Ill

July 18, 2011 Armand Leave a comment

I was ill from Thursday through Saturday last week, a thoroughly depressing experience. In addition to the sheer unpleasantness of it, there’s the tedium of not being able to work productively (did a few bits from home but head was pounding too much), there’s a general feeling of apathy and sloth that makes you feel persistently less good than you are.

Fortunately, I’m through it now. Blogging and other normalcy has resumed!

Television

@bbcapprentice ep 11–on business plans and production lines

July 14, 2011 Armand Leave a comment

Episode 11 of the Apprentice went pretty much as expected. The team with the stupid people lost, and the stupid person with the bad attitude was fired.

It’s astonishing that – on week 11 of a 12 week exercise to showcase your business acumen – that Jim and co didn’t think a business plan was worthwhile. It’s a simple set of calculations to work out margins, estimate how many of which you can sell per hour, etc. but they simply didn’t consider the need for it – it seemed to be treated as a game to design the prettiest store.

Helen was very impressive on that front, carrying all the margins in her head, and I think moves even more decisively into the lead for the win.

Messing up the production line, as Jim did, I think was a more understandable error. Time was short, he’d clearly never given any thought to how restaurants were actually run, and whilst under that pressure he simply didn’t think through the implications.Â Not to say they shouldn’t have tried to fix it, but I think they underestimated quite how labour intensive the creation ofÂ fajita would be. Which is odd, as anyone who’s ever made them at home from one of those kits knows that it takes a bit of faff.

Music

Jam session and a playlist

July 13, 2011 Armand 2 Comments

Not my guitar. But not far off

Suitably inspired, I moved my 15 year old 15 watt Marshall practice amp downstairs yesterday and got out Excalibur – my limited edition twin-humbucker 1990s Fender HH Strat variant – for a little solo jam last night.

Huge fun.

Totally unexpectedly, songs I learnt to play as a teenager at boarding school came relatively easily to my fingertips. Well, riffs I learnt to play, if not songs in their entirety. The ‘middle 8’ continues to confound me, and I need to learn some.

I’m going to make myself a playlist of songs I want to memorise. It won’t be massive, 10-15 songs or so in the first instance. But it’d be nice to sing and play whole songs rather than the fragments I know at the moment.

Any requests? I think Weezer, some Killers, some Mumford, maybe some RaTMâ€¦ will all make it onto the list.

Television

The Walking Dead

July 13, 2011 Armand 9 Comments

My brother introduced me, via iTunes, to AMC’s The Walking Dead – a 28-days-later style post-apocalyptic Zombie tv-series set in the American South – near the city of Atlanta. I’ve never really been one for horror – my cousins Rey and Anand used to lap this stuff up as kids, but I somehow never took great joy in being scared – amazed and amused were more my preference.

But the Walking Dead is very, very good television indeed. Whilst the characteristics of the zombies and the conventions of the genre are left undisturbed and ordinary, where it excels – as ArvD pointed out to me – is in the depth of the characters it manages to get across so rapidly. I’m only three episodes in but already have an excellent sense of half a dozen major protagonists.

For those curious, small-town sheriff Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln) wakes up in hospital following a car chase and a shootout that sees him badly injured. He’s been out of it for several weeks and in the meantime pretty much everyone in town has either been killed, zombiefied or both. Unable to find his kids, with the help of a couple of other survivors, he raids the police station for supplies and heads to nearby Atlanta, where reports say there is a camp of survivors, in the hope of finding his missing wife and son.

It kinds of goes from there.

Really high production values, incredible performances, and very tight writing – incorporating some brave silences for mainstream TV-writing – has seen this renewed for a second season. Andrew Lincolnâ€™s accent (heâ€™s British playing Southern) is flawless.

I’m going to have to find gaps when Amanda isn’t around to watch it, as I don’t see her being sold on the genre regardless of the quality of the writing… there is a high level of gore involved.

