Monthly Archives: October 2006

The Tale of the Tape

Sunday October 29th 2006

Back in the mid 80’s I had a cassette tape that I recorded all of my favourite TV themes onto. My favourite shows, like Airwolf, Blue Thunder, Knight Rider, and The A Team, were usually shown on Friday or Saturday nights. If I liked the show enough I would crouch in front of the TV with my stereo balanced on my knee to record the theme, while the family tried their best to be quiet for me. Once a theme was on the tape I could listen to it as many times as I felt necessary to fill the void until the programme was on the following week.

Using one of those paint pens, I had coloured my TV Theme tape gold to highlight it’s importance; I didn’t want anyone borrowing it and recording over the contents. This was further ensured by keeping the tape in a small safe in my room when I wasn’t listening to it. These are the kinds of things that are precious to an eleven year old, so you’ll have to forgive what seems particularly anal behaviour in hindsight.

The original tape had been a C30 – a demo tape that I’d gotten with a Walkman my mum had bought me for Xmas ’83. As brief as TV theme shows are, by early 1985 the tape had run out of space and I needed a way of transferring the contents to a new one.

To accomplish this, my friend Brian agreed to loan me his stereo to duplicate the golden tape on the condition that he could have the original once the copy was made. I wasn’t convinced that it was an ideal set of conditions, but I needed the space for the themes from Street Hawk and Battlestar Galactica, amongst others, so I agreed.

It’s hard to fathom why, considering I’d been using jack leads between tape recorders to copy Spectrum games for a while at that point, but we used no such connectivity when we copied the contents of the golden tape to a new C90. Sitting one stereo facing the other, we pressed play on the original and record on the other and then sat in moderate silence for the half hour or so it took to complete the job.

Smart Indeed

Wednesday October 18th 2006

A couple of months back when I was at the Great British Beer Festival, I bought myself and Fliss a pair of comedy tee shirts from a small company called Smart T’s who had a stall there. The tee shirts seemed to be of good quality, and they weren’t too pricey either.

When I got back, Fliss was well pleased with her camouflage style tee shirt with Weapons of Mass Distraction printed across the chest area.

With me, you don’t just get a present, you get a touch of class! ;o)

Sadly, after just one wash, some of the letters peeled off, leaving her tee shirt looking a bit on the used side. Disappointed, I had a look for the Smart T’s website and sent a polite mail detailing what had happened and asking if we could have a replacement. Much to my surprise and delight I received a reply from Ade at Smart T’s almost immediately, apologising for the fault and offering to replace it if I sent the old one back to him.

This is where I got a bit crap with postage, carrying the tee shirt in my bag to and from work on a daily basis for the next four weeks, but never quite getting close to packaging and posting it. I started to think I’d missed the opportunity to exchange it, until I received another mail from Ade asking if I had posted it yet. I thanked him for the good customer service and explained that I was the weak link in the chain, promising to post it in the days that followed.

Somehow, although the tee shirt made it into a padded envelope, it still took me until the following week to post it off. I don’t know why, I just always suck at getting round to post stuff.

Smart T’s, on the other hand, were not so tardy, and Fliss had a brand new tee shirt within a matter of days. I’m pleased to say that this one has survived a wash, so it was obviously an isolated incident.

A Change to Schedueled Programming

Sunday October 8th 2006

Back at the turn of the year I was told my role at work would be coming to an end, which came as no surprise as things had stagnated towards the end of the previous year. Fortunately, working for a sizeable company meant that the situation didn’t lead to redundancy – like it did when my department was axed in my previous job down in London.

Although nothing happened immediately, by June I’d been moved onto one of the development teams, where I set about re-learning programming skills I’d long since forgotten. The trouble with spending the last eight years as a web designer/developer, is that it was pretty far removed from the programming I’d done at college and university.

php is quite a high level language, when it boils down to it – you don’t really care about things like memory management, for example, because it’s all handled for you. It’s also not strongly typed – if I declare a variable and initialise it as an integer, I can change it to a string later on if the mood takes me. Not so with C or most other programming languages, for that matter – I’ve never quite understood why php was like that.

So, as you can imagine, six years spent as a php developer hasn’t exactly sharpened my programming skills with regard to C. It’s led to quite a bit of frustration over the summer, due to spending most of my time picking through compile errors caused by syntactical nuancies. It goes without saying that I was starting to doubt if I could hack it as a “real” programmer, even though I’ve wanted to be a games programmer since I was dabbling in Sinclair Basic at the age of eleven.

Recently things have been going better, though. The principle programmer on our team has offered to mentor me, and that’s been invaluable. I think I’ve moved forward more since our first session two weeks ago than I had in the six weeks previous.

I still have a long way to go, and I’m sure the steep learning curve wont even out for a while. I still welcome the odd scrap of web work that comes my way, because the feeling of confidence that comes with really knowing what I’m doing is a welcome relief.