Ian Lau visit

Lau came over to visit us this weekend for some climbing and some r&r after a busy few months involving lots of work and breaking his leg. Ouch. Still he is recovering well, and we had a couple of good days of sport climbing. Unfortunately we the weather was a bit ropey and we couldn't do the 12 pitch E1 we wanted to get on at Montserrat, but we spent an interesting day at Pas de la Mala Dona, a rather unconventional crag, in that the 'ground' is actually the top of a large concrete 'tunnel' built to protect the train track below! To make it even more bizarre, it is a sea cliff, and so this 'ground' area extends 5m from the base of the cliff, before dropping abruptly into the sea! The climbing is actually very good, mostly in the 6s, apart from the 'sector cueva' which has a handful of 7s and 8s.

I'm getting into the whole taking-a-video-on-the-mobile-thing now, so here's one I took of the place. If you look carefully, you might just see a certain Ian Lau allowing himself to be on camera. Shock!

Cavall Bernat Montserrat

Last weekend Jo Bertalot came to visit and we went out on Saturday to climb one of Catalunya’s famous peaks, the Cavall Bernat of Montserrat. It’s the obvious, err, finger, in the photo above. There are several routes to its summit, including an amenable 3 pitch grade 5 on the south face, but we plumped for the longest of the lot: a 300m, 8 pitch expedition up the north face. It is basically shaped like a giant scoop, with the first pitches being little more than scrambling, but then they get gradually steeper and harder as you reach the top! It was a great day out, though we did get royally whipped on the penultimate pitch, which was very stiff indeed for 6c+. Post-route discussion with Ferran suggests that there are some hidden holds further to the left – now he tells us!!

Here’s a video of your two heroes on top of the world, and with a funny steel statue to prove it:

Guest post: Dr Jonny K

Hello all you chaps out there. Dr Searle and I (Dr Kelly) are here enjoying Dr Evans´s hospitality. We have had a jolly fun time riding our bikes down the local dusty trails. A delicious beer on the beach topped off our bikey adventure.
Well this is Dr Jonny signing off, toodle pip and tinkety tonk! XXX

I love Barcelona so much, I've been Barcelonafied!

My mate Adam has restarted his blog about living in the capital of Catalunya, Barcelonafied. By all accounts it was going strong a year or so ago, but then the pressures of work and whatnot took their toll, and he left it slide. But now he's back - and with sidekicks! Raoul and I have been invited to contribute our er, scything wit and err, floorles righting stile to educate the public about how wonderful Barcelona is.

More specifically, I have an eye to write less about the city itself, and more about what's to do outside it. It should be good as Adam and Raoul's posts will probably focus more on the city and Catalan culture, so if you're interested then add it too your bookmarks or RSS feeds.

As you might have seen by now, my first post was about skiing, but these last two weeks have really reminded me how much of a cool place Barcelona is if you like outdoor sports. Apart from our skiing trip, I am back out on the rock again and climbing every Friday evening after work with Ferran. Here are a couple of pics from Gelida (a sports crag near me) and Montserrat:



I've also been out on Junior again recently. In my lunch break I can get up to the top to Tibidabo (the main hill overlooking the city), down the other side, back up again and all the way back down into the city and back to work. It's a good work out, and I've discovered a couple of excellent new trails. Unfortunately they're on the 'other side' of the mountain i.e. the side that faces away from the city, and the side that doesn't have funicular running up it! So it's saddle up and pedalling time. Ah well, good for my fitness. In a couple of weeks time Jonny K and Graham are coming out here to do some riding, and I'll need to keep up with them!

Spring sunset

I don' t usually 'do' neither photos of sunsets, nor stitched panaromas, but the view from our balcony tonight was one to break the rules...


a bigger version is here.

And we were singing...

...hymns and arias

Land of my Fathers

ar hyd y nos

Politics times two, this time local:

Despite saying I don't usually like talking politics on the blog, I thought I'd give you an update on the general election which occurred yesterday. José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero and his PSOE (Partido Socialista Obrero Español - Spanish Socialist Worker Party) was re-elected yesterday with an increased majority over Mariano Rajoy's PP (Partido Popular - People's Party, conservative), but not enough to form a majority government. He will probably form an informal coalition government with Catalan nationalist party Convergencia i Unío. The latter were the only minority party to come out unscathed, all the rest lost seats to the two main parties.

