A few ideas

A couple of interesting concepts struck me today as i was driving home from Wellington (the city, not the footwear).

First I was considering the problem this day and age of transportation; giving people the freedom to move where they want, when they want, with great speed and convenience. This is ultimately the problem that, if solved, would have people give up cars. As it is, other transportation methods always fail on one of these criteria, or are too expensive for most people to afford. The ideal solution would either use the infastructure that is already in place (e.g. electric/hydrogen cars) or something which needs a minimum amount of both up front capital cost and regular maintenance.

This is where a decision has to be made: any system which has no infrastructure cost (or low cost) will likely not allow the conveyance of the fuel supply along it (the problem with roads, you can't transmit any sort of power or energy through it/along it efficiently. The example of this i choose to take is that if we use the skies as our road, as aircraft do, it is impossible to transmit the fuel source through such a medium. The polar example for me is rail, where electricity can be transmitted through it or along it (with some additional infrastructure). This also raises the other paradigm shift that occurs between these two situations; if one carries their own energy/fuel source they are free to roam to the limits of their vehicle. If a user relies on the infrastructure for their fuel they can't go outside of that infrastructure, one thing that has limited electrified rail (because the infrastructure is so expensive and rigid).

The only option to move forward in vehicles that don't have their own fuel source is to create a new infrastructure. Something that can (unlike roads) transmit some source of energy, be it electrical, magnetic, kinetic, etc. And something that can be extended to every home, just as we have extended roads to every home. This is the key in the end if we hope to move away from cars as a mode of personal transportation. Some people would believe that this is what happened with cars; but cars came over a thousand years after the first paved roads. Rail was a different story, because of it's usefulness as a heavy transport medium. It is logical that there is no business case in creating an entirely new transport framework for people to use when the one they currently use isn't broken. So the challenge in creating a new mode of transportation that doesn't require people to carry a fuel supply is two-fold; can we make use of a medium or framework that already exists, as cars did? or can we start a technology like this by first monopolising a small community of users as electricity did?

These are only the issues that surround the creation of such a system, let alone the technical issues of building the system itself.

August Update

I know last blog i said i'd try update more often, but i also said last blog that i would be busy this semester :-P

All my projects are in full swing, i'm dealing with most of them, although two of them feel like i''m the only group member actually doing anything. Oh well, i'm not great at giving people a chance to participate when i'm thinking about something.... i just tend to sit there trying to get it straight enough to regurgitate to whatever assignment i'm working on; it takes enough effort to get it to a form i can understand, let alone something someone else can take away and work with. This blog is probably a good testament to that.

Galaxy (My UI concept) has been on hold for a while now, but my Marketing lecture yesterday (on idea generation) really inspired me to give it another go, and try and develop it some more. The main problem i've been running into it is that new products/technology/whatever are really supposed to be spawned from a need or requirement. I think the need for Galaxy comes from the advancement of visual display technology (3D screens coming soon apparently?) and a lack of advancement in the user interfaces we use. Windows Vista (not to pick on it more) is a shining example of such a thing; it boasts a great many features and improvements, but hardly any of those filter down to the average joe user because it is obscured by an over-simplified interface or confuscated access method, or these features don't provide any measurable benefit that is apparent to the user. One of the staples of GUI design is not to change what people know, but at the same time we need to be innovative in breaking down the barriers between human-computer interaction. Part of this is the limitations of the input systems, which i have also thought about a great deal; there is only so much you can do with someone else's hardware.

Ok let's analyse the target market and the niche we're aiming for. People want an interface that will be so intuitive that it is almost transparent; i.e. people don't actually want to manipulate an interface and jump through hoops to get it to do what they want it to do. They just want said computer to do what they want it to do. This is all fine and well in theory, but as the technology stands people have to give a computer information in order for it to know what to do. People can't read minds (well most of us can't), neither can computers. Until computer mind-reading technology is developed (apparently sony already have patents in for that sort of stuff), computers will have to try and get as much information from users as possible. Current methods of cutting down the amount of input a user has to do includes using historical data, statistical inference and interpolation of a user's behaviour, and random guessing. Ok so i'm making this up as i go along, but how is this any different from normal.

