Technology

Search Strings

Sorry, Chris has been blogging about google search strings as well, and I find this quite funny.

Here’s the top ten (of ten) search strings for this site as of today:

Top 10 of 10 Total Search Strings
# Hits Search String
1 2 18.18% avril lavigne download free don’t tell me -lyrics
2 1 9.09% armand.co.uk
3 1 9.09% axl rose facelift
4 1 9.09% badass latin phrases
5 1 9.09% download badgers song by weebl
6 1 9.09% eragon download sites
7 1 9.09% qwghlm pronounciation
8 1 9.09% richie rich punjabi download song
9 1 9.09% waiting for my real life to begin download
10 1 9.09% zatoichi dvd cover download

Google has some trouble, evidently, with blogs. If ‘google weebl badgers find’  takes you to my site, then how will one ever find badgers? And WHO searches for ‘badass latin phrases’? I thought for sure that I’d be coining a phrase there…

To check out these, and other statistics for this site (yes, we track all visitors. I know who you are, where you’re sitting, and what you had for breakfast), go here.

[Listening to: No Woman No Cry (Live At The Roxy) (Previously Unreleased) – Bob Marley & The Wailers – Songs of Freedom (05:23)]
Film, Media & Marketing, Miscellany

Three films & some random bits

Alright, I’m knackered, it’s been a long weekend, and it was a ludicrously long week before that.

But, three films seen recently before I forget that I’ve seen them:

Mystic River – winning Academy Awards for Tim Robbins and Sean Penn, this was an entertaining and eminently watchable film. It tells the story of three childhood friends, separated by time and distanced by a traumatic incident in Tim Robbins’ character’s childhood, coming together when Sean Penn’s character’s daughter is brutally murdered.

House of Sand and Fog – a gruelling, yet beautiful and moving film, I felt I’d achieved something by the time I’d finished watching this. An administrative error leads to Kathy (the beautiful, beautiful Jennifer Connelly) losing her house to the state, who auction it to Masoud Behrani, a retired Iranian army Colonel immigrant played brilliantly by Ben Kingsley. The film tells the story of the confrontation of wills, and deals with issues of alienation, identity, self-worth and depression.

Batman: Mystery of the Batwoman – evidently the only cheerful film I’ve seen in a while, Bruce Wayne has to work out who a mysterious new vigilante is, at the same time dealing with the likes of the Penguin, Rupert Thorne, Mr Dusquene and Bane. A good story, well animated and acted, and with GREAT DVD Extras.

Now, to sleep, perhance to dream (superhero dreams)…

[Listening to: Stupid Thing – Aimee Mann – Waiting for My Rocket to Come (04:27)]
Film, Media & Marketing

Spirited Away

Finished watching it now. Very good. Very touching, very beautiful, very well animated, a good story well told. And the frog is brilliant, if incidental. Particularly good also are the very cute rat/baby and little vulture/bird

Go, watch it now.

[Listening to: Waiting for My Real Life to Begin – Colin James Hay – Going Somewhere (05:46)]
Miscellany, Personal, Technology

Ahead of time

Damnit, I’m still being a techie. I remembered reading about Stuff Magazine detailing a list of the top ten gadgets for 2004, and being pleased that I had a number of them. I reckon that I’m approximately 80% geek according to this. Here’s the list: how do you scale up?

# Bluetooth Mobile (Nokia 6600)
# MP3 Jukebox (Apple iPod)
# Plasma Screen (Pioneer PDP-434HDE)
# Home Cinema (Pioneer NS-DV990)
# Personal Video Recorder (Sky+ for BSkyB)
# Digital Camera (Pentax Optio S4)
# Games Console (Microsoft Xbox)
# Wi-fi Laptop (Sony Vaio)
# Wireless Network (Netgear)
# Watch (Seiko Arctura Kinetic)

Approximations allowed in scoring (i.e. SPV e200 instead of 6600 as a bluetooth mobile, Creative Jukebox in place of iPod etc.,)

[Listening to: Seven Years – Norah Jones – Come Away With Me (02:25)]
Gaming, Media & Marketing, Technology

Xbox LIVES!