The election campaign was one of the most bitter and divisive in recent history, with Rajoy having consistently claimed Zapatero's last election victory in 2004 to be 'invalid' (the PSOE won a surprise victory, due to public backlash against the PP trying to pin the blame for the 2004 Madrid bombings on Basque separatists, when it was actually the work of Muslim extremists). The two television debates pitting the two main candidates against each other were seethingly tense affairs, with the more relaxed Zapatero winning one but the other resulting in a score-draw as Rajoy challenged hard on the economy and immigration. Tensions were further increased after the Basque terrorist organisation, ETA, murdered an ex-councillor of the PSOE just days before the election.

Yet Zapatero has prevailed with a fairly convincing victory. Undoubtedly the result is a good one for Catalunya, Zapatero is quite Catalan-friendly and the main Catalan nationalist party (which actually leans more to the right) will probably be part of his conglomerate government. It's also a good result for Spain as a whole, Rajoy is quite hard-line and several of his policies struck me as very regressive and poorly thought through, especially those on immigration (which would affect me, of course!), the devolution of power and his approach on how to deal with the problem of ETA.

Another very good bit of news was the turn-out statistic, a more-than-respectable 75%, equalling that of four years ago. Britain can only dream of such a high election turn-out, though I wonder whether it has anything to do with the fact that full democratic elections are still relatively new in Spain - only 30 years ago Franco was still ruling the country with an iron fist and a policy to shoot anybody who disagreed with him (not an exaggeration, unfortunately).

The only real shame of the result was that it has confirmed the bipartite nature of Spanish politics, though there are advantages and disadvantages to that. The big challenge now will be to see if Zapatero can steer Spain through the economic difficulty that lies ahead - despite low unemployment Spain is at the end of a boom, and without careful management and fair bit of luck the economy risks being bought back down to earth with a bump. Interesting times ahead...

Boris' buses

I rarely talk about politics on this blog, but Boris Johnson's claims of political bias in Transport for London has got me interested. It's quite an easy one to imagine, that a strongly unionised employer would support the left wing candidate for the election of over the right-wing candidate.

The row is over Boris's plans to bring back conductors and routemaster buses back to London's streets, replacing the bendy buses. It's a romantic idea, and quite a popular one I should imagine, becuase nobody really likes those bendy buses.

Boris is claiming that it would only cost 8 million pounds to hire the extra conductors, based on the fact that there are 337 bendy buses, thus 337 * 24,500 (salary of a conductor) = just over 8 million. Fine.

TFL has released it's figures about this. There are actually 390 bendy buses, and 350 on the road at any one time. Each bus works a twenty hour day, and is staffed by a rotation of three drivers. So actually you'd have to hire 350 * 3 = 1050 extra conductors.

But hang on, the capacity of bendy bus is 150 people. The capacity of a routemaster is 69 i.e. half. So you would actually have to have twice as many buses to maintain capacity, thus hire twice as many conductors. 2 * 1050 = 2100.

But hang on a little longer, becuase if you're doubling the buses, you'd need to double the drivers as well. So that's an extra 1050 drivers, each earning 35,000 a year.

So the total increased staffing cost for replacing the bendy buses with routemasters is:

2100 * 24,000 + 1050 * 35,000 = 87,150,000

More than ten times Boris' headline figure, and that's excluding the cost of hiring and training the extra staff, and replacing the actual buses themselves!!

I don't like Red Ken that much, there is undoubtedly some truth in the cronyism stories and so on. And it's very easy to like Boris, he's such an affable chap. The fact that TFL's figure disagree with his has got him crying of bias. But figures are figures, and Boris' just don't add up. If he can't do the simple maths for buses, he's in no way capable of running one of the world's greatest cities.

February update

Busy busy busy. That's what we are at the moment. Djanira is starting her new job today, as general manager of the Barcelona branch of GoCar, a tourism company just starting in Europe. Very exciting. My work is sort-of-busy, in that I am working on a European proposal and coordinating the work of several different universities and companies across Europe, which is time consuming without being busy, per se. I've also been back in blighty recently for Duples' stag do, and then of course there is our wedding to organise too!

Fortunately spring arrived right on time this weekend (a ga i ddymuno Dydd Gwyl Dewi hapus i bawb!) in Barcelona with beautiful blue skies and 20 degree temperatures. On saturday DJ and I went for a walk around Collserola, which is the national park just outside Barcelona, quite literally on the other side of Tibidabo (the hill that forms the backbone of the city). It is very strange to think that, as you stroll through peaceful forest, one of the largest cities in Europe is just over the hill, beyong Tibidado cathedral.


