Bloody Organisation

Now, before you judge me I would like to say that I am usually a very organised person. I don’t think I’ve been late to anything more than three times, which if you ask me I’d say is good going. This however, is a story of how I can easily fuck things up.

“Due to this status as Mr. Bigshot-City…”

I live in the not so fabulous city of Bristol, which if your geography is terrible or you live in another country, is in the west of England. London seems to be the place to be. I can’t see this myself. I mean, who wants to live in a highly congested, highly polluted, and highly expensive city — lots, that’s who. Due to this status as Mr. Bigshot-City, EVERY-SINGLE-TWEETUP seemed to take place in there, much to my hate.

Let’s Do This Thing!

It was in the insane Skype chat that had been going on for a few weeks that the subject of tweetups cropped up. Some idiot organised one during school and working hours, when neither he or anyone else could go (I think only two showed up in the end). I thought that a tweetup should be in Bristol, just because. An obvious location for this kinda nerdy shizzle seemed to be The Watershed. I emailed them (I’m really not a talk-on-the-phone kinda guy, maybe that’s a social defect but I don’t care) to find that they want £TOOMUCH.

They did however forward me to Pervasive Media Studio, where I spoke to Genevieve (I say spoke to when I really mean typed to). Gotta bring me on biccys and cake but it’s all organised for the 24th [Friday]. I setup a twtvite to track who is coming et cetera. Most of the people I wanted to come, were.

“Shit!”

‘Awesome!’ I thought. Well, that was when it all start to go a little…Erm…Shit. I suppose it was a little unfair of me to expect people who live farther than London to come to a meetup some two-hundred miles away in Bristol. Anyhoo, Angelique and Jack said they couldn’t make and Charlotte was having some doubts about coming, it wasn’t until this week that she booked her tickets.

This is also the week that I got my first job at Sainsbury’s but I’ll talk about that in later. It is how relevant to this story, a little. My first shift is this Friday, 10:30 - 2:30, bang in the middle of Tweetup West — looks like I’m gonna be missing it, this is just how bad my organisation is.

I’m not worried about missing it all too much if I’m honest; I just worry that Charlotte will be okay. She’s never been to Bristol before and Chris can’t make it so she’ll be all alone when she come in to Temple Meads at 12:30 this Friday. Thankfully Kurt, Oscar, and possibly Tory will be there to meet her and then I can meet up with them at Tweetup West when I arrive.

Ho hum.

MAME Cabinet: Part 1

I’ve always been obsessed with everything 80s; the music, the fashion and of course the games. It’s the era video games began and arcades were common-place. Today however, nobody visits the arcades and they have almost all died off. Systm did a series on building a MAME cabinet. Since watching this series, I felt that this is something that we [my dad & I] could do; and this summer it’s what we have, and shall be doing.

The first thing we needed to acquire was an ‘old’ computer. Over the years we had given many of ours away, so it wasn’t difficult to get one back; an old Olivetti with a Pentium MMX processor, 64MB of RAM and a 4GB HDD, of which 2GB was eaten by Windows 98. Obviously MAME was the first thing we needed to get up and running on the machine. One of the issues we had was the lack of USB support for pen drives. Intially, we burned discs to combat this, but this proved both timely and costly and we soon searched for a driver. Now that our movent issue was sorted, we tried to get MAME running.

Best OS EVAR

MAME just would not run on the old Olivetti, and so our hopes of trying to get an arcade machine on the cheap [free] were shattered. This wasn’t really any issue for dad and I but mum was certainly pissed about having to spend money on what she thought was another one of my dad’s stupid schemes (personal mug, garden toys etc.). He found someone in the Trade-It and gave them a ring, to ask about a computer. The call, I imagine, went something like this:

We ate dinner, and made our way over to the other side of Bristol (’The Norf’). The estate that the guy lived on was a bit of a mess if I’m honest, and it was the kind of place that you wouldn’t want to keep your car parked there for too long if you don’t have to. The ‘Ginger Guy’s’ house wasn’t too much better either. A rusty fridge littered the outside of his house and Dad, ‘The Ginger Guy’ and myself had to squeeze into what was at one point in time a cupboard. The cupboard had been converted into a smoking den workshop and was rummage of old computer parts, cables, and cigarettes. What should’ve been a five-minute-pickup-and-dash was quickly turning into a thirty-minute-chat-and-’is there anything else?’ kinda thing. We finally got computer, and battled our way past screaming children and a mouthy wife to the car.

All we needed to do now was configure the software, get an interface and buttons, and build a machine – not a lot.