Alright, I mentioned earlier that I was thinking about getting Xbox Live and, well, I did, along with Magic The Gathering: Battlegrounds and Amped 2, and I thought I’d post some thoughts.

The infrastructure is incredible; Xbox Live has a unified ID system, so you have one login, one friends list, across all the games that you play, and you can keep track of your rankings, friends and downloaded content, some of which is charged at a premium, using the Xbox Lived-up dashboard.

The headset plugs into the controller and works well enough. The ‘mute’ button is definitely useful, as you don’t always want to talk to people in Phoenix, Arizona, playing Magic at 4am local time.

Despite using a very small proportion of my ADSL connection (connected as it is via a network bridge/cross-over cable, via a wireless network), there’s very little apparent latency or lag for either game and the VoIP service that works in game is pretty clear.

At £29.99 including a year’s subscription, I reckon Xbox Live is well worth it, if you play with any keen-ness any of the games it supports (and they are increasingly legion).

Just so y’all know, my Xbox Live ID, oddly enough, is ‘Division6’, and I’m honing my red & white spell book for some major ass-kicking. I’m ranked about 500 in the world (mad skills!), out of about 10,000 Magic players. My aim is to kick the bejeezus out of Matt (aka CSmith), who’s a couple of hundred above me in the league table. He’s a little raging goblin.

Alright, that was remarkably geeky. I think I’ll write about sport and women for a while to straighten myself out.

[Listening to: 08-Led Zeppelin – Immigrant Song – – (02:24)]
Miscellany, Personal

8 days a week

Although it’s been a 4-day week, I’ve crammed in enough activity for substantially more than that, and am feeling very, very ready for the weekend. Which is good, because there are parties to be had.

Today is Chris’ birthday, so be sure to leave him lots of messages on his blog, and if you’re an attractive woman, make him unsolicited offers. It’ll provide much intrigue and excitement. Don’t pretend to be a woman, though, that’s just not funny.

[Listening to: Barbossa is Hungry – Klaus Badelt – Pirates of the Caribbean OST (04:06)]
Books, Media & Marketing

Meme of the Day, apparently

According to Chris, I need to do the following:

   1. Grab the nearest book.
   2. Open the book to page 23.
   3. Find the fifth sentence.
   4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.

For me, this is Neil Gaiman’s American Gods, and the text is:

   “His tie was dark grey silk, and the tie pin was a tree, worked in silver: trunk, branches and deep roots.”

That’s really not that interesting. These meme-things are definitely overrated.

Although ‘deep roots’ is a profundity in itself.

[Listening to: Bend Me Shape Me – American Breed – Tales Of A Librarian (02:09)]
Current affairs, Miscellany

Concorde and Victory

Concordalicious Yesterday, Concorde made its, like, 7th “death march” up the Thames and onto Scotland, and Kate asked me if I wanted to go watch it. Curious as to what kind of spectacle it would make, I popped down there to have a look.

It was a big event; many, many people by the Westminster and Lambeth bridges. As they parallel parked the gigantic, wasteful, polluting, inefficient and ultimately failed aircraft, emblazoned with Scottish flags and other pagan iconography (this is a joke, Scottish people everywhere), I wondered if I could raise any appropriate comparisons to the magnificent house behind it… but then decided that I didn’t quite have the degree of wit or political know-how for it. Suggestions on a postcard.

All the same, it made for some interesting photos. The plane says “Concorde in Scotland” and the lift which raised it off the barge is clearly marked “Abnormal Load Engineering”, which I found amusing for some reason. Read the BBC’s report here. I think calling it “history in the making” was hyperbole much, though.

[Listening to: Absolutely (Story of A Girl) – Nine Days – Away From The Sun (03:06)]
Film, Media & Marketing, Personal

I hate jet-lag

It’s been nearly a week and I’m still waking up too early. Of course, this morning it was at least partly caused by some monkey (silly monkey, look at the silly monkey) trying to fax our house phone at 06.32, and, of course, BT “do not have the caller’s number”.