The point is i'm using my brain to come up with these examples, piecing them together with information i have gained from other sources, and then extrapolating. How can we make computers do this?
I think the conclusion i'm rolling myself along to is that ultimately user interface design has a big affect on how much information we can get form the user, and how much information we can give them. This is why giving interfaces a third dimension will help us with collecting information, and likewise allow us to display more information. The problem that is faced with 3D interfaced is that our peripherals are still 2D. Even touch screens only allow us to work in 2D.

Been a while....

Ok so i've kind of neglected this blog for a few months now.... but i have a good reason.

Yea... WoW isn't a great reason, but it is a reason in my opinion. Anyway now i once again kicked the habit simply cause i think i really have clocked the game (or it feels like it to me, despite what other people say). Anyway, i won't have time this semester for diddling around in raids for 4 or 5 hours at a time. And i think it is definately time to move on.

So in the interest of moving on, i would like to discuss what this semester means for me. Hard work is a good place to start. Last semester i felt i worked very hard on the projects i was assigned to. That said, i didn't make much of an effort to have a meaniningful group relationship, and just plowed through the work by myself (leaving my groupmates in the dust at times, confused and bewildered). This is how i'm used to working.... i almost feel constrained when i have to keep other people up to speed on what i'm doing and why i'm doing every little thing. This worked fine last semester, when the work was manageable that i could complete it myself without too much hassle and my teammates made a reasonable effort to keep up to speed. This semester my teammates are even more competent, but the project work has become more complicated by several orders of magnitude.

For my software project we have been tasked with developing an interactive webapp, in the course of 6 months of uni. The plus to this is that this paper has no lectures, no tutorials, no exam. The downside is that we have to create a fully functional webapp in 6 months, when no one in out group has experience in building webapps (apart from my own minor experience) or working with a SQL server backend. Most of us are lacking in even basic experience with C# (which we want to use) because the university courses we did were taught in Java. This brings me to another point about this project; we are the only group of 3 in the paper doing this project in .NET. This means our tools will be a bit better (despite being proprietry), but we won't have access to as many resources (our lecturers don't have much experience with .NET.

Anyway this project alone should keep me very busy writing AJAX code to interface the backend with the frontend. I was chosen for this task simply becausei'm the only one with any Javascript experience, which i have no problems with since it makes my job easier, butit'll be ice to try out C# at some stage on something that isn't mission-critical.

So i'll try update here when i can about how the project is going. If the time strikes me.

Keep Thinking.

Ubiquitous Questing

The majority of people have been exposed to one MMO game or another these days. I myself was fortunate enough to discover World of Warcraft (WoW), but i had to quit several months ago, because WoW was becoming too involving. Basically i was addicted, and like an addictive substance it would take up all my time (although fortunately not all of my money, since that was capped at about $25 a month). I was thinking about this, and about how so many people experience the same or similar draw from WoW or other MMO games. The main reason i can see that WoW has been so successful is the avalanche effect: people would start playing the MMO, and get their friends/family to join, and they would in turn get their friends/family to join. There is a certain level of draw in the game itself, but once you have played WoW and levelled a character the maximum level you've prettymuch seen most of the content there is to see (but high-end raiding content keeps the serious players hooked). What keeps the people who joined in droves playing is the social networking; to remotely interact with the people they play with, to form relationships through the game.

This social structure in World of Warcraft is very-much Guild-centric. Guilds in World of Warcraft are mini-communities of players who cooperate towards a common goal or with a common ideal. In WoW this is usually Player versus Player (PvP) content or Player versus Environment (PvE) content. PvE content is the objective shared by most guilds, and revolves around working in teams of 5 to 40 (in original WoW content) to achieve objectives. These objectives usually involve killing a series of monsters in a dungeon with a mix of skill, preparation and coordination. This is what caused me to become so interested in the game; the level of coordination that was undertaken during a raid was amazing; 10 to 40 people cooperating to assail a beast 100 times their size and strength, it was teamwork to a degree i had never seen before. Furthermore, because of the in-game communication systems and the modding community supporting World of Warcraft, the experience could be made as plain or as exciting as one wished. Additionally there was fruther cooperation (largely) in raids when items were being shared among groups. People would have to decide who would recieve an item, and because there is usually so few items compared to the number of people who participate in a raid, the decision would have to be fair and unbiased.

