Journals

Vista blows! >:[

Merry Christmas over here from london! yes. Christmas.

Christmas arrived aproximately 40 days later than expected and now it has brought us a "huge" layer of snow about 5cm deep. yeah, huge. The hugest snow we'v had in 18 years! yeah.
more here

Its a national catastrophy over here, End of the world?
All bus services have been suspended, all primary schools have been closed, most underground and train services have been suspended and almost every single flight in the airports near or in london has been suspended because of this 5cm deep snow.

No one can go to work or leave it and no one can certainly leave london,
And the news people state that no one must leave home unless absolutely necessary (lol).

Edit: 6 million people didnt go to work today because of this. lol.
_____

Now thats what i call Christmas eh?.

...
Funny. all this happens at my sisters birthday 0.O

A recent forum discussion got me curious about other countries' education systems, so please explain yours here in as consise a way as possible.

Scotland:
Primary School (P1 - P7): Starting at age 5, scottish kids do a mandatory 7 years of Primary school.

Secondary School/High School (S1 - S4): The first 4 years are mandatory, as students study at a "Standard Grade." With Standard Grades, students of ages 16 and up can leave education entirely and get a job, or go straight to college from here.

Higher Secondary School/High School (S5 - S6): The optional final 1 or 2 years (depending on your course choices) will see students studying for Highers. These are held with greater regard than England's A-levels. Depending on exam success, S6 can be devoted to an Advanced Higher.

College:
Depending on success at school, students can study for a National Certificate (NC,) a Higher National Certificate (HNC,) or a Higher National Diploma (HND.) There are also hundreds of further education courses that fall outside these three categories. Courses can last between a year and 3 years.

Uni:
Having never been myself, i can't really say. All i know is that it's a lot more theory work than the practical work of colleges. I guess universities are pretty universal.

Well, I finished the second video with gta4 ( it's actualy the third, but the first one is just too lame).
Now , I know most of you won't like you, but I tried to make this a little funnier than the last one I posted here.

Don't even try to watch it in normal quality. Only high-quality please ...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bbJBURVXv0k

*boo striker, asshole,gtfo, this is bullshit ! *

[EDIT] Added a vimeo video : http://www.vimeo.com/3045117

Finally bought this! = )

Wanted to get this too, but i relented, aww.... ='(

Some random stuff I found funny. Just thought to share it with everyone for no apparent reason.

TF2 - Outtakes 1
TF2 - Outtakes 2
Yup, TF2 - Outtakes 3

Got back from holiday up at QLD Australia the other day - very warm.
Temps have been just stupid too - its nearly 40 deg C.

Theres something really wrong with the weather i think.

A 5-day-old child is brought to the emergency department because he has been difficult to arouse over the last 6 hours. His parents report that he has not been interested in feeding today and that he has been breathing rapidly and with a grunting noise. On physical examination, the infant's heart rate is 185 beats/min, respiratory rate is 80 breaths/min, and blood pressure is 55/40 mm Hg. A pulse is palpable in the right brachial region, but not in the feet. All of his extremities are cool and mottled, with a capillary refill of more than 2 seconds.
Of the following, the MOST appropriate next step is to

arrange for echocardiography at the first appointment in the morning

initiate a furosemide infusion

initiate a prostaglandin infusion

obtain a computed tomography scan of the head

obtain a lumbar puncture

Hey ! I made a video with gta4 and I uploaded it on youtube.

Here's the link : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=slLInUWAVl0

Please excuese me for the bad quality of the video.
The video is intended to be funny altough it may contain violent scenes.
I hope you enjoy it !

Good things DO happen to good people.

I went to an internship interview today. I have only went to two interview previously and this one was high stakes. Armed only with basic tips and a flatbook of 25 of my absolute best works in it (Riverpool included, lol). I wear my best with a suit and tie, dress shoes, belt, shaved, combed hair and a light dab of my expensive cologne (not too much, people hate it when you smell like a flower). I arrive at his office after scrambling around for a moment looking for some business building. Turns out its the guy's house and the "shop" is a million-dollar house on lake-front property surrounded by more million-dollar properties. The Vice-President of Operations answers the door... he was in a shirt and shorts (boxers?) and invited me in. The place is stupendously royal with Hawaiian art and posters of Jimmi Hendrix, with a CD collection to boot.