The fine weather continued for Sunday and so we headed out climbing. We'd been planning to go to la font de l'ametllò for some time, as it has a nice broad spread of grades. Unfortunately the rest of Catalunya seems to know this, and as we turned up at midday on Sunday it was as if we had arrived at Stanage on a nice spring day (only plus the bolts and the sunburn!). Towards the end of the day the crowd thinned out though, and we still had a very pleasant afternoon.


Earlier this month I was back in the homeland for Duples' stag do, which involved an 'adventure' thingy on some converted farm in north Wales. We had an afternoon go-carting and quad biking before going and watching Wales put one over Italy in the rugby, then onwards for a curry and a lot of beer. Shurely days don't get much better?!

me, dr kelly looking daft and Duples:

and last but not least I should report briefly on wedding plans, we have chosen our venue now, a beautiful old Masía (sort of country house thingie) about 20 mins drive from Barcelona. Here's a shot of the dining room for now, I'll see if I can find where DJ stored all the others she took of the outside:


Okay that's it for now, you never know I might even post again before the end of March...

Some January photos

Happy new year and all that. Here are some pics from January's activities.

Erik the Canadian visited Barcelona at the end of this two month Spanish climbing tour. We took him to Montserrat, an experience very different from the rest of Spanish limestone!


Yes , it really is this lovely in Catalunya in January. The next weekend Duples and Laura came out for a visit:

which was lovely, and I am seeing him again next month for his stag do, and again the month after for his wedding!

Every couple of weeks the crew out here (the male members of which, at least) get together with an Xbox or two and some wall projectors for some multiplayer computer game madness. Good fun indeed:

And most recently my old mate Richie Astbury was out here last weekend and we headed up to the pyrannees for some snowboarding action...

...and I invented a new move...the ass-grind:

And last but not least, I got engaged :D

Some early results

As you will recall, I am now working for Fundació Barcelona Media, and the main focus of my work at the moment is on a pan-european project called SALERO, which "aims at making cross media-production for games, movies and broadcast faster, better and cheaper by combining computer graphics, language technology, semantic web technologies as well as content based search and retrieval".

Specifically I am working on facial animation, and recently I was invited to upload a short video to the project's youtube channel. The official blurb to go with the video goes a bit like:

The purpose of this video is to demonstrate the concept of being able to transfer pre-exising facial animation from a low-resolution mask to any high resolution face. The 'Maskle' is placed over the face, allowing the bone structure to be automatically created, and the animation skin weights to be transferred. Current work is focussing on movement of the maskle to enable its automatic fitting to a variety of face shapes.

and the video itself looks like:

10 essential bits of software

My new laptop arrived the other day and the first thing I did was to wipe the drive and reinstall Windows, partially to ensure there was no bloatware hanging around the system (although Dell are actually very good about this, there was very little pre-installed rubbish) and partially because I wanted an English language copy of Windows, and the installation of a language pack to the pre-installed Spanish version was proving to be a more-hassle-than-it's-worth jobbie.

After reinstalling I went through the usual rigmarole of downloading and installing all the "bits of software I can't live without" (or, at least, "can't use a copy of Windows without"), and I thought I might aswell write a short list of these, simply because I found many of these excellent programs through recommendations published on blogs, just like this one.

The most important criteria for any of these programs is that they have to be as small and as fast as possible - by that I mean they should use as little system resources as possible, and not worm themselves into every single corner of your Windows installation. I don't like waiting 10 minutes for my PC to start up, and the more things that are hidden away in the registry, the slower everything runs. They should also be pretty easy to install/remove and, of course, they should be free! So here's my top 10, pretty much in the order that I would download them:

1) Firefox - Bit of a no-brainer this one. If you're not using it, you're missing out on the wonderful world of Extensions. The fact that Firefox is open source means that anybody in the world can develop a plugin that 'extends' the functionality of the browser, in a way that neither Internet Explorer or Safari can manage to the same level. My must-have extensions are Adblock (with Filterset.G), the Google Notebook extension (more on this later) and the wordreference.com search tools for English-Spanish and vice versa.

