LHC Switched On

In honour of the successful switch-on, I thought this was not bad and quite educational: The LHC Rap (which surpassed 2 million views today)

 

Chrome and Don't You Just Hate It When...

With this post, I have surpassed the total number of posts I made in August (2). Just felt like saying that.

I've downloaded the new Google browser Chrome and have to say I like it's minimalist functional take on a browser. It is sort of becoming my browser of choice already.

Last but not least a minor annoyance:

do you know the bags of pasta that you buy that provide you with a strip of tape to reseal the bag? Don't you just hate it when the tape loses its stickiness and the bag just unrolls open? The other thing I hate about those bags is that they make opening the bag so difficult that the force required to open them usually rips it down the side, thus rendering the strip of sticky tape useless because of the gap down the side.

Driving and Eating Skittles

I called at the garage on the way home tonight. It's not my usual but I was low on petrol and as I have a long journey tomorrow again I thought I would get what I needed this evening instead of tomorrow. This particular garage has some sweets that I like - called Black Jacks and Fruit Salad. I also picked up a travel pack of Skittles. Sweets help keep me alert because sometimes when I'm driving for a long time I need some stimulation to avoid getting sleepy and just to keep focused on driving situations. Skittles were a bad choice because I am so addicted. It is impossible for me to have a Skittle and forget the rest. I am even now munching on a multi-coloured handful. I think there is one colour of Skittles that contains a substance banned in the US. Even more reason not to throw them down my neck like I am doing now. And yet I still continue to eat! How much fool am I?

The Rise of iTunes

We've used iTunes for probably 2 or 3 years now but it's only in the last two weeks that I have started the big project of putting all my music into it. I haven't finished yet and have over 9,500 songs (26 days) in my library. I've gotten several boxes of old CDs from my loft and have ripped them onto our external hard disk. I was always worried about not having the capacity to store my music on our hard disk but the external hard disk eliminates that worry.

iTunes has some great features, coverflow for instance. It's funny how coverflow draws you in and just the act of browsing covers is pleasurable. iTunes sometimes doesn't associate any artwork to an album, so I have to look for the cover on the web - Google image search is the best thing for this I've found. The browse library feature is interesting because it shows you how the Gracenote database assigns a genre to your music, examining this I can see that many classifications are not what I would have chosen. It's good fun to see your music collection sliced up into someone else's categories. Just a shame that it is going to take such a long time to work through correcting incorrect categorisations. I do like the smart playlists feature that you can use to create rules that automatically selects songs for you, another way you can "find" songs you haven't listened to in ages.

Frightfest

I've been recording Film4's Frightfest films to watch at my leisure, a series of horror films to tie in with the festival in London. I'm looking forward to Re-Animator, Day Of The Dead, Dawn Of The Dead, 28 Days Later, The Blair Witch Project, The Descent, Vault of Horror and Ju-On 1 and 2 (The Japanese, and best, version of The Grudge). I haven't been to the film festival in London but some of the films look really good. This is one of the problems with having a full time job - not enough time off to enjoy life outside of work.

I don't have a all consuming dark nature to watch so many horror films - its just that the season is on and I'm taking advantage: it will take me a few weeks to watch them all and by then it will be Halloween: something else to look forward to! Let's face it, the English Summer is now over so there isn't much else to look forward to but Halloween and then Christmas.

A Roundup for August so far

We bought ourselves a DVD Recorder recently and for me its been like discovering video recorders again for the first time. I'm recording quite a few films and even though I thought our DVD collection was good, it's improving with the films I'm recording. I'm pleasantly surprised that so many great films are shown on TV: The Thomas Crown Affair (Steve McQueen version), Wargames, Unbreakable, Day of the Dead, Hellboy and The Mummy to name but a few in the last couple of weeks. This week I see that The Descent, X2, The Blair Witch Project, Terminator 2 and 28 Days Later are on. We did watch a strange horror film from the 1970s last week called Incense For The Damned, a vampire tale very heavily edited at the start - so much that it was quite comical. Not a film I could recommend unless you have some time to kill.

