A forecast high of 37 °C today, and bushfires all over the state. There is a smoky brown haze covering the city, everything is smelling of smoke, and there’s a strange orangy-red tinge to everything as I rode to work.
Lunchtime, hot, still and smoky. Walking across the campus felt like walking in the bush in summer. Cicadas calling, the smell of eucalyptus, dust and smoke.
Demos
- http://www.mindcandydvd.com/: a DVD of Demos. They’re all PC demos, but it does say that future discs may be of Amiga demos, or from other platforms…. Unfortunately, its produced in NTSC, and one of the three platforms that they say it plays badly on is the PAL Xbox. I never really could get many of the demos to work on my Amiga, so many of them were produced for the A500 or A1200, and didn’t run properly on an A1000.
I just tried to run two demos — downloaded at random — on my T21 laptop under Windows XP. Kasparov crashes with a Windows protection error, Wonder first brings up a dialog box asking how to run it, then crashes saying “update your drivers or something. Maybe a high-end Windows 98 machine with gamer-type 3D cards would work, but they’re kind of scarce around the office!
Gnod?
- http://www.gnod.net/: an interesting concept.
I stumbled across Gnod while looking up Laurence Durrell, it had nothing of interest on the author, but it could. When I wandered into its’ website recommendations I was told to go to a porn site, a political rant/soapbox, and to buy myself a copy of Gödel, Escher, Bach. Amusingly, I misread the page as saying “Based on your rantings so far… rather than ratings. It’s almost unnerving, I wish they said where they’ve got their information from. The web is very big. I like the idea of computers intelligently suggesting to me things I might like, I don’t like the idea of relying on this and not finding things myself…
Oh hell, I’ve done it now. I’ve submitted last ’s comment on obesity in Australia and the US to Gnod — I wonder what sort of politically correct abuse I’ll receive as a result…
