The default topic for British people who haven't got anything to say

Bloody Weather.

Conversation about the weather is the last refuge of the unimaginative.

~Oscar Wilde 

It's finally starting to cool down around here. By 'cool down', of course, I mean it's merely around seventy Fahrenheit at 4am in the morning, as opposed to being some ridiculous figure in the nineties. Don't even ask about what it's like in the day. It being Missouri, of course, it's not merely hot, it's also humid as hell. Thinking of wearing dry clothes today? Well, think again!

For at least this week, however, it's going to be reasonably cool, perhaps in the high eighties, and there's even talk of actual rain this weekend. Thunderstorms! And not before bloody time, in my opinion.

The first thing a lot of people ask me what the biggest change is in moving to the US. Well, it's often the second thing, actually; usually they've got some question about the royal family, not realising I'm one of the huge majority of Britons who couldn't give a toss about the royal wedding, Princess Diana, etc. But getting back to the question of change, it really has to be the climate.

I was born, raised and lived for the first thirty-odd years of my life on an island which doesn't know what weather is, beyond 'light drizzle'. Occasionally we have a thunderstorm, but comparing them to the storms of the Midwest is like comparing a couple of AA batteries to a hydroelectric dam. Our summers are warm without being unreasonably so, our winters cold but not dangerously so; snow happens, but unless you're up a mountain somewhere or the depths of Scotland, you're going to be lucky if you get more than a couple of inches per year. Not that that doesn't mean the whole country grinds to a halt as soon as a few millimeters of snow accumulate, but still. When the local papers talk about blizzards hitting the UK, someone needs to remind them that a blizzard is when you can't find your car for three weeks.

"I say, what frightful weather. Back home for tea and crumpets"

In short, I'm basically a creature who's been moved out of its natural environment, like a penguin who's been dumped in the Sahara. Everyone here native-born has at least had a lifetime to acclimate to the perverse nature of the local climate, and furthermore are presumably bred from people who also got used to it. If Mr Darwin (not a terribly popular figure around here, admittedly) is to be listened to, local Missourians should be adapting to this horrible, 'roll 2d20 for weather' style meteorology they have round here.

Kit has mentioned that this has been an pretty hot summer as far as things go around here. This is good, because I'd hate to think this had been one of the more balmy years, and I only had worse to look forward to.

Still, I've got the Autumn Fall to look forward to. For the two weeks it lasts before we're having to hope they clear the snow off the roads by the morning again.

Absences

Well, it's been a while since I posted here. This is something I tend to feel guilty about from time to time. The longer it goes between posts, the more reluctant I become to post something, because I never quite know what to say after such an absence, and it slowly spirals downwards. Sometimes (like Livejournal), I eventually never come back at all.

I'm not even sure what I'm feeling back about; it's not like anyone but a handful of people read this blog. A very small handful, at that. I don't make my living doing this, much as I'd like to be, so it's not like I'm not bringing home the bacon.

Well, enough of that. It's about time I started posting when I feel like it, or when I have something to say. If there's an period where I don't write anything, it shouldn't be a source of angst and soul searching.

Right now, I don't have an awful lot to say, other than the guilt stops here, today.

Just a quickish update to say goodbye to a couple of things, at least for the forseeable future; eventually, I might well go back to them, but for now it’s au revoir.

Firstly, goodbye Wordpress, and hello Blogspot. There are various minor reasons I decided to port my blog over to there, none of which add up to anything convincing, besides wanting to give the major competition a try. My online life is already pretty dominated by Google; my email, RSS feeds, and search engine needs are already solely met by them, Google Docs is the best of a bad bunch of online word processors (when I actually need one), Youtube is owned by... yep, you guessed. Might as well see if the blog is any better right now.

Secondly, the last update of Ubuntu didn’t agree with the laptop. After a couple of days of poking around and reinstalling the whole thing, I reached the conclusion it was a) probably the video drivers that were causing the problem, and b) it was fixable, probably, though most likely beyond my ken to do so any time soon.

At about the same point, it occurred to me that anything I’m using regularly right now is available in Windows as well as Linux, and to be honest, most of the Windows binaries are a damned sight easier to install than most Linux builds. Don’t get me wrong, I’m very fond of Ubuntu, and I do like the OS as a whole, but functionally, there’s no reason for me to be using it right now, other than to be faintly smug and elitist.

So, Windows 98 it is for now.

