Just realized what time it is, 10pm, and that I've not made a blog post yet. Also got a doctors appointment tomorrow afternoon which I can't forget about too [hint, hint to self], especially seeing as I'm wiping spit off my bloody monitor from explosive coughing right now.
Let's make this quick cus I'm vadeing college work at the moment to write this and I need to get the hell on with that...
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SHEL - When The Sky Fell (Official Music Video)
Watched 24 S09E10 this morning, which is all kinds of epic. Really enjoying that at the moment and wish there was 12 more episodes [24 with only 12 episodes is just weird] but what they've done is quite cool.
It was weird seeing her from The Red Wedding playing the bad guy, but it's so very, very epic seeing Jack in 'That was me being polite, I'll do whatever the hell I want when I want and we both know you can't stop me doing it' mode. In all the other seasons he was working under authority, and now he's still doing good but authority of any kind can kiss his ass, it's awesome.
That's the kind of freedom I want out of the world; I know best and will do what I think is right and not only should you not stop me doing it but trying to stop me once I set my mind to it is impossible.
Some day.
In other TV news: been trying to remember for several days now where I've seen the actor who plays the protagonist in Perception before, and then remembered it was Will and Grace, a US sitcom where he played this gay guy as a lawyer I think.
Gay guy lawyer in sitcom to FBI consultant paranoid schizophrenic brain specialist. GG. And he's hot too [no homo...well, half homo cus I'm bi, but I'd hit that].
It annoys me though that this thing is on it's third season now and Lie to Me got cancelled after two. Granted it went off the rails at the start of season two, but I'd rather have a continuation of season one than this. But Perception isn't a bad watch, though it does seem like every other show is a...what do they call them? Police procedural isn't it? But I've not seen a show about a paranoid schizophrenic before, and the self-reflective episodes appeal to me because half the time I think I'm several ants short of a picnic.
There was a show in 2013 called Dracula. It was a supernatural period piece featuring a rework of the traditional Dracula story. And I thought it was fucking excellent. The story was good, the action was awesome, his struggle to hide his nature was epic, the whole wireless electricity idea was very steam punk, and the black Igor was inspire. And then it got shit canned by ABC after one season. I fucking hate it when that happens. And it didn't deserve it.
Revolution got cancelled after two seasons, which was understandable because it went right off the rails after the first season, but there was nothing wrong with Dracula. Someone should pick that shit up as a novel concept and go to town, they'd make millions for the rework of the classic.
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I mean, it's a comparative analysis. You walk around not thinking like other people, you see what they don't, they tell you that you should feel this with this stimulus and you start to wonder what's broken inside your head when disassociated people tell you the same thing.
If sanity is measured by the consensus, and I don't think like everyone else, who is the madman here; me or the rest of the world? Personally I believe I'm functionally dysfunctional; I might not be like everyone else, but I'm not unhappy about that and I do get my work done [when I have any to do anyway], so what's the harm?
Well the harm is that sometimes I run into annoying lil troublemakers who decide that the big freak is too freakish to be allowed and his entire existence must be questioned and ostracised. There's a price you pay for originality, and that is rejection by your peers. Doesn't matter if it's in terms of social behaviour or professional conceptualization, if you don't measure up to someone else's standard of normal sometimes people give you a lot of grief over it in the belief that unless you're like the rest of the apples you must be poisonous rot, rather than a banana.
That's humans, and people wonder why I'm misanthropic and oh so cynical.
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With my adoption of Google 'Chrome' as my browser of choice at the moment after years of using Firefox I decided to go check out the rest of Google's product range.
This was after I restored the drag scroll functionality I have in Firefox to Chrome anyway with the 'Scrollbar Anywhere' extension. This should be included by default in all browsers as it's the best way to precisely control scrolling when you're reading for example and want a slow slide down the page.
I've adopted 'Docs', 'Sites' and 'Drive' from this list.
Docs is basically MS Word online and saves the files to Drive, online cloud storage. Sites can be set up to be like an editable PDF document, so you write a chapter introduction, and then write each sequential part under it. Automatic headings you could say and a great way to categorize content of a book or something. I think it might be useful for writing my computer games development thesis rather than Codex Mundus maybe.
I can see why the meme about Google becoming our new overlords was made after looking at this list cus let's face it, if you go around making a lot of high quality free online software which works neigh perfectly you're going to go a long, long way.
If they made Google 'Games', a computer games studio with their own console I'm sure they could corner the fucking games market easily.
Strangely though you never really hear about their products. Everyone knows about the search engine, the translator, and maybe even the blogger, and Google+ pops up every now and again, but a lot of this stuff isn't well known I don't think. I've not seen it in the places where I hear about associated online services like them anyway.
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After thinking about this for a while I did realize how virtual computing could work though.
I mean, if you had a device with great graphical processing capacity and display plus a powerful on-board router which could access over the internet something like Google 'Docs' and 'Drive', then you wouldn't need a PC with it's own hard disk drive and processor, you'd just access Google 'PC' for example and they'd do the operations and send the results to your screen.
Alright, so that comes with a whole bag of complications ranging from a spectrum of privacy issues, both in regards to your host searching your files for information combined with inception of files on route between the host server and your work station, and operational issues, including what programs you run, what files you access, and your personal activity history.
A centralized mass database of not just user details but user PC's would be the holy grail of hacks, and nothing online could ever be considered unhackable.
Then you need to consider acts-of-god. One accident and 10,000 PC's and people's virtual lives are destroyed at worst in made in accessible at best for an indefinite amount of time.
You could do it and it'd probably be awesome to be able to access from anywhere and run super high powered programs that would take a £10,000 PC to run yourself for a low monthly fee or something, like internet access. But you would lose quite a lot freedom and run quite a lot of risk in so doing.
