Mada owns clothes

I got my laptop back today after being told yesterday that the virus hadn't gone and they needed to scan it again.
This time they knew what the problem was and scanned it for about 5 hours. They assure me they got rid of it now, but we'll see if the internet goes down or not.

Last night I did a drawing of what I imagine Mada to look like. In my world he has a lab coat made out of code. A lab code if you will. I showed this to Adam today who will be playing our Mada. He liked the coat and thinks it will be great to teach and code in as it will serve as one big reference manual.

Adam also gave me some lovely code for scanning for bluetooth devices and holding their names in memory. Wonderful I now have code to build off of. Turns out my phone is incapable of running anything that uses bluetooth from java. Fantastic, I can't test anything I code in the real world. Luckily one of my old phones does work perfectly as a test machine for this kind of stuff. I just have to find it first.

Currently I am now designing the bluetooth headset shape and look. Gary bought some nice tiny headsets yesterday so they should arrive soon. I'll mostly be working on getting this code to do wonderful things and also designing the look and feel of the app.

Hooray. I think I might faint from all the excitement, someone grab me quick.

Here is my sketch of Dr Mada Nitram. Isn't it wonderful?

M.O.A

Evening sunday time.

Doing research into the boring past of bluetooth games is predictably boring.
The best thing they can come up with is top trumps where you use bluetooth as a magical cable THAT DOESNT EXIST. Crikey.

What a crazy world we live in. Nothing comes close to our project thankfully. We have a truly fun and inovative idea.

Yesterday I made a logo. It even has its own latin tag line. A posse ad essa, which means from possibility to reality. Very suitable considering what we have already gone through.

As a temporary name for us as a project group I will call us the M.O.A or Ministry of Awesome.

In TV related terms, Click was scary telling me that anyone who downloads dodgy things will be thrown in prison. But only in France. Har har france, take that you cheese monkeys.

Charlie Brookers newswipe is wonderful. BBC finally put it up on iPlayer. I dont watch the news anyway because of how depressing it makes the world. I prefer my world to be colourful where no wrong is commited ever. Nicely, Charlie spent 30 mins complaining about how evil the news makes the world. It's like he reads my mind and then wedges in a few jokes.

LOGO TIME? why not. Take some more of my creative soul internet, you greedy heartless bastards. You don't even leave me any comments and I hate you for it.

Secret Agent Man

Today, I finally got my internet back.

Somehow I got a virus that did some silly things to my computer like make everyone else connect through my computer to the internet. I was cut off for two days.

While getting the I.T guys to sort out my computer, me and Gary did some finishing touches to our poster for our super awesome excellent game-o. Secret Agent Man or SAM.

We've decided that this project is all about the style, the feel and the look. After all you are a super secret spy running around, you gotta feel cool while playing it of course.

No major work in regards to the technical side has been done. That's not important. Making posters are far more important things. We got the nice guys down at graphics to print it out for us in full colour A3, and now internet you get a wonderful special peek.

Next up on our task sheet is to sort out the music. Gotta get the tension going. It's like making a film except a lot easier because no one has to act and there's not much script.

BOOM.

Mobile processing and general failure.

Today, hopes were crushed and moods deflated.

Last week we were told we weren't allowed to use squibs as part of our project. Today we were told that making these little bugs that were once the center point of our project are impossible because the electronics woman here doesnt do bluetooth or teach first years. Lovely.

Yesterday our wonderful course leader got me started with mobile processing. A programming language made specifically for mobile phones so you can easily make applications and other wonderful things. Thats fine and dandy as he pointed out a way to use this language to make a more stable work around than bluetooth bugs and save us a lot of time. I started properlly coding with it tonight. In about 10 minutes i had made a little app that when you press a button or touch screen phone the target on the screen would change colours. To me thats impressive to pick up a language so quickly.

Now trying to use an external library to let me take control of parts of the phone like sound, video, lights and motor are harder since no where does it say how to implement a library or use the code. Fantastic. Thursday ill have a chat with our superman and he'll sort everything out. I can't bear the headaches it's been giving me today.

As the day went on the more fun I had. Class this afternoon was particularily fun. Learnt quite a bit and it had one of the best metaphors I have ever seen.

It involved a bucket, a brick and a cat.

finally I need to end this blog with something so here is Kay Pettirgrew singing the fresh prince of bel air theme accoustic styyyyyle

Men love bluetooth

Damn, I love the Big Bang Theory. This is proof of just how cool it is.

Brilliant! Men love bluetooth.
What are men going to do with hair Barettes with bluetooth?
Penny, everything is better with bluetooth.

Good morning Sunday!

Ah Sundays, the day when everyone is off and nothings on TV.

Click was quite interesting yesterday, they were talking about OLED's, the flexible tv screen that you can fit on your arm. If only I was rich. Once again, something was mentioned that would have been handy last month. www.metaplace.com build your own social network in a 3d world where you can do anything. Might have saved some people some heartbreak as they try and use ning.com

My weekly highlight of course is QI, short lazy version on friday nights and then the fully packed smart arse edition on saturdays. Of course you have to watch both to find out what they cut out to make it half an hour long. They really do make seemless edits.

Today I am mostly listening to KISS. Yes pull the trigger on my love gun indeed. You never see this kind of absurdity in the charts these days. Damn those R&B rapper kids with their funk and their shizzle my nizzle hoes.

Two more posters to show today. One being remarkably shit. As I was drawing Hide and Seek I could see it being awful but yet I continued. This only translates poorly when I start inking it up. The other ones not bad. Anyway its that work done and now I can write up some research in my big book of bluetooth. Yipee.

Here ya go slags. I would have better pictures of them but the lady in my life has yet to return my camera.
(p.s my favourite treat is turkey and cranberry sandwiches if anyone wants to get me some)

Location based gaming, a joy and hate relationship.

On Monday we were given the project of a location based experience. Me and Gary have teamed up yet again to take over the world and be hated by everyone around us. In uni world this is day 5. In reality it's somewhere more along the lines of day 20. We started brainstorming for this project a few weeks before it started. We were just that excited.

We have decided to use bluetooth as the main hub of the game. Yes bluetooth. Our research has told us we are idiots for choosing this as its mainly for linking up devices not rapid proximity detection like we have chosen to do. In our minds we are geniuses and no one can convince me otherwise.

I personally wanted to use two things, kameraflage and squibs. Kameraflage is this technology that is invisible to the human eye but visible under camera phone lens. Squibs are deemed too dangerous for me to attatch to people and set off via bluetooth as a signifier of death or game over. Cinematics are what I want. Merging the real world with the imaginary. Thats what interactive media designers do and they wont let me do it. So i'm calling for a riot. Next tuesday.

So far we've found no one is doing anything like this and that makes us happy all over. This is a first for us, being happy doesnt happen often. Getting bluetooth proximity is easy in theory, but more difficult on a pc. Mac its fine, you can code nice little bits of scripts for macs which are dead simple machines. If only they made me tea.

More breakthroughs to emerge as time passes.

This week, Ben (one of our tutors) has set us a task. A task to make 4 posters of ideas for location based crap.
Mine are all games of course, I could have done something like IDENTIFY THAT ANIMAL AT THE ZOO but I know an elephant when I see one, I dont need my phone shouting IT HAS A TRUNK IT'S AN ELEPHANT, or THATS A DOG. We don't want the tech to get too smart or it will start taking over the world.

Anyway posters. Here is one and two. More will follow as I make them, but I am particularily proud of the hand. It's my hand by the way and I think its nice and pretty.