We do "open source"

Whilst picking up my pay today, I briefly overheard a conversation on open source and cringed a little. Firstly the technical capabilties required for fully open source deployments, with centralised infrastructure are reasonably high, as are the administration costs from someone who knows what they're doing.

Secondly, and for the most important reason, that the team involved seemed to view it as a chance to provide something for very little price difference over "traditional" software. Free as in beer, rather than freedom to modify and contribute back. Generally I'll be found behind getting open source more notice, but is it snobbish to not want it at the expensive of obscenely profiting the "wrong" people?

Bear in mind that this is the team who couldn't debug a simple corrupted preferences file and proceeded to reinstall the whole application (to no avail), sat on the problem for some time, only to be solved by myself and my esteemed colleague in a little less than 2 minutes (including remote connection times to relevant desktops).

Wii all ache

Saturday evening I was taking the piss out of Dave, whom I had the pleasure of playing against on Chris' Wii. Either I just slept in a funny position last night, or its finally caught up with me, but I've got more aching than usual in the primary wii-mote arm shoulder blade and I can feel it ache slightly more when I move my arm in Wii-esque ways.

It strikes me that the population might suddenly start suffering from a new kind of Wii-related RSI, if we're not careful. For its lack of subtly (but utter hilarity), the PA team have hit it on the "head".

Social Christmas?

Generally I'm not particularly brilliant with social situations; I generally perfer to be alone, or with the computer and the internet, working on various little bits of code and so forth, or sat down with a good book or article. There are a few exceptions to this, but I won't go into it. For this reason, I often find Christmas somewhat stressful, I feel inadequate as I am unable to really get into the swing of things, and I worry that I bring everyone elses Christmas down.

Reading Nick's words, however, has made me realise that I really shouldn't worry about it so much. After all it is my Christmas as well. If I want to spend at least a brief part of the morning on IRC, catching up with a few articles, and flicking through a few misc. websites, then why should other people want to persuade me that its "sad" or wrong to do so? Surely the day is for enjoyment?

Wii

This very weekend I played with a Wii, for at least several hours and with up to 3 people at times, and I have to say I'm impressed. The system is very, very good at what it does and that is game play. But then most people were expecting that.

I have to say though that the novelty was wearing off a bit by the end of the last "session". Don't get me wrong, I absolutely love the device but I'm sceptical as to its life when it comes down to just how many games there aren't available at the moment. Wii Sports and Rayman are definately the top 2 games for fun - at the moment.

Overall I don't know what people are bitching about when they mention its not hi-def. When you consider that its standard resolution, and stretches reasonably well on a good display device, its all a bit of a wasted effort. It would probably be less of a waste of effort to moan about the weather.

The controls. Very nice, very fun, but can be easily "tricked" and I did [attempt successfully] to show off and bowl, bat and run by sitting down. There is a real compulsion to actually stand up and move around despite this, especially in boxing, bowling and tennis.

Naturally, you will need lots of space for playing with a Wii. It was a struggle fitting 3 people into a reasonably larger sized living room and having room to maneuver without hitting everyone else in the face/groin/arm. In summer you definately want to get it onto a projector on an outside wall and play in the garden - if you can.

Have Nintendo succeeded? Definately, even the 2 non-gamers in the room were obviously impressed and clearly picked it up pretty quickly. One was even kicking our arses regularly. Do I want one? At the time, yes. Having now travelled back home, after an hour and a half drive, I'm not so sure. Why so? Launch titles. Wii Sports is fun, but is clearly limited in playability, and theres nothing truely else that takes me fancy at the moment; Rayman, also hilariously funny, wears thin pretty quickly. Plus I'm more of a large/massively multiplayer man, and the lack of online play [at the moment] concerns me a little.

Once there's a lightsabre game, I'm definately having one though!

Greenpeace

For various reasons, I was a member of Greenpeace the last year or so. I recently stopped the payments. A few days ago I got yet another letter from them, trying to convince me to sign up again. Within this was a leafleat, telling me all about the organisation.

What has annoyed me is that they appear to advocate that using the funds I give them, they can best provide the world with green solutions by spending substantial amounts on marketing; I've done a rough calculation and worked out that they've now spent more on informational packs, than I've actually given them. Nice.

Now the bit that really gets my goat, is that within the most recent booklet, they clearly advocate climbing onto property, potentially defacing it, and making a joke of themselves. They also seem to advocate harassing people until they see their point of view. Quite frankly, what the fuck? Granted I am picking on the minority of the organisation now, but nevertheless this is their general public persona.

I totally agree the world needs to live in a "greener" and healthier way. Unfortunately with so many conflicting views, we cannot truely know at this stage, what is correct.