One Million

Robotron. It's a video game from 1982. The time when a family holiday meant spending ages in an arcade looking for cool graphics and spacey sounds. I'd played all the classics - the first Space Invaders I laid hands on was in my Dad's Working-Man's Club on a Sunday afternoon. My brother and I played together, me moving the base and he hitting fire.

Graphics improved and sounds got better - Asteroids, Galaxians, Gorf, and then a new level was reached with Defender. Complex controls, multiple aliens with their evil agenda. Increasing difficulty level. Explosions like we'd not heard before.

But then came Robotron. No fire buttons - just two joysticks, one for each hand. You could move left and shoot right, or up, or down. Shoot the evil robotrons that were trying to kill the last humans alive. Save the humans. Don't get shot. Each new level brought new types of robotrons with new ways to kill you. It got difficult very quickly.

I had a couple of versions of Robotron for home computers. There was a ZX Spectrum version called Wild West Hero which had a Western theme (you were a cowboy shooting bandits in a field of cacti), and an official Robotron for the C64. On my Atari ST there was Llamatron, a typically ridiculous re-visioning by Jeff Minter of Llamasoft featuring coke cans, cigarette papers, hamburgers, and cutlery.

With the increasing power of home PCs came the ability to simulate arcade machines. The Mame project has developed software that can run as thousands of different games. Robotron is one of these. The first thing I ran when I first installed Mame was not Pacman, but Robotron. Now I had real arcade Robotron in front of me, and it didn't need a supply of 10p pieces.

I installed it on my little Sony Vaio so I could play on the go. And the legends on the control keys wore out pretty quickly. I scored higher than my teenage self ever did on the full-size machines, and pretty soon level 9 was my target. After a while getting past that was easy, and to be expected. I was scoring a few hundred thousand.

Then about a year ago I moved to the School of Health and Medicine and got a shiny new desktop running Ubuntu. So I put Mame and Robotron on it, and it had the speed to play it in full-screen mode. Things got a bit easier, and the legends on the control keys succumbed to the same fate as those on my Vaio. Good job I don't need to see the keys to type these days.

I would play a game or two every night before going home. My rationale for this was that I needed to exercise my rapid reactions after a day of sitting and thinking, and that I also needed some finger exercise with a different set of muscles from those used in a day's typing. But really I did it for fun. Eventually my high scores increased until I was on 500,000s. With the occasional foray even higher. After about a year I had scored in the 900,000s on a few occasions. Hitting the million mark looked possible.

And last night I did it. Level 43. Score 1142900. I took a screen grab. I tweeted the fact. I cycled home and wondered if I ever needed to play it again.

Of course I'm playing again - in fact tonight before I go home I shall have my Friday game and toast the "Vid Kidz" programming team who made it!

The Last Mud Run Home

It's getting dark at 6 now, so Friday was probably the last chance to cycle home along the canal in fading daylight. I wouldn't normally do it in the rain - this is supposed to be a little treat to myself to mark the end of the week - but as there's only ever one last chance I decided to take it despite the increasing gloom and the possibility of droplets becoming drops.

One advantage of a wet, dark evening ride on the canal is that I have the whole linear feature to myself - except for the wildlife. I startled a couple of moorhens, which skittered off low across the water leaving their little trails of ever-increasing circles on the surface. One heron turned the tables, startling me by jumping out of the bank near me, and flying off.

So that's it for the canal or the river on a weekday. I have cycled home along the towpath in the dark once. Getting to the start was an adventure in itself, the lane to the bridge being in poor condition and it's easy to miss the edge of the tarmac and end up in a hedge. Getting along a darkened towpath is easier with bike lights turned off, so that you don't burn a bright spot into your retina. If there's some moonlight or scattered reflections from cloud, you can see enough from that glow. Not that that stopped me falling over, my head a couple of inches from the edge of the water.

I think cycling home along the canal in the dark is something to be done once. However, I am yet to cycle home along the riverside path in the dark. That could be another adventure entirely.

