Monthly Archive for March, 2007

New words for your dictionary?

Here is the Washington Post’s Mensa Invitational, which once again asked readers to take any word from the dictionary, alter it by adding, subtracting, or changing one letter, and supply a new definition.

Here are the 2006 Winners:

1. Cashtration (n.): The act of buying a house, which renders the subject financially impotent for an indefinite period of time.

2. Ignoranus: A person who’s both stupid and an a55hole.

3. Intaxication: Euphoria at getting a tax refund, which lasts until you realize it was your money to start with.

4. Reintarnation: Coming back to life as a hillbilly.

5. Bozone (n.): The substance surrounding stupid people that stops bright ideas from penetrating. The bozone layer, unfortunately, shows little sign of breaking down in the near future.

6. Foreploy: Any misrepresentation about yourself for the purpose of getting laid.

7. Giraffiti: Vandalism spray-painted very, very high.

8. Sarchasm: The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn’t get it.

9. Inoculatte: To take coffee intravenously when you are running late.

10. Hipatitis: Terminal coolness.

11. Osteopornosis: A degenerate disease. (This one got extra credit.)

12. Karmageddon: It’s like, when everybody is sending off all these really bad vibes, right? And then, like, the Earth explodes and it’s like, a serious bummer.

13. Decafalon (n.): The grueling event of getting through the day consuming only things that are good for you.

14. Glibido: All talk and no action.

15. Dopeler effect: The tendency of stupid ideas to seem smarter when they come at you rapidly.

16. Arachnoleptic fit (n.): The frantic dance performed just after you’ve accidentally walked through a spider web.

17. Beelzebug (n.): Satan in the form of a mosquito, that gets into your bedroom at three in the morning and cannot be cast out.

18. Caterpallor (n.): The color you turn after finding half a worm in the fruit you’re eating.

Batman

I have now watched all 5 Batman films. The first one (in storyline chronological order) is the latest one released - Batman Begins. All films are brilliant but quite different in their directing. Tim Burton made Batman and Batman Returns fairly dark and twisted, and you can really see the connection to some of his other films like The Nightmare Before Christmas.

It is hard to say who makes the best Batman, but Christian Bale and Val Kilmer make obvious choices.

I really like Val Kilmer, however his performance didn’t give as much depth as Christian Bale, but is defenitely stunning. George Clooney’s performance in Batman & Robin was undoubtedly the worst, and Arnold Schwartzanegger didn’t help that movie much.

As for best villain, now there is a hard question. All the villains are spectacular actors, and each have their own moments of pure brilliance. I don’t think there is anybody who can play crazy as well as Jim Carrey, although Jack Nicholson as The Joker is a masterful performance. Each villain is quite different, and the directing really helps to bring out the best (or worst?) of each. Uma Thurman does steal the show for Batman & Robin, leaving poor clooney and the rest of the superheroes looking pale in comparison.

As for gadgets and cool effects some of the best are probably in Batman Begins even though it really tries not to focus on the effects and more on the story. I think the fact that the gadgets are given little interest also adds to their effect, making them seem far more ingenious.

The effects do generally get wilder with each film, and the sets certainly get far more complex. Batman Forever and Batman & Robin have lots of UV paint as well as magnificent CGI cities and special effects, however it starts to feel way over the top in Batman & Robin.

The story is mostly consistent apart from Batman Begins completely changing the early history of Bruce Wayne by him trying to kill his parents’ killer when in fact in Batman it turns out that The Joker killed his parents. Then again in Batman Forever the story of his parents’ death is twisted a little too, making it seem more like random murder and losing any connection to who the killer actually was.

Overall I think that Batman Begins and Batman Forever are probably the best films. Batman and Batman Returns are marvellous films too, but going back to them is harder than you think and they do feel a little dated and the special effects not quite up to scratch. I would defenitely reccomend watching them all again (all except Batman & Robin which is too cheesy. On that note, do Americans not realise that “oxbridge” is not an actualy university, but a term for “Oxford University” and “Cambridge University”? Batwoman is the rejected student of oxbridge - whoever figured that storyline out should be banned from screenwriting)

IS02 v2 released (inc. stats and accounting viewer)

The extra project I had been working on before christmas has finally been approved and is released! The IS02 Broker Explorer support pack (v2) contains a whole pile of new features, including:

  • Control of remote brokers/config managers
  • Association of a broker with a config manager (local or remote)
  • Deploying a bar file (broker archive) to multiple execution groups at once
  • Viweing of accounting and statistics data, as well as remote control of accounting and statistics collection (snapshot data)

It is available for download from the IBM Support Website, and has now been released as a category 2 support pack, which means support for it is available from IBM.

http://www-1.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?rs=171&uid=swg24012457&loc=en_US&cs=utf-8〈=en

There should be a Developer Works article on it soon, I will let you know when it has been published!

[ Let me know what you think of the stats and accounting bit, as that is my code :) ]

Horrible F1 Accident

F1accident

RSS Feed now via feedburner

Inspired by The Lost Outpost I have moved my site theme to feedburner as I keep seeing links that I want to post but not write a full blog about. Feedburner allows you to splice in your del.icio.us links in every day. Now all I have to do is bookmark the interesting links in del.icio.us. I suppose I should also figure out some way of showing the latest links on the site too…

Edit: The new feeds are http://feeds.feedburner.com/Strangeparty and http://feeds.feedburner.com/CommentsForStrangeparty

BlueFusion 2007 - Done!

Thursday was the last day of this years Blue Fusion event. Friday was clearing and packing up, and the whole week even has left me quite exhausted. I will try and write a few posts to cover the activities we ran, but most of my time will be spent catching up with my day job and preparing to hand over the running of Blue Fusion to the new leads team, which will be chosen over the next few months from the recent graduates to Hursley who organised this years event. There were a lot of things we needed to know about this year- but didn’t, and I hope to make sure that we write all that down for next year’s team so that they have it a bit easier.

All in all I really enjoyed managing the event, and would probably consider doing it again if I were asked. Next year I think I might get involved with the development of an activity, possibly a computer based one…