Monday, August 20, 2007

Bugger!

Well, just when I had decided to save some dosh by upgrading rather than replacing my PC, the first components I bought blew it up.

A 'new' 2gb stick of DDR RAM shorted out, frying itself, the socket and the rest of the memory. No choice now but a full rebuild.

Tuesday, August 14, 2007

Great News!

I've had to keep this quiet for a while, but no longer.


Abby's pregnant!!!!!!!!!!

Yeah, I know; it's been a long time coming. In my defence I think Abby's employers have had a lot to do with that. The stress they've put her under for the past couple of years has been obscene. I'm sure that there's no surprise that the month after she went part-time she fell pregnant.

So, we're excited, thrilled and all those other good things. I'm also quite nervous and even a little sad. Not because of the baby, but I'm being somewhat selfish I suppose. It means I'm finally going to have to grow up and be responsible. It probably means an end to trying to make something of being an actor. The work's been far too scarce and I have now finally left it too late to do any time abroad looking for work.

I have, therefore, been looking for day jobs. Of course, having done nothing even remotely straight for years my CV is utter pants. I've already been refused for two jobs. Kinda like still being an actor really....

So, sometime around the end of March there'll be a new little person around to help buggerup the planet and probably one less actor.

Protestors at the Airport

Interesting that there are several protests against the expansion plans for Heathrow airport. One story and lots of links here:

BBC NEWS | UK | BAA wins Heathrow protesters ban

As far as I can see there are more things to be worrying us in the climate change debate. The evidence I've seen all points to air travel being only a minor contributor to the problem but even so, is this really the right time to be expanding our airline capabilities? Is a protest directly in and around the airport really a good idea? Given its likely status as a major terrorist target it has to be likely that such an ongoing disruption may cause security breaches.

Whichever side of this debate you come down on there's been one part of the reporting which instantly grabbed my attention. This was seeing just how quickly our police began threatening to use the anti-terror laws against our own citizens engaged in peaceful protest.

Again.

You know those laws which they swore blind that, if they were granted them, they would only use in emergencies and to protect us? That's right, the ones they've used in such circumstances as throwing an old man out of the Labour Party Conference for heckling, shutting down several protests against anything the government didn't want us kicking up a fuss about and, oh yes; shooting an innocent Brazilian seven times in the head whilst he was being held down.

Look, you can't blame the police for wanting stronger powers to combat the terrorists, but most people realise that what they had was pretty well enough already. The vast majority of the uses of these powers do seem to have been abuses. The fact that the vast majority of these abuses have centred around people engaged in legitimate protests or even debate within their own party tells me a lot about how the powers that be want us kept. Threatening people wiith these laws for wearing anti-government slogans on their t-shirts or confiscating placards, pens such materials just makes them look like the enemies of the people and not the protectors. Which is, after all, what they should be.

Sunday, August 12, 2007

Review: Bourne Ultimatum

The third in the trilogy of movies reputed to be the reason the Bond series improved.

This was as truly excellent film. Matt Damon is utterly convincing as the amnesiac spy trying to get on with is life and to find out who did what to him and when. Sound a little confusing? So it is with Bourne's life. The double-dealing and paranoia rife within the agencies involved in creating and hunting him see to that. Who's on his side? Who's against him? For what is, essentially, a straightforward tale there are enough plot-twists and double-blinds to ensure that you're always engaged with the characters. Unlike the aforementioned Bond where the characters are only there to hang the action sequences on, this has characters you can actually care about and believe in. Heck, there isn't even a traditional villain. The 'bad' guys are all on the same side. The moral ambiguities of American foreign policy drive their actions and they are firmly in the 'end justifies the means' camp. Unlike in Bond where villains are bad because they're evil, these guys are evil because they want to do the right thing, but have lost sight of right & wrong. Very relevant in our tumultuous world.

But I'm making this sound like a heavy political polemic and that it most certainly is not. It is a high-octane, turbo-charged thriller. Although the characters have depth and feelings they do not block the flow of the film or slow the pace of its action. Director, Paul Greengrass, uses only the merest sketches of those more emotional scenes to show us what we need without succumbing to the temptation to become maudlin or self-indulgent. For a great example of this look for the scene where Bourne has his 'successor' at his mercy.

Allowing only the briefest pauses for breath the action is the best I have seen this year. Brutal, realistic and yet still cinematic enough to be thrilling. As a fight director myself I only wish I could work on sequences like these. Better yet, many of them take place in crowded, open, everyday locations. All of which serve to bring home the fact that spooks like these are operating amongst us, only without the fantastic skills.

The performances are uniformly excellent with no one letting the side down. All too often there will be one person who sticks out like a sore thumb due to being badly mis-cast or blatantly untalented. Happily, Greengrass & the Hubbards have assembled an excellent company down to the smallest roles.

Are there problems with the film? Yes; nothing is perfect.

The hand-held style - complete with whip-pans, shots too close to see what's happening and irritating zooms - is the chosen mode of shooting here. Yes, I find it as annoying as ever. I know it helps to pull the viewer into the action and to give a sense of immediacy, but it still drives me up the wall. It's not as bad as, say, Transformers but I really don't think it's needed. Personal tastes, here, so likely not a problem for many.

It has been a while since the last one, so the names,organisations and just who's who bandied around are a little confusing at times. Again, they fall into place as you go on and I daresay the fans will either know them by heart or have a look at the DVDs before going.

I have heard that, as with so many adaptations for screen, the script bears little resemblance to the novels. I don't know, but Robert Ludlum will not doubt be happy to hear that I intend to buy his books to find out.

Crooks and Liars » FOXNews Reporter: Who are you gonna believe? Me or my lying camera?

Crooks and Liars » FOXNews Reporter: Who are you gonna believe? Me or my lying camera?

