I'm playing around with OpenTTD at the moment. It's a clone of an original Transport Tycoon game, where you have to build a transport company taking goods and passengers using trains, trucks, planes, and ships, making as much money as possible. It's quite addictive, and Alex thinks watching all the trains is marvellous.

The officially released 0.5.3 runs quite happily on my FreeBSD 6.3 desktop system, but the betas of the 0.6 release haven't been ported yet. I've loaded them onto the dual booted Ubuntu Linux side of the desktop, and it's a huge improvement. It allows the use of improved graphics with different locomotives, industries, bridges etc. (including trams!) and allows for a lot variety.

As you can tell, it's quite addictive really. You spend ages trying to get your rail junctions and signalling just right so that everything runs smoothly without you having to watch it all the time, whilst the towns grow around you. My most successful company reached a bank balance of £165 million by the year 2030 (having started in 1950), but I've a long way to go yet. I'm still just learning how to built effective main line railways with proper junctions and signalling - rather than single use lines that just go to one town or industry and back again.

Anyway, if you're a frustrated model railway fan without the space (like me!) you might find it interesting. There are even versions for Windows.

Went to see the new Sweeney Todd film recently (starring Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter). It wouldn't have been my choice necessarily, but Deb wanted to see it, and we don't get to the cinema together very often these days, and I do generally like Tim Burton/Johnny Depp films (Sleepy Hollow is one of my favourite films of all time).

It was certainly gruesome. Lots of throat-cutting in vivid technicolour. The special effects weren't too obvious (except in the opening credits). The plot zipped along at a reasonable pace, only flagging slightly before the slicing and dicing started before picking up fairly rapidly.

For the acting, Helena Bonham Carter was probably better than Johnny Depp - I don't think it was his best performance. The supporting cast was good, with Alan Rickman as the evil judge, and Timothy Spall as his henchman - both of whom meet predictably bloody ends. Sacha Baron Cohen not so good, but then he just gets sliced like all the others.

The singing was a little unexpected but not too intrusive. You wouldn't give Johnny Depp an Oscar for it, but he wasn't dreadful. In contrast to Alan Rickman, who was obviously following the Rex Harrison precedent. There was only one really great song though, and that was in the middle of the film, comparing notes on who will make the best pie (!).

I saw the plot twist coming at the end, but it was not worse for that, and Helena Bonham Carter does meet a particularly gruesome end. Overall, a good film worth the price of admission. Deb will undoubtedly want the DVD of it. It won't go on my favourites list, but it was an enjoyable watch.

And now for something completel different (sorry, I don't do smooth links).

It was Alex's birthday on Friday, which was followed by a visit by my parents. So it was a hectic weekend.

Alex's birthday went fine. He went to a local indoor adventure playground with 5 friends and the had a whale of a time. It's the first time he's really shown an interest in inviting friends and having a party. So things have really moved on. We bought him Star Wars Lego, which is one of his favourite things along with trains and Scooby Doo. He seemed to have a really good time. I wasn't at the party as I had to wait at home for Jessica to come back from a sleepover at a friends house. Her social life is just getting more and more intense as time goes by. In the evening we went out to a nearby Indian restaurant which is pretty much our favourite. It's a nice atmosphere, the food is good, and the kids like the Chicken Korma - so everyone wins.

The next day, my parents came for a visit, arriving around lunchtime. I (hopefully) fixed the printing on their laptop, which they had brought with them. Later we went for a meal to the local pub. This was nice enough, but something caught Alex offguard and he was violently sick that night (3 times!). We don't know whether it was the food, or just the over excitement. Anyway it rather put the dampers on things the following day. We drove around Wirral a bit, took look at the waterfront, and the Dee coastline (which is beautiful).

So overall it was quite a successful visit. The children in particular enjoyed seeing my parents again.

Update: we now know that it was a bug Alex had picked up, as Jessica has had it too, being off school on Wednesday after having thrown up at school on Tuesday and having Deb take her home.

The latest computer challenge is how to download video from Youtube and convert to a format that will play on a domestic DVD player. There are some old films of music hall performers that Dad is interested in, but can't pull off Youtube himself, so I said I'd see what I could do. I'll let you know how I get on.

Blog entry time again. This time I'm sitting in the Caffe Nero in central Liverpool. I've nipped out of work for half an hour to have a coffee and something to eat. Caffe Nero is definitely one of my vices now - particularly as there's one right next to the bus stop where I wait for the bus home. The temptation of a latte on the way is something I have to resist, if only because it's so darned expensive.

Anyway, back in the office today after my adventures finding wireless hotspots in Manchester Airport yesterday. I posted the last blog entry drinking tea in the waiting room of the railway station. Here in Liverpool we seemingly have BT Openzone but nothing I can connect to for free. Looks like I'll be setting up a BT Openzone account then. It'll have to be for the fun of it though as I can't afford to be on it all the time. Perhaps just to post the occasional blog entry or pick up email. As it is, this entry will have to wait to be posted until I get home.

