Aquarionics

So myself and my girlfriend are currently doing the slow, slow waltz of the house-hunters, Stalking though Reading with Very Big Nets and with miniture houses as hats on our heads to try to locate the house of our dreams.

Bah. It’s Saga time, here on Aquarionics dot com. Are you ready? Are you blogging comfortably? Then I’ll begin.

Once upon a time, in the land of Angle there lived a Beautiful Princess and a Possibly-Passable-In-Bad-Light-From-The-Right-Profile Prince whom we shall Aquarion, for that is his name. One bright and sunny spring day, they commenced on a quest to discover a new castle where they could reside. From the castle in Ca’mbridge they galloped, reaching the next (How do I put Trains into a fantasy non-steampunk scenario? Aha…) superhorse to the big city, where they caught another superhorse direct to the library city of Reading, Land of Bojs, where they met F’Rank, Herder Of Housen, who equipped them with nets of the largest size, and they went off into the urban jungle, hunting houses.

Soon, we came across a pair sitting in the middle of a herd of housen. Herder F’Rank offered the Housen examples of it’s staple food, the Keez that grow on the lesser spotted Keeooks specially cultivated by his Herdmaster, until it was pacified and the Prince and Princess could examine it without being bitten.

This Housen was no longer young (or a “Chead”), and showed signs of evolution. A number of growths which F’Rank described as “fownke-nectars”, representing the major strains of such in the local area, littered the main cavity, and there was even an “Eye Esde’en” growth inside.

The second Housen was obviously in some pain, a great metal cage had been erected around – and sometimes inside – it, and it didn’t even flinch when we entered it without offering it Keez. When wandered around inside, it was clear why. This Housen was a mother! Inside was a litter of smaller Housen, known as “Phlaits” which refused entry without a great deal of mucking around with Keez. The Prince and Princess were perfectly willing to take a Phlait instead of a Housen for their Castle, and this Phlait was a fine example, with a beautiful central cavity and a nice B’Droom cavity, but the K’chen cavity was tiny.

The Prince and Princess, together with Herder F’Rank, placated the Phlait and it’s mother, wished it good health in the future, and left to the home of Herder F’Rank’s Guild: Vanderpump and Wellbelove (And that, I assure you, I’m not making up. That really *is* the name of the letting agency). Where they decided upon the first Housen as their Castle.

Now came the longest part of the Quest, the strange and secret series of rituals and rites that must be followed before the Housen is theirs. The Calling of the References, the Summoning of the Guarantors, and the Paying of the Deposit. The Prince and Princess returned to their current Castle in Ca’mbridge, knowing that whilst the start had ended, the end – and the new castle – had barely begun.

I’m not the worlds most tidy person.

Any room of mine will come, within a week, a small-scale tip, displaying the remains of temporary interests (“Woah! That’s the game I played for weeks when I was 14, I wonder if I can get it working on Maelstrom?”), long-term projects (Four reference books on C++, the Linux Admin’s Guide, the Perl Bookshelf) clothes, and at least twenty books in various states of read-ness from “Should read this soon” (Body Of Secrets), “Can’t read this while it mirrors the Real World” (Blood of the Fold), Reference works (Aladdin, Complete Works of Shakespere, a few notebooks of stuff on various Projects (including the diagrams making up the database for the MusicDB). Not to mention enough wires to tie me up and suspend me from the rafters.

So. Currently we are moving out of this house, which means doing the “Viewing” thing, which means people wandering around the house, which means even I, who in the House-Proud stakes got the wooden-spoon that still had dried-cake mix on it, was motivated to modify some of the more foot-deep aspects of my living quarters.

My carpet appears to be blue.

Wow.

And then, with a startling burst of energy to put the power of several suns to shame, nothing happened.

Oh, I got screwed by my bank, double-charged for a couple of things, and then was charged for the priviledge of being charged for them. This could recurse indefiniatly.