The more I read these sites the more astounded I am that anyone still thinks this channel reports unbiased news.

How anyone can listen to the Iraqis in this report talk about how bad things are, see the amount of security required to get a reporter (in full battle armour no less) to make a safe report and still believe that policies in that beleaguered country are working is astounding to me.

Tuesday, August 07, 2007

It's So Funny Why We Don't Talk Any More

No, not a post about the cheesy Cliff Richards song, but about how my PDAs won't play nice.

My X50v started playing up a while back. It says it has sync'ed, I can install files and software, but Outlook information and Pocket Quicken stuff have stopped crossing the USB divide. The logs say they've done their job, but there's nothing being shared. Now, I reckon this was caused by me trying out Intellisync in a wasted attempt to get an online calendar talking to the PDA. Neither Google calendars or Yahoo! seem to have a sensible option so both were abandoned. Since reverting to Activesync 3.8 (AS) I've had all these troubles.

I then finally won an auction for a new X51v and thought that, since I knew I was going to have to upgrade to AS 4.5 that I'd just wait until it arrived. I had hoped that the new version of AS would solve the sync problem, but it hasn't. The 50v is still suffering the same troubles. The 51v has a load of its own!

It won't sync through my copy of Zonealarm free edition. (The 50 still does, oddly enough). I tried following the fix for it, but it refers to using settings not available in the free edition. With the firewall off it does seem to be sync'ing, but it's doing really odd things with some of my programmes.

Pocket Informant 5.2.1.0093 will not show any data, even though the appointments are on the machine. It also refuses to run Options, with the screen beginning to show then vanishing.

SPB's Powerlevel either vanishes completely or is unable to run several features the 50v can run. Like BT & IR business card sending. I think these are down to WM5 just being designed for phone edition machines, really and a lot of useful PDA-type stuff is gone; especially the 'New' button. So, I don't think I need any help with that.

But if anyone can advise me on how to get the sync working right with these machines I'd be eternally grateful.

Oh yeah! As if that wasn't enough, Firefox seems to be incompatible with the updater utility for flashing the ROM. Since it won't offer a choice to 'run from this location' as required. I need to figure out how to get the programme to run the updater without choosing Firefox to view its HTML.

If I had any hair I'd be tearing it out!

Monday, August 06, 2007

Glenn Greenwald - Salon

Glenn Greenwald - Salon

A very interesting article on how the media are going beyond propaganda and into out & out lying about the war in Iraq.

Great Videos

These are by the bloke who did that Citroen Transformers ad' I mentioned earlier. How coincidental that Boing Boing pointed me this way and answered some of my questions.

Now look what you did_Cigarette
Uploaded by nettouch


And a longer one.


Bad bosses get promoted, not punished? - Yahoo! News

Bad bosses get promoted, not punished? - Yahoo! News


Yeah, like this was news!

Thursday, August 02, 2007

Why Bother?

DVDs. So much better than VHS was and so many useful features. All that space on a disc. Usually filled with crap, mind you. If I never watch a 'making of' documentary again I reckon I'd learn as much more about films than I would if I watched a hundred. They are so pointless and dull.

What's more annoying about DVDs, though, is the control the disc can take of your player to make you watch stuff you never want to. Corporate logos, for example. Farscape is one bad example of that. You have to sit through about 8 corporate logos before you can watch an episode. The production company's, the authoring company's, the film company's, the original TV stations involved etc, etc. And you can't skip over any of the damned things. Or play them on fast forward.

Then there's the thrill of reading copyright warnings. In some cases in about every language on the planet. Multi-region discs with lazy encoders just trawl through the things for every region you might want to watch your disc in. Often these days that's backed up with a preachy film about how piracy is "A Bad Thing" and will result in another 9/11, the raping of your children and the end of civilisation as we know it. You can't skip of fast-forward that, either. Next comes the animated introduction to the menu, which some prat decided could be used as a marketing tool and classed as a 'special feature'.

Special, my arse!

All they do is add another 30 seconds loading time and anything up to two minutes watching the crap before you can begin the feature you actually bought the disc for and want to watch. At least these can usually be skipped over, but not always. And don't even get me started on trailers. The longer DVDs are on the market, the more of these irritating features are being foisted upon us. The copyright notice is probably the worst and most pointless.

It's illegal to copy or transmit any such material in pretty much every country in the world. The minute something has a copyright it's protected. Putting multiple versions of a piece of legalese on the screen for the amount of time it would take a three year old to read it doesn't make copying it any less legal. And those who were going to copy it and pirate it certainly aren't intimidated by it. All it does is annoy the rest of us.

These notices and logos were all on VHS tapes and we all just fast-forwarded through them. Did it make them any less legally binding? Of course it didn't. So why do we need to be hectored about them nowadays? Copying a VHS was a lot easier than copying a DVD is.

By the time you've waited through all this crap it can be easily 5 minutes. Much more if you've sat through half a dozen trailers. Maybe all you had time for was a quick episode of Scrubs before you went out. It's 25 minutes long.

So here's a request to the DVD producers:

Please stop telling us who you are and nagging us about both your future products and how butch you are in enforcing your rights. We don't care how big your nuts are or how high up the wall your pee reaches. We just want to watch the films for which you took our money. Pirates will steal your work regardless of what you say to the rest of us and usually have their discs out months before you do. If you must insist on these notices being present at least let us skip them. We know they're there and you can slap us on the wrist whether we've read them or not.
That rant's been coming for a long time. It was precipitated today by having 5 minutes spare time and watching Battlestar Galactica last night. Some twat has decided that the select episode feature will operate on a slideshow. This means you have to wait until the episode you want comes up on screen to press 'play'. Miss it and you have to wait until it comes around again. Whoever decided on that one needs to be shoved out the nearest airlock.