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Rescueing Kittens

I did something today that I have never done, that is rescue a kitten (maybe it was a young cat) from a tree.  Initially I was going to leave it, as it is going to have to learn how to get down somehow, then it tried to get down forward and ended up clinging on to the tree. It was quite happy for me to coax it down as I stood below till I could reach down and lift it from the trunk.

Chances are the same kitten will be up another tree in the next few days, maybe its experience today will have taught it a better way to get down in the future, or perhaps just to meow until a kindly stranger comes to the rescue.

Did make me think about how we learn by trying things and making mistakes, I know it has been said over and over again about children being wrapped up in bubble wrap dosn’t help them develop good judgement. I do wonder if we protect our children and indeed ourselves too much by not taking risks when perhaps the reward is only to learn not to take the same risk again.

I am not advocating being reckless or careless in our decisions, just perhaps taking a risk once in a while when we don’t know for sure and, perhaps more importantly, we can’t practicably find out by other means.

Posted in Diary, Things You Find | No Comments »

Call of Duty 4:Modern Warfare

Bought the game last week, finished the single player campaign a couple of days ago. It plays more like being in a film than a game, which for me is great, as a cinematic experience it is superb, the game play is better than any other game I have played before (which doesn’t say much really – have been out of touch of the FPS market over the past few years).

The multiplayer is great fun too. I had some initial issues connecting in the first place due to PunkBuster connect issues, resolved them by updating PunkBuster manualy with PBSetup.exe then running the game as Administrator under Vista 64.

All in all, great game – well worth the spend, and brought a lot of enjoyment to my Christmas.

Posted in Misc. | 1 Comment »

Happy New Year

Hope everyone enjoys the following year as much I have enjoyed the past. Have fun.

Posted in Diary | No Comments »

HP 22″ Widescreen Monitors

Now, I know that the larger monitors of this world have some interesting technological issues to overcome, however I think HP has made one too many sacrifices with this monitor:

w2207h 22 inch WIDESCREEN TFT

For those of you that didn’t spot it:

As pointed out on the E-O forums, the perfect monitor for fleet battles.

Posted in Things You Find | No Comments »

Bass

So after begging and borrowing the various parts I needed I finally have everything that would technically allow me to play a bass guitar, hopefully over the next few months I will have the time to dedicate to learning to play it properly. Had a bit of a play over the last day and it is great fun!

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Quantifying Ourselves

Some friends on a forum I frequent have spotted a web application called The Political Compass the premise is you answer 6 pages of questions that gauge your political views. The result is two numbers which can be plotted as X and Y axis onto a graph that represent your political views.

My result was Economic Left/Right: -3.25 and Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: 0.15.

This is a result I don’t disagree with, however I don’t think it is as clean cut as this. Peoples views change over time, moral choices are affected by different influences to economic or financial issues, those influences can change regularly. When it comes down to it a decision needs to be made at the moment it is required to make, if I am presented with an problem be it moral, social, financial, technical, etc. I make a decision based upon experiences, morality, knowledge and in my case and more importantly for me prayer.

Academics and interested parties come up with these scales and measures to enable them to categorize people, this has been seen everywhere from Business (Myers-Briggs Type Indicator) to online gaming (Bartle Test). For their purpose they serve their purpose and serve it very well.

They are however a hash function of an aspect of our personality at a specific point in time. I may be a INTJ in Myers-Briggs parlance or ESAK in Bartle Test parlance but that does not mean that all people who get INTJ in Myers-Briggs and ESAK in the Bartle Test are the same as me.

Posted in My Faith, Things You Find | No Comments »

Nate Combs on “Security” as an resource

Nate Combs has again posted on Terra Nova about what makes rare minerals rare. Nate makes the very good point; that rare minerals are not as scarce as the name might suggest. It is well worth a read as his his personal “scratchpad”.