Trailer:

Books

Song of Ice and FIre 5: A Dance with Dragons iPhone app

July 13, 2011 Armand Leave a comment

No spoilers herein, don’t worry, on the publication of the latest book in the epic George R R Martin series, A Song of Ice and Fire. I’ve managed to avoid spoilers so far despite the fact that the publisher’s screwed up and shipped copies into the UK a few weeks ahead of the official launch.

There’s a lot of hype around this book, not least because it’s been four years in the writing, the critically acclaimed HBO series has launched in the meantime, and, well, the fact that its a great story. I’m going to resist buying it until I’m through the excellent Mistborn saga (down to the last half book of that), and will probably then get the eBook to help me get through the 1000 odd pages of the new novel without lugging a massive tome around with me.

The iPhone app that accompanies the book launch comes complete with a summary of the previous books (invaluable for a quick recap, especially if you’re not sure how much ground the TV series has covered and want a reminder) as well as a few other goodies, so I will refresh my memory ahead of getting the book in.

Current affairs

Bersih 2011–fighting for electoral reform in Malaysia

July 12, 2011 Armand 3 Comments

Malaysia has been a bit late to the anti-government protests shaking the Islamic world. Understandably so; protests in Malaysia are always clamped down on hard (technically it is illegal to form any kind of public meeting without a permit, which is never granted for political gatherings, so protesting is tricky), Malaysians are by nature conservative when it comes to public statements that in any way resemble opposition to the government (the incessant and pervasive fear of IRS investigations or planted ammunition hangs over everyone’s heads, especially following what happened to Anwar Ibrahim) but things are finally coming to a bit of a head.

Electoral reform in Malaysia is an urgent issue. Over the decades that the the ruling party, UMNO, has been in power it has introduced any number of ludicrous amendments to the constitution that, in essence, make it impossible to vote it out of office. Disproportionate shares of the vote are required to pass any kind of reform, and there are persistent and likely rumours of electoral fraud with each and every election that takes place.

Reform is needed. A Euronews clipping notes that the Prime Minister’s opinion polls are showing a stronger approval rating now than when he came to power; it doesn’t note that when he came to power it was under a cloud of rumour and speculation about a murder he had allegedly had a hand in. If you can’t improve on that, especially in an environment where corruption (to an extent) is endemic, well then…

So the rallies for electoral reform, opposing corruption and encouraging transparency, are flying high now under the banner of ‘Bersih‘ (Clean) and 50,000 Malaysians went out in protest this weekend. It was a non-violent protest for the most part, but the Malaysian police cracked down with disproportional force in an effort to “make an example” and discourage further action. Tear gas was fired into the crowds, from the footage it looks like riot police got a bit carried away, and ~~dozens~~ over a thousand arrests were made. The government reaction to the protest compounds its guilt and demonstrates its immaturity on the world stage.

My extended family supported the protests ideologically and in practice. I was proud to read updates of relatives that attended the protests and that were active in supporting those arrested – essentially – illegally. I was worried that they would take this risk but it appears that the relatively high pain threshold of the Malaysian public has been reached. Enough is enough, a fair say is needed.

Democracy will hopefully arrive and perhaps I’ll once again be proud to call Malaysia my home country. I’m certainly proud of my family and the Malaysians that took a stand. It seems to be having some immediate effect; the international press are calling attention and drawing criticism of the Malaysian gov’t and UMNO Youth is planning talks with Bersih. Here’s to the power of the democratic process….!

BERSIH!

Music, Work

Live music and inspiration

July 12, 2011 Armand 4 Comments

A few colleagues have got together and formed a band, the Warm Leads (fantastic choice of name you might have a better understanding of if you work in the PR industry), which performed to much joy and delight after a company offsite last week. They’re all v talented and chose a well-crafted mix of current rock/pop tunes and classic rock to get the audience jumping.

I naturally went slightly nuts on the dance floor. I love live music, and small intimate gigs are *fantastic* when the band has the technical proficiency, talent and presence to make it all rock together.

