All posts by Armand

Film, Personal

Speech training with the King

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Amanda and I loved the King’s Speech – a wonderfully executed film. Despite my predisposition for disliking Colin Firth (mainly because every girl I know thinks he’s amazing, including my good lady wife), he’s really very good in it and Geoffrey Rush is pretty spectacular.

Watching the film did bring back memories of doing speech exercises when we were young with my Dad. Mr David Snr had a number of speech training lessons has a 20-something in London and wanted to relay them to us – so we would grow up confident, capable of projecting and never have to deal with confidence issues as adults.

We did some of the things in the clip below, in addition to reading Lincoln’s speeches whilst walking on a treadmill, doing lots of “lalalalalas”, dancing around the living room and singing (badly) to Boney M tracks. We’d whisper and try to project to the back of the room whilst reading speeches, we’d bounce and shout and sing. We didn’t thank him much for it at the time, although it was impossible not to enjoy the Boney M part of it…

At school, I took more of my Dad’s advice – confronting the fear of public speaking by joining the debating society and putting myself into every public speaking context I could find for myself. No more speech exercises required – and today I take and enjoy every opportunity I have for presenting… and possibly rather too many opportunities to make speeches at friends’ birthdays and the like.

Having appreciated the benefits of my Dad’s training and got the perspective of what it brought me as an adult, I’m wondering how Emily will react if and when we expose her to the same sorts of things when she’s little older. Will she, like we did, look slightly incredulously on at Daddy wondering what this is all about?

Probably, but hopefully she’ll have the fun we did too.

Books

Epic fantasy month slows

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My problem with writers that love “language” is that you end up clawing your way through pages of stodgy, turgid text in which virtually nothing happens. It’s one of the reasons that I’m generally dubious about literary fiction – a big vocabulary and ability to structure long sentences doesn’t make you a good storyteller. Case in point is the latest novel in Stephen Donaldson’s Last Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, which breaks several rules of good storytelling:

  1. It has so many characters and special terms (places, food, etc) it requires a glossary.
  2. It frequently uses words that really, if you wanted to understand what he was trying to say, you’d have to use a dictionary (and this isn’t me being dim…) – examples include “irenic,” “orogeny” and “frangible,” and those are just the unusual words, not the ludicrously verbose dialogue that can just about be interpreted if you stop reading for a second and think about it…
  3. Pointless use of old English in narrative flow – would it hurt to say “truth” instead of “sooth” and “virtue” instead of “virtu”?
  4. It has a higher word to event ratio than Jane Austen. The opening scene of the latest novel lasts 150 pages – in which all that happens is that they decide to go somewhere, pretty much.

So why am I still reading? I guess 15 years of being immersed in this particular story leaves me wanting to know where it ends up and my OCD is just about strong enough to see me through it. But time is against me – we go on our travels on Monday (more on that soon!) and chunky hardbacks are not coming with us!

Television

New sci-fi–Outcasts

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Update: Further thoughts on Outcasts here.

I’ve only seen the pilot of Outcasts but am loving the ambition of the show. Bold, crazy, post-apocalyptic universe, Jamie Bamber making an appearance with his native British accent*, big budget BBC drama, Roz from Spooks, staggeringly striking sets in South Africa… so many good ingredients.

It saddens me that there have already been negative mutterings about its ratings and its been shifted to a graveyard slot – probably with a doubtful future. Why set these shows up on a pedestal? It’s sci-fi! For some reason, with rare exceptions, these shows always attract what the BBC controller describes as a “loyal, core audience” and rarely hit the mass-market mainstream – so why expect otherwise? I guess SFX budgets still don’t come in cheap, and everyone’s hoping they write a BatGal or a Star Trek.

Still – even if it doesn’t do great here, the BBC didn’t do much for its chances to do much better overseas with its weird series formats. 8 episodes? What is that?? An American half-season is 13 episodes – a length which gives you more time to get into a story or a universe, and which gives time for things to evolve to a point of genuine goodness.

Sigh. Well, if it gets cancelled, I’ll hope that it gets worse by episode three and I won’t regret its demise. But I’m not hopeful – I enjoyed the pilot. Check out the trailer here:

 

*I swear I thought he was American, he must be a good actor because I thought his English accent in Outcasts was unconvincing after seeing him on BatGal for years!

Film, Update

Home alone

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Emily and Amanda are off visiting friends and I have the bizarre prospect of the first few days at home alone since we moved here.

Spooky!

Managed to keep busy with a little blogging, life-sorting-outness, and a terrible Disney film (Amanda hates Nicolas Cage, but ever since he uttered the line “Why couldn’t you put the bunny back in the box ,” in Con Air I’ve had a soft spot for him). Despite the fact that seeing a nerd take on magic is clearly a good formula for geeks everywhere, the dramatic climax of the film sees the hero emit the horrible putrescence that was:

“I’m not alone. I brought a little science with me.”

