Down With Numbers

I type this post from Safari on a shiny new MacBook Pro. Yes, I bit the bullet and got a Mac. No, I’m not wearing a beret.

I suppose the traditional line of talking about new technology is to give first impressions. The thing is, I’m not really sure what mine were. I guess “cool” would about cover it, but other than that I was a bit busy finding my way around OS X to actually develop proper impressions, so let’s skip to a slightly longer timeframe than Genesis 1:1.

For the first couple of days of using the machine, confusion reigned supreme. Everything felt alien, the environment behaved oddly and I kept tripping over keyboard shortcuts, not to mention the layout of the keyboard itself. In Britain, our keyboards have a few big differences in key placement to those in America, so the fact that Apple use a US/UK hybrid for their British keyboards doesn’t help. Especially when it’s more US than UK.

Let’s have a “for instance”. Quotes. As I was typing that phrase at the beginning of this paragraph, I accidentally hit @ instead of “. Why? Because on a UK keyboard, shift-2 is “, but on an Apple @UK@ keyboard, shift-2 is @. Similarly shift-’ is ” on this keyboard, as opposed to @ as I’m used to.

Another example. Backslash. On a UK keyboard, backslash and pipe are on the key to the left of Z. On this keyboard, they’re to the right of the quote and apostrophe key. For a touch typist who has developed fast non-alphanumeric character typing skills for the purposes of programming, this is a nightmare to get used to.

One more. Hash. This is a key I regularly use, and it isn’t even marked on the keyboard. Normally it would be on the key to the right of the apostrophe and @ key, but on an Apple keyboard it’s hidden away as alt-3. How natural.

But enough of that. What about the more important things? Well, after a few days of confusion, it suddenly and gloriously fell into place. One day I was fighting it, the next day I was flowing with it. The dock made sense, the menu bar felt natural, installing applications was second nature and keyboard shortcuts were easy.

It took 72 hours to convert me to the Church of Mac.

“But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Steve Jobs.

“THE END.”

So Valve recently let the proverbial Team Fortress 2 cat out of the Half-Life bag. After many years of stuttering and delaying, they’re finally going to release TF2. And it’s going to look like a Pixar movie.

Yup, that’s right. Cartoonish is the name of the game here, the completely opposite to the realism that they were originally planning many years ago. It’s still got the nine classes we know and love, but now they’ve got huge heads!

Of course, this puts the Fortress Forever mod in a bit of a pickle. See, FF started up shortly after HL2’s launch and have been working away busily on re-creating Team Fortress Classic for HL2. But now Valve have revealed TF2, this means there are going to be two Team Fortress mods available for HL2 - one cartoonish, one more in the style of TFC.

Obviously, this means that they’re going to be in competition with one another for the many long-time TFC players - myself included. I spent a few years involved in the TFC community, so I’m keeping a very close eye on proceedings. While I can’t say anything about TF2 (all we’ve seen is a ‘group photo’ of the classes and a rather underwhelming teaser trailer), I can say things about Fortress Forever based on my impression of the media they’ve released. Now follows a rant.

What the hell are they doing?! Crossover has TWO bridges in one of the most important choke points of the map, and they’ve given you a way to get out of the water! There’re no hiding spots in the outdoor section of Hunted, no rafters to build sentry guns on in Crossover, and no cover for sentry guns at CP1 and 5 in Canalzone 2. For Christ’s sake, the spy can now ’sabotage’ enemy sentry guns and make them attack their own team just by going up to them!

TF2 it is, then.

I don’t usually take an interest in football. Premiership football usually consists of 80 minutes of passing, 8 minutes of pretending to be injured and 2 minutes of action, so it isn’t exactly the most thrilling spectacle around. But with the World Cup consuming the nation, I felt I had to at least give it a chance, so I had a butcher’s at a first round match. What followed took me completely by surprise.

It was fun to watch. Not once in the full 90 minutes of the match was I bored. Sure, there were quiet bits, but they didn’t last an hour and consist of the same two people passing the ball between themselves. So I turned it into a regular fixture; thanks to the BBC streaming matches for free online I watched three first round matches at 8PM for three consecutive days while not entirely cutting 90 minutes of time out of my day.

Unfortunately the World Cup broadcast contract was split between the BBC and ITV, so for the following week there weren’t any 8PM matches broadcast by the Beeb. But they had coverage of the knockout stages, and I watched a few of those as well, including the most important one.

Anyone who picked up a newspaper the day after the final will know that something happened with Zidane’s head and Materazzi’s chest. 22 minutes into extra time in a 1-1 draw in the World Cup final, in his last ever match, French player Zidane slammed his head into the chest of Italian player Materazzi and, after a minute of play and another minute of confusion, was shown the red card.

Idiot. Undoubtedly he was provoked by Materazzi - according to a lipreader and Italian translator hired by The Times, Materazzi called Zidane the son of Algerian terrorists - but it doesn’t excuse his actions. In a match which ended in a penalty shoot-out, France were left without one of their best penalty takers. Thanks to the nature of penalties, Italy won a match which France deserved to win, and so the World Cup finished in disarray.

But what am I talking about? I’m not qualified to say anything about football, I couldn’t tell Queen’s Park Rangers from Sheffield Wednesday even if my life depended on it.

What has the World Cup done to me?

About this time last week, I took a couple of difficult maths exams required for entry to the university I hold an offer of a place at. I’ve mumbled into the collective void about them before; the Sixth Term Examination Papers, or STEP, papers 2 and 3. Taken by a few hundred people each year, they’ve been going since the mid-1980s, and in their exact current layout since 1994.

People who take these papers generally both want and need to do well in them. To that end, most candidates do a lot of preparation, doing many questions from various past papers. This isn’t to learn specific methods asked in these exams, since the questions can be quite wide-ranging in their style; rather, it’s simply to try and become quicker at reading between the formulae.

Anyway. So I open up STEP 3 on Wednesday afternoon last week, ready for a gruelling 3 hours of thinking and writing. “‘Ello ‘ello, one or two of these questions seem familiar,” I think to myself. But I didn’t have time for such frivolous things as non-mathematical thoughts, so I quickly put it out of my mind and settled down to the all-important business of evaluating integrals for Queen and country.

Fast forward a little. It’s now Wednesday evening. (My VCR-o’-life is rather slow, it can’t fast forward very much.) Someone on TSR has scanned in the paper so we can berate ourselves for failing to notice much easier questions than the ones we chose to attempt. Given this access to the questions from earlier that day, I decide to investigate the feelings of familiarity I had, utilising my archive of all STEP papers back to 1987.

What do I find? The STEP examiners replaced themselves with photocopiers this year. Not one, not two, but four questions were either adapted from, or duplications of, questions that had appeared in past papers. Specifically, these four questions here.

Unfortunately I couldn’t remember how to do the ones I recognised straight away, so I didn’t gain an advantage from this other than a bit of familiarity. I’m certainly not happy, though - if they’re using old questions this year, what’ll they do next year? Copy 1990’s paper?