Work is work. My boss assures me that there is an interesting job waiting for me in April when I move into the regional structure, but at the moment I just don't have enough to do - and that makes me rattle the bars of the cage a bit and fret. I've just applied or a project job on TP to SEO. Great experience if I can get it, but I doubt I stand a chance really. At the least, the application process provoked a (hopefully) honest conversation with my boss about where I'm at. We'll see.

Time to go back to work :-(

A trip to Manchester today to meet with someone in our office at the airport, so I'm typing this on the train. Another breakdown in the tunnel this morning meant that I only just managed to make the train I had planned for. The traffic was backed up half way around the M53 as one of the tunnel lanes was closed. That's the second time in 3 weeks, and a real nuisance when it happens.

The meeting is to discuss taking over a stats collation job from someone else, for the Regional Director. Now this is a job which is really up my street. It's the sort of stats analysis stuff I excelled at in my last job but haven't had the chance to do while I've been mired in all the finance work given me since I moved. The plan, as I understand it, is to take all the finance work off me to free me up for other things. This is a little worrying as it means I'll basically be without a job. But it also gives me the chance to define my own role again, and try to carve out a little niche for myself. The danger I suppose is that I won't succeed in carving out that niche. But we'll just have to see where it goes. I also have an application for a SEO project job to put in tomorrow so I still have some options open.

Jessica is very grumpy at the moment. She was at a sleep over with some friends on Saturday night and hasn't really recovered yet. She does struggle with her sleep pattern, and doesn't really have the knack of dropping off. Something like this sleepover (when apparently she was awake until 4am!) really knock her for six.

Alex seems fine - it's always a little hard to tell. His reading is really coming along and he's as heavily into Star Wars as he was once into Thomas the Tank Engine.

Off now to do some work on the long delayed website project while I wait for the train to arrive at Manchester Airport.

Update on the Nintendo Wii situation. We had promised Jessica and Alex that we would buy a Wii shortly after Christmas. My parents and sisters had sent us some money that could go towards it. Of course, at the time you couldn't get one for love nor money and the time since has been spent searching the web for anyone who had the basic £180 model which comes with just Wii Sports (rather than more expensive ones with loads of gubbins you don't actually want or need - and even they were hard to come by).

Well, after much searching I finally found one at Amazon and it was delivered this week!

First impressions? The Wii is an incredible piece of kit. We bought the version which has just the game Wii Sports with it, which is effectively the demonstration game for the console. The contrast with the traditional video game couldn't be more pronounced. The motion sensitivity makes the whole thing completely different. The tennis game is just like playing tennis, for instance. I expected the movement to be really 'blunt', ie it would not be very sensitive to small movements. In fact, it is amazingly subtle allowing for a really fine grained control. This allows you, for instance, to put spin on the ball in tennis or bowling. Or angle the direction of your shot in baseball.

I think the engineers at Nintendo have really shown a stroke of genius in the design. Instead of trying to outgun Microsoft and Sony, they've really invented something which has broken the mold of home gaming. What's more, it can really get you active. After ten minutes of tennis, your heart is really pumping. It's truly refreshing to see something which hasn't just pushed the boundaries of hardware construction to produce games which are boring to play, and actually concentrated on producing a good games console, something that's enjoyable to play.

This touches on a regular theme of mine, particularly since I bought an ipod last year. There's a real difference between something that's just been produced with a degree of contempt for the consumer (not thinking of any large companies based in Redmond!) and something that's been 'designed'. The ipod is a good example of something that feels designed. It feels natural and easy to use. And to some extent the Wii feels similar in use. It's been built with real regard to how people will use it, and to making the experience fun. I think the 'fun' aspect is something the other companies have lost sight of in the pursuit of ever more realistic gameplay. It doesn't matter how good the grass looks if the game is boring to play.

I think that's probably enough for the time being. I'll should post some more once we've another game to see how it stands up then.

In the meantime, I've been spending some time this evening on the Byzantine Studies pagewhich you might want to check out if you're interested in Byzantium, particularly for the online sources.

Well, this blog entry was supposed to be about how to get your Palm Tungsten E connected to your network, and therefore the internet, using a FreeBSD box and the USB cable supplied with the Palm. It's not actually that difficult, you just need an entry in your usbd.conf to call pppd and set up a ppp link between the Palm and the server.

However, all that is irrelevant now as I've splashed out and bought myself a brand new Palm TX. The beauty of this is that it has built in wireless, and so can connect to my router by itself without needing the cabled ppp connection through my server.

OK, so I may as well use the space instead to give you a few quick first impressions of the TX. Bear in mind that I'm a huge fan of Palms, and have been since my first one - an original Zire about 6 or 7 years ago.

In traditional fashion, I'll do the good points first:

• Connectivity: compared to previous Palms, this is a very connected device. The WiFi is excellent, it took no more than 5 minutes to get connected to my home router. Using LGet and LFtp I'm connected easily to my home server, and Versamail does an adequate job of picking up email. It also has Bluetooth, but I haven't tried this yet.
  