The nice thing of course, is decisions like these aren’t set in stone. I can change my mind tomorrow, and revert back and forth as the mood suits me. It might piss off my readers if I kept switching blog URLs all the time, but I’m sure both of them would cope.

If only all choices in life were so easily changed ;)

On a personal note

When I started this particular blog, I quietly swore to myself I wouldn’t be writing about boring, everyday things that happen in my life. That’s exactly what I used to do with Livejournal, write up all the dull shit happening, as if anyone actually gave a damn. The trouble with this was that for the most part, my days are pretty repetitive; I go to work, I come home, I bugger about with the hobby du jour, I go to bed, prior to getting up and rinsing and repeating. This is probably true of most people, but that doesn’t make me Samuel Pepys. This becomes so repetitive to write about that suddenly I’m updating once every six months, and that’s only to say that nothing new or exciting is happening.

So here, I decided I’d at least try to be a little different, and write about things that people not in my immediate family might have a passing interest in. So far, that seems to be working. I can’t claim my posts are interesting to read, that’s the readers call, but at least they’re not boring to write.

For once, though, it’s worth touching on personal events. Last week we had an interview with Homeland Security, and my green card was renewed. For the first since perhaps 2002, one of the major stress factors in my life has just... stopped. Gone away. I don’t have to deal with the interminable paperwork or shockingly high fees for filing said paperwork for at least ten years, and even that would just be a renewal. I have to admit, it’s left me flailing a little to suddenly not have that looming in the background.

I can’t say the approval came as any surprise, given I’m from one of the few countries left in the world that still likes the US. I’m pleased that once you got past the stock forms and demands for financial records of nonexistent things, once you actually get to the face to face level, the immigrations staff have been extremely pleasant. This was true in London, and it’s true in St Louis. Indeed, it’s hard to be concerned about the outcome of the interview when halfway in the interviewer starts pulling up pictures of her cats on her iPhone and showing them to us.

Really though, the whole thing’s had a sense of anticlimax for some time. There’d have been a time when I first moved here when I would actually dream regularly that I’d been deported back to England. I wouldn’t call them nightmares, as they were pretty dull as dreams go, but clearly my subconscious wasn’t thrilled at the prospect. For the last year or so, though, it’s just been another minor stress to add to the pile, a tediously slow exchange of correspondence we wished would just be done.

And now it is. It feels somehow sudden that it’s all over, but unless I want to start the naturalization process in a few months, I don’t actually have to deal with Homeland Security until 2021. Citizenship isn’t anything I’ll be rushing into, incidentally, until I can find out what the long term effects are on both sides of the water. I hear that Neil Gaiman has always, somewhat superstitiously, clung to his British Citizenship like a drowning man clinging to a wooden plank, and I would love to know why.

Nine years of bureaucracy ended in a single day. If nothing else, I thought it would be worth noting here.

In Soviet Russia, Internet reads YOU

Some (most) of the hits this blog gets seem to come from a particular source, an auto finance blog. I'll not give the url, as that might just invoke their fel spirit; at best, it'd be free advertising for them. Note I've never written about cars, or finance, in any way, shape or form. I don't think I've even used either word until this post. I have no interest in auto finance, I have no car, I have no intention of getting a car. Or a loan. Or a car loan. Or...

And yet, still, somehow, traffic comes from them, to me. With no visible sign of an actual link to my website, either. I note when I try to follow the link back, it goes through about 3 layers of Yahoo addresses before landing wherever it lands, which does nothing to raise my respect for that company.

 I'm not sure why they're latching on to me, but I suspect I'm one of thousands. I wish they'd bugger off, though. The hits on wordpress, I'd rather be authentic. It's not like I'm being paid for them, after all.

Perhaps I can entice them to sod off and ping my AC account.

A true story

I recently found out that my PC specs are adequate for running Team Fortress 2. I remembered that that looked like a lot of fun when I’d seen my brother playing it on the 360, so I duly ordered it through Steam. I found a bunch of server affiliated through a particular clan that I enjoyed, and got to playing.

And died. Over and over again.

Now some of that is probably because my PC just about meets the specs; it certainly doesn’t have the sort of Super Fandango Quad-blit video card that I see used on youtube, whose framerates make me insanely jealous. It stutters at times, and I suspect my characters heads would be exploded a lot less were it a little smoother.