Now my idea was this; why not create a new type of social networking website where people can track their progress through "life" in the same way people track each other on World of Warcraft. Why not objectivise life, organise it into small bite-size chunks that each person can track; with tagible, specific rewards for each "quest"; as well as each "quest" rewarding each individual with an amount of experience that goes towards their "level" on the completion of the task. The type of things people do in World of Warcraft and similar MMOs are not that different from real life; they involve long spans of monotonous work, but people are driven to complete this work for the rewards, and the virtual social standing that goes with it. So if a similar system was used in real life, could we convince more people to excel in their daily lives, to make things seem slightly more manageable and simple?

The short answer is no. There are many barriers to such a system; the largest of which is the complexity factor. WoW is made up of a discrete set of tasks, each with set starts and ends, and the end game content relies on the fact that everyone is at an equal level. Having lots of people spread out over many "levels" of such a system would make it harder for people to find common ground; i.e. common tasks and common objectives. One way to solve this would be to somewhat simplify life's tasks; make generic tasks that cover a wide range of real-life tasks and objectives. Another way would be for people to define their own tasks, but this could create disparity in the definition of tasks and their rewards; this decreases the perceived value of the completion of tasks, because people find it harder to use the rewards of such tasks as a schedule against which to grade other people.

The system could be successful if properly adapted, otherwise it could be a catastrophic flop. The other major part of the system and would cause either success or failure is the social networking and communications. The great thing about wow social networks is they are very close to ubiquitous (at least while in game). Players who are online can be whispered from anywhere in the game world, and there are global chat channels which span the whole world (but confined within a particular server. While we are on the topic; i think it is interesting that wow works with small units such as the servers. There is no doubt if the game simply listed one server then not only would the traffic and resource usage on that server cell be insane, but the noise inside the game would also be very loud; by this i mean public chat channels would be bursting. This would allow anyone on the network to contact anyone else; but the downside is all of the background noise that swamps public chat channels. The reason WoW is run on seperate server pods is because of the performance issues, but i think it creates an interesting social bubble; generally when people migrate from one bubble to another or to a new bubble they are drawn by other people, so the loss of communication with other people in other bubbles is not so significant.

I think i'll leave it there for tonight, i have a hacking cough and an exam on monday, so wish me luck.

NachOS in Java

I have many problems with NachOS in Java. My primary problem with someone trying to make an operating system in a language like Java is that it is not designed for that purpose. C is. When you take something like NachOS from C to Java you inherently cripple it in the process and pervert the point of creating it in the first place. Why is this so? Let's explore.

First of all is the language differences; C/C++ is made for working at a low level, it contains the kind of literal and low level manipulation you need at that level such as stream manipulation, manual pointer manipulation, fast speed. This is why C is still a popular language when programming microcontrollers and micrprocessors. Java on the other hand has none of these constructs, and would be absolutely no use in writing an OS in the real world. For example, with nachos, you end up emulating pointers (in an abstract integer type form) just so it makes sense. You also have all these ready-made Java classes that make the development so much easier, which you wouldn't have with C. Now don't think i'm a massacist, i'm a big advocate of making everything as easy as possible for the user. The problem with simplifying and "dumbing down" something as complicated as building an OS (even in the name of making it teachable), is that it misses the point completely: you take out the C, the manual pointer manipulation and the lack of pre-made classes and structures to do everything for you, and you can learn some of the broader and more general structures, while missing out on any detail at all. So when Joe Bloggs goes to implement this in real life; he'll have to learn C, have to learn how to use pointers effectively, and learn to actually program basic structures himself. So in order to streamline their learning the university professors have costed the student another 6 months of time, in which they will have to learn C.

