A friend called yesterday and told me, amongst other things, that “you teach someone how to make bolognese by making bolognese.”
There’s some profound wisdom in that.
All posts by Armand
Psychic iPod
Ok, ok, so maybe I’m just still a little excited about the iPod. After all, it is all sleek, glossy lines, a drop of shiny black heaven with a light (so bright) that brings warmth to even the darkest soul; it’s filled with glorious, glorious music and, well, the interface works so well. (I know, that last bit didn’t fit with the tone of the rest of my description, but hey, I’ve always valued form and function).
But the music its been playing for me — it’s like its sensed my mood and picked, from 12,000 songs currently on it, exactly what I needed to hear.
Today that was 80s rock ballads — including the ever emotional ‘The Touch’, by Stan Bush, made famous by the Transformers movie. Ah, Optimus: you were too young to die.
’tis funny how the music you need to hear has a way of finding you. I’ve found that. That is to say, I’ve found that music has a way of finding me. Even when I’m not looking.
I’m in a very weird, purposeless mood.
The bluffer’s guide to football…
I am, to the shock, horror, bemusement and outright disbelief of everyone who knows me, trying to understand a bit more about football this season. I’m not sure why – I guess I did enjoy the world cup (despite England’s mediocre performance) – and to a certain extent have had enough of looking and feeling completely clueless everytime a conversation about the latest premiership transfers kicks off.
So I’m supporting Spurs, am subscribed the the right RSS feeds (as provided by the BBC), and even signed up to the Metro’s fantasy football game, playing in a private league organised by Tom. If you’re up for getting involved, let one of us know and we’ll send you the pin. For those curious, my winning striker combination is Berbatov (who I have high hopes for) and Crouch (the funniest man in football). I’m playing a 4:4:2 and have Paul Robinson in goal.
Why Spurs? Well, I’m not sure who my local club would be by geography, but have taken a policy that I’ll support the team supported by the first person who explained a sport to me. For football, this was Bozza back in my school days and Damo more recently (both Spurs fans, obviously) and Daf explained Rugby to me – so I support Wales in the six nations – and everywhere else. It’s one of the advantages of having no ‘origin’ location to speak of – Malaysia only really figures in international badminton and squash (and sepak takraw, but who’s counting…).
I am enjoying freaking out people who expect me to know nothing, though. I just keep saying “Berbatov’s having a great run,” or “I think Berbatov is going to make his 25 goals this season,” or “We’re doing well in the pre-season friendlies,” and people just stare at me blankly.
The joys of RSS ;).
Damo & Evo
Damian’s been reporting like crazy for the BBC, for those tracking his Bolivian escapades. Whilst his blog has gone without updates for a while, that’s not because he’s not been busy – check out his most recent outing on the Beeb for Five Live’s Up all night here.
Damo’s on from 2h24 minutes in for about 7 minutes on Tuesday’s show (up for one week only!), providing on-the-ground commentary about Evo Morales, leader of Bolivia, and his recent football match — a celebration of the writing of the nation’s constitution. It sounds like it was a bizarre and hysterical affair, and it seems that DSHK has acquired something of a flair for this brand of broadcast journalism. Chris compared him to [[Alan Green]], which I understand is high praise.
You gotta be cruel to be kind
I’ve had shin issues ([[compartment syndrome]], apparently) for a while now – ironically caused by too much running/impact sport back from my heyday of squash/gymming a couple of years ago. Today I had the first treatment session – medical massage to loosen the tissue.
Damn, it hurt. And it’s going to cane tomorrow.
Slightly optimistic about the results, though — but was slightly surprised when Bernie (for such is the name of the miracle-working masseuse) pronounced that he was done three quarters of the way through the session and asked if I had any other injuries. I mean, confidence in your abilities is one thing, but ‘curing’ a chronic condition in 40 minutes?
I hope so! My physiotherapist was less convinced, but we’ll see. I have about a month of slow, tedious stretches to do before I can start thinking about any kind of impact activity, but hoping to make it out on the ol’ bike before the weather recedes too far.
Vice
Miami Vice was distinctly unimpressive. Michael Mann got caught up with that thing he does, taking beautiful shots of beautiful scenery, and along the way… he seem to forget it was an action movie. Of the 132 minute film, only about 12 minutes is taken up with (admittedly quite good) action sequences.
Now, I normally criticise traditional action movies for having too many explosions and not enough character development etc., — am I being a bit of a hypocrite? No. Sadly, Vice doesn’t bother with normal characterisation either, at least not of Rico and Sonny as a pair, which, IIRC, was what was interesting about the original series. This humourless film builds each character up almost completely separately — and apart from moments when one says to the other “I trust you completely,” (or words to that effect) — the two actually barely speak to each other.
So – no explosions, no characterisation… what does the movie have? A few nice cars (and some less nice ones – was that a BMW? C’mon man, apply imagination!), an absurd mullet, brief moments of fantastic brutality… and that’s about it. Not the kind of film you get angry watching and leave, as individual components seem to sit well enough — but I was definitely bored well before the end…
I love Firefox 2.0
Halfway through writing the last post, Firefox crashed. I mean, badly crashed – dead, no option to screengrab or copy and past the text out of the dialogue box – just plain gone. And I thought ‘crap, there goes the 3 minutes I spent typing that post, I’m not going through that again’ — or words to that effect.
Hereusment, Firefox’s new ‘restore session’ feature not only reopened the browser tabs I had open, but also somehow restored the text into my web interface.
Fabuloso.
It’s a thing of greatness. The reality is, no matter how stable your machine is (and even if you use a Mac or Linux).. there’s a chance that your machine will crash at some point. And that restore function will save your ass. Looks like Microsoft will be playing catch up with IE again… (although FF 2.0 is still not Sharepoint compliant ;( nerts).
Whiteleys. White-leys. WHITELEYS. Goddamnit, Bayswater.
Had to call the Odeon filmline last night. I’m sure their voice recognition technology is awesome, but we just couldn’t get the damn thing to understand the name of our Cinema. After some struggle and experimentation, we were finally able to get the film-times we were after out of it… but it was not what you might call a smooth interaction. And I’m not sure Miami Vice was worth the trouble.
I’m all for new technologies – my technophile status generally goes uncontested – but in this case I would have preferred a touchtone option. Or even (shock, horror) a person.
Happiness is a full iPod
I’ve just expanded my MP3 player family with an iPod video 60GB and am extraordinarily pleased with it. Selecting the 4GB of music for my Nano has been slightly tedious, and whilst I still love the Nano — it is great to have the chunkier iPod with all of my music on it.
For longtime readers, I still maintain my principles against Apple: the lack of functionality of the iPod compared with other MP3 players is annoying — why can it *only* deal with Quicktime video? Why can’t it play back other file types? Why can’t it record audio? Why doesn’t it have an FM radio built in? Why doesn’t it… etc.
The answer, in almost every case, is to help Apple make more money by selling own-brand accessories. Clever business model – but annoying for me. Made even moreso by the fact that no-one has, as yet, come up with an MP3 player that competes with the iPod on sleekness and interface.
Come on, you guys!!
Be interested to see what Zune looks like when it comes out, although I’m anticipating that the first generation of ‘full screen’ video portable entertainment hubs is going to be mediocre as hell. We’ll see…
Open apology
If I’ve not returned your call recently, I’m very sorry. Orange seems to have stopped delivering the ‘new voicemail’ notification to me, so I’ve discovered big pools of messages weeks after they’ve been left.
Argh. Anyone know how to get this sorted, short of calling customer support? Can’t quite face that amidst all the other life-admin…