Archive for December, 2006
Tuesday, December 12th, 2006
BBC Scotland’s new HQ Hosted on
ZooomrI spent the last weekend in Glasgow catching up with friends (I did my Computing Science BSc at Glasgow University) and relatives. During the day on Saturday though, I decided to hit the town, and not long later got pretty fed up of pushing through the many Christmas shoppers. As I had my camera with me, I decided to head over to the banks of the River Clyde via Exhibition Centre train station. I was hoping to try and get some photos of the river and the various new buildings and bridges that the area now offers. Things have changed quite dramatically round there in a relatively short timeframe, it’s no longer the wasteland it once was, despite what Google Maps would maybe have you believe.
A couple of hours later, I came away cold but with a full 2Gb SD card of RAW images. I’d ended up being joined by about four other photographers as we all tried to get the best shots from both sides of the river, and on all three of the closest bridges, as the sun went down.
If you’re interested, I’ve put ten of these shots (I’m not going to bore you with all the photos I took) up on Zooomr. I’ve made use of Zooomr’s Portals to link the photos to each other (try clicking through to Zooomr on the above image and hovering your cursor over the photo when its finished loading), but as well as that, the collection is bundled up in a Zooomr set of Glasgow.
The above shot is of the new BBC Scotland building, which they’ll be moving into early next year. There were engineers up on the roof fiddling with the satellites when I was there, but much of the building still looks to be pretty empty. What it does offer for now though is some really nice reflections of the surrounding area, hence the photo.
Posted in Photography | 1 Comment »
Wednesday, December 6th, 2006
I’ve yet to make it out to the US well at all, but in particular – I’ve yet to make it to the annual SIGGRAPH conference, the place to be if the area of CG (Computer Graphics) is your thing. It certainly is my thing, and hopefully I’ll make it to the 2007 conference in San Diego, but today ACM (the Association for Computing Machinery) who run SIGGRAPH, announced SIGGRAPH Encore – a handy dandy page of over 800 presentations from previous conferences. They’ve got content up for SIGGRAPH 2004 and 2005, with 2003 and 2006 on the way, and it’s really just a gold mine of information.
Anything you can think of in the field of Computer Graphics is probably covered in some form of presentation at a SIGGRAPH conference in recent years, so if you’ve even a passing interest, you could do far worse than take a look at the site.
Posted in Computer Graphics | No Comments »
Wednesday, December 6th, 2006
Irn-Bru’s take on the classic animation of The Snowman is well worth a look. Haven’t seen it on TV yet, but having watched it over on youtube, I don’t think I’ll ever be able to watch the original Snowman with out smiling at the thought of the slightly thuggish boy with the Irn-Bru can.
Oh, and dentists are outraged.
Posted in Animation, Ramblings | No Comments »
Tuesday, December 5th, 2006
I have an Xbox 360. I bought one shortly after making my post about Microsoft’s XNA, and largely I haven’t regretted it. Sure I don’t have an HD TV to try it out on yet, but the games I’ve tried on it so far are all good fun, and Microsoft’s done a great job of creating an intuitive UI experience throughout, right down to syncing it with my Vista installed laptop for a bit of Media Center extending.
Great. But, lately I’ve had some problems connecting to the internet. I bought a wireless adapter for the Xbox 360 when I bought it, and it’s worked rather well for using the Xbox Live service and the aforementioned hooking up to Vista. Then came the ‘Fall’ update for the Xbox that upgraded the console’s software. It might be purely coincidental, but since then everytime I turn on the Xbox 360, it fails to recognise the adapter is plugged in at all. I have to reach behind the console, unplug the USB connector and plug it back in before it springs into life. If I turn off the console, next time I turn it back on we’re back to square one and I have to unplug and replug once again.
Maybe the adapter’s dying, or maybe the update did it – I don’t know, but surely the Xbox 360 Support team can tell me, I thought. Off I head to the Xbox.com Contact Support page, where the two options are to e-mail or phone Support. I opt for the e-mail approach, and fire off an e-mail describing the problem. Just over two hours later, this is the response I get:
Thank you for your email.