What it absolutely invariably does, however, is make me want to pick up my guitar and rush onstage. I didn’t; and in point of fact probably wouldn’t have been able to do much. My "talent", such as it is, never extended much beyond the opening riff or catchy chorus of any number of songs.

But I’ve been tabspired; I’m going to look up some of my favourite songs and restart my guitar tablature folder, practice, and try to at least be able to entertain my daughter, if not jump on stage the next time the Warm Leads are gigging…

Gardening, Work

Company offsite with Thrive

July 12, 2011 Armand 1 Comment

We had a rather marvellous time on Friday with a slightly different flavour of corporate offsite; a few people around the agency researched and identified a CSR activity that would see us all contribute to something worthwhile – in this case the charity Thrive, which helps people recover or cope with debilitating psychological disorders, recover from extended illness or contend with dementia through the joy of gardening.

As someone that’s been spending a fair amount of time digging around in the dirt at home, it was a pretty enjoyable task. We were gloved up and treated to the standard health & safety disclaimer before being loaded up with strimmers, garden forks, shovels, wheelbarrows, hammers, hacksaws and the like and set to clearing a slightly overgrown orchard. We uprooted dead trees, disassembled disused raised beds, levelled out the soil and cut back the grass, digging up mountains of weeds along the way. The 60 or so of us on the ground made fairly short work of it all, getting through the clearing process in a few short hours.

After a lunch break we returned for the ‘main event’ – we’d been promised a wall to build and build a wall we did. Most of my time went into helping with the digging and levelling off a ditch so the wall would remain flat – which was a fairly frustrating process – but our architect-turned-CFO has a real talent for both project management and spirit levelling so we made good in the end.

In addition to the work teams building the two walls, my colleagues made fair progress in building a set of composters from packing crates, and others cleared a number of other raised beds of weeds. It was a pretty satisfying transformation to look back on as we left the Reading countryside and headed back to London for a performance by the Warm Leads… but more on that later…

I’d highly recommend it if you’re looking for a different kind of corporate day out, or if you live in range of one of Thrive’s gardens (one near Reading and t’other in Battersea Park), volunteer.

Film

Transformers and Michael Bay

July 12, 2011 Armand Leave a comment

Alongside the superhero / origin story fatigue I’m suffering from, I’ve kind of had it with Michael Bay. I *loved* the Transformers franchise as a kid, watching and revelling in the original G1 series (and especially the movie) as a child and enjoying the Beast Wars editions as a teenager.

Then Michael Bay came along, and subjected us to hour after hour of mind-numbing explosive nonsense. It was vaguely intriguing to begin with, and visually spectacular, but very quickly it became evident that Michael Bay’s brain – if I can call it that – works very differently to the rest of humanity. Most of us don’t speak Explosionese, apart from the other issues the films suffer from.

Which makes it harder for me to enthuse about the new movie, although I’ll probably eventually break and see it despite the inevitable mediocrity of it. It’s gratifying to see that its better than the second film, because – honestly – if it had been worse it might induce a physical reaction.

I discovered via @ArvD the Topless Robot FAQ about Transformers 2. I’m not someone that tends to overanalyze films after I watch them – it renders far too many films unwatchable – but Topless Robot’s post-event analysis of Transformers 2 is a thing of beauty. Case in point:

Okay…
So that other mysterious reason that the Decepticons wanted Sam’s brain? It’s because it contains some very vague clues about the Matrix of Leacdership, which is the device that turns on the sun-exploding machine. The Fallen needs the Matrix to blow up the sun and get his Energon.
Hold on. That’s what the Matrix of Leadership does in the movie?
Yes. Works the sun-exploding machine.
I’m fuzzy on how “Leadership” covers that.
I didn’t name it. But it does sound a little nicer than “Matrix of Blowing Up the Goddamn Sun.”

I have now subscribed to Topless Robot. Awesome blog.

division6

Ill