Now take the humble No.16 Stagecoach Bus, (take it away from me as far as possible please!)

If hell had mass transit, it would look something like this!

When the no.16 features in my life, I’m either on my way to work, or going back home from there, so nothing exciting usually happens, but the less said about a random sample of my fellow passengers, the better.

However, just today, I was the unintended audience for this little comedy nugget; The ultimate embarrassing child story, as overheard by me!

Father and young daughter on the back seat immediately behind me. Daughter is at the age where she asks questions about everything, whether it is nailed down or not. All wordings are approximate according to a faulty brain, but the good bits are all intact, oh yes they are!

Daughter - “Dad, why do we have to have buses?”

Dad – “They get you to places you want to go to, sometimes you can’t park in town.”

Daughter – “But we could go in a car, you’re a good driver. Daddy, why did the police take the car away?”

Dad – “They didn’t take the car away, I sold it.”

Daughter – “But daddy, they did take the car away!”

Dad – “No, I definitely sold it to Paul, you’re getting confused Georgia.”

Daughter – “You’re lying daddy, you shouldn’t lie!”

Dad – “Georgia, you’re confused…”

Daughter – “I don’t tell lies!”

Dad - “Georgia, shut up!”

Moral of the story? Be a dodgy crim or raise kids, but not both!

I’ve sorely neglected this blog, more posts are owed, we’ve been to some awesome events in Finland, Poland, and even Blackpool since the last time I posted, The art of Atari ST demo’s has taken a giant leap forward but more of that, hopefully when I catch the time and inclination to update properly.

Have a great Xmas y’all!

Gonna need a bigger ferret here...

I tend to think that he made a major mistake in basing his escape and evasion plans on reading Watership Down.

Firstly, it was a UK-based demo party. Not a common occurrence and only the second one after Sundown. Even better, it was the first demo party within striking distance of a return trip in the early morning hours to the palatial bedroom of CiH GHQ in Northampton, being set in the unprepossessing surroundings of Luton town centre and all. The third new feature that appealed to more than a few people was the high comfort level offered by it being located at the Strathmore Hotel. Their conference rooms have some awesome soundproofing, well up to coping with the noise output of a typical demo party, although for the most part, the atmosphere was quieter and more relaxing than usual.

A good time was had by all, and more by some, as the following pictures will demonstrate.

Felice (on the left) mostly swore off alcohol for this party, he had a road trip to Cambridge and back to do himself. However, I wonder if he had access to a secret stash of happy pills, it’s the only rational explanation for that rictus smile! I hate to think of any other possible reasons! Picture credit by mOd, who is on the right of the picture.

This is ‘Stavs‘, our passenger from Outline 2011, the white-out level accurately represents his state of alcoholic inebriation! Original picture credit by Keito.

There was even a small Atari contribution from those nice people at Torment. Poor old Spiny had the misfortune to sleep in and pick up an unwanted souvenir of Luton, no, not an STI, but a parking ticket.

In forthcoming news, our demo partying campaign season is set to climax with the forthcoming Alt Party in Helsinki, from the 21st to the 23rd October, climaxing with this appealing effort from the 10th to the 13th November in Gdansk!

As the last post discussed, I’m actually involved with a project relating to the latter of these two parties, which means I’d better stop wasting time playing around with this blog… Oh..

In slightly related news, the new hardware member of the family, discussed in the previous post, is doing just fine and peachy.

With this last sentence in mind, my 2005 era G4 PowerPC Mini-Mac has done epic service on my desktop for the last half-decade plus the extra year or so. I’m expecting that it has still got plenty of life left in it. However, the rest of the world is rapidly leaving it behind as the latest versions of stuff will not run on this veteran hardware. Not to mention a no-show from the latest versions of Firefox and the Chrome browser. Even small things like the text inputting window on this blog seems to have had an annoying “upgrade” making editing something of a less than realtime plodding chore.

So it’s time to update and Apple have been obliging enough to revamp their Mac Mini range to go with the new ‘Lion’ incarnation of OSX. The other thing that was different from 2005 is that there is now a handy(ish) Apple store within an hour’s drive from CiH HQ. So off I went today and here’s a picture of the new arrival peeking shyly out of its box.

The reviews have generally been positive, apart from one major omission, namely a total lack of any DVD drive. You can connect an external drive, so that may be a Xmas present request, or else “borrow” another computer’s optical drive, if that computer is cabled in or even wirelessly. On the other hand, the 2011 Mac Mini sounds like a decently powerful beast and not so much of a budget Mac any more.

Anyway, more about this new family member in a later post, along with the other things that I promised to mention previously. Got to do some serious backing up before it takes its place on the desktop.

Well after some Olympic level procrastination, not to mention finding a spare day and sufficient kitchen table space to throw at the matter, I’ve finally managed to get a second Sandisk CF card to have a reasonable conversation with the CT60.

What I’ve also done differently from last time.

1. Stopped before I got too clever. At the moment this is limited to plain TOS. Things went tits-uppity with the SD card after I installed Magic. I’ll probably keep this one simple and keep this card as a ‘reversion mode’ if future experiments with more daring configurations go horribly wrong. The next card will have Mint as the choice of multi-tasking O/S.

