Jon Grant's Blog

Stuff I Really Want

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 16:35:49 +0000

We've been working on a new website over the last few months - basically it's a wishlist site that allows you to add products from any other site into one (or more!) lists, and then helps you send it out to your friends and family, or share it via Facebook and Twitter, so there will be no more rubbish presents like socks or knitted jumpers ;)

You can sign up here, or to find out more about the site, check out this page.

Virgin Media Hijacks The Internet

Wed, 07 Oct 2009 09:24:12 +0000

So Virgin Media have started serving advertising whenever you try to access a website that doesn't exist. I hate this sort of meddling, but fortunately Virgin have provided an opt-out mechanism. Let's just hope they don't subtly drop this option in the future.

NovamediaDiskSupressor, Rosetta warning on Snow Leopard

Wed, 02 Sep 2009 15:18:18 +0000

If you are getting a warning about NovamediaDiskSupressor requiring Rosetta to be installed, I've managed to track down the culprit: the Vodafone 3G USB dongle software.

I found some instructions on how to remove it.

I ended up not removing the kernel extensions as I may actually want to use the dongle at some point in the future, but I definitely don't need all of that crap running on startup.

Edinburgh to Glasgow train link to take only 35 minutes

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 14:32:45 +0000

£1bn boost for high-speed trains

Oh my god, FINALLY. This is what we should have been spending all that tram money on: something that people actually want and need and will benefit people's lives, not a stupid tram service that could be easily replaced by putting on a new bus route without any of the billions of pounds worth of disruption.

US Pays More For Cellphone Service?? GASP

Fri, 14 Aug 2009 01:04:03 +0000

US pays more for cellphone service, carriers insist that we are not getting screwed

The reason you Americans pay so much for cell phone service is because 90% of your country is in the middle of fucking nowhere. Putting an antenna up in these places where someone may send a text message once per year costs a shitload. In Europe, nowhere is more than about 100 miles from the nearest city. Either you cut off the hicks or you pay more. Deal with it :)

My Job

Wed, 05 Aug 2009 11:06:42 +0000

My fucking job is unbelievable, I'll try to sum it up by first telling you about the folks I work with:

First there is the supermodel wanna-be chick. I'll give her credit she is pretty fucking hot, but she's constantly fixing her hair or putting on make-up. She is extremely self-centered and never considers the needs, wants or desires of anyone but herself. She is as dumb as a box of rocks, I'm surprised she has enough brain power to continue to breathe. She must suck a mean dick, because the boss keeps her around.

The next chick is exactly the opposite. She is probably one of the smartest person on the planet. He career oppertunities are endless, yet she is here with us. She is like a -10 on a scale of 1 to 10. I'm not sure she even showers, muchless shaves her "womanly" parts. I think is a lesbian, every time we drive by a Home Depot she moans like she is creaming her panties.

Finally and the jewel of the crown is a fucking stoner. I'm not talking like an occasional toker. This guy is baked before he comes to work, during work and I'm sure after work. I would doubt that he has been "sober" in the last 10 years easily... and he's only 22. He dresses like a freakin' beatnik throwback from the 1960's. To make it worse he brings his big fucking dog to work. Every fucking day I have to look at this HUGE FUCKING DOG!! This thing usually walks around about 1/2 stoned from the second hand smoke. Hell, sometimes I even think its trying to talk with its constant bellowing. Both of them are constantly hungry, require multiple stops at McDonalds and Burger King.

Anyways, I drive these fucktards around in my van and we solve mysteries and shit.

via http://pastebin.com/d125d57b0

Who the hell is Michael Grieve?

Fri, 05 Jun 2009 22:33:01 +0000

Is he some kind of stalker or something? He has attempted to add me on every single "social networking" website there is going, and I have rejected him on all of them, but seriously, what is his deal? Does he do this to other people too? Or do I just have my own personal stalker here?

Why your bags always take forever to come out at Edinburgh Airport

Thu, 04 Jun 2009 16:35:57 +0000

I've never understood why it takes upwards of 30 minutes to unload and drive your luggage the 100 yards to the conveyor belt at Edinburgh when other airports (Southampton being a good example) can somehow seem to get your bags there before you even enter the terminal.

I guess this would explain it: Air worker 'dodgem' drivers fined. And while those two guys have been sacked, I don't doubt that it will be a deeply embedded culture in the place and it just so happens that these two got caught.

Is It Going To Rain Today?

Mon, 19 Jan 2009 12:02:50 +0000

Time for another "inspired by B3ta" ten minute website!

  * IS IT GOING TO RAIN TODAY . COM - Probably a
  bit more complex, but with some reverse IP
  lookup for location and parsing the BBC weather
  site, a fair stab is possible.

So here it is: Is It Going To Rain Today?

Edinburgh Drivers Are Crap

Wed, 03 Dec 2008 15:49:24 +0000

Warning: I'm annoyed so this post may contain venting and/or bad language!