Centralization makes things much more efficient, but decentralization makes them much safer.
As with most things, a lil of a both are probably a good idea; keep the PC but some things, like games for example, could be turned into virtual services where the processing is done somewhere else and you just get the gameplay. If you can make the wifi efficient enough anyway, but that's improving all the time.
It's an interesting concept anyway.
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Opened Gumtree sometime this afternoon and put some credit onto my phone. Sent out about six texts to various ads asking for viewings. Got two replies and a bunch of places I need to visit to consult with them about available properties to rent in London. Going to look into it and make phone calls tomorrow and doing college work today.
And by doing college work I mean looking like this a lot of the time whilst reading and making a copy of the course materials into a 600 page [so far] word document.
It's so stupid. They have this online website called Moodle. All the college course materials for my certificate in basic policing course are on there, plus several dozen online quizzes which I need to complete in order to pass the course. The rest of the marking criteria consists of exams done from week 5 through to week 10. I aced, by my own surprise due to sleeplessness and flu, the week 5 exam. Got two on Saturday for the week 6 exam.
And basically what I've been doing is opening each annotated presentation, handout, and eWorkbook, as they call them, on Moodle and copying them into a giant word document, which means copy, paste into notepad to shred the website formatting, paste into word and adjust for double returns and bullet points, etc..
After that the online quizzes are simply a matter of reading the question list and using the search function to find the answer in the word document, writing it down and then selecting the right answer from the multiple choice quiz. Easy.
The issue is that copy, paste, adjust for formatting task takes fucking ages and is dull shit.
Granted to get through week 1-4 I basically watched all of 24 whilst copying and pasting, except for those bits where I needed to do the quizzes and revise for the exams, which was fun, but it stills boring as hell.
This course should be taught as activities. Or given to each person in a giant lump that they can search through and read as required to answer questions. This 'do a lot of reading' approach is laborious nonsense.
And the tutor just tells us information that's in the presentations during the 8 hour fucking tutorials as well. Badly presented nonsense I could do without. Exams, OK, but I'd rather spend 8 hours reading the course materials, which I hate doing, than sit there being told what's in the course materials verbally.
Le sigh. Gotta do it if I want to pass the course and get hired though, so only 10 more weeks to go and then I'll be free to review the material as needed for whatever the actual police training will require me to know. Doing it in practise will be a hell've a lot easier for my practical minded brain to absorb than reading it I can tell you that.
I just wish whomsoever wrote my course materials understood the concept of the paragraph because no case study should be a half A4 page of solid text, ye gods.
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I am having a slight issue with the concept of dispute management.
It doesn't seem like you're allowed to express anger even when it's a justifiable emotion. Someone does you wrong and any normal human being should be angry and express it as a signal of behaviour on the part of someone else which isn't acceptable.
But as a policeman it seems the most you can do is state deadpan your point of view to maintain calm in the situation. Logically I can see why, and I'm rarely angry about anything, even in the face of blatant rudeness. I treat events as information and not as emotional generators by default, it's just who I am.
On the other hand, anger serves a purpose in conversation the same way words do; to imply meaning through emotion is as essential as stating information.
I have full right to be angry at the fitness instructor who totally lacked empathy for my situation during my Day 2. But I doubt I would get away with expressing that with my reasoned point of view, especially given that she reprimanded me on the basis that my attitude was off. Her behaviour was unacceptable, and that point should be made, but deadpan delivery doesn't express my point of view, it simply states the facts. She offended me deeply for what she did given the circumstances and anger is the appropriate response. I'm not seeking resolution to the circumstances, I just want to convey that she acted like a right stone cold bitch without actually saying it. I don't care about apologies either. I just need to make sure she hasn't disabled my application, and appeal if she has.
All in all, it's not my methodology I'm questioning here you understand, it's the perspective of those who will be evaluating and training me in law enforcement. I have methods and those methods will probably work, but will they match the marking criteria written by a lesser mind who believes protocol supersedes context?
Will I be failed based on someone's perception, regardless of the effectiveness of my actions? It's happened before, but given the amount of work I'm putting in here I don't want it to happen again.
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In a lighter note: when I become a copper I'll be a constable, or police constable, or PC. I'll be PC Miles. I'll evolve into a computer, lol. They said I could become anything, so I because a personal computer.
And yes, I am such a freaking nerd. xD
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And that's about it.
Got a customer survey from the guys behind TOME: Immortal Arena, and replied with my professional opinion about some aspects of the game. Already wrote about them here and been writing this for an hour and half now so I don't wanna rehash.
I did realize though that the male voice [which is unusual for games which normally go in for female voice actresses] they use during play to announce towers being attacked and things is actually Bruce Campbell, the fucking bas ass mother fucker who played Ash in the Evil Dead franchise.
It's quite possible I'll never forget the line 'Your top tower thingy fell down'. xD
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OH: and I also looked into maybe doing some freelance writing and things.
A helpful human, @JoeThreepwood on Twitter, gave me some tips in that area, like don't work for free, cover games editors don't already know about, like indie titles, and write pitches to send to editors, not whole articles.
Might be an interesting writing sideline to working for the police seeing as I write a hell've a lot anyway [I mean, look at these blog posts], but I don't have time right now seeing as I need somewhere new to live on Monday and have not one but two exams on Saturday.
Right now though I'm starving hungry and want to get a couple more hours of college work done before snooze and going to the doctors tomorrow where they'll hopefully tell me what the blood hell this throat issue is and how to cure it. I need some fucking exercise for crying out loud.
Have a good one.
