(Click to enlarge photo)

Last night I went to the opening night of William Shatner’s Canadian tour and it was epic! (It couldn’t be anything else right?)

Anyway, it was in an interview format with Shatner and an interviewer sitting in chairs on the stage. Shatner basically went through his whole life with extremely funny anecdotes (he’s quite the comedian), some occasional clips from TV appearances, and a few emotional stories such as choosing his father’s coffin and finding his wife dead in their swimming pool! Of course he finished off with a “song” about hockey which was classic. Afterwards some of us got to meet him and get a photo. I only wish my dad were alive so I could tell him that I met Shatner, he would certainly have been impressed being a big Star Trek fan.

Some interesting factoids:

- He has never watched any of the other Star Treks apart from his series!
- He loves horses
- He has worked extremely hard as an actor throughout his life and believes in saying YES to opportunities. Something that I agree with wholeheartedly.

Anyway, it was great fun. It lasted about 3 hours with an intermission, so there’s plenty of material. Highly recommended if you are a fan. See if you can see him on the other tour dates.

image by fritish

The other day I told a Canadian friend I had eaten beans on toast and he said “How British”. Then I got to thinking about how the British seem somewhat obsessed by toast and thought I’d build a list of British toast-based snacks, as you do.

Beans on Toast

Normally Heinz beans are the best. Most other beans are basically inferior tasting and cheapen the experience. Really medium/thick-sliced white bread with butter on tastes the best and if you put some thinly sliced cheddar cheese on top, it rocks. Some people have also been known to pop a fried or poached egg on top as well.

Canadians – notice how the British bean tin in the photo is blue not brown. Also I think Canadian beans are sweeter.

Cheese on Toast

Normally you’d use cheddar cheese. Somehow when the cheese it melted it becomes stronger in flavour, it’s weird. It’s common to add Worcester Sauce, Brown Sauce, Branston Pickle or Tomato Ketchup to the cheese. There’s even a fancy version called Welsh Rarebit. Note that you have to make this under a grill, you can’t just make toast in a toaster and then stick cheese on it, or it won’t melt properly.

An alternative to cheddar is cream cheese on toast. You can do the toast in a toaster and use a brand of cream cheese like Philadelphia. It’s pretty delicious if the toast remains hot enough after applying cold cream cheese.

Egg on Toast

You can bung a fried or poached egg on toast and add a bit of salt and pepper, and maybe brown sauce, and it is delicious. What’s good is that when you burst the yolk you can mop it up with the toast.

Also popular is scrambled eggs on toast of course. I prefer the toast buttered and soft as otherwise it’s too dry for me. The difference between good and bad scrambled eggs on toast is huge. Once, bizarrely, I cracked a tooth eating scrambled eggs on toast!

Marmite on Toast

Lots of people in the UK like Marmite, but plenty hate it too. The Australians swear by Vegemite instead, but it really is not so good compared to Marmite ;-p You’d normally butter the toast before adding Marmite otherwise it would be too dry. White bread works fine but if you can get a nice soft good quality brown bread, it’s delicious. I like to wash mine down with a cup of tea. In fact pretty much all these toast snacks go down well with tea, except for maybe cheese on toast…

Marmalade on Toast

This is a typical breakfast snack. It somehow seems nicer if you can get fancy soft thick white bread to toast. The trick is to not over toast it so that the toast is still nice and soft, then you have to butter it quickly and add the marmalade before it all goes cold. Again, this is best served with a cup of tea.

Note that whenever I say “butter”, you could use real butter, but it’s a pain in the ass to spread and normally rips up your toast, so most people use margarine or some kind of soft butter spread.

Lemon curd on Toast

I’m not sure this is very popular any more, but when I was a kid we used to have Lemon curd on toast and it was pretty good. The brand we used to get was called Robertson’s and it used to have a picture of a “Golliwogg” on the jar. Thankfully they have since removed that particular imagery.

Peanut Butter on Toast

Some people like crunchy peanut butter and some people like it smooth. I still butter my toast before adding the peanut butter, something that my youngest son says is not required because after all you are using peanut “butter”.

One thing the British don’t do is mix it with jam and call it “Peanut Butter and Jelly”. I never had that until I came over to Canada, and it’s actually pretty good, although it feels somewhat excessive.

Jam or Honey on Toast

These are fairly obvious. A good quality jam on toast with a cup of tea always perks you up and can be eaten pretty much any time of the day.

Chocolate Spread on Toast

Hazelnut chocolate spread on toast is a pretty awesome guilty pleasure. I love it with a cup of tea. I’m pretty much incapable of eating anything chocolate without the savoury cleansing power of a nice cuppa – I don’t know why.

