Nick Jackson

Today our great and extraordinarily expensive VLE goes down for some upgrades to prepare it for the next academic year, where it’s taken out of the hands of the unfortunate computing students who have been giving it a thorough hammering and replaces the venerable and admittedly shit Virtual Campus.

Will we get features we have been asking for like RSS feeds of course content? Will we finally be able to use the message boards without Java? Will the university finally get it into its head that not everybody uses Word, and perhaps some form of PDF document would be far nicer? Will the academic staff decide on a single, sensible format for all the content so you don’t have to remember how each individual tutor stores their notes?

Probably not. Still, any update which requires the entire system to be taken offline for several hours is either going to be a nice improvement, a major behind-the-scenes set of tweaks, or a total cock-up. I await the results with great anticipation.

As you may of may not know, next year I’m living in a place called The Junxion with a few friends. We’ve decided to go a bit above and beyond the usual student flat with printed photographs Blu-Tacked to the wall by heading to everyone’s favourite Swedish store, IKEA.

The trouble is all the cool stuff we really want to get, like better lighting, shelves, artwork, hanging rods for kitchenware and so on rely on us drilling holes into the wall, which will probably upset accommodation.

We’ll just try make the flat look so good they don’t care.

After writing 1500 words on it, I can safely say that Systems Thinking is yet another instance of consultants coming up with a set of convenient buzzwords and terms to explain something at £500 an hour that I could explain in 10 minutes for free.

I acknowledge that there is a need for people to sit back and look at things like processes and systems in order to better understand and improve them. What I don’t get is why it has to be wrapped up in endless diagrams, words that nobody else understands, and marketed as a silver bullet to solve all business woes.

Systems thinking is an approach to analysis that is based on the belief that the component parts of a system will act differently when isolated from its environment or other parts of the system.

That’s it in a nutshell. Wikipedia rules. I have somehow managed to drag that sentence into a 1500 word report. It’s like UML all over again, but with fewer boxes.

This is the BT Home Hub. It’s a nice white box with blinky lights on the front, a phone, and a load of cables coming out of the box. It is also one of the singularly worst pieces of communications hardware it has ever been my misfortune to have to deal with.

The Home Hub is BT’s “plug-and-play” router for home users, and indeed it does have some plug-and-play elements. If you plug in the power supply and the ADSL cable, it connects to the internet for you with zero configuration. Shove in an ethernet cable and it sets itself as a default gateway router through DHCP, or it serves as a WiFi hotspot. At least, all this happens with the latest software.

When we got it, it had the original software. Oh joy of joys, this needed configuring through a terrible user interface. We were promised it would get better though, it had automatic updating! Sure enough, a few weeks later, it was updated with the new user interface, better stability, automatic configuration and so on.

Well, automatic except for everything else. Whenever your hub is reset to the factory settings, it forgets extra things you have as addons. This means that our IP phone stopped working until we re-activated it.

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And lo, with the blocking of “Have You Ever?” and “Which Les Miserables Character Are You?”, my Facebook blocked applications list now includes over 100 of the most irritating bits of the internet to ever have been created.

I’ll admit to having had a couple of Facebook applications installed. I had a couple of interesting network visualisation ones installed, and still do have one for inserting mathematical formulas in messages around the site. I have even shared applications with people who I thought would find them interesting. However, I object to having people mindlessly send invites to everybody on their address list. Anybody who knows me will know that I don’t do the pointless quizzes, and I have a penchant for elegance and simplicity in websites. Why anybody believes that I would want to fill my profile with things saying “I am most like: Peter Petrelli” and “I have 1,285,395.4 fish in my tank!” is beyond me.

Seriously guys, I don’t want your app invites unless you think I’ll genuinely be interested. I’m far more likely to spot a useful application on your profile and just add it myself.

Oh, and as for the coloured profile people? You can go swivel on it as far as I’m concerned. Facebook started as a simple, elegant method for students to keep in touch. Despite the opening to everybody (Bad idea in my opinion, but oh well) it’s being kept mostly that way, providing you know how to block all the crap. Coloured profiles, even if limited to preselected themes, are a bad idea. Sure, allow users to theme their own view but please, for the love of all things holy, don’t let people expose us to fuschia pink on green.

I reckon next year I should be able to collide my robotics/AI units with my elective Games Design unit and build an exmersive game, or at least an interface to one. What is exmersive you say? Simple, it’s the opposite of immersive.

There has been a trend in gaming to bring gamers deeper into the gaming world. This is awesome for some games whose worlds are amazingly crafted with some stunning story and environments. FPS like the Half-Life series and Bioshock instantly spring to mind as worlds which are carefully built for the player to just drop into. Likewise with RPGs and pseudo-RPGs such as Grand Theft Auto 3 (VC/SA included) or World of Warcraft. Even some top-down simulation  such as Command and Conquer can really drag you in with its amazing backstory and the work which goes into keeping the ‘world’ working and believable even though when you sit back you realise it’s only a few pixels on a screen.  Immersive gaming is taking that same world and trying to drag you into it through means such as VR glasses or enormous projected screens. Alienware have a big curvy screen which fills your peripheral vision and is a good step towards taking this into the home.

Exmersive gaming, on the other hand, is the opposite. You can go on with your daily life and the game is brought out into the real world, with the computerised ‘players’ (Robots in my case) interacting with normality. There have been some attempts at this collision mostly by puzzles such as Perplex City, but they again try to bring players into believing the game world. Here’s where exmersive is different, for example in this RPG:

You get given your ‘quests’ by robotic or static computer terminals, and the chances are your quests will have a bearing on the real world. Since if this happens anywhere it’ll be round campus, you may well get a quest to take some printouts down to the admin office in return for which you will gain experience (Allowing you to undertake bigger quests) and a reward (Print credit, for example).

Another possibility would be to involve real people as actors in the game (Perhaps clash with some robots somewhere) and only have the computer being a Dungeon Master of sorts, instructing people in what roles to take. Hook up some gadgetry to detect movements and you’ve got yourself a real-life Dungeons and Dragons. Sweet.

Whilst heading home yesterday, I intended to catch the 1809 service from Lincoln Central to Newark North Gate (Operated by East Midlands Trains), from there to catch the NXEC service to Leeds. Unfortunately, upon arriving at Lincoln, I discovered that my train had been cancelled.

At this time of year, the reasons for cancelling trains are wide and varied. The wrong kind of frost on the line, snow, inclement weather, and attack of killer snowmen are all possibilities. My train was cancelled for an altogether less acceptable reason - a shortage of train crews.

Now, call me cynical, but aren’t the timetables for trains available months in advance? This is plenty of time to make sure there are crews for all timetabled services. If there aren’t, don’t timetable them in the first place!

You’ve usually got around 2,000 horsepower. Put your fucking foot down!

Addendum: following this freight train, we remained stood at the level crossing for 13 minutes before the barriers raised. No other train went by.