It almost makes me feel like in making courses that use NachOS, the academia don't actually intend students to put it to practical use. If they did, surely it would be taught in a practically realistic environment: i.e. C.
Of course there is a reason things are the way they are, and there is a reason why NachOS was converted to Java. Imagine having to teach students C, on top of teaching them OS structure. Now compress that into 6 months. Now you have the mindset of our dear lecturers.

Firefox 3 RC1

I should probably stop using this blog for speculation and opinion and start using it for posting stuff that people might actually find useful. Still, it feels nice to share and get it out there, even if no one is reading it.

Today i finally found myself with 5 minutes spare (among the endless torrent of assignments that marks the end of the University semester), so i decided to check out the new Firefox 3 RC1, as it had been recommended highly by a friend at uni. I used Firefox 2 extensively during my summer holidays working at Unlimited Realities and was very impressed with Firebug and the fast JavaScript engine (very obvious with the heavy AJAX scripts i was writing). Since then i basically didn't bother installing it on my computer at home. Why? because while internet explorer is chunky, slow, and has few or no addons; it did what i needed it to do. Ok, so i couldn't be bothered, but that's probably the reason half of IE users are still using it; it's what came with their PC. IF Firefox came with every PC (provided people knew what it was) it would have a fairly decent market share. All browsers are much of a muchness; most users care that they do what they need to do, and that's about it. Firefox is adopted by most power users for many reasons; developer-friendliness (Firebug, open source community, wide range of addons, etc.), speed (as i mentioned about the JavaScript engine), and of course the good old anti-Microsoft stigma. The last reason isn't such a big one these days; Microsoft do alot of PR work to try improve their image with developers and power users.

Anyway onto Firefox 3 itself; first let's consider the Interface. I'm running this on Vista, and i have to say, the look'n'feel for this version of firefox really does update it to XP/Vista interface, but then according to the release notes this is very much indended; they have tweaked the UIs for the Mac and Windows versions to make them seem less out of place. I thought this was a smart move; i actually like the look and feel of Firefox better than the IE look and feel in Vista, and i don't think it would look out of place in XP either. Firefox continues it's tradition of offering a concise and uncluttered interface, and avoiding the hallmark mistakes of most alot of past Microsoft apps; huge and overflowing menus, cluttered and overpopulated toolbars which i never personally use. I like the simple approach of just having the browser controls and a favourites bar.

Now to move onto the Firefox feature i've always liked, and still do in this installment; addons. As an open source project Firefox has good support for the addon community, with a following so large and devoted that i would liken it to the WoW mod community. If you browse the Firefox Addons site you can come up with addons for anything from ripping video off flash-based players like YouTube to ad blockers. My favourites after a quick float around the site were ScribeFire (what i'm writing this blog in), Download Statusbar and FireGestures. FireGestures i think is very cool, especially if you're working on a touchscreen or with a laptop touchpad. Basically you make a gesture with the mouse pointer and it converts it into an action in Firefox. There's a heck of a learning curve in learning the gestures, but other than that i think this plugin is very well done. As i said, i'm writing this in ScribeFire, which gives me a WYSIWYG editor which automatically logs me in and sends my blogs directly to the server, allowing me to be even more lazy.

Overall i have to say i'm very happy with Firefox 3; if you're a novice user, wait until the final release comes out and then give it a go. If you're reasonably confident you can download the RC1 now. This will definately be my primary browser, at least until someone comes out with a browser that can beat it's plugin support and superior speed (neither of which Internet Explorer has ever been good at).

With All the Formalities

I'm currently in the process of plowing through the end-of-semester rush of assignments that always comes at university; it's like all the papers forgot they have to get another assignment done, so they hastily tack it onto the last week or second to last week of the semester. Of course this is never the case; assignments are planned out at the beginning of the semester, so those of us who have to do them can't use the old excuse "it crept up on me and covered my eyes so i couldn't see it".