My wife bought me a nice surprise last week: Guitar Hero III for the Wii. My daughter and I have been flexing our fingers and rocking out in the sitting room. It's a great game and the controller works fantastically well. The music is great too.

I finished reading Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell and now I'm reading the 4th in the Op Centre series (Acts of War), it's a very exciting read. I've also begun the first volume of the complete Judge Dredd comic strips. I always remember seeing a drawing of Judge Dredd on his motorcycle and thinking that his bike was really cool. It had spikes on the wheels and it was the first time I had ever seen that.

Team GB are doing well in the Olympics considering we are such a small nation. I've enjoyed watching the coverage on the TV.

Wall-E

We took the children to watch this film today at the cinema. It was my wife's idea. There was a short animated film at the beginning about a magician and his rabbit. My 5 year old son absolutely loved it, laughed his head off he did! That was great. The main attraction was Wall-E. I've been aware of the hype recently, everywhere I go or every advert I watch seems to have the robot depicted somewhere. I had only read one brief review of the film before watching it but I think my wife was more exposed to it than I. The story is about man filling Earth up with junk and blasting off into space for a massive exodus vacation while the Wall-E robots clean the Earth up and make it habitable once more. However, as time goes by the vacation turns out to be much, much longer - like 700 years! By then, everyone's bones have gotten smaller since they just sit around on hover chairs constantly watching their personal screens infront of their noses. They get their daily nutrition from big drink cartons that robots are only to happy to supply after the slightest request. Meanwhile, Wall-E has been on Earth keeping it clean as the sole robot of his type. He has made a home for himself and a cockroach. His world is changed when he falls in love with another robot dropped off on Earth to check for signs of vegetation capable of sustaining human life. This other robot is super-sophisticated compared to Wall-E but somehow they fall in love and have to save humanity from the comfort and sloth of life on board the big pleasure cruiser. I thought the best part of the film was the scale of the worlds created by the animators. The detail was incredible, always is with Pixar, but on such a scale it was fascinated viewing. Particularly the first half hour on Earth which was mainly just Wall-E without talking. To keep the audience engaged for such a length of time without any dialogue in the script, was truly a magnificent feat in itself. My wife had read a review talking about it being the best film ever made (or words to that effect). It's certainly not that, but I thought it was a very enjoyable film and one for both adults and children to enjoy.

Work, Work and More Work!

I haven't mentioned this before but since the end of Spring I've been doing two jobs: trying to keep my own job going as well as looking after some of my managers stuff while he works on a new big project. Stepping up into a managers shoes is probably good experience for me, career-wise. However, the financial rewards aren't that great and in terms of what takes my time these days, you could say that I'm losing out on leisure time big style. This is the main reason I've not been here very often this year. Its a sad fact I'm afraid. I will try to be here more often because the work-life balance has to be in place, right? Next week, I have some time off, so I will be looking forward to relaxing.

A few months ago, I was browsing in a book shop and I saw a book that I knew a friend of mine would enjoy. I wasn't sure if he had it already but I bought it anyway - it called out to me. I put it on a shelf at home and forgot about it. Before I had thought about it more than a couple of times, my friend's birthday was upon me and I took it into town to post to him, luckily I had some free time on that day. It turns out that my friend enjoyed the book, he hadn't got it already and so it all turned out well. I like it when things like that happen, I rarely see something I know for a fact someone will like and buy it in advance of their birthday. I should do more of this, it would save worrying about what to get for someone near to their birthday.

Here comes the rain again

It absolutely heaved it down with rain this morning, I could even hear thunder. It has stopped now and the sun has come out. I wonder what this afternoon has in store?

Forgot to mention that yesterday we had a shopping trip and spent far too much. I got a couple of Wii games for the kids stockings this Christmas and I picked up a bargain DVD of John Carpenter's The Thing, a film I've always enjoyed when its been on the TV but never owned.

Bad Habits

On the food front, I've started to slip with my healthier eating - one too many burgers and chocolate thingies. I hope I can stop myself before going any further down this road because if I don't stop I'll just put back all the weight I lost.

