than my own.  For someone who professes to be a musician I really don't listen to a lot of other people's music, Powderfinger notwithstanding*.  When I do listen to music, I am strange in that I like to listen to a single album at a time - sometimes for days or weeks, constantly, while I work.  I've never really gotten into the listening to mp3s thing - I really enjoy listening to an album played in order (or sometimes on shuffle if I'm feeling adventurous) as the artists intended.  Lately I've had the chance to do this with a few different artists, so here goes...

My very musical friend Dave gave me an album for being a groomsman at his wedding.  That album was Arcade Fire's Neon Bible.

To be brutally honest, I was a little cynical after the first listen or two.  The last offering that Dave had bought for me as a present was some of Sufjan Steven's more experimental work, and other than a couple of standout tracks I found it a little too experimental for my tastes - so I was preparing myself for the worst with this new unknown offering.

But, to their credit, Arcade Fire's album really grew on me.  A lot of good music does this for me, but because of my preconceptions I wasn't really expecting this to - I would never have fallen in love with this album if I hadn't had a couple more listens to give it one last chance to impress me.  I recognised a couple of  songs from the radio - Black Mirror and No Cars Go, which I really enjoyed from the start - but over time, I grew to love many of their album tracks** even more.  Particular standouts are Black Wave/Bad Vibrations and Ocean of Noise - these were stuck in my head for weeks!  There aren't really any tracks I could count as "misses" - they're all tight and well thought out, and even at their worst provide enjoyable background music.  I might accuse the title track Neon Bible of being unmemorable; but then, it's part of a long tradition of unmemorable title tracks.

I love good emotive vocals and the lead singer Win Butler really delivers, particularly in the lesser-known tracks.  I'm not-so-much taken with the backing vocals of Régine Chassagne - on their own - but the harmonies between her and Win are for the most part amazing!  I tend to concentrate most on the vocals (in terms of both lyrics and melody) in terms of music I like, and to this end Neon Bible is a winner for me also: the instrumentation and various sound effects scattered throughout the album are always interesting, always tight and very nicely complement the vocal work.  I know (from listening to the album as I type) that there are a multitude of really nice hooks played by the keyboards and guitar in particular, but I wouldn't be able to remember most of them - they fit so seamlessly into the story the voices tell.

Anyway, I think I've ranted enough about this album.  Tell me your thoughts on this album if you've listened to it, and I'd be particularly interested to hear peoples' opinions of the other Arcade Fire albums.  Is this as good as they get?  Or am I really missing out if I don't give the other albums a try also?

* I've been avoiding writing a full-blown critique of all seven of their albums lest my fanboyish gushing send you all to sleep!
** I usually call them "B-sides" but my girlfriend scolds me for it...

I'm still alive!

Wow.  Just when I thought life couldn't get any busier.  Apparently moving takes a lot of time and effort.  As well as helping with a wedding.  And having three jobs.  And (still) doing a PhD.  And playing two gigs in four days - the second of which went four times longer than originally planned o.O

On the upside, we have a shiny new place (now just to unpack, grumble), money is starting to come in, and finally - finally - things are starting to settle into a routine once again.

Of course, now that things are getting less hectic I'm finding more things to fill the time with - Dave, now a married man, is finally getting the chance to get back onto my EP, so hopefully more work will be done on that soon!  And The Solution is back, and will hopefully soon be rehearsing regularly for the next gig, whenever that may be!

Seeing as I don't really have much exciting to show you, I'll show you something tangentially related to what I'm doing at work at the moment.  Reaction-diffusion modelling, which I'm working on now, uses a series of mathematical equations to determine the distributions of things in space - and depending on what you plug into it, some interesting things can happen!  Alan Turing (after whom these Turing Patterns were named) found that the patterns on leopards and jaguars are the result of chemical reactions that are modelled by such reaction-diffusion equations.  It's another example of how maths can - as well as helping us understand how things work - actually be aesthetically pleasing, which I love :)

Is this the real life?

Hullo everyone!

Thanks for all your support and suggestions on Longest Night and EP covers.  There were literally dozens of pageviews that weren't mine!

Sorry about not posting for a while - life has gotten hectic.  A few of the things that have been going on:

• I have searched for, and found, a new place to live with a lot more space for me and my lovely partner.  We move in next week.  I'm excited!
• I have searched for, and found, a new job!  I will be a typist working from home.  Hopefully I can type fast enough to make it worth my while, I'm looking forward to having a bit more money as things have been getting pretty dire lately.
• I have been helping prepare for Dave's wedding, including attending his buck's night last night!  The wedding is in two days, so it's going to be a huge weekend.  After the wedding, we can expect to see more news on both my EP and his shiny new album!

Speaking of music, I have two gigs coming up!

The first is on the 26th of February at the Lark Distillery, as the support act for the amazing George Begbie launching his new EP "These Familiar Streets".  I've listened to these songs at length, and I can assure you that you are in for an incredible treat!  I can't wait to get my hands on this and future EPs from him, so come along and get in on the ground floor ;)

The second is on the 1st of March at Irish Murphy's with my band The Solution.  We haven't had the chance to rehearse or play for months and we're relishing the chance to start playing again, especially after our last gig unfortunately fell through.  We are so excited to play for you, and hope you'll come along and have fun with us!

Oh and as a final note, check out the blog list on this page, there are two thought-provoking and pretty new blogs to while away those lazy hours!