Twenty-Third

I slept in this morning - I actually forgot that I was back at work, and slapped the alarm off, wondering sleepily why I had set it in the first place. Luckily (hah!) I woke up an hour or so later, needing a pee, and the truth came crashing home as I blearily stumbled back to bed. Cursing under my breath, I about-faced and clambered into the shower.

I realise this blog has been somewhat downcast recently- I'm not sure if I have many regular readers, but if I do then I apologies to them. I'll try to keep this entry a little less morose, but suffice it to say that January 19th is D-Day for us, one way or t'other, so look out for some big news then, if not sooner.

Anyway - I spent most of my time in the office over the last two weeks playing Beneath a Steel Sky on ScummVM. I had a Spectrum and a C64 when I was younger, so missed out on directly experiencing some of the old graphical adventure games. A couple of my friends did have Amigas, so I was able to live vicariously through them on occasion. Old-school adventure/puzzle games have always floated my boat - at one point in my youth, I was so obsessed with Text Adventure Games that I tried to write one myself in BASIC. It ran to a couple of hundred lines of GOTOs and GOSUBs before my brain started to leak out my ears and my eyeballs bled from trying to follow the code back and forth, so I gave it up. It was set in a crashed spaceship as I remember, and I distinctly remember feeling delighted that I could make a lift work in the same way that I made doors work - I had rarely felt smarter than that moment.

In more recent memory, I played through The Dig, after finding it God-knows-where, and I've got a feeling that I played Broken Sword 2 on my PC not too long ago, but I can't remember actually seeing the disc when I cleared my desk out just before the holidays. Strange - I'll have to look again tonight.
In a similar vein, I have Inform installed on my iBook, and that's yet another thing on my 'get to grips with' list. While that task in itself is not a monumental one - if you look around the Inform site, you'll see how fantastically easy it is to use - I just haven't got the time to lay the foundations for even a simple Inform game at the moment. As with so many other projects I have in the back of my mind, it occurs to me that I spend so much time commuting that I could use that time to get work done, but I still need the time at home to prepare and research online, which is where reality bends me over and has her wicked way.

Oops. Nearly started bitching again there. Sorry.

Moving on - I'll be sloping off early this afternoon. Things are still quiet, and my colleague is not back until tomorrow, so I can't move on any of the cases we have sitting open until he returns. If I was really honest, I'd admit that I probably could take care of one or two small things, but I'm not really honest, so I won't, as I want to get home early.
Aside from the sheer joy of being home early, I want to get home as we have just started watching the first series of 24. I should probably have warned you to sit down before reading that. I know the 6th series/day is just about to start, and I know that the series has been praised constantly and consistently, but we just never got round to watching it at all. We spent the holidays fairly quietly, only visiting our parents briefly, so we ended up stuck in the house over Christmas with a living room full of old videos and nothing on the T.V. worth watching. I was kicking myself, because it had actually occurred to me on the 22nd or thereabouts, to rent a series of something from our local Blockbuster, but I didn't get round to mentioning it. Last Sunday though, we popped into said shop and grabbed the first season of 24. I won’t bother evangelising it here, as I'm sure I'm probably one of only a handful of people not in a coma who hasn't seen 24 yet, but we are both enthralled by it so far. So much so that I think I'll be leaving in an hour at most.