Help!

It's getting pretty dark by 6 these days, so I'm trying to enjoy the last days of having daylight to cycle home in. This means leaving at 5.30. So today I'm cycling home at the same time as lots of students finishing their lectures and probably staff eager to get home in the daylight.

If I see someone stopped on their bike I often stop and ask if they need any help. Sometimes they're just texting or talking on their mobile (although some cyclists manage to do this and carry on pedalling), but sometimes they have problems with their bikes. I like to help.

The first person I stopped to help today was a foreign student who explained he was looking at the chestnuts on the ground - he'd never seen them before! I told him horse chestnuts weren't edible - but didn't go so far as to explain the rules of conkers.

The next faltering student had a stuck chain. That seems to be the most common problem I help cyclists with. The chain slips off the cogs, jams up, and they're stuck. This guy had a full-suspension bike, and his chain had fallen off his big cog and jammed. I got him to hold the bike while I dug in and freed it. I then explained how to adjust the limit screws - I couldn't do it there and then because I had no tools on my bike. He pedalled off with my instructions to get his bike serviced hopefully ringing in his ear. He'd only just bought it, second hand.

I rolled on home and finished painting the living room walls yellow.

Ferret Rescue

Ready to head off to work yesterday, I opened the bedroom curtains and running along the pavement outside the houses opposite was a ferret. What? A ferret. A woman walking past looked at it in disbelief as it flumped by. It stopped under a parked car, then headed back up the street behind her. Then someone on my side of the street caught its attention and it crossed the road. She had a large dog - a labrador, and the little critter was right in its face, and the dog didn't like it! These dogs are retrievers of dead birds, not hunters. It was clearly more scared than the ferret!

So I ran downstairs to see what was going on, and decided this poor little guy was an escaped pet and I better catch him using my super animal skills. I grabbed a plastic recycling box and jumped out. At that point my neighbour Kate appeared and wondered what was going on. By now the ferret was behind her shed in the side alley next to mine. Now Kate is scared of mice. And rats. And giant rat-like animals. Including ferrets. She bravely tried to shoo it out from behind her shed with a broom, but it ran back towards my back garden.
I ran through the house to try and catch it there. But by the time I got there, it had run towards the street again. I did wonder what the local alley cats would have made of it, but they never saw it.

Now Kate was trying to get it into the street again, and it jumped into the yard next to mine. I followed it in, and he was very tame, just looking around, nosing into flowerpots and eventually walked up to me. I grabbed him (I was wearing one of my work gloves) and took him out of the yard. Kate was now in the middle of the street - she'd rather be run over than approach a mustelid, it seems. I asked her to get the lid of the box and she handed it to me at a very stretched arm's length. I popped the little feller in and snapped the lid shut.

He scratched the box a bit, but I got him indoors and he settled down. Now what to do? I looked on the RSPCA web site and called their advice line, but after five mins on hold I gave up and called a local veterinary. They told me that if I brought him (or her, I don't know how to sex a ferret) in they would check for a chip and try and find its home. So I popped a note on my front window (Found! Ferret!), packed him up into the back of the Land Rover and trundled round to the vet's.

The vet told me it was a very nice polecat ferret, and that they'd keep me informed. I drove back home and cycled off to work.

When I got home that evening there was a note through the door. "Pan" belonged to the family a few doors down, so I went and told them where he was and they very nicely gave me a couple of jars of home-made jam for my troubles, and a jar to give to Kate for being brave.

 The next morning I snapped this picture as Cathy came back from the vets with him. I hope he doesn't get out again!

New blog time

Today I've created a new blog so I can share things I do at work. I've made it a separate blog so I can keep personal stuff here and work stuff there. Not that I write a lot of personal stuff here, but maybe I'll do a bit more in the future.

The new blog is GeoSpaced

It'll cover anything work-related (health, medicine, mapping, geospatial tech). So subscribe if you're interested!