Posted in EVE Online, MMORPG | No Comments »

Microsoft attacks Google Apps

I was reading Pete’s Images of Broken Light, specifically the interesting post about Microsoft’s public attitude towards Google’s Apps, it seems fairly typical of modern corporate America to rubbish someone else technology, brushing over their own failings without a second thought.

I don’t quite understand companies that do this, who are they targeting these comments at? Perhaps home users? surely they would use the free Google Apps Standard Edition as opposed to Microsoft Office Standard at £200 – £300, anyone could use Microsoft Office Live in the UK for free as well however it is still in “Beta” itself – how is that different from Google Apps “Beta”. What about Enterprise decision makers, clearly a press release is going to swing the opinions for a multi million pound roll out of a particular productivity suite – or not. Perhaps it is just sour grapes, after all Office Live hasn’t made nearly the impression I thought it was going to, certainly not in the UK.

Posted in Things You Find | No Comments »

Blocking Adverts

I read an interesting article on The Register about the Firefox Plugin AdBlock Plus, the article covers a bit about the current favourable relationship between Firefox and Google which could be threatened by the increased usage of products that block adverts from being displayed.

I am no fan of adverts on websites, as you can see; this site is devoid of adverts for the conscious reason that I find them distracting. Many adverts can not be controlled, if I add adverts to a page then I am leaving some of my screen space open to be used by another company, doubtlessly this company will have different views on what is appropriate, perhaps they promote content I would find objectionable (betting or breaking of game rules for example).

This of course doesn’t mean that you can’t make any money out of blogs and other user generated content, my personal preferences is contextual links, not the automatically generated JavaScript kind but the ones that the author puts in his or herself. For example affiliate links to Amazon or Barnes and Noble for books and music, Eclipse Internet to recommend as an ISP or EVE Online to encourage people to join you in-game. So many companies run successful affiliate programs why do so many people still invest so much time and clunky and unappealing design constraints just so that they can include an advert?

I would be really interested in the thoughts of readers, does anyone else use AdBlock? do adverts on sites annoy you? or do you see them as a fact of life, after all they do pay for the free content we are consuming?

Posted in Blog, Things You Find | No Comments »

Economics of Virtual Worlds

I have been thinking about the economics of Online Games (specificly MMORPGs) for some time. Most of my interest comes from writing my undergraduate dissertation which was more of an overview of the future of MMOGs than any specific focus. Lately, and most importantly with EVE Online, economics has shot into the public eye.

First CCP Employed an Economist, Dr. Eyjólfur Guðmundsson, which as it turns out is probably the first time an Economist has been employed to study and create reports based upon an ingame economy. Dr Guðmundsson has already posted a blog item about the Mineral Market in EVE Online although he describes it himself as more of a “statistical overview” than an in-depth study.

I am certainly not alone in my interest in Virtual World Economics as there is at least one “research network” who actively post about research found on the internet and in acedemia. A good number of posts over the past few years over at Terra Nova have considered the implications of applying real world economic principals to Virtual Worlds, Edward Castronova wrote a book about them, of which I have a copy which I still haven’t read.

The thing that facinates me most is probably they way you can maniuplate a virtual world’s market and not get sent to prison for it. You can collude with other players to fix prices buy up entire stocks of a particular item only to put it back on the market again at an artificially inflated rate! I am sure that people reading this who play EVE would say that that is unfair or even worthy of outwrite wrath. However who is to say that it is a bad thing? it all leads on to the Good vs. Evil argument and the question “is it wrong to do something in a virtual world just because it is wrong in the real world?”

So what does the future hold for virtual economys, well I can see lots of research comming from big university’s… I mean why wouldn’t they, if an economy such as EVE Online’s can act so much like that of the real world why not use it as a economic study. I also expect real world corporations to start accepting virtual economy “experence” as a creadable experence for job applicants. This has already started happening with MDs and CEOs of small technology companies getting the job because of past leadership experence within World of Warcraft.

Posted in EVE Online, MMORPG | 1 Comment »