One of the worst things about doing a report is the level of formality usually espected. In my first Practical Work Report (Practicum 1) for engineering, i had my mark downgraded because the report was "too personal", and "felt more like an essay than a report" to be fair the man was right. I used the letter "I" far too much, but my excuse was that i was writing about a personal experience. How else am i supposed to write about diagnosing a problem with an offshore tide monitoring station. My computer didn't diagnose the problem, it didn't diagnose itself; I did it. For my latest statistical report i decided to make it pretty casual: the lecturer is a fairly laid back and funny sort of guy, so i thought i'd throw a few colloquial terms in there, use "I" alot (after all I was the experiment), and talk about walls of text.

It got me thinking, why can't all reports be like this? I can see how it might be regarded as unprofessional to not be as objective as possible, and how you could get bored of someone talking about themselves. But when describing what actions you took, surely the use of "I" is not prohibited. For me it's boring just writing like this about personal experiences. I can be objective about things that just happened in my presence, or decisions that were made not just by me. Anyway objectiveness is just the tip of the ice berg. I also tend to be the sort of person that doesn't make good use of appendices; i prefer not to include irrelevant material in my report, and if it's that relevant it should really deserve to be up front, in the body of the report itself.

Ah well i guess it's all hopeless in the end. So much depends on standards and compliance in the modern world. I'll learn to change my ways in the end.

Better Window Tiling

I was thinking about this today in my computer lab, where i was working with a multi-windowed program, and at the same time flicking between tutorials and help files. What a pain in the butt.

Luckily the program in question, LabVIEW, allowed the tiling of windows that were related to the program. However i still had to alt-tab for the documentation and help. For once i would like to see an OS include some really smart tiling, something allowing you to actually specify which windows you want to tile, instead of tiling all or none. And options like being able to choose whether to scale the windows to fill all available space, or scale them as a factor of their current dimensions, so they fit together as a sort of jigsaw, but you don't get overly thin or short windows, obscuring most of the content and defeating the purpose of tiling them in the first place.

Of course the only reason this is even possible is because my university is rich enough to fill our engineering labs with 23" and 24" screens. Tiling isn't very applicable to small screen sizes or small resolutions, probably why it's never been considered a big feature of most desktop environments. But my point is it would be nice to have something to do some slightly smarter and more customizable tiling instead of just expanding every open window to the size of the screen.

Keep thinking.

The Housing Market

ok, let me just say, this is entirely speculation (i know, when isn't something i post here -_-).

[speculation]
I was thinking about the housing market and it's current state, after seeing an American news article saying Forclosure filing rise rise 65%. Wow, sounds like they're well and truly in trouble. But then if 65% is an increase from 3% to 5%, it doesn't sound quite so bad. I don't know the exact figures, but it would figure for the media to try and get "maximum effect" out of the numbers they have available, to try and get their point across... But still, 65% in a single month is very high, and considering the number of forclosures has been out of control for many months now (causing the credit crunch), whis it probaly alot bigger increase than we would all hope.

Anyway onto the actual speculation. This article featured a picture of a house with an auction sign in front of it. That then in turn made me think about a comment made on the NZ herald website about the same topic. The comment in question was this; the reason the house market is in such bad shape all over the world is because people at the moment know house prices are just plain stupid at the moment (who would have figured >.>), with people (and their real estate agents) filling their heads with dellusions of super high sale prices. This in turn just causes people (like ourselves) to sit on what money we have at the moment and wait patiently for house prices to get more realistic. I thought this was a fair comment to make, and very true. However i would go one further: the reason why the housing market is in such a dilemma in the first place can be put largely down to the boom of "investment" or rental properties.

The pyramid scheme of our day. For yonks (ages for those of you who don't speak kiwi) the latest and greatest investment has been property. Anyone with any smarts has bought a couple of houses and done them up a bit, then slapped a nice big rent price on them to not only service their loans but actually turn a profit from. Fair enough too, goodness knows i'd have done the same a few years ago. Anyway i'm not speculating on why the house prices have gone up. There are a million different reasons, and that could be another 5 blog posts in itself (at least).