I had a good idea today but I've completely forgotten what it was! It was a business idea or something like that, I was thinking of just changing the business model for it and reaping the rewards financially. I've forgotten what IT was though! Typical!

The good news is that we finally managed to see someone about getting a better savings plan this weekend. She was good, our fear was that she would be just trying to sell more of a particular financial product to make up sales figures for the month but instead she actually went on the web and looked at competitors rates and told us honestly what she thought. She accepted that some of our money was best left with a competitor. I hope we get her again when we need advice. She was also good with the kids, who decided to go a bit loopy.

On Saturday we watched the annual Roald Dahl street procession. There were the usual great models - this year the theme was The Twits.

Glasto Nearly Upon Us

According to the Glastonbury Festival countdown clock right now as I type there are 11 hours and 1 minute until the festival gates open. I've never been to Glastonbury Festival but I do have some fond memories of some of the performances I've seen from the TV coverage. It's good that they cover it on TV nowadays, when I was younger it was never broadcast on TV - it might have been on the radio I suppose, but I never heard it if it was.

I did attend a festival for a few years running in the early/mid 90s. The music lineup was really good and I saw some great acts. But the downside was that I didn't have any friends to go with and so I felt a bit lonely on my own, as everyone else seemed to be enjoying themselves with friends and generally having a big party, staying up into the early hours, sleeping most of the day etc. I have some good photographs I took of the people and one day I'll have to scan them in and post them up here. I was afraid of being in my tent alone at night, having the stuff in my tent stolen and all sorts of violent thoughts go through your mind. But there are some really nice things too: the people are generally very friendly, you see lots of people with weird and wonderful tattoos and piercings, strange looking hairstyles and clothes - and you get to see some strange behaviours too - whether drug induced or not. I would recommend at least trying one music festival out during your lifetime.

I hope the weather stays dry for the people this year.

A Sunday in June

I've found this month a difficult one to blog. Quite a lot of things are happening this month, my daughter's birthday for one. She received an early present from her grandma. A new bicycle, it's bigger than her old favourite and its quite heavy. The saddle is as low as it can get and she can't reach the floor properly when she sits on it, her tiptoes do but not the whole of her feet. Yesterday, we found a great place to cycle: it's a track between two villages that used to be a railway line but is now a special track for cyclists. Some traces of the railway still exist, like the platforms but they are all grassed over and you can barely tell. It was a great place to try the new bike out. My daughter has fits of tears when she has to learn something new, she fell into a patch of stinging nettles and stung the side of her hand. I didn't think she would get back on the bike after that but she eventually did. Her next challenge was to push off and get herself going without me holding the saddle. After several miles and lots of tears and coaching she eventually did it and instantly brightened up. We went from despair to triumph and almost over-confidence instantly!

I was woken up with some excitement in the house on Sunday. I had completely forgotten it was Father's Day. The family congregated around me as I groggily woke up and found their expectant faces eager for me to wake up and seize the day. I didn't feel like seizing anything except more sleep but I tried to hide my tiredness. I was given some really nice gifts and it was a lovely surprise, I love my family. I couldn't go back to sleep but by the evening I was good for nothing, all that running after my daughter on her bicycle.

Oh Sunny Day

Unusually for England in June, the weather hasn't been so bad so far. Sunday and Monday were absolutely lovely. Let's hope it continues a bit longer than forecast (Thursday and on to the weekend doesn't look so good). This week I finally converted my Club Nintendo stars into something useful - points to spend in the Wii shop. We don't make a lot of use of the Wii's online potential: sometimes looking at news and the weather channels, sometimes playing strangers at Wii Chess, sometimes entering Mii competitions and judging other entrants and sometimes playing multiplayer races on Mariokart Wii. This week though, I used the stars I've earned through buying games and converted them into Wii Points Cards and have accumulated the 500 points needed to download the Internet Channel. This is a web browser on the Wii. So I can watch You Tube on my TV and read blogs and so on. There are also games sites that allow you to play free online Flash games on the Wii. I don't think I'll be writing much on the Internet Channel though because typing on the Wii is a bit like trying to type with one finger on a keyboard your not used to: painful.

