I am fairly relaxed and confident about tipping in restaurants, apart from occasional practical wibbles about not having the right change. But there's a whole penumbra of other similar circumstances in which I have a vague idea that tipping might be expected but I'm not sure, and I worry about getting it wrong. Is it normal to tip all these people and I've been offending them if I don't? Or is it just for exceptional service? Or is it not customary at all except overseas? Please help unconfuse me.

Poll #1477011
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 16

In the UK it is generally customary to tip...

Tags: polls, society, tipping

Cats

Look at this wonderful birthday card my sister drew for me, featuring cartoons of Pepsi and Tango!


Up

We went to see the new Disney/Pixar movie, Up. It is fantastic. Probably their best yet. It's laugh-out-loud funny and cry-real-tears moving. It's also a huge amount of fun, featuring some delightfully cool ways to fly, including a zeppelin, the house held up by lots of helium balloons which you'll have seen in the poster, and (minor spoiler) a person held up by a few helium balloons, sitting astride a leaf-blower like some kind of roaring broomstick/motorbike hybrid :))

Go and see it!

Tags: cats, films, life, reviews, up

In two of the last three films we saw, people got up as soon as their alarm clocks went off. I know films aren't noted for realism in many respects, but I wondered how widespread this was. So, a poll:

Poll #1442004
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 13

What do you do when your alarm goes off?

(I wondered whether to phrase it as "wake up" or "get up". I mean "become fully conscious so that you could get up if you felt like it", I think. Sitting up in bed and reading counts.)

I don't like wasting an hour of each day snoozing, but I'm not sure what to do about it.

A few months ago I got a SleepTracker, which is a watch with an accelerometer-thingy in it, so it can tell when you move in your sleep. It reckons movement corresponds to the shallowest points in your sleep cycle, or "almost-awake moments". So you give it a window, like 8:00-8:30, and it beeps to wake you up at the first "almost-awake moment" in that window, on the grounds that waking from that should be easier. It worked well for a month or so - it would wake me and I'd feel fully awake. But now it's no better than a normal alarm clock. I sleepily silence it and fall back to sleep. I suspect its success owed as much to the placebo effect, and the slightly-increased cognitive load of silencing an unfamiliar device, as to sleep cycles.

So I think novelty helps. If I had lots of alarm clocks, and a different random one went off each morning, that might work, at least for a while. Waking up for something outside the normal routine is also easier - not just fun things like holidays, but also annoying things like answering the door to cold-callers or having to break up cat-fights in the landing.

Communication also helps. A silly idea that occurred to me this morning is that if I had a Chumby like simont has (or I could just do it on my PDA) I could write an alarm that could only be silenced using a piece of information derived from a passphrase I have and a passphrase Alex has, so we'd have to wake up enough to talk to each other. (Obviously we wouldn't use that alarm if one of us was away.) Although you can have a conversation while semi-conscious and fall back to sleep and forget about it, that's probably less likely if the conversation topic is something real like how do we shut this blasted thing up?

I've also heard about someone who locked his alarm clock in a trunk and put the key in a bucket of icy water. Never tried that one yet, but to gain an extra hour in each day it might be worth it...

Tags: alarms, life, polls, sleep
Current Mood: sleepy

Yesterday we downloaded the first chapter of The Tales of Monkey Island, Launch of the Screaming Narwhal, and finished it this afternoon. It is excellent :D

I'd been looking forward to it, but been slightly apprehensive that it would be an inferior ripoff by some people who'd bought the rights to the original series and slapped them on their own unrelated games, or a graphics-fest at the expense of gameplay and fun, but those fears were completely dispelled. It's a delightful, extremely fun game in the spirit of the originals, with at least some of the voices from #3 and #4. The puzzles are intriguing and are pitched at a good level of challenge. The dialogue is excellent, with witty one-liners, cheesy puns, and occasional amusing innuendo ("Release my wife at once, LeChuck - she gets a bit tetchy if she's tied up for more than an hour"), which I hadn't noticed in the previous games, but maybe I was too young. There are the obligatory references to the previous games and to Indiana Jones. As well as the main three characters, the Voodoo Lady makes a reappearance, and there's a hint that Stan might be involved later, or it might just have been an in-joke. The relationship between the no-longer-newlywed Threepwoods is entertainingly depicted. Elaine treats Guybrush with a mixture of patient amusement and annoyance that reminds me of Susan from Coupling.

I give it 9.5 out of 10, and the missing 0.5 is all interface niggles. You have to click and drag to walk anywhere; and you can't combine inventory items by clicking on one with the other, but you have to drop each into a special area of your inventory and click a "combine" button. And it took us until nearly the end to find the button to skip unwanted dialogue (e.g. that you've seen before), that was always mapped to the dot key in LucasArts games (it's right-click now).

We've also bought the remastered Secret of Monkey Island - Special Edition. We haven't started playing it at all yet, but from the screenshots, it looks as though they've stayed very faithful to the original - the scenes look very familiar, drawn from the same camera angles, just with improved graphics and (presumably) voices. And it was only £6.99 - I thought it might be full game price. And it includes the original un-remastered version, and you can hot-swap back and forth between the two renderings at any point.

So we're going to play that next (well, Alex will play it, because he's never played it all the way through before, and I will sit and watch, squee with nostalgia, and offer cryptic hints if required).

Tags: games, monkey island, reviews
Current Location: Flotsam Island
Current Mood: happy
Current Music: Monkey Island theme tune

I recently played an adventure game in which you play character A and have to lock character B in a room, and then in the next chapter you play character B and have to escape. It was a slightly unsettling shift in perspective: I'd been playing character A and identifying with her, and agreed with her that character B needed to be locked up because he was a danger to himself and others. I didn't want to help him escape.

alextfish plays a lot of Starcraft, and he says you get the same phenomenon in that, but even worse. At least the two characters above were ultimately on the same side, but in Starcraft you play the Terrans and build a base, and then you play the aliens and destroy the base you just built.



