Wordle - text visualised!

A friend on Twitter posted the link to Wordle.net, and I tested it and loved it. So I'm sharing the love...

What is it? It's a web-site where you can turn text into tag clouds, where the size of the word is proportional to its frequency of usage. Simple, but very neat. There's a bit of setup to make sure that Java runs on your computer, but running it on this site gives the result above.

Master Class on Future TV Tools

Today I presented a lecture for an Entertainment Master Class group in Cambridge. I talked about the future of tools for video, and I used my long-held conjecture that what happens in audio happens in video a few years later. Given the virtualisation of just about everything audio, then I predicted that the same would be happening for video next.

There's all sorts of pointers to this, not least the company I founded: Real Time Content, which is actively pushing the boundaries of what is possible with video in real time.

But it was very refreshing to be able to present to an audience of about 40 of the next, rising generation of tv producers and commissioning editors at a time when the tv business faces a time of huge change. They were keen, alert, professional, and asked some very pertinent and very knowing questions, which bodes well for the future of tv.

It was also humbling to be invited to present, because the list of presenters is truly stellar!

And if anyone is interested in attending a future Entertainment Master Class (2009/10), then it definitely gets my seal of approval.

Burnout Paradise loses its sparkle.

It is with a heavy heart that I write this posting. I loved previous versions of 'Burnout', and pre-ordered Criterion's 'Burnout Paradise' for the Sony PS3, and it has been one of the most enjoyable purchases that I've made. I say this despite some niggling little annoyances from Criterion over the last year:

- there's the audio podcast that I used to listen to, which then went video-only, and got dumbed down into little more than pure marketing of a product that changed from a stated policy of free updates and down-loadable content to one that includes bits that are slightly less than free.
- there's the online availability from day one of detailed statistics on exactly what progress you have made in the games, so incredibly detailed that when they finally added trophy support, there was no way of using all that information to update the trophies. Starting again was the only option... Ouch!

And now, there's today's '1.60' update. Now, dumbed-down IS fashionable, and I applaud Criterion for following a potentially profitable trend in a time of financial uncertainty, but the cost has been considerable:

- there's the selection of bikes or cars, which used to be via selecting one or the other in a garage, but which now has been moved to the (slower feeling) start-up sequence so that now you have to quit the game and re-start to change from bikes to cars or vice-versa. Just a minor negative improvement there.
- choosing the car or bike used to have that subtle highlighting that any PS3 owner is familiar with, but this has now been replaced with the selected car being rather unsubtly highlighted. Maybe it was just me who didn't have any problem with knowing which car I had chosen?
- then there's the night mode. Previously the night was... dark, and it made high-speed driving a considerable challenge because you couldn't see much beyond your headlights. Rather like when it is dark in the real world. But now we have that wierd 'blue=night' effect that you see in some films, where it isn't really dark, but there's this blue version of sunlight instead. Suddenly, what was a challenge becomes just a colour change. So, a slightly more negative improvement there...
- the game features some 'find these items' challenges, and finding billboards, closed-off areas, and places offering big jumps has required a keen eye and long periods of exploration. Until now, that is. The billboards now flash with a bright saturated red so that you can't really miss them (oh, and the early cars have been made easier to control so that driving them is easier anyway!), the smash-thrus now have bright-yellow flashing signs, and the big jumps now have actinic blue lights attracting your attention. Careful searching has given way to a desperate need for sunglasses.
- the game has also changed its look. It now has the greys with the odd burst of important colour look of 'Mirror's Edge', but the greys are washed out and the colours bloom because the saturation is set too high. Cars with bright green paint now glow in the sun-light because the colour is set so high, whilst the backgrounds look dull and samey. All in all, it looks like a child's toy: bright, vibrant primary colours for a young mind. But hey, you can now see all those things that you are supposed to because they are the bits in colour! Duh! So there's more negative improvement there too.
- oh, and the rather attractive orange colour that featured in all of the menus and title has been replaced with a slightly washed-out royal blue. Just a bit dull for my taste, and not quite the bold colours of 'Burnouts' of old.
- I won't even mention the 'No Retry' policy which has been U-turned. That would be cruel.

So there we have it. A great game turned into a very different game at a stroke. There doesn't seem to be a 'No Thank You' option for the update, so I'm stuck. This is yet another 'downgrade as upgrade'! I notice that Criterion have turned off their forums, but there are other forums still open, and the posts have a tense mixture of shock and dismay, contrasted with enthusiastic welcomes. I'm one of the former, and for me, today was the day that 'Burnout Paradise' lost a lot of its sparkle. A sad day.

The ability to update games online has been an interesting ride since the PS3 came out. 'Burnout Paradise' had been leading the curve up until now, but this feels like a step too far to me. I can only hope that lessons will be learned from this. It seems that updatability has advantages and disadvantages...

The Malted Milk Misinterpretation

There are only two types of biscuit.

The ones that you actually want to eat, and the ones that you feel compelled to take by reason of social imperative when someone offers you a biscuit. In my case, and I suspect many other people's as well, the first category contains rather a lot of biscuits containing, or dipped in, or coated by, chocolate, to varying degrees. Some biscuits do seem to be little more than chocolate with a few grams of actual biscuit thrown in as added texture.

Malted Milk biscuits, fall, in my humble opinion, into the type where you are forced to take one because the biscuit barrel/jar/plate/tin contains nothing better. (There's another blog posting lurking on my fingers about the significance of something where there are lots of words for the same object or action or feeling, but that's another story...)

At this point in time, a colleague piped up with an opinion (It's that type of office...) as the proffering took place: "Malted Milks are surprisingly sturdy..."

So there I was, fresh cup of tea and Malted Milk biscuit in alternate hands, and I did that thing that my Mum told me never to do in polite society. I dunked the Malted Milk into the tea. At which point things happened very fast. What I pulled out of the tea a fraction of a second later was suddenly incomplete - about half of a Malted Milk. I realised that in a surprisingly short time, the biscuit's integrity had been compromised, and the missing half was now beneath the glossy, opaque brown surface of the milky tea, presumably going soggy.

The sturdiness seemed to be a hollow promise, replaced with the glum prospect of the last few gulps of tea being nothing more than biscuit soup. So I took my teaspoon, the result of a trip to "The Kitchen Shop" in Woodbridge, where I had bought a 'proper' knife, fork, spoon and teaspoon 'for use at work' unprepared for the shock when I got alarmingly little change from the note I presented for payment, and stirred vigorously in order to distribute the biscuit and thin the eventual soup as much as possible - maybe even to the point where I would not notice its passage.

So, no-one was more surprised than me (particularly because it was only myself who was drinking that particular cup of tea!) when I got to the bottom of the cup of tea and discovered the missing half of the Malted Milk, soggy, but otherwise unscathed by the experience of being enthusiastically stirred for some time with a decently heavy and solid teaspoon.

Truly, and deceptively, sturdy.

But still very unpleasant to drink!