The interview took place on his patio facing the lake. He told me about his company and where they are going and what they are about. After his intro, I hand him my flatbook and he takes a gander at it. He gets half-way, silence so far, and exclaims "Your work is bad-ass!" One of the other workers there give him his pen back, I met him aswell, and he showed the employee my flatbook, he too was very impressed and recommends I work with them on the new project they have undertook. We traded experience and tools-we-know stuff and there he has no problem with the way I do things, in fact, he is allowing me to choose my tools to get things done, either bring them in or he will get them to me somehow.

The rest of the time was meeting the rest of the staff who worked like friends around the guy's home casually. They were all impressed and were eager to see what I could bring to the table. At the end I mentioned transportation was an issue because I have not a car, but only a bike. The guy offered a carpool scenario, and if I wanted to come later and stay later, I could (likely won't though). I exit his "shop" and text my ride who had run off to do errands. The vice-pres comes around in his SUV and asks "You need a ride, buddy?" I declined and said my ride is on the way.

I got a place in a very prestigous group and he plans to keep me there and turn it into a career for me. I'm totally cool with that.

This day has been epic and win.

As I write this I'm exactly 2 minutes and 4 seconds into being 17 years of age, sadly I still only have one hair on my chin and a few under my lip, but I guess the hair in other places compensates for tha-

We're getting slightly side tracked here...

My parents bought me some stuff for my car, so now I look like an awesome boy racer(!) I'll be so cool. -_-' And I have my first driving lesson in 15 hours.

In other news, I'm not allowed to have sex with a girl for two weeks so I win World Of Goo off Huntey, tommorrow is the first week mark, only one more to go! (Don't ask)

Get your credit card ready Huntey! >=]

Obama details his economic recovery plan in the weekly YouTube address.

I never thought that I would bookmark the White House website.

But I just did.

Obama gave the site a new life.

Yeah, moving to Source.

Starting with the Room Compo for source.

I originally posted this on LiveJournal, so it's a little light on technical talk, and a little heavy on explanation to non-Hammer-savvy civilians, but it's relevant here too!

January is half-gone already, and it's been an interesting month so far, full of ups and downs. I'm not here to talk about those, though; I'm here to talk about my next HLDM mapping project. I'm actually slipping this in front of the ongoing work on Lab11: Erupt, and I'm basically treating it as a "quicky" project -- which, for me, means less than a month. Hopefully. Needless to say, there's a back-story...

Many moons ago (mid 2004) my buddy Ben built an HLDM level of his own. I'd already built a couple, and was working on another - off-hand I don't remember which one - and he wanted to get in on the act and express a few ideas of his own. It was his first -- and so far, his only; with a wife (and now a child) Ben does not have as much free time on his hands as I do -- and he'll be the first to admit that it is not as, uh, visually polished as it could be. That level was (and is) called Canyon.

The original design idea behind Canyon was the same original idea that drove the creation of my first level, LavaLab: quite simply, "glass walkways". In fact, one of my false starts before I settled on the LavaLab setting was a canyon. I didn't know enough back then (and was working under an artificially imposed constraint which I have since ignored) to do the idea justice, and finally set about to remedy the situation with my most recent level, Lab11: LavaLab... Of course, the remake has no glass walkways at all, and the original had them pared back to squeeze the level into that constraint I mentioned, so I haven't yet managed to produce a level making proper use of the idea. I'm sure it will manifest itself at some future point in my map-building career...

(Edit: Ben tells me that the original design idea behind Canyon was actually one of the extremely vertical, vertigo-inducing levels of one of the Jedi Knight shooters, combined with some other canyon-like level we'd seen. Live 'n learn, huh?!)

Canyon, meanwhile, ended up with a grand total of one glass walkway, and absolutely no "canyon"-like features apart from its being a long deep hole. The story that we developed to explain the purpose of this facility was that it is a garbage disposal thing, but there was little in the design to back up that explanation. A couple of years ago, with Ben's permission, I set out to "reimagine" the idea, making the place a rocky hole on an asteroid somewhere, with a garbage compactor at the bottom. I was using a set of grungy tech textures from the same guy who made the Egyptian texture set I'd used in my Necropolis: Mausoleum level, and I was excited. The attempt stalled, however - I'll get back to it sometime - and I then decided to work on the remake of LavaLab instead.

