On University Challenge (the professionals (The Idler vs the FT; Alex James answered 2 questions one incorrectly, the rest of the time he smiled and had a vague ‘no fucking clue mate’ expression on his face, not like Jarvis Cocker on that Pop Quiz show where he basically answered every question)) the other night there was a question about punctuation. ‘What do the greeks use to denote a question instead of a question mark?’ (the wording was, as usual, impossibly more convoluted and confusing than that, but that was the basic question). The answer? A semi-colon (;). I wonder what programming in C or Java or Actionscript or Perl or any of those other languages which use semi-colons to denote the end of a line/statement must seem like to someone who uses that symbol to denote a question. I wonder if it changes the way you think of programming, like you’re asking the computer if it wouldn’t mind doing something for you if it’s not to busy or anything. My friend Ash told me that Indians were good programmers because the grammar of their language is similar to common computer languages. LR, LL &c.? he didn’t know enough about programming or grammar to be able to tell me, nor was he able to tell me if I, as a programmer, would be able to easily pickup Indian languages. I’m a bit dubious about this, it’s a nice story, but it’s difficult to envisage what a spoken language that’s structured like a computer language might be like, do Indian languages have support for functions?

After being nearly knocked off my bike by a van driver cutting accross the cycle path (runs between 2 lanes for a while on Wood Lane) I shouted “watch out!” in the slightly pathetic way that my shouting allways seems to come out*. The response of the van driver?

“FUCKING LONDON WANKER! FUCKING LEARN TO DRIVE! YOU DESERVE WHAT YOU GET! THATS WHY YOU GET FUCKING BOMBED!”

So there you have it, the London bombings were a direct result of my cycling. Quite shocking really.

*I wish I was a better shouter; I always kind of lose heart and it comes out sounding more wounded and complaining than indignant or angry or aggressive.

Sent to me by Emma.

This game is amazing. I’ve had to stop as it was eating my morning whole. Truely original mechanics in games are very rare and this is the first I’ve seen since Katamari’s make the ball bigger gameplay. I got to level 7 before I gave up, though I intend to download the swf and play it at home sometime.

The wonderful Hacknot website is back online again providing a much needed source of rational, hype free articles about programing. Their XP debunking articles [1, 2] are particularly good (Rhetorical Antipatterns in XP is a wonderful title). For a less technical audience Wikiphillia, The New Illness is recomended as a primer on common software developer delusions.

From France, the land of overrated bread, Kronenbourg Anglaise (couldn’t resist trying it; kind of like Leffe + 1664, pretty horrible) , xenophobic cycling commentators and saussison for lunch every fucking day for ever and ever (except the last day when I resisted). Anyway, back to the usual rubbish…

Generally speaking I like to encourage people to cycle to work, it’s fun and environmentally friendly and so on, but now I’ve changed my mind; can all the people who’ve taken up cycling in the past couple of weeks either stop now or at least try to cycle in a manner that suggests you’re aware of your surroundings, and yes, that includes traffic lights. It’s very annoying to be trapped behined you for the whole fast bit of my morning journey and then when I finally get an opportunity to overtake your wobbling bulk you just ignore the traffic lights and get ahead again like some big fat idiot, as if the rules don’t apply to you. Grrrr! doesn’t even come close.

• It’s a bit like Powerstone +50%
• It’s more like Powerstone 2 -3%
• Replacing Powerstone’s awesome crystal collecting dynamic with taunting based specials powering doesn’t really work-10%
• The animation is very smooth +10%
• The characters don’t look like they’re touching each other when they fight, sense of contact is *vital* in a beat’em’up, the throws are particularly un-satisfying -5%
• The controlls aren’t as intuitive as Powerstone -5%
• The one player story mode is much better than Powerstone, more levels more variety of gameplay +20%
• The graphics are murky and this occasionally clouds the onscreen action -5%
• Not much difference between the characters in terms of abilities, they aren’t particularly inspired design wise either -3%
• The mini games are a great deal of fun +5%
• Not as good as Powerstone -10%
• What is? +20%
• £10, bargain!

Total 64% (±10% dependant on multiplayer performance, as yet untested)

• The kind of solid playability you’d expect from a Sega/Nintendo co-production. +20%
• It’s fast. +5%
• For sheer imagination and exhuberance the tracks blow Wipeout’s out of the water. +30%
• Arcadish handling model +10
• It’s really fast. +5%
• Much better than Mario Kart DD. +10%
• Some of the worst FMV/voice acting I’ve seen for a while. -5%
• Character design seems deliberately ludicrous. -10%
• £10 second hand. Bargain! +10%
• Did i mention how fast this game is? +5%

Total 80%

This track nearly made me physically sick, I don’t know how Japanese people manage given that they apparently experience motion sickness from FPSs.

London was the scene of carnage on Thursday after a series of deadly blasts but American R&B crooner Omarion, who suffered no injury or inconvenience, wants people to pray for him.

full story!
This guy’s extremely punchable, I had to get out of bed to avoid watching his perfunctorily ’sexy’ performance on Popworld (spectacularly disfunctional website) this Sunday.