Some smart ex-Sony employee has introduced the PSP as a learning tool at the school she now works at. Enabling the students to download pictures and *shudder* podcasts to aid the learning process, the trial is being held at a school in Birmingham.
School sure has come on some from my day. As dragging in a ZX Spectrum wasn’t really practical, I had to make do with my calculator watch as a “learning aid”. 😉
I’m usually immune to playing Flash games. For some reason I find them utterly trivial in comparison to the “proper” games I play. However, Desktop Tower Defence has had me hooked for a couple of days, now. I cant seem to score more than around 1200, despite thinking I’ve greated a foolproof strategy – I’m quite content to keep working on my tactics, though.
Apologies for the lack of updates, of late; I’ve been in a bit of a daze since spending last weekend in Amsterdam, at the European WipEout Convention attended by members of my fan site, WipEoutZone.com. The days running up to the event were equally dazed, with all of the last minute stuff that you typically have going in before a trip of that nature.
Amsterdam itself was great – lots of nice architecture, and it just seemed like a very cool place to be, with all the trams and bicycles everywhere. It’s by far the smokiest place I have ever been, though, but since most of the smoke smelled more pleasant than the usual variety, it wasn’t as bad as it could have been. I even went to a “coffee shop”, just for the experience. Turns out their coffee is fairly bland compared to all the other funky stuff they have on offer.
The whole weekend went very well, too – all of the guys at the convention were very friendly, so it couldn’t have gone more perfectly. I kind of had the opportunity to be a minor celebrity in the crowd, in that I run the fan site and I’m on the game team. Instead, I took a back seat the whole time and just enjoyed it as a WipEout fan, first and foremost.
To that end, I took very few pictures and only recorded about a half hour of video. Reason being that wanted to live the weekend, rather than get bogged down by documenting it. It’s kind of a double edged sword, because now I wish I had more pictures and more footage, but then I’m glad I took the time to talk to people and play a lot of WipEout when I had the chance.
The only bad point was waiting for four hours or so in the airport for the return flight, which was delayed half an hour. There were no internet kiosks or wireless internet access points that could be used without creating an account with some comms company I’d never heard of. I had my PSP on me, natch, so I thought I’d be sorted for checking my mail and that kind of thing after paying a few euro’s, especially in a nice modern airport like Schiphol.
For the first time in a long time I bought a newspaper just to kill time, because it was literally eating me alive that I couldn’t surf the net!
Maybe the future isn’t quite ready for use, yet.