Eurovision 2008 Result

Well, it's over. It will be held in Moscow next year because Russia won last night. It wasn't the best song in the competition and a lot will be said elsewhere about the predictability of the voting so I'm not going to harp on about it here. I judged along with my daughter and I found it quite difficult, the scoring sheet I downloaded had columns for song, performance, dance routine and outfit. The hardest thing for any judge is consistency and the need to identify and correct any bias in your own mind. After a few beers I must admit that my powers to judge accurately were seriously affected, as you can see from my top 5 below. The only way I can defend Spain finishing second is to say that after watching 21 other Eurovision songs prior to hearing it, my mind was mixed up. On reflection this morning, the Russian song isn't as bad as I remember.

In general, although I'm disappointed with the position of the UK entry - countries can't vote for themselves - at the end of the day I'm not that upset with the show. I realise that's naive to an extent but if the show rules were changed then it wouldn't be the spectacle that it is.

1. Greece
2. Spain
3. Norway
4. Ukraine
5. Turkey, Azerbaijan

 

The actual results were:

1. Russia
2. Ukraine
3. Greece
4. Armenia
5. Norway

 

My winner (Greece) (official video, not performance on the night):

Actual winner Russia (official video, not performance on the night):

 

My second place Spain (official video, not performance on the night):

 

Actual second place (official video, not performance on the night):

Eurovision tomorrow!

I'm looking forward to the competition tomorrow. I've spoken before about this subject:

• When the UK finalist was chosen for this year
• My top 3 songs from the 2007 competition
• The 2006 competition results
• My first mention of the competition on this blog back in 2005

So in true time honoured fashion this post is dedicated to Eurovision 2008. I can't wait to buy some comfort food and just veg out on the sofa. A great way to spend a Saturday evening on a Bank Holiday weekend.

Great Wall

The awful events in Burma and China have brought home to me how vulnerable we all are really. My wife and I were discussing The Great Wall of China just before the weekend. Her grandma walked it as a pensioner (apparently), I thought it was too long to walk but didn't know anything about it: except that it is the only man made structure visible from space - I had somehow lodged that fact in my brain. The Wall has always fascinated me, the beauty of it, the brutality of the work (over a million people died in its construction) and the pointlessness of it to an extent. I hope that relief gets to the people who need it and fast.

Maybe Not!

After Friday's triumphant declaration it appears that problems with the PC rose their ugly head again on Saturday. It's been 3 years since I put the system together and its been in constant use, even so, its not ancient. My wife was seriously annoyed by the lack of stability of it and we both decided we couldn't do without a properly working home computer, so we did something that I've never done before. We visited PC World! We firstly wrote down all of the applications we regularly use and some things that we like doing like photo editing and storage, music storage and playback, shopping online, watching video online and so on - the list goes on but its pretty standard family stuff we probably all do. So we took the list with us and spoke to a person. To clarify what I have never done before, I have bought other stuff at PC World, but this time I actually trusted someone else to tell us what to buy. I haven't the time to keep on top of all the processors and issues anymore, so I allowed myself to be guided by someone who hadn't long left school. He seemed intelligent enough and was willing to offer us deals so that we could take away a machine that day - I wanted to capture video from my camcorder and the machine he was recommending didn't have a firewire card, so he offered to install one along with replacing the graphics card with a more beefed-up one. We ended up buying a machine with a dual core quad processor thingymajig, which apparently usually is something you'd expect to find in a 1000 pound plus machine. We had a max limit of half that so we did well and we didn't need a monitor either, so saved a few pounds there. It was ready really quickly and we had it home in less than 2 hours, which was great because we had a good morning in town at the library and weren't rushing around to cram everything in - we strolled around PC World just after lunch. The other amusing thing was that my wife recognised the salesman as the brother of a boy she teaches.