2) Grisoft AVG Free - Forget paying for McAfee, Norton, Symantec or F-Secure. For some time Grisoft have offered their free, cut-down version of their anti-virus software, and it's great. You don't get all the bells and whistles, but you do get a virus checker that provides live scanning of every file that passes through your system, and lets you schedule exactly when you want it to update itself. Unless you are given a free copy of another product, there's no reason to use anything else.

3) SpyBot Search and Destroy - One of the original spyware killers which, through creaking a little on Vista, still does a good job. Download and run once in a while, just for piece of mind. It's a shame the other 'must-have' spyware killer, Adaware, has shot itself in the foot with its 2007 release as it has an 'updater' that permanently runs in the background, which is rather ironic when you think about it.

4) 7-zip - Windows does an okay job of integrating zip-file functionality, but doesn't deal with other compressed formats, notably *.rar. 7zip is to my mind the king of compression software. Small, discreet, well-written, and very very powerful.

5) Google Talk - Instant messaging, file transfer, VoIP telephone calls, and email notification. Essential for those with a gmail account, useless otherwise. You do use gmail though, right?

6) uTorrent - Contrary to popular belief, there are legal uses to file-sharing software. Just the other day I downloaded the freeware version of Rebirth RB338, which is only available as a torrent. Of course, the less-than-legal use of such technology (which of course I whole-heartedly condemn) is why there are hundreds of bit-torrent clients, of which uTorrent consistently gets the best reviews.

7) Picasa - While I'm a little bit alarmed by Google's increasing world dominance, there no denying that if you like fast, useful software, much of their stuff is up there with the best. Picasa is a pretty good photo management software, and has a fair stab at being photo editor, but its strongest feature is a seamless link to an excellent web album. If you already have a google account, it's the easiest way of publishing photos on the web.

8) Paint.NET - Windows' old Paint program is a throwback to the days of Windows 3.1 and I was astounded to see it still bundled with Vista. Yet on many occasions you don't want to open up Photoshop or the GIMP just to save a screen grab, or to do some simple image editing. Enter stage left Paint.NET, the MS-approved-unofficial-replacement to Paint. It is simple, quick, yet vastly more powerful that its predecessor.

9) Real Alternative - RealPlayer is a horrible bit of software. The default install spreads itself everywhere, tried to hijack your system so that it is the default player for everything, throwing popups every now and again, nagging you to update it every 5 minutes, and generally being a pain in the arse. Unfortunately, if you are outside the UK, to listen to BBC Radio online you have to use it - or so I thought! Fortunately there is an alternative - the Real Alternative only installs the codec (the file required to decode audio data encoded in a certain format) that RealPlayer uses, thus letting you listen to the BBC free and without hassle.

10) Foxit Reader - For similar reasons to number (9) above, I don't like Acrobat Reader. The latest version is ridiculously slow, is bundled with all sorts of useless nonsense, and has an annoying 'update' program which lurks around in the background. There are variety of alternative pdf readers, but this one was the first I found, and I can see absolutely no reason to change, as it is small, unobtrusive, and over twice as fast as Adobe Reader. And while we're talking about pdfs, don't forget there are some nifty tools that such as PDF995 and Bullzip that let you 'print' a pdf.

Lastly, honourable mention should go to something which is less software and more of a service. Google Notebook is essentially a mobile, searchable, bookmarks folder, which lets you save interesting pages or useful bits of text, and access them via the web from anywhere in the world. When combined with the relevant Firefox extension, I think it is the single most useful thing that has come out of internet development for several years. Of course, all this means that I am now sharing my emails, photos and personal favourites which one of the largest companies on earth...let's just hope they stick to their "Don't be evil" motto!

Windy Weather at Pooh Corner

For the last 24 hours much of the eastern coast of Spain has been battered by 70 mph gusts of wind, which has seen a fair bit of damage but no serious accidents. Last night I woke up at 3pm, cursing the neighbour that had forgotten to secure their window shutters, which were clattering away in a very annoying fashion. 10 noisy minutes later it dawned on me that that annoying neighbour was in fact, me; so I spent a chilly five minutes on our balconies tying things down. On my commute to work this morning I was expecting to see big waves, but as you can see from the photo, it was pretty flat, and the wind and had completely died, very disappointing.


