While I was out at work today, and while Bec was briefly sorting things out upstairs, my nearly two year old son Zak took it upon himself to remap half my keyboard to various squiggles and symbols that not even Prince could pronounce, with a permanent marker pen!

Ahh, the joys of parenthood...

Customer: Worcester sauce crisps please
Shopkeeper: Sorry can't, it's off the shelves; cancer scare.
Customer: Oh right, Chinese Chicken Wings?
Shopkeeper: Ah that's the same. Cancer scare
Customer: Hamburger Relish?
Shopkeeper: Cancer scare
Customer: Sausage and Mash?
Shopkeeper: Cancer scare
Customer: Cottage Pie?
Shopkeeper: Yes ...no wait, cancer scare.
Customer: So they're all off the shelves because of a cancer scare?
Shopkeeper: Yes
Customer: (sigh) Just give me a packet of fags then.
Shopkeeper: Certainly. £4.50 please!

Spent my first day at DevWeek 2005 today, and I have to admit my brain seems fit to burst this evening. John Robbins was the keynote speaker this morning, giving a general talk on the new features in VS.NET 2005. I have to admit that if I was one of the developers behind ReSharper (the development tool for VS.NET 2003) I'd be seriously worried. All the refactoring tools in VS.NET 2005 seem to be heavily influenced by, if not directly copied from ReSharper (or at a push, Eclipse).

I spent the rest of the day being lectured by (and asking far too many akward questions of) Jeffrey Richter. His first two sessions were connected with the new features in C# 2.0 of which I'll blog about more later.

What was more worrying was what was mentioned almost in passing during his Exceptions lecture (which was in itself fascinating); .NET Remoting is dead - or at least not promoted any more by Microsoft. I'll have to get Ingo Rammer's take on this tomorrow as he's one of the speakers here. It's a shame if this is correct, as the last major project we completed at IS Solutions would not have been possible (or at least would have been even more painful than it was already) if .NET remoting wasn't as well designed as it is.

 

I've threatened on many occasions to make some MP3s available on this site of the worst band in the South West, the infamous Shirley Temple Pilots. Up till this point, common sense has prevailed and I've forgotten to carry out my promise.

Well, common sense has gone out of the window for the moment - so ladies and gentlemen, I give you a track recorded at Finns in Weymouth on the 8th January 2005.

Fuel

Usual caveats apply; I'd had too much to drink, voice playing up, a car drove by outside that was exactly the wrong shade of puce... you get the picture.

 

I'm really grateful to id for releasing Doom3 back in September. I thoroughly enjoyed the experience of near pant soiling terror, the shocks when turning on my flashlight in a darkened area to see a zombie poised to rip out my throat, the awesome special effects like the heat haze around the imps' fireballs and the creepy 'System Shock 2'-esque PDA plot device.

An excellent game that I still highly recommend.

But, if Valve had released Half-Life 2 before id had got its magnum opus out of the door, I doubt I would ever have played it. Once again, the bar has been raised when it comes to first player action; in fact, not so much raised as moved wholesale by several miles.

I got home from work last night, started Steam which promptly started to unlock the preloaded copy on my hard drive. Off to the kitchen to make hot steaming cup of caffeine, and when I came back the game was ready to play - no hassles, no dramas. I know some people have had problems, but for me the experience was seamless.

And then on to the game; first things first - the videos that we have all been drooling over for what seems like forever (insert obligatory DNF joke here) do not do the game justice. The game feels smooth, the action is fluid and the facial animation is something else. OK, I don't have the most sluggish rig in the world, but it's certainly not the best (FWIW; Asus P4P800-SE Deluxe; P4 HT 3.0GHz; 1Gb 2700 RAM; MSI FX 5700 Ultra; 160Gb DiamondPlus 9 SATA); by contrast, Doom 3 struggled to get a decent framerate at 1024x768 on this machine whereas Half-Life 2 simply seems to take things in its stride.

So far, I've only played for a couple of hours (I'm still on the wonderfully named 'Route Kanal' level), but already I've come across a couple of wonderful touches; in particular, Barney's jibe that a degree from MIT must have come in really useful for throwing a switch is priceless.

My other favourite touch at the moment has to be feeding exploding barrels to the barnacles, and then exploding them.

I cannot recommend this game highly enough. The temptation to throw a sickie was very strong - but as I work in an IT environment, I suspect I would have been rumbled! Go buy, go play. End of story.