Martin Geisler Online

Today is Camilla’s birthday, she turns 23! Congratulations! We’re about to go in and wake her up and sing her a birthday song… I’ve just got wake up Christina, Jesper, Hanne, and Mia so that they can help me.

Later in the afternoon…

I’ve now got back from Uni and we’ve just had a really nice birthday cake in Camilla’s room. Christina has made a really good carrot-cake with Happy Birthday Camilla! written on top in red icing and Camilla has also made a cake using dough as described here. As the Danish tradition bids, she has formed it like a human but it’s hard to tell if it’s a man or woman because Torben has decorated the cake with both long hair and other, hmm, more male features… :-)

We finished the day by seeing IMDB:Thirteen Days (2000) which is a great movie about the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, see my post about war movies for a longer review. After that we started to watch IMDB:Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (2001), but I went to bed before it was finished because it was getting really late. We’ve booked tickets for IMDB:Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (2002) tomorrow night — I’m sure it will be fun!

I woke up this morning to a beautiful scenery: everything outside is covered in a thick layer of snow. Although it’s been terribly cold in Denmark for several days now, we haven’t had any show here in Århus until now.

I hope everybody got well into the new year — I certainly did! The big party here at [Skejbygård][] was a big success: the food was fantastic and there was a lot of happy people. We started the party by watching Queen Margrethe II make her annual speech in TV. After that we had all the nice food I talked about some days ago.

The party lasted until 6:00 in the morning for me, but I’ve heard that others continued until at least 8:00… It was only when we woke up again at around 14:00, that we could see just how big a success the party had been: the room was a mess! I’ll not even begin to describe it, I’m sure you can imagine how it looked :-) But after a couple of hours cleaning things started to get back to normal. We ate the leftovers at 17:00 — it was almost as if the food tasted better this time, but it was probably just because most of us haven’t had anything to eat since the dinner the night before.

But now it’s time to start studying abstract algebra again… there’s only four days until my exam(!) so I guess the holidays are over :-/ -Martin Geisler

We’re just about to begin making the food for the big New Year party here at [Skejbygård][]. It will be a party of special magnificence, much larger than our normal parties: there will be about 47 people at the dinner.

We’ve all paid 100 Danish Kroner (about 15 USD) so there was plenty of money to shop for when the food was bought yesterday. So there will be all sorts of delicious dishes to choose from: tuna mousse, roast beef, lamb, spiced potatoes (that’s what I’ll be preparing together with Jesper Klintø and Hanne Enemark, his girlfriend), Curly Kale (that’s ”grønlangkål” in Danish), caramelised potatoes, smoked ham, and much more that I’ve forgot about again. I’m really looking forward to it!

As tradition bids, we’ll also have some fireworks for tonight. The Board decided to help the party tonight, so I’ve just been in Føtex with SvenneRasmussen to buy a massive battery called ”Miracle of Fire”. It costs 350 Kroner (about 50 USD) and it’s rather heavy. I’ve never had such expensive fireworks before in my life — I really hope it goes off as planned tonight!

The weather forecast says that we’ll get perfect weather for tonight: a clear sky without much wind. But that also means that it’ll be freezing cold, we’ll get temperatures around -10 °C (about 10 °F) so most people will probably prefer to stay indoor and watch the fireworks from there. [Skejbygård][] is eight stories high so we have a really nice view in over Århus from the seventh floor.

I would like to wish everybody here a very Happy New Year, see you next year! -Martin Geisler

It was very nice to get some sleep — I needed it! We’re now waiting for the Closing Ceremony to begin and after that we’ll disassemble our computers and head home. I’ll be picked up by my father who will drive me back to [Skejbygård][]. -Martin Geisler

!!!Day Three at The Party

It feels like it’s still Day Two, but that’s only because I haven’t been in bed yet — it’s now 4:55 in the morning… I’m going to bed Real Soon Now ™ but I’ll write about the Demo competition first.

It was a nice change to see something else than Counter-Strike — the demos were generally good. The problem was, that there were too few of them, so few that the original three competitions (WiLD, Demo, and Intro) were combined into a single competition with only nine entries!

So the tiny introes (this is a demo with a maximum size of only 64 KB) were mixed with the huge WiLD demos and inbetween you had the normal demos. Thoooms and Paaske made it with their demo, but it ran way too fast :-( Because they had been in such a rush to finish the demo, they hadn’t had time to implement a framerate, limiter and the machine used to run the demos for the bigscreen is pretty fast, much faster than the machine Thoooms used to develop the demo on… You can see a full-size version of the screenshot at /images/pq_torus.jpg and you can download the demo from one of the mirrors listed at scene.org.

It’s clear from the entries in the demo-related competitions this year, that the Scene is moving away from The Party. I’ll probably not go to The Party next year, instead we talking about going to Compusphere in Sweden. It’s held on the same dates at The Party, but it’s only for Sceners, so there will be no Counter-Strike competitions stealing the bigscreens… And it’ll also be cheaper for us, even after we’ve bought tickets for the ferry.

That all for now — I’ll go get some sleep now! -Martin Geisler

I’m still at The Party, and ready for another day! We decided to go to the nearby school to get some sleep last night, The Party has arranged for the school to stay open at night so that we can have a quiet place to sleep. When we got up, we discovered that half of Jutland was without power! Luckily it only took a couple of hours before the power was back up — you cannot run The Party without power…

I’ve had time to work a lot on GimpsterDotCom and on [PHP Weather][]. I’ve just released version 2.1.0 — if I gave the releases codenames, it should be called “Release TP-2002″ :-)

This release adds five new translations and fixes a number of bugs, so I urge you to upgrade if you’re using an older version now. You can download it here.

Thoooms and Paaske is currently working hard on their demo for the competition at 18 O’clock. This is the first time they have an entry for the competition — it’s gonna be exciting to see how it is received. We haven’t seen or heard much from the other demogroups this year. There’s a couple of guys from hybrisNEMESIS and that’s about it — everybody seams to be playing Counter-Strike or something like that :-/ It’s a real shame that The Party has degenerated into this. Last year they were able to open all three halls, but not this year: the big hall 3 is closed because there’s too few people here. So hall 1 where I sit with Thoooms and Paaske is filled with gamers. There’s a constant noise from people blowing eachother up, the noise used to come from people playing scene-music.

But then again — let’s not judge this party before it’s over. We still haven’t seen this years demos, so we might still be surprised.