DDR, DSF and ITG

Before the update that I had prepared for today, I feel obliged to mention that to my lasting surprise, Sunset Boulevard in Aberdeen seem to have thrown out their Dancing Stage machines and replaced them with Dancing Stage Fusion and ITG, the two new ones. Hooray!

I had a quick go of Fusion before leaving. Now, only about two readers of this journal will understand or care about any of this (and that's an optimistic guess), so I've put plain English translations at the side.

Foot ratings are available before song selection. (Good)
The songlist is almost completely new... (Good)
...I mean, just look at it... (Very Good)
but that means there are no Maxes unless you count Paranoia Max. (Bad)
The pad sensitivity seems rather low - it probably needs more working in. (Bad)
The volume on the machine is pitiful. (Very Bad)
The nonstops seem rather simple - Hard 1 might as well be called "Really Quite Easy 1". There's an option to upgrade the difficulty levels of everything, though. (Depends on your opinion, really)
There seem to be no high score tables at all. (Baffling)

So, half the bad points are down to the individual machine. I'm hoping that particularly the inclusion of things like Electric Six will encourage more people to have a go at it. I'll have to go back there some weekends - once again I'm pleased to live in Aberdeen. Actually, this is the only time.

Revised Personal Statement

The process of writing personal statements, as told to me by Craig Muir in fifth year when we all had to send ours to universities, is the art of "BSing without actually lying". You have to make you and your meagre achievements sound as world-explodingly extraordinary as possible while at the same time remembering to stop short of making anything up. Using words of five syllables or more as often as possible also helps (I'm still very proud of squeezing the word "anthropomorphic" into the Dancing Robots report).

I think that this is an outdated practice, though. In a gap in doing anything at work (at the time this was written, the gap had lasted roughly sixteen hours) I decided to take the personal statement that I had sent them and revise it a little, changing the exaggerated claims and glossings-over in to things that are a little more realistic. Deleted text is strikethrough'd (struckthrough? You try turning it in to a verb), and new text has been italicised.

( Revised Personal Statement )

This, I think, is the way forward. If honest things like that were sent to employers, then choosing a candidate would be much easier. Or, once the system was established, I could just go back to the old trend and creatively exaggerate things, and could get any job with comparative ease.