But I persevere. I have a crack at it most nights, I get to the point where names of the other players are starting to sound familiar. They don’t say a lot, as they’re too busy firing rockets and flamethrowers at my asshole, but I attribute emotions to them, I start to judge their level of competence, and I slowly begin to get better at the game. I learn where the taunt key is, and use it liberally. I learn how the different roles play out, and basically how to lay down some smack occasionally between deaths.

And then, late one night, someone makes a comment about ‘Jesus, how many bots do you have on here?’ I pay it no mind at first, but obviously my subconscious nags away at it. I check and find you can bring up the scoreboard with the tab key, and sure enough, ‘BOT BOT BOT BOT BOT’. Out of the 20 players on the server at that point, 3 are actual people, the rest are being run by a computer.

Now, it’s a credit to TF2 that the bots are that good; that they can make complex tactical  decisions and contribute to a team’s game so well, that they can mimic human players reasonably, and they don’t get stuck running on the spot against a wall somewhere. They’re possibly some of the smartest AIs I’ve seen playing a game. But I get the feeling I might as well have just been playing offline half the time. I suspect the clan’s servers have more real people during reasonable hours; I tend to play well after midnight, and anything up to 4am.

It’s also slightly creepy to think that even if I weren’t online, there would be anything up to 24 bots, all battling it out, 24 hours a day, with no end in sight and nobody even watching. On multiple servers and maps. War has never looked so futile.

So, back to the drawing board. Time to look for more servers where real, breathing people actually play at OMG o’clock. On the plus side, playing against bots for so long has made me a better player. I suspect the bots have a fair better reaction time than most people; they don’t have to see something and lurch for a key combination or anything, they just do it. On the downside, I also suspect I’ll be back to getting killed to death pretty quickly; however good the bots are, they’re not as good as some of the hardcore players who drink, sleep and shit TF2, and eat punks like me for breakfast.

Written 1/29. Promptness is a virtue

I suspect I need a peer group. At least, some kind of Blog peer group. I still cringe at the word ‘blogosphere’, but this blog really is a wee bit isolated.

Trouble is, every other blog I’ve seen recently is selling something. At the very least, they’re selling themselves, desperate to get pagehits to their sites by any means necessary.

Now, that’s not necessarily a bad thing; given my flirtation with AC/Yahoo, I can’t really claim I haven’t done this without being an enormous hypocrite. The sad thing is, you see so many ‘successful’ sites that get thousands of hits a day, and say absolutely nothing. I noticed one site had somehow sent me a few hits my way, and I was curious how. Google Chrome inched its way past the screens of ads, and led me to a blog where there was no sign of the article cited, just 40 or 50 esoteric articles on blog design. I can’t tell if mine was ever mentioned anywhere or just generated randomly with some sort of bot to generate him that tiny bit more traffic. The posts involved appeared to be little more than links to other posts on other blogs, with a thumbnail picture of something vaguely relating to the topic thrown in.

And this site, mind you, had hundred of comments on the posts. On each post. I didn’t even dare read them. How much can you have to say about the importance of graphics in articles?

The point is, this traffic being generated to my blog was never, as far as I can tell, touched by human hand. It was certainly never read by anything sentient due to these clicks, I’m sure.

Am I the only one who finds this a bit depressing? I mean, if we’re going to play silly buggers and write articles and posts that aren’t going to be read, why don’t we just code something up to write articles that no-one will read? Then the two algorithms can just get on with it, and anyone creative involved can go for a drink and relax.

So, this is why I’ve previously been reluctant to join any little blog circles or things of that nature. Discussions on AC’s forums are all about the Search Engine Optimisation of articles, and how to maximise potential hits by parroting key phrases a certain percentage of times throughout your writing. Not only does this seem slightly dishonest, the writing equivalent of trying to lure someone into the back of a van with the promises of puppies, those who do it well turn out articles which are frankly... inelegant. Search engines are supposed to love these (or did; I don’t believe Google relies on SEO any more), but for humans trying to read, it’s a load of tedious, repetitive bollocks.

The short version: I’d love to read your blog, actual real person. I’d love you to read mine. I don’t even care what it’s about, as long as I find it interesting. If you’re such a real person, feel free to subscribe.

If you’ve a blog that’s optimised for maximal hits from Google, I’m probably not interested. If I was interested, I’d have looked you up on Google, wouldn’t I?

If you’re a bot, go play with the other bots. You already outnumber actual people; don’t crowd those of us left who actually write for the hell of it out entirely.