Basically the reason people can sit and wait patiently for house prices to come down (decreasing the value of people's investment properties) is because there is so much investment property around. Someone invests in a property, what do they do next? They rent it. With a flood of rentals on the market rent rates (although climbing with the house prices a bit) have not climbed at nearly the same exponential rate (at least not in the small town there i live; i pay NZ$60 a week for rent, and no i don't live in a chicken coop). So while someone could own their own (starter) family home for say $200,000-$300,000 and pay (at best) somewhere around 10% interest p.a. So $20,000 to $30,000 just to service the loan. Maybe my maths is screwy, cause that sounds like alot just sitting here. Ok so there's 52 weeks in the year, we divide that loan servicing down and we get.... $384 to $577 a week.

Anyway the point was, at least $400 a week just to service your loan. I currently get NZ$150 from the NZ goverment per week to live as a university student. This isn't free money, i have to pay it back (eventually), and it doesn't scale with inflation, rent prices, commodity prices, or any of that. So i'm living for $150 a week in the current climate, while some poor sods have combined wages of over $1000, but over half of that is going to servicing the debt on their home. Woot for owning your own home....
As you can see, right now you would be crazy to own your own home; with repayments say you're paying $600 a week. For a low-income couple that's a reasonable amount. For a single person that's even more. So the assumption people (myself included) are currently working on, is that why get a loan now, and be paying this much for the next god-knows-how-many years. We would all hope that house prices will drop by about 30-50% (to about what they were before the housing boom) and then we pay 20-50% less interest. In the meantime we can live on a much smaller amount of money (like my $150) and save the rest for a deposit, not only ensuring we pay less of that pesky interest when we do get into the market, but also that we increase our chances of being able to put a deposit down on a nicer house.

Ok that's enough of a rant for today.

Again, these are just my thoughts, prettymuch all speculation and opinion, so feel free to completely ignore them.
[/speculation]

On a non-speculative note (or less speculative) i've started writing a computer copy of a draft i wrote up on a few scraps of paper floating around my desk i've titled "Galaxy-like desktop interface: truly 3D desktop". I believe thisis the sort of thing that needs to happen if we are ever to move any closer to Virtual Reality and Ubiquitous Computing. Plus who didn't think it was cool when Tom Cruise was throwing video clips around on a projected screen using his hands (mice are old skool).

Keep thinking.

The Internet

Today was interesting, Massey University Palmerston North hosted a guest lecturer who talked about the internet. It was largely a history lecture, but some interesting issues and ideas were raised surrounding the internet. One comment that i found particularly interesting was about embedded device networking and it's interfacing to the internet.

One idea this raises is if your home appliances were connected to the internet, how would they be kept safe? What would you do if someone hacked your toaster or changed the temperature on your hot water supply. But yea the main idea i got thinking about was ubiquitous networking (sort of related to the smart toaster). What if we had every modern device with any sort of smarts try and network to any other device in range? This would create a constant moving P2P network between these devices. The great application for this is mobile phones, and viral information distribution. You could create bulk messaging systems like say a news website. This website could then be updated at a hardwired local node (say a cell site), and then that cell site transmits to all other nodes in range. If you wanted to save bandwidth you would make use of the viral distribution network: transmit to say 20% of the network, then use that 20% to virally spread the information to other devices in range.

This would practically put mobile service providers out of a job if it could be made to work; you could distribute information en masse simply by getting each node to sync with every other node in range. My great vision for this would be diminishing the need for wireless access points for internet; the devices become the internet; their interconnections support a short range network allowing information to hop from device to device to reach it's destination, rather than relying on the cell site to transmit the information to each device.

For another example, you could have two people on opposite sides of a town/city IM each other. Normally message would be transmitted to the cell site, then through local network infrastructure, then to possibly another cell site, and finally transmitted to the target phone. From the phone company's point of view they could free up bandwidth on the infrastructure for other information. From the person's point of view it would be cheaper because there practically isn't any cost to make a message jump from phone to phone.

This is not a perfect system by any means though: the first and biggest hurdle is that the technology would have to be available, and it would require cooperation from phone vendors and telecos. With most telecos, they would not be willing to let people exchange any sort of information for free; they make their money by making people pay for it. A great example is how Telecom NZ has always used CDMA handsets that are stripped of all software that allows you to transfer content from computers or other devices. This means you have to buy any new content from their "online stores" via WAP or other mobile services.