On Monday evening, I'm driving the family back from a trip to Tesco on a route I've driven hundreds of times. We approach a T-junction, driving straight across (from right to left on the top of the T), and we have a green light. Literally just as we cross the line of the junction, the light goes amber. Suddenly there's another car coming from the opposite direction turning right across in front of me. I stamp on the brakes but unfortunately am unable to stop in time and hit his front passenger side.

The other driver (an off-duty policeman by the way) says he had a green filter arrow to turn right, which I don't dispute. Many times I have been in his position and traffic continues to cross for a few seconds after the filter light goes on, which indicates a problem with the traffic lights... but since when do you ever just blast across a junction when turning right without even looking? Filter or no filter. Imagine there was a bus that could only make it half across the junction and therefore was blocking the road for his right turn. By his reasoning he would just drive straight into the side of the bus?!

Unfortunately due to him being a copper, he knew all the right things to say. It was like hearing him reading from a script the way he recited his story of the accident. Fortunately it seems pretty cut-and-dried and my insurance company believe I'm in the right.

So yesterday we get a replacement hire car, and today I drove out to a nearby shopping centre at lunch. I'm driving happily down the road; there are no traffic lights and no junctions this time, it's a completely open road... and some stupid bint comes from a concealed entrance on the left and cuts right across in front of me, trying to turn right.

I slam on the brakes (getting used to that maneuver) and managed to stop about 3 foot before hitting her, horn the crap out of her, and she just looks straight ahead and drives off with a guilty look on her face. It's so icy today she is lucky I was able to stop.

Seriously, are Edinburgh driving instructors all smoking crack or something? I've honestly never seen as many bad drivers anywhere as in this city. Twice in the past I've been in accidents where the other driver basically drove into me, and twice now some idiot has pulled out in front of me either actually or nearly causing an accident. And what the hell is up with that retarded "I'm signaling right on the roundabout but actually I'm going straight across" thing? Where the hell do these people learn to drive?

They should run some sort of "bad driver report" thing where you can report people's number plates and if they get a certain number they get 3 points on their licence. Maybe that would get the bloody idiots off the road.

Maschinenfest 2008 Review

Mon, 13 Oct 2008 11:56:24 +0000

Winterkälte - Image by Jairus

So Maschinenfest was last weekend, and it was a lot of fun! We saw a lot of bands, did a lot of dancing, drank a lot of beer, and saw a little of Germany!

Some parts were a little disappointing though; for example some of the newer material by bands that I haven't seen live for a while wasn't quite up to the level I had hoped. MS Gentur and P·A·L were fairly big let-downs for me. I'm not sure if it's just that I remember them much better than they really were last time, or if it's the fact that it's now about eight years later and they have mellowed and/or changed style. Maybe it's both!

On the other hand, we discovered a few bands that I hadn't heard of before that were really good! Two that particularly stick in my mind were Scorn (from Napalm Death! awesome) and Enduser, and in the end that's what it was all about for me.

The last night, after all the bands were done, turned into a random party with everyone - including the staff - letting off steam. There was a guy in a gimp mask, and another wearing only a cardboard box! This was probably one of my best memories of the weekend and I had an amazing time. There are rumours it may have been the last one, but I sincerely hope not, as I'm already planning to go back next year!

Which Is Gayer?

Sun, 21 Sep 2008 15:52:26 +0000

Okay, so it's completely puerile and childish, I know - but I was inspired by this week's B3ta newsletter "star in next week's issue" segment...


* WHICH IS GAYER? "Gay Apple" is 19m Google
  results, whilst "Gay Microsoft" gets 16m
  results. Hence Apple is gayer than Microsoft.
  Fact. Write an application which tests the
  comparative gayness of everything. With
  pie-charts for extra win.

So, in a couple of hours I knocked up a small site to do just that. So know you know for sure, which is gayer!

Spore: First Impressions

Wed, 10 Sep 2008 11:50:01 +0000

So I've completed the first three stages of Spore; a game I have been waiting for for about the last two years. So far I have played the Cell, the Creature and the Tribal phases, and I thought I would post my impressions so far.

I think the best summary would be that it's a really fun toy: none of the modes I've played so far are "deep" enough into that specific genre to really warrant wanting to come back and play through them again. The stages I've played through so far are both too long (repetitive and a bit dull) and too short (it abruptly ends and you're expected to move on, even though you have probably only discovered maybe 25% of the available stuff).

There are some really fun touches, like seeing the occasional spaceship fly overhead and abduct someone, and there are a few "epic" creatures scattered about the world which are just huge versions of a specific creature type, and they have loads of health and give lots of food when killed (but it took about 30 deaths of my guys to kill it).

I suppose my main gripe with the game is the way some of the stages hang together; for example when you click the button to exit the tribal stage, you get a cutscene where random symbols appear over your creatures' heads and then it just dumps you into the building editor, and you're supposed to know somehow that you're designing yourself a city hall. After that you get dumped into another editor and this time you're building your military vehicle... it doesn't seem to introduce it very well. Also at the end of the tribal stage, it just throws up some text saying something like "your creature has now spread across the world, but has broken into factions"... I would have much preferred it if they actually showed this happening in the world rather than just cheating and sticking some text up there. The stages feel a bit too discrete and could have used much better storytelling to link them together I think.

