Monthly Archives: November 2002

Friday, 29 November 2002

Feeling good!

I saw Harry Potter on Tuesday and James Bond on Wednesday. It felt so good to be in a cinema again. Both films were quite worth it. Harry Potter was better than the first part but a bit slow at times. That might have been due to the fact that I have read the book and knew what was gonna happen though. But I enjoyed it. Especially the little gimmick after the credits :) I always watch the credits until the very last second. Probably because I'm such a movie geek. But I just like to sit there and let the film sink in. And what I love the most is getting rewarded with a little extra scene at the end that all the people who hurry out of the room even before the credits have truly started always miss :)

James Bond was pretty good also. Better than the last couple of James Bond films. I especially loved all the little references they had to old James Bond movies. According to imdb they had at least one reference to every single JB movie there has ever been to celebrate the 40th anniversary and the 20th Bond film. And I love Halle Berry and I love Pierce Brosnan. 'Nuff said...

  Posted by Edda at 04:57 CET  |    0 comments

Tuesday, 26 November 2002

New Tanks

Just uploaded the tanks pic again. I had to hurry on Wednesday and accidentally resized them unproportionally. Now they look right...

  Posted by Edda at 17:32 CET  |    0 comments

Foo Trouble and Games

There must be some kind of law that whenever we need the car for a longer distance something breaks. On Wednesday we wanted to start our journey around 19:00h. It happened to be the first day with temperatures below 0°C (we had around -3°C). This is important to note because when we were ready to go Foo (the car) wouldn’t start. We tried about 10 times but it was no good. Fortunately we are members of an automobile club that sends you a mechanic for free in case of a breakdown (I learned the hard way that this is essential if you drive an old car).

Anyway, so we called them and they told us they’d send someone as soon as possible and we should stay where we were and wait. So we waited. It started to get pretty cold. Our feet started to freeze. An hour later we were pretty fucking frozen. I went back home and made hot tea so we could warm up a bit. We called them again and they said the guy had been dispatched and should be there any minute now. An hour later nobody had shown up. We called them again. They said the guy said he had been there but hadn’t found us. Right. We had waited in front of the car for two fucking hours and there was definitely no yellow car with bright yellow flashy lights in that street during that time. We told them that. They said they’d send someone as soon as possible. Half an hour later a yellow car with bright yellow flashy lights arrived. The guy appologized for his colleague, checked everything, found out that apparently some of the glow plugs were broken, sprayed some gas into the carburetor and Foo started. We were on our way by 22:00h, 3 hours later than planned, our feet were ice blocks and took another hour or so to defrost.

The drive to Michi’s family was fortunately uneventful. The next day we brought Foo to their trusty mechanic. Of couse our car needs super special glow plugs that he didn’t have in stock and the car parts wholesaler wouldn’t deliver them until the next day. Which was bad as our gaming weekend started Thursday and we didn’t want to miss a day. So we drove there ourselves to pick up the plugs. When we came back the mechanic didn’t look happy. One of the old plugs wouldn’t come out. Aparently the screw thread was broken. He tried to brute force the glow plug out of there but it took an hour and lots of brute forcing to get it out. Of course, as the thread was non-existant after that, the new plug wouldn’t stay where it was supposed to. So the mechanic used an old screw to tap a new thread. I’m very, very happy that we trusted this particular mechanic with the repairs. I’m sure the mechanics we go to here in Berlin would have told us that we needed to buy a new cylinder block (which is around €2000)…

Nothing bad happened afterwards. We arrived safely in France, just in time for dinner, and then proceeded to play games, which we did until sunday, only pausing to eat and sleep a bit. I got to play a bunch of new games. Most notably Sid Meier’s Civilization - The Boardgame which …well… sucks. It looks great and sounds great at first but it just doesn’t work out. They adopted stuff from the computer game that just didn’t work as well in the boardgame. And they also left out stuff from the computer game that would have helped balance the boardgame. Currently it’s a game of pure luck. So much so that even in the first round there are people who get 30 gold and some who get only 10. A couple of rounds later, some people get 70 gold while others still get only 10. Anyway, I’ll probably try this game again in a year or so when people have worked out good rules for the game. I also played Witch Hunt/Werewolf/Mafia for the first time. That was quite fun but would have been more fun if certain people hadn’t played. But I guess that’s always the problem with this type of game….

I’m sure this report is already much too long and nobody read it this far so I’ll stop now. But as you can probably tell I am already looking forward to the next gaming weekend in Spring…

  Posted by Edda at 16:49 CET  |    2 comments

Wednesday, 20 November 2002

Tank and Gone

I'm off to my biannual gaming weekend in France. I do feel a little bad about leaving my thesis alone but the main chapters are more or less finished and I think the break will do me good. I'll be back on Sunday. Here are some tanks to look at while I'm gone...

  Posted by Edda at 18:27 CET  |    5 comments

A capella Horses

Always wanted to make horses sing a capella? Here's your chance. It's a little tricky to get the timing right but if you do, it sounds great :)

  Posted by Edda at 12:44 CET  |    2 comments

Sunday, 17 November 2002

Exploding Eggs

This morning Michi fried us some eggs. I know what you're thinking now: "BOOOOORING!!! Somebody tell this girl to stop blogging." Anyway, so we stand beside the pan and chat when suddenly one of the eggs explodes. The yolk catapults into the air, chunks of egg fly around and we dive under the kitchen table. It looked like a battle field with all the egg splatter everywhere. I have no idea what those organic farmers feed their hens but it sure packs quite a punch...