At around that time we discovered that Ben had mislaid the source files - the MAP and RMF - from which the playable BSP file is compiled. Without those, he was unable to make any changes to his level, and over the years that we've been playing it, he had numerous things he wanted to fix, or change, or add. At the time I hunted out a decompiler, which takes a BSP file and generates a MAP. The process is far from perfect, and the resulting MAP file would have required a lot of work just to get it back to its current state, so he (and I) gave up on the attempt.

Then, in the lead up to my release of Lab11: LavaLab - something we both highly anticipated (Ben with delight; myself with more than a hint of trepidation) - we stopped playing whichever of my levels we had been playing and switched back to Canyon. After we started playing my level, of course, we had Ben's on our minds. One thing led to another and, on a whim, I went looking for another decompiler. Of the few I found, one gave us a MAP file which was almost useable. I rubbed my chin thoughtfully, and then I told Ben I had a working canyon.map file. I offered him first dibs on jumping into it and fixing up all the things he wanted to fix.

When he declined, I made my counter-proposal: I would take it and work on it. He agreed.

For a time I simply sat and stared at it, in the editor. (Interesting typo there; I originally typed "deitor"!) Where to begin? It didn't take me long to decide that I would use his work to arrive at a hole of the same dimensions, and with the same doors and walkways and layouts -- but that I would rebuild the level from scratch, within those constraints, with my own design sensibilities. It was the only way I could get fully enthusiastic about the project! The original transformation of the layout from untextured blockwork to final design went fairly quickly: after all, I did not have to think (much) about layout and could focus all my energy on detail and texture. And since I already knew I'd be going back to the same texture set I'd wanted to use the first time I reimagined the level, that texture set began to drive detail design much as its sister set had guided the design of Mausoleum...

I very quickly arrived at something which had both Ben and myself really excited about what I am now calling Canyon: Redux... I also very quickly pushed the compile time up from minutes to hours.

So far, Canyon: Redux has no glass walkways at all... Additionally, because 18 months of work on Lab11 had cured me of any wish to do rocky walls (to do them realistically, they rapidly consume the available resources) I have opted for the same full-tech approach of the original Canyon. I always like to try new things when building a level -- I'm more than happy with how my garbage disintegration field is shaping up, and the round doors have me quite excited, although I haven't yet proved I can get them to work. Revisiting complexities that I've already proved (to myself) that I can make work ... there's just no fun in that!

Which brings me to last night. After Ben and I finished firing it up -- 30 minutes in Lab11: HeatHaze (which is merely Lab11: LavaLab with gorgeous orange fog, and surprisingly the level works quite well for its size, even with only the two of us) -- we were talking about Canyon and Redux as we packed up our stuff in preparation for our respective trips home. (We play after work most nights...) Ben referred to it as "this thing we call Canyon", and the phrase lodged in my head. I decided we needed something to explain the actual "Canyon" name, given its complete un-canyon-ness, and the idea of having graffiti tagging the facility with its "common nickname" (given, no doubt, by those who worked there) occurred to me. (I'd already been thinking of using some generalised graffiti art somewhere, but that thought now crystallised into something very specific.)

Of course, while I'm fully confident in my mastery of Valve Hammer Editor when it comes to building levels, I have a dim view of my digital art abilities. So making a suitable piece of graffiti art for inclusion into Redux was something of a challenge.

I do like a challenge! I have to say, I'm pretty happy with the end result; it's certainly better than any of the textures I'd made up till now. Of course, it is applied over one of the wall textures I was already using so it would fit seamlessly into the level -- making a texture from scratch is still beyond my abilities...

Also last night, apart from putting the finishing touches to my disintegration field, I solved another problem which threatened to stall my progress. I had all my wonderfully circular doorways -- they existed in the original Canyon, I merely found a texture to suit them -- which had to open into much smaller (than the exterior space, anyway) square rooms. My solution was to construct a square-to-round transition piece. I'm still compiling last night's efforts so I don't know exactly how it will look in-game, but I'm pretty happy with it...

So there you have it. New project, coming soon...