2. Copied in ‘clean’ files from CD-ROM only. Another possible reason for failure on the previous attempt may be due in part to taking files from a suspect SCSI hard drive, things copied from it which sort of stuttered and stopped working randomly. That being said, it seems my copy of the Dead Hackers Outline 2006 invitro might be a bad copy. At least it dies consistently at the same place each time, about halfway through.

3. I’ve manged to get some things working happily. Screengrab below!

It’s nice to revisit other old friends, also with a big “Hi there!” going to Silkcut from TBL. Other demos will need to wait until I’ve reconnected to a non-VGA screen.

The other point of interest is that the CT60 variable cpu clock (CTCM) seems to have a much lower tolerance ceiling before things go bang with solid state storage, compared with a conventional hard drive. I have a revision 6 MC68060, which has been clocked past 90 MHz previously. It is currently set to 72 MHz, a real ‘safe mode’ speed. Any attempts to push much higher end in catastrophic boot failures.

(To put things in context for non-genre savvy casual readers, the Motorola MC68060 series was an end-of-line processor from the MC68K family, roughly contemporaneous with early Intel Pentiums. The normal unclocked speed is 50 MHz, which speaks volumes as to how far this design can be overclocked without adverse consequences, if a French Atari-loving genius is on the case!)

Anyway, to end this post, I’ve quietly pleased, but thinking very carefully about the next step, specifically other devices to try with it. If anyone has any suggestions, I’m listening.

In these uncertain times, I’m inclined to take a broader view of the whole vexatious topic of billionairedom. If you take a look at the carefully crafted screengrab of the visages of two of my personal favourite examples of the genre, Messrs Ecclestone and Murdoch below.

Oh - dear - god - no !

Looking closely at both of these gentleman, you have to conclude that the ball-aching process of relentless sociopathic ambition, which ultimately diminishes their capacity to be properly human, really leaves lasting physical scars.

Almost as if the average billionaire has had a face made over by a deranged circus midget carelessly sprinkling burning kerosene and rusty agricultural tools onto their cheekbones.

So apart from questioning closely how their actions have huge external consequences for the rest of us, you also have to ask is it doing them any good?

The answer is apparently, “No.”

(I will get back to posting some nice geeky fluffy stuff about Atari and the demoscene shortly. There has been quite a few new happenings there recently. It’s just that this whole “Evil press baron’s Death-Star exploding lark” has got my attention in a big way.)

A few thoughts on the closure of the ‘News of the World’.

Well we’ve been enjoying our very own ‘Arab Spring’ moment here in the UK. A terrible and ancient regime, based on fear, rumour, tits and scandal has been overthrown. Like the Arab Spring, it is still open to question as to what replaces it in the near future. It won’t necessarily be such a big improvement.

One line of thought considers that Rupert Murdoch was planning to close down this loss-making paper for some time and events merely brought the cunning plan forward.

So in a matter of weeks, you could be seeing the ‘Sunday Sun’ replacing the old discredited ‘News of the World’. Probably with most of the same people, so a bit like rebranding the fearsome loathed soviet-era’KGB’ into the warm and cuddly ‘FSB’! Don’t forget the News of the World was operating as a scandal sheet more or less from the beginning, a long time before Rupert Murdoch got involved. Never underestimate the great British public’s appetite for scandal and hypocrisy. The lust for moral panics and hyped up outrage is still more than adequately catered for by the likes of the Daily Mail and Daily Express though.

Anyway, here’s an anecdote which might be interesting.

“A further variation, which certainly happened after the King’s Cross fire, is to ring up the enquiry centres and swear at the volunteers. If one of them cracks you immediately have an ‘Emergency workers swear at anxious relatives’ headline.”

And this joke.

Once upon a time two lads were playing footie in the park in Liverpool. Suddenly a big Dobermann appeared and started mauling one of them. Quick as a flash the other lad ripped a piece of fencing off and stuck it through the dog’s collar. He twisted it and choked the dog to death, saving his friend’s life.

At the press conference a reporter stood up and congratulated him saying “Tomorrow’s headline in the Daily Mail will be Man U fan saves friend’s life”. The kiddy excused himself and said “Sorry mister, I’m not a Man U fan.”

The Daily Telegraph reporter congratulated him and said “Our headline will read Blackburn Rovers fan saves playmate’s life”. The kiddy replies “Sorry mister, I’m not a Man U fan or a Rovers fan. I support Liverpool FC”.

The New of the World reporter stands up and says “Our headline will be Scouse thug murders family pet”.

So who’s next?

“It certainly goes beyond the Murdoch papers. I used to be acquainted with a former Evening Standard journo, who for a while was crime reporter; he freely confessed to regularly paying coppers with cash in envelopes, both for one-off details of ongoing investigations, or regularly to have them on retainer.”

One of the reasons why the tabloid press got away with taking the piss for so long was that the people working for them kept quiet about each others misdeeds. There has been a strange reluctance of the other papers to celebrate any misfortune affecting one of their number. The only place you could find out more of the ‘inside story’ was in places like the Private Eye magazine.

Now it seems that this press Omerta is breaking down, as more people lose their jobs and are threatened with police action, they will want to drag down as many as they can or try to protect their own position.

The following days and weeks are going to be really really interesting, as in ancient Chinese proverb interesting, for the future of the popular press.

This really is like shooting at an especially fat and lazy fish in a barrel no bigger than a teacup, but I don’t give a stuff!

There is a real “wtf?” moment in there if you look closely at the bottom of the picture.