Pâté on Toast

Because I’ve been vegetarian for a long time, I only have vegetable paté on buttered toast, but plenty of people enjoy meat-based pâté and other meat spreads on toast.

Plum Tomatoes on Toast

This one might seem a bit weird but I used to eat this a lot as a young man on a limited budget. I would heat up a tin of plum tomatoes and pour them over some buttered toast. Then I’d add pepper and Worcester sauce, and sometimes cheese. It was delicious, warming and quick to prepare.

Soup and Toast

Often, when I eat soup, I make a few slices of buttered toast and dip them in the soup before taking a bite. Sometimes I fold the toast in half like a toast sandwich. Anyone else eat toast with soup or is it an oddity to my family?

Boiled Egg with Toast Soldiers

You soft boil an egg so the yolk is still runny and stick it in an egg cup and remove the top. Then you butter toast and cut it into strips that are called “soldiers” and then dip them in the yolk. It’s delicious providing that you don’t get egg shell stuck to the toast!

Cooked breakfast with toast

A traditional cooked English breakfast with all the trimmings normally comes with toast that you can use to mop up all the “juice” at the end, or eat as you go along, whatever takes your fancy.

Toasted Sandwich

Some people buy a sandwich toaster and make toasted sandwichs containing all manner of foodstuffs. I haven’t had one of these in a long time. Are they still popular in the UK I wonder?

OK I think that’s pretty much it. I know that not all of the above toast-based snacks are exclusive to Britain but many of them are.

If you can think of any more that I’ve missed out, please let me know!

Remember when PC games used to come in huge boxes instead of those nice small DVD cases? Well back then I bought quite a few classic PC games and you can see them all in this photo: http://www.greyaliengames.com/misc/OldskoolGameCollection.jpg

I used to have them proudly on display but now they are packed away in my loft.

The FPS games start with Doom and are roughly in chronological order. How many have you played? There are a few gaps in my collection of FPS games but that’s because back then I was a bit naughty and pirated a few (not many) games. Not that it’s a good justification, but at least I bought quite a lot as well.

Have you got a photo of an epic game collection?

photo by by MarcinMoga / Lolek

Someone just emailed me and asked me a good question (the answer to which will be in my next post). What was interesting is that they asked me the question in such a way that they were pretty much guaranteed a response. Their email went like this:

- Say nice things about my blog and establish a common ground.
- Ask question.
- Finish up with nice thing.

How could I refuse? This is like the sandwich technique of giving advice during speech evaluations at Toastmasters which goes: praise, criticise constructively, praise. Also it taps into social obligation: the emailer gave me a gift of praise, and now I am obligated to give back by answering their question.

So remember this technique when writing to people to ask them questions. I do it all the time at work:

- You are awesome and so is everything you do.
- Can you help me with this?
- Thanks, you’re awesome.

Then I always follow up with a thanks email when they do it, so they’ll remember I was grateful the next time I ask them for something.

Try it out!

Disclaimer: Do Not Play this video if you are worried about messing with your brain! I cannot be held responsible for any unusual effects or damage that may occur. You have been warned.

I made this track on my Amiga using ProTracker in about 1993 when I was 18. It contains a 3Hz pulse which is supposed to adversely affect your brainwaves. I made the pulse go in and out of phase on the left and right sides to mess with your hemispheres and then I added some crazy intense trance music over it. Listen to it with headphones on for the full effect.

The sample in the track is my friend Steve Bond saying “There’s something weird going on in my body … uh ah … I can’t take it, I think it’s going to kill me.” and the guitar playing is me.

Enjoy!

My kids love games with level editors or the ability to build vehicles – they spend hours and hours on them! I think it’s cool that they like doing that because it’s training up their little brains as game designers, or maybe engineers.

Here are some of their recent favourites:

Lego Indiana Jones 2 (Xbox 360)

This game has a proper level editor and they have been making all kinds of fantastic creative levels for each other to play (usually full of boulders). Hours and hours of fun. Plus the actual game rocks too.

Banjo Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts (Xbox 360)

This game has to win the award for the most hours played. They have put an insane amount of time into building all kinds of ground, air and water-based vehicles in the game’s easy-to-use workshop. They’ve made 100s. I totally recommend this game for 5 year-olds upwards.

Spore (PC)

Conan bought this with his Christmas money. They’ve both been creating wacky creatures and then exploring their galaxies – there are a lot of options. Make sure to patch it if you buy a boxed copy.