Much of the blogging world appears to be caught up in the fact we have probably passed the increasingly blurred line that’s labeled “War Begins Here”. Today is a sad day for peaceniks everywhere, for the government of this country at least have proved that it doesn’t matter what the people think, we don’t run this country after all.

“The grand plan that is Aquarion proceeds apace”, as Frank Miller failed to say in ‘Ronin’, and wasn’t relentlessly sigged by Stuart (TAFKA Aquarius). We move out of this house in less than two weeks (Two weeks exactly yesterday) and we now at least know which town we are moving to, or at least within twenty miles of. Reading here we come…

Apart from that, empty worlds. I’m working – slowly but surely – on the geekstuff.co.uk reviews system, the worlds nicest PIM (Which is slowly moving away from being internally XML-RPC based, though should aways have that functionality. Maybe I should look at REST-style things, or go back to my original C&R(Call & Response) ascii-based server idea. First, however, I must build some kind of interface to the database so I can remember to not forget weddings and such. The paid project I hinted at earlier I shouldn’t have done, for now the waveform has collapsed. The cat is dead. Possible employment is an experiement in superposition. It’s either going to happen and you’ll be employed, or it isn’t and you won’t, the wave-form collapses when you get a phone call or email. However, in deviation from Schrodinger’s cruelty to felines, you can effect this equasion by mentioning it to people under this law: “As more people know of your possible future employment, the probability that you will not gain said employment approaches one” (Aquarion’s first law of employment. There may be others). This particular project was so unbelivably close to actuallity that the only possible way the employer could get out of it would be to – say – Go to Mexico for a month on short notice before he has a chance to write and send me the specs of the project. For example. But, like the John Smiths, I’m not bitter.

I find it facinating that of the once sentance I made on the war, Laurabelle commented on one half, and Nick Boalch took me to task for the other half.

So, it’s been decided that Aquarionics isn’t really self-centred enough already, and since I’m trying out this new toy for ccooke, the Aquaricam has been brought back into the land of the living. Currently on view is someone who desperatly needs a haircut and is wearing a horrific pink shirt, though this is likely to change.

One of the nicest things about my current computer is that the following things work:

As I type, I’m listening to Pulp, f.e.e.l.i.n.g.c.a.l.l.e.d.l.o.v.e. You won’t see this in the “Now Playing” box because I’m having an argument with the doSomething plugin for winamp over the correct definition of “ID Tag”. Yet I digress.

Whilst I do this, I’m installing SuSE in a virtual machine, just for kicks, whilst playing the old Amiga game Top Hat Willy in a UAE window (Currently paused while I type diary entry). Earlier this afternoon I was playing the original “Jet Set Willy and almost impossible to complete to boot. Not because of bad mechanics, but the fact the game is a) huge, and b) difficult. Yet – once again – I digress) to which Top Hat Willy is a remake/sequel/2040 of. This involved getting a Spectum emulator and making it work, always fun.

Anyway, there was a point to all this, and it goes as follows: I was reminded of a game called “Valhalla” which I played over at least a decade on the Commodore 64. It was an adventure game, where you interacted with all these random people (Well, less random, more Viking Mythology) in the form of “Ask Thor buy hammer” “Thor refuses to sell you the hammer” “Throw fireball at Thor” “You throw the fireball at Thor, Thor dies” “Take Hammer” “You take the hammer” “Thor enters” “Thor attacks you” “Thor Kills you” “Say ‘Fuck’” “Mary enters.” “Mary hits you” “Mary Leaves”. That was it. Well, there were some things like having to discover the great sword of sommat or other, and the helm of mit, Ring of Phyre, etc etc. It had about a hundred differant locations on many many levels (If you jump, you go up a level. If you die and there is a level below you, you go down, otherwise you get randomly put in a new location. Same goes for the AI).

The reason for all this drawn-out nostalgia? Someone has done Atari Adventure in Flash.