There hasn’t been alot of activity on here for various reasons. Initially I was finalising the design of the new iteration of my Demo Harness system. The initial design grew out of a smaller-scale design I had been working on and, while fully functional, was not suitable to be easily used by people who are not me. The new design is cleaner, has a more industrial-grade foundation that it sits on top of and has a nice abstraction layer providing flexibility to people wishing to use the harness for their own projects at the same time as allowing me to work with it how I want.

After I finished the new design I wrote the foundation layer (boring stuff - memory management, environment setup etc…) and started on reimplementing the various sub-systems that make up the renderer core.

But now I have writer’s block. Well, I guess it is more implementer’s block. Probably brought on by a number of factors: I’m essentially just re-doing the work I did previously in a cleaner fashion so it’s not that interesting (although I’m usually OK with this as its quick work), the bastard living above us kept me awake for days with his euro-disco, happy hardcore and heavy metal (although that was sorted out yesterday when the landlords gave his whole floor a written bitch-slap to behave) and I’m visiting the UK again soon and it will be weird as many of my friends have moved away and my parent are moving out of Reading so it will most likely be my last time visiting Reading and having a place to stay.

Working for yourself (in the full sense - not as a contractor for someone else) is hard. When I was working for an internet company in London I never had problems getting things done - even if they were as boring as hell - just being part of a team is a great motiviator.

So, I’m in a bad mood today. Not even a fairly decent spread of comics can lighten my mood (Desolation Jones, Fell, Winter Men, Neverwhere, …). There is only one thing to do I think. Have some food, go out for a drink, have a long sobering walk back home and stay up all night working.

I will see you tomorrow.

As part of my ongoing investigation of new cultures I stayed up all night watching late night TV. This led me to a number of interesting observations.

Firstly, Swedish late night TV is good until around 4:30AM when it all turns bad. In the good hours you can watch such classics as Magnum, Miami Vice, Walker: Texas Ranger and Cagney and Lacy. You can also catch more modern programs such as Alias and Buffy, but they are few and far between. Tonight I flicked between some film with an old-but-still-smooth Burt Reynolds in it and Miami Vice. After that there was perculiar Swedish program - a drama I think - involving a priest who somehow managed to have a pyjama party with two teenage girls, got a bit hot and heavy with them but had drunk too many spirits to get it up. “Wierd” I thought. It got wierder when it turned out the program had some kind of phone-in going on. God knows what people where asked to vote on. I should have rung up and asked. Next time maybe. The observation made here is that Sweden is not a great producer of late-night TV but when it does produce something it makes no sense (to me).

Secondly, I watched a bit of a Swedish music channel over here and saw the video for the song “Siren” from the band “Nightwish“. The video was a mixture of machinima (boiled down: using a game engine for acting purposes - see www.machinima.com) and concept art and it was strangely captivating. From this video I guessed that the band were Finnish (based on the fact it used machinima and the style of the art and song) and a quick google search proved it. It turns out Nightwish are one of the top rock/metal bands in Finland and are actually quite good. This led me on to the discovery of www.moremusic.fi and the fact that Finland has A LOT of rock/metal/goth bands. Now, this is kind of common knowledge as the long winter nights don’t give the Finns much else to do than create dark, banging music but I am slightly amazed at just how many bands of this type are coming out of Finland. By my reckoning there are 2.4 hard rock/metal/goth bands per citizen in Finland. The observation made here is that Finland is indeed a dark place.

I’m considering staying in Helsinki at some point when I’m approaching the end of my project so I can fully dedicate some time to polishing it up and if I do I’ll have to go out and see what the music scene is like over there. I’ve been a couple of times already (and really enjoyed it over there) but I never got around to seeing any gigs.

My last observation of the night (now morning) is more of a hypothesis. There are alot of TV shopping programs on at night and in the mornings over here. You can buy such quality products as the Magic Bullet(TM) , The Ultimate Gym and the Star Mop all by just picking up the phone. I should mention that these TV shopping programs appear on the terrestrial channels, not just cable. This got me wondering: Are the sales through these programs really so great that they support TV shopping being on 3 channels at once? I guess it must be or the companies hawking the products wouldn’t be paying for airtime (albeit very cheap airtime no doubt). My hypothesis is that it is the geography of the country that has led to this. If you are living up north in Sweden, amoung the Reindeer and lichen, you can’t exactly pop down the road for a Star Mop. Sweden is a big and sparsely populated country. Observation: Maybe TV shopping does have a place after all?

Well, that’s it. I’m going back to my breakfast of mellon flavour ice cream.

I was laying on the sofa tonight, just about half an hour ago, watching some TV with headphones on as Karin was asleep in bed and within the space of 30 seconds I almost had a heart attack. I was quite sleepy with the volume turned down low so I could still hear the traffic outside. Suddenly I hear the door to our room open and someone say something in Swedish. For no good reason I thought we were under attack. I jumped up, ripping the headphones from my head, screamed “Yes! F**k” a bit louder than really necessary almost killing Karin with shock. I reached down as I headed for the door to grab a weapon but all I could find was an empty bottle of squash and a brand new bright red toilet brush still in it’s shrinkwrapping. At this point whoever had opened the door quickly closed the door again and disappeared down the corridor. After explaining to Karin exactly why I woke her up by screaming obscenities I was still shaking with adrenaline. Even now after a Coke and some instant noodles my heart is still beating fast.

When will I learn that They are not out to get me.

The alternate ending of tonight (available on the Special Edition DVD no doubt) has me being deported back to England after beating a random Swede into unconciousness with an IKEA toilet brush. I ’spose there are less impressive ways to be deported.