It took me all night to move files and settings and stuff from the old PC to the new, its not as smooth a process as it could be and Windows has some limitations in the way it operates. We have now to get used to a new version of Windows (Vista), which isn't proving to be too hard thankfully.

The funny thing is, I working now on the machine that wasn't working yesterday! So far it is behaving itself today, which is quite annoying on one level and on another level I'm quite grateful because we needed files and stuff and will probably need to keep it going for a few months until we're sure everything is on the new one.

Mr Fixit Strikes Again

I'm known in the family as the computer expert. I can qualify this comment by saying that I'm not an expert, I just know a bit more than other members of the family. The latest episode has been related to a speed issue with our family workhorse computer. This computer is where I do my blogging, video capturing, iTunes storing etc. and my wife does her research and watches TV programmes on it and so on. You name it, this is our general main computer in the house for it. So it's switched on most of the time. We're not known for compulsive cleaning in our house, dusting is not something we do generally and neither is ironing. So anyway, we've been experiencing 24 hours of snail pace computing - literally it taking five minutes after clicking on something for the computer to do anything. It was showing less signs of life than a Zombie. We were even at the stage where we were preparing to buy another computer. Reasoning dictated to me a course of action whereupon I disconnected all cables and opened up the computer box. The hot weather we have been experiencing lately has exacerbated the problem. My thinking was based on a pop-up notification from a processor temperature monitor program that said something to the  effect that the processor was getting too hot and the fan speed was raised while reducing the throughput of work that the processor did. All this mumbo jumbo told me was that the brain in our PC was getting overheated. I cleaned out the box not so long ago, as I experienced similar problems when processing 60 minutes of video from our camcorder over a period of about 7 hours! To cut to the nub, I took the PC shell outside and used my wife's hairdryer on cold air setting to blow all the dust from the motherboard and the fans on the power supply and GPU and what I could reach of the CPU fan. Funnily enough that seems to have cured the problem and we can once more use our workhorse. Thank goodness because all of our links, email, documents, music, photos and video are on this machine and getting it all back on to a new computer would have been a nightmare. I know we should backup frequently but who does?

An Air Of Summer

Things are looking up for England on the weather front this week. We have had some really lovely hot sunshine for the past three days now and it is set to continue until Friday. Its so nice for the kids to go outside and play in the garden after school, rather than be stuck in the house watching TV. We don't make enough of our garden, never have really. So this year I'd like to get outside a little bit more. On the outdoors theme, I'm not your typical outdoors kind of man. This may sound like a contradiction considering my previous statement but my natural environment is indoors - usually infront of a computer or videogame. Well, we visited a garden centre on Sunday on the way back from Collectormania and in addition to buying some soil for pot plants, some plants and various bits and pieces, I bought myself a new garden strimmer. It's a 2-stroke petrol job that has a starter cord you pull. It has a great tickover rumble to it, a bit like a chainsaw in Doom or something, and it is really loud when you full throttle it. Infact, I didn't quite realise exactly HOW LOUD it was until this morning when I woke up and couldn't hear a damn thing in my right ear. Seriously, I was deafened by silence. I don't know if that's possible but there definitely felt like I had something over my ear all morning. Next time I use the strimmer, I will either have earplugs or ear defenders on.

Last thing for tonight, is a link to a website where you can watch people from all over the world enjoying games on their Wii.

Collectormania 2008

My wife has an autograph collection, she writes off for them occasionally and we some good ones. Today we visited The Centre at Milton Keynes to go and see Collectormania. I've written about this event before and always enjoy visiting it. There is a marketplace (see photos below) and there is a whole section devoted to stars and their fans who queue up dressed in long black leather coats and other such attire, I love it. As a family with young children its quite frustrating when all you really want to do is go and queue and have your photo taken with Linda Blair but you can't because when you have children queueing is the last thing in the world that they understand and want to do. So on one hand it's a little disappointing but on the other, I just love seeing so much STUFF devoted to the TV shows and films I love. Its great to be with so many other people who share a love of horror and SF. It makes me want to go and watch some films now, bye bye film fans!