I think that most Community Support Officers and Special Constables do an excellent job, but you can’t know every law inside out. However, you should know laws like when and where people can film/photograph if it’s your job to film the streets of London…
My company has a draconian clear desk policy which requires me to have nothing on my desk save the things attached to my computer. Apparently it’s in an effort to “portray the right image when clients/potential clients arrive.”
I think it would just portray an image of a room full of mindless corporate drones, unable to express themselves with so much as a small picture of their son/daughter, or a amusing Dilbert strip to alleviate the day-to-day.
I exaggerate of course, I break the rule constantly as my desk is a permenant reminder of what happens when you employ someone like myself. I am, however, sat in the middle of the room, so I guess I serve as a reminder of how your desk SHOULDN’T look!
Unfortunately my wife said “You are NOT going to work like that, I don’t want your friends thinking I would let you out of the house like that!”.
The real kicker is that everyone at work thought it was cool…
Since Google announced that their app-engine would be initially supporting Python with the Django framework, the buzz around Django has increased. If the great web-lord Google says play with it, the peons of the web do as they’re told
And for good reason - python is an incredible sophisticated language that’s both elegant and easy to learn, add Django into the mix and you’ve got a winning combination! Learning Website Development with Django by Ayman Hourieh is one of the first books on the subject and sets the bar very high.
From the outset Ayman Hourieh makes no bones about the fact that really, you need to have more than a passing knowledge of python. You don’t need to know all it’s nuances, but being familiar with the syntax will help immeasurably. However, his code examples are excellent and even if you just copy verbatim what he’s written, you’ll soon pickup enough to call yourself a python/Django developer.
From describing the actual installation on multiple platforms to the reasons behind some of the choices the Django team made, the book makes an effort to help you understand the whys and wherefores of Djangos (and pythons) existence as well as the technical and development facets.
The book helps you build a bookmarking application, but anyone who knows anything about web2.0 will instantly see that there are many more uses for the application. Your mind will be a-flutter at the possibilitiesDjango opens up for you and the author will show you far enough down each path to give you a taste of the power at your fingertips. Each chapter is structured as steps in the build process and guides you through the application. At first I was a little dismayed to see basicMVC (or MTV) rules being broken so early on with HTML in the python code, however it’s merely an example and later on in the book the author discusses proper use of templates with some first class examples.
Any coding language is too big for one book so don’t expect to learn everything Django has to offer, but Ayman Hourieh has written a guide which is succinct, accurate and elegant, with an application which you can re-purpose in hundreds of different ways or use as a foundation for the next killer web2.0 app!
I’ve been reading and listening to a lot of short stories recently. There are quite a few podcasts where people read short stories. One that has impressed me is Escape Pod hosted by Stephen Eley. He often reads the stories himself, but he also has quite a few guest reads on the show.
They have the odd lemon, well, I say that, what I should say is they have the odd story which isn’t to my taste, but the majority of the stories are excellent. Two that are though were outright amazing were Edward the Bear and the Very Long Walk and Homecoming at the Borderlands Cafe. I’ve listened to quite a few of the backlog now (about 40 odd) and the quality is consistently high.
Anyway, head over there and subscribe, it’s well worth it!
As you may or may not have read below, depends on how often you stop by, I did actually win NaNoWriMo last year. 50,000 words in a month. It’s amazing what the brain can do if you force it to think hour after hour fueled with diet coke, snickers and Nine Inch Nail - Year Zero to help.
Anyway, I did say I wasn’t going to show anyone until I’d edited it and re-written parts etc etc. But, now I’ve read it through myself, it’s a bit simple plot-wise, the characters are thin and it’s interspersed with random gibberish as I fell asleep at my keyboard.
To that end, I’ve put it online in the hopes that someone will read it and offer me any feedback - should I edit it and rewrite parts? Is it worth spending the time? Did I waste many precious hours on a blithering bucket of bilious carbuncles? (Actually, the answer to the last question I already know, no, I didn’t waste any time, I thoroughly enjoyed doing it.).
So, click the link below, have a read and let me know what you think … please!
Research published in December showed that Catholicism is now the most popular Christian denomination with more worshippers attending mass than Church of England services.
Reuters UK
While it doesn’t scite it’s source, it’s an interesting statement!
Update: The Times agrees.
I know that I post one of these “It’s been a long time since I posted anything on here” posts at least once every six months, but it always surprises me that sooo much time has lapsed since I last vomited my mind onto the interwebs.
With that said, here’s some content:
I recently finished my first every short story entitled “Extremely Bad Luck“, you can read it by clicking that title, or clicking here: http://oort-cloud.org/?q=node/539.
