what’s the big deal?

I’m sure that a lot of you have heard of that magical place called World of Warcraft (known to them that’s cool as “WoW”). Some of you may have even visited there. It’s been featured on South Park, and countless YouTube videos about people who live their lives through it. They find their future spouses while they’re battling evil kobolds, they have entire social groups around quests, and I’ve even heard about groups gathering and having virtual funerals to honour friends who have died in real life.

Here’s a bit of mindless diversion which gives you an idea of what World of Warcraft looks like, in a funny wee song about what the internet is REALLY for:

Anyway, long story short, I decided the other day to see what all the hullabaloo was about. I signed up for a free 10-day trial, and then embarked on the marathon task of downloading all the files and patches needed to actually run the game – almost 7GB of them!! It took about 24 hours of setting downloads going, and then coming back after work or after a good night’s sleep, but eventually I actually got to, you know, play the game!

I invented a character – a fiesty warrior type with black hair and long legs and a face like Faith from Buffy, and called her Palinea – a good fantasy name, a name that’s been created with little thought apart from how it might sound phoenetically.

Then I let Palinea loose on the region of Thunderhorn, in the realm of Azeroth.

Are we in Geek Nirvana yet?

Aaaanyhoo. It’s a relatively easy thing to do to get out your sword and start hacking at things – it’s kinda the default action for a warrior in WoW. As I was wandering around (in the virtual world) trying to work out what I was supposed to do (instruction manuals? pah!), I came across a little bunny. It was totally unafraid of me, and I thought I’d randomly click on it and see what happened.

Lo and behold, out comes my sword, and without even meaning to, I smite the poor little beastie. It gave a little squeak, and suddenly the little caption which described it when I clicked on it (which before had said something like “fluffy bunny”) read “corpse – fluffy bunny: skinnable”.

How bad did I feel? I’d just killed a bunny. It was a very cute bunny too.

But it was just a virtual bunny. It was just lines of code, which changed from one state to another. I can’t even kill a virtual rabbit witout feeling bad.

So with that in mind, I was walking along this morning on my way to work, and saw this plastered to the back of someone’s car:

I’m sorry, but I just don’t get it. What’s so great about hunting? Culling, I can understand – if an animal population gets out of control, then it starts causing damage to its environment (I mean, just look at humans!) so culling is a neccessity sometimes. But hunting? For sport?

I’ll just never understand it, but that’s cause I feel bad even when I kill a virtual rabbit. I never really get how people can switch off their guilt when they cause the death of a REAL life

More jetsetting with the Mark Saul Band

Here we go folks – after almost 18 months of no touring or playing with (or even SEEING) my beloved boys in Mark’s band, we’ve been booked to do a show at a highland games in January.

“Highland games in January?!” you splutter, “isn’t Scotland a bit cold to be thinking about anything other than curling up infront of the fire in January?”

Well, yes. Yes, it is. Scotland in January is coooooold. Bloody cold. But that would only worry us if the Highland Games were in Scotland – but they’re not!!

No, dear friends, we have been invited to play somewhere far more clement – WE’RE GOING TO FLORIDA, BABY! Yep, highland games in Florida, land of white linen suits and alligators and shuttle launches and disneyworld…

Suffice it to say, we’re a little excited about the whole thing, I can assure you. I can’t think of anything I could use more than a week of sunshine and funky moosak with m’boys, to escape the chill of Scottish Winter.

one word at a time

I know I’ve not been the most forthcoming blogger recently. This comes about kinda as a result of not not leading a particularly interesting life recently (apart from the odd gig with jetsetting musicians, that’s always fun), and partly as a result of the hundreds of spam comments I have to wade through daily to keep this blog artificial-meat-free.

I’ve tried a few different antispam plugins for Wordpress, but stacks still seem to get through despite the word blacklist I’ve been growing as more spam comes in – words like aderall, amoxicylln, diazepam and hundreds more – mostly prescription drugs.

Anyway, I read today about a new kind of CAPTCHA developed by Carnegie Mellon University. What’s CAPTCHA, you might ask? Well, to quote the reCAPTCHA website, a CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Turing Test To Tell Computers and Humans Apart) is a program that can tell whether its user is a human or a computer. You’ve probably seen them before — colorful images with distorted text at the bottom of Web registration forms. CAPTCHAs are used by stacks of websites to prevent abuse from “bots,” or automated programs usually written to generate spam. No computer program can read distorted text as well as humans can, so bots cannot navigate sites protected by CAPTCHAs.

Anyway, a team have been digitizing old books (and they only have about 100 million left to go!), using scanning and OCR – Optical Character Recognition. But OCR isn’t perfect – about one word in ten is mis-read, and the only way to check the accuracy is to have a human actually read the scanned word, and verify the correct spelling.

What reCAPTCHA’s all about is using humans across the globe to decipher the illegible words as part of their everyday internet experience. The wonderful thing about this particular CAPTCHA is that it presents you with two words: one is already known by the system, but the other is a scanned word from an old book which can’t be read by a computer – either because the ink is smudged, the page is damaged, or because the book is just. Plain. Old.

So I’ve introduced reCAPTCHA into my website – let’s see if it cuts down on spam. If it does, then I’ll relax some of my other antispam measures, and let new people post new comments immediately. If I can ever find anything useful to talk about.

So just remember, every time you see a reCAPTCHA square a bit like the one on the comments page for this post, you could use it to help contribute to the monumental task of preserving the history of the written word.