Ideally though, it is exciting to think about mini-networks driven by mobile devices. Bringing us slightly closer to that goal of faster, cheaper information exchange. It relies on the principle of human population density, where most people are concentrated on popular centres, which cause more people to gravitate toward them simply by being populous. Because in these areas people are so densely packed in a single area, viral information distribution and networks like the one i have described would be highly feasable to reduce the amount of traffic going through cell sites. It could also make internet access cheaper for people on the move if it could be integrated with local wifi networks; phones could attach themselves to nearby wifi networks and be used as mini cell sites for other phones to communicate with.

The big thing about any part of this theory that i've put forward is that it means phones/nodes/devices/whatever we're talking about here would be constantly active. For mobile phones this would mean a much, much shorter battery life. Even standard wifi equipment uses a reasonable amount of power. So this theory is largely hitched on the classic hitch to all mobile technology; a power source/battery life. You could lower the power requirement, but this would shorten the range considerably. This might still be feasable in a small area scope; maybe up to a couple hundred metres of low-bandwidth networking? This would be enough for places like schools, universities, businesses.

In the beginning....

There was me.... now there's a blog.

I guess i should start in the logical place - me. That is after all what this blog is supposed to be about right? Me, my intrepid adventures, etc. etc.
First, the name. I hear you saying "What sort of name is GenBattle?", well here we go: when i first started playing online games (Medal of Honor: Allied Assault/Spearhead, i was about 14) my online alias was General Specific, from the cartoon Sheep in the Big City. Anyway eventually fter circulating my way around that whole scene i moved onto other games in a series after this point, most prominently including the game Freelancer which i played for almost 2 years, and on and off for a bit longer. Anyway with thisgame came a new game name for 2 reasons: firstly freelancer game names couldn't contain spaces and were a bit limited on length, so "General Specific" wasn't the ideal phrase; secondly, it wasn't a very space-themed name. Since it was a space game, and at the time the new Battlestar Galactica series had just started, i thought up the original name of "Battlestar". From there it was a series of morphs from not being able to get the game name i wanted on different games/servers/services (like gmail) so i merged the two into a combination that was (by and large), unique. Of course i was proven wrong when i bought an Xbox and this name (nor any morhping of it) was available.

So now that we have the name out of the way; why am i suddenly making a blog? I didn't have one yesterday, or the day before, or the day before that even. I've never really been a person to be motivated about anything that contains the words "social networking", mainly because i do believe that there is no such thing as private information on the internet. Also because i just haven't had the time or motivation; i've never thought i really had much to write about, yet here i sit, probably talking to myself. Anyway, i've been sidetracked. Why i started this blog. There's a combination of reasons; one is that i've decided to at least have a go at trying to develop a few creative ideas i've had for a while but not done anything about. As one of my lecturers always used to say; "Smart people are lazy". We later got him back with this whenever we were late for something, like many university students are with assignments. Another reason for starting this blog is to try improve my communication skills, and let other people know what i'm up to. Yet another reason is just to fill time; i'm a university student and gamer, but at the moment there's something missing as far as time filling goes. I could go into the WoW addiction that has left this hole, but that's a completely different story/post altogether.

As i've already said, i'm not a big fan of putting information on the internet with the intention of no one ever seeing it. Lately my ego has been inflated to the point where i have come to think that what i post online could actually be useful or interesting to others. And what do i intend to post online? Well i suppose it just depends. As i said, there are some personal projects i would like to make a decent start to, which it will be good to document, as much for my benefit as for others. I've never been good with keeping track of things in my mind, but at the same time i've never been in good habits of writing anything down. There's a first time for everything. I will also try to post any technical information i stumble across; as an example i'm currently in the middle of taking apart one of my Xbox 360 controllers because the trigger failed just as i was going to sell it. I'll post something on this when i've got nothing else to post about.

For now i think i've just about killed my fingers with all the typing, and to double it's getting late here in New Zealand. Until next time my dear blog.