That’s all for now!
I’ve got an XBOX360, a thing which I am immensely pleased about. I’ve also got Assasins creed, a thing which I am not so immensely pleased about. It started well and I was thoroughly enjoying it before I got to the third section and thought “Hang on, haven’t I done all this before?”. You see, Assasins Creed is a bit … samey.
Don’t get me wrong, visually this game is an absolute stunner, pretty much setting a new benchmark for the way games should look on next gen consoles. The first time you round a corner and see the first city spreading out in the valley below you is a real jaw-dropping moment. The first time you swan dive from a viewpoint, or perform a retaliation kill will cause you to spontaneously whistle through your teeth in amazement.
But a game isn’t all about the way it looks.
It’s about the gameplay. Isn’t it? Assasins Creed starts with some phenominal gameplay and then, well that’s the point, it just does the same things over and over again. Without giving too much away, there are several set peices you need to do in order to learn enough about your mark to then be given the go-ahead to stab ‘im up good. These things never vary from level to level, they are always “Pick Pocket”, “Interrorgate”, “Evesdrop” and “Talk to Informer” the latter being either collect some flags an idiot has carelessly dropped or stab someone (or two, or three) who your informer doesn’t like. There are also side missions, well, side “mission” and that is to “Save the citizen”. Someone will be having a bad day at the hands of the city guards and it’s your job to rush in, kill the guards and talk to the Citizen. They will then tell there brother/husband/uncle/dog who will tell their mates and then you’ve got either a walking camoflage point, or some people who’ll get in guards’ way if they’re chasing you (more about guards in a moment). But that’s it. There is little more to the game, save the assasinations. Some assasinations will take you a fair amount of time, especially if you have to get into a castle, or somewhere similar.
But thats it. Seriously. The same 7 or 8 tasks over and over again, set in some of the most beautiful computer game environment ever made.
Somebody dropped the ball.
On top of that are the guards. The guards who roam about the city have some not bad AI. They will chase you up buildings and through tunnels, so no problem there. The guards on the roof tops? Idiots, all of them. When you climb up onto a roof, they will stand there and say things like “You’re not supposed to be up here.” and after a period, will start to fire their arrows at you. But they won’t give chase or do more than stand there firing arrows until you nip behind something and out of their line of sight.
‘Fair enough,’ says you, ‘can’t ask much more from a city guard.’
Well, you can, you see, after an assasination, you’re most sought after, meaning that any guard who sees you will raise the alarm and soon you have five or six chasing you, if you run up onto the roof tops they’ll run up too and chase you there as well, yelling “Stop him!” and “He’s an assasin” and “He’s just murdered so-and-so!”
Then you’ll hear “You’re not supposed to be up here.” as you run past a rooftop guard seemingly oblivious to whats going on behing you.
*Sigh* dropped the ball again.
It’s these little things that make the game so much less impressive than it could be. They could have mixed up the tasks a bit. For example, evesdropping: instead of just “Sit on bench, look at someone, press button to evesdrop on someone who is a hundred yards away in a crowded market square you couldn’t possibly hear even if you had 20th century technology.” you could have “Get within so many feet of this person and listen to them, if they spot you, you have to try again.” - that would have been more fun.
The thing that really amazes me most is that the biggest plot twist, the thing that, if saved for the end, would blow your mind, is used to open the game. What a waste.
Even after all that though, I still go back occasionally, not for the gameplay, but for the mindless sprinting across rooftops. Anyone who played Spiderman2 and just webbed round the city for hours on end will know exactly what I mean. It’s not Spidey, but it sure is purdy.
Some people will have you believe that the reason Assasins Creed is shit is because:
… you have to understand that the game has had to be limited in order to make it accessible to the lower-spec XBox 360.
The Golden Monkey’s Blog
While that is quite obviously the largest peice of bullshit ever written on a webpage, even if it WERE the case that the game was “limited” in order for the XbOX360, I doubt anyone, during the entire lifecycle of the games’ development, ever said:
“We need to make this accessible for the 360 - let’s remove most of the gameplay elements and keep the pretty, pretty.”
Because that, ladies and gentlemen, would be hamstringing the game JUST so you could have pretty visuals on the PS3. Plenty of great games on the 360, and no. Gears of War didn’t push the 360 to it’s limits; Assains Creed is a far more punishing game visually yet there’s still plenty of stuff left to do on the 360.
Yes dear readers, no posts for a month! Why? you ask, here is why:
I’ve won NaNoWriMo. 50,000 words in a month. What a month!
Now to find me a publisher…