So now for the more petty gripes: the control scheme is a bit rubbish. I suppose they copied it from the Sims or something, and additionally there is the need to have a consistent control scheme throughout all the modes, but still it felt kinda awkward.

Also, the tribal stage customisation is a bit lame. You get bits of outfit to put on your character: hats, shoulderguards, backpacks, and so on... but there are no restrictions on the number of hats (for example), or where you can put them... so I ended up using hats as kneeguards :) But you don't really feel like you're dressing your character, more just sticking badges on him.

So anyway despite those flaws it still is fun to play, but I don't see it having a huge amount of lasting appeal... but maybe the later stages will have more replayability, I don't know. Also I think it might be more fun if I knew a few people who were playing and then would see their creatures in my world rather than the Maxis pre-loaded ones or ones from general randoms.

There's a bit of a revolt kicking off over on Amazon over the draconian DRM that Spore comes loaded with, too. It wasn't a deal-breaker for me, but I am dreading that fourth install after wiping my PC again...

Why Age of Conan sucks

Tue, 02 Sep 2008 09:40:45 +0000

I wanted to like Age of Conan, I really did. I tried, twice. World of Warcraft has become kinda boring for me, and while I'm sure that the next expansion: Wrath of the Lich King will have me sucked in once again, it would have been nice to have something else to keep me entertained until then.

I think my problem with AoC isn't so much that "it's not WoW", but more that... well, unless you can come up with something much better, then it should be as WoW-like as possible: surely that's your target market! For example: the chat system is awkward, the friends system is awkward... It all makes me feel that they never actually used it themselves.

To take a simple example: they use forward-slash (/) for commands, just like WoW, but in WoW you can just type a forward-slash to open up the chat window and keep typing, it's all automatic. In AoC, forward-slash is bound to some other action, so you always have to press enter first to open up the chat box. I've lost count of the number of times I've forgotten to do this and had to re-enter my command, and it quickly becomes frustrating.

Another simple example is key bindings: there is no excuse here at all to not have the default keys set up the same as WoW. Key bindings are instinctive, and are often used without thinking, so why on earth are the strafe keys bound to Z and C instead of Q and E? A sure-fire way to annoy any WoW converts is to have them perform random actions when they are trying to do something else... and even when I tried to fix it using the key binding UI, my changes wouldn't save.

That brings me to another point... AoC is probably the buggiest game I have ever played. For a long time after I installed it, I just couldn't get textures to work. Everything else was fine, but all the 3D models has a sort of chess-board black and white pattern on them. I would love to tell you how I managed to fix this, but in the end what happened was the game crashed and burned, and when I restarted it had magically fixed itself!

There are lots of things that seem completely overcomplicated, I suppose because they thought they knew better; again it makes me think they never really tried using it. An example: emotes. Pretty simple, right? In WoW, you can do things like "/smile Kotaro" and it will smile at Kotaro! In AoC, emoting requires some crazy-ass voodoo like /emote social_expression_suspicious, and half the emotes you are used to using in WoW don't work; and I don't mean anything obscure here: there is no smile emote that I can find. Maybe AoC developers just don't like smiling.

Oh, and there is an emote UI, but you first have to find out how the hell to turn it on (press Y, if you're interested), then you have to select from one of about 50 emote categories (happy, ecstatic, sad, melancholy, friendly, etc), guessing which one might contain the action you're looking for, and then, finally, you can wave at someone... about five minutes after they have already run off and found something better to do.

There are other things that are more fundamental, too... like every single character you create starts off in the exact same place with the exact same quests, regardless of class or race. This means there is almost no incentive at all to try any of the other classes, and the game quickly loses any interest.

When you look at it, compared to all the other games, it's pretty amazing what Blizzard managed to create with WoW. Somehow AoC manages to be smaller, more buggy, less immersive and harder to use, when AoC actually had the luxury of having WoW right in front of them to copy. They had a golden opportunity to steal so many WoW players, but in my opinion, they have wasted that chance.

Maschinenfest 2008

Mon, 01 Sep 2008 15:58:51 +0000

So I finally got around to booking my sojourn to Krefeld for Maschinenfest today. I've never been before; in fact I've never even been to Germany before, and I hadn't really intended to go. That is, until a friend of mine said she was going to be going too and pointed out that there were some really excellent bands on the line-up (MS Gentur, P·A·L, Winterkälte, to name just a few).

It's all a bit last minute, and I don't really have enough holidays left to go, but what the hell; it would be awful to miss out on such a great set of bands, and it'll be an adventure to explore a new place! I can't wait...

Introduction

Thu, 21 Aug 2008 12:51:51 +0000

Congratulations! You've found my little inconspicuous corner of the internet. Not a lot will be going on here I'm sure, but you never know: miracles might happen.

I suppose I should say something about me: my name is Jon Grant, and I'm a 28 year old guy living in Edinburgh, working as a senior technologist for an IT consultancy company. In the real world, that mostly means I develop software systems for other businesses to do exciting things that I couldn't possibly ever tell you about.

So.. who knows what will happen here. Maybe you should check back later and see if I have written anything interesting.