I know it was meant to be a little tongue in cheek but it’s nowhere near the comic mastery of  XKCD and just made me shudder a little. Randall Munroe is legend, Jerry Brucheimer, not quite so much.

Still, there was something about seeing the scene from Fantasia take CGI-tastic form.

Software

Sparrow for Windows?

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One of the other things that trigger my newfound Mac envy was seeing Chris use Sparrow, a lightweight Gmail client for OSX. Now I’m a big fan of the cloud and a big fan of the Gmail UI, so was impressed that an app had been developed that actually made me want to try something else.

Of course, it doesn’t do a great deal more than the web app, especially if you use Chrome (at least as far as I can tell without a Mac to try it on properly), and it would probably be hard to justify the $10 price tag as such, but it does look slick, productivty-lorious and it’s on my WANT list for when I eventually break and go the Mac way (ETA for Armand on Mac – about 3 years).

I’m not the only PC fan to think so, either.

Video here if you’re on Mac / use Gmail.

Sparrow – The new mail for Mac from domleca on Vimeo.

Update

Brief moment of self consciousness…

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…complete. Writing will resume.

Not sure what happened there. Think a bit of busy-ness and tricky writing at work stumped me for the blogging. But I’m back now, and the girls are away this evening so time to catch upon some of my Evernote blog post ideas.

My Evernoting is going quite well, btw. The only issue are occasional sync errors that creep in – probably due to my trying to edit notes on too many different platforms simultaneously. I’ll work it out…

Social media

My personal social media syndication strategy

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The blog is connected to the… Twitter… The Twitter’s connected to the… Google Buzz… The Google Buzz is connected to the Facebook… and somewhere it all ends up a mess.

Inspired by this new WordPress feature, I’ve been trying to work out how to best link my various social sharing tools so that people can keep up with me as they’d like to. Here’s where I’ve ended up by way of automatic syndication / cross posting:

1) My blogs (this one and LSR) syndicate to Twitter, Google Buzz, LinkedIn and my Facebook page

2) My Google Reader shared items (interesting news stories I’ve seen around the web) syndicate to Twitter, and Google Buzz

3) Twitter syndicates to nowhere; if you’d like to keep up with my Tweets, follow me. I don’t think I’ve even connected it to LinkedIn.

4) Flickr syndicates to Facebook and Google Buzz (although I use it less and less these days)

5) I don’t pay attention to FriendFeed, Quora, MySpace, FourSquare, YouTube, Friendster or any of the half-dozen or so other, less useful to me social venues. But who knows, someday I may do.

6) Gyminee / Dailyburn may become useful again once I restart the diet and the half-marathon training, and Runkeeper probably needs integrating somewhere – it does automatically post to Facebook.

If the world understood and used RSS readers I’d be less concerned about all of this, but given that not all of you do, I’m going with this approach. Hopefully its focussed enough and there isn’t so much overlap its annoying.

I need a personal social media strategy? Who knew!?

What do you do to simplify the share/follow experience for your friends/fans/family?

Training

Scientific testing to improve running technique

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In a past life, I was pretty heavily into the science of things. I’m still fascinated by science and all that jazz as a general principle, but the specifics are lost to me.

Which is one of the reasons why I’m so horrible at improving my running process/technique. Instead of changing one thing – new shoes, summer running gear, running in the morning or one of the other half-dozen variables under my control, I change them all in one go so have no idea what it was that helped me break a certain time or that caused me a particular issue.

As I’ve commented before, running is like golf – the number of uncontrollable variables is legion. I may need to introduce some scientific rigour to my process as I aim to improve my half marathon time this year…

Miscellany, Observational

Defeating SAD

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There’s a lot of winter I don’t love, but particularly the dark morning/dark evening routine. Where I grew up, the story went that they shifted the time zone so that people wouldn’t have to commute in the dark (I can’t find evidence this is true on the internets, so must have been an old wives’ tale).

So it has been a growing relief that I need to fumble less as I head out for work in the mornings, unlocking garage doors and making my way through the (semi) darkened corridors and the like… and amazingly, today I left work to birdsong and returned without having to wait for 10 minutes for the car to demist!

Bring on the sunshine and sandals – summer’s practically here!

General update

Welcome, work contacts

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I’ve gotten used to the fact that this blog is principally an outlet for my random running thoughts. I guess the fact that people so rarely comment on the posts (except for Sensei Paul!) themselves means I sometimes forget I have readers!

That said, the content I publish here syndicates to homes on Facebook, LinkedIn and Google Buzz, so I suppose I should be less surprised when people comment on it.

Last week the surprise came when a research firm I’ve done some work with came in to present to us. The director looked at my shoes and said "Ah, New Balance 850s. For the moderate overpronator. Did you run your half-marathon in those? Have you chosen your next race yet?” I really didn’t expect that as an opener and was duly surprised!

I really don’t mind blurring the lines between my personal and professional life a little bit (I draw the line at headhunters approaching me via Facebook!), and love that knowledge of this blog (and my other blog) brings out some individuality and passion in people in unexpected contexts.