In other news, Djanira and I drove down to the Costa Blanca this weekend for some climbing. It was a 'puente' weekend - bank holidays in Spain are taken on the exact date, not the nearest monday as in Britain, and the result is that if the holiday falls on a tuesday or thursday, most people 'make a bridge' ('hace puente') and take the intervening monday or friday off for a four day weekend. This is what we did this weekend, and it's a good job too becuase it's bloody miles down to the Costa Blanca. The climbing there is excellent and it of course the weather was superb - sunny and 20+ degrees every day, much warmer than up here in Catalunya (although, it IS still sunny here ;) Here are some piccies:


Both of us were quite pleased to get climbing again and, although not at peak fitness, there were still signs of life in the forearms. Dj was doing particularly well as she led several routes which has given her some more confidence in ropework and the leading system. She's yet to take a lead fall though! On Saturday we hope to able to get out again to one of the local crags, and we might even try and get a bit of floodlit climbing done at La fuixarda (Barcelona's crag/climbing wall). Might be a little chilly though!

Why biometric ID is a bad idea

I'm not all that against the idea of an compulsory ID card. I mean, most of us carry around enough stuff with us anyway - driver licenses, bank cards, AA cards etc. that it makes no difference. And here in Spain (and elsewhere in much of Europe) everybody carries their photo ID (which you have to show when buying anything using a credit/debit card) and it's not a big deal.

However, I am very against the use of biometric data, such as fingerprints or iris data, for the purposes of identification. For one simple reason: once it is stolen, it cannot be reset.

If somebody gets hold of your bank card details, your PIN number, your passport number, your email, your drivers license etc. it's a pain, yes, but a quick phone call to relevant people and the old number/card/document is declared void, and you get a new one. If somebody steals your fingerprint, they have it for life. Furthermore, we leave our fingerprints on every single thing we touch. And yes, it really is that easy to make a copy, as the ever-reliable Ben Goldacre demonstrates.

Via Ferrata in Andorra

The rest of the piccies are here.

While Djanira was away in Madagascar over the summer, I popped back to London for a week or so, and one afternoon I ended up in Stanfords on Long Acre (as you do) where I happened upon a newish Cicerone guidebook entitled "The Mountains of Andorra". Within seconds of picking it up I was walking to the counter - it is a well-written summary of about 50 walks in the Andorran Pyrannees, and just what I was looking for. But the really interesting stuff was at the end of the book, a chapter describing the Via Ferrata of Andorra.

Via Ferrata is a style of climbing which, to paraphrase the guidebook description, "goes against the primary rule of the mountains (leave only footprints, take only photographs), but there is no denying it is a lot of fun". Essentially, a via ferrata ("iron way") is a metal cable which has been laid or strung up the side of mountain, for the purpose of the safety of people who wish to climb it. Basically, you clip a carabiner, attached to your climbing harness via a metre of rope to the cable, so if you happen to fall, the cable saves you from doing so to your death. The story goes that the original via ferrata were created to enable the Italian army to rapidly cross the Dolomites, and it is there that this style of mountaineering is still most famous (though, thanks to Helicopters, the army doesn't use them any more). Yet as the popularity of climbing and mountain sports in general increases, many other areas (such as Andorra) are spending the time and money creating Via Ferrata to increase tourism and boost the economy.

The construction of the Andorran ferrata has been quite a success. As a country, Andorra is blessed with a vast quantity of rock (it is right the middle of Pyrannees) but unfortunately much of it is quite shattered and not so suitable for pure rock-climbing. This is where the Via Ferrata comes in, as it lets you link the good bits of climbing by letting you quickly and safely scramble over the less attractive sections (you climb Ferrata with light walking boots). They are very generously equipped with metal rungs (more so than in the dolomites, so I've heard) so that if you can climb a ladder, you can reach the top. However, what this means is that they lead you into wildly overhanging and exposed territory (in climbing terms, places you'd need to be leading E-something to get to) and they are not for the faint of heart or those without a head for heights.

This weekend was a bank holiday weekend and so DJ and I spent four days in Andorra with some friends, did three via ferrata and a Very Long Walk. It was completely awesome, the last day in particular leading us up a mountain that is essentially one large cliff, finishing off with a tightrope suspension bridge. I say again, it was completely awesome, and we are hooked on this via ferrata stuff. It's going to have wait for a while now though as, despite this weekend's good weather, the first snows have reached Andorra already and everybody's fingers are crossed for a good ski-season. Still, there's no reason the ferrata can't be done in the snow!

