After a bit of an arduous birth Space Giraffe for the PC is all done and out in the wild 
Why am I writing about it here? I am sort of tangentially involved. I’ve always been a big fan of Jeff’s work and helped him get the deal with MS for doing the X360 visualizer and Space Giraffe’s release on XBLA.
I helped a little on the PC version though oddly it was more my rusty coding skills than biz ones that were called on. It’s been a nice learning experience. I got understand the whacky world of PC graphics and do quite a lot of optimisation work, a few changes managed to speed the game up considerably. Space Giraffe now runs really well on lowish level hardware. You can get a good game out of it on Radeon 9600, a six year old card I also got to learn a lot about rails and built an ecommerce site to sell the game and a very basic CRM allowing others to update the LS web site. Nice to do a bit of spare time dev and see the results out in the wild 
Anyway it’s taken a while but he guys have now finished the game. You find out all about it, download a demo or even buy the game here:
- http://www.llamasoft.co.uk/
It’s $20 which seems to be the standard price for indy games right now and offers a complete graphical overhaul for the game’s 100 levels as well as containing the original look of the X360 version. I’m a massive fan of the game but then again I would be wouldn’t I?
Absolutely fizzing furious this morning. We’re currently in the position of trying to rent a place in Dundee. Work is taking us north of the border so me, Suzey and Charlie hauled it up to Scotland to look at some properties to let. We saw 5 in all and one was absolutely perfick.
Now before starting out on this course we were warned by a few friends that Dundee estate agents are notoriously awful. The market is pretty liquid up there, properties go quickly and you don’t have be the sharpest tool in the box to lease stuff out. We were warned it’s not unusual for the agents to uncommunicative and to find a property you’ve offered on has gone with no warning at all.
And that’s what’s happened to us. We saw a place we really liked, said we wanted and then spent since then trying to get any traction with the estate agents only to find out this morning from their front desk that the house has gone. This despite the point we’d got to was waiting for a call back from the agents last Friday.
So it means another trip to Scotland and another couple of days looking round for places to live and even less chance of getting there before Christmas. My rage-o-meter is on full infuriate.
Luckily this picture cheered me up a bit
Got a Canon 5D mk II today. It’s a great bit of kit with some nice increments from the old 5D. Best of all though is the addition of a HD video mode. You can see the results here:
And the you can see them in super duper extra ultra rez HD here:
http://www.blockcopycoders.com/temp/charlie_test2.mov
Being able to use your SLR lenses is a massive boon, everything looks so nice it’s amazing. It is trickier to use than a standard HD vide camera, there’s not autofocus once you start shooting and the huge control you have over the image also means you can get a little overwhelmed by the options available to you. Even so I’m sure a bit of time will get me used to it.
In other news we’re off to Scotland next week, should be good to visit there but this time taking Suzey and Charlie. Hopefully I’ll be able to post a bit more with some pics and vids
It’s all been so hectic there’s just not been a chance to blog. Wanted to mention this, it’s BallzUp Lite, a great little iPhone game by G that’s now available on the iTunes Store. You can get it right here if you’ve iTunes on your machine.
If you have a Mac then there’s a playable demo on the Touchy Toy Stuff site right here. Congrats to G for getting his first game out there
Bit of travelling today. Away until Sunday and not surprisingly it’s very hard to be away from home right now. It’s all the fault of these characters:
We’ve made a good one there. It’s been a real treat seeing his personality continue to emerge over the last 4 months. Rather worryingly he’s showing a fascination with computer screens and has a favourite TV show. In The Night Garden is what the Telly Tubbies people did next and is similarly colourful, repetitive and continually baffling to its precursor. Shall we go by Ninky Nonk or Pinky Ponk asks Dereck Jacobi every episode. I still don’t know the answer to that and don’t think I ever will.
That said Charlie seems to have a crush on Upsy Daisy and even goes a bit radio rental when shown the babies In The Night Garden book Suzey got him. It’s amazing to see someone so young in scanning the book’s pages in rapt attention waiting for each page turn. All in all despite some difficult nights (Suzy gets the worst of this) and the vomiting and occasional screaming, he’s a constant delight
Travelling is made a bit easier thanks to my iPhone and the Genius function in the latest firmware update. I know I sound like a MacWanker 
but it is pretty ace. Genius allows me to select one track I like and then BY WITCHCRAFT a playlist is constructed of songs Genius thinks complement that choice. I’m a bit of a bugger for buying music and then not taking the time to listen to it so this has been perfect.
It’s like having your very own electronic music antiquarian taking you on a guided tour around the dark recesses of your music collection. I’ve been quite surprised to find out that, among others, I like Blonde Redhead and My Bloody Valentine a lot more than ever suspected before.
I don’t like fupping BATTLES though, Atlas pollutes every list for some reason despite being a terrible song which sounds those genetically engineered midgets in Bladerunner having a sing song. Anyway. Genius is mostly Genius, if you’re not an insufferable mac using iphone zealot already I would heartily recommend you to start being so.
So that’s my from the train blog update. The travelling right now isn’t for nowt. It’s work stuff but good work stuff edging us a little bit nearer to taking our company closer to where we want to be. There’s a -long- way to go (and maybe what we want will never happen) and this is just a little step mind but a step never the less
Sitting here at the isle of wight Garlic Festival watching a really terrible band singing a terible song where the chorus is ” These are the best days of our life”
I don’t know much about bands and that but I suspect that when you start out on the road of wild rock and roll you’re not hoping that you’ll one day end up headlining a Garlic Festival.
Oh well Alvin Stardust is on at four
I received the handlebar mount for my GPS yesterday and today got to test it out. It turns out my daily route is 10.1 miles. After a quick look around the web I found the site Everytrail.com that lets you upload your trip’s GPX file gives you some snazzy info about the speed and elevation changes over the journey all on top of a google map. I can even embed it here:
Widget powered by EveryTrail: GPS Geotagging
Just slide the arrow along the bar and you can see me speeding down Mousehole Lane and grinding slowly up Burgess Road
EDIT
DOH! Does’t work in Livejournal, click through to my wordpress site to see it in action
As expected the inoculations weren’t very nice. The people at the surgery were great but whatever way you do it getting a couple of jabs in the thigh at the age of 9 weeks isn’t going to be anything but painful. Here’s the little chapper before:
And here just after 
Poor wee chap, if either of us could have done this for him we would have. He soon settled down and within a couple of hours was back to his smiling best. Another set in a month’s time and it’s Suzey’s turn to hold him this time
Hoorah! Got some new inner tubes and fixed my bike yesterday which put me in good spirits today to cracked my 10 mile cherry. Here’s the route I took early this morning:
It didn’t help having to cycle through a fair bit of drizzle and a hangover. I really can’t do lots of beer any more. Last night out with Tony and Karl was excellent fun but as I get older the morning after consequences are getting more severe. It was pretty funny that Karl’s taken up cycling too, he’s further into it than me and did the London / Brighton in June. Fish suggested doing that next year and I could well be up for it.
In the meantime I’m now aiming for 15 miles by the end of next week. To help me stay enthusiastic I’ve now got a cateye cycling computer and ordered handlebar mount for the Garmin GPS Suzey got me last year That’s an excellent intersection of biking and nerding right there and should mean I can upload routes into google maps sometime soon.
In other news it may not be a great day today; the boy gets his inoculations later this afternoon and from what we understand it can be pretty grim for the litter fella. We’ve the calpol on standby but neither of us are relishing seeing him go through this. We’ve been told by a couple of people that once settled it’s not unusual for the baby to do a 12 hour stretch of sleep after but getting them settled can be pretty distressing. Fingers crossed for 2pm.
