All posts by Armand

Current affairs, Music, Television

Eurovision

So, watched the Eurovision song contest tonight with some friends from college; its a tradition of theirs I’ve never fully embraced, but really enjoyed tonight. Suzanne and Jamie hosted an entertaining evening, and there were two things in particular that snagged my interest.

    (1) Terry Wogan is hysterically funny. His sarcastic deconstruction of Europe really made me chuckle: “this is a kiosk… why its not like kiosks in other countries I can’t say… oh yes, I know stuff…” — paraphrased equivalent
    (2) I really, really enjoyed Finland’s winning entry. Shows that humourous music really is appreciated, which was gratifying.

It is a bizarre event, though. Spex speculated that the only people who could adequately replace Wogan would be Ant and Dec – saddens me that they are the best that British television has to offer… but it did make a great deal of sense. Their high-energy idiocy might be the only thing that will wean the UK public off the reassuringly cutting wit of Wogan.

Film

X3

So, I saw X3 over a week ago and still no comment: what, l ask you, is wrong? Could lt that it was awful? Well, it could have been, and have been making up my mind about it over the last week: but on the whole think that it just about held its own weight.

There’s no doubt that the writing on X3 is, well, mediocre, when judged by the standards set by its predecessors. Characters struggle through some fairly awkward exchanges that never quite succeed in convincing you that they are experiencing a normal range of (mutant) emotions.

That said, some of the action sequences are delightful in their ridiculousness (what exactly are Jean Grey’s powers?)… And Frasi- erm, Kelsey Grammar brings some bright blue colour to the cast, which had us all chuckling.

All in all, it’s a film that takes less energy to like than dislike, for all its flaws.

Definitely one for a fly by night fan of the franchise like myself. If Spidey 3 is as poorly scripted I will probably be upset.

This post is published with two NTKs:

    (1) We’re still quite a long way before the film’s official release, so have tried to avoid spoilers. Apologies for scant nature of information offered.
    (2) This review was initially tapped away by hand on a PDA. Which is a great way to give yourself RSI, but little else…
Technology, Television

The Sky is falling

1 Comment

The last few days have been windy. I mean really, hats blowing off, cycling is twice as hard, umbrella-inverting kind of windy. And probably as a result, our satellite transmission stopped working… and so I had an encounter with Sky’s customer support.

They’re usually pretty helpful, I’ve got to say, and the process they guided me through involved at least one thing I hadn’t thought of myself (“are you sure its plugged in?” – not that one)… but, asides from the fact that the lady was singularly grumpy, they couldn’t help me. You see, it could be the dish, and not the digibox, at fault. Which would require me to pay a separate bunch of people to come around and fiddle about with the cabling.

So its all very frustrating. Bring on IPTV – and a new version of Tivo that can cope with it…

Music, Technology

A flaw in iPod’s armour

Erm, in my new ‘listening to albums’ instead of on random strategy, I tried to stick on a greatest hits album to find… you guessed it… all the greatest hits albums had combined on my iPod.

Perhaps this is a flaw in the ID3 tagging system, but its certainly irritating.

Music

Listening strategies

I go through phases of music listening. My most recent phase has been going for 5 years and is wholly unsatisfactory.

In the mid-90s, I was an album obsessive; I listened to every CD I bought religiously, repeatedly and analytically; deconstructing riffs, harmonies and solos, in part for mediocre reproduction purposes on my guitars, and in part because I had the time to do that.

Then came the late 90s and digital music. All was still good; I had time to make Winamp playlists, my music collection was still manageable.

Sometime around 2001/2, I digitised my entire music collection and gave up trying to listen to coherent collections of songs; I just chucked a bunch of music onto my iRiver/iPod and let it play on random; which had a few side-effects:

    It drained the batteries out of my digital music players
    It drained my enjoyment of music out of me

The latter was a gradual process, which only really properly sunk in this morning as I skipped through track number 175 of 400 on my Nano trying to get something I wanted to listen to. I gave up and put on the Anchorman soundtrack, which I then proceeded to enjoy.

So I think I’m going to go back to the album model of music listenership, and see if I can spare the time to build some playlists again.

All the automated online services that guess at what you want to listen to based on your previous faves – Last.fm, Pandora etc – don’t quite do it for me. Perhaps I’m just in a nostalgic phase of my life… who knows. But we’ll see if I get the music back into my world!

Software, Technology

Google Desktop vs. Copernic

So I’ve just switched over to Google Desktop, having been using Copernic for about a year (and Lookout before that). It’s much improved over its previous incarnations; includes integration into Outlook and does find things very easily. So kudos. Google’s also a lot more stable than Copernic was (so far, even on my hulking desktop), which was one of about four applications that regularly stopped responding whilst it drained my CPU of all available resource.

On the minus side, it seems to be bloating. I want a fully thin client app (and like the Scratch pad utility as such) but really, really dislike the sheer memory consuming chunkiness of all the sidebar elements. And so have disabled them…

Do think that this type of unstructured search software will be increasingly important; I’m waiting for Google to move the indexes online, move the file storage online, secure it all properly and enable multiple profiles (Armand work, Armand home, Armand laptop, Armand PDA) to take care of the remaining offline content, and then we’re away!

Personal

Love the Summer

Even though its raining, its still light when I get back from work and today I even mustered the enthusiasm to go on a bike ride, rain notwithstanding. Feels pretty damn good.

Software, Technology

Boot time

It now takes a little over 8 minutes for my PC to get to a usable starting point.

Damn. Think its time to reinstall Windows. And if anyone tells me I should get a Mac I will fight them.

Current affairs, Media & Marketing, Television

Back… on the BBC

So, the story of poor Guy Goma, who was brought on as a commentator for a BBC news programme about the Apple v. Apple courtcase, is an interesting one. Valuable lessons can be learnt from this:

Bloopers are funny, especially on the Beeb!

Bad though I feel for Guy Kewney, who was left waiting in the lobby as a fellow pundit taxi driver job seeker took his place and his identity on National Television, I can’t help but chuckle at the hilarity of it. And of course, both Guys have received an inordinate amount of media coverage, and Guy Coma will probably be offered a slot on the next season of The Apprentice thanks to his slick blagging skills. Presumably the Beeb will get Mr K back on to comment on some other breaking news story pronto!

Video is here, if you want a quick chuckle. The man done good.