• Battery life, although criticised in other reviews, is significantly better than my Tungsten E. Maybe that's because it's battery had deteriorated over the years, but I'm getting much better time from the TX, even with occasional WiFi use.
  
• The screen doesn't seem quite as bright as the Tungsten E, but it's full screen. The pop up 'faked' silk screen is excellent - you get full screen when you want it and silk screen which shows your graffiti strokes when you don't. This makes data entry much less prone to mistakes. The only downside is that many of the older apps (such as Vagablog which I use for blogging) refuse to run full screen.
  
• As I mentioned above, the silk screen is 'faked' and this allows all graffiti strokes to be echoed to the screen. This has made data entry with graffite, although still slower than by keyboard, much easier than previously.
  
• The casing is plastic, and although this initially looks less impressive the the Tungsten E's metal, it looks less prone to scratching and scuffing, and will hopefully last longer in good looking condition.
  

Now for the not so good:

• The OS (5.4.9) seems quite unstable, with a few crashes already, and an ability to turn off when you press the wrong combination of buttons, or refuse to close a dialogue.
  
• The build quality is a little dodgy in parts. Maybe it's just because I'm used to the metal casing on the Tungsten, but the plastic case doesn't feel quite so 'satisfying'. I'm not at all convinced that the various buttons will last the course. None of them feel as robust as on the Tungsten E.
  
• I still use Plucker for offline web browsing more than I use the built in Blazer 'live' web browser. Although the battery feels good to me, it does run down quickly with WiFi use.
  
• As I mentioned above, not all the older apps support full screen mode. This is disappointing as I was looking forward to coding in SiED in full screen.
  
• My IR keyboard still works, but won't work in landscape mode as it rotates the 'wrong' way - ie. With the IR port pointed away from the keyboard's IR transmitter.
  

I think that's it for the moment. On the whole I'm please with it, but I'm not as blown away as I was when I moved from a Zire to a Tungsten E. Be careful if you're looking to buy one though. I bought my from Ebuyer for £158 and they're selling it now for £206 (same model) so the price does seem to fluctuate. Shop around.

Next up some thoughts about the Nintendo Wii which we finally manage to get hold of (was delivered from Amazon yesterday).

Talk soon and keep in touch.

Very frustrated at the moment. The team I'm working with really aren't committed to it at all. In fact, it usually seems that work is something they use to fill a dull moment when they haven't got the match to talk about. Or their lottery syndicate. Or what's happening on Coronation Street. You get the idea. I want to pick them up and shake them. They're so damn complacent that everything is someone else's fault. Grrrrrr.

Saxophone lesson at school for Jessica today. She's also singing in the chorus in the school pantomime this evening. She got a bit worried last night because it seems the teacher running the show has put a bit of pressure on them to get it right - which had Jessica in a bit of a blather.

Alex rumbles on, school is still going OK - he may be in the lowest set for Literacy and Numeracy, but he's there. And his reading has improved no end since the summer.

I'm reading a single volume abridgement of Gibbon's "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" at the moment, mostly on the bus on the way into work. It's interesting how the conclusions he draws are often still the 'canonical' ones regarding any given period.

I'm also trying to wean myself off a growing addiction to Caffe Nero Lattes, usually to drink on the bus on the way home.

Here we are at the run down towards Christmas. I can't tell you how much I dislike this time of year. It's dark in the morning, it's dark in the evening. You feel constantly tired and there's the stress of trying to prepare for Christmas.

We're not doing big presents for the kids this year - although my family have given me quite a bit of money, and we are therefore thinking about getting a Wii afterwards. No chance of getting one beforehand, and both kids enjoy their electronic games. It's a lot of money, but we know they'll get their money's worth out of it. The alternative is a holiday somewhere, or perhaps membership of Chester Zoo. I'll let you know what we decide.

Work is work. I just hate getting up when it's dark and then going home when it's dark. Still there is light on the horizon as I may shortly be able to hand over my staff to someone else and just be a planning manager - which I think is probably more up my street although it only forms part of my role at the moment.

Time for another update. Where are we up to?

Well, Jessica is now in Year 5, and finding it all quite hard work. Mind you, that might be at least partly because she finally seems to have thrown herself into the activities available at school. So she is now doing rugby, gardening club, computer club. She's been shouted at for giggling in class and is finding the homework a bit of a struggle. History at the moment is the Victorians, and she's seemingly interested for the first time. So we took her to the Walker Art Gallery at the weekend to see some Victorian buildings and art.

Other than that, she's into a kid's social networking site called club penguin, along with one of her friends. This is helped by having a computer in her own room now, which allows her to play without getting in the way of everyone else.

So the new term has been difficult for Jessica. We're moving back to 5p's for good behaviour (Jessica's version of a star chart) and we'll see how we go.

Meanwhile Alex has started at Junior school. Despite all our concerns, it's gone really well. In fact, he's just been given the Headteacher's Award (the top award the school gives out each week).