For all Xbox Live connectivity issues please visit http://www.xbox.com/sv-se/support/xbox360/connecttolive/webconnectivitywizard.htm. If you are still unable to connect or have issues in connecting to Xbox after following the Connectivity Wizard, please contact our customer care team on http://www.xbox.com/support/contact/
Thank You
From Xbox 360 Support Team
So okay, firstly I’m told to go the Web Connectivity Wizard, except they’ve linked me to the Swedish version of that page. Once I change the link to go to the British version of the page, I discover that the suggestions there are more about setting up your internet connection. I don’t really have a problem with that, my problem is with the adapter itself being identified at all by the Xbox 360. No good then, so what should I do instead? Well, next up I’ve to contact customer care at, oh wait – the very same page I just contacted them at.
The e-mails you get back from the support team have no notice to tell you if you can reply to the e-mail you’re sent, in fact there’s very little official confirmation that there’s any real followup at all to persue. So off I trundle, and put in a new support call via their e-mail form, telling them that their suggestion didn’t apply to my case, and copied and pasted the rest from my previous call.
This time the response comes back within minutes, or so Gmail tells me the next morning. Here’s how it goes:
Dear Ben,
Thank you for your email. In order to respond effectively to your email we need to investigate further. Therefore please contact the Xbox 360 Customer Support team on http://www.xbox.com/support/contact/ or please call tel.0800 587 1102 (customer support), or 44 20 7365 9792 (direct line).
Thank you.
Yours, Xbox Customer Suport.
Hmm, so basically this time I get a response marginally clearer. Although they’re telling me to get in touch via the same page I just have done so from, what they are REALLY saying is, just phone us. E-mail us by all means, but we’re just going to suggest you phone us.
So I did that this evening, and even though I pressed the option it suggested I could right at the start, it still insisted on telling me that I should visit, yes you guessed it, the support site at xbox.com. Once it finally chucked me into the queue system, an american voice told me that I’d have to wait more than two minutes. I took that to mean maybe a couple of minutes more than two minutes, and I presumed that I’d maybe get an update as to how long I’d have to wait, a little while into the queue. Instead, I was repeatedly told to just wait, and 20 minutes later I hung up, having heard Air‘s “La Femme d’argent” from the album Moon Safari start its third playing. Hey, it’s a nice chilled out song, but played in tinny quality over a phone interrupted by an automated voice every couple of minutes, it takes on a slightly more irritating edge. Couldn’t Microsoft afford any other songs? Do they take requests, or is there another queue for that?
These are questions I might have even asked them had I got through. I didn’t, and I’m no further on with sorting out the problem. Maybe someday…
Posted in XBOX 360 | 1 Comment »
Sunday, December 3rd, 2006
A few things have caught my attention this week, so I thought I’d regurgitate them for you now, whether you want me to or not.
The first thing I wanted to point out kind of leads on from my post about Windows Vista, no not because this post ALSO lacks style or any kind of substance, but because it relates to the many different editions of Microsoft’s new pretty operating system. Microsoft clearly realised that it was all becoming a little too complicated, but rather than just, you know – release one version of Vista, they instead enlisted the help of some cartoon monsters. But of course! If you’ve a spare five minutes of your life that you don’t really mind never getting back, head on over to They Came for Windows Vista for the first two episodes of strangeness.
Moving on, I spotted over on Make that somebody came up with the comical idea of making their own huge Google Earth pin point icon and sticking it in their garden. Genius – the details of how they made it are here.
Whilst you’re in a Google Earth/Maps mood, you might also want to browse through the GoogleSightSeeing list of the top 10 naked people on Google Earth.
Just before I move away from Google Earth and Google Maps, Fredericiana, intern at Mozilla Corporation points out that the Firefox crop circle made over the Summer has made it onto the satellite imagery of both. You can see it for yourself on Google Maps, complete with nearby plane as featured in the rather cool video of the whole thing on Firefox Flicks.
Meanwhile BusinessWeek of all places has an article on the making of Lego, which is a good read. The Lego Group makes 15 billion Lego bits a year, and technically makes more rubber tyres than any other manufacturer in the world, they’re just significantly smaller obviously. Make sure you also look at the photos of the factory itself. I should say that Lego was pretty much my favourite thing to play with growing up, and the sight of so many Lego bricks in one place stil gets me excited. I don’t see any roof bits though in those photos, I never had enough of them to actually meet in the middle…
Catch me if you can Hosted on
ZooomrThat’s pretty much it, except for the above random photo of my cat that I uploaded to Zooomr over the weekend. No animals were harmed in the making of this blog.
Posted in Ramblings, Software, Vista | No Comments »