  Posted by Edda at 23:26 CET  |    3 comments

Saturday, 16 November 2002

Crunch

Am in major crunch mode right now. No time to blog. Wouldn't have any interesting stuff to report anyway. Except maybe that I have now transcended to a new level of freakiness. Now I am drawing tanks instead of mummies...

  Posted by Edda at 23:26 CET  |    5 comments

Wednesday, 13 November 2002

Analyse This!

By popular request here's a scan of two mummies on a printout of part of "The Thesis"(tm). Analyse away...

  Posted by Edda at 11:56 CET  |    6 comments

Tuesday, 12 November 2002

Am I weird?

Lately I have had the strong urge to draw mummies. This must have a deeper meaning. Or I might have blown a fuse or three. You decide...

  Posted by Edda at 18:05 CET  |    5 comments

Monday, 11 November 2002

There might be hope

Okay just surfed the net for a bit and it seems the company that made the superglue I was using also offers a glue remover which seems to work quite nicely. Only problem is that it might damage the fabric. But I guess I'll take my chances...

  Posted by Edda at 15:25 CET  |    2 comments

Damn Glue

So I checked my local supermarket for glue removers. I did find lots of remover stuff for many types of stuff you will want to remove from fabrics. They also carried glue remover. Only problem is that the bottle explicity said not to use this remover with superglue. Great. Now what?

  Posted by Edda at 15:07 CET  |    0 comments

Sunday, 10 November 2002

Boat

Just saw part of Das Boot on TV, one of the best movies I know and probably the best German movie I have ever seen. Makes me wish I could see it in a movie theater again...

  Posted by Edda at 02:21 CET  |    0 comments

Saturday, 9 November 2002

More Switch

A new type of switch ad: Switch to Canada :)

  Posted by Edda at 16:56 CET  |    0 comments

Friday, 8 November 2002

It's been weeks

It's been weeks since I last saw the inside of a cinema. Now this might not be a big deal for most people but for me this is very unusual and I don't much like it. It's of course all because of that-damn-thesis(TM). Today however there's an event I simply cannot miss. In the course of a short film festival here in Berlin they are showing 23 short films in a planetarium tonight. Now how cool is that?

  Posted by Edda at 18:13 CET  |    0 comments

Wednesday, 6 November 2002

F*CK!!!

I just spilled superglue on my favorite pair of pants. I hope there's some way to remove this. Otherwise I will have to weep...

  Posted by Edda at 20:53 CET  |    3 comments

Movie Physics Part 2

As randomlife points out the Movie Physics link doesn’t work anymore. It seems to have been slashdotted or something. But you can still view part of the site in google’s cache. God bless google! :)

  Posted by Edda at 00:32 CET  |    0 comments

Tuesday, 5 November 2002

Movie Physics

Insultingly Stupid Movie Physics is a great collection of unrealistic movie physics and the reason why this wouldn't work in the real world. Very funny! Thanks to Todd for the link :)

  Posted by Edda at 17:43 CET  |    4 comments

Marbles

My birthday present for Michi arrived today. It's of course a geek toy that other people would call a toy for children :) , a very cool marble track made from wooden cubes of uniform size with holes drilled into them such that you can make the marbles run on top or inside the cubes.

To the left you see our first track, which we fondly named "Castle Marble" :) (Click picture for bigger version) There's of course lots of expansion sets with cool new cubes that can make the marbles jump and whatnot. This is going to get so expensive :)

  Posted by Edda at 16:16 CET  |    6 comments

Monday, 4 November 2002

Happy Birthday Sweetie!

It's Michi's birthday today! And I don't have a present. Thus at least a virtual cake...

  Posted by Edda at 14:14 CET  |    0 comments

Sunday, 3 November 2002

CrimsonLand 1.4

And here's a review of CrimsonLand on Multiplay.co.uk with a link to version 1.4 at the bottom which offers even more weapons and extras than the one I linked to yesterday (version 1.3)...

  Posted by Edda at 16:04 CET

Saturday, 2 November 2002

CrimsonLand

On GameGirlAdvance Justin mentioned briefly a freeware 2D shooter all the journalists at World Cyber Games liked to play. It’s called CrimsonLand and the developer’s site seems to be down and doesn’t look like it’ll come back anytime soon. Of course the words “2D” and “shooter” immediately put me into search-mode and I began to look for a mirror to download the game from.

As it turns out this isn’t exactly easy. All the freeware sites I found featured it and rated it as one of the best freeware games out there. Unfortunately they either linked to the broken link on the developer’s site or had taken the game down themselves. This must be the rarest popular freeware game out there. Anyway, after a while I did manage to find a single working download hosted on a German freeware site (download will start automatically after a couple of seconds).

But beware. The game is really quite addicting and especially nice if you need some relief after a long day of work :)

  Posted by Edda at 22:51 CET