Some time ago I blogged about how the Wii was looking like the way forward for the gaming industry. The Xbox 360 and PS3 may have the better graphics, but the Wii has its motion sensitive controller, possibly the most revolutionary item of gaming hardware since the joystick was invented. I was interested to re-read my words from back then, because I raved about how the Wii looked great, while the PS3 looked dead in the water, and that I wasn't that impressed with the Xbox360. Yet, as you will notice by scrolling down the page a little, the other day I got me an Xbox, not a Wii. Why? Well to answer that question, we have to talk about the Wii version of a game called Rockstar Presents Table Tennis.

The game was first released on the Xbox 360 over a year ago, and made a big impact due to it's outstanding graphics, addictive gameplay, and cheap price. In fact, the existence of the game contributed to my decision to buy an Xbox360 rather than a Wii or PS3, in that it is part of a large catalog of excellent games that I wanted to play, that were only available for the Xbox. The news that it had been ported recently to the Wii made me feel a little sick - surely the idea of actually being able to *play* virtual table tennis, crafting shots with a motion sensitive controller, would make this version superior to that on the Xbox? In which case, had a just bought the wrong console?

Well, from reading about the game, and from having played around a bit with other games on Wii, it would appear that my fears are unfounded. Yes you can use the motion sensitive controller to play table tennis, but in a completely unrealistic way. You don't hit the ball as you would do with a table tennis bat, you have to learn to make the correct gesture in order to hit the ball in the desired direction - it doesn't even separate the different swings for forehand and backhand - and to impart spin (crucial in table tennis) you have to resort to pushing buttons on the controller body. Basically, you still have to learn an artificial control scheme before you can actually play the game which, for me, rather nullifies the point of having motion sensitive controller.

The other big difference is the fact that there is no online play in the Wii version. Playing another human being is vastly more satisfying than playing an artifical intelligence, and online play gives you a greater opportunity to do that. Lastly, the graphics are crap, at least compared to the almost-lifelike quality of those of the Xbox verion. I know this shouldn't matter, but when you're comparing two versions of the same game, there's no doubt that it does.

I must admit that, in general, and having played it a bit at a mate's house and in FNAC, I'm quite disappointed with the Wii. Yes, it is a significant milestone in computer gaming. Yes, it has been a commercial success. Yes, it has drawn in grannies and mums and all sorts of people that never thought they would play a video game, ever. And you have to applaud Nintendo for achieving that. Yet all it has managed to do is pull the wool over people's eyes, glossing over the necessity to learn an artificial control system by making it seem more real - but real it is not, and learn it you must. For those of us less scared of traditional console joypads, the wiimote is actually a regressive step, offering less precision and less opportunity to practice and master a game's interface.

So although the Wii is a step in the right direction, I'm happy with the Xbox for the time being. Eventually, somebody will develop a commercially viable controller that is able to properly mimic the motion of a virtual table-tennis bat, and let you play near-as-dammit real table tennis against some random person in another part of the world. That would be worth paying money for.

Rugby Final

I watched the game in some Irish bar downtown. Possibly the dullest game of rugby I've ever watched. I spotted this on the Guardian's website, a comment by some anonymous person,

Well done England for getting to the final with a crap team. I hope it will be some solace to you to know that Wales scored 50 points more than you despite playing three games fewer.

Home come Johnny didn't do that thing with the drop goal in the dying minutes?

Xbox 360

Despite my last post, it would seem that recently I've gone all Microsoft crazy in that I've installed Vista, and got me an Xbox 360. Now I'm no great fan of Microsoft, but neither am I a Sony/Nintendo/Mac/Linux/Unix/ fanboy, and I wanted to see what all the fuss was about.

So, the Xbox. I have been thinking of getting one for ages, tempted by stories of online gaming, cheap retro games and Media Centre compatibility. What finally tipped the cart was a miserable wet Saturday morning (after I'd just come back from a miserable week in Germany), a lack of Djanira in the flat, and only the sixth ever 10/10 given to a game by Edge Magazine, for Halo 3.

