Archive for February, 2008
Something you don't read about often
Police incompetence in Singapore!
Terrorist suspect escapes while in police custody in Singapore
It's always great for your peace of mind when your family lives in the same 700 square kilometre area as an escaped terrorist.
No commentsPakistan broke the Internet!
I thought it might have been funny if the Pakistan government's blocking of Youtube had caused yesterday's outage (the site was unavailable for pretty much half the day)…I guess I was closer to the truth than I realised.
No commentsIt's melting!
This article on the BBC website kind of jumped out at me today:
Starbucks to lay off staff in Seattle
When the coffee companies in Seattle start laying off people, you know we're in for some trouble.
Jokes aside, the US economy doesn't look too great right now. What started as the bursting of a housing bubble seemed to have locked the rest of the economy in a vise grip, causing other markets to freeze up and generally cause problems. Most worryingly it looks like the credit markets in general have tightened up, meaning money isn't as readily available - this will probably end up having a contractionary effect on the economy. A recession looks like an inevitability, not a possibility.
For those who have heard the word “subprime” tossed around by the talking heads on TV without a clue of what it meant, here's a quick summary. Subprime mortgages were housing loans (supposedly) offered to people who couldn't qualify for loans with better interest rates due to poor credit histories. Thanks to a perfect storm of low interest rates, weak financial regulation and “financial innovation,” many of these loans were offered to prospective homeowners, even those who could have qualified for loans with better terms. After this - and this is where the weirdness begins - the banks and financial institutions performed some financial wizardry on these loans and sold them to other parties, who then sold them to other people…and so on. In the meantime, people used the rising value of their properties (caused by the housing bubble) as collateral to fund a spending boom.
The bursting of the housing bubble ended up throwing a spanner into this mechanism. With the values of their properties falling, homeowners were faced with the prospect of losing their homes (Some statistics put the number at as high as a third of homeowners in the US). However, because of the financial engineering that had gone into this process, people and organizations who had bought mortgage backed financial instruments - like, say, the Michigan state board in charge of student loans, or the Florida state teachers' pension fund - found that their source of income had vanished in a puff of smoke. A major British lending institution, Northern Rock, was found to have invested heavily in such securities and needed to be bailed out by the British government. Here in the States, Countrywide Financial, one of the biggest subprime lenders, was devastated and eventually acquired by Bank of America. And the process still continues.
The government has been making all the wrong noises in the face of a recession; an economic stimulus package that does nothing for those who need it most (low-income households), and - this really made me laugh - persuading the private sector to provide relief. The last president who thought that was a good idea was Herbert Hoover.
This will probably be a major issue in the election campaign - for one, I'm hoping John McCain doesn't win, because he has openly admitted to not knowing anything about economics, which leads me to believe that he will continue to foist an economic policy that I can only describe as mistargeted, ineffective and self-serving on a beleaguered economy.
No commentsAgainst all odds
Sega Superstars Tennis is looking really fun
Then again, it IS being handled by Sumo Digital, who ported Outrun 2 SP and Virtua Tennis 3 to consoles, and did an excellent job on both, so I wouldn't expect any less.
Too bad the Wii version doesn't have any online features…that would have made it a must buy. I guess I'll have to wait until it's released on PC or I finally fork over the cash for a PS3 or 360.
Or, I could just get the DS version, which is looking pretty good as well.
No commentsThe sky fell on my head today
Awaiting more details (and a high-resolution trailer) with bated breath.
No commentsSame old, same old
The main line that threw me for a loop was
While in prison, Mr Ranjan contested and won a seat in parliament for his party, an ally of the government.
…
Mr Ranjan is expected to remain an MP until the next election.
I think it's fairly obvious that this is bloody ridiculous.
No comments
Shark-jumping
When I was in primary school, there was a locally-published series of books called “Bookworm Short Stories” that revolved around the daily adventures of a group of (somewhat stereotypical) Singapore kids in primary school. It was fairly popular at the time - I still have a few of the old books, but I never thought too much of them (Enid Blyton and Roald Dahl were far superior in my eyes). The publishers would come around to my school about once a semester and try and make us all buy the newest copies of their books, sign up for fan newsletters and so on..it was pretty depraved marketing, now that I think about it.
Anyhow, an idle comment in IRC prompted me to find out what had become of the series since I stopped reading it all those years ago.
The results of my investigation were somewhat…disturbing.
A quick look at the edit history confirms that this is probably the work of Wikipedia vandals (a lot of the questionable stuff was added by one guy and the citations are all nonsense), but it did surprise me for a minute. Although part of me wonders if this post-shark-jump series would be any more interesting to read :P
An upcoming release on Steam has me pretty interested. It's a game called AudioSurf, and it was a finalist at this year's Independent Games Festival. The gimmick of the game is that it takes your music (ANY music) and turns it into a puzzle/racing/rhythm game hybrid with multiple game types. It's basically a cross between Rez, Lumines and F-Zero, if that's possible to fathom :P
Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger by Daft Punk
God Knows by Aya Hirano
One Winged Angel by Nobuo Uematsu/The Black Mages
and just to annoy the crap out of my friends list, here's
Never Gonna Give you up by Rick Astley
It gets released on Steam on Friday for $10, but you can pre-order it before then and get it for $8 along with a copy of the Orange Box soundtrack preloaded into the game for you.
I'm making a note here.
HUGE SUCCESS.
Oh, and here's one for
And on a completely random note, I saw all 13 episodes of Minami-ke on Sunday and I loved it. バカ野郎！！！
No commentsThere's a reason I haven't been on GGPO a whole lot
I hate losing. Particularly when the gap in skill level between me and my opponent is really wide. I don't see any point in playing when the odds are stacked against me from the get-go. Yes, I know I won't learn to play better without getting beaten by other players, but I fail to see how getting hammered into the corner and dying because I couldn't react in time teaches me anything at all.
Compounding this problem is my poor execution, half the crap I want to do not coming out thanks to lag (network or input, take your pick) or the emulator turning my stand C into a C throw even though I had let up on the arrow keys a full second ago.
Maybe I just don't have the mindset for games like this.
No comments