Two films to talk about briefly; both of which I dozed off in, and therefore comments will be insubstantial. The first, an American movie (apparently for a change) – Ocean’s Eleven (the remake). This was re-watched the other night following a late supper with Kate, because we both felt the need for a silly film. Of course, I’d seen it before, but still deeply enjoyed the excellent performances from Brad Pitt, George Clooney, Friends’ Elliot Gould, and the deeply amusing Bernie Mac (who reminds me of the excellent and improbably named Cedric the Entertainer). It was great for the second time, even if I did doze off a couple of times, but was disappointed to find out that the sequel, due out next year, is going to be called Ocean’s Tweleve. Come on, guys, some imagination!

The second is the beautiful but VERY weird and very Japanese Spirited Away, which, unsurprisingly I watched with Matt and James. Like Princess Mononoke, its a fantastical Japanese anime film, but not really comparable in any other way. It dealt with extremely odd concepts of reality, good and evil, and had some of the weirdest protagonists I’d ever seen. The heroine, a little girl called Chihiro, struggles through a kind of twisted dystopic ‘Wonderland’, assisted and sometimes antagonised by a talking frog (nothing Disney about him), a dragon vaguely reminiscent of Atreyu (or was it Valkor) from the Never Ending Story, and a monochrome monolith called ‘No Face’ in an effort to rescue her parents, who have been turned into pigs. I’m going to watch the end of that film again to catch what I missed out on through my inadvertant naps – definitely intriguing.

I also finished reading Jennifer Government and Hey Nostradamus, mentioned in earlier posts. Spectacular books, both, one for its comic simplicity and the latter for being a profound and moving examination of faith in the face of hardship. I’m not a religious man, but have come from that background and was very impressed with Douglas Coupland’s careful narrative, telling an excellent story as well as dealing with issues of struggling with faith and dealing with personal disaster.

Oh, and a link to a “hot internet nerd” – a 20-year old girl from somewhere in the US who’s made a name for herself largely by being a girl and promoting herself as an ordinary individual. Unlike some of the weirdos on the internet, I didn’t surf to her site by typing “hot internet nerd” into google (no, really), but rather through a link in someone’s blog that I was reading. Honest. Anyway, I thought her blog was reasonably amusing for those with a spare minute.

Busy week this week. Posting frequency to resume at the weekend. Hope you’ve all had an egg-filled Easter and are ready to rumble. By the way, you might want to steer clear of Primrose Hill for a few days – those durned kids with their egg-and-spoon races have left fragments of boiled eggs all over the place. It’s going to smell like the 3rd circle of hell in a few days…

[Listening to: Try – Nelly Furtado – Folklore (04:40)]
Technology

Hello Transatlantia!

…by which I mean, hello to all the lovely Canadians who have been reading my site! I should probably password the webstatistics, but I’ve found them to be of moderate interest; and its somewhat gratifying to realise that other people read my site more than I do (I use Mozilla rather than IE as a browser – and yet IE 6.0 is the most popular browser to readers of my site).

Mozilla is brilliant, by the way. Get it. Now. Tabbed browsing! No pop-ups! Do you know what that means? Never mind, you still need it. Really.

As to other things; jetlag, shopping, driving and other preparations, as well as seeing many members of extensive family have occupied Malaysia time. Interestingly, though, my sleep-deprivation-jetlag-preparing-experiment seems to have worked reasonably well, and I’ve adjusted to Malaysian time reasonably rapidly. Of course, that means my only excuse for my relative inactivity is the heat… but that sleep deprivation thing did make me go slightly loopy. I don’t recommend it; no wonder Channel 4 got in trouble over its reality TV programme Shattered.

Saw American Splendor last night. A movie about how real life is difficult – which evidently can make for a pretty interesting film. Reasonably gritty and given a sense of the real by interstitials with the characters on whom the film is based (the mature – not adult – comic book writer Harvey Pekar primarily). A film, even a docu-film, about a subject this self-involved would have been easy to do badly, but it wasn’t. Muy Bueno – read Harvey and his wife’s blog here.

Armand David's personal weblog: dadhood, technology, running, media, food, stuff and nonsense.