So, is all the hype worth it? Well, there's no denying that, by and large, it all seems to work very well. Xbox Live (the name given to the online gaming portal) couldn't be easier to set up, but the biggest novelty is not just being able to play games online (the PC sorted this years ago), but being able to speak to other players in real time. The Xbox comes with a (wireless) controller and a headset unit that plugs into it, which enables communication between players. It's quite something to be able to play Rockstar's Table Tennis against a human-being located who-knows-where in the world; but it's something else entirely being able to speak to them as you play, congratulate them on a good shot, complement each other after a good rally or, more usually in my case, excuse oneself for being completely rubbish. The headset, and its default inclusion into the Xbox Live experience, is what elevates online gaming on the console above that what is available for the PC. Sure, there are a million and one gaming-talk applications on the PC, while on the Xbox there is only one - but everybody is using it.

There other excellent feature of Xbox Live is 'Xbox Live Arcade', a growing collection of old-school (though not necessarily old) arcade games that can be downloaded and saved to the console's hard-drive for a few quid each. Most of them have a free demo-level for you to try, and while many of them are rubbish, some are excellent. Geometry Wars is one of the most popular and has become a classic, proving that you don't need amazing graphics to have a great game, but I'm very excited about SpeedBall 2, a classic amiga game which I used to play with my cousin John when I was a kid, which is being revamped for Xbox Live Arcade. Lastly, Xbox Live lets you download free demos for all the latest full-price releases, nothing new for a PC gamer but a welcome bonus for your average consolista.

The final clincher for me is the console's integration with a PC running XP Media Centre or Vista. The Xbox connects with the Media Centre, allowing you to access the music and video stored on your PC through the console. This works well for me as my PC (and all my music) is not in the lounge, but my Xbox is: ergo I can listen to tunes in the lounge without having to go through the hassle of burning a CD and all that. There's no doubt that the interface is very slick and it all works well, though the lack of native DivX and Xvid video support on the Xbox is what prevents it from being the all-in-one solution. Still, it is very impressive.

So, to conclude; from what I've experienced and read of the PS3 and the Wii, the Xbox is quite comfortably ahead in terms of functionality, at least at the moment. Of course, the fact that it is an accomplished single-player gaming system is one thing, but what really sets it apart is its online and media centre capabilities. All I need now is get some of you lot to come and join me in Halo 3's cooperative mode...

Old Microsoft joke

I was searching the internet for some help with a little code problem I had, and stumbled across this page, which consists of some bloke asking a question (exactly the same one as I had) and a Microsoft employee giving an answer:

http://www.thescripts.com/forum/thread300172.html

Upon reading it I was instantly reminded of old joke which, given the employee's response in the link above, is based upon reality...!

A helicopter was flying around above Seattle when an electrical malfunction disabled all of the aircraft's electronic navigation and communications qquipment. Due to the clouds and haze, the pilot could not determine the helicopter's position and course to fly to the airport. The pilot saw a tall building, flew toward it, circled, drew a handwritten sign, and held it in the helicopter's window. The pilot's sign said "WHERE AM I?" in large letters. People in the tall building quickly responded to the aircraft, drew a large sign and held it in a building window. Their sign read: "YOU ARE IN A HELICOPTER." The pilot smiled, waved, looked at her map, determined the course to steer to SEATAC airport, and landed safely. After they were on the ground, the co-pilot asked the pilot how the "YOU ARE IN A HELICOPTER" sign helped determine their position. The pilot responded "I knew that had to be the Microsoft building because, like their technical support, online help and product documentation, the response they gave me was technically correct, but completely useless."

Barf!

Internet at last!

You may recall a solution that a friend of mine employed to gain access to his neighbours wireless networks, with the aid of a wok as an arial to boost the signal. Well, had i been following my friends example over the last few months, then I would no longer need to, because now finally our flat is connected to the outside world! We had organised for one company to come and connect us up, but after three months of waiting nothing had happened, so we said bugger it and went with another company - and yesterday (less than a fortnight after I had requested it) the engineers came and installed the service. I'll be changing the default 'security' settings on my wireless router though!

In other news, the last three days have seen a solid 2 foot of swell, which in the mornings is glassy clean, but more choppy by the evening after the wind has picked up. Unfortunately, lazy bones Alun hasn't been bothered to get up early enough to enjoy it clean, and has only watched it enviously on his ride to work, and gone in in the evening instead. But the clocks go back sooner rather than later so ther'll be no time for surfing after work, so I'll have to get my arse in gear in the mornings.

And one funny story to finish off. Yesterday afternoon it started to rain, and I couldn't help chuckling as the whole off office stopped working and walked to the window to look. In fairness, it was a quite impressive heavy shower, but the thought struck me that if people behaved similarly in Britain, nobody would get any work done!