Trials HD (Xbox 360)

Apart from the fact that this game is just brilliant, funny and addictive, it also has a level editor. They spent quite a while making fiendish tracks full of exploding barrels and other nutty stuff. You can buy an expansion pack for hardly any MS points and it comes with more things to use in the editor like giant fans.

Viva Piñata

In this game you clear out a wasteland and make a lovely garden populated with cute little creatures that you have to care for and stop from fighting each other. It’s highly addictive and they really enjoyed it. I’m sure if I let them have a Facebook account they’d also get addicted to Farmville, but I’m not going to let them go on Facebook for a few years yet!

Any more?

If you can recommend any more great creative games for kids, please let me know!

PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES:

So what about programming languages for kids? Well we’ve tried out a few recently with varying levels of success:

BlitzMax (PC)

I began to teach my eldest son, Conan, who is 8, BlitzMax. He understood the basics and was able to fiddle with some simple code to get different things happening, but he never really carried it on. Perhaps I need to encourage him more, or perhaps it’s just that games these days are way more fun and appealing (and readily available) than when I was a kid and took up programming, and so BlitzMax may feel a bit techy and boring by comparison.

Game Maker (PC)

We went through the tutorial game together and again Conan understood it easily. I was impressed by the application and the variety of options that it offered – it’s very flexible. It’s probably a lot easier to get into than BlitMax. However, once again, Conan hasn’t really carried on with it, possibly for the same reasons as mentioned above.

Kodu (Xbox 360)

At first we tried this on the PC but the interface seemed awkward. It was originally released on the Indie channel of XBLA so we downloaded it and tried it out. It was much better on Xbox, the controls made sense and everything seemed smoother. There are loads of pre-made levels you can fiddle with plus built-in media. Both my boys had great fun with it. My youngest son, Callum, who has just turned 6, was able to use it easily and make quite advanced levels using the mainly visual interface. I recommend that you at least check out the demo. They “played” this on their own without any encouragement from me so it was the most successful of the three languages.

Please let me know your experiences with teaching your children how to program. Thanks!

I moved to Vancouver in November 2008 to work as a game designer/programmer for Big Fish Games. One of the reasons we decided to move here was that Canada has amazing scenery and Vancouver is in a fantastic beautiful location.

I love taking photos and here are some recent ones that I feel capture the essence of our local environment. Enjoy! (click images to enlarge them)

View from our rear balcony (we are seriously lucky to have such a great view).

Bald Eagles nest here, North West of Vancouver.

View out to sea from a roadside parking lot, North West Vancouver.

Someone called Blitzplotter on the Blitzmax.com forums often asks what games we played over the last week and this time he also asked what IDEs we’d been using. I thought I’d post my answer here as it’s been a fun week with lots of variation and cool times gaming with my boys.

OK then, “top 5″ games this week:

1) Half Life 2 Episode 2
2) Lego Indy 2
3) Trine (completed)
4) Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy (completed)
5) Either World of Goo or Lego Batman.

And that in fact is all I played this week, apart from Facebook games: Treasure Madness and The Warlords, and maybe Bejewelled Blitz. I recommend you check them all out if you like Facebook games (and even if you don’t!)

Oh wait, just realised I played a ton of XBox Live Arcade and Indie games (all demos) and some were neat such as:

Arkedo Series 01: JUMP!
Arkedo Series 03: PIXEL!
Miner Dig Deep
Magic the Gathering
Gyromancer

Unfortunately Alien Breed Evolution didn’t do it for me, too dark and annoying. Shame as I loved the original games on the Amiga. There were quite a few other lacklustre titles too – I can understand that for Indie titles (people maybe just starting out), but not for Live Arcade titles.

Top 5 IDEs used this week:

1) Visual Studio 2008 Express with XNA
2) Flex with AS3.
3) MS Frontpage and Notepad++ (for my new Aikido website). Yes I know I’m stretching the limit of what an IDE is.

And that’s it. Sadly I didn’t use Blitz this week. Well I fired up the IDE to answer a question for someone.

Yes, thanks to Facebook I’m raking it in (virtually). My farms and restaurants are earning me massive amounts of (virtual) money whilst I sleep with only a small amount of admin required each day! Plus I’m gaining more experience as a farmer, a cook, and a pet owner etc. I’m so rich it’s fantastic. Now the only problem is how to turn the virtual cash into real cash…

What are you playing that’s hot on Facebook right now?

Well the title of this post says it all. Someone posted this massive crazy Grey Alien conspiracy rant in the comments of one of my posts. What do you make of it?