A good developer needs to be at least a reasonably good tester; and a good tester needs a certain quality which, in normal life, is usually bad. I might even call it malevolence, or at least scepticism. It goes beyond just the destructive desire to try to break things; you have to try to break things which other people have just created, which they've put time and effort into, which they might have invested a part of themselves in. You have to assume those creations are flawed, and make it your mission to expose the flaws.

I am not very good at writing robust code. The testers find even fairly obvious bugs in my software. And I think this is because, on some subconscious level, I'm being precious about the thing I've just built. I don't want to prod it until it falls apart; I don't want to look for the flaws in it.

To be a better developer I need to apply this perspective-shifting, side-switching trick to my work. I need to look for ways out of the room I just locked; I need to bomb the base I just built.

Tags: games, software, work

I ordered a computer game from Amazon Marketplace as a present for a friend.

The seller, games4u-uk-net, sent me a bootleg copy. The cover was printed in low quality, like from a home printer, and with no logos or branding, and there was a badly-spelled note on the back saying that the game was free software (it's not) and you're paying for the disc and the emulator.

I looked at their feedback page. They had mostly very good feedback, but the few negative ones were a bit suspicious-looking: they didn't sound like honest mistakes, like sending the wrong product. They were from people who'd ordered consoles described as new, and received them in unbranded plain white boxes. All the negative comments were followed up by indignant, not very polite, not very grammatical replies from the seller asking why the buyer had left negative feedback rather than contacting them.

So I decided to be nice and contact them, asked for a citation for the claim that the game was free software, because I hadn't been able to find one, and tried to explain the difference between free software and abandonware, and said if I had wanted abandonware I wouldn't have paid £10 on Amazon for a legitimate version of the game. I said they were misrepresenting what they were selling, and if they're going to sell discs and emulators they ought to make it very clear that's what they're selling.

They replied, reiterated the claim that the game was free software and that they were only charging for the disc and emulator, and claimed outright that the original producers of the game were an outfit called Classic Gaming Presents (who, as far as I can tell, are an abandonware download site: they have the moral high ground over games4u because they a) have a link inviting the real owners of the game to request they take it down, and b) don't misrepresent what they're offering). They also said they would refund me only if I didn't leave negative feedback.

I was particularly appalled by that last bit, and went into righteous-indignation mode, and reported them to Amazon and to the Federation Against Copyright Theft, and told them so[1], and told them I would certainly leave negative feedback now, and did so (including the bit where they tried to buy my silence).

Amazon replied to my complaint with long complicated instructions of what I should do to claim a refund. I didn't get around to doing anything for a couple of days, and then they sent my money back anyway, without me having done any of the stuff in the email, which surprised me.

Interestingly, games4u now seem to have dropped their price by £2, and have also added a comment to the product page, saying "This is NOT the Whit Label vresion. what we sell is the modified software which enables the game to be run on XP and/or VISTA, the game is distributed for free with the software." [sic]

I've written this for the benefit of two groups of people:
* Those who, like me a few weeks ago, naively think that Amazon Marketplace is something more official and vetted than it really is. Be warned. Treat it like you would eBay. Research the sellers.
* Those who cynically accept that receiving bootlegs is an inevitable part of buying stuff online, and who just shrug and play the CD/DVD/game anyway, or stick it in a drawer and forget about it. Stop it. You're enabling them. Complain, get your money back, get them to start being a bit more honest.

[1] The downside of this is They Know Where I Live. I should have used my work address for the original order.

Tags: bootleg, games

"Daddy, Daddy, you know you're always saying pigs might fly? They actually did! I heard it on the news."
"Huh, really?"
"Yeah, they keep saying swine flew."

The Freedom Bill is a bill drafted by the Lib Dems to "restore civil liberties and democratic rights in Britain". It would repeal things like ID cards and the National Identity Register, the restrictions on protesting near Parliament, and 28-day detention.

Its website is here, and there's a petition here you can sign to support it.

Tags: id cards, politics
Current Mood: hopeful

Our church is having a carol service next Sunday evening: Sunday 21st December, 7-8pm. Alex and I are singing in the choir. There will be free mulled wine and mince pies afterwards.

The church is here, in a big blue building called Brickfields, on Cheddars Lane, near Newmarket Road Tesco.

Come along and sing carols :)

Tags: carols
Current Mood: festive

It annoys me when people use Uncle Tom to mean a member of an oppressed group who disloyally sucks up to the privileged group, perhaps to get better treatment from them than his fellows receive. Tom in Uncle Tom's Cabin was a good, brave and loyal man: when a fellow-slave escaped to make a better life for herself and her baby, Tom knew where she went, but refused to tell his master, in defiance of a direct order, and was beaten to death for it.

Similarly, I've heard people use Little Lord Fauntleroy to mean a stuck-up, overprivileged young man with no idea about the real world. But the actual Little Lord Fauntleroy is a down-to-earth, fair-minded boy from an ordinary lower middle class home, who discovers one day that, due to the deaths of a series of relatives he didn't know he had, he's inherited a lordship. At first he's horrified, because he's a staunch little republican and egalitarian, and thinks the aristocracy are bad. Later, he uses his influence to make life better and fairer for the poor tenants in the neighbourhood.

You could probably also make a case for Pollyanna, whose name gets used to mean someone who is optimistic to a pernicious and destructive extent, refusing to face up to the existence of problems, as opposed to someone who chooses to improve her life by trying to find the good in everything; but that may be just different value judgements about optimism, rather than factual error.

What others are there?

Tags: books, nanowrimo procrastination